Rory Linnane:

At the same time, the biggest reason funding for MPS has dropped, the report says, is that MPS doesn’t have as many students as it used to. That’s partly because there are fewer children in the city, and partly because of the growth of non-MPS schools, like independent charter schools and private schools that get tax-funded vouchers. When students leave MPS, the funding goes with them.

Mark Lisheron:

Add to that the district’s almost total lack of accounting for the $87 million referendum voters approved in 2020, with the final $3 million payout this year. Or the $772 million the district received from three COVID “emergency” bills, $506 million of that from the American Rescue Plan Act, which will allow the district to spend federal dollars through 2026.

“It’s like they looked at it and said ‘Let’s just shoot for the moon’ with this referendum, Andrekopoulos told the Badger Institute. “At some point, don’t you have to say ’No’?”

Linda Carnine, Susie Andrist, and Jerry Silbert

Project Follow Through was probably the largest study of educational interventions that was ever conducted, either in the United States or elsewhere. While it is now largely forgotten, at the time it embodied many of the hopes and ideals of those who wanted a more just and equitable society and believed that education had an important role to play in those endeavors. Follow Through emerged from President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” announced in his 1964 State of the Union address in Congress.

Project Follow Through was originally conceived as a service project that would extend the types of support provided in Head Start to students in the primary grades. When it became clear that the cost of such an endeavor would be very large, the purpose was changed to determining the most effective educational interventions for students from low-income households. The Office of Education developed a research design, called “planned variation.” In contrast to a carefully controlled laboratory setting, this design would involve the implementation of educational innovations in real-life settings, but in the very best way possible. Sponsors of these innovations were required to “provide the community with a well-defined, theoretically consistent and coherent approach that could be adapted to local conditions,” and implement a “total program, rather than a small fragment, with a resulting possibility for a major impact on the child’s life.” Participating districts received supplemental funding of $750 for each Follow Through student to support additional costs for aides, materials, and staff travel. In addition, all children were provided health and dental care as well as nutritious food through meal programs. In total, Follow Through served over 10,000 students from low-income households in 180 communities at a cost, at that time, of 500 million dollars, a research expenditure that will likely never again be matched.

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More.

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Alan Borsuk:

The approach is best known for emphasizing phonics-based instruction, which teaches children the sounds of letters and how to put the sounds together into words. But when done right, it involves more than that — incorporating things such as developing vocabulary, comprehension skills and general knowledge.

More:What is phonics? Here’s a guide to reading terms parents should know

The approach differs from the “balanced literacy” approach widely used in recent decades, which generally downplayed sounding out letters. One well-known balanced literacy approach, called “three-cueing,” will be illegal in Wisconsin in all public schools, charter schools and private schools taking part in the state’s voucher program as of this fall.  

What curriculums will be recommended? 

Good question. The law created an Early Literacy Curriculum Council with nine members, generally educators from around the state, to make recommendations. The council had a big job and got behind schedule. But it recently recommended four curriculums, generally ones regarded favorably by prominent “science of reading” advocates.

The state Department of Public Instruction has been critical of aspects of the council’s work, including saying that council members didn’t stick strictly to the requirements of the new law. DPI took the council’s recommendations, deleted one, and added eight to come up with 11 curriculum choices that it said meet the law’s requirements.

Some literacy council members and other advocates have criticized the DPI list for including programs that are not as good as the ones the council recommended.  

Can you give examples?  

Sure. “Into Reading,” by HMH (also known as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is a popular program. It is one of three programs now being used by schools in New York City, the largest district in the country. And Milwaukee Public Schools has been using “Into Reading” for a couple years. It is considered to meet “science of reading” standards, but some experts regard other curriculums as better.

The literacy council did not include “Into Reading” on its list. The DPI included it. For one thing, including it could lead to saving districts, including MPS, large sums of money by not putting them under pressure to get new textbooks and other materials.    

And then there is “Bookworms.” This curriculum has some distinctive aspects, and some advocates, such as well-known curriculum analyst Karen Vaites of New York, regard it highly and say schools using it have had good results. The literacy council included “Bookworms” on its list. DPI did not and said the program did not meet all the standards of the new law.  

——-

Politics and the taxpayer funded DPI.

Wisconsin DPI Reading Curriculum Evaluation list

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jean Mackenzie:

Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life. 

South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, beating its own staggeringly low record year after year. 

Figures released on Wednesday show it fell by another 8% in 2023 to 0.72. 

This refers to the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. For a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1. 

If this trend continues, Korea’s population is estimated to halve by the year 2100. 

Jill Barshay:

Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact, controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness. 

That’s the technical name for showing children how to break down words into their component letter sounds and then fuse the sounds together. In a phonemic awareness lesson, a teacher might ask how many sounds are in the word cat.  The answer is three: “k,” “a,” and “t.” Then the class blends the sounds back into the familiar sounding word: from “kuh-aah-tuh” to “kat.” The 26 letters of the English alphabet produce 44 phonemes, which include unique sounds made from combinations of letters, such as “ch” and “oo.” 

Wisconsin Public Radio’s Kate Archer Kent interviews Laura Adams:

mp3 audio. Transcript.

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

Last week, the nine-member ELCC submitted its recommendations: four curricula widely praised for their quality (Bookworms, Core Knowledge, EL Education, and Wit & Wisdom). Literacy leaders cheered the selections. Personally, I consider it the best state list we’ve seen.

Just two days later, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) issued a statement asking the Joint Finance Committee to approve a rather different list of 11 options… the list of curricula that earn “all-green” ratings on EdReports. Conspicuously omitted from DPI’s list: Bookworms, a curriculum with the most persuasive studies showing that it improves reading outcomes – but which earned a widely-questioned yellow review on EdReports.

The average quality of the DPI list was markedly lower than the ELCC list, something that even DPI acknowledged. Laura Adams of the DPI told CESAs,“The two different lists represent two different perspectives. The Council’s list represents a judgment of quality, while DPI’s list represents a floor of those materials that meet the requirements, even at a minimal level.”

Jill Underly didn’t attend the meetings, so she missed these conversations. Frankly, her absence from ELCC meetings speaks volumes. If DPI felt urgency about children’s reading success, or even about the review timelines, one would have expected Underly to make time for ELCC meetings. Underly’s late-breaking objections have not sat well with close watchers of the process.

Karen Vaites:

All eyes have been on Wisconsin, where politics threaten to stall promising curriculum improvement efforts. 

The Badger State’s Act 20 literacy bill was one of the bright spots in a flourishing national legislative phase. The bill had a refreshing focus on all aspects of literacy, and recognized the importance of curriculum in fostering change. Act 20 called for the convening of an expert Early Literacy Curriculum Council (ELCC) to identify a set of recommended ELA curricula; only these programs would be eligible for state subsidy.

The ELCC – which includes a high-performing superintendent, practitioners immersed in reading research, and dyslexia advocates whose children suffered under previous DPI choices – has real stakes in Act 20’s success. And the stakes are high: Wisconsin has the largest gap in reading outcomes for Black vs white students of any state. 

Last week, the nine-member ELCC submitted its recommendations: four curricula widely praised for their quality (Bookworms, Core Knowledge, EL Education, and Wit & Wisdom). Literacy leaders cheered the selections. Personally, I consider it the best state list we’ve seen.

Just two days later, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) issued a statement asking the Joint Finance Committee to approve a rather different list of 11 options… the list of curricula that earn “all-green” ratings on EdReports. Conspicuously omitted from DPI’s list: Bookworms, a curriculum with the most persuasive studies showing that it improves reading outcomes – but which earned a widely-questioned yellow review on EdReports.

The average quality of the DPI list was markedly lower than the ELCC list, something that even DPI acknowledged. Laura Adams of the DPI told CESAs,“The two different lists represent two different perspectives. The Council’s list represents a judgment of quality, while DPI’s list represents a floor of those materials that meet the requirements, even at a minimal level.”

——-

Jill Underly didn’t attend the meetings, so she missed these conversations. Frankly, her absence from ELCC meetings speaks volumes. If DPI felt urgency about children’s reading success, or even about the review timelines, one would have expected Underly to make time for ELCC meetings. Underly’s late-breaking objections have not sat well with close watchers of the process.

—-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Erin Geary:

The letter of the day is B: Bureaucracy, benefits, and billions

The school reading wars have raged since the 1800s and consists of two camps: Those who believe that children learn to read through phonics and those that believe that children read using a whole language approach. A third recent addition to the ongoing battle over how to teach reading skills is referred to as balanced literacy, which combines the best of both phonics and whole language.

In preschool and kindergarten after recognizing each letter of the alphabet both in lower and upper case, phonics teaches that letters have their own corresponding sounds and that some consonants can be blended to form new sounds. Children are not taught letter sounds in alphabetical order, rather pupils ate instructed in an order of hierarchal importance based on frequency. First, for example, teachers may start letter sounds based on each child’s name before moving on to the letters: s, t, p, n, i, and a. It’s quite easy to make numerous words from these initial letters, their sounds, and rhyming words—sit, pit, nit, sat, pat, sin, pin, tin, etc. Words can easily be deconstructed by their individual letter sounds then brought together as a word: S-i-t, sit.

Naturally, not all words in the English language can be decoded in this way, and these words are the ones known as sight words (e.g. the, she, said), which must be memorized. Teachers have been using the 220 Dolch sight words, which were considered the most frequently used sight words seen by readers (excluding nouns) for kindergarten through the second grade since they appeared in the 1930s. The Fry list, first appearing in 1957 and updated in 1980, focused its attention on the1,000 most frequently used words beyond grade two. Both lists need children to memorize rather than sound out words, which is a whole language approach.

Ryan Mcmaken:

In recent months, stories from both the legacy media and the independent media have continued to pile up on how undocumented foreign nationals—also known as “migrants” and “illegal aliens”—are able to take advantage of a vast network of taxpayer funded benefits in daycare, medical care, housing, and more. 

For example, both the New York Post and Denver Post report that these foreign nationals have “overwhelmed” the Denver Health hospital system in Denver, and that the situation is “unsustainable.” Meanwhile, public schools report classrooms are filling up quickly with the children of these foreign nationals. Denver is hardly alone. The New York Post notes that both the City of New York and the state government have expanded local welfare programs, including pre-paid credit cards, to further ensure that migrants continue to receive cash and resources from American taxpayers. This is in addition to the approximately 66,000 foreign nationals who are housed in hotels and shelters, care of both New York and federal taxpayers. USAToday reports that colleges “across the country” are receiving millions in taxpayer money to offer housing to migrants at no charge. Chicago’s mayor is bragging he’s giving away $17 million in taxpayer-funded giveaways to “asylum seekers” who are presently living off the sweat of the taxpayers in government shelters. This, of course, is just a downpayment on many more planned giveaways. 

Just how much in taxpayers’ resources is going to foreign nationals? It’s difficult to estimate for a number of reasons. The spending is done through numerous different government agencies at various levels of government. Moreover, much of the money if filtered through non-profits (i.e., “NGOs”) that are labeled “charities” but are simply adjuncts of the regime. 

Once we add up $1 billion here and $77 million there, after a while we’re talking about real money, and one thing becomes abundantly clear: the regime and its partners are subsidizing the influx of foreign nationals who are promised a variety of both cash and in-kind benefits. It must also be noted that, contrary to certain myths, the largesse is not reserved for only the so-called “illegal aliens.” Legal immigrants can take advantage of the generous and well-funded American welfare state even more readily than can the undocumented migrants.

Jessica Winter:

When Tiffany Hammond was growing up in Texas, in the nineteen-nineties, other children teased her for how she spoke: she talked too softly, she talked in a monotone, she paused too long between words, she didn’t talk enough, she talked to herself. “Something’s wrong with her head,” kids would say. She was always fidgeting with pens or Troll dolls. She tried to connect with her peers by taking on their interests as her own—the Goosebumps series of scary novels, the N.B.A.—but the attempts backfired, as when she printed out an N.B.A. schedule, laminated and color-coded it, and brought it to school as a conversation piece. She kept a notebook on “how to be human,” which included tips such as remembering to staple your worksheets at the top-left corner and acquiring a pair of the correct Filas. Nothing worked. “I wondered why I didn’t have friends, or if I even deserved friends,” Hammond said. She dreaded school so much that, on a few mornings, when she was supposed to be walking there, she instead tried to make it to her great-grandparents’ house, some twenty-five miles away.

Liyan Qi:

China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago.

The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments around the world feared overpopulation would hold back economic growth. A Moscow-trained missile scientist led the push for China’s policy, based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.

Four decades later, China is aging much earlier in its development than other major economies did. The shift to fewer births and more elderly citizens threatens to hold back economic growth. In a generation that grew up without siblings, young women are increasingly reluctant to have children—and there are fewer of them every year. Beijing is at a loss to change the mindset brought about by the policy.

Births in China fell by more than 500,000 last year, according to recent government data, accelerating a population drop that started in 2022. Officials cited a quickly shrinking number of women of childbearing age—more than three million fewer than a year earlier—and acknowledged “changes in people’s thinking about births, postponement of marriage and childbirth.”

Some researchers argue the government underestimates the problem, and the population began to shrink even earlier.

Denise-Marie Ordway

About half of U.S. states offer private school choice programs, which help families pay for private school. It’s a highly politicized, complicated issue involving multiple types of tuition assistance, hundreds of thousands of children and billions of taxpayer dollars.

It’s also an issue journalists need to examine closely. News coverage grounded in academic research is particularly important as more states consider starting these programs and lawmakers in states that have them push to expand.

How can journalists strengthen their coverage? We put this question to seven university professors who study private school vouchers and other private school choice programs. Here’s their advice:

1. Explain how the various private school choice programs differ.

In the U.S., the three most common private school choice programs are tuition vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, or ESAs. Journalists often refer to them all as “voucher” programs, but there are key differences.

“ESAs are radically different from school vouchers,” Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

In our roundup of research on private school choice, we briefly explain these three programs:

by Carolyn Jones • CalMatters

An Assembly bill introduced this week would require all California schools to teach students to read using the “science of reading,” a phonics-based approach that research shows is a more effective way to teach literacy.

AB 2222, introduced by Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, a Democrat from West Covina, is backed by Marshall Tuck, who ran for California superintendent of public instruction in 2018. Tuck is now the chief executive officer of EdVoice, an education policy organization. It’s also backed by the advocacy groups Decoding Dyslexia California and Families in Schools.

Many schools in California have already transitioned to the science of reading approach, but some are still using a method known as balanced literacy or whole language, which emphasizes sight recognition of words in addition to phonics. The battle over the best way to teach children to read has been heated, because the stakes are so high: strong literacy skills are linked to higher graduation rates, better employment opportunities, the chances of being incarcerated and the state’s overall economy.  

Carl Trueman:

The problems with the sexual revolution are embarrassingly obvious. A philosophy of sex that views it as recreational and focused on personal satisfaction tilts inevitably toward seeing the other person as an object to be used. That is why sexual liberation has not proved the gateway to a feminist utopia but has instead favored men. It has also further downgraded children to those who interfere with self-fulfillment. Human bodies do not do well when we use them in any way we wish, especially in the sexual realm. Active gay men are seventeen times more likely to develop anal cancer than their heterosexual counterparts. Even the government acknowledges that, though it is strangely coy about offering the obvious advice. It is hard to imagine the government blithely reporting that statistic relative to any other human activity without also strongly advising people to desist from the problematic behavior. And we have yet to see the full effect of the free-floating sexual life of no commitments on that other current health problem: loneliness. I’d wager it will intensify, not mitigate, the problem of late-life isolation and despair. And yet the revolution continues apace, with each catastrophe simply one more glitch for the experts to solve.

Human history indicates that the self-evident nonsense of an idea is seldom a barrier to it becoming the dominant philosophy of its age. That man is born free and is everywhere in chains is one. That sex is a cost-free, light recreation is another. And we are paying a heavy price for this sexual fantasy, with no sign as yet that our scientific experts are willing to step up and play the role of moral conscience on anything but those issues where they can safely affirm the tastes of the day, such as recreational drugs, fruit-flavored vapes, and alcohol.

Philip Greenspun:

So the poor kids are now likely to have both intensified poverty and intensified ignorance as factors in shortening their lives (plus the Biden-era flood of migrants, who are correlated with unemployment and incarceration for the low-skilled native-born).

The NYT journalists and editors don’t mention what happened in the one state where school closure was limited by the governor to about 3 months: Florida. Digging into their cited data source, characterized as a “national study” and with analysis “led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard”, it appears that Florida was ignored by the academic worthies (maybe anti-Science DeSantis suppressed data?).

Sweden recently showed a decline in PISA scores, suggesting that keeping schools open is just as bad for kids as closing them.

Pete:

The problem of collapsing world-wide birth-rates is a complex topic but I will state my thesis baldly at the beginning: there is a large overlap between the things that underpin long-standing worldwide birth-rate declines and the things that underpin our prosperity. As the biologist John Aitken has put it:- ‘The fundamental cause of human fertility decline is prosperity.’ Therefore, birth-rate declines are hard to undo and reverse because to unpick low-fertility risks also unpicking our prosperity too. Therefore, pronatalists face an uphill battle, to put it mildly. Pronatalism (a term used to describe advocates for policies geared towards increasing fertility rates) is nothing new but has gained greater salience in recent years due to rapidly rising old age dependency ratios across the OECD countries in particular. The Economist reports that the share of countries with pro-natalist policies has grown from 20% in 2005 to 28% in 2019. In any analysis of the merits or demerits of pronatalism it is important to differentiate between liberal and illiberal forms of pronatalism. In its illiberal guise, pronatalism can be motivated by an ugly ethno-nationalist undercurrent which views pronatalism as a means of avoiding what it perceives to be the evils of mass-immigration, which is seen in catastrophic terms as tantamount to ethnic replacement and racial/civilisational suicide. But this form of pronatalism is, at best, a fringe view in this country and I’m not going to waste my time critiquing a set of views which are not held by anyone with any real influence or power. 

My critique is aimed at the less sinister and more liberal form of pronatalism which holds sway over a greater swathe of policy-makers. There are bad-faith criticswho will try to collapse the two forms of pronatalism into one and pretend that all forms of pronatalism are inherently morally suspect, but this is not a view I subscribe to. My critique of liberal pronatalism is not that it is inherently morally problematic to utilise various policies to try to encourage more people to have children.  Pronatalism, in its liberal form, is a perfectly legitimate set of policy aims. My argument is pragmatic, not moralistic. My argument is that liberal pronatalism is simply not going to work. As the authors of Empty Planet’ explain:- ‘the “low-fertility trap” ensures that, once having one or two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm. Couples no longer see having children as a duty they must perform to satisfy their obligation to their families or their god. Rather, they choose to raise a child as an act of personal fulfilment. And they are quickly fulfilled.’

Lauren Gilbert:

In a discrete choice experiment in which bureaucrats in education were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones. For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism.

This may sound like an odd set of priorities, but both European and Latin American countries had similar priorities when they expanded their education systems to serve more than a small elite around the turn of the 20th century. The goal was not to produce scientists or entrepreneurs but to inculcate a reliable workforce that would support the state.

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Commentary

This is part of why I think modernity was born out of the Reformation and the response thereto. Education is always in danger of falling afoul of the state – either banned for any appreciable number of folks or for being required to emphasize the propaganda and justifications of the state. China, for instance, had everything needed for mass literacy – printing, a large scholar class, and even some reverence for written words. But instead the state used education largely to staff the bureaucracy on the basis of who could make Confucian piety sound the best and who had memorized the most Legalistic commentary. 

The Protestant Reformation, most notably in Scotland, has this radical idea that even the poor dirt farmers of society need to be literate and educated enough to understand holy scriptures to grasp Reformed doctrine. And that understanding had to be enough to end with a “credible profession of faith” the evidenced understanding and (at least in theory), not just vain repetitions. 

And this is part of why I think the West achieved so much, there really was an ideology of learning for a higher purpose and enough teachers bought that they were dealing with the immortal souls of their pupils that the fundamentals could not be short changed merely to maintain discipline or orthodoxy.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

The coronavirus pandemic was a 2-year catastrophe for children. Students suffered through virtual schooling, quarantined teachers, and emotional misery. Academic results, the lowest this century, still have not recovered.

After sending $860 million to help Wisconsin public schools manage through spring 2021, Congress sent a final $1.49 billion to get students back on track.

The goal? Do whatever it takes to catch kids up by September 2024.

The problem? No one knows how schools have directed it or not directed it…until now.

The Privacy Dad:

This week saw a conclusion on the Danish Chromebook case. The result, long-awaited by father and privacy activist Jesper Graugaard, shows that the Danish Data Protection Authority has issued an injunction regarding the tracking of children’s personal data via Chromebook and Google platforms in schools.

From 1 August 2024 onwards, Danish schools will no longer be allowed to enable Chromebooks and Google platforms to collect students’ personal data for processing. Each municipality will need to give an indication of how they will comply to this injunction by 1 March 2024.

For activist Graugaard, the decision comes as a relief. He began his crusade against Chromebooks in school in his home town Elsinor over four years ago. While this week’s report makes no reference to Jesper’s initiatives, it is clear that this injunction could not have been issued without his tireless and sometimes solitary activism.

The Economist:

A year ago New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, proposed to adjust a state cap on charter schools, the publicly funded but privately run schools that have become a locus of innovation and controversy in American education. Ms Hochul’s plan was not ambitious, but it would have allowed dozens of new charter schools to open in New York City, where they already attract about 15% of public-school students and where thousands of families languish on waiting lists. But the governor’s plan drew fervent protests from fellow Democrats, including state legislators aligned with teachers’ unions. After a bruising fight, the governor had to settle last autumn for a small increase.

The row reflected a discouraging change in the politics of charter schools. Once a topic of unusual bipartisan enthusiasm, the schools have become divisive, particularly among Democrats. Barack Obama campaigned on charter-school expansion in 2008, but Joe Biden declared in 2020 that he was not enamoured of them. (His administration has nonetheless maintained federal funding for charters.) Republicans are more favourably inclined overall, and Donald Trump increased support during his presidency. But Republican priorities have shifted since George W. Bush, as president, and his brother Jeb, as governor of Florida, championed charters as beacons of racial equity. These days Republicans prioritise vouchers that allow parents to use taxpayer funds to enroll children in religious schools.

Thomas Lin:

Inside, the office is spare, pragmatic: just a computer, printer, chalkboard, papers and books, with few personal effects. The place where the magic happens seems not so much a physical location in space-time as a higher-dimensional world of abstractions in Viazovska’s mind.

Across the small table in her office, the world’s preeminent sphere-packing number theorist begins to recount her story in her usual matter-of-fact manner. Gradually, she breaks form and smiles, her eyes light up and lift upward, and she grows ever more animated while summoning memories from the past.

The earliest memory is of walking with her grandmother as a 3-year-old from her family’s utilitarian Khrushchyovka apartment building (named after the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) down a wide boulevard to a monument of the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, where her grandmother lifted her up and tossed her into the air. The late 1980s were a difficult time in the Soviet Union, said Viazovska, now 37. “It took people many, many hours to buy even basic things.” When a shop was low on goods like butter or meat, her mother felt bad about taking more for her three children and worried that others waiting in the long line would get angry at her. Her family didn’t have much, because there wasn’t much to have, but her parents made sure she and her sisters never went hungry or without heat. No stores carried nice clothes, but workers were sometimes offered a chance to win a stylish pair of shoes made in Czechoslovakia as an incentive for doing good work. The shoes might not fit, her mother explained to her, but if you won a pair, you could trade with someone who had won a pair in your size.

Nader Issa & Sarah Karp:

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says he supports ending the controversial Chicago Public Schools program that puts uniformed police officers in dozens of high schools.

The mayor said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ on Tuesday that he will give the Board of Education the green light to end its $10.3 million contract with the Chicago Police Department. CPS officials told principals in early January to prepare for the possible removal of police officers by next fall.

“The Board of Education is moving in the direction that I do support,” the mayor said in his conference room on City Hall’s fifth floor. “There is an intergovernmental agreement between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department. To end that agreement, there’s no qualms from me there.”

There have been years-long calls to remove police from public schools to stem what research has shown to be a disproportionate policing of Black students and children with disabilities that often lands kids in the criminal justice system for in-school disciplinary situations.

Prepared by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity Staff

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

The people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction. They’ve isolated themselves from everyday America’s realities to such a degree their views about what is and what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average American’s.

An analysis of their thinking, conducted for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, finds that on a variety of economic, social, and political issues, there exists a wide gap between how the top 1% – the Elites – think things should be and how the rest of America looks at them.

Elite thinking, as it’s termed, is under attack – and rightly so – for being out of step with the rest of the country. Below, we highlight some of the profound attitudinal differences between elites and average Americans:

• In a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of elites say they are financially better off today than in the past versus 20% of all Americans.
• Nearly six in ten say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
• More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of vital energy and food sources to combat the threat of climate change.
• In stark contrast to the rest of America, 70% of the Elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
• Two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
• Somewhere between half and two-thirds favor banning things like SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning, and non-essential air travel to protect the environment.
• About six of ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions—lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists.
• President Joe Biden enjoys an 84% job approval rating from this group – roughly twice as high as the general public.

Esther Dyson:

People worried about AI taking their jobs are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans.

We should automate routine tasks and use the money and time saved to allow humans to do more meaningful work, especially helping parents raise healthier, more engaged children.

We should know enough to manipulate ourselves and to resist manipulation by others.

Front-line trainers are crucial to raising healthy, resilient, curious children who will grow into adults capable of loving others and overcoming challenges. There’s no formal curriculum for front-line trainers. Rather, it’s about training kids—and the parents who raise them—to do two fundamental things.

First, ensure that they develop the emotional security to think long term rather than grasp at short-term solutions through drugs, food, social media, gambling or other harmful palliatives. (Perhaps the best working definition of addiction is “doing something now for short-term relief that you know you will regret later.”)

Second, kids need to understand themselves and understand the motivations of the people, institutions and social media they interact with. That’s how to combat fake news—or the distrust of real news. It is less about traditional media literacy and more about understanding: “Why am I seeing this news? Are they trying to get me angry—or just using me to sell ads?”

Unfortunately, many children today are exposed to bad training as the result of having divorced or missing parents or experiencing abuse, hunger, exposure to addiction, mental illness, racism or bullying. These children complete less school, commit more crime and suffer from more instances of addiction, obesity and poor health than their peers with loving relatives and helpful neighbors. Affected children then often pass these vulnerabilities to those around them, including their own children when they become adults. Everyone suffers (including future taxpayers).

Expecting and new parents are the ideal place to begin such training. They are generally eager for help and guidance, which used to come from their own parents and relatives, from schools and from religious leaders. Now such guidance is scarce.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

On Thursday two Catholic schools in Chicago’s western suburbs announced they are shutting down. St. Frances of Rome School in Cicero and St. Odilo School in Berwyn said that the 164 Invest in Kids scholarship students between them represented more than half of the schools’ enrollment. Without them, the schools no longer have enough students to keep their doors open.

In a statement on Thursday, the Archdiocese of Chicago said Catholic schools in the Windy City are facing a “financial cliff” after the loss of Invest in Kids. “We are doing all that we can to keep our schools open,” Catholic schools superintendent Greg Richmond said, but “these may not be the last closures in our archdiocese.”

On Friday Notre Dame Academy in Belleville announced that it’s closing, despite “devoted labor” aimed at boosting enrollment and raising funds. The school cited the financial hardships of aging buildings and the fact that the state discontinued Invest in Kids “that benefitted our school, especially those with financial need.”

Schools like these are often the best chance for low-income families to escape rotten union schools. At Berwyn North, the neighborhood where St. Odilo school is located, 30.8% of students in third through eighth grade are proficient in reading and 18.5% in math. In the Cicero school district, 18.1% of third through eighth graders are proficient in reading and 9.8% in math. Parents will now have to send children back to these failure factories. (This data comes from the Illinois Assessment of Readiness via the Illinois Policy Institute.)

Sarah Karp:

Blackburn and Presswood are two Black mothers in the middle of an intensifying debate about school choice, the system that allows Chicago parents to send their children to charters, magnets and selective enrollment schools, rather than be tethered to the school in their attendance boundary.

The Chicago Board of Education wants to undo that system. Leaders said it is built on a foundation of structural racism and makes inequality worse. But changing a system that some parents see as creating the only viable options for their children will be difficult and complicated. This is especially true in the Black community. CPS data shows that a third of Black students go to charter, selective enrollment or magnet schools — more than any other racial or ethnic group in the district.

Middle-class and upper-middle-class Black families in most urban cities, including Chicago, live in low-income neighborhoods far more often than white and Asian families of the same economic status, according to a Stanford study. School choice has provided a way for these Black families to escape the neighborhood schools that have historically suffered from disinvestment.

Some city leaders and school board members, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, know this conundrum well. They are among the many that trek across the city to take their children to either selective enrollment or magnet schools.

The stories of Blackburn and Presswood illuminate this complicated issue. It is not only about how money is allocated, they say, but also about how parents and students are treated and feel about their schools.

Here’s Paul Ehrlich in 1970 saying that the government needs to become increasingly tyrannical to stop child birth.

Says the gov’t should use the FCC to force negative depictions of large families and eventually “throw you in jail if you have too many” children. pic.twitter.com/R7iOB2PBbO

— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) January 3, 2023

Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt:

It is now widely accepted that an epidemic of mental illness began among American teens in the early 2010s. What caused it? Many commentators point to events in the USA around that time, such as a particularly horrific school shooting in 2012. But if the epidemic started in many nations at the same time, then such country-specific theories would not work. We’d need to find a global event or trend, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis doesn’t match the timing at all, as Jean Twenge and I have shown.

In our 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and I presented evidence that the same trends were happening in Canada and the United Kingdom—not just the rise in depression and anxiety, but also the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.” It seemed that all the Anglo nations were setting up their children for failure in the same ways at the same time.

The Economist:

Fake birth certificates have long been a hot (if niche) commodity in China. In past decades couples would seek them out in order to get around the one-child policy. They could legally have two children if they were twins—or if their counterfeit papers stated as much. The one-child policy was loosened in 2016. But fake birth certificates remain in demand. Several hospitals are suspected of selling them. Some believe human-traffickers are the buyers. But investigators are eyeing another group: people who have babies via surrogates.

Surrogacy falls into a legal grey area in China. The state often says that the practice is banned; but there is no law against being a surrogate or hiring one. Yet doctors and hospitals that facilitate it are punished. Selling eggs, sperm or embryos are also crimes. And surrogacy contracts are not recognised by the state. That is where the bogus documents come in. A birth certificate is needed to obtain such things as health insurance, social security and household registration (see Chaguan). The fake ones allow non-biological children to officially be part of their new families.

James Lister:

The Madison School Board needs to take a hard look at the lessons of the last 10 years. The general functioning and the overall management of the school district have been poor and unprofessional. If you call the central offices, you seldom get ahold of a person or get a call back.

Teachers are mistreated and disrespected by students and administrators. No wonder so many quit the profession or retire as soon as possible. Disruptive students ruin lessons and intimidate classmates based on the erroneous theory that we are helping disruptive students by leaving them in the classroom when they are highly agitated. They have very low consequences for poor behavior.

The School Boards that hired the last two superintendents are responsible are taking an excellent district and driving it into the ground by hiring poor superintendents.

No, we should not return to the 1950s and ’60s when classes were in rows and students never spoke. Yet we must reinstate self-discipline and respect for all people in our schools where hard work and learning are cherished. Parents must be responsible for the behavior of their children and support teachers.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

CJ Szafir:

Despite having a new liberal majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused this month to hear a challenge to the state’s school-choice programs. The lawsuit, supported by the Minocqua Brewing Co.’s progressive super PAC, would have deprived more than 60,000 students of funding. The episode carries a lesson for advocates of education freedom.

Families and school leaders were more engaged. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s brief against the lawsuit represented 22 clients, including parents and private-school leaders. Parents and students spoke out. “The new Supreme Court case will be devastating to all families . . . because it would take away opportunities from children who can’t support their education through a public school system,” Sherlean Roberts, a senior at Marquette University, told us. She attended a charter school in Milwaukee and will be the first in her family with a college degree.

Wisconsin began its experiment with school choice in 1990 with a bipartisan voucher program, enrolling 341 in secular private schools in Milwaukee. The state expanded the program to include religious schools in 1998, private schools outside Milwaukee in 2011 and 2013, and special-needs students in 2016.

MB Matthews

As we survey the American landscape, we cannot help but notice that just about everything has been corrupted by the left.

The justice system has been corrupted by partisan politics to the point where Republicans and conservatives are persecuted and prosecuted at a level far higher than anyone else.  We on the right can reliably depend on being prosecuted for “misgendering,” contributing to conservative causes, being a Christian or a Jew, speaking out against the barbaric transing of children, defending ourselves with a firearm, and not being a Democrat.  We can depend upon getting arrested for protesting peacefully as the corrupt “Justice” Department singles us out for jail, bankruptcy, or keeping us off election ballots, while really destructive rioters go free.

Medical research has been corrupted by the deliberate downgrading of meritorious research that just so happens to be at odds with the latest leftist perversion du jour.  For example, there are research grants for hamster fights.

Elections have been corrupted. Mail-in ballots, demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to fraudulent inflation of Democrat votes, are ready for the next fraud. Dead people vote; people vote multiple times; non-residents vote in other states; and phony ballots are printed and signed with the same handwriting, then run through counting machines multiple times. Computer problems pop up so as to skew the vote.

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..

Josh Cowen:

First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory lenders in the mortgage sector. These schools are either pop-ups opening to cash in on the new taxpayer subsidy, or financially distressed existing schools desperate for a bailout to stay open. Both types of financially insecure schools often close anyway, creating turnover for children who were once enrolled.

And the voucher results reflect that educational vulnerability: in terms of academic impacts, vouchers have some of the worst results in the history of education research—on par or worse than what COVID-19 did to test scores. 

Those results are bad enough, but the real issue today is that they come at a cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments. Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to pass vouchers have had to slow spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.

That’s because most new voucher users were never in the public schools—they are new financial obligations for states. The vast majority of new voucher beneficiaries have been students who were already in private school beforehand. And for many rural students who live far from the nearest private school, vouchers are unrealistic in the first place, meaning that when states cut spending on public education, they weaken the only educational lifeline available to poorer and more remote communities in some places. That’s why even many GOP legislators representing rural districts—conservative in every other way—continue to fight against vouchers.

Wall Street Journal:

What if you could create public schools that are racially and economically diverse with 90% of children reading at grade level? That’s the profile of a handful of selective-enrollment schools in Chicago that have been a success for many parents. Instead of replicating the model, the Chicago Public School system (CPS) wants to end it.

The Chicago school board last week passed a resolution that endorses phasing out selective enrollment. The purpose would be to “transition away” from test-based enrollment policies “that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools,” the board said. That would cover Chicago’s 11 selective high schools that rank academically among the best in the state and nationwide.

The schools are a beacon for children from all neighborhoods, and admission is weighted to allocate spots among different income groups. The idea is to bring in high achievers from all backgrounds, ensuring that children from difficult circumstances can thrive. At Jones College Prep High School, 91% of students read at grade level. At Northside College Prep, 92% do, according to Wirepoints and the Illinois State Board of Education.

But Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson sees the success of black and Hispanic students at selective-enrollment schools as a threat. “When those students succeed at a selective enrollment, particularly black students,” Mr. Johnson said in a 2018 conversation, “what ends up happening is all other black students who don’t meet those same standards get shamed. . . . ‘See, so and so made it out, what’s your problem?’”

By Sue Loughlin

Under a new law, HEA 1558, the state of Indiana is mandating instruction and curriculum that aligns with the science of reading; use of Reading Recovery must be phased out by fall of 2024.

Science of reading is a methodology that uses direct, systematic use of five elements in literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

It is based on research about how brains actually learn to read.

The law says schools may not adopt curriculum based on the “three-cueing” model, which uses context, pictures or syntax clues for literacy instruction.

Teresa Stuckey, VCSC executive director of elementary education, says that Reading Recovery is considered three-cueing under the changes.

“The research is showing (three-cueing) doesn’t fit with the way children’s minds work, the way the brain processes,” she said.

The district has 24 Title 1 reading teachers, or interventionists, who use Reading Recovery part of the day.

———

Madison has long used Reading Recovery, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ross Pomeroy:

The average number of children per family in the United States has fallen dramatically, from seven in 1800 to fewer than two in 2018. That’s good news for kids’ cognitive development, suggests a recently published study.

Over the past few decades, scientific research has shown that children in larger families perform worse in school, score lower on cognitive tests, and attain fewer years of education than kids in smaller families. Researchers theorize that additional children stretch parental resources thin, leaving parents with less time, energy, and money to devote to their kids’ development. For example, parents might read to children less, not have the time to ensure school attendance, or lack the savings to pay for tutors or after-school programs.

Liz Essley Whyte:

Jessica Harris’s 15-year-old daughter was walking to her school bus in London, Ky., last month when a classmate offered her a piece of red candy.

The square-shaped sweet seemed harmless at the time to Harris’s daughter. But it turned out it contained a form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the intoxicating ingredient in cannabis plants, and it sent her to the hospital.

An explosion of products containing THC and similar chemicals—some of them in kid-enticing forms such as candy or gummy bears—is sending children to emergency rooms across the country and has federal and state regulators grappling with how to contain it. Many of these products face little to no restrictions, because their creators obtain their intoxicating compounds not from marijuana but from hemp, which Congress legalized in 2018.

Calls to poison-control centers concerning these newly popular hemp-derived cannabinoids boomed over the past several years, from four in January 2021 to hundreds every month of 2022 and 2023 for which there is data, according to America’s Poison Centers. More than half of those calls concerned children. Reports of adverse events from these products to the Food and Drug Administration have also increased.

Jason Riley:

That advice, more popularly known as the “success sequence,” is often credited to research done by Brookings Institution scholars Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, though others have made similar observations. In his recent book, “Agency,” Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute writes that the message “has attracted many admirers because of the simplicity of the three steps that young people, even if born into disadvantaged circumstances or raised by a young single parent, can themselves control and take in their lives.”

The effort nevertheless faced significant backlash from detractors who accused then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg of stigmatizing teen pregnancy and pushing a “moralistic, conservative agenda to revitalize marriage,” Mr. Rowe writes. Mr. Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, ultimately abandoned the effort. Public moralizing has since fallen further out of favor and been replaced by a kind of self-congratulatory nonjudgmentalism. In today’s New York, you’re likely to see ads for free syringes and directions to “safe” injections sites for junkies, even as drug overdoses have reached record levels.

We could use more of that moralizing from public officials, whether the issue is solo parenting, substance abuse or crime. The success sequence works to keep people not only off the dole but also out of trouble with the law. High-school graduates and children raised by both parents are much less likely to end up in jail. “Virtually every major social pathology,” political scientist Stephen Baskerville writes, “has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty.”

James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley:

The Jehovah’s Witnesses have long preached that going to college is a waste of time because the world as we know it is going to end soon. “No doubt, school counselors sincerely believe that it is in your best interests to pursue higher education,” advised the faith’s official publication a few years ago. “Yet, their confidence lies in a social and financial system that has no lasting future.”

It would be interesting to know how soon Americans actually think the world is going to end. A growing number of secular progressives have begun echoing the apocalyptic rhetoric of religious sects. Their views aren’t driven solely by fear of imminent environmental doomsday. They believe the whole “system” is broken and don’t want to bring children into a world plagued by structural racism, sexism and irreversible oppression. It is one reason campus protests are so common, with some spilling over into violence. According to this worldview, there’s no time for considered political persuasion.

But the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a point. If one thinks the world will run out of time to save itself from climate catastrophe in 2030, as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in 2018, then there isn’t much point in going to college or planning for the future.

Christopher Brunet:

Dr. Dybvig told Karlstack:

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.

Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’

By Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli

We at Fordham view this as a healthy development, both because we believe in the fundamental right of parents to choose schools that work best for their children, and because of the large and ever-growing research literaturedemonstrating that competition improves achievement in traditional public schools. That “competitive effects” are largely positive should be seen as good news for everyone, as all of us should root for every sector of American education to improve. And it means that the whole “school choice versus improving traditional public schools” debate presents a false dichotomy; we can do both at the same time. Indeed, embracing school choice is a valuable strategy for improving traditional public schools.

Yet, despite the amount of attention that school choice receives in the media and among policy wonks, politicians, and adult interest groups, the extent of actual competition in major school districts is not well understood. We were curious: Which education markets in America are the most competitive? And which markets have education reformers and choice-encouragers neglected or failed to penetrate?

Those questions prompted this analysis, conducted by David Griffith and Jeanette Luna, Fordham’s associate director of research and research associate, respectively. The study seeks to quantify the extent to which competition is occurring by estimating the number of students enrolled in charter, private, and homeschools in each of the nation’s 125 largest school districts in spring 2020 and then dividing that sum by an estimate of a given district’s total student population (which includes students in traditional public schools). The resulting quotient—the report’s measure of the competition facing a district—is the combined market share of all non-district alternatives. While this is not a perfect measure (we can’t account for inter-district open enrollment, for instance), it is as good an estimate as current data allow.

Robin Hanson

I’ve recently come to estimate that the world population and economy will suffer a several centuries fall, with innovation grinding to a halt, ended by the rise of Amish-like insular fertile subcultures, much like how Christians came to dominate the Roman Empire. And even though this hasn’t actually happened yet, my new estimate pushes me to recalibrate my respect. I not only want to respect such cultures more, I want guess which of their choices and features are most responsible for their coming success, to more respect those choices and features. And to contrast those with the features of others, to be respected less.

As a result, I’ve been watching many documentaries about various insular fertile subcultures, trying to get a feel for what it is that distinguishes them, and which of those distinguishing features we should credit for their successfully achieving persistent high insularity and high fertility. While they may not seem very impressive to my eyes according to my prior intuitive impressiveness scoring system, we all need to figure out how to change our scoring systems to assign them the much higher ratngs that their future success deserves. 

Robin Hanson So far I can see that I haven’t gotten very far; I still have much recalibration to do. I can see a lot of raw emotional energy due to adults being surrounded and respected by so many basically happy children, kids who are themselves happy due to being around so many other kids. I can see a strong communal bond and lack of resentment of communal obligations due to their pretty egalitarian practices and strong communal autonomy; each group of roughly a hundred can do what it wants, but does whatever that is together. Their isolation, limits on tech, and fundamentalist religion clearly serve well to insulate them and to make their basic policies seem beyond question. And just being typically very busy in activities that are clearly valued by associates seems important.

Ryan Grim:

What made the moment dramatically different, however, was that the Squad wasn’t isolated, but instead was part of a sizable group pushing back. Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota rose to slam the assault on Gaza, as did Reps. Andre Carson of Indiana, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, and Joaquin Castro of Texas.

As chair of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, McCollum had influence over U.S. foreign military aid. “The unrestricted, unconditioned $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid . . . gives a green light to Israel’s occupation of Palestine because there is no accountability and there is no oversight by Congress,” McCollum said. “This must change. Not one dollar of U.S. aid to Israel should go toward a military detention of Palestinian children, the annexation of Palestinian lands, or the destruction of Palestinian homes.”

Castro thanked Tlaib for her presence, agreeing with her statement, “My mere existence has disrupted the status quo.” He seemed to address Israeli leaders directly when he said that “creeping de facto annexation is unjust.” “The forced eviction of families in Jerusalem is wrong,” Castro said from the floor, offering what would have been an uncontroversial assertion most anywhere else, but that was a foreign one to the House floor.

David Blaska:

The teachers union laid down a gauntlet of demands — over two dozen! — before they would return, including (Surprise! Surprise!) that teachers union default: More Money, aka “hazard pay.” Socialist provocateur John Nichols had their back. When a former governor encouraged schools to reopen for in-class instruction, Comrade Nichols lit the match:

“Scott Walker is exploiting the pandemic to … attack teachers and their unions.”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: “Teachers and their unions” — always the progressive’s top of mind priority. Children? Schmildren! All the while, Wisconsin’s smaller school districts remained open or closed for only a couple of weeks. Nationally, schools in Republican states such as Florida and Iowa kept their schools entirely open.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The Economist:

Two and a half millennia ago, Socrates complained that writing would harm students. With a way to store ideas permanently and externally, they would no longer need to memorise. It is tempting to dismiss him as an old man complaining about change. Socrates did not have a stack of peer-reviewed science to make his case about the usefulness of learning concepts by heart.

Today a different debate is raging about the dangers of another technology—computers—and the typing people do on them. As primary-school pupils and phd hopefuls return for a new school year in the northern hemisphere, many will do so with a greater-than-ever reliance on computers to take notes and write papers. Some parents of younger students are dismayed that their children are not just encouraged but required to tote laptops to class. University professors complain of rampant distraction in classrooms, with students reading and messaging instead of listening to lectures

David Blaska:

Who is behind the lawsuit seeking to bring down Wisconsin’s school choice program that helps 52,000 low-income, often minority students, escape failing public schools? Guy named Kirk Bangstad. 

Killing school choice is written into the Democrat(ic) party platform. Obeisance to the teachers union and the one-size-fits-all government school monopoly is central to Woke progressivism. Easier to seize control. That is why the news media says little more than that Kirk Bangstad is a Minocqua WI-based contract micro-brewer of beers named after his heroes, like “A.O.C. IPA” and “Biden Beer.” Ran for political office as a Democrat. Unsuccessfully.

→ Of the top 10 schools in reading proficiency in Wisconsin that largely serve low-income children, six are voucher or charter schools, according to the Institute for Reforming Government. — Wall Street Journal

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Mike Nichols:

Half of Wisconsin’s 72 zip codes don’t have a single licensed dentist, according to the Wisconsin Primary Health Care Association; less than 40 percent of children covered by Medicaid received any dental care last year.

Just this week, the Assembly Committee on Health, Aging and Long-term Care held a public hearing on a bill introduced by two Republicans, Sen. Mary Felzkowski of Tomahawk and Rep. Jon Plumer of Lodi, to license dental therapists — trained professionals who could do a lot more than dental hygienists but less than dentists. They could provide basic exams, fill cavities, pull some teeth.

Robert Pondiscio:

Campus radicalism is easy to spot—and condemn. Attempts to justify the atrocities committed by Hamas, and in some cases to celebrate it, have caused crises at dozens of universities, prompting deep-pocketed donors to publicly withdraw philanthropic support and threaten not to hire graduates. Even some stalwart liberals have been shocked by the depth and virulence of campus anti-Semitism.

Such scenes might be fewer and farther between in K–12, but that doesn’t mean there’s not cause for concern about how the Israel-Hamas war is being taught and discussed in public-school settings. The blunt truth is that America’s K–12 education system is uniquely ill-suited to help students make sense of complicated world events and navigate contentious issues, let alone achieve some level of moral clarity about them.

When major news breaks, social media and education news sites fill up with well-intended advice for teachers on “how to talk to students” about traumatic events. As often as not, that advice is aimed at reassuring children that distant events do not place them physically at risk or fostering “tolerance and empathy,” not teaching history. “When approached by children with questions about the Israel-Hamas war, parents and teachers should center conversations on empathy rather than politics,” advised Harvard “global health” lecturer Claude Bruderlein in the Boston Globe. New York City schools chancellor David Banks tweeted that New York City would be “providing resources to our schools to facilitate discussions about the conflict and supporting our students in being compassionate global citizens.” A fine impulse as far as it goes, but surely it’s of equal public interest to encourage students to become well-informed global citizens.

Jonathan Sumption:

The Covid-19 inquiry’s terms of reference are as broad as could be, but it has only one useful purpose. Lockdowns and other aggressive government interventions were an unprecedented and untested experiment with the lives and wellbeing of each one of us.

We need to know what they achieved, if anything. We need to know whether it was worth the appalling collateral consequences for other clinical conditions, for our mental wellbeing, for our children’s education and for the economy and public finances of our country. We need to know whether other policies might have produced acceptable results at a lesser cost in human misery. That way, we may have some prospect of avoiding a similar disaster next time, for there will surely be a next time.

Related: Dane County Madison Public Health Mandates.

Wall Street Journal:

Progressives tee up a case for the state Supreme Court’s new majority.

This should be an easy case, but the new 4-3 progressive majority on the Court is cause for worry. If the lawsuit is successful, it could end school choice in Wisconsin without a possibility of appeal because the case is based on state law claims. The result would mean upheaval for 29,000 children in Milwaukee’s voucher program, 4,000 in Racine and 19,000 in the rest of the state. Judges call that a “reliance” interest to consider carefully when considering a precedent.

The real power behind this case is the teachers union. Bob Baxter, executive director of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, says tests scores are a “fallacy” and that “every student that’s in a voucher school suffers.” Students who attend charters “are not learning the curriculum they need to learn in order to be a part of a democratic society,” Mr. Baxter adds. “We believe the right wing wants to crush participation in democracy.”

But the vouchers passed democratically. The real democratic issue here is whether four progressive Justices are going to trample their court’s precedent and the voters and impose their own policy preferences. That would rob poor children of better choices in favor of the unions who financed Justice Protasiewicz’s judicial campaign. Who’s anti-democratic?

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Lauren Sloss:

Anecdotally, at least, a desire for scheduling flexibility is taking root. Melissa Verboon started the Facebook group Travel With Kids in 2017 and writes a blog covering her family’s travel; she said that the group’s membership had grown since the pandemic, with more conversations centering on traveling during the school year. Ms. Verboon, who lives in Holiday, Fla., and has four kids (15, 13, 11 and 9), believes that family time at home during the pandemic was a major impetus for reimagining vacation scheduling, as well as reimagining the types of trips that parents could take with their children.

Stephanie Tolk voiced similar thoughts. Ms. Tolk currently lives in Portland, Ore., but in 2021 and 2022, traveled internationally with her husband and two daughters for more than a year.

“People had bought into the idea that their kids went to school at 8:15 and that you don’t see them again until 4 in the afternoon. That was all shattered in 2020,” she said. “I found that I wanted more time with my kids.”

Easier with younger children

For parents eager to travel with their offspring year-round, a prepandemic truth remains: It’s significantly easier with younger, grade school children who have fewer academic, extracurricular and social demands. Ms. Thimm, whose daughter started middle school this year, has discovered that school-year travel planning is more challenging.

“I’m getting a little more nervous about taking her out, and she doesn’t want to miss out on anything that’s going on in school,” she said.

Alison McMaster, a travel adviser and corporate travel planner who lives outside Boston, has been traveling with her two sons, now 11 and 13, during the school year since they were young, sometimes tacking on extra days or weeks to school breaks. The family has even spent close to a month in destinations like Peru, Colombia and Europe.

“The education that they’re going to receive by way of international travel and cultural experiences outweigh days missed in the classroom,” she said. “The best version of my kids is when we are traveling.”

Commentary.

Steve Sailer:

As I’ve pointed out before, many veteran New York Times writers, such as Declan Walsh, the white guy who is the NYT’s chief Africa correspondent, often want to do a good old-fashioned job of informing readers about important facts. (Granted, the younger diversity hires mostly seem to want to talk about their hair.) But the marketing department no doubt warns them that the Times’ 9.7 million subscribers don’t want to read too much truth. Instead, they mostly want to hear reasons that they are right and their enemies are wrong, that they are on the side of Good, not Bad.

Blacks, for example, are Good. Hence, the more the better, logically.

So, the opening article in The New York Times’ series on Africa’s “youth boom” begins with a dose of happy talk, such as, “As the world grays, Africa blooms with youth.”

But buried further down are some disturbing facts. The few readers who make it to the 28th paragraph are informed:

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is already deeply stressed: Nearly two-thirds of its 213 million people live on less than $2 a day; extremist violence and banditry are rife; and life expectancy is just 53, nine years below the African average. Yet Nigeria adds another five million people every year, and by 2050 is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s third most populous country.

Then in the 43rd paragraph, the NYT gives subscribers permission to worry. It’s not just Bad People who are troubled; so are Experts:

Africans are rightfully cautious of foreigners lecturing on the subject of family size. In the West, racists and right-wing nationalists stoke fears of African population growth to justify hatred, or even violence.

But experts say these demographic predictions are reliable, and that an epochal shift is underway. The forecasts for 2050 are sound because most of the women who will have children in the next few decades have already been born. Barring an unforeseeable upset, the momentum is unstoppable.

But then the NYT reverts to upbeatness about how Africa is becoming a “cultural powerhouse,” citing Rema’s song “Calm Down” that was popular with fans at last year’s soccer World Cup in Qatar.

Stephen Bush:

Unlike other modern inventions, however, there is a healthy cottage industry that likes to extend the concept backwards through time. In the UK, a new children’s book, Brilliant Black British History, defines both Quintus Lollius Urbicus, one of Britain’s Roman governors, and Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor whose campaign to conquer what is now Scotland was cut short by his own death, as “Black Britons”. 

In historical terms, of course, this is pure fiction. Severus was born in Africa and is depicted with dark skin in contemporary work, but he was no more “black” in the sense we understand it today than growing up near a Roman road makes me a centurion. He was not a Briton and, having come here as a conqueror, would have found the term insulting.

But of course, Brilliant Black British History is not really a history book, just as the surprisingly engaging hit Christian cartoon series Veggie Tales is not really biblical education. These are actually morality plays for concerned parents to read to small children to prepare them for adult life. So too are the whole gamut of what you might call “Feelgood Tales for Liberal Tots”: the Little People, Big Dreams series, which wants to teach kids that they can do anything and be anything. This features heavily sanitised stories about the likes of Coco Chanel (heavy on the entrepreneurship and the stylish outfits, light on the Nazism and the cocaine) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (much is made of the art and his sexual openness, less of his early death and heroin habit). 

None of these books are free of controversy. Even Veggie Tales is frowned upon by some ultraorthodox Christians for implying that talking vegetables can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, a privilege extended only to humans. But it is not, I think, particularly helpful, to criticise Brilliant Black British History because it is flatly contradicted by Olivette Otele’s marvellous African Europeans: An Untold History, or to find Veggie Tales wanting because it falls short of what the Bible actually says.

Oyin Adedoyin

Faced with the gargantuan cost of higher education, Americans often have to choose between securing their children’s future or their own. A new rule change makes it slightly easier to do both.

Pretax contributions made to retirement accounts will no longer count as income in the formula that measures a family’s ability to pay for college, under changes to this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa. The Education Department made the changes to simplify the form and ensure more aid goes to those who need it most.

Some families could save between $5,000 to over $10,000 on the cost of college each year, depending on their income.

Paying for college and saving for retirement are two of the biggest financial challenges Americans face. The change encourages saving for retirement while making college more affordable to middle-income Americans at a time high inflation and interest rates have stretched family budgets.

Amy Dockser Marcus:

The Japanese biologist Katsuhiko Hayashi said earlier this year that he believes it will be possible to create a human egg from skin cells within a decade. He and his colleagues have already turned skin cells from male mice into mouse eggs and used them to breed baby mice.

Matt Krisiloff, chief executive officer of Conception Biosciences, has dozens of scientists working at a lab in Berkeley, Calif., trying to make eggs outside ovaries. Such a technique could allow women to have biological children later in life.

Krisiloff, who is gay, says the technology, known as in vitro gametogenesis or IVG, could also help male couples have biological children without anyone else’s genes. Echoing the desire that has driven so many advances in reproductive technologies, Krisiloff says, “I want the chance to have biological kids with my partner.”

Reproductive technology has already reshaped the way families are made. Flash-freezing techniques enable eggs to be stored for years in banks, then thawed for use. Babies have been born using a technique that incorporates DNA from three people. And in vitro fertilization, or IVF, which involves taking mature eggs from ovaries, fertilizing them in a lab and implanting the embryo in a uterus, facilitates approximately 2% of births in the U.S.

Philip Greenspun:

It is surprisingly tough to find a broad study of how SAT scores from, say, 1990, correlate to 2022 income. But it makes sense that there would be a correlation. People who do well on the SAT are good at sitting at a desk, following instructions, being consistent with procedures, etc. These are exactly the capabilities that many high-paying jobs require. Some high-paying jobs, such as physician, have been explicitly limited to those who score well on standardized tests (though that may change; see “Removing the MCAT Could Improve Diversity in Medicine” (Newsweek 2023)).

Circling back to the NYT article, I find it interesting that the possibility of SAT score being heritable was not considered, even for long enough to dismiss it. Let’s also look at the solution:

Luke Andrews:

Dr Melissa Kearney, an economic professor at the University of Maryland, previously told DailyMail.com: ‘There has been a greater emphasis on spending time building careers. Adults are changing their attitudes towards having kids.

‘They are choosing to spend money and time in different ways… [that] are coming into conflict with parenting.’

There are also signs the ‘Instagram generation’ of millennials and baby boomers are now prioritizing travel and relaxation over building families.

As a result, people are waiting longer to have children than in previous generations — with older women more likely to have fewer children. A number of women are also conceiving via fertility treatment, driving a rise of mothers in their 40s.

The higher cost of living and rising costs of childcare have also been blamed.

Dr Phillip Levine, an economist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, warned previously that the decline would eventually ‘have a damaging impact both on social cohesion and general well-being.’

Abortion data. Planned Parenthood by the numbers.

There are <i>more</i>, not fewer, abortions in the year after <i>Dobbs</i>, but isn’t the increase in the earliest weeks of pregnancy?

Scott Girard:

In total, nearly 9,000 children in Madison public schools missed more than 10% of the school year, a rate of absenteeism that can indicate broader problems facing children and puts them at risk of a serious, long-term disadvantage in learning.

Grelinda Isom’s four children are among those considered chronically absent. Isom herself has found the system a challenge to navigate as she tries to advocate for her children and their needs, she said, and each additional roadblock further drives a wedge between her family and the schools.

“The way they’re treated, them being heard, them crying out for help from trusted adults that they consider there for them, that they trust — they’re telling them what they need and their needs are still not being met,” she said, detailing Individualized Education Plans and safety plans going unfulfilled. “Mentally, physically it’s messing them up because they feel like no matter what they do, they’re not going to be heard or their needs are not going to be met.”

The chronic absenteeism rate is rising across Wisconsin and the country after the COVID-19 pandemic, with Madison’s fast-rising rates contributing to the trend. Across all Wisconsin schools, 22.7% of students missed enough days to be categorized as chronically absent in 2021-22, up from 12.7% in 2017-18.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Kendra Hurley:

Call it the end of an era for fantasy-fueled reading instruction. In a move that has parents like me cheering, Columbia University’s Teachers College announced last month that it is shuttering its once famous—in some circles, now-infamous—reading organization founded by education guru and entrepreneur Lucy Calkins.

For decades, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project was a behemoth in American education. As many as 1 in 4 U.S. elementary schools used Calkins’ signature curriculum. But that number is dwindling as a growing chorus of cognitive scientists, learning experts, and parents—many amplified by education journalist Emily Hanford via her 2022 podcast Sold a Story—argue that the Calkins approach to reading is ineffective at best, actively harmful at worst, and a large part of why more than half of our country’s fourth graders aren’t demonstrating proficiency on reading exams.

It’s common knowledge that never learning to read well damages children’s self-esteem, their life prospects, and our country’s future workforce. What’s less talked about is how, when schools fail to teach reading, it harms the public’s trust in schools. An unspoken contract between public schools and parents is that schools will teach their children to read. In many places, that contract was broken when schools adopted Calkins’ methods, kids didn’t learn to read, and responsibility for teaching reading transferred onto parents and guardians.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The Economist:

Ho Chi Minh is the founding father of Vietnam, was clear about the route to development. “For the sake of ten years’ benefit, we must plant trees. For the sake of a hundred years’ benefit, we must cultivate the people,” was a bromide he liked to trot out. Yet despite years of rapid economic growth, the country’s per person is still only $3,760, lower than in its regional peers, Malaysia and Thailand, and barely enough to make the average Vietnamese feel well-nurtured. Still, Ho Chi Minh was alluding to a Chinese proverb extolling the benefits of education, and on that front Vietnam’s people can have few complaints.

Their children go through one of the best schooling systems in the world, a status reflected in outstanding performances in international assessments of reading, maths and science. The latest data from the World Bank show that, on aggregate learning scores, Vietnamese students outperform not only their counterparts in Malaysia and Thailand but also those in Britain and Canada, countries more than six times richer. Even in Vietnam itself, student scores do not exhibit the scale of inequality so common elsewhere between the genders and different regions.

Quinton Klabon:

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

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

Scott Girard:

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

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

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

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

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

More.

Corrinne Hess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Leonardt

Among the reasons the Defense Department schools do so well:

• Consistent with military culture, they set high standards and create a disciplined classroom culture. In 2015, the schools overhauled their curriculum using principles from the Common Core, a national program that many other districts have abandoned after criticism from both the political right and left. But the approach seems to benefit students. “Unlike the Common Core, which was carried out haphazardly across the country, the Defense Department’s plan was orchestrated with, well, military precision,” Sarah writes.
• Defense Department schools are racially and economically integrated. Asian, Black, Hispanic and white students attend the same schools. So do the children of Army privates earning $25,000 a year and the children of high-ranking officers earning six-figure salaries.
• The schools receive more funding than public schools in many states do. One teacher at an elementary school on Fort Moore in Georgia told The Times that she doubled her salary by switching from a traditional public school in Florida. The supply closets at Defense Department schools tend to be well-stocked, and teachers don’t have to pay for paper, pencils and books out of their own salaries, as is common elsewhere.
• During the pandemic, the military’s schools reopened relatively quickly — and it’s clear that extended closures were terrible for children. By December 2020, 85 percent of students at Defense Department schools were learning in person, officials told Sarah. Only a handful of states exceeded that share, according to the Covid-19 School Data Hub. The share was below 10 percent in California, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and several other states.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Mandy McLaren and Naomi Nartin:

Learning to read is the greatest gift a school can give a child. And yet here, in the birthplace of public education, outmoded teaching methods leave thousands of students struggling to gain this critical skill.

It bears repeating: The vast majority of Black and Latino children and kids with disabilities are being sent off to the fourth grade — where students start reading to learn instead of learning to read — hobbled by this major deficit, which has cascading effects on spelling and writing as well. Some can’t sound out words on the page. Others can’t understand what they’re reading. Many never catch up; they drop out of high school or fail to finish college. The social and economic rifts in our society widen.

And how have Massachusetts’ Legislature and educational establishment responded to this appalling state of affairs? By largely failing these neediest learners, an investigation by the Globe’s Great Divide education team shows.

Yes, the Legislature approved a law aimed at improving third grade reading proficiency more than a decade ago, but little came of it. At least 30 states, but not Massachusetts, have since passed literacy reform laws addressing this crisis.

Bloomberg:

Nearly four years into America’s learning-loss crisis, perhaps the biggest challenge facing the country’s schools is a basic one: getting students to show up. Rates of absenteeism have surged since the start of the pandemic, across nearly all regions, income levels and age groups. School leaders need to act now to solve the problem, or risk seeing millions of students lose any chance of recovery.

By every measure, US students are missing huge amounts of school. During the 2021-22 academic year, 28% of schoolchildren were “chronically” absent — defined as missing at least 10% of the 180-day school year, or three and a half weeks. That’s up from a rate of 15% in the last full year before the pandemic. The problem is most acute in urban public school districts: Chronic absenteeism topped 40% in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago; in Detroit, the rate…

Eliza Mondegreen:

Deep in the comments section, someone raises an uncomfortable question: “If the use of puberty blockers are more beneficial than harmful, why did Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the UK rethink their use?” 

But—never fear—Alexander’s got this covered, too—not in the sense that’s actually looked into but in the sense that he’s decided in advance that it can’t possibly matter: 

I haven’t looked into this, but my prior is that it’s because Europeans are hopeless communist nanny-staters who ban anything cool on general instinct. Cf. melatonin, GPT-4.

This is truly wild stuff. 

Alexander thinks something “suspicious and bad” is afoot with “everyone […] suddenly becoming transgender” (indicating he believes that at least many of the people coming out as trans are not “innately” trans) and he supports “efforts to figure out why and stop it at the root” (so he recognizes that coming out as trans is not only not a positive thing, it’s not even neutral—he clearly thinks that it’s better that people don’t come to think of themselves as trans in the first place). But, given that we haven’t turned off the tap yet, it would be—*checks notes*—bad to not allow children who have come to identify as trans at a time where something “suspicious and bad” is influencing people to identify as trans to transition. Make it make sense.

Jason Riley:

Melissa Kearney’s new book, “The Two-Parent Privilege,” is an attempt to explain the importance of marriage to her fellow liberal intellectuals. Sadly, she has her work cut out.

The author is an MIT-trained economist, and as the book jacket explains, she makes “a provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution’s decline has led to a host of economic woes—problems that have fractured American society and rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.” Her argument is solid, and she makes it using minimal academic jargon in an impressively brisk 200 pages.

I’m not sure how “provocative” it is, however. When Ms. Kearney writes that “the absence of a father from a child’s home appears to have direct effects on children’s outcomes—and not only because of the loss of parental income,” or that we need to “restore and foster a norm of two-parent homes for children,” it not only makes perfect sense to me but also sounds very familiar. Then again, I’m not the reader she’s targeting. I hardly need convincing that there are strong links between family structure, the well-being of children and outcomes later in life. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said as much in his 1965 report on the black family, and Moynihan relied on research conducted much earlier by black sociologists such as E. Franklin Frazier.

Erika Edwards and Kate Snow

A new report about kids and their smartphone use may offer other parents a warning: Children like Armita are inundated with hundreds of pings and prompts on their phones all day and all night — even when they should be paying attention in class or getting a good night’s rest.

It’s a “constant buzzing,” said Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a group that studies the impact of media and technology on kids and families. “They literally wake up and before they go to the bathroom, they’re on their phone.”

New research Common Sense Media releasedTuesday finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications on their phones every day. About 25% of them pop up during the school day, and 5% show up at night. 

In some cases, they get nearly 5,000 notifications in 24 hours. The pop-ups are almost always linked to alerts from friends on social media.

From the report:

The good news is that many young people have grown savvier about how their phones try to draw them in, and they’re taking steps to protect their digital well-being. But the business model of these apps and devices depends on users picking up their phones and engaging with them as much as possible, and it’s clear that young people are struggling to set boundaries. Helping kids develop digital well-being requires support from parents, educators, and the tech industry itself

Steven Morris:

Criminal justice and antiracist campaigners have raised concerns over an app being used by schools in Bristol to “monitor and profile” pupils and their families.

The app, which is being used by more than 100 schools, gives safeguarding leads quick, easy access to pupils’ and their families’ contacts with police, child protection and welfare services.

One of the concerns campaigners have is that the Think Family Education (TFE) app includes analysing which children could be at risk of exposure to criminality, which they argue risks leading to more discrimination against pupils from minority ethnic or working-class backgrounds.

Staff using the app have told the criminal justice campaign charity Fair Trialsthat they keep it secret from parents and carers, and admitted many would be concerned about it if they knew of it.

Corrinne Hess:

But data shows that most teacher education programs at colleges and universities are still not fully teaching the science of reading. 

Instead of learning how to read through pictures, word cues and memorization, children will be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on sounding out letters and phrases, with the hope of addressing the state’s lagging reading scores. 

Wisconsin’s new reading law doesn’t explicitly tell the universities how to teach. But it will prohibit the Department of Public Instruction from approving teacher education programs unless they include science-based early literacy instruction and do not incorporate three-cueing — a model that emphasizes that skilled reading should include using meaning and sentence structure cues to read new words.    

Wisconsin teachers who do not receive this training will not be eligible for a license beginning July 1, 2026.  

“I do believe that the universities have been one of the major causes of the problems we see in reading,” said State Rep. Joel Kitchens, R- Sturgeon Bay, one of the lead authors on the reading legislation. “They now seem to be moving in the right direction, but change is hard.”

More.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Melissa Kearney:

Earlier this year, I was at a conference on fighting poverty, and a member of the audience asked a question that made the experts visibly uncomfortable.

“What about family structure?” he asked. “Single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones. Does family structure play a role in poverty?”

The scholar to whom the question was directed looked annoyed and struggled to formulate an answer. The panelists shifted in their seats. The moderator stepped in, quickly pointing out that poverty makes it harder for people to form stable marriages. She promptly called on someone else.

I sighed. As an economist who studies inequality and families, I have often found myself in the same position as the questioner. I have suggested in similar settings that we need to consider how marriage and household structure affect children’s life outcomes, only to be met with annoyance or evasion.

David Blaska:

Jill Underly is Wisconsin’s superintendent of public instruction. The position is elected for four years on the Spring non-partisan ballot along with city alders and circuit court judges. We are one of only 12 states to elect them.

One of Jill Underly’s predecessors was Tony Evers, now governor of Wisconsin. A Democrat. If there has been a conservative superintendent of public instruction in Wisconsin, it was long ago. Nonetheless, Jill Underly claims the position is non-partisan. She was endorsed by the teachers union, which gives all its campaign donations to Democrats. (Underly was good for $18,000.)

Thursday 09-21-23, Supt. Jill Underly gave her State of Education speech in the capitol. It was Woke boilerplate. The state’s chief school marm portrayed Wisconsin public schools as impoverished, even after the Republican legislature boosted education spending by $1.2 Billion dollars. Democrats wanted twice that. It’s never enough. Supt. Underly defended the Woke agenda.

Our children’s communities – their classrooms – are also some of the most inclusive and equitable places in our state. … Affirming the lives of our black, Indigenous, and students of color matter is not political. It is a statement of fact.

— Jill Underly, State of Education
What does that even mean? How is a life “affirmed”? Ms. Underly’s prepared remarks used the word “diversity” (or some form thereof) 10 times, “equity” 4 times, “inclusion” 2. At the other end of the scale: “Discipline” 0, “responsibility” 0, and “achievement” 0.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Andy Haldane:

I am suffering from PESD (post-examination stress disorder). This is a new condition — indeed, I have just invented it — but it afflicts millions of parents whose children are put through the psychological mangle of school examinations.

The trauma is, of course, not confined to parents. Pity the students each year facing trial by examination, followed by weeks waiting on the verdict. Little wonder there is an epidemic of wellbeing and mental health problems among the young.

In the UK, a terrifying one in five young people aged 17 to 24 were reported as having a probable mental health disorder in 2022. Of course, not all are rooted in education and examinations. But the correlation is strikingly high between the incidence of mental health problems and low educational attainment in young people. It can be seen, too, in surveys of wellbeing — as many as a quarter of young people leave education loathing, rather than loving, learning. It would be hard to think of a worse endowment.

This means those departing education with fewest skills are also least likely to engage in life-long learning. And it means the gaps in attainment in early years are likely to widen over time, becoming chasms in adult opportunity and income. Education can entrench inequality, rather than redress it.

What could be done to close those chasms? A good start would be to rethink the metrics of success. Currently, examination results and school league tables are paramount. But if the key arbiter of later-life success is learning attitudes and experiences, rather than outcomes per se, it would be better to target those directly by measuring pupil wellbeing.

Wall Street Journal:

Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates has called school choice racist and made it her mission to kill an Illinois scholarship program for low-income children. So how did Ms. Gates try to explain herself this week after press reports that she has enrolled her son in a private Catholic high school?

“Dear Union Sibling,” began her email to fellow teachers. She said that black students have “limited” options on the city’s south and west sides: “It forced us to send our son, after years of attending a public school, to a private high school so he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs.”

Ms. Gates’s desire to do what’s best for her child is laudable. What’s not is to do that while denying other families the same choice. The school where her son is enrolled reportedly costs her $16,000 a year. What about those who can’t afford such a school? Illinois’s Invest in Kids program funds about 9,000 scholarships, and last year it had 31,000 applications. But the program is scheduled to sunset, and that’s exactly what the teachers unions have demanded.

“Here is the truth: If you are a Black family living in a Black community, high-quality neighborhood schools have been the dream, not the reality,” Ms. Gates’s email says. There’s no arguing about that. For some schools on the south side, the percentage of students who can read or do math at grade level is in the single digits. But then she insists, as the teachers unions always do, that the answer is spending yet more money to “undo the decades of systemic underinvestment.”

Karol Markowicz

The lives of our children were destroyed by lockdowns — and long lockouts — from school during the pandemic.

This policy was largely forced through by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. 

But we now know that President Biden and his wife-teacher, Jill Biden, were the ones who overruled their own medical experts to give Weingarten what she wanted — and threw American kids out the window.

It begins on the administration’s first day, when Jill Biden invited Weingarten and Becky Pringle, head of the National Education Association, to the White House, telling them, “I told you I was going to bring you with me to the White House. And on day one, you’re here,” according to a new book by Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer, “The Last Politician.”

There they were, making sure kids didn’t get to have an education.

Foer is, of course, a partisan Democrat, and the portrayal of the Biden White House is comical in its friendliness. 

In retelling the story of Jill meeting with two women, Foer repeats the disgusting canard, “In upper-middle-class neighborhoods . . . there was a sense that the unions were acting in a spirit of selfishness.”

That’s obviously a joke. Upper-middle-class people, in areas unlucky enough to be under teachers unions’ thumb, had every option available to their children.

and:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.”

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.

Paul Tough:

In the fall of 2009, 70 percent of that year’s crop of high school graduates did in fact go straight to college. That was the highest percentage ever, and the collegegoing rate stayed near that elevated level for the next few years. The motivation of these students was largely financial. The 2008 recession devastated many of the industries that for decades provided good jobs for less-educated workers, and a college degree had become a particularly valuable commodity in the American labor market. The typical American with a bachelor’s degree (and no further credential) was earning about two-thirds more than the typical high school grad, a financial advantage about twice as large as the one a college degree produced a generation earlier. College seemed like a reliable runway to a life of comfort and affluence. 

A decade later, Americans’ feelings about higher education have turned sharply negative. The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Only about a third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And in contrast to the college-focused parents of a decade ago, now almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

The numbers on campus have shifted as well. In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021. As recently as 2016, 70 percent of high school graduates were still going straight to college; now the figure is 62 percent. 

Outside the United States, meanwhile, higher education is more popular than ever. Our global allies and competitors have spent the last couple of decades racing to raise their national levels of educational attainment. In Britain, the number of current undergraduates has risen since 2016 by 12 percent. (Over the same period, the American figure fell by 8 percent.) In Canada, 67 percent of adults between 25 and 34 are graduates of a two- or four-year college, about 15 percentage points higher than the current American attainment rate. 

Britain and Canada are not the outliers on this point; we are. On average, countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have increased their college-degree attainment rate among young adults by more than 20 percentage points since 2000, and 11 of those countries now have better-educated labor forces than we do, including not only economic powerhouses like Japan and South Korea and Britain but also smaller competitors like the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland. Americans have turned away from college at the same time that students in the rest of the world have been flocking to campus. Why? What changed in the last decade to make a college education — and higher education as an institution — so unappealing to so many Americans?

Sandra Palma:

It was March 2022, and with my best friend’s baby shower approaching, I knew the gift I wanted to make: a stuffed whale or two.

My friend loves whales and I love sewing. The mother-to-be received the plush cetaceans with delight, but as I’d worked, my own satisfaction waned. 

Most children’s toys have a limited lifespan. Kids grow up; toys get lost. Yet the polyester and spandex fibers in the whales’ fabric and stuffing would last for decades, centuries, even millennia. Polyester is spun from polyethylene plastic, the same stuff used in water and soda bottles; while spandex is made, in part, of polyurethane, the main ingredient in memory foam mattresses. Petroleum-based textiles don’t readily biodegrade like wool or cotton — instead, they break down into ever-smaller bits of plastic. Textiles are a major source of microplastic pollution. According to a June study, we inhale about a credit card’s worth of floating plastic fibers each week. 

I imagined polyester filaments wafting into the newborn’s lungs or washing down the drain and making their way to the ocean, where they’d wind up ingested by creatures as small as krill and as huge as humpbacks. 

I resolved to make a new, better, improved set of plush whales — ones that would be plastic-free, and entirely home compostable. All I had to do was source 100% cotton fabric, stuff it with cotton and kapok — a natural fiber from the seedpod of a rainforest tree — and embroider baby-safe eyes with cotton thread. All the scraps would be sent to my backyard compost pile, and slowly transform into soil for my organic garden. 

It sounded simple.

Wall Street Journal:

One goal of robust school choice programs is to broaden quality education alternatives. A new report brings evidence that this is happening in Florida, where Catholic PreK-12 schools are defying national trends.

Of the 10 states with the highest Catholic school enrollment, Florida is the only one where Catholic school enrollment has grown over the past decade. It’s a modest 4.4%, or 3,644 students, but compare that to New York and New Jersey, where enrollment dropped by more than 30%. Pennsylvania saw a 25% loss. The report comes from Step Up for Students, a nonprofit that administers Florida’s K-12 scholarships.

The Sunshine State’s population growth may have something to do with it, the report acknowledges. But other states showed larger declines in Catholic school enrollment than in the number of school-age children, so other factors seem to be at play. A big one is the state’s private school scholarships.

Florida has offered publicly funded scholarships since 2001 and has expanded eligibility over the years. “As a share of total enrollment, the percentage of choice scholarship students in Florida Catholic schools has risen from 16.3 percent to 46.6 percent” from 2012-13 to 2022-23, says the report.

This year the Legislature passed a bill to open the scholarships to all students regardless of income, so this percentage will likely grow as parents take advantage of the program to afford tuition at Catholic school.

Laura Mechler:

Her program is part of a company called Prenda, which last year served about 2,000 students across several states. It connects home-school families with microschool leaders who host students, often in their homes. It’s like Airbnb for education, says Prenda’s CEO, because its website allows customers — in this case, parents — to enter their criteria, search and make a match.

An explosion of new options, including Prenda, has transformed home schooling in America. Demand is surging: Hundreds of thousands of children have begun home schooling in the last three years, an unprecedented spike that generated a huge new market. In New Hampshire, for instance, the number of home-schoolers doubled during the pandemic, and even today it remains 40 percent above pre-covid totals.

For many years, home schooling has conjured images of parents and children working together at the kitchen table. The new world of home schooling often looks very different: pods, co-ops, microschools and hybrid schools, often outside the home, as well as real-time and recorded virtual instruction. For a growing number of students, education now exists somewhere on a continuum between school and home, in person and online, professional and amateur.

Joseph De Avila:

“I really resent being forced into a position where my role as an educator is all of a sudden somebody who is in charge of censorship,” said Cleaver, who teaches at Ferry Pass Middle School. “That’s not my role as an educator.”

Teachers in Florida said a wave of recent educational-policy changes has sown confusion and chaos, creating fresh concerns for educators struggling to navigate through a new academic year. Disputes over new African-American history standards, Advanced Placement Psychology and new restrictions on calling a student by their preferred name also have many teachers on edge.

Many of the issues confronting teachers this academic school year are byproducts of laws passed in 2022. Florida has been at the forefront of a group of conservative-led states that have made sweeping changes to the way teachers can discuss race, gender and sexuality in the classroom.

One change is Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act passed in 2022—called the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation by opponents—which restricts instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. It originally applied to grades kindergarten to third grade with bans in later grades if not age-appropriate. The state Board of Education expanded it in April to apply through the 12th grade.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis championed the Parental Rights in Education Act, saying it gives parents more control over children’s education and prohibits inappropriate classroom instruction.

Matt Barnum:

In the long-running reading wars, proponents of phonics have won.

States across the country, both liberal and conservative, are passing laws designed to change the way students are taught to read in a way that is more aligned with the science of reading.

States, schools of education, districts, and — ultimately, the hope is — teachers, are placing a greater emphasis on phonics. Meanwhile, the “three-cueing” method, which encourages students to guess words based on context, has been marginalized. It’s been a striking and swift change.

But there has been much less attention paid to another critical component of reading: background knowledge. A significant body of research suggests students are better able to comprehend what they read when they start with some understanding of the topic they’re reading about. This has led some academics, educators, and journalists to call for intentional efforts to build young children’s knowledge in important areas like science and social studies. Some school districts and teachers have begun integrating this into reading instruction.

Yet new state reading laws have almost entirely omitted attention to this issue, according to a recent review. In other words, building background knowledge is an idea supported by science that has not fully caught on to the science of reading movement. That suggests that while new reading laws might have real benefits, they may fall short of their potential to improve how children are taught to read. 

“It’s an underutilized component,” said Dan Trujillo, an administrator and former teacher in the San Marcos Unified School District in California. “There’s a lot of research about that: The more a reader brings into a text, the more advanced their comprehension will be.”

Danyela Souza Egorov:

Tim Castanza admits that he was “triggered.” The year was 2016, and Castanza, then working for the New York City Department of Education, attended a Community Education Council meeting in Staten Island, where several mothers of kids with dyslexia spoke. The public schools didn’t have any programs for their children, they said, describing how long schools took to offer proper evaluations and how the district failed to provide adequate services, even after children received diagnoses. Along with Rose Kerr, a retired DOE principal and director of education for Staten Island’s borough president, Castanza wanted to do something. “I know what good phonics instruction looks like because of my elementary school teacher,” Castanza, who received an ADHD diagnosis in college, said. “Still, I had a lot of needs that were not met at that school.”

Three years later, Castanza opened the school that he wished he could have attended himself: Bridge Prep Charter School. Designed according to scientific reading instruction, the school offers all the necessary support for children with dyslexia and other language-based learning difficulties. City leaders should learn from its impressive results.

Bridge Prep’s advantage consists not just of a different curriculum but of a different way of training teachers and an expansive capacity to meet students’ needs. Nearly two-thirds of students at Bridge Prep have an Individual Education Plan, and nearly all of these receive multiple services. Seven in ten Bridge Prep students also hail from low-income families, which often cannot afford extracurricular phonics coaching (a common but expensive practice among high-income students who struggle to read). The school, therefore, offers 60 minutes of daily instruction based on the Orton-Gillingham Approach. Phonics instruction gets delivered to students grouped by grade and ability. This is “equity,” Castanza says. A school is “not prepared to teach every kid” unless it has a structured literacy program, he adds.

Georgia Orosz’s son has benefited. When he came to Bridge Prep to repeat second grade, he was reading at kindergarten level, had a dyslexia diagnosis, and was writing in reverse. And his struggles at school had become a behavioral issue. His mother was so frustrated with the Staten Island public school he attended that she planned to homeschool him—until a therapist referred her to Bridge Prep. Her son enrolled in the school right before the pandemic. By the beginning of fifth grade, he was reading at grade level.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Theresa Macphail

Elizabeth, an engineer in her late-30s, has three children, all with some form of allergy. Her eldest daughter, Viola, 12, had eczema as a baby; has environmental allergies to pollen; and allergies to corn, tree nuts and peanuts.

Her youngest son, Brian, 3, also had eczema as a baby and subsequently developed allergies to peanuts and barley, though Elizabeth fears there could be more. Her middle daughter, five-year-old Amelia, had a dairy allergy as an infant, but is now just lactose intolerant. She’s the easiest of the three, at least in terms of allergy.

By the time I hear her story, Elizabeth is already a veteran at dealing with her children’s irritated immune systems. She began a support group for parents of children with corn allergies and is heavily involved in trying to educate other parents about food allergies.

The parents share their theories about why their children have allergies. Her own is that Viola and Brian both went to the emergency room with high fevers as babies and were given precautionary antibiotics. She blames the antibiotics for altering her children’s gut microbiome and herself for agreeing to the treatment in the first place.

Part of Elizabeth’s rationale is that no one else in her family has allergies. In fact, it’s so rare that her parents initially didn’t believe the diagnoses. They argued that “back in their day,” everyone ate everything and was fine; food allergy was made-up nonsense. But when both Viola and Brian landed in the ER repeatedly for food-related anaphylaxis, her parents realized these allergies were indeed “real.”

The Economist:

^{In the southern city of Huizhou an electronics factory is hiring. The monthly salary on offer is between 4,500 and 6,000 yuan (or $620 and $830), enough to pay for food and essentials, but not much else. The advertisement says new employees are expected to “work hard and endure hardship”. The message might have resonated with Chinese of an older generation, many of whom worked long hours in poor conditions to give their children a brighter future. But many of those children now face similar drudgery—and are unwilling to endure it. “I can’t sit on an assembly line,” says Zhang, a 20-something barista with dyed-red hair at a local tea shop. He scoffs at the idea of making such sacrifices for so little gain. The job at the tea shop pays just 4,000 yuan a month, but he enjoys chatting up customers.}

Sara Randazzo & Scott Calvert:

In the race to fix a nationwide reading crisis that worsened during the pandemic, more states are threatening to make students repeat third grade to help them catch up.

Tennessee, Michigan and North Carolina are among at least 16 states that have tried in recent years to use reading tests and laws requiring students to repeat third grade to improve literacy. Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and Nevada have all passed similar laws that will go into effect in the coming years.

Politicians and educational officials say the goal isn’t to hold children back, but to create an incentive to do well while also reducing social promotion.

Tennessee state Rep. Mark White, a Memphis Republican who co-sponsored a 2021 law that went into effect for students entering fourth grade this fall, said the threat of retention brings needed accountability.

“We cannot continue to kick the can down the road when it comes to reading literacy and proficiency with young people,” he said, citing a desire from businesses for a better-educated workforce.

Reading by the end of third grade is considered a pivotal benchmark, because students must be able to read in subsequent grades to learn math, science, social studies and other subjects. Third-graders who lack reading proficiency are four times more likely to drop out of high school, according to a 2011 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Reading scores dropped last year on a federal reading test known as the Nation’s Report Card, with 33% of fourth-graders scoring proficient or higher in 2022, down from 35% in 2019.

Tying fourth-grade advancement to reading has fallen in and out of favor over the decades. Opponents say the policies cause families unnecessary stress and social turmoil for children, and can disproportionately impact minority students.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Liv Finne:

The COVID school shutdowns are being blamed for current shortages of nurses, engineers, customer service representatives, seasonal workers, and army recruits.  

A recent WSJ article notes that since 2020 the pass rates on certification exams taken by engineers, office workers, soldiers and nurses have all fallen. This means fewer engineers and other skilled workers on the job, and a lower degree of competency among those who make it: 

“It is one reason that professional service jobs are going unfilled, and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S Labor Department.”  

These facts do not even begin to describe the psychological and mental distress suffered by teenagers isolated from their friends for nearly two years, a harm that may linger throughout their lives. 

Parents aren’t fooled by the falsehoods being told by Washington’s school officials. The families of 46,000 students have withdrawntheir children from the public schools, among the highest out-migration from the public schools in the nation. 

Across the country lawmakers are trying to help parents. They are responding to the COVID school shutdowns, and to the radical CRT agenda now in the public schools, by passing school choice programs to give parents an alternative to public schools.

Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, John Friedman

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

By Reihan Salam

I don’t begrudge Biden for doing whatever he could to secure his granddaughter’s admission to a prestigious university, an admirable act of grandfatherly devotion, or Gutmann for having been receptive to his entreaties, as her job was in no small part to add luster to the University of Pennsylvania. The relationship between them is striking nevertheless. One would normally expect a university president to be solicitous toward a former vice president of the United States, not the other way around.

But Gutmann wasn’t the president of just any university. She was the president of an Ivy League university, and that made all the difference. Her relationship with the Biden family is a perfect distillation of the immense influence of the Ivy League and its peer institutions—and it points to how that influence might come undone.

Armed with billion-dollar endowments, America’s most selective universities have in recent decades transformed themselves into “the makers of manners” for the nation’s mass affluent population. By mixing the children of the rich and powerful with the children of designated disadvantaged groups, they’ve given rise to a new progressive elite that holds enormous sway over the nation’s cultural and political life. Now, as Ivy-plus admissions practices come under intense scrutiny from left and right, this potent alchemy is at risk, opening  the door for a new set of elite-making institutions.

One of Gutmann’s distinguished predecessors as U.S. ambassador to Germany is James Bryant Conant, who served as the U.S. high commissioner for Germany and then as the first U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic at the dawn of the Cold War. In a neat parallel, Conant took on the role after a highly consequential 20-year tenure as president of Harvard University.

Between Conant’s era and Gutmann’s, elite higher education in America reached the zenith of its power. But Conant’s vision for Harvard and Gutmann’s vision for Penn were strikingly different.

Keri Ingraham:

Teachers unions and education bureaucrats hail public schools for being open to all children while condemning private schools for limiting access. But most “public” schools aren’t public at all.

In most communities, children are restricted to a single assigned school based on their home address and arbitrary boundary lines. Private schools often have academic, behavioral or other admissions standards, but they don’t keep children out simply based on where they live.

The cost of tuition is the primary barrier to parents who want to enroll their children. Nine states—Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia—have enacted universal or near-universal school choice into law, thus the financial barrier for families to enroll their children in private schooling—whether traditional, online, hybrid or micro schools—is crumbling.

Yet unions, bureaucrats and their political allies continue to insist not only on keeping kids in the public system but restricting them to a single assigned “public” school, even if it is failing to educate children or keep them physically safe.

Parents have been charged with stealing public education, fined and sentenced to jail time. Sixteen parents in Maryland and Virginia were charged for providing fraudulent addresses for their children to attend a public school other than their specifically assigned school without paying nonresident tuition of $10,000 to $14,000 a year. A recent report found that in at least 24 states, parents can be criminally prosecuted for providing false home address information to enroll their children in a “public” school.

Laura McKenna:

Has the Neurodiversity Movement Forgotten The Most Disabled and Their Parents?

When Ian was three, the local school district sent him to a neurologist to see why he couldn’t talk. After a few background questions for me about my pregnancy and his birth, she turned to Ian, and said, “okay, let’s see what’s going on here.” She pulled out a wooden puzzle with a dozen barnyard animals and dumped them on ground. I smiled and said, “wait until you see this.” 

Ian glanced down at the puzzle pieces of the cow and the dog, picked up one by the little peg, and slapped into the wooden puzzle board without hesitating or jiggling the piece to fit it into place. Slap. And it was in. And then he did it again and again. Fast and perfect, without looking at us once to register our reaction and without any comments at all. I handed him a candy reward.

“Wow,” said the neurologist. At the end of the appointment, she said that he couldn’t talk because he was smart. (Yes, doctors really did say that twenty years ago.) As we later learned, Ian is smart, and he’s also autistic. But autism looks differently in every person, and few have Ian’s combination of strengths and weaknesses. 

In a viral article for The Free Press — Bari Weiss’s substack — Jill Escher writes that the neurodiversity movement, which celebrates autism and normalizes it, has done real damage to her family. Escher say that those autism advocates do not speak for her or her two profoundly autistic adult-children, completed derailed the effort to find causes of autism, and distracted from the real desperate need to create programs for adults with autism. 

The neurodiversity movement, which gathered steam in 2010, maintains that autism is not a disability, but a feature of normal human variation, and in some cases, an evolutionary advantage. I once joked described that this movement should be renamed, Woke Autism, but they’ve been very successful in reshaping the terms of the debate and even transformed advocacy at the mega-foundation, Autism Speaks.

Joshua Grossman, Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay C. Page, and Sharad Goel.

we estimate the odds that Asian American applicants were admitted to at least one of the schools we consider were 28% lower than the odds for white students with similar test scores, grade-point averages, and extracurricular activities. The gap was particularly pronounced for students of South Asian descent (49% lower odds). We trace this pattern in part to two factors. First, many selective colleges openly give preference to the children of alumni, and we find that white applicants were substantially more likely to have such legacy status than Asian applicants, especially South Asian applicants. Second, after adjusting for observed student characteristics, the institutions we consider appear less likely to admit students from geographic regions with relatively high shares of applicants who are Asian.

Commentary.

Jeff Davidson

With school about to commence around the country, in two to four weeks, a friend mentioned that her granddaughter has been home-schooled for her whole academic career. She is currently in her 9th year, yet, by all indications, she is academically on par with most high school seniors. 

Curiously, when the young lady sought to visit the local high, the principal was intentionally obstructive. What, pondered the grandmother, could the principal want to hide? How confronting might a one-hour visit be?

Maybe what he has to hide is classrooms filled with posters and charts designed to indoctrinate children to accept far Leftist views. He might wish to conceal indications of acceptance of “The 1619 Project,” a rainbow flag, and demeaning references to Donald Trump, white males, or Conservatives. In seconds, perhaps, an objective visitor could see the degree to which classrooms have become indoctrination centers.

He might wish to hide beleaguered teachers, belligerent students, and class room decorum in the gutter. Who knows?

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Anna Mutoh:

Jaclyn Ohmer couldn’t wait to have a baby. Before she was pregnant, she bought onesies and beagle-shaped booties. She and her husband, her high-school sweetheart, found out they were having a son and prepared a Star Wars-themed baby room. The 26-year-old from Parma, Ohio, was ready for his arrival.

Things got harder after he was born in June of last year. Ohmer loved him but she often felt sad. She grew anxious waiting for his next cry. She wasn’t sure she was fit to be a mom.

When he was shrieking one day, Ohmer had a terrifying thought: “If I put my hand over his mouth, he will be gone. He wouldn’t have to live with me, or go through this.”

She became increasingly fearful of hurting her baby—and more convinced that her family would be better off without her. Ohmer tried to seek help, but help was hard to find.

Researchers estimate that one in five new mothers in the U.S. suffers from mood and anxiety disorders during pregnancy and up to a year after giving birth—about 800,000 mothers every year. Yet studies show that a large majority of women who suffer from maternal mental-health disorders aren’t able to get help.

A major cause is the piecemeal nature of the U.S. healthcare system, where no one medical professional takes responsibility for new mothers and their mental health. Obstetricians, usually the first medical point of contact for new mothers, often don’t specialize in it. Pediatricians focus on the children. Many women seeking help go from doctor to doctor, who struggle to find care amid a shortage of mental-health specialists.

Jill Barshay

When you think of a college student, you might imagine a young adult leaving home, moving into a dorm, navigating a campus and maybe attending a fraternity party. That’s an outdated image. We’ve written a lot about how older adults with jobs and children are a giant group on campus. But a more surprising species is spreading through the college registrar’s rolls: teenagers living at home, taking yellow buses to high school and maybe scrambling home before curfew.

The number of high schoolers taking college classes has been surging for more than two decades. In what is called dual enrollment, students simultaneously earn high school and college credits from a single class. These advanced college-level courses are no longer just for gifted students who have exhausted the high school course catalog. Now they’re a tool to encourage more Americans to enroll in college by giving them an early taste of post-secondary education and a head start with a few credits. 

Dual enrollment students were estimated to number more than 1.4 million in the fall of 2022, and account for almost one out of five community college students. That’s according to estimates from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Some scholars believe the total number could be much higher, perhaps 2 million students, when spring 2023 course taking is included. Dual enrollees appear to far outnumber the 1.1 million high school graduates in the class of 2022 who took at least one Advanced Placement exam.

Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman:

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

Commentary.

Jill Barshay:

When you think of a college student, you might imagine a young adult leaving home, moving into a dorm, navigating a campus and maybe attending a fraternity party. That’s an outdated image. We’ve written a lot about how older adults with jobs and children are a giant group on campus. But a more surprising species is spreading through the college registrar’s rolls: teenagers living at home, taking yellow buses to high school and maybe scrambling home before curfew.

The number of high schoolers taking college classes has been surging for more than two decades. In what is called dual enrollment, students simultaneously earn high school and college credits from a single class. These advanced college-level courses are no longer just for gifted students who have exhausted the high school course catalog. Now they’re a tool to encourage more Americans to enroll in college by giving them an early taste of post-secondary education and a head start with a few credits. 

Dual enrollment students were estimated to number more than 1.4 million in the fall of 2022, and account for almost one out of five community college students. That’s according to estimates from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Some scholars believe the total number could be much higher, perhaps 2 million students, when spring 2023 course taking is included. Dual enrollees appear to far outnumber the 1.1 million high school graduates in the class of 2022 who took at least one Advanced Placement exam.

“It’s meteoric,” said Brian An, a sociologist at the University of Iowa. “When I first started working in dual enrollment research in the mid 2000s, it was nowhere near these numbers. If you had told me 10 years ago that 20 percent of all community college students would be dual enrollment, I would have said that’s crazy talk.”

Jim Hinch:

Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.

Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.

For decades, drug policy in America centered on using law enforcement to target people who sold, possessed, or used drugs—an approach long supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Only in recent years, amid an epidemic of opioid overdoses and a national reconsideration of racial inequities in the criminal-justice system, has the drug-policy status quo begun to break down, as a coalition of health workers, criminal-justice-reform advocates, and drug-user activists have lobbied for a more compassionate and nuanced response. The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.

Alisa Rosenbaum:

The old idiom, “if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck,” directly applies to the Latin School of Chicago for what increasingly appears to be a hostile, bullying environment for both students and parents alike.

Both Chicago Contrarian and many other media outlets have covered the story of the $100 million lawsuit filed against the Latin School by Rosellene and Robert Bronstein for its role in the suicide of 15-year-old Nate Bronstein, a former student there.

Recently, Latin stands accused of failing to deliver school records (as highlighted in a recent Chicago Tribune article) to the parents of Nate, who took his own life in early 2022 due to repeated bullying and cyberbullying at the hands of students at school-sanctioned events. Nevertheless, Latin’s latest blunder shows how far this school has fallen in its treatment of students.

In the latest Latin offense, a pair of graduating twins were allowed to walk but not receive their diplomas nor transcripts for college matriculation due to a dispute between the school and the twins’ mother, Katie O’Dea.

Ms. O’Dea had left her role as the school’s director of communications after 16 years in November 2022 (according to her LinkedIn profile), holding a valid enrollment contract for her children to finish the academic year after paying the agreed upon discounted sum. Yet her children were still denied their diplomas and transcripts.

O’Dea filed a lawsuit on June 27 along with her husband, Daniel McKee, and their children, Molly and Hugh McKee.