Paul:

Welcome to my online math tutorials and notes. The intent of this site is to provide a complete set of free online (and downloadable) notes and/or tutorials for classes that I teach at Lamar University. I’ve tried to write the notes/tutorials in such a way that they should be accessible to anyone wanting to learn the subject regardless of whether you are in my classes or not. In other words, they do not assume you’ve got any prior knowledge other than the standard set of prerequisite material needed for that class. In other words, it is assumed that you know Algebra and Trig prior to reading the Calculus I notes, know Calculus I prior to reading the Calculus II notes, etc. The assumptions about your background that I’ve made are given with each description below.

I’d like to thank Shane F, Fred J., Mike K. and David A. for all the typos that they’ve found and sent my way! I’ve tried to proof read these pages and catch as many typos as I could, however it just isn’t possible to catch all of them when you are also the person who wrote the material. Fred, Mike and David have caught quite a few typos that I’d missed and been nice enough to send them my way. Thanks again Fred, Mike and David!

If you are one of my current students and are here looking for homework assignments I’ve got a set of links that will get you to the right pages listed here.

At present I’ve gotten the notes/tutorials for my Algebra (Math 1314), Calculus I (Math 2413), Calculus II (Math 2414), Calculus III (Math 3435) and Differential Equations (Math 3301) class online. I’ve also got a couple of Review/Extras available as well. Among the reviews/extras that I’ve got are an Algebra/Trig review for my Calculus Students, a Complex Number primer, a set of Common Math Errors, and some tips on How to Study Math.

John Stossel:

Yale University has fancy dining halls. They pay no property tax.

Local restaurants struggle to compete, but their tax burden makes that hard.

“We basically pay one-third of our rent in taxes!” complains Matt West, manager of Koon Thai Restaurant. “Yale is a money-making machine.”

It is. Many colleges are.

Yale has a $31 billion endowment. Harvard’s is $40 billion. My alma mater, Princeton, has $26 billion.

Yet, these schools also get government handouts and tax breaks. How government rips off taxpayers and students by subsidizing colleges is the subject of my video this week.

Yale owns about a quarter of the town of New Haven, Connecticut, but the school pays little property tax. It even has a golf course that’s half tax-exempt.

Politicians tried to tax the school, but they cannot.

“It’s written into the constitution,” complains New Haven Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers. “They just don’t have to pay.”

George Leaf:

For decades, law school was a growth industry. Back in 1970, there were 146 law schools with an enrollment of 78,000 students; by 2013, there were 201 schools, enrolling 139,000 students. Enrollment peaked in 2010 at 147,000. (For the current year, it seems that enrollments will probably remain level with last year.)

By 2015, we were seeing articles such as this one in the Wall Street Journal: “Fewer and Fewer Students are Applying to Law School.” A number of law schools have closed since 2017, including Valparaiso, Whittier, Savannah, Arizona Summit, and Charlotte. More are on thin ice.

Evidently, many prospective law students were figuring out that the high cost of three years of study necessary to earn a JD just wasn’t worth it in a glutted market and were choosing other paths after college.

Just how right they were is highlighted in a new study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation entitled, “Objection! Law schools can be hazardous to students’ financial health.”

The study’s author, Andrew Gillen, explains the approach, “a debt-to-earnings test called Gainful Employment Equivalent (GEE). GEE compares the earnings of recent graduates with the typical borrower’s student loan debt to determine if students can afford their student loan payments.”

4 people on Biden’s transition team for the Department of Education are from the nation’s two largest teachers unions.

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) November 11, 2020

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin (state) Senators

“An emphasis on adult employment“.

Annysa Johnson:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Carolyn Stanford Taylor is seeking an additional $1.6 billion for education over the next two years, along with changes that would cushion districts as they weather the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Stanford Taylor’s proposed 2021-23 budget, announced this week, reflects many of the same priorities as her predecessor, now-Gov. Tony Evers: an increase in special education funding and mental health resources, a focus on equity, and restoring the state’s commitment to fund two-thirds of the cost of education.

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

Keio University:

From the Fall Semester, some experiment and practical lessons are being held on-campus (face-to-face).

At the Faculty of Science and Technology, School of Medicine, and Faculty of Pharmacy, practical knowledge and experience has been gained while using actual equipment and continuing to ensure that sufficient measures to prevent infections are in place.

Sally Weale:

There has been a “shocking” decline in primary school pupils’ levels of attainment in England after lockdown, testing has revealed, with younger children and those from disadvantaged backgrounds worst affected.

The results provide the first detailed insight into the impact of the pandemic on academic attainment among young children and show an average decline in performance of between 5% and 15% on previous years. The biggest drop was in maths scores, and overall seven-year-olds were the most impacted.

The data, shared exclusively with the Guardian, is based on standardised tests sat by a quarter of a million pupils earlier this term. Researchers said they expected attainment to drop after more than five months out of school for most pupils, but were surprised at the scale of decline.

“Purely statistically speaking, it’s a massive drop,” said Dr Timo Hannay of the education data analytics company SchoolDash, who analysed the results. “We could have expected something like this. But it’s absolutely shocking in terms of its size.”

The tests by RS Assessment from Hodder Education are widely used in primary schools across England, usually on a termly basis, to assess children in maths and English to track their progress.

Tests which were scheduled to take place during the summer term were postponed as a result of school closures, and children in 1,700 schools sat them four months later when they returned at the beginning of the autumn term.

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

Sebastian Meineck:

Erik Parens:

Over the past decade, economists, sociologists and psychologists have begun collaborating with geneticists to investigate how genomic differences among human beings are linked to differences in their behaviours and social outcomes. The insights sought are wide-ranging: why do some of us have a greater sense of subjective wellbeing than others? Why do some go further in school than others? When it comes to income, why do some people earn more and others less?

As surprising as it might be to readers familiar with the history of often-ugly efforts to investigate complex behaviours and outcomes through genetics, some prominent members of this new cohort of researchers are optimistic that their work will advance progressive political agendas. According to the progressive authors of a recent European Commission report, insights from what I call ‘social genomics’ are ‘fully compatible with agendas that aim to combat inequalities and that embrace diversity.’

Indeed, findings from social genomics are compatible with what we in the United States consider Left-leaning agendas to combat inequalities. They are, however, equally compatible with what we think of as Right-leaning agendas that accept – or make peace with – inequalities. Moreover, such findings are as compatible with a Right-leaning version of ‘embracing diversity’ as they are with a Left-leaning one. This should move Left-leaning social genomicists to curb their optimism about the potential of their research to advance their political agendas.

Richard Reeves:

The AFS also asks respondents about prospects for their own sons and daughters (for those who have them). This is important, because there is often a difference between how people feel about something in general, and how they feel about it in their own particular case. This “local v. global” effect has been seen in the AFS before, for example with regard to marriage (people think that marriage in general is falling apart, but that their own marriage is as strong as ever). 

Milken Institute:

The State Technology and Science Index (STSI) provides a benchmark for evaluating the knowledge economies of all 50 US states. The index compares each state’s capacity for achieving prosperity through scientific discovery and technological innovation, using the latest available data from US federal government and private-sector sources to perform a cross-sectional analysis of their rankings on key indicators.

The index is a composite of five sub-indexes, which rank states on a set of indicators. These sub-indexes cover a diverse range of topics: research and development (R&D) inputs, risk capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure, human capital investment, technology and science workforce, and technology concentration and dynamism. By comparing how states rank in these areas, the index assesses their capacities for generating new scientific ideas, as well as for commercializing technologies that contribute to firm expansion, high-skills job creation, and broad-based economic growth.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Joanne Jacobs:

Remote learning isn’t working, especially for younger children, but “normal” schooling wasn’t working well either, writes Erika Christakis, an early childhood educator, in The Atlantic.

She envisions an alternative — year-round “pandemic camp” — to focus on children’s needs for “exercise, outdoor time, conversation, play, even sleep.”

Parents should demand “a broader and deeper curriculum with more chances for children to explore, play, and build relationships with peers and teachers,” Christakis writes. “The most obvious demand should be for more time outside.”

Outdoor learning is safer right now, she writes. But even if coronavirus goes away, getting kids outside has many other benefits, from reducing hyperactivity to improving science learning. “The biggest obstacle is a lack of will and imagination.”

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

Adam Rogan:

After an hour of comments and arguments over the proposed anti-racism curriculum, protesters shut down the Burlington Area School Board meeting. Soon after School Board members gave up on carrying on with their meeting, police escorted demonstrators out of the building, although the chanting and story sharing continued outside the building.

More, here.

Jordan Baker:

Australian National University vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt has questioned the validity of the global ranking systems relied upon by universities to market themselves, saying they mislead students and distort universities’ research priorities.

Professor Schmidt, a Nobel Laureate in physics, said the companies behind global rankings arbitrarily chose to reward science and engineering but overlook teaching quality, humanities research, and subjects with little interest beyond Australia, such as local literature and history.

“Everyone says [rankings] don’t matter, but they do,” Professor Schmidt, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, told the Herald. “They drive students to you, they hold up your prestige in community and governments. It’s a shame they really aren’t very good.

Kerry McDonald:

Ongoing and renewed shutdowns of public schools across the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in astonishing public school enrollment drops.

NPR recently reported that public school districts in at least 20 states have seen shrinking numbers of students this fall, with Orange County and Miami-Dade County in Florida down 8,000 and 16,000 public school students, respectively. Los Angeles public school enrollment has dropped by nearly 11,000 students.

Families are increasingly turning away from public schooling and toward private education options during the pandemic—a trend that is likely to continue even after the virus fades.

Since March, US parents have been put back in charge of their children’s education in unprecedented ways. Zoom schooling has given them a peek into what their children are actually learning (or not learning) in their classrooms, and ongoing school closures have encouraged families to pursue education options beyond their assigned district school. Many families have withdrawn their children from a district school in recent months in favor of independent homeschooling or private schooling, or have decided to delay their child’s kindergarten entry.

Alexandre Afonso:

In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics. The title of the chapter, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”, was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let’s say at McDonald’s. They calculated $3.30 as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that’s why they still live with their moms).

If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at McDonald’s. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing. It is very unlikely that they will make it (their mortality rate is insanely high) but they’re ready to “get rich or die trying”.

With a constant supply of new low-level drug sellers entering the market and ready to be exploited, drug lords can become increasingly rich without redistributing their wealth towards the bottom. There is an expanding mass of rank-and-file “outsiders” ready to forgo income for future wealth, and a small core of “insiders”  securing incomes largely at the expense of the mass. We can call it a winner-take-all market.

Eugene Volokh:

But I take it that this isn’t the Michigan AG’s concern here—rather, the concern must be that people will be fooled into overestimating the risk of election fraud (assuming those statements are indeed false), and will thus either be less interested in voting or will view the election results as illegitimate. And that strikes me as a special case of the much broader concern about certain kinds of political lies: Lies about the government or its processes, the theory goes, will wrongly undermine citizens’ faith in the government.

This is a factually perfectly plausible concern. Indeed, it is an old concern, which dates back at least to the Founding era, and in particular to the debates about the Sedition Act of 1798 and similar speech restrictions—laws that generally banned (to quote the relevant part of the Sedition Act),

false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress …, or the President …, with intent to defame [them]  … or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them … the hatred of the good people of the United States.

The Act’s backers stressed that the law (unlike the English common law of seditious libel) was limited to “false” and “malicious” statements; and they noted the importance of restricting those statements. Here is Justice Chase’s instruction to the jury in U.S. v. Cooper, about the Sedition Act specifically:

Cory Doctorow:

Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many’s the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company’s changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to part unhappy printer owners from their money. Printer companies have long excelled at this dishonorable practice, but HP is truly an innovator, the industry-leading Darth Vader of sleaze, always ready to strong-arm you into a “deal” and then alter it later to tilt things even further to its advantage.

The company’s just beat its own record, converting its “Free ink for life” plan into a “Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working” plan.

Plenty of businesses offer some of their products on the cheap in the hopes of stimulating sales of their higher-margin items: you’ve probably heard of the “razors and blades” model (falsely) attributed to Gillette, but the same goes for cheap Vegas hotel rooms and buffets that you can only reach by running a gauntlet of casino “games,” and cheap cell phones that come locked into a punishing, eternally recurring monthly plan.

Nicolas Bourbaki:

The group is known as “Nicolas Bourbaki” and is usually referred to as just Bourbaki. The name is a collective pseudonym borrowed from a real-life 19th-century French general who never had anything to do with mathematics. It’s unclear why they chose the name, though it may have originated in a prank played by the founding mathematicians as undergraduates at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris.

Abstractions navigates promising ideas in science and mathematics. Journey with us and join the conversation.

“There was some custom to play pranks on first-years, and one of those pranks was to pretend that some General Bourbaki would arrive and visit the school and maybe give a totally obscure talk about mathematics,” said Chambert-Loir, a mathematician at the University of Paris who has acted as a spokesperson for the group and is its one publicly identified member.

Bourbaki began in 1934, the initiative of a small number of recent ENS alumni. Many of them were among the best mathematicians of their generation. But as they surveyed their field, they saw a problem. The exact nature of that problem is also the subject of myth.

In one telling, Bourbaki was a response to the loss of a generation of mathematicians to World War I, after which the group’s founders wanted to find a way to preserve what math knowledge remained in Europe.

Stephen Dowling:

On 29 October 1945, the New York City branch of Gimbels department store unveiled a new product. Billions upon billions would follow in its wake.

Gimbels was the first to sell a new kind of ink pen, the design of which had taken several decades to come to fruition. The pens, made by the Reynolds International Pen Company, promised an end to the messy mishaps users of fountain pens encountered – leaking ink, smudges and pooling ink blots.

The new ballpoint pens did away with this, using a special viscous ink which dried quickly and didn’t leave smudges. At the heart of it, the rolling ball in the nib – and gravity – ensured a constant, steady stream of ink that didn’t smear or leave solid pools of ink on the page.

The new ballpoint was clean and convenient. What it wasn’t was cheap.

The new Reynolds ballpoint cost $12.50 – convert that to 2020 money and it’s more than $180 (£138.50). Today, if you were buying your pens in bulk, from stack-‘em-high superstores, you could end up with more than 1,000 for the same price.

Dongryul – Kim:

Danielle DelPriore et al.;

This research: (1) implements a genetically informed design to examine the effects of fathers’ presence-absence and quality of behavior during childhood/adolescence on daughters’ frequency of substance use during adolescence; and (2) tests substance use frequency as mediating the relation between paternal behavior and daughters’ sexual risk taking. Participants were 223 sister dyads from divorced/separated biological families. Sisters’ developmental exposure to socially deviant paternal behavior predicted their frequency of tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis (TAC) use. Older sisters who co‐resided with fathers who were more (vs. less) socially deviant reported more frequent TAC use during adolescence. More frequent TAC use predicted more risky sexual behavior for these daughters. No effects were found for younger sisters, who spent less time living with their fathers.

Reeves Wiedeman:

In the weeks after the Cotton op-ed, #newsroom-feedback served as a heated pandemic-era office watercooler. This was healthy enough — albeit a distinctly un-Timesian way of handling dissent. The Times had always been a place where employees grumbled in the cafeteria, and complaints might slowly wind their way to the editorial cabal atop the newsroom known as “the masthead,” at which point any decisions would be handed down quietly. Now, Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, was in #newsroom-feedback, answering critiques about the Times’ journalism from not only his reporters but also the paper’s software developers and data scientists.

The conversations could become tense. Employees would paste tweets criticizing the paper into the channel; the journalists would get defensive; someone would leak the argument to friends with Twitter accounts; and the ouroboros of self-criticism would take another bite out of its tail and everyone’s time. “Gang, it would be great to shift the tone of this discussion,” Baquet jumped in to say during a fight about whether “Opinion”-section provocateur Bari Weiss’s description of a “civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals” was a reductive argument, a mischaracterization — or perhaps an unwelcome assessment with a modicum of truth.

The dustup laid bare a divide that had become increasingly tricky for the Times: a large portion of the paper’s audience, a number of its employees, and the president himself saw it as aligned with the #resistance. This demarcation horrified the Old Guard, but it seemed to make for good business. “The truth can change how we see the world,” the Times declared in an advertisement broadcast at last year’s Academy Awards, positioning itself as a bulwark in an era of misinformation.

On Election Night, as the Times’ polling appeared to have overestimated Democratic response, subscribers experienced a partial repeat of 2016’s anguish about whether they were living in a bubble. Four years of upheaval and a summer of unrest, followed by the looming end of the Trump administration, had some inside the paper wondering the same thing. Was whatever might have been lost in the course of the Trump era gone for good — and good riddance?

Watertown Daily Times:

Caitlin Condon, a member of the Lakeside Lutheran FFA Chapter in Lake Mills, received the American FFA Degree at the 93rd National FFA Convention & Expo held virtually Oct. 27-29.

She was the third Warrior FFA member to earn the American degree since the LLHS chapter began.

Each year, the National FFA Organization honors FFA members who show dedication to the organization through their desire to develop their potential for premier leadership, personal growth and career success through agricultural education.

The American FFA Degree is bestowed upon a select group of students in recognition of their years of academic and professional excellence. This year 4,136 American Degrees will be awarded.

To be eligible, FFA members must have earned and productively invested $10,000 through a supervised agricultural experience program in which they own their own business or hold a professional position as an employee. Recipients must also complete 50 hours community service and demonstrate outstanding leadership abilities and civic involvement through completion of a long list of FFA and community activities. Less than 1% of FFA members achieve the American FFA Degree.

Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler & Daniel Walters:

At the center of contemporary debates over public law lies administrative agencies’ discretion to impose rules. Yet, for every one of these rules, there are also unrules nearby. Often overlooked and sometimes barely visible, unrules are the decisions that agencies make to lift or limit the scope of a regulatory restriction, for instance through waivers, exemptions, and exceptions. In some cases, unrules enable regulators to reduce burdens on regulated entities or to conserve valuable government resources in ways that make law more efficient. However, too much discretion to create unrules can facilitate undue business influence over the law, weaken regulatory schemes, and even undermine the rule of law. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic empirical investigation of the hidden world of unrules. Using a computational linguistic approach to identify unrules across the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations, and the United States Code, we show that unrules are an integral and substantial feature of the federal regulatory system. Our analysis shows that, by several conservative measures, there exists one obligation-alleviating word for approximately every five to six obligation-imposing words in federal law. We also show that unrules are surprisingly unrestrained by administrative law. In stark contrast to administrative law’s treatment of obligation-imposing rules, regulators wield substantial discretion in deploying unrules to alleviate regulatory obligations. As a result, a major form of agency power remains hidden from view and relatively unencumbered by law. Recognizing the central role that unrules play in our regulatory system reveals the need to reorient administrative law and incorporate unrules more explicitly into its assumptions, doctrines, and procedures.

A local example: My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results.

Meta:

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.

“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

Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns:

This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in  Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We leverage this introduction to study the impact of neighborhood school choice on student achievement, college enrollment, and other outcomes using a matched difference-in-differences design. Our findings reveal that the ZOC program boosted test scores and college enrollment markedly, closing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district.  These gains are explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and school-specific gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality. The model allows us to measure the increase in competition facing each ZOC school based on household preference reports and the spatial distribution of schools. We demonstrate that the effects of ZOC were larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel mediating the impacts of ZOC. In addition, demand estimates suggest families place a larger weight on school quality compared to peer quality, providing schools the right competitive incentives. An analysis using randomized admission lotteries shows that the treatment effects of admission to preferred schools declined after the introduction of ZOC, a pattern that is explained by the competitive incentives facing less-preferred schools. Our findings demonstrate the potential for public school choice to improve student outcomes and underscore the importance of studying market-level impacts when evaluating school choice programs.

Madison has very little school choice:

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

Karol Markowicz:

The blows keeping coming for New York City school kids — with some of them specifically meant to hide just how disastrous this school year has become.

The latest? The State Education Department last week canceled Regents exams for January.

“We determined the January Regents exams could not be safely, equitably and fairly administered across the state, given where the pandemic currently stands,” muttered Interim New York State Education Commissioner Betty A. Rosa. How convenient.

This comes on the heels of news of the city’s new grading system for this year: Everyone passes. Elementary-school students will receive grades of an “N” (needs improvement) and middle- and high-school kids an “NX” (course in progress) in place of failing grades.

Which means no one — not school staff, teachers or kids — has much reason to put in much effort.

Think about it: How hard will kids work if they know they can’t fail? Why would teachers spend much time trying to get a child up to speed if they can slap an “N” or “NX” on their report card and make it someone else’s problem?

All this fits a trend: Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has long wanted to cancel state tests. In August, he openly hoped a Joe Biden administration would let him do just that.

Alex Usher:

It is a disappointing time for those of us who value accountability.  Governments across the country (outside the Atlantic, anyway) are failing us – badly – in their pandemic responses.  And yet, apparently there are no political consequences for their shameful performance and the accompanying body count.  The Ford and Legault governments, with close to 10,000 deaths between them, are rising high in the polls.  Because everyone (again, if you ignore the Atlantic provinces) is making similar pig-headed mistakes, everyone gets a pass! 

In contrast, Canadian higher education has mostly been a model in this pandemic.  Certainly if you compare our national sector performance against those of the UK and the US – countries which lend new meaning to the phrase “crossing a minefield in clown shoes” – we look extremely good, at least from the point of view of providing program continuity and keeping our community safe.   But while these are important achievements, the fact that we have managed this does not give Canadian universities and colleges a pass.  There are lots of areas where performance still can be measured, and lessons from these observations applied not just in the immediate response to the pandemic but to longer-term aspects of institutional government and management.

The first thing everyone should be doing is checking in on students to see how they view the transition to online.  It’s not so much a question of looking at “satisfaction” (which is a meaningless term); rather, it’s about gauging how students perceive institutions’ efforts to keep education going in this trying time.  How many hours of contact are they getting?  Do they see professors making real efforts to adapt to the online format, or are they just getting slide decks and told to read it themselves?  What kinds of interaction are they getting with either professors or teaching assistants?  What kinds of use are they making of library services?  Of student services? 

(Plus, you can see how many students might prefer the current set up to going back to the old one.  I continue to think there is a bigger market here than institutions may think, primarily among older students.  Not a majority or anything, but enough that a clever and nimble university might profit from focussing on them.)

Brendan Nyhan:

Misinformation presents a challenge to the American political system. Unsupported claims can distort debate, deceive voters and encourage contempt for the other party. In the final days of the presidential race, for instance, hundreds of thousands of people in key states received mysterious text messages with falsehoods about Democratic nominee Joe Biden (including that he wants to give “sex changes to second-graders”). But how much of the news that average Americans consume is misinformation, and what impact does it have? Many news sources ironically misinform readers about its prevalence and influence. These five myths are particularly persistent.

Most Americans dwell in online echo chambers.

Janelle James:

More, here.

State Superintendent @CStanfordTaylor is seeking an $844M increase in equalization aid in the upcoming budget, along with $371M more for special ed and $46.5M more in mental health and wellness aid.

See the proposal:https://t.co/uq8sWeVApN

— JR Ross (@jrrosswrites) November 10, 2020

Juan Perez, Jr.

COVID ‘CONVEYOR BELT’ — A generation of U.S. kids is in the midst of what educators worry will amount to a largely lost school year. Will they be ready for the next grade?

Hundreds of thousands of children continue to catch the coronavirus each month, complicating plans to return to in-person instruction throughout the country. Education officials are starting to think long-term about how to fill that learning gap in the years to come, weighing the consequences of social promotion against the effects of holding back students, and questioning norms for testing and grades in this anything-but-normal learning environment.

— “What are we going to do for these kids that have lost so much learning?” asks Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute education think tank. “The path of least resistance here, and probably what most schools will do unless they’re encouraged to do something else, is just pass kids on and keep the conveyor belt moving.”

— Petrilli is calling for states and schools to rethink kindergarten. Mississippi’s education chief is pushing schools to speed up children’s learning. New York is revamping its testing plans for high schoolers this year.

Related: Frederick Taylor & K-12 schools.

Jay Elwes:

But what if left and right are both wrong? What if the system isn’t corrupt, as Corbyn suggests, and yet still leads to rampant inequality? What if some people pedal as hard as they can, and despite what Johnson says, they still can’t get to the top, even though they are intelligent and capable? What if the true cause of the most extreme form of inequality is down to a mechanism that both the left and right welcome and accept – the idea of merit?

That is the question at the heart of The Meritocracy Trap, by Daniel Markovits, a Professor of Law at the Yale Law School, a position that puts him right at the heart of the US’s meritocratic engine room. He specialises in teaching America’s brightest and best, the students who’ve come from the top schools and who will go on to get the top jobs with salaries to match. You’d think someone who spent his days overseeing this cycle of perpetual success would be happy. But he’s not. He’s deeply worried.

Meritocracy, as Markovits explains in this brilliant and deeply alarming book, is tearing society apart. But his focus is not on the poorest in society. As he sees it, the buying power of the very worst-off Americans has increased substantially since the mid-twentieth century, and is still improving. The gap between the broad middle class and the poorest has therefore narrowed.

What worries him is the gap between the middle and those at the very top. It is here that we find the worst and most damaging inequality. It’s the gap between the mid-ranking functionary and the CEO, between the shop owner and the hedge fund manager, the high street banker and the investment banker. While the gap between the poorest and the middle has closed, the gap between the middle and very richest has widened.

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

Kevin Estep & Pierce Greenberg:

Cases of measles and other highly contagious diseases are rising in the United States. Public health experts blame the rise partly on the spatial concentration of parents declining to vaccinate their children, but researchers have given little attention to theorizing why this clustering occurs in particular communities. We argue that residential and school selection processes create “pockets of homogeneity” attracting parents inclined to opt out of vaccines. Structural features of these enclaves reduce the likelihood of harsh criticism for vaccine refusal and foster a false sense of protection from disease, making the choice to opt out seem both safe and socially acceptable. Examination of quantitative data on personal belief exemptions (PBEs) from school-based vaccination requirements in California schools and districts, as well as findings from parent interviews, provide empirical support for the theory. We discuss substantive implications for lawmakers and public health officials, as well as broader sociological contributions concerning neighborhood effects and residential sorting.

Charles Hilu:

The Health Department of Washtenaw County, which governs the University of Michigan, recently put Michigan undergraduates under a “stay-in-place” order for two weeks. Once the order had expired, cases had slightly fallen in students, but they rose in older, more vulnerable populations, data show.

The October 20 order said “all U-M undergraduate students enrolled in U-M Fall 2020 on the Ann Arbor Campus, living in on-campus, near-campus or off-campus housing will be required to ‘stay in place’ and remain in their current designated residence.” The order ended November 3.

The results toward the end of the lockdown showed, however, that “cases among 18- to 29-year-olds in the county have decreased slightly, while there has been a steady rise in the infection rate in the 30- to 49-year-old age group,” wrote University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel in an October 30 email to students.

As Schlissel’s email noted, cases had decreased slightly among undergrads, but older populations in the county saw their cases rise despite the fact that students were sheltering in place.

Even the lockdown order had stated that “COVID-19 cases among 18-24 year-old persons, thus far in Washtenaw County, have not resulted in increased hospitalization or death rates. Additionally, thus far, the increased incidence in 18- to 24-year-old persons has not been linked to increased incidence in other populations in Washtenaw County.”

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

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

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

Ben Zeisloft:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered — to its surprise — that most of its students are not discriminatory.

UW psychology professor Markus Brauer, who led the study, said that students from marginalized backgrounds “are very frequently the target of discrimination or offensive comments.” To test students’ habits around inclusivity, Brauer and his team hired actors over the course of several years to represent students from marginalized backgrounds — Black, Asian American, and Muslim, as well as a male who wore a “gay pride” shirt — to participate in behaviors that could elicit discrimination from other students.

The researchers, who expected to find a high degree of discrimination, found that the vast majority of students treat students from different backgrounds equally well.

“We were surprised by these results,” explained Brauer. “We tried out one situation, then another one, and so forth. But study after study came back with the same result: Most students did not treat our white actor more positively than the Black, Asian, or Muslim actors.”

The study found that only 20 percent of students engage in “subtle or explicit forms of discrimination.” 

Elyse Marcellino:

World-changing events like the coronavirus pandemic have often upended norms and out of necessity made way for reforms not previously thought possible – or not thought of at all.

Traditional schools suddenly had to think about how to deliver an academic program online.

Newer options like learning pods and microschools surged. Virtual schools and their flexibility became more attractive, as did tutoring services. Favorability toward homeschooling rose.

Chris Arnade:

The list includes some admirable advice, such as volunteering in a homeless shelter. And then there’s Tip 10: “As we were working on this book, our cherry orchard on the Kristof farm in Yamhill needed to be replaced, so after seeing the need for jobs in the area, we decided to plant the land with cider apples and wine grapes. Cider and pinot noir will employ more local people than other uses of the land, and we’ve already hired a couple of local people with troubled histories to clear the land.”

This isn’t a bad thing at all. We all could use more empathy, understanding, and be open to working with people “with troubled histories.” Maybe not just as the hired help, though.

Throughout the book there is a noblesse oblige attitude; not the old country club type, but an updated version steeped in well-to-do educated leftist language. Again, that isn’t a bad thing by itself, but here it too often comes with an uncomfortable savior vibe.

Kristof and WuDunn are hard-working journalists dedicated to their task, so they do put boots on the ground to get beyond the data, traveling to working-class communities in the U.S. for interviews, particularly Kristof’s Yamhill, Oregon, hometown, where his family farm is located.

Despite this hard work and genuine empathy, the authors can’t break out of their worldview. They can’t get beyond wanting to get people on the good ladder, and not dismantle the system of two ladders. They don’t emphasize devaluing the meritocracy, as Case and Deaton do, but rather take on the easier feel-good task of figuring out how to get talented young people on their preferred path. Or to use their metaphor, have access to the escalator, so they can escape.

Larissa Kennelly:

J.D. Tuccille::

As already unimpressive government schools fail the test put to them by the pandemic, families have turned to alternatives old and new to see that their children are educated. Among the popular responses have been learning pods of cooperating families, either to facilitate and enhance the online offerings of public-school systems or else to replace them as stand-alone education environments.

School bureaucrats have responded not by stepping-up their efforts, but by first begging people not to leave, and then lashing out against the competition. It’s an ill-conceived war that they’re bound to lose.

With schools struggling to deal with social-distancing for in-person teaching and to offer effective virtual lessons, “parents are increasingly turning to microschools — very small schools that usually have a specific culture — and learning pods,” The New York Times noted last month. “Microschools can be based outside or inside a home, and may or may not be state-approved and accredited. Learning pods are generally ad hoc and home-based, most having been created this summer in response to public school closings.”

Stop telling people to learn to code as if it's easy and some kind of magic fairy dust that will save them from what's coming.

Does Rahm really think *the answer* for 55 year olds losing their job at JC Penney is coding? https://t.co/DvFPESdH57

— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) November 7, 2020

Ann Althouse:
The “who” and the “why” seem to have dropped out of journalism. 

Scott Girard:

The largest measures were here in Madison, where voters approved a total $350 million investment in the district. That includes $33 million in operating funds phased in over four years and $317 million for capital projects, including renovations to the four comprehensive high schools and a new elementary school.

Statewide, 30 of the 51 measures were to fund operational expenses, while 21 were to issue debt to borrow funds for construction and renovation projects. The total is slightly down from April, when there were 60 school ballot measures, of which 52 received approval.

Notes and links on the substantial 2020 Madison K-12 Tax & Spending increase referendum.

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

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Nationally, undergraduate enrollment fell 1.4% at four-year public universities and 9.4% at two-year public universities, according to a report last month by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. First-year enrollment fared even worse, with four-year schools seeing a 14% drop and two-years a 23% decline.

The System reported a 6% decline in first-year enrollment and a nearly 500-student increase in underrepresented minorities.

Zach Whittaker:

A series of tweets by one Miami University student that were critical of a proctoring software company have been hidden by Twitter after the company filed a copyright takedown notice.

Erik Johnson, a student who works as a security researcher on the side, posted a lengthy tweet thread in early September about Proctorio, an Arizona-based software company that several U.S. schools — including his own — use to monitor students who are taking their exams remotely.

But six weeks later, Johnson received an email from Twitter saying three of those tweets had been removed from his account in response to a request by Proctorio filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Proctoring software isn’t new, but its usage has skyrocketed because of the pandemic. More students than ever are having to take exams and tests from home, and colleges and universities are relying on proctoring software to administer the tests. Students have to install their university’s choice of proctoring software, which gives the exam administrator deep access to the student’s computer, often including their webcams and microphones, to monitor their activity to spot potential cheating.

Roslyn Anderson:

Parents of a Simpson County elementary school student file suit in federal court against the school district after she was ordered to remove her “Jesus Loves Me” face mask.

According to attorneys, the district singled out the girl and robbed her of her constitutional rights.

In October nine year old Lydia Booth wore a “Jesus Loves Me” face mask to Simpson Central Elementary School in Pinola.

Her parents, Matthew and Jennifer Booth, say the principal told Lydia to remove it and gave her another with no message on it.

:

A podcast by history nerds for history nerds (and everyone else too). The AskHistorians Podcast features members of Reddit’s AskHistorians community, as well as published academics, and experts for long-form 60-90 minute in-depth conversations about a topic of their research. Additionally, each podcast episode is accompanied by a thread in AskHistorians where the expert swings by to answer followup questions. Find us answering questions at www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians or on patreon at www.patreon.com/askhistorians

OK, just in case you think things have never been so bad etc..here’s an edu story. Today’s Nov 6, it’s the 47th anniversary of the death of Marcus Foster. Foster, a noted educator, was sup’t of Oakland schools. He was killed by the SLA in 1973 & his deputy wounded. 1/

— Andrew Rotherham (@arotherham) November 6, 2020

Notes and links on Marcus Foster and the the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

Scott Girard:

With wide margins of success on recent ballot measures, the Madison Metropolitan School District’s $350 million questions were almost certain to pass ahead of Tuesday’s ballot count.

Four years ago, the district’s operating question won by a 74.2% to 25.8% margin, while a capital referendum the year prior passed with 82.2% of voters casting a “yes” ballot. The question going into this year’s measures, which were both larger than those previous measures, was more about the margin by which they would pass.

Voters, turning out in record numbers with the closely contested presidential contest on the same ballot, offered a resounding “yes” to both the $317 million capital referendum and $33 million operating referendum. Superintendent Carlton Jenkins said Tuesday night he was thrilled with the outcome.

Notes and links on the substantial 2020 Madison K-12 Tax & Spending increase referendum.

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

Rod Dreher:

She said she doesn’t come to work to talk about religion, race, or anything. She just wants to do her work. But she was required by her employer to go to a retreat. The reader who sent me the link characterizes (accurately) Shaw’s discussion:

You may be aware that Jodi Shaw released another video yesterday. This one concerns thee days of diversity training that Smith College required her to participate in. On the first day, the diversity consultants asked Jodi and her co-workers, in a group setting, to describe their race in the context of their childhood, adolescence, and college years. Why anyone in a work setting would want to hear this, let alone feel entitled to know it, is beyond me.

For her part, and I can easily identify with this, Jodi did not want to share anything so personal (and unnecessary) with the group. When it was her turn, she simply said that she was uncomfortable talking about this subject and wanted to pass. Go to the 4:10 mark in the video to see how the diversity consultant responded later in the day. That individual told the group that any white person who expresses discomfort or distress when asked to comment on her race is not actually experiencing discomfort but is engaged in white fragility. Such a person, the consultant said, is merely engaged in a “power play.”

Amelia Nierenberg:

In San Francisco, restaurants, movie theaters and museums are open at reduced capacity. The share of coronavirus tests that come back positive in the city has stayed low since a surge over the summer.

But as some of San Francisco’s private and parochial schools have begun to reopen their doors, its public school district has not set a timeline for resuming in-person instruction, except to say that it is not likely in this calendar year.

That has made San Francisco the latest flash point over school reopening. This politically progressive city is also California’s most unequal area, and its sharp debate about how best to safely educate low-income and minority students during the pandemic resonates across the country.

Frustrations boil over

Last month, in the wake of months of protests for racial equity across the country, San Francisco’s district administrators recommended a significant move. They told the principals of roughly one-third of the district’s 125 public schools that their communities should start brainstorming new names for their schools, because the current names had historical associations with slavery, genocide, colonization or other injustices.

The list included schools named for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as enslavers; Abraham Lincoln, for his treatment of Native Americans; and even the state’s senior U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein, over reports that, as mayor in 1984, she replaced a vandalized Confederate flag outside City Hall.

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 Hanson:

Lauren A. Rivera’s Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs is a depressing book because it tells how the world works:

Pedigree takes readers behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation’s highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn’t, and why.

A big % of graduates of elite colleges take such jobs, and the other jobs they take don’t make nearly as much money. The other big employers, such as hedge funds, private equity firms, and tech firms, choose similarly. And elite colleges use similar criteria to pick their students. So this is a window into how we pick a big % of the top elites in the US today.

While I often assume that prestige is a big driver of human behavior, my poll respondents hardly admitted to putting much weight on prestige when picking experts. And many complain that I put too much emphasis on the concept. However, these elite employers strongly confirm my view, as they focus overwhelmingly on prestige when picking junior employees.

They only recruit at the most elite colleges, and they want recruits to be attractive, energetic, articulate, socially smooth, and have had elite personal connections, jobs, and extracurriculars. They don’t that much care about your grades, what you’ve learned, or what you did in your jobs or extracurriculars, as long as they were prestigious.

John Ellis:

In this election season it’s almost impossible to find pro-Trump bumper stickers or signs anywhere in my town. The reason is not lack of support but fear of vandalism, or worse: People nationwide have been physically assaulted and even threatened with loss of their livelihoods for no other reason than that they plan to vote as one half of the country does, and political goals are now commonly pursued by violent means. With this our civilization seems to be regressing to a more primitive stage of its development—a time when disputes were settled by force instead of rules, and before the First Amendment guaranteed the right…

Karen Nitkin:

Sarven Sabunciyan was intrigued.

He had been reading about xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, or XMRV, a virus never before seen in humans. But according to attention-grabbing studies in PLoS Pathogens and Science, it was now showing up in people with prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Sabunciyan, a pediatric neurovirologist in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, studies the role of viruses in psychiatric diseases and behaviors. He decided to see if people with schizophrenia also had XMRV, a finding that would yield important clues about the mental disorder and how to treat it.

His first step was to find people who had been exposed to the virus. Sabunciyan’s team developed a test that could detect antibodies that XMRV would have left behind. “Even if you recover from an infection, you would retain some antibodies,” he explains. But no sign of the antibody could be found in blood samples of people with or without schizophrenia.

Jennifer S. Light:

Travelers should be sure to visit the curious community in Freeville, New York, where boys and girls were in charge, wrote Baedeker’s turn-of-the-20th-century guide to the United States. This “miniature republic modelled on the government of the United States” was well worth a detour to observe the “legislature, court-house, jail, school, church and public library” staffed by citizens aged 14 to 21, most of them immigrants or impoverished youth.

Of course, these young Americans were not actual members of the civil service, but their adultlike activities were exceedingly realistic nonetheless. They “elect their rulers, make and enforce laws, and carry on business just as adults do in the greater world,” author James Muirhead marveled.

Wall Street Journal:

The details are more complicated. Religious work in this sphere goes back centuries, and CSS says the first Catholic orphanage in Philadelphia dates to 1798. Today about two dozen agencies facilitate foster care. For decades, that included CSS. It serves all children, regardless of sexuality. If a gay couple were to ask for a home study, CSS would refer them elsewhere. “But the record shows,” it says, “that no same-sex couple had ever approached CSS in this way.”

The genesis of the case was a Philadelphia Inquirer article in 2018 that highlighted the CSS policy. Soon thereafter, CSS says a city official pushed it to change its approach, saying that it’s “not 100 years ago” and urging it to follow “the teachings of Pope Francis.” The official, according to the city, is also Catholic and was merely trying to find common ground.

When CSS refused to budge, the city froze its foster referrals and its contract was allowed to expire. An appeals court sided with the city, saying that CSS is owed no exemption, since the nondiscrimination policy is “a neutral, generally applicable law.” The precedent here is the 1990 ruling in Employment Division v. Smith, in which a Native American was denied state benefits after using peyote in a ritual.

Alana Abramson:

The litigation landscape

To the extent that it can be simplified, this year’s election-related legal brawls can be distilled into two groups: a push to eliminate expanded mail-in voting policies on the basis that they would produce unprecedented fraud, and a push to ease the restrictions already in place.

The first battle, waged by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, has largely failed. Lawsuits on this theme filed in Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were all dismissed because of a lack of evidence. In Pennsylvania, federal Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan, who was appointed by Trump, dismissed the Trump campaign’s case on the grounds that their allegations of fraud were “speculative”—the same word invoked by federal district Judge James C. Mahan, who was nominated by George W. Bush, in dismissing a similar case in Nevada. In Montana, federal district judge Dana Christensen described the Trump campaign’s fraud allegations as “a fiction.”

The second battle—the fight over the weedy regulations governing voting by mail—has had more grist. Democrats have banked key victories in lower courts, while Republicans have gotten at least half a dozen of these decisions either reversed on appeals or put on hold pending further consideration. “It’s not the score at the end of the first quarter that counts, and there is a lot of game left in most of these cases,” says an aide at the Republican National Committee.

Scott Girard:

Immediately, the operating referendum approval means district officials can implement the “passing referendum budget,” which includes $6 million in extra funds. That will go toward initiatives including early literacy, Black Excellence and a slight base wage increase for staff. The School Board passed two versions of the 2020-21 budget Oct. 30, one for each outcome of Tuesday’s vote.

The rest of the $33 million ask will phase in over the coming four years, with $8 million added in 2021-22, $9 million in 2022-23 and $10 million in 2023-24. The total $33 million will then be added in perpetuity to the district’s state-imposed revenue limit, allowing it to spend more than it would otherwise be allowed to.

For property owners, the tax rate for the 2020-21 school year will rise from last year’s $11.10 per $1,000 of property value to $11.13 per $1,000 of property value. Without the referenda, the tax rate would have dropped to $10.55 per $1,000 of property value.

Logan Wroge:

Melinda Heinritz, the executive director of the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools, which championed support for the referendums through its advocacy arm’s Vote Yes to Invest campaign, expressed gratitude to the voters for supporting the referendums.

The referendums are estimated to increase taxes on an average-value home of $311,000 by $470 annually by the 2023-24 school year.

In recent years, Madison voters have largely supported referendums, with the last four before this year passing by at least 2:1 margins. The last time a referendum failed was in 2005.

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

Ideas and Data:

In this post, I’ll argue that scientific progress has significantly slowed over the last century, both at a per-scientist and absolute level, and then offer some speculative hypotheses about why this might have occurred.

On Measuring Scientific Progress

To begin with, it is necessary to make clear how we go about measuring scientific progress. Broadly speaking, there are two ways of quantitatively measuring this construct.

First, there is the subjective approach. This approach measures scientific progress during a time period by counting up the number of important events which occurred during that period or the number of important people who lived and made achievements during the period. What events and which people are important is determined by relevant experts.

This expert opinion can be measured in a variety of ways. For instance, you can ask experts to rate a list of potentially significant figures or events, you can analyze the frequency with which individuals or works are cited within expert material, you can analyze the frequency with which individuals are included in encyclopedias, or the amount of space they are given in such works, etc.

Eric Levitz:

David Shor got famous by getting fired. In late May, amid widespread protests over George Floyd’s murder, the 28-year-old data scientist tweeted out a study that found nonviolent demonstrations were more effective than “riots” at pushing public opinion and voter behavior leftward in 1968. Many Twitter users — and (reportedly) some of Shor’s colleagues and clients at the data firm Civis Analytics — found this post insensitive. A day later, Shor publicly apologized for his tweet. Two weeks after that, he’d lost his job as Civis’s head of political data science — and become a byword for the excesses of so-called cancel culture. (Shor has not discussed his firing publicly due to a nondisclosure agreement, and the details of his termination remain undisclosed).

But before Shor’s improbable transformation into a cause célèbre, he was among the most influential data gurus in Democratic politics — a whiz kid who, at age 20, served as the 2012 Obama campaign’s in-house Nate Silver, authoring the forecasting model that the White House used to determine where the race really stood.

Hui Li and Dexter Roberts:

The weekend ritual for many American kids includes hanging out with friends, sports, cruising the mall, or honing their online gaming skills in Fortnite. Steven, a serious-looking 9-year-old public school student in Beijing, spent a recent Friday evening in a classroom at a tutoring center operated by TAL Education Group, cramming mathematics drills. On Saturday he was back for extra instruction in English and Chinese. “He likes the environment at TAL, where classes are lively and students get to play little games while learning,” says his mother, Zhao Liu, a nurse in a Beijing military hospital. “His father and I would never force him to study.”

No one has to, because even elementary school students in testing-obsessed China know the importance of doing well on the dreaded national exams. Those who do poorly can end up in dead-end livelihoods with no chance of college admission. That’s why many parents are gladly willing to make the investment in time and money—

Boston Globe:

Brookline teachers have voted to go on strike on Tuesday, accusing school leaders of reneging on a promise to maintain six feet of social distancing in schools.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

2020: Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Joe Byerly:

One of the best ways to work through a problem is to write it down. Throughout history, leaders who found themselves in tough situations sat alone with their thoughts and worked through them using pen and paper.

Marcus Aurelius, who served as Roman emperor for almost two decades, wrote his Meditations to work through daily leadership challenges, wars and a pandemic. In the week leading up to the D-Day landings, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote himself letters to help work through risks, opportunities and necessities of operations.

Both Marcus and Eisenhower used writing to achieve clarity of thought. This point is underscored by author Stephen King, who has said writing is “refined thinking.” In our minds, our thoughts are clear, but real clarity doesn’t come until those thoughts are solidified in writing. The process of framing an email, capturing important points and discarding nonessential elements helps us gain more clarity.

Sound Authentic

Over the years, I have worked under multiple commanders while in staff positions, and the best ones never let me draft their intent for operations orders. They wanted to own those. At the time, I didn’t understand it—thinking it was one more staff drill I could handle for them. But as I gained experience, I realized they wanted that section of the operations order to reflect their voice.

Philippe Van de Calseyde:

Many decisions rest upon people’s ability to make estimates of some unknown quantities. In these judgments, the aggregate estimate of the group is often more accurate than most individual estimates. Remarkably, similar principles apply when aggregating multiple estimates made by the same person – a phenomenon known as the “wisdom of the inner crowd”. The potential contained in such an intervention is enormous and a key challenge is to identify strategies that improve the accuracy of people’s aggregate estimates. Here, we propose the following strategy: combine people’s first estimate with their second estimate made from the perspective of a person they often disagree with. In five pre-registered experiments (total N = 6425, with more than 53,000 estimates), we find that such a strategy produces highly accurate inner crowds (as compared to when people simply make a second guess, or when a second estimate is made from the perspective of someone they often agree with). In explaining its accuracy, we find that taking a disagreeing perspective prompts people to consider and adopt second estimates they normally would not consider as viable option, resulting in first- and second estimates that are highly diverse (and by extension more accurate when aggregated). However, this strategy backfires in situations where second estimates are likely to be made in the wrong direction. Our results suggest that disagreement, often highlighted for its negative impact, can be a powerful tool in producing accurate judgments.

Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger:

Big data is poised to transform society, from how we diagnose illness to how we educate children, even making it possible for a car to drive itself. Information is emerging as a new economic input, a vital resource. Companies, governments, and even individuals will be measuring and optimizing everything possible.

Related: Weapons of Math Destruction.

Jay Greene:

There has been a flurry of research recently claiming to find compelling causal evidence that increasing school spending would significantly improve student outcomes and avoiding cuts in spending would prevent significant harm.  This research has been embraced so quickly as settled fact that over 400 researchers and advocates signed a group letter citing it while urging the federal government to provide financial support to local schools during the COVID recession. The confident conclusion that spending more is the path to improving education is so appealing that the research behind that claim has received remarkably little scrutiny.

A new study by Jessica Goldstein and Josh McGee begins to remedy this lack of skepticism by carefully attempting to replicate the most recent school finance study co-authored by Kirabo Jackson with Cora Wigger and Heyu Xiong, which is forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and has appeared in Education Next.  Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong examine the effect of K-12 spending cuts during the Great Recession by comparing the downturn in states where much of the funding comes from state revenue to states where more funding comes from local sources.  The idea is that state revenue is more sensitive to a recession, and so cuts would be more severe in states that were more reliant on state sources, even when the effects of the recession on the state’s economy were the same. Using this technique, they conclude that K-12 spending cuts hurt student outcomes.

Goldstein and McGee are able to reconstruct what Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong report, but they find that their results are highly sensitive to the non-standard ways in which they construct their statistical model and disappear or even change direction when trivial changes are made.  Goldstein and McGee also highlight some serious problems with the data used in the original study. 

Madison’s substantial Fall 2020 tax & spending increase referendum notes and links.

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]

2020: Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Samantha West:

Jordan Meulemans’ weekday routine used to begin at 6:30 a.m., when she would wake up and get ready for school.

But for the past month, the De Pere High School junior’s days have looked starkly different. Meulemans rolls out of bed around 7:30 a.m., puts on some sweats, wakes her little sister, eats breakfast and settles in at her family’s dining room table. She opens her laptop and logs into her first class of the day: advanced placement calculus, held on Google Meet.

Because new cases of COVID-19 have soared in Brown County and across Wisconsin over the last couple of months, Meulemans and the roughly 4,500 students in the Unified School District of De Pere have been attending class online since the district closed its schools on Sept. 25.

Meanwhile, just across the Fox River, senior Maria Miller’s school days begin at 6:55 a.m. sharp, when she and her sister hop in the car and head to West De Pere High School.

After switching to online learning for two weeks on Oct. 1, West De Pere reversed course and returned its 3,500 students to classrooms after parents pressured leaders to make the change — even after the city health department advised against returning the spread of COVID-19 worsened 

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

Military Times:

Would ending the numerous ongoing wars increase the risk to American security as these voices claim? Fear is one of the most effective tools used by the defenders of the status quo to resist any change, claiming that if their chosen policy isn’t followed, a terrible incident is likely to occur in the future.

McMaster resurrected the specter of Munich and Continetti the Second World War, both claiming that to withdraw troops (from Afghanistan and Syria respectively), would increase the risk of a horrific outcome for America.

Such claims are only effective, however, if the reader is unaware of the specific circumstances behind the historical events cited and does not understand how different today’s conditions are.

In this case, the circumstances aren’t merely different, but virtually incomparable. More to the point, the reality is that America absorbs far more risk by not withdrawing from places like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Forever-war advocates rest on the logic that because it is theoretically possible a negative outcome might result if we end unsuccessful wars, it is safer to continue supporting them; that the lowest cost is to maintain the status quo. When the actual conditions of each deployment are examined, however, it becomes quickly evident the significant costs we are enduring, right now, are inappropriate and unsustainable.

Similarly, continuing the legacy K-12 model, built for an era that no longer exists has plenty of risks, as well.

Ling Huang, via a kind reader:

According to Jo Boaler and other math reformists, traditional math is racist, elitist,
and inequitable, particularly for underrepresented minorities and women. Traditional math emphasizes outdated, boring, procedural, rote-learning materials while neglecting conceptual understanding. Traditional math questions are narrow and closed thus incompatible with growth mindsets. Timed tests and the traditional grading methods cause anxiety and traumatize students.

Jo Boaler’s reform-math ideas are summarized below.

1. Ban times table tests
Jo Boaler said in an ideal world she would ban times tables tests; she had never
memorized her times tables. “It has never held me back, even though I work with maths every day.”
2. Encourage finger counting
Teachers should celebrate and encourage finger counting and use among younger
learners and learners of any age. Even university students’ finger perception
predicted their calculation scores.

Chris Rickert:

“There’s no room for dialogue. There’s no room for compromise,” he said. “It’s happening across the country. It’s not just Madison.”

Every single day I am proud that I refused an endorsement interview with this trash ass publication. Omg, they really just are unapologetic piece of shit excuse for journalism. And don’t come at me with the not all journalists bullshit, they are complicit at this point. https://t.co/lujdyRQfWE

— Nada Elmikashfi (@nadaelmikashfi) August 24, 2020

The man who perhaps most embodies Madison politics over the last 40 years, former three-time, 22-year mayor Paul Soglin, looks at Madison’s current political atmosphere and sees something new and “very dangerous.”

Soglin said that in the past, Madison’s leaders understood that to fund progressive social priorities, they needed a property tax base and revenues created by commerce. But many of Madison’s current leaders seem more interested in punishing business people, including State Street merchants, while enjoying the “luxury of being ideologically pure,” he said.

Dr. Alex Gee’s Reformation Sunday message (begins at 8:30)

The article fails to mention Madison Schools….

Madison’s well funded K-12 system recently sought to waive an annual civics test.

Madison’s substantial Fall 2020 tax & spending increase referendum notes and links.

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]

2020: Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

Associated Press:

A lab experiment aimed at fixing defective DNA in human embryos shows what can go wrong with this type of gene editing and why leading scientists say it’s too unsafe to try. In more than half of the cases, the editing caused unintended changes, such as loss of an entire chromosome or big chunks of it.

Columbia University researchers describe their workThursday in the journal Cell. They used CRISPR-Cas9, the same chemical tool that a Chinese scientist used on embryos in 2018 to help make the world’s first gene-edited babies, which landed him in prison and drew international scorn.

The tool lets scientists cut DNA in a precise spot and has profound potential for good — it’s already used to raise better crops and livestock, holds promise for treating diseases, and earned its discoverers a Nobel Prize earlier this month.

Daniel Suarez’s Change Agent is worth reading.

Mackenzie Mays:

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday his children have returned to in-person learning under a “phased-in approach” as many schools across the state remain shuttered due to Covid-19 — including nearly all public schools in Sacramento County where the governor lives.

The news: Newsom said at a news conference that his four children, ages 4 to 11, have returned to classrooms in some capacity.

Newsom’s children attend a private school in Sacramento County that has a hybrid schedule that alternates remote and in-person education before it will return full-time next month, according to a source. POLITICO is not naming the school for privacy reasons.

“They’re phasing back into school and we are phasing out of our very challenging distance learning that we’ve been doing, so many parents are doing up and down the state,” Newsom said Friday when asked about his own children’s education.

Sacramento County schools are allowed to open classrooms under Newsom’s reopening system. But the county’s large public school districts — including San Juan Unified, which serves Newsom’s neighborhood — have yet to do so. Some Sacramento County districts plan to reopen elementary schools next month, while San Juan has a January goal date. Sacramento City Unified has yet to propose a reopening date.

Kara Zupkus:

The tipster, a University of California-Davis student, wishes to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution shared documents showing the school segregating RA training into distinct racial and gender groups. In addition, the documents state that students are not permitted to attend trainings for groups to which they do not belong.

“Student staff should only participate in an affinity group if they hold that identity. These groups are not for those wanting to learn about that identity or to explore curiosity in that identity,” the training website stated.

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

Alan Borsuk:

In terms of education, there is no evidence kids nationwide are making progress and some evidence they are backsliding. Test scores in reading and math in Wisconsin and nationwide had gone down a few notches in recent years, even before the pandemic hit. That was underscored by results released Wednesday from the National Assessment of Educational Progress on math and reading abilities of 12th graders nationwide. Based on 2019 results – before COVID-19 — math success was flat and reading was down a bit. In short, reading and math abilities remain a big (and likely growing) worry.  

The Economist:

The Democrats have been trying to catch up since 2010, when they were outspent, outsmarted and lost control of 21 chambers. During Mr Obama’s two terms, Democrats lost around 1,000 of the 4,000-odd state seats they held in 2009 (there are 7,383 in all). This cost them not only control of the policy agenda but also, in many states, control of the power to draw congressional-district boundaries.

A decade later Democrats control 39 out of 98 chambers (not counting Nebraska’s unicameral, non-partisan legislature) and have regained 450 of those lost seats. On the watch of Jessica Post, head of the dlcc, they have taken ten state-legislative chambers and made inroads in North Carolina and Texas. They are unlikely to match the Republicans’ success in 2010, but only because they have already won the easiest targets. At stake, once again, is control over redistricting. David Abrams of the Republican State Leadership Committee says this means “there’s a decade of power hanging in the balance” on November 3rd.

Related: Madison seeks to waive the State of Wisconsin’s civics exam requirement

Vanessa Rancano:

For as long as Connie LuVenia Williams can remember, letters have been giving her trouble. Sure, she learned the ABCs, but making sense of how these symbols we call letters combine to form the sounds that make up the English language – that part stumped her. And from what she remembers nobody taught her those skills as a kid. 

Her first teachers used Dick and Jane style books with simple, repetitive phrases. 

This whole-word approach to reading teaches kids to memorize and recognize entire words rather than start by sounding out individual letters, like you would with phonics. Whole-word was prevalent in the ‘60s, but for a decade, phonics proponents had already been arguing the method produced poor reading skills. In Williams’ case, they were right.

“I never learned how to spell my middle name,” she told me as she struggled to spell out ‘LuVenia’ and turned to her driver’s license for help. 

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

Joe Heim:

But as with everything else in 2020, normal has flown out the window. Facing the toxic maelstrom of the presidential election and many divisive state and local contests, teachers across the country find themselves rethinking how — or even whether — to provide lessons on America’s political selection process.

Some teachers say the races are so outside the bounds of a typical election that they are uncomfortable presenting them to their students as examples of how American democracy functions. Others worry about uttering the wrong word or being misinterpreted and facing backlash from administrators, parents or polarized community members. In a year already blasted by the coronavirus pandemic, job losses and widespread protests for racial justice, teaching about the bitter election battle can feel like a high-wire act over a sea of sharks.

In previous presidential election years, Jenifer Hitchcock would follow a teaching plan that was synchronous with the election and the news around it. 2020 has changed that. This year, she has focused on the process and the responsibilities of elected leaders rather than the often caustic showdowns between the backers of President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden.

5.7MB PDF.

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

2017: W

est 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.

Stephen McDonell:

It’s only when you sit back and ask yourself, “What has Tony Chung actually done?” that you realise just how draconian Hong Kong’s state security law is.

Among the accusations against Mr Chung: that he posted on social media advocating independence for Hong Kong.

According to Joshua Rosenzweig, the head of Amnesty International’s China Team, “a peaceful student activist has been charged and detained solely because the authorities disagree with his views”.

Consider it another way. Mr Chung is 19 years old. What views were you expressing when you were 19? What opinions were others expressing? Should you have been threatened with life imprisonment for them?

In just a matter of months, the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong has made use of the new national security law to erode the harbour city’s once vaunted freedom of speech. It is nothing short of a disaster for the vast majority of residents who voted for the pro-democracy block in the most recent local elections.

As a document, the proposed law was frightening, but now people are seeing the reality: state security agents grabbing teenage activists from cafes and taking them away perhaps for the rest of their lives. On the ground in Hong Kong, the shocking reality of the new legal regime is becoming clear.

Meanwhile:

Jemima Kelly, writing in the Financial Times: “We need to be more honest in our reporting on Biden”.

Apple refuses to engrave “Liberate HKers” on customer’s Apple Pencil.

The Guardian on Glenn Greenwood and Censorship.

Amartya Sen on authoritarianism and arguing

Mailchimp makes its censorship rules official, outlines right to ban users for “inaccurate” content.

Is the Traditional ACLU View of Free Speech Still Viable? Ira Glasser Speaks Out.

empower Wisconsin:

Nearly 14 months ago, the Associated Press reported the Evers Administration was “evaluating how to better present “accurate information about public records to the public.” The promise to do better – or at least evaluate how to do better – was in response to criticism of Gov. Tony Evers not following former Gov. Scott Walker’s executive orders on open government. Unfortunately, since then, there has been little, if any, signs of progress. In fact just the opposite.  

That’s disappointing because open government is an essential fabric of our republic, necessary to build trust with the other branches of government, media, and public. 

Walker won a nonpartisan award for his open government policies. Evers’ predecessor crafted a number of good government reforms, including the creation of a website that makes it easier to show how responsive state agencies are to records requests from the public. This was a common-sense tool to evaluate state bureaucrats accountability to the public. 

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

Samara Kalk Derby:

Mark Paradise made the tough decision to close Sunroom Café on State Street, even though, at age 67, he said, he had a least two more good years to give it.

That was also the number of years he had left on his lease at the sunny, second-floor restaurant at 638 State St., which routinely had customers lined up down the stairs waiting on weekends.

Paradise just marked his 25th year of ownership, and said his decision was also based on the uncertainties of the pandemic and the unknowns about being able to reopen safely. He said he also worried about retaining skilled employees in a limited work capacity. “I guess there were too many variables,” he said.

He enjoyed the job, he said. “Going to the café each morning, interacting with all of the employees and greeting customers, I didn’t want those feelings to change under the new reality of COVID-19.”

Paradise said being on the second floor made doing business during the pandemic difficult, since he couldn’t offer outdoor dining. Before the pandemic, Sunroom — which served breakfast, lunch, dinner and Sunday brunch — could seat about 65 people inside. Complying with COVID restrictions would be impossible because the tables were squeezed too close together to make distancing realistic, he said.

“We had a good business, and it was a lot of fun working and being down there and meeting all the students and faculty and staff,” Paradise said. “We had regular customers that I saw five times a week and it’s sad that it was all sort of taken away.”

Much more on Madison’s substantial Fall 2020 tax & spending increase referendum, here.

Chris Stewart:

This past Sunday my 8 Black Hands crew did a show on the missing importance of school boards, and then this article pops up saying the National School Boards Association (NSBA) has launched a campaign called “Public School Transformation Now!”

The goal, flimsy as ever, is to “bring equity issues front and center.” I’m triggered because leaders, especially education, consistently go for sophistry over function. They focus on the feel-good rather than the complex. They love the fashion instead of the fix.

If you read through the article and the NSBA’s Twitter timeline you’ll be browbeaten with the words “reinvent!” and “reimagine!” and “transform!” With America’s massively ineffective public schooling gasping for air from the shock of Covid, I don’t blame them for branding their effort in aspirational terms even as parents and journalists complain about the remote learning “disaster” across cities. And I certainly don’t blame them for ringing the bell on important issues like increasing teacher diversity, stemming potential teacher shortages, the urgent need for flexibility on how special education services are delivered, and the national need to ensure kids can access the internet. But it feels like some essentials are missing from their hubbub.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

The Economist:

Ten years ago Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, made a startling prediction in Nature. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he asserted, pointing in part to the “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees”. The subsequent surge in populism in Europe, the unexpected votes in 2016 for Brexit and then for President Donald Trump in America, and a wave of protests from the gilets jaunes to Black Lives Matter, has made Mr Turchin something of a celebrity in certain circles, and has piqued economists’ interest in the discipline of “cliodynamics”, which uses maths to model historical change. Mr Turchin’s emphasis on the “overproduction of elites” raises uncomfortable questions, but also offers useful policy lessons.

As far back as ancient Rome and imperial China, Mr Turchin shows, societies have veered from periods of political stability to instability, often at intervals of about 50 years. Consider America. Every pundit knows that Congress has become gridlocked, with Democrats and Republicans unwilling to compromise with each other. Fewer know that it was also highly polarised around 1900, before becoming more co-operative in the mid-20th century.

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

Barry Lynn:

Popular histories present the Boston Tea Party as a rebellion against taxes. Yet what the colonists objected to more than anything was the idea of an all-powerful corporate middleman regulating commerce. They viewed the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor as a victory for liberty and a blow against the British East India Company’s trade monopoly.

That corporation owed its dominance not to any proprietary advantage but to an exclusive British government charter. The artificial nature of this power was made clear soon after the Congress of the new United States signed a peace treaty with Britain. Six weeks later, the American ship Empress of China sailed from New York, bound for Canton. When the ship returned, its traders sold tea and porcelain on the open market. Without the active backing of the British state, the East India Company could not stop the sale—let alone determine who sold what, or where and how they sold it, in America.

But around the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans began to develop technologies that could not be broken into component pieces. This was especially true of the railroad and the telegraph. These expensive and complex networks were built across vast areas of land and required large teams of people to operate. This made the earlier solution to monopolies—dissolution—impossible. If Americans planned to take full advantage of these technological advances, they would have to regulate the actions of the corporations that controlled them.

Such corporations posed one overarching challenge: they charged some people more than others to get to market. They exploited their control over an essential service in order to extort money, and sometimes political favors. The system of “discriminations made between individuals . . . is the most serious evil connected with our present methods of railroad management,” the Yale professor Arthur T. Hadley explained in 1885. “Differences are made which are sufficient to cripple all smaller competitors. . .  and concentrate industry in a few hands.”

Americans found the answer to this problem in common law. For centuries, the owners of ferries, stagecoaches, and inns had been required to serve all customers for the same price and in the order in which they arrived. In the late nineteenth century, versions of such “common carrier” rules were applied to the new middleman corporations.

Many taxpayer supported K – 12 school districts use Google and Facebook services., including Madison.

Kieren McCarthy:

Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform.

The social media goliath informed New York University (NYU) that research by its Tandon School of Engineering’s Online Transparency Project’s Ad Observatory violates Facebook’s terms of service on bulk data collection and demanded it end the program immediately.

The project recruited 6,500 volunteers to install its AdObserver browser extension that collects data on the ads that Facebook shows them personally. It sends the information to the American university, allowing it to perform a real-time check that Facebook is living up its promise to clearly disclose not only who paid for political ads shown on the platform but also how much and when the adverts would be shown.

“We launched the Online Transparency Project two years ago to make it easier to see who was purchasing political ads on Facebook,” said co-founder Laura Edelson, of the project.

st.im:

The other day I had a bit of a crisis, I was worried that I was starting to have trouble with my memory. Something had to be wrong! I started to notice (increasingly!) my inability to recall trivial things; for example, the action points from a Zoom call, or a quote from a book that I had read a couple of months ago. Surely this can’t be normal?

Before calling the doctor’s office I did what any decent hypochondriac would do, and started googling. After clicking through a few pages, I began to feel a bit better. It was normal. Short term (or working) memory is inefficient, and unless I revisit the thing I’m trying to remember a few times, I’m most likely going to forget it. And no, it’s not a side effect of turning thirty. Phew.

It’s a “feature, not a bug” of how our memory systems are designed.

Our memory is made up of not one, nor two, but three components: 1) a sensory register, 2) working memory, and 3) long-term memory.

Teresa Watanabe:

In late 2018, UC Berkeley bioethics professor Osagie K. Obasogie received a campus email about a research fund available to faculty members in the School of Public Health.

He was stunned by what he read.

The Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund, the email said, supports research and education in eugenics — a field discredited after World War II as a horrifying ideology that sought to use science to improve the human race by promoting traits deemed superior and breeding out those judged undesirable. The judgments aligned strongly with social biases that favored white, able-bodied and financially stable people.

Eugenics was used as a justification for Hitler’s Nazi Germany to kill 6 million Jewish people, and U.S. authorities to forcibly sterilize more than 60,000 people in California and more than 30 other states largely in the early 20th century.

But Berkeley’s eugenic research fund has been very much active.

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s eugenics advocacy continues to be controversial.

Will Flanders:

The results for the 2019 administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have just been released. The NAEP is given to samples of students around the country on a biannual basis and provides the best method for comparing performance among students in different states. Unfortunately for Wisconsin, the story is yet another riff on a tired tune: student achievement is largely stagnant and wide racial achievement gaps persist.

Overall, achievement in Wisconsin remains relatively flat. Scores have moved no more than a point in either direction over the past decade. In some ways, this is not a bad thing. Wisconsin students remain above the national average among eighth graders in reading and math. But there is some cause for concern. Wisconsin’s fourth grade students used to exceed the national average in these areas as well but are now on par with the rest of the country. It appears other states are “catching up” to Wisconsin.

Some might say that this is a result of cuts in Wisconsin’s spending, but the facts don’t support this. The chart below shows Wisconsin’s per pupil spending since 2013 along with the NAEP scores. Inflation-adjusted spending has increased while NAEP scores stagnate.

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

Jordan Weissman:

Seven months into the coronavirus crisis, the states with the most severe unemployment in the country all seem to have one thing in common: They vote blue.

In September, just eight states had jobless rates that were significantly higher than the nation as a whole, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each of them—New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, California, Nevada, and Hawaii—backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and all but Massachusetts had a Democratic governor.* These states did not suffer from unusually high unemployment rates before the pandemic began, but now are facing rates ranging from 9.4 percent up to 15.1 percent, compared with 7.9 percent nationally.

Note: These are the eight states that have unemployment higher than the U.S. rate, and where the difference is statistically significant at the 90 percent level. Jordan Weissmann/Slate

By contrast, the states with the lowest unemployment last month tilted red: Of the bottom 10—Nebraska, South Dakota, Vermont, North Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Utah, South Carolina, Montana, and Oklahoma—eight both had a Republican governor and backed Donald Trump in the last election. All had jobless rates below 5.4 percent.

Even if you turn your attention away from the extremes, it’s clear that the economic damage has been significantly worse overall in Biden Country, where employment has fallen 8.6 percent, than in Trump country, where it’s down 4.6 percent, according to an analysis by Indeed.com economist Jed Kolko.

Much more on Madison’s substantial Fall 2020 tax & spending increase referendum, here.

Lindsay Gorman:

The United States and its democratic allies are engaged in a contest for the soul of the Future Internet. Conceived as a beacon of free expression with the power to tear down communication barriers across free and unfree societies alike, the Internet today faces significant challenges to its status as the world’s ultimate connector.1 In creating connectivity and space for democratic speech, it has also enabled new means of authoritarian control and the suppression of human rights through censorship and surveillance. As tensions between democracies and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) heat up over Internet technologies, the prospect of a dichotomous Internet comes more sharply into focus: a democratic Internet where information flows freely and an authoritarian Internet where it is tightly controlled—separated not by an Iron Curtain, but a Silicon one. The Future Internet is deeply enmeshed in the dawning information contest between autocracies and democracies.2 It is the base layer—the foundation—on which communication takes place and the entry point into narrative and societal influence. How the next generation of Internet technologies are created, defined, governed, and ultimately used will have an outsized impact on this information contest—and the larger geopolitical contest—between democracy and authoritarianism.

Wall Street Journal:

Some institutions are responding better than others to the stress of political polarization, and one of the worst performers has been the press. Its broad and intense progressive partisanship is escalating into attempts to stifle information and stigmatize opposing points of view.

A case in point is the media distortion of a pair of recent reports in The Wall Street Journal. Our Kimberley Strassel wrote a detailed analysis in her Friday column about the emails and text messages of former Hunter Biden business associate Tony…

Joseph Cox:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is refusing to tell Congress what legal authority the agency is following to use commercially bought location data to track Americans without a warrant, according to the office of Senator Ron Wyden. The agency is buying location data from Americans all over the country, not just in border areas.

The lack of disclosure around why CBP believes it does not need a warrant to use the data, as well as the Department of Homeland Security not publishing a Privacy Impact Assessment on the use of such location information, has spurred Wyden and Senators Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Ed Markey, and Brian Schatz on Friday to ask the DHS Office of the Inspector General (DHS OIG) to investigate CBP’s warrantless domestic surveillance of phones, and determine if CBP is breaking the law or engaging in abusive practices.

Susan Edelman:

Chancellor Richard Carranza’s highly anticipated new grading policy for this school year will again ban failing marks, according to an internal memo obtained by The Post, riling educators and parents.

The city Department of Education document, titled “Grading Policy 2020-2021,” says schools should use the same softer “considerations” adopted last May during the COVID-19 shutdown.

Among the main guidelines:

• “Continue to use ‘course in progress’ in place of failing grades.”

• “Permit students in high school an additional semester to complete coursework and meet the learning outcomes for their courses.”

Under the DOE policy adopted in May, schools had to drop numeric grades. Instead, it directed the use of “meets standards,” “needs improvement,” or “course in progress” for marking periods as well as end-of-year grades.

The new policy will allow elementary and middle schools to give numeric grades — but not to fail students, the document states.

JacK TrocinskI:

I think that in today’s world financial literacy is more important than ever to financial success in life and yet it seems like many kids graduating high school are financially illiterate. In my opinion everyone should a fundamental understanding of how a savings account, CD account, IRA, Roth IRA, 401(k) and MSA account work. Likewise, everyone should have a fundamental understanding of the equity markets, derivatives markets, futures markets, bond and treasury markets along with an understanding of how interest rates work and their effects on financial instruments like mortgages. Kids should be taught about the various forms of business structures available to them from starting a simple DBA to the numerous flavors of corporations out there. All this can be taught without giving financial advice, which may be more in the domain of parents, but by focusing on the theoretical and historical aspects of financial instruments so that kids have a better understanding of how they work and are better prepared for life in gen

Simon Usborne:

Dahlia Francis is sitting on a small couch at the foot of her bed, in her shared flat, on a housing estate in south London. She wears her new uniform of pyjama bottoms and a Zoom-ready plain T-shirt. Her room used to be a living room. Now the only communal space is the kitchen, where Francis’s three flatmates occupy a small dining table. They, like almost half of Britain’s workforce, are also working from home.

Francis, who is 29, is a credit controller for a charity in central London. She commuted there, by bus and tube, for a little more than a year. There were baking competitions and quizzes and a kitchenette, where gossip and tea flowed freely. Now the kettle is silent and the cubicles are empty. They are likely to remain so for the rest of the year.

For the first few weeks after her office closed in late March, Francis was too busy to consider her new circumstances. Then they hit her – and got her down. Days spent in her bedroom hunched over a laptop, centimetres from where she slept, blurred into endless weeks. She has become lonely.

Update: @MilwaukeeMPS administration is recommending schools start bringing students back to classrooms in-person in January, using a hybrid model. The school board will discuss it tomorrow: https://t.co/XCwhMjCGYL

— Emily Files (@emilyrfiles) October 26, 2020

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Facing a coronavirus-induced “budget crisis” that exceeds $300 million, UW-Madison announced on Monday another round of furloughs and pay cuts for the first six months of 2021.

“We are not out of the woods yet,” Chancellor Rebecca Blank said in a message to the campus community. “The pandemic will affect UW into 2021 and beyond.”

Roughly 16,000 university employees will take between three and six unpaid days off between Jan. 1 and June 30, reducing their pay between 2.5% and 4.6%. Blank and vice chancellors will take a 15% salary cut over those same six months. School and college deans will take voluntary 10% salary cuts.

The latest round of furloughs and salary cuts is expected to save $27 million, university spokesman John Lucas said. That’s about the same as what UW-Madison recouped when it imposed its first six-month furlough period that ends Friday.

The university estimates about $320 million in revenue losses and increased costs from March through the end of this fiscal year, which ends June 30. Some of that shortfall has already been made up for through the first round of furloughs, a hiring freeze, travel restrictions and other reductions.

But the budget gap is still “larger than any that we’ve faced in any past year,” Blank said.

Much more on Madison’s substantial Fall 2020 tax & spending increase referendum, here.

Robby Soave:

Betsy DeVos became President Donald Trump’s education secretary on February 7, 2017, following Vice President Mike Pence’s vote to break a Senate deadlock—an inauspicious first for a Cabinet-level confirmation. Furious opposition to her nomination came from the nation’s teachers unions: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called DeVos an “ideological” opponent of public education.

But DeVos’ tenure has shown that she’s an ideological opponent, not of public education, but of public education managed by federal bureaucrats. And she includes herself in that.

“I would not be at all unhappy to work myself out of a job,” she says.

A former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, DeVos was known as an advocate for vouchers, charter schools, and more educational options for parents well before President Trump offered her the nation’s top ed job. These issues became even more relevant in 2020, after the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close or go virtual, leaving millions of families in the lurch. With teachers unions all over the country fighting on behalf of their members to stop schools from reopening, many parents might be feeling ideologically opposed to the K–12 status quo as well.

Eli Lehrer & Skip Stitt:

America’s labor movement has become increasingly concentrated in the public sector. As a result, modern debates about formal labor relations often take for granted that many of the workers involved are government workers. For people holding public office in much of the country, building relationships with these public-sector unions has become a priority.

The public sector’s importance to the labor movement is beyond dispute. As of 2019, 49% of America’s 14.7 million union members worked for government units. And while about 34% of public-sector workers today belong to unions, less than 7% of those in the private sector do. The handful of unions that have gained strength in recent years are primarily either groups devoted almost entirely to unionizing public-sector workers, like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), or entities that organize in both public and private sectors, like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

When unions engage in politics, they lean heavily to the left. This, too, is beyond dispute. In recent election cycles, Democrats never received less than 85% of organized labor’s campaign contributions. They also received nearly 100% of the contributions from public-sector unions not involved in public safety. This group of “public-service” unions, which will be the focus of this article, represents a major source of opposition to conservative candidates and many of the policies they support. This has led to a deeply antagonistic relationship between public-service unions and most right-of-center officeholders.

Weac four senators for $1.57m

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). Run for office. Spring 2021 elections: Dane county executive.

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