Citizen Stewart:

Less than 1% black proficiency (as opposed to a startling 9% for the state overall)?

Man, y’all better keep the eye on the prize and put the outrage where it is supposed to be. Student achievement this bad paints a picture of the future none of us want.

Yes, I think it’s terrible that a referee with history of racism required a black student athlete to cut his hair or forfeit his match, I’m more bothered by the fact that we’re outraged at that and not at the fact that his school is failing students like him so spectacularly.

Related: “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”.

Amanda Milkovits:

Authorities said they found an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle at the home of a student who posted a “threatening” video Tuesday night on YouTube.

The teenage boy, who attends Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School, is being evaluated and will not return to school until the investigation is complete, police said.

Neither Providence school officials or the police would describe the video, but said it was enough to prompt an investigation. Providence police met with the teen and his guardians Wednesday morning.

“Due to the swift actions of PPD, in collaboration with the resource officers at the school, the weapon has been secured and there remains no threat to Alvarez or any Providence Public School,” Public Safety Commissioner Steven M. Paré and Police Chief Colonel Hugh T. Clements Jr. said in a joint statement Wednesday night. “We take matters like this very seriously and given national trends, investigate every credible threat thoroughly.”

Glenn Garvin:

The sprawling, ranch-style home in Coral Springs is nearly vacant now — Andrew Pollack and his wife, Julie, will be leaving for good in a couple of days, and there’s not even a chair for him to sit in during this interview — and when Pollack plays videos from his cell phone, they give off a hollow, distant echo that make the place sound haunted. Which, of course, it is.

Sirens. Static. “Shots fired! Shots fired!” The sounds crackle forth as a blurry set of images unspool on the phone’s screen. A roadway, then a locked car trunk, then a pair of hands, leisurely retrieving a vest that’s stenciled SHERIFF. A series of spinning, unstable views as the law officer — it’s now obvious this footage is from a cop’s body cam — shrugs the vest over his shoulders and fastens it. More pictures of hands moving onto and off of the camera. Ninety seconds have elapsed and the car trunk is still visible; the deputy has not moved an inch toward Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a scene of terrible carnage.

And throughout that 90 seconds, a series of sharp retorts have sounded in the background of the video.

“Hear that? Hear those noises?” says Pollack, snapping the video off. “Those are gunshots. That’s my little girl being shot. That’s my little girl being murdered. While this deputy gets dressed. It took them 11 minutes to get to the hallway where she died.”

Evan Kindley:

In the winter of 1965, Allen Ginsberg hit the road in a Volkswagen camper. The trip was a speaking tour, of sorts, as Ginsberg was scheduled to read his poetry in cities all over the West Coast and the Midwest, but it was also an experiment in composition. Ginsberg brought with him a portable Uher tape recorder, then an expensive novelty (bought with $600 given to him by Bob Dylan), and used it to dictate what eventually became part of The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (1973). Moving “through a range of shifting American environments,” Lytle Shaw writes in his new book Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018), “Ginsberg could capture his own voice, and make almost instantaneous notations, without having to scrawl in a notebook or type on a typewriter.” He could also record radio transmissions, effortlessly incorporating the transistor buzz of contemporary history into his pocket epic. Here, for instance, is the opening of “Hiway Poesy L.A.–Albuquerque–Texas–Wichita”:

Darren Allen:

Education in the system means compulsory schooling in a world of artificial scarcity · · · Schooled activity stunts maturity, punishes experience, corrupts initiative and cuts the individual off from the world, making self-sufficiency and self-confidence all but impossible · · · The most schooled people on earth are generally the most stupid; the most heavily indoctrinated, the most insensitive, the most conceited and the most helpless.

The purpose of education is to socialise human beings into a life of complete institutional dependency. School teaches you that justice must come from someone in institutional authority, that meaningful activity must come from a ‘career path,’ that if you want to express yourself you must first gain access to centralised speech platforms,1 that if you want to do something, you must first of all gain a licence or a qualification and that, above all, your own desires and instincts are invalid.
General incompetence, self-alienation and permanent childishness is the purpose of education; indeed the stated purpose. The designers of the modern school were chillingly explicit about what school is supposed to do.2 Self-knowledge, self-confidence, peace-of-mind, sensitivity, spontaneity and autonomy do not figure; indeed they are existential threats of the highest order which must be repeatedly exterminated.

The purpose of education is to train students in techniques required by the market-system; managing large amounts of useless data, doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, doing things you don’t actually want to do, under extreme time pressure, for no better reason than because someone in authority tells you to, paying no attention to the world around you and unquestioningly accepting given myths. So called ‘objective’ exams fulfil this purpose perfectly, weeding out those who insist on doing things their own way, in their own time, without any need of overt coercion; although there are plenty of other ways that systemic threats and defective units can be identified. Inability to sit still, staring out of the window, refusal to do ludicrous assignments, hatred of authority, bunking off, asking the wrong kinds of questions, ‘inappropriate’ behaviour and offensive language are all grounds for suspicion, tranquillisation, ridicule, failure or expulsion.

Chris Rickert:

Some Madison schools will participate next year in a Black Lives Matter event that features a call to “fund counselors, not cops” — despite the School Board’s decision this week to keep police officers in the Madison School District’s four main high schools.

Hamilton Middle School said in an email to community members Thursday that it would participate in Black Lives Matter at School week Feb. 4-8. “Other schools in Madison” are also participating in the event, according to the email.

The BLM at School movement began in 2016, according to the group’s website, and its first “week of action” was in February of this year. In addition to cutting funding for school-based police officers — commonly known as educational, or school, resource officers — the movement’s other three goals are to:

End “zero tolerance” discipline and implement more restorative justice programs.

Hire more black teachers.
Mandate black history and ethnic studies in K-12 curriculum.
Andrew Waity, president of the Madison teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc., said in a Friday email that “MTI members have been interested in participating in this event for a while and first brought it forward last year.”

But that “does not change our existing position of support for Educational Resource Officers in (Madison School District) high schools,” he said. “We believe that it is the responsibility of the district and (the Madison Police Department) to develop a contract that defines the roles and responsibilities of these officers.”

Hamilton is Madison’s least diverse (Madison K-12 statistics) middle school, yet, we recently expanded it.

“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”

Jeff Francis:

What this means is that the government decided to convert the pension payments into the Petro cryptocurrency. This was done without any prior notice or the consent of the people receiving the pensions.

Senior citizens who get a pension now have to navigate through the carnet de la patria system and find the process that allows them to convert the Petro into bolivars and then send the fiat to a local bank. (This is necessary as you can’t use the Petro for anything currently.) Needless to say, the site does everything possible make this as hard as it can be.

Compounding the issue is that people who had not signed up to be part of the carnet de la patria system found their pensions converted. This means that they have to create an account and deal with the official government website in order to access the funds they’re entitled to.

Marilyn Simon:

The orthodox line of feminism is that women don’t need men, and that it is men who keep women in a state of dependence. This is the doctrine of women’s liberation: we are trying to liberate ourselves from our dependency on men. Pragmatically speaking, the notion that we don’t need men is largely true. (As a single mother and single woman, I’m certainly poorer than my married counterparts, but I am running a family household successfully, if chaotically.) Paradoxically, however, the rhetoric of orthodox feminism implies the reverse: we need men in order to prove to ourselves that we don’t. I don’t need to sleep with a stuffed animal at night, but were I to insist on mentioning this at every opportunity, it would become abundantly clear that the idea dominated me. At a time when Western women have achieved economic independence, control over their reproductive rights, legal equality, and equal professional opportunities, the continued obsession with the need to win independence from the thing that we are, in every measurable way, already independent from, reveals just how subservient we are to the idea of powerful men. After all, only a child still dependent on the comfort of a stuffed toy needs to insist to herself that she isn’t.

Yes, but—my detractors might say—women only insist that they don’t need men, because men assume that we do need them. We are fighting the tacit understanding of male privilege and power, and we need to prove to them that their archaic assumptions are not only incorrect, but unethical. Or, they might object that women need to assert that they don’t need men so loudly and consistently because, historically, we’ve been raised to believe we do need them under the rule of the patriarchy and its constructed gender roles, so we must now de-program our sisters and daughters. These objections, however, fall back into the familiar pattern of making The Patriarchy the centre of female identity and ignore what is perhaps the most important fact of the relationship between men and women: although women may not need men, men still need women.

Let me say that again: men need us. It’s silly to enter into a conversation about women and men without acknowledging the basic biological drives of our species. I’ve never known a heterosexual man who isn’t constantly preoccupied with thoughts of women. Their own nature is at work against self-possession: the sight or the thought of a woman can overturn a man’s thoughts, his will, and seriously compromise his reason and unbalance his ability to make decisions. At times, this preoccupation can manifest as anger and even hatred. Nobody is suggesting that misogyny isn’t real. Most of the time, however, men’s need of women results in clumsy attempts at flirtation or awkward and unwanted advances. From what I can tell, a large proportion of the #Metoo complaints are of this nature.

Perri Klass:

All the excesses of my own childhood are, of course, available on eBay, priced for the vintage market. There are the accessories for the 1960s Thingmaker, from Mattel, with its metal molds to be poured full of plastigoop (I can smell it now) and cooked to a nice soft solid texture on the square little electrical stove, then lifted out of the mold with a pin and assembled into Creepy Crawlers or Creeple People. I saw a vintage 1965 Thingmaker available for a mere $25, but full sets run to a couple of hundred dollars.

I don’t know if you’ll actually be able to find Chop Suey, a 1967 board game in which a bowl is filled with small plastic food items, and you have to pick them out with (wait for it) chopsticks as the bowl spins. Culturally insensitive, perhaps, but very good for learning how to handle chopsticks; in the interests of defeating my brother in the contest for slippery little pieces of plastic, I developed reliable skills that have served me well.

Let’s not even talk about Barbie and her dream house. Most evocative of all for me, there on eBay are the 1960s vintage Easy-Bake Ovens, and as I look at the photo, a jingle starts to play insistently in my brain: “Be a Betty Crocker baker, make a Betty Crocker cake, in your Betty Crocker Easy-Bake oven!”

Jill Ortman-Fouse:

Do you have any idea how many processes there are? From changing bus routes for road work to turning in hours for home teaching staff—both done on paper. What is your obsession with names? There are around 800 people in central office. Many have been working there decades. They are unfamiliar with the processes used by outside institutions including other school systems. Humans fear change.

You don’t change processes by bullying. It takes time and energy. You commit to the work to make it happen. You can’t pass a resolution if you don’t have the votes. You don’t get the votes if staff don’t trust your idea and aren’t supportive to your colleagues. I started to write a response to your other question I can’t find now, but my phone died.

There are two ways to get questions answered. One, board members ask follow-up questions at the board table, if staff don’t answer it at the table, board staff record it and eventually you get a staff response. Two, board members submit questions to the chief of staff of the board office, that person “bucks the question”to the appropriate department. You may or may not get an answer eventually to your question as it was asked.

I recommended that we have a tracking system like other school systems use where all board members questions are openly recorded so that all board members can see what questions their colleagues are asking, and ensure that those questions were answered. Our chief of staff did not implement that process while he was serving our office as they had other processes I guess he preferred.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques:

Dear Editor: We read “The new math: how data is changing the way teachers teach” with great interest. We learned that for freshmen at East High School, coming to school 90 percent of the time, having a 3.0 grade point average, and having no more than two failing grades is enough to put them “on track” for high school graduation.

What about core academic skills, we wondered? Do students at East need, for example, to be able to read in order to graduate?

To answer our question — and in keeping with the spirit of the article — we went to the data.

Here are the ninth-, 10th-, and 11th-grade reading proficiency and graduation rates for the East classes of 2016 through 2019. (Note: missing proficiency data is because students were not tested in those years; missing graduation data is because DPI has not reported it yet.)

Click or tap for larger versions

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at East, especially if you are black or Hispanic. But when 70 percent of your minority students earn diplomas and fewer than 20 percent of them are able to read at grade level, what does that high school diploma mean?

East ninth-graders who don’t know how to read might not want to go to school (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might be chronically absent. They might not want to go to class (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might engage in disruptive activities elsewhere. And they might not be able to keep up (because they don’t know how to read!) and thus might fail.

Rather than focus so heavily on attendance, behavior, and socioemotional learning, as described in the article, teachers and administrators should prioritize teaching students how to read. Students who know how to read are more likely to come to school, go to class, work hard, and have a meaningful and rewarding post-high school life.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

The three-term School Board member said he is most proud of helping further MMSD’s work on diversity and inclusion. Howard said he wished the School Board could have approved several more major initiatives that he said would have helped students of color.

Howard, the only black man on the School Board, is currently its longest serving member. He was first elected to Seat 4 in 2010 after defeating Tom Farley by nearly a two-to-one margin. Howard captured 76 percent of the vote when he was re-elected in 2013. He ran unopposed in 2016.

Howard, an economist for the USDA Forest Service, was widely expected to not run for re-election this spring. He said during his 2016 campaign that his next term would be his last.

Still, even as recently as earlier this month when several challengers announced School Board runs, Howard told the Cap Times he was still deciding if he would run again.

Notes and links:

Ali Muldrow

David Blaska

James Howard

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

J Carlisle Larsen:

In the late 19th century, the United States implemented laws to prevent corporations from growing too large and stifling competition in the market. While these rules have been around for more than a century, Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu argues that it’s time to revisit them in order to better regulate massive companies like Amazon and Google. He joins us to talk about antitrust laws and how concentrated corporate power can lead to massive inequality, nationalism, and populism.

Derek Thompson:

But what appears obvious may not be true. In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.

This finding suggests that the talents and ambitions of individual students are worth more than the resources and renown of elite schools. Or, less academically, the person you’re becoming at 18 is a better predictor of your future success than the school you graduate from at 22. The takeaway here: Stress out about your habits and chill out about college.

That’s kind of inspiring. It also implies that all the angst and time devoted to the infamous admissions process is a wasteful pageant for the vast majority of its participants. Could that really be true? Or were Dale and Krueger off somehow?

Glenn Greenwald:

A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told she can no longer work with the public school district after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation. A lawsuit on her behalf was filed early Monday morning in a federal court in the Western District of Texas alleging a violation of her First Amendment right of free speech.

The child language specialist, Bahia Amawi, is a U.S. citizen who received a master’s degree in speech pathology in 1999 and, since then, has specialized in evaluations for young children with language difficulties (see video below). Amawi was born in Austria and has lived in the U.S. for the last 30 years, fluently speaks three languages (English, German, and Arabic), and has four U.S.-born American children of her own.

Amawi began working in 2009 on a contract basis with the Pflugerville Independent School District, which includes Austin, to provide assessments and support for school children from the county’s growing Arabic-speaking immigrant community. The children with whom she has worked span the ages of 3 to 11. Ever since her work for the school district began in 2009, her contract was renewed each year with no controversy or problem.

Sreejith Sugunan:

LIKE MOST MIDDLE-CLASS INDIANS I was primed from early childhood to value a practical life over a contemplative one. The assumption was that only an education in science can develop one’s reasoning capabilities and, more importantly, solve the world’s pressing problems. So when I decided to enroll for a master’s degree in philosophy, the question that troubled me was less about whether the subject would lead me to the truth and more about how effectively it would help me use my reason. I was conditioned to believe that “reasoning” meant solving complicated mathematical and scientific problems, or figuring out the issues of poverty and development. So I chose politics over philosophy. Most contemporary problems are political, and the solutions to even non-political problems depend on politics, the best example being climate change. Yet, having made this decision, I continued to wonder how we could live well in the world without investigating what a good life is. And that is when I discovered the centrality of this question to the ancient Greeks and to classical Western philosophy, and these philosophers’ belief that reason was crucial to living the good life.

Greece had produced philosophers such as Heraclitus, Parmenides and Protagoras before Plato, the protagonist of this essay. But despite the variety in their thought—from the metaphysical to the cosmological—Plato’s predecessors are often clubbed together and referred to as the “Pre-Socratics.”

Plato was deeply influenced by his teacher Socrates, and Plato’s writings are referred to as Socratic dialogues. This is not merely because these works featured Socrates as the main character but also because they were written in a “dialectical” mode—a form of discourse in which characters are in conversation with each other, acknowledging what is worthwhile in the other’s argument, while at the same time productively criticising it. Most of Plato’s dialogues, including his most famous one, Republic, were written to counter some of the philosophical positions advocated by the Pre-Socratics. In taking on such a wide range of ideas, Plato ended up commenting on almost every possible philosophical subject. And it is this immensely rich contribution to the discipline that the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had in mind when he said, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Almost every major western philosopher, from Aristotle to Heidegger, has written about his ideas, and Platonic studies is a substantial field within Western philosophy. Some, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, saw Plato as the quintessential philosopher, while others, such as Nietzsche, felt his ideas represented everything that philosophy should not be.

Logan Wroge:

The Madison School Board on Monday backed a proposed contract that would keep police officers at Madison’s four main high schools.

Board members voted 4-2 in favor of the proposed contract, which would emphasize alternative disciplines instead of arresting or citing students, lay the groundwork for a new complaint procedure against the officers and require more training in areas such as autism, adolescent brain development and implicit bias.

The board, though, added contract language that would give the Madison School District the ability to require an officer be replaced for cause.

“The reality is things that we don’t control make having (police officers) in our schools absolutely the best decision,” said board president Mary Burke. “Unfortunately yes, there are downsides, unintended consequences.”

Members T.J. Mertz, James Howard, Dean Loumos and Burke supported the contract, Nicki Vander Meulen and Kate Toews voted against it, and Gloria Reyes was not present for the vote.

Earlier in the meeting, the school board approved by a vote of 5-2 a new specialized learning track for its Personalized Pathways program to go in effect at East, La Follette and Memorial high schools during the 2019-20 school year.

Dave Lee:

As well as this lawsuit, Facebook is being probed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice.

In the UK, the company was fined £500,000 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal , the maximum fine the British data regulator could impose.

Bigger trouble may arise from the Irish data protection regulator, which is investigating Facebook for multiple admissions of security flaws, in what is being seen as the first major test of Europe’s new privacy rules as dictated by the General Data Protection Regulation.

According to the Post, the DC attorney general’s action could be amended to include more recent data security admissions, including more revelations published on Wednesday by the New York Times

Related: the Obama campaign’s 2008 and 2012 Facebook relationship.

Justin Murphy and Georgie Silvarole:

Federal data shows black students in particular face serious obstacles to advancing education

Black and Latino students spoken to for this report say they thrive on opportunities, but still run into instances of racism

In 10 districts with significant black populations, those students were more than a year behind

Suburban school districts are growing increasingly diverse, with 40 percent of the county’s minority students attending

Will Barrett, an 11th-grader at Fairport High School, has avoided the pitfalls of many other suburban students of color. He takes several Advanced Placement classes and doesn’t have any disciplinary problems.

Even so, he said he is constantly confronted by the sort of overt racism that many white people believe disappeared generations ago.

He recalled one instance where another student said that black people come from the jungle. Black people commit the vast majority of crimes, the white student continued, so the country would be better off without them.

Kevin Collier and Jeremy Singer-Vine:

The Justice Department is investigating whether crimes were committed when potentially millions of people’s identities were posted to the FCC’s website without their permission, falsely attributing to them opinions about net neutrality rules, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Two organizations told BuzzFeed News, each on condition that they not be named, that the FBI delivered subpoenas to them related to the comments.

The reports are the first that federal investigators are taking in interest in the case, which was already subject to an investigation previously announced by the New York attorney general’s office.

Both organizations had previously been subpoenaed by New York and said the scope of those subpoenas were similar.

Mike Masnick:

We’ve talked in the past about NY Times columnist Nick Kristof, who is a bit infamous for having something of a savior complex in his views. He is especially big on moral panics around sex trafficking, and was one of the most vocal proponents of FOSTA, despite not understanding what the law would do at all (spoiler alert: just as we predicted, and as Kristof insisted would not happen — FOSTA has put more women at risk). When pushing for FOSTA, Kristof wrote the following:

Even if Google were right that ending the immunity for Backpage might lead to an occasional frivolous lawsuit, life requires some balancing.

For example, websites must try to remove copyrighted material if it’s posted on their sites. That’s a constraint on internet freedom that makes sense, and it hasn’t proved a slippery slope. If we’re willing to protect copyrights, shouldn’t we do as much to protect children sold for sex?

Victor Davis Hanson:

The great culture wars on the campuses of the 1980s were largely lost by traditionalists. And the question then became not if but when the liberal arts would die off as a result. What is strange nearly 40 years later is that the apparent outrage over what was clearly foreordained is now becoming fact. What did academia expect, given its years of academic specialization and politicized indoctrination?

Recently the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point announced plans to drop liberal-arts majors in geography, geology, French, German, two- and three-dimensional art — and history. The Atlantic ran a well-meaning essay by Adam Harris on the controversial move, “The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century” — again, a topic much in the news recently. The article’s chief thrust is that insidious efforts to promote STEM vocationalism — the need to prepare young people for careers requiring extensive math and science skill sets — has driven out the need for more in-depth focus on the liberal arts, in a climate in which crass Republican state legislators, in allegedly vindictive and short-sighted fashion, demanded catastrophic cuts in state public higher-education budgets.

The Stevens Point campus highlighted a popular perception that emphases in literature, history, or languages lead nowhere for cash-strapped graduates but to more debt and fewer jobs. Yet what the article on official university policy misses is why students do not concentrate in the liberal arts in the fashion of the past.

After all, only that fact of declining enrollments allows the university to institutionalize the unspoken reality of eroding student interest. In other words, the university is simply burying liberal-arts majors that were already killed off not by bottom-line-minded state legislators but by the choices of either students or faculty or by university policies, or by combinations of all three.

Robert Weissberg:

What if the Supreme Court rules decisively against Harvard in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College? Will racial preferences fade into history as has Prohibition? Or will universities employ legally safe proxies such as social class to admit less qualified minorities?

Let me suggest one resistance tactic not yet on the agenda but, rest assured, it will show up: challenging the definition of “merit” that underlies the SAT, MCAT, GRE’s and similar tests. To be sure, racial and ethnic differences in these scores are probably intractable but developing new tests to replace old “racist” ones might narrow gaps sufficient for judges to conclude “close enough” to escape the verdict of racial discrimination.

For fans of preferences, this quest is relatively simple, and I suspect that woke Education Testing Service (ETS) psychometricians are already at work, given the firm’s financial incentives.

Let me try to predict the possible transformation of “merit.”

James Crabtree:

Global chess enthusiasts are sitting enthralled this week as the sport’s latest World Championships head toward a tense finale in London. $600,000 in prize money awaits the victor of the 12-game clash between Magnus Carlsen, Norwegian wunderkind and current titleholder, and his younger challenger Fabiano Caruana, a combative U.S.-born grandmaster of Italian descent.

Yet while this long-anticipated contest is being fought out between an American and a European, rapid developments in modern chess hold intriguing lessons — technologically, geographically and institutionally — for the future of Asia too.

For starters, chess is a corrective to those who fret that new technologies, and in particular artificial intelligence, will render human beings redundant. Basic smartphone apps can now easily beat Carlsen, Caruana or indeed any flesh-and-blood player. Despite this, interest in the game is thriving.

Charlie Tyson:

In April, 51 of the 54 students slated to graduate from Columbia University’s visual-arts M.F.A. program came to the provost with an unusual demand: a full tuition refund for the 2017-18 academic year. These candidates had reportedly been working in decrepit conditions. Limestone had fallen from studio ceilings and hallways had flooded, damaging works of art. Room temperatures often dropped below 40 degrees. The environment outside the studio was equally chilly: Star professors took repeated sabbaticals. The university had cheated the students out of an education, they claimed. (One year of tuition at Columbia’s fine-arts program is $63,961.)

The state of Columbia’s highly ranked program — a “disgrace,” the provost acknowledged as he declined their refund request — may be unusual. But the ceiling has yet to crumble on the M.F.A. market more broadly. The degree has increasingly become a prerequisite for people trying to break into the art world, especially those seeking the attention of the leading New York galleries. More than half of the 500 most successful American artists at auction hold M.F.A.s. But what is really happening inside these programs? And what effects do they have on contemporary art?

Tyler Cowen:

As I continue to do Conversations with Tyler, more people ask me about “the Tyler Cowen production function.” Well, here is one piece of it I don’t think I’ve written about or talked about before. I’m going to bring you there in slightly long-winded fashion, long-winded for a blog post that is.

I’ve long been convinced that “matters of culture” are central for understanding economic growth, but I’m also painfully aware these theories tend to lack rigor and even trying to define culture can waste people’s time for hours, with no satisfactory resolution.

So I thought I would tackle this problem sideways. I figured the best way to understand culture was to try to understand or “crack” as many cultural codes as possible. As many styles of art. As many kinds of music. As many complex novels, and complex classic books, and of course as many economic models as well. Religions, and religious books. Anthropological understandings. I also learned two languages in my adult years, German and Spanish (the former better than the latter). A bit later I realized that figuring out how an economic sector works — if only partially — was really not so different from cracking these other cultural codes. For instance, once I spent three days on a boat (as keynote speaker), exclusively with people from a particular segment of the shipping trade. It was like entering a whole new world and every moment of it was fascinating.

Eventually it seemed to me that problems of management were themselves a kind of cultural code, each one different of course.

And travel was the most potent form of this challenge, every new place a new culture to be unraveled and partially understood, and how much time was there to do that anyway?

Richard Halstead:

Robert Fellner, executive director of Transparent California, which posts information on the compensation of California public employees on the internet, questions the use of salary surveys to justify raises.

“Wages should be set on market conditions and reflect whether the county is able to attract and retain talent,” Fellner wrote in an email.

“Governments deploy misleading salary surveys limited to only other government agencies, and whenever an agency is at or near the bottom half of agencies surveyed, cite this as proof for the need to raise pay,” Fellner continued. “This approach literally guarantees an upward cycle of rising pay, based solely on the banal observation that, by definition, half of the agencies surveyed must be below the so-called market midpoint.”

Mimi Willard, founder and president of the Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers, said, “Our elected public officials are always telling us that pensions are completely out of their control. Well, every time you do something like this it increases the pension burden.”

Additional pension costs will account for nearly $44,000 of the $220,000 in annual additional ongoing county costs that will result from the equity raises.

Responding to Fellner’s comments in an email, Hymel wrote, “We survey other public agencies of similar size and scope because those are the agencies that we are competing with for talent. During the last recession, our department heads and our assistant department heads went several years with no salary increases.”

Hymel said because the salary increases won’t average more than 3 percent annually they won’t add to the county’s unfunded pension liability. He said that is because the county’s pension board has already factored a 3 percent annual increase in employee costs into its projections.

Alexandre Tanzi and Wei Lu:

Even migration is bigger in Texas. Dallas leads all U.S. cities as the largest net gainer with 246 people arriving daily, according to a Bloomberg analysis of 2017 Census data on migration to the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. In 2014, the crown belonged to Houston with 269 migrants per day.

After Dallas, Sun Belt beacons Phoenix, Tampa, Atlanta and Orlando round out the top five. Seattle, at number six with a gain of 116 people daily, is the only cold-weather destination in the top 10. The daily influx surpassed 100 people in nine cities, while Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles saw an exodus of more than 100 people every day.

These figures exclude the natural increase in population, which is the difference between the number of live births and the number of deaths.

East Bay Times:

The Oakland City Council has suddenly declared that Mayor Libby Schaaf’s “Children’s Initiative” passed in last month’s election even though it failed to receive the required two-thirds voter approval.

The seemingly unprecedented decision to effectively move the election goal posts closer after the ballots were counted constitutes a stunning breach of trust with the voters.

This decision is headed to court, where it should be stopped. Voters were told by the city attorney before the election that Measure AA required two-thirds approval. It fell short with 62.5 percent support. Suddenly, the council says it only needed majority backing. The time to make that argument was before the campaigning began.

David Moser:

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, “Hard for whom?” A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the “terrible twos”, it’s Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by “hard”? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me — and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

Emily Hamer:

The hit that put Walker Williams’ brain over the edge — leaving him with ongoing headaches, mood swings, ringing in his ears, depression, anxiety and short-term memory problems — was nothing out of the ordinary.

The University of Wisconsin football team had the ball and was lined up against Northwestern’s defense during a November 2015 game in Camp Randall Stadium. With 13:29 left in the second quarter, the ball was snapped, and the Badgers’ offensive line sprang into motion.

The clock ticked down to 13:28, and Williams, an offensive lineman, blocked a Northwestern player from moving toward the ball carrier. Their helmets collided — something that happens all the time in football.

A second later, Williams’ mind went blank. He stayed in for the next four plays, but he is not sure why. He does not remember any of them.

When Williams came over to the sidelines, “it was quite clear that I was not okay,” he said. His “speech was off” and he “wasn’t all there,” so associate head coach Joe Rudolph took him out of the game. Williams remembers bits and pieces of the episode, such as sitting on the bench and getting evaluated in the training room.

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is funded by a variety of organizations.

Arthur Krystal:

If we are to believe Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, her father, Lord Redesdale, read only one book in his life and that was White Fang. “He loved it so much he never read another. … ‘Dangerous good book,’ he used to say, ‘no point in trying any more.’ ” I also loved White Fang, but instead of desisting from books, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on more of them. Of course, I was barely a teenager at the time, and since then I’ve come across a few novels even better than White Fang—and some worse.

Nonetheless, Lord Redesdale, father of the notorious Mitford sisters, whose daughter Nancy wrote novels that he presumably opened, had a point. Reading ought to be pleasurable, so why waste time on poems or novels that don’t provide any? A plausible enough conceit that becomes bothersome only when we attempt to define reading pleasure. Should we even begin, or is the subject a spiraling Escheresque staircase whose ending is everywhere and nowhere? Pleasure? Surely no sane critic would approach the subject, not anymore, not today.

Frank Kermode was eminently reasonable and almost dishearteningly well read, but he took it on, in 2001, in two lectures delivered at the University of California–Berkeley. The lectures were later published as Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon, boosted by commentaries from professors Geoffrey Hartman and John Guillory and theater director Carey Perloff. All too aware that the canon, as the product of privilege, is suspect by the very qualities that have traditionally defined literature, Kermode uses the word “canonical” advisedly, tapping books known in part because of the pleasure that is “a necessary though not obvious requirement of the canonical.”

David Skinner:

The chairman of the usage panel, Edwin Newman, was on hand. His book Strictly Speaking was the Eats, Shoots & Leaves of its day, a number-one bestseller. In it, Newman lodged the usual complaints against hopefully, malapropisms, redundant phrasing, and cliché-mongering (marathon talks, swank hotel, uneasy truce). He asked in the book’s first sentence, “Will American be the death of English?”

American English, however, was not really the problem, as any careful reader would have discerned. What truly bothered Newman was the scripted melodrama of press secretaries, speechwriters, and journalists. He disapproved of how these spokesmen of the educated class recycled favored tropes and hyped their own minor insights into major revelations. And he reserved a special contempt for the legalese of the Watergate proceedings, not just the infamous banality “at that point in time,” but the whole pompous subspecies of circuitous Nixonian blather.

“In Watergate,” Newman observed, “nobody ever discussed a subject. It was always subject matter. The discussion never took place before a particular date. It was always prior to. Nor was anything said, it was indicated; just as nothing was done, it was undertaken. If it was undertaken, it was never after the indications about the subject matter; it was subsequent to them.”

Katia Dmitrieva:

Global debt hit a record $184 trillion last year, equivalent to more than $86,000 per person — more than double the average per-capita income.

Borrowing is led by the U.S., China, and Japan, the three biggest economies, the International Monetary Fund said Thursday, highlighting potential risks to global expansion given that their share of debt exceeds that of output. Overall, the amount of worldwide public and private debt is equal to about 225 percent of gross domestic product.

The IMF debt figure is $2 trillion higher than the fund’s previous estimate released in October, adding end-2017 data and several countries that had not previously reported updated numbers. The agency uses data for 190 countries dating back to the 1950s.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

The Madison School Board’s general election is still nearly five months away, but candidates have been jumping into the race the past few weeks at a rapid pace. Three seats on the seven-person School Board will be on the ballot this spring, and each seat will be contested. Here’s what you need to know about the race so far:

Seat 3

Seat 3, currently held by Dean Loumos, will have a new member this April. Loumos announced earlier this month that he would not seek re-election, citing medical concerns that would take him away from the campaign trail.

Cris Carusi, a district parent and volunteer, is running against education activist and One City Schools founder Kaleem Caire. Carusi ran for Seat 6 in 2017. She fell short in the three-person primary in that race.

Carusi told the Cap Times that she learned a lot from her first-ever campaign for public office.

Caire also has run for School Board. He lost the race for Seat 4 in 1998.

One City Schools, which expanded from One City Early Learning Center earlier this year, is one of the state’s first 4K and kindergarten charter options authorized by the University of Wisconsin’s Office of Educational Opportunity.

Caire went to the UW System to get One City Schools chartered after an earlier attempt to get a charter school, Madison Prep, approved by the Madison School District failed on a 5-2 vote in 2011.

He has previously said that he won’t have a conflict of interest if he serves on the School Board because One City Schools isn’t chartered through MMSD.

Notes and links:

Kaleem Caire

Cris Carusi

Dean Loumos

TJ Mertz

Ed Hughes

Ananda Mirilli

Ali Muldrow

David Blaska

Kate Toews

A majority (including Mr. Hughes) of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Citizen Stewart:

To be specific, one of my sons is a daily witness to minor and major forms of bullying between races and classes of students in his new school. Some of it amounts to the kids-will-be-kids variety of abuse like relentlessly making fun of ears or nose sizes or other immutable characteristics.

Other times its nuisance crimes like having his personal property purposefully broken by other people’s children.

And, too often for my comfort, it is the threat of violence or actual violence.

In most of those cases, I give my kids all the bad advice I was given back in the era of disco.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

“Never start a fight, but always finish one.”

“If you feel you’re going to lose a fight, make sure your opponent gets so many scars they never want to try you again.”

And, most famously, “respect everyone, but if they put their hands on you punch them in the throat.”

Luckily I’m married and my wife offers our kids responsible strategies to use when they encounter trouble at school.

The fact that we need to focus so intently on working with our kids on navigating don’t wild school environments where adults have too little control is a sign that has “exit” written all over it.

But, it gets worse. My elementary school-age daughter reports to us she has been punched has had her hair pulled, and was spit on by a boy in her class.

Playtime is over.

This is where the SIS transforms into the SIT and SID.

Joanne has more.

Gary L. Kriewald:

It appears we are headed toward a School Board election that promises something new: a candidate whose voice will do more than add sound and fury to the liberal echo chamber that is Madison politics.

David Blaska has the background, experience and most importantly the courage to expose the abuses and neglect of those in charge of our schools.

Having been shouted down and bullied at several meetings of the Madison School Board over the past several months, Blaska is uniquely qualified to expose the pusillanimous hand-wringing that passes for decision-making by those who shape educational policy in this city. He has seen firsthand how a small cadre of vocal extremists, called Freedom Inc., have cowed the current School Board with their unique brand of cop-hating venom.

When ordinary citizens are afraid to attend meetings for fear of being harassed by a mob of fanatical ideologues, we are witnessing a system that has shamelessly abandoned its mandate.

If elected, Blaska may be a lone voice crying in the wilderness, but at least it will be a voice unafraid of speaking truth to power.

Gary L. Kriewald, Madison

Chris Rickert:

It starts with safety and discipline,” said Blaska, who on his blog has been sharply critical of the district’s deliberations over whether to continue stationing Madison police officers in the high schools.

Despite raucous protests by the activist group Freedom Inc., a committee of the board recommended on Sept. 26 that the police officers, called educational resource officers, or EROs, remain in the schools. Protests against EROs by the same group shut down a School Board meeting on Oct. 29 to approve the budget. It was approved two days later in a special meeting.

Blaska also criticized the district’s Behavior Education Plan as “too bureaucratic” and the “product of too many administrators and too many meetings.” The plan — which was rolled out in 2014 and runs to 77 pages for elementary schools and 82 pages for middle and high schools — is largely an attempt to move away from “zero tolerance” policies and reduce the disproportionately high number of students of color who are expelled or suspended. It is undergoing revisions this year.

He said he would try to get the BEP down to about eight pages while giving teachers and administrators more discretion over how they handle student behavior in their schools.

Incumbent Dean Loumos, who chaired the ERO committee, said he was “not at all” vulnerable to criticism about the way he has handled security issues.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Blaska has frequently criticized members of Freedom Inc., the local social justice advocacy group that has spoken out at recent School Board meetings against the use of educational resource officers in the city’s four comprehensive high schools.

Protests that broke out during the public comment period at the School Board’s October meeting led to a vote to adjourn the meeting early. Blaska has lamented that some do not feel safe attending School Board meetings because of the “far-left mob.”

Blaska in recent blog posts has called on Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to prosecute the the protesters who shut down the October meeting.

Notes and links:

Dean Loumos

Cris Carusi

David Blaska

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Leonod Bershidsky:

Burhan Yildiz, a leader of more than 4,000 Kurds living in the Stockholm suburbs of Tensta and Rinkeby, claims he knows people who voted this year for the Sweden Democrats, the nationalist party whose improving electoral performance has thrown Swedish politics into disarray.

“They are angry about the criminality,” Yildiz said of the nationalists’ local voters. “They think where every other party has failed, the Swedish Democrats will manage to kick those who don’t respect the law out of the country.”

Yildiz has lived in the area for 29 of his 55 years and knows everyone, but a search for those who backed the Sweden Democrats in the September parliamentary election would be a tall order even for him. In the nine electoral districts in Tensta, where Yildiz and I spent part of an afternoon drinking Turkish-style tea, just 302 people out of the 5,907 who cast valid ballots supported the nationalists. More than 19,000 people, most of them immigrants or children of immigrants, live in Tensta. Many of them aren’t entitled to vote, and even those who are often don’t: While the turnout was 87 percent nationwide, it only reached 56 percent in Tensta.

John Rosenberg:

Ever since Justice Powell’s lone opinion in Bakke allowed the camel’s nose of “diversity” under the anti-discrimination tent, controversy has raged over preferential treatment awarded to college applicants of certain races.

Just as hurricanes often change direction after landfall, the diversity movement has recently taken off in some surprising new directions that deserve public attention.

Diversity Statements

First came the “diversity statements,” introduced by a smattering of institutions for promotion or tenure and sometimes for all new hires.

Both the prevalence and the required content of these diversity statements has expanded dramatically.

UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, for example, recently released Version 2.1 of a comprehensive “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Statement FAQs” attempting to justify why equity, diversity, and inclusion should “figure into faculty hiring and promotion” and laying out chapter and verse of what should be included in EDI statements.

Chris Lehmann:

In whatever remains of our weirdly didactic civic culture, the death of a statesman is supposed to impart a lesson. John F. Kennedy’s assassination was held to be a solemn set piece about the loss of American innocence—something that occurred in the actually existing world roughly an hour or so after the first settlers in Jamestown set about scouring the New World for gold, at the expense of the basic rigors of sustenance. John McCain’s passing was naturally treated as a sermonette on the waning martial character of our once-great republic, which was somehow failing to heed the stirring example of a true patriot’s fealty to imperial war-making and supply-side dogma.

So it was anything but surprising that the loss of George H. W. Bush sparked a vigorous round of pundit nostalgia for an America of noble elite public service and self-sacrifice. “President, patriot, gentleman,” read the headline about Bush’s funeral in my hometown Washington Post. This selfless Brahmin “made our lives, and the lives of nations, freer, better, warmer, nobler,” marveled Jon Meacham, the spirit of potted consensus history made flesh, from his eulogist’s pulpit.

Meacham’s effusive tone poem would certainly have been discordant to thousands of Iraqis on the Highway of Death—and to thousands of stateside AIDS sufferers to whom Bush expressed a wan patrician indifference while in office. But the actual record of leadership and history counts for no more in Bush’s case than in Kennedy’s. No, what matters is the image of the civitas we project onto the dead leader—and in Bush’s case, the obvious thing to mourn was the passing of our stately WASP establishment into the boorish Guignol of the Trump era.

Chris Rickert:

Meanwhile, in a sign of how the Madison district is responding to subsequent charter applications, former Madison School Board member Ed Hughes said he went before the Goodman Community Center’s board on the district’s behalf on Sept. 24 to express the district’s opposition to another proposed non-district charter school, Arbor Community School, which was looking to partner with the Goodman center.

Arbor has not entered contract negotiations with OEO yet, according to incoming OEO director Latoya Holiday, but has been approved for a charter contingent on finding a location. Goodman executive director Becky Steinhoff said the school first approached the center in early summer about using space there and possible other, later collaborations.

Hughes said he delivered a letter from Madison superintendent Jennifer Cheatham that expressed the district’s dismay at allegedly being kept out of the loop on Arbor’s plans, and told the board that as a Goodman donor, he did not think other donors would look kindly on a Goodman partnership with Arbor.

In the letter to UW System president Ray Cross, which is dated Sept. 24, Cheatham points to alleged deficiencies in Arbor’s application, and accuses OEO of not sharing information with the district about the proposed school.

“I am writing you to formally request that the OEO immediately terminate contract negotiations with (Arbor Community School) or, at the very least, require that this school not be located in the City of Madison,” she writes.

Steinhoff said partnering with a charter school such as Arbor would likely be controversial in Madison but that even in the absence of the district’s opposition to the school and Hughes’ appearance before the board, the board “probably” would not have authorized further discussions with Arbor.

Fascinating.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Mertz said he will look to highlight his record during the campaign, and also talk about building trust and accountability in the Madison Metropolitan School District.

“In order for us to provide our students the education they deserve, we need to work to repair the breakdowns of trust we see manifested in the divisions within our schools, within our community, and between too many of our families and our schools,” Mertz said. “We need to respect each other, assume the best intentions, and work together with honesty and hope.”

Notes and links:

TJ Mertz

Ed Hughes

A majority (including Mr. Hughes) of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

Ed Hughes (2005): Madison Teachers union and the school board.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and ] do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Ashlee Vance:

An idyllic ease permeates California’s Carmel Valley. Wealthy people have built ranch-style houses into the mountains, giving them views of the Pacific on one side and pine and cypress forests on the other. It’s neither too hot nor too cold, and the fresh ocean air makes you feel calm inside. These conditions, which give big ideas room to grow, have attracted artists to the area, as well as retirees who want to meditate on the good life. But every now and then, the gentle rhythm of this place gets disturbed. Someone’s perfectly manicured existence goes in a turbulent, unexpected direction.

For some people, it’s a real estate shock. For others, it’s an earthquake or—God knows—a wildfire. For Randy Hunter, a local art dealer, that moment arrived in 2008. The financial crisis had come to paradise. Artists and galleries accustomed to a steadyish stream of wealthy collectors fell on hard times. Things got bad enough that Larry Fischer, the owner of a sculpture foundry, decided to auction off pieces he’d held on to for years to help make ends meet. Ahead of the auction, he invited Hunter to come see if there was anything he liked. He guided his friend through the gritty warehouse toward a collection of bronze sculptures he thought might be of particular interest.

Elena Beiser:

Fresh waves of repression in China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia sustained the global crackdown on press freedom in 2018 for the third consecutive year. In its annual global survey, the Committee to Protect Journalists found at least 251 journalists in jail in relation to their work, as Turkey–still the world’s worst jailer of journalists–released a small number.

The past three years have recorded the highest number of jailed journalists since CPJ began keeping track, with consecutive records set in 2016 and 2017. Turkey, China, and Egypt were responsible for more than half of those jailed around the world for the third year in a row.

The majority of those imprisoned globally–70 percent–are facing anti-state charges such as belonging to or aiding groups deemed by authorities as terrorist organizations. The number imprisoned on charges of false news rose to 28 globally, compared with nine just two years ago. Egypt jailed the most journalists on false news charges with 19, followed by Cameroon with four, Rwanda with three, and one each in China and Morocco. The increase comes amid heightened global rhetoric about “fake news,” of which U.S. President Donald Trump is the leading voice.

Simon Kuper and Emma Jacobs $$:

Matt Smith, acting headteacher of Huntington School in York, is teaching a maths class. He projects a circle with three sectors on to the whiteboard. How many degrees is each sector? Twelve boys and girls, aged 15 and 16, in blue uniforms with knotted ties, stare at the board. It’s 10am on a rainy Tuesday in December, the sort of day that almost anyone who ever went to school will remember. 

Huntington is a comprehensive school whose 1,532 pupils (almost all classified as “white British”) range from professors’ kids to children from a poor housing estate. The school has playing fields and tennis courts but is mostly a collection of unremarkable 1960s buildings. 

Smith, not quite 40, is a tall, upright, serious figure. Today he is working the room like a performer on stage, scanning faces to make sure everyone is focusing. About once a minute he asks a question. Most of the time several hands go up, even from the two boys in the back row. There is no whispering. 

We now have growing scientific evidence to replace old biological superstitions. Grey matter in female brains develops faster, says Jay Giedd, psychiatrist at the University of California San Diego. Because girls mature earlier, they are given more books sooner, and learn more. Sexism may encourage this: parents often stereotype girls as quiet readers, and boys as rambunctious adventurers. 

Either way, boys fall behind in school and get discouraged. There is evidence that they lose motivation in class from age eight. Smith says that when 11-year-olds arrive at Huntington, “the vocabulary gap between boys and girls is striking”. Many boys enjoy reading for information but struggle with the fiction that is central to schoolwork. The literacy gap peaks at about 16, when boys are often at their most dysfunctional — just when decisions about post-school destinations are being taken. 

Joshua Chaffin $$$:

The slightest gust of unanticipated news can blow her finances off-course entirely — like the $144 car registration fee she had overlooked a few months ago. “It just jumped on me — I should have known,” said Ms Tilton, 53. She has fine, platinum hair and flips easily between laughter and tears.

There is one other thing Ms Tilton faithfully records: the $50 or so she puts away each month, steady progress towards her dream of one day owning a home.

In September, she was accepted by a charity called Habitat for Humanity, which builds low-cost houses with people like Ms Tilton — the working poor who are just scraping by, yet are somehow deemed too well off for public housing. If the prize seems distant, it looms just across the street from Ms Tilton’s two-bedroom flat at the Tucson Palms apartment complex — a glamorous-sounding facility whose namesake trees are withered and whose railings have been appropriated as clothes lines. There, on the other side of Yavapai Road, the wooden frames of nine new Habitat houses are rising on concrete slabs that have taken over a vacant lot.

Richard Vedder:

Two of our nation’s premier credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have issued reports recently giving a negative outlook on the finances of American higher education. Of course, the financial condition of schools varies considerably: there are affluent ones with large cash reserves, billions in investments in their endowment, and robust demand for their services, while other schools are worried about where they will get cash to meet their payroll and pay their bills. I heard of one state school that was supposedly trying to sell buildings in order to meet its payroll.

The pessimism of the rating agencies seems justified. Total higher education enrollments in the U.S. have been falling for the last seven years, particularly concerning for the majority of institutions dependent on tuition fees for much of their operating funds. Most current college freshmen were born in or near the year 2000. The number of births in 2005 or even 2009 (potential students a few years from now) was less than it was in 1990. The lifetime fertility rate of American women is at a record low of around 1.8, well below the level needed to avoid long-term population decline in the absence of large-scale immigration. Moreover, anti-immigration attitudes and toughening visa requirements do not bode well for large increases in foreign-born students.

Eduardo Porter:

Rural America is getting old. The median age is 43, seven years older than city dwellers. Its productivity, defined as output per worker, is lower than urban America’s. Its families have lower incomes. And its share of the population is shrinking: the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena.

Rural communities once captured a greater share of the nation’s prosperity. Jobs and wages in small town America played catch-up with big cities until the mid 1980s. During the economic recovery of 1992 to 1996, 135,000 new businesses were started in small counties, a third of the nation’s total. Employment in small counties shot up by 2.5 million, or 16 percent, twice the pace experienced in counties with million-plus populations.

These days, economic growth bypasses rural economies. In the first four years of the recovery after the 2008 recession, counties with fewer than 100,000 people lost 17,500 businesses, according to the Economic Innovation Group. By contrast, counties with more than 1 million residents added, altogether, 99,000 firms. By 2017, the largest metropolitan areas had almost 10 percent more jobs than they did at the start of the financial crisis. Rural areas still had fewer.

Scott Beauchamp:

It would be too much to say that the office is the prime locus of utopian aspirations in American life. But the claim wouldn’t be entirely misleading, either, and it might even shed some light on what the office actually is. From their earliest days as dingy counting houses in Boston and Manhattan, American offices have adapted to the flux of capitalism. Or capitalisms, really. Each new management technique or architectural fad, if not the direct result of some larger shift in modes of production, at least isomorphically reflects the evolution of capitalism’s spirit. From Taylorism to the open-plan design, the office is a stage on which we act out capitalism’s fantasies of itself. Set changes are necessary as the spirit shifts and the plot develops.

But does capitalism actually have a spirit? And what does it mean to claim that it does? Language that flirts so casually with poetic analogy demands a basis in some kind of formal definition. One can find worse sources for that clarity than Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, who in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso, 2018) provide brief and maximally efficient definitions of both “capitalism” and “the spirit of capitalism.”

Capitalism, they write, is “an imperative to unlimited accumulation of capital by formally peaceful means.”1 They elaborate that capitalism, as an economic and social imperative, is something more than the mere existence of a market economy: “capitalism is to be distinguished from market self-regulation based upon conventions and institutions, particularly of a legal and political character, aimed at ensuring equal terms between traders (pure, perfect competition), transparency, symmetry of information, a central bank guaranteeing a stable exchange rate for credit money, and so on.”2 The spirit of capitalism, meanwhile, is simply “the ideology that justifies engagement with capitalism.”3

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Mertz said he will look to highlight his record during the campaign, and also talk about building trust and accountability in the Madison Metropolitan School District.

“In order for us to provide our students the education they deserve, we need to work to repair the breakdowns of trust we see manifested in the divisions within our schools, within our community, and between too many of our families and our schools,” Mertz said. “We need to respect each other, assume the best intentions, and work together with honesty and hope.”

Notes and links:

Ananda Mirilli

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Phil Gramm & Michael Solon:

The same driving forces have propelled every strong American economic recovery since World War II: a sustained rise in business investment and increases in new-home building. The resulting increases in the demand for credit have driven up interest rates. As the current recovery builds and extraordinarily low interest rates normalize, the economy will begin to feel for the first time the effects of the unparalleled borrowing of the past decade. Exploding debt-servicing costs and the new federal borrowing could crowd out private borrowing at levels never before experienced in any of the 10 previous postwar recovers.

During the weak Obama recovery, business investment lagged behind the norm, and new-home construction remained at the recessionary level. Today business investment is at the highest level in a decade, and housing starts are up 42% from the average level of the Obama era. With the economy now growing at the average postwar rate of 3.5%, interest rates also should be expected to rise toward their postwar norms as government and the private sector compete for available credit.

Nominal interest rates in the postwar period were highly affected by inflation, which rose at an annual rate of 3.8% from 1948-2008. Interest rates surged when inflation approached double-digit levels from 1977-82, and Treasury borrowing costs reached their highest postwar levels, averaging 10.6%. If that six-year period is set aside as an anomaly, the Treasury’s average borrowing cost from 1948-2009 was 4.8%. For the entire 1948-2008 period, real Treasury borrowing costs—the nominal borrowing costs minus the inflation rate—were 1.2%.

Joseph Klein:

A number of the panelists also praised unconscious bias training for employees. As of 2015, 20 percent of companies provided such workshops. The notion of “unconscious bias” is based on implicit-association tests, which ask participants to look at pictures of members of various identity groups and then measure their response time in matching images with either pleasant or unpleasant words. Such tests have been subject to an abundance of criticism—most notably that the tests don’t measure bias, but unrelated things such as the time it takes to switch tasks. It’s also the case that many people with strong negative implicit-association test results don’t show any overt racism in their actions.

Unconscious bias training is based on an unproven and cynical worldview: Deep down, everyone is at least a little bit bigoted. This perspective may serve to delude bigoted people into justifying their prejudices as “normal.” Some research explicitly suggests unconscious bias training may actually create a norm for stereotyping and thus increase its prevalence.

Mr. Kazmierczak also referred to the T. Rowe Price Associates board of directors as having “over 40 percent diversity,” as if an individual can be measured as diverse. In Mr. Kazmierczak’s telling, a board made up entirely of black women would be 100 percent diverse. That’s not the definition of diversity; the word means having “variety” or “difference” in relation to a larger group. In practice, labeling an individual as diverse “others” members of minority groups, which weakens the concept of a larger unified humanity, and encourages individuals to silo themselves according to tribal notions of group membership.

The panelists claimed that to be competitive, businesses must hire and promote for a diversity of identities and ethnicities, but in fact, research shows the most valuable sort of diversity in hiring is diversity of thought. Intellectual diversity can sometimes correlate with diversity of identity group membership and end up increasing demographic variety as a side effect, but it doesn’t need to.

Mike Antonucci:

The Acero charter school network and the Chicago Teachers Union reached a tentative agreement on a four-year contract early Sunday, bringing to an end a four-day teacher strike. It was the first strike of charter school employees in U.S. history.

This singular event garnered a great deal of press coverage. Several narratives were popular, which involved tying the strike to:

● the stalling of the charter school movement in Chicago and Illinois in general;

● the statewide teacher strikes last spring in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona;

● the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012;

● the growing union success in organizing charter school teachers; and

● a union show of force in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus ruling.

The primary purpose of a strike is to extract concessions from an employer when other methods fail. The Acero teachers were successful in this regard, and so perhaps the strike was justified. But there are charters in 43 states and some have been unionized for years. Teacher unions have opposed charters since the first one opened in 1992. So why did the first strike occur in Chicago in 2018?

No reporter delved into that question.

Related

Daniel Gallant:

If you used Facebook in late November, you probably saw a stream of fundraising campaigns for charities and cultural organizations. That’s because Facebook offered up to $7 million in matching donations for nonprofits that used its platform to raise funds on Giving Tuesday. But this gesture masks the negative impact Facebook’s newly adopted advertising policies have had on nonprofit organizations that rely on social media.

In response to public scrutiny stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal this year, Facebook has implemented enforcement measures aimed at improving election security and discouraging anonymous political messages. These measures have been poorly executed and inconsistently applied. They unfairly burden charitable organizations and small businesses, yet are easy for organized or well-funded actors to circumvent.

Several paid advertising campaigns run by my colleagues and clients have been inexplicably obstructed by Facebook’s policing in the past several months. Facebook refused to allow my New York cultural nonprofit, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, to pay to promote a post encouraging people to vote in the midterms because our page was not “authorized to run ads related to politics.” A campaign promoting a lecture about sculpture at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was blocked because Facebook’s censors mistakenly believed it was intended to influence an election in Ireland.

Similarly, Arts Japan 2020, an entity that highlights Japan-related cultural programs in the U.S., was unable to promote a post celebrating an award given by the emperor of Japan to an American arts curator. Facebook claimed the topic was of “national importance.” These harmless posts remain on Facebook in unpromoted form, but unpromoted content has a limited reach.

Associated Press:

-The nation’s obesity rate has reached the highest-ever level this year, according to the United Health Foundation’s 2018 . Obesity is a leading contributor to cardiovascular disease, cancer and other conditions. Additionally, an increase in drug deaths, suicides and cardiovascular disease deaths is contributing to an increase in premature death.

In its 29 th year, the America’s Health Rankings Annual Report also reveals bright spots, including the reduced rate of childhood poverty and an increased number of mental health providers and primary care physicians per 100,000 people. Key findings include:

Obesity Prevalence Reaches All-Time High; Premature Deaths Continue to Increase
The obesity rate exceeded 30 percent of the adult population for the first time in America’s Health Rankings history, up 5 percent in the past year (from 29.9 percent to 31.3 percent). Premature deaths increased 3 percent (from 7,214 to 7,432 years lost before age 75 per 100,000 people).

Suicide Rate Increases
The suicide rate has increased 16 percent since 2012 (from 12.0 to 13.9 deaths per 100,000 people). The suicide rate is 3.5 times lower in New Jersey – the state with the lowest rate for this measure – with 7.5 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with Montana, the most at 26.0 deaths per 100,000. The suicide rate is much higher among males: 22.2 deaths per 100,000 compared with females at 6.2 deaths per 100,000.

Erica Green and Katie Benner:

Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer.

A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and earned high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.”

The narrative earned Mr. Sassau acceptance to St. John’s University in New York. There was one problem: None of it was true.

“I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies,” Mr. Sassau said.

T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges. A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan.

Wall Street Journal:

Remember the 2014 bestseller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by French economist Thomas Piketty? … The dismal tale of exploding inequality and capitalist failure has been a recurring theme in political chatter ever since. But a new report highlights just how poorly Mr. Piketty’s thesis has held up under further study.

This column should note that some scholars saw problems right from the start. … Chris Giles of the UK’s Financial Times examined Mr. Piketty’s work and found that “the rock-star French economist appears to have got his sums wrong.” …

Now a new report from the Urban Institute goes back further, to Mr. Piketty’s influential research with University of California, Berkeley professor Emannuel Saez published in 2003. Stephen Rose writes:

Piketty and Saez’s findings garnered tremendous attention and were cited repeatedly. But many researchers eventually found problems with Piketty and Saez’s approach and developed income inequality measures that led to different findings.

Sue Schellenbarger $$$:

It’s a monthslong ordeal that could change the course of a high school senior’s life, leading to a choice that could cost tens of thousands of dollars or more. No wonder the college-application season can torpedo the holidays for teens and their parents.

Many students labor to meet early-winter deadlines for college applications, often under the anxious eyes of their parents. The resulting stress can damage family relationships if parents fail to set good boundaries and keep their own anxieties in check.

“Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks can pretty much be ruined by a poor college-application process,” says Stephanie Meade, an educational consultant in Sherman Oaks, Calif. “Parents talk about how it’s the last year the student will be living under their roof, and the last thing they want to do is to be fighting with them.”

The path is often rockiest for the oldest child. Pavanaja Reddy of New York was frustrated when her older daughter, now 20, resisted her suggestions on where to apply. “She could get into the Ivies. But that’s not what she had in her mind. It was a really bad time for both of us,” says Dr. Reddy, a physician. “There was a constant struggle with me telling her, ‘I’m the parent, I know what’s best for you,’ and her saying, ‘I know what’s best for myself.’ ”

Looking back, Dr. Reddy says, “I was thinking about what I would do rather than what she would do.” She sees now that her daughter, a junior at Case Western Reserve University, was well-informed and well-equipped to make her own decision.

Brian Resnick, Julia Belluz, and Eliza Barclay:

With so many of us now constantly tethered to digital technology via our smartphones, computers, tablets, and even watches, there is a huge experiment underway that we didn’t exactly sign up for.

Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, even Vox (if we’re being completely honest) are competing for our attention, and they’re doing so savvily, knowing the psychological buttons to push to keep us coming back for more. It’s now common for American kids to get a smartphone by age 10. That’s a distraction device they carry in their pockets all the time.

The more adapted to the attention economy we become, the more we fear it could be hurting us. In Silicon Valley, we’re told more parents are limiting their kids’ screen time and even writing no-screen clauses into their contracts with nannies. Which makes us wonder: Do they know something we don’t?

Rolfe Winkler and Laura Stevens:

Kima Nieves recently received two Aveeno bath-time sets and a box of Huggies diapers through her baby registry on Amazon. The only problem? The new mother didn’t ask for the products, or even want them.

Instead, Johnson & Johnson JNJ 1.58% and Kimberly-Clark Corp. KMB 1.73% each paid Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.03% hefty sums to place those sponsored products onto Ms. Nieves’s and other consumers’ baby registries. The ads look identical to the rest of the listed products in the registry, except for a small gray “Sponsored” tag. Unsuspecting friends and family clicked on the ads and purchased the items, assuming Ms. Nieves had chosen them.

“Very sneaky,” said the 28-year-old health-care analyst from Fredericksburg, Va. “That’s friends’ and family’s money going somewhere we didn’t approve of.”

Amazon in recent years has charged into advertising, building the third-largest digital ad business in the U.S. after Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL +0.76% Google and Facebook Inc., according to eMarketer. Its ad revenue is on pace to double this year, to $5.8 billion, eMarketer estimates.

Chris Rickert:

Caire, 47, is a Madison native who in 2011 mounted a contentious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get the School Board to approve what was initially conceived as an all-male public charter school serving those who have long struggled in Madison’s traditional public schools: poor children and children of color.

In an interview, Caire said he’s open to the School Board approving charters, but is “not a charter purist.” His preschool, One City Early Learning on the city’s South Side, was approved as a charter this year by the University of Wisconsin System’s Office of Educational Opportunity.

“I’m less concerned about what we call it,” he said. “I’m more concerned with what we get done.”

He also said he’s in favor of keeping Madison police officers, called educational resource officers, in Madison’s four main high schools and that he’d like to see a Madison public school focused on the performing arts and one focused on science, technology, engineering and math — the so-called STEM disciplines.

Madison also “needs upgraded facilities,” he said. “We’ve got to do more than just patchwork on our facilities.”

Caire’s entrance into the race for Seat 3 brings to five the number of non-incumbents seeking seats on the seven-member board. There are three seats up for a three-year term in the April 2 spring election. If more than two candidates vie for a seat, the field would be pared to two in a Feb. 19 primary.

Notes and links:

Kaleem Caire

Cris Carusi

Dean Loumos

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

QuodVerum:

Arrogance & Ignorance : A Toxic Mix

Notice Macron’s age, when he became a senior civil servant – 27 years of age. That’s important.

The French elites are young men and women, who have been told that they are not just the intellectual creme de la creme, but morally superior. Better human beings, than their inferiors.

These people are arrogant. But they are also ignorant. Raised in very wealthy families and cosseted in the networks those families are part of, they have no understanding of ordinary people and their real lives.

Arrogance and ignorance is a very toxic mix. Macron’s tone-deaf appeal to climate change to justify the rise in diesel taxes, as well as his outrageous suggestion that ordinary French folk must drive less, is a classic example of the problem.

Just 27 years old.

The Economist:

His latest film, “HyperNormalisation” (the trailer of which is below) argues that stability has been preserved by ideas that are somehow both difficult to believe and almost impossible to escape. As part of The Economist’s Open Future initiative, we interviewed Mr Curtis at his work studio in London. The conversation glided from individualism and data to populism and “this sense of doom” that people feel. Fittingly for a discussion that touched upon the superficiality of media, we are publishing the transcript with only the lightest of edits. It is 8,500 words, or around 35 minutes to read. The less committed can google “youtube epic card trick” and affirm Mr Curtis’s theses instead.

Tom Knowles:

Google workers are at each other’s throats over leaks emerging from the search engine giant, according to a former senior employee.

Jack Poulson, a former research scientist at Google, has described a culture in which the “number one priority” among senior managers is to stop leaks to the media.

Employees at the company’s headquarters near San Jose, California, are encouraged to monitor their colleagues and list on a web page within Google called “Stopleaks” any confidential information that they see externally. Anyone who is caught revealing information to the press is fired.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts, including Madison, use Google srrvices.

Drew Harwell:

When Jessie Battaglia started looking for a new babysitter for her 1-year-old son, she wanted more information than she could get from a criminal-background check, parent comments and a face-to-face interview.

So she turned to Predictim, an online service that uses “advanced artificial intelligence” to assess a babysitter’s personality, and aimed its scanners at one candidate’s thousands of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts.

The system offered an automated “risk rating” of the 24-year-old woman, saying she was at a “very low risk” of being a drug abuser. But it gave a slightly higher risk assessment — a 2 out of 5 — for bullying, harassment, being “disrespectful” and having a “bad attitude.”

The system didn’t explain why it had made that decision. But Battaglia, who had believed the sitter was trustworthy, suddenly felt pangs of doubt.

“Social media shows a person’s character,” said Battaglia, 29, who lives outside Los Angeles. “So why did she come in at a 2 and not a 1?”

Ross Douthat:

But then the WASPs themselves decided to dissolve their own aristocracy, and transform their once-Protestant universities into a secular mass-opportunity system — a more democratic way of education, in which anyone with enough talent could climb the ladder, and personal achievement and technical expertise would be prized above all else.

This was meritocracy, the system that we now take for granted. And for several reasons it didn’t work as planned.

First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.

Second, the meritocratic elite inevitably tends back toward aristocracy, because any definition of “merit” you choose will be easier for the children of these self-segregated meritocrats to achieve.

Spread Privacy:

Over the years, there has been considerable discussion of Google’s “filter bubble” problem. Put simply, it’s the manipulation of your search results based on your personal data. In practice this means links are moved up or down or added to your Google search results, necessitating the filtering of other search results altogether. These editorialized results are informed by the personal information Google has on you (like your search, browsing, and purchase history), and puts you in a bubble based on what Google’s algorithms think you’re most likely to click on.

The filter bubble is particularly pernicious when searching for political topics. That’s because undecided and inquisitive voters turn to search engines to conduct basic research on candidates and issues in the critical time when they are forming their opinions on them. If they’re getting information that is swayed to one side because of their personal filter bubbles, then this can have a significant effect on political outcomes in aggregate.

Back in 2012 we ran a study showing Google’s filter bubble may have significantly influenced the 2012 U.S. Presidential election by inserting tens of millions of more links for Obama than for Romney in the run-up to that election. Our research inspired an independent study by the Wall Street Journal (paywall):

Douglas Belkin and Dylan Moriarty:

College graduates in general earn higher income, live longer and are healthier than those who complete only high school.

But it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes, depending on several factors, college graduates can end up worse off than people who haven’t gone to college at all.

Betsy McKay:

Life expectancy for Americans fell again last year, despite growing recognition of the problems driving the decline and federal and local funds invested in stemming them.

Data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Thursday show life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years, pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicides in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from powerful opioid drugs like fentanyl. Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year’s increase.

Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation’s prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care.

Anjana Ahuja, Nicolle Liu and Louise Lucas:

“Off-target effects” are when an edit intended for one location in the genome accidentally crops up elsewhere, like a stray comma. Such mistakes could litter the girls’ germlines in perpetuity. A single gene, moreover, might juggle several roles in a genomic balancing act that has evolved over millennia. This, experts say, is possible with CCR5: a mutation may protect against HIV but research suggests it may also increase vulnerability to West Nile virus and influenza. 

Given that the CCR5 mutation has been tentatively associated with improved brain function, Mr He’s self-funded handiwork might even come to be seen as an exercise in genetic enhancement.

Prof Collins says there is now an urgent need for a binding scientific consensus; otherwise “a technology with enormous promise for prevention and treatment of disease will be overshadowed by justifiable public outrage, fear, and disgust.”

Jennifer Doudna, the University of California Berkeley professor widely considered a founder of gene-editing and tipped for a Nobel Prize, said she was “horrified and stunned” by the development. Things may get worse: researchers examining Mr He’s work have suggested the enterprise might have been botched, with the girls carrying a mix of edited and unedited cells — something that would have unknown long-term effects. 

Negassi Tesfamichael:

“I’ve been working in the field ever since,” Caire said in an interview with the Cap Times. “The number one thing is that I’ve been really frustrated about how little attention is focused on young people in our city and country.”

One City Schools, which expanded from One City Early Learning Center, is one of the state’s first 4K and kindergarten charter options authorized by the University of Wisconsin’s Office of Educational Opportunity.

Caire has deep roots in education. When he was CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison in 2010, he worked to submit a proposal to the Madison School District to charter Madison Preparatory Academy, a school for black boys in sixth through 12th grades. However, the School Board voted 5-2 against the charter proposal in Dec. 2011.

Caire dismissed the notion that he would have conflicts of interest because he runs a public charter school.

“There’s no conflict. We’re not chartered by the school district,” Caire said. “We’re chartered by the University of Wisconsin.”

Notes and links:

Kaleem Caire

Cris Carusi

Dean Loumos

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

James Freeman:

The story doesn’t necessarily look better when one examines some of the specific beneficiaries of government pension systems. Steve Cortes writes in RealClearPolitics:

I grew up in Park Forest, Ill., a working-class suburb of Chicago. In my youth, Park Forest was pleasantly middle-class — a solid community of well-kept lawns, strong churches, and active sports. Unfortunately for my hometown, times have been tough over the years, reflected by a jobless rate about twice the national one and a poverty rate 43 percent higher than the state of Illinois average. As a consequence, Park Forest has lost almost a third of its peak population of 30,000 since the 1970s.
But like many such struggling communities, one class of people has found a way to prosper: public employees. Recently, Fox affiliate Channel 32 and Open the Books detailed the exorbitant pay package for part-time interim school Superintendent Joyce Carmine. She retired in 2017 making $398,000 annually, the highest-paid superintendent in Illinois, in a community where the median household income is $44,000. She will receive, courtesy of taxpayers, a pension of just under $300,000 for the rest of her life. Adding insult to injury, the school district hired this retiree back as a consultant at the rate of $1,200 per day for a total of 100 days, bringing her pay this year to $419,000 total for part-time work. Given the modest $75,000 median home price in Park Forest, her salary equates to 5.5 home purchases…per year.
If you can believe it, the story gets worse. According to Mr. Cortes, most students in the school system don’t meet state academic standards and by the time “those students matriculate to the local Rich East public high school, only 16 percent meet expectations and a truly shocking 0 percent exceed them.”

The photo accompanying today’s column shows a 2011 political demonstration in Illinois and a poster created by a government employees union which reads, “Defend the Middle Class.” But as in other states, many government workers in the Land of Lincoln have long since left the middle class. Mr. Cortes adds:

Google:

Below is a listing of politically-engaged trade associations, independent third-party organizations and other tax-exempt groups that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Public Policy and Government Affairs team. We are committed to updating this information on a regular basis.

Many taxpayers supporter K-12 school districts utilize Google services, including Madison.

(more…)

Jasmin Wertz, Terrie E. Moffitt, Jessica Agnew-Blais, Louise Arseneault, Daniel W. Belsky, David L. Corcoran, Renate Houts, Timothy Matthews, Joseph A. Prinz, Leah S. Richmond-Rakerd, Karen Sugden, Benjamin Williams, Avshalom Caspi:

his study tested implications of new genetic discoveries for understanding the association between parental investment and children’s educational attainment. A novel design matched genetic data from 860 British mothers and their children with home-visit measures of parenting: the E-Risk Study. Three findings emerged. First, both mothers’ and children’s education-associated genetics, summarized in a genome-wide polygenic score, predicted parenting — a gene-environment correlation. Second, accounting for genetic influences slightly reduced associations between parenting and children’s attainment — indicating some genetic confounding. Third, mothers’ genetics influenced children’s attainment over and above genetic mother-to-child transmission, via cognitively-stimulating parenting — an environmentally-mediated effect. Findings imply that, when interpreting parents’ effects on children, environmentalists must consider genetic transmission, but geneticists must also consider environmental transmission.

Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin:

As they sifted through resumes, the team recruiting for the new London hub of China’s state-run broadcaster had an enviable problem: far, far too many candidates. Almost 6,000 people were applying for just 90 jobs “reporting the news from a Chinese perspective”. Even the simple task of reading through the heap of applications would take almost two months.

For western journalists, demoralised by endless budget cuts, China Global Television Network presents an enticing prospect, offering competitive salaries to work in state-of-the-art purpose-built studios in Chiswick, west London. CGTN – as the international arm of China Central Television (CCTV) was rebranded in 2016 – is the most high-profile component of China’s rapid media expansion across the world, whose goal, in the words of President Xi Jinping, is to “tell China’s story well”. In practice, telling China’s story well looks a lot like serving the ideological aims of the state.

Christine Emba:

T.M. Landry College Preparatory, a scrappy independent school in Breaux Bridge, La., gained fame over the past five years for sending many of its underprivileged African American students off to Ivy League colleges. The school’s YouTube videos of acceptance notifications frequently went viral (one, of an admission to Harvard, has been viewed more than 8 million times). Its inspirational students were fodder for feel-good morning TV shows.

But last month, the New York Times published a report that revealed Landry was not all it seemed. As it turned out, the school’s administration forged transcripts and confected harrowing life stories to appeal to college admissions officers, and abused its students in pursuit of high test scores while neglecting to teach some of the basics of writing and math. Its founder, Michael Landry, pitted black and white students against each other, forced students to kneel for long periods, and at times choked and hit them.

Even so, Landry remained defiant. “Write whatever you want to write about us,” he told a Times reporter. “But at the end of the day, my sister, if we got kids at Harvard every day, I’m going to fight for Harvard.”

The story is appalling, and it appeared at a moment when it is clear that our obsession with elite education is out of control. America’s deification of schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale distorts everything in their orbit — and far too much is.

T.M. Landry was able to go unnoticed because it hid behind our most favored marker of success: Ivy League admissions. The school sent 50 graduates over five years to Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and Brown, among other top universities, so it must have been doing something right. (Brett Kavanaugh went to Yale! Shouldn’t we all aspire?)

Points and figures

Have you heard of Bill Easterly? He is an economics professor at NYU. He wrote a book, The Tyranny of Experts. I’d suggest that you read it. It seems as though everyone is quoting from Hillbilly Elegy these days and I think I’d rather see them pick up the ethos of this book and put it into practice.

Top down solutions to big problems don’t work. In fact, when it comes to stamping out poverty, the top down solution becomes an excuse for technocrats, bureaucrats, the smart people, the elites and “benevolent dictators” to keep trampling upon the poor all the while making themselves feel good and important. They enrich themselves as well.

Easterly prefers free markets. I read this article about him this morning. Here is a quote.

He sees the development establishment—philanthropic organizations, multilateral institutions, many of his fellow academics—as shortsighted and inured to failure. He emphatically criticizes the field’s leaders for being enamored with central planning, so-called benevolent dictators, and their own technocratic genius.

Microeconomics 101 tends to work when you let it. Those principles are ingrained into human DNA.

If I look at what is going on in my own community, it’s full of central planners. The smart people. Deciding for us. Deciding for you. Charting the course. Stamping out dissent. Creating or enforcing a closed network. Trying to control outcomes.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

 2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Alice Speri:

Shenery, who had only three nonviolent misdemeanor arrests on his record from when he was a teenager, could have been released that night on his own recognizance with a misdemeanor charge. He had no idea why prosecutors would call him a gang member and strongly denied the accusation. But as his case has dragged in court for nearly two years, prosecutors labeled him a gang member over and over — telling a judge, but providing no evidence, that he belonged to Harlem’s Cash Money Boys, “a violent narcotic sale crew based out of 1990 Lenox,” according to court files.

More than a year after his April 21, 2017, arrest, Shenery learned that prosecutors appeared to be basing their accusation on his inclusion in a database of more than 42,000 New Yorkers that the New York Police Department considers as “gang members.”

As The Intercept has reported, the NYPD’s gang database was massively expanded in recent years, even as gang-related crime dropped to historic lows. The information on the secretive list is available to prosecutors but not to those named in the database, who often learn that the police have labeled them gang members only if they are arrested and slammed with inexplicably harsh charges or excessive bond. The database has been widely criticized as arbitrary, discriminatory, and over-inclusive — with no clear process in place to discover or challenge one’s alleged gang affiliation. Like Shenery, an overwhelming majority of people in the database are young black and Latino men.

Alexis Madrigal:

Think back a few years, before the Amazon HQ2 sweepstakes, before Susan Fowler’s viral blog post, before the #MeToo movement, before the 2016 election. Across the nation, Silicon Valley was the crown jewel of the economy. The companies were youthful and ambitious. The culture was loose and exciting. The capabilities they put into the world’s pockets were astonishing: talk to anyone, know everything, buy anything, all with a few little taps on glass. Yes, this had unleashed unprecedented surveillance possibilities, as Edward Snowden revealed, but these were still the most beloved companies in the country. Their founders were legends.

The past several weeks have been like the past two years in miniature. First, The New York Times released a blockbuster article about Google’s sexual-harassment problems that placed the blame both on the institution itself and on the co-founder and current CEO, Larry Page. Then, Amazon selected its new headquarters, releasing a torrent of criticism of the deals: Why were municipalities subsidizing the richest man in the world in their race to the bottom? And finally, yesterday, the Times put out a 50-source story about Facebook’s obliviousness to its own platform’s darker possibilities. (In a statement today, Facebook’s board of directors called the story “grossly unfair.”)

At home in Northern California, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed a tax designed to extract money from tech companies to help ease homelessness in the city. Across the Bay, Oakland voters passed a progressive property-transfer tax, which was another way of taxing the enormous wealth that’s poured into the Bay Area.

Chris Quintana:

A handful of Democratic senators want an influential ranker of colleges to reconsider what’s important in higher education.

Specifically, the six senators wrote in a letter to U.S. News & World Report, compiler of the most prominent college rankings in the country, that more weight should be given to institutions that open their doors to students from underrepresented backgrounds.

“We urge U.S. News to use its influential platform to better align its rankings with the three longstanding goals behind federal financial aid: improving college access, supporting student success, and providing every talented student a pathway to economic stability and meaningful participation in our country’s economic, social, and civic life,” they wrote in the letter, released on Monday.

Will Fitzhugh:

The Concord Review this week welcomed its new editor, Charles Emerson Riggs, to the organization. Mr. Riggs succeeds TCR editor William Hughes Fitzhugh, who will remain Head of the parent organization he founded, The Concord Review, Inc.

Mr. Riggs, who is currently finishing his doctorate in American History at Rutgers University, is a graduate of Harvard College, summa cum laude, in History. He has more than a decade of experience as an editor, researcher, historian, and educator, having worked for Morgan Reynolds Publishing, Let’s Go Publications, The Immigrant Learning Center, and Rutgers University. In the summer of 2018, he acted as dean of The Concord Review’s summer programs in San Francisco, Boston, and Seoul, a role he will continue to occupy in 2019 and beyond.

A native of North Carolina and a descendent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mr. Riggs is a scholar of American intellectual history. His Ph.D. dissertation, which he recently completed and will be defending this spring, is about the confluence of religion, existentialism, and psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth-century American thought, with a focus on the German-born theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich.

His first task at TCR will be editing the Review’s 120th issue, to appear in the Spring of 2019. Under Mr. Fitzhugh, The Concord Review has published 1,307 student academic research papers in History from more than 40 countries on a quarterly basis since 1987. Incidentally, that is also the year of Mr. Riggs’s birth.

Mr. Fitzhugh expressed his congratulations on the arrival of the new editor. “I am very glad that Charles Emerson Riggs has a deep commitment to both History and to academic expository writing, and he understands and believes in the mission of The Concord Review to encourage and celebrate the achievements of secondary students around the world in both areas.”

Henry Grabar:

“Large swaths of our city are exclusively zoned for single-family homes, so unless you have the ability to build a very large home on a very large lot, you can’t live in the neighborhood,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me this week. Single-family home zoning was devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods, and it still functions as an effective barrier today. Abolishing restrictive zoning, the mayor said, was part of a general consensus that the city ought to begin to mend the damage wrought in pursuit of segregation. Human diversity—which nearly everyone in this staunchly liberal city would say is a good thing—only goes as far as the housing stock.

It may be as long as a year before Minneapolis zoning regulations and building codes reflect what’s outlined in the 481-page plan, which was crafted by city planners. Still, its passage makes the 422,000-person city, part of the Twin Cities region, one of the rare U.S. metropolises to publicly confront the racist roots of single-family zoning—and try to address the issue.

“A lot of research has been done on the history that’s led us to this point,” said Cam Gordon, a city councilman who represents the Second Ward, which includes the University of Minnesota’s flagship campus. “That history helped people realize that the way the city is set up right now is based on this government-endorsed and sanctioned racist system.” Easing the plan’s path to approval, he said, was the fact that modest single-family homes in appreciating neighborhoods were already making way for McMansions. Why not allow someone to build three units in the same-size building? (Requirements on height, yard space, and permeable surface remain unchanged in those areas.)

Shorewood Hills rejects low income apartments (2010).

Shorewood Hills is part of the Madison School District.

We have long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Finally, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools, one of which supports Shorewood Hills (Hamilton Middle School). 18.8% of Hamilton’s student population are classified as low income, according to the Madison School District – far below the organization’s average.

Chris Rickert:

It starts with safety and discipline,” said Blaska, who on his blog has been sharply critical of the district’s deliberations over whether to continue stationing Madison police officers in the high schools.

Despite raucous protests by the activist group Freedom Inc., a committee of the board recommended on Sept. 26 that the police officers, called educational resource officers, or EROs, remain in the schools. Protests against EROs by the same group shut down a School Board meeting on Oct. 29 to approve the budget. It was approved two days later in a special meeting.

Blaska also criticized the district’s Behavior Education Plan as “too bureaucratic” and the “product of too many administrators and too many meetings.” The plan — which was rolled out in 2014 and runs to 77 pages for elementary schools and 82 pages for middle and high schools — is largely an attempt to move away from “zero tolerance” policies and reduce the disproportionately high number of students of color who are expelled or suspended. It is undergoing revisions this year.

He said he would try to get the BEP down to about eight pages while giving teachers and administrators more discretion over how they handle student behavior in their schools.

Incumbent Dean Loumos, who chaired the ERO committee, said he was “not at all” vulnerable to criticism about the way he has handled security issues.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Blaska has frequently criticized members of Freedom Inc., the local social justice advocacy group that has spoken out at recent School Board meetings against the use of educational resource officers in the city’s four comprehensive high schools.

Protests that broke out during the public comment period at the School Board’s October meeting led to a vote to adjourn the meeting early. Blaska has lamented that some do not feel safe attending School Board meetings because of the “far-left mob.”

Blaska in recent blog posts has called on Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to prosecute the the protesters who shut down the October meeting.

Notes and links:

Dean Loumos

Cris Carusi

David Blaska

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Sergio Chapa:

“I will be honest with you, it troubles me that the American people seem to want to know so little about issues, that they are satisfied with a 128 characters,” Tillerson told Schieffer.

Tillerson voiced those concerns even further in his conversation.

“I don’t want that to come across as a criticism of him,” Tillerson said. “It’s really a concern that I have about us as Americans and us as a society and us as citizens”

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Mark Perry:

And yet according to some data that I recently discovered from several sources, there might not be such a shortage of women in STEM after all, at least overall. In fact, according to several measures, women are actually slightly over-represented in STEM graduate programs and earn a majority of STEM college degrees. A lot depends on how we define “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)” and that definition is fairly fluid and subject to various interpretations. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics “The definition of STEM can vary, depending on the group using it.”

1. The table above displays data on total graduate school enrollment in 2017 from the most recent annual report from the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) on “Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 2007 to 2017” (see Table B.13). If the CGS category “Health and Medical Sciences” is included as a STEM field (e.g., graduate degrees in Nursing, Kinesiology, Occupational Therapy, Health Sciences, Physical Therapy, Physician Assistant, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nutrition Sciences, Environmental Health, Audiology, etc., see Appendix D “Taxonomy of Fields of Study”) there are slightly more women currently enrolled in STEM graduate programs (335,346) in the US (master’s and doctoral degrees) than men (326,846).

Michael Hardy:

Apart from its early-eighties Phi Slama Jama men’s basketball team and a top-ranked creative writing program, the University of Houston has largely stayed under the national radar as a solid if unexciting commuter school since its founding, in 1927, as Houston Junior College.

The city’s largest public university in the country’s fourth-largest city finally asserted itself in 2008, when Renu Khator was hired as the university president and chancellor of the University of Houston System. Khator, who was born and raised in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, immigrated to the United States in 1974, earning her PhD in political science and public administration at Purdue University before being hired as a professor by the University of South Florida, where, over the next two decades, she worked her way up to provost before being tapped for the top job at UH.

In Houston, Khator immediately set about transforming a school derisively called Cougar High into an academic and athletic powerhouse. To revive campus life, she added several new residence halls, spent $80 million expanding the student center, erected a new football stadium, and renovated the basketball arena. Khator’s relentless fundraising (the university is nearing the end of a $1 billion capital campaign) and faculty recruiting bore fruit in 2011, when UH became the fourth university in Texas to earn Tier One status from the Carnegie Foundation, putting it in the company of Rice and UT-Austin. In 2015 the university was awarded a coveted Phi Beta Kappa chapter.

Public Domain Review:

Napoleon had had a rollercoaster eighteen months. First he had been forced to abdicate as Emperor of France and exiled to the island of Elba. Then he had managed to escape, march on Paris, and retake the throne. Finally a crushing loss at Waterloo had led to exile once again, this time to a far more remote island called Saint Helena. The watery walls of his new South Atlantic prison were at least a thousand miles thick in every direction.
The British had agreed to provide Le Petit Caporal with plentiful wine, meat, and musical instruments, but he could not have what he most craved — family, power, Europe. To make matters worse, he had virtually nothing to read. Newspapers were banned, and those he did manage to get his hands on were nearly all in English. That was the main reason why, on January 16, 1816, three months after landing on the island, he decided to learn the language of his captors. For the following three months he studied nearly every afternoon. The daily labour produced a mixed bag of verbal fruit; a sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet taste of his time on the island where he would end his days, six years later, aged 51.

Far more than rote learning conjugations, declensions, and articles, Napoleon enjoyed scribbling his thoughts in French and then translating them into English. The results were often wistful:

Alan Borsuk:

One of my all-time favorite Milwaukee School Board anecdotes is from maybe a dozen years ago when Reagan High School on the south side was a rising star. Student success was impressive and enrollment was increasing quickly. The school started out as part of a “small high school” initiative and had grown to more than 1,000 students because so many parents and students wanted to enroll.

At a meeting, one School Board member demanded to know who authorized the school to grow so big. How did this happen? The school’s success was treated like a problem, not a solution.

kubuszok:

If you work with anything that can be modeled mathematically, you most likely know that many things you work can be expressed with algebras. However, if you are not a graduate of a computer science course or similar you might not know how ubiquitous they are and how often you rely on some of them. (And I don’t mean F-algebras and FP-concepts). So what are algebras and where can we meet some most common of them?

Reasonable Theology:

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.

The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.

The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay:

ostmodernism shifted us away from objective Truth and Enlightenment values like free inquiry, open expression, progress, and scientific methodologies. It valorized notions of subjectivity and lived experience while deprecating the idea of an objectively knowable world.

But not everyone’s lived experiences became equally privileged—the experiences of the marginalized received particular status and deference. The more marginalization, oppression, and discrimination one experiences—or one’s ancestors experienced—the more one is attributed a clear, accurate understanding of reality. Old social hierarchies of dominance and subordination are thus inverted to become new hierarchies of credibility and distrust.

The legacy is a widespread internalization of the unsettling values governing our age: victim-based identity politics and intersectionality. In contemporary identity politics, people of a certain race or religion, or who share other identifying characteristics, form alliances based around demographic identities. These identities intersect in complex ways to construct individuals’ self-understandings. The more claim one can make to being a victim—perhaps belonging to multiple oppressed groups—the greater one’s social status and the more secure one’s claim to speak the truth. In short, perceived victimization becomes a new type of epistemology.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Carusi, who has been a district parent for more than a decade and was an active parent-teacher organization member, will seek to unseat incumbent School Board member Dean Loumos, who currently holds Seat 3.

Carusi ran in the 2017 primary for Seat 6, which opened up after current mayoral candidate Michael Flores decided not to run for re-election. Carusi received 28.9 percent of the vote, but did not advance to the general election that featured GSAFE co-executive director Ali Muldrow and the now-School Board member Kate Toews. Muldrow won the primary, while Toews won the general election.

Carusi said she gained valuable experience during her first campaign in 2017.

“As a first-time political candidate, the 2017 primary was a tremendous learning experience for me, and I emerged with better organizing and leadership skills,” Carusi said. “I’ve since worked with families, students and educators to advocate for better learning conditions in our schools.”

Notes and links:

Dean Loumos

Michael Flores

Ali Muldrow

Kate Toews

Cris Carusi

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Negassi Tesfamichael:


A second candidate has announced that she will run for a seat on the Madison School Board this spring.
Ananda Mirilli, who first ran for School Board in 2013, filed paperwork with the city clerk’s office Wednesday announcing she will run for Seat 5, which is currently held by TJ Mertz.
Mirilli finished third in the 2013 primary for Madison School Board, while Mertz and Sarah Manski advanced to the general election. Manski, however, abruptly withdrew from the race, clearing the way for Mertz.
Mertz, as well as fellow School Board members James Howard, Seat 4, and Dean Loumos, Seat 3, all ran unopposed in 2016 and are up for re-election this spring.
With Carusi and Mirilli now in the race, two of the incumbents will now have a challenger.


Notes and links:

TJ Mertz


Sarah Manski


Ananda Mirilli

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: 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.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Wendy Liu:

My contribution to this panel will be less about the details [of how to tame the tech giants] and more about the bigger picture of what’s wrong with the way things are. I don’t know a lot about trade policy or international regulation. Instead, I’d like to take a step back to analyse the [broader] problems with the increasingly dystopian world we live in today. And in this analysis, I see the problems with the tech giants as requiring larger structural transformations [than merely “taming” the tech giants]. Transformations that require changing the way this discussion is framed altogether.

There’s a tendency, in the discourse around technology regulation, to implicitly accept the terms that these corporations set. We buy into the narrative that they want us to believe1: that these corporations are the only possible stewards of innovation, and so deserve to profit handsomely as a result. This creates a situation where even if we try to rein in their worst excesses, rarely do we doubt their right to exist in the first place.

And I think this constrains our imagination. It limits possible solutions to things like codes of ethics2, more taxation, more consumer rights. But rarely do these solutions go beyond cosmetic tweaks. The underlying causes of the problem – their accumulated power and their role in propping up an increasingly lopsided economy – remain untouched.3

So what’s actually happening, behind the scenes? These companies have made use of technological advances – often funded ultimately by the state4 – and capitalised on them, quite literally. Through a combination of early mover advantage, network effects, and zero marginal costs of production, they’ve established themselves as middlemen to the digital realm. They dictate our terms of access in a way that has proven extremely lucrative, accumulating not just wealth but also power. Over users, over competitors, over whole industries. And they’re pouring their massive resources into developing technology not according to social need, but according to what they think will eventually make them money.

Rick Hess:

Field trips can get pushed aside when schools decide to focus on math and reading skills in order to boost standardized test scores. Is anything lost as a result?

In this 60-second video produced by AEI, Rick Hess takes a look at rigorous research by University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene on the benefits of culturally enriching field trips.

Jay Greene’s first study on this topic, co-authored with Brian Kisida and Daniel Bowen, was “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” which appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of Education Next.

McKinsey:

A starting point for addressing the potential disruptive impacts of automation will be to ensure robust economic and productivity growth, which is a prerequisite for job growth and increasing prosperity. Governments will also need to foster business dynamism, since entrepreneurship and more rapid new business formation will not only boost productivity, but also drive job creation. Addressing the issues related to skills, jobs, and wages will require more focused measures. These include:

Evolving education systems and learning for a changed workplace by focusing on STEM skills as well as creativity, critical thinking, and lifelong learning.

Stepping up private- and public-sector investments in human capital, perhaps aided by incentives and credits analogous to those available for R&D investments.

Improving labor market dynamism by supporting better credentialing and matching, as well as enabling diverse forms of work, including the gig economy.

Rethinking incomes by considering and experimenting with programs that would provide not only income for work, but also meaning and dignity.
Rethinking transition support and safety nets for workers affected, by drawing on best practices from around the world and considering new approaches.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques:

Thank you for your excellent article on the increase in juvenile crime in our city. May we suggest a followup story?

It is well known that students who are not reading proficiently by fourth grade — when “learning to read” becomes “reading to learn” — do not fare well. For example, they are four times more likely to drop out of school and two-thirds of them will end up in prison or on welfare.

Here are the fourth-grade reading data for the MMSD going back to 2005-06.

We can’t help but wonder if the students we fail to teach to read in early elementary school are the same ones who are “acting out” behaviorally in middle and high school.

If so, might they be trying to tell us something?

Apparently the Madison Police Department sees the same connection between reading level and behavior that we do because it has a new fund — the “Community Reading Fund” — aimed at supporting the educational needs of at-risk students. Readers can make an end-of-year donation to the fund at madisoncommunitypolicingfoundation.org or by sending a check (made out to “MCPF — Community Read”) to the Madison Community Policing Foundation, P.O. Box 44246, Madison, WI, 53744.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques

Madison

Related: Madison Wisconsin High School Graduation Rates, College Readiness, and Student Learning.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques 2MB PDF full presentation to the Simpson Street Free Press:

Individual slides (tap for larger versions):

More here.

Related: The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2013: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer funded school districts. Details, here.

Erica Klarreich:

Well, Igor takes out a scratch sheet of paper and starts doing calculations, but somehow he can’t get it. Landau says, “Igor, you regard yourself as an educated adult, yet you’re incapable of performing such a simple task.”

When I read this, I took it as a personal criticism. I regarded myself, rather arrogantly, as a very educated person, but I had never heard of calculus in my life. I hadn’t the slightest idea what this sequence of symbols meant.

I decided, as a personal revenge on Landau, to study the subject up to the point where I could solve this exercise. Landau said, in the biography, “Don’t waste your time on mathematicians and lectures and so on — instead, find a book with the largest number of solved exercises and go through them all. That’s how you learn mathematics.” I went back to the library and found the mathematics book with the largest number of problems. The book was in Russian, and I didn’t know Russian, but a young linguist is not afraid to pick up another language.

So I devoted a whole winter to this, and after maybe a month and a half, I came to the point where I could actually do this integral. But I had inertia, so I kept going. I couldn’t stop. And toward the end of about three months, I realized two things. Number one, I was fairly good at this kind of silly manipulative exercise. Number two, maybe this is not the only way to study mathematics. So I looked around and found I could take a two years’ leave of absence from my job.