Git:

Welcome to Anthropic’s educational courses. This repository currently contains five courses. We suggest completing the courses in the following order:

1. Anthropic API fundamentals – teaches the essentials of working with the Claude SDK: getting an API key, working with model parameters, writing multimodal prompts, streaming responses, etc.
2. Prompt engineering interactive tutorial – a comprehensive step-by-step guide to key prompting techniques. [AWS Workshop version]
3. Real world prompting – learn how to incorporate prompting techniques into complex, real world prompts. [Google Vertex version]
4. Prompt evaluations – learn how to write production prompt evaluations to measure the quality of your prompts.
5. Tool use – teaches everything you need to know to implement tool use successfully in your workflows with Claude.

Please note that these courses often favor our lowest-cost model, Claude 3 Haiku, to keep API costs down for students following along with the materials. Feel free to use other Claude models if you prefer.

WisPolitics:

“Because both the “Limited Term” and “Non-Domiciled” identifications are issued pursuant to Chapter 343 of the Statutes, Wis. Stat. § 5.02(6m)(a)1. mandates that these identifications must be accepted as a proper form of voter identification. However, possessing a valid identification does not necessarily mean the holder of the identification is eligible to vote. 
 
“… if the potential voter presents a DMV identification marked “Limited Term” or “Non-Domiciled,” that indicates that the individual is most likely ineligible to vote because they are not a citizen and the election inspector should challenge that individual’s eligibility to vote, unless the person presents documentation demonstrating the person is now a citizen.” 

Read the full letter and draft memo here. 
 

CTUP:

Comedian Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time,” is known to zing and call out both left and right on his late-night show. The self-described “common sense liberal” was in rare form last week when he attacked teacher unions for their role in destroying the quality of public education:

Standardized testing was dropped until schools saw how dumb that was. And yet, the head of the teachers union in Chicago still maintains that testing is “junk science rooted in white supremacy.”

And her union tweeted during COVID, when many Americans felt we could have gotten back to normal sooner, that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” No, it was rooted in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The teaching of which is apparently job none in Chicago because only about one in four students in the city are proficient in either math or English, and absenteeism is off the charts. … Our schools need to do better. Our kids need to be in school, and when they’re there, they need to have the phones off and the brains on, learning the basic things we used to teach.

Mike Masnick:

People also seem to forget that recommendation algorithms aren’t just telling you what content they think you’ll want to see. They’re also helping to minimize the content you probably don’t want to see. Search engines choosing which links show up first are also choosing which links they won’t show you. My email is only readable because of the recommendation engines I run against it (more than just a spam filter, I also run algorithms that automatically put emails into different folders based on likely importance and priority).

Algorithms aren’t just a necessary part of making the internet usable today. They’re a key part of improving our experiences.

Yes, sometimes algorithms get things wrong. They could recommend something you don’t want. Or demote something you do. Or maybe they recommend some problematic information. But sometimes people get things wrong too. Part of internet literacy is recognizing that what an algorithm presents to you is just a suggestion and not wholly outsourcing your brain to the algorithm. If the problem is people outsourcing their brain to the algorithm, it won’t be solved by outlawing algorithms or adding liability to them.

It being just a suggestion or a recommendation is also important from a legal standpoint: because recommendation algorithms are simply opinions. They are opinions of what content that algorithm thinks is most relevant to you at the time based on what information it has at that time.

And opinions are protected free speech under the First Amendment.

Jash Dholani:

You can’t expect politicians to not respond to public will. Even Napoleon said: “Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult.” But what you can do is persuade, nudge, seduce, and pull the public over to your side. This is why “Culture Wars” matter

Global China Pulse:

Chinese characters constitute one of the world’s oldest writing systems and these iconic symbols are so intertwined with Chinese history, philosophy, and the arts that they are virtually a semiotic representation of the culture itself. The staggering number of Chinese characters makes the system unique among the scripts of the world. The exact number of characters appearing in the historical record is debated, but is certainly in the tens of thousands. The latest version of the official Xinhua Dictionary contains more than 13,000 characters, but only 4,000–4,500 are necessary for full literacy. The process of mastering the system has thus been a daunting task for Chinese children throughout the centuries and up to the present. During the dynastic era, only the offspring of the wealthy elite had the time and wherewithal to spend their childhoods practising characters with a calligraphy brush, and therefore the literacy rate at the turn of the twentieth century was roughly 10–15 per cent—a number that was virtually unchanged when Mao Zedong took power in 1949 (Ross et al. 2006).

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the May Fourth intellectuals under the new Republic of China turned their attention to language reform, with the focus on the problem of Chinese characters and literacy. After China’s century of foreign aggression and exploitation, the Chinese reformers recognised the need to cultivate an educated populace and the formidable task of memorising thousands of characters was seen as a stumbling block to that goal. Many prominent public intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and, later, even Mao Zedong advocated eliminating the characters altogether, while transitioning to an alphabetic system (Moser 2016). The developed Western countries were in the middle of an information revolution and the Chinese intelligentsia was keenly aware that the myriad Chinese characters were ill-suited to the alphabet-based world of typewriters, telegrams, and teletype. For decades, Chinese linguists and inventors struggled mightily to develop phonetisation methods, character classification schemes, and character input systems to bring the ancient Chinese characters into the twentieth-century information environment (Tsu 2022).

Quinton Klabon:

ACT 20 READING UPDATE

• debate about which skills are screened, whether students age out for screening lower-level skills, and whether a screener exists that screens all skills needed
• DPI says DA chose aimswebPlus by price, Pearson’s evidence, and limitations of other vendors

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

AJ Manaseer:

People need to understand how incredible Johnson’s proposed property tax increase is (the one he promised multiple times wasn’t coming).

The current levy for Chicago is $1.73B.

The proposed increase is $457M, bringing the total up to $2.19B.

That is a 26% increase in your property taxes.

It gets worse:

In 2014 the levy was $859M. If Johnson’s increase goes through, that means Chicagoans’ property taxes have risen 155% in 10 years.

Abbey Machtig:

“We are spending more revenue than we have to spend, therefore we are going to be spending one-time (reserve) funds …” Gothard said Monday. “We have a lot of work to do. Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, we have to have some strategic direction.”

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Catherine Herridge:

IRS Whistleblowers Involved in Hunter Biden Tax Case Reveal IRS, DOJ, and FBI Knew Laptop “Was Real” Immediately; Claim Prosecutors Demanded They Not Ask Questions About Joe Biden Ahead of 2020 Election

“There were a lot of overt investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming election.”

“The prosecutors…told us that they didn’t want to ask about ‘The Big Guy.’”

“We corroborated that ‘The Big Guy’ was Joe Biden. Yes.”

More.

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed its 12th lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Administration, this time targeting the U.S. Department of Education’s McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program. This $60 million program provides financial and educational opportunities to students nationwide who want to pursue graduate studies. But many college students are ineligible because of their race, including Asians, whites, Arabs, Jews, and some Latinos.  

WILL is representing Young Americans for Freedom Chapter at the University of North Dakota, the nationwide student organization Young America’s Foundation (YAF), and two students who are ineligible for the program solely due to their skin color.  

The Quotes: Scott Walker, President of Young America’s Foundation, stated, “Denying a student the chance to compete for a scholarship based on their skin color is not only discriminatory but also demeaning and unconstitutional. At YAF, we proudly defend our students’ right to be judged on their merit and abilities, not on race.” 

WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, stated, “WILL continues its march through Biden-Harris radical DEI programs. We have already heard that the Administration knows they can’t win in court and so one-by-one we will terminate these discriminatory, taxpayer-funded efforts.”  

Jill Barshay:

A new analysis released in October 2024 by the Community College Research Center (CCRC), at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center tracked what happened to every high school student who started taking dual enrollment classes in 2015. Of these 400,000 high schoolers, more than 80 percent enrolled in college straight after high school. That compares favorably with the general population, of whom only 70 percent of high school graduates went straight to college. Almost 30 percent of the 400,000 dual enrollees, roughly 117,000 students, earned a bachelor’s degree in four years. But a majority (58 percent) had not earned any college degree, either a four-year bachelor’s or a two-year associate, or any post-secondary credential, such as a short-term certificate, within this four-year period. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

This is the most detailed and extensive analysis of dual enrollment that I’ve seen, covering all students in the nation, and tracking them for years after high school. But the analysis does not answer the fundamental question of whether dual enrollment  is a worthwhile public policy. 

It’s not clear that  an early taste of higher education encourages  more students to go to college who wouldn’t have otherwise. And it’s hard to tell from this report if the credits are helping students get through college any faster. 

Meanwhile, the taxpayer funded Madison k-12 system has resisted such student opportunities.

More.

Cliff Mass:

The United States should be far ahead of the rest of the world in a technology that saves lives, promotes our economy, and has great strategic value.  But we are not.

As you will see, this unfortunate situation results from ineffective government bureaucracy, isolation of government weather prediction from the creative energy of the university community, and too much money leading to multiple duplicative efforts, among other reasons.   

Reason Number One:  U.S. numerical weather prediction is spread over too many agencies 

In most nations, numerical weather prediction is the responsibility of one group.  In the U.S., governmental global weather prediction is spread over FIVE efforts:

• NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (the leading U.S. effort)
• The US Navy
• The US Air Force
• NASA
• U.S. Department of Energy

Bruno:

Subdividing your topic

Use a LLM like chatgpt to subdivide your topic, this helps making what you need to learn more clearer and concrete.

Some prompts:

• “Tell me the main topics of X”.
• “Subdivide X into as many topics as possible”.
• “For everything i say here, make me a list of topics i have to learn with [ ] on each one, be as specific as possible”(my particular one, but you can test each and see what’s best).

Then you use the output as a checklist.

Boston Globe:

The school day was not yet 30 minutes old, but on the first floor of the district’s central office, in the small, overstuffed cubicle of social worker Jackie Willemain, the problems were already piling up.

A first-grader from Haiti hadn’t shown up at school, again. Memorial, one of the elementaries, needed supplies — wipes, underwear, pants — for students who were homeless. Abigaille, a 13-year-old from Haiti, was suffering headaches from squinting to see the board, but was afraid to tell her mom because she feared glasses would be too expensive.

Willemain’s eyes flashed frustration; of course, the child was eligible for free glasses. She turned to the young man standing by her desk, Morad Majjad, the district’s multilingual family liaison. “The case worker should have taken care of this,” she said, as much to him as to the universe.

Jeff Nesbitt:

Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.

The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

Simon Sarris:

Do children today have useful childhoods?

~ ~ ~

An individual’s life can continue with an inertia that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most young people today know approximately what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life: school. Post-schooling, the inertia continues. Many a modern story opens with a worker—an office worker usually—who is so inert that he scarcely notices the passage of time until he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality that forces him out of this inertia. Since we do not live in stories, we have to ask: How can we make that pull ourselves?

Agency is the capacity to act. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you. Remarkable people typically go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a telegraph message boy is one opportunity; asking how to operate the telegraph is another. He was handed the first one, but he had to ask for the second. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them all in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan.

F. A. Hayek:

Caroline Alphonso:

“If teachers know only 60 per cent of the correct responses, then they can only teach with 60 per cent accuracy to their students at best. So, it clearly does have impacts,” he said.

“It also tells us, across the faculties, that whatever we’re doing, we’re not quite doing enough,” he added. “We need to do more here to make sure that our teachers are well prepared for the schools.”

The challenge, he said, is trying to cover the teaching of foundational word-reading skills within the existing language arts curriculum in teacher-education programs. He said that his university is looking at developing an elective class on reading methods in the absence of a mandated course from the province’s teacher accreditation body.

When asked why reading instruction courses were not made mandatory, the Ontario College of Teachers, which regulates and licenses teachers, responded by saying that teacher education programs should enable educators to teach the Ontario curriculum, including math, reading and literacy.

In the meantime, some school districts are taking steps to change teaching practices in reading.

More.

Jeff Bezos:

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

“The Washington Post never spoke to PG Shokin even though Shokin volunteered to talk. The WP never checked the details of what actually happened with the case in Ukraine. They used a one sentence quote given by someone who was fired by Shokin on suspicion of working with the Biden family in Ukraine, to form this story…”

Maze:

The Washington Post committed massive election interference on behalf of Joe Biden to help him win in 2020. WP produced a fake story through its “fact checking” department that became nationally accepted and served as the basis for exonerating Biden of corruption in Ukraine. From CNN to Senate Democrats, everybody repeated verbatim the WP story in defense of Joe Biden.

This was just as big, if not bigger interference than the media outlets claiming Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

Riva:

People are way too forgiving. The Washington Post spent years contributing to narratives that have destroyed this country, and Bezos’ ex-wife is spending her billions on progressive programs. Oh he wrote an op-ed after it all? Strong and brave

Mollie Hemingway:

But in the same way that a reporter can publicly disclose an anonymous source who burns them with bad information, Tapper and CNN are causing serious harm to the country with their revisionist history of their own key role in the Russia collusion hoax. It’s become a matter of conscience that I stop hiding what I witnessed at CNN.

In his debate Sunday with J.D. Vance, an extremely emotional and petulant Tapperasked no policy questions, choosing instead to talk almost exclusively about the mean things that neoconservatives such as Gen. John Kelly and former Rep. Liz Cheney have to say about Trump. In an amazing coincidence, this is also a major closing argument of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Vance highlighted the unimportant nature of Tapper’s questions, noted that the claims were credibly disputed, and kept trying to turn the conversation to important policy distinctions between the two campaigns.

Vance also noted Tapper’s problems with “integrity,” highlighting his media outlet’s leading role in driving the hysteria surrounding the dangerous Russia collusion conspiracy.

John Robb:

A majority of people across 27 developed countries now believe:

Governments are untrustworthy, unethical, and incompetent.

Corporations are trustworthy, ethical, and competent.

Corporations should take the lead in delivering prosperity and social progress.

Glenn Greenwald:

Hilarious: the NYT identifies “a stream of conspiracy theories” on Truth Social:

• The US has a Deep State: a permanent secret DC power faction.
• Kamala and the media hid Biden’s failing health.
• The US blew up Nord Stream 2.
• The Soros’ use their wealth to control Dems.

Wall Street Journal:

What is Florida doing right? After the 2000 recount made the state a punchline, it successfully reformed its elections. Anyone can cast a mail ballot, no excuse required, but the system is set up to ensure speedy results. The deadline to request a blank ballot via the mail is 12 days before the election. Completed ballots must be received by 7 p.m., local time, on Election Day. In the meantime, clerks are permitted to pre-process mail votes that come in early.

California’s rules are intentionally lenient. Every registered voter is sent a mail ballot, and as long as the return envelope has a postmark saying it was sent back by Election Day, it’s still valid if it arrives at the clerk’s office a week later. This is “a little slower,” one proponent in the state Assembly recently said. “But in a society that wants immediate gratification, I think our democracy is worth taking a little time to get it right and to create a system where everyone can participate.”

American elections are hardly rushed affairs. They last for months, and mail ballots are sent out to voters with weeks to spare. It isn’t too much of a burden to ask that they be returned by Election Day, and this interminable counting of tardy mail ballots is corrosive to public confidence. Late counting opens the door for partisans to raise doubts about races that flip outcomes after Election Day.

Rick Hess:

What’s in? The sugar-frosted stuff: teacher pay, forgiving loans, reducing the cost of college, CTE, and money for early childhood are pretty much all upsides for elected officials (except when bills eventually come due).

Now, there are two big items on the GOP “in” list where things get more complicated. One is the “science of reading.” Fueled both by practical frustrations and conservative antipathy to “whole language” progressivism, this may be the closest thing you’ll find in 2024 to Bush-Obama wonkery—even if it’s been partly fueled by culture-clash ire. (The politics of reading are fascinating, so let’s set this aside for another time.)

Then there’s school choice. Politically, the great thing about school choice is that it gives families the freedom to decide what kind of education is best for their children. This has immediate, visible benefits for families. But the political challenge is that any adverse consequences are immediate, too, allowing critics to point to lost enrollment and budgetary impacts. Moreover, some worry that choice will upend familiar, comfortable arrangements, especially in suburban and rural communities. These complicating factors are why the appeal of choice tends to vary with state context, program design, and sales pitch.

Hal Johnson:

Some years ago—I think it was 2008, and was certainly no earlier—I found myself in the audience for panel discussion with graphic novelists. Somehow the rest of the audience was composed of people who had never read a graphic novel. They seemed confused by the idea. A panelist mentioned that there were graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare plays, and several audience members seemed to latch onto that fact. They asked, somewhat timidly, if it might be possible to create a graphic novel that was an adaptation of…someone else’s plays? The panel had to assure them that not all graphic novels were adaptations!

This seems an absurd story for NYC in 2008, but I was there. It’s a true story. Surely it couldn’t happen today! 

Graphic novel is a terrible term. It is never used with any kind of precision. The three graphic novels most non-nerds are likely to have encountered are Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home, none of which are novels (being memoirs). Somehow Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year and Joe Sacco’s Palestine and John Lewis’s March and Derf’s Kent State are all graphic novels despite their non-fiction credentials. Adrian Tomine’s 32 Stories and Gilbert Hernandez’s Fear of Comics are graphic novels despite being quite explicitly collections of short stories.

Apple:

At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. Our work to protect user privacy is informed by a set of privacy principles, and one of those principles is to prioritize using on-device processing. By performing computations locally on a user’s device, we help minimize the amount of data that is shared with Apple or other entities. Of course, a user may request on-device experiences powered by machine learning (ML) that can be enriched by looking up global knowledge hosted on servers. To uphold our commitment to privacy while delivering these experiences, we have implemented a combination of technologies to help ensure these server lookups are private, efficient, and scalable.

One of the key technologies we use to do this is homomorphic encryption (HE), a form of cryptography that enables computation on encrypted data (see Figure 1). HE is designed so that a client device encrypts a query before sending it to a server, and the server operates on the encrypted query and generates an encrypted response, which the client then decrypts. The server does not decrypt the original request or even have access to the decryption key, so HE is designed to keep the client query private throughout the process.

The One Percent Rule:

For most of the 20th century, IQ scores steadily climbed, a phenomenon so consistent it was named the “Flynn effect” after the psychologist James Flynn, who first documented it. Generations across the globe were getting smarter, or at least, their scores on intelligence tests were improving. Explanations ranged from better nutrition and healthcare to more complex societies that required sharper minds. But now, as we move further into the 21st century, the Flynn effect seems to be crumbling. In some countries, the rise has plateaued; in others, it has reversed. What is going on? Are we getting dumber, or is something else at play?

A timely study by Sandra Oberleiter and her colleagues has provided an answer that is both unsettling and enlightening. Published in Intelligence, their research suggests that the Flynn effect is faltering because the nature of intelligence itself is shifting. The problem isn’t that we’re getting dumber. It’s that we’re getting more specialized, and that, in turn, is weakening the ties that bind our cognitive abilities together. In short, modern life is forcing us to become experts at the expense of being generalists.

Daily Times:

Lincoln STEM Elementary School in Watertown will be honored with an Excellence in STEM Award, commonly known as a Stemmy, Oct. 30 at the 21st annual sySTEMnow Conference in Milwaukee.

Lincoln STEM is being recognized in the Partnership category by STEM Forward, the host organization for the Stemmy awards. 

“Lincoln Elementary School re-established itself as a STEM elementary school within the Watertown Unified School District (WUSD) in 2016,” says a release from STEM Forward. “They couldn’t provide STEM opportunities within their school budget without the organization, planning, and support of parents, staff, and educators through the Lincoln STEM PTO. The Lincoln STEM PTO is a 501(c)(3) organization established to help bring school families and staff closer to aid in enriching their student’s education. Together, they have created more engaging STEM experiences to start the love of hands-on, problem-solving learning early in their 4K-5th grade levels.

Lou Raguse:

Despite a $2.3 billion increase in public school funding, Minnetonka Public Schools faces a $6 million budget deficit due to limitations in the funding increase. The biggest cost, teacher and staff salaries, was not fully covered by the increase, which did not keep up with inflation.

Kayla Huynh:

Nearly 95,000 people in Dane County received Social Security payments in 2022. In January this year, the estimated average monthly Social Security check was about $1,900.

The annual property tax bill on the average Madison home costs over $7,000 for city- and school-related taxes, according to city and school district estimates. In a few years, depending on the Nov. 5 election results, those costs could grow by over 20% for many residents.

The Madison Metropolitan School District is asking voters for $507 million to fund facilities construction costs. Approval of the referendum would increase property taxes by about $300 annually for the average homeowner over 23 years.

The district’s separate $100 million referendumwould fund day-to-day operating costs, such as salaries and programs. Approving this referendum alone would hike property taxes on the average home by over $40 in the first year, according to the district.

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Becky Jacobs:

Howard is disappointed the athletics department is spending millions of dollars to build a brand new facility that she said would be inadequate for some of the university’s athletes.

“I think they need to be held accountable for that,” she said.

PEN America

PEN America today sharply criticized some Republican members of Congress for their recent actions scrutinizing academic decision-making at the Naval Academy, including insinuating that an invitation to scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat to deliver a lecture could violate federal law, which led to the event’s cancellation.

A leading expert on authoritarianism and history professor at New York University, Ben-Ghiat is  the author of numerous books on Italian fascism, including most recently Strongman: Mussolini to the Present — which compares Donald Trump to Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet, among other dictators. She is a regular commentator on MSNBC, and has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump, regularly connecting his temperament and viewpoints to some of the dictators she studies. Ben-Ghiat had been invited by the Naval Academy’s history department to deliver the Bancroft Memorial Lecture on October 10, which she said would focus on “what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule.”

In the days before the scheduled lecture, however, the Naval Academy canceled the lecture claiming it wanted to avoid even appearing to violate federal law. This came after the urging of Congressman Keith Self (R-TX), who wrote to the Academy’s superintendent, Admiral Yvette M. Davids, saying the invitation was “a serious lapse in judgment” and that allowing her to speak, especially within weeks of the presidential election, would violate a Department of Defense directive that prohibits the military from engaging in partisan political activity. A group of sixteen Republican members subsequently wrote to Superintendent Davids, similarly labeling Ben-Ghiat a “partisan historian” and lauding the event’s cancellation. They also posed a series of questions to Academy leadership about internal academic processes, including how Ben-Ghiat came to be selected for the lecture, and how the institution defines “academic freedom.”

Canadian Paedoatric Society:

Literacy is a key social determinant of health that affects the daily socioemotional lives of children and their economic prospects later in life. Being able to read, write, and understand written text is essential to participating in society, achieving goals, developing knowledge, and fulfilling potential. Yet a significant proportion of adults in Canada do not have the literacy skills they need to meet and manage increasingly complex workforce demands. Paediatric care providers play a pivotal role in identifying children and families at risk for low literacy. This statement offers approaches for assessing children and counselling families to improve reading skills, while advocating for their right to access evidence-based reading instruction.

Christopher Rufo:

With the help of Open the Books, a nonprofit research organization, we have obtained documents detailing the NIH’s descent into left-wing racialism. The agency, which is supposed to prioritize hard science, has made DEI a top priority, shelling out millions on “diversity” initiatives that do nothing to advance medical research.

At the beginning of his term, President Biden signed an executive order implementing DEI throughout the federal bureaucracy and Congress directed the NIH to develop “a strategic plan with long-term and short-term goals to address the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities at NIH.” In short: less focus on curing cancer, and more attention to making sure no one cures cancer without acknowledging his “responsibility to correct systemic racism and inequities.”

The NIH immediately got to work implementing the executive order across the mammoth agency. The plan, which applied to fiscal years 2023 through 2027, required“the participation of all 27 Institutes and Centers (ICs); Offices within the Office of the Director (OD); and working groups, staff committees, advisory groups, and employee groups across NIH.” Altogether, the agency reported, it had “identified a community of almost 100 offices, committees, and groups working within the NIH-wide DEIA ecosystem.”

Rizqy Amelia Zein:

2023 research highlights a dramatic increase in fraudulent scientific artiles traced back to paper mills. In just five years, the numbers of retractions soared jumped from 10 in 2019 to 2,099 in 2023.

Paper mills have also extremely overwhelmed major scientific journal publishers. Hindawi and Wiley, publishers of open access journals in the UK, for example, retracted around 1,200 paper mill articles in 2023. SAGE, a global publisher of books, journals and academic library resources and Elsevier, a scholarly publisher in the Netherlands also retracted hundreds of paper mill articles in 2022.

Paper mills are found operating in countries whose research policies incentivise researchers to produce as many scientific articles as possible, such as China, Russia, India and Iran.

In this brief video, Dr. Cheryl Twyman, Director of Partnerships, and Dr. Penny Rossetto, Senior Coach and School Designer, both with EL Education, speak about their organization and its partnership with One City Schools. They also share their assessment of the progress being made at One City’s elementary and middle schools.

About EL Education

EL Education, formerly known as Expeditionary Learning, is a non-profit organization that partners with K-12 schools to help students learn through active learning, teamwork, and character development:

EL Education’s approach to education is based on the following principles:

Richard Vanderford:

The top U.S. consumer finance watchdog warned businesses about potential legal problems they could face from using new technology such as artificial intelligence or algorithmic scores to snoop on and evaluate their employees.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday said “invasive” new tools to monitor workers are governed by a law designed to ensure fairness in credit reporting, giving employees specific rights.

Employees have the right to consent to the collection of personal information, to receive detailed information and to dispute inaccurate information, the CFPB said in the newly released guidance.

“Workers shouldn’t be subject to unchecked surveillance or have their careers determined by opaque third-party reports without basic protections,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said.

More companies are leaning on AI and other powerful tools throughout the employment process, using software that can, for example, interview candidatesand surveillance tools that can look for unsafe behavior. Americans have expressed concerns about Big Brother-style surveillance while they are on the job.

Emma Camp:

A small but growing number of American schools are reducing or delaying access to advanced courses. Most often, these changes have been enacted in the name of reducing achievement gaps between demographic groups. However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.

“Detracking” is an increasingly popular proposal among educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path.

Cynical Publius:

Think Dave Petraeus. The idea of the “warrior scholar” is nice in the abstract, but in reality what we did was infect our senior leaders with the woke mind virus.

Sofoklis Goulas, Foreword by:  Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. and Michael J. Petrilli:

In Chicago, where 35 percent of seats are now unfilled, nearly three in five school buildings are underutilized.[3]

In Milwaukee, at least forty schools are “significantly underenrolled” (though that hasn’t stopped the district from requesting a 30 percent increase in property taxes).[4]

In Broward, sixty-seven schools are now operating at less than 70 percent capacity.[5]

The same can be said for forty-eight schools in Fort Worth.[6]

Glenn Youngkin:

“Let’s be clear about what just happened: only eleven days before a Presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals–who self-identified themselves as noncitizens–back onto the voter rolls. Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities.

“This is a Virginia law passed in 2006, signed by then-Governor Tim Kaine, that mandates certain procedures to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, with safeguards in place to affirm citizenship before removal–and the ultimate failsafe of same-day registration for U.S. citizens to cast a provisional ballot. This law has been applied in every Presidential election by Republicans and Democrats since enacted 18 years ago.

“Virginia will immediately petition the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court, for an emergency stay of the injunction.”

More.

15,000 of those ballots were sent to people who have expressed they have no intent to return back to the United States. And also, 15,000 of those people have not ever registered before.

Dan Lennington:

Sun Prairie School District has a whopping 42% of all employees assigned as “administrative.” In their defense, they told parents basically, “we’re not as bad as other Dane County schools.” Ugh. Learn how bloated your district is at will-law.org/school-scoreca… @WILawLiberty

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

Jay Bhattacharya:

The House report on HHS covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden admin spent almost a billion dollars to push falsehoods about covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.

More: taxpayer funded Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate lockdowns.

Chester Finn:

In 1953, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin published one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated essays, titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” He was riffing on the Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In this essay, Sir Isaiah divided people—well, writers and thinkers, those sorts of people—into two categories. As summarized in Wikipedia, they are:

…hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust, and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe).

Reflecting on my own engagement with education over the past sixty years, beginning just a dozen years after Berlin wrote, I find that I started as a hedgehog but have turned into a fox. My hedgehog self, I should add, was young, optimistic, probably naïve. Becoming a fox has meant growing skeptical, wary, perhaps jaded, though still determined.

Once upon a time—college senior time, LBJ time—I pretty much agreed with President Johnson that the way to end poverty in America while achieving other worthy ends was to beef up the education system, particularly the parts that served poor kids, and that the way to do that was to ramp up its funding, such as via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the War on Poverty, both of which he pushed through Congress.

When he signed ESEA in the one-room schoolhouse of his childhood in Johnson City, Texas, the president declared that:

John Staddon:

Dealing with an increasing number of marginal students in an equity-charged environment is one factor that has favored grade inflation. But there is a contributing factor that is built into the American system and has taken some years to reach fruition. When I first came to this country from Britain, I was surprised to find that students were graded by the individual who taught them. This obviously introduces a conflict of interest, especially for teachers of elective courses. Harsh grades mean a drop in enrollment. A drop in enrollment means a loss of salary for the tenured, or of a job for adjunct faculty. Given the incentives, I am surprised that grade inflation has taken so long to become a problem.

The U.S. system allows for spontaneity but also for corruption; how might it be fixed?The contrast with British practice was stark. At that time (the 1960s), pupils’ futures were decided by two sets of high-stakes exams: Ordinary Level, taken at 16, and Advanced Level, at 18 or so. After O-level, a good pass meant you could go on to A-level two years later and then, possibly, to college (maybe five percent or so of each cohort made it to college in those days, so the process was very selective).

These vital examinations took place in a separate location, “examination halls” (mine was in South Kensington in central London). Students, identified not by name but by a number, from schools all over the city, sat at widely separated tables patrolled by a gowned “invigilator.” The whole thing was completely anonymous; the student didn’t even know who was grading his exam, which was done by a system-wide committee that might include his teacher but most likely did not.

This system is totally fair, but it’s also rather rigid, because all must teach from the same syllabus. Teachers have little room for spontaneity.

Madeleine Kearns:

On October 4, Emma, who asked not to be named, got a letter from the Scottish government. Addressed “Dear Resident,” its purpose was to alert her that her home, due to its proximity to the hospital, is now in an abortion censorship zone.  

This is due to the UK’s brand-new “Safe Access” law, which came into effect September 24 and made it a criminal offense to do anything within 200 metersof an abortion facility that could “influence” someone’s decision to access, provide, or facilitate an abortion. In the Scottish government’s letter, Emma read that even “activities in a private place (such as a house) within the area could be an offence if they can be seen or heard within the Zone and are done intentionally or recklessly.”

“You can report a group or an individual that you think is breaking the law,” the letter added, before providing instructions on how to do so.

More.

Chris Bennett:

The ball began rolling on a steady chain of glaring constitutional violations, contends IJ attorney Kirby West: “The government cannot go wherever and whenever it wants—that’s the very reason for the Fourth Amendment in the first place. We see a lot of cases where government goes overboard, but this statute is the plainest example I’ve seen that contradicts the Fourth Amendment on its face.”

Leor Sapir:

NEW: Azeen Ghorayshi reports in the @nytimes that prominent gender clinician Johanna Olson-Kennedy of @ChildrensLA has refused to publish data from a study on puberty blockers, fearing that the unimpressive results will be “weaponized” by critics of “gender-affirming care.”

JK Rowling:

‘We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.’

Benjamin Ryan:

The top readers’-pick comments on the @NYTimes article on the researcher shielding her null findings from her puberty blocker study for political reasons:

Akilah Winters:

The judge ruled in favor because she said the district attorney’s office failed to timely provide the requested documents. According to Krause, the law firm is owed those documents and will be awarded attorneys’ fees.

It stemmed from a lawsuit in which Ashleigh Merchant accused the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office of violating the state’s Open Records Act.

The lawsuit accused Willis of “hiding documents” related to a media monitoring company, alleging the district attorney had used taxpayer dollars to pay for it. It also accused the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office of not wholly fulfilling open records related to employees’ nondisclosure agreements.

“She is the elected DA. It’s her office. I think that every government agency has a duty to respond to open records requests. I think when you have an elected official, they are the ones who are held accountable by the public. They are the ones who set the policy,” Merchant, who is Trump co-defendant Michael Roman’s lawyer in the election interference case, said on Monday while testifying on the stand in the case. 

Will Flanders:

An example of the problem with DPI changing standards from Reddit. This poster earnestly believes proficiency is up 12% this year. The average person doesn’t have time to delve into the nuance of state tests. DPI is willfully pulling the wool over our eyes to hide their failings.

Curiously, after reducing rigor statewide, Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly chimes in.

The taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI recently reduced rigor….

FIRE:

POLL: Americans rank free speech second only to inflation on their list of 2024 concerns, according to a new poll by FIRE. That’s higher than other hot-button issues like crime, immigration, and health care.

Adrian Vermeule:

Trump has to meet a very high bar to rule as our most authoritarian President ever. If he sends an ethnic minority to internment camps, tries to pack the Court, and stays in office for four terms, he’ll still only be tied.

Sean Davis:

The result of the WIAA’s incorrect use of tiebreakers means Madison West’s and Greenfield’s seasons are over at least a week earlier than they should be. It would have been the Regents’ first playoff appearance since 2019. Meanwhile, Madison Edgewood and Pewaukee will get the opportunity to play in the postseason after doing nothing wrong.

“These things are just so weird,” Madison Edgewood athletic director Ben Voss said. “We were told we’re in the playoffs, and we’re preparing for Friday.”

Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker

In the Disinformation Chronicle/Racket articleyesterday, we noted that “both the CCDH and Labour Together were founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street.” We added that the CCDH documents “carry particular importance because McSweeney’s Labour Together operatives have been teaching election strategy to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” with Politico dubbing Labour and the Democrats “sister parties.” 

Today, I appeared on Times UK evening edition with host Kait Borsay, who said Times radio was able to get new comment from the “Labour Together” think-tank about CCDH. Borsay relayed a statement from Labour Together, which says it has “nothing to do” with CCDH. This was surprising for a number of reasons. McSweeney not only founded both groups, he was director of CCDH for a three-year period that overlapped with Starmer’s leadership campaign. McSweeney resigned from CCDH to become Starmer’s Chief of Staff. 

Benjamin Breen:

Two things had to change to make letter writing into a form of mass communication.

First, the advent of widespread literacy, which was very much a project of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — something I wrote about here:

Philip Greenspun:

An official U.S. Department of Education email received by a nephew who just finished college highlights the advantages of being an incumbent (his email and name redacted):

Ogden Lindsley:

The fate of highly productive educational methods in public instruction is a national shame. No highly effective educational method or program has ever been widely adopted in North America. I didn’t understand and accept this until 1983, when I read the results of Project Follow Through and how they had been ignored and covered up (Car-nine, 1983; Engelmann & Carnine, 1982). Here, the clear-cut results of the most extensive and most expensive educational research ever conducted were being ignored. You couldn’t even get the reports out of Washington. These were the results of investing public funds, and they had run out of reports! They couldn’t find them! “Call back next Monday!”

DHS watchlist

The DHS Bureaucrat Watch List is dedicated to exposing the career staff who have outsized influence on efforts to secure the southern border. While everyone knows who Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland are, few Americans know who the career bureaucrats are that implement their orders.  

By uncovering hidden agendas and failures, we aim to restore integrity to our immigration system and border protection by showing America who can be counted on to reform America’s broken immigration system and who is in league with left-wing open border groups. Join us in defending our borders and reclaiming America’s sovereignty.

Peter Bernegger:

The lawsuit emphasizes that while Wisconsin’s online voter registration for the Nov. 5 election closed on Oct. 16, the portal remains active for managing absentee ballot requests and other adjustments through Election Day.

To support their claims, the plaintiffs reference the indictment of Harry Wait, who allegedly used MyVote to request absentee ballots in the names of two voters without authorization. Wait’s actions demonstrate how the system can be exploited for election fraud, according to the plaintiffs.
The plaintiffs have requested an immediate injunction to shut down MyVote until adequate security measures are implemented, warning that its continued use could disenfranchise voters and compromise the upcoming election.

“As such, use of the MyVote portal should be enjoined until the system and website can be redesigned and redeveloped, or retooled, and tested for cybersecurity vulnerabilities of the kind illustrated within the Harry Wait indictment,” the plaintiffs wrote in their complaint. “The inadequate cybersecurity safeguards present within the MyVote website pose significant risks to the integrity of the electoral process and the personal data of Wisconsin voters.”

A request for comment on the allegations sent to the Wisconsin Election Commission was not immediately returned.

Paul Teller:

Year after year, administration after administration, Congress continues to pass last-minute spending bills without amendment, without cutting spending and without addressing our unsustainable federal debt.

They continue to extend liberal priorities without a second thought, while conservative policy provisions are left out year after year.

Despite a Republican majority in the House and very narrow Democrat control of the Senate, the current Congress has once again chosen this well-trodden path and set up Dec. 20th as the day by which to pass the annual Christmas spending bill. This Christmas chokepoint will likely be used to force an earmarks-laden omnibus appropriations bill (or equivalent) that increases spending and carries on it other big-spending items, like a food-welfare extension, a PAYGO waiver and a debt-ceiling increase.

It is noteworthy that House Speaker Mike Johnson and the entire House Leadership team adopted and sincerely advocated the appropriations plan developed by House conservatives and the Conservative Movement: a six-month CR to avoid a Christmas chokepoint, with the SAVE Act attached to prohibit the voter registration of non-citizens.

The Leadership efforts are commendable. The conservative world made a very reasonable ask, and leadership not only listened but made a real push to pass the conservative plan. They deserve thanks from conservatives.

US debt clock.

James Bisbee And Kevin Munger

Twitter has been a prominent forum for academics communicating online, both among themselves and with policy makers and the broader public. Elon Musk’s takeover of the company brought sweeping changes to many aspects of the platform, including public access to its data; Twitter’s approach to censorship and mis/disinformation; and tweaks to the affordances of the platform. This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their “engagement” with the platform, measured by either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets). We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others’ tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others’ content).

Kristina Armitage:

Ramanujan is perhaps most famous for coming up with partition identities, equations about the different ways you can break a whole number up into smaller parts (such as 7 = 5 + 1 + 1). In the 1980s, mathematicians began to find deep and surprising connections between these equations and other areas of mathematics: in statistical mechanics and the study of phase transitions, in knot theory and string theory, in number theory and representation theory and the study of symmetries.

Most recently, they’ve appeared in Mourtada’s work on curves and surfaces that are defined by algebraic equations, an area of study called algebraic geometry. Mourtada and his collaborators have spent more than a decade trying to better understand that link, and to exploit it to uncover rafts of brand-new identities that resemble those Ramanujan wrote down.

Brie Stimson

The parents of a Massachusetts high school senior who used artificial intelligence (AI) for a social studies project have filed a lawsuit against his teachers and the school after their son received detention and a “D” grade.

“He’s been accused of cheating, and it wasn’t cheating, there was no rule in the handbook against AI,” Jennifer Harris, who along with her husband, Dale, are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in Massachusetts’ Plymouth County District Court last month against the Hingham High School administration and the school district, told Boston 25 News. 

The lawsuit alleges that their son will “suffer irreparable harm that is imminent” over the grade that his parents say kept him out of the National Honor Society, which they claim is threatening his standing with top tier 

Alberta Parents Union:

We are urgently calling on Alberta to teach math teachers to teach math!

That may seem like a silly request, but read on to find out which math-like-substance is being sold to teachers as “teaching math” now.

It’s a perennial struggle in parent advocacy.

Parents want to know the basics are being covered in every subject, with time-tested, evidence-based approaches, so we can see our kids are learning.

Whenever we win once, though, the next fad – with the same fundamental flaws – comes packaged in new terms.

First it was “discovery math”.

Now it’s “Building Thinking Classrooms”.

Peter Liljedahl, a professor of math education at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, has seen his “Thinking Classrooms” pervade Alberta.

For him, a teacher demonstrating how to work a problem before the students work it themselves is “mimicking” rather than “thinking”.

Practicing math facts like reciting “2+2=4” and multiplication tables is deemed “memorizing” rather than “thinking”.

And on it goes.

2007 math forum audio video

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Remedial math

Madison’s most recent Math Task Force

Cleo Krejci:

The board’s committee on accountability, finance and personnel approved a resolution that gives notice of non-renewal for a Carmen lease with MPS that will expire in June 2026. The resolution, which is expected to go to the full board for approval Oct. 31, signals an intention to end the “co-location” between Carmen’s South and Southeast high schools that currently operate out of the same buildings as MPS’ Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes (ALBA) and Pulaski High School.

But committee members also wrote-in a caveat: Carmen could still extend its lease by one more year, if necessary.

That’s because Carmen is in the midst of constructing a new $55 million high school, scheduled to be open for students in fall 2026. That’s just a few months after the charter’s lease with MPS ends that June — meaning if construction is delayed, students could end up with nowhere to go.

“Obviously, we don’t want students to be displaced. We want Carmen students to have a home while the building is being built,” said board member Missy Zombor, who has led board efforts to end the co-location.

Alec Johnson:

Over a year after the Wisconsin Legislature approved Act 20 and Gov. Tony Evers signed it into law, the state Department of Public Instruction is still waiting for the joint finance committee to release nearly $50 million it was promised as part of the new legislation intended to improve reading among state schoolchildren.

State DPI superintendent Jill Underly appealed to the committee to release those funds in a letter sent Monday to state Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, and state Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, who co-chair the committee. Underly said she has “repeatedly called” for the committee to release the funding.

It was among the issues Underly brought up in her annual state of education address last month. Underly said at the time the state Legislature’s failure to release most of the funding needed to help schools implement the law left already-struggling public schools to fund the mandate themselves.

The new law requires schools to emphasize a phonics-based approach for teaching reading, meaning students learn how to sound out parts of words.

Evers signed the bill in July 2023. He also enacted a controversial partial veto to Act 100, the appropriations bill that funded the bill. That veto has been the source of legal wrangling since spring.

“I understand you have a concern about the governor’s partial veto, but the clear decision of the circuit court judge in that case has now once again made it clear you have the obligation to provide these funds to DPI,” Underly wrote this week to Born and Marklein. “I know we agree that the children of Wisconsin need this critical support to learn to read, and we need to support the Wisconsin districts with the greatest early literacy needs. Now is the time to keep your promise to Wisconsin families. Now is the time to take action and release the funding.”

Notes and links on DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Despite a decline from the previous year, rates of chronic absenteeism for Wisconsin’s students – defined as missing more than one in ten school days for any reason – remained at historically high levels in 2023 for children of every race, grade level, and socioeconomic status. District leaders point to many causes, including lasting impacts of the pandemic. Some have made improvements through strong communication campaigns and concerted, districtwide efforts. 

In the 2022-23 school year (referred to in this brief as 2023), 19.5% of Wisconsin’s K-12 public school district and charter students were chronically absent. While this number represents a welcome decline from the record number of students who were chronically absent in the prior school year, it is still dramatically higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Last year, we delved into the data on chronic absenteeism in Wisconsin and found that, in 2021, chronic absenteeism rose alarmingly and was highest for districts with large shares of students of color and students from low-income households. Since that time, two more years of data have been published, showing rates even higher than in 2021. Here, we analyze these latest data in an effort to plumb not only the problem but also potential causes and solutions.

The data we use come from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), which defines chronic absenteeism as missing at least 10% of possible attendance days, including excused absences. In most school districts, this amounts to a student missing 18 or more days of school in a year.

More.

Abbey Machtig Summary.

Ben Jordan:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, known as WILL, claims the district would be violating the constitution for ‘racial balancing’.

The Wauwatosa School Board is mulling plans to close WSTEM Elementary School. A district task force report says the school currently lacks diversity.

Watch: TMJ4’s Ben Jordan investigates potential legal action involving Wawautosa’s STEM programs. 

WILL claims it would be illegal to move forward with that plan.

“Why does WILL believe shutting down this school would be illegal?” TMJ4 reporter Ben Jordan asked.

“The U.S. Constitution prohibits what’s called racial balancing which is to try to balance the type of students you have in a district based on their race,” said WILL attorney Dan Lennington.

Lennington sent a letter to the Wauwatosa School District superintendent Tuesday, saying the district, “has ‘no authority…. to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.’”

Curiously, Madison taxpayers funded the expansion of two of its least diverse schools a few years ago: Van Hise elementary and Hamilton Middle.

Kayla Huynh:

Most students at West High School aren’t old enough to vote in November’s election. 

That shouldn’t stop them from learning about the candidates on the ballot, though, said Adah Lambeck, a 17-year-old senior at West High.

Lambeck and students from the high school’s civics club hosted two town halls Monday with candidates running for U.S. Senate, including Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin and Libertarian challenger Phil Anderson.

“I think we achieved our goal, which was to educate the student body about the positions of the different candidates on issues,” Lambeck said following the event at West High’s auditorium. “That way, when they do turn 18, they can make a more informed decision when they’re voting.”

Republican challenger Eric Hovde didn’t attend the event. Campaign spokesman Zach Bannon said “the schedule just didn’t end up working” and Hovde “never confirmed participation.” Hovde sparred with Baldwin Friday in their first and only scheduled debate.

“The students have been working on this for a year,” said Carrie Bohman, a social studies teacher and adviser to the civics club. “I wish Republican candidate Hovde was here, but he opted to cancel on Friday.” 

James Furey:

I really think the composition of the class matters more than the number of students. And of course, if the teacher is empowered to enact consequences, that makes a huge difference. I have more students right now than at any previous point in my career and it’s my (so far) best year ever.

Holden Culotta

Mike Rowe: “We’re dealing with alarming math … For every five tradespeople who retire this year, two will replace them.”

“I got a call a few months ago from a company … building four nuclear-powered subs. They need to hire 100,000 tradespeople in the next nine years. This guy called me and said, ‘Can you help? … Do you know where they are?’

And I said, ‘Yeah, I do, they’re in the eighth grade.’ We have to start now, because we’re racing the math and the math almost never loses.” @mikeroweworks

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Jeremy Wayne Tate:

Somehow the one room school house produced objectively higher educational outcomes for 8th graders 100 years ago than 12th graders today.

They did it with almost no budget, a partial schedule, and no Dep of Education.

Drew Lichtenberg:

How real is this Shakespeare shrinkage? American Theatre magazine, which collects data from more than 500 theaters, publishes a list of the most performed plays each season. In 2023-24, there were 40 productions of Shakespeare’s plays. There were 52 in 2022-23 and 96 in 2018-19. Over the past five years, Shakespeare’s presence on American stages has fallen a staggering 58 percent. At many formerly Shakespeare-only theaters, the production of the Bard’s plays has dropped to as low as less than 20 percent of the repertory.

Why might American theaters be running away from Shakespeare? […]

Over the past 10 years, as American politics and culture have grown more contentious, Shakespeare has become increasingly politicized. In 2017, the Public Theater’s Delacorte production of “Julius Caesar” depicted the assassination of a Donald Trump-like Caesar. The production elicited protests from Trump supporters, and corporate sponsors pulled their funding. Shakespeare is also under assault from the progressive left. In July 2020, the theater activist collective “We See You, White American Theater” turned the industry upside down with demands for a “bare minimum of 50 percent BIPOC representation in programming and personnel,” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color. Though Shakespeare’s name went unmentioned, his work remained the white, male, European elephant in the room. […]

Wisconsin Legislative Council:

This memo summarizes the proposals raised by members during the first four meetings of the Study
Committee on the Future of the University of Wisconsin (UW) System or submitted by members
directly to Chair Nedweski or Legislative Council staff. This memo is intended to guide committee
discussion during the October 24, 2024 meeting and help the committee determine recommendations it
would like to make to the Joint Legislative Council.
Proposed Recommendation #1: Separate UW-Madison From UW System

Raised by: Several Committee Members
Several committee members propose to separate governance and funding of UW-Madison from the
governance and funding of the other 12 UW campuses. The proposals envision creating a new Board of Regents to oversee UW-Madison and maintaining a separate Board of Regents to oversee the other comprehensive universities. The proposals also envision creating a new state appropriation to provide general purpose revenue (GPR) funding specific to UW-Madison, and maintaining or increasing a separate GPR appropriation for the other comprehensive universities in the UW System.
Individual members propose varying details relating to the separation, such as creation of UW-Madison
as an authority rather than a state agency, a requirement that UW System headquarters be located outside of Madison, and a guaranteed GPR funding percentage increase for both UW-Madison and the separated UW System each biennium.
Proposed Recommendation #2: Cr

Meanwhile, k-12…..

Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker

The British are coming, to meddle in our elections!

In an explosive leak with ramifications for the upcoming U.S. presidential election, internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate—whose founder is British political operative Morgan McSweeney, now advising the Kamala Harris campaign—show the group plans in writing to “kill Musk’s Twitter” while strengthening ties with the Biden/Harris administration and Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced multiple bills to regulate online “misinformation.”

Senator Klobuchar’s office did not respond to request for comment.

Collingwood:

A bombshell report, by renowned investigative reporter @mtaibbi and former US Senate investigator @thackerpd, could have serious political and diplomatic ramifications for the UK. This thread explains why, and lists the questions that must be asked of the government.

Politics UK:

BREAKING: Donald Trump has filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against ‘far-left’ Labour helping the Kamala Harris campaign for ‘illegal foreign campaign contributions’ and ‘interference in our elections’

Mike Benz:

CCDH — whose explicit written goal is to “Kill Musk’s Twitter” — not only has its Chairman come from NATO’s Atlantic Council, its former Comms chief was a CIA operative who worked extensively in NATO intelligence ops.

Thats where this is coming from, folks

Network Effects:

Countering “hate” or “disinformation” is not a side-show or small-scale political tactic, it is a key pathway to take and manage power today. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s founder Morgan McSweeney is Kier Starmer’s Chief of Staff.

Quinton Klabon:

ACT 20 READING UPDATE

• 38% of districts did not reply to DPI’s legal obligation to report teacher reading retraining progress (LETRS)
• of 62%, ~10% of administrators, ~15% of teachers had not begun
• boards responsible for July 2025 deadline, law needs 2026 check for missers

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Abbey Machtig:

Student/adult ratio for the school construction projects included in the referendum:

Orchard Ridge 3.92

Toki Middle School: 4.84

Gompers Elementary: 4.56

Black Hawk Middle: 4.24

Anana Elementary: 4.5

Crestwood elementary: 4.78

Sherman Middle: 4.0

Shabazz City High: 4.0

Cherokee Middle: 4.96

Sennett Middle: 4.64

Notes and links on the Fall 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Don King:

“I don’t like the government following my every movement and treating me like a criminal suspect, when they have no reason to believe I’ve done anything wrong,” said Lee, a 42-year-old Norfolk husband and father who recently retired from the Navy.  

“My work requires me to drive around Norfolk very often, and it’s incredibly disturbing to know the city can track my every move during that time,” said Crystal, a 44-year-old home health care worker who lives in Portsmouth. 

In 2023, Norfolk Police partnered with a company called Flock Safety, Inc. to install 172 automatic license plate reading cameras across town. The cameras were strategically placed to create what Norfolk Police Chief Mark Talbot referred to as a “nice curtain of technology,” which would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.”  

Rachel Alexander:

Progressive activists are warning conservative election attorneys to avoid getting involved in litigation over the 2024 election or they will have their jobs threatened, will be targeted for disbarment, and even prosecuted. Many attorneys who assisted with litigation over the disputed 2020 presidential election, such as Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman, underwent disciplinary proceedings and prosecution.

The New York Times published an op-ed a few days ago by law professor Kate Shaw (pictured above, left) warning attorneys not to represent Trump in election litigation. She said, “Lawyers cannot, consistent with their ethical obligations, participate in devising litigation that is retrofitted to support the position Mr. Trump seems to hold — that the only ‘real’ Americans are those who cast their ballots for him and that those who vote against him are by definition engaging in fraud.”

She provided instructions on how to punish these attorneys. “Attorneys at prominent law firms should already know that they cannot defensibly assist in Mr. Trump’s specious efforts. If they waver, their corporate clients should make clear they do not want their attorneys associating with a candidate who has already told us he will not respect the will of the voters if they do not choose him.”

Marc Elias, the controversial election fraud denying progressive election attorney who intervenes in election lawsuits and files bar complaints against conservative election attorneys, posted the article on X, calling it a “must read.”

More.

Glenn Greenwald:

A long-time senior Israeli government official and Netanyahu/Liduk adviser, Jordana Cutler, is now the chief of Facebook’s US censorship unit on Israel and Palestine.

She repeatedly and aggressively uses that position to demand censorship of Israel critics:

Joanne Jacobs:

Hoping to be “innovative,” schools have added digital devices — tablets, Chromebooks, iPads and so on — without a clear idea of how to use them or any reason to believe students will learn more, writes Amy Tyson on After Babel.

A former child therapist and the mother of four children, Tyson is a co-founder of Everyschool, which promotes the limited use of technology only if it’s superior to traditional methods.

“Teachers are pressured to use devices and apps because districts have invested millions in technology,” she writes. Students spend more and more time on screens.

Helen Warren:

It is high summer in the English suburbs, and the hedges around Josh’s house are cut sharp as a Lego brick. He has mown the grass to an exacting stripe and is clipping the ragged bay tree. Josh, who is 13, has few friends and spends his school holidays gardening. From inside the house, his parents watch him work, stranded between pride and despair.

For the past two years, Josh’s teachers have complained of “persistent poor behaviour”, ranging from making inappropriate comments to hitting a fellow pupil who had been taunting him. An educational psychologist concluded that Josh had autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but recommended his parents, Mike and Sarah, seek a formal NHS diagnosis. In the meantime, the school continued to sanction Josh for small infractions — forgetting his pencil or kicking a chair. His parents pointed out repeatedly that his suspected autism led him to be forgetful, lose focus and lash out when confronted. Teachers countered that his condition did not excuse his conduct.

The situation escalated during a PE lesson in June, when a teaching assistant reported that Josh had shouted, “Get them out! Reform UK” at a non-white pupil, apparently referencing the populist political party, which takes a hard line on immigration. Josh disputed having mentioned “Reform UK” and said that “get them out” was a cricketing reference, as he was bowling at the time. He was given detention, during which he wrote a story about three Asian men embarking on an ill-fated adventure to join Isis-K, the Afghan-based Islamist terror group. Their hopes of glory collapse when they are caught by counter-terror police, convicted and sent to prison. The final line reads, “Moral of the story: don’t try and join Isis-K”.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Stahl falsely claimed the laptop “can’t be verified.” She further incorrectly asserted, “So this story about Hunter and his laptop, some repair shop found it; the source is Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.” The New York Post, in fact, reported the story. The FBI did not deny it.

Yet old Twitter and Facebook, under collaborating FBI tutelage and pressure, suppressed dissemination of the truth. Joe Biden’s then-advisor and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in conjunction with former interim CIA Director Michael Morrel, helped round up “51 former intelligence authorities” (among them Leon Panetta and both John Brennan and James Clapper, who had admitted previously of lying under oath to Congress) to claim falsely that the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian information gambit to warp the election.

Joe Biden used the “expert” consensus to further lie in the last Biden-Trump debate that the laptop was cooked up by the Russians. And neither CBS, the “intelligence authorities,” nor any of the Bidens have ever since apologized.

More recently, CBS got caught selectively editing the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, cutting and pasting an incoherent Harris response to lessen her embarrassing word salad. And in a subsequent interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the network once again edited and pruned his answers, but in contrast, on this occasion, to make him seem far less persuasive.

In yet another current CBS interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, network host Tony Dokoupil honestly questioned Coates about his new, one-sided, anti-Israeli book The Message. The result was that the left-wing icon Coates was almost immediately revealed to be abjectly ignorant of the Middle East, unapologetically biased, and completely uninterested in any viewpoint other than his own partisan prejudices.

Mel Westbrook:

I reviewed the upcoming Seattle Schools capital levy (BEX VI) which sits at $1.8B. They aren’t even TRYING to hide using more capital dollars for operations. 90% of the Tech department’s funding now comes from this levy (and that’s up 10%). bit.ly/3BTfYYu

Austin Berg:

🔻“This is what it looks like when you burn a district down,’ said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “It is a level of dysfunction that feels beyond destabilizing, enough to make people lose confidence in the system.’”

🔻Soon after the federal government approved a historic $190 billion in covid relief funds for schools, experts warned school districts across the country that it would be risky to use the one-time funding for ongoing expenses…Chicago used its whopping $2.8 billion allocation, which it was required to spend by September 2024, to add nearly 8,000 positions to its workforce, budget documents show.

🔻The district has resisted even modest staff reductions, but also had no clear plan for how to maintain that payroll once the covid relief money was gone. It also has promised not to close any schools, although enrollment in the district has fallen significantly over the past two decades.

🔻Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher who is closely aligned with the Chicago Teachers Union, says he won’t tolerate cuts to the schools staff, which he refers to as laying off “Brown and Black women…” the mayor has pressured the schools to consider a high-interest, short-term $300 million loan that some call irresponsible, because it shifts the problem to next year and adds interest.

More, from the Bezos’ Washington Post.