Will Flanders:

WILL Research Director Will Flanders’s new policy brief, Needs Improvement: How Wisconsin’s Report Card Can Mislead Parents, provides an important explanation of how Wisconsin’s school report cards work and how the various inputs work towards a school’s score. Specifically, Flanders highlights:

• School report card scores vary widely based on student demographics. In schools with fewer low-income students, overall performance is given more weight. In schools with more low-income students, growth is given more weight.
• Wisconsin’s report card can make some bad schools look good. Some schools with less than 5% proficiency in math and English are rated as “Meets” or “Exceeds” expectations on the current report card. This severely limits the ability of families to make use of the report card as a metric for school quality.
• The report card harms private schools in the choice program due to a mismeasurement of disability & economic status. Disability status affects growth scores and the economic status of students effects the weight of growth in the report card score. Both of these factors are often measured inaccurately in choice schools, harming their overall scores.
• Private school systems cannot get school-level report cards. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has made it so that private school systems must choose between byzantine enrollment and auditing systems or getting individual school report cards for their schools. Without individual school report cards, it is more difficult for schools to determine how each school in their system is doing.

The Report (PDF).

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Sara Randazzo:

The parental pushback in Culver City mirrors resistance that has taken place in Wisconsin, Rhode Island and elsewhere in California over the last year in response to schools stripping away the honors designation on some high school classes.

School districts doing away with honors classes argue students who don’t take those classes from a young age start to see themselves in a different tier, and come to think they aren’t capable of enrolling in Advanced Placement classes that help with college admissions. Black and Latino students are underrepresented in AP enrollment in the majority of states, according to the Education Trust, a nonprofit that studies equity in education.

Culver City High School eliminated honors English classes to try to improve racial equity, but many parents disagree with the move.
Since the start of this school year, freshmen and sophomores in Culver City have only been able to select one level of English class, known as College Prep, rather than the previous system in which anyone could opt into the honors class. School officials say the goal is to teach everyone with an equal level of rigor, one that encourages them to enroll in advanced classes in their final years of high school.

“Parents say academic excellence should not be experimented with for the sake of social justice,” said Quoc Tran, the superintendent of 6,900-student Culver City Unified School District. But, he said, “it was very jarring when teachers looked at their AP enrollment and realized Black and brown kids were not there. They felt obligated to do something.”

Culver City English teachers presented data at a board meeting last year showing Latino students made up 13% of those in 12th-grade Advanced Placement English, compared with 37% of the student body. Asian students were 34% of the advanced class, compared with 10% of students. Black students represented 14% of AP English, versus 15% of the student body.

My honors English teacher encouraged me to publish my first letter to the editor. Reducing excellence in education is not equality of opportunity or liberalism. We need to invest to empower those who are left out, not tear down those who are doing well. https://t.co/bW8a9U6bzk

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) February 19, 2023

Related: Madison’s English 10 expedition (Mid 2000’s)

2017, yet Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results continue (despite spending about $23k/student).

Madison’s recent attempt to eliminate honors classes.

Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron is worth a read.

Ricardo Cano, Nanette Asimov

Teachers at San Francisco’s Lowell High School gave freshman students significantly more D and F grades this past fall, the first semester after the school board eliminated the merit-based admissions it had relied on for decades.

The lower grades, while expected by many, are likely to become part of a fervid debate over Lowell that touches on race, equity and achievement. The grades raise questions about how students — and the school’s teachers and administrators — are adapting to the changes.

However, it’s unclear exactly how much the change in admissions policy factored into the rise in D’s and F’s among Lowell’s ninth-graders, compared with other possible factors such as the pandemic.

Of the 620 students in Lowell’s freshman class, 24.4% received at least one D or F grade during the fall semester, compared with 7.9% of first-year students in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019, according to internal San Francisco Unified School District figures obtained by The Chronicle.

Deja Vu: 2005 Madison:

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading.

2007: one size fits all: English 10.

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 

Indira Dammu and Bonnie O’Keefe:

Nationwide, English learners (ELs) are a fast-growing and diverse student population in the K-12 public school system. Today, the Southeast region of the U.S. is home to more than 710,000 EL students, who speak about 400 different languages and account for 15% of EL students in the country. This number is quickly increasing as certain states in the region see unprecedented growth in EL enrollment. Despite the trends, state education finance systems in the Southeast have not adapted to support the unique learning needs of EL students.

Bellwether Education Partners’ report, Improving Education Finance Equity for English Learners in the Southeast, examines state funding policy structures and data in nine Southeastern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee — and shares a set of policy recommendations based on promising, equitable funding practices. The report includes a supplemental interactive data tool, accessible here.

As the report shows, state school funding systems in the Southeast have a lot of room for improvement in EL policy, but the region also has an important opportunity to be a leader nationally and demonstrate what transformational and equitable funding systems for EL students can look like.

Chris Barianiuk:

“We converted more than 200,000 old emails from former chief editors of Helsingin Sanomat – the largest newspaper in Finland,” she says, referring to a pilot project by Digitalia, a digital data preservation project. The converted emails were later stored in a digital archive.

The US Library of Congress famously keeps a digital archive of tweets, though it has stopped recording every single public tweet and is now preserving them “on a very selective basis” instead.

Could public institutions do some digital data curation and preservation on our behalf? If so, we could potentially submit information to them such as family history and photographs for storage and subsequent access in the future.

Kosonen says that such projects would naturally require funding, probably from the public. Institutions would also be more inclined to retain information that is considered of significant cultural or historical interest.

At the heart of this discussion lies a simple fact: it’s hard for us to know – here in the present – what we, or our descendants, will actually value in the future.

Archival or regulatory interventions could go some way to addressing the ephemerality of data. But that ephemerality is something we will probably always live with, to some extent. Digital data is just too convenient for everyday purposes and there’s little rationale for trying to store everything.

Scott Girard:

Madison Metropolitan School District high schools plan to move away from “standalone honors” courses for freshmen and sophomores in the next few years, with an Earned Honors system expected to replace them.

The goal, MMSD leaders told the School Board Monday, is to bring rigor to all classrooms for all students and give more students access to the level of learning that goes on in standalone honors classrooms. Disparities in the demographics of standalone honors classrooms are driving the change, with ninth grade moving to entirely Earned Honors by the 2022-23 school year and 10th grade the following year.

“We should see high level of rigor and an equal quality of programming across every single one of our classrooms,” executive director of curriculum and instruction Kaylee Jackson said.

The Earned Honors system, which began in MMSD for ninth-graders in 2017-18 and expanded to 10th grade the next year, allows students an “opportunity to earn honors designation at the end of each semester/course by meeting predetermined criteria,” according to the district’s presentation. That opportunity is offered across all classrooms, rather than students needing to enroll in honors-specific classes that can be intimidating for students of color who are unfamiliar with them, have been given low expectations by staff or do not see students who look like them in those classrooms.

“This is about levelling the playing field of providing access for all,” co-chief of secondary schools Marvin Pryor said.

East High School principal Brendan Kearney, who expressed support for the change along with the other three comprehensive high school principals, recalled his first day of teaching at the school. His first class, he said, was non-honors and included just one white student, whereas in his second-hour honors class, there were about three students of color, “and that’s in a school that’s fully two-thirds students of color.”

“Whatever the intentions, whatever the efforts that have been made, our current honors system has the effect of sorting students by race, by ethnicity, by language and by disability,” Kearney said.

Deja Vu: one size fits all, 2007 Madison… English 10.

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]

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

Patrick O’Donnell:

High school students won’t have to be “proficient” in either math or English to graduate, under minimum required test scores proposed by State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria.

They will just need to know enough to do the most basic of jobs.

New high school graduation requirements passed this summer require most students to show “competency” in math and English through scores on Ohio’s Algebra I and English II tests to qualify for a diploma. The new requirements start with the class 2023, this year’s high school freshmen.

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

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

In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.

Cliff Maas:

The writer of the story, Lynda Mapes, could not have been more explicit:

The cause of death was climate change: steadily warming and drier summers, that stressed the tree in its position atop a droughty knoll.

So, lets check the data and determine the truth. My first stop was the nice website of the Office of the Washington State Climatologist (OWSC), where they have a tool for plotting climatological data. Here is the summer (June-August) precipitation for the Seattle Urban Site, about a mile away from the tree in question. It indicates an upward trend (increasing precipitation) over the period available (1895-2014), not the decline claimed by the article.

Or lets go to the Western Region Climate Center website and plot the precipitation for the same period, considering the entire Puget Sound lowlands (see below) using the NOAA/NWS climate division data set and for June through September. Very similar to the Seattle Urban Site. Not much overall trend, but there is some natural variability, with a minor peak in the 70s and 80s.

Related:

Van Hise’s “special sauce”

Ben Rhodes rhetoric, media and governance

Madison’s English 10 experiment.

Will Fitzhugh:

When it comes to Words, our High School English Departments are the Rulers. They dominate reading and writing, partly because the other departments—including the History and other Social Studies departments—don’t want to assign book reports or term papers and they certainly don’t want to read and grade them.

The English Word Experts are supported in this by the K-12 Literacy World, which never saw a student history research paper they could not ignore. Everywhere you look, reading and writing mean fiction, and for fiction, the Literacy World is adamant that the responsibility for that belongs to English (English Language Arts) Departments.

College professors and employers, with near unanimity, complain about the nonfiction reading, research, and writing abilities of the young people they work with. Talking to the schools and/or the Literacy World about their concerns is just exactly like talking to a dead phone. They cannot hear what they are being told.

Students are not lobbying, in most cases, for the chance to write a serious 5,000-6,000-word term paper, and only later will they face the consequences of their lack of preparation.

Since 1987, The Concord Review has published 106 issues, with 1,165 history research papers by secondary students from 44 states and 40 other countries. The average length of the eleven papers in the Winter issue last Fall was 7,500 words, with endnotes and bibliography. Some of those papers came from International Baccalaureate schools, which still require an Extended Essay for the full Diploma. Some came from private schools, where faculty (and parents) still expect students to write at least one serious term paper before college.

Many of the papers lately have been from an Independent Study, or from Summer programs, like the Stanford Summer Humanities Institute and the TCR Summer Program for high school students. But in general, our public high schools, in my experience, even including an exam school like Boston Latin School, not only do not assign serious term papers, they also do not even want students to see the exemplary work that has been published by their peers, so that they cannot be inspired by them to work harder on reading history and on writing research papers themselves.

Thanks to the Web, more and more students are finding such examples anyway, and they take advantage of them. (e.g. www.tcr.org) One example of hundreds:

————————-

“Thank you so much for publishing my essay on the Irish Ladies’ Land League in the Spring issue of The Concord Review. I am honored that my writing was chosen to appear alongside such thoughtful work in your journal.

“When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports. A week before a paper was due, I would visit the local university library, check out all available books on my assigned topic and write as articulate a summary as possible. Such assignments are a useful strategy for learning to build a coherent argument, but they do not teach students to appreciate the subtleties and difficulties of writing good history. Consequently, few students really understand how history is constructed.

“As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task. At first, I did check out every relevant book from the library, running up some impressive fines in the process, but I learned to skim bibliographies and academic databases to find more interesting texts. I read about women’s history, agrarian activism and Irish nationalism, considering the ideas of feminist and radical historians alongside contemporary accounts.

“Gradually, I came to understand the central difficulty of writing history: how do you resurrect, in words, events that took place in a different place and time? More importantly, how do you resurrect the past only using the words of someone else? In the words of Carl Becker,

History in this sense is story, in aim always a true story; a story that employs all the devices of literary art (statement and generalization, narration and description, comparison and comment and analogy) to present the succession of events in the life of man, and from the succession of events thus presented to derive a satisfactory meaning.

“Flipping through my note cards, the ideas began to fit themselves together in my mind. I was not certain, but there was an excitement in being forced to think rigorously; in wrestling with difficult problems I knew I could not entirely solve. Writing about the Ladies’ Land League, I finally understood and appreciated the beautiful complexity of history.

“In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.”

Sincerely,
Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse
[North Central High School, Indianapolis, Indiana
and Columbia University]

===========

Let’s do make an effort to free our high school students from the English Department/Fiction-Only Monopoly, and allow them to be inspired, by the serious academic expository writing of their peers, to attempt real term papers themselves, before they go on, as most now do, to find themselves both unprepared and a Literacy Problem for their professors and their future employers.

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
www.tcr.org

Peter Norvig:

On December 17th 2012, I got a nice letter from Mark Mayzner, a retired 85-year-old researcher who studied the frequency of letter combinations in English words in the early 1960s. His 1965 publication has been cited in hundreds of articles. Mayzner describes his work:

I culled a corpus of 20,000 words from a variety of sources, e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, etc. For each source selected, a starting place was chosen at random. In proceeding forward from this point, all three, four, five, six, and seven-letter words were recorded until a total of 200 words had been selected. This procedure was duplicated 100 times, each time with a different source, thus yielding a grand total of 20,000 words. This sample broke down as follows: three-letter words, 6,807 tokens, 187 types; four-letter words, 5,456 tokens, 641 types; five-letter words, 3,422 tokens, 856 types; six-letter words, 2,264 tokens, 868 types; seven-letter words, 2,051 tokens, 924 types. I then proceeded to construct tables that showed the frequency counts for three, four, five, six, and seven-letter words, but most importantly, broken down by word length and letter position, which had never been done before to my knowledge.

and he wonders if:

perhaps your group at Google might be interested in using the computing power that is now available to significantly expand and produce such tables as I constructed some 50 years ago, but now using the Google Corpus Data, not the tiny 20,000 word sample that I used.

The answer is: yes indeed, I am interested! And it will be a lot easier for me than it was for Mayzner. Working 60s-style, Mayzner had to gather his collection of text sources, then go through them and select individual words, punch them on Hollerith cards, and use a card-sorting machine.

Abbey Machtig:

The school also would focus on building literacy and math skills through “boot camps” in the first year of enrollment. Beyond this bootcamp, students would get grade-level English instruction through the Odell High School Literacy Program, according to the proposal.

——-

A majority of the taxpayer financed Madison school board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy Charter School.

Per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the spending number used (!)

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

April Rubin:

The class of 2023 had the worst ACT performance in more than three decades, according to newly released data from the nonprofit that administers the college admissions test.

Why it matters: The scores are the latest indication of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education, with academic performance and test scores declining at all levels. The 2023 cohort was in its first year of high school when the pandemic began.

By the numbers: The 2023 composite score, an average of the scores for the English, math, reading and science sections, was 19.5 out of 36.

Rory Linnane:

Milwaukee School Board members could fire Superintendent Keith Posley or take other disciplinary action against him at a meeting Monday night, according to a meeting noticeupdated Friday evening, days after board members found out MPS had failed to submit key financial reports to state officials.

According to the meeting notice, board members could discuss Posley’s employment in a closed door meeting, before possibly returning to a public meeting to take action.

At the meeting, board members may consider “dismissal, demotion, licensing or discipline” of the superintendent. They may also discuss Posley’s compensation and performance evaluation data, and confer with legal counsel, according to the meeting notice.

The meeting, at 5:30 p.m. Monday at MPS’ Central Office, will also include a public hearing on the district’s budget and financial situation. Board members delayed voting this week on a district budget for the 2024-25 school year to get more information about where the district’s finances stand.

Also at the meeting on Monday, board members plan to announce the hiring of an outside financial consultant that will help the district get its financial reports in order.

MMAC

The school district’s non-compliance with federal and state statutes should have been disclosed to the Milwaukee taxpayers, the majority of whom are working families, before they were asked to increase the district’s budget by more than a quarter-billion dollars annually in April. It would have changed the narrative and forced the electorate to think twice about entrusting this amount of funding to a body who seemingly can’t manage it.  MPS has a transparency problem, and the state and federal governments are holding it accountable.  

We now ask the Milwaukee Public School Board to investigate the matter and hold those responsible fully accountable.  A deep, independent performance audit of the district must be conducted, and the results made public.  

Our students are told to complete their work and turn it in on time. MPS administration needs to be held to that same standard.    

——

“I asked @WisconsinDPI why they didn’t inform the public months ago about MPS’s failure to disclose financial data…..”

——-

Rory Linnane:

Milwaukee School Board members could fire Superintendent Keith Posley or take other disciplinary action against him at a meeting Monday night, according to a meeting noticeupdated Friday evening, days after board members found out MPS had failed to submit key financial reports to state officials.

According to the meeting notice, board members could discuss Posley’s employment in a closed door meeting, before possibly returning to a public meeting to take action.

At the meeting, board members may consider “dismissal, demotion, licensing or discipline” of the superintendent. They may also discuss Posley’s compensation and performance evaluation data, and confer with legal counsel, according to the meeting notice.

The meeting, at 5:30 p.m. Monday at MPS’ Central Office, will also include a public hearing on the district’s budget and financial situation. Board members delayed voting this week on a district budget for the 2024-25 school year to get more information about where the district’s finances stand.

Also at the meeting on Monday, board members plan to announce the hiring of an outside financial consultant that will help the district get its financial reports in order.

Some community members have called for Posley to resign, or for school board members to fire him, since news broke this week that the district has failed to submit financial reports to the state Department of Public Instruction, some of which were due more than eight months ago. DPI warned that it could suspend funding to MPS if the reports are not filed promptly.

MPS has not granted the Journal Sentinel an interview with Posley.

Quinton Klabon:

Good gracious! Alderman Westmoreland “disgusted and embarrassed” by MPS situation.

“Change at MPS is imperative to prevent a fate as disastrous as the Titanic’s.”

“[MPS] must excel in every area they can control. There is absolutely no room for error.”

Madison’s chamber involvement in the schools…?

Michael S. Garet, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, Daniel Hubbard, Joanne Carminucci and Barbara Goodson:

Boosting literacy among school-age children remains a national priority. Nearly one third of students in the United States have not developed the foundational reading skills needed to succeed academically, with students living in poverty, students with disabilities, and English learners especially at risk. Starting in 2010, Congress invested more than $1 billion for state literacy improvement efforts through the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy (SRCL) program. SRCL was intended to focus funding on disadvantaged schools, encourage schools to use evidence-based practices, and support schools and teachers in providing comprehensive literacy instruction. These efforts were expected to lead to improved literacy outcomes for students. This study assesses how well SRCL implementation was aligned with these goals, using information collected from states, districts, and schools in all 11 states awarded grants in 2017.

Key Findings

• Uneven targeting of resources to disadvantaged schools, according to the study’s definition of disadvantage, suggests that SRCL’s funding objectives were not realized in every state, though limited data availability and variation in states’ definitions of disadvantage make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Not all states consistently funded the most disadvantaged schools in their states in terms of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, students with disabilities, students who are English learners, or average student English language arts scores.
• Literacy programs supported by rigorous research evidence were not a focus, according to independent reviews of the quality of the research. Few districts used SRCL funds to purchase such programs and few teachers in SRCL schools reported using such programs.
• The kinds of comprehensive literacy instruction consistent with research and emphasized by SRCL were less widely used by teachers than intended. Consistent with this finding, there was no difference in English language arts student achievement between SRCL schools and comparable non-SRCL schools.

Quinton Klabon:

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin’s kids need help learning to read, so let’s see more cooperation and an end to power maneuvers and partisanship.

Enough. Enough.  

I’m fed up with partisanship, polarization and power maneuvers in the state Capitol that put adults and politics first and kids last. 

There have been many episodes of this unfortunate soap opera over the years. And now we have one of the most aggravating because it involves something that has both urgency and broad agreement, yet is at a standstill.   

Wisconsin has a reading crisis. Milwaukee and some other areas where poverty is high especially have a reading crisis, but the problem goes beyond income, race and where a child lives. There are just too few children who are becoming capable readers by the end of third grade, which a wide range of educators would tell you is an important point in determining whether a kid is on the road to doing well in school and, in many cases, in life beyond school.  

In state standardized tests a year ago (the most recent results available), 37% of all third-graders in Wisconsin were rated as proficient or better in English language arts, which generally means they’re reading well. Another 36% were rated as “basic,” which I interpret as “kind of OK.” And 25% were rated as “below basic,” which I rephrase as “not really on the playing field.” Overall, that means about 60% of the kids are rated below proficient — or, to put it more gently, a quarter are not doing well at all. That is a lot of kids.  

Education and the Administrative State

CJ Safir:

The “why can’t we all get along?” narrative doesn’t apply here.

➡️DPI worked WITH legislators to craft literacy legislation copying the best states.

➡️Now, as my team has shown, DPI has tried to override the law every step of the way.

J-S

In 1964, 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a coalition set up a one-day boycott of Milwaukee Public Schools to protest school segregation.

——

Legislation and Reading: the Wisconsin Experience 2004-

——

Literacy momentum stalls in Wisconsin (DPI): Why would Wisconsin’s state leaders promote the use of curriculum that meets “minimal level” criteria, instead of elevating the highest-quality

——-

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Cassandra Willyardarchive

Human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language models. To be able to write in passable English, ChatGPT had to be  trained on massive data sets that contain millions or even a trillion words. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data, yet by age three they’re communicating in quite sophisticated ways.

A team of researchers at New York University wondered if AI could learn like a baby. What could an AI model do when given a far smaller data set—the sights and sounds experienced by a single child learning to talk?

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A lot, it turns out.  The AI model managed to match words to the objects they represent.  “There’s enough data even in this blip of the child’s experience that it can do genuine word learning,” says Brenden Lake, a computational cognitive scientist at New York University and an author of the study. This work, published in Science today, not only provides insights into how babies learn but could also lead to better AI models.

George Leef:

Among the many destructive ideas that “progressive” thinking has unleashed on education in America is that it’s unfair to hold students from “underrepresented groups” to the same standards as others. Schools and colleges should “help” minority students succeed by lowering expectations for them—somehow atoning for wrongs done to their ancestors in the distant past. That is how Claudine Gay wound up as president of Harvard.

The notion that academic standards should be lower for minority students has swept through our educational institutions, but there are some dissenters who argue that this doesn’t help but hurts. One of them is Professor Erec Smith of York College. He teaches rhetoric and composition and has written a book challenging the belief that minority (especially black) students are somehow harmed by teaching them to use standard English. Smith argues in his book, A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition, that standard English empowers those students by giving them another tool to accomplish their objectives.

Much as woke professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.As Smith sees things, professors in his field, eager to display their “anti-racist” zeal, have adopted the trendy idea that “whiteness” is the enemy of progress for blacks. They’re passionate and sincere, but they have allowed their emotions to trample over reason in evaluating the pros and cons of their pedagogy. Smith writes that “feelings and opinions have replaced critical thinking in attempts to decenter whiteness and challenge hegemonic forces in academia.” Much as those professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.

That way entails an exclusive focus on the racial identity of students. Black students are assumed to be victims of white, racist social forces against which they are helpless. Therefore, they must band together in group solidarity to be empowered against “whiteness.” The trouble with that, Smith shows, is that it actually disempowers them. It leads to fallacious interpretations of texts and situations (seeing racism everywhere) and an inability to communicate and persuade. Instead of enabling black students to succeed, it infantilizes them. They’re trapped in an identity of victimhood, always looking for excuses and villains.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Cory Doctorow gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’ (though of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. It’s an English word. We don’t have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let’s examine how enshittification works.

It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

———

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Will Flanders:

It’s an unfortunate reality that demographic factors historically play a large role in student performance; any honest assessment of how schools and school sectors are performing must take those factors into account. Much of the reporting on school performance, though, ignores this reality. This report endeavors to incorporate these factors through rigorous statistical modeling that controls for, and assesses the impact of, several student characteristics. This report has been updated to include data from the 2022-23 report cards.

Among the key findings:

• Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public school peers. Proficiency rates in private choice schools were about 8.6% higher in English/Language Arts (ELA) and 7.0% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee.
• Charter school students in Milwaukee continue to outperform their public school peers. District charters saw 6.9% and 6.6% higher proficiency in ELA and math respectively than traditional public schools.
• Statewide, choice students outperform their public school peers in ELA. Proficiency rates were about 5.4% higher in ELA for students participating in school choice statewide than traditional public school students. No difference was found in math performance.
• Wisconsin continues to struggle with its achievement gaps. Statewide, a school with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency rates 40.6% lower in ELA and 44.0% lower in math compared to a hypothetical school with zero low-income students. For African American students, that gap is 17.8% in ELA and 20.3% in math. Hispanic students have an achievement gap of approximately 6.3% in math, but no significant gap was found in ELA.
• Choice and charter schools are more efficient with taxpayer money. Once the demographics of students in the schools are taken into account, choice and charter schools earn more proficiency per $1,000 of spending than traditional public schools in both Milwaukee and the state as a whole.
• Choice schools offer more value added. 12 of the top 20 schools in the state where student performance exceeds expectations based on demographics are in the state’s choice programs.
• Rural schools perform worse than schools in any other type of geography. On average, proficiency in Wisconsin’s rural schools is significantly lower in both ELA and math than urban, suburban, or town schools.

Commentary.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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 are thickets.

Madison von Mering, a driven 16-year-old who loves field hockey and sailing, is not a strong reader. As a young child, she was never correctly taught how to sound out unfamiliar words.

More.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Anyone hoping for improvement in Madison’s public schools will need to keep waiting. Incumbent school board members Savion Castro and Maia Pearson will be reelected by default in April as no challengers showed up before the filing deadline yesterday. Sincere congratulations to Castro and Pearson. They’ve stepped up. They put their names on the line. I strongly disagree with their views, but I have to respect the fact that they’ve put themselves in the arena. It’s ironic that the story of their de facto reelection appeared on the same day as a story about how MMSD is moving away from letter grades. Failing a class? Heading for a “D”? Turns out you’re not failing at all. You’re “emerging.” It wasn’t at all clear what MMSD is trying to accomplish by moving away from letter grades. They admit that it will create more work for already over-burdened teachers and they’ll need to translate “emerging” into a “D” at some point so that high school students can have a GPA for their transcripts when applying for college. I guess it spares a kid’s feelings in the short-run, maybe. Also, attendance and behavior won’t be taken into account with the new non-grading system either. In fact, this board seems to view good behavior as some sort of privileged cultural hegemony. I see it as just good behavior. It’s being respectful of your fellow students and teachers. Maybe I just don’t get it. I guess you’d have to say that when it comes to my grasp of MMSD policies my work is emerging. This is precisely the kind of stuff about this school board that drove me to encourage challengers to the incumbents. When this board, or any group of leaders, sees every issue in terms of race and gender they’re pretty much guaranteed not to solve the problem because they’ve misdefined it from the start. The problem is not a racial achievement gap. The problem is that there are some kids, of every race, who aren’t learning. To cover that up with words like “emerging” is just moving us further away from solutions rather than confronting the problem. We’ve got a school system where more than 60% of students are consistently performing below grade level in English and math, where behavioral problems are going unaddressed thanks to an ill-conceived “Behavior Education Plan,” and where parents have been voting with their feet for over a decade. And now we’re going to continue down that same road by phasing out the accountability (and yes, the pressure — it’s a good thing) that comes with real grades.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Corrinne Hess:

The proposed bill, authored by Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and state Rep. Jeff Mursau, R-Crivitz, extends that exception to applicants for all licenses that require the FORT exam.  

Felzkowski and Mursau did not respond to requests for comment. 

Lawmakers, DPI and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards say the change is necessary to help alleviate the state’s teacher shortage. For years, the FORT test has had dismal results. Only 54 percent of first-time test takers passed for the 2020-21 school year. That’s down from 66 percent in 2014-15.   

“Passing the FORT examination can be a costly and time-consuming process, with a relatively high failure rate, especially among teacher license applicants of color and applicants whose first language is not English,” according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. “There is also little credible evidence that passing the FORT exam, by itself, improves teacher performance or produces any positive impact on students’ literacy skills or reading achievement.”  

But some reading advocates and teachers say the onus should be on colleges and universities to better prepare their education students to teach, rather than throw away the test.  

Curtis Kadow is a third grade teacher at Kosciuszko Elementary School in Cudahy. Kadow did not have to take the FORT test — he became a teacher before the test was implemented 11 years ago.

Still, Kadow sees value in the test.  

“I believe it’s our only check to make sure that our universities are helping our pre-service teachers understand the science of reading and those foundational skills that they need in order to be successful coming into the workforce,” Kadow said. “I think it’s kind of interesting that our Legislature passed this really big reading bill focused on the science of reading, but now we’re trying to get rid of a test that checks for that.” 

The Cudahy School District, which serves a suburb on Milwaukee’s south shore, shifted to the phonics-based science of reading three years ago and test scores show it’s beginning to pay off.

Kadow understands the argument by lawmakers and DPI that low pass rates on the FORT exam are making it more difficult to hire staff, but to him, that means universities should change how they’re teaching.  

“If we think about the Forward exam, lots of kids don’t pass that, and we’re not getting rid of it,” he said. “Why? Because it’s a check to make sure that schools are doing what they need to do.”

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

1 year and $1 BILLION in federal relief later, it’s still tragic.

•6,000 fewer kids on college track
•101,000 kids below grade level
•Green Bay, Janesville stuck at pandemic low
•Milwaukee Black kids not catching up

Scott Girard:

In the Madison Metropolitan School District, proficiency rates in both subjects are well above the state for white students, but below the state for Black students.

Among the district’s white students, 64.3% scored either proficient or advanced in English language arts; among its Black students, it was just 8%, nearly the same as the 7.9% the year before.

In math, MMSD saw 60.7% of its white students test in the top two categories and 5.7% of its Black students do the same.

Institute for Reforming Government Senior Research Director Quinton Klabon said in a news release on the results that the state took a positive step forward with recent reading legislation, but was critical of how schools have spent their COVID-19 relief funding in recent years. Additional changes beyond the reading legislation will be required to make “Wisconsin’s schools our premier attraction for families once again,” he said.

“Wisconsin is quickly becoming a state where disadvantaged students do not succeed,” Klabon said.

More.

Corrinne Hess

Wisconsin continues to have the largest achievement gap between Black and white students

Fewer than 40 percent of Wisconsin students were proficient in reading and math during the 2022-23 school year. Standardized test scores were better than the previous two years but are still not back to pre-pandemic levels.

Results of the Forward Exam, a statewide test taken by Wisconsin’s 3rd through 8th graders, the PreACT Secure test given in grades 9 and 10 and the ACT given in grade 11 showed 38.9 percent of children were proficient in reading and 37.4 percent were proficient in math last year. 

When taken alone, the Forward Exam showed Wisconsin students were 39 percent proficient reading and 41 percent proficient in math. 

That’s up from a low of just over 33 percent proficiency in both reading and math during the height of the pandemic during the 2020-21 school year.  

Prior to the pandemic in the 2018-19 school year, 41 percent of Wisconsin students scored proficient in reading and 43.4 percent in math.

State Superintendent Jill Underly said she’s proud of this year’s test results and the increased participation rate of nearly 95 percent of students being tested.  

“I am also tired of politicians claiming that our children aren’t learning because they aren’t reaching a proficiency score,” Underly said in a statement. “Instead of using test scores as a cudgel, we should all take the time to learn what a high bar proficiency on this test represents, because the truth is that our proficiency cut scores are very high in comparison to every other state in the country.”

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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 at how, when and why we should be using the Sustainable Development Goals. We’ll change them from simply being a poster on the wall to being an effective learning tool and look at how to genuinely encourage students to engage in and connect with the 17 SDGs.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Abbey Machtig:

The Madison School District bought the land for $6.4 million and construction was estimated to cost about $25 million, financed by a 2020 facilities referendum. Landscaping and playground construction at Southside Elementary are continuing, according to the district website.

The school serves an especially diverse population. Of the students in the area, 81% are from low-income households, 89% are students of color and 50% are English learners, according to district data from February. The school’s location at the center of the community “provides one of the best walking options available,” according to the district. 

Mullen said attendance was an ongoing issue at Allis: If students missed the bus, they often had to miss school altogether that day. 

Having a school closer to home will also create more opportunities for families to meet face to face with educators and see their students’ school, she said.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

James Vaznis:

The ballot initiative would allow students to graduate “by satisfactorily completing coursework that has been certified by the student’s district as showing mastery of the skills, competencies, and knowledge contained in the state academic standards and curriculum frameworks in the areas measured by the MCAS high school tests.”

A small group of union activists, parents, and high school graduates filed a ballot initiative Wednesday, with the backing of the state’s largest teachers union, that would end a state provision requiring students to pass the MCAS tests to graduate, setting up a potentially costly election fight.

Currently, high school students must pass Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams in English, math, and science to graduate. More than 700 high school students a year typically don’t receive a diploma because they didn’t meet that requirement, according to state data. Instead, they received “certificates of attainment,” which are given to students who only satisfied local graduation requirements. However, many educators say a number of students who don’t pass MCAS ultimately drop out.

The ballot question is the MTA’s latest effort to end the graduation requirement. Earlier this year, the MTA and other unions had legislation introduced on Beacon Hill that would end the graduation requirement.

Groups, such as the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, have been aggressively fighting the unions’ efforts.

“MCAS is a crucial instrument for measuring students’ vital signs to make sure they’re getting the education they deserve and that they need to be successful after high school,” the business alliance said in a statement.

Notes and links on MTEL.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004–

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

George Will:

Ian Rowe, a charter school advocate, notes thatsince the “nation’s report card” was first issued in 1992, in no year “has a majority of whitestudents been reading at grade level. The sad irony is that closing the black-white achievement gap would guarantee only educational mediocrity for all students.”

Mysteriously (or perhaps not), California’s most recent standardized test revealed declines in math and English language arts — yet rising grades. Larry Sand, writing in City Journal, reports that 73 percent of 11th-graders received A’s, B’s and C’s in math, while the test showed that only 19 percent met grade-level standards. Among eighth-graders, the disparity was 79 percent and 23 percent. Among sixth-graders’ English scores, it was 85 percent and 40 percent. Amazingly (or perhaps not), the high school graduation rate has risen as students’ proficiencies have fallen.

Grade inflation, sometimes called “equity grading,” and “social promotions,” which combat meritocracy as a residue of white supremacy, leave a wake of wreckage. “According to World Population Review,” Sand says, “California now leads the country in illiteracy. In fact, 23.1 percent of Californians over age 15 cannot read this sentence.”

As alarming as what students are not learning is what they are being taught. Robert Pondiscio and Tracey Schirra of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in National Affairs (summer 2022), say “public education has drifted toward an oppositional relationship with its founding purpose of forming citizens, facilitating social cohesion, and transmitting our culture from one generation to the next.” The result is the emergence of what might be a dominant political issue in 2024: parental rights concerning educational content and curriculum transparency.

Remote learning during the pandemic, say Pondiscio and Schirra, “pried open the black box of America’s classrooms.” Progressives, anxious to slam it shut again, portray any public involvement in public education, other than paying for it, as an infringement of the hitherto unenunciated right of teachers to unabridged sovereignty over other peoples’ children. But as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has said, “Someone’s got to decide what is going to be taught in K-12 schools.” Teachers, principals, legislatures, school boards — the First Amendment does not say whom.

“unlike the Establishment, with kids in private prep schools and only caring about blame-shifting”

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Kevin Mahnken:

COVID-19’s cataclysmic impact on K–12 education, coming on the heels of a decade of stagnation in schools, has yielded a lost generation of growth for adolescents, new federal data reveal. 

Wednesday’s publication of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — America’s most prominent benchmark of learning, typically referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — shows the average 13-year-old’s understanding of math plummeting back to levels last seen in the 1990s; struggling readers scored lower than they did in 1971, when the test was first administered. Gaps in performance between children of different backgrounds, already huge during the Bush and Obama presidencies, have stretched to still-greater magnitudes.

The bad tidings are, in a sense, predictable: Beginning in 2022, successive updates from NAEPhave laid bare the consequences of prolonged school closures and spottily delivered virtual instruction. Only last month, disappointing resultson the exam’s history and civics component led to a fresh round of headlines about the pandemic’s ugly hangover. 

But the latest release, highlighting “long-term trends” that extend back to the 1970s, widens the aperture on the nation’s profound academic slump. In doing so, it serves as a complement to the 2020 iteration of the same test, which showed that the math and English skills of 13-year-olds had noticeably eroded even before the emergence of COVID-19.

Seems like huge spending increases during COVID didn't help.

We need to hold students & teachers accountable and not let the rampant social promotion in K-12 schools continue. https://t.co/krIJY1DgzV

— Robin Vos (@repvos) June 21, 2023

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ari Kauffman:

In the 23 City Schools of Baltimore, zero students are proficient in grade-level math. The Baltimore Teachers Union, unsurprisingly, is among the nation’s most influential and a top AFT ally. They partner in hurting children.

Weingarten and her totalitarians love to talk about supposed “racism,”; but if her union cared about black Americans’ lives — instead of collecting massive salariesand funding Democrats — rather than political grandstanding, they would do something since the district is majority black.

They also might do something about the fact that 40 miles down the road in the Washington D.C. public school system, only 9% of black 3rd-12th graders counted as proficient in math last year.

Why doesn’t the Washington Post or NPR care that despite the massive amount of money the nation’s capital’s residents spend per pupil, their public school teachers cannot get 1 of 10 black students proficient in math? That’s not “economic inequality”; that’s a true scandal.

It’s not much better for other groups.

Only 17% of D.C.’s Hispanic students are proficient in math. And in English, only 20% of black students and about a third of Hispanic students count as proficient.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Abigail Anthony

“Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees.”

Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed: They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras. Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees, which could explain the land acknowledgementsin syllabi and the deluge of departmental anti-racism statements that inform students what can and can’t be said in class. The university’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning offers recommendations for “inclusive teaching” and encourages instructors to “address blatantly offensive and discriminatory comments and hold students accountable for their behavior,” which seems to contravene the university’s adoption of the University of Chicago’s Free Speech Principles. Princeton’s Office of the Provost encourages departments to “develop a departmental procedure for the regular examination of syllabi to ensure the representation of a diverse array of scholars in the field” and to “redesign the curriculum to address inequities in access and retention.”

In the name of diversity, some requirements have been dropped and others have been added. In 2021, the Princeton classics department began “removing barriers to entry” and stopped requiring study of Greek or Latin, while the politics department introduced a Race and Identity track. The Provost recommendsboosting the number of “underrepresented discipline-specific scholars and researchers to participate in departmental events.”

To ensure that faculty hiring results in a diverse work force, academic departments (possibly illegally) appoint a search officer who is the “only individual who can see the confidential individual, self-identified demographic data, including data about gender, race, and ethnicity,” and the officer should “monitor the recruitment and selection processes for tenure-track and tenured faculty positions.” The guidance states that “before the short list is sent to the associate dean for academic affairs or the deputy dean, the search officer must review it for gender and racial/ethnic representation.”

The search officer indicates to the search committee whether the applicant pool is diverse enough and recommends specific individuals without explicitly stating why, thereby circumventing federal and state laws prohibiting race-based hiring. Unsurprisingly, the university has documented a rise in Asian and black tenure and tenure-track faculty since fall 2018, while the white tenure and tenure-track faculty fell by 4.4 percent. Although Princeton doesn’t require diversity statements for hiring, the university has developed guidelines for departments that do wish to ask for such affirmations.

Scott Girard:

Option A would use a curriculum developed by Savvas for both English language arts and Spanish and dual literacy programs at a cost of $1.17 million. Option B would use Open Up for English and Savvas for Spanish and dual literacy programs for $2.1 million.

Whichever is selected, the district will use one-time federal COVID-19 relief funds for the purchase. Implementation will begin ahead of the 2023-24 school year.

Option B would be more similar to what the board chose a year ago, with Open Up as the vendor for English language arts at elementary schools and a different vendor as the choice for multi-language programs. The consistency with Open Up from elementary to middle school was one favorable point for administrators in Option B, as it would make the fifth to sixth grade transition easier for students.

Jackson explained that in Option A, Savvas’ curriculum prioritizes consistency within school buildings, while Option B’s Open Up choice would move toward coherence across the district.

Either way, she stressed the differences between English programs and dual-language programs and that even if they choose to use a single vendor for both, the way those programs function will be unique to each other.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

California Reading Report Card:

As in the 2019 Report Card, funding and share of high-need students had very little correlation with results. There are top performing districts with over 90% high-need enrollment, and low performing districts with less than 40%.

The clear message is that it is not the students themselves, or the level of resources, that drive student reading achievement – the primary drivers are district focus on reading, management practices, and curriculum and instruction choices. The top performing districts come in all types: urban, rural, and suburban, across 9 different counties, with high-need students levels ranging from 39% to 94%. Any district can succeed at teaching reading.

New this year is a break-down by percent of limited-proficiency English Learners (ELs). With ELs, districts are tasked with teaching both English and reading; short-comings in either will yield low results. Districts with higher shares of ELs may have lower results, but still out-perform many districts with a similar student mix by as much as 25 percentage points.

A very small number of districts (7 in total) bucked the pandemic-driven trend. Palo Alto Unified, one of 2019 lowest performers, improved by 9 percentage points, and was the state’s most improved district. Their Every Student Reads Initiative, started in 2021, appears to be having positive impact. Newark Unified improved by 5 percentage points.

How the Rankings Work

Districts are ranked by the percent of economically disadvantaged Hispanic/Latino (Latino) students who “meet or exceed” grade level for the CAASPP 3rd grade ELA test in 2022. For measuring improvement, we compared to the same results for 2019.

More, here.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Nathan Heller

She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

Tara K. Menon, a junior professor who joined the English faculty in 2021, linked the shift to students arriving at college with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach. At Harvard, as elsewhere, courses that can be seen to approach an idea of canon, such as Humanities 10, an intensive, application-only survey, have been the focus of student concerns about too few Black artists in syllabi, or Eurocentric biases.

“There’s a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, ‘I want to read post-colonial texts—that’s the thing I want to study—and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men,’ ” Menon said. “My answer, in the big first lecture that I give, is, If you want to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire”—she smiled—“is that all those writers read all those books.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Emma Camp:

One California high school has eliminated honors classes for ninth- and 10th-grade students. While school officials claim that the change was necessary to increase “equity,” the move has angered students and parents alike.

“We really feel equity means offering opportunities to students of diverse backgrounds, not taking away opportunities for advanced education and study,” one parent who opposed the change told The Wall Street Journal.

Starting this school year, Culver City High School, a public school in a middle-class suburb of Los Angles, eliminated its honors English classes for ninth- and 10th-graders. Instead, students are only able to enroll in one course called “College Prep” English. The decision, according to school administrators, came after teachers noticed that only a small number of black and Hispanic students were enrolling in Advanced Placement (A.P.) courses.

“It was very jarring when teachers looked at their AP enrollment and realized Black and brown kids were not there. They felt obligated to do something,” said Quoc Tran, the district’s superintendent. According to an article by The Wall Street Journal‘s Sara Randazzo, data presented at a school board meeting last year showed that Latino students made up 13 percent of 12th-grade A.P. English students, despite comprising 37 percent of the student body, while black students made up 14 percent of A.P. English students while comprising 15 percent of the student body.

Deja vu: One size fits all in Madison – English 10

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Emma Camp:

One California high school has eliminated honors classes for ninth- and 10th-grade students. While school officials claim that the change was necessary to increase “equity,” the move has angered students and parents alike.

“We really feel equity means offering opportunities to students of diverse backgrounds, not taking away opportunities for advanced education and study,” one parent who opposed the change told The Wall Street Journal.

Starting this school year, Culver City High School, a public school in a middle-class suburb of Los Angles, eliminated its honors English classes for ninth- and 10th-graders. Instead, students are only able to enroll in one course called “College Prep” English. The decision, according to school administrators, came after teachers noticed that only a small number of black and Hispanic students were enrolling in Advanced Placement (A.P.) courses.

“It was very jarring when teachers looked at their AP enrollment and realized Black and brown kids were not there. They felt obligated to do something,” said Quoc Tran, the district’s superintendent. According to an article by The Wall Street Journal‘s Sara Randazzo, data presented at a school board meeting last year showed that Latino students made up 13 percent of 12th-grade A.P. English students, despite comprising 37 percent of the student body, while black students made up 14 percent of A.P. English students while comprising 15 percent of the student body.

Deja vu: One size fits all in Madison – English 10

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Sarah Mervosh:

But recently, he said, he has made strides, in part because of an unusual and sweeping high school literacy curriculum in Memphis.

The program focuses on expanding vocabulary and giving teenagers reading strategies — such as decoding words — that build upon fundamentals taught in elementary school. The curriculum is embedded not just in English, but also in math, science and social studies.

With his new tools, Roderick studied “I Have a Dream,” the speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — no longer skipping unfamiliar words, but instead circling them to discern their meaning. And when scanning sports news on ESPN in his free time, he knew to break down bigger words, like the “re/negotia/tion” of a player’s contract.

The instruction “helped me understand,” said Roderick, 17, who is on the honor roll at Oakhaven High School and is preparing to take the ACT. (He and other students, interviewed with parental permission, are being identified by their first names to protect their privacy.)

The program in Memphis is an extension of a growing national movement to change the way younger children are taught to read, based on what has become known as “the science of reading.” And it is a sign of how sharply the pendulum has swung in the decades-long, contentious debate over reading instruction, moving away from a flexible “balanced literacy” approach that has put less emphasis on sounding out words, and toward more explicit, systematic teaching of phonics.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Paloma Esquivel:

Their situation is far from unique. After falling in the early semesters of the pandemic, by spring 2022 high school and middle school math and English grades in the Los Angeles Unified School District not only rebounded, but went up, according to an L.A. Times analysis. At the same time, math and English proficiency rates on the state’s standardized tests fell to their lowest levels in five years.

The vast majority of students — whose teachers follow revised grading guidelines put in place amid the pandemic — received A’s, Bs and Cs in their classes. But the good report cards may not reflect a student’s ability to meet California’s grade level standards — even though a district policy calls for a C to mean that a student understands the material.

While grades and standardized tests are distinct ways of measuring how students are doing, the growing disconnect raises questions about whether families are fully informed about the extent of their children’s academic setbacks and whether they are being well positioned to push for additional help.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Dylan Brogan:

The “time is now” to eliminate standalone honors classes in Madison high schools, according to Superintendent Carlton Jenkins. At a Dec. 5 school board meeting, Jenkins said a “racist attitude” underlies support for keeping separate classes that offer more rigorous coursework to students. 

“We are no longer going to uphold what is considered to be a segregated mentality,” Jenkins said. “We should work together to get it done.”

To replace traditional honors classes, Jenkins wants to expand the district’s current Earned Honors program to all core classes — English, math, science and social studies — offered to Madison freshmen and sophomores. Earned Honors started in 2017 and is at different stages of implementation at each high school. The program allows students to receive an honors credit on their transcript by doing extra work while enrolled in a non-honors class. 

District officials first informed the board in April 2021 that they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. But administrators in February “hit pause” on that plan “to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.” This fall, however, staff began moving forward with plans to expand Earned Honors while sunsetting standalone honors classes for freshmen in 2023 and sophomores in 2024.

The policy shift didn’t need board approval but, according to The Capital Times, members Christina Gomez Schmidt and Nicki Vander Muelen requested a vote. Board president Ali Muldrow now says it’s “likely” the board will vote on two issues at its meeting on Dec. 19: whether to expand the Earned Honors program and whether to eliminate standalone honors classes. 

Deja vu: one size fits all: English 10.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

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.

“(Stand-alone) honors does feel slightly more rigorous, but usually still manageable,” West High senior Holly Wright said.

Wright said she liked the earned honors format, though, because it allowed her to dive deeper into classes and subjects she enjoyed without it feeling like too much additional work.

Honors classes are often seen as precursors for Advanced Placement, or AP, classes that students take later on, but the two are separate.

AP classes are designed by the College Board to give students the chance to earn college credit when they perform well on the exam given at the end of the course. Students have the option to take the test or not, and AP courses are most often offered to juniors and seniors.

Deja vu: one size fits all: English 10.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

Mr. Agresto, 76, is a lifelong champion of liberal-arts education—the subject of his new book, “The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It.” It’s an unpopular cause: According to U.S. Education Department data, students who majored in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages or literature constituted only 4% of college graduates in 2020. The number of degrees awarded in each of these disciplines declined by between 15% and 34% between 2012 and 2020, while the total number of degrees rose by 14%.

Many young Americans—old ones, too—don’t see the point of liberal arts: “We are suspicious, because we don’t know what good they are and we don’t know what use they are,” Mr. Agresto says in a Zoom interview. But for those students in Iraq, this was the first time they were “allowed to think about how you build a democracy, or what’s the place of religion in society or what is the role of my having a free and inquisitive mind” while also being “a person who obeys what the imam says. Once they got a taste of the liberal arts, that changed everything.”

Scott Girard:

West math teacher Sigrid Murphy said that even more recently, in the 2020-21 school year, “30% of the students in geometry at West identified as white while 72% of the students in geometry honors identified as white.” The school’s overall enrollment that year was about 52% white students.

“Within the (West) math department, all of us are completely, 100% behind the district’s plan,” Murphy said.

Those opposed suggest eliminating the classes isn’t the solution — instead, preparing students earlier on in their school careers so they feel ready to take on a challenge is key. Lately, some have also pointed to low reading scores on standardized tests to show that the district may not be doing that.

Laurie Frost, who is part of a group of Madison residents that has pushed the district on literacy in recent years, wrote in an email to the School Board and district administration on honors last month that she is “as concerned about the race-based disparities in enrollment in our honors classes as you are,” but that she has “a different way of understanding why the disparities exist.

“Put simply, the race-based disparity in honors class enrollment is due to the fact that we are not preparing our students of color for honors classes in their pre-high school years,” Frost wrote.

Board president Ali Muldrow suggested the district needs to focus on what outcome it wants, “striving for greater inclusion for all at the most rigorous levels of opportunity for our district.” She, like Frost, pointed out that preparing students for success in advanced high school coursework needs to begin early.

“One of my problems with how we’ve had this conversation over and over again is that we create the achievement gap in elementary school and then we pretend to resolve it in high school,” Muldrow said. “I’m really curious how what we’re doing in elementary school and middle school is going to align with this approach in high school, or if we’re just going to kind of create classrooms where some kids are more successful in a variety of ways than others.”

Associate superintendent of teaching and learning Cindy Green said the district is working on early literacy, full-day 4K and access to the arts, among other initiatives, to do just that.

Another concern from some opponents to the plan has been whether or not classes will be rigorous enough. La Follette High School senior and student representative to the School Board Yoanna Hoskins said she completed earned honors for a history course, and it only required one additional piece of work from the rest of the class.

“It wasn’t hard or anything like that,” Hoskins said.

The plan’s timeline includes updating course catalogs and course selection cards in November 2022, a step Green said they have already taken.

Round and round we go: Once size fits all English 10 in the mid 2000’s.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

Mr. Agresto, 76, is a lifelong champion of liberal-arts education—the subject of his new book, “The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It.” It’s an unpopular cause: According to U.S. Education Department data, students who majored in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages or literature constituted only 4% of college graduates in 2020. The number of degrees awarded in each of these disciplines declined by between 15% and 34% between 2012 and 2020, while the total number of degrees rose by 14%.

Many young Americans—old ones, too—don’t see the point of liberal arts: “We are suspicious, because we don’t know what good they are and we don’t know what use they are,” Mr. Agresto says in a Zoom interview. But for those students in Iraq, this was the first time they were “allowed to think about how you build a democracy, or what’s the place of religion in society or what is the role of my having a free and inquisitive mind” while also being “a person who obeys what the imam says. Once they got a taste of the liberal arts, that changed everything.”

Scott Girard:

The Madison School Board’s closed session meeting to discuss the appeal of fired principal Jeffrey Copeland Tuesday lasted just over 15 minutes without a decision.

“I can’t explain that,” board member Nicki Vander Meulen said, leaving around 5:16 p.m. and declining further comment. Other board members who left shortly after also declined to comment and said they could not share what happened.

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds wrote in a statement sent half an hour later that “no action was taken” during the meeting.

“The Board will be scheduling final action in the upcoming days,” LeMonds wrote. “This change was made to address a technical issue with the public notice in fairness to all parties involved.”

A group of about 10 Sennett staff stood outside the door at the beginning of the meeting, but most left about 10 minutes in as the board met behind the closed door, with one remaining to deliver the news to the others at the end of the meeting.

Because the meeting was held in closed session, as allowed under state law when a public body considers someone’s employment, board members are mostly barred from sharing information on what happened during the meeting.

Two board members — board president Ali Muldrow and vice president Maia Pearson — remained in the room with a small group of district leaders after the meeting, including general legal counsel Sherry Terrell-Webb and senior executive director of staff Richard McGregory. As a reporter stood outside the open door, another staff member closed it as the group continued to meet.

Olivia Herken:

The School Board was set to have the final say on whether Copeland would be reinstated after he was fired Sept. 26 for comments he accidentally left on a teaching applicant’s voicemail on Sept. 6 that the district has deemed bigoted.

The candidate, with whom Copeland had spoken on the phone, speaks English as a second language and holds a doctorate from a university in the Dominican Republic.

Thinking the phone call was over and unaware his comments were being recorded, Copeland remarked to Assistant Principal Matt Inda that he could barely understand the applicant on the phone, and then made comments about “just giving people damn jobs.”

In an email to the Wisconsin State Journal this week, Copeland said he was expressing concern about teacher qualifications amid widespread school staffing shortages and not specifically referencing the candidate.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Olivia Herken:

The principal of Sennett Middle School who was fired over comments that were construed by the Madison School District as bigoted toward a specific job candidate said he was expressing general concern about teacher qualifications in an era of staffing shortages.

“This incident is clearly subjective rhetoric with no factualization,” Jeffrey Copeland told the Wisconsin State Journal in an email this week. “To indicate that I would be racist towards anyone. Racism is a learned behavior that I have not been taught and would not be interested in learning.”

Copeland was fired on Sept. 26, just days into the school year, after he was recorded making disparaging comments about a teaching candidate who held a degree from the Dominican Republic and was not a native English speaker.

During the recording, Copeland made comments about “just giving people damn jobs” and said he could barely understand the applicant during their phone conversation.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Olivia Herken:

Others agreed, saying Copeland was known for “speaking plainly.”

“As an educator, when I’ve had the opportunity to speak and interact with Dr. Copeland, I can say that he’s always had respect for me and my interests, as well as my culture,” said Marlene Patiño. She’s a bilingual dual-language seventh-grade science teacher, whose second language is English.

“Speaking plainly is not a crime. But sometimes in Madison we can take things and turn it into a crime,” said Shannon Stevens, a school social worker who occasionally substitute taught at Sennett while Copeland was there. She said Copeland “didn’t mince words” but was always respectful.

When Copeland was initially fired in September, staff expressed that he had transformed the middle school, which had been experiencing behavioral issues.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

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 it looks as if Copeland believed that his teachers should have strong English language skills and he felt the District was hiring teachers without those skills, perhaps to meet diversity goals.

Here are a few questions that spring to mind from a writer who is against racism but not necessarily on board with the whole “anti-racist” thing. First, how are students of color served by teachers who struggle to communicate ideas clearly? Second, how are those students served by a chaotic and sometimes even dangerous environment? Third, wouldn’t a principal who was insisting on teachers with strong language skills and on orderly and safe classrooms be serving those students better than anyone?

The story will go on. Copeland is fighting to get his job back and so there will be more proceedings along those lines in which, I hope, more questions will be answered. But from what we know now this looks like yet another mess the Madison School District has gotten itself into because of its obsession with graduate level anti-racist theories as opposed to dealing head on with the real racial unfairness on the ground.

And with that, have a good weekend, folks.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Scott Girard:

A St. Louis-area native, van Buren spent five years teaching there and five more in New Mexico before she arrived in Madison and began working at La Follette. Her jobs have included a mix of teaching English, being a school librarian and now teaching a mix of design and technology classes.

At all of her stops, though, journalism was a key component.

“I don’t want to grade essays, I really just have always wanted to be a full time journalism teacher,” van Buren said, “but that’s not very common. They just don’t have schools where there’s enough classes to be full time journalism.

“So being a librarian and a journalism teacher, I absolutely loved.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Susan D’Agostino:

“It doesn’t feel like something I’d write, but it also doesn’t not feel like something I’d write,” a North Carolina State University student said about their work integrating prose from an artificial intelligence text-generating program into a final course essay. Paul Fyfe, associate professor of English and the student’s instructor in the Data and the Human course, had asked students to “cheat” in this way and then reflect on how the experiment tested or changed their ideas about writing, AI or humanness.

Humans have long relied on writing assistance powered by artificial intelligence to check spelling and grammar, predict text, translate or transcribe. Now, anyone with an internet connection can access an AI tool such as OpenAI or Moonbeam, give it a prompt and receive—in seconds—an essay written in humanlike prose.

Instructors who are concerned that students will use these tools to cheat may hold fast to in-class writing assessments or install surveillance tools to try to detect misconduct. But others argue those are fools’ errands. AI-generated prose is original, which prevents plagiarism software from detecting it.

Olivia Herken:

“Historically, the concept of advanced learning and honors has served to segregate students based on race, socioeconomic status and special education status,” School Board member Savion Castro said. And when these students do access the advanced classes, they often report feeling “isolated, feeling tokenized and experiencing a white-washed curriculum.”

“I think we all agree that disparities at this level are unacceptable, and change is needed,” board member Chris Gomez Schmidt said. “In my opinion, our focus should be on addressing the barriers to access and preparation for these courses instead of dismantling the courses themselves.”

“Stand-alone and earned honors can coexist to create more opportunity for more students,” she said.

Multiple parents contacted by the State Journal weren’t willing to be quoted for this article, saying the contentious issue had become toxic.

Green said honors courses are just a “singular point” in advanced coursework, which includes expanding advanced classes and more experiential learning and internships.

Regardless of whether the stand-alone honors courses are still around next year, the district plans to implement a universal approach to the earned-honors credits. All ninth-graders will be required to take an advanced course, which could include a course that offered earned-honors credits.

2007: Madison West High School English 10: One size fits all.

Madison West High School: Small Learning Communities

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Wall Street Journal:

The decline is all the more worrisome because fewer students are taking the test since fewer schools require it. About 1.35 million took the test this year, compared with 1.91 million in 2018. Playing down standardized tests lets schools rely on more subjective measures for admission, such as race or diversity.

ACT CEO Janet Godwin notes “rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure.” These benchmarks, for math or science, say, try to predict whether students are prepared to succeed in college courses. More than 40% of seniors met none of the ACT’s benchmarks for college readiness. None. No doubt many of these students will head off to campus anyway, unprepared for basic English courses, much less calculus or organic chemistry. They can thank heaven for college grade inflation.

The high schoolers in America doing the worst are from low-income families. Only 10% of students from households earning less than $50,000 met all four readiness benchmarks, compared with roughly half from homes with income north of $150,000. This is particularly depressing because education has long been an engine of upward mobility.

This dumbing down of American youth should set off alarms, as students are learning less and less even as the world grows more competitive. U.S. K-12 education is failing, and it’s getting worse despite the hundreds of billions of additional dollars that politicians have shoveled into public schools.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Scott Girard:

“This means a lot to me because I don’t want students who are younger than me to lack various resources and opportunities that will be offered,” La Follette’s Yoanna Hoskins said. “I want my teachers to be well compensated and respected for all the hard work they put in every single day.”

Adding that she’s not yet old enough to vote herself, she urged everyone else to do so.

“And leaders, the adults that I’m supposed to look up to, let’s work together so we can get caught up (on funding),” Hoskins said.

Among the stakes in the Nov. 8 election are school choice. GOP candidate Tim Michels has offered support for universal school choice, and while he hasn’t provided detailed plans, it’s likely that includes a voucher system without income limits, given his past statements.

Incumbent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, running for reelection, won’t likely get many of his policy priorities regardless of the outcome of the race, given the overwhelming Republican majority in the Legislature. But he used his veto pen regularly in his first term, including on education items, like halting a “parental bill of rights” and stopping a proposed breakup of the Milwaukee Public Schools district.

Evers, along with State Superintendent Jill Underly, have proposed adding almost $2 billion for public schools across the state in the 2023-25 biennial budget.

Kabby Hong, who teaches English in Verona and was a 2022 Wisconsin Teacher of the Year, said that the “public education system is on the ballot.”

“One election can radically change the landscape for all of us,” Hong said. “That is why I’m asking all of you to go out and vote and to not give in to cynicism, apathy and indifference.”

$$ Madison taxpayers have long spent far more than most k-12 school systems, now $21,720 per student!

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Will Flanders and Miranda Spindt:

For the past two years, families across the country have been dealing with regular shutdowns of in-person learning in their schools. While people have speculated on what the effects of losing face-to-face class time would be on academic progress, we are beginning to have the data necessary to determine the extent of these effects. Recent data from Wisconsin allows us to conduct one of the first comprehensive analyses of this question.

Using newly available data from the 2021 administration of the state’s Forward Exam, combined with data gathered on school closures at the district level from the Fall of 2020, we describe the nature and impacts of school closure. The key findings of this research include:

• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in math proficiency. Math proficiency was approximately 4.8% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in Fall 2020.
• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in English proficiency. English/Language Arts proficiency was 1.6% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in Fall 2020.
• Districts with a higher percentage of African American students were more likely to remain closed in fall 2020. Our results show that the higher the percentage of African American students in a district, the more likely that district was to remain shut down for in-person learning.
• Districts with a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students saw larger performance declines. A district with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency declines of more than 6% in math and 7% in ELA relative to a school with no low-income students independent of closure status.
• More than 257,000 students in Wisconsin spent at least part of the 2020-21 school year without in-person learning. This represents approximately 30% of all students in the state.

Leah Triedler:

But in a statement after the speech, Republican Sen. Alberta Darling, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said Wisconsin students’ poor performance stems from Gov. Tony Evers “refusing to reform education in Wisconsin” despite Republican efforts, including a literacy bill Evers vetoed twice.

Darling said Underly is following in his footsteps.

“The DPI Secretary refuses to acknowledge failure,” Darling said. “Under her watch, too many children in our schools are failing. There was not a single acknowledgment that less than one-third of students are proficient in English or Math. Instead of accepting we have the largest achievement gap in the country, she’d rather change the definition.”

Underly, however, outlined ways to improve student achievement and bridge racial disparities. She said policymakers and educators need to recognize that those disparities stem from a gap in representation and engagement, not the student.

“Instead of blaming the student because of their learning challenges or their family, because their parents are working multiple jobs to get by, or their school district or teachers are under-resourced,” Underly said, “instead of placing blame about their achievement, we can make important choices about curriculum that can make a difference.”

That includes increasing representation in curriculum, she said. All students, especially students of color, need to see themselves reflected in what they learn, she said, and not just learn about trauma and struggle, but also growth.

That includes teaching students about the country’s complicated history, Underly said.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

John McWhorter

The Association of Social Work Boards administers tests typically required for the licensure of social workers. Apparently, this amounts to a kind of racism that must be reckoned with.

There is a Change.org petition circulating saying just that, based on the claim that the association’s clinical exam is biased because from 2018 to 2021 84 percent of white test-takers passed it the first time while only 45 percent of Black test-takers and 65 percent of Latino test-takers did. “These numbers are grossly disproportionate and demonstrate a failure in the exam’s design,” the petition states, adding that an “assertion that the problem lies with test-takers only reinforces the racism inherent to the test.” The petitioners add that the exam is administered only in English and its questions are based on survey responses from a disproportionately white pool of social workers.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Moria Balingit:

While students saw across-the-board gains in the 2021-2022 school year compared to the previous academic year, state education officials said the progress was not enough, and pinned some of the good news on lowered standards — not on better student performance.

“Despite the scores being up from last year, they are down from pre-pandemic levels,” said Jillian Balow, state superintendent of public education, in a news conference Thursday.

The standards of learning data also showed that schools that returned to in-person instruction sooner fared considerably better than schools that remained virtual or hybrid longer.

“Students whose schools were closed suffered the most,” Balow said.

Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin tied the results to school closures, and pledged to address disparities.

“The SOL results released today demonstrate that prolonged school shutdowns undeniably exacerbated the learning loss experienced by Virginia’s students, and the very best [antidote] is in-person education,” Youngkin said.

The differences were particularly stark in mathematics. Two-thirds of students passed math exams last school year, compared to 82 percent before the pandemic. Racial and economic disparities also widened, with White and Asian students making more progress toward their pre-pandemic levels than Black and Hispanic students.

Passage rates remained more than 20 points behind pre-pandemic levels in math for Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students, and among students learning English.

All groups fared better in reading than they did in math, but state officials said that was due to the fact that standards were lowered in 2021, and cautioned against optimism.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Heather Smith:

During his rough and tumble 1997 campaign Evers directly criticized fellow Democrat Benson saying he had failed to call attention to the problems in our state’s education system, and that continual promotion of the good without sounding the alarm on the bad “wrecks our credibility.”  Evers said students and districts were in trouble and that “being a cheerleader has its place, but that place is not the superintendent’s chair.”

(Yes, this is the same guy who – in another ad we recently fact checked – is cheerleading a US News ranking putting Wisconsin schools as 8th in the nation while only about a quarter of students statewide can do English or math at grade level.)

But those are not the only striking political moves Evers made in the 1997 race.

He campaigned on recommendations in the Fish Commission that suggested breaking up MPS.  He accused Benson, who opposed charter schools, of trying to bury them in regulations. Evers supported statewide public school choice and said charter schools work, because they “provide local competition, innovation and research.” He called for clear, measurable standards in core academic areas to help districts improve. He said under Benson, “DPI has become a lackey for WEAC.”  Those are not the words of a guy without political aspirations.

And when Benson claimed that the crisis in public education had been “manufactured” Evers asked – again, in 1997, a quarter century ago:  “Is the 40% dropout rate in Milwaukee public schools a crisis or not?   Is the fact that most colleges remediate our graduates a crisis?” 

The 3.8% of MPS students who can do math at grade level and the 6.4% who can do English at grade level are a crisis today, and colleges are still remediating graduates from our “top 10 in the nation” schools. But while politically savvy Evers used school quality as a wedge issue when he wanted to defeat a fellow Democrat, today, he’s doing the same thing he accused Benson of: cheerleading while schools fail students.

During his time as Deputy, Wisconsin was called out for setting “cut scores” low to game accountability measures to make proficiency scores appear higher. DPI had set reading passing levels for 8th graders at the 14th percentile, while states like South Carolina set theirs at 71%. Evers defended the cut scores saying that the 14th percentile was proficient.

And when Education Sector, a national non-profit, ranked states on which used technicalities to be overly cheery about student performance, Wisconsin topped the list. Evers, who had decried this very habit in his run against Benson, defended DPI saying everything they did “had been approved.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Scott Girard:

That was the fourth-highest percentage among the 10 districts in the state with the most Black students enrolled in AP courses, behind only Beloit (83.7%), Wauwatosa (82%) and Racine (68.9%).

Milwaukee Public Schools, the only Wisconsin district larger than MMSD, saw all student groups have lower rates of opting out of AP exams than the state average.

“This is especially important as MPS serves large numbers of students of color and is the district with the highest AP enrollment for English Learners and students who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic, and is a very close second for students identifying as Asian,” WPF writes in its report.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Anna Allen:

Average scores on the ACT college admissions test dropped to their lowest in 30 years, revealing more evidence of the pandemic’s alarming impact on American education.

The average composite score for the class of 2022 was a 19.8 out of 36, according to a report released Wednesday, falling under 20 points for the first time since 1991. This year’s graduates endured the effects of the pandemic for three of their four high school years.

These results fuel concerns that post-pandemic graduates are not prepared for college-level work. Of the ACT-tested graduates, 42 percent failed to meet any of the four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks (English, reading, math, science). Last year, 38 percent of students did not meet any of the benchmarks.

While ACT scores have been gradually falling in recent years, “the magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement. “We see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting college-readiness benchmarks in any of the subjects we measure.”

Dale Chu:

In the 1840s, Horace Mann, known as the “father of American education,” argued that children should be taught to read whole words instead of individual letters, which he described as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” that make children feel “death-like, when compelled to face them.” This malformed opinion morphed into the broader whole-language theory, whose proponents hold that learning to read is analogous to learning to speak, coming naturally, as if through osmosis. Disciples of whole-language instruction believe that if a word is unfamiliar to a child, it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from context. To wit, Kenneth S. Goodman, the founder of whole language, once referred to reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game.”

Phonics takes exactly the opposite approach. Mastery of a set of symbols is the initial step; an analogy for learning how to read might be learning music notation or Braille. Children should be taught that words are made up of discrete parts and shown how different letters and letter combinations convey the English language’s 44 phonemes. Also dating back to the 1800s, the theory behind phonics is that learning to read requires knowledge and understanding of the relationships between letters and sounds, with the aim of helping early readers develop decoding skills (i.e., sounding out and recognizing words) that will eventually become automatic.

Those with allegiances to either phonics or whole language have ever since fought to determine how reading is taught in America’s classrooms. By the 1980s, the debate had become so intense that people began referring to it as “the reading war.” Things got so hot between the two opposing camps that Congress was pulled into the fray, convening the National Reading Panel in the late 1990s to review all the research on reading in the hopes of facilitating a truce. The upshot from the panel’s report was that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. The same could not be said for whole language.

The myths about the efficacy of whole language / balanced literacy are legion nonetheless. Its proponents assert that children don’t all learn to read in the same way and that a whole-language approach meets their different needs, and they confidently claim that kids learn more when teachers use this method. Research has shown that neither is true. On the contrary, reading researchers have found that, unlike learning to speak, a natural process that occurs by being surrounded by spoken language, learning to read does not come naturally. That’s because the written word is a relatively recent addition in human history, dating back just a few thousand years. To crack the code of how the spoken word connects to the word on a printed page, children need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. This is the premise undergirding the science of reading.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Will Flanders & Dylan Palmer:

How does Wisconsin stack up against other states in K-12 education? An eye-popping list from U.S. News and World Report ranked the Badger State K-12 system as the 8th best in the country.i But this rosy picture contradicts other key indicators that Wisconsin students are falling behind. So what’s going on? To get a clear look at public education in the Badger Sate requires a dive into the details.

Key Takeaways
• The academic proficiency data used by U.S. News & World Report to rank Wisconsin 8th is from the 2018-19 school year. Notably, this school year featured a transition in the governor’s mansion and was a full year before the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on Wisconsin schools.

• A sophisticated analysis of Wisconsin’s academic proficiency from 2018-19 puts Wisconsin in the middle of the pack. An Urban Institute analysis that controls for demographic factors finds Wisconsin falls out of the top ten in both math and reading on the NAEP scores.

• Academic proficiency has fallen significantly in Wisconsin since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020. Forward Exam scores fell by about 4 percentage points in reading and 5 percentage points in math.

• Chronic absenteeism in Wisconsin schools reached new heights in the most recent school year. The share of students not regularly showing up for class rose to 16% in 2020-21 school year—the highest in five years.

The Recent U.S. News & World Report Rankings
The core claim in question, that Wisconsin is ranked 8th for Pre-K-12 public education, refers to Wisconsin’s placement in the U.S. New & World Report Pre-K-12 rankings for 2022.ii In the previous ranking released in 2018, Wisconsin’s schools were ranked 16th , meaning the state shot up 10 places. While this would doubtless be encouraging news if it were credible, there is recent to question where Wisconsin sits on the list.

The biggest issue with the rankings is in the use of raw scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP). As a national norm-referenced test, the NAEP is arguably the best tool for making interstate comparisons, but one must be careful when simply using the raw numbers, which U.S. News does for eighth grade reading and math. On these metrics, Wisconsin is ranked 6th and 4th respectively. Just as in WILL’s Apples to Apples report,iii where we note that demographic factors must be taken into account in determining how well a school is doing, they must also be taken into account when ranking state performance. Unfortunately, factors like poverty, race, and English Language Learner status (ELL) matter in school performance. Low and minority students, on average, perform worse on exams for any number of reasons. These factors must be controlled for to make serious comparisons.

Fortunately, the Urban Institute has such a ranking.iv After controlling for age, race, disability status, family income and ELL, Wisconsin falls to 14th from 4th in math and from 6th to 21st in reading. The Urban Institute also provides a chart of the overall trend in ranking for each state. The unadjusted ranking is in yellow, while the demographically-adjusted ranking is in blue. The chart shows that there isn’t much of a discernible trend in performance—if anything, it’s the opposite of improvement.

The status quo solution for public school education has been to simply provide more money, which research has found bears little relationship to student performance. In order for Wisconsin school districts to actually be some of the best in the nation, Wisconsin needs to sever the connection to the preferred policies of teacher unions and the public-school establishment, who fight competition from every alternative option. Instead, Wisconsin education policies must empower parents to make the best choice for their son or daughter, which may include a traditional public school.

Wisconsin needs robust alternative options that enable every student in the state to attend the school that best meets their needs. This includes opening up private-school choice to middle- class families who can’t afford private-school options, and a more open charter school sector that ensures public-school options exist in every corner of the state. Achieving these goals won’t be easy, but the information here shows that the state can ill afford complacency when it comes to education policy.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

MacIver:

Claim 1: Tony Evers has Taken Wisconsin Schools into the Top 10 in the U.S.

The ad repeats a brag Evers has been making for months.  The top 10 ranking issued by US News, shows Wisconsin’s rank improved 10 places since the 2018 list.  Evers has been taking credit for the improvement although the current ranking uses data largely from the years when Scott Walker was governor, and the lower 2018 ranking was after nearly a decade of Evers’ leadership as DPI Superintendent.

First, let’s start with the obvious. K12 student achievement numbers are trending the wrong way in Wisconsin and the most recent proficiency scores were abysmal.

Despite $2.6 billion additional federal dollars to prevent learning loss and to keep our kids on track academically, Fs increased dramatically during COVID. School funding increases every year – the most recent budget sends $2.5 billion more state aid to K12 schools than the 2015-17 budget, yet more than two-thirds of our children are not proficient in math or English language arts.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Ann Althouse:

But what’s really bothering Strauss isn’t the outrage of insulting education departments. It’s Hillsdale’s participation in charter schools around the country. There’s the “Hillsdale K-12 curriculum that is centered on Western civilization and designed to help ‘students acquire a mature love for America.'”

Valerie Strauss:

At the reception last week, held at a Cool Springs conference center in Tennessee, Arnn made comments while addressing an audience from a lectern and while sitting on the stage next to Lee on a stage. Here’s a sample:

• “Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department. Ours [Hillsdale’s] is different. They are the dumbest part of every college. [Audience laughs.] You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.”
• “If you read a book called ‘Abolition of Man’ by C.S. Lewis, you will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like a plague. … The teachers are trained in the dumbest part of the dumbest colleges in the country. And they are taught that they are going to do something to those kids. … My wife is English, and she is a gardener, big-time. And she doesn’t talk about what she is going to do to these plants. She talks about what they need. Because if you give them what they need, they will grow.”
• “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement. … They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
• “Here’s a key thing we are going to try to do. We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.”

Educators and other Tennesseans said they were angry at Arnn for making the comments and at Lee for failing to defend his state’s teachers and teacher preparation programs. Claude Pressnell Jr., president of Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, tweeted: “This is incredibly disturbing. Dr. Larry Arnn’s demeaning portrayal of Tennessee’s Ed prep programs and professors is uninformed and offensive. I’m disappointed that @GovBillLee is not on record with Dr. Arnn defending the integrity of Tennessee’s education programs.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Kaleem Caire:

I have grave concern for our children in Dane County and Wisconsin.

We face no greater long-term crisis in America than the widespread underperformance, diminishing motivation and poor preparation of children and young people in our nation’s K-12 schools, and the rapidly declining number of educators available to teach our children.

Student performance in Dane County is troubling. In spring 2021, near the conclusion of our first full pandemic-impacted school year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s website shows that the percentage of proficient readers in grades three, four and five of public elementary schools across Dane County’s 16 school districts was only:

7% of Black students (5% in Madison alone).
13% of Latino students (7% in Madison).
37% of Asian students (25% in Madison).
42% of white students (41% in Madison).
26% of multiracial students (16% in Madison)

This means they tested at or above grade level on the English language arts section of the state’s Forward exam, administered annually to children in Wisconsin in grades three through eight and 10. The remaining students tested below grade level.

The results were very similar statewide in grades three through eight, across all 423 public school districts and 32 independent public charter schools in Wisconsin.

If the percentages above aren’t shocking enough, consider this: When you look at the educational performance of Black students in Dane County by the conclusion of third grade — when reading shifts from learning how to read to reading to learn — just 10% move on every year to fourth grade as proficient readers. Among the remaining 90%, 30% have a partial understanding of reading and language arts while the remaining 60% struggle to read well at all.

We are talking thousands of children attending public schools in Dane County and our state who are way behind academically. Every demographic is affected by this. The matter has only been made much worse by the pandemic, and by the lack of enough educators to effectively address the problem. The situation is worsening by the day and year. It is not getting any better.

All in favor of teaching civics in Wisconsin high schools, say aye — ‘Aye!’

The future of our community hangs in the balance. The massive numbers of job openings across our region and this country are not because people don’t want to work. We haven’t prepared our young people well enough for the jobs that are available, and we have not helped enough of them develop the skills to create a job for themselves.

We cannot build a future and solve the growing numbers of geopolitical, environmental, housing, food insecurity and public health crises with thousands of children who cannot effectively read a restaurant menu, or who attend schools that aren’t preparing them to solve these problems.

We must do better, and I welcome that conversation.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Alex Gutentag:

The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 policy choices exacerbated inequality perversely led many public school systems to try to hide their mistakes by dismantling programs for gifted and talented students along with entrance tests and other standardized testing regimens—piling on more bad policy choices that deprive economically disadvantaged students of opportunity.

The available numbers tell a worrying story of educational slippage that is likely to keep large numbers of kids from acquiring the basic skills, both intellectual and social, that they will need to hold decent jobs. Recent test scores have dramatically declined, with one report finding that in districts offering distance learning, the decline in passing rates for math was 10.1 percentage points greater than in districts that offered in-person instruction. In Maryland, 85% of students now are not proficient in math, and in Baltimore the figure is 93%. Michigan, Washington, and other states have found dramatic declines in their test scores. In Los Angeles, the decline has been worse for younger students, with 60% of third and fourth graders not meeting English standards compared to 40% of 11th graders. Overall, the youngest children were most profoundly impacted by lockdowns and school disruptions, and some of them now lack basic life skills.

Alex Gutentag:

The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 policy choices exacerbated inequality perversely led many public school systems to try to hide their mistakes by dismantling programs for gifted and talented students along with entrance tests and other standardized testing regimens—piling on more bad policy choices that deprive economically disadvantaged students of opportunity.

The available numbers tell a worrying story of educational slippage that is likely to keep large numbers of kids from acquiring the basic skills, both intellectual and social, that they will need to hold decent jobs. Recent test scores have dramatically declined, with one report finding that in districts offering distance learning, the decline in passing rates for math was 10.1 percentage points greater than in districts that offered in-person instruction. In Maryland, 85% of students now are not proficient in math, and in Baltimore the figure is 93%. Michigan, Washington, and other states have found dramatic declines in their test scores. In Los Angeles, the decline has been worse for younger students, with 60% of third and fourth graders not meeting English standards compared to 40% of 11th graders. Overall, the youngest children were most profoundly impacted by lockdowns and school disruptions, and some of them now lack basic life skills.

As the severity of these repercussions comes to light, some outlets—notably those that most aggressively advocated for lockdowns and masking—have been eager to suggest that we are now aware of the overwhelmingly negative consequences of these policies thanks to “new research” that has only just become available to fair-minded people, who can therefore be forgiven for having adopted the course they did. But to many doctors and scientists, the damage to kids caused by COVID-19 panic was neither inevitable nor surprising. Rather, it was the result of the public health establishment’s conscious choice to eschew rational cost-benefit analysis in favor of pet cultural theories and political gamesmanship. For those who applied the scientific method to the available evidence, the consequences were already clear just a few weeks into the pandemic. “It was not at all true that people in healthcare and public health were unaware of what was going on with children,” Dr. Noble told me. “They were not ignorant.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Mary Kay Linge

The sabotage is ongoing,” another parent said — recalling that Vasconcelos previously made waves for suggesting that AP tests “reflect systemic racism” and tried to scale back LaGuardia’s AP offerings.

Draft schedules circulating among the faculty show the instructional day being shaved down by nearly two hours for the Fall 2022 semester. 

While 10 periods would remain on paper, teachers will have to seek special approvals to actually schedule classes during the first and 10th slots, sources said — creating a de facto eight-period day.

“My kid’s guidance counselor told her she can’t take math and science APs next year if she also takes all her arts classes,” one mother complained.

Deja Vu: 2005 Madison:

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading.

2007: one size fits all: English 10.

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

Will Flanders:

Here are the biggest findings:

• Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public-school peers. Proficiency rates in private choice schools were 4.6% higher in English/Language Arts (ELA) and 4.5% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee.
• Charter school students in Milwaukee continue to outperform their public-school peers. In both math and ELA, independent charter school students in Milwaukee saw about 2.6% higher proficiency on average than traditional public-school students.
• Forward Exam participation was higher in Milwaukee choice and charter schools. Compared to public schools, choice students in Milwaukee participated in the Forward Exam at a 46% higher rate. Independent charter school students participated at a 39% higher rate.
• Statewide, choice students outperform their public-school peers in ELA. Proficiency rates were about 4.6% higher for students participating in school choice statewide than traditional public-school students. No difference was found in math performance.
• Wisconsin continues to struggle with its achievement gaps. Statewide, a school with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency rates 42% lower than a school with no low-income students. For African American students, that gap is 14% in ELA and 15% in math.
• Little evidence was found that more spending affects student performance. Once student and district demographics are taken into account, the level of per capita spending in a public school district has no statistical impact on student proficiency.
• Data inaccuracy is a major concern. Proficiency reported in the media and in WiseDash did not accurately reflect student proficiency and the impact of the non-test- takers. Proficiency rates were deflated this year and will, consequently, be inflated next year.
• District size has a small, positive relationship with proficiency. Contrary to the argument that smaller districts perform better, larger districts performed better to a very small extent (0.03%) in Wisconsin when controlling for other factors.
• For the first time, proficiency fell below 40% statewide in both math and ELA. Even accounting for test non-participation rates, proficiency in Wisconsin’s schools hit a record low in the 2020-21 school year.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Ronald Kessler:

Essentially, that meant kids were not being taught to read at all.

Whole language proponents even said that when children guessed wrong, they should not be corrected.

“It is unpleasant to be corrected,” Paul Jennings, an Australian whole language enthusiast, said. “It has to be fun, fun, fun.”

But reading, like devising algebraic equations, is anything but natural. It must be learned.

Whole language had one thing going for it: Instead of teaching the 44 sounds or phonemes that the 26 letters of the English alphabet can make, with whole language, teachers could sit back and relax.

They gave kids books and passively watched as students struggled to make sense of the material placed in front of them. When their children failed to learn to read, they could blame it on their homes or on poor motivation.

Egged on by teachers’ unions, public schools across the country widely adopted the whole language approach. As evidenced by their reading scores, Blacks often struggled the most. Unable to read even a simple road map, they faced a lifetime of failure.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Rebecca Jack, Claire Halloran, James Okun and Emily Oster:

We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020-21 school year on students’ pass rates on standardized tests in Grades 3–8 across 11 states. Pass rates declined from 2019 to 2021: an average decline of 12.8 percentage points in math and 6.8 in English language arts (ELA). Focusing on within-state, withincommuting zone variation in schooling mode, we estimate districts with full in-person learning had significantly smaller declines in pass rates (13.4 p.p. in math, 8.3 p.p. in ELA). The value to in-person learning was larger for districts with larger populations of Black students.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Daniel Lennington and Will Flanders

Last week, Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly put out a press releasebroadly outlining her plans to address Wisconsin’s racial achievement gap. While it is perhaps a positive to finally see the superintendent addressing the failings of Wisconsin’s public schools, this release offers a disturbing window into the way the public school establishment sees the achievement gap problem, and the misguided ways in which they plan to solve it.

Underly referred to Wisconsin’s racial achievement gap as “egregious” in her release, and indeed it is. According to the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the state regularly has the largest gap in scores between white students and African American students of any state in the country.  On average, African American students scored 47 points lower in math and 39 points lower in English than their white counterparts. But Underly misdiagnoses the cause of this gap, which is almost entirely poverty.

In groundbreaking research released in 2019, scholars at Stanford University endeavored to discover the causes of the racial achievement gap in the United States. They found that concentrations of poverty — not the race of students — was the main driver of achievement differences. This is highlighted in the finding from our research in 2017 that student proficiency in rural school districts which suffer from high poverty is often indistinguishable from that of our urban districts that routinely bear the brunt of scrutiny.

Misdiagnosing the problem means Underly’s proposed solutions miss the mark.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Scott Girard

“There is a lot of evidence that the state of Wisconsin has the most extreme gaps in opportunity and outcomes based on race and that within Wisconsin, MMSD is often ranked among the worst or the worst in some of these indicators,” MMSD director of research Brianne Monahan said.

Jackson said the process was delayed by a few months as they translated all of their materials from English into Spanish and Hmong to reach more families and voices within the district. That same translation is occurring with the transcribing of the interviews, but as long as there are no “hiccups,” a report will be ready by mid-summer.

“If I am right, the next steps would just be filled with the excitement associated with learning what participants actually think,” he said.

He added that district officials and the School Board should be ready for whatever people have had to say, even if it’s difficult to hear.

“I’ve shared with (the district) that I don’t know what they’re going to say,” Jackson said. “It’s not my job or my team’s job to do anything other than amplify what those voices do say. And they may absolutely say none of the things you want them to say.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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:

In Natasha Sullivan’s AP English class at La Follette High School, students are assigned books by prominent Black authors alongside works like Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

At Memorial High School, English teacher Maureen Mead aims to help her English language learners develop their language skills instead of penalizing them if they enter her class without a strong grasp of the language.

Elsewhere in the Madison School District, history lessons pointedly note that most Black people brought to early America were enslaved, avoiding more anodyne descriptions that refer to “the migration of Black people to America.” Music lessons may include teaching about musicians from different cultures from across the globe.

To many conservatives, such intentional efforts to decentralize whiteness and diversify the curriculum constitutes “teaching” critical race theory, a graduate-level theoretical framework that examines how American political and social systems perpetuate racism.

David Blaska:

Baby steps. This time, at least, the Wisconsin State Journal reporter bothered to report the other side: namely, Blaska and Daniel Lennington of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

Two months ago, Elizabeth Beyer “reported” without a single attribution: “Critical Race Theory, an academic framework that focuses on racism embedded in the nation’s laws and institutions … isn’t taught in any of Wisconsin’s K-12 schools.” Today, education reporter Ms. Beyer doubles down on that Woke fiction with these three lies:

• It isn’t being taught in K-12 schools, only at teachers’ colleges.
• It’s nothing new.
• You are a dupe if you oppose it, if not racist.

CRT is “a wedge issue — “manufactured panic,” according to the State Journal.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Collin Binkley:

Early results of data gathering by some of the country’s biggest school districts confirm what many had feared: Groups of students that already faced learning gaps before the pandemic, including Black and Hispanic students and those from low-income families, appear to be behind in even greater numbers now.

In Fairfax County, tests given this fall found that 68% of Hispanic elementary school students need intervention in math, up from 55% in 2019. Students learning English saw a similar increase. A quarter of white students were flagged for help, up from 19% in 2019.

Last year, public schools in Houston found that 45% of Black and Hispanic students had at least one failing grade. That was up from 30% in 2019, and nearly three times the rate of white students.

Similar inequities are turning up at schools across the country, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a national research group. It suggests that longstanding inequities are widening, she said, which could translate to deeper learning and income gaps for generations to come.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Dana Goldstein:

The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency.

As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.

In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”

In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

“We’re in new territory,” Dr. Hogan said about the pandemic’s toll on reading. If children do not become competent readers by the end of elementary school, the risks are “pretty dramatic,” she said. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of high school, earn less money as adults and become involved in the criminal justice system.

Please get this straight: It wasn't just an awful pandemic that "compounded" an unfortunate situation but also a series of school system actions including prolonged shutdowns, inadequate remote, & failure to prioritize vulnerable kids.
https://t.co/XrST2EyGJ9

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) March 8, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders

#1 – Wisconsin is 8th in Education Nationwide

Governor Evers made the claim during his state of the state that Wisconsin’s “education system” has moved from 18th to 8th in the nation during his administration, and gave the credit to increased spending in public schools.  His claim appears to come from a report from US News that ranks the 50 states on their overall educational systems. However, a number of large caveats need to be attached to this data.

The report only takes into account three factors: pre-K enrollment, standardized test scores, and graduation rates. One area Wisconsin does do quite well is in the high school graduation rate, and it is without a doubt a credit to the schools around the state that ensure that students achieve high school graduation goals.

But the picture becomes far murkier when it comes to the area of student achievement. On NAEP scores, Wisconsin continues to have among the largest racial achievement gaps in the country. Proficiency rates on the state exam in some districts are below 10%, despite these districts being ranked as “Meeting Expectations” on the state’s report card. These are real problems for which the only solution from the Governor, in general, appears to be spending more money. While it may be possible to craft a metric by which Wisconsin ranks in the top ten on education, large swaths of students throughout the state are not proficient in areas like English and Math. We’re going to hold our applause on student proficiency.

Additionally, the inclusion of pre-K enrollment in this metric is curious in light of the lack of evidence that pre-K makes any appreciable difference in the academic outcomes of students. A recent random assignment study from scholars at Vanderbilt University found that students who participated in state-run pre-K programs had worse outcomes by third grade than those who did not. At the very least, program quality matters, and we shouldn’t assume that simply having more students in pre-K will improve student outcomes.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Dylan Brogan:

The Madison school district is delaying its plan to eliminate standalone honors classes at its high schools.

The district hasn’t publicly announced the policy shift or if it’s considering scrapping the plan entirely. At its Dec. 6 meeting, school board members were told by Director of Advanced Learning Sharon Alexander that the district was on track to end standalone honors classes for 9th graders starting in the 2022 fall semester and 10th graders in 2023. Isthmus learned the plan was being delayed from a high school teacher in January. It took district spokesperson Tim LeMonds three weeks to confirm what administrators had already told teachers. 

“Standalone and earned honors will still be available for 9th and 10th graders next year,” wrote LeMonds in a Feb. 8 email to Isthmus. “We have put a pause on the removal of standalone honors to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.” 

District administrators informed the Madison school board at an April 5, 2021, board meeting they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. These courses are for core subject areas like biology, English, and history. There are no exams or other requirements to get into these classes and any student is allowed to enroll. Instead of standalone honors courses, the district was going to focus exclusively on the “Earned Honors” program. Begun in 2017, this program allows students to receive honors designation in non-honors classes if they complete “predetermined criteria.” 

Administrators at the April 5 meeting enthusiastically endorsed eliminating standalone honors classes. 

“This is an anti-racist strategy. Earned honors supports our commitment to truly becoming an anti-racist institution. It allows us to set a bar of excellence for all of our students, for 100 percent of our students,” said Kaylee Jackson, executive director for curriculum. “[Standalone honors classes] are an exclusionary practice in which only some students within our high schools are receiving this rigorous instruction and capable of receiving honors credit.”

According to the latest data from the district, 41 percent of students in standalone honors classes are students of color. White students represent 43 percent of the total student population in the district, but make up 59 percent of standalone honors classes. 

Most school board members expressed support at the meeting for eliminating standalone honors, although no vote was taken to either move forward or reject the idea. Board member Ananda Mirilli said she was “100 percent behind” the plan, a sentiment echoed by board member Savion Castro.

Chris Rickert:

Under a plan proposed by administrators last year, beginning with the 2022-23 school year, ninth-graders would only be able to earn honors credit through the district’s “earned honors” program, which places all students in the same classes but allows those who want to earn honors credit to do so if they meet a set of criteria showing mastery of the content. The same would apply to 10th-graders beginning in the 2023-24 school year.

The shift away from stand-alone honors classes was pitched by administrators as a way to boost racial equity, as students of color historically have been less likely to take honors-only classes, although they are open to all students. Those racial disparities have been closing in recent years.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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 Flanders:

Findings: Counting the Cost: Wisconsin School Closures and Student Proficiency, by Will Flanders and Miranda Spindt, reviewed school closure decisions in the 2020-21 school year and ran an analysis to see their impact on recent Forward Exam data. The findings point towards significant learning loss for students in districts that chose virtual learning over a hybrid or in-person experience. 

• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in math proficiency. Math proficiency was approximately 4.8% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in fall 2020.
• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in English proficiency. English/Language Arts proficiency was 1.6% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in fall 2020.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Kim Feller-Janus:

Several years ago I became disenchanted by my profession. I was not happy with the results of my work as a Reading Interventionist in a large school district. Yes, the students assigned to me made progress and the principals, teachers, and parents were pleased with my work, but I wasn’t. Year after year I worked with my students to reach “grade level reading” by years’ end and most of the time we met that goal. However, these same students were back to see me the following year because what they had learned the year before didn’t seem to stick and they were falling behind once again. This was hard to accept. I felt that I could do better, but I didn’t know how. And, this is why I decided that it was time to make a change.

Upon leaving the school environment I opened my own business, Auburn Reading Center, LLC. This gave me the opportunity to continue to work with struggling readers and time to learn more about effective reading instruction. This is when I discovered the book, Uncovering the Logic of English by Denise Eide. I devoured it within hours and then I wanted to scream, “Why didn’t anyone teach this to me in college?!” 

This began my journey to learn more about our English language and the connection it has with the decades-old brain research. This research shows brain activity when a good reader is reading as well as the brain activity when a poor reader is reading. There is evidence proving that our brains are not wired to read and that we need to be taught. Effective reading instruction that is explicit, systematic, multisensory, and structured is the “silver bullet” for most people. This explained to me why the students I taught within the school system were making minimal overall progress and never actually becoming proficient readers. In fact, in some cases what I was doing may have been more harmful than helpful. This broke my heart and pushed me even more to learn a better way to teach.

My next thought was to learn more about the author of this amazing book and find a way to connect with her in hopes that she could lead me into the right direction for coursework or training. This is when I discovered that Denise Eide had also written a comprehensive language arts curriculum that is based on brain research. I also learned that her office was located in Rochester, Minnesota which is just a little over 3 hours away from where I lived. I was determined to make that 6-hour round trip to meet this brilliant woman. Fortunately for me, Denise graciously agreed to meet me for lunch near her office to talk about her book and curriculum. We also talked about my frustrations with what seemed to be a norm in most schools – which is the belief that there will always be about 20% of children who will never be good readers. This is something that I never want to accept.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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?

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders:

Madison is ranked dead last when it comes to performance among disadvantaged students.

Pre-pandemic, Madison’s overall student proficiency in English/Language Arts hovered around 35% while Milwaukee’s overall student proficiency was even worse at around 19%. Even after accounting for a huge number of students who opted out, proficiency rates plummeted further in the 2020-21 school year.

But concerned parents will find that these shocking results are not reflected in the state’s own report cards. Under the 2020-21 DPI report cards, Madison Metropolitan School District was rated “exceeds expectations” and Milwaukee Public Schools were rated “meets expectations.” You have to be wondering how either of these districts could be considered to meet anyone’s expectations.

DPI, without input from the state Legislature or taxpayers, changed what information was included in the report card scores and how districts are rated. Specifically, DPI changed the cut-off points for the five thresholds that determine a school’s score and changed the manner in which absenteeism is accounted for. Their result? Three hundred ninety-nine of the state’s 421 districts were able to “meet expectations” in a year where student proficiency took a precipitous decline. After a year in which school districts faced extensive criticism for refusing to open despite scientific evidence it was safe, perhaps it makes sense for DPI to give districts cover.

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?

The Economist:

“A school district where one-quarter of students were black spent, on average, 10 more weeks in the classroom than one where three-quarters of students were black.”

A recent working paper by a group of researchers led by Emily Oster, of Brown University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at the results of standardised tests taken by children in grades three to eight (aged roughly eight to 13). The tests, which vary slightly between states, assessed pupils’ grasp of maths and English. The researchers examined 12 states, comparing the results of tests taken in 2019, before lockdowns, with those taken in 2021. They found a 14 percentage-point drop in the pass rates for maths and a six-point drop for English.

Scores in English and maths were falling even before the pandemic(although researchers cannot agree on why). To isolate the effect that remote schooling had on childrens’ performance the authors built a statistical model. For each district the model contained information on the amount of time that pupils spent attending school in person. It also contained information on covid-19 cases, the racial composition of the district and the number of pupils who were eligible for reduced-price lunches (a proxy for income).

The authors found that, even when controlling for these other factors, the amount of in-person schooling in a given school district had a big impact on pass rates. The results suggested that moving from fully virtual to fully in-person lessons counteracted the drop in scores by around ten percentage points for maths, and just over three percentage points for English. In both subjects, the detrimental effect of virtual schooling was largest in poorer areas, where students are more likely to lack the space for undisturbed study or the technology to access online lessons.

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?

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?

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?

Shannon Whitworth:

Ensure that kids can read, write, understand the fundamentals of math, science and history. But a lot of public schools appear to be more interested in pushing an ideological agenda than providing children with the skills they need to compete on a global scale. For the first time, many parents started to take note of critical race theory concepts and the sexual and gender ideology being taught at the youngest levels. Then, of course, there are the tanking proficiencies in math and English, closed schools and never-ending mask mandates, and even indescribable levels of violence in our urban schools. The deafness to parents’ concerns, coupled with the arrogance and condescension of a government that appears to have forgotten who is supposed to serve whom, appears to have “awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve” (“Tora! Tora! Tora!”).

The educational establishment should be paying attention to this trend coming into an election period next year. If Wisconsin is going the way of the rest of the country, the establishment is particularly vulnerable. When the state of our public schools is coming under increasing scrutiny, those who have been failing our system for decades are about to be held to account. School choice is now favored by a majority of Americans. Inner city parents have been complaining and trying to get their children out of failing schools for decades. Now with the rest of the country paying attention to the sorry state of our public schools, the rising crescendo will be difficult to ignore. Which leads us to our latest educational outrage here in Wisconsin.

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?