Fordham Institute, via a kind reader:

In school districts and charter school networks nationwide, instructional leaders are developing plans to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year. To help kick-start their planning process, we are proud to present The Acceleration Imperative, an open-source, evidence-based document created with input from dozens of current and former chief academic officers, scholars, and others with deep expertise and experience in high-performing, high-poverty elementary schools. It has four key design principles:

Jon Marcus:

A Yale-educated evolutionary biologist and a member of the faculty at Catholic, liberal arts-focused Sacred Heart University, Geffrey Stopper also oversees one of its newest courses: Advanced Craft Beverage Brewing.

Sacred Heart is launching career-focused programs like this to give its students vocational credentials that can speed them into their first jobs while expanding the university’s market to older adults who are hoping to get new ones.

After all, there are 115 breweries in Connecticut, according to the Connecticut Brewers Guild, employing about 6,000 people. But there are no other formal training programs in the state to cover such things as brewery management and brewing theory.

“You need to know how enzymes work and how acids work and apply equations to what you’re doing,” Stopper said of the program, standing on a catwalk overlooking fermentation tanks and repurposed wine and whiskey barrels filled with beer in the cavernous warehouse of Two Roads Brewery, where the course is taught.

Pew Research:

Most young people are at little risk of dying from the coronavirus. But a new Pew Research survey shows that they are disproportionately bearing the consequences of heavy-handed pandemic lockdowns and isolating government restrictions.

Pew finds that an astounding 32 percent of young adults aged 18 to 29 report experiencing high levels of “psychological distress.” An additional 31 percent say they’ve experienced a medium level. Notably, women and lower-income are even more likely to have experienced serious psychological distress within this young subgroup.

Meanwhile, 45 percent of respondents under 30 reported being “nervous, anxious or on edge” at least “occasionally or a moderate amount of time.”

What’s the root cause of this widespread distress among young adults? Well, reports often attribute it to “the pandemic” or “COVID,” but in actuality, it’s largely attributable to the lockdown policies and government restrictions, not the virus itself. 

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.

Mike Antonucci:

A majority of only one group was able to cite some positive benefits.

“Those who work at a school or college are far more likely than other government employees to report positive benefits from the pandemic,” Rasmussen reports. “By a 60% to 36% margin, those who work in education report positive benefits.”

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.

Megan McArdle:

Substack became an appealing sanctuary for media’s heterodox refugees because people are most likely to pay for a newsletter that offers them something they can’t get from other outlets. Ironically, thanks to the cancellation artists, viewpoint diversity is one thing that’s getting harder to find in bigger places with more resources.

That’s not the only thing people look for on Substack — newspapers also don’t provide 1,500-word missives on the history and preparation of craft cocktails, which is why my husband, a political writer, runs a successful cocktail newsletter on the side. But viewpoint diversity is obviously profitable. So profitable, in fact, that one wonders why woke capital doesn’t do what capital normally does and go after a lucrative economic niche.

Recently, economist Cameron Harwick suggested one possibility: We actually are witnessing woke capital do what capital normally does, if the capitalist controls a monopoly. That is, extracting excess returns from the market — what economists call “rents.”

Companies with valuable monopolies typically force higher prices from customers, a.k.a. “economic rents.” Labor monopolies, however, often prefer fringe benefits to straight cash. And woke capital, Harwick argues, is actually the creation of a labor cartel: the highly progressive monoculture of professional workers. To keep them happy, institutions that employ a lot of professionals have been pressured toward a narrow ideological consensus, corresponding to the views of roughly the left-most 8 percent of the American electorate. It’s a hidden fringe benefit that Harwick dubs “ideological rents.”

Douglas Newby:

I have left for last this tax advantage, which is the most obvious economic reason Fortune 50 companies and individual families are moving from Los Angeles to Dallas. A fourth generation Angelenos family who belongs to the most prestigious Los Angeles beach club, have their children in the finest preparatory schools, and live in a beautiful home told me they will enjoy escaping the high taxes, but it is the quality of life Dallas offers that they are really seeking. They are excited about schools that are open, restaurants they can go to, friendly, optimistic neighbors, blue skies, a sense of freedom and robust opportunities.

The pandemic brought everything into hyper-focus. Californians who a few years ago were tempted to leave for economic reasons decided to leave now to live in a city their family would enjoy. Those arriving in Dallas are not coming here with doubt or trepidation, but with excitement and enthusiasm to begin life in Dallas that offers so much of what California offered families moving there a generation or two ago.

For the next 30 years Dallas will be the city that leads the way in Organic Urbanism and the aesthetic and economic opportunities it provides. The pattern of migration to and from cities has evolved for 200 years. Technology increases the fluidity of where people live and simultaneously allows a greater intimacy and connectivity with neighbors and the community.

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.

Matt Piper Madeline Heim:

Even though the state budgeted $75 million to trace the virus’ path, its health department chose from the earliest days of the pandemic to reveal little about outbreak locations.

Then, during last fall’s surge, the state’s most powerful business and manufacturing group sued to make doubly sure nobody but the state could access those records.

So once the wave crested, there was nothing public at the state level to answer claims like those from the head of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association on Nov. 30, who said there was no data that proved people were more likely to contact the virus in restaurants.

The same was true for data about bars, churches, stores, meatpacking plants or manufacturers. 

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.

Ken Klippenstein, Eric Lichtblau

Within hours of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, the FBI began securing thousands of phone and electronic records connected to people at the scene of the rioting — including some related to members of Congress, raising potentially thorny legal questions.

Using special emergency powers and other measures, the FBI has collected reams of private cellphone data and communications that go beyond the videos that rioters shared widely on social media, according to two sources with knowledge of the collection effort.

In the hours and days after the Capitol riot, the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people who were identified at the crime scene. Investigators have also relied on data “dumps” from cellphone towers in the area to provide a map of who was there, allowing them to trace call records — but not content — from the phones.

The cellphone data includes many records from the members of Congress and staff members who were at the Capitol that day to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The FBI is “searching cell towers and phones pinging off cell sites in the area to determine visitors to the Capitol,” a recently retired senior FBI official told The Intercept. The data is also being used to map links between suspects, which include members of Congress, they also said. (Capitol Police are reportedly investigating whether lawmakers helped rioters gain access to the Capitol as several Democrats have alleged they did, though Republican officials deny this.)

Stewart Lawrence:

Getting a good college education turns out to be a lot easier than it used to be. It’s not that the courses have gotten any easier, but academic cheating has, and most schools seem powerless to stop it.

In recent months much of the media has focused on the high-profile college admissions scandals involving Hollywood celebrities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. But that’s just the tip of the ice berg.

While getting students into prestige schools is one way parents and their children “game” the college system, it’s what they do afterwards that may be even more shocking.

I spent weeks interviewing unemployed writers and assistant professors who say they are earning a lucrative side income by writing student term papers and essays for a fee – sometimes posing as these students online and taking an entire load of semester courses anonymously on their behalf.

It turns out that academic “ghost-writing” isn’t illegal but it is highly unethical. Schools have “intellectual integrity” guidelines in place that require students to do their own work or risk being expelled.

Wisconsin Democracy:

Liberal groups are winning the money race in the so-called “nonpartisan” state school superintendent race, where Pecatonica Area School Superintendent Jill Underly faces Deborah Kerr, a retired Brown Deer schools superintendent.

Three groups that generally back Democratic candidates in partisan elections – A Better Wisconsin Together, Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin – have doled out $766,425 to support Underly or oppose Kerr.

American Federation for Children, a pro-voucher outfit founded by Betsy DeVos that generally backs Republicans, has spent $56,500 to oppose Underly.

That’s a 13 to 1 advantage for the liberal groups backing Underly.

Two weeks out from the April 6 spring elections, eight special interest groups have topped $1 million combined in outside election spending on the state school superintendent race and two special legislative elections.

Scott Girard:

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.

Benjamin Lesser, MB Pell and Kristina Cooke:

A few weeks after San Francisco’s school district moved to remote learning last year in hopes of halting the spread of the coronavirus, Kate Sullivan Morgan noticed her 11-year-old son was barely eating. He would spend days in bed staring at the ceiling.

The mother formed a pod with three other families so the students could log on to their online classes together. That helped, but her eldest remained withdrawn and showed little interest in his hobbies, such as playing piano and drawing. Then her younger son, then 8, started to spiral down.

“He would scream and cry multiple times per hour on Zoom,” she said. “It was all really scary and not in keeping with his personality.” She scaled back her job as a healthcare regulatory attorney to be there for her sons.

In December, with schools in San Francisco still closed, the family packed up and moved more than 1,700 miles, to Austin, Texas, so the children could attend school in person. “Kids are resilient, but there is a breaking point,” Sullivan Morgan said.

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.

WSWS.org:

The West Coast Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committees call for Los Angeles and Oakland teachers to vote “no” on their unions’ sellout agreements and refuse to return to classrooms until conditions are completely safe. The efforts of the politicians and teachers unions across the West Coast to return students and staff to schools under deadly conditions must be resisted in order to save lives.

We reject the governmental attempts to classify teachers as “essential workers” in the midst of the deadly coronavirus pandemic in order to push them back into unsafe classrooms. Despite the recent decline in case numbers with a small but slowly increasing minority of the population having been vaccinated, coronavirus infections and deaths are poised to increase. More infectious variants of the virus are now circulating with state and local governments instituting drastic rollbacks of lockdown measures that will guarantee a renewed explosion of infections and deaths.

Joanne Ingram, Christopher J. Hand and Greg Maciejewski:

Studies examining the effect of social isolation on cognitive function typically involve older adults and/or specialist groups (e.g., expeditions). We considered the effects of COVID‐19‐induced social isolation on cognitive function within a representative sample of the general population. We additionally considered how participants ‘shielding’ due to underlying health complications, or living alone, performed. We predicted that performance would be poorest under strictest, most‐isolating conditions. At five timepoints over 13 weeks, participants (N=342; aged 18‐72 years) completed online tasks measuring attention, memory, decision‐making, time‐estimation, and learning. Participants indicated their mood as ‘lockdown’ was eased. Performance typically improved as opportunities for social contact increased. Interactions between participant sub‐groups and timepoint demonstrated that performance was shaped by individuals’ social isolation levels. Social isolation is linked to cognitive decline in the absence of ageing covariates. The impact of social isolation on cognitive function should be considered when implementing prolonged pandemic‐related restrictive conditions.

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.

Robin Hansen:

Many people, including myself and Bryan, think it is a shame that so many seem worse off from making poor lifestyle choices, and so are inclined to recommend that good advice be spread more widely. However, what if most everyone who makes poor choices is actually well aware of the usual good advice when they make their poor choices? And what if they like having the option to later pretend that they were unaware, to gain sympathy and support for their resulting predicaments? Such people might then resent the wider spreading of the good advice, seeing it as an effort to take away their excuse, to blame them for their problems, and to reduce their sympathy and support.

Judy Cole:

For a little girl growing up in Colombia in the 1980s, a science career with NASA may have seemed about as likely as setting foot on a faraway planet. These days, however, Diana Trujillo is an aerospace engineer.

In fact, she leads a 45-person team at the NASA laboratory that’s responsible for the robotic arm of the latest Mars rover.

Bret Devereaux:

This is Part I of a seven part series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII) comparing the popular legacy of Sparta (embodied in films like 300) with the historical ancient state. Today, we’re going to start by looking at the sources of our information on Sparta, and then begin at the beginning: the Spartan rearing and training system, the agoge.

I knew we’d go here eventually (a critique of 300 in particular has been a fairly common request), but I decided to move this up in the calendar after reading the dueling articles in the New Republic about the value of Sparta. I don’t think either article was really as comprehensive as it could have been, and I felt one of them was deeply mistaken – it will soon be very obvious which one.

Sparta’s legacy in American popular culture has always been prominent, but it seems particularly so now. You see the Spartan lambda (the Λ for Lacedaemon, the name of the territory of Sparta) on t-shirts. Sparta is invoked in fitness motivational posters. Famous Spartan witticisms (like molon labe – “come and get them”) are turned into modern political slogans. There’s an entire, popular series of obstacle course runs called ‘Spartan race’ (an unfortunate phrasing if ever I’ve heard one).

Chris Rickert:

Fourteen districts eventually responded with at least some of the data. The county’s two largest and most racially and socioeconomically diverse, Madison and Sun Prairie, required the newspaper to file public records requests for the data. To date, they remain unfilled.

In Madison, students could be marked present simply by exchanging messages with “the homeroom teacher and any specials teacher they are scheduled to receive instruction from that day.” In Verona, “two-way communication” with a teacher of staff had to occur at some time during the 24-hour day when the class occurred for the student to be marked present.

By contrast, the Marshall School District expected students to show up for each online class just as they had to show up for each in-person class pre-pandemic. It saw its rate of chronic absenteeism rise from 7% to 12% from the first semester of the last school year to the first semester of this one.

Seven school districts in Wisconsin, including three in Dane County — Madison, Sun Prairie and Mount Horeb — dispensed with enforcing state attendance laws altogether. The law identifies actions districts have to take when students are regularly absent without valid excuses.

Madison, the county’s largest district, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on why it sought the waiver.

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.

Michael Bindas:

The Supreme Court went a long way toward protecting the right of parents to direct the education of their children in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020). But the court’s opinion left a critical constitutional question unresolved. As a result, students are still being denied the opportunity to attend the schools that will best meet their needs. Fortunately, the justices have a chance to finish the job.

Robert Cherry:

Using 2019 FBI statistics — the most recently available data — I computed black and white perpetrators of hate crimes as a percentage of men 18 to 44 years old in their populations. The black rate was 40 percent, 76 percent and 303 percent higher than the white rate for hate crimes against the Asian/Pacific Island, Latino and LGBTQ communities respectively. Even more troubling, black rates for hate-crime assaultswere 94 percent higher while for property destruction and vandalism, they were 14 percent lower than white rates. 

Evidence from Los Angeles verifies the limited reach of white supremacist actions, particularly with regards to violent crimes and those perpetrated against Asian/Pacific Island, Latino, or LGBQT communities. Its Human Rights Commission found:

‘After declining for two years, white supremacist crimes…accounted for 22 percent of all [2019] hate crimes. Seven out of 10 white supremacist crimes involved vandalism and more than half targeted persons from the Jewish community.’

Disproportionate black behaviors extended to all violent crimes. For 2019, black arrests per male for murders and all violent crimes were, respectively, 4.94 and 2.73 times white arrests per male. And these numbers are before the unprecedented 2020 homicide spike.

Additional commentary via Joshua Chaffin:

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Discrimination against Asians in America was legislated as far back as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited immigration by Chinese workers.

Yet many Asian Americans complain that they are overlooked in the discussion of America’s racial injustices. “In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough, nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down,” writes Cathy Park Hong, the poet and critic, in her recent book of essays, Minor Feelings.

Asian Americans are often regarded as a “model minority” for the economic success achieved by some of their members. It is a label that Hong and others argue is deployed as a means to downplay their suffering.

It certainly does not fit the circumstances of the women murdered in Georgia, four of whom were of Korean descent. Massage parlours often rely on undocumented labourers with few rights or protections.

Noam Cohen:

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages as well as other wiki-projects, is announcing the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia’s content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too).

Conversations between the foundation’s newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, point-people on the project said in an interview, but the next couple of months will be about seeking the reaction of Wikipedia’s thousands of volunteers. Agreements with the firms could be reached as soon as June.

“This is the first time the foundation has recognized that commercial users are users of our service,” says Lane Becker, a senior director at the foundation, who has been ramping up the Enterprise project with a small team. “We’ve known they are there, but we never really treated them as a user base.”

Claude E. Shannon:

In 1948, Claude E. Shannon published the paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which is seen as the foundation of modern information theory.

In 1949, Shannon published Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems which relates cryptography to information theory, and should be seen as the foundation of modern cryptography.

Both papers derive from a technical report, A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography, written by Shannon in 1945. In this report, Shannon defined, and mathematically proved, perfect secrecy.

Bill Osmulski:

The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) is planning to make sweeping changes to how it handles teacher layoffs, and wokeness could become the biggest factor in who stays and who goes.

All teachers would be scored in five weighted categories, according to the school board’s current draft proposal. Most of the weight would be given to a teacher’s “Cultural Responsive Practices,” which could make up 40% of their score.

“Teachers should understand and be able to articulate the systems and beliefs that may lead to inequitable outcomes for students of color, and adapt instruction to meet the needs of each student,” according to the draft.

Sample layoff rubric provides examples of unacceptable practices and attitudes including: taking the color-blind approach, focusing on equality instead of equity, failing to understand one’s own implicit bias, and being reluctant to participate in race and equity professional development.

“If you’re a teacher and you cannot distinguish systems and beliefs that lead to inequitable outcomes for students, you should not be in MMSD,” School Board Member Ananda Mirilli said.

Instead, teachers must “[seek] out opportunities to uncover implicit biases and [take] action to ensure equitable learning environments for all.”

The next category would be “Student Learning Objective” with a weight of 30%. That focuses on academic growth rather than achievement. It is measured subjectively. Teachers with the best outcomes would have “in collaboration with focus group students and/or colleagues analyzed the outcomes of the SLO process and reflected on the growth achieved throughout the cycle.”

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.

Marguerite Roza:

While last week’s $1.9T federal relief plan did not forgive student loans, it did include a provision that would make future debt cancellation non-taxable. Senator Warren and others released a celebratory statement suggesting that the law “clears the way for President Biden to use his authority to cancel $50,000 in student debt.”

But student loan forgiveness is far from a done deal. That’s because there are legitimate concerns about cost, equity and fairness that come with any of the current plans to waive student loans. President Biden knows that, and that’s likely why he hasn’t done it.

But, there’s a better way to relieve the pain of student debt that addresses these concerns while costing taxpayers nothing.

Instead of waiving away the debt and sending the bill to taxpayers, this would be a trade: in return for each $10,000 in debt relief, recipients delay eligibility for federal retirement benefits by a year. In exchange for up to $40,000 now to pay off student loans, recipients would postpone Social Security and Medicare benefits for up to 4 years. The trade would be completely optional and open to all Americans for generations to come. Best of all, it costs taxpayers nothing.

William H. Sadlier, Inc. | Series Overview:

The instructional materials reviewed for From Phonics to Reading Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 meet the criteria for alignment to standards and research-based practices for foundational skills instruction. The instructional materials use a synthetic approach to phonics. Materials include a scope and sequence that clearly delineates an intentional sequence in which phonological and phonics skills are to be taught. Instructional materials include explicit instruction in letter identification and formation and provide instruction in general concepts of print. Materials provide systematic and explicit instructions for phonological awareness and frequent student practice opportunities (K-1). Instructional materials include systematic and explicit instruction in phonics skills with repeated teacher modeling located with in the Teacher’s Edition and Instructional Guides. The materials provide frequent opportunities for students to decode phonetically spelled words using phonemes and/or syllables. The materials include partially meet the criteria of application and encoding of phonics in activities and tasks. While the student practice is frequent, there are missed opportunities for teacher instruction and modeling of encoding. Materials include recurring instructional routines explicitly model and teach both reading and spelling of high-frequency words, primarily using the Read-Spell-Write routine. Materials provide explicit instruction in phoneme/grapheme recognition, syllabication and morpheme analysis using the Word Study routines and when introducing new sound-spelling patterns in the Blend It exercises. Materials include explicit instruction in fluency. Explicit instruction in and modeling of phrasing, expression, intonation, rate, and accuracy is included in the From Fluency to Comprehension: Routines and Minilessons guide. Materials include decodable readers that align to the phonics and high-frequency word scope and sequence. Materials also regularly and systematically provide a variety of assessment opportunities over the course of the year to demonstrate student progress toward mastery of all foundational skills; however, specific guidance to the teacher for next steps after assessments have been administered is limited.

Daniel Bice:

No one has been a bigger promoter of public schools during the race for state school superintendent than Jill Underly. 

That was, no doubt, a large part of the reason that Underly, the Pecatonica school superintendent, has won the endorsement of state and local teachers unions.

But back when it was her decision to send her two children to school when she lived in Madison, Underly went private. 

Her campaign has confirmed that she chose to send her kids to St. James Catholic School in Madison during the 2013-’14 and 2014-’15 terms rather than Leopold Elementary, the low-performing neighborhood school in Fitchburg. 

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.

Edward Peter Stringham:

One year ago, between March 13 and 16, 2020, began what most of us would agree were the most difficult days of our lives. We thought our rights and liberties were more or less secure or could only be hobbled on the margin. We took certain things for granted, such as that our governments would not – and could not – order us to stay home, close most businesses and schools, shut down travel, padlock churches and concert halls, cancel events, much less lock down society in the name of virus control. 

All that changed with a federal document issued March 13, 2020, and declassified three months later. It was the lockdown guidelines. Over the following days, governors panicked. People panicked. Bureaucrats were unleashed. All the powers of the state at all levels of society were deployed not on the virus but on the people, which is all that governments can really control. The lockdowns were nearly universal, implemented around the world but for a few holdouts, one of which was in the US (South Dakota). 

A year later, most states are opening up while those still clinging to lockdowns can no longer control people. Regardless of warnings from the top that going back to normal life is too dangerous, most people have decided to be done with the whole dreadful episode. 

All year we’ve asked ourselves the question: why did this happen? Pathogens are part of life now and always have been. For the better part of a century, social and economic outcomes from new viruses were ever less disruptive. Public health had a settled consensus that disease is something to mitigate through doctor-patient relationships. Taking away people’s rights was out of the question. The last time that was tried in very limited ways in 1918 demonstrated that coercion only distracts, divides, and delays. This is why lockdowns were not attempted for another hundred years. Wisely so. 

In the severe pandemic of 1957-58, officials explicitly said: ‘‘[T]here is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease.’’ It was the same in 1968-69, 2006, 2009, and 2012-13. 

Then came 2020 and SARS-CoV-2. The 24-hour news cycle and social media kicked in. Shocking images from China – people dropping dead in streets, police dragging people out of their homes or otherwise sealing whole apartment units – were blasted onto cellphones the world over. Then a part of Italy seemed to erupt. To many, it felt like a plague, and a primitive disease panic took over political culture. 

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.

Stephanie Hanes:

Raymond Jiang was scrolling through Instagram this past June – a way to pass time during a summer of no camps or social gatherings, after a high school freshman year that ended early – when he came across a post from education innovator Sal Khan.

For this 16-year-old son of Chinese immigrants living in the suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mr. Khan was something of a rock star. Mr. Jiang had used Khan Academy, Mr. Khan’s nonprofit offering free online classes, to pass trigonometry and pre-calculus the summer prior. Now, he saw, Mr. Khan was looking for people to join his newest enterprise: schoolhouse.world, a free, global, online tutoring network.

Mr. Jiang loved calculus. He was thrilled by the idea of working with Mr. Khan himself. So he applied to be one of the organization’s first math teachers.

Samantha Cole:

A Pennsylvania woman is accused of spending months harassing and threatening teenagers on her daughter’s cheerleading squad using manipulated images made to look like the girls were smoking, drinking, and posting nude images of themselves to social media.

Raphella Spone, from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, allegedly sent images that were edited and videos created using “deepfake” technology to the owner of the Victory Vipers cheer squad and girls’ parents, according to the criminal complaint viewed by Motherboard, in an effort to get them thrown off the team. She also sent texts and voicemails to the girls themselves, telling them “you should kill yourself.” 

BOE commissioner Alison Collins appears to remind Ritu Khanna, SFUSD chief of research, planning & assessment, to use the term “learning change” instead of “learning loss” during a March 16 BOE meeting.

Khanna agrees: “So let’s keep using the word learning change,” she says. pic.twitter.com/RVVzaottk6

— HereSay Media (@HereSayMedia) March 17, 2021

Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council:

This unnamed person successfully sued the Madison Metropolitan School District to enforce the ability of citizens to get records anonymously, as the Open Records Law explicitly allows. Kudos also to attorney Tom Kamenick of the Wisconsin Transparency Project, which brought the suit.

Notes and links on the taxpayer supported Madison School District’s open records practices.

Chloe McKim Jepsen:

The panel hosted speakers from policy, education, human development and leadership backgrounds.

At the panel, Ariel Tichnor-Wagner, the program director of educational policy studies, and Dean Emeritus Hardin Coleman of Wheelock presented their research findings on civic education in the context of education reform.

In an interview, Coleman said historically, discussing civic education has been neglected in urban school curriculums.

“Over the past 40 years of education reform, there’s been this huge focus on literacy and numeracy and now science,” Coleman said, “and a lot of very important things have been pushed to the side in the curriculum: social studies, civics education, arts and other topics, particularly in urban settings.”

From a policy perspective, Reuben Henriques, a history and social science content lead of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and event panelist, said in an interview it is important to discuss civic education across different fields of study.

“I think one of the themes that came up in that panel that is so powerful is just the importance of cross-sector collaboration around civic education,” Henriques said, “equity and civics more specifically.”

He said in an interview his work for the state department involves both guiding instruction and holding schools accountable. He said there has been a recent effort to emphasize civic education.

Armand Fusco:

Much more needs to be done to protect and secure the treasure chest such as having access to meaningful data and information—internal and external. A good external financial resource is the American Association of School Business Officials; it has many excellent financial publications including an internal audit procedure booklet with 20 sample audit guides for a variety of areas. Having a well- trained FAC–Forensic Auditing Corps–would also provide independent and objective information.
In addition, there should be a school finance library with good reference materials and books such as: The Principal and Fiscal Management, and The Gods of Mismanagement: A Mythological Exploration of Our Management Predicament. Such information is essential in training and education required for a proactive forensic auditing program to prevent and identify financial misdeeds.

A list of Internet resources should also be compiled to provide important information on using school dollars more effectively. A practical source is the school finance program of CPRE—Consortium for Policy Research–located at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It has first-hand experience in working with schools to manage school dollars more productively.

A 300 pupil school they worked with wanted to adopt a new instructional program design that required smaller classes and eight additional teachers. By reallocating school and district resources, the additional teachers were hired without increasing the budget. Sounds incredible? The seemingly impossible is simply more difficult to achieve, but it can be done, was done and has been done; it works!

A critical need is the development of a financial culture that encourages, protects, and rewards school personnel to report fraud, waste and mismanagement without being crowned with the “whistle- blower-syndrome.” This cultural development can be enhanced by allowing employees and others to suggest ways for “saving and stretching” school dollars.

Part 5 Finance: Can a FAC protect the school treasure chest?

Jonathan Chait:

It is entirely possible that when we look back at the coronavirus pandemic decades from now, we may see the gravest catastrophe as a generation of schoolchildren whose formative years were irrevocably stunted. Even if the year and counting of public-school rollback has not done as much damage as the death toll itself, it is a social crisis of the same magnitude.

As the pandemic recedes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand why school closings continue to grind on. The answer at this point is simply to open up schools, everywhere, right away.

Every social-distancing measure is the product of a cost-benefit calculation. Some measures net out obviously positive: wearing masks indoors or closing bars and in-person dining. Closing schools last spring was an act of desperation in the face of a spiraling pandemic, very much like eating your seed corn as an alternative to starvation.

Schools have remained shuttered not for any rational calculation but because they’re easy to close and difficult to open. Closing can be done with an order by a governor or public official. Opening requires negotiating a gamut of government guidelines, negotiation with often recalcitrant teachers unions, and persuading parents who have (in some cases) come to see in-person schooling as a serious risk.

An important dynamic is that when authorities first closed schools, they were operating in an atmosphere of extreme uncertainty. It would be an exaggeration to say that schools pose no risk, or even that public-health authorities have a perfect understanding of the risk they pose. It can be said, however, that the weight of evidence strongly suggests in-person schooling, especially of younger students, poses a small health risk. One of the most recent additions to the literature finds “in-person learning in New York City public schools was not associated with increased prevalence or incidence overall of COVID-19 infection compared with the general community.” A New York Times surveyof 175 experts drew the same conclusion.

Many schools have been held back by CDC standards saying that they only permit in-person classrooms if students sit no closer than six feet apart. This requirement makes full-time schooling impossible, because schools simply don’t have enough room to teach every student while spacing them so far apart.

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.

3b1b

Manim is an animation engine for explanatory math videos. It’s used to create precise animations programmatically, as seen in the videos at 3Blue1Brown.

Luke Rosiak:

A group of current and former teachers and others in Loudoun County, Virginia, compiled a lengthy list of parents suspected of disagreeing with school system actions, including its teaching of controversial racial concepts — with a stated purpose in part to “infiltrate,” use “hackers” to silence parents’ communications, and “expose these people publicly.”

Members of a 624-member private Facebook group called “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” named parents and plotted fundraising and other offline work. Some used pseudonyms, but The Daily Wire has identified them as a who’s who of the affluent jurisdiction outside D.C., including school staff and elected officials.

The sheriff’s criminal investigations division is reviewing the matter — but the group’s activities might be no surprise to top law enforcement because the county’s prosecutor, narrowly elected with the help of $845,000 in cash from George Soros, appears to be a member of the Facebook group.

Secret communications reviewed by The Daily Wire do not offer any evidence of racism by the group’s targets, or even attempt to. Their opponents were apparently those who objected to, sought to debate, or were even simply “neutral” about “critical race theory,” a radical philosophy opposed by many liberals and conservatives but increasingly embraced by governments.

Kirabo Jackson & Claire Mackevicius:

We use estimates across all known “credibly causal” studies to examine the distributions of the causal effects of public K12 school spending on test scores and educational attainment in the United States. Under reasonable assumptions, for each of the 31 included studies, we compute the same parameter estimate. Method of moments estimates indicate that, on average, a $1000 increase in per-pupil public school spending (for four years) increases test scores by 0.044 , high-school graduation by 2.1 percentage points, and college-going by 3.9 percentage points. The pooled averages are significant at the 0.0001 level.

Locally, Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer funded K-12 school districts. Yet, we have long tolerated 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.

Ilya Somin:

The 25-page suit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia against Brabrand and the Fairfax school board, charges that the revisions to TJ’s admissions process were specifically meant to drive down the number of Asian American students enrolled at the school and cites presentations and comments made by the superintendent and school board members to try to prove that point.

As described in the complaint filed by the plaintiffs, the key to the new admissions system is a system under which the previous admissions test (on which Asian-American applicants tended to score well) is eliminated, and replaced with a “holistic” evaluation system under which there are caps on the number of students who can be admitted from any given middle school in Fairfax County. The latter would have the effect of greatly reducing the number of Asian-American students accepted, because Asian students are disproportionately concentrated in some middle schools, relative to others.

The TJ case could sent important precedents on two major issues: how to deal with cases where racial affirmative action policies are pursued by policies that are facially neutral, and how to address situations where a major goal of the policy is to reduce the number of Asian-American students.

The mere fact the new admissions system would result in fewer Asian-American students does not make the policy unconstitutional. Neither does the possibility that the new policy might reduce the quality of education at TJ overall. Rather, the problem is that extensive evidence indicates that the change in admissions policy is motivated by policymakers’ desire to reduce the percentage of Asian-American students, so that the TJ student body will more closely reflect the demographics of the region. The plaintiffs’ complaint gives many examples, such as this one:

Brad Polumbo:

State Bailout Money Was Never Necessary

In the president’s telling, this is much-needed aid that will allow municipal governments facing massive COVID-related revenue pitfalls to pay their front-line emergency responders and essential personnel. But the facts reveal a different story.

While it’s plausible on its face to think that COVID would have led to a revenue drop for state and local governments, this never materialized in most places. According to JP Morgan, state revenue was “virtually flat” in 2020 nationwide while 21 states actually saw slight revenue upticks. 

Cato Institute economist Chris Edwards notedthat while there was a significant downturn in state revenue in the second quarter of 2020, overall it was balanced out by an uptick in the third quarter. “There is no need for more federal aid to the states,” he concluded.

Mills College:

A Message from Mills President Elizabeth L. Hillman

Since 1852, Mills College has brought transformative learning opportunities to many by breaking barriers, forging connections, and changing lives. Today, because of the economic burdens of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural changes across higher education, and Mills’ declining enrollment and budget deficits, Mills must begin to shift away from being a degree-granting college and toward becoming a Mills Institute that can sustain Mills’ mission. The Mills College Board of Trustees, after careful consideration, has decided that after fall 2021, Mills will no longer enroll new first-year undergraduate students. We will focus our resources on building degree pathways for our continuing students, and supporting the new first-year undergraduate, transfer, and graduate students who will join us this fall. Mills will most likely confer its final degrees in 2023, pending further consideration and action by the Board of Trustees.

We will begin to transition our academic programs by creating options and degree pathways for all Mills students. The Provost’s Office, working under the guidance of Mills’ accrediting agency, the WASC Senior College and University Commission, will develop plans for each degree program that Mills offers, enabling students to either earn a Mills degree or transfer to another college or university. Our Admissions Office will support students who choose to pursue transfer opportunities outside Mills through agreements with peer institutions. Mills is committed to working with these institutions to provide our students with streamlined admission processes, financial aid support, and pathways to degree completion.

Philippe Lemoine:

• A year ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit most of the world, there was arguably a good case for lockdowns. The initial growth of the epidemic implied a high basic reproduction number, which in turn meant that unless transmission was reduced the virus would quickly sweep through most of the population because incidence would continue to grow exponentially until the herd immunity threshold was reached, overwhelming hospitals and resulting in the deaths of millions of people in a few weeks. Lockdowns and other stringent restrictions seemed like a plausible way of reducing transmission to “flatten the curve” and prevent that scenario from materializing.

• Many people continue to reason along those lines, but since then we have learned that, whatever the precise effect that lockdowns and other stringent restrictions have, it is not so large that it can easily be picked up in the data, as it would surely be if restrictions had the very large effect that pro-lockdown advocates claim. In particular, it is not the case that the alternative to lockdowns is herd immunity (at least in the short run), because in practice incidence never grows exponentially for very long even in the absence of stringent restrictions. While it is plausible that, without stringent restrictions, incidence would start falling a bit sooner and faster, the data show very clearly that it always starts falling long before the herd immunity threshold is reached with or without a lockdown.

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.

Scott Girard:

The Report:

WPF highlights five areas for policymakers to consider:

• Elevate teacher diversity as a top education priority

• Target state investments to support both individuals and institutions

• Provide flexibility and rigor in teacher preparation and evaluation

• Require districts and teacher training programs to demonstrate greater transparency and accountability for teacher diversity

• Build state data system capacity

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

I’ve been inundated with reports of school districts spending state and federal Covid relief money on substantial one-time bonuses to teachers and administrators instead of spending them on getting kids back in classrooms or to curb learning loss.

This thread will document them.

— Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) March 14, 2021

Additional commentary.

Madison, too has received substantial federal taxpayer (and borrowed) funds.

Philip Grant (almost daily Grants)

Indeed, a pair of abiding relics of Uncle Sam’s rescue effort: Federal debt held by the public stands at $21.8 trillion, up 24.5% from a year ago. Similarly, Gregory Blaha of Bianco Research notes today that Fed owns 21% of the Treasurys market, up from 13% a year ago.

Daniel Willis:

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) will send $15.3 billion in assistance to California’s K-12 schools, the biggest of three relief pieces of legislation that Congress passed in less than a year to combat the pandemic and the recession. This latest bill will bring an estimated total funding of $26.4 billion to K-12 schools in California.

Districts and charter schools must use the money on Covid-related learning and school reopening expenses.

The database below shows how much money districts are expected to receive from 1) the March 27, 2020 CARES Act; 2) the Dec. 27, 2020 $900 billion Covid relief bill;  and 3) the March 11, 2021 $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.  The CARES Act “state allocation” refers principally to funds from the $4.4 billion that Gov. Newsom chose to allocate to schools that could have been used for other purposes.   The “federal allocation” refers to funds that went directly to school districts.

University of California:

The University of California today (March 16) announced a pioneering open access agreement with the world’s largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, making significantly more of the University’s research available to people worldwide — immediately and at no cost. The deal will put more UC research into the hands of individuals across the globe at a time when international collaboration to fight COVID-19 has illuminated the value of open access to scientific findings.

The agreement is the largest of its kind in North America to date, bringing together UC, which generates nearly 10 percent of all U.S. research output, and Elsevier, which disseminates about 17 percent of journal articles produced by UC faculty. The deal will double the number of articles made available through UC’s transformative open access agreements.

“This groundbreaking agreement will allow for more open, equitable access to information,” said UC President Michael V. Drake, M.D. “As more universities and research institutions support open access, scientific knowledge will advance at an unparalleled pace.”

Benjamin Zeisloft:

American academia spent more than $80 million lobbying the federal government in 2020.

According to data compiled by Open Secrets, lobbying dollars spent on education totaled $80,121,878 last year.

The top ten universities for lobbying were as follows:

University of California ($1,050,000)

University of Pittsburgh ($890,000)

Johns Hopkins University ($800,000)

University of Washington ($790,000)

University of Florida ($738,780)

Colorado State University ($710,000)

University of Colorado ($707,631)

Texas A&M University ($700,000)

Nova Southeastern University ($640,000)

California State University ($633,000)

Yuichiro Kakutani:

A joint degree program bankrolled by the Chinese government is causing an uproar among Cornell University professors, prompting soul searching at the Ivy League institution about the extent to which American academics should cooperate with the oppressive regime.

At issue is a program introduced at a faculty meeting in early February, when Professor Alex Susskind, an associate dean at Cornell’s school of hotel administration, touted a joint degree program funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education that he said would generate up to $1 million in annual profits for the university, according to meeting minutes and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. 

Liz Matthews:

Via social media on Thursday, Wilson and his wife Ciara gave a shout-out to some very lucky students.

“We welcome the @wnyacademy (Why Not You Academy) founding class of 2025! Last week marked a significant milestone on our pathway to opening in the Fall of 2021, as enrollment offer letters went out to our inaugural class. If you’re interested in enrolling, apply today as limited seats remain! #WhyNotYou #WhyNotUs”

Caitlin Flanagan:

The Dalton parent is not supposed to be on the wrong side of a savage inequality. She is supposed to care about savage inequalities; she is supposed to murmur sympathetically about savage inequalities while scanning the news, her gentle concern muffled by the jet-engine roar of her morning blowout. But she isn’t supposed to fall victim to one.

In early October, stern emails began arriving in Best’s inbox. A group of 20 physicians with children at the school wrote that they were “frustrated and confused and better hope to understand the school’s thought processes behind the virtual model it has adopted.” This was not a group with a high tolerance for frustration. “Please tell us what are the criteria for re-opening fully in person,” they wrote. And they dropped heavy artillery: “From our understanding, several of our peer schools are not just surviving but thriving.”

Shortly after the physicians weighed in, more than 70 parents with children at the lower school signed a petition asking for the school to open. “Our children are sad, confused and isolated,” they wrote, as though describing the charges of a Victorian orphanage. They were questioning why “everyone around them gets to go to school when they do not.”

Parents at elite private schools sometimes grumble about taking nothing from public schools yet having to support them via their tax dollars. But the reverse proposition is a more compelling argument. Why should public-school parents—why should anyone—be expected to support private schools? Exeter has 1,100 students and a $1.3 billion endowment. Andover, which has 1,150 students, is on track to take in $400 million in its current capital campaign. And all of this cash, glorious cash, comes pouring into the countinghouse 100 percent tax-free.

Samantha West:

In one Wisconsin school district, two in five high school students failed a class during first semester. In another, the fall failure rate was four times what it had been in recent years.

Almost all of the 60 school districts responding to a USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin survey reported that more high school students failed a class last fall than in recent years, and most blamed the same factor: online learning.

Students’ first-semester grades offer the earliest hard evidence of the toll the pandemic has taken on learning this year. Because the state Department of Public Instruction doesn’t report such data, the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin sent a survey to all the state’s districts asking administrators about their high schools’ failure rates.

Nine in 10 said failure rates had gone up. While most schools reported only a slight increase, others reported failure rates that had doubled or tripled.

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.

University of Michigan:

For teens, pandemic restrictions may have meant months of virtual school, less time with friends and canceling activities like sports, band concerts and prom.

And for young people who rely heavily on social connections for emotional support, these adjustments may have taken a heavy toll on mental health, a new national poll suggests.

Forty-six percent of parents say their teen has shown signs of a new or worsening mental health condition since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health at Michigan Medicine. Parents of teen girls were more likely to say their child had a new onset or worsening of depressive symptoms and anxiety than parents of teen boys.

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.

WISN-TV:

One year after the pandemic started, students in Milwaukee still haven’t returned to classrooms, and a teachers’ union leader is signaling that educators may need to see additional safety measures, beyond vaccinations, in order for them to return.

Milwaukee Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, is holding classes virtually. The district has a plan to phase-in in-person learning next month.

But in an appearance Sunday on “UPFRONT,” Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, would not say whether the union backs the district’s plan to return to classroom learning in April. “UPFRONT” is produced in partnership with WisPolitics.com.

“We have always been in support of being in classrooms, in schools, with our students, when we know that it is safe to do so,” Mizialko said.

Vaccinations for teachers started last week. Mizialko said it has been difficult to track how many MPS teachers have received vaccinations, because some educators are going to their private medical providers for shots.

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.

European Commission:

This Style Guide is intended primarily for English-language authors and translators, both in-house and freelance, working for the European Commission. But now that so many texts in and around the EU institutions are drafted in English by native and non-native speakers alike, its rules, reminders and handy references aim to serve a wider readership as well.

In this Guide, ‘style’ is synonymous with a set of accepted linguistic conventions; it therefore refers to recommended in-house usage, not to literary style. Excellent advice on how to improve writing style is given in The Plain English Guide by Martin Cutts (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and the European Commission’s own How to write clearly, all of which encourage the use of good plain English. See also Clear English – Tips for Translators, Tips on translating from Slovak into English and Misused English words and expressions in EU publications.

John Hilliard:

After a year turned upside down by COVID-19, some Massachusetts school districts are looking ahead to summer and how they can use the traditional time off as a chance to expand educational opportunities interrupted during the pandemic.

School officials in Framingham, Chelsea, and Fall River said they hope to offer families and staff the option of participating in summertime programs — including academics, enrichment, and the arts — as a first step in what is expected to be a long process of helping students resume their normal schooling and lives. There would also be mental health support to help children navigate the trauma caused by COVID-19, school officials said.

“I think this once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic requires an extreme and robust reaction,” said Adam Freudberg, chairman of the Framingham School Committee. “We have to go big.”

The planning comes as billions of dollars in federal stimulus money is being earmarked for school districts across the country to help children grapple with the academic and emotional toll wrought by COVID-19. President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion stimulus package into law Thursday.

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.

Krassi Twigg and Kerry Allen:

‘Wolf warriors’ on social media

In recent months, China experts have noticed dozens of new and highly active official social media accounts representing Chinese embassies and leading diplomats.

This has become known as “wolf warrior” diplomacy. The best-known account belongs to Zhao Lijian from the Chinese foreign ministry.

He caused controversy in March after tweeting articles suggesting that coronavirus originated in the United States.

The US and China traded unverified theories about the origins of coronavirus

Those tweets have been shared more than 40,000 times and referenced in 54 different languages, according to research from the Digital Forensic Research Lab, part of the Atlantic Council think tank.

Popular hashtags referencing the posts have made waves at home too – they’ve been viewed by users of Chinese social network Weibo more than 300 million times.

In December, Zhao Lijian was widely criticised for sharing a fake image of an Australian soldier killing an Afghan child, for which China refused to apologise.

Gail Heriot:

Mounting empirical research shows that race-preferential admissions policies are doing more harm than good. Instead of increasing the numbers of African Americans entering high-status careers, these policies reduce those numbers relative to what we would have had if colleges and universities had followed race-neutral policies. We have fewer African-American scientists, physicians, and engineers and likely fewer lawyers and college professors. If, as the evidence indicates, the effects of race-preferential admissions policies are exactly the opposite of what was originally intended, it is difficult to understand why anyone would wish to support them.

Rory Cellan-Jones:

Wispolitics:

State superintendent candidate Deb Kerr called for all K-12 schools to reopen for in-person instruction, claiming “the science is clear” such a move is kids’ best interest.

Meanwhile, Kerr’s opponent Jill Underly slammed her for lying about the science behind reopening schools.

At a Saturday news conference on the Capitol steps, Kerr warned the future of Wisconsin schools is on the line in the spring election. She said organizations like the Centers for Disease Control back her recommendations for returning to in-person schooling and knocked her opponent Jill Underly for not having a plan.

A New York Times analysis this month found that only 4 percent of school districts nationwide have low enough COVID-19 community transmission to safely hold full-time in-person classes.

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.

God bless her. Public School teacher goes nuclear on the Critical Race Theory insanity— and calls it what it is… straight-up racism. pic.twitter.com/wm0JU2xewp

— Joe Dan Gorman – Intellectual Froglegs (@JoeDanMedia) March 12, 2021

Glenn Greenwald:

While I share the ostensible motive behind the bill — to stem the serious crisis of bankruptcies and closings of local news outlets — I do not believe that this bill will end up doing that, particularly because it empowers the largest media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC to dominate the process and because it does not even acknowledge, let alone address, the broader problems plaguing the news industry, including collapsing trust by the public (a bill that limited this anti-trust exemption to small local news outlets so as to allow them to bargain collectively with tech companies in their own interest would seem to me to serve the claimed purpose much better than one which empowers media giants to form a negotiating cartel). 

But the broader context for the bill is the one most interesting and the one on which I focused in my opening statement and testimony: namely, the relationship between social media and tech giants on the one hand, and the news media industry on the other. Contrary to the popular narrative propagated by news outlets — in which they are cast as the victims of the supremely powerful Silicon Valley giants — that narrative is sometimes (not always, but sometimes) the opposite of reality: much if not most Silicon Valley censorship of political speech emanates from pressure campaigns led by corporate media outlets and their journalists, demanding that more and more of their competitors and ideological adversaries be silenced. Big media, in other words, is coopting the power of Big Tech for their own purposes.

My written opening testimony, which is on the Committee’s site, is also printed below. The video of the full hearing can be seen here. Here is the video of my opening five-minute statement:

Burbio:

Burbio actively monitors 1,200 districts, including the 200 largest school districts in the US.  District plans are reviewed every 72 hours to identify changes. School districts in the data set are a mix of sizes and distributed nationally in such a way to represent local decision-making across the country and averages are weighted to reflect student populations.  For more details on methodology or detailed breakdown of county information email dennis@burbio.com.

Gayle Worland:

Andrew Reed:

In a world seemingly beset by problems, Steven Pinker has made a career out of focusing on the positive. For the past decade, the Harvard professor turned celebrity intellectual has been spreading the good news about human progress. Pinker has written two bestsellers on the subject and won the praise of thinkers and commentators from Bill Gates to Joe Rogan. His message? Things are getting better. Progress is not inevitable, but the trends are good. Even though it may not always seem like it, the world is more peaceful, prosperous and happy than even just a few decades ago.

Steven Pinker has spent years documenting human progress, and right now he’s worried we may be backsliding.

Not in any of the big areas. The overall trends on crime and life expectancy haven’t all of a sudden reversed. Nor is humanity primed to descend into a second Dark Age. Rather, the not-so-newfound concern of Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology hits far closer to home. In the last several years, Pinker has become increasingly concerned about a wave of illiberalism, particularly on college campuses.

I spoke to Pinker this past summer after he and several dozen other writers and intellectuals released “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” The letter decried “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” 

Nowhere is this ideology more widespread than in the halls of America’s colleges and universities. And Pinker has been among the loudest voices pushing back.

Will Flanders:

In the last few days, a debate has jump-started regarding grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) following reporting from Wisconsin Spotlight on questionable activities in Green Bay.  CTCL is a foundation heavily funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.   It describes its mission as “ensur(ing) elections are secure, voters have confidence in election outcomes, and democracy thrives as civic engagement grows.” However, it has come under criticism for making donations to left-leaning areas more than others.

A few weeks ago, a group of lawmakers spearheaded by Senator Duey Stroebel and Representative Adam Neylon introduced legislation that specifies that any third party election grants must be administered through the state and distributed equally to municipalities on a per-capita basis.  An important underlying question in this debate is whether these grants actually have an impact on election results.  Here, I attempt to answer that question. 

The CTCL website provides a list of all the grant requestors by state, including those for Wisconsin. A small number of municipalities that share a name (such as Wisconsin’s four Springfields) don’t provide enough detail for us to determine which one received the grant.  Consequently, we are left with 212 municipalities throughout the state requested some amount of funding from the CTCL, from amounts as low as $5,000 to multiple millions.  WILL is currently evaluating each of these grants for a deeper dive later this spring, but we already have the data to look at the impact of these grants and their impact on election results.

Helen Raleigh:

Critical race theory (CRT) is a divisive, discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color. It has penetrated our society—it’s in federal agencies’ and federal contractors’ “bias training,” in school curricula and many corporations’ “diversity training.” Few are willing to speak out against it for fear of being labeled racists or white supremacists. Asian Americans, however, have emerged as a powerful voice against this pernicious ideology.

The Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY) delivered the most vigorous rejection of CRT yet, calling it “a hateful, divisive, manipulative fraud.” CACAGNY is one of the oldest chapters of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, which was founded in San Francisco in 1895 to respondto nationwide discrimination and violence against Chinese Americans. For more than a century, this organization has helped Asian Americans, especially Chinese Americans, to “quicken the spirit of American patriotism” and to “insure the legal rights of its members.” CACAGNY speaks out against CRT now because Asian Americans have experienced its harm firsthand.

According to CRT’s victimization ledger, all whites are oppressors, and all “people of color” are oppressed. CRT argues that unequal economic outcomes among different races in our society result from white power and white privilege. Asian Americans punch a big hole in that worldview. As a group, their economic achievement has surpassed that of all other racial groups, including whites. Last year’s Department of Labor statistics even showed that the median weekly earnings of Asian women surpassed white men’s earnings.

Values drive Asian Americans’ economic success. Many believe in education attainment, stable marriages, delayed gratification, hard work and meritocracy. CRT attacks all these as “white” values, and the people who practice them as acting “white.”

Saritha Rai

Caste in India speaks, as race does in America, to centuries of social, cultural, and economic divisions. Unlike in the U.S., though, India has since 1950 had a national system of affirmative action designed to undo the legacy of bias. Among its provisions are ones that help Dalits and other oppressed groups get into and pay for college. For nearly half a century, IIT admissions have been subject to a reservation system that’s still hotly debated on the campuses. In recent years, the schools have opposed attempts to extend affirmative action to faculty hires, arguing it would dilute the quality of the applicant pool and undermine their meritocratic image.

The IITs are notoriously cutthroat, starting with the admissions process. Some 2.2 million people have registered to take the 2021 entrance exam, to vie for roughly 16,000 slots. About 15% of those are allotted to students from the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and another 7.5% to applicants from the Scheduled Tribes (STs), indigenous people who’ve faced marginalization and whose status has also been formalized by the constitution. To fill those slots, universities sometimes offer seats to students with test scores below the cutoff point—though not as far below as is commonly assumed.

Caste-based resentment at the IITs can run high. In one video posted on YouTube in 2018, a student poring over a pile of books is labeled “GEN,” for general pool, while the two students sleeping nearby are identified as “SC” and “ST.” In another post circulated widely among IIT groups last year, a student suggested Covid-19 should also give preferential treatment to the marginalized groups. “My dear Corona,” it said in Hindi. “In every sphere SC/STs get first preference. So if you can, please look into the same.”

Dalit IIT graduates who’ve managed to land jobs in the U.S. say that such attitudes can be found there, too. Last year a Dalit graduate of IIT Bombay filed suit in the U.S. against Cisco Systems Inc. and two of his fellow alums, saying he’d experienced caste-based discrimination at their hands while the three of them were employed at the company. The accompanying publicity prompted a wave of complaints about caste discrimination in American tech—allegations that seemed to blindside the industry.

SF Chronicle:

One year ago, school classrooms closed across the Bay Area. In San Francisco and many other districts, they have yet to reopen.

We asked for readers to tell us their experiences with distance learning, hybrid learning or in-person school. In just over a week, we received over 200 responses, an outpouring of stories from parents, grandparents, concerned residents and teachers from all over the Bay Area.

Jeffrey Carter:

Most of the time when I read or listen, it’s highly educated people positing theories and desiring more centralized decision making.  They usually aren’t threatened by technology.  Sure, universal basic income is a great idea but I don’t need it and it will cost me little to implement it.  Most of these arguments are normative.  Because they “feel” bad for someone, so we need to do something about it.  There is very little positive economic analysis when it comes to these arguments.

I also don’t believe in limits.  Certainly, there are constraints.  You have to put yourself into a situation to be successful and you have to prepare yourself to be successful.  You also have to be willing to define your own success and not let society determine it for you.  One thing that was great about Trump was you never heard “I can’t” when it came to taking on challenges that had to be taken on.

Successful people are like that. I have known lots of them.  It’s really interesting to listen to them talk about their success.  None of them were 100% lucky.  It wasn’t given to them.  They assumed risks others were not willing to assume and they saw things others didn’t see.

Indeed.

A fine elementary teacher mentioned years ago that “high expectations for all students is essential”.

This same teacher ruminated that “if we are doing such a great job, why is civic engagement and voting such a disaster?”

2017: Madison 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.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Unity School District in northwestern Wisconsin made the decision to remain open and continue with extracurricular activities at the beginning of the year in concert with a number of other districts in rural Polk County.

“Certainly, things look different,” Robinson said. “There’s been a lot of streaming events because we have to limit the number of people in person at our events, but we were very excited to be able to offer a fall sports season.”

The district, with a student population of roughly 1,000, took what Robinson called a “pause” in November after COVID-19 cases climbed significantly across the state, also due to a staffing shortage.

“One of the limiting factors in a small town or rural community is the shortage of available substitute teachers and support staff. We don’t have a large population to draw from for these positions,” Robinson said. “It wasn’t uncommon for a high school teacher to walk down and cover an elementary classroom for a period of time.”

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.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Mark Wirtz, a third-grade teacher at Hawthorne Elementary, said he was a bit frightened to return to the classroom.

“I’m really concerned about fellow staff members, really glad we are getting vaccinated, but I’m concerned about how my fellow staff members are feeling,” he said before being whisked away for his injection. “I have heard from fellow staff members (who returned to classrooms this week), they are a little bit stressed.”

District mitigation efforts

The students at Stephens Elementary School call Amanda Monson “Nurse Mandy.” She’s been a school nurse at the school for 12 of her 16 years working for the Madison School District, and before the pandemic her days were filled with office visits by students with stomach aches, scraped knees and medicinal needs — she was used to having more than one child in her office at a time.

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.

Alan Borsuk:

This means her children have been learning virtually for a year now while she has been teaching in person. As a generalization, most suburban schools have been open for in-person education, in some cases for the whole school year, in some cases since around mid-year. Also as a generalization – and almost no one disputes this – in-person education is better than virtual education not only for academic work but for social and emotional development of students.  

So as a generalization, as this mother and teacher can see, her suburban students are very likely moving ahead in school better than her children’s fellow students in Milwaukee.  

In other words, the gaps between these groups – and more broadly, richer kids and poorer kids – presumably are getting larger every day that nothing changes. It’s become more acceptable to call these gaps “opportunity gaps” rather than “achievement gaps.” So let’s say that the opportunities for city kids are not developing as well as the opportunities for suburban kids. This, of course, was true before the pandemic and it is truer now.   

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.

Matt Taibbi:

I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.

These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

Christopher Rufo:

Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology.

The new program, called the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, seeks to extend the Left’s cultural dominance of California’s public university system, 50 years in the making, to the state’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million students.

In theoretical terms, the new ethnic studies curriculum is based on the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” developed by Marxist theoretician Paolo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and, consequently, develop the capacity to overthrow their oppressors. Following this dialectic, the model curriculum instructs teachers to help students “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” This approach, in turn, enables teachers to inspire their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”

SSS:

The Sweden Solar System (SSS) is the world’s largest model of our planetary system. The Sun is represented by the Globe in Stockholm, the largest spherical building in the world, and the planets are lined up in direction north from here.

Roberto Wakerell-Cruz:

The 13-year-old student who claimed that her teacher showed Muslim students a naked depiction of the prophet Muhammad has admitted that she was lying. This lie led to the beheading of that teacher.

The History and Geography teacher, Samuel Paty of Paris, France, was beheaded by a Muslim radical after the story the young girl told gained international attention.

The student had told her father that the teacher kept Muslim students after class to show “a photograph of the Prophet [Muhammad] naked.”

Her father then went on to file a legal complaint and began a full-on hate campaign against the teacher. This included creating videos detailing the accusations against the teacher.

Days later, Paty was beheaded by 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov.

According to Mbeko Tabula, the lawyer representing the 13-year-old, the teen wasn’t even in class when the alleged incident she described would have taken place.

“She lied because she felt trapped in a spiral because her classmates had asked her to be a spokesperson,” said Tabula to AFP News.

CRFB:

Now that the American Rescue Plan Act has been signed into law, the federal deficit is on course to exceed $3 trillion this year, with debt reaching a new record as a share of the economy.

In February, under what was current law at the time, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projectedthe budget deficit would total $2.3 trillion in 2021, $1.1 trillion in 2022, and $1.9 trillion in 2031. Incorporating the direct effects of the American Rescue Plan Act, we project the deficit will now total $3.4 trillion this year – higher than last year’s record $3.1 trillion – and $1.6 trillion in 2022.

With the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act, we now project deficits will total $16.6 trillion over the 2021 to 2031 budget window, a $2.1 trillion increase over CBO’s prior estimate of $14.5 trillion. Virtually all of this increase will take place between 2021 and 2026.

Measured as a share of the economy, the deficit will total 15.6 percent of GDP this year and average 4.7 percent over the coming decade. Previously, the deficit was expected to total 10.3 percent of GDP in 2021 and average 4.4 percent over the 2022-2031 period. As a share of GDP, the 2021 deficit will be the fourth highest in history, eclipsed only by three years of borrowing to fight World War II. 

Benjamin Kay:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides sample classroom layouts that promote 6-foot social distancing during in-person education. These sample 30′ by 30′ classroom layouts hold at most 9 students while complying with the 6-foot social distancing requirement. I offer an alternative layout that allows 21 students into the classroom while complying with the minimum social distancing requirement. Improved layouts reduce or even eliminate the need for rotating cohorts of students and wait-lists, allowing more days of live instruction per student.

Mike Antonucci:

At 651 pages, the U.S. Department of Education’s recently released Digest of Education Statistics isn’t so much a digest as an encyclopedia of every relevant number concerning schooling in this country. It takes years to compile the figures, so they are not up to the minute, but the researchers also add their projections for the next 10 years. We get a clear picture of what has happened, and what is likely to happen in the near future.

The document has almost everything you need to know about education, both public and private, but here we will limit ourselves to two topics: expenditures and staffing.

Because we so often hear about how America shortchanges education, it’s worth knowing that we spent an estimated $1.5 trillion in 2018-19 on education at all levels. That’s about 7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Spending on K-12 schools totaled an estimated $832 billion, of which 92 percent went to public schools.

Non profit vote:

Amid the story of record turnout nationwide is also a story of differences. At the core of this report is a state-by-state ranking of voter turnout in all 50 states and DC – from the lowest-turnout state at 55% to a record-shattering 80% in the highest-turnout state. This 50-state ranking provides a powerful tool for examining the impact of state election policies. States in the top 10 of the ranking have markedly different policies than states in the bottom 10. Same Day Voter Registration states and “Vote at Home” states that mail every registered voter their ballot were consistently at the top of the turnout rankings. Those at the bottom generally made both registration and use of mail ballots harder. The report also looks at the role of competition and the Electoral College in shaping turnout.

Human Centered AI:

The 2021 AI Index report is one of the most comprehensive reports about artificial intelligence to date. This latest edition significantly expands the amount of data available in the report, which was drawn from a broader set of academic, private, and non-profit organizations for calibration. The report also shows the effect of COVID-19 on AI development from multiple perspectives, including how AI helps with COVID-related drug discovery and the effect of the pandemic on hiring and private investment.

Armand A Fusco:

It should now be clear that education dollars are not immune from corrupt indulgences, and that school budgets in the approval phase and spending process leave much to be desired. If dollars are to be spent more wisely and if fraud is to be prevented, a new thought process is needed about budgets–how financial transactions are monitored, how resources are used, and how the treasure chest can be secured from being plundered. Part of the rethinking process must also include prevention—making it difficult for waste and fraud to take place.

To begin with, school boards must keep a very unpleasant fact in mind. Don I. Tharpe, the executive director of the Association of School Business Officials (ASBO) claims that “embezzlement happens a lot more frequently than we are willing to admit.” However, ASBO does not track cases of theft and fraud and neither does anyone else. With billions of dollars involved, it’s amazing that such a void exists. Since such information is not easily available, school officials are handicapped in keeping an intelligent and forensic eye on district funds.

Therefore, it’s important for the state to be much more proactive in helping school districts guard the treasure chest; after all, education is a state responsibility. In Texas, the State Comptroller—a 60-year old grandmother who was elected to the position–is performing this task. Unlike previous office holders, she had a zeal for looking at school operations and doesn’t wait to be invited to audit school operations (transportation, retirement plans, curriculum alignment, finance, etc.); instead, she unhesitatingly “storms the ramparts.” Her proactive efforts in 32 school districts have saved over $85,000,000 in just two years. In fact, she won a prestigious award for government innovation from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. This program demonstrates the value and impact of independent and aggressive audit reviews.

Inside Education, Part 4: Finance: Are school budgets cholesterol free?

Dylan Brogan:

District officials are refusing to release a 2020 report detailing an investigation into a former Madison East High School educator. 

David Kruchten allegedly placed hidden cameras in the hotel bathrooms of students he was chaperoning on school trips. Students found these cameras concealed in smoke detectors, alarm clocks and air fresheners while at a conference in Minneapolis in October 2019. Kruchten was arrested in January 2020 and faces state and federal charges for attempting to produce child pornography.

Promising in February 2020 to review “every detail” of the incident, then-superintendent Jane Belmore told parents in an email that a private attorney had been hired to conduct an independent, internal review of the incident. That report was completed in June 2020, but the school district has turned down requests for the full report from parents and the media. The district also confirmed to Isthmus that the full report has not been provided to school board members, either. 

Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, asks, “Why should this investigation be secret? 

“I suspect they want it secret because there is evidence of the district’s own culpability and negligence on how this episode played out,” says Lueders, who is also editor of The Progressive. “This shouldn’t be allowed and people should be outraged.” 

I got the same "attorney-client privilege" and FERPA denials in December when I requested this report that @telldylan details here.

In November, @MMSDschools spokesperson told me in an email: "The full review will be made public after the criminal court cases have concluded." https://t.co/05SwbC8dcv

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) March 12, 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.

Brad Polumbo:

President Biden just signed his sweeping $1.9 trillion spending package into law. Once this bill hits the books, total taxpayer expenditure on (ostensibly) COVID relief will hit $6 trillion—which, roughly estimated, comes out to $41,870 in spending per federal taxpayer. 

Did you see anywhere near that much in benefit? 

The sheer immensity of this spending is hard to grasp. For context, $6 trillion is more than one-fourth of what the US economy produces in an entire year, according to Fox Business. The COVID spending blowout is at least eight times bigger than the (inflation-adjusted) price tag of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” 

Moreover, the COVID spending bills have all lost huge sums of money to unrelated carve-outs, politician pet projects, corporate bailouts, fraud, waste, and worse.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Redistributed Federal taxpayer funds and Wisconsin Schools

San Franciscans sacrificed. We masked up, kept our distance & stayed home. Our numbers are going down. Almost to orange. Yet, @SFUnified still has no plans to open up middle & high schools lagging @LASchools & other urbans. Let's open our schools. https://t.co/rrEEP4veN4

— Phil Ting (@PhilTing) March 12, 2021

Rory Linnane:

Deborah Kerr, one of two candidates competing to lead the state Department of Public Instruction, said she would move or rehire most of the agency’s over 400 employees  away from Madison and into offices around the state. 

“Under DPI’s current model, agency staff are plucked from the Madison area, and that’s not inclusive of any of the diversity and the needs of our Wisconsin children,” Kerr said at a press conference Wednesday in Milwaukee. 

Kerr, former superintendent of Brown Deer schools, said she would perform an “equity audit” of DPI staff and look to hire new staff who live in communities outside of Madison, possibly resulting in terminations of some current employees. Kerr, who lives in Caledonia, would not move to Madison and would work at offices around the state.  

Kerr’s opponent in the race, Pecatonica Area School District Superintendent Jill Underly, called Kerr’s proposal potentially a “Hail Mary to get more attention for a flailing campaign.”

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

CJ Szafir:

4. Billions in savings for taxpayers: Since 2011, Act 10 has saved taxpayers over $13 billion, according to the MacIver Institute.   

5. The sky didn’t fall on public education.  A study from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which I co-authored, showed that Act 10 had little or no impact on student-teacher ratios, the number of licensed teachers, school district spending on teacher salaries, and teacher experience. Especially as Wisconsin compared to other states that didn’t enact collective bargaining reform.

Further analysis by WILL showed that districts that embraced Act 10 actually had an uptick in math test scores.

Much more on Act 10, here.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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.act 10

James Freeman:

At the same time, shut­downs ne­ces­si­tated mas­sive gov­ern­ment spend­ing of bor­rowed money to off­set the loss of nor­mal eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity. So U.S. chil­dren were handed a mas­sive ad­di­tional debt bur­den at the same time their abil­ity to gen­er­ate fu­ture in­come was re­duced.

In the last year the United States has added more than $4 tril­lion in fed­eral debt, and that doesn’t even count the his­toric Biden spend­ing surge, which kicks off to­day with his sig­na­ture on the mas­sive new stim­u­lus plan.

Yet as the coun­try was lock­ing down last spring, Dr. Fauci de­scribed the im­pact on Amer­i­cans as “in­con­ve­nient” and later ac­knowl­edged that he did not do cost-ben­e­fit analy­sis and re­ally had no idea what the con­se­quences were for stu­dents: “I don’t have a good ex­pla­na­tion, or so­lu­tion to the prob­lem of what hap­pens when you close schools, and it trig­gers a cas­cade of events that could have some harm­ful cir­cum­stances.”

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

John Bailey:

One year after nationwide public school closures, a growing body of medical research and the firsthand experiences of school systems worldwide can provide a sound basis for determining a reopening strategy. This report examines the collective findings of more than 120 studies and considers their implications for current decisions. These studies cover a wide array of topics, including risks for children, transmissibility concerns, and the impact of school reopenings on community spread.

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.

Doree Lowak:

“But, unfortunately, teachers who opted [to work remotely] still aren’t coming in, so kids go in to learn on Zoom while wearing a mask,” she said, referring to the teachers who received permission in September to be remote for the whole year. “They could have a math teacher ‘watching’ the class while the social studies teacher Zooms from home. It’s still a mess.” (On Wednesday, Staten Island City Councilman Steven Matteo blasted this practice in a letter he posted on Twitter, saying “that is not ‘in-person’ learning; it is just a glorified version of remote learning.”)

Fed-up public school parents, many of whom are philosophically aligned with a public education, are increasingly driven away from a disjointed system they feel keeps them in the dark. 

While embattled Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has resigned, there’s still deep mistrust. There have been sweeping changes to admissions, from unscreened middle schools to a monthslong lag in admissions decisions, leaving parents too shaky to wait until as late as June, instead of the usual March, to know where their kid lands next year. Since most private schools’ decisions come out in late February and early March, families are making the bitter sacrifice now — even if it puts them in the poor house.

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.

Ashley Carnahan:

The University of California-Berkeley is on its way to becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution, which means that at least 25 percent of undergraduate students identify as “Chicanx/Latinx.”

UC-Berkeley’s Chancellor Carol Christ announced in August 2018 her “intention to set the UC Berkeley campus on a journey to become an HSI by 2027,” according to the Chancellor’s Task Force on Becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution’s report, published in December 2020.

A Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) is defined as one that “has an enrollment of undergraduate full-time equivalent students that is at least 25 percent Hispanic students at the end of the award year immediately preceding the date of application.”

The report states that Christ would like to see 25 percent of undergraduate students “self-identify as Chicanx/Latinx” by 2027.

“[Christ] identified this priority as one of the boldest goals in the campus’ strategic plan—for at least 25 percent of enrolled undergraduate students to self-identify as Chicanx/Latinx, for the University to be a preferred destination for Pell Grant eligible students, and for every student to thrive at Berkeley and to find belonging in all dimensions of the campus towards a true exemplification of comprehensive excellence,” the report said.

Freedom House:

The impact of the long-term democratic decline has become increasingly global in nature, broad enough to be felt by those living under the cruelest dictatorships, as well as by citizens of long-standing democracies. Nearly 75 percent of the world’s population lived in a country that faced deterioration last year. The ongoing decline has given rise to claims of democracy’s inherent inferiority. Proponents of this idea include official Chinese and Russian commentators seeking to strengthen their international influence while escaping accountability for abuses, as well as antidemocratic actors within democratic states who see an opportunity to consolidate power. They are both cheering the breakdown of democracy and exacerbating it, pitting themselves against the brave groups and individuals who have set out to reverse the damage.

The malign influence of the regime in China, the world’s most populous dictatorship, was especially profound in 2020. Beijing ramped up its global disinformation and censorship campaign to counter the fallout from its cover-up of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which severely hampered a rapid global response in the pandemic’s early days. Its efforts also featured increased meddling in the domestic political discourse of foreign democracies, transnational extensions of rights abuses common in mainland China, and the demolition of Hong Kong’s liberties and legal autonomy. Meanwhile, the Chinese regime has gained clout in multilateral institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council, which the United States abandoned in 2018, as Beijing pushed a vision of so-called noninterference that allows abuses of democratic principles and human rights standards to go unpunished while the formation of autocratic alliances is promoted.

As COVID-19 spread during the year, governments across the democratic spectrum repeatedly resorted to excessive surveillance, discriminatory restrictions on freedoms like movement and assembly, and arbitrary or violent enforcement of such restrictions by police and nonstate actors. Waves of false and misleading information, generated deliberately by political leaders in some cases, flooded many countries’ communication systems, obscuring reliable data and jeopardizing lives. While most countries with stronger democratic institutions ensured that any restrictions on liberty were necessary and proportionate to the threat posed by the virus, a number of their peers pursued clumsy or ill-informed strategies, and dictators from Venezuela to Cambodia exploited the crisis to quash opposition and fortify their power

Applied Divinity Studies:

If this data isn’t surprising to you, it should be.

Several EA organizations work on actively growing the community, have been funding community growth for years and view it as an active priority:

• 80,000 Hours: The Problem Profiles pagelists “Building effective altruism” as a “highest-priority area”, right up there with AI and existential risk.

• Open Philanthropy: Effective Altruism is one of their Focus Areas. They write “We’re interested in supporting organizations that seek to introduce people to the idea of doing as much good as possible, provide them with guidance in doing so, connect them with each other, and generally grow and empower the effective altruism community.”

• EA Funds: One of the four funds is dedicated to Effective Altruism Infrastructure. Part of its mission reads: “Directly increase the number of people who are exposed to principles of effective altruism, or develop, refine or present such principles”

So if EA community growth is stagnating despite these efforts, it should strike you as very odd, or even somewhat troubling. Open Philanthropy decided to start funding EA community growth in 2015/2016 [1]. It’s not as if this is only a very recent effort.

As long as money continues to pour into the space, we ought to understand precisely why growth has stalled so far. The question is threefold:

• Why was growth initially strong?

• Why did it stagnate around 2015-2017?

• Why has the money spent on growth since then failed to make a difference?

Branko:

Here’s a sentence:

Honor Levy, 23, with a piece of fiction published on The New Yorker’s website and a short story collection coming out next year, was regretting her decision to pull her piece from The Drunken Canal as we walked last Thursday past the publication’s unmarked white newspaper box in Lower Manhattan. 

I have so many questions.

Is the person a writer for New Yorker? Is The Drunken Canal somehow related to the New Yorker? What is The Drunken Canal? How was she “regretting” something at that point in time? Vocally or otherwise? What publication was being stored in those unmarked white newspaper boxes? Wait, is The Drunken Canal a publication?

Matti Vuorre Amy Orben Andrew Przybylski:

Digital technology is ubiquitous in modern adolescence, and researchers are concerned that it has negative impacts on mental health that, furthermore, increase over time. To investigate if technology is becoming more harmful, we examined changes in associations between technology engagement and mental health in three nationally representative

Nick Triggle:

The impact of NHS Test and Trace is still unclear – despite the UK government setting aside £37bn for it over two years, MPs are warning.

The Public Accounts Committee said it was set up on the basis it would help prevent future lockdowns – but since its creation there had been two more.

It said the spending was “unimaginable” and warned the taxpayer could not be treated like an “ATM machine”.

But Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the MPs’ report “defies logic”.

Baroness Dido Harding, head of the National Institute for Health Protection, which runs the system, pointed out it had been built from scratch and was now doing more tests than any other comparable country.

She said performance had been improving with more people who tested positive being reached and more of their close contacts being asked to isolate.

“It is making a real impact in breaking the chains of transmission,” she added.

But the MPs’ report questioned:

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.

David Aaro:

“Friendly reminder: If you are planning any trips for Spring Break, please keep that off of Social Media. It is hard to argue that it is unsafe for in-person instruction, if parents and the public see vacation photos and international travel,” a post from the group read, according to FOX 11 of Los Angeles reporter Bill Melugin.

Stacey Lennox:

Congrats to Stanford Law and Policy Lab. They have identified the problem but are pursuing an epic failure with their solution. It seems the top-tier school has finally figured out that tying children to failing schools by their zip codes systematically oppresses black and brown children. President Trump knew that when he called school choice the civil rights issue of our time. However, Stanford is taking the standard approach of over-educated leftists. As is typical, they detected disparate outcomes in a system they are evaluating, they blamed it on racism and their first instinct was to lower the standards.

Their practicum is The Youth Justice Lab: Imagining an Anti-Racist Public Education System. Perhaps they would like to engage in a deeper analysis. Recently I wrote about a teen in Baltimore who only passed three classes in his entire high school career. Even more shocking, with a GPA of 0.13, his class rank was 62 out of 120 students The mayor of Baltimore City is black, the city council is extremely diverse, and the CEO of Baltimore City Schools is also black. The school district’s average teacher salary is $62,000, and its per-student spending was the third highest in the nation in 2019.

This overall picture of well-funded schools with a minority-led city government and school leadership is common in underperforming urban school districts. These districts have financial resources, and it would be hard to imagine their leadership’s primary goal is to hold students down based on racial identity. Instead, schools and individual student school performances are a multi-factor analysis. It is not as simple as assigning a motive, as Stanford Law has.

Luckily, Stanford University has one of the most astute students on inequity in education at the Hoover Institution. Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote a data-filled book called Charter Schools and Their Enemies. He demonstrates that charter schools, free from mandates from the local school board, can operate in the same building as a public school and produce significantly better results with predominantly minority populations. He spends quite a bit of time evaluating Success Academy, a charter school system comprised of 47 schools in New York City that enroll approximately 20,000 students.

Success Academy enrolls students through a lottery in underserved neighborhoods. In the last year that students in New York took standardized tests, Success Academy students had the state’s highest scores. Of the more than 7,000 students who took the exams, 99% passed the math portion, with 86% achieving the highest score, and 90% passed the English and language arts portion, with 41% achieving the highest score. The student population that took the tests was diverse and had an average household income of less than $50,000 in one of the world’s highest cost-of-living cities.

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.

Gabriel Schwartz:

Adverse birth outcomes put children at increased risk of poor future health. They also put families under sudden socioeconomic and psychological strain, which has poorly understood consequences. In this paper, we test whether infants experiencing an adverse birth outcome — low birthweight or prematurity, as well as lengthy hospital stays — are more likely to be evicted in early childhood, through age 5. We analyze 5,655 observations contributed by 2,115 participants in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study — a national, randomly sampled cohort of infants born in large US cities between 1998 and 2000 — living in rental housing at baseline. We fit proportional hazards models using piecewise logistic regression, controlling for an array of confounders and applying inverse probability of selection weights. We find that being born low birthweight/preterm is associated with a 1.74-fold increase in children’s hazard of eviction (95%CI=1.02,2.95), while lengthy neonatal hospital stays were independently associated with a relative hazard of 2.50 (CI=1.15,5.44) compared to uncomplicated births. Given recent findings that unstable housing during pregnancy is associated with adverse birth outcomes, our results suggest eviction and health may be cyclical and co-constitutive. Children experiencing adverse birth outcomes are vulnerable to eviction and require additional supports.

Academic Freedom Alliance:

Within established ethical and legal bounds, we pledge to defend faculty members’ freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers, as well as in their lives as citizens; their freedom to design courses and conduct classes using reasonable pedagogical judgment; and their right to be unburdened by ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.

The AFA will in appropriate circumstances aid in providing legal support to faculty members whose constitutionally, statutorily, contractually, or other legally protected rights to academic freedom have been violated or are under threat.

Keith Whittington:

Today the Academic Freedom Alliance goes public. I am honored to serve as the inaugural chair of the AFA’s Academic Committee, and the founding members include some of my Volokh Conspiracy co-bloggers. The group boasts a broad and diverse coalition of over 200 academics from across the country who are committed to upholding the principles of free speech in academia. I am particularly pleased that we were able to pull together faculty from across the political spectrum who recognize a common threat to scholarly inquiry and robust debate on college campuses and who are willing to defend those principles whether individual professors are targeted from the left or the right, from forces on campus or off.

Marc Eisen:

The downtown tax base reached $3.08 billion in 2020, a hike of $1.2 billion from 2011, according to a recent downtown report. One percent of the Madison landmass was producing 10.5% of the city tax base. This despite the fact that 39% of the buildable land downtown was tax exempt. Housing boomed as 5,311 residential units were either built or approved for construction in the 2010–19 period. Property tax collections hit $67.2 million in 2020.

Madison’s hotels are reeling worst of all from the shutdown of the convention business and the crippling of tourism. The Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club, for example, saw business plunge 70% to 80% in 2020, prompting major layoffs at the city’s largest hotel, according to general manager Steve Zanoni. Of note: In 2020, the Concourse was assessed at $33.9 million, which produced a total property tax bill of $777,528. Zanoni is prepared to appeal the 2021 assessment.

Kyle Koenen & Libby Sobic:

The state has already received $2.0 billion in stimulus funding under the federal CARES Act and is expected to receive billions more in the latest round of stimulus. While the Department of Administration has developed a dashboard displaying CARES Act funding allocations, this tool fails to keep the public adequately informed on how and when this money has actually been spent. Having greater legislative input can also help ensure that these funds are spent in a manner that does not create long-term, ongoing fiscal obligations to the state.

In 2009, legislative Democrats recognized the importance of having both the legislative and executive branches involved in the allocation of federal stimulus funds by passing similar legislation that required Joint Finance oversight.

A prime example for why AB 149 is a necessary proposal today is the delay of the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) funds by Governor Evers in 2020.

The first allocation of federal funding to Governor Evers was a result of the CARES Act, which included the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) fund. Governor Evers received over $46 million in GEER funds that could be allocated to institutions of higher education, K-12 public schools, and other education-related entities.1

Unfortunately, these funds were delayed in getting to Wisconsin schools. Other governors worked quicky to complete the necessary paperwork to the U.S. Department of Education to receive the grant of these funds, while Governor Evers submitted his paperwork in late May 20202. Many other states, including Alaska, California, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, and Oklahoma, completed the process weeks, if not a month, before Governor Evers.3

Even after the paperwork was submitted, the GEER funds were furthered delayed by the Governor. Governor Evers didn’t announce the allocation of these federal funds until June 17, 20204. Then, after the Governor’s announcement of the funds, the GEER applications were not available to local districts until October 2020.5 Ultimately, this was a delay of nearly five months for much needed federal dollars

Additional Federal Taxpayer (and borrowed Funds) for the Madison School District.

Matt Barnum:

Districts must use at least 20% of their money to address learning loss. Other than that, schools will have broad latitude to use the money for anything from buying masks to keeping teachers employed to setting up an after-school program.

In another boon to public schools, states and cities will get $350 billion to fill their own budget gaps. Education advocates see this as critical, since states provide a substantial share of schools’ funding.

All this money, in addition to the relief packages passed last year, means that most schools are unlikely to face imminent budget cuts, which were a distinct possibility when the pandemic hit and the economy cratered.

“That’s really a testament to the power of federal support,” said Zahava Stadler, who works on school funding issues for Education Trust, which advocates for federal aid. “We really need to be thankful for the breathing room that this federal aid has provided.”