Jacob Carpenter:

Texas Education Agency officials have recommended that a state-appointed governing team replace Houston ISD’s locally elected school board after a six-month investigation found several instances of alleged misconduct by some trustees, including violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act, inappropriate influencing of vendor contracts and making false statements to investigators.

The recommendation and findings, issued by TEA Special Investigations Unit Director Jason Hewitt, will not become final until HISD officials have had an opportunity to respond. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, who leads the agency, ultimately will decide whether to oust HISD’s school board. HISD officials have until Aug. 15 to respond, and Morath likely would issue a final decision in the following weeks.

In his recommendation, Hewitt wrote that HISD trustees should be replaced by a state-appointed board due to their “demonstrated inability to appropriately govern, inability to operate within the scope of their authority, circumventing the authority of the superintendent, and inability to ensure proper contract procurement laws are followed.”

The Chronicle reviewed a copy of the report Wednesday. It is not a public document.

Questions have been raised regarding the taxpayer supported Madison School Board’s compliance with open records and meeting laws.

Continued:

Through interviews and a review of text messages, state investigators determined the five trustees — Board President Diana Dávila, Holly Maria Flynn Vilaseca, Sergio Lira, Elizabeth Santos and Anne Sung — secretly met with former HISD superintendent Abelardo Saavedra in two separate groups to coordinate ousting Lathan and installing him as interim superintendent. The meetings took place at a Houston restaurant on the same day in October 2018, the report said. Investigators determined that arrangement constituted a “walking quorum,” in violation of state law that requires trustees to conduct district business in public.

Three days later, the five trustees voted to replace Lathan with Saavedra, offering no advance warning to the public or the other four board members about the move. Trustees reinstated Lathan within a week of the vote following intense public backlash. Lathan remains the district’s indefinite leader.

TEA officials interviewed trustees as part of their investigation, ultimately determining that Dávila and Lira falsely claimed in interviews with investigators that they only met one-on-one with Saavedra. In separate interviews, Saavedra and Flynn Vilaseca placed Dávila and Lira at the restaurant meetings, the report states.

In an interview Wednesday, Dávila said she provided her best recollection of meeting Saavedra to TEA investigators, and denied that she attempted to mislead state officials.

Wisconsin Supreme Court:

¶27 Applying these principles, we conclude that CAMRC was a committee created by rule under Wis. Stat. § 19.82(1). First, it qualifies as a “committee” for purposes of the open meetings law because it had a defined membership of 17 individuals upon whom was conferred the authority, as a body, to review and select recommended educational materials for the Board’s approval. This authority to prepare formal curriculum recommendations for Board approval was not exercised by teachers and curriculum specialists on their own. The Board——acting through Rule 361 and the Handbook——provided that the members of review committees would exercise such authority collectively, as a body. Second, CAMRC was created by rule because District employees, when they formed CAMRC, relied on the authority to form review committees that was delegated to them by Rule 361 and the Handbook.
1. CAMRC Was a “Committee”
¶28 The parties appear to agree that CAMRC took the form
of a “committee” for purposes of the open meetings law, and they focus their dispute instead on the second part of the definition. But we are not bound by the parties’ concessions. See State v. Hunt, 2014 WI 102, ¶42 n.11, 360 Wis. 2d 576, 851 N.W.2d 434. We therefore briefly explain why we agree that CAMRC was a “committee” under Wis. Stat. § 19.82(1).
¶29 First, CAMRC was formed as a collective entity with a defined membership of 17 particular individuals. Although these individuals volunteered, and Bunnow suggested that more would have been welcome to join, the 17 nevertheless constituted a defined membership selected pursuant to the procedures set forth in the Handbook. Bunnow testified that all 17 members were present and voting at all CAMRC meetings, except for a final meeting which Bunnow characterized as merely a “subcommittee” meeting.

Patrick Marley:

John Krueger and the parent group Valley School Watch asked the Appleton Area School District to offer an alternative freshman communications course because they didn’t want children reading references to suicide and sex in the book “The Body of Christopher Creed.”

District Superintendent Lee Allinger asked the district’s chief academic officer and humanities director to respond to Krueger’s concerns but didn’t tell them how to specifically handle it.

They declined to form a new course because students already could opt out of reading specific books. Instead, they formed a 17-member committee and Krueger argued its meetings must be conducted in public because it was essentially created by order of a high-ranking official.

The committee did not meet in public and Krueger sued in 2011 with the assistance of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. A Waupaca County judge ruled in the school district’s favor in 2014, as did the District 3 Court of Appeals in 2016.

Scott Girard

The public records request came from NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas, who requested all emails from Dec. 19, 2021, through Dec. 19, 2022, that contained her name or references to an NBC15 reporter. The district released hundreds of records related to the request, but per open records law notified LeMonds that the complaint would be part of the release and allowed him time to challenge that.

He did so, with his attorney arguing that the October 2022 complaint and related documents are “technically” responsive to the request, but were “not, themselves, the subject of the request.” The filing further argued that releasing the documents “would almost certainly cause irreparable harm to him, his reputation, the public’s perception of him, his standing in the community, and within MMSD itself.”

The briefing also states that an investigation of the complaint by the district’s legal and human resources department found that the accusations were “without merit.”

Olivia Herken:

A meeting in which the Madison School Board was to discuss its open records policy was effectively held behind closed doors Monday after a problem with its livestream kept the public from being able to see it.

The meeting was scheduled for 5 p.m. Monday and was legally noticed as a virtual meeting, with only school board members attending in person. But when officials couldn’t get the public’s livestream for the meeting to start, they decided to proceed with the meeting anyway and post a recording of it later.

A recording of the meeting has since been posted on the board's YouTube page.

I'm about 15 minutes into it so far, and there is no video, just audio, and it's been silent for at least the last 10 minutes.

— Olivia Herken (@oherken) April 11, 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.

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

Chris Rickert:

Individually or in pairs, Madison School Board members spend hours each year in private “board briefings” with Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, discussing matters soon to come before the full board for votes that must be held in public.

Cheatham instituted the briefings after she was hired in 2013, and district administrators and some board members defend the practice.

But recent guidance from the state attorney general’s office cautions that such small, private gatherings of public officials risk running afoul of the state open meetings law, a current board member and attorney called them “on the line” legally, and a former board member stopped participating in them because he believes the public and board members should be able to hear policy discussions involving members and administrators.

Related:

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, now around $20k per student.
What will be different, this time?

“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”

Elizabeth Wadas:

Imagine being a parent worried for your child’s safety and not being able to get more information from staff about what’s going on. That’s the reality one Madison mom says she has lived for more than 11 months. And she’s not alone.

“As a parent we entrust the school, these people in leadership positions, to care for our children, to ensure they’re safe to ensure they’re in a good environment,” said Amy Ryan.

That trust for Ryan is now broken. She says the Madison Metropolitan School District gave her the run around when she had concerns for her kids’ safety at school. Ryan says she tried emailing her questions and setting up meetings with staff. Still she says her questions went unanswered.

“It’s frustrating as a parent to not get a response and to feel like my family didn’t matter,” said Ryan.

Phil Dini:

The second tool is something I’ve been working on recently: SQL-backed full text search of city meeting minutes. You can see this working for the cities of Alameda and Oakland right now. That’s 18,746 pages of city minutes for Alameda, and 37,172 pages of city minutes for Oakland, now fully searchable by anyone.

So let’s talk about how I did this, and how you can do this for your city, possibly with my help!

Emily Baker-White:

The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.

“Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)

The recordings range from small-group meetings with company leaders and consultants to policy all-hands presentations and are corroborated by screenshots and other documents, providing a vast amount of evidence to corroborate prior reports of China-based employees accessing US user data. Their contents show that data was accessed far more frequently and recently than previously reported, painting a rich picture of the challenges the world’s most popular social media app has faced in attempting to disentangle its US operations from those of its parent company in Beijing. Ultimately, the tapes suggest that the company may have misled lawmakers, its users, and the public by downplaying that data stored in the US could still be accessed by employees in China.

Amanda St. Hilaire:

A Wauwatosa School Board member says the board president punished him after he revealed a secret conversation about a FOX6 public records request.

Board member Mike Meier’s attorney sent the school board a letter this week, warning the matter could go to litigation. FOX6 shared documents related to the case with additional open government attorneys, who say the school board’s actions are questionable, and potentially a violation of Wisconsin’s open meetings law.

Meier says he’s concerned these actions will discourage public leaders from turning over public records and speaking up about potential violations of Wisconsin’s laws governing transparency.

The school board president, without addressing the legality of the board’s actions, claims Meier violated board policy and could expose the district to “negative financial impact.”

Dan O’Donnell:

Recently released emails reveal that last May, Racine Mayor Cory Mason emailed his fellow Democrat mayors in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, and Kenosha to set up a virtual meeting during which “the Elections Planning Grant will be discussed.”

That grant—from CTCL—was ultimately awarded to the five cities, which were dubbed “The Wisconsin Five.” In both Green Bay and Milwaukee, CTCL deployed a partner organization, the National Vote at Home Institute, to essentially take over the administration of the presidential election.

The National Vote at Home Institute’s Wisconsin director, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, was given unprecedented access to ballot data and even ballots themselves and so thoroughly (and almost certainly unlawfully) took over Green Bay’s election planning that the city’s municipal clerk quit in disgust.

In Milwaukee, he demanded a daily email from the director of the city’s election commission with detailed statistics on which ballots had been returned and which were still outstanding. He was so brazen that he even asked for access to the city’s absentee ballot database.

Mark Seidenberg:

Reading researcher and author Dr. Mark Seidenbergtalks with people working to improve literacy outcomes in the US and other countries. Teachers, school system administrators, activists, parents—and readers!—confront the hard questions about how to address low literacy outcomes, especially among children with other risk factors, such as poverty and development conditions such as dyslexia. Dr. Molly Farry-Thorn joins Mark in these conversations. Molly got her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis and now works with Mark as a postdoctoral researcher. She brings her perspective as a former preschool teacher and researcher of children’s pre-literacy skills. Together with our invited guests, we will focus on a specific topic and discuss how to bridge the gaps between researchers and educators. We want these meetings to be responsive to the needs and wants of our audience and an opportunity for a deeper dive into topics that are complicated and require nuance.

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.

Norene Malone:

It was mid-August. The playgrounds of Brookline, Massachusetts, had finally reopened, and so the news spread fast. Sharon Abramowitz had resigned from the school committee. If a lab wanted to manufacture a school committee member to help the 7,800-student Brookline School District through the COVID crisis, it probably would’ve ended up with Abramowitz. The sociologist-anthropologist-epidemiologist had studied Ebola, written interagency guidelines about what community engagement should look like during a crisis, and, after the district shut down in March, spent 40 hours a week in volunteer meetings on Zoom trying to make a safe reopening feasible. But now she was moving full time to her second home in Vermont.

As summer turned into fall, the school district was melting down. Parents largely wanted their kids learning in person, but it looked like Brookline wasn’t going to pull it off, even though the wealthy town just outside of Boston probably has the highest infectious-disease-expert-per-capita rate in the country. Abramowitz was fed up. “Sorry to be all UNICEF about it,” Abramowitz, who does work for UNICEF, said when we spoke in September, “but education is a fundamental human right for all children.”

Mike Antonucci:

The Massachusetts Teachers Association has been active since the COVID-19 shutdown — surveying members, holding meetings and issuing guidelines and policies. The state union hasn’t been shy about providing bargaining instructions to local affiliates, some of which go beyond the standard problems associated with reopening.

Last week the MTA board of directors approved a policy statement, which it then sent to all locals, asking for them to hold a vote to endorse the statement. Here it is, in full:

Educators across Massachusetts miss their students and are eager to resume learning in person – as that is how education is supposed to be. Our greatest collective obligations, however, are to keep students, educators, families and communities out of harm’s way and to prevent a resurgence of COVID-19 in our communities and across the state. Therefore, the districts and the state must demonstrate that health and safety conditions and negotiated public health benchmarks are met before buildings reopen.

The different abilities of communities to meet these standards reflect the profound inequality of our society by class and race. The legacy of structural racism through community disinvestment has left Black, Latinx and Indigenous students, educators and communities with higher risk factors and worse outcomes, all while depriving them of resources to meet these standards. Middle-class and affluent communities will be better suited to meet necessary health and safety benchmarks.

:

In a memo to council members on Wednesday, which mentions a local political party but doesn’t name Progressive Dane, May wrote, “I was deeply disturbed to hear reports this week that seven or eight alders met privately to discuss matters on the City Council agenda. Such meetings almost certainly involve negative quorums on some issues and thus, under the Showers (state Supreme Court) decision, could easily be violations of the Open Meetings Law.

“At this point, I have not done or requested any further inquiry on the reports I received,” May wrote. “I urge you to be very careful in your private meetings and discontinue those involving more than five alders, unless the meetings are properly noticed.”

At least one council member, Ald. Barbara Harrington-McKinney, 1st District, has formally requested additional follow-up and sanctions. “This warning is not sufficient for me,” she wrote in an email to May.

Taxpayer supported Dane County Board joins the Madison School Board in ignoring open meeting laws:

Meetings between the board’s leadership and leaders of some of its key committees, first reported by a local blogger, raise questions about whether the board is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the state open meetings law, as well as why county leaders feel the meetings need to be secret at a time when the board has been making a concerted effort to interest the public in its work.

On January 21, 2020, I sent this email to board@madison.k12.wi.us

Hi:

I hope that you are well.

I write to make an open records request for a list of invitees and participants in last week’s “community leader and stakeholder” meetings with the (Superintendent) candidates.

Thank you and best wishes,

Jim

Hearing nothing, I wrote on February 13, 2020:

Has my open records request gone missing?

School Board member Cris Carusi emailed me, twice that day, kindly following up on this request.

I received an email on February 18, 2020 from Barbara Osborn that my “request has been shared with our legal department”.

I received this response from Sherrice M Perry on March 13, 2020:

Dear Mr. James Zellmer,

Please accept this email as the Madison Metropolitan School District’s (the “District”) response to your public records request for “a list of invitees and participants in last week’s ‘community leader and stakeholder’ meetings with the candidates.” Attached below are the records that are most responsive to your request.

With regard to the requested records, the District redacted portions of the attached records consistent with the provisions of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA; 34 CFR 99.3 et seq.) and Wis. Stat. § 118.125(1)(d). The requested records contain “personally identifiable information.” Pursuant to FERPA, “personally identifiable information” is defined as “information requested by a person who the educational agency or institution reasonably believes knows the identity of the student to whom the record relates” or “information that, alone or in combination, is linked or linkable to a specific student that would allow a reasonable person in the school community, who does not have personal knowledge of the relevant circumstances, to identify the student with reasonable certainty.” (34 CFR 99 3). According to these definitions, the District determined that the redacted documents contain information regarding very small populations (e.g. one or two students) from a distinct group or affiliation and thus, a “reasonable person in the school community” could identify the students who were referenced in the record. Nonetheless, by providing you the record with only limited redactions, the District is in full compliance with Wis. Stat. 19.36(6).

Please note: The denials, in the form of the redacted material referenced above, are subject to review in an action for mandamus under Wis. Stat. 19.37(1), or by application to the local district attorney or Attorney General. See Wis. Stat. 19.35(4)(b).

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the District’s Public Information Officer, Timothy LeMonds, at (608) 663-1903.

PDF Attachment.

Much more on the 2019 Madison School District Superintendent Search, here.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”. 

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close. 

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

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

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

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

2011: A majority of the taxpayer supported Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

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

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

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.

Chris Rickert:

Groups of Dane County Board members have since 2014 been meeting privately and without any public notice to discuss government business — a practice that echoes private caucus meetings the liberal-dominated board has conducted in years past.

Meetings between the board’s leadership and leaders of some of its key committees, first reported by a local blogger, raise questions about whether the board is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the state open meetings law, as well as why county leaders feel the meetings need to be secret at a time when the board has been making a concerted effort to interest the public in its work.

Notes and links on taxpayer supported school Board open meeting issues, including Madison.

Madison taxpayers spend far more than most K-12 school districts. Yet, we have long tolerated disastrousreading results.

Madison K-12 administrators are planning a substantial tax & spending increase referendum for 2020.

Commentary

Madison School District projects loss of 1,100 students over next five years, yet 2020 referendum planning continues.

Madison School Board approves purchase of $4 million building for special ed programs

2013: What will be different, this time? 2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison Experience

Brenda Konkel:

OK, WHAT DO YOU WANT TO HAVE HAPPEN KONKEL?

At. least. try.

The school board is so messed up when it comes to transparency I don’t know where to begin.

I’d really like to see them receive some training in open meetings laws and openly discuss the challenges and solutions to have a small board where open meetings violations become more challenging.

I’m hoping the new superintendent has a greater sense of urgency towards and prioritizes transparency and following open meetings laws.

I’m hoping the new general council for the school board gives the school board better advice on open meetings laws.

I’m hoping the new media person is also on board for ensuring that the school board is not just managing the media, but open and transparent.

I’d like to see a commitment by board members to change practices and policies to increase transparency.

I’d like to see practices and unwritten policies put into writing.

But mostly, I just want them to be educated and supported by staff in being more transparent so the public can better understand where all our taxes are going and why and who we should vote for in future elections.

This, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts and tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

Chris Rickert:

Nicki Vander Meulen, who was elected to the board in 2017 and serves as the board’s clerk, said that in response to the union’s push, district administrators in a private “board briefing” Monday with her and another board member said acceding to the union’s demand would set a “bad precedent.”

“That’s virtually telling you how to vote,” she said.

Vander Meulen is not the first board member to question the legality of board briefings, which were instituted in 2013 by just-departed former superintendent Jennifer Cheatham and are held separately between one or two board members and administrators to go over items on upcoming agendas.

Former board member TJ Mertz stopped attending the meetings out of fear they could amount to the creation of “walking quorums,” which occur when members of a public body coordinate privately to take a certain action, thus rendering “the publicly held meeting a mere formality,” according to the state Department of Justice.

Madison has for decades spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts. Yet, we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

In an open letter to the community released Thursday morning, Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham acknowledged that the district “cannot be silent” on issues of racial justice.

The letter comes eight days after media reports surfaced regarding an alleged assault at Whitehorse Middle School. In that incident, which is still being investigated by the Madison Police Department, a white staff member allegedly pushed an 11-year-old girl and pulled her braids out. Rob Mueller-Owens, the staff member facing accusations in the Whitehorse incident, is a positive behavior support coach. He is currently on administrative leave and will not return to Whitehorse, according to MMSD.

Cheatham said in her letter that the incident at Whitehorse was “especially horrific” and said there was failure on part of the district regardless of what comes out of the police investigation.

The letter:

February 28, 2019

Dear Madison Community,

I have talked with enough people in Madison to know that racism is a problem in our community and has been for a long time. We are not immune to it. It is at times intentional and unintentional. It is everywhere, every day. It is within us and surrounds us. Any school district is a microcosm of the society we live in.

The polarization in our country today puts a tremendous amount of pressure on young people and the people who work in schools to somehow get it right, while the rest of society gets it wrong.

But as a school district that exists to protect children and cultivate the beauty and full worth of every single child, we must be held to the highest possible standard.

The series of racial slur incidents that have occurred this school year and caused harm to Black students, their families, and our community are indefensible. They run counter to our core values and our commitment to serving youth and families.

The most recent incident at Whitehorse Middle School was especially horrific. No matter what comes out of the police investigation, there was a failure on our part. We will review every fact to understand what happened so that we can take aggressive action.

If we are serious about our vision — that every school is a thriving school — we have to disrupt racism in all of its forms. We cannot be silent. We cannot perpetuate it. We must examine everything. In no way can we, as a community of educators, accommodate or make excuses for actions that hurt the very students we have dedicated our lives to help.

As the superintendent of this school district, as a leader for racial justice, as a mother, I know I’ve been charged with making changes that will disrupt this pattern, and even more, uplift the students we serve. I embrace that charge and will continue to do so.

For those who are demanding meaningful change, I want you to know that there are many inside this institution who are already actively engaged in making it, including our staff of color and white coconspirators. It is through their unwavering commitment and continual push for change that we have a clearer path forward, more momentum, and cause to move faster. There are a number of critical actions currently underway. Those include:

A new system for staff, students, and families to report incidents of racism or discrimination that will launch this spring

A full review of investigation and critical response protocols to ensure they are culturally responsive, grounded in restoration, and more transparent Revision and consistent application of the MMSD equity tool to ensure current and future HR policy and practice, as well as Board policy recommendations, are developed through a racial equity lens

A refresh of the School Improvement Planning process to ensure that race, rigor and relationships are central to school based decision making

A new required professional development series for all staff on racial identity, implicit bias, and racial inequity in the United States, along with a refined support and accountability system to monitor progress

We are also committed to working alongside our community and will hold several facilitated community meetings in the next two months dedicated to building trust and ensuring our collective actions support the students and families we serve.

Last fall, we reaffirmed, more strongly than ever before, our belief in the inherent brilliance, creativity and excellence of Black youth, families, and staff. We know that requires an equal commitment to confront the practices, policies, and people that stand in the way of Black Excellence shining through.

I promise this community that we are going to work hard to get it right. I know we will continue to be challenged. More issues will likely surface. And we will be relentless in our efforts. This is the work we signed up for. Most important, we will listen and learn in a way that models the best instincts of this community that we love.

In partnership,

/s/

Jennifer Cheatham
Superintendent

Related: Graduation rates and non reading in the Madison School District:

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

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

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

David Blaska:

But nothing about holding parents and students responsible for their actions. Nothing about requiring children to obey their teacher. Nothing about parents’ responsibility to read to their children and instruct them to be good citizens. Nothing about maintaining civility at school board meetings.

What is more, Cheatham appears to have thrown that vice principal at Whitehorse middle school under the bus. Perhaps the superintendent is in a position to know the whole story. Perhaps she is yielding to the strongest voices.

“No matter what comes out of the police investigation, there was a failure on our part.”

In would be interesting to know exactly what was that failure?

Anna Welch and Mckenna Kohlenberg:

In the five years since the group’s inception, MOST has not given the public notice of its meetings times, dates, locations, and agendas, allowing little to no oversight.

According to an internal document from a 2014 meeting, MOST formalized an “Action Team” that began meeting twice a month starting July 2013. But, the group did not make meeting notices publicly available. The same handout said the City’s Education Committee adopted MOST as one of its “key initiatives” in November 2013.

According to MOST meeting notes sent only to MOST participants by the former coordinator, Jennifer Lord, on Nov. 3, 2013, concerns about the committee’s need to comply with open records laws were discussed. In response, city employees cited a desire to want to remain an “independent coalition.”

But, a desire to remain an “independent coalition” is not sufficient to grant MOST immunity from open meetings laws. Nor does this desire grant MOST immunity from open records laws.

Tom Kamenick is a deputy counsel and litigation manager at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a non-profit organization that advocates for open government and civil liberties. WILL successfully litigated the 2017 Supreme Court case.

Kamenick said in an email to Simpson Street Free Press that after briefly reviewing MOST, he was unable to definitively determine if the group qualifies as a public body. But, he also said the Attorney General has stipulated open records and meetings laws should be “applied expansively.”

According to Kamenick, there is a five-factor test for determining if groups must comply with open records and open meetings laws; whether the group is funded government money, whether the group serves a government function, whether the group appears to be a government entity, whether the group is subject to some level of government control, and whether a governmental body can access to group’s records.

MOST is a publically funded city initiative staffed by government officials on the city payroll.

Taxpayer funded MOST’s website.

Molly Beck

Even so, “I don’t think they followed the law,” Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders said after reviewing minutes from the meetings.

“I think they interpreted the (open meetings law) exemption overbroadly. The idea of an open meetings law is that exemptions are supposed to be for extraordinary circumstances and narrowly applied.”

Lueders said minutes from other closed School Board meetings obtained by the State Journal also raise questions about whether the discussions should have been held before the public.

April Barker, a Waukesha-based attorney and council member who specializes in open records issues, said some of the topics discussed were “bottom-line budget impact discussions and policy and procedure discussions,” which are not exempt from the state’s open meetings law.

“It looks like there are some troubling and overreaching exercises of closed session represented,” Barker said.

Sarah Karon:

Back in 1990, when Milwaukee launched the nation’s first publicly funded voucher program, participating schools could enroll no more than 49 percent voucher students. These schools were considered private, because the majority of their students paid private tuition.
Fast-forward to 2013.
Now, more than half of Milwaukee’s 110 voucher schools have at least 95 percent of students on publicly funded vouchers. In one-fifth of these schools, every student receives a voucher.
Yet because voucher schools are still classified as “private,” they can — and do — ignore Wisconsin’s open records and meetings laws. It’s a double standard that undermines transparency and shields information from parents and the public.

Hoppy Kercheval:

It’s understandable that friends and admirers of former state school superintendent Jorea Marple are upset with her firing.
Marple spent a lifetime in public education in West Virginia, and she built strong relationships.
The board did not help its case by potentially running afoul of the state’s open meetings law when it dismissed Marple two weeks ago.
On Thursday, the board held a special meeting, allowed Marple supporters to vent, and then cured any legal question with a do-over of Marple’s firing.
Her dismissal is apparently a result of a clash of ideas between Marple, school board president Wade Linger, and others on the board over how to respond to the independent audit of the school system released nearly a year ago.

Chastity Pratt Dawsey:

Highland Park school board member Robert Davis is asking the state attorney general to remove the emergency financial managers running the Highland Park and Detroit public school districts.
Davis, who has successfully sued public bodies for violating legal procedures of the Open Meetings Act, claims that Gov. Rick Snyder skipped several steps when he appointed the managers Wednesday.
Davis expects Attorney General Bill Schuette to deny his argument. Schuette’s office provides legal representation for emergency financial managers.

Associated Press:

Three New Mexico teachers unions are complaining the state Public Education Department has failed to consult parents and teachers as it crafts a new teacher evaluation system.
The state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, the Albuquerque Teachers Federation and the Albuquerque Education Assistants Association sent a letter Friday to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
The letter claims the state didn’t include any teachers nominated by the American Teachers Federation on its evaluation task force.
The letter also says parents and school board members weren’t included and that the task force violated the Open Meetings Act by meeting without public notice.

Corrinne Hess:

Four members of the Whitnall School Board are being investigated for allegedly violating Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law. 

LuAnn Bird, a Hales Corner resident, filed the complaint last month with the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office. 

The complaint alleges school board President Jason Craig, Vice President Cassie Rainer, Clerk Rachel Scherrer and Treasurer Karen Mikolainis conducted board business on the private Facebook group “Whitnall Watchdog” starting in April 2023.

Clara Jeffery:

But let’s review the array of irritants.

Remote learning: Against every other issue I’m about to name, some of which were on a slow boil before the pandemic, you need to understand that SF schools stayed closed until the fall of 2021, longer than most districts in America. Now: SF takes the pandemic damn seriously. Because of the AIDS crisis, because we have a truly multiracial city, because we have a lot of Asian American residents who mask up even in non-pandemic times (thanks to SARS, etc.), we took collective measures early and often to safeguard each other. And we did so across racial and class lines. So, it’s not just that the “schools were closed.” It’s that the board and the district didn’t do much planning back in the summer of 2020 to reopen them or distribute laptops or make substantive contingency plans, and they didn’t make much progress even a year into the pandemic. Parents started freaking out because there was seemingly little effort to even talk about scenario planning. Instead, in interminable Zoom meetings, the board focused on…

School names: The board pushed a risible process to rename 44 schools. Should some schools be renamed to strip enslavers and other terrible people from the walls where our kids are taught? Sure, most San Francisco voters are cool with that, and many are eager for that. But the process was a crowd-sourced embarrassment that placed Dianne Feinstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Paul Revere among the names to be stricken and got many basic facts and even full identities wrong. Nevertheless, the board stood defiant in its defense of this shambolic process, which basically made a mockery out of scholarship. Along the way, it also violated the open meetings law (this will become a theme), triggering a potential lawsuit (ditto).

The murals: For years, there’s been debate about murals in George Washington High School, some of which show Washington standing over Black and Native peoples who are being subjugated. Students protested that the murals were racist. At least at the onset of this debate, most students were probably unaware that the heretofore obscure WPA-era painter Victor Arnautoff, who depicted Washington overseeing these horrors, did so as a way to critique racism and colonialism—a very progressive take for the 1930s. Again, rather than use this as a teaching opportunity, maybe even something to build a curriculum around, the board voted to paint over the murals, then backtracked, then decided maybe they should be covered—at a cost of $815,000. This alienated art historians, the local NAACP, actor Danny Glover, and even Matt Gonzalez, the uber-progressive who ran against Gavin Newsom for mayor in 2003. “Don’t whitewash history,” he warned in an op-ed.

Lowell admissions: Lowell is one of the highest-rated public high schools in the country. Admission was determined by “merit,” i.e., GPA. Lowell was also overwhelmingly Asian American (the biggest group) and white. Many people inside and outside the Lowell community had for decades been advocating various ways to make the school more representative of Black and Brown students. This was always going to be a touchy subject because there’s a proud alumni base, and because some kids—particularly Asian American and/or immigrant kids—had been working their asses off for their whole lives to get in, and all that work was for naught when the board decided to assign spots by lottery. More broadly: Is SF school inequity best solved by rearranging one high school? Or would resources and time be better spent on intervention in elementary and middle schools? And does getting rid of “academic merit” admissions for Lowell mean that we should also get rid of audition-based admissions for the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts(a.k.a. SF’s “Fame” school), where Collins’ kids attend? Tl;dr: Reform was always going to be contentious and messy but needed to be public and transparent. Instead the board rammed through a change without allowing for public input, apparently violating state sunshine provisions and triggering more lawsuits.

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?

Emma Talley:

But opponents argue the move is hurting Asian American students and taking away a springboard to achievement for low-income families. Opponents also charge that it was done without proper public input and that the school was already diverse.

Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a critic of the new admissions policy, noted that before the change Lowell’s student body was 82% non-white.

The board’s problem is not underrepresentation, it is “a perceived over-representation of a community of color the Board disfavors — Asian Americans,” she wrote in a 14-page letter to the board after its decision in March.

Other opponents of the move, who filed a lawsuit over it in April, said the board’s February vote violated the state’s open meetings law by fast-tracking the issue and failing to gain proper public input.

Alice Herman:

For individuals and organizations seeking state records, Wisconsin law is clear: the state guarantees public access to government business, barring “exceptional cases,” and identifies a lack of transparency as “generally contrary to the public interest.”

Despite the fact that the public right to state information is baked into Wisconsin legal code, freedom of information advocates say that state agencies frequently block or otherwise delay records requests.

“I would say that in recent years, we’ve seen more bad faith assertions of reasons to deny access [to public records],” says Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (and an Isthmus contributor).

To address the issue of transparency in government, Tom Kamenick, a former counsel for the conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), has founded a law firm specifically to handle open records cases in the state.

“The way the law’s written is pretty good among the states. Our definition of what’s covered by a record is quite broad, there’s very few exceptions to it similar to when it comes to meetings. A lot of governmental bodies are covered by open meetings law … but the enforcement is difficult,” says Kamenick. Many states — including Illinois, Connecticut and Hawaii — have created state commissions to handle records disputes. Wisconsin possesses no such organization, and furthermore, says Kamenick, “the attorney general and district attorneys can bring lawsuits but they rarely do, so it’s up to individuals to enforce it with lawsuits, which doesn’t happen often.”

Mckenna Kohlenberg:

My concern stems from recent Board actions that I find concerning enough to warrant this stern message. As local press has noted (here too), the Board’s recent activities suggest a troublesome pattern of skirting, if not outright violating, open meetings and public records laws.

Wisconsin law requires school boards, like other local public bodies, to: a) hold their meetings publicly, hold them in reasonably accessible places, and open them to all citizens; b) have a quorum of members (usually a majority or more) before taking official actions; and c) precede each meeting with public notice, which includes to news outlets that have filed a written request for such notice.

There are narrow exemptions to the state’s open meetings laws. For example, if a school board is to vote on a motion related to considering an employee’s employment, they may be exempt and may move to convene in a closed session instead. Motions to convene in closed session can be adopted only if the body’s authority announces to those in attendance the nature of the business to be considered at such closed session (i.e. the reason the meeting should be exempt from the open meetings law); further, this information, in addition to the vote of each member of the body, must be recorded in the meeting’s records.

Two recent official actions by the Board leave me particularly wary. First, the hiring of an interim superintendent. Following Dr. Cheatham’s resignation announcement to the Board during a closed session meeting on May 6, the Board held five additional closed session meetings at which the hiring of her replacement was on the agenda.

Only after The Cap Times reported that the Board was seriously considering Nancy Hanks for the interim position did the Board hold two open “workshop” sessions, though no votes were officially taken during these sessions. And when local reporters submitted multiple open records requests related to the Board’s hiring process, including for its list of top choices and its list of all possible choices, MMSD legal counsel stated that no such records existed.

Further, in response to the reporters’ additional open records request for meeting minutes from five of the Board’s closed sessions spanning May 30 to June 17, the Board’s secretary stated that the minutes hadn’t been transcribed yet.

Second, and similarly unsettling, was the Board’s official action on July 22 — a vote — to fill the seat left vacant by Mary Burke with Savion Castro. The vote occurred during an open session workshop during which no public comment was permitted. The open session workshop immediately followed a closed session meeting (the posted agenda for the closed meeting stated its purpose was to address a teacher discipline matter).

I’ve heard local education experts, attorneys, and parents call the open workshop “choreographed” and “a performance.”

Did the Board really narrow the pool of applicants from 29 to 1 — unanimously — in a matter of 75 minutes? Or was the decision made ahead of time, during closed session meetings for which no records exist — or at least for which no records are publicly accessible, in violation of the closed session requirement that votes be kept as part of meeting records? Alternatively, and perhaps even more troublesome, was the decision the result of conversations tantamount to walking quorums?

So why hold open sessions at all? What purpose can they possibly serve you in making decisions, Board, if they’re not actually a forum for decision-making?

Related: Transparency, and Accountability, an Example: The MMSD Interim Superintendent Search Process by TJ Mertz.

Notes and links on the taxpayer supported Madison School Board’s Superintendent search expedition, and “what will be different, this time (2013)?”

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts – between $18.5k and 20k per student, depending on the district documents reviewed.

Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick:

Thus, I actively participated when MMSD crafted the Behavior Education Plan (BEP). Indeed, I was the person who suggested that it should carry that name instead of simply MMSD’s Discipline policy, because moving away from zero tolerance also requires MMSD to actively engage in teaching children with challenging behaviors how to behave properly. When the BEP was adopted, I advised the school board that in order to succeed, it would need: 1) adequate training for staff; 2) adequate staff support; and 3) and an ombudsman program to assist students and their parents caught up in the disciplinary process. Unfortunately, to date MMSD has not provided these three critical elements of support, which is why the implementation of the BEP continues to be challenging. I was heartened to see the recommendation for an ombudsman program from the Black Excellence Coalition. Improving the BEPby implementing these recommendations is another issue that I bring special expertise if chosen to fill the empty seat on the board.

Systems change requires analyzing data to quantify the problems I encounter while representing my clients. My data analysis reveals that MMSD has failed to make significant improvements in eliminating the racial disparities our students of color and those with disabilities experience academically, in discipline, and from seclusion and restraint. To eliminate these disparities, MMSD must establish achievable short and long-term goals to improve graduation rates, academic performance and reduce negative disciplinary encounters. It must analyze the data district-wide and on a school-by-school basis in order to learn how to replicate school building success throughout the district and to hold those accountable who are unable or unwilling to make improvements in these critical areas.

Finally, my experience as Chair of the Goose Lake Watershed District has made me fully aware of Open Records and Open Meetings laws, Robert’s Rules of Order and the importance of public input to governmental bodies. This experience will serve me well if I am chosen to serve on the MMSD school board.

More, here

David Blaska:

Tony Gallli, dean of the Madison’s broadcast journalists at WKOW-TV27, asked our favorite candidate for Madison School Board Seat #4:

Any concerns over using a live feed into the MMSD auditorium Monday evening to satisfy the Open Meetings requirement, as the school board met in a room closed to the public?

Blaska answered: “None whatsoever. They did what they had to do. But they have also reaped the bitter fruit of their policy of bowing and scraping.”

The disruption of Monday’s Board of Education meeting is of a piece with the disruption in our classrooms. The same sense of victim entitlement. Rules allowing everyone gets to speak for three minutes? Just another sign of white supremacy. Shout down those with whom you disagree. Good behavior, optional. The school board does the same run-and-hide practiced by that former principal at Sherman middle school. When the kids act up, go to your office and close the door.

Much more on the 2019 Madison School Board election, here.

Anna Welch and Mckenna Kohlenberg:

Local watchdogs and litigators say a City of Madison initiative and its multiple committees should provide the public with greater transparency.

In a unanimous 2017 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that committees created by local governmental bodies in Wisconsin are themselves governmental bodies subject to the state’s open meetings law.

Wisconsin open meetings law states: “All meetings of all state and local governmental bodies shall be publicly held in places reasonably accessible to members of the public and shall be open to all citizens at all times unless otherwise expressly provided by law.”

Public bodies are required to give notice of the time, date, location and general agenda of all meetings at least 24 hours in advance. Even when, “for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical…in no case may the notice be provided less than 2 hours in advance of [a] meeting.”

Chad Calder:

Two advocacy groups have taken legal action in Orleans Parish Civil District Court against the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts over the expulsions of two students seen on campus surveillance video smoking what appeared to be — but what they say was not — marijuana.

The Louisiana Justice Institute has asked for an injunction against the school on behalf of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, alleging a state open meetings law violation, breach of contract and a violation of the students’ right to due process.

“My clients got pranked on Halloween,” Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute said. “Everyone knows it was a practical joke, but they (NOCCA) will not back down.”

Abbey Machtig:

The district administered a survey and held a series of input meetings earlier this year, which indicated mixed opinions from the public on referendums for this fall. That was before the School Board voted to place the questions on the ballot, and before the district shared the exact dollar amounts of the proposals and the list of schools selected for updates.

The School Board and district have already begun requesting contract proposals from vendors, should the facilities referendum pass.

Those contracts are for architects and engineers, project managers and construction firms.

All contracts must be approved by the School Board.

—-

Commentary on Madison’s tax & $pending increase referendums

Madison’s taxpayer (well) funded k-12 school district has not addressed boundaries in decades…

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?

Joe Nocera:

And how did the hosts and guests on Morning Joe react to this well-reported story with its wealth of telling details? With venom. Instead of acknowledging that it might have some validity, they derided the article. “This does have the feeling of Trump acolytes laundering their attacks through a reputable, prestigious news organization,” said co-host Willie Geist. 

“This was a classic, classic hit piece, probably ordered up by the 93-year-old, fifth-time married Rupert Murdoch over the weekend,” added Morning Joe regular Mike Barnicle.

In fact, it was anything but a hit piece. Rather, it was the product of journalism’s essential function: finding out the truth, and then bringing that truth to the public. Indeed, according to the Journal, Biden’s problems—problems most elderly people face sooner or later—were not some kind of new phenomenon. One of the meetings the Journal recounted took place 14 months ago, in May 2023.

Corrinne Hess:

We had asked that the governor use the Audit Bureau, but he’s decided to go on a different path. That doesn’t mean we can’t pursue it as well. The more eyes looking at what happened to prevent problems going forward, the better.” 

As of Thursday, the MPS audit was not listed as one of the nine audits in progress or planned on the LAB website. 

Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Cedarburg, said it’s “incredibly troubling that the state Department of Public Instruction knew that MPS was late on reporting their finances months ago, but waited until after the $252 million MPS referendum narrowly passed to release this information to the public.”

DPI said the state first became aware in late March that MPS may have submitted incorrect data that led to the state giving the district more money than it should have.

State Superintendent Jill Underly told WISN’s UPFront on June 23, DPI did not realize how bad it was until late April. At that time, DPI began daily meetings with MPS officials, Underly said. 

Stroebel said what is happening at MPS is concerning because the district’s actions could affect schools across the state. 

“I’ve already heard from a number of constituents, including school district employees in my district, who are concerned about how this crisis at MPS will impact their school’s finances,” Stroebel said. 

Maddie Hanna

We have seen success in the classroom with what teachers are using,” Ashwina Mosakowski, the district’s director of elementary teaching, learning, and innovation, told the school board in January, explaining why the district continues to use Units of Study — a reading program that experts say is deeply flawed.

‘A disservice to all students’

At a school board meeting in April, Mosakowski told the board, “We have adopted the science of reading.”

The reading curriculum has been a recurring topic of debate at school board meetings this year. Mosakowski has acknowledged gaps in the Units of Study program, noting that Wallingford-Swarthmore teachers have made “so many modifications” since it was adopted 10 years ago. She told the board in January the district recognized that more changes were needed, and has since piloted a number of programs to add instruction in word study to the curriculum.

But parents such as Mead say the district is clinging to elements of an outdated approach.

“I’m just kind of outraged by the injustice of it,” said Mead, who has two children in elementary school in Wallingford-Swarthmore. In an affluent district such as hers, many families can afford to hire tutors, masking how many kids might be struggling. But those who can’t fall further behind — “that opportunity gap,” she said.

Christopher Rufo:

What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”

On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency, even when her efforts veer into self-parody. She never explains, never provides new interpretation—she just repeats the phrases, in search of affirmation and, when the time is right, a promotion.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was “excited” about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She “just [couldn’t] wait to vote” for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands” with Kamala Harris. She worked to “get out the vote” in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a “Biden supporter”; for her, it was simply a matter of being a “supporter of human rights, dignity, and justice.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a “deranged racist sociopath.”

If you read Maher’s tweets closely, you also get glimpses of the human being. She spent much of her time in airports, taxis, meetings, and conferences. She expressed anger over the fact that most first-class flyers were white men, then noted that she went straight “to the back of the bus.” In her thirties, unmarried and without children, she felt the need to explain that “the planet is literally burning” and that she could not, in good conscience, “bring a child into a warming world.”

Behind the frenetic activity and the moral posturing, you wonder. Maher once posted her daily routine, which involved yoga, iced coffee, back-to-back meetings, and Zoom-based psychotherapy. She resented being served maternity advertisements on Instagram, she said. She was not “currently in the market for a baby” and would not be “tending her ovaries” according to the dictates of American capitalism. 

Dave Cieslewicz

And even if power won’t listen, those of us who hear what Berliner hears appreciate his courage for saying it out loud.

As a service to YSDA readers who might not take the time to read the entire lengthy piece, here are some of our favorite excerpts. 

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. 

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population...

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals. 

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America...

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too. 

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR)...

Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None...

Christopher Rufo:

I am hoping you can set the stage. In general terms, what is happening at Boeing?

Insider: At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes.

In 2018, the first 737 MAX crash that happened, that was an engineering failure. We built a single-point failure in a system that should have no single-point failures. The second crash that followed—we cannot say this from a legal standpoint, with the FAA—looked like pilot error. But, in any case, a company cannot survive two crashes from a single aircraft type. Then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg defended the company in front of Congress, defended the engineering, defended the work—and that protected the workforce, but it also prodded the board and stoked public fear, which resulted in a sweeping set of changes that caused huge turnover in talent.

So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is all outsiders. The current CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO whom he brought in. And we have a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. The head of our commercial-airplanes unit in Seattle, who was fired last week, was one of the last engineers in the executive council.

The headquarters in Arlington is empty. Nobody lives there. It is an empty executive suite. The CEO lives in New Hampshire. The CFO lives in Connecticut. The head of HR lives in Orlando. We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week—except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings. And that is the story: it is a company that is under caretakers. It is not under owners. And it is not under people who love airplanes.

In this business, the workforce knows if you love the thing you are building or if it’s just another set of assets to you. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most important story of all. There is no visible center of the company, and people are wondering what they are connected to.

…

DEI is the drop you put in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture and was tied to compensation. Every HR email is: “Inclusion makes us better.” This kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.

If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it’s a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.

The radicalization of HR doesn’t hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses. At Google, they’re making a large profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring policies. Because they are paying 30 percent or 40 percent more than the competition in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the “DEI tax” and still find top people.

Rebecca Kleefisch:

Reform-minded school board associations are appearing countrywide, with around 30 new groups emerging since the National School Boards Association (NSBA) asked for federal law enforcement intervention against moms and dads who attended school board meetings to stand up for their kids.

There’s a better way to train educators.Learning lags with new teachers. Many quit.

As ridiculous as it sounds, Attorney General Merrick Garland even issued a directive to create an FBI task force to investigate after the NSBA essentially accused moms and dads of being terrorists. The NSBA tried to retract its statement and apologized to its members but not the parents, who were just worried about schools prioritizing political objectives over academic excellence.

National School Board Association wages ideological war

Dominic Anthony Walsh:

At Love Elementary in the Heights area of Houston’s Northside, parents filled the cafeteria on Thursday, Jan. 25 to hear administrators pitch the New Education System (NES). Love is among 24 Houston ISD campuses that would have performed poorly on the Texas Education Agency’s revamped accountability system and now have the option to apply for the NES reform program — but most folks at Love weren’t very interested in the pitch. 

“It was very clear that 99.9% of the parents wanted to keep this school the way that it is,” said Pablo Lambea, parent of a Love Elementary first grader, arguing that “NES is eliminating basically any human element from the classroom and only teaching towards the test results.”

Several parents invited Houston Public Media to a second NES information meeting on Feb. 1, but the district denied access. A Houston ISD spokesperson wrote that “these are meetings for the school community and are not open to the press.” The first meeting at Love Elementary was recorded and can be viewed at this link.

Abbey Machtig:

The Madison School Board is scheduled to hire a new superintendent by February or March. The board began interviewing candidates in closed meetings this month and will continue into January. The board is expected to announce two or three finalists and hold open interviews where the public can participate.

The new superintendent will eventually replace Lisa Kvistad, a longtime district educator who has been serving as interim superintendent since June. She was selected to replace Jenkins earlier this year.

This time around, the board is looking for a superintendent familiar with Madison who can “lead large-scale change” and has a track record of improving outcomes for students of color, according to a job profile drafted and approved in October.

School Board elections also will take place on April 2. Incumbents Maia Pearson and Savion Castro have announced their reelection campaigns. Board members serve in staggered, three-year terms.

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?

Tyler Cowen:

Penn’s board has 48 voting participants, and a further 36 longstanding emeritus members who have reached the retirement age of 70 but are still allowed to attend and speak at meetings.  MIT has 74 board members, Cornell 64.  Harvard has a “corporation” of 12, and then 32 overseers.  Of course that is done in part to keep donors involved and perhaps also reward them.  It does not lead to good governance or a strong ability to make substantive decisions.

I very much enjoyed this FT article on these themes.  Faculty members are upset that their governing boards want to govern.

I almost split my gut over this part: “…said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and former head of Mount Holyoke College. “Often people from the corporate world don’t understand the culture of collegiality, transparency and shared governance.”

Sara Weissman:

A tenured history professor at Bakersfield College in California who founded a controversial, conservative-leaning faculty group received notice earlier this month that the Kern Community College District Board had voted to fire him. The professor, Matthew Garrett, says administrators are penalizing him for exercising his free speech. College leaders say the decision has nothing to do with his conservative views and have charged him with a litany of offenses.

The Kern Community College District Board of Trustees voted to end Garrett’s employment in a closed session at a board meeting on April 13, according to a notice provided to Garrett the following day. At the meeting, the board listened to public remarks from Garrett and other faculty members before discussing the matter and ultimately deferred making a public announcement on its decision. The termination notice, however, was leaked to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy organization. It gives Garrett the option to appeal the decision within 30 days, which he has done.

Garrett has been a polarizing figure on campus as co-founder of the Renegade Institute for Liberty, which describes itself as a faculty coalition “dedicated to the free speech, open inquiry, critical thinking to advance American ideals within the broader Western tradition of meritocracy, individual agency, civic virtue, liberty of conscience and free markets.” Members of the group say it’s intended to foster diversity of thought and good-faith debate. Critics say some members have contributed to a hostile campus environment by making inflammatory posts on the group’s social media page and stalling diversity initiatives by repeatedly questioning and criticizing them in committee meetings.

Commentary.

Josh Koehn

Two San Francisco supervisors will miss key meetings this week to attend a taxpayer-funded junket in Japan to learn how an institute in the country teaches math. 

The details of that word salad of a sentence might seem a bit mystifying for those who realize:

• San Francisco supervisors have no role in deciding how math is taught in the city’s public schools.
• The mayor just announced last month that the city could be facing a half-billion dollar deficit, and trips to Japan wouldn’t seem to rate on the priority scale.
• Algebra hasn’t even been taught to San Francisco’s eighth graders in almost a decade.
• Cherry blossom season doesn’t start until the end of March.

Adding a bit more complexity to the situation, the absences of Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Myrna Melgar from this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting could create hiccups in getting measures on the March 2024 ballot, especially if the return leg of their 5,180-mile trip runs long. Recent history shows it wouldn’t be the first time a supervisor was overly optimistic about returning home in time for an important meeting.

Hannah Natanson:

Students first told Shanta Freeman-Miller about how it hurt to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” five years ago.

The stories came out during Wednesday meetings of the Union for Students of African Ancestry, a group that Freeman-Miller, one of the only Black teachers at Kamiak High School, founded at teens’ request. Students shared their discomfort with the way the 1960 novel about racial injustice portrays Black people: One Black teen said the book misrepresented him and other African Americans, according to meeting records reviewed by The Washington Post. Another complained the novel did not move her, because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.

Mohar Chatterjee and Rebecca Kern:

The White House is poised to make an all-hands effort to impose national rules on a fast-moving technology, according to a draft executive order.

President Joe Biden will deploy numerous federal agencies to monitor the risks of artificial intelligence and develop new uses for the technology while attempting to protect workers, according to a draft executive order obtained by POLITICO.

The order, expected to be issued as soon as Monday, would streamline high-skilled immigration, create a raft of new government offices and task forces and pave the way for the use of more AI in nearly every facet of life touched by the federal government, from health care to education, trade to housing, and more.

At the same time, the Oct. 23 draft order calls for extensive new checks on the technology, directing agencies to set standards to ensure data privacy and cybersecurity, prevent discrimination, enforce fairness and also closely monitor the competitive landscape of a fast-growing industry. The draft order was verified by multiple people who have seen or been consulted on draft copies of the document.

The White House did not reply to a request to confirm the draft.

Though the order does not have the force of law and previous White House AI efforts have been criticized for lacking enforcement teeth, the new guidelines will give federal agencies influence in the US market through their buying power and their enforcement tools. Biden’s order specifically directs the Federal Trade Commission, for instance, to focus on anti-competitive behavior and consumer harms in the AI industry — a mission that Chair Lina Khan has already publicly embraced.

———

President Biden has signed an executive order that will require AI companies to “address algorithmic discrimination” and “ensure that AI advances equity.” They want to embed the principles of CRT and DEI into every aspect of AI.

Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, and.

“Fiscal indulgences”

Imagine a computer code Ibram Kendi installed directly into your operating system, forever.

This is a terrible tech policy document. The noise made by some closed AI companies around simple word calculators taking over the world has now led to a regulatory regime which functionally makes it tougher for newer entrants, in both closed and open source AI worlds. This is the textbook definition of regulatory capture playing out (cc @bgurley). Some red flags:

It mostly demands a lot of reports, almost entirely from within the government.

1. A lot of government employees will be writing a lot of reports.
2. After they get those reports, others will then write additional reports.
3. There will also be a lot of government meetings.
4. These reports will propose paths forward to deal with a variety of AI issues.
5. These reports indicate which agencies may get jurisdiction on various AI issues.
6. Which reports are requested indicates what concerns are most prominent now.
   1. A major goal is to get AI experts into government, and get government in a place where it can implement the use of AI, and AI talent into the USA.
   2. Another major goal is ensuring the safety of cutting-edge foundation (or ‘dual use’) models, starting with knowing which ones are being trained and what safety precautions are being taken.
   3. Other ultimate goals include: Protecting vital infrastructure and cybersecurity, safeguarding privacy, preventing discrimination in many domains, protecting workers, guarding against misuse, guarding against fraud, ensuring identification of AI content, integrating AI into education and healthcare and promoting AI research and American global leadership.

Andy Kessler:

Sen. Chuck Schumer, who’s never seen a camera he didn’t want to jump in front of, held a closed-door meeting last week on artificial intelligence. What? Closed? To me, it suggests an agenda beyond paving the path to a fantastic future. At the meeting, Elon Musk warned that AI is a “civilization risk.” Mr. Schumer declared, “We can’t be like ostriches and put our heads in the sand.” They sound more like dodo birds.

One clue to the hidden agenda: Besides Mr. Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s CEO and other techies, the attendees included union leaders such as Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, Liz Shuler of the AFL-CIO, Meredith Stiehm of the Writers Guild and two tech critics with “Humane” in their company names. Ugh. It looked like the ghosts of economics past had come to spook the spirit of economics future.

So of course it was held behind closed doors. It was as if the nascent AI companies were called into a meeting with a tough guy named Spike who listens and then says, “You wouldn’t want anything to happen to your nice companies there, would you?” Or as if the union representatives of the horse-drawn-trolley conductors, rail-gauge manufacturers and manure sweepers were sitting in car-design meetings, demanding full employment for their guilds.

Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Politicians might have demanded to tax horses based on speed. Back then, no one appreciated the potential for those rickety automobiles to transform the economy. We’re at the same juncture with AI today.

Elizabeth Heubeck:

In an era where humans have managed to create an artificial intelligence toolsophisticated enough to churn out an essay on Shakespeare, it seems unlikely that there would still be ambiguity about how best to teach kids how to read. But the “reading wars” continue to incite differences of opinion in various forums, from school board meetings to legislative sessions. 

Recently, literacy curriculums that include systematic attention to phonics—the most contested of the strategies, but one that has been affirmed by decades of research—have again emerged as a best practice. (Phonics and sound-letter correspondence aren’t the only pieces of evidence-based literacy, of course; so are building students’ vocabulary, knowledge of sentence structure, and content.) 

Lofty curriculum decisions such as these are often made at levels far removed from classrooms. Between 2013 and July of this year, 32 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction. It’s teachers who must implement them, sometimes after years of using very different instructional approaches. It’s an inordinately challenging task.

Ali Swenson:

Moms for Liberty, a “parental rights” group that has sought to take over school boards in multiple states, is looking to expand those efforts across the country and to other education posts in 2024 and beyond. The effort is setting up a clash with teachers unions and others on the left who view the group as a toxic presence in public schools.

The group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, said during its annual summit over the weekend in Philadelphia that Moms for Liberty will use its political action committee next year to engage in school board races nationwide. It also will “start endorsing at the state board level and elected superintendents.”

Her comments confirm that Moms for Liberty, which has spent its first two years inflaming school board meetings with aggressive complaints about instruction on systemic racism and gender identity in the classroom, is developing a larger strategy to overhaul education infrastructure across the country.

Commentary.

Tyler O’Neil:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, added a slew of parental rights organizations to that “hate map” for 2022 and labeled them “antigovernment groups.”

“Schools, especially, have been on the receiving end of ramped-up and coordinated hard-right attacks, frequently through the guise of ‘parents’ rights’ groups,” the SPLC’s “Year in Hate and Extremism” report claims. 

“These groups were, in part, spurred by the right-wing backlash to COVID-19 public safety measures in schools,” the SPLC report says. “But they have grown into an anti-student inclusion movement that targets any inclusive curriculum that contains discussions of race, discrimination and LGBTQ identities.”

“At the forefront of this mobilization is Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based group with vast connections to the GOP that this year the SPLC designated as an extremist group,” the report notes. “They can be spotted at school board meetings across the country wearing shirts and carrying signs that declare, ‘We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT.’”

The SPLC report does not once mention the Left’s aggressive promotion of sexualized material for children in schools and at other venues. It does not mention the “Drag Queen Story Hour” movement or the fact that many of the books which parents demand removed from school libraries include pornographic content. It does not mention how many on the Left champion the idea that children should be able to identify with a gender opposite their biological sex, hide that identity from their parents, and even obtain life-altering drugs without parental consent. Instead, it acts as though the parental rights movement emerged in a vacuum, or worse, is motivated by hatred.

The SPLC long has demonized conservative Christian groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom as “anti-LGBT hate groups,” national security groups such as the Center for Security Policy as “anti-Muslim hate groups,” and immigration groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies as “anti-immigrant hate groups.”

Antonia Noori Farzan

The Barrington School Committee has reached a settlement with three teachers who were fired for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Brittany DiOrio, Stephanie Hines and Kerri Thurber will each receive a payment of $33,333, a spokesperson for the school district announced Thursday in a news release. Additionally, they will receive back pay: $65,000 for Hines, $128,000 for Thurber and $150,000 for DiOrio. The three teachers’ legal counsel will receive $50,000 in attorney’s fees.

Tabia Lee:

My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice. On the contrary, I was informed during the interview process that the office I would be working in had been alienating some faculty with a “too-woke” approach that involved “calling people out.” (After I was hired, this sentiment was echoed by many faculty, staff, and administrators I spoke to.) I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role. I was wrong.

Even before any substantive conflicts came to a head, warning lights started flashing. Within my first two weeks on the job, a staff member in my office revealed he had also been a finalist for my position and objected to the fact that I had been chosen over someone who had been there for years “doing the work.” I would have a rough ride ahead, this person told me—and, indeed, I would. It also soon became clear that my supervising dean and her aligned colleagues were attempting to prevent me from performing my duties.

From the beginning, efforts to obstruct my work were framed in terms that might seem bizarre to those outside certain academic spaces. For instance, simply attempting to set an agenda for meetings caused my colleagues to accuse me of “whitespeaking,” “whitesplaining,” and reinforcing “white supremacy”—accusations I had never faced before. I was initially baffled, but as I attended workshops led by my officemates and promoted by my supervising dean, I repeatedly encountered a presentation slidetitled “Characteristics of White-Supremacy Culture” that denounced qualities like “sense of urgency” and “worship of the written word.” Written meeting agendas apparently checked both boxes.

Landon Mion:

Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired by the school board Tuesday night in response to a grand jury report on the district’s handling of two sexual assaults committed by the same student.

The Northern Virginia district drew national attention last year after a father accused it at a school board meeting of covering up his daughter’s sexual assault in which a biological boy wearing a skirt raped her in the girls’ bathroom. The suspect then transferred to another school in the district and assaulted another girl, and faced charges in both cases.

The father alleged the district had attempted to cover up his daughter’s assault to advance its transgender policy, which had been subject to parental protests at LCPS school board meetings.

The grand jury report released Monday said the district was looking out for its own interests instead of the best interests of its students and that the school system “failed at every juncture.”

🚨NEW LOUDOUN COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 🧵

1: The Loudoun County School Board CLAIMS there were things in special grand jury report that weren't in its own report from an "independent review" and that's why it didn't fire Superintendent Ziegler earlier.

Let's review some receipts⬇️

— Ian Prior (@iandprior) December 9, 2022

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?

Alex Seitz-Wald

The week before his cryptocurrency empire spectacularly collapsed, one of Sam Bankman-Fried’s political groups hosted back-to-back happy hours for movers and shakers in both parties at the $3 million townhouse it had recently purchased steps from the Capitol. 

The congressional chiefs of staff, top operatives and lobbyists who attended didn’t come for the open bar and finger foods — mostly vegan, in honor of their benefactor’s preferred diet. They came to cement their connections to a 30-year-old billionaire who had, practically overnight, become one of the country’s biggest Democratic political donors and was building a Washington footprint designed to influence public policy for decades to come.

“SBF,” as he is widely known,” visited the White House, attended a congressional retreat, and held countless meetings with lawmakers and top regulators. He got chummy with Bill Clinton after paying the former president to speak at a conference. He spent $12 million getting a referendum on the ballot in California. And he earned praise during Senate testimony from Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., for a “much more glorious afro than I once had.”

Adam Andrzejewski

Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the National Institutes of Health — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dinner and workshops on December 19 and 20th – the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.

On the morning of the 19th, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: “one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”

Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act request.

So, for the first time, here is our exclusive release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s official calendar:

Tyler O’Neil:

Feller insisted that the school district’s legal department—rather than the board president—schedules the hearing of grievances and that she has “no input” on such decisions.

However, another board member, Danielle Weston, countered Feller’s claim, insisting that the board president has authority over its meetings. 

Police arrested Story on Sept. 17, 2021, on a misdemeanor charge of hindering proceedings by disorderly conduct. The charge dates to the previous Aug. 16, when Story raised concerns about Schools Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez, who at the time faced allegations of family violence in an application for a protective order (redacted version available here). 

According to publicly available footage of the meeting, Amy Weir, then president of the Round Rock Independent School District Board of Trustees, warned Story not to speak about “something other than D1 or D2” on the meeting’s agenda. 

Story responded: “I will show you how what I’m about to comment on is related to that.”

Joseph Simonson:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coordinated with social media companies and Google to censor users who expressed skepticism or criticism of COVID-19 vaccines, according to a trove of internal communicationsobtained by America First Legal and shared exclusively with the Washington Free Beacon.

Over the course of at least six months, starting in December 2020, CDC officials regularly communicated with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over “vaccine misinformation.” At various times, CDC officials would flag specific posts by users on social media platforms such as Twitter as “example posts.”

In one email to a CDC staffer, a Twitter employee said he is “looking forward to setting up regular chats” with the agency. Other emails show the scheduling of meetings with the CDC over how to best police alleged misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

Although many of the posts flagged by the CDC contained false information about the COVID-19 vaccines, the efforts to police misinformation also resulted in mistaken acts of censorship. An April 2021 email from a CDC staffer to Facebook states that the “algorithms that Facebook and other social media networks are apparently using to screen out posting by sources of vaccine misinformation are also apparently screening out valid public health messaging, including [Wyoming] Health communications.”

IFS:

“School boards across the country should take note. Rules for public comments must respect the First Amendment rights of speakers. If you are limiting which opinions may be shared, you’ll be held liable for violating First Amendment rights,” said Alan Gura, Vice President for Litigation at the Institute for Free Speech.

A federal court ruled in November that several Pennsbury policies governing speech at school board meetings were unconstitutional. Those policies, modeled after a template recommended by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA), allowed the meeting’s presiding officer to stop speakers whose comments were deemed “personally directed,” “personal attacks,” “abusive,” “verbally abusive,” “irrelevant,” “disruptive,” “offensive,” “inappropriate,” or “otherwise inappropriate.” After an evidentiary hearing in Philadelphia, Judge Gene Pratter found ample evidence that the Board selectively enforced the rules to stifle criticism of its actions and members.

The plaintiffs in the case were censored for attempting to criticize district policies, including efforts to promote contested ideas about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Marshall was once interrupted mere seconds into speaking because the solicitor objected to his use of the term “critical race theory” to describe the district’s initiatives. Critics of the board were cut off for addressing their comments to board members, while other speakers were permitted to directly praise board members and school employees.

“Rules for public comment periods are meant to maintain time limits and protect each speaker’s right to be heard, not police which viewpoints are expressed. Pennsbury’s rules were so vague and subjective that the board could effectively shut down any speech they didn’t like, and that’s exactly what they did,” said Del Kolde, Senior Attorney at the Institute for Free Speech.

After the injunction was issued, Pennsbury abolished one of the two policies challenged in the lawsuit and rewrote the other to comply with the First Amendment. The court also ruled against a board requirement that speakers publicly announce their home address before beginning their remarks. According to a spokesperson for the PSBA, the model policy was put under review after the court’s ruling.

Dan Barry:

But they were also chastened. They hadn’t attended the town meeting. They hadn’t fulfilled their democratic obligation. They hadn’t kept informed about the Free State movement. To some observers, they had gotten what they deserved.

“I was practically kicking myself in the ass for not being there,” Mr. Spiker said. “I guess I assumed our town would take care of it.”

The moment revealed a democracy mired in indifference. Turnout at town meetings has been low for years. The town’s websites are barely rudimentary, with school board minutes posted online sporadically. The select board’s minutes are found at the town hall — open three afternoons a week — or the general store, beside chocolate bars being sold to benefit the local humane society.

From this muddle of anger, confusion and regret, though, a movement was born. It came to be known as We Stand Up for Croydon Students.

Evaluating the utility and effectiveness of ongoing k-12 tax and spending practices is rare….

Calling the proposed budget a “ransom,” he moved to cut it by more than half — to $800,000. He argued that taxes for education had climbed while student achievement had not, and that based in part on the much lower tuition for some local private schools, about $10,000 for each of the town’s 80 or so students was sufficient — though well short of, say, the nearly $18,000 that public schools in nearby Newport charged for pupils from Croydon.

Leighton Woodhouse:

A few weeks later, one of Charlotte’s teachers asked the kids to introduce their stuffed animals with their pronouns. “The six-year-olds were like, ‘What’s a pronoun?’” Beka said.

A former MCDS teacher whose daughter attended the school said his little girl was similarly confused when MCDS “started introducing gender, and you can be whoever you want, and it’s fluid. She started taking that on.”

The former teacher, who declined to speak openly, said his daughter was hardly alone. A group of girls in her class started to think of themselves as gay, and then transgender. By the fourth grade, his daughter was “dating” other girls in her class. By sixth grade—last year—she had adopted male pronouns and a boy’s name, and had started wearing a breast binder.

“You could see the old going away,” the former teacher said. “It was intense. And it was just sobering to go to these meetings week after week after week, and just talk about the same thing over and over.”

Jeff Hoffman

Our leaders must remember that education doesn’t begin with some isolated bureaucrat’s hidden agenda or union boss in Washington (in our case, across the river). It doesn’t even begin with state or local officials – like a General Assembly in Richmond who can’t even pass a state budget. It begins with the parents!

This Thursday, May 26, the Fairfax County School Board is scheduled to vote on measures to enhance the so-called “gender identity” language in the Student Rights & Responsibilities (SR&R) regulation. Measures include a decrease in the age of children susceptible to greater disciplinary actions. According to recent articles in media outlets like the “New York Post”, this could result in suspension or expulsion for what the SR&R regulation defines as “malicious misgendering or deadnaming.” Kids as young as K-3 are susceptible to some form of discipline.

Toby Green:

Translation: taxpayers invest in developing products through government agencies, and private companies and their shareholders reap the profits. How does this work in practice? Gates does not give what we might call full disclosure. He offers the example of the antiviral Molnupiravir which “Merck and its partners developed”. It was authorised to great fanfare as a Covid treatment inNovember 2021.

Yet Merck did not develop this drug. It was initially developed as a veterinary drug for horses at Emory University, with a US$19 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID and funding from other sectors of the US government. Molnupiravir costs US$17.74 per dose to manufacture, according to an estimate from researchers at Harvard and King’s College London, but is being retailed to the US government for US$712 per course — a profit of 4,000%.

Another example of Gates’s eye for detail is his discussion of Remdesivir, which was approved as “Standard of Care” for Covid in the US by the Federal Drug Agency. Again, like Molnupiravir, much of the funding and institutional support for the drug originally came from the US government. Remdesivir was the baby of the drug company Gilead.

Gates describes how one study showed that “it may have a major impact in patients who aren’t yet sick enough to be in the hospital”. But other details are ignored. He doesn’t tell us that in an earlier, peer-reviewed study from China, published in the Lancet in May 2020, “Remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits”, and that the trial was “stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early”. All the same, the profits were good: while the drug cost Gilead just US$10per dose to manufacture, it was being retailed to US taxpayers at US$3,120.

Maybe Gates knows nothing about the Lancet study. Perhaps he doesn’t know that in both of these cases, public investment has funded enormous private profits — and that in the case of one of the drugs, there’s little evidence that this was to any benefit. He’s just a software engineer after all. 

For Gates, technology really does provide all the answers, as it certainly has in his own life. He believes humanity belongs online: “once people learn the digital approach, they generally stick to it”. Post-Covid, he envisages a world of flexible working, in which regular guys like him with large mansions and decent living space can languidly choose between going into the office on Wednesdays or Thursdays. The problem with Gates’s digital utopia — full of virtual spaces where 3D avatars attend business meetings — is that I suspect many of us will not want to live in it.

Abigail Cartus and Justin Feldman:

Of the numerous political battles sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, some of the most bitterly contested have taken place over K-12 education. Schools have been a site of decisive struggles over the norms, values, and policies of the U.S. response to the public health crisis. While teachers collectively fought for stronger COVID mitigation measures, a small but vocal minority of parents confronted school boards in acrimonious meetings, demanding an end to remote instruction and mask mandates. These local skirmishes took place against the backdrop of successive COVID surges and a national media narrative that cast doubt on the usefulness of public health measures. It is impossible to understand the failed U.S. pandemic response, which has left over one million people dead, without understanding the role that schools have played as sites of political contestation. And it is impossible to understand the school reopening debate without understanding one of its main interlocutors: academic economist Emily Oster.

Glenn Reynolds:

People used to talk about “resistance” to President Donald Trump. That’s old hat. Now it’s resistance to the woke.

And we’re seeing more and more of that resistance. University of Michigan economics professor Mark J. Perry is working with numerous folks across the nation to file equal-opportunity complaints with the federal Department of Education when colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of race and sex.

Perry recounts that in three years of research, he’s found more than 1,200 Title IX and Title VI violations — and continues to uncover more. “The significant and troubling frequency of violations of federal civil rights laws in higher education demonstrates unaddressed systemic sexism and racism that needs greater awareness, exposure and legal challenges,” he writes.

“Typical and frequent” Title IX violations “that have gone unchallenged for many decades,” he says, include “female-only scholarships, fellowships, awards, study spaces, mentoring, tutoring, special freshman orientations, industry meetings, summer STEM programs, summer STEM camps, coding clubs, leadership programs, entrepreneurship programs, gym hours, etc. that operate exclusively for women while illegally excluding and discriminating against boys and men.”

Perry says that “racially segregated or racially preferential” programs and events that violate Title VI have also “become increasingly common in higher education.”

Chester Finn

Monday’s Washington Post featured a long, front-page article by the estimable Laura Meckler titled “Public schools facing a crisis of epic proportions.” In it, she skillfully summarized a laundry list of current woes facing traditional public education:

The scores are down and violence is up. Parents are screaming at school boards, and children are crying on the couches of social workers. Anger is rising. Patience is falling.

For public schools, the numbers are all going in the wrong direction. Enrollment is down. Absenteeism is up. There aren’t enough teachers, substitutes, or bus drivers. Each phase of the pandemic brings new logistics to manage, and Republicans are planning political campaigns this year aimed squarely at failings of public schools.

Public education is facing a crisis unlike anything in decades….

As I’m sure Ms. Meckler would agree, this is a “supply side” lamentation, a catalog of woes as seen from the perspective of those inside the education system. She might instead have written a very different article describing the “crisis” as viewed by consumers of public education. (You know—students, parents, taxpayers, us folks.) Such a piece might have read more like this:

The schools our kids attended were closed so long that students lost whole years of learning. Those from families with limited means lost even more. Those schools were closed far longer than they needed to be, apparently because the adults who work in them didn’t want (or were scared) to return and those running them put their employees’ interests ahead of those of their students and parents. We watched the firemen and nurses and utility workers keep coming to work despite the pandemic. Why not the teachers?

Worse, the closed schools’ failure to supply satisfactory forms of remote instruction meant that millions of children forgot how to study, how to get along with other kids, how to relate to grown-ups outside their families. Idleness, lassitude, and frustration took a toll of their physical and mental health and made life extremely difficult for us parents and other caregivers, including messing up our own work lives. Many of us had no choice but to quit our jobs. No wonder many of us took education into our own hands, seeking out other schools that managed to stay open, getting serious about homeschooling, hiring tutors when we could afford it, and teaming up with neighbors to create quasi-schools. Yes, we’re angry, furious even, and yes, our kids are upset and acting out. And it didn’t get any better when we got them back into school only to discover that, instead of the Three R’s, our schools were obsessing over racial and political issues. No wonder we’re protesting at school board meetings. No wonder a bunch of politicians are using our unhappiness to get themselves elected. And it’s no help at all when folks in Washington seem more interested in sending money and coddling misbehavers than in whether our children are learning. 

Yes, it would have been a very different sort of lamentation. The point, though, isn’t journalism per se. It’s what’s the proper perspective from which to view the semi-meltdown of traditional public education: the system’s perspective or the perspective of those for whose benefit it exists and whose tax dollars pay for it? If the nation is still—or again—at grave risk because its children aren’t learning enough (and in many cases seem not even to be in places of learning), where ought responsibility for the melting be placed?

I’m not exactly saying the public schools had it coming. Nobody (except perhaps the denizens of a mysterious Wuhan laboratory) had any idea what was coming, and nobody is ever fully prepared for a full-scale catastrophe. No giant system that’s been doing the same thing for decades can be expected to turn on a dime. The inertia is profound. And yet, in many ways, the educational failures of the past several years were far worse than they needed to be because of long-standing characteristics of American public education. It’s worth recounting three of those.

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?

Chuck Ross:

Two dozen Republican senators are calling on Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to explain his role in soliciting a letter from the National School Boards Association that compared school parents to domestic terrorists.

An email released this week showed that an association official told a colleague that Cardona asked the group to write the Sept. 29 letter that urged President Joe Biden to use the FBI to investigate threats made against school board members. The letter was the catalyst for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to form a federal task force to track school board threats across the country.

Republicans and parent groups have bristled at the federal task force, saying that it will have a chilling effect on parents protesting at local school board meetings. Parents across the country have pushed back against school districts’ coronavirus policies as well as the teaching of left-wing curricula, such as those that include critical race theory.

A group of senators, led by Tim Scott (R., S.C.), on Thursday asked Cardona what role he played in crafting the letter.

“While we knew early on that White House staff were complicit in the creation of this letter, it is only recently that information has surfaced implicating you and your office in this shameful episode,” the senators wrote.

Laura Meckler:

Email correspondence from the time suggested that the NSBA might have been acting at request of the White House, according to documents released through open records requests filed by a conservative group called Parents Defending Education. Slaven and the White House said that isn’t true.

In one email, an NSBA board member wrote that Slaven had said the letter had been requested by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for use by the White House. In another, Slaven wrote that the letter included “additional information on some of the specific threats,” as requested by the White House. Cardona’s spokeswoman said he did not solicit the letter.

Five days after the NSBA letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland responded. He directed the FBI to work with U.S. attorneys across the country to convene meetings within 30 days with federal, state and local leaders to discuss strategies for addressing threats to school personnel.

Slaven circulated a copy of the letter to the NSBA board on the evening of Sept. 29, after sending it to the White House. He told members it would be distributed to the press the next day.

Scott Girard:

Wednesday’s meeting, which begins at 5 p.m., includes a public comment portion, a chance to summarize written public comments and an “update on safe return to school buildings for in-person learning.” The last item will be a discussion, but will not include a vote of any kind.

Those interested in speaking during the meeting must fill out a registration form on the district’s website, which opens two hours prior to the meeting. Written comments can be submitted at any time.

The meeting will be livestreamed on the board’s YouTube channel.

At Friday’s meeting, which shortly followed a press conference from district administrators and health experts explaining the decision, board members expressed a mix of understanding and urgency to get students back inside buildings.

Multiple board members encouraged administrators to offer a more solid commitment to the hopeful Jan. 10 return.

“We need to be committed to reopening on Monday unless something happens where we can’t because like half our staff are out,” Cris Carusi said. “Every day that we keep kids in virtual learning is a day when mental health issues are going to become worse for our students, is a day when students are more likely to disengage from school and I think is a day that is going to lead to several more days of challenges when kids get back into buildings.”

Parents vs Madison’s K-12 Administration.

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?

Ken Bensinger & Jessica Garrison:

In early March, federal prosecutors took the unusual step of securing an indictment against their own informant, accusing him of illegally buying a high-powered sniper rifle from a man he met at church and then reselling it for a profit. Robeson acquired the gun on Sept. 26, just 11 days before the FBI’s takedown in the kidnapping case.

Even before Robeson was indicted on the gun charge, prosecutors appear to have gone to some lengths to keep his involvement out of the kidnapping case’s public record. The original charging papers, for example, cite a different informant who attended a June gathering of militants in Dublin, Ohio, but make no reference to the fact that Robeson had helped organize the event or that he was in the meetings as well.

As part of their trial strategy, defense attorneys in the kidnapping case plan to call Robeson as a witness. They say he can shine a light on what the government did to drag targets into the alleged plot and on the FBI’s conduct overall.

If that happens, his testimony could put prosecutors in the unusual and awkward position of having to discredit their own confidential informant.

That case carried over many of the tactics that were successfully used against young, disaffected Muslims in cases that Chambers had helped bring, at times over the strenuous objections of defense lawyers.

In one instance, a 21-year-old man in Detroit was approached online by two undercover operatives pretending to be Muslim women looking for love, one of whom repeatedly attempted to convince him to consider martyring himself in an act of terrorism.

In a second investigation, three young Somali American men were contacted on Facebook and other platforms by a series of people posing as ISIS recruiters, converts to Islam, individuals in Somalia, and flirtatious women, among other personas. After nearly two years, one of the men agreed to travel to Somalia using money provided by an undercover agent and was arrested at the airport.

All the men eventually pleaded guilty and received lengthy prison sentences.

Dan Lennington and Dr. Will Flanders:

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

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

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

Christopher Rufo:

The school board was able to do this because the Round Rock Independent School District has its own police force, with a three-layer chain of command, patrol units, school resource officers, a detective, and a K-9 unit. The department serves under the authority of the board and, through coordination with other agencies, apparently has the power to order the arrest of citizens in their homes. For many parents, the school board is sending a message: if you speak out against us, we will turn you into criminals. When reached for comment, the school district’s police department confirmed that it initiated the investigation and that “one board member requested details from the RRISD Police” prior to the criminal referral.

Round Rock is not the only school board to resort to repressive tactics to stifle dissent. In Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, where parents have protested against critical race theory and a sexual assault cover-up, the superintendent asked the county sheriff to deploy a SWAT team, riot control unit, and undercover agents to monitor parents at school board meetings. The sheriff refused, telling the superintendent that he had not provided “any justification for such a manpower intensive request,” but the mere attempt was astounding.

Even the FBI, under the direction of Attorney General Merrick Garland, has mobilized to monitor parents at school board meetings and, if necessary, prosecute them under domestic terrorism laws. The National School Boards Association, which had requested the federal intervention in a letter to the Justice Department, was later forced to apologize after state chapters strenuously objected to the tone and content of that letter. Yet the Biden administration has moved forwardwith the effort, creating a task force of federal agents and attorneys to coordinate against parent protesters.

The battle lines are clear: on one side, the Biden administration, public school bureaucrats, and their armed agents; on the other, parents and families who oppose school closures, mask mandates, critical race theory, and corruption. Public school officials have demonstrated a willingness to use police power to silence and intimidate their opponents. If parents are to succeed, protesters must continue to organize peacefully and highlight corruption and abuses of power by local school officials.

“This isn’t just about Dustin [Clark] and me,” said Story. “It is about everyone. If they can come for us and get away with it, school boards nationwide will be emboldened to come for you.” He is right—and parents must work together to stop it.

Ben Smith:

On Friday afternoons this fall, top American news executives have dialed into a series of off-the-record Zoom meetings led by Harvard academics whose goal is to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.”

Those are hot topics in the news industry right now, and so the program at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy drew an impressive roster of executives at CNN, NBC News, The Associated Press, Axios and other major U.S. outlets.

A couple of them, though, told me they were puzzled by the reading package for the first session.

It consisted of a Harvard case study, which a participant shared with me, examining the coverage of Hunter Biden’s lost laptop in the final days of the 2020 campaign. The story had been pushed by aides and allies of then-President Donald J. Trump who tried to persuade journalists that the hard drive’s contents would reveal the corruption of the father.

The news media’s handling of that narrative provides “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns,” according to the Shorenstein Center summary.

Christopher Rufo:

The school board was able to do this because the Round Rock Independent School District has its own police force, with a three-layer chain of command, patrol units, school resource officers, a detective, and a K-9 unit. The department serves under the authority of the board and, through coordination with other agencies, apparently has the power to order the arrest of citizens in their homes. For many parents, the school board is sending a message: if you speak out against us, we will turn you into criminals. When reached for comment, the school district’s police department confirmed that it initiated the investigation and that “one board member requested details from the RRISD Police” prior to the criminal referral.

Round Rock is not the only school board to resort to repressive tactics to stifle dissent. In Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, where parents have protested against critical race theory and a sexual assault cover-up, the superintendent asked the county sheriff to deploy a SWAT team, riot control unit, and undercover agents to monitor parents at school board meetings. The sheriff refused, telling the superintendent that he had not provided “any justification for such a manpower intensive request,” but the mere attempt was astounding.

Even the FBI, under the direction of Attorney General Merrick Garland, has mobilized to monitor parents at school board meetings and, if necessary, prosecute them under domestic terrorism laws. The National School Boards Association, which had requested the federal intervention in a letter to the Justice Department, was later forced to apologize after state chapters strenuously objected to the tone and content of that letter. Yet the Biden administration has moved forwardwith the effort, creating a task force of federal agents and attorneys to coordinate against parent protesters.

Logan Rude, Brad Hamilton

More than 600 students did not show up for classes on Tuesday, the district said, more than one-third of the total 1,717 students enrolled at East. As of noon, 277 were excused and 325 had not shown up and were not excused, though secretaries were still updating records at that time.

During Monday’s lunch hour, more than 15 police responded to break up a set of fights that broke out near school grounds. Eight students were pepper-sprayed as police tried to break up the fights.

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds told News 3 Now that an estimated 90% of behavioral issues at the high school have happened during the school’s open lunch period when students can leave campus. Just over two weeks ago, fights involving more than 100 students and parents broke out in a crowd around lunchtime.

MMSD modifies East High School safety plans following student fights and citations

additional Commentary:

The teachers cannot be happy with the situation. I can’t imagine teaching at East High School. I picture the teachers all afraid of the students and the students knowing it and the worst of them exploiting it.

I’m seeing at least 2 comments that say it’s not just Madison and linking to this WaPo article from a couple weeks ago, “Back to school has brought guns, fighting and acting out”:

Elizabeth Beyer and Chris Rickert:

The Madison School Board’s decision to remove school resource officers, or SROs, from the high schools came amid the racial reckoning following the murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, sometimes-destructive social justice protests in Downtown Madison, and a years-long campaign to get rid of SROs that included shouting down School Board meetings and demonstrating outside the School Board president’s home by the local group Freedom Inc. and its allies.

“Even with SROs we still had people bring weapons and threaten to bring weapons to school and we still had fights,” said Allen, the student body president. “It wasn’t like their presence prevented any of that. The East student body in general still does not want SROs in our school.”

In other words, everything but discipline

Ambulances respond to school yard brawls because Madison outlawed discipline

“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

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?

Chuck Ross:

House Republicans are requesting information from U.S. attorneys’ offices regarding their involvement with the Biden administration’s effort to monitor school board meetings for potential acts of domestic terrorism.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent letters to all 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices Monday asking for information about discussions authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland to address what he called a “disturbing trend” of violence at school board meetings. On Oct. 4, Garland directed the FBI, U.S. attorneys, and the Justice Department’s civil rights and national security divisions to join local law enforcement officials to discuss strategies to prevent the violence.

Garland’s action came days after the National School Boards Association called on President Joe Biden to deploy the FBI to monitor school board meetings for potential acts of domestic terrorism. The association was in contact with the White House and Department of Education in the weeks leading up to the letter, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The timeline has raised questions about whether the association and White House colluded to draft the letter as a predicate to forming a federal task force to scrutinize the meetings.

Preston Cooper:

The reconciliation bill currently under debate in Congress includes a scheme to provide two years of free community college, the centerpiece of a $111 billion boost to higher education funding. The bill’s Democratic backers say that “every American should have the opportunity to get the quality and affordable education they need to find a rewarding career.” But community college is already affordable. The problem is the quality, which is something the free-tuition plan does too little to address.

Nationwide, average community college tuition is just $3,770. Over the last decade, real tuition at these schools has risen by only $50 per year, far less than the increase at four-year colleges.

But even that overstates the cost. The $3,770 figure represents the “sticker” price of tuition at community colleges. In practice, most students get financial aid from federal and state governments, which defrays the cost of attendance. After applying financial aid, the average community college student pays no tuition at all.

Yes, you read that right: on average, community college is already free.

Bradley Thompson:

Garland’s letter is a moral, political, and constitutional abomination. To say there are serious problems with the Attorney General’s Orwellian letter would be an understatement. The letter asserts, for instance, that “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” It claims as fact a “rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.” Neither the NSBA nor the Justice Department have provided any credible or meaningful evidence to support this unfounded claim, nor does Garland’s passive-aggressive letter specify what it classifies as “criminal conduct” or “domestic terrorism.” (Not surprisingly, Garland’s letter neglects to mention that some school board members and the teachers’ unions have been harassing and threatening parents for months. See here, here, here, here, and here.) The simple fact of the matter is that virtually no violence has occurred at school board meetings this year.

In support of the NSBA request, Garland’s memorandum announced that he has directed the FBI and each U. S. Attorney to convene meetings immediately with “federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district” in order to “facilitate the discussion of strategies” for dealing with threats against school officials. The Department of Justice will also “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response. In other words, the government will establish “snitch” lines against parents. If a school board member doesn’t like what they hear in a public meeting, they will be able to report (presumably anonymously) threats of harassment and intimidation.

But there’s more. In conjunction with Garland’s letter, the Department of Justice issued a press release in which it announced that the DOJ will be creating a task force “consisting of representatives from the department’s . . .

• Criminal Division
• National Security Division
• Civil Rights Division
• Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys
• FBI
• Community Relations Service
• Office of Justice Programs

The purpose of this Star Chamber will be to “determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes.”

America’s security state has not been mobilized like this since 9-11. Recall, for instance, that the Justice Department’s National Security Division was created in 2005 to conduct “counterterrorism and counterespionage” operations against foreign enemies threatening the United States and its citizens, enemies such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS—ya know, the kind of individuals and organizations that commit mass murder as their day job.

The Biden Regime is now turning the full apparatus of America’s security state against ordinary American citizens who are challenging the hegemony of America’s Education-Industrial Complex. Dissenting parents who are unhappy with the substance and method by which their children are being taught are now to be designated and possibly prosecuted as domestic terrorists! To wit: the FBI and the National Security Division will now be in charge of monitoring school board meetings and parent organizations around the United States.

But we need to be crystal clear about who these alleged “terrorists” really are. Have you ever wondered what the new Merrick Garland version of a “domestic terrorist” looks and sounds like? You might start by taking a good look at your mother, your wife, your sister, or your daughter. 

Where will all this lead? Should we not treat “domestic terrorists” in the same way that we treat international terrorists? (Asking for a friend.) I’m told there are now a lot of empty bunks (with a view) at Guantanamo Bay. Should America’s domestic terrorists receive the full Khalid Sheikh Mohammed treatment? 

But even if it were true that there have been a few isolated threats of physical violence, how is this an issue for the FBI and the full apparatus of the National Security State rather than for local law enforcement? It’s not. This is massive power grab and a serious threat to the rights and liberties of millions of ordinary Americans.

Let’s not kid ourselves. We all know what this is and is not about. It’s NOT about alleged threats of violence against school board members. It’s about targeting political opponents, criminalizing dissent, and weaponizing the FBI and the National Security State against parents who are protesting peacefully and lawfully against indoctrination and censorship in America’s government schools. It’s about turning complaining parents into domestic terrorists for the crime of being parents. It’s about turning America’s mothers into the legal equivalent of Islamic jihadists. It’s about intimidating parents. It’s about using the coercive force of the State against our First Amendment rights to free speech, to assemble peaceably, and to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It’s about silencing parental opposition to the Education Establishment. Make no mistake about it, that’s what this about.

Sundance:

Lisa Monaco was Barack Obama’s former homeland security advisor and former legal counsel in the White House.  Monaco was the tip of the spear in using political activism under the guise of ‘homeland security’ to target political opposition.  That type of political targeting is her specialty.  Lisa Monaco is now the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.

As a direct result of her skill-set in combination with her current position, it is almost a guarantee that Deputy AG Lisa Monaco authored the DOJ targeting memorandum that AG Merrick Garland signed and sent to the FBI. Again, weaponizing internal political targeting under the guise of homeland security concerns is what Monaco is specifically famous for doing. Today, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley confronted DAG Monaco about the targeting memo. WATCH her response:

Thread/In Sept, we got a tip @defendinged that @fcpsnews is diverting COVID cash to @PanoramaEd to data mine kids. We also got another tip: US Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter is MARRIED to the cofounder of Panorama. WATCH. Garland has a serious conflict of interest. pic.twitter.com/NNXCGrz7YA

— Asra Q. Nomani “Domestic Terrorist” (@AsraNomani) October 5, 2021