Associated Press:

A lab experiment aimed at fixing defective DNA in human embryos shows what can go wrong with this type of gene editing and why leading scientists say it’s too unsafe to try. In more than half of the cases, the editing caused unintended changes, such as loss of an entire chromosome or big chunks of it.

Columbia University researchers describe their workThursday in the journal Cell. They used CRISPR-Cas9, the same chemical tool that a Chinese scientist used on embryos in 2018 to help make the world’s first gene-edited babies, which landed him in prison and drew international scorn.

The tool lets scientists cut DNA in a precise spot and has profound potential for good — it’s already used to raise better crops and livestock, holds promise for treating diseases, and earned its discoverers a Nobel Prize earlier this month.

Daniel Suarez’s Change Agent is worth reading.

Sui-Lee Wee and Steven Lee Myers:

The number of babies born in China last year fell to a nearly six-decade low, exacerbating a looming demographic crisis that is set to reshape the world’s most populous nation and threaten its economic vitality.

About 14.6 million babies were born in China in 2019, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That was a nearly 4 percent fall from the previous year, and the lowest official number of births in China since 1961, the last year of a widespread famine in which millions of people starved to death. That year, only 11.8 million babies were born.

Births in China have now fallen for three years in a row. They had risen slightly in 2016, a year after the government ended its one-child policy and allowed couples to have two children, a shift that officials hoped would drive a sustained increase in the number of newborns. But that has not materialized.

Chris Baynes:

An investigation into suspected sex-selective abortions has been launched by magistrates in a district of northern India after government data showed none of the 216 children born across 132 villages over three months were girls.

Authorities in Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand state, said the official birth rate was “alarming” and pointed towards widespread female foeticide,

India outlawed the selective abortion of female foetuses in 1994 but the practice remains commonplace in the country, where parents often see boys as breadwinners and girls as costly liabilities.

Number of deaths resulting from abortions: 1973 – 2014 more

Worldwide abortion data.

Rob Stein:

A scientist in New York is conducting experiments designed to modify DNA in human embryos as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases, NPR has learned.

For now, the work is confined to a laboratory. But the research, if successful, would mark another step toward turning CRISPR, a powerful form of gene editing, into a tool for medical treatment.

A Chinese scientist sparked international outrage in November when he announced that he had used the same technique to create the world’s first gene-edited human babies. He said his goal was to protect them from infection with HIV, a claim that was criticized because there are safe, effective and far less controversial ways of achieving that goal.

In contrast, Dieter Egli, a developmental biologist at Columbia University, says he is conducting his experiments “for research purposes.” He wants to determine whether CRISPR can safely repair mutations in human embryos to prevent genetic diseases from being passed down for generations.

So far, Egli has stopped any modified embryos from developing beyond one day so he can study them.

What’s on Weibo:

A recent article, in which two Chinese academics propose the implementation of some sort of ‘tax’ for people under 40 who have no second child, has sparked outrage on social media. “The same woman who had to undergo a forced abortion before, is now pressured to get pregnant,” some say. A controversial ‘no child tax’ measure proposed by two Chinese academics has set off a wave of criticism on Chinese social media this week. The proposal was published in Xinhua Daily, a newspaper controlled by the Jiangsu Communist Party branch, on August 14, and was authored by Nanjing University economics professors Liu Zhibiao (刘志彪) and Zhang Ye (张晔). In their proposal, Liu and Zhang suggest various measures to prevent a supposed demographic crisis in mainland China. Their idea of imposing taxes on those who do not have a second child particularly sparked anger online. The authors plead for a so-called ‘maternity fund system’ (生育基金制度) in which citizens under the age of 40, regardless of gender, have to pay a certain percentage of their income in some sort of ‘tax fund’ as long as they do not bear a second child. They write:

Tom Whipple on “Editing a Human”:

Doudna was in for a shock. “One attendee [at the conference] pulled me aside and said three manuscripts had been submitted to journals involving experiments on human embryos. He said, ‘You should know this is happening.’” The labs in China had destroyed the embryos they had developed, and the modification had been only partial. Far sooner than predicted, a threshold had been crossed.

The Francis Crick Institute in London is conducting its own experiments on creating fully edited human embryos, though as its goal is scientific discovery not designer babies, it destroys the embryos.

Terrency Jeffrey:

“The production of TKO-BLT mice to obtain healthy mice with high level reconstitution of human cells and tissues requires specialized methods that are presented in detail,” says the abstract at the top of the article.

“The methods in this manuscript will help prevent duplication of the empirical work done to optimize this humanization protocol and maximize the future success of others endeavoring to produce TKO-BLT mice,” the researchers say in their introduction.

The researchers stated that they “routinely produced cohorts of approximately 40 TKO-BLT mice from a single tissue donor.”

They indicated that the human tissue donors were at 17 to 22 weeks gestational age and that their tissue was provided to the researchers by Advanced Bioscience Resources, which is a non-profit organization located in Alameda, Calif.

This summary of recent newsfeed items reminds me of Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time lyrics:

Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.

Harm Venhuizen

“I continue to believe that having ‘we the people’ decide the profound moral issue of abortion is the only way to find a reasonable consensus that most people will accept,” Johnson said in a statement Wednesday. “One of the benefits of a one-time, single-issue referendum would be the education and discussion that would occur leading up to it. Unfortunately, with an active court case and resistance in the Legislature, a referendum in 2024 is highly unlikely.”

Choose life. Notes and links on abortion,

Yi-Fu Tuan:

What is it then that I do? My answer is human geography; more precisely, a sub-field within human geography that might be called (albeit inelegantly) systematic humanistic geography. And what is that? I will try to provide an answer, drawing on my own experience and work. A good way to start is to envisage a faculty social gathering. At such a gathering, a historian is unlikely to be asked, “Why are you a historian?” Yet I have been asked repeatedly, “Why are you a geographer, or why do you call yourself one?” My unimposing physical appearance may have prompted the question, for people even now tend to see the geographer as a robust explorer in the mold of Robert Falcon Scott or Indiana Jones. As a matter of fact, when I was an undergraduate, the professors of geography at both Oxford and Cambridge were explorers. The question “Why do you call yourself a geographer?” may also have been prompted by the titles I have given to some of my books. People don’t immediately understand how Morality and Imagination, Passing Strange and Wonderful, Cosmos and Hearth, and Escapism can be the works of a geographer.

To those who have wondered about my vocation, I respond in three ways, each geared to a different level of seriousness. At a social gathering, when people are not at their most attentive, I am likely to say, “As a child, I moved around a great deal with my family, and there is nothing like travel to stimulate one’s appetite for geogra- phy.” Sad to say, this lazy answer nearly always satisfies my inquirer. It is what he or she expects. My second and more thoughtful response is: I have always had an inordinate fear of losing my way. Of course, no one likes to be lost, but my dread of it is excessive. I suspect that more than physical discomfort is at stake. To be lost is to be paralyzed, there being no reason to move one way rather than another. Even back and front cease to be meaningful. Life, with no sense of direction, is drained of purpose. So, even as a child, I concluded that I had to be a geographer so as to ensure that I should never be disoriented. Geographers always know where they are, don’t they? They always have a map somewhere–either in their backpack or in their head.

We barely had enough to eat. The elementary school I attended was a single, ill-equipped room. Yet, astonishingly, we were given a thoughtfully packaged, cosmopolitan education. We read elevating stories from the Chinese, European, and American pasts, stories about great scientists and inventors such as Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, and Benjamin Franklin that were meant to stimulate our intellectual ambition, and moral tales (ones of filial piety, naturally, but also Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”) intended to help us grow into compassionate adults.

Zeina Amhaz:

In the US, one in eight couples, or 6.7 million peoplestruggle to conceive. A quick Twitter search of “IVF” will return scores of women sharing heartbreaking stories of failed IVF rounds and crushing miscarriages, like Breanna. Each year, the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) increases 5-10%. Considering that our only real job, biologically, is to procreate, this is very alarming. 

Probably the most popular (and controversial) work regarding infertility comes from Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist and professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In her book Count Down, Swan finds that sperm count in Western men has dropped by more than 50% in the last forty years. Even more shocking, Swan predicts that by 2045, we’ll have a median sperm count of zero, and most people will have to use ART to reproduce. The cause of this “Spermageddon?” Swan points to weight, alcohol, smoking, and, most importantly, endocrine disruptors. 

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals like phthalates, bisphenols (e.g. BPA), pesticides, and flame retardants, which are found in everyday items like plastic, food, clothes, and skincare. When we absorb them (through eating, breathing, applying lotions, and wearing clothes), these chemicals can mess with our hormones. For example, phthalates are known to lower testosterone which, in turn, lowers sperm production. Research shows that women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS)— the most common cause of female infertility— have higher levels of BPA in their bodies. Even exposure to these chemicals in small amounts can have major effects on the body, as delicate hormone levels are already controlled by only slight changes.

One of the most surprising things about endocrine disruptors is that they begin to affect the body in utero, via exposure to the mother. In a previous newsletter, I wrote about new research that found BPA-containing microplastics in human placentas. Not only is it terrifying to think about “cyborg babies” (babies made out of a combination of human cells and inorganic entities) being born, but scientists have also found that the chemicals in the microplastics have an effect on the fetus’sreproductive health. After all, a female fetus develops all the eggs she will have in her lifetime in utero. One studylooked at the effects of BPA in mice and found that it caused birth defects in the mice’s grandchildren; the first generation mouse’s BPA exposure disrupted its fetus’s egg development, resulting in chromosomal abnormalities in the next generation. This suggests that the effects of endocrine disruptors can be multigenerational. In male fetuses, exposures to endocrine disruptors like phthalates have been shown to result in smaller penis size and, in adulthood, lower count sperm.

Choose life.

Kara Zupkus:

An English professor at Iowa State University has threatened to dismiss students who voice opposition to abortion or the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization from her upcoming class this fall. She falsely claims students who resist leftist orthodoxy hold a viewpoint “that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same basic human rights as you do.”

According to the syllabus obtained exclusively by Young America’s Foundation, Chloe Clark includes a “GIANT WARNING,” for her English 250 class bolded near the top of the document:

“GIANT WARNING: any instances of othering that you participate in intentionally (racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, sorophobia, transphobia, classism, mocking of mental health issues, body shaming, etc) in class are grounds for dismissal from the classroom. The same goes for any papers/projects: you cannot choose any topic that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same basic human rights as you do (ie: no arguments against gay marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter, etc). I take this seriously.”

Iowa State’s response.

Ronald Bailey:

The U.S. total fertility rate has dropped to below 1.73 births per woman, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. This record low edges out the previous U.S. fertility nadir of 1.74 births per woman back in 1976.

U.S. rates appear to be following the downward trend seen in other developed countries. The overall total fertility rate for the 28 members of the European Union is just under 1.6 births per woman; Japan is at 1.4, and Canada is 1.5.

In a 2010 study, University of Connecticut anthropologists Nicola Bulled and Richard Sosis found that fertility drops as female life expectancy increases. As global average life expectancy rose from 52.6 years in 1960 to 72.4 years today, the global total fertility rate fell by more than half, from 5 to 2.4 births per woman.

CDC US abortion data:

In 2016, 623,471 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC from 48 reporting areas. The abortion rate for 2016 was 11.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 186 abortions per 1,000 live births.

Compared with 2015, the total number and rate of reported abortions fell by 2%, and the abortion ratio decreased by 1%. Additionally, from 2007 to 2016, the number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions decreased 24%, 26%, and 18%, respectively. In 2016, all three measures reached their lowest level for the entire period of analysis (2007-2016).

Hacker News:

I’m at the end of my MSc. studies in CS. At the moment, I can choose to graduate in a month or two, or stay-on for another 9 months doing research in interactive theorem proving that will potentially lead to a PhD opportunity.

I’m doing my MSc in a foreign country and I’m very unhappy here. Another ~9 months seems like a huge hurdle to me. The current situation is if I choose to graduate soon, I will likely surrender my chance for a PhD.

I don’t particularly love studying. I think interactive theorem proving is quite cool, but the actual practice of studying/research hasn’t been that enjoyable to me, but I enjoy having the knowledge once I’ve acquired it. In many ways it seems like “the future” to me, and it’d be really neat to be one of the first passengers on that train, so to say.

I have no desire to become a professor/researcher. After I acquire my PhD, I surmise that I would go to industry.

The issue here is one of bad information: I don’t have industry experience and I don’t really know how any of this stuff plays out. I’m worried that if I chose to forego the PhD, I’ll really regret it in a number of years. I’m afraid I won’t be able to find interesting work with just a MSc, and I’m really afraid of getting a boring software engineering gig.

A professor mentioned some years ago that when getting your PhD, you try to save the world and then after you have it you try to save yourself.

Ross Douthat:

The analyst is a historian named Ben Schmidt, who just five years ago wrote an essay arguing that the decline of the humanities was overstated, that enrollment in humanistic majors had declined in the 1970s, mostly as women’s employment opportunities began switching to more pre-professional tracks, but that since then there has been a basic stability, at best a soft declension.
But now he’s revised his argument, because the years since the Great Recession have been “brutal for almost every major in the humanities.” They’ve also been bad for “social science fields that most closely resemble humanistic ones — sociology, anthropology, international relations and political science.” Meanwhile the sciences and engineering have gained at the expense of humanism, and with them sports management and exercise studies — the “hygiene” and “sport,” if you will, from Auden’s list of Apollonian concerns.

Notably this trend is sharper among elite liberal arts colleges, the top thirty in the US News and World Report rankings, where in the early 2000s the humanities still attracted about a third of all students, but lately only get about a fifth. So it’s not just a matter of the post-Great Recession middle class seeking more practical degrees to make sure their student loans get repaid quickly; the slice of the American elite that’s privileged enough and intellectually-minded enough to choose Swarthmore or Haverford or Amherst over a state school or a research university is abandoning Hermes for Apollo at the fastest clip.

Eric Fish:

When 22-year-old Langou Lian looks back at her decision to study in the United States, one influence sticks out: Disney Channel movie High School Musical.

“I hated Chinese education,” Lian says, the high-pressure, test-centred schooling in her native Sichuan province. High School Musical presented an alternative: a carefree atmosphere where even adolescent students are independent, free to speak their mind and have a palette of social activities to choose from.

But after she arrived in the US, that rosy image became complicated.

“The one word that describes my impression of America before coming is ‘freedom’,” says Lian, who currently studies at the University of California, Irvine. “[But] after I studied here for a while, I started to kind of understand American society. My impression went from good to bad.”

And that had a knock-on effect, on her as it had on others. “A lot of [Chinese] students become more patriotic,” Lian says.

ABC:

Carolina Williams of Brentwood, Tennessee received a letter from the prestigious school’s admission committee in March announcing the good news. More surprisingly, the letter highlighted one of the ten essays she had written for the application as a stand out.

“It really tickled me that they specifically commented on that one because there were a ton of essays,” William told ABC News. “I think it stood out because it was just very genuine and reflective of me and it was kind of taking a risk, I guess.”

Radhika Nagpal:

As a young faculty member at Harvard, I got asked such questions a lot. Why did you choose this career? How do you do it? And I can’t blame them for asking, because I am scared by those myths too. I have chosen very deliberately to do specific things to preserve my happiness, lots of small practical things that I discovered by trial and error.
So when asked by graduate students and other junior faculty, I happily told them the things that worked for me, mostly in one-on-one meetings over coffee, and a few times publicly on panels. Of course, I said all these things without any proof that they lead to success, but with every proof that they led me to enjoy the life I was living.
Most people I talked to seemed surprised. Several of my close friends challenged me to write this down, saying that that I owed it to them. They told me that such things were not done and were not standard. That may be true. But what is definitely true, is that we rarely talk about what we actually do behind the scenes to cope with life. Revealing that is the scariest thing of all.
I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.

Esther Cepeda:

In his revealing book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” Charles Murray spends hundreds of pages using statistics to illustrate the rising inequality that is increasingly putting the white working class on the path toward generational poverty.
Murray concludes by suggesting that the “new upper class” — which increasingly is cloistered in pockets of rich, highly educated super-neighborhoods — move into the communities of “regular” people.
“Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us,” writes Murray, who himself lives in what he describes as an increasingly troubled “blue-collar and agricultural region of Maryland.”
He closes: “A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding — and more fun — to lead a textured life, and be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.”
Murray’s invocation sprung to mind a few weeks ago as I was reading stay-at-home dad Andy Hinds’ “Why I Want to Choose the ‘Disadvantaged’ Local School (and Why I Might Not)” on The New York Times’ “Motherlode” blog.
Hinds describes the gut-wrenching choice he has to make about whether to put his “mixed-race, socioeconomically advantaged, English-proficient twin girls” into the good school where his neighbors’ kids go or into the troubled school only a five-minute walk from his home. His idealism makes him wonder if he and a group of caring, motivated parents could change a school with 100% poverty and a predominantly Hispanic student body. Ultimately, such participation could make a difference for the whole community.

Free through 3.31.2012 in epub, pdf and mobi format:

This is a book of passion, media literacy and social justice. Grounded in real-life examples, it points the way for all of us by raising important questions of how we can live on this planet as one human family.

STL:

Birth rates have steadily declined since the Great Recession in 2008, a cohort that will start graduating high school next year. At the same time, tuition and operating costs have skyrocketed. And with rising doubts among Americans about the value of higher education, more campus closures are “inevitable and probably necessary,” McCarter said.

Nationwide, undergraduate enrollment increased slightly this year to 15.3 million but is still down nearly 1 million students from fall 2019, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. And colleges that were already struggling before the pandemic are now running out of federal relief funds.

Fontbonne joins a growing list of private liberal arts colleges that have collapsed under financial pressures in recent years, including Lincoln College and MacMurray College in Illinois.

The Scholarship Foundation of St. Louisreleased a watchlist in March of 37 Midwestern colleges in danger of closing due to “significant financial distress” in the past five years.

——

Choose life. Notes and links on abortion,

Japan Times:

The number of those that have reached Japan’s legal adult age fell by 60,000 from 2023 and accounted for 0.86% of Japan’s total population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Sunday.

The year 2005, when the new adults were born, had seen the country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is estimated to bear in her lifetime — fall to a record-low 1.26, later matched by that of 2022.

In Japan, the age of adulthood was lowered from 20 to 18 in April 2022 in a bid to encourage active social participation by youth.

Choose life..

Ashley Ahn:

Yun-Jeong Kim grew up imagining what her future family would look like — married with several kids, a nice home and a dog. But when the lease on her apartment in Seoul, South Korea, became too much to afford, she found herself somewhere she’d never imagined: 31 years old and living back at home with her younger brother and their parents.

Kim, a product designer and art instructor, calls her hopes of one day having children “just a fantasy” — especially now, when housing costs are soaring, the job market is oversaturated and marriage rates are plummeting.

“I can’t believe that [not having children] is the current situation in Korea,” she said. “But this is the reality.”

It’s a reality that has left the country with the lowest fertility rate in the world since 2013. Across South Korea, women are choosing to have fewer children — or none at all — as they contend with a rise in the cost of living that has hit young people disproportionately hard. At the same time, marriage rates are down more than 35%, according to the last 10 years of available data, as more South Koreans are increasingly prioritizing work over starting a family. 

In South Korea, the fertility rate — the average number of children born to a woman in her reproductive years — is now 0.78, according to figures released by the Korean government in February. It could be years before the country can reach the 2.1 rate that experts say is needed for a country to maintain a stable population without migration.

Choose life.

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox:

We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see population declines while the world’s population is due to peak sometime later this century.

This kind of long-term global demographic stagnation has not been seen since the Middle Ages. World population has been growing for centuries, but the last century has dwarfed previous rises. About 75 percent of the world’s population growth has occurred in the last hundred years, more than 50 percent since 1970. But now, population growth rates are dropping, especially in more developed nations, according to the United Nations (all subsequent references to UN research in this essay are drawn from these data). 

It’s not a matter of if but when global populations will start to decline. Under the UN’s medium variant projection, the world’s population will peak in 2086, while under the low variant, the peak will occur in 2053, and by 2100, the population will be about a billion below today’s level. Demographer Wolfgang Lutz and colleagues project a global population of between 8.8 and 9.0 billion by 2050 falling to between 8.2 and 8.7 billion by 2100. The projected declines are concentrated in countries with high fertility rates, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, we will inhabit a rapidly aging planet. In 1970, the median world age was 21.5 years. By 2020, it had increased to 30.9 years, and the UN projects that it will be 41.9 years in 2100.

We are well past the time when we need to concern ourselves with Paul Ehrlich’s long-standing prophecy that humanity will “breed ourselves to extinction.” On the contrary, we need to worry about the potential ill-effects of depopulation, including a declining workforce, torpid economic growth, and brewing generational conflict between a generally prosperous older generation and their more hard-pressed successors. The preponderance of low fertility in wealthier countries also presages a growing conflict between the child-poor wealthy countries and the child-rich poor countries.

Abortion links: choose life.

Olivia McCormack

Ryan Bomberger comes from a family of 15. He was adopted out of the foster-care system — along with 9 of his 12 siblings. Bomberger is staunchly antiabortion, in part because of the circumstances around his own conception, he said.

“I am 100 percent antiabortion, 100 percent pro-life,” said Bomberger, a 51-year-old living in Virginia. “Being rescued from the violence of abortion … is what compels me to actually be as pro-life as I am.”

Bomberger said his adoptive parents were told by the adoption agency that he was a product of rape, a point that has been an integral aspect of his advocacy, he said: In 2009, he co-founded the Radiance Foundation, a faith-based antiabortion nonprofit organization.

“All the things I’ve been able to become in my life are the result of that singular decision,” Bomberger said.

Bomberger is now a father of four children, two of whom are adopted. Adoption, according to him, is not all “sunshine and rainbows.” But he does believe that it is one of two alternatives to abortion.

“Either you can choose to parent or you can make a powerful parenting decision and say ‘I’m not ready or prepared or able to take care of this child but another family can,’ ” he said.

Notes and links on abortion, choose life.

Tanya Lewis:

Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months of 2020 and first months of 2021, compared with the same period in previous years. Hungary, Italy, Spain and Portugal had some of the largest drops: reductions of 8.5, 9.1, 8.4 and 6.6 percent, respectively. The U.S. saw a decline of 3.8 percent, but this was not statistically significant—perhaps because the pandemic’s effects were more spread out in the country and because the study only had U.S. data through December 2020, Aassve says. The findings were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Birth rates fluctuate seasonally within a year, and many of the countries in the study had experienced falling rates for years before the pandemic. But the declines that began nine months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, were even more stark. “We are very confident that the effect for those countries is real,” Aassve says. “Even though they might have had a bit of a mild downward trend [before], we’re pretty sure about the fact that there was an impact of the pandemic.”

Choose life:

Joel Kotkin:

Families, and the lack of them, are emerging as one of the great political dividing lines in America, and much of the high-income world. The familial ideal was once embraced by all political factions, except on the extremes, but that is no longer the case.

This is among the biggest lessons from the Republicans’ big electoral wins earlier this month. Areas close to Washington DC, where singles predominate and birth rates are negligible, remained Democratic, but in the suburbs, from Northern Virginia to Dallas to Long Island, where the families roam, voters shifted to the centre-right. It’s a poor omen for Democrats, who made strong gains in these areas in 2018. 

Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin, hit the jackpot by attacking the education establishment – and the teachers’ unions – for its woke indoctrination of kids and arrogant attitude towards parents. According to some pre-election polls, governor-elect Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McAuliffe by 15 points among parents and cut the GOP deficit in half from 2020, even in staunchly Democratic areas. Many Virginians, not just knuckle-dragging Trumpistas, object to having their children’s brains washed with racialist ideology by their ‘betters’.

Yet if these results demonstrated the still existent potency of family voters, the power of the radical education agenda reflects the growth of non-families – particularly in the deep-blue precincts of the inner city, but more widely as well. In the United States, more than a quarter of households in 2013 were single-person households. In urban areas like Manhattan, that figure is estimated at nearly half. In 2018, a record 35 per cent of Americans aged 25 to 50, which is 39million people, had never been married, according to a new Institute for Family Studies (IFS) analysis of US Census data. The share was only nine per cent in 1970.

For many people, having offspring seems like an impossible dream, a luxury item, as the costs associated with child-rearing, including school and housing, have risen far faster than incomes. Overall, young Americansplace much less of a focus on having children than their parents did – a worrying sign. Already in 2020 half of US states have experienced more deaths than births, which was only partially due to Covid.

This reflects a global phenomenon that has been building for decades. Europe – including Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece and most of Eastern Europe – now experiences some of the world’s lowest fertility rates. As in the US, more children who are born do so out of wedlock. In Britain eight per cent of households in 1971 were headed by a single parent; now the rate is over 22 per cent. In the Scandinavian countries around 40 per cent of the population lives alone.

Choose life.

Janet Adamy and Anthony DeBarros:

Some demographers cite an outside chance the population could shrink for the first time on record. Population growth is an important influence on the size of the labor market and a country’s fiscal and economic strength.

Yet after births peaked in 2007, they never rebounded from the nearly two-year recession that followed, even though Americans enjoyed a subsequent decade of economic growth.

With the birthrate already drifting down, the nudge from the pandemic could result in what amounts to a scar on population growth, researchers say, which could be deeper than those left by historic periods of economic turmoil, such as the Great Depression and the stagnation and inflation of the 1970s, because it is underpinned by a shift toward lower fertility.

“The economy of the developed world for the last two centuries now has been built on demographic expansion,” said Richard Jackson, president of the Global Aging Institute, a nonprofit research and education group. “We no longer have this long-term economic and geopolitical advantage.”

Choose life. WHO global abortion data.

Sabrina Tavernise:

How the declining birthrate could profoundly shape the nation’s future.

michael barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]
A few days ago, the U.S. government revealed that the country’s population is growing at the slowest rate in nearly a century. Today, Astead Herndon spoke with our colleague Sabrina Tavernise about why that is and just how profoundly it could shape America’s future.

It’s Tuesday, May 4.

astead herndon
So Sabrina, when the U.S. government finished counting the American people this time in the census, it found that the American population was growing really slowly. That was a bit surprising to me personally. What’s going on here?

sabrina tavernise
So this is a very interesting and relatively new thing for the United States. We have this extremely slow population increase, which is different for the United States. The United States usually grows really quickly. What we saw with the census data was the second-slowest decade for population growth in American history. That is since 1790, when the United States government started taking the census. So that’s really surprising. We had known that there was some slowdown for some time, but this census data really tells us this is really the new normal in the United States.

astead herndon
So population is growing at a slower rate. How do we explain this?

Abortion notes, links and data. Choose life.

Ann Althouse:

There was some concern expressed yesterday over the “remarkable slackening” in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don’t maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don’t worry about it, less population growth is good for the environment. But if you took the other side of that debate… you’d better worry about women declining the option to undertake childbearing and men and women passing on the potentially fulfilling endeavor of child-rearing. It’s terribly expensive!… [Y]ou’re going to have to incentivize reproduction a little bit.

Abortion notes, links and data. Choose life

Axios:

As the U.S. fertility rate falls to a 35-year-low, new technologies promise to radically change how we have babies.

Why it matters: The demand for assisted reproductive technology like IVF is likely to grow as people delay the decision to have children. But newer advances in gene editing and diagnostic testing could open the door for a revolution in reproduction, raising ethical questions we haven’t begun to answer.

By the numbers: New data from the CDC indicates the U.S. had just 58.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in 2019, a 1% decline from the previous year and the lowest level since 1984.

Choose life. US abortion data:

In 2018, 619,591 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas. Among 48 reporting areas with data each year during 2009–2018, in 2018, a total of 614,820 abortions were reported, the abortion rate was 11.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 189 abortions per 1,000 live births.

Izabella Kaminska:

When you’re on a plane, do you think about its aerodynamics? When you look at a mountain, do you think about how precisely it was formed? Do you always notice how the music you are listening to is structured? If the answer to all these is yes, you could be what Simon Baron-Cohen calls a hyper-systemiser.

People who are that way inclined have a hard-wired compulsion to seek out patterns in their surroundings, following a simple “if this and that then this” algorithm. It is through this process of endless iterative discovery and experimentation that such minds eventually stumble upon new inventions, pushing human evolution forward, and in many cases changing the world forever. Today, these nerdy brain types are commonly associated with autism. But while society views that condition as a disorder, Baron-Cohen — a clinical psychologist based at the University of Cambridge — argues that its connection with systemising techniques and influence on human invention should not go unnoticed.

“Those humans who had minds with a systemising mechanism in overdrive were — and are — central to the story of invention,” he writes.

Reddit users, with their systemising minds, took less than 48 hours to pinpoint the monolith that appeared in the Utah desert

Baron-Cohen anchors his theory in the story of young “Al”, also known as Thomas Alva Edison, whose endless compulsion to tinker with things brought us a slew of 19th-century inventions — among them, most famously, the lightbulb. He contrasts this with the story of another young boy named Jonah, now in his 40s, who is similarly plagued by a compulsive pattern-recognising mind. Unlike Edison, Jonah is diagnosed with autism, and his life is a lonely one because he cannot easily fit in with others or succeed at getting a job.

What differentiates the two, Baron-Cohen contends, is how their conditions were treated by family, society and the medical establishment.

Choose life!

Associated Press:

China is eliminating a trio of agencies responsible for enforcing family planning policies in a further sign the government may be planning to scrap long-standing limits on the number of children its citizens can have.

The move was part of a reorganization of the National Health Commission announced Monday that creates a new single department called the Division of Population Monitoring and Family Development responsible for “establishing and perfecting a specialized system for supporting families.”

Expectations of an end to birth limits were also raised by the appearance of a postage stamp last month featuring smiling mother and father pigs with three piglets.

Alarmed by the rapidly aging population and shrinking workforce, China abandoned its notorious one-child policy two years ago to allow two children, producing a nearly 8 percent increase in births in 2016, with nearly half of the babies born to couples who already had a child.

However, that appeared to have been a one-time increase, with 17.2 million births in the country last year, down from 17.9 million in 2016. Meanwhile, the proportion of the population aged 60 or older increased last year to 17.3 percent.

Related: Choose Life.

Austin Bay:

It’s highly probable China will face the same “geriatric” economic conditions that already threaten Japan and several Western European countries: too few workers paying the pensions of retirees as well as shouldering their medical costs. By 2030, the median age in China will rise to 43. In 1980, the median was 23. In 2011, China had 925 million workers. By 2050, China’s working-age population will fall by 225 million, about 23 percent of the projected population. Between 2040 and 2050, 25 percent of the population will be over 65 years old, retired and drawing pensions. The “squeezed” worker cohort must then support both pensioners and dependent young.

Technologists theorize increased automation may mitigate the worker shortage, but it won’t solve it.

Wealth exacerbates China’s government-inflicted conundrum. Worldwide, prosperous and educated couples tend to have fewer children. This trend applies to China.

Increasing wealth and personal lifestyle preferences played key roles in the fertility rate decline in Japan and highly developed Western countries. Japan’s fertility rate is 1.4 children per woman. A recent study suggested that circa 2080 the Italian and German populations could decline by 50 percent. The same trend has begun to affect wealthy South Korea.

Choice is one thing. However, China’s dictatorship relied on government intimidation and physical coercion to cut the birthrate. Concerned about overpopulation, Beijing used political stigmatization, stiff fines, compulsory sterilizations, abortions and infanticide to enforce the one-child policy.

Related: Choose Life.

Mandy Zuo:

A proposal to tax all working adults aged under 40 – with the money going to a “reproduction fund” to reward families who have more than one child – has caused uproar in China.

The idea was the most controversial among a series of measures floated by two academics from prestigious Nanjing University in an article published by Communist Party mouthpiece Xinhua Daily on Tuesday.

It comes amid a nationwide campaign to encourage people to have more children – a drastic turnaround after a one-child policy that lasted nearly four decades and only ended three years ago – as Beijing worries about a rapidly ageing society, shrinking workforce and falling birth rate creating a demographic time bomb.

Related: Choose Life.

Bloomberg:

China’s parliament struck “family planning” policies from the latest draft of a sweeping civil code slated for adoption in 2020, the clearest signal yet that the leadership is moving to end limits on the number of children families can have.

A new draft of the Civil Code submitted Monday to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress removed all “family planning-related content,” according a report published Tuesday in the Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper. That would suggest that the decades-old birth restrictions wouldn’t be enforced after the law goes into effect, since the code is intended to govern all aspects of private life from contracts to company registrations to marriages.

Related: Choose life.

Leo Lewis in Tokyo and Wang Xueqiao and Thomas Hale in Shanghai

In the US, which is by far the world’s largest pet market, there are more pets than children of any age. The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates there were 84mn-89mn dogs and 60mn-62mn cats in 2020. Government data shows there were 73mn children of all ages in the same year. Chinese pet ownership also came into focus under the country’s strict lockdowns between 2020 and 2022. A survey by UBS of 1,500 pet owners found 80 per cent maintained or increased pet-related spending “after the pandemic versus before the pandemic”.

Analysts at the Swiss bank said this was “evidence of the pet market’s strong resilience in the face of macro headwinds”. It attributed resilience during the pandemic to “the significant role that pets can play in households”.

—-1

Choose life.

Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum:

Solis’s closure is an omen of what could be coming to more schools in Los Angeles and cities across the country. And it reflects a difficult-to-sustain dynamic: too many schools for too few students.

As birthrates have dipped, families have moved elsewhere, and public school alternatives have grown, many urban districts have hemorrhaged students. That has left officials with the difficult choice of keeping open shrinking schools with resources spread thin or shutting them down, a move that inevitably garners fierce community backlash. How school leaders navigate this challenge could define urban school systems for the next several years.

Schools in Los Angeles are shrinking

Many LAUSD schools have fewer students enrolled since 2010

Choose life.

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a response to a case brought by Planned Parenthood seeking an original action ruling from the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCoW) that would create a constitutional right to an abortion in Wisconsin. WILL believes ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood would embroil SCoW in the same mess of policy questions that Roe v. Wade created.  

As WILL has stated before, Wisconsin’s duly elected legislature and governor should go through the normal legislative process and create policy to govern abortion.  

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, stated, “There is no right to an abortion in Wisconsin’s Constitution. No judge, justice, or lawyer should be creating policy for Wisconsinites out of thin air. Reversing Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs decision rightfully placed the abortion issue back where it should have been all along—in the halls of state legislatures. That’s where the debate and conversation must remain.”  

Where Would the Court Draw the Line? If the Wisconsin Supreme Court were to agree with Planned Parenthood, what would happen next? For example, would the prohibitions on abortions after viability, Wis. Stat. § 940.15, or after the unborn child can experience pain (defined in the statute as 20 weeks), Wis. Stat. § 253.107, also be unconstitutional? How about partial-birth abortions, very late term abortions? None of those prohibitions are challenged or at issue in this case, but if this Court constitutionalizes abortion, it will have to answer these questions sooner or later.  

—-

Choose life.

Natalie Stechyson

It’s something her own children won’t experience.

Lancastle’s older brother and sister don’t have children and her husband is an only child. So Nicholas, 9, and Charlie, 7, don’t have any cousins at all — a growing trend as the decreasing fertility rate causes extended families to narrow over time, sociologists and demographers say.

Worldwide, families are shrinking, according to a kinship study published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. That study, using international demographic data for every country in the world, projected a 38 per cent global decline in living relatives for individuals aged 65 by the year 2095, compared to 1950.

——

Choose life.

James Pethokoukis

But there’s another kind of Peak Human, a moment whose occurrence and timing are far more foreseeable. If you’re a Millennial or a younger Gen Xer, you’ll probably see the start of a long-term decline in human population due to the global collapse in fertility. That’s something that’s never happened before with Homo sapiens. While the most recent UN forecast sees a possible population peak of nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s, plenty of other experts see our species’ numbers cresting at a far lower level — and much earlier:

A key factor in population projections is the fertility rate, particularly how it might change over time. When University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde calculates global fertility rates, he finds them “falling much faster than anyone had realized before.” Something more like that UN Low Scenario in the above chart. As Fernández-Villaverde (I will be referring to several of his papers and essay throughout) told me in an enlightening Faster, Please! podcast:

Choose life.

Evan Osnos:

Even as the ruling class has become a preoccupation of the right, it remains a concern on the left. Senator Bernie Sanders had such an abundant audience for his latest book, “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism,” that his royalties nearly matched his salary for representing Vermont. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who entered Congress denouncing the “tippy-top of the one per cent,” has become a target of activists further to the left, who accuse her of turning into an “Establishment liberal.” Critiques of the élite now emanate from so many angles that it’s difficult to know who remains to be critiqued.

Nobody in American public life has a more unsettled relationship to status than Donald Trump. For years, as he elbowed his way into Manhattan and Palm Beach, he touted the exclusivity of his golf courses (“the most elite in the country”) and hotels (“the city’s most elite property”), and he promoted Trump University with the message “I want you to become part of an elite wealth building team that works under my direction.” (He later agreed to a twenty-five-million-dollar settlement with former students who described Trump U. as a scam.) None of his élite talk endeared him to what he called “the tastemakers,” who dismissed him as a boorish trespasser. Even after he turned his Mar-a-Lago estate into a private club, he still resented those who had sniffed at him, telling an interviewer, in a tone rarely employed after the age of twelve, “I have a better club than them.”

When Trump ran for President, he adopted the expected criticism of “media élites,” “political élites,” and “élites who only want to raise more money for global corporations.” But, after he took office, he didn’t seem to want to do away with the idea of an élite; he just wanted his own people to be on top. During a 2017 speech in Arizona, he told the crowd, “You know what? I think we’re the élites.”

“Now, let’s get out there and walk really fast to places we don’t want to be.”Cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst

The term is now invoked so ubiquitously that it can seem to crumble through our fingers. As George Orwell wrote, about a frequent accusation of the nineteen-forties, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ” But, if our élites are undesirable, what would a better élite look like? What, exactly, are élites for?

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, living as a wealthy recluse in Switzerland, was at work on some of the earliest statistical research into what we now call income inequality. By his count, twenty per cent of the population of Italy owned about eighty per cent of the land. He found a similar ratio in another, more eccentric area: twenty per cent of the pea pods in his garden yielded eighty per cent of the peas. Pareto took to describing these imbalances as a “natural law,” known as the “80/20 rule.”

Pareto wanted a pithy term for his concept, but “ruling class” was out—it had been popularized by his archrival, the scholar Gaetano Mosca. Instead, he adopted élite, a French word derived from the Latin eligere, which means “to choose.” Pareto intended it to be neither a pejorative nor a compliment; he believed that there were élite scholars, élite shoe shiners, and élite thieves. Under capitalism, they would tend to be plutocrats; under socialism, they would be bureaucrats.

His formulation suggests several varieties of élite influence. There is the cultural power wielded by scholars, think tanks, and talkers; the administrative power radiating from the White House and the politburo; the coercive power resident in the police and the military. (Security forces constitute the strongest branch of élites in much of the world but the weakest in America.) Looming over them is economic power, which has occupied a fluctuating position in the West—worshipped, except when it is scorned.

In ancient Athens, wealthy citizens supported choruses, schools, and temples, on pain of being sentenced to exile or death. From the late Middle Ages, philosophers proposed that, instead of banishing the rich, society should exploit their bounty. The Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini argued, in “On Avarice,” that in times of public need the prosperous élite could be made to serve as a “private barn of money.”

Michael Walsh:

Social Security’s problems aren’t just its unrealistic economics, which posited starting from a hole and an ever-increasing work force paying taxes in order to support the generation ahead of it; the “trust fund” was always a polite fiction, which as you see is now being stealthily abandoned. But keeping Social Security solvent isn’t just a matter of calibrating tax rates. What FDR and its founders never contemplated was that Americans would stop having children,and yet continue to expect retirement money. So the solution is obvious: ladies (and some gentlemen), if you proudly announce you will never have children, that your career is more important and you get all the love you need from your “fur babies,” your SS benefits should be $0.00 until such time as you actually get some skin in the game in the form of real babies. (Adopting doesn’t count.)

Choose life.

Robin Hanson:

Re fertility decline, yes, as the main change in the last half century is the number of women who become moms, not the number of kids per mom, all we need is a larger fraction of women having kids. Yes, as that used to happen, it must still be feasible. Yes, a big enough subsidy per kid would work, and we could make the new kids pay for that via government debt. And yes, as we’ve seen fertility rise at some times and places, there’s historical variation that we could plausibly mine to find factors to promote fertility.

However, it takes voters who want more kids to vote in politicians who promote them. After all, the cultural ask re higher fertility is huge, plausibly even larger than to cut carbon emissions. The trends to be opposed are in both cases deeply embedded in existing culture, and in ways that most of us treasure. Societies in history that have loudly lamented fertility declines, and tried to reverse them, either among elites or more widely, have consistently failed. This includes recent versions of our societies. Our world’s fertility decline has been pretty consistent for ~2.5 centuries, and local deviations have so far always been temporary. 

Thirteen years ago I guessed fertility to be our biggest problem, but didn’t let it distract me much. Two years ago I guessed that insular fertile subcultures is how fertility decline will end, but still didn’t let the topic distract me. A few months I realized that innovation would grind to a halt during a declining economy, and since have read and talked much on the topic.

Alas this has confirmed my worse fears. I’m not sure quite how best to persuade you all of this, but world population will soon fall fast, and then unless we achieve full AGI or end aging by then, our total world economic capacity will also fall, with scale economies and innovation rates both falling roughly in proportion. Actually innovation will fall faster due to diminishing returns, populations getting older, and lower-than-Western African innovation quality.

Choose life.

Wall Street Journal:

Happy to report: North Carolina on Friday became the tenth state to approve universal school choice. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper says he won’t veto the bill passed by the Legislature, no doubt because Republicans have enough votes to override.

The choice provisions are in the state’s much-delayed budget, which includes Medicaid expansion the Governor favors and tax cuts he opposes. North Carolina created the Opportunity Scholarship program in 2013, but this budget increases funding from $176.5 million to $520.5 million by the 2032-33 fiscal year. It also opens up eligibility to all North Carolinians, though the amount of the scholarship declines as income rises.

The fight illustrated both the importance of Republican unity and the vulnerabilities of Democrats who take orders from the teachers union and ignore parents. In May, when legislators signaled their intentions, Gov. Cooper released a video declaring a “state of emergency.” “It’s clear,” he said, “that the Republican legislature is aiming to choke the life out of public education.”

The emergency stunt did nothing but make the Governor look weak. It also highlighted his double standard. Mr. Cooper was happy to choose private school for one of his daughters. But when the legislators were ready to give North Carolinians the same choice, suddenly it was an attack on public schools.

Diana Fleischman, Ives Parr, Jonathan Anomaly, and Laurent Tellier:

This is where a new technology comes in: preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) or polygenic screening, which may inform which embryo parents choose and who is born. Because embryo choice is so consequential, polygenic screening—like other, new reproductive technologies before it—attracts more than its share of controversy and critics, many of whom use the label of eugenics as a smear, to suggest that parents electing to screen their own embryos are somehow akin to Nazis endorsing sterilization and murder. Progressives who criticize polygenic screening tend to use accusations of eugenics inconsistently, applying it to reproductive technology like polygenic screening but not abortion.

Other similar reproductive technologies are less controversial today than when first introduced. For example, most couples using IVF choose to genetically test their embryos for an abnormal number of chromosomes, known as “aneuploidy.” One reason for this genetic screening is that aneuploid embryos almost always result in a miscarriage. Another reason is that the few cases that do not miscarry result in life-long, incurable syndromes, such as Down Syndrome—associated with health problems, disability, and shorter lifespan. While aneuploidy screening is not entirely uncontroversial, this screen is far more widely accepted than when it was first introduced decades ago, and criticism of screening out Down Syndrome as “eugenics” is increasingly a fringe position. 

Another commonly accepted embryo screen is for monogenic disorders, that is for diseases caused by single genes. For example, couples can screen out embryos with Tay-Sachs, a devastating neurological disorder that kills young children. Carriers of Huntington’s disease—a degenerative neurological disease that, on average, kills its victims in their early sixties – also often choose to use IVF to screen out embryos likely to be afflicted. For most people, it is clear today why future parents would not want their children to have chromosomal abnormalities or monogenic disorders. But the acceptance of these tests has taken time and was far from universal when these tests were introduced in the 1990s.

Jessica Grose:

The number of school-age children in America is declining. At least one reason is the fallingbirthrate after the Great Recession. And declining university enrollment based on a lower school-age population — which has been described as a “demographic cliff” — is something that some colleges are already grappling with.

K-12 public school systems around the country are facing a similar demographic reality. Declining enrollment hit cities like Chicago and states like Michigan before Covid, and the pandemic hit many other school systems — Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle and several districts in the Boston suburbs — like a wrecking ball. As The Times’s Shawn Hubler reported in May, “All together America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020,” according to a survey from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

Choose Life.

Guillaume Blanc :

According to Alfred Sauvy, the French demographer who coined the term ‘third world’, in 1962, the decline in fertility is ‘the most important fact of the history of France’. France was eclipsed as Europe’s only real superpower by the relative growth of its rivals, most importantly England and Germany, in the nineteenth century.

France’s emergence as a major global power spanned several centuries, from the foundation and expansion of the Kingdom of the Franks under Clovis and Charlemagne in the fifth and ninth centuries to Napoleon. During the Hundred Years’ War in the fourteenth century, London was by far the most populous city in medieval England, but Rouen, only France’s second city, may have been as large as it.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the long-lived Louis XIV France boasted the continent’s largest population and the world’s second largest colonial empire, after Spain. It was so dominant that it prompted multiple coalitions, or grand alliances, of all the other major European powers together to challenge it. And even then the first Grand Alliance was unable to make significant gains in the Nine Years’ War at the end of the seventeenth century. In the War of the Spanish Succession soon after, the French could field 400,000 troops at times, almost as many as the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, England, and the Netherlands.

Choose life.

Ryan Quinn:

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we clearly have a world-class faculty that exists and teaches students and creates leaders of the future,” Boliek said. “We, however, have no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that with the School of Civic Life and Leadership, which will provide equal opportunity for both views to be taught.”

That interview came two days after his board passed a resolution asking Chapel Hill’s administration to “accelerate its development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership,” with “a goal of a minimum of 20 dedicated faculty members and degree opportunities for undergraduate students.” The evening that passed, the Wall Street Journal editorial board was already praising the university for planning “to build a syllabus free from ideological enforcers.”

“Students will be able to choose the new classes to fulfill university core requirements,” the Wall Street Journal board wrote. “Those who aren’t interested can stay in the existing courses.”

The editorial’s headline and a Fox News chyron during Boliek’s interview were the same: “UNC Takes on the University Echo Chamber.”

Ross Douthat

“You can’t insist that the immediate economic benefits of ending a pregnancy should be counted in Roe v. Wade’s favor, but any of the larger negative shifts in mating and marriage…””… and child rearing associated with abortion can’t be considered as part of the debate…. [Consider a] world clearly shadowed by the effects of family breakdown and social atomization, with loneliness and despair stalking young and old alike… population aging, population decline, childless cities and empty hinterlands and a vast inverted demographic pyramid on the shoulders of the young…. [And look at] the most influential voices in our aging, unhappy, stagnation-shadowed society — the most educated and impassioned and articulate, the most self-consciously devoted to the idea of progress — committing and recommitting themselves to the view that nothing is so important as to continue ensuring that hundreds of thousands of unborn lives can be ended in utero every year…. … I beseech you to consider that you are making a mistake.”

Choose life.

Commentary

Luana Maroja:

For the past two days, more than 150 professors, scholars, and a few hangers-on, including yours truly, gathered at Stanford to talk about the state of academic freedom. If you read this newsletter and listen to our podcast, you know well that the need for such a conference—to say nothing of new universities—is urgent.

This one was organized and attended by many whose names will be familiar to you from their bylines in Common Sense and on Honestly: economist John Cochrane; geophysicist Dorian Abbott; mathematician Sergiu Klainerman; economist Tyler Cowen; historian Niall Ferguson; psychologist Jonathan Haidt; lawyer Nadine Strossen; and courageous young scholars like Solveig Gold, among many others. 

The most important of the panels, to my mind, were those focused on hard sciences and the way that this authoritarian ideology has impacted even fields like chemistry and biology. Below is an edited version of what Luana Maroja, a biology professor at Williams College, shared.

Kevin DeYoung

True, human beings are reproducing—but in most countries, not fast enough to replace themselves. Measuring total fertility rate (TFR) is not an exact science, so the numbers vary from source to source, but the trends are undeniable. Outside of Africa, which is home to forty-one of the fifty most fertile nations, the planet faces a bleak demographic future. Many major European nations—such as Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and Spain—have a TFR of 1.50 births per woman or lower, disastrously below the replacement rate of 2.1. Italy’s future is especially grim, as that country has one of the lowest TFRs in the world, just 1.22. Virtually every country in Europe—including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and Denmark—has a TFR below 1.8. Only France, with a TFR of 2.03, comes close to the replacement rate. Decline is on its way. The Russian population is already contracting. Germany’s population is on pace to shrink from 83 million to around 70 million over the next thirty years. If trends do not reverse, Europe’s population will plummet from 750 million today to less than 500 million by the end of the century.

The numbers for East Asia are even worse. Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan each have a TFR around 1.0; South Korea’s is 0.81. These countries make aging and shrinking Japan, with its TFR of 1.37, look almost vibrant. And whatever military and economic power resides in China, increasingly children do not. Despite the replacement of the notorious one-child policy by a two-child policy in 2016 and then a three-child policy in 2021, China’s birthrate has continued to tumble. As recently as 2019, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted that China’s population would peak in 2029. But the decline has already started. This year, for the first time since the Great Famine (1959–61), China’s population has shrunk, by just over 1 percent since 2021, according to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

For many years, the United States appeared to be an exception to the rule of declining birthrates in the industrialized world. In 2007 the United States had a TFR of 2.1, whereas the figure for the European Union was below 1.6. But since then, the U.S. birthrate has fallen by 20 percent, to as low as 1.73 according to some estimates. What looked like American exceptionalism less than a generation ago now looks like mere delay.

At no time in history have people been having fewer children. In most countries the number of births per woman is well below the replacement rate, and even in countries with a high TFR, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa, the rate is dropping. The human race seems to have grown tired of itself.

The reasons for declining fertility are no doubt many and varied. Surely, some couples want to have more children but are unable to do so. Others struggle with economic pressures or health limitations. But fertility does not plummet worldwide without deeper issues at play, especially when people around the world are objectively richer, healthier, and afforded more conveniences than at any time in human history. Though individuals make their choices for many reasons, as a species we are suffering from a profound spiritual sickness—a metaphysical malaise in which children seem a burden on our time and a drag on our pursuit of happiness. Our malady is a lack of faith, and nowhere is the disbelief more startling than in the countries that once made up Christendom. “I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven,” God promised a delighted Abraham (Gen. 26:4). Today, in the lands of Abraham’s offspring, that blessing strikes most as a curse.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted worldwide famine and a “race to oblivion” in his book The Population Bomb. Fifty years later, the bomb has not detonated. Today, we must fear population bust rather than boom. The list of Very Bad Things—as Jonathan Last calls the consequences of declining fertility in his 2013 book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting—is long and depressing: an aging population, a shrinking workforce, a declining tax base, a decrease in technological and ­industrial dynamism, difficulty in finding a spouse, empty buildings and crumbling infrastructure, unfunded entitlements, and a general disquiet as more and more people get older and sicker with fewer people to care for them. Some future president might be forced to coin the campaign slogan, “It’s midnight in America.”

Last emphasizes economic and national concerns, the sort of developments that get the attention of presidents and parliaments. But the problems with declining fertility, and the accompanying collapse of the family, go much deeper. Whittaker Chambers was led to reject atheism by studying the miracle of his infant daughter’s ear. As he watched his daughter eat in her high chair, an “involuntary and unwanted” thought entered his mind: “Those intricate perfect ears” could have been “created only by immense design.” Faith can give us a heart for children, but children can also give us the eyes of faith.

Choose life.

Based on current fertility rates and age structures, here are the largest declines in population expected by the UN from 2022 to 2100:

🇰🇷 South Korea –53%
🇺🇦 Ukraine –49%
🇨🇳 China –46%
🇨🇺 Cuba –42%
🇵🇱 Poland –42%
🇯🇵 Japan –41%
🇬🇷 Greece –39%
🇮🇹 Italy –38%
🇹🇭 Thailand –38%

— Edouard Mathieu (@redouad) October 21, 2022

choose life.

commentary

Edward Luce:

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alling life expectancy is the last thing you would expect on a worry list about US national security. Yet when it is dropping as fast as it is in the US — Americans live almost five years less than the wealthy country average — even the Pentagon has to sit up. At 76, Americans now live shorter lives than their peers in China and only a year longer than the citizens of supposedly benighted Mexico. People in Japan, Italy and Spain, on the other hand, can expect to live until around 84. Your people’s longevity is the ultimate test of a system’s ability to deliver. Yet neither Democrats nor Republicans, presidents or legislators, seem too bothered.

Do Americans no longer care how long they live? The answer is obviously no. Yet concern about the country’s falling lifespan is barely reflected in its politics. It is as though Washington has turned a blind eye to the issue that captures the deepest trends behind America’s democratic woes. Terms such as “deaths of despair” and “obesity epidemic” are in frequent use. But America’s shortening lifespan seems too big a subject for Washington to acknowledge. US life expectancy has fallen in six of the last seven years and is now almost three years below what it was in 2014. The last time it fell in consecutive years was during the first world war. In most other democracies this would trigger a national debate.

What explains US indifference? The biggest drivers of America’s morbid trajectory are politically hard to confront — rising obesity, the opioid epidemic and Covid. Over 40 per cent of US adults are now classified as obese — a problem that keeps getting worse. More than half of American adults suffer from a chronic condition, most of which are associated with obesity, such as diabetes, hypertension and heart problems. A quarter suffer from two or more of these conditions. This partly explains America’s unusually high death rate from coronavirus. Almost two-thirds of Americans hospitalised with Covid were suffering from at least one pre-existing condition. The pathogen was working in fertile territory. America’s obesity rate is by far the highest among wealthy countries.

Choose life.

Isabelle Sarraf:

The University of Maryland, College Park, has asked students to detail their favorite thing about…last Tuesday. That’s a tough one if your Google Calendar shows a lot of white space. One college-admissions consulting blog advises, “If you laid in bed all day Tuesday, but went for a beautiful hike on Wednesday, write about the hike.” The school says it continues to ask that question, but changes the day each year.

Chapman University asks applicants to name one dish they would cook for the school’s admission team. Princeton University, meanwhile, has asked “What song represents the soundtrack of your life at this moment?”

To get into Pomona College, last year’s seniors had to answer, in 50 words or less, “Marvel or DC? Pepsi or Coke? Instagram or TikTok? What’s your favorite ‘this or that’ and which side do you choose?”

Janice Goldwater:

In a 2016 analysis as part of the five-year Turnaway Study… UCSF researchers… found that one week after being denied an abortion due to a late-term pregnancy just 14 percent of 171 study participants reported plans to place the baby for adoption or considered it as an option. Only nine percent of those who went on to give birth – 15 women — actually placed their newborns for adoption…. 

In interviews with researchers, Turnaway participants gave several reasons for deciding to parent, including finding relatives were more willing to help than they anticipated and the bond they felt with their infants after birth. Lastly, they said they would feel guilty if they chose adoption “either because they believed adoption was an abjuration of responsibility, or because they believed it meant they’d have no ongoing knowledge of their child,” the report summarized. 

Those who chose adoption expressed strong satisfaction with their decisions, but follow-up interviews “revealed mixed emotions,” the report said. The 2016 analysis concluded: “Political promotion of adoption as an alternative to abortion is likely not grounded in the reality of women’s decision making.”…

Choose life.

Commentary.

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.

Reuters:

China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try to avoid the economic risks from a rapidly aging population, but the high cost of urban living has deterred couples from having more children.

The 2021 rate of 7.52 births per 1,000 people was the lowest since 1949, when the National Statistics Bureau began collating the data, adding further pressure on officials to encourage more births.

The natural growth rate of China’s population, which excludes migration, was only 0.034% for 2021, the lowest since 1960, according to the data.

“The demographic challenge is well known but the speed of population aging is clearly faster than expected,” said Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset management.

“This suggests China’s total population may have reached its peak in 2021. It also indicates China’s potential growth is likely slowing faster than expected,” Zhang said.

Choose life.

Rhythma Kaul and Anonna Dutt:

India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR), or the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime, has declined from 2.2 to 2 while the Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) has increased from 54% to 67%, according data from the National Family Health Survey-5. The union health ministry released data for Phase-2 of the survey on Wednesday; data from Phase-1 was released in December 2020.

A TFR of 2.1 is termed the replacement rate, and means there will be neither an increase, nor a decrease in population.

As per the fourth edition of the survey conducted between 2015 and 2016, the TFR was 2.2. The fifth survey was conducted between 2019 and 2021 in two phases and reflects gains made in population control.

Choose life.

Joel Kotkin:

For millennia the family has stood as the central institution of society—often changing, but always essential. But across the world, from China to North America, and particularly in Europe, family ties are weakening, with the potential to undermine one of the last few precious bits of privacy and intimacy.

Margaret Mead once said, “no matter how many communes anyone invents, the family always creeps back.” But today’s trajectory is not promising. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, family formation and birth rateswere declining throughout much of the world, not just in most of the West and East Asia, but also in parts of South American and the Middle East.

The ongoing pandemic appears to be driving birth rates globally down even further, and the longer it lasts, the greater possibility that familial implosion will get far worse, and perhaps intractable. Brookings predicts that COVID will result in 300,000 to 500,000 fewer U.S. births in 2021. Marriage rates have dropped significantly to 35 year lows.

The Surprising Demographic Crisis

It’s been a half century since Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb(1968) prophesied a surge of population that would foster Malthusian mass starvation, which echoed the premise of lurid book called Famine 1975! Ehrlich and his acolytes urged extreme measures to stave off disaster, including adding sterilantinto the water supply. Similar conclusions were drawn four years later in the corporate-sponsored Club of Rome report, which embraced an agenda of austerity and retrenchment to stave off population-driven mass starvation and social chaos.

These predictions turned out to be vastly exaggerated, with a rapid decline in global hunger. The anticipated population explosion is morphing into something more like an implosion, with much of the world now facing population stagnation, and even contraction. As birth rates have dropped, the only thing holding up population figures in many places is longer lifespans, though recent data suggests these may be getting shorter again .

These trends can be felt in the United States, where the birthrate is sinking. U.S. population growth among the cohort aged between 16 and 64 has dropped from 20 percent in the 1980s to less than 5 percent in the last decade. This is particularly bad for the future of an economy dependent on new workers and consumers.

This demographic transition is even more marked in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and much of Europe, where finding younger workers is becoming a major problem for employers and could result in higher costs or increased movement of jobs to more fecund countries. As the employment base shrinks, some countries, such as Germany, have raised taxes on the existing labor force to pay for the swelling ranks of retirees.

Choose life. Commentary on the Roe effect.

Daniel Gross:

The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.

There are a handful of popular e-book venders, including Bibliotheca, Hoopla, Axis 360, and the nonprofit Digital Public Library of America. But OverDrive is the largest. It is the company behind the popular app Libby, which, as the Apple App Store puts it, “lets you log in to your local library to access ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines, all for the reasonable price of free.” The vast majority of OverDrive’s earnings come from markups on the digital content that it licenses to libraries and schools, which is to say that these earnings come largely from American taxes. As libraries and schools have transitioned to e-books, the company has skyrocketed in value. Rakuten, the maker of the Kobo e-reader, bought OverDrive for more than four hundred million dollars, in 2015. Last year, it sold the company to K.K.R., the private-equity firm made famous by the 1989 book “Barbarians at the Gate.” The details of the sale were not made public, but Rakuten reported a profit of “about $365.6 million.”

In the first days of the lockdown, the N.Y.P.L. experienced a spike in downloads, which lengthened the wait times for popular books. In response, it limited readers to three checkouts and three waitlist requests at a time, and it shifted almost all of its multimillion-dollar acquisitions budget to digital content. By the end of March, seventy-four per cent of U.S. libraries were reporting that they had expanded their digital offerings in response to coronavirus-related library closures. During a recent interview over Zoom (another digital service that proliferated during the pandemic), Potash recalled that OverDrive quickly redirected about a hundred employees, who would normally have been at trade shows, “to help support and fortify the increase in demand in digital.” He recalled a fellow-executive telling him, “E-books aren’t just ‘a thing’ now—they’re our only thing.”

Alexandra Olins:

On March 11, 2020, a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) was the first large school district in the country to close. First, we were told there would be no school during the closure because the district couldn’t distribute laptops to everyone — despite being in the tech capital of the country. Next, we heard there would be online class meetings but zero instruction.

For the rest of the school year, my 11-year-old son had four one-hour Zoom check-ins a week. That is all. Like many parents, we wrote off the year and hoped like hell that fall would be better.

Over the summer, SPS asked families to choose between hybrid and remote options for fall. For those ready to send their children back in-person, it felt hopeful. But when former President Donald Trump weighed in to say kids should be 100% in person in fall, SPS — along with hundreds of other districts — reversed course. Despite Seattle having a relatively low number of COVID cases, the district announced plans for 100% remote learning for fall. The hybrid option was off the table.

As fall 2020 wore on, my normally gregarious son became increasingly silent, sedentary, and disengaged during remote school, watching Fortnite on YouTube during “school,” despite my best efforts to stop it (while trying to keep my own job), creating a nasty parent/child dynamic. It soon became clear that SPS had no plan for how — or when — to transition back to in-person school.

Some parents, growing weary of seeing their kids stare into a screen for hours on end, began to ask questions of SPS and the SPS board. We got no answers. And we began to wonder, where was our local paper, the Seattle Times, when it came to covering the impact of prolonged school closures on kids and parents?

As the following months would reveal, the Seattle Times could not — or would not — cover the situation by asking the hard questions about why Seattle started the reopening conversation later than other districts and took so long to reopen. A lifelong Democrat, former teacher, and union member, I became increasingly enraged at both the failure of the school system and the inadequacies of the education team to cover what was happening with the hard questions and critical analysis that the situation demanded.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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.

Daphne Keller:

There is a popular line of reasoning in platform regulation discussions today that says, basically, “Platforms aren’t responsible for what their users say, but they are responsible for what the platforms themselves choose to amplify.” This provides a seemingly simple hook for regulating algorithmic amplification—the results for searches on a search engine like Google or within a platform like Wikipedia; the sequence of posts in the newsfeed on a platform like Twitter or Facebook; or the recommended items on a platform like YouTube or Eventbrite. There’s some utility to that framing. In particular it is useful for people who work for platforms building product features or refining algorithms.

For lawyers or policymakers trying to set rules for disinformation, hate speech, and other harmful or illegal content online, though, focusing on amplification won’t make life any easier. It may increase, rather than decrease, the number of problems to be solved before arriving at well-crafted regulation. Models for regulating amplification have a great deal in common with the more familiar models from intermediary liability law, which defines platforms’ responsibility for content posted by users. As with ordinary intermediary liability laws, the biggest questions may be practical: Who defines the rules for online speech, who enforces them, what incentives do they have, and what outcomes should we expect as a result? And as with those laws, some of the most important considerations—and, ultimately, limits on Congress’s power—come from the First Amendment. Some versions of amplification law would be flatly unconstitutional in the U.S., and face serious hurdles based on human or fundamental rights law in other countries. Others might have a narrow path to constitutionality, but would require a lot more work than anyone has put into them so far. Perhaps after doing that work, we will arrive at wise and nuanced laws regulating amplification. For now, I am largely a skeptic.

Tara Bahrampour, Harry Stevens and Adrian Blanco:

The birthrate has also dropped, and life expectancy has dipped in the past couple of years — a reversal that has been driven by factors such as drug overdoses, obesity, suicide and liver disease and that sharply accelerated last year during the pandemic.

The extent to which the coronavirus has contributed to population patterns is not apparent in the new census data because much of the related displacement and the deaths of over half a million people took place after Census Day. According to the Pew Research Center, 5 percent of U.S. adults said they moved because of the pandemic; it is not clear whether these moves will be permanent.

But it is clear that going forward, older populations, especially those over age 65, will continue to see far higher rates of growth than young ones. The percentage of Americans 65 and over has grown by 35 percent, based on census estimates released last year. In the coming decade, the large baby boomer generation will reach their 60s, 70s and 80s.

Choose life.

Jason Wordie::

Books, like everything else, have their own natural lifespans. Publishers of original material thought likely to be popular may choose to invest in a larger print run, which ensures more surviving copies. Conversely, marginal works might only merit a small initial outlay, with any reprint contingent on successful sales figures.

These can be significantly affected by capricious reviews; many a worthwhile book has been torpe­doed by a few unfortu­nate published remarks. Likewise, local-interest books produced in minority languages in relatively small, predominant­ly mono­lingual target markets – such as for English-reading audiences in Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan and Japan – result in even smaller print runs.

Unless serious biblio­philes in a parti­cular subject areas assiduously collect whatever newly appears, many titles sink without trace, becoming largely forgotten reference-library fossils. Eventually, some titles become of sufficient historical, cultural or literary interest to merit a full reprint, and find a new life.

Scott Girard (Machine generated transcript):

Hi, I’m cap tines K-12 education reporter Scott Gerard. Today. Our cap times IDFs panel will discuss how will COVID-19 change K-12 education. I’m lucky to have three wonderful panelists with me to help answer that question. Marilee McKenzie is a teacher at Middleton’s Clark street community school, where she has worked since the school was in its planning stages.

She’s in her [00:03:00] 11th year of teaching. Dr. Gloria Ladson billings is a nationally recognized education expert who was a U w Madison faculty member for more than 26 years, including as a professor in the departments of curriculum and instruction, educational policy studies and educational leadership and policy analysis.

She is also the current president of the national Academy of education. Finally dr. Carlton Jenkins is the new superintendent of the Madison metropolitan school district. He started the districts top job in August, coming from the Robbinsdale school district in Minnesota, where he worked for the past five years, Jenkins began his career in the Madison area.

Having worked in Beloit and at Memorial high school in early 1990s before moving to various districts around the country. Thank you all so much for being here. Mary Lee, I’m going to start with you. You’ve been working with students directly throughout this pandemic. How has it gone? Both in the spring when changes were very sudden, and then this fall with a summer to reflect and [00:04:00] plan, it’s been interesting for sure.

Um, overall, I would say the it’s been hard. There has been nothing about this have been like, ah, It’s really, it makes my life easy. It’s been really challenging. And at the same time, the amount of growth and learning that we’ve been able to do as staff has been incredible. And I think about how teachers have moved from face-to-face to online to then planning for.

A myriad of possibilities. And then, you know, ultimately not knowing where the next step might be. And so, um, although it’s been challenging and there has been so many times where there’s been frustration or glitches or those kinds of pieces, I also have watched. Staff, um, grow and blossom and try to [00:05:00] make the best of a situation.

Um, and I’ve also watched our district try to figure out, okay, how do we negotiate this? So it’s been hard. There’s no, no way around that. And, um, I also think we are learning and positioning ourselves to make some bigger changes down the road. Thank you, dr. Jenkins. You’ve spoken about how the transition to virtual learning went and Robbinsdale.
When you were there this spring, what lessons did you learn from that experience that you were able to bring here in Madison as you started the job with just a month until the school year began? Well, um, there were a lot of lessons out of this, the first one, the whole idea that the science. Was real. Um, we initially, uh, sent out a communication about COVID-19 February to six in our district.

And then again in February 28th, and we were watching what was coming out of Hopkins in terms of the information CDC, [00:06:00] but it was from afar, but when it hit us and we had the initial, um, case in our district, even though we had read up on it, it was real. And so in terms of all of your plans, when you have a crisis that we’ve done before, we’ve had crisis in schools, but nothing like this things we had talked about doing way out five years, 10 years from now with technology, we talked about it.

We’ve been talking about building our infrastructure. We went from being the first district to close in the state of Minnesota thinking we were closing for two days to disinfect, right. And we’ll be right back. To now the real reality of what we’re going through. But the lessons we learned in is in terms of how much we depend on one another and how much we need our children to be in close proximity to us, our realization of the children who are [00:07:00] behind, uh, during the traditional schools.

Or just illuminated 10 times, you know, more that, wow, we really need to do a better job of trying to engage, not only the children, but the families. This went from her, just totally child centered to whole family, whole community. And so COVID-19 for us has said let’s pause and check on the social, emotional wellbeing, the mental health aspect, and understanding our community even deeper.

Because the economic employment, the health, all these things that happened. So as a staff, we had to change our delivery models for instruction. Uh, initially in a crisis, we were trying to put in model the same things we were doing in traditional schools that did not work. And we learned from our students and our staff and our community, we needed to change it and not be so much it’s just on associate motion or that we didn’t.

Continue to [00:08:00] try to continue with the high levels of instruction. But initially we were just thrown off guard. I’m gonna be honest with you. And over the summer, you know, we worked together to really come up with a model that we think is better, but we’re not done. We’re still learning. Even being here in Madison.

Now the transition Madison staff did a lot in terms of just like across the country. People were taking food out to the community, getting devices out in the community, getting hotspots out. And we were not prepared for that level of support that we needed to give, but I was amazed at how all the staff and the community came together to try to get those things done.

Yeah. I still remember the lack of sharedness around the closures and how long it would be here. I talked to a number of teachers who said bye to their students for two weeks, and then it ended up being the whole semester. Thank you so much, dr. Ladson billings, this summer, you were involved in a program at Penn park that had some students outdoors learning STEM lessons for three [00:09:00] days a week.
What were the most important aspects of that sort of programming this summer for you? Well, I think dr. Jenkins actually hit upon what was central for me. I know that people are concerned about learning loss or learning, uh, opportunities, missed learning opportunities. But first let’s be clear. Our children are learning all the time.
They are human beings. There is no time when they are not normal. Maybe when they’re sleeping, I learned they’re always learning. Now, whether they’re learning academic things or curricular based things, that’s something different. But what I was doing really focused on and developing that program and we call it smartly in the park, um, I knew that the, the STEM.

Attraction will be there for the wider community. But my focus was on the children’s social, emotional and mental health needs. So many of [00:10:00] our kids are isolated. They, you know, they got a parent who was trying to go to work. Who says you may not leave the house. Okay. You got to stay here. And we figured that out when we started this with the lunches kids, weren’t coming to get the lunches because they were told don’t leave the house.

So, uh, at Mount Zion, one of the things we did is we got, we got the van together. We collected the lunches and we delivered them. So I said, this can’t be good for our kids to be this isolated. So, you know, we did not have sort of assessment metrics or any of those things in place for the summer. What it was, was the opportunity for kids to be in face to face communication with one another and with caring adults.

And I think that’s what we’re learning in this whole process. We can talk about curriculum. We can talk about instruction. But we are in the human being business. We don’t have any human beings. We have no business. And so indeed until we meet those basic [00:11:00] needs, those social, emotional, and mental health needs, we are, we’re not going to be successful.

And I think those were really underscored, uh, as, as spring went on and into the summer. Thank you very much. And that actually leads into another question I have here. Uh, all of you have spoken to me or publicly about social, emotional learning, being as important right now, uh, as academic learning, but how can that be done through a screen?
Um, I’m going to start with Mary Lee just because you’ve been trying to do that with your students. Okay. Um, so there’s a number of ways to do it. Um, It would be a misnomer to think that all of our students were showing up to school on a daily basis when we were seeing them face to face. And so, as teachers, as staff members, we’ve developed ways of connecting with students beyond the physical classroom to begin with.

Right. But there’s also ways to do that in front of a screen. Right. Taking the [00:12:00] time to check in with students. Yeah. I have 50 minutes with my group of students. But guess what? I spend that first five, 10, and that’s at least checking in, maybe it’s a silly question. What’s your favorite fall activity to do or fall flavor.

Right? It could be something silly like that, but it also could be something of like, how are you right now? Where are you at? Um, and then on top of that, it’s meeting students where they’re at some of our students. I have students who are not ready to do a zoom meeting. It’s too much for them. The and a number of ways.

So guess what I’m doing? Phone calls and text messaging and finding ways to connect with them in, in lots of different ways. Do I wish that I could be face to face with them? Absolutely. A hundred percent. And we are, we are finding ways to make those small connections that then lead to being able to open up to bigger connections.

And trying to provide some space during our class time or whatever, you know, [00:13:00] synchronous time that we have to also let them talk with each other. Because like dr. Ladson billings said our kids are isolated in their houses and some of them haven’t seen peers or reached out to peers. So creating some structures and spaces to have some of those conversations, to be able to have engaged in that discussion, that would happen in a classroom.

And, you know, creating those spaces. What are you hearing from staff and what are staff doing in Madison to foster those sorts of things? First of all, let me just say thank you, Mary. I mean, she really spoke to what I’m hearing from a number of our staff and, uh, not just here in Madison, but just throughout the country, as a meeting with other superintendents regularly on a national level to talk about what we can do to continue to build these relationships.
And funny go back to doctor Lassen billings. When she started talking about culturally relevant pedagogy and always look at that in terms of relationship building. [00:14:00] And that’s what Mary was talking about so way before everyone else was talking about it, that the last and bill has been talking about this whole thing of relationship relationship.
And we talk about relationships, but the reality of relationships as just describe that’s where our teachers are. Another thing in terms of uplifting. The voices of the teachers, all of the assessments. Some individuals think that when still need to be hard on the AP exam, harder and act, that’s not the main thing right now.

The main thing is that we put our arms around our students, around our staff, around our community. We see one another and we uplift the voices of the students and of the staff. How are they really experiencing this new thing? Taking those voices in the emphasis of our planning in the past, a lot of times we have gotten to planning from my office, all the other offices, the hierarchy that we’ve known must be flipped up on his head right [00:15:00] now that has not even worked doing a traditional for all.

Children serve some children. Well, but not all children. This is the time that we’re saying before you start the lesson, ask a simple question. But a big question. How are you today? And then pause and listen. Okay. And so our staff intentionally, but when we design our lessons and coming back and looking at how we get students in groups, how we’ll listen to them, individually, students talk to students and we have to be very careful about, um, just doing the content at this time.

But at the same time, our students. They want the structure. They need the structure to help them have some sense of what am I to do today. Parents need it. The other thing we’re doing, trying to connect more with parents and for us, we’re finding that we are actually having more contact with some parents than what we did prior to COVID in particular black and Brown [00:16:00] families.

We have the one group that’s been disengaged before Kobe that’s even more now. Particularly with black and Brown and special needs students. But right now, at this time, we’re trying to make sure we have that additional communication for those students who have been most marginalized prior to covert and now doing covert.

And so I think those things, uh, and students know we’re paying attention to them, staff know that we’re hearing their voices, parents know that we’re hearing their voice and then being prepared to pivot right now we’re in the middle of making shifts from what we’ve learned, even since school started back.

Our early learners, we have to define what the screen time mean, how we’re approaching our earliest learners, our ELL students, how do we give them the support? How do we support our students who may be special needs and just students who may be having anxiety and social, emotional issues and staff. So that’s what we’re trying to do to build a relationship, see people, and then actually.

Serve them based on [00:17:00] their needs and then provide the overall support, uh, systematically, not just an isolated classroom, how will all of our teachers in our face with our students now, that’s what we’re doing. Thank you so much for detailing all of that. Dr. Ladson billings, what sorts of best practices are you seeing on social, emotional learning right now?

So, you know, it’s interesting, there is an instructional practice that we had before all of this called the flipped classroom. And it suggests that a lot of the learning take place online and then you come face to face to do sort of minimal things. Well, I’m seeing that we have in flipped relationships.

What do I mean by that? Is this this stuff worried about in terms of communicating electronically, our kids already know how to do that. They can sit in a room right next to their best friend, and they’re not talking, they’re texting them. It’s become their way of communicating so we can learn some things [00:18:00] from them and not presume that we have to be the ones who are telling them, uh, I want to know, and visited a class, you know, visit as an electronic yeah.
In Baltimore. And I asked the kids, uh, what they liked or didn’t like about. Oh, virtual learning. And one kid said, Oh, I love it. He said, cause when she gets on my nerves, I just turn her off. He’s he’s I couldn’t do that when, when I was in the class, but to sit there and listen. So it’s interesting that the way that they are adjusting and adapting, um, and I think we can take some hints from them.
Uh, no, we don’t want everybody on screens all the time. I think we’re all sick of that. But I do think we can be a lot more creative with it and what I will say. And I think, you know, thinking of dr. Jenkins sitting there, I think that we’re having a diff totally different relationship with our it departments that before they were this group on the side, they were the [00:19:00] resource people.

If my internet goes down, if I can’t get my email, I call them they’re there moved to the center. And we are now in a partnership with them, which is the way it should have been, that they should have been our instructional technology folks as opposed to information technology on the side. So I think we’re learning a lot of how to improve education, uh, as a result of this.

Thank you so much. Are any of you concerned about the screen time for students right now? Does anyone want to talk about how they’re trying to manage it? Well, interesting. You asked that question because that’s been our conversation the last several weeks from parents, from students and staff, uh, and our team.

First of all, we need to redefine what the screen time and all the research prior to Colvin, we need to look at that research with a critical eye [00:20:00] because. You may be on a zoom. And as with dr. Lessen villain just said, the kid may be there. It may be working independently. It’s on, but you’re working independently.

You’re not just interfacing eyes and concerned about, um, whether or not the students engage from a visual straight up point. It just may be on. And so we need to define it first of all, and that’s what we’ve been talking about, but we do need to pay attention to our learning earliest learners. You know, four and five year olds and what can they really manage?

And do we want them to be in such a structured environment? Whereas they’re not being able to be them be independent learners because students can learn independent in what some would call it, unstructured environment. I’d say playtime playtime is very important. So we need to think about it on levels of primary and secondary.

Now, secondary students. They’re on it, but they’re doing it in a totally different way than what our early learners. And so we just need to be respectful. Then [00:21:00] that goes back to listening to the student. And sometimes they can’t manage as much as we were trying to. We’re trying to give them, we have, the pendulum has swung from last spring, not being as much.

And people say, Hey, we want more too. I think sometimes now we’ve got a little too far. And we need to engage the students, hear that voice engaged the teachers. The most important thing right now is to engage that teacher, those formative assessments will allow us to know how we need to pivot along with engaging the voices of the studio.

That’s where we are with. What about you for high schoolers, Mary Lee. I mean screen time is a conversation that we have with our high schoolers, even when we’re face to face in the building of how much time are they spending on their Chromebook in the classroom. Um, because. It’s still a lot. And then we expect them to go home and do homework.

And that a lot of times is on [00:22:00] the Chromebook or on a computer or on their phones. And then you bring in the phone piece. So are a lot of times my high schoolers are definitely multitasking with a phone in one hand and a zoom meeting in the other. And we’ve had some really good conversations about that.

Um, because as we kind of go back to that social, emotional learning, The high school students. And not that the elementary aren’t either, but like the high school students are searching and seeking that social connection. And right now it’s the device. It’s the phone that brings that social connection right level than it already did, even beyond, you know, students sitting next to each other and texting each other.

Like there’s, there’s so much more there. Um, I don’t know if there’s a good answer. For any of that? I think we have to keep learning. I think we have to keep a critical eye of thinking about how can we make our screen-time meaningful. And how can we also pull off the [00:23:00] screen? How can we get creative and pull off of the screen and get kids back outside?

I think of the STEM program that dr. LED’s and billings talked about of being outside working, um, one benefit we’ve had is we’ve had students in our, uh, community garden that we have outside of our school. And I look at that and seeing that is been amazing. Um, that they are engaging with, um, the food chain and how things are produced and you know, how can we build that into schools all over, not just at school, but in their homes, in their communities and connecting there.

I feel that it’s in billings. I know screen time was a concern. And part of the reason that you were so happy with the program this summer, that was outdoors. What are your thoughts on students avoiding too much screen time? So earlier this year, well, probably late, late, late summer, as we were thinking about going back to school, I did a workshop [00:24:00] for.

A local bank that has branches in Milwaukee and green Bay. And because a lot of those, uh, employees, so, you know, I still have to work, but what about my kids? And so we had really good conversation and I literally helped them build a schedule for whether it was elementary, middle, or high school. And I built into that schedule, like stop and go outside.

Like that was like written there. Oh, cause one of the things that we are forgetting is that, you know, as human beings, we, we are mind, body and spirit. We’re not just minds. And so this is an opportunity to literally say it’s important that you get some exercise. I talked to, to the parents about having more than one in one place in their home.
Or their kids to be engaged in their learning. So yeah, maybe the, the den or their room is where they, they might do English or [00:25:00] literacy or reading and mathematics, but maybe it’s the kitchen table or the kitchen Island where you’re going to do the craft activity. And then get outside, you know, minimum amount of time.

We need the very things that we need to do in a well-developed face to face program. We still can keep going, uh, modify at home. We want to make sure that our kids are taking care of their bodies. Um, you know, one of the unanticipated. A result of this pandemic is that a number of our high school students are, are taking jobs.

And we hadn’t thought about that. A merely talked about knowing that that some of the kids are not checking in. They’re not checking in cause they’re working. Uh, and they’re adding hours if they already had a job. So they need to be active. They need to minimize the amount of time that they have to be.

In front of those [00:26:00] screens. Um, cause they haven’t drawn to the many way. Um, my generation was drawn to the TV and back then it was like the television producers had enough sense to turn us off at midnight. It’s like, we go watch no more, but we are, you know, we’re in, in a generation in which. People getting most of their information through the screen.

So we’ve got to break it up and make it, uh, an opportunity for them to also get their bodies moving. And so that they just don’t, you know, secondary, um, activity is what leads to all the sort of heart disease and diabetes and things like that. So we don’t want to set them up for, um, a negative future.

Well, I have one other part about that, and I know we we’re talking about with the students screen time. We’ve also been talking about we’re wrestling as adults. When do we begin our day? When does our day end? So we’ve got to have more calibration around this whole moment. We’re [00:27:00] in, it seems like there’s no ending to it.

We did have a set time doing traditional, but now you’re at that desk. You’re in your space working from early morning to late at night. So we have to recalibrate on that. And I think as we think about ourselves, That will help influence what we’re doing with our students. Realizing too, as you mentioned about the phone’s constantly going, and if we don’t do that as dr.

said, it impacts our health. When our minds never shut down. And that’s whole about the whole sleep time study. And that’s another discussion, but yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, Mary Lee, how, how has that been for you as a teacher wanting to connect with students, but trying to live your own life? Well, and I, I thank you for bringing that up.

I really appreciate it because I do think as teachers, we spend a lot of time thinking about our students screen time, and then we’re not necessarily reflecting on how exhausted we are and understanding why that is. Um, I, I taught [00:28:00] online before online was the cool thing too do. And so I had to learn that I was, I was balancing both teaching some face to face some online.

And when I first started teaching that online piece, I realized I was working all hours of the day and I was responding to emails at eight o’clock at night and at five 30 in the morning. And I realized I had to set some boundaries for myself and. As a community of staff members, we haven’t, we haven’t, I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet because we feel like there’s so much to do and we’re learning and trying to stay on top of so many things.

And as I think about our staff, um, yesterday we were in a professional development and we, we did try to take some times to take a break, but it just becomes all consuming. And, um, I appreciate dr. Jenkins thinking about the staff and how [00:29:00] yes. We might be teaching face to face or not face to face, but on zoom, synchronous, you know, from nine to two, but guess what?

Our job doesn’t end there. And so then we’re on the computer on a screen beyond those hours, a lot of times, many hours beyond those hours. And so, um, And I think we are, we’re learning and we’re going to hopefully get into a place where we’ve gotten through the first term. We’ve started to realize, okay, here’s some strategies that really work and how we can set some of those boundaries.

Thank you both for speaking to that aspect of this, one of the other pieces that we’ve spoken about Mary Lee is that sort of this time has illustrated. That no learning system is going to work for everyone, including virtual, but, but I think, uh, a lot of people assumed the other system was just the way it was, but this has highlighted that it’s not going to work universally.

How can education move forward with that? [00:30:00] Understanding that not all systems work for every student. Um, I’ll actually start with dr. Ladson billings on this one. So now that you’ve, um, Toss me a nice softball, cause it’s kind of what I’ve been talking about all along all, since we’ve been in the pandemic and I’ve suggested that, um, this is an opportunity for us to do what I’ve called the hard reset, and I’ve actually used the analogy of the devices that we all have, that when they don’t work.

Um, we, you know, try something, things, we take the SIM cards out, put them back in the battery out, put it back. They don’t work, they don’t work. And we, we, we head off to the store, whether it’s the Apple store or the Samsung store, Android, wherever you got your device and somebody who was about 17 years old, wearing a tee shirt, tells you the dreaded words, we’re going to have to do a hard reset.

And what they mean. I mean, by that is if you haven’t backed up everything. When [00:31:00] they give you that phone back, all your contacts are going to be gone. All your pictures are going to be gone wherever you were in the candy crush. Thing’s going to be gone. You’re going to have a phone that’s like it was when it came to you from the factory.

And that’s really where I believe we are in education. I don’t think, I think we can, you know, when people say I can’t wait to get back to normal, well, normal. For the kids that I’m most concerned about was a disaster. Normal was they weren’t reading normal was that they were being suspended at a disproportionate rate.

Normal was, they were over identified for special education. Normal was, they were being expelled normal was they weren’t getting an advanced placement. So with the heart reset, We have this opportunity, you know, I’ve been siting a Indian novelist by the name of our Arundhati Roy who says this, the pandemic is a portal.

It’s a gateway from the old world into the new, [00:32:00] and that we have an opportunity. I know we’re all talking about how horrible this is, but I want to say that it’s also an opportunity. There’s also a chance for us to have a clean slate, to think differently about what we’re doing too. Focus differently.

I’ve got a panel coming up next week with the national Academy. And one of the things I’m going to say is that we need to center science and I’m not just saying science curriculum, but the problems of living in a democracy, whether it is climate change, whether it’s economic downturn, whether it’s an inability for people to access a quality education, that if we send it problems, then the curriculum will come along because.

You know, you, you can’t make a case if you’re not literate. Right. So I don’t want you to, just to read, because I want you to have a set of skills. I want you to be able to solve a problem. So I just think, yeah, again, I can’t remember whether it was [00:33:00] Ronald manual or some political person who said we should never let you know, not take advantage of a good crisis.

Well, we got a good crisis here and we need to take advantage of it. Mary Lee, how can you bring that idea of systems? Not universally working for every student into teaching? Uh, so I I’ve been really lucky. Um, I work at Clark street community school. We have started this step. We’ve gotten rid of grades.

Not, standard-based not one, two, three, four. Like we have truly, there is no GPA, there’s no grades. We are mastery-based. So we’re actually looking at when you write something or when you read something or when you do some math work, we’re looking at that and saying, okay, where can you improve? Where have you really mastered this skill, that kind of piece.

Um, we’ve looked at how do we. [00:34:00] Look at personalized plans for students. And how are the students taking the lead on that plan? What do they want to do? What do they want to pursue? I do think this, I cannot second enough. What doctor Ladson billings is saying is this is such an opportunity. That we can start saying maybe one size doesn’t fit all.

And here is our chance to actually make those changes that maybe we don’t need all of our students in our building at the same time, in order for them to be growing and learning, maybe we can connect with our communities. I think of, um, what dr. Jenkins was saying about how, you know, the outreach and the connection with community centers and community groups.

Maybe we need to make that the norm as compared to just the crisis situation. So I think there’s so many different opportunities within that to say, huh? Turns out when we take some of these pieces away, not everything [00:35:00] falls apart and maybe we are actually seeing students grow and seeing students thrive in, in a way that we haven’t seen before.

How can a whole school district embrace those ideas? Do you think. I think it’s critical that we all pause and look at what we have and turns out COVID-19 intersecting with the whole racial injustice. Um, since the emphasi of our country. For me, when I publicly witnessed mr. Floyd being lynched 16.2 miles from our home.

Um, a moment as an educator of 30 years, I said, I’m not doing my job. I’m not being disruptive enough. It came full circle, the historical wrongs of black and Brown, poor children, special needs children. [00:36:00] And I’m saying, what can we do? That was the question I asked. And I said, it’s time that we go back and look on the promise of America.
Of America and hold America accountable, but it’s reciprocal accountability. We have to do our parts and America must do their parts. We’re fundamentally flawed, no matter which system we try to implement right now, we’re fundamentally flawed how we resource education. We need to make education, the main thing.

And when I say resource, see, it’s not just money. It’s the resources. Be it human. Be it an opportunity for advancement once. An individual would come educated. This is an opportunity for us to hold America true to his promise. When Abraham Lincoln said we came together to form a more perfect union. This is the time to form a more perfect union and to be all inclusive, put the schools in a community and hold the community accountable.

Put the community in the schools [00:37:00] to hold schools accountable. It’s a shared responsibility. It’s not just schools is businesses. Is healthcare. It’s all about the employment. And I just think, regardless of where we stand, which system, if we don’t see the people, and if we don’t have a service mentality about the people, right.
And trying to support the people and we develop policies that impact our practices, that impact the people that are still not taken into that promise. We are Americans. I think this is the greatest opportunity in my time in education. It’s like I’ve had a rebirth. I consider myself as a first year educator right now, not superintendent dropped the titles.
That’s nonsensical, drop the titles and let’s just come together and do the work whichever system we designed, make sure it’s one of excellence and not non excellence. I think critically when we say excellent [00:38:00] excellence is not some children reading at 18% and other children reading it. 64%. And we’re trying to compare the students, black and Brown students to white students who are scoring at 64%.
64% does not put us on a competitive level internationally. That’s the very reason in math and science, we had 32 and 34 in terms of our rating. When you look at the performance of international that says, this is an opportunity for America to really lead how America can lead. And I truly believe with the great science that’s here in Madison.

Number one public institution share parking lots with MMS D share a parking lot is no reason that we can’t come together. Take the science, take the practice, listening to the students, listen to the staff and listen to the community. Whichever system we come up with. We’ve come up with it together. And it’s all in.

That’s what I believe that we have to do in a system that we choose must maintain [00:39:00] unhuman perspective. And not just test outcome perspective. Thank you all very much for that per those perspectives. We need to take a quick break here and we’ll be back to talk more about teaching and learning. Going forward.

Cap times idea Fest 2020 is made possible by the generous support of our spots. Presenting sponsor the bear-ish group that UBS a financial services firm with global access and a local focus to pursue what matters most. For its clients. Major sponsors are health X ventures, backing entrepreneurs who are creating value with digital health solutions, exact sciences pursuing earlier detections and life changing answers in the fight against cancer courts.

Health plans built with you in mind and Madison gas and electric. Your community energy company with goal is net zero carbon electricity. By 2050 co-sponsors are Epic systems and the Godfrey con law firm, [00:40:00] other sponsors are Wisconsin alumni research foundation savings bank, UnityPoint health Meriter cargo coffee, and the forward theater company, media partners are the Wisconsin state journal and madison.com.

Welcome back to our panel on how COVID-19 will change the future of education. So one of the things I think a lot of students and adults are facing right now through this pandemic is uncertainty. Uh, in their lives, how can teachers and, uh, educational institutions help students through that uncertainty, uh, while also managing, you know, their, their own, uh, challenges, Mary Lee, I’ll start with you.
Um, I think it starts with. Well, going back to the question of [00:41:00] how are we approaching social, emotional wellness? How are we looking at the wellness needs of our students, of our families and of our teachers? Um, I think we have spent a lot of last spring. Early this fall saying, okay, we’re going to check the box on making sure our kids are okay.

And I do have some concern that we’re going to, you know, get further in and be like, Oh, well we already checked that box. So we don’t need to continue to do that. And that’s where I think parents and staff members and students and administration and the greater community can help, continue to check in to.

Keep that pulse. Um, we’re going to head into winter here soon, whether or not the weather today actually looks like that. Um, and that’s going to change the dynamic. And so as we continue through these different phases, as the data changes as well, different events come through in the next few months, we need to continue [00:42:00] to check in, um, because the uncertainty is not right, going away, not for awhile.

And. The more that we are being aware of the mental health need. The more that we continue to message to families that the wellness of your family is of the utmost importance. Yes. We want students learning. We want students growing and they’re going to continue to do that. Especially when they are. Wow.

Especially when they have levels of security and that could look like a lot of different things, whether that’s a schedule. I love how dr. Ladson billings talked about working with families of how do you do a schedule? How do you actually, we make a schedule I’m going, I wonder if we’ve done that with our parents?

I don’t know if we have, we’ve talked with some of our high schools students about doing that, but that might be really great for our elementary students to think about. We’ve actually set up a schedule as teachers I’m really skilled at that. It’s what I live in, right? Like that’s my world that I live in.

Not everybody lives in that world. So as we [00:43:00] continue on, we have to continue doing those checkpoints. We can’t just check a box and say that we’re moving forward. Dr. Jenkins on that similar note. I mean, how can the district give parents and students certainty right now? I think right now we have to truly just be honest with the community.
We’re in a state of uncertainty and it’s all about how you view it. Uh, it doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the world because we’re uncertain. We’ll give you as much information as we can, based upon the information we’re getting, but I’m also really pushing for parents and for staff to be very careful about what information coming to you.

For example, there is a, an economist out of Harvard Shetty. He just put this piece out based upon his metrics really would fall into discern online curriculum about Wisconsin [00:44:00] and the high socio economic students have increased learning 83.3% on his own online curriculum and the lower socioeconomic students have.

Decrease by 1%. So we know we have gaps, we’re Wisconsin, number one in the nation. Right. But what does this type of data mean inflammation when you get it, it contained to perpetuate narratives of someone else versus trying to understand your own realities. And so that narrative individual may take, do we even use the Zurn curriculum in all of Wisconsin?

No, but right now the narrative is, these are the things that’s happening. So no, the information and from where it come, no, the metrics do your homework as much as you can to be in alignment with the guidance that’s coming out, we’re in a medical situation, the academic piece. And I wholeheartedly agree [00:45:00] with dr.

Our students are learning right to the staff. I’m saying, Hey, give yourself some space and grace and give the students in space and grace. You didn’t turn it in about two o’clock. Nope. Zero, hold up. Wait a minute. That kid was at home helping three of their siblings. You don’t know all the situation, ask questions before we make those final decisions.

Same thing to parents in particular, parents who are working and have children at home, give yourself some space and grace give you students in space and grace. And one of my former people, uh, student services, um, supervisor, she said that to our team. Because when we first started, we were in a crisis. She say, hold up, everybody, let’s just give some space.

And grace. And I really embraced that philosophy of saying, you’re not going to be perfect. I’m not going to be perfect, but we’re just striving to do better. And as long as we can understand that we’re going to strive to get better. You don’t have to be perfect. That’s the other thing, [00:46:00] too. Right? As long as we know our intent and we’re really working hard.

To get there. I think we’ll be a little bit better off, but that adds to the social emotional. I have to be perfect. I’ve had to have more psychologists talking to our 4.0 students over time because of the anxieties they have. Wait a minute. I just scored a 97 on that test. Oh my goodness. I didn’t get a hundred, hold up, slow down.

You know, that wasn’t all that bad, you know, and that’s not low expectations. But it’s just saying, relax, you know, and we all going to have to do that, help one another, uh, do that. And I think we’ll be better off the anxiety’s a real amongst all of us right now, dr. Ladson billings, how can uncertainty and, you know, disruption to routine affect kids’ learning, um, and development.

Um, so I think what’s important for us to understand is even though this panel is about COVID-19, we are in the midst of four readily [00:47:00] identifiable pandemics. We do have COVID-19 it’s the reason why, you know, people are distancing, why I’m here and not in the studio with you. We understand that one, but we’re also in a pandemic of anti-black racism that that’s everywhere.

I mean, was George Floyd and Arbery, um, C’mon Arbery and Brianna Taylor, and then lo and behold, Jacob Blake, I mean, right down the road and Kenosha. So that’s all around too, but we also are facing a terrible economic situation. We haven’t talked much about it, but the truth of the matter is that, um, even though the governor has, you know, had a landlord stay the requirement for people to pay their rent, those rents are going to come due.

And people don’t have jobs or they’ve had to cut hours. So rents and mortgages and all those things will come down, come, come due. And then the fourth one, although we think of [00:48:00] ourselves as kind of safe from it in the upper middle is the coming climate catastrophe. You know, I’m a grandmother who all of her grandchildren are on the West coast, so they can’t even go outside because the air is so bad.

So those fires raging in California, or if you live in that, um, in the, in the Gulf coast area, uh, we are now through all of the regular alphabet with storms and now into the Greek alphabet, Louisiana is bracing for, uh, the Delta, right? So all of these things are happening. So uncertainty is not just around COVID-19 it’s around living in this world right now.

So one of the things that I think will help us with the uncertainty is that as teachers, we have to begin to build our pedagogical repertoires, COVID-19, it’s forced you to do it. To some extent you can’t just do the same old [00:49:00] stuff. Uh, I recall as a professor at UWA because, you know, unlike, um, K-12 school and we don’t get a room.

You know, you don’t have a room. That’s your room. You have your office, what you teach, wherever they assign you, wherever their space. And I, I made a decision that whatever space I’m in, I’m going to take advantage of whatever, whatever resources are there. So my last. Couple of rooms were connected to our IMC, which meant I had all of this technology.

I had smart boards, I had docu cams. I had, uh, all kinds of listening and I decided to start doing some things differently. I began to run a, um, uh, a class hashtag. A Twitter feed. And what did I find out that many of my international students absolutely loved because they don’t like raising their hands and speaking out because that’s not how they came into education in their countries, but they can pull out their [00:50:00] devices and tweet about what we’re doing.

I would not have thought about that without that resource there in front of me. So I think the, again, you know, I want to look at the opportunity. So the opportunities are for us to build, um, better, um, pedagogical repertoires to learn, to teach together. That’s another thing that I think we, we, we give lip service to team teaching, but I think now we do have to work together.

Uh, and that as that Jenkins had said earlier, the whole notion of the community and the school and the school and the community, that, that, that gives us another opportunity. Um, Mary Lee talked about a community garden. Um, we could be doing so many more things, uh, and not letting the assessment tail wag the dog here that.

Uh, I just wanna, I just don’t want us to lose this opportunity to miss it because it really is, uh, an [00:51:00] opportunity. Thank you so much, dr. Jenkins, dr. Ladson billings just spoke a lot about teacher development and growth and learning right now. What are you doing as an administrator to learn and grow through this period of time?
JFK said that leadership and learning are indispensable. You can’t be a leader without wanting to continue to grow. And I am listening a whole lot more to everyone. Uh, and what I’m hearing from the children, uh, when I go out in the community, when I’m going and tapping into the schools, when I’m meeting yesterday with the principal groups and what, uh, when I’m listening to the parents.

Okay. When I say I’m in my first year of my new education, As a leader, this is my first year. And it’s exciting. It’s given, it’s rejuvenated me in a way as a learner, you know, reading, uh, [00:52:00] any and everything, because there’s not a blueprint for this where we are now. So as I walked through it and looking at the models, not of what has been, but what could be, I think what dr.

Less ability to say, this is an opportunity. I am in that mode of saying this is the learning should be occurring for myself, trying to educate also working in collaboration with our board, working with the staff and yesterday the principals, we had a great time conversations and we’re going to flip our model central office, bringing in all the experts central office, come in and leave.

No, no, no, no, no. Principals will lead the PD. They were going to come up with the topics and working in concert with the staff. And, um, I met with some amazing principals. Yes,
we have so much talent in MMS. D I just, I mean, I’ve been in a lot of places and I knew that when I left and it’s still [00:53:00] here. So that’s what I say as a, as a new leader, you know, I am in a learning mode. And I think I’ve been rejuvenated by this COVID-19, but it’s racial the whole injustice piece. So I think that’s what, from my level and lens, we have to do throw out what we were before this and start a new.

Yeah, in sort of to build on that. Are there any specific curricular or content changes that you see happening as a result of everything that’s going on right now? Mary Lee? I mean, do you plan to build any of what’s been going on in the world into your content going forward? We are, that’s a really amazing part.

Um, so the school that, uh, I work at, um, we’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now of looking at, um, how do we bring what students are already passionate about? How do we bring what is already, um, in [00:54:00] both popular culture, in the news in science and bring it into our focus. So right now our students are split into two cohorts.

One cohort is working on a, um, the theme is growing. You’re growing our future. So looking at food, sustainability, planetary health, looking at philosophy, how does philosophy impact how we, we, um, interact with the world poetry? So how can poetry and. Within that hip hop and language be impactful for communicating your ideas.

So that’s our one strand. And so we have a group of teachers who are then working with our half of our students for this entire first term interspersing, all of those ideas I’m in the coming of age. So thinking about what does it look like to come of age? Both in this time and in times, All over the world.

Right. [00:55:00] So thinking about it from a global perspective and right here in our community, so what are we looking at? What are we doing? How do we look at statistics and use that to inform our, our decisions that we’re making? How do we use literature to have that windows and mirrors effect? Right. What do I see in literature that is similar to me?

What is literature that opens my eyes to different pieces? Um, so. I’ve been really lucky that I’ve been doing this for many years now. And I think we are now we have an opportunity to say, how can we use what is happening in our world right now? If you take any of the pandemics that dr. Ladson billings talked about, you could develop curriculum for years on those topics alone.

And. We have an opportunity to do that. We have the materials, we have the ideas out there, but it’s going to take a massive shift. It’s a massive shift to shift away [00:56:00] from what we’ve been doing to what we can do. And I think this might be the time and yes, it’s going to be hard. It’s already hard. So what can, what are those steps that we can start taking as we look at that?

Dr. Ladson billings, how important do you think it is for teachers to do that sort of curricular adjustment, uh, for their students? Um, I think it’s imperative, you know, it’s interesting some years ago, um, psychologist, how a gardener who most people know from multiple intelligences, Howard said, you know, We keep talking about what schools need to do or what, you know, how, how to get better.

He said the truth of the matter is if you look around the world, there are different places in the world that are X.
[00:57:00] We keep talking about what schools need to do or what w you know, how, how to get better. He said the truth of the matter there is, if you look around the world, there are different places in the world that are expert at different aspects of it. He said, if you want, wanted to have a child have a perfect education, you put them in preschool, Italy at Reggio Emilia.

You put them in elementary school in Finland. You then put them in high school in Germany, and then you send them to college in United States. That indeed that’s the best system seemed to be. So we have this opportunity to look or what what’s going on at Reggio Emilia, how can our preschools be less sort of structured and focused and more whole child oriented what’s going on in Finland?

Why are the fins doing so well in elementary school? Uh, How much [00:58:00] latitude do their teachers have to make curricular decisions what’s going on in Germany, uh, with high school? Well, one of the things I know for sure is that German high school offers a promise. If you stick through this, this is what we’re promising you at the end.

So they’ve sat down with industry and ha and postsecondary ed and said, Buhr people come through the program. We guarantee them a route to one of these. They want to go work in the Mercedes Benz plant. They can do that, but if they want to go to belong, yeah. Uh, to study, they can do that. And then of course our colleges are the cream of the crop.

Everybody comes here. Everybody wants to go to a college and university in the U S we have to find a way to synthesize all of this great information and great opportunities, because we were one of the best resource countries, nations the world’s ever seen. And I don’t actually think it’s about quote money.
I think it is about our [00:59:00] political will. It is about our political, do we want to invest in just the fence or do we want to invest in our people? Thank you so much, dr. Jenkin, you spoke a little earlier about sort of some conversation about achievement gaps, uh, nationally, and that’s something that’s been certainly a big part of the conversation over the past seven months is the potential for widening achievement gaps through this time.

Uh, is that a concern here and how can you stop that from happening? Well, I think achievement gap is one thing, but the opportunity gap and based upon just even what you just heard. They were talking opportunities, right? And the higher, more wealthy families have opportunities before school, after schools on the weekend spoken language at home is so many opportunities.

And when I said there’s a resource with fundamental flaw, how we resource, this [01:00:00] is what I mean, it’s bigger than just money to these opportunities we can create, uh, for our children. And I’m still on the narratives. We have to shift the narratives. I said this when I was speaking at, um, the editorial board for the state journal, I think the media has a lot to do with shifting this narrative.
And when I mentioned Shetty’s work earlier or some other individuals who are economists or, and we should be shooting, what were you doing? The other side?

…. the remaining audio is indecipherable.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees). Run for office. Spring 2021 elections: Dane county executive.

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

Jim Desmond:

I’ve repeated this often over the last few months. We have lost sight of the goal. I think it’s reasonable for everyone to take a step back and ask “how did we end up here?”

How did we go from “we need to flatten the curve for the month of April” to “we are going to shut your business down in September and October if you decide to stay open?”

In California, the goalposts continue to move. At the beginning the goal was to make sure we had enough hospital beds, make sure we had enough PPE equipment, make sure we weren’t having to choose between who could live and who couldn’t. Thankfully because of the people of San Diego and the great work from our local public health officials, we never had any of those problems.

Now though, the goal has changed. In California, we have a flawed color-coded system and that doesn’t even have a green tier, with full openings. Businesses are going to limited capacity for an indefinite time.

We’ve been told that life won’t get back to normal until there’s a vaccine. So, if the goal truly is to keep everyone locked down until there is a vaccine, we have to start being honest. An Axios/Ipsos poll was done last week that said only 13 percent of Americans would be willing to try the vaccine when it comes out.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

Rahil Sheikh:

Born in an Indian village with cerebral palsy, Kuli Kohli was lucky to survive. Neighbours told her parents they should throw her in the river, instead they brought her to the UK. As she grew up here, writing became her means of escape – and transformed her life in ways she never expected.

Waiting to be called on stage in her home town of Wolverhampton, Kuli Kohli felt sick with anxiety. She was petrified her words wouldn’t come out and worried she would fall flat on her face. Her heart soared and her nerves clattered. Self-doubt raced through her mind. “Why am I putting myself through all of this?” she asked herself.

The host welcomed Kuli to the empty chair that was waiting for her. It was dark, a spotlight illuminated the stage, and a small wave of applause rippled around the room.

Emerging from the side of the stage, Kuli nervously approached the mic. She took a breath and a few seconds of silence passed before she shared one of her poems with an audience for the very first time.

Choose Life.

Steven Elbow:

The coronavirus pandemic has a lot of people feeling boxed in. But for Michelle Possin it opened up a whole new realm of possibilities.

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the 54-year-old recruiter for TASC, a Madison-based administrative services company, spent half her time at home and the other half in the office. But now the company has nixed office work altogether, freeing employees to work from wherever they choose. So she sold her condo on the Isthmus and bought a house on Lake Wisconsin, giving her room for an office, a yard and, when the time comes, a place to retire.

“Living and working from a condo was not sustainable,” she said. “It was extremely small, and I felt very claustrophobic being there all the time.”

It was a life-changing decision to flee the city for more rural environs where Possin can spread out with twice the square footage of her condo, enjoy the lake and entertain at safe social distances outdoors, the kind of lifestyle that many crave, and more are finding within reach.

“There are quite a few people in my company who are moving because now they can work from anywhere,” she said. “One of my colleagues just moved to Colorado.”

Real estate agents across the country are noticing the trend. Untethered from the office and emboldened by historically low interest rates, telecommuters from the Bay Area to the East Coast are starting to look to the countryside, where they can have larger homes, bigger yards and a quieter life to raise their families.

Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes:

Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, based on this comparison of 2017 sales.

Fall 2020 Administration Referendum slides.

(Note: “Madison spends just 1% of its budget on maintenance while Milwaukee, with far more students, spends 2%” – Madison’s CFO at a fall 2019 referendum presentation.)

MMSD Budget Facts: from 2014-15 to 2020-21 [July, 2020]

Property taxes up 37% from 2012 – 2021.

– via a kind reader (July 9, 2020 update).

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

The Economist:

IN THE NORMAL run of things, late summer sees airports in the emerging world fill with nervous 18-year-olds, jetting off to begin a new life in the rich world’s universities. The annual trek of more than 5m students is a triumph of globalisation. Students see the world; universities get a fresh batch of high-paying customers. Yet with flights grounded and borders closed, this migration is about to become the pandemic’s latest victim.

For students, covid-19 is making life difficult. Many must choose between inconveniently timed seminars streamed into their parents’ living rooms and inconveniently deferring their studies until life is more normal. For universities, it is disastrous. They will not only lose huge chunks of revenue from foreign students but, because campus life spreads infection, they will have to transform the way they operate (see Briefing).

Yet the disaster may have an upside. For many years government subsidies and booming demand have allowed universities to resist changes that could benefit both students and society. They may not be able to do so for much longer.

Higher education has been thriving. Since 1995, as the notion spread from the rich world to the emerging one that a degree from a good institution was essential, the number of young people enrolling in higher education rose from 16% of the relevant age group to 38%. The results have been visible on swanky campuses throughout the Anglosphere, whose better universities have been the principal beneficiaries of the emerging world’s aspirations.

Yet troubles are piling up. China has been a source of high-paying foreign students for Western universities, but relations between the West and China are souring. Students with ties to the army are to be banned from America.

Annysa Johnson:

The Milwaukee Public Schools board on Thursday approved a $90 million plan to start the school year online and gradually return to the classroom once the threat of coronavirus has subsided.

Superintendent Keith Posley said the plan will remain fluid depending on how the pandemic unfolds over the coming months.

“We know students want to go back to school. Educators want to go back to school. Parents and families want their children back in school. But we have to be safe,” he said. “We can make up school hours for our students to make up their lessons. But we can’t bring a lost life back.”

The vote followed hours of testimony by parents, many of whom supported the plan and others who objected, saying they would have to choose between their jobs and their children’s education, and even threatening in some cases to pull their students out of the district if it went through with the plan.

Several were skeptical of MPS’ ability to provide quality instruction online, given its slow and inconsistent ramp-up of virtual learning when schools closed in spring.

Professor Okhwa Lee [Chungbuk National University in South Korea]

Schools could not have face to face learning for nearly 6 weeks since March, which is the first month for the year and it is almost similar in most of countries in the world. Online learning substituted regular classroom activities. During that time, without students in classrooms, what happened? Here is the story from Korea, mainly for k-12 education, from the perspectives of teachers, infrastructure preparation, students, parents, bureaucrats.

Teachers panicked at first, just waiting for guidelines from the higher administrative institutes such as educational provincial office or the ministry of education. Teachers tried to use ICT [Information & Communications Technology] for content delivery and communication gradually, but covid19 did not allow much time for teachers to prepare for the sudden change in the learning environment. They were busy keeping students online following the timetable which is similar to those used during the regular time.
They were just too busy to keep the business as usual and had no time to try out new innovations. Gradually, when they became comfortable with the new instruction methods and realized the potential of online learning (which can compliment off line learning), they became quite creative.

Infrastructure for online learning: content were provided from the database of instructional multimedia developed by KERIS and EBS. Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) invited a few very talented teachers to record teaching and open to the nationwide classrooms. Korea Educational Resources and Information System [KERIS] also provided content and software for online learning. But students wanted to see their own teacher on the video content. Also the ministry promotes the idea of developing content by the teacher, directly. Many teachers tried hard (spent many hours) learning how to design script and instructional design to create EBS-like quality content. But teachers realized that they cannot quickly match those professional video development skills.

WiFi school installation was accelerated. The original plans were to complete this work by 2023.

Three instructional models were provided: two way synchronous communication using video conferencing system, project based self guided instruction, and lastly, providing multimedia content. The first synchronous model requires more ICT resources than other two models but is a more familiar instruction to teachers and students as the model resembles what teachers do in the regular classroom. Two other models are asynchronous and they allow more flexibility to students and teachers. The instructional models propose many significant questions for education. Are those an extension of what we do in school? How can we include some innovative approaches? Why do students have to go to online classes for 5 days as if they were in classrooms? Can they choose what they want to learn and produce results for their own interests? Those instructional models can be (or will be) used when schools open for campus based learning? Or how can we implement the experience from online learning instructional model into the regular classroom instruction?

Students received instructional content and information from any form of learning platform. Students have to focus on screen for many hours a day, every day. It is very tiring and they could not be alert, doing time on task for that many hours. But students could communicate with teachers more aggressively than before. Teachers could recognize student presence by sending texts or questions, or even very simple responses. It all could make teachers pay attention to all students, which was not possible during the face to face learning situation. Students shared their IT knowledge with teachers and it created a more democratic culture in classrooms.

Students miss the interaction with friends, talking, giggling, hustle and bustle. They miss the time to learn social skills from the collaborative physical gathering.

Parents, particularly those who have young children, should stay home to support those little ones’ learning and support their time management. Also another big job on top of the extended babysitting time, was cooking three meals. All Korean students eat free warm food for lunch at school. Parents realized that the role of school is not for only learning but many other functions. Those who cannot share time with their children are usually from the low socio-economic background. It can generate the same class descent, by having not enough time to care of children, economic power to provide IT facilities, and knowledge to support children’s learning.

Given this new normal life in education, I would like to ask a few issues and try to find solutions with you.

Question1: equity issue

Students could previously obtain support from the school but during this online learning, how can we support students with their learning time management needs?

Careful use of IT (Use of background picture for Zoom use)
Students who do not have adults to help them
Students who are disabled physically

Question2: changed role for teachers and schools

What is the function of schools?
If knowledge delivery is done by star teachers and other professional institutes, what is the role for teachers?
New identity for teachers

Question3: golden opportunity to implement educational visions?

Customized individualized learning and self directed learning have been the educational goal for many years. Those skills should be emphasized more for the future when lifelong learning becomes essential for everyone. It has been only dream of big educational thinkers but the present educational system cannot allow students to practice self guided learning, or individualized learning effectively. Covid19 provides the opportunity to practice such vision? If we do not practice now, when can we do it?

Question4: post covid19 and education

When we go back to face to face education, will education go back to the same traditional one?

Jasmine Lane:

Shallow successes allow us to pat ourselves on the back. But a high graduation rate is meaningless when our graduates enter the world without a fundamental grasp of the tools and knowledge necessary for full participation in life and citizenship. We can hope for a reimagining of schooling during this time, but nothing will change in our schools until we prioritize the education of our students.

Yes, there is trauma: from pandemic fear, from centuries of racism and violence. We will likely need a trauma-informed approach as school begins in some form again. Some say that means educators should let relationships be the focus. But that does not necessarily mean relationships outside of content-the “I teach kids, not content” approach. I would reframe that to say: I teach my students content. That’s my job and what my students trust me to do.

Doug Lemov of the Uncommon Schools charter network writes that “relationship building starts in the classroom with attentiveness to the craft of teaching and with attentiveness to the progress and experience of the learner.” I knew my students’ lives because they decided to tell me, not because I made them do an emotional check-in. I provided them with routine during distance learning by greeting them and giving them a brief overview of the day in a synchronous setting. I created an opportunity for hope by not overly dwelling on the woes and news of the present. And I continued to build relationships by capitalizing on the trust that I had earned from doing the best teaching I could.

And in all this, I was helped by the subject I teach: literature. One of the beautiful things about literature is its ability to center isolating and abstracted fear in previous human experience. Albert Camus wrote in The Plague: “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people equally by surprise.” Literature attests that people have been here before, and their experience can strengthen us -if we know how to access it.

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

“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”.

Erin O’Donnell:

RAPIDLY INCREASING number of American families are opting out of sending their children to school, choosing instead to educate them at home. Homeschooled kids now account for roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of school-age children in the United States, a number equivalent to those attending charter schools, and larger than the number currently in parochial schools.

Yet Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, sees risks for children—and society—in homeschooling, and recommends a presumptive ban on the practice. Homeschooling, she says, not only violates children’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to be protected from potential child abuse, but may keep them from contributing positively to a democratic society.

“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet asserts. All 50 states have laws that make education compulsory, and state constitutions ensure a right to education, “but if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.” Even apparent requirements such as submitting curricula, or providing evidence that teaching and learning are taking place, she says, aren’t necessarily enforced. Only about a dozen states have rules about the level of education needed by parents who homeschool, she adds. “That means, effectively, that people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves.” In another handful of states, parents are not required to register their children as homeschooled; they can simply keep their kids at home.

This practice, Bartholet says, can isolate children. She argues that one benefit of sending children to school at age four or five is that teachers are “mandated reporters,” required to alert authorities to evidence of child abuse or neglect. “Teachers and other school personnel constitute the largest percentage of people who report to Child Protective Services,” she explains, whereas not one of the 50 states requires that homeschooling parents be checked for prior reports of child abuse. Even those convicted of child abuse, she adds, could “still just decide, ‘I’m going to take my kids out of school and keep them at home.’”

As an example, she points to the memoir Educated, by Tara Westover, the daughter of Idaho survivalists who never sent their children to school. Although Westover learned to read, she writes that she received no other formal education at home, but instead spent her teenage years working in her father’s scrap business, where severe injuries were common, and endured abuse by an older brother. Bartholet doesn’t see the book as an isolated case of a family that slipped through the cracks: “That’s what can happen under the system in effect in most of the nation.”

In a paper published recently in the Arizona Law Review, she notes that parents choose homeschooling for an array of reasons. Some find local schools lacking or want to protect their child from bullying. Others do it to give their children the flexibility to pursue sports or other activities at a high level. But surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families (by some estimates, up to 90 percent) are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture. Bartholet notes that some of these parents are “extreme religious ideologues” who question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy.

She views the absence of regulations ensuring that homeschooled children receive a meaningful education equivalent to that required in public schools as a threat to U.S. democracy. “From the beginning of compulsory education in this country, we have thought of the government as having some right to educate children so that they become active, productive participants in the larger society,” she says. This involves in part giving children the knowledge to eventually get jobs and support themselves. “But it’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” she says, noting that European countries such as Germany ban homeschooling entirely and that countries such as France require home visits and annual tests.

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.

Harvard’s Homeschooling Summit: Problems, Politics, and Prospects for Reform – June 18-19, 2020.

Commentary.

Related: 1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Alex J. Harris:

And yet these imperfections and heartbreaking realities are not unique to homeschooling. Should there be oversight? Yes. Can we have productive conversations about how best to realize the power and flexibility of homeschooling for certain students while guarding against abuse for others? Absolutely. But there are risks to sending your child to public school, private school, or parochial school. As a parent, the fact that children are vulnerable to abuse by any authority figure in their life is a danger I am ever mindful of. (I’m not aware of any research suggesting that abuse by homeschool parents is more prevalent than abuse by other parents, relatives, teachers, or coaches.)

So why single out homeschooling? For Professor Bartholet the critical fact seems to be that “a majority of such families … are driven by conservative Christian beliefs” and that some are “extreme religious ideologues” who are

“ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture” and who “don’t believe in the scientific method, looking to the Bible instead.” She highlights the story of Tara Westover and her incredible memoir Educated, suggesting that Tara’s remarkable experience—as the daughter of a mentally unstable, off-the-grid survivalist in rural Idaho—demonstrates why a permissive homeschool regime is untenable. Unstated but implied is that any child in a family with “conservative Christian beliefs” is just a few short steps from Tara’s nightmare. Unexplained is how any law would have made a difference in a case like Tara’s.

Ironically, like so many missives from the ivory tower,

Professor Bartholet’s argument and unacknowledged biases may accomplish the exact opposite of what she intends: highlighting the virtues of alternative education options in a world full of “experts” ready to teach our children what is good and true and beautiful.

As for this homeschool graduate, I can only express my gratitude that the educational choices that were made for me were made by the two people in this world who knew me best, who loved me most, and who sincerely wished the very best for me and my siblings.

Thanks for the sacrifices, Mom & Dad. They were worth it.

Logan Wroge:

On March 31, Gutierrez sent a letter to Reyes letting her know he was rescinding his acceptance of the job and explaining what led to his decision.

Most board members didn’t find out until a week later during a closed session Monday night, LeMonds said. Gutierrez’s decision was publicly announced after the closed session.

Castro said it was “definitely jarring” to hear Gutierrez choose to remain superintendent in Seguin, Texas. But Castro added he understood where the lifelong Texan was coming from.

“I can’t imagine the conflicting emotions he was feeling when the community that he’s in now was in a crisis and really needed important, stable leadership,” Castro said.

In the letter, Gutierrez said his choice to back out of becoming superintendent of Wisconsin’s second-largest school district, which was “to be the pinnacle of my career,” was not without “interminable personal conflict and grief.”

But the experience leading the 7,500-student Seguin Independent School District through the pandemic has changed how he perceives his job, Gutierrez said in the letter.

“The sudden necessity of coordinating in a manner that not only educates but saves and sustains lives has changed my role as superintendent of a small school district from a title and a job to something far more personal; we have become an interdependent family,” Gutierrez wrote.

Related: Jennifer Cheatham (2013-2019) and the Madison Experience.

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

Madison has long spent far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts.

2019: WHY ARE MADISON’S STUDENTS STRUGGLING TO READ?

Karen Swallow Prior :

Before she was a writer, Jane Austen was a reader. A reader, moreover, within a family of readers, who would gather in her father’s rectory to read aloud from the work of authors such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and William Cowper—as well as, eventually, Jane’s own works-in-progress.

Not surprisingly, then, in Austen’s novels, the act of reading is a key indication of how a character should initially be judged, and of major turning points in her development. For Austen, the way a character reads is emblematic of other forms of interpretation: One’s skills in comprehending written language are linked to one’s ability to understand life, other people, and oneself.

Characters’ choices of books are a frequent target of Austen’s satire. Persuasion, for example, opens with a vignette that might otherwise seem insignificant: the reading habits of the protagonist’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, who “for his own amusement, never took up any book” except one—the record of British families that contains his own lineage. In Pride and Prejudice, the insufferable clergyman Mr. Collins chooses to orate from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women one afternoon because (as he piously proclaims) he abstains from novels. This episode clearly represents what Henry Tilney, Catherine Morland’s love interest in Northanger Abbey, means when he says, “The person … who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” On the other hand, Catherine’s friend Isabella Thorpe takes great pleasure in novels—but not high-quality ones. Accordingly, Isabella’s character turns out to be as excessive, hyperbolic, dramatic, and deceptive as the Gothic tales she recommends to Catherine.

Nathaniel Peters:

Kronman applies this vision of excellence to the controversies roiling American universities today: campus speech, diversity, and how we remember the past. He contrasts the university with an urban speakers’ corner. Debaters in a speakers’ corner and the public walking by compete as buyers and sellers in a marketplace of ideas. There is no obligation to offer sustained argument or to listen to the speaker. But the university is a community dedicated to the pursuit of truth and structured around the conversational idea. Their members must make and respond to arguments on the common ground of reason and shared premises. When students and professors assert their feelings or social location in place of rational argument, they shut down conversation without furthering it, thwarting the university’s core purpose.

Kronman’s final chapter examines the controversy over Yale’s decision to rename Calhoun College. The chapter has too much inside baseball for readers who didn’t choose Yale, but it helps show where the book’s overall argument breaks down. Kronman’s defense of keeping Calhoun’s name on the college rests on the university’s responsibility “to cultivate the capacity for enduring the moral ambiguities of life.” If we come to recognize that John Calhoun and Woodrow Wilson held odious views, he thinks, we should see the institutions that bear their names as monuments to the contradiction of good and evil in all human beings and the moral complexities that become clear only in hindsight. Colleges should help students learn to live with these ambiguities, not deny their existence.

This is true, up to a point. But it overlooks the primary purpose for which we erect memorials: honoring greatness and sacrifice, and mourning loss. Yes, we recognize that the great were not perfect. But we build statues of them and name buildings in their honor because they have been excellent. We may acknowledge ambiguity, but we don’t erect buildings for it. If our condemnation of Calhoun’s views about race and slavery now outweigh our appreciation of his political importance, it makes sense to reconsider the honors we have bestowed on him. If not, our memorials to Calhoun remain a testament to his excellence despite his vices, not to the moral ambiguity of his life overall.

David Robson:

Fifteen years ago, the people of Italy experienced a strange kind of mass hysteria known as “53 fever”.

The madness centred on the country’s lottery. Players can choose between 11 different wheels, based in cities such as Bari, Naples or Venice. Once you have picked which wheels to play, you can then bet on a selection of numbers between 1 and 90. Your winnings depend on how much you initially bet, how many numbers you picked and how many you got right.

Sometime in 2003, however, the number 53 simply stopped coming up on the Venice wheel – leading punters to place increasingly big bets on the number in the certainty that it must soon make a reappearance.

By early 2005, 53 fever had apparently led thousands to their financial ruin, the pain of which resulted in a spate of suicides. The hysteria only died away when it finally came up in the 9 February draw, after 182 no-shows and four billion euros worth of bets.

While it may have appeared like a kind of madness, the victims had been led astray by a reasoning flaw called the “gambler’s fallacy” – a worryingly common error that can derail many of our professional decisions, from a goalkeeper’s responses to penalty shootouts in football to stock market investments and even judicial rulings on new asylum cases.

Todd Richmond:

 A group of parents filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging the Madison school district’s transgender policy is unconstitutional because it prohibits teachers and staff from informing parents that their children want to switch sexes. 

Conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed the lawsuit on the parents’ behalf in Dane County Circuit Court. 

According to the lawsuit, Madison schools adopted a policy in 2018 that states a person’s gender identity can be male, female, a blend of both or neither and is determined by person’s sense of self. The policy states that the district is committed to affirming each student’s self-designated gender identity and the district will strive to “disrupt the gender binary” with books and lessons stating that everyone has the right to choose their gender.

Bruce Vielmetti:

The district’s policy interferes with parents’ right to direct their own children’s health treatment and religious upbringing, the suit states. Eleven of the parents are Christians and believe the “sex each of us is born with is a gift, not an arbitrary imposition.”

A policy affecting such fundamental rights must protect a compelling government interest in the most narrowly tailored and least restrictive ways. The suit says there is no such interest in “keeping secret from parents that their child is dealing with gender dysphoria.”

Brian Juchems, co-director at GSAFE, a support and advocacy group for LGBTQ students, said Madison’s policies provide “space for students to understand their identity while building confidence to tell their parents.”

He said most state school districts prohibit discrimination against transgender students, but few have adopted formal procedures like Madison to guide staff in providing support.

He also agrees parents should be in the conversation when a student is ready. “Telling your child that you will love and support them no matter who they are is a way for families to make it safer for the child to have that conversation

The Complaint:

This action seeks to vindicate parents’ fundamental and constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children. The Madison Metropolitan School District has violated this important right by adopting a policy designed to circumvent parental involvement in a pivotal decision affecting their children’s health and future. The policy enables children, of any age, to socially transition to a different gender identity at school without parental notice or consent, requires all teachers to enable this transition, and then prohibits teachers from communicating with parents about this potentially life-altering choice without the child’s consent. Even more, the Madison School District directs its teachers and staff to deceive parents by reverting to the child’s birth name and corresponding pronouns whenever the child’s parents are nearby. These policies violate Plaintiffs’ rights as parents.

Lisa Van Damme:

Years ago, I accompanied an 8th-grade student I had homeschooled as she visited prospective high schools. At one school, the director of admissions welcomed us and then proceeded to assault my student with the information that entry to college had become highly competitive, and she must therefore chart the right course through the right high school to stand even a chance of admission to the better colleges. She then proceeded to sell the school with the following: my student would need to take multiple AP courses—this school offered a wide variety; she would need to complete the IB program—they were honored to be a member school; she would need to be competitive in a sport and ambitious in an extra-curricular activity—they had many from which to choose. As the director mapped out all that my student must do (with the unquestioned assumption that admission to Harvard was her foremost educational goal), I looked over—and saw her wilt.

This was a child of whom I had endless vivid, touching stories from the classroom—stories of her gasping out loud when she was irrepressibly moved by a passage from Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three; stories of her eagerly recreating science lessons at home with her parents as students; stories of her writing with ferocious confidence (though she had previously loathed writing), because, she said, I taught her how. Now, before both our eyes, education was becoming nothing about the development of invaluable, life-long skills, nothing about the discovery of joy and utility in the acquisition of knowledge, nothing about the deepening of a capacity for emotional experience. Admission to high school was about… admission to college, which was about…

The answer to that was nothing more than a vague, unstated apprehension of doom.

Andrew Gillen:

But the second tsunami bearing down on higher education will be even bigger — informed choice on the part of students and parents.

For years we’ve asked students to make one of life’s most important decisions essentially blindfolded. We’ve told them a college degree is the surest path to success but have given them little guidance on where to go to college or what major to choose once they get there. As a result, too many students leave with a mountain of debt and a credential that isn’t worth much on the labor market. The new data will help equip students — and their parents — with the information necessary to avoid these costly mistakes in several ways.

First, the data will help guide students toward non-risky majors. Potential students will know that earning a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing is likely a safe choice, as there are 100 programs that pass GEE for every program that fails.

Second, the data will help students avoid risky programs within generally non-risky fields or colleges. Of the universities in the top 5 of the US News and World report college rankings, Harvard and Yale both had one program fail, and Columbia has 10 programs that fail. Helping students avoid these financial bad apples will help all students by keeping the pressure on individual academic programs, not allowing them to coast on a college’s (or field’s) reputation.

The ultimate nightmare scenario for teachers unions isn’t a case like Janus but large numbers of African-American parents rejecting them as legitimate and not viewing them as partners in a shared cause. And this is why the Warren affair is so important.

— James Merriman (@JamesMerriman6) November 25, 2019

Item 10.11: $100,000 contract to WestEd (funded from the Teaching & Learning budget) for evaluation of the Special Education Plan

Item 10.15: $4 million purchase (all cash from fund balance) of a building for use as an alternative education site, meeting spaces, and offices for the professional learning department.

The regular meeting also has the annual presentation of the audited financials for the year ending June 30, 2019, toward the end of the meeting

This year the auditors actually called out a few “significant deficiencies” (Letter) (accounting term of art, which Kelly Ruppel chooses to call “significant findings” in her memo to Belmore & BOE).

Wegner CPA’s has delivered the district’s financial audit statements, single audit statements, and communication letter with those charged with governance. These documents are attached to this memo via email. Following are some pertinent points:

Our fund statements include an operating fund surplus of $8,488,636. This surplus includes unspent TID funds in the amount of $1,407,402, unspent TID closing $3,200,000, interest earnings over budget $902,426, and a Medicaid cost settlement over budget of $1,022,628. Governmental funds also showing a surplus include a Capital projects Surplus of $1,429,799 for safety projects completed over the summer, a Donation fund surplus of $918,635 related to the East High Field House donation, and a Community Service fund surplus of $107,920.

The auditors’ report includes a significant finding that some of the 12 schools tested retained incomplete documentation support for disbursements or deposits for their school activity funds. Although procedures are in place to mitigate this, we are working on retraining staff and emphasizing the importance of this documentation. We are also including this information in the Secretary and Principal’s back to school training to emphasize these procedures.

The auditors’ report also includes a significant finding that two special education employees were not properly licensed per the Department of Public Instructions licensing requirements. The new HR system currently being implemented will mitigate this in the future.

In the past, the Board has asked Administration to state the status of our non-WRS post-employment long term obligations. As of June 30, 2019, the liability balances of these are:oSick Leave –Currently Active Employees $39,644,330 (actuarial value)oSick Leave Escrow -Retirees $29,225,362 (actual value)oTeacher Emeritus Retirement Program (TERP) and Administrative Retirement Plan-$30,965,900 (actuarial value)oOther Post-Employment Benefits, OPEB(health and life) -$27,483,949 (actuarial values

Scott R. Haumersen, a Wegner CPA partner (the District’s auditor), recently held a fundraiser for School Board member Gloria Reyes.

Related: “an emphasis on adult employment“.

“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”

Will Flanders:

First, it is important to note that spending on school choice represents a minuscule share of the state’s education spending. For fiscal year 18-19, Wisconsin spent $5,899,757,400 in aid to local school districts according to LFB. Spending on school choice was $192 million, or about three percent of that total. To make the claim that school choice is undermining public school spending is one of the biggest fallacies regularly repeated by choice opponents.

Perhaps the most misleading aspect of Pope’s summary of the information is in the $42 million reduction that is attributed to Milwaukee. Pope presents this as if this is continual reduction that requires Evers’ extremist position of capping enrollment in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to address.

In reality, this reduction is already disappearing over time. Indeed, quoting Pope’s own LFB memo “Under Provisions of 2013 Act 20, (the percentage of this aid reduction) will be reduced by 3.2 percentage points each year, until no aid reduction is made beginning in 2024-25.” In other words, the legislature has already taken steps to reduce by $42 million the aid reduction that Pope is discussing, yet this appears nowhere in her press release.

That aid reductions should occur for students that a district is no longer educating seems to be common sense. Districts that have students whose families make the decision to attend a private school that works better for them should not still see the school they left rewarded with tax dollars earmarked for that student. As we have noted on several occasions, Pick and Save does not continue to receive money from you if you choose to shop at Aldi. Pope believes public schools should be exempt from the performance-improving benefits of competition. We do not. Moreover, districts have the ability to raise property taxes to make up for the loss of state aid, and many do, for better or worse.

Also neglected from Pope’s press release is the reality that school choice saves Wisconsin money overall. Students in independent charter schools and those using a voucher are funded at a substantially lower level than students in traditional public schools throughout the state. Independent charter schools receive $8,619 per student and voucher students receive $7,754 (K8) or $8,400 (9-12) per student. Public school students are funded at a rate more than $2,000 higher on average throughout Wisconsin. According to recent research from EdChoice, this leads to a savings of $800-1,200 per student in the choice program. Over the lifetime of the programs, Wisconsin has realized a benefit of more than $345 million from school choice. I’d wager some of that boon was poured back in to the public school system.

Keith Axline:

Online privacy is important for everyone, not just tinfoil hat wearers. First, it’s more in line with what a user’s expectation is when they browse the internet. Not many people understand all the tracking that happens by default.

Second, it’s more how we operate in real life. You don’t have someone following you around from store to store writing down every product you touch or look at, and then block you from entering other stores until you watch an ad.

Third, the principled view of not giving away valuable data to companies for them to sell is beneficial for everyone. Yes, in some cases you happily give up your data to sites that you enjoy so that they can stay in business. But you can’t opt-in to the sites you choose until you put the tools in place to block every site.

By the end of this post, you’ll be leaving much lighter footprints in the internet forest. Certainly more so than your average web surfer. We’ll switch up your browser and search engine, add some plugins to block surveillance, and get a little technical with DNS servers.

Don’t worry, the faster browsing and smug satisfaction of being a savvy internet user will make up for the discomfort of changing your routines.

Kira Davis:

For parents (and students) who might be out there right now fretting over college tuition and applications and aren’t rich Hollywood players , here are some college alternatives to consider. Free yourself from the “labels” of elite institutions. If they’re thinking of becoming a lawyer (but seriously, how many more of those do we need??) or an engineer then obviously you’ll need to pursue institutional options. But if they’re just not sure about their paths and/or might have skills that are immediately marketable, here are some ideas to give some serious thought. I’ve seen plenty of parents and students take these paths, and almost to a person they are far, far ahead of their peers in terms of earning, achievement and job satisfaction.

Teach English in a foreign country. I headed straight to college from high school but I had a few friends who headed overseas to teach English to the students of hopeful and/or rich parents desiring to give their kids an advantage by learning Western culture. Typically, you don’t need any type of special training or education. Often times living expenses are paid for. It’s a great way to earn for a year or two and learn about different cultures and lifestyles firsthand. It’s basically getting paid to be educated!
The military. Somewhere in the last few decades the idea that the military was the “last resort” for people who are too dumb or too poor for college became pervasive. This idea couldn’t be further from the reality that military service can be a fantastic conduit to a successful and fulfilling career. Military life teaches discipline and teamwork, two extremely valuable skills in the civilian job market. They’ll also educate you for free and provide healthcare and housing subsidies. There are a plethora of non-combat tracks to pursue that can lead to incredibly elite and specialized careers, including information tech, health services and other support personnel. You can pursue a lifetime career or serve for a limited amount of time and leave with a degree, money in the bank and the very distinguished resume enhancer of having served your country. It is a legitimate career path that boasts some of our greatest minds.
Charitable service. The Peace Corps, missions work through a religious organization, volunteering with a UN or WHO organization that provide healthcare and sustenance in third world countries — if you’ve got a child with a heart for serving others and a thirst for new experiences, it might be a great idea to look at volunteering for a fixed time. Again, often the basics are paid for and you’re learning skills in an intense environment that could offer an invaluable advantage in the job market back home. Also, the quickest and best way to find contentment in your own life and a perspective that makes you flexible and resilient is to see firsthand how challenging life is for most of the rest of the world. Like military service it is also a fantastic resume-enhancer. Few things are more valuable to potential employers than an employee who can easily shift gears and refocus when things get tough.
Work on a cruise ship. This isn’t for everyone, but it can be a great option for those who endeavor for careers in the arts. Cruise lines need entertainers and often hold mass auditions once or twice a year in port-of-call regions like California or Orlando. They’re always in need of comedians, dancers, singers, musicians and also production staff…pretty much any position in stage entertainment. Not only are your accommodations paid for but you’re also earning a competitive salary, one that often ends up being far and above the yearly income for a struggling artist on land. It can be an adventure and an opportunity to intimately connect with other artists who will no doubt be the one to lead you to more work once your cruise stint is over.
Take a gap year…or two. The bourgeois fantasy of a gap year includes travel and adventure, but it doesn’t have to be that. A gap year can just be taking some time off to simply work and get a better feel for what you want to do in the future. It’s also a great way for parents to help their kids when they aren’t in a position to pay for college tuition. You may not be able to pay for four years of college, but you can allow your child to continue to live at home rent-free, get any job they can find and then save their money to pursue something more fulfilling once they’ve figured out what it is. Don’t turn your nose up at a year or two behind the counter at McDonald’s. Some of the wealthiest people in America started right there.
Instead of paying for four years of college, pay for a couple of years of living expenses. A young friend of mine decided that she would like to pursue a career in film production. Her parents had some means to pay for schooling but they made her an offer — they would pay for a few years of college or pay for two years of reasonable living expenses and she could move to L.A. and start working her way up the food chain. She chose the latter, found some less than ideal roommates in L.A. and began volunteering for every crap job on every indie film set she could get close to. By the time the two years were up she had worked her way into a steady job in the industry, earned enough money to get her own place and is now a working executive producer in Hollywood for the independent film scene. If you’ve got a child who is disciplined enough to take on the challenge of forging their own way, this is a great alternative to college. There’s no replacement for real-world experience and some career paths aren’t really enhanced by a degree. In some industries, employers only need to know you can do the job. If you can earn while you learn, you should!
Trade school. A Gender Studies degree might get you a job teaching Gender Studies to other Gender Studies students but more likely (statistically speaking) it will get you a minimum wage job to help pay the bills while you search for another career path. You know who does work steadily and lucratively? Plumbers. Electricians. Morticians. Mechanics. Even if you’re the type of snob who feels those jobs aren’t “elite” enough, don’t worry…there are actually elite positions in most trade jobs that can satisfy that perverse need. Someone has to fix the toilets at Buckingham Palace. The Queen poops too!
Nothing. Let your kid figure out how to pay for school or travel or whatever all by herself. Offer her advice on budgeting, living frugally, give her a timetable for complete independence and then back away. The notion that we parents are obligated to pay for our kids’ higher education is a big part of our debt problem in America. Your children are in the prime of their lives. They have energy to burn. They can go to school, work/party through the night and get up the next day to do it all over again. You remember the days! You (and I) on the other hand are nearing retirement age. Our window for earning enough money to carry us through our later years is closing quickly. There’s nothing wrong with just letting your child pay their own bills and choose their own path while they’re in the physical position to be able to work hard, work long and work smart. Let them take advantage of their youth and concentrate on padding your future so you don’t overly-burden them down the road with the financials of your care just as they’re incurring their own family financial burdens. I know it’s a shocking thought, but it’s really not that crazy to about 99% of the rest of planet Earth. The idea that we’re supposed to provide every single privilege for our kids no matter the cost is embarrassingly Western and relatively new. I’m not saying you have to choose this option, I’m just telling you it is an option and there’s nothing wrong with it.

Katarzyna Szymielewicz:

Your online profile is less a reflection of you than a caricature.

Whether you like it or not, commercial and public actors tend to trust the string of 1s and 0s that represent you more than the story you tell them. When filing a credit application at a bank or being recruited for a job, your social network, credit-card history, and postal address can be viewed as immutable facts more credible than your opinion.

But your online profile is not always built on facts. It is shaped by technology companies and advertisers who make key decisions based on their interpretation of seemingly benign data points: what movies you choose to watch, the time of day you tweet, or how long you take to click on a cat video.

Many decisions that affect your life are now dictated by the interpretation of your data profile rather than personal interactions. And it’s not just about advertising banners influencing the brand of the soap you buy—the same mechanics of profiling users and targeting messages apply to political campaigns and visa applications as much as supermarket metrics. When advertising looks like news and news look like entertainment, all types of content are profiled on the basis of your data.

So what story does your data tell about you?

Tom Gould:

A petition to remove Emeritus Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy John Finnis from teaching has attracted three hundred and fifty signatures in five days. Finnis has been accused of having “a long record of extremely discriminatory views against many groups of disadvantaged people”, including the LGBTQ community. Finnis co-teaches a series of seminars for postgraduate students who choose to take the jurisprudence and political theory course in the BCL or M.Jur degree.

Remarks highlighted by the authors of the petition as particularly discriminatory include a comment from his Collected Essays in which he suggests that homosexual conduct is “never a valid, humanly acceptable choice and form of life” and is “destructive of human character and relationships” because “it treats human sexual capacities in a way which is deeply hostile to the self-understanding of those members who are willing to commit themselves to real marriage”. This essay was published in 2011 but refers to arguments he made in a previous essay from 1994.

The essay also argues that “just as a cowardly weakling who would never try to kill anyone, yet deliberately approves of the killings of innocent people in a terrorist massacre, has a will which violates the good of life, so even a person of exclusively and irreversibly homosexual inclination violates the good of marriage by consenting to (and deliberately approving) non-marital sex acts such as solitary masturbation”.

The 1994 essay entitled “Law, Morality and Sexual Orientation” claims that “copulation of humans with animals is repudiated because it treats human sexual activity and satisfaction as something appropriately sought in a manner that, like the coupling of animals, is divorced from the expressing of an intelligible common good – and so treats human bodily life, in one of its most intense activities, as merely animal. The deliberate genital coupling of persons of the same sex is repudiated for a very similar reason.”

Nathan Robinson:

There are so many bad opinions crammed into this single Wall Street Journal op-ed by Yale professor David Gelertner that I cannot hope to address them within the finite period of a human lifespan. Primarily, Gelertner argues that hatred of Donald Trump is hatred of America. Here is a large chunk of the op-ed for you to read and enjoy with me:

Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared. The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says “Empty.” The left is beaten. For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful. Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know do hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins. They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of… In truth they are dumb as sheep. Mr. Trump reminds us who the average American really is… He might be realigning the political map: plain average Americans of every type vs. fancy ones. [T]he Trump-hater truly does hate the average American—male or female, black or white. Often he hates America, too.

My God! Where does one start? I suppose it’s futile to insist that despite writing a book on what a loathsome person Donald Trump is, I do not, in fact, hate America. Or to point out that there are many people who dislike Trump and go to church. Or to show that there’s no such thing as having your “only ideology” be “getting the job done,” because everything depends on which job you choose to do. Or to note that there are many extremely valid reasons to be horrified by Trump, like his intentionally malicious immigration policies and his deadly and irresponsible rejection of climate science. Or to deconstruct this idea of the “average American,” who always seems to be a goddamn farmer. (Besides, there are countless farmers, machinists, and factory hands who also think the president is a cruel and stupid man.) Perhaps I might note that I like vulgarity and bluntness, mistrust intellectuals, and enjoy Simple Ideas That Work. (Though I do find “American Exceptionalism” to be a downright silly notion. The only respect in which America is exceptional is that it is exceptionally convinced of its own exceptionalism.)

Andrew Gelman:

As a person who’s taught at a number of universities for quite a while, I have some opinions about this.

I know that when I teach my SET scores better be excellent or else I will have some problems in my life. And so I put some effort into making my students like me (Trust me, it’s a challenge) and perform a burlesque of hyper-competence lest I get that dreaded “doesn’t appear to know the material” comment. I give them detailed information about the structure of the exam. I don’t give them tasks that they will hate even when I think it would benefit certain learning styles. I don’t expect them to have done the reading*.

Before anyone starts up on a “kids today are too coddled” rant, it is not the students who make me do this. I teach the way I do because ensuring my SET scores are excellent is a large part** of both my job and my job security. I adapt my teaching practice to the instrument used to measure it***.

I actually enjoy this challenge. I don’t think any of the things that I do to stabilize my SET scores are bad practice (otherwise I would do it differently), but let’s not mistake the motives.

(For the record, I also adapt my teaching practice to minimize the effects of plagiarism and academic dishonesty. This means that take-home assignments cannot be a large part of my assessment scheme. If I had to choose between being a dick to students who didn’t do the readings and being able to assess my courses with assignments, I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat.)

But SETs have some problems. Firstly, there’s increasingly strong evidence that women, people of colour, and people who speak english with the “wrong” accent**** receive systematically lower SET scores. So as an assessment instrument, SETs are horribly biased.

Arthur Laffer and Steve Moore:

The Illinois crisis is so severe that paying the promised pensions would require a 30-year property-tax increase that would cost the median Chicago homeowner $2,000 a year, according to a study from three economists at the Chicago Fed. Not a penny of that added tax money would pay for better schools, police, roads, hospitals or libraries. Already, Illinois’s property taxes are among the country’s highest.

The pension problems have gotten so bad because state lawmakers don’t dare to stand up to powerful government unions. Consider the legendary California Teachers Association, which collects some $240 million a year from its 325,000 members and about 28,000 nonmembers who have been forced to pay fees. The CTA is the most influential political force in Sacramento. It spent twice as much on politics from 2000-10 as the next largest donor—also a government union, the California State Council of Service Employees.

Janus will allow teachers and other government employees to stop funding the union if they oppose its political goals. Under the old Supreme Court precedent, public workers could choose not to join unions, but in 22 states—including California, Illinois and New Jersey—they were required to pay “agency fees” to cover the cost of collective bargaining, including over the pensions now swamping state budgets. Janus has freed such workers from that obligation.

Related links:

Act 10.

Madison Teachers, Inc.

John Matthews

Peter Wood:

What’s to be done about the large and growing number of Americans who cannot repay their student loans? There are two new developments. The New York Times reports, “Senators Marco Rubio and Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill on Thursday that would prevent states from suspending residents’ driver’s licenses and professional licenses over unpaid federal student loans.”

And The Wall Street Journal explains, “For decades, bankruptcy judges refused to consider reducing student loans. That is now changing, and some judges are throwing lifelines to people struggling to repay their debt.”

The Rubio/Warren bill, though it comes from the oddest of political bedfellows, makes a fair amount of sense. Depriving debtors of the means to repay their debts never seemed the smartest way to collect what they owed. The NYT reported last November that it had found 8,700 cases of student loan defaulters being stripped of their professional licenses, a figure that “most likely understated the true tally.” Tennessee appears to be the worse state in which not to repay student loans. Between 2012 and 2017, it went after the licenses of 5,400 student loan debtors.

Before giving too loud a hurrah for Rubio and Warren, however, it is worth considering why states passed such laws in the first place. Some student loan debtors, for example, do have the means to keep up with their repayments and simply choose not to. I’ve encountered several such individuals in the last few years—encountered because they boasted about it. What leverage does a state have to make such deadbeats pay up?

Alan Borsuk:

But look at other aspects of all this.

Mental health for students, running the spectrum from more routine problems to the extremes of the Florida shooter, have been getting more attention recently than in previous years. The bad news is that the overall problem appears to have grown. The good news is that more help might be in the offing. Shouldn’t that be an urgent goal?

There were many indications that the Florida shooter was unhinged, dangerous and open about wanting to shoot up a school. There were specific calls to authorities about him. They brought no helpful response. Wouldn’t improving the effectiveness of systems for dealing with people such as him be a good investment, better than putting more guns into schools?

How about more effort to stabilize the lives of the many children who live in very troubled circumstances? Moving all the time, unsure where food or shelter is coming from, shifting from one family setting to another or lacking stable adult connections. The Florida shooter (yes, I’m intentionally not using his name) fit some of that description.

At the risk of alienating just about everybody, permit me to say a few words about our general culture. What do kids take in every day? They learn from the world around them, starting from the earliest days after birth and never stopping. How do people around them talk to each other? What’s life like at home? What are they seeing on television, on all their different screens, in the recreation activities they choose, in the social interactions around them?

If it’s rude, crude, violent and more, what surprise is it that some kids lean in those directions?

Related Satire – “Proud of Our Nation”, via “Anonymous”:

I am very proud of you all and our great nation that understands so well the need for GUNS in our American life! We have now learned to accept a ritual after each mass killing that goes from shock to prayers to outrage to intense introspection/national soul searching to debate in Congress to forgetting until the next incident. Whether the victims are grade schoolers, high schoolers, adult concert or movie goers and or minority gang members in places like Chicago i.e. irrespective of demographics or geography …from ‘sea to shining sea’, the format is now fortunately securely in place. Nor does it matter whether the victims are Congress members or gang members or the 60% of suicide victims who used a firearm…No matter, we patriots ARE secure!

And does the media ever profit from the killings along with ourselves from all of the increased viewers. When fellow Americans hear that overall crime rates in the USA are indeed down, we convince them that it is because of our guns. Instead of GUN regulations, we are fortunate that often more guns are accepted after each of these killings. Look at the attempts now to get guns into the hands of 10 year old hunters in WI, and access to every churchgoer in certain Southern states…perhaps in the future to all school teachers as well. After Vegas and Texas, the House Judiciary Committee then passed another gun owners rights bill to allow owners with state issued concealed weapons to carry them to any state that allows such weapons. We are sailing, brothers with now some 265 million guns in our nation, half of all of the civilian guns in the entire world….and growing. Well done, brothers & sisters!

Even with some 80% of the public wanting gun controls, our increasing bribes to Congressmen, even some Democrats ..over $50 million to Senators and last year alone the $31 million to Trumps campaign, has sure paid off! No worry about stopping our gun flow. Senator Richard Burr for example said after Las Vegas that “ tragic violence has absolutely no place in America”. Yet no worry. He has already received $6.986 million from us at NRA. Uh, huh! And the Supreme Court after a recent killing turned away two appeals from firearm advocates on banning assault weapons (And even if some day, real comprehensive gun control laws were passed, it would take our great country some 20 years to really see an impact on mass killings. No fear, brothers. By then another GOP administration would be in place to reverse any such legislation.)

True, we have convinced these Congressmen that we Americans are indeed a unique species of Homo sapiens. That even if nations like Canada and & Japan with so little gun violence have as many real mental health , domestic violence, suicide, isolated troubled youth and wealthy middle class crazies as we in America, our good propaganda (& $$) has convinced them that only in America do our people need weapons essentially available to all for protection AND to express publicly their illnesses and anger… And thank God, our DC leaders have committed their loyalty, not to their constituents, but first to us at NRA and our contributions!

And even a surprise to us faithful, assault weapons like AR-15s , and it appears even bump stocks, much less 100 round clips to turn them into full automatics, continue to be allowed and are circulating rapidly. We are looking now at some diversification for the future as we study the Second Amendment. Though many scholars believe it references only state militias, our good Supreme Court is convinced that any ordinary citizen has the ‘right to bear arms’. Why then would this not allow hand grenades & bazookas in our hands? Some day perhaps even nuclear devices in each home to protect ourselves?

It is indeed good times for us. Despite heavy human costs, we Americans are uniquely the most free in the world with our rightful many and growing number of ‘arms’. And we at NRA are highly profitable, and my annual compensation of $4 million as well as yours will continue to grow and grow! God bless America!

FIRE:

Every year, FIRE chooses the 10 worst colleges for free speech — and unfortunately, 2017 left us with plenty of options: Campuses were rocked by violent mob censorship, monitored by bias response teams, plagued by free speech zones, and beset by far too many disinvitation attempts. Although the number of colleges with the most restrictive speech codes has continued to decline, 90 percent of schools still maintain codes that either clearly restrict or could too easily be used to restrict free speech.

Today, we present our 2018 list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech. As always, our list is presented in no particular order, and it includes both public and private institutions. Public colleges and universities are bound by the First Amendment; the private colleges on this list, though not required by the Constitution to protect student and faculty speech rights, explicitly promise to do so.

A new feature of this year’s list is our Lifetime Censorship Award. This “honor” goes to the one college or university that is so frequently discussed as a contender for our annual “worst colleges for free speech” list that it deserves special recognition. This year, that school is DePaul University.

Are you a student or faculty member whose free speech rights are imperiled on campus? Submit a case to FIRE. Also, check out FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus to help you fight for free speech, due process, religious liberty, and more.

Jacob Hamburger:

Allan Bloom was an elitist. He saw himself as a champion of excellence in an age of vulgarity. While a professor at the University of Chicago between 1979 and 1992, he sought to immerse his students in only the most classic works of philosophy and literature. Someone looking to define the “Western canon” could do worse than to dig up his course syllabi. In his personal style, he embodied high culture nearly to the point of caricature. His friend Saul Bellow captured him in the novel Ravelstein as a man who wore expensive European suits, lived in a Hyde Park apartment lavishly decorated with French art, and bragged of listening to Mozart on a state-of-the-art stereo system. A lifelong Francophile, he made regular jaunts to Paris over the course of four decades. Yet Bloom insisted that for all his erudition, he was merely a product of America’s democratic promise. Well into his fifties, he often spoke of himself as a simple “Midwestern boy,” the Indiana-born son of Jewish immigrants who received the best gift a meritocratic democracy could offer: a great education. Bloom thought of himself as proof that, thanks to its universities, anyone can make it in America.

So when thirty years ago Bloom addressed a group of Harvard students and faculty as “fellow elitists,” he was not being entirely ironic. The quip came in response to controversies surrounding his 1987 best seller The Closing of the American Mind, which defended an idiosyncratic vision of higher education in the United States. Bloom saw the liberal education traditionally offered at exclusive colleges and universities as the fulfillment of democratic ideals, but condemned his fellow professors for having abandoned this crucial responsibility. Closing received an onslaught of criticism for its “elitism,” particularly from fellow academics such as Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, who also observed correctly that his book was at times rambling, historically sloppy and philosophically one-sided. Bloom in turn accused his critics of projecting their own intellectual privilege onto him. “‘Elite’ is not a word I care for very much,” Bloom explained. “It is imprecise and smacks of sociological abstraction.” But no matter how elites are defined—whether in terms of wealth, prestige or knowledge—it is clear that “bad conscience accompanies the democrat who finds himself part of an elite.” Bloom pushed back against this bad conscience by suggesting that academic elitism was in fact healthy for American democracy.

Like Tocqueville, whom he admired and cited incessantly, Bloom aimed to explore the ways in which the democratic principles of liberty and equality shape American society. Unlike the French aristocrat, however, Bloom based his observations on a far smaller sample: college students “materially and spiritually free to do pretty much what they want with the few years of college they are privileged to have—in short, the kind of young persons who populate the twenty or thirty best universities.” Bloom believed these students represented the best of a democratic society, mainly because they enjoyed an unparalleled form of liberty. One of the fundamental guarantees of democratic society is the freedom of self-determination, or the “pursuit of happiness.” Bloom saw the proper exercise of this freedom as something that a philosophical education can help teach—the pursuit of happiness, after all, presumably involves attempting to know what happiness is. An education in the humanities, like Chicago’s Core curriculum, allowed undergraduates to devote four years to literature and philosophy. Under the guidance of wise teachers and classic texts, they learned to challenge their most deeply held beliefs according to the highest standard of reason. This philosophical overhaul of the self, what Bloom referred to as “liberal education,” amounted to no less than the perfection of democratic autonomy. Not only, then, could elite college students choose a rewarding professional career after graduation, but more importantly, they had been given the most “authentic liberation” a democracy can provide.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:

Albert Shanker was a very good friend to The Concord Review almost from the very beginning in 1987. He wrote a number of letters, to the MacArthur Foundation and others, and he spent two of his New York Times columns on comments about the journal. In addition, at a national AFT convention, he scheduled a breakfast meeting for the AFT’s vice presidents, at which I was the only guest, invited to talk about The Concord Review. On that occasion, he told this story: When Jaime Escalante left Los Angeles for a new school in Sacramento, of course the local media took an interest in this nationally famous teacher. They interviewed students, and one ninth grade girl said he was a terrible teacher. “Tell us more!” said the media. And the girl said, “Well, I had a problem with algebra, and I went to Mr. Escalante. He kept me after school several days, and even kept me in on a Saturday morning.” “And what happened?” said the media. And she said: “Well, I finally got it, but he didn’t teach me anything. All he did was make me work!” This was a favorite story of Shanker’s and I heard him tell it again.

I am offering a new kind of professional development for secondary History and Social Studies teachers—one in which they will not be talked to or “taught” in the customary “professional development” way—but instead one in which they will work on serious History papers of their own. This is a new approach, but one which could increase the number of secondary students who will learn to do more of the academic expository writing which, by all reports, they now almost universally cannot do.

Will Fitzhugh
Founder, The Concord Review, Inc. [1987]
Varsity Academics® is our registered trademark.

===============

September 2017—A TCR Academy for Professional Development is offered to secondary History and Social Studies teachers to do the academic expository writing of History research papers themselves. This is new.

We seek $5,000 in Professional Development funds for each of 12 high school History and Social Studies teachers to attend the Pilot residential two-week TCR Academy where they will actually do a serious academic History research paper of their own from July 15 to July 27 in Boston in the Summer of 2018.

Dana Goldstein in The New York Times of August 2, 2017, reported that:
“Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress…The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves.”

Jay Mathews, Washington Post Columnist, reported on August 14, 2016, that: “Writing instruction in our schools is terrible. We need to fix it. A new study has found that U.S. schools emphasize the mechanics of writing instead of teaching students to engage with—and enjoy—such assignments…The results are distressing and show that the instruction students are getting—particularly in writing—is deeply inadequate.”

“Interestingly, the United States is home to a program that is, to my knowledge, the world leader in encouraging and assessing the kind of non-fiction writing that is now in greatest demand in the world: The Concord Review, run by Will Fitzhugh.”….Marc Tucker, National Council on Education and the Economy.

Many History teachers completed their college degrees and teacher preparation without ever having written a serious History research paper of their own. Part of the reason so few History term papers are assigned in American high schools is that teachers do not have either the experience or the confidence to provide students with the preparation in nonfiction reading and academic expository writing they need to write such papers.

Over the past four years, The Concord Review Summer Programs have provided academic expository writing instruction in preparing serious academic History research papers of their own for 79 students, from China, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, and from nine American states.

We propose to offer this same experience in writing to a dozen high school History and Social Studies teachers who will work on their own 6,000-word History research paper, with endnotes and bibliography, on a topic of their choice for two weeks in the Summer of 2018. Teachers will be asked to choose a topic, prepare an outline, and find ten sources before the course. During the program they will receive instruction on academic writing and have plenty of opportunity to read for and write on their paper, with the guidance and personal attention of our staff. They can then finish their paper after the course. This is a change from programs which talk about History and writing.

The goal is to give them (in some cases to remind them of) the real pride and satisfaction that comes from their own serious study on and careful writing about an interesting Historical topic that they choose. This should both inspire and prepare them for assigning serious term papers to their own students when they return to their schools.

The Concord Review has been, since 1987, the only academic journal in the world for the History research papers of secondary students, and has now published 1,252 essays in 114 issues, by students from 44 states and 40 other countries.

=================

“We have switched to courses that emphasize reading, research, and writing—you are an inspiration to all of us, keep up the good work.”

Paul Horton, History Teacher, University of Chicago Laboratory High School

“I very much like and support what you’re doing with The Concord Review. It’s original, important, and greatly needed, now more than ever, with the problem of historic illiteracy growing steadily worse among the high school generation nearly everywhere in the country.”

David McCullough, Historian

“Your visit to Singapore has stimulated a great deal of conversation about what our courses will look like next year as well as ways to better prepare our students for university/college. As a direct result of your visit, we are offering a semester course to high school students next year titled: “Writing a Research Paper.” Students will be expected to produce a major research paper at the end (c. 5,000 words).”

Richard Bisset, History Teacher, Singapore American School

“It’s hard for me to say adequately how much I admire and value what The Concord Review has accomplished. It has not only encouraged students to take the writing of history seriously, and significantly raised the level of quality of their historical analysis, but it has encouraged students to take their writing as seriously as their history. The Review is a jewel in the crown of American education.“

Stanley N. Katz, Director, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies,
Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

“As a physicist, I am accustomed to the many initiatives, such as math competitions and physics olympiads, instituted to recognize and promote interest and talent in the sciences among high school students. However, I have always felt that there was no equivalent mechanism to encourage and nurture students in the humanities, and to recognize their accomplishments. The Concord Review strikes me as a simple yet brilliant idea to help fill that gap, and as a very effective way to promote high standards and excellence in the humanities.”

Chiara R. Nappi, Theoretical Physicist, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study

“We wish instead to draw your attention to one of those little starbursts of intelligence sparkling over our dreary educational landscape: The Concord Review. The first and only academic journal dedicated to the work of high school students, The Concord Review has published essays on everything from the sinking of the Lusitania to the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the Harlem Renaissance. Appropriately enough, it is published out of the same town where, more than two centuries back, embattled farmers fired the shot heard ’round the world.”

Bill McGurn, Chief Editorial Writer, The Wall Street Journal

“The leading U.S. proponent of more research work for the nation’s teens is Will Fitzhugh, who has been publishing high school student [history] papers in his Concord Review journal since 1987…“

Jay Mathews, The Washington Post

“The Concord Review offers young people a unique incentive to think and write carefully and well…The Concord Review inspires and honors historical literacy. It should be in every high school in the land.”

the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Historian

“Interestingly, the United States is home to a program that is, to my knowledge, the world leader in encouraging and assessing the kind of non-fiction writing that is now in greatest demand in the world: The Concord Review, run by Will Fitzhugh. The Concord Review is a quarterly journal of history research done by high school students from all over the world [41 countries so far]. The quality of the thinking and writing in the papers that appear in The Concord Review is nothing short of remarkable.”

Marc Tucker, President, National Council on Education and the Economy

“We have been glad to have reprints of essays published in The Concord Review, submitted by our applicants over the years, to add to the information we consider in making admissions decisions…All of us here in the Admissions Office are big fans of The Concord Review.”

William R. Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Harvard College

“I applaud you for your dedication to improving education, lifting genuine standards of accomplishment, and maintaining your high ideals for our youth. Almost alone, you have fought to improve the teaching of history, while encouraging young people to write thoughtfully and clearly about the meaning of the past. Your devotion to history, to good writing, to serious reading, and to the potential of young people should be an inspiration to us all. I wish you the best as you continue to promote sound ideas about education. The Concord Review provides a splendid forum for the best student work in history…It deserves the support of everyone in the country who cares about improving the study of history in the schools.”

Diane Ravitch, Research Professor, New York University, Author of Left Back,
The Language Police, Reign of Error, etc.

“May I take this opportunity to congratulate you on your splendid journal, The Concord Review. That you are performing a valuable service to American education goes without saying. What I find most remarkable is that the journal is intrinsically worth reading as interesting historical writing and not merely as a celebration of young talent. The articles would delight any professor of history if submitted to an advanced undergraduate class, and the best are of graduate student quality. With each issue I feel better about the future of American education and of our profession.”

Eugene Genovese, late Founding President, The Historical Society

“I wanted to tell you how much I admire the energy, commitment, and vision that have led to The Concord Review. Many people talk about the need for new ways to encourage and engage students. You have actually created a new way to raise students’ standards and their expectations of themselves. Your project deserves study by teachers and students across the country. The Concord Review has done a great service not simply to the students whose essays it publishes but to the cause of American education as a whole. I hope it has a long and prosperous life.”

James Fallows, The Atlantic

“It remains the case that most high school students are never required to write a serious research paper. But now there are 30 years’ worth of Concord Reviews that open a window into an alternative universe. You want to see what high school kids can do? Spend some time with The Concord Review, and prepare to be inspired.”

Jeff Jacoby, Columnist, The Boston Globe

sSuzy Hansen:

When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadn’t heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. Class in America was not something we understood in any structural or intellectual way; class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss or acquisition of any of them could transform one’s future entirely.

In the end, I chose to pursue the new life Penn offered me. The kids I met had parents who were doctors or academics; many of them had already even been to Europe! Penn, for all its superficiality, felt one step closer to a larger world.

Still, I cannot remember any of us being conscious of foreign events during my four years of college. There were wars in Eritrea, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kashmir. US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. Panama, Nicaragua (I couldn’t keep Latin American countries straight), Osama bin Laden, Clinton bombing Iraq – nope.

I knew “Saddam Hussein”, which had the same evil resonance as “communism”. I remember the movie Wag the Dog, a satire in which American politicians start a fake war with foreign “terrorists” to distract the electorate during a domestic scandal – which at the time was what many accused Clinton of doing when he ordered a missile strike on Afghanistan during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I never thought about Afghanistan. What country was in Wag the Dog? Albania. There was a typical American callousness in our reaction to the country they chose for the movie, an indifference that said, Some bumblefuck country, it doesn’t matter which one they choose.

Bennett Murray:

“Each person only has a life, but if I had the chance to choose again I would still choose my way.”

They are the words of one of Vietnam’s most influential bloggers — known by her online pseudonym, Mother Mushroom — minutes before she was handed the shock sentence of a decade in prison. Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh directed her defiant comments at her 61-year-old mother, who was watching a live feed in a room next door as she was not allow into the courtroom.

The 37-year-old was accused of defaming Vietnam’s communist regime in her blogs and interviews with foreign media.

Ken Burns returns to take on Vietnam – ‘a war we have consciously ignored’
Read more
“I clapped my hands in the room, where 20 security officials looked at me with very angry eyes, but I was not afraid; I was OK, very proud of her,” said Nguyen Thi Tuyet Lan.

Arrested in October while attempting to visit another dissident in prison, Quynh, 37, has already spent nine months behind bars, in what her lawyer said were desperate conditions.

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She subsisted only on a diet of anchovies and spinach soup for the first seven months, and was denied both sanitary pads and underwear, Vo An Don said.

After Quynh was arrested on 10 October, her mother heard nothing about her whereabouts or wellbeing until a brief reunion in prison hours before her 29 June trial for crimes against the state.

The months had taken their toll on her daughter, Lan told the Guardian in a phone interview from her home in the southern coastal city of Nha Trang. Quynh appeared sickly during their meeting, she said.