Logan Wroge:

Scott Girard:

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

April, 2020 election results.

Vanessa Thorpe:

An urgent call is to go out to children’s television broadcasters this weekend, backed by major names in British entertainment, politics and technology. Writer and performer Stephen Fry, best-selling author Cressida Cowell and businesswoman Martha Lane Foxare joined by former children’s television presenter Floella Benjamin as signatories to a letter, carried in today’s Observer, that urges all leading streaming, network and terrestrial children’s channels to make one simple change to boost literacy among the young: turn on the subtitles.

If English-language subtitles were to be run along the bottom of the screen for all programming, they argue, reading levels across the country would automatically rise. Longstanding international academic research projects prove, they say, that spelling, grammar and vocabulary would all be enhanced, even if children watching TV are not aware they are learning.

The campaign aims to improve reading ability across the English-speaking world and has won backing from former President Bill Clinton, who said: “Same-language subtitling doubles the number of functional readers among primary school children. It’s a small thing that has a staggering impact on people’s lives.”

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

Madeline Peltzer:

As colleges across the country have sent students home and moved classes online due to COVID-19, many institutions find themselves in a tough spot: how to appease distraught students while remaining afloat financially.

On Tuesday, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that because of the pandemic, the University of Wisconsin-Madison expects to lose $100 million by June, a loss of about 3.2 percent of UW-Madison’s $3 billion budget. The figure includes reimbursements given to students for room and board after the school closed its campus, hired professional cleaners, and purchased the technology needed for distance learning.

“Financially, many colleges have been struggling, facing a perfect storm which is going to be even more difficult now”

In Wisconsin’s neighboring state, the University of Minnesota stands to lose an estimated $315 million from its $3.8 billion budget, according to the Associated Press. The financial losses stretch to universities in all parts of the country, as the University of California-Berkeley said it will lose $100 million, at least. Nearby San Jose State University in California stands to lose an estimated $16 million by the end of May. And Clemson University in South Carolina is estimated to lose about $20 million from the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Greenville News. Meanwhile, the University of Maine lost $12.8 million after it issued refunds to students for unused room and board.

Kelsey J. Griffin:

Nearly 200 third-year Harvard Law School students signed a letter to Law School administrators Thursday asking for the school to publicly advocate for an emergency diploma privilege — a policy granting graduating students their law licenses without requiring the bar examination.

The letter asked the Law School to take four specific actions on behalf of its students. These requests include issuing a public statement supporting the emergency diploma privilege across the United States; sharing the students’ letter with other law schools; sending a statement supporting the privilege to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; and hosting a virtual town hall for students to discuss their needs with the administration.

Donna C. Saadati-Soto, a co-author of the letter, said she believes it would be unfair to ask students to sit for the multi-day exam this summer since the ongoing coronavirus pandemic limits the ability of some students to prepare over the coming months.

“I intended to sit for the California bar exam that was set to happen in July,” she said. “There’s no way that folks are going to be able to sit for a July 2020 administration of the exam.”

Saadati-Soto said that several states have already postponed their exams in light of the COVID-19 crisis and associated social distancing restrictions. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts announced Monday it would postpone its July 28 and 29 exam until an undetermined date in the fall.

Ross Anderson:

There have recently been several proposalsfor pseudonymous contact tracing, including from Apple and Google. To both cryptographers and privacy advocates, this might seem the obvious way to protect public health and privacy at the same time. Meanwhile other cryptographers have been pointing out some of the flaws.

There are also real systems being built by governments. Singapore has already deployedand open-sourced one that uses contact tracing based on bluetooth beacons. Most of the academic and tech industry proposals follow this strategy, as the “obvious” way to tell who’s been within a few metres of you and for how long. The UK’s National Health Service is working on one too, and I’m one of a group of people being consulted on the privacy and security.

But contact tracing in the real world is not quite as many of the academic and industry proposals assume.

First, it isn’t anonymous. Covid-19 is a notifiable disease so a doctor who diagnoses you must inform the public health authorities, and if they have the bandwidth they call you and ask who you’ve been in contact with. They then call your contacts in turn. It’s not about consent or anonymity, so much as being persuasive and having a good bedside manner.

Chris Stuart:

They want me to tell you a few things, so here goes.

I renounce every critique I’ve ever made about the American public education system. Our public schools are the best in the world if you remove the children who aren’t white. The test scores don’t lie when white kids pass them. Unfortunately, the tests don’t tell us anything meaningful about nonwhite people.

Our nation’s teachers are faultless heroes. Their unions are freedom fighters. If there are racialized outcomes it is because children are too poor to learn, their parents too irresponsible to teach them, and their politicians refuse to provide schools more money to deal with them.

If we really want better outcomes we will split them into small cohorts and send them with extra funds to white schools where they can learn how to be fully human.

I regret having promoted the idea that there was more to the story than that. 

Also, can we acknowledge there is only one way to do school? It has to be state-delivered through local school districts with board members selected through low-turnout elections that are dominated by public employee unions. That worked so well before the anti-democratic reformsters started pushing the idea that parents should “vote with their feet” and that their “money follows the child.”

Let’s get back to good. Back to the time when public schools worked for everyone.

Logan Wroge:

Anna Hauser’s son Xavier typically has a team of 15 people caring for and educating him throughout a school day at Madison’s East High School.

But with schools closed statewide to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus, the 14-year-old freshman, who has spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy making it impossible for him to walk or talk, hasn’t been getting in-person services such as physical therapy he would typically get at school.

Hauser, who has two other children — ages 7 and 11 — at home, is finding YouTube math videos to keep her oldest child educationally engaged and doing the stretches a physical therapist would normally provide for him.

“They’re just stressed because life is so much different,” Hauser said of her children. “We live in a little two-bedroom apartment. Nobody has any room to breathe.”

Almost a million Wisconsin school children are out of class following an order that shuttered all schools by March 18, forcing families to adapt work schedules, child care arrangements and learning opportunities.

Tawnell D. Hobbs:

About 26 million public-school students, just over half in the U.S., are considered low-income and rely on free or reduced-price meals at school. In recent years, school districts and government agencies have increased focus on feeding students, even providing them dinner after school. Many school leaders say their jobs extend beyond education to making sure students are fed and receive proper care.

The Ferguson-Florissant district said April 5 that one of its bus drivers tested positive for the coronavirus and died that day. Another bus driver, who died the day prior after a prolonged illness, had symptoms associated with the virus. Four other employees in the district have tested positive.

The drivers last worked in the district on March 20. District officials said they don’t believe that students or families came in contact with the drivers or the other employees who tested positive. The district, which serves a mostly poor student body in the St. Louis metro area, said it is seeking safer alternatives for food service and hopes to have something in place this week. One idea being considered is cooperating with neighboring districts in a regional food operation to limit staffing and reduce contact.

Tom Fairless and Jason Douglas:

When the crisis is over, “it will be very hard for any government not to increase spending on health,” and to fund new areas such as medical research and vaccine production, said Mr. Travers.

A similar shift happened after the depravations of World War II, when countries like the U.K. pushed up taxes to finance sweeping new social-safety nets, including universal health-care programs.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Joel Kotkin:

Recreating the Conditions for Autocracy

Throughout history, crises – like the Covid-19 pandemic – have been ideal opportunities for expanding centralized control of life, ostensibly for our own good. We are already seeing the potential rise of a new police state and in some countries, such as France, a rising incidence of informers, conspiracy theories, and even vigilantism.

Propaganda, relentless and clever, is critical for creating any kind of police state. The green movement and supporters of unlimited authoritarian steps to address the pandemic can now rely on the mainstream media’s often hysterical and innumerate reporting to provide political leaders with a rationale for uber-control.

Expertise and Oligarchy

A scientifically-based crisis offers an ideal terroir for the promotion of oligarchy. The current approach to reducing climate-altering emissions offers enormous opportunities not only for expanded government but also for Wall Street and the large tech firms to profiteer on our energy “transition.” This illustrates sociologist Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,”  articulated in the early 20^th century, that the more complex the issue, the greater the need for elite-driven solutions.

Like the pandemic, climate change is an extraordinarily complex issue that has been promoted by consistent exaggeration and predictions of catastrophe. Alarmed by the threat of imminent doom from a changing climate, some progressive pundits openly favor replacing democracy with a global “technocracy” that would preempt popular control and allow experts to implement policies of their own design.

The problem here lies with the notion of an “expert” class, which likes to see itself as “scientific” and unencumbered by prejudice. But having a PhD does not suppress the human desire for unbound power and influence. As the “experts” grow in power, as James Burnham noted, they see themselves as responsible not to the public, but to others in their peer group from whom they seek approval and support.

In this and other crises, we need to remind ourselves that enforced orthodoxy among “experts” – which we often seek – can prove very dangerous. After all, we have had so many miscalls from our cognitive betters on everything from “peak oil” and dietary advice to policy toward Syria and the Soviet Union. Facing pressure from the virus’s spread, there is already danger of embracing the same kind of centralized groupthink practiced so disastrously in China.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

My recent email to the Madison School Board and District Chief Financial Officer:

I hope that you, your families and colleagues are well.

I write to see if anyone has modeled the implications of a property tax base drop on the proposed 2020 referendum? Madison’s property tax base has increased substantially over the past decade, somewhat due to a significant federal taxpayer ($38B+) electronic medical record backdoor subsidy.

How might a construction slow down and declining property values due to a recession/deep downturn affect the proposed tax & spending increases?

I further wondered if the looming substantial federal funds might be applied to replace part or all of the planned property tax based referendum?

Finally, I was part of the group that reviewed Infinite Campus (and other similar systems) years ago. Some time ago, the District completed a teacher, staff and parent usage study. Has that been updated? Please forward the % of teachers who use IC daily, weekly and monthly along with the % of parents, staff and students for similar time frames.

Best wishes,

Jim

Heather MacDonald:

As American unemployment mounted by the millions in March and April, the dance of the college diversity deans kept up its usual brisk pace. On April 1, Harvard University announced that its acting associate dean for inclusion and belonging was moving on to Denison University. But the Harvard associate deanship will not be vacant for long. On May 1, the current head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus will step into the Harvard position, to direct the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion team within the Dean of Students Office; the Office of BGLTQ Student Life; the Office of Diversity Education and Support; the College’s Title IX Office; the Women’s Center; and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Elsewhere, campus diversocrats enjoyed similarly enviable mobility while the rest of the country was shutting down. The vice president for inclusion and diversity at George Mason University will become chief diversity officer at the University of South Carolina at Columbia on June 15. The former occupant of the South Carolina position decamped to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 15 to serve as its community and equity officer. On March 1, a former associate vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Iowa became associate vice president for inclusive excellence at Georgia Southern University. The first diversity, equity, and inclusion librarian at the University of Florida assumed her position in February.

Many college presidents are terrified that the coronavirus pandemic will devastate their schools’ finances and enrollment. Anyone who cares about a revival of serious learning can only hope that they are right.

Manner Thelua:

A large number of artifacts held in Western museums and libraries are known to have been appropriated over the ages through conquest and colonialism. The looting of African objects anthropologists, curators and private collectors took place in war as well as in peaceful times. It was justified as an act of benevolence; as saving dying knowledge.

Across Europe, Museums are rethinking What To Do With Their African Art Collections. Big royal statues from the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, are pictured in 2018 at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. 

While it appears that more artifacts will be making their way to their home countries, it’s unlikely that this will lead to empty shelves in European museums anytime soon. It’s estimated that 90 to 95 percent of sub-Saharan cultural artifacts are housed outside Africa.

The issue of repatriating museum objects has become an increasingly critical one in the museum sector. It was given additional weight due to a report commissioned by the president of France Emmanuel Macron in 2018.

Scott Girard:

MTI says going through an entire school year with another interim is unacceptable, though they understand that will be required for a period of time “and want clarity around who will fill that position immediately.”

“However, there are too many critical issues facing our schools, staff, students, and community for us to have another year without a permanent leader in place,” the letter states. “While it is difficult to predict what the future holds and what the new ‘normal’ will be, we know that our public schools will be a critical part of the recovery efforts in Madison. A permanent superintendent is necessary for that work to move forward effectively.”

[Madison School District superintendent-hire Gutiérrez rescinds acceptance]

The union also shared members’ feedback on key characteristics desired in a new superintendent, which include advancing work around racial equity, maintaining high expectations for everyone in schools, making staff feel respected and supported, being present in schools on a regular basis, proposing fewer initiatives and top-down mandates and having a strategic plan to build trust in the community — specifically between educators and administration.

“We are happy to continue this conversation with you and look forward to continuing to collaborate as we serve the students and families of the Madison public schools,” the letter states.

Related: Jennifer Cheatham (2013-2019) and the Madison Experience.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

First Inspires:

Renewable sources of energy are everywhere, all the time. Working together in the 2020 season of FIRST^® Robotics Competition, INFINITE RECHARGE^SM, we can support boundless innovation and create a society that’s empowered, inspired, and hopeful. Kickoff and game reveal are January 4, 2020. 

Matt Stoller:

In Cantillon’s day, the basis of money was gold, so he wrote about what happened when a nation-state discovered a gold mine in its territory. Increasing the amount of gold in the realm would not just increase price levels, he observed, but would change who had wealth and he didn’t. As he put it, “doubling the quantity of money in a state, the prices of products and merchandise are not always doubled. The river, which runs and winds about in its bed, will not flow with double the speed when the amount of water is doubled.”

Cantillon went on to discuss how money would flow, basically noting that rich people near the mine would spend it on 18th century luxuries like servants and meat pies, prompting a general rise in prices. Eventually the money would get out to the populace, but until it did, working people would have to pay higher prices without access to the new money that mine owners had. So there would be inflation, with uneven distribution of purchasing power. 

There’s also a China angle. Cantillon noted that a kingdom discovering gold would in the long-run erode its own manufacturing base, that the non-neutrality of money also had geopolitical consequences. 

Here’s how he put it:

Vicki Porter Adams:

Infoworld, 1981.

Luca Vebber:

For example, bureaucrats published an entirely new licensing scheme for “real estate appraisal management companies.”[2] That rule has been in the works for almost two years, did we really need to wait until the middle of a healthcare emergency to publish it? I am willing to make the bold prediction that our state would survive just fine without it for another month or two without this new license. This week, DATCP announced a 20% across the board fee increase on labs that test food, water and milk.[3] Their rationale? The fees had not been increased since 2008, so it was time to raise them. Why on earth would anyone think this is a good idea in the middle of the current emergency?

There are other reasons why Wisconsin should press “pause” on all non-essential regulatory changes. Mainly, the lack of transparency and oversight. As Wisconsinites worry about their families and ensuring they can put food on the table, they should not also be expected to maintain a robust oversight over an ever-growing regulatory behemoth.

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

Rob Low:

In an interview with the Problem Solvers, Wallin said, “I find it hard to believe with all the things going on in our communities, the only way to resolve a situation like this was to handcuff a father in front of his daughter.”

The sign at Donelson Park said “Closed” but in smaller print reads, “in groups of no more than 4 persons, parks remain open for walking, hiking, biking, running and similar activities.”

Chris Rickert:

Exercise is a good thing!

Alexandra Deligiorgi:

Poststructuralist relativism, following the Nietzschean critique of Western rationalism, denounces the quest for truth as a quest to legitimize various claims on the level of universal human value, by covering up the indirect coercion of their discourse or imagery. Using perspectivism as an argument against philosophical grounding of various patterns and schemes, post-modern thinkers, under the influence of Poststructuralist relativism, try to depart from the cognitivist tradition by transforming philosophical thought to an edifying discipline (Rorty) or learning (Lyotard) liberated from a theory of knowledge, and giving into a discourse of literary or prosy character. I argue that post-modern perspectivism and the individualistic or collectivistic logic which nurtures its scope can be transcended through construction of hyperperspectivistic prisms based on alogic of interrelation animated by the interdisciplinarian spirit prevailing in the field of modern science. This latter serves as the leading thread for the foundation of a new canonicity which, without losing its historical and cultural character, can make claims to truth and validity of general acceptance. The hyperspectivistic canonicity deriving from such an interrelational logic is in a position to animate a new educational model capable of overcoming both idealistic and romantic versions of Bildung.

Chris Baraniuk:

On 3 June, 2017, FBI agents arrived at the house of government contractor Reality Leigh Winner in Augusta, Georgia. They had spent the last two days investigating a top secret classified document that had allegedly been leaked to the press. In order to track down Winner, agents claim they had carefully studied copies of the document provided by online news site The Intercept and noticed creases suggesting that the pages had been printed and “hand-carried out of a secured space”.

In an affidavit, the FBI alleges that Winner admitted printing the National Security Agency (NSA) report and sending it to The Intercept. Shortly after a story about the leak was published, charges against Winner were made public.

Jon Hilsenrath:

Student debt has become a heavier burden for households, and since 2007 it has tripled to $1.5 trillion, with large exposures among young individuals, according to Fed data.

“We were talking about, when this is over, we want to downsize, maybe move into a townhome, being way more conservative in terms of major purchases and spending and start building savings,” Heather Schmiege, 41 years old, said of a conversation she recently had with her husband.

Both have student loans, in addition to a mortgage and two car payments. The Tallahassee couple makes enough with two jobs to cover the bills with a bit left over, but the crisis and recent Florida hurricanes have made them wary of risk.

Congress, concerned that delinquencies could rise if unemployment skyrockets—as happened after the last economic downturn—granted a reprieve for student-loan borrowers as part of the recent economic-rescue package.

The law will allow most of the 43 million Americans with federal student loans to suspend their monthly payments, interest free, for six months. Since the federal government is the nation’s primary student lender, the program effectively shifts the student debt fallout from the crisis to Washington.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

My recent email to the Madison School Board and District Chief Financial Officer:

I hope that you, your families and colleagues are well.

I write to see if anyone has modeled the implications of a property tax base drop on the proposed 2020 referendum? Madison’s property tax base has increased substantially over the past decade, somewhat due to a significant federal taxpayer ($38B+) electronic medical record backdoor subsidy.

How might a construction slow down and declining property values due to a recession/deep downturn affect the proposed tax & spending increases?

I further wondered if the looming substantial federal funds might be applied to replace part or all of the planned property tax based referendum?

Finally, I was part of the group that reviewed Infinite Campus (and other similar systems) years ago. Some time ago, the District completed a teacher, staff and parent usage study. Has that been updated? Please forward the % of teachers who use IC daily, weekly and monthly along with the % of parents, staff and students for similar time frames.

Best wishes,

Jim

Scott Girard:

Staff began working on the new curriculum adoption last year, following a 2018 needs assessment that showed a “need for materials K-5 that have a structured phonics component, are standards aligned and are more culturally and linguistically responsive, historically accurate and inclusive,” according to Monday’s presentation.

The steps since have included forming focus groups made up of staff and families, a pilot in five kindergarten classrooms and regular Review Committee meetings.

Staff plan to soon begin a request for proposals process and implement sample lessons in selected grades later this year. In December 2020 or January 2021, they expect to make a recommendation to the School Board and have a board vote, with implementation that fall following staff training.

Kvistad told the board staff had learned from the last materials adoption a decade ago, noting that “materials are different now,” as is support for teachers.

“We found ourselves moving too fast, I think, around implementation that we couldn’t learn from what we did and adjust moving on,” she said.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Logan Wroge:

On March 31, Gutierrez sent a letter to Reyes letting her know he was rescinding his acceptance of the job and explaining what led to his decision.

Most board members didn’t find out until a week later during a closed session Monday night, LeMonds said. Gutierrez’s decision was publicly announced after the closed session.

Castro said it was “definitely jarring” to hear Gutierrez choose to remain superintendent in Seguin, Texas. But Castro added he understood where the lifelong Texan was coming from.

“I can’t imagine the conflicting emotions he was feeling when the community that he’s in now was in a crisis and really needed important, stable leadership,” Castro said.

In the letter, Gutierrez said his choice to back out of becoming superintendent of Wisconsin’s second-largest school district, which was “to be the pinnacle of my career,” was not without “interminable personal conflict and grief.”

But the experience leading the 7,500-student Seguin Independent School District through the pandemic has changed how he perceives his job, Gutierrez said in the letter.

“The sudden necessity of coordinating in a manner that not only educates but saves and sustains lives has changed my role as superintendent of a small school district from a title and a job to something far more personal; we have become an interdependent family,” Gutierrez wrote.

Related: Jennifer Cheatham (2013-2019) and the Madison Experience.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

David Blaska:

A jogger found Beth Potter the morning of March 31 lying aside a trail in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. She was clothed only in pajamas and socks on a 30-degree night, not yet dead. Her husband, Robin Carre, lying nearby only in his underwear, was already gone.

Two good, community-minded Madison liberals, trying to live their sense of social justice. (Mr. Carre’s letter supporting the liberal WI Supreme Court candidate.) How had they failed their adopted daughter and her minority-race boyfriend? Or did their Madison progressivism fail them?

Police found .357 SIG shell casings around the bodies, “indicating a likelihood that the victims had been shot at that location,” according to the criminal complaint. Both had been shot point-blank in the head. A resident nearby heard gunshots at about 11 p.m. the night before. 

Beth Potter and Robin Carre, it appears, had been dragged out of bed, taken to the heavy woods of the arboretum, and executed point blank. For money.

The criminal complaint cites an informant overhearing a conversation in ceramics class (no less!) at Madison West high school between one of the defendants, Khari Sanford, and the murdered couple’s adopted daughter (who has not been charged as of this writing),  “of how they could get money” — that her parents were wealthy. (The criminal complaint names the second defendant as Alijah J. Larrue.)

Jacob Kastrenakes:

Google’s chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a fairly new development that may not be sustainable. “Privacy may actually be an anomaly,” Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions. Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn’t even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. “In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.”

Rather than privacy being an inherent part of society that’s been stripped away by new technology, Cerf says that technology actually created it in the first place. “It’s the industrial revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity,” Cerf said. Cerf warned that he was simplifying his views — “I don’t want you to go away thinking I am that shallow about it” — but overall, he believes “it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy.”

Though Cerf’s comments may echo concerns over NSA surveillance, he appears to be interested primarily in privacy as it relates to social networks like Facebook. “Our social behavior is also quite damaging with regard to privacy,” Cerf says. He gives an example how a person could be exposed doing something that they wanted to keep secret by being tagged in the background of a stranger’s photo — a photo they never expected to be caught in. “The technology that we use today has far outraced our social intuition, our headlights. … [There’s a] need to develop social conventions that are more respectful of people’s privacy.”

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

Emma Charlton:

Getting infected by COVID-19 isn’t just a worry for the elderly.

That’s one of the first findings about the virus in the US, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

While fatalities were highest in people over 85 years old, catching COVID-19 can result in hospitalization and admission to an intensive care unit for a range of ages, it said. Of the more than 500 people known to be hospitalized, 18% were 45-54 years and 20% were aged 20-44 years.

Jerry Saltz:

The title of this essay isn’t mine. “The Last Days of the Art World” was the title my editor gave to another essay I wrote, last week, about the last day that I spent in New York art galleries before they shuttered for the foreseeable future. I thought it was too sensationalistic and untrue. I freaked out, scared, and asked him to change it. But less than seven days later, I am seeing his dark light and thinking there may be more to that bleak prediction than I wanted to believe at first.

Why didn’t I see it that way originally? In large part, I think, it’s because I’ve watched the art world go through episodes like this before — not pandemics, of course, but contractions and crises of various kinds, which each have shaped, not destroyed, the community I love. I thought, “Don’t be a disasterist; we’ll see what happens.” In particular, I’m a true believer from one particular former bygone world. I came of age during the last years of the smaller, nonprofessional, non-moneyed 1970s art world, where there were no such things as stable careers, sales, art fairs, big audiences, and auctions. This world ran on the desire and passion of semi-outlaws, vagrants, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, creeps, geniuses, hangers-on, exiles, gypsies, and aristocratic bohemians. It was a world before the one we know now that has grown so large, hyperactive, circuslike, top-heavy, and professional — all seasoned with obscene amounts of money, however concentrated it is in the hands of a lucky, mostly white 1,500 people.

Dan Friedman:

I had high hopes about the potential impact of being a Data Scientist. I felt every company should be a “data company”. 

My expectations did not meet reality.

Where did my expectations come from? 

I attended a 12-week data science bootcamp in mid-2016. 11 of the 12 weeks’ focus were on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). At this time, ML & AI news mentions had hit an all-time high. Tesla was paving the way in self-driving cars, and even older behemoths like General Motors (GM) invested over a billion dollars in an AI company to stay at the frontier of automotive tech. At the consumer level, headphones emerged that used AI to automatically translate your words to someone else as you speak, and an AI beat the world’s best esports team.

I figured I’d spend most of my time buried in code and data to find hidden patterns, implement machine learning models in production and optimize them. Executives would likely rely on me to help inform the product roadmap based on insights in data, and I would be highly valued.

However, practically none of that happened.

CJ Szafir and Libby Sobic:

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) Act provides $2.2 trillion of relief for those impacted by COVID. Of this, CARES allocates about $30 billion for K-12 schools and higher education institutions. Soon, Wisconsin will need to make decisions on how to spend the huge influx of federal funds on its education.

Analysis: WILL’s CJ Szafir and Libby Sobic explain the two main pots of money in the CARES Act that Governor Tony Evers and local school districts can soon access from the U.S. Department of Education. Szafir and Sobic make recommendations on how Wisconsin policymakers can tailor the federal money to meet the needs of our state during the COVID crisis. Opportunities exist to immediately do the following:

• Provide teachers with resources for improved distance learning

• Defray the cost of online education to schools and low-income families

• Encourage summer learning camps and literacy programs so students are more prepared for 2020-2021 school year

• Purchase supplies to sanitize and clean school buildings

• Help graduating high school seniors who have to take remedial college courses next year

Why It Matters: Schools and communities are facing significant challenges right now. Many Wisconsin schools, across all sectors, were not prepared to switch to distance learning with such short notice. They must work to ensure students will still receive meals and help families access resources like broadband and devices to do schoolwork. These problems jeopardize student learning and risk further widening the racial achievement gap, already the largest in the country. The CARES Act was passed to provide relief and assistance to combat the impact of COVID so the allocation of K-12 dollars must be considered quickly, collaboratively, and transparently.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools

Scott Girard:

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

Scott Girard:

Logan Wroge:

Related: Jennifer Cheatham (2013-2019) and the Madison Experience.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

Lauren Feiner:

On March 6, New York City high school principal Matt Willie was already preparing for the worst. After watching a news report that said the city’s Department of Education was preparing to close public schools amid the coronavirus crisis, Willie texted his assistant principal: “Prepare for the apocalypse.”

Willie said his school, University Neighborhood High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was about as prepared as he could hope, having started disaster prep about a week before the DOE gave its final judgement. During that time, Willie and his staff took inventory of in-school laptops, surveyed students about whether they had devices and internet connections at home (“just in case”) and had already distributed some laptops to students whose parents said they were no longer comfortable sending them to school. 

But when the DOE finally announced school closures, staff still had to scramble. The decision came down on a Friday, upending the school’s plans to ask students to sign out laptops from their third-period teachers.

I suggested to several Madison Superintendents that teachers and staff receive a stipend to purchase and maintain an internet connected device (cellular iPad would be my choice) and begin to interact with everyone using this device. Further, Apple’s assistive efforts are substantial.

This occurred during Infinite Campus evaluation and implementation meetings. I wonder what the teacher/staff utilization data looks like today?

Infinite Campus – or similar – was for many years an expensive, missed opportunity.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has apparently made little progress online– in 2020.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

James Hankins:

One of the comforts of studying history is that, no matter how bad things get, you can always find a moment in the past when things were much, much worse. Some commentators on our current crisis have been throwing around comparisons to earlier pandemics, and the Black Death of 1347 — 50 inevitably gets mentioned. Please. The Black Death wiped out half the population of Europe in the space of four years. In some places the mortality was far swifter and deadlier than that. The novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, who gave us the most vivid picture of the Black Death in literature, estimated that 100,000 people died in Florence in the four months between March and July 1348. The population of the city in 1338, according to one contemporary chronicler, stood at 120,000.

Boccaccio at the time was a city tax official and saw the whole thing at ground level. Every morning bodies of the dead—husbands, wives, children, servants—were pushed out into the street where they were piled on stretchers, later on carts. They were carried to the nearest church for a quick blessing, then trundled to graveyards outside the city for burial. As the death toll rose, traditional burial practices were abandoned. Deep trenches were dug into which bodies were dumped in layers with a thin covering of soil shoveled on top. Boccaccio writes that “no more respect was accorded the dead than would today be shown to dead goats.”

Evan Wyloge:

For the past few weeks, state health department officials have been working with an expert task force of physicians, researchers and mathematicians from local universities, to try to predict how the novel coronavirus spreading across the world might progress locally.

The group of specialists provided three reports to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, as of the end of last week, and Gov. Jared Polis presented some of the findings of the experts during a press conference Friday, March 27. Polis relayed some stark estimates during the press conference, with possible COVID-19 deaths in Colorado ranging from 900 to 33,200.

Logan Wroge:

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Peter Greene:

It made sense for states to cancel the big end-of-year standardized reading and math test even before it became obvious that many students will never be back to school this spring to take the tests. In this extraordinary year, the tests were never going to supply valid data that could be compared to other years.

Now that this year looks to be a “short” year for students, the same argument should be made for next year’s test as well. If (please, God) students go back to school next fall, most will be starting out with less preparation than any class in recent memory. Not only will they have been shorted academic content, but primary students who haven’t been in a classroom in over half a year will not easily slip back into a school routine in just a day or two. In other words, next year will also be a short year. The Big Standardized Tests would once again be a waste of time, time that could be better spent on instruction.

But for the past 20 years, the Big Standardized Test has been the center of accountability for school districts, individual schools, and classroom teachers. With the test on hold, this is the perfect time to revisit accountability tools for education.

Thi My Lien Nguyen:

In February, before the COVID-19 pandemic locked down cities and closed borders, I spent four days with about 50 mathematicians at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in the Black Forest of southern Germany. Most weeks of the year the institute hosts small gatherings focused on different areas of mathematics. I planned to insinuate myself among the professional mathematicians: break bread with them, take a far-back seat at their lectures, eavesdrop on their hallway conversations, and try to figure out how a close gathering like this one promotes mathematical discovery.

There’s no easy way to get to Oberwolfach. I arrived on a Monday by the recommended route, which is to fly to Frankfurt, then take a two-hour train trip south to the hamlet of Wolfach, then a 30-minute cash-only taxi ride along the river Wolf. Eventually I spied the institute itself, perched midway up a steep hill and backed by an expanse of evergreen forest.

Remoteness is the point.

Suzan Clark:

The FBI and a Philadelphia-area prosecutor are looking into whether a school district broke the law when it remotely activated cameras on school-owned laptops and watched students in their homes.

The parents of 15-year-old Blake Robbins have filed a lawsuit against Harriton High School of the Lower Merion School District, alleging their son’s privacy was violated.

The teenager said he found out about the remote surveillance when he was confronted by his assistant principal at the Rosemont school.

His suit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that school vice principal Lindy Matsko on Nov. 11 cited a laptop photo in telling Blake that the school believed he was engaging in improper behavior. He and his family have told reporters that an official mistook a piece of candy for a pill and thought he was selling drugs.

Davide Castelvecchi:

After an eight-year struggle, embattled Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki has finally received some validation. His 600-page proof of the abc conjecture, one of the biggest open problems in number theory, has been accepted for publication.

Acceptance of the work in Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) — a journal of which Mochizuki is chief editor, published by the institute where he works at Kyoto University — is the latest development in a long and acrimonious controversy over the mathematicians’ proof.

Two other RIMS mathematicians, Masaki Kashiwara and Akio Tamagawa, announced in Japanese the publication at a 3 April press conference in Kyoto. The paper “will have a big impact”, said Kashiwara. When asked how Mochizuki reacted to news of the paper’s acceptance, Kashiwara said, “I think he was relieved.”

Jesse Stiller:

A New York university was given access to the parody account of a student at the college who used the account to make fun of the school. 

A Twitter account under the name @SUNYGeneeso that was operated by student Isaiah Kelly, according to Business Insider, had been using the handle to poke fun at the college for its handling of recent events on campus, which included a power failure and the library being closed due to an asbestos infection.

Stephen Mihm:

The coronavirus has already dealt a vicious blow to key sectors of the U.S. economy. If the pandemic drags on into the fall, though, it’s likely to devastate yet another area that has so far escaped with minimal damage: higher education.

The problems confronting the nation’s colleges and universities long predate today’s crisis. But if current trends continue, the pandemic is likely to act as a catalyst for a historic reckoning that may transform the delivery of higher education in this country.

It’s common knowledge that the cost of attending both public and private institutions has grown far faster than the rate of inflation over the past 40 years. Since 1980, the sticker price of tuition, room and board has more than doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Michael Elsen-Rooney:

Lorenzo F. Manuali:

We’re living in a state of war. It’s beyond stressful for everyone.

The link between heightened chronic stress and a weakened immune response is well-established in psychological literature. Citing one professor of infectious disease, a recent Wall Street Journal article warned readers, “The more you stress about the virus, the more likely you are to suffer from it.” Seriously. The chronic inflammation and high cortisol levels stress causes can erode the body’s ability to rapidly marshal the immune system and even activate latent viruses.

Students are no exception — certainly not to stress nor to its negative effects.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 has imposed chronic stress on all of us — stress from leaving campus early, being quarantined in a room, seeing constant reminders of a seemingly omnipresent threat splayed on every TV screen and newspaper, or living with the threat that the virus is posing to us and our loved ones. This is to say nothing of students for whom the ramifications of COVID-19 have caused disproportionate stress. For some, life at home is unstable; for others, mental illness has been exacerbated, and for yet others, low-income or first-generation status poses additional challenges that the rest of us can only imagine.

Annysa Johnson:

As part of its plan, MPS intends to provide grade-level content aligned to state standards that students and families can access online. But the work will be voluntary and not used as part of the students’ grades. While many teachers likely will continue to interact with students online, they will not be required to do so, at least for now.

“We are not requiring them. But that’s what good educators are doing, and we’re seeing that,” Bronaugh said. “And we just want to be able to enhance that as much as possible and support them.”

MPS board members approved a plan that requires most staff to be paid through April 30, but it does not require them to work during that time, though many have continued to do so. Board President Larry Miller said Friday that issue would be revisited at the April 23 board meeting.

Is the MPS Tax & Spending Increase Referendum Good for Milwaukee?

Logan Wroge:

Madison students will have flexibility in their virtual school day schedule, teachers will hold remote office hours, and assessments during online learning will not “harm” a students’ grades.

After three weeks out of class following an order for all Wisconsin schools to close to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, the Madison School District on Monday is launching its virtual learning plan designed to supplement missed classroom time, which could last until the end of the school year.

But when the district’s 27,000 students make the switch to virtual school, things will look quite different, from the number of hours a day spent learning to how students interact with teachers.

I suggested to several Madison Superintendents that teachers and staff receive a stipend to purchase and maintain an internet connected device (cellular iPad would be my choice) and begin to interact with everyone using this device. Further, Apple’s assistive efforts are substantial.

This occurred during Infinite Campus evaluation and implementation meetings. I wonder what the teacher/staff utilization data looks like today?

Infinite Campus – or similar – was for many years an expensive, missed opportunity.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has apparently made little progress online– in 2020.

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Steven Davidoff Solomon:

My family has been forced into a social experiment. One of our daughters is in second grade at a private religious school. Her twin sister, who has special needs, attends a public school. Can you guess which one went online immediately?

You no doubt guessed right. Almost all Bay Area private schools went online within two days of the March 17 lockdown. One daughter has a full day of school, 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., including physical education and art. The other daughter’s public school initially gave us a list of things to do—mostly a list of websites, including GoNoodle (which is excellent for getting kids to jump up and down).

It’s not mainly a problem of resources. The private school went online in two days with Zoom. I’m teaching all my law-school classes online. New York, the country’s biggest school system, is going online. Why not Berkeley? One teacher wrote a parent I know that Berkeley isn’t moving online “because of equity issues.” Ann Marie Callegari, the district’s supervisor of family engagement and equity, confirmed that in an email to me: “The answer to your question of course is Yes! There are existing inequities in our educational system and right here in Berkeley that will only be exacerbated by going fully online.”

When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

Stephanie Hanes:

Jessica Calarco has been thinking a lot recently about the importance of school.  

This isn’t just because the sociology professor has been learning firsthand, like so many millions of other parents around the country, how life works without school. (For her, it involves new locks on the office door to keep her 5- and 2-year old from interrupting the Indiana University classes she is now teaching by Zoom.) 

No, for Professor Calarco, the new life of trying to get a preschooler to do worksheets while a toddler runs amok in the background has brought up a host of concerns about what this unprecedented moment in American education might mean long term – particularly for disadvantaged students. 

Scott Bauer:

A 16-year-old Wisconsin high school sophomore who had symptoms of the coronavirus and posted about it on social media was ordered by a sheriff’s deputy to delete the posts and threatened with being taken to jail, her attorney said Friday.

The teenager is a student in the Westfield School District in Marquette County. Her attorney, Luke Berg, wrote to both the county sheriff and district administrator, who called the posts a “foolish means to get attention,” asking for apologies. The girl also should be permitted to post on social media again without fear of being charged or taken to jail, said Berg, an attorney with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

Sarah Cook:

1A widely used digital television service in Kenya includes Chinese state television in its most affordable package while omitting international news outlets.2 Portuguese television launches a prime-time “China Hour” featuring content from Chinese state media.3 Chinese diplomats intimidate a cable executive in Washington, DC, to keep New Tang Dynasty Television (NTDTV), a station founded by Chinese Americans who practice Falun Gong, off the air.4 And a partly Chinese-owned South African newspaper abruptly ends a writer’s column after he discusses repression in China’s Xinjiang region.5

These examples, which have come to light over the past three years, illustrate the various ways in which Chinese Communist Party (CCP) media influence—in the form of censorship, propaganda, and control over content-delivery systems—extend beyond the borders of mainland China to reach countries and audiences around the globe.

Associated Press:

A former University of Southern California admissions worker who offered to get unqualified students from China into the school agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to wire fraud, prosecutors said.

Hiu Kit David Chong, 36, of Arcadia was an assistant director in USC’s Office of Graduate Admissions.

Chong acknowledged in the plea agreement that from 2008 to 2016, he “caused false college transcripts with inflated grades, phony letters of recommendation and fraudulent personal statements to be placed in the students’ admissions packets,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Jill LePore:

This week the Internet Archive, in San Francisco, announced—and, in the blink of an eye, opened—the National Emergency Library, a digital collection of 1.4 million books. Until June 30th, or the end of the national emergency in the United States (“whichever is later”), anyone, anywhere in the world, can check books out of this library—for free. As Brewster Kahle, the digital librarian at the Internet Archive, wrote in an online announcement, if you can afford to buy books, please buy books! Bookstores still need your business. But, by God, if you can’t afford them, or if the books you need aren’t in any bookstore, and, especially, if you are one of the currently more than one billion students and teachers shut out of your classroom, please: sign up, log on, and borrow!

Meanwhile, not to be sneezed at is the sheer pleasure of browsing through the titles. “How to Succeed in Singing.” “Interesting Facts about How Spiders Live.” “An Introduction to Kant’s Philosophy.” Those are all from 1925. Nearly all the books in the collection come from the last century or so. I looked up “Proust,” which brought up four hundred and forty-eight titles. You can read Beckett on Proust, or Bloom on Proust, or just “On Proust.” I found about a hundred more books about moose, mainly children’s books, including a Dr. Seuss book, “Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose,” but also an illuminating natural history from 1955, “North American Moose” (“the first comprehensive book of its type”), by a curator from the Department of Mammalogy at the Royal Ontario Museum. I did also look up books with the word “virus” in the title. Blech. I do not recommend this search. Still, if you sort the virus books by reverse publication date, and only look at the jackets, you get a freaky little mini-history of the visual iconography of virality. It passes the time.

Madison School District:

We are committed to providing robust learning experiences for our students of MMSD during this time of school closure. Our instructional leaders are working to provide a virtual learning experience for our students that incorporates family engagement, limited screen time, and student overall health and emotional wellness.

We recognize the impact that these unusual circumstances are having on all of us. We encourage our students and families to continue to find and create moments of familiarity and maintain other routines as much as possible, including communicating with friends, and staying active.

I suggested to several Madison Superintendents that teachers and staff receive a stipend to purchase and maintain an internet connected device (cellular iPad would be my choice) and begin to interact with everyone using this device. Further, Apple’s assistive efforts are substantial.

This occurred during Infinite Campus evaluation and implementation meetings. I wonder what the teacher/staff utilization data looks like today?

Infinite Campus – or similar – was for many years an expensive, missed opportunity.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has apparently made little progress online– in 2020.

Rob Copeland:

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

Marion Fourcade & Henry Farrell:

GOVERNMENTS AROUND THE world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes exacerbated the pandemic, we’ve so far paid dangerously little attention to coronavirus’s challenge to democracy.

In a democracy, citizens need to be able to vote, politicians to deliberate, and people to move about, meet, and act collectively. Democratic politics is a mixture of mass involvement and endless meetings. All this is hard when people can be infected with a potentially deadly virus if someone simply coughs nearby. The obvious answer might seem to be to move democracy to the internet, but some parts of democracy translate badly to an online world, while others are already being undermined by emergency powers (for example, Hungary’s parliament just passed a law that allows the prime minister to rule by decree) and by the rise of digital surveillance.

If people have to vote in person, they might catch coronavirus from queuing, pressing buttons, or handing ballots to election officials. No wonder 14 US presidential primaries have been postponed so far. But not postponing elections in the midst of the crisis has been just as controversial, since the resulting vote is likely to see a dramatic reduction in turnout (as did France’s first round municipal elections, and as is feared in the Polish presidential election this May).

David Blaska:

We are in the midst (and we hope, not the beginning) of a history-making coronavirus pandemic that could well change America forever, in ways not yet apparent. Will distance learning become the new normal? America work from home? Sporting events in front of the cameras only? Has the simple handshake gone the way of the spittoon? 

In my youth, we thought we would never see as much change as our grandparents, who were 18 years old when the Wrights took flight. Now I realize my generation has seen as much history as they. We admire the scenery of a chosen street in Prague using Google Earth and peered down from the moon. We have put a birth date on the universe’s origin and mapped out genomes, the building blocks of life. We had our own wars but different, against stateless terrorists.

Pardon, therefore, this Old Settler if he recounts a little history of his own. It is of the quotidian kind but so was The World of Yesterday, a Jewish kid growing up in pre-WW1 Vienna. (We’ll concede Stefan Zweig has greater literary merit.) But in many ways, so much remains the same.

Eli Lake:

For years, we civil libertarians were told that our concerns about the secret court that oversees the FBI’s applications to monitor U.S. citizens were overblown. So what if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved more than 99% of all applications. The bureau and Justice Department must follow an onerous process, we were assured, that protects innocent citizens from being snooped on by their government.

Those assurances, as it turns out, were not very reliable. On Tuesday, the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a new report that found systematic errors of fact in the FBI’s applications for warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The memo does not speak to the materiality or significance of those errors — but they are startling nonetheless.

Out of 42 applications, the report says, 39 included major defects. All told, the inspector general uncovered 390 deficiencies, including “unverified, inaccurate, or inadequately supported facts, as well as typographical errors.”

The memo follows the report Horowitz issued in December that reviewed four FISA warrants for Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2106 presidential campaign. The bureau suspected him of being a Russian agent, but the report found that it repeatedly relied on an opposition research dossier to persuade the secret court to renew the surveillance warrant even after agents knew the dossier was riddled with errors. Rules that have been in place for nearly 20 years to verify the accuracy of facts presented in the warrant and include exculpatory information, known as the Woods procedures, were ignored.

The December report was a black eye for the bureau. It prompted one judge on the surveillance court to reprimand the agents involved in the Page applications, temporarily barring them from appearing before it.

Those applications were so troubling that Horowitz launched an audit of how the FBI was complying with its own rules in all FISA applications between October 2014 and September 2019. His conclusion is straightforward. “We do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods procedures in compliance with FBI policy,” the report says.

The Woods procedures are crucial because the surveillance court is unlike other U.S. courts. For obvious reasons, it does not operate under the adversarial system, whereby a lawyer representing the suspected spy or terrorist can challenge the government’s evidence. Instead, the court itself is supposed to provide special scrutiny to the prosecution’s case — but as the Page fiasco showed, it is in no position to do so.

Boston Globe:

Students of all ages are navigating uncharted territory during an unprecedented time in history as the coronavirus crisis forces schools to close and students to adjust to new and uncertain routines. Facing a migration to virtual learning environments, the loss of access to critical in-school resources, and the disruption of their social lives, students may be feeling more disconnected than ever. 

Join reporters from the Boston Globe in a weekly virtual town hall organized in collaboration with area students. These virtual forums will create space for students to share their experiences, connect with peers, pose questions to an adult support network, and offer their own suggestions and ideas on how they would like to see their schools and communities support them at this time.

Yuan Yang, Nian Liu, Sue-Lin Wong and Qianer Liu:

Three days after the Chinese government locked down Hubei, the province at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, a local government official more than 1,000km away received data from telecoms carriers alerting her to a list of people who had left Hubei and entered her town.

The data included traces of the estimated locations of users’ mobile phones, showing that many had driven back along the highways from Hubei to Guangdong province in southern China, where the official works in a small town. The location data helped the official’s team “more or less” pin down everyone who came back from Hubei, she said. 

But for another Guangdong town, the information it was able to get hold of was much less comprehensive.

“We did identify one man from Hubei on the list who was high-risk. We searched everywhere for him but just couldn’t track him down,” a second official told the Financial Times, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Gregory Kaebnick:

This is where Fauci shines. He’s showing us how to be not just trustworthy but actually trusted.

The role is still fundamentally about providing accurate information. Fauci is fighting the outbreak with “the sledgehammer of truth,” as the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty put it—helping everyone to understand the real dimensions of the problem in spite of widespread misinformation and politics-driven fact-spinning.

But what makes him so helpful and credible has to do with how he provides the information, and what’s especially powerful about his approach is that he’s more or less the opposite of a sledgehammer. He is grounded in humility and humanity: he uses plain language; he admits uncertainties and failings; he seems to be at pains to say that he has a special perspective, “as a scientist,” rather than the only possibly useful view; he refuses to make the science overtly political; he is gracious and cautious when offering corrections.

In the midst of this transformation, what it means to be an expert has also changed. At one time, one could qualify as an expert just by being particularly smart or well educated about a technical topic and having been anointed as an expert by other experts, like university officials or political leaders. Think of 1950s scientists and doctors whose lab coats signified their training and the respect and deference they deserved.

Today, more is required. To qualify as an expert is to meet the criteria for a special social role, and nowadays, having the requisite knowledge, ability and recognition is only part of what one needs. Credentials alone no longer make one credible.

This is where Fauci shines. He’s showing us how to be not just trustworthy but actually trusted.

The role is still fundamentally about providing accurate information. Fauci is fighting the outbreak with “the sledgehammer of truth,” as the Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty put it—helping everyone to understand the real dimensions of the problem in spite of widespread misinformation and politics-driven fact-spinning.

But what makes him so helpful and credible has to do with how he provides the information, and what’s especially powerful about his approach is that he’s more or less the opposite of a sledgehammer. He is grounded in humility and humanity: he uses plain language; he admits uncertainties and failings; he seems to be at pains to say that he has a special perspective, “as a scientist,” rather than the only possibly useful view; he refuses to make the science overtly political; he is gracious and cautious when offering corrections.

Rather different than “we know best“.

“The last shall be first and the first shall be last”. – duckduckgo links.

Scott Girard:

Strehlow said the school has offered her cohort three options: submit the edTPA to Pearson as they would normally; submit the edTPA to UW and receive approval from the school; or come up with an alternative self-assessment with the UW staff to demonstrate their fitness for licensure. She is planning to submit her edTPA to Pearson as she would have anyway, because she’s heard that will be necessary if she ever plans to teach outside of Wisconsin.

Owenby said students are working with their partner teacher on the transition to online learning, and Strehlow said she and her partner teacher at Lincoln are doing their best to collaborate as they work in an unfamiliar setting.

“Still trying to navigate a place where we can slowly start to become those lead teachers, but also at the same time this is brand new territory for everybody,” Strehlow said. “It’s just like, ‘Oh my gosh, we just need to figure out what’s going to happen Monday.

Jeremy Lott:

School is out for the year in most locales. More innovative districts are retooling like crazy and trying to do online classes. Parents are looking for cheap or free resources to do the job and keep their kids occupied during our enforced isolation.

Now that we’re out the money and have to take care of the kids, reassessment is going to happen.

In short, we are all homeschoolers now. Expect that to be much more the case next school year, as enough parents who were forced to try it either a) like it and decide to keep this knowledge train rolling or b) don’t believe the schools are safe enough to send their kids back into and so suck it up.

This will create knock-on problems for public schools certainly, and also for private schools.

Kids go to school for six-plus hours a day, but a lot of that time is wasted. In most cases, you could run through the lessons in about two hours. Parents are seeing that now.

CJ Szafir and Libby Sobic:

SB 789, which improves upon the outdated “Part-Time Open Enrollment” program — allows any elementary, middle, or high school student to take up to two courses at any other school, including public, public charter, and private. And this happens all without the student ever dis-enrolling from their school. This could allow students to take courses at any nearby school “in-person” — or at a school across the state “virtually.” SB 789, led by Senator Alberta Darling and Representative Jeremy Thiesfeldt, received bipartisan support in its passage in the Assembly and now awaits a vote in the Senate.

Even before COVID, Wisconsin had a course access problem. Too many students in rural and urban K-12 schools simply do not have access to important courses. 60% of public high schools in Wisconsin do not offer intro computer science. Surveying AP courses offered at all traditional Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) high schools, 95% do not offer computer science, 84% do not offer economics, and 84% do not offer physics. In Northeastern Wisconsin, a survey of high schools found that 100% do not offer Spanish or economics, and 78% do not offer government or computer science. All of this is directly related to Wisconsin’s K-12 educational woes — struggling urban and rural schools, major racial achievement gaps, and too many graduates not equipped for the workforce.

---

Related: credit for non-MMSD courses.

Robert Wright:

Many colleges and universities will evidently have to tighten their belts for some time. Counterintuitively, it would be the lack of resources rather than a surfeit of them that could spur positive change among our very costly but not very effective schools.

Business, education, and policy leaders tend to think in terms of inputs. Achieving goal X will require inputs that cost at least a certain amount. That common approach, which often spends more than anticipated for something less than the stated goal, will be forestalled for the foreseeable future. Budgets will be tight at public and private schools (the former due to state government budget cuts and the latter due to endowment and donation losses because of the stock market crash). Planned educational “essentials” like rock climbing walls, expanded sports stadiums, and new buildings for administrators will have to be put on hold and possibly canceled altogether.

If, as seems likely, a recession or depression hits, student applications may well increase. They have in previous downturns because people who are out of work have a lower opportunity cost of time. But schools shouldn’t count on revenues increasing since many applicants will need more financial aid than they previously would have. In addition, universities that are reliant on foreign students (who often pay full tuition) will be stressed due to travel restrictions and cautious parents keeping their children closer to home.

On the plus side, biology and nursing departments and medical schools may find themselves flush with grants and donations—but likely at the expense of other programs. Universities may urge private donors left on the fence by the stock market crash to donate to promote public health education and research, money that pre-COVID-19 would have gone to general, or other specific, ends.

Matthew Prince:

Since launching 1.1.1.1, the number one request we have received is to provide a version of the product that automatically filters out bad sites. While 1.1.1.1 can safeguard user privacy and optimize efficiency, it is designed for direct, fast DNS resolution, not for blocking or filtering content. The requests we’ve received largely come from home users who want to ensure that they have a measure of protection from security threats and can keep adult content from being accessed by their kids. Today, we’re happy to answer those requests.

Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families — the easiest way to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content. 1.1.1.1 for Families leverages Cloudflare’s global network to ensure that it is fast and secure around the world. And it includes the same strong privacy guarantees that we committed to when we launched 1.1.1.1 two years ago. And, just like 1.1.1.1, we’re providing it for free and it’s for any home anywhere in the world.

More, here.

Mackenzie Hawkins:

In place of the standing-room-only budget meetings normally held in the Board of Alders Chamber, New Haven residents filled the city’s Zoom budget meeting to capacity on Monday. While the venue was different, this year’s budget negotiations featured a recurring theme: that Yale fails to meet its moral — and financial — obligations to the Elm City.

Amid the COVID-19 public health crisis, New Haven’s annual budget negotiations labor on. Mayor Justin Elicker said last week that the novel coronavirus outbreak will affect the budget process and outcome in ways yet to be determined, as the pandemic has put additional pressure on a city already in fiscal crisis. At Monday’s public hearing, scores of New Haven residents — some of whom are affiliated with the University — identified another strain on the municipal budget: Yale. Many said that COVID-19 has only exacerbated existing issues in the city, underscoring that today’s problems are symptoms of Yale’s long-standing failure to adequately contribute to New Haven.

“Our communities have always been in crisis,” West Haven resident Briyana Mondesir said. “Right now, we are just in a deeper and more widespread sense of emergency.”

Halimah Marcus:

TC: The familiar is always comfortable, but we need to make a distinction between what is actually desirable and what is simply what we’re accustomed to; sometimes those are the same, and sometimes they are not. The people who are the happiest with the status quo are the ones who benefit most from it, which is why the wealthy are usually conservative; the existing order works to their advantage. For example, right now there’s a discussion taking place about canceling student debt, and a related discussion about why there is such a difference in the type of financial relief available to individuals as opposed to giant corporations. The people who will be happiest to return to our existing system of debt are the ones who benefit from it, and making them uncomfortable might be a good idea.

Josh Gerstein:

A Justice Department audit of the FBI’s use of secret surveillance warrants has found widespread problems with the law enforcement agency’s process for ensuring that all claims it makes to judges to get the warrants are backed up by facts.

The finding of broader failings in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program came in a review launched by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz after an earlier inquiry found numerous errors in applications for surveillance for former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

In a bid to assess whether the faults in the Page’s surveillance process were an aberration or a chronic problem, Horowitz’s audit team zeroed in on 29 applications for surveillance on U.S. citizens or green-card holders over a five year period and whether the so-called “Woods procedures” for justifying an application were properly followed.

Karen Swallow Prior :

Before she was a writer, Jane Austen was a reader. A reader, moreover, within a family of readers, who would gather in her father’s rectory to read aloud from the work of authors such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and William Cowper—as well as, eventually, Jane’s own works-in-progress.

Not surprisingly, then, in Austen’s novels, the act of reading is a key indication of how a character should initially be judged, and of major turning points in her development. For Austen, the way a character reads is emblematic of other forms of interpretation: One’s skills in comprehending written language are linked to one’s ability to understand life, other people, and oneself.

Characters’ choices of books are a frequent target of Austen’s satire. Persuasion, for example, opens with a vignette that might otherwise seem insignificant: the reading habits of the protagonist’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, who “for his own amusement, never took up any book” except one—the record of British families that contains his own lineage. In Pride and Prejudice, the insufferable clergyman Mr. Collins chooses to orate from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women one afternoon because (as he piously proclaims) he abstains from novels. This episode clearly represents what Henry Tilney, Catherine Morland’s love interest in Northanger Abbey, means when he says, “The person … who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” On the other hand, Catherine’s friend Isabella Thorpe takes great pleasure in novels—but not high-quality ones. Accordingly, Isabella’s character turns out to be as excessive, hyperbolic, dramatic, and deceptive as the Gothic tales she recommends to Catherine.

Concepción de León

When the playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins’s short stories were published in 2016, nearly 30 years after her death in 1988, they were called a “revelation.” The stories, deeply moving and autobiographical, had been locked in a trunk untouched for decades, along with a trove of other work, until Collins’s daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, took on the task of bringing them to light.

At first, Ms. Collins said, she thought no one would publish these “literary short stories by an unknown dead black woman.” But in 2016, Ecco released them in a collection titled “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” which was met with widespread acclaim. Elizabeth Alexander, in the book’s introduction, compared finding Collins’s stories to discovering Atlantis.

The revival of Collins’s work is part of a larger trend of recently released titles by authors who were previously marginalized or entirely lost to history. Some of these books are being published for the first time ever (like “Romance in Marseille,” by Claude McKay, and “Barracoon,” by Zora Neale Hurston), while others are being resurfaced for new generations, such as “The Street,” by Ann Petry.

Matthew Syed:

Our world has changed immensely in the last few weeks but amid the upheaval and distress, there are reasons to believe we can emerge from the crisis with some human qualities enhanced, writes Matthew Syed.

A few years ago, Michael Michalko, a former US army officer, came up with a fascinating idea to sharpen creativity. He called it “assumption reversal”. You take the core notions in any context, subject, discipline and then, well, turn them on their head.

So, suppose you are thinking of starting a restaurant (obviously not possible right now!). The first assumption might be: “restaurants have menus”. The reversal would be: “restaurants have no menus”. This provokes the idea of a chef informing each customer what he bought that day at market, allowing them to select a customised dish. The point is not that this will turn out to be a workable scheme, but that by disrupting conventional thought patterns, it might lead to new associations and ideas.

Or, to take a different example, suppose you are considering a new taxi company. The first assumption might be: “taxi companies own cars”. The reversal would be: “taxi companies own no cars”. Twenty years ago, that might have sounded crazy. Today, the largest taxi company that has ever existed doesn’t own cars: Uber. Now we are living through a disruption (you might even call it a reversal) of unprecedented scale.

:

In addition to academics, schools are where many students are fed two meals a day, where they receive mental health services to counter the often daily trauma of their lives, where they have safe places to stay and play after school and where their families get connected to vital resources in their community.

Now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which has closed schools in Wisconsin and across the country, many of the district’s staff and even volunteers are trying to maintain that lifeline under what most would have considered unimaginable circumstances just a few weeks ago.

“Milwaukee Public Schools and the people who work there are really trying to … function as a social safety net for students and families because there aren’t enough,” said Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association.

Micah Lee & Yael Grauer:

Katy Grimes:

In March 2019, California Globe reported Sacramento City Unified School District Superintendent Jorge Aguilar and seven other administrators spent more than $35,000 to attend a six-day conference at the Harvard Business School, while the district teetered on the verge of insolvency, and under the threat of state takeover as it struggled with a $35 million budget gap.

Flash forward one year and SCUSD is still faltering; the district threatened to pink slip teachers right before the March 3 Primary Election. This is likely how the school district managed to convince voters within the Sacramento school district to vote to authorize the district to sell $750 million of bonds to improve schools’ facilities.

While this infusion of funding may stave off the bleeding for now, the Sacramento City Teachers Association just reported, “Superintendent Aguilar has taken a significant pay increase after stating last year that he would not accept a salary increase while the District had significant financial issues.”

In a March 25 email sent to union members titled, “SCUSD to Present Its Draft Plan for Distance Learning Tomorrow (Thursday), District Refuses to Pay Day-to-Day Subs, as the Superintendent Takes His Pay Increase,” the union questions district priorities.

Notably, the district is refusing “to pay short-term, day-to-day substitutes as required by Governor Newsom’s March 13 Executive Order,” during the shutdown of schools over the coronavirus crisis, which SCTA says is “saving the District $44,000 per day or more than $800,000 per month. We asked the District what it intended to spend the money on and received no response.”

Former Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham is the new director of Harvard’s “Public Education Leadership Project”.

The article referenced this $32,000 course [PDF]

Charles Blain:

From the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, state and local governments responded in various ways from issuing emergency orders⁠—citywide shutdowns⁠ to school closures and beyond⁠—but it’s the suspension of various laws and regulations that is exposing the unnecessary regulatory web that burdens businesses.

As often happens during emergencies, governors and mayors across the country have used executive power to waive laws and bypass regulations. This allows goods to get to the public quicker at lower cost, more service providers to enter struggling industries, and the market to respond to the crisis in countless other ways.

Lifting these regulations does not put public health or safety in jeopardy; if that were the case, they wouldn’t be lifted with such ease. But this should lead the public to question why the regulatory burdens exist at all.
Useless Regulations

– via a kind reader.

Milwaukee annual per student $pending:

Public: just over $14K

Charter: just over $9k

Voucher: just under $9k

“The problems have less to do with funding and more about policies and practices”. Mission vs organization.

Madison’s taxpayer supported school district spends around $19 to 20K/student and is planning a substantial tax and spending increase referendum. This, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Kevin Huffman:

Schools and teachers are mobilizing to roll out instruction. Many are showing entrepreneurial spirit and creativity, and the ad hoc home-school universe is awash in ideas and resources. District leaders are working long hours, trying their best to serve kids. While larger districts have at times struggled with communication and rollout, some schools and districts are showing a more nimble and collaborative approach. Achievement First, a charter network with schools in multiple states including Rhode Island, has jumped in and offered to share all resources with the Providence Public School District, which is under a state takeover for low performance. And Chiefs for Change, an organization of state and local education leaders, is hosting a virtual forum for school districts to share how they are collaborating with charter schools during this crisis. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, those jurisdictions struggling to support online coursework will catch up and find workarounds for students without access to technology, learning from the more entrepreneurial players.

Related: Twitter notes. Commentary on Virtual Learning and the taxpayer supported Madison School District.

:

Title IX requires that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, . . . be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 20 U.S.C. §1681(a); accord 34 C.F.R. § 106.41(a). Title IX’s prohibition against sex discrimination extends to athletics operated or sponsored by recipients of federal money. 34 C.F.R. § 106.41. As a result, covered institutions must “provide equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes.” Id. § 106.41(c). The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), however, has adopted a policy that requires biological males to compete against biological females—despite the real physiological differences between the sexes—if the male is a transgender individual who publicly identifies with the female gender. CIAC claims that “federal law” requires this state of affairs. CIAC 2019-2020 Handbook (CIAC Handbook), at 55, http://www.casciac.org/pdfs/ciachandbook_1920.pdf; see also Defs.’ Initial Summ. Issues at 7, ECF No. 63. So do the proposed student-intervenors. See Mot. to Intervene at 11, ECF No. 36

Logan Wroge:

The passage rates of referendums have historically tended to track with the strength of the economy, said Anne Chapman, a senior researcher for Wisconsin Policy Forum.

At the height of the Great Recession in 2009, voters approved 45% of school referendum questions, down from 60% in 2006, Chapman said.

Notes and links on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum.

Anthony Michael Kreis

Not since 1918 has the United States faced the kind of wide-scale public health crisis that Americans face today. The novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020 jeopardizes multiple millions of Americans’ lives, especially the elderly and immunocompromised. It also stands to cripple the American economy with the real prospect of the nation plunging into a depression. The virus itself is more easily transmitted than other seasonal diseases like the flu. Each non-isolated case of novel coronavirus will infect 2 to 2.5 additional people compared to the flu, where each additional case will infect 1.3 other people on average. Moreover, it is more deadly than the flu. As I write, nearly 85,000 Americans have been infected, and over 1,000 lives have been lost to the pandemic. These numbers will surely grow as the challenges to respond to the crisis mounts. Public health resources are strained, and the testing capacity of the United States lags behind other nations. 

Public health experts and government officials face a stark choice: swift crackdowns on private movement or the possibility of mass mortality. To “flatten the curve,”i.e., slow the exponential growth of new infections and avoid overwhelming the healthcare system, governors and mayors have mandated social distancing and instituted stay-at-home orders. And while the pandemic has touched every state in the nation, certain states like New York, New Jersey, and Washington have acute outbreaks. In response, some governors have instituted de facto travel bans for short-term visitors. The governors in Alaska and Hawaii issued mandatory self-quarantine periods for all persons entering either state for 14 days. Travelers whose final destinations are Florida or Texas coming from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut must quarantine for 14 days, as must persons traveling from New Orleans to Texas. Rhode Island has instituted a similar policy directed at New Yorkers, including police stops of non-commercial vehicles entering the state with New York license plates, that has come under fire from the state American Civil Liberties Union chapter.

Scott Girard:

In the first nine days since schools closed for the COVID-19 pandemic, the Madison Metropolitan School District has given out 15,500 meals to students.

The Monday through Friday distribution of breakfast and lunch at 12 sites has been “running without a hitch,” MMSD spokesperson Tim LeMonds wrote in an email Thursday.

And it’s being helped by community efforts that are delivering some of the meals to families and others offering additional food to cover snacks, dinner and weekends.

A partnership between Thoreau Elementary School and Cherokee Middle School has delivered meals to 275 families — all of them from food collected through the Second Harvest and River food pantries. It will soon expand to serve between 400 and 500 families, all in the elementary schools that feed Cherokee plus West High School.

Cherokee social worker Abby Ray said the effort has “come a long way” from the first day of the closures, March 16, when they were just delivering to families they knew were in need. Schools are closed until at least April 24 by order of Gov. Tony Evers.

“A lot of it shows the relationships that families have with schools already,” Ray said. “The school is so much more than a place for kids to get learning and so many other needs are met through education in schools.”

Law School Transparency:

Law school tuition has exceeded inflation for decades.Private and public law school tuition is 2.8 and 5.9 times as expensive as it was in 1985—after accounting for inflation. In 2019, tuition topped out at $72,360. The average tuition at top-performing law schools is much higher than the rest. But prices do not scale with job outcomes. The average tuition at the lowest-performing schools is similar to the average for mid-range schools.While law schools typically discount the sticker tuition price for a portion of the class, 25% of J.D. students paid full price in 2018-19. Students who pay full price or close to it are more likely to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or be underrepresented racial minorities. Their tuition dollars subsidize the scholarships that their more advantaged classmates receive.

These disparities enhance persistent inequity in law practice.1Students borrow to pay these high prices. Three in four graduates borrow for law school at high interest rates. Among borrowers, the average 2018 graduate borrowed $115,481. This person is likely to have roughly $130,000 in debt from law school alone when they start repayment six months after graduation because interest accrues immediately on law school loans. As with scholarships, underrepresented racial minorities—not to mention women—borrow more on average for law school.2When factoring in graduate salaries, students borrow excessively for law school.

One common-sense rule in student lending provides that students should not borrow more than they expect to earn after their first year. At 94% of law schools, the median amount borrowed exceeds the median earnings in the first full year after graduation. The median debt-to-income ratio is 1.86. One in six law schools have a ratio of 3.0 or higher, which means that the median amount borrowed exceeds the median earnings by 200%.

Scott Girard:

While campaign season looks slightly different in a social distancing world, the Madison School Board races have continued this spring.

The ballot for the April 7 election includes two contested races and one uncontested seat. The five candidates participated in a virtual forum hosted by Simpson Street Free Press earlier this week.

Much more on the 2020 Madison School Board Elections, here.

Scott Girard:

Madison Metropolitan School District teachers will have to find child care for their children while teaching remotely, according to an email sent to staff Thursday night.

Portions of the email from MMSD’s human resources department were sent to the Cap Times and shared on Facebook. Virtual learning is expected to begin April 6, with training and planning time the week of March 30 through April 3.

The email informed staff they “cannot watch (their) children and work at the same time,” but that employees working from home “can flex their hours within the workday.”

“The expectation is that you secure childcare,” the email states. “Whether the childcare is outside of your home or in your home is up to you.”

Related: Madison teachers balk at directive to secure child care when working from home

Kevin Carrico:

On March 18, Mingpao published an opinion piece entitled “This pandemic originated in Wuhan, the lessons of seventeen years ago have been completely forgotten.” The authors Dr. Kwok-Yung Yuen and Dr. David Lung are unrivalled experts in their field. Dr. Yuen is a microbiologist whose SARS study group discovered the role of the coronavirus in the SARS epidemic in early 2003. Dr. Lung is also a microbiologist who has recently published on the detection of COVID-19 via saliva samples.

In their article, the authors offer practical advice on understanding the virus for the general reader. First, they explain how the World Health Organization and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses name viruses, while also acknowledging that the colloquial use of “Wuhan pneumonia” is understandably more straightforward than COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 and thus does not need to be condemned.

Second, Yuen and Lung explain that genetic sequencing has shown the virus likely originated in horseshoe bats before spreading to an intermediate host in the Wuhan Seafood Market (most likely endangered pangolin), which then served as an amplification epicentre spreading from animals to humans, before mutating to enable human-to-human transmission.

Marc Oliver Rieger (University of Trier), Mei Wang (WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management), Mareike Ohlberg (MERICS)

• China’s emerging social credit system should be understood not as a single unified system but as a package or policy framework combining many different policies.
• Results of our student survey at three Chinese universities between December 2018 and April 2019 suggest that no easy conclusions about broad-based approval of such policies can be drawn. We also surveyed Taiwanese and German students for comparison.
• Our survey sought their responses to four policies associated with the social credit system mega-project. Students from China rated the measures more positively, with approval rates between 41 and 57 percent, than their German counterparts, who gave a maximum of 19 percent approval. However, approval rates from students in China were lower than the 80 percent approval rates found in a previous study by researchers at Freie Universität Berlin.
• Our results also show a complex picture of how Chinese respondents think about social credit and the associated risks: e.g. government surveillance was rated as a higher risk in China than abuse of data by private companies, although media discussions related to “privacy protection” in China’s official media has focused predominantly on the latter.

Public Policy Forum:

The level of competition varies in these counties, but in none are even half the seats contested. Eleven of Brown County’s 26 seats (42.3%) are contested placing it at the top of the list, while none of Waukesha County’s 25 seats are competitive. In Wisconsin’s two largest counties, few seats are up for grabs: only three out of the 18 Milwaukee County seats (16.7%) are contested, while Dane County features six competitive races out of 37 (16.2%). Assuming each seat represents the same number of people in a county, more than 80% of the 10-county population – or 2.56 million residents – will not get a choice for their supervisor in April.

Using 2017 population estimates, Milwaukee County supervisors represent 52,894 people on average, while each of Marathon County’s supervisors represents just 3,572. While many smaller counties’ supervisors volunteer, some are paid. Milwaukee County pays its supervisors a salary of $25,924, the most on our list.

Due to a constitutional provision called home rule, cities have broader authority to govern themselves than counties, meaning municipal elections are not uniform. For this analysis, we look at Wisconsin’s 10 largest cities.

Danny Westneat:

So Los Angeles announced an “unprecedented commitment” of $100 million in emergency funding to get all students who need them both devices and internet access for continuing their educations online this year.

Compare to what school leaders have been saying here.

Seattle Public Schools “won’t transition to online learning,” Superintendent Denise Juneau tweeted last week. “2 things — not all students have access to internet and technology AND educators can’t just switch to online teaching overnight — it’s a specialized approach.”

“There’s just no way a district this large can do that,” Juneau said in an interviewwith Time magazine.

This is not our finest moment, Seattle.

How is it that Los Angeles, a district with half a million students, is attempting to keep its schooling going online during this crisis? And we are the ones barely trying.

I suggested to several Madison Superintendents that teachers and staff receive a stipend to purchase and maintain an internet connected device (cellular iPad would be my choice) and begin to interact with everyone using this device. Further, Apple’s assistive efforts are substantial.

This occurred during Infinite Campus evaluation and implementation meetings. I wonder what the teacher/staff utilization data looks like today?

Infinite Campus – or similar – was for many years an expensive, missed opportunity.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has apparently made little progress online– in 2020.

Scott Girard:

“People win elections by hitting pavement, just historically. That was one of my biggest things, before the pandemic,” she said. “I wanted to gain the knowledge, or get more insight and talk to more people regarding my platform so that if I win the election that I kind of have that knowledge already.”

Like Pearson, Strong said he was adding some personalized letters about his platform to his plans along with more mailers.

“We knew eventually, once we saw other states putting in the stay-at-home placements, that was going to definitely impact us at some point,” Strong said. “It’s going to be a very close race, I believe it’s going to be very hard-fought. So I’m just trying to garner as much support from the community as I can.”

Vander Meulen said as a “semi-tech person,” the transition to focusing there hasn’t been too hard. What she misses, though, is connecting with voters on the campaign trail.

“People need human connection,” she said.

Notes and links on the 2020 Madison School Board election, here.

Chris Rickert:

According to a police report released Wednesday to the State Journal under the state’s public records law, the parent, Tyeisha Ivy, considered the text a threat and reported it to police because she wanted it documented. Ringelstetter was not arrested, and no charges were filed in the case.

Ivy told police that with school canceled because of the coronavirus outbreak, she was exchanging texts with Ringelstetter in an attempt to get online access to homework for her daughter.

In screen shots of the texts sent to the parent and reported by Madison365, Ringelstetter appears to be asking a co-worker for help getting online access set up and wrote “I want to reach out and slap them through the phone!!

According to the police report, Ringelstetter told police she was frustrated with the school’s closing, that the text was meant for someone else and that she never meant to slap the parent or her daughter.

I suggested to several Madison Superintendents that teachers and staff receive a stipend to purchase and maintain an internet connected device (cellular iPad would be my choice) and begin to interact with everyone using this device. Further, Apple’s assistive efforts are substantial.

This occurred during Infinite Campus evaluation and implementation meetings. I wonder what the teacher/staff utilization data looks like today?

Infinite Campus – or similar – was for many years an expensive, missed opportunity.

Despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, Madison has apparently made little progress online – in 2020.

Joel Kotkin:

Living in dispersion may not save you from contagion, but being away from people, driving around in your own car, and having neighbors you know, does have its advantages in times like these. Even the urban cognoscenti have figured this out—much as their Renaissance predecessors did during typhus and bubonic plague outbreaks, wealthy New Yorkers today are retreating to their country homes where they struggle with the locals over depleted supplies of essentials.

Back to the Dark Ages?

In classical times, plagues devastated Athens, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome. Along with barbarian invasions, they reduced the population of the Eternal City from 1.2 million at its height to barely 30,000 by the sixth century. Outside Europe, pandemics devastated cities such as Cairo, Canton, and Harbin. Following the conquest of the New World, the indigenous population suffered massive casualties from exposure to European diseases like smallpox.

Mural Hemmadi:

The City of Toronto is obtaining cellphone data from wireless carriers to help it identify where people have assembled in groups, part of its attempts to slow the spread of COVID-19, Mayor John Tory said on Monday. But city staff said Tuesday morning the city doesn’t plan to collect such data.

“We had … the cellphone companies give us all the data on the pinging off their network on the weekend so we could see, ‘Where were people still congregating?’” Tory said during an online video-conferencing event Monday evening hosted by TechTO, a local meetup organization. “Because the biggest enemy of fighting this thing is people congregating close together.”

Tory said the data will be used to generate a heat map. He did not name the companies that had provided the city with data.

Other governments are using or seeking location data to inform measures to combat the spread of COVID-19. Dr. Vera Etches, Ottawa’s deputy medical officer of health, said Monday the city was considering using “aggregated data, potentially from electronic sources” to see where residents were congregating, citing mobile devices as one option. Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized internal intelligence agency Shin Bet to use geolocation data it already collects from cellphone companies to identify and contact people who have had close contact with infected individuals.

R Colin Johnson:

The U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) grants government agencies permission to surveil citizens who assume privacy in their electronic communications. Today such oversight, even by the U.S. Congress, is opaque (summarized and anonymized), and any notification of those being monitored nearly always takes place after the fact.

New Mexico State University (NMSU) researchers presented a paper at the ACM Conference on Computers, Communications and Security (CCS 2019, London) in which they claimed to be able to automate proactive oversight that prevents privacy violations before they occur, using algorithms and blockchain in the form of what they call the Enforcer software.

Said Stephanie Forest, director of the Biodesign Center for Biocomputation, Security, and Society at Arizona State University in Tempe, “Electronic surveillance is the single biggest security threat we face today. It comes in many forms, ranging from the surveillance we agree to when we purchase and activate network-enabled electronic devices, to stealthy monitoring of which we are unaware.” Forrest said the paper, Scalable Auditability of Monitoring Processes using Public Ledgers, tackled the problem “of how to audit electronic surveillance processes involving multiple actors, focusing on government surveillance, especially agencies and companies, that violate court-sanctioned authorities. Methods such as these represent an important check and balance in our democracy and provide a way to audit government-sanctioned surveillance.”

Mary Beard:

But I see some far less desirable outcomes. How many universities (I hope not mine) will discover that online lectures are much cheaper and more “convenient” than the traditional face-to-face versions? And how many will discover that those large lecture buildings have a different, commercial potential? I am all in favour of exploiting online resources in teaching, but no one is going to tell me that face-to-face teaching has no advantage over the remote version. Lecturing and teaching is made special by real-time interaction.

Much the same goes for conferences. I think there is a hell of a lot the matter with some of the big international academic congresses and would be very happy to see some of them go (indeed I doubt I will ever/hope I will never go to another, for various reasons). But the idea that we can really productively thrash out academic issues via Skype, rather than face-to-face, over the seminar table and over the dinner table is impoverishing. Others may be more adept at this technology than I am, but I never found that a crackly Skype connection gets anywhere close to the progress you can make when you actually meet, and get that breakthrough over dinner late at night … 

The crowning example for me was my experience as an assessor for (the very generous) European Research Council awards. I am not sure how these are awarded now (and especially now), but a few years back the international assessors all met in Brussels and went through the applications together. A waste of time and a worrying carbon footprint, you might say. But two or three days together, dawn till late, fostered a communal project and a sense of understanding between the adjudicators that I don’t think it will ever be possible to achieve remotely.

Charlie Tyson:

My life as an advertiser began at a firm that specialized in one of the oldest American industries: grift. Staffed almost entirely by interns earning minimum wage, the company sold ad space in phone directories that, once printed, were promptly dumped in desolate corners of campus student centers, next to stacks of greasy pizza boxes. Flailing business owners who bought ads were locked into contracts that forbade cancellation. By the time they sensed a scam, it was too late: We would dispatch a collection agency to press them into line.

My job — keep in mind that I was 17 and entirely unskilled — was to make the ads for which the tanning salons, auto-body shops, and pizza joints paid so dearly. I would drag and drop images with whimsical abandon, superimposing brand logos and stock photographs on top of one another in the manner of a Magritte painting.

That adolescent flirtation with advertising was inevitably short-lived. When I chose to go to graduate school in literature, I did so with the maximum possible moral smugness. I dropped meaningful hints among my consultant-friends about the “coarse imperatives of business” and the “disfiguring strictures of our capitalist order,” all of which, I suggested, I would sidestep by bowing into the university’s hallowed halls.

You know how the story ends, how the academy makes advertisers of us all. Exhortations to promote our work, to lure undergraduates into our courses, to specialize in a sexy brand or niche (“I’m an ecocritic focusing on the aquatic imaginary [translation: I read books about dolphins]”), turn nearly every young scholar into a walking PR firm.

Chris Freeland:

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Libraryto serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. 

During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist, ensuring that students will have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar, and that people who cannot physically access their local libraries because of closure or self-quarantine can continue to read and thrive during this time of crisis, keeping themselves and others safe.  

This library brings together all the books from Phillips Academy Andover and Marygrove College, and much of Trent University’s collections, along with over a million other books donated from other libraries to readers worldwide that are locked out of their libraries.

This is a response to the scores of inquiries from educators about the capacity of our lending system and the scale needed to meet classroom demands because of the closures. Working with librarians in Boston area, led by Tom Blake of Boston Public Library, who gathered course reserves and reading lists from college and school libraries, we determined which of those books the Internet Archive had already digitized. Through that work we quickly realized that our lending library wasn’t going to scale to meet the needs of a global community of displaced learners. To make a real difference for the nation and the world, we would have to take a bigger step.

Yuval Noah Harari:

In order to stop the epidemic, entire populations need to comply with certain guidelines. There are two main ways of achieving this. One method is for the government to monitor people, and punish those who break the rules. Today, for the first time in human history, technology makes it possible to monitor everyone all the time. Fifty years ago, the KGB couldn’t follow 240m Soviet citizens 24 hours a day, nor could the KGB hope to effectively process all the information gathered. The KGB relied on human agents and analysts, and it just couldn’t place a human agent to follow every citizen. But now governments can rely on ubiquitous sensors and powerful algorithms instead of flesh-and-blood spooks.

Michael J. Petrilli and Pedro Enamorado

It’s often noted by individuals of a certain age that “I could never get into my alma mater if I were applying today.” The conventional wisdom is that it’s now much harder to be accepted into highly selective colleges and universities than it was a generation ago. But is that true?

To find out, we identified the median SAT scores (math plus verbal) of most of the 100 top national universities and 50 top liberal arts colleges (as determined by the 2020 US News and World Report college rankings) for the incoming freshmen classes of 1985 and 2016. The 1985 data came from the 1986 edition of Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, tracked down at the Library of Congress. The 2016 data were found in the 2018 edition of Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. Since the SAT was re-normed in 1995 (and again in 2016, but after the time period for our data), we used a concordance tablepublished by the College Board to adjust the 1985 scores accordingly. Of the 150 institutions examined, median SAT scores were available in both years for 95 of them.

We used SAT scores as our measure of selectivity rather than acceptance rates because those rates have plummeted for most institutions in recent years, due to changes in the application process itself. For example, the “common app” makes it relatively easy and affordable for students to apply to larger numbers of schools. More and more students, particularly those gunning for the big-name institutions, are doing so. Given that the college rankings lists give a lot of weight to rejection rates, colleges face strong incentives to push those rates as high as possible by doing things such as generating large numbers of applications from students unlikely to be accepted, much less attend. In contrast, median SAT scores—appropriately adjusted—give us a better measure of the academic quality of an institution’s freshman class.

Anne Applebaum:

On March 13—Friday the 13th, as it happened—my husband was driving down a Polish highway when he turned on the news and learned that the country’s borders would shut down in 24 hours. He pulled over and called me. I bought a ticket from London to Warsaw minutes later. I don’t live there all of the time, but my husband is Polish, the only house I own is in rural Poland, and I wanted to be in it. The next morning, Heathrow Airport was spookily empty except for the Warsaw flight, which was packed with people trying to get one of the last commercial trips back into their country. During check-in, agents were refusing to board passengers without a Polish passport (I have one) or residency documents. Then someone realized that the new rules went into effect only at midnight, and so I witnessed a conversation between one of the stewards and two non-Polish passengers: “You realize that you might not be able to fly out again. You realize that you may be in Warsaw for a very long time …”

That same day, we called our college-freshman son in the United States and told him to get to the airport. He had been planning to stay with friends and family after his university closed. Instead, we gave him 30 minutes’ notice to get on one of the last flights to London, connecting to one of the last flights to Berlin. By the time he landed in Europe on Sunday, Poland had shut its borders to all public transportation. He took a train from Berlin to Frankfurt an der Oder, a town at the Polish-German border. Then he got out and walked across, carrying his luggage, as if in a Cold War movie about a spy exchange. He saw roadblocks, soldiers with guns, men in hazmat suits taking temperatures. My husband picked him up on the other side.

Jaron Lanier & E. Glen Weyl:

The spread of the novel coronavirus and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have provided a powerful test of social and governance systems. Neither of the world’s two leading powers, China and the United States, has been particularly distinguished in responding. In China, an initial bout of political denial allowed the virus to spread for weeks, first domestically and then globally, before a set of forceful measures proved reasonably effective. (The Chinese government also should have been better prepared, given that viruses have jumped from animal hosts to humans within its territory on multiple occasions in the past.) The United States underwent its own bout of political denial before adopting social-distancing policies; even now, its lack of investment in public health leaves it ill-equipped for this sort of emergency.

The response of the bureaucratic and often technophobic European Union may prove even worse: Italy, although far from the epicenter of the outbreak, has four times the per capita rate of cases as China does, and even famously orderly Germany is already at half China’s rate. Nations in other parts of the world, such as information-manipulating Iran, provide worse examples yet.

Taiwan’s success has rested on a fusion of technology, activism, and civic participation. A small but technologically cutting-edge democracy, living in the shadow of the superpower across the strait, Taiwan has in recent years developed one of the world’s most vibrant political cultures by making technology work to democracy’s advantage rather than detriment. This culture of civic technology has proved to be the country’s strongest immune response to the new coronavirus.

TECH FOR DEMOCRACY

The value of Taiwan’s tech-enabled civic culture has become abundantly clear in the current crisis. Bottom-up information sharing, public-private partnerships, “hacktivism” (activism through the building of quick-and-dirty but effective proofs of concept for online public services), and participatory collective action have been central to the country’s success in coordinating a consensual and transparent set of responses to the coronavirus. A recent report from the Stanford University School of Medicine documents 124 distinct interventions that Taiwan implemented with remarkable speed. Many of these interventions bubbled into the public sector through community initiatives, hackathons, and digital deliberation on the vTaiwan digital democracy platform, on which almost half the country’s population participates. (The platform enables large-scale hacktivism, civic deliberation, and scaling up of initiatives in an orderly and largely consensual manner.) A decentralized community of participants used tools such as Slack and HackMD to refine successful projects. (Much of our analysis is based on open interviews through these tools with leaders in the g0v community of civic hackers.)

I thought about this in light of the taxpayer supported Madison School District’s long term online education challenges, from Infinite Campus to the recent imperatives – this, in 2020! This lack of progress has continued, despite spending far more than most K-12 school districts.

Successful technology transformations and implementations require constancy of purpose, that is mission, vs. perpetuating the organization.

Jennifer Peltz:

The coronavirus shutdowns have launched an unplanned, unprecedented experiment with online education at schools across the U.S., and the nation’s largest school system plunged in Monday as New York City asked over 1.1 million students to log in and learn.

After a whirlwind week of planning, students — those who could — signed in to Google classrooms and Zoom video conferences for virtual versions of everything from high-school English discussions to kindergarten gym classes. City officials were still trying to get laptops to hundreds of thousands of students in need. Parents grappled with how much to expect of their schools, their kids and themselves.

Emily James was pleased to see the vast majority of her ninth-grade English students showed up for class by video Monday, some using smartphones or borrowed laptops.