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Governor Evers: TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE:I am vetoing Senate Bill 454 in its entirety. The bill would mandate school boards and independent charter schools to assess the early literacy skill of pupils in four-year-old kindergarten to second grade using repeated screening assessments throughout the year and to create a personal reading plan […]
By Kadjata Bah, Josepha DaCosta and Moises Hernandez The Kohlenberg paper looks closely at school-to-prison pipelines and uses the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause to emphasize her case. She points out the Constitution “authorizes and mandates Congress to guarantee a meaningful floor of adequate functional literacy instruction nationwide.” During the past few years, federal courts have […]
AB446 Legislative links and lobbying information. (League of Women voters is against!) Speakers, in order: 0.08: Rep. Dave Considine (D-Baraboo) voted No. 4:50: Rep. Robert Wittke (R-Racine) voted Yes. 6:30: Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay) voted No. 11:40 Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) voted yes. 14:14 Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt (R-Fond du lac) voted yes. 30.08: […]
mp3 audio Transcript (Machine Generated). Representative LaKeshia Myers. Related: Assembly bill AB446 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 […]
mp3 audio Related: Assembly bill AB446
October 21, 2021 11:00a.m. CST. Watch via Wisconsin Eye. Wisconsin AB 446; SIS links. The list of lobbying organizations (many taxpayer supported!) opposed to Roadmap to Reading Success is remarkable: Association of Wisconsin School Administrators League of Women Voters Wisconsin (!) Pearson NA (!) Southeastern Wisconsin Schools Alliance WIRSA Wisconsin Association of School Boards Wisconsin […]
Transcript (machine generated) mp3 audio Notes and links on AB446. Kelly Butler Barksdale Reading Institute bio. 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 […]
Kymyona Burk bio. Wisconsin AB446 notes and links.
Machine generated transcript. September 14, 2021 Assembly Education Committee Hearing audio. October 7, 2021 Senate Education Committee Hearing audio. Much more on our long term, disastrous reading results and Wisconsin AB446, here.
“1993: Wisconsin Students #3 in the Nation in Reading 2019: #27 If Mississippi can do it, we can do it”. 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 […]
Michael J. Petrilli and Devon Nir States across the country have enacted new private-school choice programs in recent years, inevitably raising questions about accountability for participating institutions. Though it is true—as our friends in the school choice movement argue—that choice itself is a form of accountability because of the agency it provides to parents and […]
Alec Johnson: The DPI doesn’t seem worried. After raising the alarm in May with a letter to MPS saying it was “incredibly late” in submitting required financial reports, the DPI is now urging patience. Bucher said the department is working with the district on a daily basis and “stands with MPS every step of the […]
Www. On Wednesday August 28, the Virginia Board of Education will hold a Special Session to consider the Statewide Comprehensive Support Plan. The Plan proposes the requirements that will be imposed on schools and districts when they do not meet the Board’s new rules for accreditation and accountability. —- Andrew Rotherham: Context missing here is […]
Robert McFadden: In 1961, Ms. Colvin, a middle-aged, college-educated Syracuse homemaker and mother of two, was appalled to discover that the recent census had counted 11,055 residents of Onondaga County, N.Y., who could not read or write. She had no experience teaching, but felt passionately that she had to do something about it. It was […]
Paul Buchheit: The Biden situation is a good example of why single-party states are dangerous — the incentives always favor party loyalty over truth. If it weren’t for the disastrous debate and upcoming elections, experts and insiders would still be insisting that Biden is “sharp as a tack”, and that all evidence to the contrary […]
Dave Zweifel Many educators complained at the time that the entire voucher program would serve as a foot in the door to eventually undermine the public school system — a system that had served the country since colonial days and was credited with representing the true melting pot among children from different cultures, races and incomes. […]
Beth McMurtrie: Theresa MacPhail is a pragmatist. In her 15 years of teaching, as the number of students who complete their reading assignments has steadily declined, she has adapted. She began assigning fewer readings, then fewer still. Less is more, she reasoned. She would focus on the readings that mattered most and were interesting to them. For […]
Barbara Biasi Using employment records on all public-school teachers in Wisconsin linked to individual student information on achievement and demographics from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, I first document how teacher salaries changed in flexible-pay and seniority-pay districts in the aftermath of the reform. After the expiration of districts’ collective bargaining agreements, salary differences […]
Dirk Bethmann and Jae Il Cho Highlights The 2002 FIFA World Cup led to an unexpected and temporary increase in South Korea’s fertility rate. We use the quasi-experimental nature of the event to examine Becker’s trade-off between quantity and quality of children. Our results support the notion of adverse effects on child quality measured by […]
Corrinne Hess: “I think DPI is trying to appease the masses and go with the status quo,” Warner said. “I think they are putting in too many, and putting in poor quality because they are not willing to push the envelope of what they are expecting in schools.” —— More. —— Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin […]
Chris Rickert: Math achievement did not necessarily line up with per-pupil spending in Dane County and Wisconsin’s largest districts. Madison spent the most, for example, of the 10 county districts included in the analysis, or $18,896 per pupil in the 2021-22 school year, according to data from the state Department of Public Instruction. Among the […]
Rich Kremer: The Wisconsin Association of School Boards, the Wisconsin Educational Association Council teachers union and Wisconsin State Reading Association have registered against the bill. The Wisconsin Child Care Administrators Association and the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association have registered in support. Wisconsin Early Childhood Association Co-Director Paula Drew told legislators that while the organization “acknowledges […]
Esther Dyson: People worried about AI taking their jobs are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans. We should automate routine tasks and use the money and time saved to allow humans to do more meaningful work, especially helping parents raise healthier, more engaged children. We should know enough […]
Bob Uttl, Victoria Violo and Lacey Gibson Background. According to a widespread belief, the average IQ of university students is 115 to 130 IQ points, that is, substantially higher than the average IQ of the general population (M = 100, SD =15). We traced the origin of this belief to obsolete intelligence data collected in […]
Scott Girard: In total, nearly 9,000 children in Madison public schools missed more than 10% of the school year, a rate of absenteeism that can indicate broader problems facing children and puts them at risk of a serious, long-term disadvantage in learning. Grelinda Isom’s four children are among those considered chronically absent. Isom herself has […]
WILL: The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and School Choice Wisconsin (SCW) released a new report examining amount of special needs students in Wisconsin’s choice schools serve students with disabilities. Serving All: Students with Disabilities in Wisconsin’s Parental Choice Programs shows that schools in Wisconsin choice programs serve far more disabled students than […]
David Blaska: Once every blue moon, the Head Groundskeeper does what he says he is going to do. Posing as average citizen “David Blaska,” he sat in with eight other citizens at one of three roundtables coordinated 10-04-23 by the headhunters hired by the Madison public school district to find yet another a new superintendent. […]
Harry Waters Just over seven years ago the United Nations developed the 2030 agenda. The central theme of this agenda was the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But what are the SDGs? Why are they relevant to my English classroom? And how can I incorporate them into the curriculum? Let’s take a look […]
Patrick Mcilheran: The series of day-long webinars, four per school year, is an initiative of the DPI, the regulator of every Wisconsin school. The agency says it doesn’t necessarily endorse everything said by every one of the academics it invites, but since racial equity is the first quality it mentions in its mission statement, one can see why 2,500 […]
Emilia David: The US Copyright Office is opening a public comment period around AI and copyright issues beginning August 30th as the agency figures out how to approach the subject. As announced in the Federal Register, the agency wants to answer three main questions: how AI models should use copyrighted data in training; whether AI-generated material […]
Corrine Hess According to DPI, Holy Redeemer did not submit its September 2021 enrollment audit in a timely manner. The school also failed to timely submit its 2021-22 Fiscal & Internal Control Practices Report, which determines if the school has sound fiscal and internal control practices. These practices include paying vendors and employees on […]
Dan Lennington and Will Flanders Encouraging high-school graduation is a policy that garners broad support, as it paves the way for higher wages and a better quality of life. In 2015, bipartisan majorities passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, a law aimed at reducing dropout rates. Since then, dropout rates have declined about 13%. But now a […]
Education Policy Innovation Collaborative In this report, we combine data about students in Michigan’s K-12 public schools and public universities with educator certification testing, credentialing, and employment records to examine how the pool of prospective Michigan teachers changes as candidates progress through the pipeline and into the workforce. KEY FINDINGS: Commentary. “Well, it’s kind of […]
Wisconsin State Journal: It’s not just LeMonds’ staff that has struggled to work with him. LeMonds physically blocked a WMTV-TV (Ch. 15) news reporter from posing a question to Superintendent Carlton Jenkins at a public event — even grabbing and pushing down her hand and microphone, as video of the incident shows. He allegedly called […]
Kimberly Wethal: Higher rates of chronic absenteeism are largely driving the increase, as about 98% of the district’s 2,231 at-risk students have been deemed “habitually truant,” defined as missing more than 10% of days in an academic year. The number of students considered habitually truant during the 2021-22 school year more than tripled from the […]
Sara Randazzo: Las Vegas high-school English teacher Laura Jeanne Penrod initially thought the grading changes at her school district made sense. Under the overhaul, students are given more chances to prove they have mastered a subject without being held to arbitrary deadlines, in recognition of challenges some children have outside school. Soon after the system was […]
Sarah Mervosh: About one in three children in the United States cannot read at a basic level of comprehension, according to a key national exam. The outcomes are particularly troubling for Black and Native American children, nearly half of whom score “below basic” by eighth grade. “The kids can’t read — nobody wants to just […]
Mark Seidenberg: My heart sank. Why would a person need to ask this? The goal of teaching children to read is reading, not phonemic awareness. We know that learning to read does not require being able to identify 44 phonemes or demonstrate proficiency on phoneme deletion and substitution tasks because until very recently no one who learned […]
Scott Girard: Wisconsin K-12 students had a significantly higher rate of chronic absenteeism following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. The report, published Friday, shows there was an increase from a 12.4% chronic absenteeism rate in the 2016-17 school year to 16.1% in in 2020-21, […]
Olivia Herken: This week the school district contended with more violent incidents. On Tuesday, a 14-year-old was stabbed in the chest in a park after an incident at a middle school parking lot earlier in the day, and on Wednesday, police were called to East High for a fight between students. Some survey respondents called […]
Fiona McCann: The most terrifying podcast I listened to so far this year was not about the death of American democracy or even Jordan Peele’s new horror offering (though more of that at a later date). Rather, it was a podcast about reading. Sold a Story, Emily Hanford’s new six-parter highlighting how American kids have […]
Olivia Herken: His stand-alone classes didn’t give him that much deeper of an understanding of a subject than earning honors did, Hernandez said. In his general Western civilization class, for example, he had to read an additional book to earn his honors credits, which allowed him to gain more knowledge than he normally would have. […]
We also discussed state report cards with @DrJillUnderly. More kids performed at ‘below basic’ levels than pre-pandemic. In MKE and Beloit, about 2/3 students are ‘below basic.’ Dr. Underly says the solution is more funding. “Revenue, honestly, is what creates opportunities.” pic.twitter.com/JaRX6bXPGQ — A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) November 27, 2022 Complete Interview. The data clearly indicate that […]
Posted at the Hechinger Report: Re “A company has made millions selling books on reading instruction rooted in bad science” (Nov. 10, 2022) We are educators who have devoted our lives to the cause of helping children read and write with power. We’re dismayed that at this moment in our history, when all of us […]
Dave Cieslewicz: To which I think I can safely say that I share a widespread reaction among Madisonians: Huh? Again, we could use a whole lot more context here and it would be useful if Copeland would speak to reporters to clarity just exactly what was going on. But from what’s currently on the record […]
Alex Tabarrok: A very nice paper in Management Science by Kini, Shen, Shenoy and Subramanian finds that labor unions reduce product quality. Two strengths of the paper. First, the authors have relatively objective measures of product quality from thousands of product recalls mandated by the FDA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway […]
David Leonhardt: Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas and other states more rigorously measured student learning and pushed struggling schools to adopt approaches that were working elsewhere. The accountability movement went national in the 2000s, through laws signed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The timing of the test-score increases is consistent with this story, as […]
Elizabeth Beyer: The district is receiving $70.6 million over the course of three payments. The district’s first installment, ESSER I, was approximately $9.2 million and had been exhausted by the end of the 2020-21 school year. Currently, $39.8 million of the second two installments, ESSER II and III, are written into the 2022-23 preliminary budget. […]
Elizabeth Beyer: “That was my first-ever protest,” he said. “It was remarkable to see people outside of Door 1, outside of the Castle (what students call the Collegiate-Gothic style façade that faces East Washington Avenue) all together coming as one. We actually made change from it.” The protests were organized in response to what students […]
Bill Glauber: One panelist from suburban Milwaukee was critical of the amount of time schoolchildren spend on electronic devices, including computers, claiming that it connects students to pornographic images and affects their learning. Johnson said: “This is their testimony, this is their viewpoint … that is something that should concern parents if that is happening.” […]
Libby Sobic and Will Flanders: The Department of Public Instruction has estimated that expanding school choice will cost taxpayers over $500 million. This DPI estimate rests on faulty assumptions that would not occur in the real world. If a student whose family is currently paying for private school moved on to the voucher, there are, indeed, some tax […]
Laura Meckler and Matt Viser: Democratic governors have responded by dropping mask mandates, urging that schools remain open and emphasizing there is a light at the end of the dark covid tunnel. They also are trying to change the subject, with a focus on education investment and recovery and warnings about the consequences if Republicans […]
Heather Smith: School board primary elections are next week, and there is much consternation in the education establishment about the civic engagement of parents who are stepping up to take a more active role in the education of their children. The pandemic brought to light many things about our school system that served as an education […]
Benjamin Yount: It’s the latest snapshot of just how many parents in Wisconsin want to explore educational options for their kids. Tuesday was the first day for parents to enroll in the state’s Private School Choice Program. By midday, the state’s website crashed because of a flood of applications. “Due to high volume, the system […]
Molly Beck: Low-performing schools in Wisconsin would be forced to close under a plan to overhaul K-12 education put forward by Kevin Nicholson, a Republican who is expected to announce this week he is running for governor. Nicholson, who was defeated in a Republican U.S. Senate primary in 2018 by former state Sen. Leah Vukmir […]
Noah Diekemper: It’s little wonder that the American Enterprise Institute’s education research fellow Max Eden has denounced college requirements for preschool teachers as “regressive,” declaring that there is “ no evidence to support this will help with student outcomes .” Why, then, are lawmakers considering a federal law that would fund preschool programs only if lead teachers […]
Jay Matthews: Now some schools are experimenting with easing homework and grading as a way to be fair and coax students back into the learning process. I had assumed educators would quickly realize this was a formula for disaster. But I have learned such take-it-easy policies are being seriously considered in what I have considered […]
Robert Pondisco: In some of his first public comments since being named New York City’s incoming schools chancellor, David Banks has drawn cheers from savvy education observers and literacy experts for remarks critical of “balanced literacy,” the city’s long-standing approach to teaching reading. “‘Balanced literacy’ has not worked for Black and Brown children. We’re going […]
Matt Taibbi: In preparation for today’s forthcoming story, A Culture War in Four Acts: Loudoun County, Virginia. Part Two: ‘The Incident,’ TK News sent Freedom of Information requests to the county on several questions. Concerned with the issue of when the controversial “Equity Collaborative” was hired, we asked for “procurement or purchasing process documents, stakeholder emails and communique […]
The Economist: hen amaury gomes began teaching history in Sobral in the mid-1990s, its schools were a mess. The city of 200,000 people lies in Ceará, a baking-hot north-eastern state that has one of Brazil’s highest rates of poverty. When local officials ordered tests in 2001 they found that 40% of Sobral’s eight-year-olds could not […]
The Assembly Committee on Education is holding a public hearing today on AB611, relating to the licensure requirements for teachers in regard to reading readiness. Similar to AB446 — a literacy bill vetoed by the Gov. — this bill seeks to boost WI’s dismal literacy rates. pic.twitter.com/XLUL9NVXBD — MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) December 14, 2021 Wisconsin […]
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 […]
Mark Seidenberg: Fountas and Pinnell have written a series of blog posts defending their popular curriculum, which is being criticized as based on discredited ideas about how children learn to read. (See Emily Hanford’s post here; EdReports evaluation here, many comments in the blogosphere.) The question is why school systems should continue to invest in the F&P curriculum and […]
Madeline Fox: Students in Wisconsin had two years of disrupted learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s heightened concerns about Wisconsin’s low reading scores on national assessments — only about 36 percent of Wisconsin fourth graders scored at or above proficient in reading on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. A bill to assess kids’ […]
Abbi Debelack: The latest data on testing and proficiency rates for Wisconsin’s children were recently released by the Department of Public Instruction and it is not pretty. Yet despite the alarmingly low test scores, there appears to be little to no outrage by the media and education establishment. Each year, Wisconsin students, in various grades, […]
mp3 audio: PDF Transcript (Machine generated). Related: Some legislators attempt to address our long term, disastrous reading results. 2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results. My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on […]
It’s not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world’s natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they’ve also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project.
At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation’s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.
Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and lecturer at NYU, is one of the 2,000 braniacs who contributed their DNA. I spoke to him about what this creepy-ass program might mean for the future of Chinese kids.Related: New data reveal scale of China abortions and Eugenics.
Many links here.
Technology Review:In its scientific work, BGI often acts as the enabler of other people’s ideas. That is the case in a major project conceived by Steve Hsu, vice president for research at Michigan State University, to search for genes that influence intelligence. Under the guidance of Zhao Bowen, BGI is now sequencing the DNA of more than 2,000 people–mostly Americans–who have IQ scores of at least 160, or four standard deviations above the mean.
The DNA comes primarily from a collection of blood samples amassed by Robert Plomin, a psychologist at King’s College, London. The plan, to compare the genomes of geniuses and people of ordinary intelligence, is scientifically risky (it’s likely that thousands of genes are involved) and somewhat controversial. For those reasons it would be very hard to find the $15 or $20 million needed to carry out the project in the West. “Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t,” Plomin says. “But BGI is doing it basically for free.”
From Plomin’s perspective, BGI is so large that it appears to have more DNA sequencing capacity than it knows what to do with. It has “all those machines and people that have to be fed” with projects, he says. The IQ study isn’t the only mega-project under way. With a U.S. nonprofit, Autism Speaks, BGI is being paid to sequence the DNA of up to 10,000 people from families with autistic children. For researchers in Denmark, BGI is decoding the genomes of 3,000 obese people and 3,000 lean ones.
The age of big government is now upon us. The question is how to respond to this daunting reality. One possible approach is prudential acquiescence to the inevitable. Conservatives could work toward incremental reform within today’s political paradigm. The Hoover Institution’s own Peter Berkowitz offers this advice in his thoughtful column in the Wall Street Journal. Libertarians, in particular, must “absorb” the lesson that frontal assaults on New Deal-era policies are out. He writes:
[C]onservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities. But to undertake to dismantle or even substantially roll back the welfare and regulatory state reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.
Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.I fear the downside of Berkowitz’s counsel of moderation. For starters, no one can police Berkowitz’s elusive line between “small” and “limited” government. At its core, Berkowitz’s wise counsel exposes the Achilles heel of all conservative thought, which can be found in the writings of such notables as David Brooks and the late Russell Kirk. Their desire to “conserve” the best of the status quo offers no normative explanation of which institutions and practices are worthy of intellectual respect and which are not. No one doubts that politics depends on the art of compromise. But compromise only works for politicians who know where they want to go and how to get there.
Many states emphasise abstract concepts rather than history itself. In Delaware, for example, pupils “will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history”. Other states teach children about early American history only once, when they are 11. Yet other states show scars from the culture wars. A steady, leftward lean has been followed by a violent lurch to the right. Standards for Texas, passed last year, urge pupils to question the separation of church and state and “evaluate efforts by global organisations to undermine US sovereignty through the use of treaties”.
Some states fare better. South Carolina has set impressive standards–for example, urging teachers to explain that colonists did not protest against taxation simply because taxes were too high. Other states, Mr Finn argues, would do well to follow South Carolina’s example. “Twenty-first century skills” may help pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens.Many states emphasise abstract concepts rather than history itself. In Delaware, for example, pupils “will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history”. Other states teach children about early American history only once, when they are 11. Yet other states show scars from the culture wars. A steady, leftward lean has been followed by a violent lurch to the right. Standards for Texas, passed last year, urge pupils to question the separation of church and state and “evaluate efforts by global organisations to undermine US sovereignty through the use of treaties”.
Some states fare better. South Carolina has set impressive standards–for example, urging teachers to explain that colonists did not protest against taxation simply because taxes were too high. Other states, Mr Finn argues, would do well to follow South Carolina’s example. “Twenty-first century skills” may help pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens.Related: The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011: Wisconsin = F.
This Saturday, high-school students around the country will sit for hours of silent testing that will determine some portion of their future: That’s right, it’s SAT time. For both parents and kids, the preparation for taking the standardized test is stressful and expensive, often involving hours of studying and several hundreds of dollars spent on classes, workbooks and tutors. And many kids will take these tests more than once.
So this week I tried a Web-based form of test prep called Grockit that aims to make studying for the SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE or LSAT less expensive and more enjoyable. Grockit.com offers lessons, group study and solo practice, and does a nice job of feeling fun and educational, which isn’t an easy combination to pull off.
A free portion of the site includes group study with a variety of questions and a limited number of solo test questions, which are customized to each student’s study needs. The $100 Premium subscription includes full access to the online platform with unlimited solo practice questions and personalized performance analytics that track a student’s progress. A new offering called Grockit TV (grockit.com/tv) offers free eight-week courses if students watch them streaming live twice a week. Otherwise, a course can be downloaded for $100 during the course or $150 afterward. Instructors hailing from the Princeton Review and Kaplan, among other places, teach test preparation for the GMAT business-school admissions test and SAT.
Jamie Oliver:
Eight-year-old Alex picked up a 75-cent can of fruit punch from one of the grocery store’s shelves and called excitedly to his mother in Spanish.
Maria, 38, gave her stocky third-grader a sympathetic smile. She’d already made Alex and his 3-year-old sister, Emelyn, walk 30 minutes under a broiling sun from their house in suburban Maryland to the Safeway, the closest place that accepts Emelyn’s federal milk and cereal vouchers. Then they’d trekked 20 minutes more to this cheaper Latino grocery so Maria, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who can’t afford a car and wouldn’t be eligible for a driver’s license anyway, could save $3.40 on chicken.
“At home, my son,” Maria said soothingly. “When we get home, you can drink some water.”
One reason that too many Arabs are poor is rotten education
A RECENT issue of Science, the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was devoted to research into “Ardi” or Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4m-year-old hominid species whose discovery deepens the understanding of human evolution. These latest studies suggest, among other things, that rather than descending from a closely related species such as the chimpanzee, the hominid branch parted earlier than previously thought from the common ancestral tree.
In much of the Arab world, coverage of the research took a different spin. “American Scientists Debunk Darwin”, exclaimed the headline in al-Masry al-Youm, Egypt’s leading independent daily. “Ardi Refutes Darwin’s Theory”, chimed the website of al-Jazeera, the region’s most-watched television channel. Scores of comments from readers celebrated this news as a blow to Western materialism and a triumph for Islam. Two or three lonely readers wrote in to complain that the report had inaccurately presented the findings of the research.
A few months ago, 71-year-old Chrissie Maher got a mailing from her bank titled “Personal and Private Banking — Keeping You Informed.” Baffled by its blizzard of terms such as “account facility limit,” Ms. Maher replied in simpler language.
“The leaflet needs much more thought if it is to be understood by your customers,” she said in a letter to Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. “As it stands, it should be renamed ‘Keeping You Confused.’ ”
After critiquing the pamphlet’s “tortuous and ambiguous sentences,” she redrafted it, changing terms like “maximum debit balance” to “the most that can be owed.”
RBS may have picked the wrong woman to target with financial mumbo jumbo. Ms. Maher is the founder of the Plain English Campaign, a 30-year-old group whose stated goal is to stem “the ever-growing tide of confusing and pompous language” that “takes away our democratic rights.”
Over the years, Ms. Maher and her group have battled police agencies, expansion planners at Heathrow Airport, and the “frequently bizarre language” of the European Union. (At issue: phrases such as “unlock clusters,” “subsidiarity” and “sector-specific benchmarking.”) She has blasted local government on the use of “worklessness” to refer to unemployment and once attacked the president of the U.K. Spelling Society over his claim that the apostrophe is “a waste of time.”
AP:
Contraband candy has led to big trouble for an eighth-grade honors student in Connecticut.
Michael Sheridan was stripped of his title as class vice president, barred from attending an honors student dinner and suspended for a day after buying a bag of Skittles from a classmate.
School spokeswoman Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo says the New Haven school system banned candy sales in 2003 as part of a district wide school wellness policy.
Michael’s suspension has been reduced from three days to one, but he has not been reinstated as class vice president.Joanne has more.
Dave Cieslewicz To quote a Wisconsin State Journal story on test scores that were released yesterday: “The four specific categories used to calculate the district’s overall achievement score all declined in comparison with last year’s school report card. Graduate rates fell slightly, while chronic absenteeism, or the percentage of students that miss at least 10% of school, […]
Quinton Klabon: 84% of schools are 3 stars or above and 93% of districts are. We need report cards that accurately judge schools based on our national performance. Report cards change again next year, so that is the perfect opportunity. ….. DPI suppressed insanity from lowering test score standards, though it led to some bizarre […]
Christopher Peak: For decades, schools all over the country taught reading based on a theory cognitive scientists had debunked by the 1990s. Despite research showing it made it harder for some kids to learn, the concept was widely accepted by most educators — until recent reporting by APM Reports. Now, state legislators and other policymakers are trying to change […]
By Keegan Kyle and Brandon Raygo Voters all across the communities and neighborhoods in the Madison Metropolitan School District widely supported the district’s two referendums this month that will raise property taxes for decades. (more) But in the affluent village of Maple Bluff, on the eastern shore of Lake Mendota, voters expressed more aversion to hiking taxes […]
Kayla Huynh: “If they don’t go to college, they should be able to walk right into a well-paid career. The No. 1 thing is to really work with these kids to help them find a career that they will enjoy,” McKenzie said. “These are all things that are directed at attacking the cycle of poverty.” […]
wire points Now look at the SAT results as reported by the state, and how much they are down since 2017. Property taxes up, up, up. Outcomes tragic. Zero accountability. Via @Wirepoints —— Bill Maher CALLS OUT Democrats: "You're the Teachers Union Education Party and you've turned schools and colleges into a joke." pic.twitter.com/5VGCHzDUVZ — […]
WILL School board elections have a big impact on the day-to-day lives of Wisconsin families. Yet they are decided in the least democratic elections. Today, WILL is releasing a new policy report with a proposal to solve this problem. Spring elections have an average turnout of 28% in the last decade, compared to Fall elections where […]
Helen Lewis: But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media […]
Naomi Martin and Mandy McLaren: At school, she panics if she has to read aloud. She’s a conscientious student and keeps her grades up, but it isn’t easy; at times she has such trouble synthesizing the novels she reads in English class, she Googles plot summaries to remind herself of what happened. Even in math, word problems […]
Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education seats 3, 4, and 5 will be on the 2025 ballot. —- Our govt’s decision to remove all subject area requirementsfor teachers will make things worse. 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” […]
Anna Stokke Imagine hiring a piano teacher who can’t play the piano or a swimming instructor who’s terrified of water. While it’s clear that these examples are absurd, the Manitoba government seems to have missed the obvious: teachers can’t teach what they don’t know. Last week, Manitoba quietly announced significant changes to teacher certification. Manitobans […]
Kyle Koenen: Jill Underly’s proposed DPI budget would eat up 65% of the state’s budget surplus, all while allowing property taxes to continue to go up. We fund students at approximately $20k per student on average. When is it enough? Abbey Machtig: State Superintendent Jill Underly is proposing more than $4 billion in new spending […]
NCTQ: NCTQ regularly convenes reading experts — researchers, teacher educators, and experienced elementary educators — to review both textbooks and educational resources, such as journal articles or instructional videos, used by teacher preparation programs in their required reading coursework. These experts examine how well each material aligns with scientifically based reading instruction, a science rooted […]
Grace Hagerman: What is the potential problem with focusing on the Science of Reading alone? Some educators say it places too much emphasis on a one-size-fits-all model of explicit, systematic, intensive phonics instruction for all students. Ground zero for the Science of Reading movement was an article by education reporter Emily Hanford for APM Reports.Published […]
Andrew Potter: What is interesting about Phetasy’s piece, in many ways, is just how unremarkable it is — the I-was-abandoned-by-my-divorced-parents has been its own genre of Gen X lit for a while now. For example, in 2011, the journalist Susan Gregory Thomas wrote an essay for the WSJ called “The divorce generation”, where she describes […]
Maggie Macintosh Among them, the province is no longer requiring teachers to specialize in an approved list of major or minor subject areas to get certified. The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic” My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on […]
Quinton Klabon: ACT 20 READING UPDATE • 440 schools ignored DPI about reading retraining progress. Below describes those who responded. • The large number may be due to teachers who previously completed a program or who chose a shorter retraining than LETRS. I welcome correction. The October, 2024 Wisconsin DPI Report (PDF): University of Wisconsin […]
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner It should be considered one of Illinois’ most egregious failures. School officials announced last week that in 2024 the state graduated high school students at a record 88 percent rate, even though the same data release showed that nearly 70% of graduating students can’t read or do math proficiently. Take black students […]
Kayla Huynh: “We are spending more revenue than we have to spend,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said. “We have a lot of work to do. Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, we have to have some strategic direction moving forward.” “We need to be sustainable. There’s no doubt about this,” he added. “It’s frustrating to have […]
Anjney Midha: One the saddest realizations for me when we were scaling the @midjourney server at @discord in ‘22 was seeing millions of US gen z kids struggle to prompt They literally don’t have the words. Broken english. Pidgin lingo. Translating thought to language is insanely hard for them Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ […]
Corinne Hess: “The Governor and DPI will very likely show that the Governor validly partially vetoed Act 100 and that DPI is entitled to the $50 million in disputed literacy funding,” Kaul wrote to the Supreme Court. “Both issues are destined for this Court, and leaving them to the ordinary appellate process would significantly harm […]
Jonathan Chait: Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here. Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic” My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous […]
AJ Manaseer: Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here. Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending. The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic” My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous […]
Abbey Machtig: “We are spending more revenue than we have to spend, therefore we are going to be spending one-time (reserve) funds …” Gothard said Monday. “We have a lot of work to do. Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, we have to have some strategic direction.” Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, […]
Kayla Huynh: Nearly 95,000 people in Dane County received Social Security payments in 2022. In January this year, the estimated average monthly Social Security check was about $1,900. The annual property tax bill on the average Madison home costs over $7,000 for city- and school-related taxes, according to city and school district estimates. In a few years, depending […]