“Our students have a right to public education… That right should not be conditioned on the medical decision to receive a vaccine created last year for a disease that is not life-threatening for the overwhelming majority of children.” – Board approved letter from @clovisusd. pic.twitter.com/J4wcM4WYB0

— Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) December 11, 2021

Michelle Fulcher:

The emergency is over,’ according to Governor Jared Polis, who explained on Colorado Matters on Friday that vaccines have changed the COVID-19 landscape, rendering masks useful but not required in the state’s fight against the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, Colorado continues to see a rise in hospitalizations and deaths among unvaccinated patients. With the state’s healthcare system overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients and staffing shortages, public health officials are worried another surge of infections may overwhelm already overworked hospitals and medical staff. And the emergence of the omicron variant in the state has introduced more uncertainty into the fight against the pandemic.

The Governor spoke about why he favors vaccination over mask mandates, despite many metro counties having implemented their own mandates to help control the spread of the virus. “Public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job,” the Governor said.

Meanwhile, Dane County / Madison continues to operate under “mandates” that have not been voted on by elected officials.

James Walsh:

Now we’re at this point where we may have the highly infectious Delta, which surely is causing very serious illness and deaths, up against one that is likely much more infectious and transmissible, and at the same time all of our early evidence suggests it may cause much less severe illness.

Sumantra Maitra:

So, what are Rufo’s theory and strategy? In the most important parts of the speech, Rufo discussed what he thought was “the Achilles heel of this cultural revolution”:

Critical theory… is entirely a creature of the state. It was born, and nurtured, and raised within publicly financed and publicly subsidized universities and it now survives only in this vast constellation of publicly supported and publicly subsidized bureaucracy; It also gives us a tremendous opportunity because what the public giveth the public can take [ ] away… We should never fight directly. It’s very hard. We should fight indirectly, in a more sophisticated way, to start slowly chipping away at these bureaucracies and institutional powers.

Rufo may be the most intellectually coherent and theoretically sound activist in the right to right of center, since perhaps Phyllis Schafly. And one can be thoroughly curious to find out that his strategy verges on a mix of libertarianism with political reaction—a sort of libertarianism that seeks to further reactionary aims. Perhaps that is why he constantly refers to his strategy as “counterrevolution,” and not “reaction,” as reaction might have a negative connotation in American politics.

Consider his strategy for freeing the country’s institutions—including higher education—from the pernicious ideology of critical theory. First, he argues that the right should “cripple the critical ideologies within the federal agencies through executive order; defund the left by blocking, delaying, and stalling federal grants that support the critical ideologies in universities, schools, and nonprofits; force all agencies to run any identity-based programs through OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] and strangle them in red tape.”

The fundamental aim would be to disrupt any federal financing of the cultural revolution for four or eight years, during which time Congress could pursue a longer-term strategy to destroy centralization. However one may wish to label this strategy, it is not “reactionary;” reactionary policies, tend to heavily focus on wielding state power. And Rufo’s goal is to take away the federal government’s power, not transfer it to another political party.

Member (and former President) of the SF school board thinks merit-based admissions are “segregationist”.

Meanwhile her kids go to a special magnet school for children gifted in the arts.

Utter hypocrisy. https://t.co/k6L2OwJg9E

— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) December 9, 2021

Ann Althouse:

“There are a bunch of comments on the Internet about how, ‘Oh, these girls are just letting this happen. They should just boycott or protest.’ At the end of the day, it’s an individual sport. If we protest it, we’re only hurting ourselves because we’re going to miss out on all that we’ve been working for.” 

Women, being fake? That’s an old sexist stereotype — female guile and deceit. 

And speaking of old patterns… feminism always steps back politely and allows others to go first. Young girls get the message: Don’t be mean. No one will love you if you are mean. 

ADDED: Surely, Lia Thomas has read this news — the news that these teammates are 2-faced, fake friends. Here’s a test of femaleness, just a thought experiment, not a real, proposed test: Did Thomas break down and cry? Did Thomas confront the teammates in an emotional outburst?: How could you treat me this way? Lying to my face! I thought you were my friends!

Aaron Garth Smith:

Preliminary data on the 2019-2020 school year released by the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that the state of New York now spends more than $30,000 per K-12 student, further entrenching its position as the most expensive public education system in the country. Despite this new public school spending milestone, falling enrollment and dissatisfied parents indicate education dollars aren’t doing enough to help kids.

All told, New York spends $30,772 per student each year. This number doesn’t account for recent influxes of cash including $13 billion in federal COVID-19 pandemic relief and $3 billion in state dollars for last school year that taxpayers are footing the bill for. New York City schools will get roughly half of this total windfall, amounting to billions in additional funding for the embattled school district.

For perspective, this means that a typical classroom of 20 students costs New York taxpayers $615,000 each year. Yet, some still claim public education isn’t adequately funded and that high-performing charter schools like Success Academy drain funding from public schools.

Boaz Barak, Edith Cohen, Adrian Mims and Jelani Nelson:

We write to express our alarm over recent trends in K-12 mathematics education in the United States. All of us have first-hand experience of the role that clear mathematical thinking has played in advancing information technology and American economic competitiveness. We all also share the urgent concern that the benefits of a robust mathematical education, and the career opportunities it opens up, should be shared more widely between students of all backgrounds, regardless of race, gender, and economic status. We fully agree that mathematics education “should not be a gatekeeper but a launchpad.”

However, we are deeply concerned about the unintended consequences of recent well-intentioned approaches to reform mathematics education, particularly the California Mathematics Framework (CMF). Such frameworks aim to reduce achievement gaps by limiting the availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers. While such reforms superficially seem “successful” at reducing disparities at the high school level, they are merely “kicking the can” to college. While it is possible to succeed in STEM at college without taking advanced courses in high school, it is more challenging. College students who need to spend their early years taking introductory math courses may require more time to graduate. They may need to give up other opportunities and are more likely to struggle academically. Such a reform would disadvantage K-12 public school students in the United States compared with their international and private-school peers. It may lead to a de facto privatization of advanced mathematics K-12 education and disproportionately harm students with fewer resources.

Aaron Garth Smith:

Preliminary data on the 2019-2020 school year released by the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that the state of New York now spends more than $30,000 per K-12 student, further entrenching its position as the most expensive public education system in the country. Despite this new public school spending milestone, falling enrollment and dissatisfied parents indicate education dollars aren’t doing enough to help kids.

All told, New York spends $30,772 per student each year. This number doesn’t account for recent influxes of cash including $13 billion in federal COVID-19 pandemic relief and $3 billion in state dollars for last school year that taxpayers are footing the bill for. New York City schools will get roughly half of this total windfall, amounting to billions in additional funding for the embattled school district.

For perspective, this means that a typical classroom of 20 students costs New York taxpayers $615,000 each year. Yet, some still claim public education isn’t adequately funded and that high-performing charter schools like Success Academy drain funding from public schools.

K-12 spending will likely rise for the foreseeable future, but this trend is nothing new. A recent analysis by Reason Foundation reveals that between 2002 and 2019, New York’s inflation-adjusted public education revenue skyrocketed by $12,068 per pupil, or 68%. This is by far the highest growth rate in the country.

So where exactly are all of these additional dollars going? Not school choice, since New York does not allow programs such as education savings accounts or tax-credit scholarships that empower families with options outside of public schools. And they’re certainly not spent on New York City’s charter schools, which receive an estimated 19% less per student than traditional public schools, according to a study published by the University of Arkansas.

Madison spends more than most K-12 school districts.

Emily Hamer:

Public Health Madison & Dane County said it believes Dane is the only county in the state to still have a mandate.

Weigand and Rockwell said Public Health should explain what goals need to be met for the mask mandate to be lifted. They’re encouraging residents to share how masking has affected their families, businesses and schools.

“The citizens of Dane County deserve a forum to express their thoughts on this public policy issue,” Weigand and Rockwell said in a statement. “Whether one supports or opposes the mask mandates, the people should have the right to share their thoughts with Dane County’s elected officials.”

WMC Foundation PDF:

When it comes to education funding in Wisconsin, both Republicans and Democrats have made it a priority. The most recent State Budget approved spending $14.2 billion in state tax dollars on K-12 education – roughly 36 percent of the general fund budget.

s spending has continued to climb in recent years, educational outcomes have not. The most recent data available for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides a bleak outlook for students. Only 41 percent of eighth graders and 45 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math in 2019, according to the NAEP tests.50
In reading, 39 percent of eighth graders and 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient.

Looking to the state’s Forward Exams, it appears the COVID-19 pandemic made a bad situation even worse. The Forward Exam tests proficiency for grades 3-8 in Wisconsin.

In the 2016-17 school year, 44.4 percent of students were proficient in English Language Arts. That number has dropped in subsequent years and hit a low of 33.7 percent in 2020-21.51 In math, 42.8 percent of students were proficient in the 2016-17 school year. The number went up and down slightly the next two years, but then dropped significantly to 33.6 percent in 2020-21.

The proficiency problems continue into and past high school. The latest data from the University of Wisconsin-System shows many students are not ready for college. Even though a four-year college degree is pushed as a one-size-fits-all answer for success in this country, Wisconsin schools are not always preparing students for this next step.

According to the UW-System, nearly one in five freshmen were required to take remedial math education in 2017. That number was over 20 percent from 2007 to 2013. In English, 6.3 percent of UW-System freshmen were required to take remedial education, though that number peaked at 9.9 percent in 2012.

s Wisconsin businesses struggle with a growing workforce shortage, poor outcomes in education are a big concern. Throughout the dozens of interviews conducted for Wisconsin 2035, a number of themes developed on how to improve the K-12 education system in the state.

Business leaders urged local school districts to keep the focus on core subjects like reading, writing and math with an added focus on STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – programming. Many, in fact, expressed concerns that subjects outside the core curriculum could be a distraction for students. They also pushed back at the one-size-fits-all approach to students and their potential success. Instead, they argue the curriculum should prepare students best for college OR a career – especially given so many rewarding careers in Wisconsin do not require a four-year degree.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Elizabeth Beyer:

Madison School Board member calls for action on COVID-19 paid time off for teachers, staff

A Madison School Board member is calling for the full board to address a lack of access to COVID-19 sick leave for district teachers and staff during the next board meeting.

As district policy stands, teachers and staff must use paid time off (PTO) and sick leave to cover COVID-related absences, including a required quarantine period if a teacher or staff member is identified as a close contact to a COVID-19 case, board member Nicki Vander Meulen said in an interview Thursday.

Vander Meulen said she sent an email to the full board and district administration six weeks ago asking the board to include the topic in its regular monthly meeting, but nothing came of her request. She re-sent the email in December and asked that the subject be added to the agenda in time for the board’s Dec. 13 meeting.

“One, that’s a safety risk because people can’t afford to miss work,” she said. “Two, it affects our Black, brown and disabled staff because majority of them are either hourly workers or in a position as an hourly worker with less access to time off and less access to sick days.”

Vander Meulen brought the subject up at Monday’s Instruction Work Group meeting and was told by district human resources staff that teachers and staff are using their personal time off to cover COVID-related absences.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Joseph Bernstein:

However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don’t have special access to the fabric of reality.

Abigail Shrier:

Why am I unwilling to back down? Why wouldn’t I prostrate myself before the petulant mobs who insist that my standard journalistic investigation into a medical mystery—specifically, why so many teen girls were suddenly identifying as transgender and clamoring to alter their bodies—makes me a hater? Why on earth would I have chosen to write this book in the first place and am I glad that I wrote it?

You don’t have to be a troll to find yourself in the center of controversy. You need only be two things: effective and unwilling to back down.

If you’re here, you no doubt are familiar with at least some of the unpleasantness you encounter whenever you deviate from the approved script. So, again, what’s it like to be the target of so much hate? It’s freeing. That’s what I’d like to talk about tonight.

As an undergraduate studying philosophy, I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering whether my will was free. This is the metaphysical question of whether anyone can be said to have acted ‘freely.’ And most of the philosophers seemed to agree that our will wasn’t all that free. The hard determinists painted a world in which every human action was ultimately explicable by the wave function of elementary particles, ultimately leading neurons to fire—setting off of axonal conduction well beyond our control and none of which we directed.

The Economist:

Parents seeking government money to send their children to religious schools have won a string of victories at America’s Supreme Court. The dollars began flowing in 2002, when the justices let states provide parents with vouchers for religious schooling. In 2017 the court said states may not exclude church-based preschools from grants for playground resurfacing. And in 2020, in Espinoza v Montana Department of Revenue, parents persuaded the high court that their state must provide tuition assistance for students to attend religious schools if they also offer these funds for secular private schools.

James Freeman:

Since the start of the pandemic, some media folk have continued to insist on making obscene comparisons between the number of Americans who have died with Covid and the number of Americans killed in various wars, as if it’s irrelevant whether one dies at age 80 or age 18. But there is one way in which Covid really is similar to combat. In both cases, aging policy makers demand disproportionate sacrifices from the young. 

Fortunately children age 0 to 17 in the U.S. are always at comparatively low risk of death relative to their elders. When children have died in 2020 and 2021, the website of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in 99% of cases the kids have died from something other than Covid.

Joanne Jacobs:

San Francisco hoped to close achievement gaps by adopting a new, detracked math curriculum that delays algebra till 9th grade, writes Joe Hong on CalMatters. Results are mixed, at best.

California’s proposed new math frameworkrecommends all districts follow San Francisco’s policies, citing the reforms as a success story, writes Hong. It’s complicated.

Fewer students are failing algebra — but the district dropped an end-of-course exam, making it easier to pass.

More students are taking AP statistics in 12th grade, but fewer qualify for AP calculus.

Joselyn Marroquin, a freshman at Lincoln High, is taking algebra and geometry in the same year, so she can take calculus in 12th grade. Her grandfather, who wants her to go to UCLA, paid $850 for her to take algebra in summer school, so she could handle the double load. Many families can’t afford that.

“It has led to even worse inequities and driven them underground,” said Elizabeth Statmore, a math teacher at the district’s Lowell High, the city’s top performing public high school. “People with means started finding other ways to get ahead.”

“Some schools offer a summer geometry course for which low-income students get priority enrollment,” writes Hong. “At other schools, students can take a one-year class that combines Algebra 2 and Precalculus.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Students made far below-average progress in the Honolulu, Las Vegas, Raleigh, Baltimore, and Salt Lake City metro areas, as well as Scranton, Harrisburg, Ogden (UT), Portland (ME), Tulsa and Knoxville, the analysis concluded.

In addition to academic growth, SLAM looks at growth for disadvantaged students, improvement in achievement over time and high school graduation rates. Viewers can go to the interactive site and give more weight to other factors. Do you think graduation rate should be more heavily weighted? Progress for lower-income students? Change the weighting and see the results.

Eduwonk:

Denis Doyle has passed. I didn’t know him really well but was fortunate enough to cross paths from time to time around various things. He was early to the leverage that data provided in education and built, with others, a company around that – Schoolnet. A few things stand out. First, his mind. You run into smart people in this sector all the time, and then you run into *smart* people in this sector. He was the latter. A real intellect, polymath, and curious person. Second, he was funny. He was kind, but he was hilarious. And finally, upon his passing, it was noteworthy the number of people who said things like, “a real mentor to me.” People spend a lot of time worrying about impact and legacy. People calling you out as a mentor, it seems to me, is impact and legacy.

Kevin Collier:

China-based propagandists created an elaborate online disinformation campaign this year centered on an internet persona claiming to be a Swiss biologist to mislead the public about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, Facebook researchers said Wednesday.

Going by the name Dr. Wilson Edwards, the persona wrote on Facebook that the U.S. was putting undue political pressure on the World Health Organization to blame China for the coronavirus. But Edwards isn’t a real person, which Switzerland’s embassy in Beijing made clear in August.

Facebook researchers said they found evidence that the person was the creation of a Chinese cybersecurity company.

Although the character got little attention in the West, he was credulously cited in Chinese state-sponsored media as a whistleblower on world health policy.

Facebook said it had traced that account’s creation to Sichuan Silence Information Technology, a company in central China. According to its website, Silence was founded in 2000 and offers a wide range of information security services — and it counts China’s Ministry of Public Security among its customers. An inquiry sent to an email address on the company’s website bounced back as undeliverable. 

A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in an email that “China has shown a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude from the very beginning” in global efforts to research the origins of Covid-19, but did not address specifics about the Facebook account.

Chris Rickert:

The mother of the victim, identified only as “Erin” in the WMTV-TV news report, said the school did not call police about the attack. LeMonds said that was accurate but that the school called the victim’s parents, who came to the school and called police themselves. He said the school would have called police if the parents hadn’t.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Rebecca Diamond and Enrico Moretti

Low-income families who live in the most affordable commuting zone enjoy a level of market-based consumption measured in real terms that is 74% higher that of families with the same income who live in the least affordable commuting zone.
We estimate that the elasticity of overall market consumption with respect

Justin Haskins:

Based on tax data from 2017 and 2018, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced taxes for the vast majority of filers, led to substantial improvements in upward economic mobility, and disproportionately benefited working- and middle-class households, many of which experienced tax cuts topping 18 percent to 20 percent.

William Briggs:

This is update CIX.

Let’s summarize, shall we?

My first post on the panic was 27 January 2020: “Taleb Chastises Calm Journalist, Advises Precautionary Panic To Coronavirus“. Taleb almost at once became a shrinking, shrieking hersteric. Which I should have, but did not see, would have become the default position among Experts and rulers almost planetwide.

My second post was on 3 February 2020: “Unnecessary Panic Over Coronavirus?” Note the question mark, which left room for uncertainty, which at that time still existed. Health theater had already begun, and was laughable even then.

There was lots of uncertainty at the start. Would this bug stay in China, have just one wave, and so on. Many on our side bought the Chinese propaganda and panicked, and became just as hersterical as Taleb. This was exasperating. Our own Moldbug said, “In the next few months, you or someone you love will drown of a cough.” (He’s still at it, by the way.)

The word “exponential” was on everybody’s fingertips. Twitter became idiotic, with those on the right advocating panic, and those on the left screaming racism. 

This was just silly, so, for fun and instruction only, since I did not guess the size of the resulting panic, I posted on 13 February 2020 some R code I had been using to post projections on Twitter. This became Update I. This used only the data available at the time, and common models on pandemics. Exponential forever was impossible, but you could hardly get anybody to understand that.

I had no sense the entire world would retreat toward effeminacy, and so didn’t take these models seriously. Except to smack those who kept screaming doom. Even as early as February people thought this is the end. There were “sober” predictions of billions-with-a-B dead.

By 3 March, and Update III, we had Blue Cheka warning about farts. That update also showed what happened seasonally with flu, including the season leading into the Hong Kong fly pandemic of 1968.

We pointed out that there were many other pandemics, like the Asian Flu in 1957 and the Hong Kong, and others, which were much deadlier, and with no panics. Back then, the CDC had these historical events on their web page, saying each killed “up to four million” globally. They’ve since removed the “up to”. You have to laugh.

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health.

Open Record:

It’s a FOX6 investigation that sparked change before it even went to air. Thousands of tax dollars poured into a school program — but was it for the kids or a school leader’s relationship? In this episode of Open Record, FOX6 Investigator Amanda St. Hilaire explains how she came upon AVID and the Wauwatosa School District. Amanda breaks down what AVID is and why a seemingly conflict of interest raised red flags. You’ll hear how the district responded, what the school board is doing about the issue, and what prompted Amanda to show up at a recent school board meeting

Florian Sohnke:

In Chicago, those days are long gone and the latest example of the lack of academic standards in Chicago’s hopelessly failing public schools is unfolding now at Steinmetz College Prep. Steinmetz has adopted a “zero grade” policy.

Located in Chicago’s Northwest Side Belmont Cragin neighborhood, the principal at Steinmetz is Mr. Jaime Jaramillo. A man with close to two decades in education, Jaramillo has served as principal at Steinmetz for three-and-a-half years. Over this time period, Steinmetz has seen little improvement in overall achievement scores so it is surprising Jaramillo would support a policy which lowers expectations for students.

Trotted out in front of the Steinmetz Local School Council in September, Jaramillo glibly explained the change was inspired by COVID realities, the necessity to accommodate students’ “challenges and circumstances,” and the desire to achieve “equity.”

Prior to “equity grading,” student grades existed on a 100-point scale, with A, B, C, and D 10-points apart. Grades beneath 59 were deemed failing, and those students who failed to turn in assignments altogether would receive a zero until the assignment was completed for partial credit.

Under Jaramillo’s new “equity” grading” system, students who fail to turn in an assigned tasks will receive a minimum grade of 45 percent; those who undertake a reasonable attempt would automatically receive a minimum grade of 50.

Just out today: @OhioState has a small army of 132 “diversicrats” at an avg. salary of $77,000 and total est. payroll cost of $13.4M, which would cover in-state tuition for 1,120 students https://t.co/C80vP05kvJ @jennsmola @CollegeFix @FreemanWSJ @stevenfhayward @charliekirk11 pic.twitter.com/piuXgBy4Rv

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) December 6, 2021

Media corporations meeting in secret with WH officials to discuss how to present a more optimistic view of Biden’s economic policies seems to me to be a bit like . . . . . . state TV.

But I’m glad (and unsurprised) to hear from CNN that the “conversations have been productive.” https://t.co/l9fsiV4ph6

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 7, 2021

Kelly Meyerhofer:

UW-Madison, other UW campuses want test-optional admissions extended 2 more years

The standardized test, a well-established college admissions requirement dreaded by many high school students, could be considered optional for another two years at all University of Wisconsin System campuses.

System officials are asking the UW Board of Regents this week to extend the current test-optional policy through the 2024-25 school year. The policy was implemented just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic when many students were unable to take the test because of extremely limited testing site availability.

Eric Kelderman:

The legacy of legendary academic prankster Alan Sokal lives on. In April 1996, the journal Social Text published an article by Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, that he later revealed to be entirely a joke.

His article was lauded by conservative critics of higher education for its sendup of the progressive political views taking hold in academe. It also raised a host of deep questions about not only the direction of scholarly inquiry but also the integrity of the peer review process.

AWF Edwards:

But now the college Fisher loved has turned its back on him. It has removed from the Hall a stained-glass window commemorating him, one of a set of six installed to celebrate him, Crick, Venn, Chadwick and two other distinguished college figures, Sir Charles Sherrington and George Green. It has done so because of accusations that Fisher was a proponent of eugenics.

The college council stated its intentions last June:

Sir Ronald Fisher was a student, Fellow and President of Caius. His contribution to science, through his work on statistics and genetics, was fundamental to fields as wide ranging as clinical trials in medicine through to increased production in agriculture. However, while Fisher was at Cambridge [as a student] he became the founding chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society and his interest in eugenics stimulated his interest in both statistics and genetics. He was a prominent proponent of eugenics, both in his scientific work and his public pronouncements throughout his career.

Fisher was the inspiration for the whole set of the six windows in Hall. His was the first to be suggested. The chosen design — the Latin Square from the dust-jacket of his book The Design of Experiments — set the tone for the rest. In particular, with this pattern in the lower window of an embrasure there was a need for something compatible in the upper window. The choice was not difficult: the three-circle logic diagram of John Venn, one of Fisher’s predecessors as President. These two windows were installed in time for the celebration of the centenary in 1990 of Fisher’s birth. They were much admired, and pressure for a further four soon mounted. The whole set was the work of Maria McClafferty, chosen on the strength of her rose window in Alexandra Palace, London.

After School Alliance:

Student-centered, active, and engaging learning experiences that build on young people’s interests, while developing their skills and knowledge, are
at the heart of high-quality afterschool programs. Young people of all ages can benefit from these experiences, however, there is increasing attention
on adolescence as a critical time for exposure to these types of learning opportunities. In addition to a period during which significant neurobiological and social and emotional growth occurs,1 adolescence is a time when young people discover their interests and passions as they begin on their path toward adulthood. Creating new and engaging learning opportunities for middle and high school students can help them find their inspiration, gain skills that will benefit them in and outside of the classroom, and play an active role in designing their own learning journey to reach their full potential.

Afterschool programs can provide older youth with opportunities to explore their interests and participate in activities that also allow them to earn credits toward their graduation requirements. These credit-for-learning opportunities can cover a wide range of content—from students earning physical education credits through a local YMCA to taking part in a boat-building course
for elective math or science credit. Credit-for-learning programs are a valuable resource to provide unique, challenging, and compelling learning opportunities that individualize knowledge acquisition and complement school day lessons for middle and high school youth.

“Expanded Learning Opportunities (ELOs)— our credit-for-learning programs—allow students to bring their full identities into school, for a unique, personalized learning experience. As students progress through their education, they become curious and develop interests. ELOs provide students with the opportunity to pursue interests both inside and outside the school setting that often evolve into career pathway goals after graduation.”

Wall Street Journal:

The last few years have seen a proliferation of “open letters” by academics in politics and the humanities in favor of progressive causes. The hard sciences are different, and when mathematicians, physicists and engineers speak up to defend the integrity of their fields, Americans should pay attention.

The latest example is a new public statement from hundreds of the country’s top quantitative scientists warning about the assault on math in schools. “We write to express our alarm over recent trends in K-12 mathematics education in the United States,” the statement begins. The social-justice wave of 2020 accelerated efforts to eliminate standardized testing and lower standards in math to give the appearance that achievement gaps don’t exist.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Aaron Ter:

Discrimination. Censorship. Elizabethtown College is quickly gaining a reputation for disregarding student rights. FIRE recently covered the college’s hosting of a racially segregated event. Now add to the college’s missteps its refusal to approve a student group’s guest speaker because of the speaker’s political views.

On Oct. 5, FIRE wrote privately to Etown, calling on the college to recommit to its strong promises of free expression after it notified the campus chapter of a student organization, Turning Point USA, that it could not host conservative political commentator Joe Basrawi. 

The college ignored our letter, just as it remained silent when we called out its decision to endorse racial segregation. If Etown won’t defend its actions to FIRE, the college at least owes its student body and the public an explanation for why it continues to trample on the rights it promises — or that it is required by federal law to respect, as in the case of nondiscrimination on the basis of race — to its students.

Alex Nester:

A top Democratic economist says the rise of “antiracist” math curricula is a national security threat.

Larry Summers, a Harvard economist who led the National Economic Council under former president Barack Obama, shared a letter on Monday signed by almost 600 academics that condemns the rise of woke math initiatives in K-12 schools. The letter says the initiatives have devalued foundational math courses such as algebra and limited advanced math courses “to reduce achievement gaps.” Summers calledrigorous math instruction “an economic and a national security imperative,” noting that “in China, math standards are not subject to continued erosion by social justice warriors who can’t themselves define exponential growth or solve quadratic equations.”

Radical education activists want to purge math curricula of allegedly racist practices, which include showing your work and arriving at the right answer. Democratic donors have played a role in propagating this now-popular trend in math education, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation bankrolled A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, the nonprofit behind a curriculum that asks teachers to observe how math “is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

Proponents of “antiracist” curricula often push to eliminate advanced math classes in order to reduce achievement gaps for underprivileged students. The coalition behind the open letter, k12mathmatters, says this misguided approach diminishes “access to skills needed for social mobility.”

Haze Fan, a member of Bloomberg’s Beijing bureau, is still detained in China one year on, with no information forthcoming on her case https://t.co/xMu32Rk1sV via @bpolitics

— Rosalind Mathieson (@RosMathieson) December 7, 2021

Pew Research:

That framing is dramatically different from the coverage of the first few months of the Trump administration four years earlier. Then, 74% of all stories were oriented around his character and leadership, compared with only about one-quarter (26%) framed around his ideology and policy agenda. Another significant difference in their coverage is that while the negative Biden stories modestly outnumbered the positive ones, negative stories about Trump exceeded positive ones by four-to-one.

One new element of this year’s study – in Part 2 of this report – is a survey component that measures Americans’ exposure to and sense of news coverage during this early time period, how that differs by media diet, and how it compares with the analysis of media content in Part 1. For example, while the topic of the economy was covered most heavily by outlets with a left-leaning audience, a large majority of Americans, regardless of their media diet, report hearing a lot about the passage of the economic stimulus bill in the news. At the same time, the public’s sense of news coverage of the Biden administration is more positive than the study of the news coverage reveals: 46% of U.S. adults say that the early coverage they’ve seen about the Biden administration offered mostly positive assessments, far more than the 14% who say they’ve seen mostly negative ones.

Kaylee McGhee:

Conservatives must make education a policy priority — not only because it will help us win elections, as we saw in Virginia last month, but because education lays the very foundation for this movement and what it’s trying to do, which is to preserve the principles that founded this nation and the documents in which they are described.

A coalition of conservatives published a strategy this week that will help us do just that. Led by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and the Heritage Foundation, the signatories laid out a three-pronged plan: First, state legislators need to pass legislation that rejects the toxic racialism found in critical race theory. Second, the states must increase transparency regarding the curricula taught in public schools so that parents can be as involved as possible. And third, lawmakers need to expand school choice and give parents the power to pull their children out of the public school system if that’s what they would prefer.

Scott Girard

McFarland School District students considered close contacts of a person who tests positive for COVID-19 are no longer required to quarantine.

The School Board unanimously approved the change to COVID-19 protocols Monday. For most schools in Dane County, students who are considered close contacts and are unvaccinated are required to quarantine for 14 days from exposure or receive a test one week after exposure to allow them to return a few days earlier.

In a letter to Dane County school superintendents last month, Public Health Madison & Dane County director Janel Heinrich encouraged districts to continue quarantine practices.

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health.

Wei Shan and Juan Chen:

On the internet, one may get the impression that the Chinese youth is increasingly nationalistic and hostile towards the West. But this is an oversimplification. Multiple national sample surveys find that Chinese youth are adopting Westernised values, with a greater preference for individualism and self-expression, and are less nationalistic. Yet, they are far from embracing Western democracy, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the recent Tokyo Olympics, Chinese netizens — many of whom belong to the post-1990s/2000s generations — caught international attention when they flooded a Japanese athlete’s social media account with hateful messages after he defeated his Chinese opponent. Likewise, Chinese netizens also rebuked a Taiwanese star who referred to Taiwanese athletes as “national players”. Such cases demonstrate the aggressive nationalistic sentiments of part of the Chinese youth known as the  “Little Pinks”.

To get a full picture of Chinese youths, we examined the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) and World Values Survey (WVS). Both surveys have been conducted in China for over a decade and give insights into generational changes.

Values and political orientation

Perhaps the most striking generational change is that younger generations in China are turning more individualistic. In Confucian culture and Leninist tradition, the state is viewed to be responsible for individuals’ well-being. In turn, individuals are expected to prioritise collective interests over their personal interests.

In the past four decades, however, rapid economic development has transformed Chinese society. The last four waves of the ABS survey, carried out from 2002 to 2015, reveal that the younger generation is more likely to place individual interests before collective interests.

The Public Domain Review:

At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Find here, in this advent-style calendar, our top pick of what lies in store for 2022. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights!

Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain — and here we focus on three of the most prominent. Newly entering the public domain in 2022 will be: works by people who died in 1951, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (e.g. UK, Russia, most of EU and South America); works by people who died in 1971, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia); and works published in 1926 (and all pre-1923 sound recordings), for the United States.

Owen Thompson:

Racial segregation can occur across educational programs or classrooms within a given school, and there has been particular concern that gifted & talented programs may reduce integration within schools. This paper evaluates the contribution of gifted & talented education to racial segregation using data on the presence and racial composition of gifted & talented programs at virtually all US elementary schools over a span of nine school years. I first show that, consistent with widespread perceptions, gifted & talented programs do disproportionately enroll white and Asian students while Black, Hispanic and Native American students are underrepresented. However, I also show that accounting for the within-school racial sorting caused by these programs has little or no effect on standard measures of overall racial segregation. This is primarily because gifted & talented programs are a small share of total enrollments and do enroll non-negligible numbers of under-represented minority students. I also estimate changes in race-specific enrollments after schools initiate or discontinue gifted & talented programs, and find no significant enrollment changes after programs are eliminated or initiated. I conclude that gifted & talented education is a quantitatively small contributor to racial segregation in US elementary schools.

“They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

WILL:

It is still not possible to infer fraud solely from these unlawfully cast votes or failure to maintain voter rolls.

There isn’t much, if any, evidence that these voters did anything intentionally wrong. In many instances, they seem to have relied on the advice of election officials. It is unclear whether, had these ballots been disqualified, the results of the election would have changed. And we do believe that a coordinated effort to exploit the weaknesses created by this failure to follow the law would likely have resulted in some discernible anomaly.

We found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. We found limited instances where ineligible persons voted or attempted to cast ballots. We found no evidence of more than one vote being cast in the name of the same voter. And our analysis of the results and voting patterns does not give rise to an inference of fraud.

We found no evidence of significant problems with voting machines.

Donald Trump won communities that used Dominion voting machines with 57.2%, an increase from 2016. WILL’s review found that jurisdictions that used Dominion voting machines had no effect on the expected vote total.

Kvistad noted that MMSD completed a report similar to this one in 2011, but said it ended up “on a shelf.” This time, she said, the district has “got to do something different,” 

12 Slide Presentation (PDF):

Charge to the Task Force:

1. Reviewing and becoming familiar with the best evidence about the most effective ways to teach literacy in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade – and developing future teachers who can better teach literacy in schools.

2. Identifying how literacy, especially early literacy, is currently taught across MMSD and analyzing achievement data for MMSD students with respect to literacy.

3. Examining how literacy, especially early literacy, is being taught to teacher education students at UW-Madison’s School of Education and analyzing what these future teachers are currently learning about literacy.

4. Making recommendations to MMSD and the UW-Madison School of Education about steps to be taken that can strengthen literacy instruction in the Madison Schools and UW-Madison’s teacher education programs.

2021 Literacy Task Force Report (104 Page PDF):

MMSD’s most recent K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation was released a decade ago and many of the challenges identified in that report persist. The district has worked to provide coherent literacy instruction through adopting curricular approaches, creating professional learning opportunities, utilizing various forms of assessment, and adopting new tools and materials for teachers. An infrastructure was created to support these efforts, which relies heavily on instructional coaches to support teachers as they implement core practices at the school level. Other organizational contexts which contribute to the district’s current state of student literacy outcomes were also reviewed by the Task Force. Finally, it is of note that under the leadership of Dr. Carlton Jenkins, MMSD is using literacy at every level as an equity strategy to ensure all MMSD students receive high-quality, grade level instruction.

The evidence presented in this report paints a relatively consistent picture of literacy outcomes in MMSD. In analyzing the student outcomes across selected student demographic groups some troubling patterns are evident, presented below as three considerations:

Consideration 1. There are stark race and ethnicity differences in students’ outcomes in literacy from early elementary through high school. In particular, Black and Hispanic students’ level of proficiency and college readiness lags behind that of their White and Asian counterparts. Given their share of the population, White students are overrepresented among students who test as both proficient/advanced and college ready.

Consideration 2. As with race/ethnicity, there are also troubling outcome disparities across ELL and non-ELL students, low-income and non-low-income students, and special education and non-special education students that are consistent in each of the years measured.

Consideration 3. The overall patterns of grades 2, 4, 8, and 11 from year-to-year do not show significant increases in proficiency rates, indicating a need to strengthen core instruction for all students and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions.

Scott Girard’s commentary notes:

Kvistad noted that MMSD completed a report similar to this one in 2011, but said it ended up “on a shelf.” This time, she said, the district has “got to do something different,” hoping that the task force group and partnership with UW-Madison will keep everyone involved accountable.

“We could have all stayed in the task force for a really long time talking,” she said. “But we actually have to go to action. And that’s why the charts were in there and the commitment to … the joint partnership.”

Diamond said the “high-level investment” from Jenkins and School of Education dean Diana Hess will help move the recommendations forward.

“Some of the things that are being recommended are enhancements of activities that are already underway, doing things in ways that are more productive, more focused, not necessarily creating things whole cloth,” he said. “And so I think a lot of the foundation is already there.”

More:

‘Recognize reading as a right for all children’

The first of the report’s 28 recommendations calls to “explicitly state and recognize reading as a right for all children.”

The language is reminiscent of a Michigan court case in which seven Detroit students brought a federal court case against the governor claiming that their inadequate education violated their rights under the 14th Amendment.

The report, however, makes clear that it uses the phrase “to describe a moral imperative,” and it “is not meant to be interpreted as a legal statement.”

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Ed Treleven:

An 18-year-old La Follette High School student accused of bringing a loaded gun to the Madison school last week was charged Monday with two gun possession-related charges, and also faces six additional new unrelated criminal cases.

The seven new cases against Marquan Webb, of Madison, brings to 11 the number of criminal cases Webb now faces, charges that include burglary, fraudulent credit card use, identity theft, driving a vehicle without owner’s consent, misappropriating identification, theft, battery, criminal damage to property and criminal trespass.

Three of the cases are misdemeanors, and the rest are felony cases.

The criminal complaint related to the incident at La Follette charged Webb with possession of a firearm on school grounds, possession of a firearm by a person previously adjudged delinquent as a juvenile, resisting police, two counts of felony bail jumping and two counts of misdemeanor bail jumping.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Joanne Jacobs:

Public school enrollment fell 3 percent last year and it’s down again this year in major cities, writes Chad Aldeman, policy director of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab.

Fadumo D. Kahin, right, dressed her family in Highwood Hills Elementary’s school color — orange — to protest the school’s possible closure at an Oct. 28 St. Paul School Board meeting. Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle/Sahan Journal

A few districts are downsizing to match the fall in per-pupil revenue, but federal Covid aid is allowing districts to keep “under-enrolled schools open and fully staffed in the hopes that students come back.” That’s a dangerous gamble.

Beth Hawkins tells a tale of two cities on The 74.

Already losing students before the pandemic, Minneapolis Public Schools’ enrollment fell by more than 12 percent since fall of 2019-20. St. Paul has lost almost 10 percent.

Harold Hutchison:

The lawsuit filed Nov. 17 by two public interest law firms against the Kettle Moraine School District in Wisconsin over the clandestine social transition of a 12-year-old girl marks the latest in a series of cases where school officials allegedly initiated social gender transitions without parental consent.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, one of the public-interest firms suing the Waukesha-area school district, is also involved in litigation against the Madison Metropolitan School District. But one attorney involved in the litigation tells the Daily Caller News Foundation that policies and guidelines that are prompting schools to carry out clandestine transitions are in place across the country.

dailycallerlogo
“[T]his sort of thing is metastasizing like a cancer underneath the surface around the country,” Vernadette Broyles, president and general counsel of the Child and Parent Rights Campaign, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Broyles represents Jeff and January Littlejohn in a lawsuit that alleges that Leon County Schools in Florida began helping their daughter transition without their consent after their daughter experienced gender dysphoria during the spring and summer of 2020.

Mrs. Littlejohn told the DCNF she emailed her daughter’s math teacher, explaining that they “weren’t affirming at home,” but that they “didn’t feel like we could stop our daughter from using a nickname.”

Kevin Rector, Richard Winton:

“The fact that this has happened, her being shot and killed in her own home, after giving, sharing, and caring for 81 years has shaken the laws of the Universe,” declared Oprah Winfrey, expressing her grief over Avant’s killing to her 43 million Twitter followers. “The world is upside down.”

While overall city crime rates remain far below records set during the notorious gang wars of the 1990s, violent crime has jumped sharply in L.A., as it has in other cities. Much of the violence has occurred in poor communities and among vulnerable populations, such as the homeless, and receives little attention. 

However, since the start of the pandemic and more rapidly in recent months, crime has crept up in wealthier enclaves and thrust its way to the center of public discourse in L.A. — against a backdrop of COVID-19 angst, evolving political perceptions of what role police and prosecutors should play in society and, now, a holiday season upon which brick-and-mortar retailers are relying to stay afloat.

Some wonder if this could be a turning point for California, which for decades has been at the center of the movement for criminal justice reform, rolling back tough sentencing laws and reducing prison populations.

Matthew DeFour:

“I’m surprised it’s taken this long to get it, and it’s unfortunate board members have to see it in the news,” former Madison School Board president Gloria Reyes told the Wisconsin State Journal. “We need to be transparent about these issues even if we don’t have all the answers.”

Releasing the report also would have reassured families the district was addressing their concerns transparently and expeditiously. Now the students are suing the district and Kruchten for the psychological damage his actions caused.

Even though the district accidentally released the full report, it continues to deny requests for the same record, as well as a $30,000 third-party review of another hidden camera incident in an East High locker room. The locker room cameras were supposedly put in place to catch a custodian napping on the job, but they were in a location where special needs students changed clothes.

Joel Kotkin:

When we think of oppressive regimes, we immediately think of the Stalinist model portrayed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the heavy-handed thought control associated with Hitler’s Reich or Mao’s China. But where the old propaganda was loud, crude and often lethal, the contemporary style of thought control takes the form of a gentle nudging towards orthodoxy – a gentle push that gradually closes off one’s critical faculties and leads one to comply with gently given directives. Governments around the world, including in the UK, notes the Guardian, have been embracing this approach with growing enthusiasm.

Nudging grew out of research into behavioural economics, and was popularised in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book, Nudge. It now has widespread public supportand has influenced everything from health warnings for cigarettes to calorie counts for fast food. Yet nudging also has an authoritarian edge, employing techniques and technologies that the Gestapo or NKVD could only dream about to promote the ‘right behaviour’. 

Tech firms, both in the US and China, already use messaging nudges to ‘control behaviours’. They use their power to purge their platforms of the wrong messages, as both Facebook and Twitter did when they censored the New York Post’s pre-election story about President Biden’s dissolute son, Hunter. Meanwhile, these same firms blocked the account of Donald Trump, Biden’s admittedly awful predecessor, on the grounds that he was fostering ‘violence’ – and they did so while tolerating open calls for mayhem and killing from leftists and foreign governments.

Free speech is clearly not a high priority in Silicon Valley. ‘Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment’, Twitter’s new head Parag Agrawal said in a November 2020 interview. ‘Our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.’

Sadly, the ability of Agrawal and other oligarchs to shape opinion may only be in its infancy. Nearly half of US adults now get their news through Facebook or Google and for young people social media are even more important. Millennials in both the United States and the UK are almost three times as likely to get their information from these platforms as they are from print, television or radio.

Samuel Veissière and Julius Grey:

In a recent open letter signed by the executives of the Students’ Society of McGill University and seven student associations, a group of students demanded that Philip Carl Salzman be stripped of his emeritus status for publishing views with which they disagreed, and further demanded “an immediate, transparent, and student-centred overhaul of McGill’s Statement of Academic Freedom, enshrining the university’s commitment to inclusivity in teaching and research in policy.”

We agree that inclusivity and diversity in teaching, research, policy, scholarship, communication and knowledge translation are the core, inalienable principles without which free inquiry, open dialogue and the pursuit of truth cannot be carried out. These principles extend far beyond the mission of the university, and define the very fabric of democracy and freedom our societies have attained through long and difficult struggles for civil rights. We note that academics and public intellectuals, through their courage to dissent and question what is taken for granted, have historically played a crucial role in the advancement of such freedoms and civil rights. But we insist that inclusivity must begin with a commitment to a broad diversity of thought, methods, opinions, theoretical interests and political views, as well as an openness to tolerate dissent, disagreements and debate.

Daniel Estevez:

The recordings follow the usual observing cadence of Breakthrough Listen, described in Section 2.1 in this paper. Six scans of 5 minutes each are done. The primary target (in this case Voyager 1) is observed in three of the scans, called ON scans. In the three other scans, called OFF scans, other targets or the empty sky are observed. The ON and OFF scans alternate, starting with an ON scan. The goal of this schedule is to discard as local interference signals that are present both in an ON and OFF scan.

I think that these recordings have not been published yet in the Breakthrough Listen open data archive. I guess they will be published at some point when the data is curated.

The files I used are from compute node BLC23, which processed the data in a 187.5 MHz window around the frequency 8345.21484375 MHz. A total of 24 compute nodes were used in this observation to cover the span between 7501.5 and 11251.5 MHz approximately (a few of the 187.5 MHz windows were duplicated into two nodes).

Good Optics:

A few years ago at a party I was explaining some interpretive debate about Marx to a friend. Marx, I was saying, might have believed A, or he might have believed B, and there is evidence on both sides. My friend objected: what does it matter? Surely we should talk about whether A or B (or neither) is correct, not about which of them a guy from the Rhineland who died almost 150 years ago believed. 

Prima facie, this is a pretty good objection. It is a good objection because a lot of people who study the history of ideas don’t seem to realize that it is an error to believe something merely because someone whom you consider to be wise believed it. 

But I think the history of ideas is worth studying. Some of the reasons for this are pretty complicated (see here and here), but two are simple:

Bismee Taskin:

The Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police has busted a “module” that has allegedly been taking online IT certification exams on behalf of students and professionals aiming to boost their career prospects in IT companies. So far, the police have arrested three people in connection with the money-for-marks scheme.

According to the police, the masterminds of the high-tech cheating racket are a father-and-son duo, Rajesh Kumar Shah and Deep Shah, who run an IT coaching institute in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The two allegedly hired a Delhi-based technical expert, Aklakh Alam, to take the exams remotely for clients.

“We received intel that several services are available on the dark web, in which hackers claim they can get the desired score by hacking into the device used by the examinee,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) K.P.S. Malhotra told ThePrint. Another police source said that the accused charged around Rs 9,000-10,000, and gave exams for about 200 clients.

The caveat that the Feds are placing on 5% of this big pot of money is a big deal. It will be very interesting to see what response there is from Republican legislative leaders. https://t.co/Kt7Dfy48TZ

— Alan Borsuk (@alanjborsuk) December 6, 2021

Richard Phelps:

Given the enormity of the public and private investment in US higher education, of course we should evaluate its effectiveness. But, how?

It is claimed that over 200 higher education institutions administer the one-size-fits-all Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). When administered pre-post—that is, near the beginning and then again near the end of a student’s program—the difference in scores on equivalent forms of the same test (i.e., the “gain score”) represents how much students have learned in that program. Or does it?

Everyone knows that any one test cannot be valid in all contexts. Administering an advanced calculus exam to kindergarteners would not tell us much, for example, nor would administering it as a college exit exam for art majors. College students study a wide variety of topics.

According to the CLA’s owner, the Council for Aid to Education (CAE),

One of the unique features of CLA+ is that no prior knowledge of any specific content area is necessary in order to perform well on the assessment.

Given that much of a student’s time in college is devoted to accumulating knowledge of specific content, this seems problematic. And according to cognitive scientists, it is. “Higher-order” skills, such as lateral thinking and experimentation, depend on the accumulation of a critical mass of knowledge. Content-free or generic skills do not exist.

If not from cognitive scientists, then, where does the belief in generic skills come from? Ed schools. The cynic in me wants to classify this as another attempt by US educators to hide from meaningful measurement. One of them might say, however, that factual content is readily available just a mouse click away on the internet. Such is true, but only in isolated, disaggregated forms.

Look beyond the college promotional froth about building better citizens, molding character, and teaching “higher-order skills,” such as “reasoning, critical reading and evaluation, and critique.” One will find remaining the more measurable and unfairly derogated benefit of “recall of factual knowledge,” which the CLA eschews.

Emily Hamer:

Janeway said they were “very ignited by” the posts. Janeway wants to protect trans children, including the third- and fourth-graders that they teach in two Madison schools through a UW-Madison arts program called Whoopensocker.

“I go back to school on Tuesday and on Thursday, and I will be face to face with kids who use they/them pronouns,” Janeway said. “I have nothing but an urge and an inspiration to stand up for them.”

Janeway is a prominent activist who used to go by Andi, but recently changed their first name to Shepherd.

Walters, 55, is a mother of three who has experience teaching photography and art, including a program for children at risk. She ran for lieutenant governor in 2014 as a Democrat. She said safety in schools is her biggest priority.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Christopher F. RufoJames R. CoplandJohn Ketcham;

The purpose of this policy document is to ensure public transparency in schools’ instructional, training, and learning materials; and to give parents and students reasonable access to review such materials.
SECTION 2. TRANSPARENCY IN TRAINING AND CURRICULUM
A. The governing body of a public school, including public charter schools, shall ensure that the following information is displayed on the school website in an easily accessible location:

Tutanota:

As “amazingly specific” judges the German news magazine Die Zeit the coalition plan for a ‘right to encryption’.

Consequently, the coalition agreement was met with great approval, especially among net activists. The website Netzpolitik.org sees “many good and exciting promises,” but it is now a matter of implementation. And members of the Chaos Computer Club point out the great similarities between the new coalition paper and a formulation aid from the hacker association.

Taken together, the coaliation agreement signals a change in politics in Berlin. The former government led by the conversatives CDU/CSU repeatedly pushed for more surveillance, but fortunately, the new one plans to take a different road.

Rebecca Smith and Andrea Fuller:

Professional degrees like dentistry and veterinary medicine are leaving many students with immense college debt, threatening the outlook for fields that provide essential public services, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data.

Sara Jastrebski finished her veterinary studies at the University of Pennsylvania in May with about $400,000 in student debt, including more than $30,000 in loans from prior studies elsewhere.

Now working as an associate veterinarian for about $100,000 a year, Dr. Jastrebski, 29 years old, said she loves being a vet but is haunted by the tremendous cost of her education. “It doesn’t dominate my thoughts, but it’s always there,” she said.

In addition to programs for veterinarians and dentists, chiropractic medicine, physical therapy and optometry produced graduates with some of the worst combinations of high debt and modest beginning paychecks, according to newly released data from the U.S. Department of Education.

Students pursuing professional programs can take out loans to cover all their school costs and living expenses under a federal loan program called Grad Plus.

David Blaska:

Yet students of color continue to be disproportionately disciplined. “The simple fact is this: black boys do commit more violent offenses in public schools than other kids,” acknowledges John McWhorter, in his book Woke Racism.

You want “equity”? According to MMSD data from 2017-18, 59% of disciplinary actions were taken against boys, even though they account for 49% of enrollment. To play their game: Why are Madison schools biased against boys? Professor McWhorter, himself black, argues:

To insist that bigotry is the only possible reason for suspending more black boys than white boys, is to espouse harming black students [who are left] not only improperly educated but beaten up.

Trouble at school? School district teachers and staff must navigate a 111-page school safety plan. Its flow chart is no help; it’s a bewildering corn maze of 23 possible action steps that begin with “Notify Central Office.” Try to find “call the cops” despite the mandate of state law to report serious threats.

Time and again, the school district pulls the rug out from under disciplinarians. The most tragic example is the white “positive behavior coach” beaten by an unruly black student at Whitehorse middle school in 2019. He did everything by the book. He still got the hook.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Glenn Greenwald:

That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a “wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading “disinformation.” No debate about COVID’s origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.

The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”

Markus Strasser:

;DR: I worked on biomedical literature search, discovery and recommender web applications for many months and concluded that extracting, structuring or synthesizing “insights” from academic publications (papers) or building knowledge bases from a domain corpus of literature has negligible value in industry.

Batya Ungar-Sargon:

The documents revealed a serious breach of journalistic ethics, though by no means Chris Cuomo’s worst. His coverage of the pandemic included staging a fake emergence from quarantine, and turning interviews with his brother, then governor, into a family joshing session, even as his brother was overseeing the deaths of 20,000 elderly and developmentally disabled New Yorkers through an edict that forced the COVID-positive back into nursing homes. 

There’s a deeper truth here about the interconnection of our political and journalistic elites. Because Chris Cuomo using his journalistic star power to protect his brother, who was using his political star power to harass and grope women and sentence seniors and the developmentally disabled to death, is not an aberration of how these two sectors of America’s elites operate. It is instead a perfect literalization of the role our elite chattering class plays consolidating the power of its chosen celebrity politicians.

Dave Cieslewicz

That one demonstrated some of the dysfunction of the district. Their spokesperson denied that anything had happened at the school because, technically, the incident, which involved students enrolled at West, occurred on a sidewalk that wasn’t part of school property.

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”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Andy Kessler:

Public-school education has gone from bad to worse. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 26% of 11th-graders were at grade level in reading and math in 2019. Remarkably, the school system had a record-high graduation rate of nearly 84% in 2021. Those students must have had strong senior years! This is why over half of first-year community-college students in the U.S. take at least one remedial course in reading or math. In the U.S., 43 million adults are illiterate. This is a disgrace.

In pre-pandemic California, only 32% of fourth-graders were at or above proficient for their grade in reading. Only 19% of eighth-grade Hispanics read at grade level, and only 10% of eighth-grade blacks did. Those who find disparate impact everywhere should be screaming from the rooftops that public education is racist. Instead, silence.

Despite these poor results, spending per student goes up each year. New York spent $25,139 per student in fiscal 2019. In California, it’s over $20,000. So why haven’t outcomes improved? Parents know why. Bad teachers don’t get fired. Because of tenure, even some capable teachers mail it in. Bad school districts don’t get fixed. Caps on charter schools, even those with proven records, limit their ability to put pressure on public schools. Teachers unions are all-powerful.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Welch is trying to improve California’s education system. He tells me we need “accountability of quality education.” You may recall the 2014 Vergara v. California decision, a suit Mr. Welch and others funded. Filed on behalf of nine public-school students, the ruling found that five California statutes related to teacher tenure, firing bad teachers and layoff policy violated the state’s Constitution. In his ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu noted, “Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

Scott Aaronson:

Today, I’m turning over Shtetl-Optimized to an extremely important guest post by theoretical computer scientists Boaz Barak of Harvard and Edith Cohen of Google (cross-posted on the windows on theory blog). In addition to the post below, please read—and if relevant, consider signing—our open letter about math education in the US, which now has over 150 signatories, including Fields Medalists, Turing Award winners, and Nobel laureates. Finally, check out our fuller analysis of what the California Mathematics Framework is poised to do and why it’s such an urgent crisis for math education. I’m particularly grateful to my colleagues for their writing efforts, since I would never have been able to discuss what’s happening in such relatively measured words. –Scott Aaronson

Mathematical education at the K-12 level is critical for preparation for STEM careers. An ongoing challenge to the US K-12 system is to improve the preparation of students for advanced mathematics courses and expand access and enrollment in these courses. As stated by a Department of Education report “taking Algebra I before high school … can set students up for a strong foundation of STEM education and open the door for various college and career options.” The report states that while 80% of all students have access to Algebra I in middle school, only 24% enroll. This is also why the goal of Bob Moses’ Algebra Project is to ensure that “every child must master algebra, preferably by eighth grade, for algebra is the gateway to the college-prep curriculum, which in turn is the path to higher education.”

The most significant potential for growth is among African American or Latino students, among whom only 12% enroll in Algebra before high school. This untapped potential has longer-term implications for both society and individuals. For example, although African Americans and Latinos comprise 13% and 18% (respectively) of the overall US population, they only account for 4% and 11% of engineering degrees. There is also a gap in access by income: Calculus is offered in 92% of schools serving the top income quartile but only in 77% of schools serving the bottom quartile (as measured by the share of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch). Thus minority and low income students have less access to STEM jobs, which yield more than double the median salary of non-STEM jobs, and are projected to grow at a 50% higher rate over the next decade.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff:

After our book The Coddling of the American Mindcame out in 2018, business leaders from the corporate and non-profit sectors began contacting us about internal issues they are having with recent hires. They told us that their youngest employees show increased levels of anxiety, depression, and fragility; a tendency to turn ordinary conflicts between co-workers into major issues requiring the attention of the Human Resources Department; and greater insistence that the organization must share and express their personal political values related to social justice. 

In short: Beginning around 2018, parts of the corporate world began to experience the same changes we saw in universities from around 2014. This makes sense once you realize that members of Gen Z began to arrive on campuses in 2013 and 2014—they spent four years within institutions that largely catered to their new needs and demands, and began to graduate from four-year colleges around 2017 or 2018. 

A 2021 survey found that 48% of Gen Z respondents reported feeling stress all or most of the time, and the top source of worry among them was career prospects. As for the increased internal conflicts and tensions among employees, the title of a 2021 articleon the front page of the business section of The New York Times sums it up well: “The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them.” Friction and punishment campaigns in the corporate world seem to be hypercharged by Slack and other internal company messaging platforms. 

The turmoil at The New York Times in 2020 offers multiple case studies of personal and political conflicts intermixing, as individual journalists ran afoul of the new sensibilities. Bari Weiss, a staff editor and Op-Ed writer, resigned in July 2020. In her resignation letter, Weiss mentioned “constant bullying” and how she was subjected to what one outlet described as “‘Mean Girls’-styled sniping at her in company Slack channels.” Science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. resigned in 2021 over criticism of his behavior on a company-sponsored trip to Peru in 2019 (primarily his repeating a racial slur to clarify how it was being used in a story told by a student on the trip). McNeil had already been disciplined for his behavior on the trip, but co-workers, accusing McNeil of racism, complained that he hadn’t been fired. A month after his resignation McNeil wrote, “I’m surprised by how quick some colleagues who barely know me were prepared to accept those accusations and even add more on a Times alumni Facebook page.”

Alex Davies, Petar Veličković and Pushmeet Kohli:

The practice of mathematics involves discovering patterns and using these to formulate and prove conjectures, resulting in theorems. Since the 1960s, mathematicians have used computers to assist in the discovery of patterns and formulation of conjectures¹, most famously in the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture², a Millennium Prize Problem³. Here we provide examples of new fundamental results in pure mathematics that have been discovered with the assistance of machine learning—demonstrating a method by which machine learning can aid mathematicians in discovering new conjectures and theorems. We propose a process of using machine learning to discover potential patterns and relations between mathematical objects, understanding them with attribution techniques and using these observations to guide intuition and propose conjectures. We outline this machine-learning-guided framework and demonstrate its successful application to current research questions in distinct areas of pure mathematics, in each case showing how it led to meaningful mathematical contributions on important open problems: a new connection between the algebraic and geometric structure of knots, and a candidate algorithm predicted by the combinatorial invariance conjecture for symmetric groups⁴. Our work may serve as a model for collaboration between the fields of mathematics and artificial intelligence (AI) that can achieve surprising results by leveraging the respective strengths of mathematicians and machine learning.

Ann Althouse:

By “put them in a safe place,” I think Ross means put Ethan Crumbleyin custody. He apparently begged “help me.” It sounds as though he struggled with an uncontrollable impulse. I understand the school wanting to defend itself after the fact, but what’s more important is for schools to take action to protect the students who are trapped there and endangered by other students. 

This is part of a larger issue of government declining to keep the peace and attempting to convince us that it cannot keep the peace, something I wrote about last month, after the Rittenhouse verdict and the Waukesha massacre, here:

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Landon Míon:

A Massachusetts teacher who had been terminated from Hanover High School for posting a number of videos to TikTok opposing critical race theory has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against her former employers, claiming they had violated her First Amendment rights.

Kari MacRae, represented by nonprofit legal organization Judicial Watch, sued Hanover Public Schools superintendent Matthew Ferron and Hanover High School principal Matthew Mattos for firing her over two TikTok videos she posted as part of a campaign to be on the Bourne School Committee that criticized critical race theory, the controversial doctrine that teaches students that white people are oppressors and people of color are oppressed.

She had worked as a math and business teacher at Hanover High School for a month before she was fired.

The court filing notes that MacRae was hired on Aug. 31 and terminated on Sept. 29. However, the TikTok videos Hanover High School cited as the basis for her firing were posted months before she was hired as part of her committee campaign.

“So pretty much the reason I ran for school board and the reason I’m taking on this responsibility is to ensure that students, at least in our town, are not being taught critical race theory,” MacRae said in a video posted last spring, according to The Boston Globe. “That they’re not being taught that the country was built on racism. So they’re not being taught that they can choose whether or not they want to be a girl or a boy.”

David Blaska:

As parental advice, it’s up there with Ma Barker.

“You have to learn not to get caught,” the mother of the Michigan school shooter advised.

What is chilling is that as school counsellors met with the 15-year-old sophomore and his parents, the semi-automatic handgun — an early Christmas present (Sig Sauers ain’t cheap!) — was nested in the boy’s backpack in that very room. That afternoon, Ethan Crumbley came out of the can blazing. The toll: four dead, seven injured.

The kid may as well have announced his murderous intentions over the school loud speaker. That morning, he’s drawing bullets and blood. The day before, a teacher espied young Crumbley searching for ammo on his smartphone.

Districts (+politicians/policymakers/unions/educrats) ♥️ when parents pay private tutors—it gives the illusion of effective (failed) policy/ies.#IDEAFailures #InvestigateIDEA #IDEAHearings #ReauthorizeIDEA #EnforceIDEA #FundStudents @Moms4EDFreedom @Kress_Sandy @Richardafowler https://t.co/6chBsbtsh8

— Marilyn Muller #LiteracyIsEquity (@1in5advocacy) November 30, 2021

US Secret Service:

BEHAVIORAL

Several plotters displayed symptoms of, or were diagnosed with, behavioral disorders, including disruptive disorders. One plotter was admitted to the hospital for a mental health evaluation after a tip was received about the attack. Prior to this, she had been diagnosed with multiple conditions, to include conduct disorder. She had been prescribed medication but stopped taking it due to its side effects, and she irregularly attended treatment due to the cost of the sessions.

NEUROLOGICAL/DEVELOPMENTAL

Several plotters evidenced a history of developmental issues and neurological conditions, including developmental delays, learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia), neurological conditions or symptoms (e.g., fetal alcohol syndrome, sensory sensitivity), and diagnoses within the autism spectrum.

A 14-year-old male was arrested after a classmate told the principal that the student had two guns and was plotting an attack. The plotter had shown several students his firearms and told them of his intentions to target students and staff whom he felt mistreated and bullied him. When the plotter was an infant he had been removed from the custody of his biological parents due to their drug and alcohol abuse. He was subsequently diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome along with reactive attachment disorder due to childhood neglect.

Douglas Belkin:

“This is a battle for our culture and, in many ways, for Western civilization,” said John Craig, who heads a similar organization at Davidson College in North Carolina called Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse. “Open and free expression is what makes our country great, and if we lose this, our country is in deep trouble.”

Some faculty and students say campus politics are more complicated now than it was when many of these baby-boomer alumni were in school because student bodies are much more diverse.

Students carefully calibrate their remarks because people from so many more backgrounds and beliefs are listening, said Carol Quillen, president at Davidson.

“A little intellectual humility is not a bad thing,” she said.

There’s a myth that local tax revenues are in crisis, and that property and sales taxes are no longer sufficient. Sometimes you hear that local governments never truly recovered from the Great Recession.

Inflation-adjusted local tax revenues are up 64% over the past 20 years. pic.twitter.com/1bEgHF0CCH

— Jared Walczak (@JaredWalczak) December 3, 2021

Scott Aaronson:

Today, I’m turning over Shtetl-Optimized to an extremely important guest post by theoretical computer scientists Boaz Barak of Harvard and Edith Cohen of Google (cross-posted on the windows on theory blog). In addition to the post below, please read—and if relevant, consider signing—our open letter about math education in the US, which now has over 150 signatories, including Fields Medalists, Turing Award winners, and Nobel laureates. Finally, check out our fuller analysis of what the California Mathematics Framework is poised to do and why it’s such an urgent crisis for math education. I’m particularly grateful to my colleagues for their writing efforts, since I would never have been able to discuss what’s happening in such relatively measured words. –Scott Aaronson

Mathematical education at the K-12 level is critical for preparation for STEM careers. An ongoing challenge to the US K-12 system is to improve the preparation of students for advanced mathematics courses and expand access and enrollment in these courses. As stated by a Department of Education report“taking Algebra I before high school … can set students up for a strong foundation of STEM education and open the door for various college and career options.” The report states that while 80% of all students have access to Algebra I in middle school, only 24% enroll. This is also why the goal of Bob Moses’ Algebra Project is to ensure that “every child must master algebra, preferably by eighth grade, for algebra is the gateway to the college-prep curriculum, which in turn is the path to higher education.”

WILL

The News: Governor Tony Evers vetoed curriculum transparency legislation (SB 463/ AB 488), Friday, denying parents access to the classroom materials in our public schools. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) supported the legislation to require all public schools to publicly provide access to the material taught in our public-school classrooms.

The Quotes: WILL Director of Education Policy, Libby Sobic, said, “Governor Evers’ veto of the curriculum transparency legislation, authored by Sen. Stroebel and Rep. Behnke, denies parents access to taxpayer-funded classroom materials. By vetoing this important legislation, the Governor is telling parents that their concerns are less important than the status quo in Wisconsin public schools.”

Bill Brewer, a parent from Slinger, Wisconsin, said, “Governor Evers chose politics over parents when he vetoed SB 463, legislation that would have required transparency for public school learning materials. When we send our children to school, we entrust their education to our teachers and school districts. But as parents, we also want access to what our kids are learning. Governor Evers and his veto pen has denied every public-school parent a path for easier and more timely access to this information.”

Why WILL Supported This Legislation: The pandemic provided parents with a unique peek into the classroom. Many demanded to know more about what their children are learning in public schools. WILL supported this legislation because parents deserve to access curriculum material and information without having to jump through hoops, like submitting open-records requests and paying exorbitant fees.

BREAKING: Teachers union president @rweingarten supports the principle of curriculum transparency. Now that we agree that "parents should know what the curriculum is," I invite Ms. Weingarten to endorse Manhattan Institute's model policy, available here:https://t.co/c1LsYCgQEm pic.twitter.com/3FN0K9hOJV

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 5, 2021

Commentary from Co-sponsor Senator Duey Stroebel.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

This plot has more x/y axis fuckery than a startup pitch deck’s growth chart. Spectacular. https://t.co/BsYx5r8zL4

— Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) (@antoniogm) December 3, 2021

Twitter:

Twitter first published a comprehensive, public archive of data related to state-backed information operations three years ago. We’ve made improvements, outlined our principles, and iterated on our approach over time. Since that first disclosure in October 2018, we’ve shared 37 datasets of attributed platform manipulation campaigns originating from 17 countries, spanning more than 200 million Tweets and nine terabytes of media. 

Today, we’re disclosing an additional 3,465 accounts to our archive of state-linked information operations — the only one of its kind in the industry. The account setsinclude eight distinct operations we’ve attributed to six countries – Mexico, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Venezuela, respectively. Every account and piece of content associated with these operations has been permanently removed from the service. 

In addition, we have shared relevant data from this disclosure with three leading research partners: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Cazadores de Fake News, and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). In most instances, accounts were suspended for various violations of our platform manipulation and spampolicies. See more via our Transparency Center.

Matthew Foldi:

Taxpayers were left with the bill for more than $800,000 worth of legal fees after Democrats moved to overturn the results of an Iowa election won by Republican congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks, congressional records show.

House Democrats took advantage of a provision they tucked into this year’s rules package to use government money to challenge the results of the Iowa election in the Committee on House Administration. The Democrats on the committee paid high-priced law firm Jenner & Block a total of $699,294 to lead their attempt to overturn the election results, which had already been officially certified by Iowa’s secretary of state after a recount. Republicans on the committee retained law firm Jones Day to respond to the challenge, paying it a substantially smaller sum of $126,942, according to committee records requested by the Washington Free Beacon.

Miller-Meeks’s victory over Democratic nominee Rita Hart was never seriously in doubt, even with her small six-vote margin of victory. Several Democrats urged party leadership to drop the challenge, citing concerns that it undermined their criticism of former president Donald Trump questioning the results of the 2020 presidential election. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), however, stood by the decision to challenge the results through the House committee, all on the taxpayer dime.

Jill Tucker:

When Carol Prater started what she thought would be a few years teaching at Burlingame elementary schools, she had a master’s degree in music and a talent for math and technology, never imagining a career of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and “Hot Cross Buns” played out of tune and off key.

It was 1972 and Donny Osmond was singing about puppy love and the average family had a choice of three television channels, with “The Mod Squad” and “The Waltons” in a fierce battle for Thursday nights.

Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has set up a process to track threats against school-board members and teachers, moving to implement a Justice Department directive that some law-enforcement officials and Republican lawmakers say could improperly target parents protesting local education policies.

The heads of the FBI’s criminal and counterterrorism divisions instructed agents in an Oct. 20 memo to flag all assessments and investigations into potentially criminal threats, harassment and intimidation of educators with a “threat tag,” which the officials said would allow them to evaluate the scope of the problem.

The internal email asks FBI agents to consider the motivation behind any criminal activity and whether it potentially violates federal law. Agents should tag such threats “EDUOFFICIALS” to better track them, according to the memo, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels,” says the email signed by Timothy Langan, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, and Calvin Shivers, the assistant director of the bureau’s criminal division, who retired this month.

Joanne Jacobs:

The pandemic has accelerated a push to ease grading and homework policies, writes Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews.

“Schools have stuck to an outdated system that relies heavily on students’ compliance — completing homework, behaving in class, meeting deadlines and correctly answering questions on a one-time test — as a proxy for learning, rather than measuring the learning itself,” editorializes the Los Angeles Times.

Mathews asked four experienced public school teachers what they thought.

None of them assign much homework, except as a way to complete work begun in class. They don’t emphasize one-time tests.

But when it comes to making sure everyone is behaving in class, they are firm traditionalists. Class time to them is vital because, in their minds, the give-and-take between students and teachers during those precious hours is the essence of what they do.

. . . D’Essence Grant, an eighth-grade English and language arts teacher at the KIPP Academy Middle school in Houston, said, “My content requires meaningful conversations about the text to help support text comprehension and character development. . . . Making claims, supporting claims with evidence, and listening, building and challenging other student claims verbally is just as important as writing them on paper.”

Under “mastery learning,” students demonstrate a skill or subject-matter knowledge, then move on. Greg Jouriles, a social studies teacher at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, California, thinks students need to practice academics as they do sports. If doing something once was good enough, “a basketball coach would end practice after each player made one free throw,” he told Mathews.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Dan Lennington and Dr. Will Flanders:

At the top of the list of legitimate parental grievances was the decision to keep many schools closed during the 2020-21 school year, despite strong scientific evidence that it was safe to reopen. Research by our own organization, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), found that it was not the rates of COVID transmission in a community that effected reopening decisions, but rather whether there was a strong union presence in the school district.

This electoral disconnect has continued into the present school year with many schools persisting in their belief that mask mandates are necessary or somehow even legally required. Also, many schools have doubled down on the continued expansion of critical race theory and “equity” policies. Here in Wisconsin, school boards have also eschewed transparency and in some cases attempted to limit public comment at meetings.

In response, parents have certainly escalated the fight by employing unusual and extreme tactics. For example, Wisconsin has had more school-board recall attemptsthis year than any other state except California. While no school board member has yet been recalled, six schoolboard members have resigned in response to recall attempts and roughly 1/3 of incumbents lost in the spring 2021 election. Some parents have also moved to take over annual school board meetings, and in one case, successfully cut school-board member salaries by $6,400 each. Other school board meetings have become colorful, to say the least, and in some circumstances, rather raucous.

James R. Copland John Ketcham Christopher F. Rufo:

In 2021, public school parents vaulted to the forefront of America’s fractured political landscape. Around the country, parents objected both to Covid-related school closures and to racially divisive curricula. Parental frustration helped secure sweeping GOP wins last month in Virginia, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin’s victory over former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has promised to rein in public-school radicalism and “ban critical race theory” on his first day in office.

Perhaps the central moment in the Virginia gubernatorial race was McAuliffe’s comment during a debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Like most Virginia voters, we couldn’t disagree more. Research shows that greater academic success follows when parents actively engage in their children’s education. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that we should decide the finer points of curricular design by plebiscite; nor does it mean that a minority of objecting parents should dictate school pedagogy. But public schools are institutions created by “We the People” and should be responsive to the input of parents and the broader voting public at the state and local level.

At a minimum, parents should be able to know what’s being taught to their children in the classroom. Transparency is a virtue for all of our public institutions, but especially for those with power over children. To that end, we have drafted a template—building on one of our earlier efforts at the Manhattan Institute and the work of Matt Beienburg at the Goldwater Institute—to inform state legislatures seeking to foster school transparency. The policy proposal is designed to provide public school parents with easy access—directly on school websites—to materials and activities used to train staff and teachers and to instruct children.

I find it interesting that this is an issue. University course syllabus are easily available. Perhaps college professors and lectures have a personal marketing, accomplishment and industry incentive – that unionized k-12 teachers lack. “They are all good”.

Adrian Wooldridge:

Yet taking something so fundamental to the health of both our economy and our polity for granted is the height of folly. Look at the history of the West and you don’t have to go back very far to find a world where jobs were handed from father to son or sold to the highest bidder. Look at the rest of the world and you can see governments riddled with corruption and favoritism. The meritocratic idea is necessarily fragile: humans are biologically programmed to favor their kith and kin over strangers. We are right to think that the modern world, with its vibrant economy and favor-free public sector, would be impossible without the meritocratic idea. But we are wrong to think that meritocracy will be with us forever if we proceed to douse its roots in poison.

The old world

The pre-modern world was founded on the basis of the very opposite assumptions from meritocracy: lineage rather than achievement and willing subordination rather than ambition. Society was ruled by hereditary landowners (headed by the monarch) who seized their positions by fighting and pillaging and then justified them by a combination of God’s will and ancient tradition. Civilization was conceived of as a hierarchy in which people occupied their God-given positions. Ambition and self-promotion were feared. “Take but degree away, untune that string”, Ulysses says in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, “And, hark, what discord follows!” People were primarily judged not on the basis of their individual abilities but on the basis of their relationship with family and land. British aristocrats still come with place names attached: the higher the rank the bigger the place.

Noah Diekemper

A key piece of the massive “Build Back Better” legislation under consideration in Congress is the institution of “universal, high-quality, free, inclusive, and mixed preschool services” funded by the federal government but administered by the states — with strings attached. For example, the bill would require that “at a minimum, [States] requir[e] that lead teachers in the preschool have a baccalaureate degree in early childhood education or a related field by not later than 7 years after the date of enactment of this Act.”

This requirement doesn’t seem to address the challenges about pre-K, including lack of childcare options and childcare workers. Parents want a safe and loving place to take their children. Is the government creating a solution for that, or more barriers?

The strongest argument for the policy might be the fact that several states already have some such requirement on the books for state-run preschool systems, and nothing is obviously apocalyptic. There is a sort of patchwork across the states with many requiring a college degree, some requiring it for only some of the state-run systems, and some having no requirement — or no state-run program at all.

And there’s certainly a lot of partisan diversity in the different state policies. States like New York, Texas, Hawaii, and Alabama all require such degrees already. But states like Florida, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Arizona, and Oregon do not require a degree.

But that would miss the fact that preschool demand is in fact a crisis subject for many parents who are in the market for it. Wisconsin, which requires bachelor degrees for some programs, has had a well-documented shortage of preschool teachers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Washington, DC, which adopted the policy, is already the most expensive place for infant care in the country.

Tálal Ansari:

University of Connecticut women’s basketball star Paige Bueckers will become Gatorade’s first signed college player.

Ms. Bueckers will be the first college athlete on Gatorade’s roster since the National Collegiate Athletic Association over the summer passed rules allowing student athletes to earn money on endorsements.

Noah Diekemper:

A key piece of the massive “Build Back Better” legislation under consideration in Congress is the institution of “universal, high-quality, free, inclusive, and mixed preschool services” funded by the federal government but administered by the states — with strings attached. For example, the bill would require that “at a minimum, [States] requir[e] that lead teachers in the preschool have a baccalaureate degree in early childhood education or a related field by not later than 7 years after the date of enactment of this Act.”

This requirement doesn’t seem to address the challenges about pre-K, including lack of childcare options and childcare workers. Parents want a safe and loving place to take their children. Is the government creating a solution for that, or more barriers?

The strongest argument for the policy might be the fact that several states already have some such requirement on the books for state-run preschool systems, and nothing is obviously apocalyptic. There is a sort of patchwork across the states with many requiring a college degree, some requiring it for only some of the state-run systems, and some having no requirement — or no state-run program at all.

And there’s certainly a lot of partisan diversity in the different state policies. States like New York, Texas, Hawaii, and Alabama all require such degrees already. But states like Florida, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Arizona, and Oregon do not require a degree.

Adam Andrzejewski:

Federal agencies paid out at least $548 million to informants working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), in recent years, according to government audits. 

• A few informants became millionaires, with some Amtrak and “parcel” delivery workers making nearly $1 million or more. 
• Many informants were authorized to commit “crimes” with the permission of their federal handlers. In a four-year period, there were 22,800 crime authorizations (2011-2014). 
• The FBI paid approximately $294 million (FY2012-2018), the DEA paid at least $237 million (FY2011-2015), and ATF paid approximately $17.2 million total (FY2012-2015) to informants.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com compiled this information by reviewing federal reports. While some of the data is several-years old; it’s apparently the most recent available.

The FBI spent an average of $42 million a year on confidential human sources between fiscal years 2012 and 2018. “Long term” informants comprised 20 percent of its intelligence relationships (source: DOJ IG 2019 report). 

The ATF employed 1,855 informants who were paid $4.3 million annually (FY2012-2015). Therefore, on average, each informant made $2,318 for the year. (source: DOJ IG report 2017).

Schools aren’t the problem. They never have been.

One of the frustrating things about the pandemic has been our inability, even at this late date, to understand why surges occur. They hit communities with mask mandates, and communities without. Last year, we believed that the surge from October through February was caused by seasonal changes. The cold drove everyone indoors, where COVID was much more likely to spread, and therefore cases developed more quickly. This year, though, the surge began long before the weather turned cold. Vaccines are certainly protective and likely mitigate the severity of surges locally. Even so, things may worsen again—the data right now aren’t looking good for much of the country, and many people fear more hardship to come from the emergent Omicron variant—but no predictable pattern has emerged to explain what sets off periods of dramatic increases.

What is pretty certain, however, is that schools are not to blame. They didn’t cause the surges. They didn’t cause the massive numbers of hospitalizations and deaths that Florida experienced this summer and thatMichigan appears to be experiencing now. They haven’t done nearly as much damage as bars, restaurants, and indoor events (including kids’ birthday parties), which never seem to receive the same amount of attention.

This doesn’t mean that kids aren’t getting COVID, of course. It doesn’t mean that kids aren’t in danger,haven’t gotten sick, haven’t been hospitalized by the thousands, and even died. Kids catch COVID, and transmission does occur in schools, but it is rare when precautions are taken. Because of this, the level of school transmission is sometimes lower than that of the surrounding community. Most schools are on guard, at least. Many require masks. More are being thoughtful about close contacts and group dynamics, and they enforce isolation and quarantine as much as they can. That may be inconvenient, but it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t made a difference.

Notes and links on Public Health Dane County Madison

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Will Flanders:

The News: The recent release of Wisconsin’s state report cards for individual districts and schools proved, once again, that the current composition of the report card is not doing enough to reveal the true state of education and academic performance in Wisconsin’s schools. A new policy brief from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) highlights why the various elements of the report card intended to address persistent achievement gaps serve to create a scenario where schools with high numbers of low-income students can earn a passing grade, “Meets Expectations,” with academic proficiency rates of 10% or less.

The Quote: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, said, “Wisconsin’s state report cards are, quite simply, not serving their purpose. Families, taxpayers, and policymakers deserve a report card that accurately shows the state of Wisconsin’s schools.”

How to Improve the Report Card: In The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations: Wisconsin’s Report Card “Fails to Meet Expectations,” WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, takes on the key metrics that are warping the results and masking poor achievement in Wisconsin’s state report card. Flanders suggests the following reforms:

• Reduce the weight applied to growth scores in low-income schools. Student growth is important, but a report card formula that counts student growth as 45% of a score in some schools and only 5% in others is unfair and untenable.
• Report card thresholds should be established by state law. The legislature should remove the ability of DPI to adjust report card thresholds at their own volition—”Meeting Expectations” should mean the same thing every year.
• Restore absenteeism and dropout reductions in the report card formula. If the pandemic has shown us anything in education policy, it is that classroom-based instruction matters. School districts that fail to get students into the classroom should have that reflected in their scores.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed the president of the Portland Association of Teachers a/b the stress/being experienced by some educators this school year. Today, we found out a lot more about the union’s proposed solutions. (1/5)

— Julia Silverman (@jrlsilverman) November 29, 2021

Noah Carl:

Last year, Britain’s life expectancy fell by about 1.1 years. That means it would have fallen by an additional 1.1 years under focused protection. Is this figure large enough to justify the manifold harms of lockdown?

I would argue: no. Although 1.1 years is a large year-on-year change, it only takes us back 12 years in terms of rising life expectancy. In other words: to find a year in which mortality was as high as it was in 2020, we only need to go back to 2008. I remember 2008; it wasn’t full of front-page headlines about sky-high death rates. Aside from the financial crisis, people just got on with their lives.

Notes and links on Public Health Dane County Madison.

Allison Garfield:

County Board Chair Analiese Eicher told the Cap Times that the resolution takes away from the “real work” the county could be doing to help with the pandemic. 

“The Dane County Board has been supportive of public health measures since the beginning of the pandemic. For many of us, we look at the health and overall safety of our community and see the measures being put in place working,” Eicher said. “A few supervisors are choosing to take this path and seek to spread misinformation and pursue resolutions that wouldn’t actually change anything.”

Emily Hamer:

Dane County Board Chair Analiese Eicher said the next step will happen at the board’s Dec. 16 meeting when board members will take a vote on whether to even discuss the resolution. Since that’s a decision on County Board procedures, the public won’t be able to comment.

Weigand’s resolution also seeks a public hearing on the mask order, an explanation from Heinrich to the County Board on the justification for it, and a consensus from both the County Board and public on whether the order should be in place.

“Whether masks are mandated or not really should be up to the people, and it should be up to the elected officials to make that decision,” Weigand said.

Weigand said he’s frustrated that debate over the topic of masking “is being stifled.” His resolution has been stuck for months. He declined to say whether he’s against masking, but said residents and the board should get a chance to discuss the issue. He said he plans to hold his own public hearing on the matter Dec. 13.

Notes and links on Public Health Dane County Madison.

Leslie Bienen:

When Reynolds Middle School shut down its classrooms for three weeks, it wasn’t because of Covid-19 cases. On Nov. 16, parents of students at school in Troutdale, east of Portland, received a brief email informing them the school would revert to online learning so that district officials could develop “safety protocols” and “social-emotional supports” to deal with disruptive student behavior, including fights.

Reynolds students aren’t alone in being stuck at home again. Thousands of schools in dozens of districts across the U.S. have taken previously unscheduled days off or moved back to remote learning for “mental health” reasons. Other schools have cut back time in school buildings because of staffing shortages or for “deep cleaning,” a pointless anti-Covid precaution.

“The shifts in learning methods and isolation caused by COVID-19 closures and quarantines have taken a toll on the well-being of our students and staff,” Reynolds Superintendent Danna Diaz’s email said. “We are finding that some students are struggling with the socialization skills necessary for in-person learning, which is causing disruption in school for other students.”

Eder Campuzano:

To help Portland Public Schools’ educators and students adjust to the stresses of resuming full-time in-person classes, the union representing the district’s teachers proposes cancelling in-person instruction for high schoolers one day every week after winter break.

Under a bargaining agreement proposed by the Portland Association of Teachers Monday afternoon, teachers would spend half of that day offering some students individual or small group help online and a half-day planning future instruction.

Additional commentary and notes.

Michael Bloomberg:

American public education is broken. Since the pandemic began, students have experienced severe learning loss because schools remained closed in 2020—and even in 2021 when vaccinations were available to teachers and it was clear schools could reopen safely. Many schools also failed to administer remote learning adequately.

Before the pandemic, about two-thirds of U.S. students weren’t reading at grade level, and the trend has been getting worse. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the nation’s report card, show that in 2019, eighth-grade math scores had already fallen significantly.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Jonah Beleckis:

After spending a decade in prison, Jarrett Adams never wanted to come back to Wisconsin — the state that wrongfully convicted him as a teenager and tried to incarcerate him for a 28-year term.

He would only return if he could do so as an attorney, a force that can operate from within the criminal justice system he saw for himself and desperately wanted to change.

On Jan. 22, 2020, Adams was officially admitted to the Wisconsin State Bar during a ceremony at the state Capitol. Keith Findley, a co-founder of the Wisconsin Innocence Project and part of the team who helped free Adams, was there for the occasion.

Now with an eye on reform, Adams is sharing his story in a book, “Redeeming Justice: From Defendant to Defender, My Fight for Equity on Both Sides of a Broken System.”

“If the courts could see me as I am now when I was a 17-year-old, I never would have been sentenced to 28 years in prison,” Adams said recently on WPR’s “Central Time.” “I enjoyed the moment (at the Capitol), and it inspired me to keep going to create other Jarrett Adamses.”

One systemic issue Adams pointed to was about public defenders, whom he believes are often saddled with too many cases. But Adams didn’t get a public defender. Sometimes if there are conflicts of interest, for example, private attorneys take on public defender cases.