To say that teachers weren’t involved in discussions as we worked through the process is untrue.
I also personally met with @WSRAliteracy. At that meeting, a light was shined on why we are in this reading crisis. https://t.co/w6tZfArOUx

— John Jagler (@JohnJagler) July 19, 2023

I am pleased to announce the Right to Read Act has been signed into law. @RepKitchens and I authored AB 321 to curb Wisconsin’s ongoing literacy crisis by investing $50 million in early literacy development and banning reading curriculum that has hindered students for decades. pic.twitter.com/mBGSR0Gya1

— Duey Stroebel (@SenStroebel) July 19, 2023

Mitchell Schmidt:

Wisconsin falls for MS miracle scam

And children and teachers suffer the consequences

https://t.co/0ELJUm0KL9

— Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) July 19, 2023

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?

Wisconsin Employer Survey

A new survey of Wisconsin businesses paints an unflattering picture of the education system in the state. According to the Wisconsin Employer Survey, nearly three-quarters of businesses think students graduating from the public K-12 system are not prepared for the workforce. Making matters worse, 56 percent of respondents said they have employees who struggle with the ability to read or do math.

The unsettling new information sadly reflects the fact that more than 60 percent of students cannot read or do math at grade level in Wisconsin.

“Not only is this new data disappointing, but it should also make all of us outraged,” said WMC Senior Director of Workforce, Education & Employment Policy Rachel Ver Velde. “Wisconsin’s public school system is failing our children, and it is having an outsized impact on our workforce and economy.”

With young people set up for failure, employers are now having to step in to provide remedial education for workers on top of the technical training they already offer. Forty-one percent of businesses said they have provided employees with additional education or tutoring because their K-12 education did not prepare them with the basic skills needed for a career.

The educational failures are also impacting Wisconsin’s already challenging workforce shortage. According to the survey, nearly two-thirds of employers said they have reduced hiring requirements in an effort to get more job applicants.

“Wisconsin taxpayers should be asking themselves what our return is on the billions of dollars we spend each year on public education,” added Ver Velde. “We cannot measure success by how much money is spent. Instead, we need to start focusing on what students are learning and if they are being set up to succeed upon graduation.”

“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?

Christopher Huffaker:

Martin Udengaard wants more for his son, and he doesn’t think Cambridge schools can deliver.

Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school, something that could hinder his son Isaac from reaching more advanced classes, like calculus, in high school. So Udengaard is pulling his child, a rising sixth grader, out of the district, weighing whether to homeschool or send him to private school, where he can take algebra 1 in middle school.

Udengaard is one of dozens of parents who recently have publicly voiced frustration with a years-old decision made by Cambridge to remove advanced math classes in grades six to eight. The district’s aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the decision has had the opposite effect, limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons, like the popular after-school program Russian Math, or find other options for their kids, like Udengaard is doing.“The students who are able to jump into a higher level math class are students from better-resourced backgrounds,” said Jacob Barandes, another district parent and a Harvard physicist. “They’re shortchanging a significant number of students, overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.”

Mary Rice Hasson:

Wake up, friends. America’s stubborn commitment to progressive-controlled government education has already abandoned “the vast majority” of our children “to the progressive cause” for well over a decade. The results have been disastrous.

For starters, schools have failed abysmally in their fundamental task — teaching basic academic skills — despite spending staggering sums. In 2019, annual expenditures for K–12 public schools totaled almost $800 billion, but, according to the Nation’s Report Card, barely one-third of public school students were “proficient” in math and reading pre-COVID, a dismal track record that worsened significantly post-COVID. Nationally, just 26 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math, with 31 percent proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 3 percent of fourth graders are mathematically proficient, while twenty-three Baltimore public schools reported exactly zero math-proficient students. Government schools, which enroll almost nine out of ten American children, repeatedly fail to deliver on their promises but are rewarded with big budgets and near-monopolistic power.

The most troubling aspect of our government school system, however, is not what it has failed to teach but what it has succeeded in teaching.

As cultural revolutionaries have long known, it is far easier to capture and mold the beliefs of children than to change the minds of adults. The evidence is in: the cultural revolutionaries are winning. A recent Wall Street Journal/NORC poll found disturbing gaps in the values embraced by Americans under thirty compared to those espoused by older adults. While majorities of older Americans say patriotism, religion, and having children are “very important,” shockingly few young people agree. Among Americans under thirty, just 23 percent consider patriotism and having children to be very important, while only 31 percent say the same of religion. The shift in the values and beliefs of younger Americans is dramatic but hardly surprising, as it tracks the leftward swing of our public education — indoctrination — system.

Robert Pondiscio:

It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated. 

If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system. 

They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it. 

Michael Bailey:

I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. I have been a professor for 34 years, and a researcher for 40. Over the decades, I have studied controversial topics—from IQ, to sexual orientation, to transsexualism (what we called transgenderism before 2015), to pedophilia. I have published well over 100 academic articles. I am best known for studying sexual orientation—from genetic influences, to childhood precursors of homosexuality, to laboratory-measured sexual arousal patterns. 

My research has been denounced by people of all political stripes because I have never prioritized a favored constituency over the truth. 

But I have never had an article retracted. Until now.

On March 29, I published an article in the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Less than three months later, on June 14, it was retracted by Springer Nature Group, the giant academic publisher of Archives, for an alleged violation of its editorial policies.

Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.

The retracted article, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was coauthored with Suzanna Diaz, who I met in 2018 at a small meeting of scientists, journalists, and parents of children they believed had Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). 

ROGD was first described in the literature in 2018 by the physician and researcher Lisa Littman. It is an explanation of the new phenomenon of adolescents, largely girls, with no history of gender dysphoria, suddenly declaring they want to transition to the opposite sex. It has been a highly contentious diagnosis, with some—and I am one—thinking it’s an important avenue for scientific inquiry, and others declaring it’s a false idea advocated by parents unable to accept they have a transgender child.

Richard Hanania

The first thing to point out about public education is that it involves an extreme restriction of liberty beyond anything we usually accept. How common is it for government to force you to be in a certain place at a certain time? What I call “time-place” mandates are rare. Sometimes you have to go to the DMV, but even then you spend a short amount of time there, and can generally choose when to go. Sometimes people have to respond to subpoenas or jury duty, but those are uncommon events in most people’s lives. Government says to do your taxes, though you only have a deadline and can fill out the paperwork whenever and under whatever conditions you want.

The only substantial populations of individuals who have their lives structured according to time-place mandates in a free society like ours are prisoners, members of the military, and children. The mandates for children have gotten less strict over the years now that all states allow homeschooling, but opponents of school choice for all practical purposes want to do what they can to shape the incentive structures of parents so that they all use public schools (liberal reformers tend to like vouchers that can be used at charter schools, but not ESAs, which give parents complete control). Of course, children don’t have the freedom of adults, and so others are by default in control of how they spend most of their time. But it’s usually parents, not the government, that we trust in this role. Given the unusual degree to which public education infringes on individual liberty and family autonomy, the burden of proof has to be on those in favor of maintaining such an extreme institution.

Commentary

Jo Ellison:

In a brilliant take on the late novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died this month, the writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton describes The Road as being the best parenting book of all time.

It’s an unlikely angle and one that might at first seem facetious. The Road, McCarthy’s odyssey about a father and son walking across a post-apocalyptic landscape in the wake of an unspecified disaster, is more generally celebrated for its spare prose and vivid expression than as a viable alternative to nap-training manifestos and toddler-taming manuals.

But for Jezer-Morton, who was caught up in the infrastructural collapse of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the novel’s brilliance (and its most valuable lessons) is found in its immortal “relevance”. As she writes: “It eschews the typical narrative terrain about heroic American ingenuity in the face of adversity and, instead, focuses almost exclusively on the emotional work of being loving and brave while fearing for your life.”

I have never been caught up in an infrastructural collapse, and read The Road while lying on a comfortable bed. But, as with Jezer-Morton, it stirred in me an almost primal fear. As I reached the book’s conclusion, I put it down, crept into my then five-year-old daughter’s bedroom, picked up her sleeping body and put her in my bed. McCarthy’s novel of dystopian survival had been so terrifying, the only comfort I could think of was to hear my daughter breathe.

Every day I’m grateful for that privilege. The most fundamental hope for any parent is to see their children thrive. As parents we are all on the metaphorical road, trudging towards some distant “safe place” in which we can dispense with all the worry associated with taking care of other human beings. And if we’re lucky we will never reach it, because the very act of worry is an indicator that — right now — everything is basically OK. One hopes the hazards on our road will be small, innocuous dangers especially when for so many others, escaping warzones or natural disasters, the road can be a fact of daily life.

Noah Smith:

In an old Saturday Night Live skit, Chevy Chase, portraying Gerald Ford, says “It was my understanding that there would be no math.” Half a century later, it seems like this has become America’s national motto. Even as high-tech manufacturing has migrated relentlessly to China, plenty of Americans seem to think that they — or anyone — should be able to flourish in a modern economy without a functional understanding of mathematics. U.S. high school math scores lag significantly behind other countries, even though scores in reading and science are above average, and our country is utterly dependent on a continuous inflow of foreign talent for a number of critical STEM fields. Math, out of all subjects, seems to hold a special terror for Americans, who often seem to view the subject as a test of innate intelligence rather than a skill that can be acquired and honed through hard work. 

In response to lagging math scores, educators in California have been trying to water down math education — banning students from taking algebra in 8th grade, replacing advanced algebra classes with “data science” courses that don’t even teach the algebra required to understand basic statistics, and so on. I see this as an extremely wrongheaded move, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. But data analyst Armand Domalewski, a friend of mine, has been following the issue far more closely than I have, and has been outspoken about it on social media, so I thought I would ask him to take a crack at saying what needs to be said.

One of the strangest things about California is that it is simultaneously one of the technology capitals of the world and has some of the worst math scores for children in the entire United States. In practice, California has relied on a combination of pockets of home grown math excellence and imported math whizzes from around the globe to bridge the gap between the math skills it needs and the math skills it has. It works, somewhat—but we can and should do better by all of the kids in our state.

Edward Luce:

If Rome’s oligarchs could have travelled to the future, they might have learned a trick or two from the US Ivy League. It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practised by America’s top universities. Last week the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in US higher education — a ruling mourned by the heads of each of the eight Ivy League schools. Dartmouth even offered counselling to traumatised students. An ancient Roman might have thought something radical had changed. Little could be further from the truth.

Of the 31mn Americans aged between 18 and 24, just 68,000 are Ivy League schools undergraduates — about a fifth of a per cent. Of these, a varying ratio are non-white beneficiaries of affirmative action. Many of those are from privileged black or Hispanic backgrounds, as opposed to Chicago’s South Side or the wastelands of Detroit. That is the basis on which the Ivy League lays claim to being a deliverer of social change. It is an optical illusion. In that respect the Supreme Court has done America a favour. Any disruption to this status quo is a plus.

But it is unlikely to trigger the soul-searching America needs. The US debate remains stubbornly monopolised by the ethnic breakdown of the tiny number of students who win the Ivy League lottery. The 19mn or so of those 31mn young Americans who do not progress beyond high school, and the roughly 12mn who go to less elite colleges, barely feature. Whatever tweaks the Ivy League has to make to keep its diversity ratios after last week’s ruling are thus largely irrelevant to the 99.8 per cent that will never get there.

The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained. The key to the Ivy League is exclusivity; a big expansion in intake would dilute that premium. We are thus likely to continue with a situation in which universities such as Harvard, with a $53bn endowment, or Princeton with $36bn, continue to get richer. Each of these fortunes could revolutionise financial aid at dozens of public universities.

The second most radical option would be for the Ivy League to abolish what is called “ALDC” — athletics, legacy, dean’s list and children of faculty and staff. Forty-three per cent of Harvard’s intake come from one of these groups. The first, athletics, includes sports that can only be learned by the privileged, such as lacrosse, sailing and rowing. The generous athletics intake by universities is why so many recent admission corruption scandals, such as the FBI’s Varsity Blues sting operation, involved athletics directors. Contrary to popular opinion, most athletics scholars are not black basketball players. Sixty-five per cent are white.

The second, legacy students, are the close relatives of alumni — the very definition of elite reproduction. Again, these are mostly white. The third, dean’s List, is a euphemism for the children of people who have donated a lot of money. An example of this is Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose father, Charles, gave $2.5mn to Harvard. Finally, there are the children of faculty members and staff. Taken together, the Ivy League could as easily be construed as an affirmative action plan for wealthy white people, which is very far from the progressive brand it has cultivated.

Its chief victims are Asian. The historic irony is rich. Affirmative action was conceived in the 1960s as a form of reparation for the descendants of slaves. It quickly morphed into a system of race-based gaming for many ethnicities. The group that has lost out the most, Asian-Americans, are immigrants from countries that had nothing to do with US slavery. The chief beneficiaries have been elite whites, rather than African-Americans. The latter supply window dressing for a system that remains substantially unchanged.

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

Daniella Silva:

With the fate of Harvard’s affirmative action lawsuit in the hands of a judge, a new study stemming from that suit has raised more questions about the role of wealth, race and access in college admissions at prestigious universities.

The study, published earlier this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list — applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard.

That number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students, according to the study, with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories.

The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled ‘ALDCs’ in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs,” the study said.

Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories, the authors found.

Joseph Simonson and Andrew Kerr:

The department could start by examining how politically connected families like the Bidens get their children into Ivy League schools.

In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.

Maisy Biden’s college admissions process could raise a number of uncomfortable questions for the president. The saga highlights exactly the kind of “legacy admissions” Biden has slammed. The story also highlights the Biden family’s occasionally shady dealings with the University of Pennsylvania just as congressional Republicans are probing alleged ethical misconduct by both Joe and Hunter Biden.

Maisy Biden was never much of a student. But she had her sights set on the University of Pennsylvania, whose 5.9 percent acceptance rate made it one of the most exclusive schools in the country.

“I applied early decision to Penn today!!” Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31.

Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy’s application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.

On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was “going to try to see [University of Pennsylvania] Pres GUTMANN tomorrow.” Two days later, Joe Biden told Hunter Biden that he “had a great talk with Guttman [sic].”

“Maisy still in the game for regular acceptance. But must do well in class this period. It’s real,” Joe Biden wrote on December 15. “We should talk about tutors etc starting tomorrow.”

Of course, this is a target rich area. “Elizabeth Warren Says Without Affirmative Action, A Native American Girl Like Herself Would Never Have Been Accepted To Rutgers”

The Economist:

Yet improving school buildings and expanding places only gets you so far. India is still doing a terrible job of making sure that the youngsters who throng its classrooms pick up essential skills. Before the pandemic less than half of India’s ten-year-olds could read a simple story, even though most of them had spent years sitting obediently behind school desks (the share in America was 96%). School closures that lasted more than two years have since made this worse.

There are lots of explanations. Jam-packed curriculums afford too little time for basic lessons in maths and literacy. Children who fail to grasp these never learn much else. Teachers are poorly trained and badly supervised: one big survey of rural schools found a quarter of staff were absent. Officials sometimes hand teachers unrelated duties, from administering elections to policing social-distancing rules during the pandemic.

Olivia Herken:

Madison had some of the worst reading gaps in Dane County. Only 10% of Black students in grades 3 through 8 scored proficient or higher in ELA, and only 21% of Hispanic students, compared to 45% of their white counterparts.

Other Dane County schools had similar disparities. In Middleton, 20% of Black children were proficient compared to 62% of Black children. In Oregon, 15% of Black students were proficient compared to 47% of white students. In Stoughton, 11% of Black children were proficient compared to 41% of white 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?

Betsy Hammond:

In the latest sign that Oregon children have been failed by leaders and need an intensive educational rescue, new federal test results indicate that the nation’s students experienced staggering instructional setbacks during the pandemic – yet Oregon’s bore an even worse brunt.

Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only standardized achievement test given to a representative sample of students in all states, reveal that Oregon schools, which once outdid national averages, produced jaw-dropping declines in student outcomes last school year.

The results, made public late Sunday, show Oregon elementary and middle school students now read and do math far more poorly, on average, than their counterparts nationwide. Oregon’s fourth- and eighth-grade math performance ranked sixth worst in the country, the 2022 results indicate.

In fourth grade, only one state – West Virginia – generated significantly worse math scores. Meanwhile, in the west, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana and Utah all significantly outdid Oregon.

Douglas Belkin:

In a December interview with the campus newspaper, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana was given the chance to offer a word of advice to seniors.

“Don’t gratuitously drop the H-bomb,” Khurana said.

The H-bomb, for those unaware of lingo from the most famous Ivy League school, is the thermonuclear act of saying aloud that one attends or attended Harvard. The process of explaining to someone not from Harvard that you went to Harvard is complicated, students at Harvard will tell you, repeatedly.

For years Ivy Leaguers have been conspicuously obtuse about where they went to school. But the H-bomb conversation is at an all-time high.

The odds of admission to Harvard are at historic lows and the Supreme Court is poised to weigh in this month on whether Harvard’s affirmative-action program is constitutional. The high-profile trial that preceded the High Court case shed light on Harvard’s opaque selection process, including evidence that children of donors, offspring of alumni, as well as socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants get special consideration by the admissions office.

The revelations moved Massachusetts lawmakers to recently introduce an act proposing to tax the endowments of schools which consider an applicant’s legacy status or employ early-decision admission, which tends to benefit students from well-off families. The 0.2% surcharge would cost Harvard about $100 million a year and would fund the state’s community colleges. The bill is set for a committee hearing in the Massachusetts legislature this month.

George Will:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Bridget Phetasy

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably witnessed the backlash to Pride. There have been mass boycotts of Bud Light after the beer company partnered with trans woman and TikTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, sending her a custom can to celebrate her first year of “girlhood.” Target was next to come under fire for its Pride display targeting children and their “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for women. 

This set the stage for the most divisive Pride month in some time. First, the boycotts. Then videos of angry parents at school boards went viral. Conservative radio hosts and commentators vowed to make Pride “toxic” to brands. But it’s not just conservatives who are pushing back; according to a recent Gallup poll, even Democrats have seen a drop in the acceptance of same-sex relations.

Which begs the question: what happened to Pride? After decades of progress for gay rights, growing acceptance of gay marriage and the normalization of same-sex relationships, Pride is unexpectedly political again. Why? 

In search of an answer, I spoke to prominent LGBT thinkers and writers, many of them dissenting voices when judged against the views of many LGBT advocacy groups. Their answers surprised me. Across the board they all said some version of “this was inevitable.”

“When it comes to gay issues, conservatives largely lost the culture war,” Katie Herzog observes. “But something about recent trends has reignited that passion — and issues that seemed resolved are up for debate again. I guess the Nineties really are back.”

“The core reason for the backlash is pretty simple: children,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “The attempt to indoctrinate children in gender ideology and to trans them on the verge of puberty has changed the debate. Start indoctrinating and transing children… and you will re-energize one of the oldest homophobic tropes there is: ‘gays are child molesters.’”

Jessica Grose:

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

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

Choose Life.

Sarah Neville:

On a rainy evening in Copenhagen last year, a diminutive woman in jeans, ankle boots and a casual shirt waited offstage at the Koncerthuset, a vast venue renowned for its acoustics. She had been invited by Science & Cocktails, a Danish non-profit that pairs lectures with drinks chilled in dry ice. Many in the audience were decades her junior and the mood was more rock concert than lecture as a voice over the loudspeaker announced, “The one and only — Shanna. Fucking. Swan!”

Swan, who turned 87 last month, walked on to the thump of a techno track, whoops and applause. “Wow. I have to say” — she chuckled gamely — “I’ve never had an introduction like that. And it’s wonderful.” As the hall quietened, she began to speak, calmly and without notes, about the animating purpose of her professional life. “I’m going to tell you a mystery story,” she said. “And hopefully, you’ll help me to solve it along the way.” 

The mystery is this. Since the late 1930s, sperm counts around the world appear to have dropped significantly. While the decline was initially observed in western countries, there is evidence of the same phenomenon in the developing world, and it seems to be accelerating. Swan, a Berkeley-trained statistician-turned-epidemiologist, believes she knows why.

For more than two decades she has devoted her life to studying the effects of “endocrine disrupting” chemicals (EDCs), which can interfere with the body’s natural hormones. These include pesticides, bisphenols, which harden plastic so it can be used in food storage containers and baby bottles, and phthalates, which soften plastic for use in packaging and products such as garden hoses. In recent years, traces of EDCs have been found in breast milk, placental tissue, urine, blood and seminal fluid.

In the glare of orange spotlights, Swan led the Copenhagen audience to her conclusion: that the innocuous products in your kitchen cupboard, bathroom cabinet or garden shed may be lowering sperm counts. They could also affect the reproductive systems of your unborn children. The implications of EDCs for human health don’t stop there: they can disrupt thyroid function, trigger cancer and obesity.

Jonathan Kay

It’s now been more than two years since Canada was convulsed by claims that 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous schoolchildren had been discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. No actual bodies or human remains were in evidence—just ground-penetrating radar data indicating regularly-spaced soil dislocations. But you wouldn’t have known that from the breathless manner in which the story was reported at the time. A Global News headline announced the “Discovery of Human Remains at Kamloops Residential School Grounds.” Another, at the Toronto Star, declared, “The Remains of 215 Children Have Been Found.” 

I was one of the many Canadians who believed these headlines. The racist abuses meted out by Canada’s 19th- and 20th-century-era residential-school system, which had been created to “civilize” Indigenous people and strip them of their culture, has been widely discussed for decades. Given this dark history, it wasn’t hard to believe that some of the priests and educators who ran these schools hadn’t just been cruel and negligent (this much was already known), but also had committed acts of mass murder against defenceless children.

Without waiting for the hard evidence to be sprung from the earth, flags were lowered, July 1st Canada Day celebrations were cancelled, Justin Trudeau took a knee for the cameras, and the whole nation went into an utterly unprecedented collective period of self-flagellation. Before the summer was over, Trudeau pledged more than $300 million in new funding for Indigenous communities, so they could complete the grim task of scouring the earth for child corpses. The Canadian Press later called it the story of the year.

WM Briggs:

Here’s why.

Heard about the formal peer-reviewed paper “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases” by Suzanna Diaz & J. Michael Bailey in the Archives of Sexual Behavior?

It was canceled. 

Or, in science speak, retracted. Because why? Not because of any gross error. Because “activists” (i.e. true believers) hated it.

Rapid onset gender dysphoria is the kind of madness that for instance strikes classrooms full of girls, who, under the tutelage of a purple-haired “educator”, or even on their own, suddenly all “discover” they are boys. 

Article says “Parents reported that they had often felt pressured by clinicians to affirm their AYA [adolescents and young adults] child’s new gender and support their transition. According to the parents, AYA children’s mental health deteriorated considerably after social transition.”

Which is no surprise to any sane person. But truth is not a beloved entity in our Regime. So the paper had to go. 

Even more amusing is that “Suzanna Diaz” is a fake name. Imagine. A scholar so frightened of other academics she, or he, had to use a nom de guerre. (There is no typo here.)

You can read all about the cancelling elsewhere. Which is one among many.

Now you and I, dear reader, have looked at hundreds of papers over the years, nearly all bad. Most with mistakes so egregious even Kamala Harris would blush at them. All of them committing scientific sins far in excess in any found in the Rapid Gender Madness paper. None of them have been retracted.

Minneapolis School Voices

The district’s lack of transparency has limited our ability to report about Minneapolis Public Schools. 

Since launching in November of 2022, Minneapolis Schools Voices strives to provide accurate, timely and useful information about Minneapolis Public Schools’ district administration, school board, and schools for readers. We aim to reach a diverse group of sources and audience members who are parents, educators and community members in the district. 

For over two decades, student academic data has shown a large, persistent racialized gap in the outcomes of the district’s students. In recent years, the chronic, inequitable, underfunding by the State of economically, racially and linguistically diverse school districts in Minnesota, like Minneapolis Public Schools, has become more apparent. The district is on the precipice of a financial crisis, long in the making, and delayed by the pandemic. At the same time, the district is working to become a more welcoming place for the diverse communities it serves. And, it is searching for a new superintendent to lead the district through an as yet unspecified “transformation.”

Amidst everything happening at the nearly 70 schools serving about 30,000 children in Minneapolis, MPS has a transparency problem.

The district has faced consistent criticism for years about its lack of communication with families, staff and community. Given the challenges ahead for the district, and the likely disruption to students, families and staff as the district confronts its large, structural budget deficit, it is even more important for the public to have factual, timely information.

Simon Kuper:

Elite US colleges could do that even without affirmative action. First, they would have to abolish affirmative action for white applicants. A study led by Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University found that more than 43 per cent of white undergraduates admitted to Harvard from 2009 to 2014 were recruited athletes, children of alumni, “on the dean’s interest list” (typically relatives of donors) or “children of faculty and staff”. Three-quarters wouldn’t have got in otherwise. This form of corruption doesn’t exist in Britain. One long-time Oxford admissions tutor told me that someone in his job could go decades without even being offered a donation as bait for admitting a student. Nor do British alumni expect preferential treatment for their children.

The solutions to many American societal problems are obvious if politically unfeasible: ban guns, negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Similarly, elite US universities could become less oligarchical simply by agreeing to live with more modest donations — albeit still the world’s biggest. Harvard’s endowment of $50.9bn is more than six times that of the most elite British universities.

But US colleges probably won’t change, says Martin Carnoy of Stanford’s School of Education. Their business model depends on funding from rich people, who expect something in return. He adds: “It’s the same with the electoral system. Once you let private money into a public good, it becomes unfair.”

Michael F. Shaughnessy, via email:

1. Rick, COVID came, it saw, and it conquered, and it impacted a lot of schools. In your new book, The Great School Rethink, you discuss the pandemic’s effects and the aftermath. Can you talk a bit about the consequences of COVID-19 on the education system?

Look, during COVID-19, when schools shuttered across the nation, educators and families suddenly had to scramble. The shift to remote learning spurred new practices and led teachers to explore new skills and attempt new strategies. The pandemic altered household routines and upended how tens of millions of families interacted with schools. Even as schools opened back up, disruption lingered. Students had suffered staggering learning loss. Behavioral and disciplinary issues were rampant. Enrollment in the nation’s public schools declined by more than one million students, the biggest drop ever recorded. Schools struggled mightily to answer the challenges of a once-in-a-century cataclysm highlighted and exacerbated longtime frailties that were hiding in plain sight.

2. One consequence of COVID was a switch to online instruction for many students. How do you think this worked out?

Initially, harried school leaders responded to school closures by throwing classrooms online—telling unprepared teachers to essentially move their classroom onto a screen filled with glazed-eyed, muted kids. Some schools even implemented a widely reviled practice, derisively termed “Zoom in a room,” in which masked students sat six feet apart in classrooms staring at screens, supervised by a nonteacher, while their teacher taught remotely. This stuff was a debacle. It was glitchy, rote, and dehumanizing. It was technology at its impersonal worst.  

This was always going to make for a worse experience. At the same time, online instruction created new opportunities for instructional delivery. Just three or four years ago, the technology for virtual tutoring was something totally alien to most parents and teachers. Today, millions of families think it’s no big deal to enroll kids in online courses, when appropriate, and students are more acclimated to such settings. Used well, this potentially opens a whole world of opportunities to customize course-taking and instructional support.  

3. As we “catch our breath” and transition back to normal in education, we may have an opportunity to re-evaluate and re-assess what we are doing. But are people doing this? If not, how would you recommend people go about it?

Some of the early signs aren’t promising. When funders, advocates, and the US Secretary of Education started burbling about the need for a post-pandemic “Great Reset,” the grandiose rhetoric left me cold. Look, given what I do all day, I’m well aware that the easiest thing in the world to do is talk about school improvement. It’s a whole lot easier to write white papers, deliver keynotes, and churn out colorful PowerPoints than to change things in real schools for real kids.  

As I pondered the opportunities to do better, it struck me that there’s less need for a Great Reset than a great rethink. Instead of more self-assured answers, there might be more value in helping to ensure that we’re asking the right questions. If that impulse doesn’t come naturally to many of those passionately seeking to improve schools, that just may make it all the more necessary.  

4. In The Great School Rethink, you address some of the issues coming out of the pandemic. What do you see as the main challenges for education leaders?

Here’s how I see it. As families, communities, and neighborhoods dealt with the fallout from COVID-19, many things became newly clear. Too much school time gets wasted. The parent-school relationship has grown distant. Families need more and better school options. Schools are too inflexible and don’t make good use of new technologies. This doesn’t mean that we need yet another eleven-point plan from on high. Leaders should resist the impulse to come up with those complicated plans, and instead ask hard questions about how schools use time and talent, what they do with digital tools, and how they work with parents. 

5. What has COVID taught us about what makes an effective teacher?

During the pandemic, I heard a lot of highly regarded teachers saying that they were having trouble adjusting to online teaching—that their repertoire wasn’t designed for pixel-based instruction. At the same time, plenty of school leaders remarked that they were pleasantly surprised to find that teachers who’d sometimes struggled in classrooms were surprisingly adept when online. The pandemic taught us that some in-person skills translate to remote learning, but not all of them. And remote learning may utilize skills that don’t count for as much in person.  

This can all get pretty complicated. But one simple takeaway is that it’s nuts to solely think of teachers as either “good” or “not good.” When we say that an educator is effective, the first question should be “At what?” And the second question should be, “How do we get them doing more of what they’re effective at?” 

6. I hear from a lot of educators that we need more time in the school day or year. Do you agree that we need to extend those to make up for lost time during COVID?

Advocates and public officials have long argued that American students need to spend more time in school. Reformers will insist that American students spend too little time in the classroom compared to their international peers. But the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reportsthat, on average, U.S. students attend school for 8,903 hours over their first nine years in school—which is 1,264 hours more than the OECD average.

It turns out that enormous amounts of time get wasted in the school year. For instance, researchers studying schools in Providence, Rhode Island, estimated that a typical classroom in a Providence public school is interrupted over 2,000 times per year and that these interruptions combine to consume ten to twenty days of instructional time. Before locking kids into dingy school buildings on a sunny afternoon or warm summer’s day, we should first be sure that we’re productively using the 1,000+ hours a year that schools already command.  

7. In The Great School Rethink, you talk about what teachers actually do during the school day. Can you share some of your thoughts on this?

Teachers perform many, many different tasks each day. They lecture, facilitate discussions, grade quizzes, monitor hallways, fill out forms, counsel kids, struggle with obstinate technology, and much else. Yet when I work with teachers, they almost invariably report that they’ve never been part of a meaningful effort to unpack what they do each day. That makes it tough to know if time is being used effectively or what might be done differently. 

If you get teachers to list out what they do each day, you’ll often find that many teachers are spending a lot of time on things that they don’t think matter the most for kids. Post-Covid, school leaders should start asking how they can get teachers to do more of the hand-on-shoulder work that makes the profession meaningful. 

8. There’s a lot of concern right now about students’ mental and emotional well-being. Given what we saw during the pandemic, is that a product of technology? Or is there any way that these new technologies can help with that?

It’s clear that kids’ mental health took a beating during the COVID-driven isolation. Today, kids are enmeshed in fewer social networks than ever before. They are far less likely than they once were to engage in things like church groups, the Boy Scouts, and 4-H clubs. One oft-overlooked downside of this isolation is that kids now encounter fewer potential mentors, which matters for everything from learning to college admissions to landing a job.  

Technology can help with some of this. They can provide students, especially those who don’t have a lot of educated adults in their lives, with access to mentors they might not otherwise encounter. For instance, platforms like ImBlaze and Tucson, Arizona-based CommunityShare streamline the act of locating experts and potential partners. School systems can partner with these agencies to increase student engagement with potential mentors. This is the human dimension of mentoring, which is something that risks getting lost in all the enthusiasm for AI-enabled tutoring. 

9. Rick, after the pandemic, there has been a lot of consternation about school choice laws coming out of red states. Can you tell us about what’s going on here?

You’re right to be puzzled about the proliferation of school choice laws, commonly billed as education savings accounts. Essentially, they entail states depositing a student’s education funds into a dedicated account which families then use to mix-and-match education goods and services from schools and other providers. ESAs are, in large part, a response to the limits of school choice. School choice isn’t a great solution for parents who like their schools but have more specific concerns.  

And given that the lion’s share of parents say they like their kid’s school, this means that school choice isn’t much help for many students or families. But because these programs frequently require parents to pull their children from public schools to be eligible for the ESA, are subject to a variety of restrictions, depend mightily on execution, and may be available to only a limited number of families, we’re a long way from the kind of radical evolution that supporters seek and critics fear. 

10. Who is publishing your book and how can interested readers get a copy?

The Great School Rethink was published by Harvard Education Press. Readers can purchase a copy on Harvard’s website, or through familiar platforms like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. And, if you visit just the right bookstore, you may be able to pluck a copy off the shelves. 

I should say that any readers interested in ordering bulk copies for professional development or book clubs can reach out to my assistant, Greg Fournier (greg.fournier@aei.org), who will be happy to work with Harvard to get them the best possible price.

Learn more, here.

Allie Kohn:

Readers alarmed by your coverage of a report asserting that Massachusetts is “among the worst states … for preparing teachers how to teach children to read in scientifically proven ways” should be aware that the National Council on Teacher Quality, which issued the report, is a political advocacy group founded by the right-wing Thomas B. Fordham Institute (“Colleges earn low grades on preparing reading teachers,” Page A1, June 14).

Some have understandably objected to the basis for the council’s claims about what prospective teachers are actually being taught in education programs. But the problem here runs deeper. The “science of reading” campaign — with references to “evidence-based” methods — represents a distortion of the data. Many experts have objected to the claim that children must receive explicit phonics instruction in order to learn to read. In fact, that approach, particularly when imposed too early or for too long, can adversely affect children’s depth of understanding (their comprehension of meaning) as well as their enjoyment of reading.

Robert George:

After the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization early last summer, Princeton University’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies issued a statementfiercely condemning the ruling. The director stated that the program stood “in solidarity” with the people whose rights had been allegedly stripped away by five conservative justices doing the “racist” and “sexist” bidding of the “Christian Right,” causing women to endure “forced pregnancies,” and waging an “unprecedented attack on democracy.”

I have no doubt that the statement reflected the views of a large majority of those associated with the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. But was the director, speaking on behalf of an official unit of the university, right to declare an institutional stance on the Dobbs decision?

I am myself the director of an academic program at Princeton—the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A majority of those associated with the Madison Program believe that elective abortion violates the rights of unborn children. So: Would it have been appropriate for the program to put out the following statement?

The James Madison Program of Princeton University applauds the Supreme Court of the United States for rectifying a long-standing constitutional and moral atrocity. The so-called constitutional right to abortion, which had been imposed on the nation by the Supreme Court nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, lacked any basis in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution of the United States. It was “an act of raw judicial power,” to quote Justice Byron White’s dissent in Roe, which deprived the American people of their right to work through constitutionally prescribed democratic procedures to protect innocent children in the womb from the lethal violence of abortion. The Supreme Court has, finally, relegated a tragic error to the ash heap of history alongside such similarly unjust and ignominious decisions as Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu v. U.S.

The Madison Program put out no such statement. Nor did I, as director, consider even for a moment issuing such a statement or asking my colleagues to do so. My understanding of what is proper was and is that, although I may certainly speak for myself, and identify myself as a Princeton faculty member while doing so, it would be wrong for me and my colleagues to identify the university or one of its units with a view of the rightness or wrongness of the Dobbs decision, or to make sweeping pronouncements on the justice or injustice of abortion.

NCTQ

All children deserve to learn to read, and all teachers deserve the preparation and support that will allow them to help their students achieve this goal. Yet more than one-third of fourth graders—1.3 million children¹ in the U.S.—cannot read at a basic level.²

Not learning how to read has lifelong consequences. Students who are not reading at grade level by the time they reach fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school,³ which in turn leads to additional challenges for them as adults: lower lifetime earnings,⁴ higher rates of unemployment,⁵and a higher likelihood of entering the criminal justice system.⁶ Even more alarming, the rate of students who cannot read proficiently by fourth grade climbs even higher for students of color, those with learning differences, and those who grow up in low-income households, perpetuating disparate life outcomes.⁷ This dismal data has nothing to do with the students and everything to do with inequities in access to effective literacy instruction.

The status quo is far from inevitable. In fact, we know the solution to this reading crisis, but we are not using the solution at scale. More than 50 years of research provides a clear picture of effective literacy instruction. These strategies and methods—collectively called scientifically based reading instruction, which is grounded in the science of reading—could dramatically reduce the rate of reading failure. Past estimates have found that while three in 10 children struggle to read (and that rate has grown higher since the pandemic), research indicates that more than 90% of all students could learn to read if they had access to teachers who employed scientifically based reading instruction.⁸

“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?

Suzanne Moore:

Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.

The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.

We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.

Scott Girard:

A report last month showed that students in Madison schools’ full-day and half-day 4-year-old kindergarten programs had similar academic gains over the 2021-22 school year.

The results of the study, which covers the first year of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s full-day 4K program, weren’t a surprise to Director of Early Learning Culleen Witthuhn, given how “tricky” it is to look at academic information for 4-year-olds.

Plus, Witthuhn said, the full-day 4K implementation wasn’t necessarily about seeing better test results for 4-year-olds.

“(That) really wasn’t our goal or our intent,” Witthuhn said. “It was really to provide access to families who typically might not have been able to have any high-quality, early learning experiences at all otherwise.”

Accessing half-day programming can be difficult for families experiencing homelessness, or who have parents or caregivers who work full-time throughout the day, Witthuhn said. 

Full-day programs in MMSD, on average, included more students of color and children whose parents did not attend college compared to the half-day programs, according to the Madison Education Partnership study.

The district began its full-day 4K program in fall 2021 and expanded it for this school year, with enrollment growing from 237 in the first year to 417 in the second.

This fall, it will once again grow with five more classrooms at additional schools.

“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?

Tom Loveless:

In February, 2023 Bari Weiss produced a podcast, “Why 65% of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read” and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, wrote “Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It.” Both headlines are misleading. The 65% and two-thirds figures are referring to the percentage of 4^th graders who scored below proficient on the last reading test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered in 2022.

The problem is this: scoring below proficient doesn’t mean “can’t really read” or “struggling to read.”   It also does not mean “functionally illiterate” or identify “non- readers” as some of the more vituperative descriptions on social media have claimed. It doesn’t even mean “below grade level in reading,” one of the milder distortions.

Both press reports were second-hand accountings of Emily Hanford’s series, Sold a Story. Hanford immediately took to Twitter to try to clear up the matter.

But what about the percent below basic? How do they fare, Tom? And when we go periods of time when we fail to make progress in further reducing the percent below basic we are harming these children and putting their prospects at risk, no? @arotherham @1in5advocacy @CharlesBarone

— Sandy Kress (@Kress_Sandy) June 12, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Peter Thiel:

What I’d like to do is delineate a few areas in which diversity is making us ignore the real issues that we should be paying attention to. I want to suggest that, at least on a public-policy level, all these debates about diversity, identity politics, multiculturalism, the woke religion, etc., should be treated like debates about homelessness. Homelessness is a mess. It’s a problem. And at the same time that it is a very real problem, it is a giant machine to redirect attention from all the other problems across America toward a narrow aspect of big-city dysfunction. When homelessness is forced into every policy conversation, it leads to circuitous, dead-end reasoning—We’re never going to fix homelessness until we fix the schools, but we’re never going to fix the schools, the police, or even the roads until we fix homelessness. It becomes an all-purpose excuse for ignoring what’s really going on. So let me, in quick succession, list a few of the deeper issues obscured by our diversity obsession today.

Start with the university. It’s easy to focus on all the insanity in the humanities. But if you remember what universities themselves believe—that all their serious work, their cutting-edge research, is done in the sciences—the focus on the humanities begins to resemble an attention redirect, stifling the hard questions about what is actually going on in the sciences. Are they progressing as advertised? Are we still living in an accelerating world in which science is fundamentally healthy and critical, with diversity of thought? It shouldn’t have required covid to be able to ask these questions, to notice that “science” has somehow gotten to be a very, very diseased thing. Most imagine a scientist to be an independent researcher who thinks for himself, and this figure may still appear in children’s books, but in practice the occupation mostly entails the enforcement of a fixed set of dogmas.

A few years after The Diversity Myth came out, a Stanford physics professor, Bob Laughlin, got a Nobel Prize. And he began to suffer from the supreme delusion that, now that he had a Nobel Prize in physics, he also had academic freedom and could investigate anything he wanted. Now, there are a lot of controversial topics in science. You could have a heterodox view on stem-cell research, or you could be a skeptic of climate change or Darwinism. But Laughlin hit on a topic that was far more taboo than any of the above. He had the idea that most of the scientists were doing no work at all. They were actually stealing money from the government, just creating all these fraudulent grant applications. Laughlin had done a lot of work studying the physics of super-high temperatures (superconductivity and the like), and he once told me that, of the roughly fifty thousand papers written on the subject, maybe twenty-five of them were any good at all.

Laughlin’s team started with the biology department at Stanford, launching a sort of inquiry into what, exactly, it was doing. They didn’t actually publish the results—they just had a public hearing and generally denounced all the professors as having stolen money from the government. The generous conclusion would be that the department wasn’t fully fraudulent: just an incredibly incrementalist exercise in groupthink that wasn’t really moving the dial forward. This was a line of thinking that was completely, completely taboo. I don’t need to tell you how the story ends.

Breaking:

The NHS have banned puberty blockers for children outside of clinical research.

This day will go down in history as the day that safeguarding of children came back into existence.

— James Esses (@JamesEsses) June 9, 2023

Source Document.

Corrinne Hess:

A bipartisan bill is expected to be released this month that would change the way most public schools in Wisconsin teach reading. 

State Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay, who chairs the Assembly Committee on Education, has been working with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction on the plan that would move more schools away from teaching what is known as “balanced literacy,” to a “science of reading” approach.

Instead of being taught reading through pictures, word cues and memorization, children would be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on learning to sound out letters and phrases.

According to DPI, only about 20 percent of school districts are using a phonics-based approach to literacy education. Other reading curriculums that don’t include phonics have been shown to be less effective for students.

The bill will be introduced separately from the 2023-25 biennial budget that is currently being crafted but $15 million to support the plan would be included in the budget, Kitchens said during an April 24 interview on Wisconsin Eye.  

“Education is the one chance we have to break the cycle of generational poverty that we see in Wisconsin and reading is by far the most important skill to allow children to be successful in school,” Kitchens said. 

Kitchens told Wisconsin Public Radio on Thursday he is updating the current draft of the bill and will share it with DPI “in coming days.”

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?

Keith McNulty:

As a child, I remember reading the warning messages on plastic shopping bags: ‘This bag is not a toy, keep away from children’. I found this statement hilarious. Of course a plastic shopping bag is not a toy.

At the time, I was too young to appreciate the reason for the warning — that anything can be a toy and that toys can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Over the years since, I’ve heard many stories of young children swallowing lego pieces or small batteries, or teenagers causing injury from flying Wii controllers.

But when it comes to truly dangerous toys, you’d struggle to beat the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab. Billed as ‘Exciting and Safe’, the kit contained four sealed jars containing actual Uranium ores. Made by the A.C. Gilbert Toy Company, this kit came on the market in 1950 at a price of $49.50 (over $500 in today’s money).

Nowadays, it seems completely unbelievable that a children’s toy like this would be allowed on the market. Let’s have quick look into the story of what could be the most dangerous toy ever.

Tyler O’Neil:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison emptied its dorms in March 2020, instructing students to hunker down at home.

Freshman Isaac Wells-Cage didn’t have a home to go to. His mom was in the hospital, his dad was out of the picture, so he shared an apartment with a friend.

While in some ways, his pandemic experience was similar to classmates — he listened to lectures from bed and had swabs stuck up his nose for required COVID testing — he weathered things differently because of all he had already been through.

“Those experiences, they’re definitely monumental and they matter,” Wells-Cage said. “But in comparison to what I’ve experienced in life, it’s just, like, another day.”

His mother struggled with schizophrenia, so he lived in a foster home from ages 4 to 8. When he moved back with his mom, their living situation was always temporary: sometimes an apartment, sometimes a group home or homeless shelter. Wells-Cage grew up in a slice of northwestern Milwaukee where 95% of residents are Black. It’s a place that’s been subjected to decades of redlining and systemic racism, where two-thirds of the children live in poverty and the reputation as one of the country’s most incarcerated ZIP codes has stuck for years.

Robert Pondisco:

A new study from the Texas Public Policy Foundation is a reminder that the most persuasive argument in favor of school choice is not the promise of higher test scores, the beneficial effects of competition, or even an escape hatch from failing public schools—it’s the power of choice to make a more satisfying range of school cultures and curriculum available than traditional public schools can accommodate.

For years, wonkish arguments for school choice mostly revolved around enhanced performance. Researchers and policymakers have long built the case for (or against) choice based on test scores or other measurable metrics to demonstrate that choice “works.” The rapid growth of charter schools, for example, has long been framed as a moral imperative: a lifeboat to rescue students from failing schools, and a means of pressuring traditional public schools to improve or lose students to competition. More recently, some have offered choice as a means of disarming combatants in our ongoing “culture wars.” This train of thought brings us a little closer to putting school culture and curriculum at the center of the case for choice, but it still treats those things as a means, not an end in itself.

These common arguments for choice are lost on those actually doing the choosing. An analysis of the growth of classical charter schools in Texas by Albert Cheng and Cassidy Syftestad, suggests that parents are choosing those schools because of the intrinsic appeal of an education for their children grounded in the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. The pair surveyed 431 parents with children enrolled in Texas classical charter schools and convened focus groups for 25 of them to discuss their educational priorities for their children and what they liked or disliked about their child’s school. They found that “parents’ educational priorities aligned with the priorities of classical education,” which has seen a big spike in demand in Texas and elsewhere. Parents expressed “strong desires for their children to grow in wisdom and virtue,” they explain.

Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism School (along with Marquette University), the formation, affiliation(s) and funding sources of Wisconsin Watch have generated some controversy. Jim Piwowarczyk noted in November, 2022:

“Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-funded UW-Madison campus, has taken more than $1 million from an organization founded by George Soros over the years. Wisconsin Right Now discovered that the group is still prominently pushing out stories by a writer, Howard Hardee, who was dispatched to Wisconsin by a Soros-funded organization to work on “election integrity” stories and projects.” When major media outlets like WTM-TV and the Wisconsin State Journal run stories by Wisconsin Watch or Hardee, they fail to advise readers that he’s a fellow with a Soros-linked group. The group says that “hundreds” of news organizations have shared its stories over the years, giving them wide reach.

The Soros family also boasts significant influence over American media. An analysis from the Media Research Center found numerous media outlets employ journalists who also serve on boards of organizations that receive large amounts of funding from Soros.

More recently, and amidst Wisconsin’s biennial budget deliberations including many billions ($11.97B in 2019! [xlsx] excluding federal and other sources) for traditional government K-12 school districts, Wisconsin Watch writer Phoebe Petrovic posted a number of articles targeting choice (0.797%!! of $11.97B) schools:

May 5, 2023: Considering a Wisconsin voucher school? Here’s what parents of children who are LGBTQ+ or have a disability should know. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 5, 2023: False choice: Wisconsin taxpayers support schools that can discriminate. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 20, 2023: Federal, state law permit disability discrimination in Wisconsin voucher schools. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

## May 22, 2023 via a St Marcus Milwaukee sermon [transcript]- a church family whose incredible student efforts are worth a very deep dive. Compare this to Madison, where we’ve tolerated disastrous reading results for decades despite spending > $25k+/student!

## May 23, 2023: Curious (false claims) reporting on legacy k-12 schools, charter/voucher models and special education via Wisconsin coalition for education freedom. (Focus on 99% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 31, 2023: ‘Unwanted and unwelcome’: Anti-LGBTQ+ policies common at Wisconsin voucher schools. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 31, 2023: Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school options via another Wisconsin Watch writer: Mario Koran. (Focus on 99% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

WI’s open enrollment program is one of the best in the country, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t limitations. When anti-#SchoolChoice folks use @WisconsinWatch articles to attack, they should also remember the same things happen in public schools. https://t.co/EwPIiwm7CU

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 1, 2023

The free market roots of #SchoolChoice are often overlooked in today’s political debates. It’s important to remember that the goal of school choice isn’t the elimination of public schools, but rather the lifting of all ships by providing competition to the public school monopoly. https://t.co/t49It5boHq

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 1, 2023

Related: Governor Evers’ most recent budget proposals have attempted to kill One City Schools’ charter authorization…… and 2010: WEAC $1.57M !! for four state senators.

June 2, 2023 Wisconsin Watch’s Embarrassing Campaign against Vouchers and Christian Schools

Oops:

“Wisconsin Watch isn’t nonpartisan in a way that a layman would understand the term. Rather, it’s nonpartisan because there isn’t a party far enough to the left to earn its support.” @LutherAbel1 dismantles Petrovic’s reporting.https://t.co/2U1miyLSv7

— Patrick McIlheran (@PaddyMacMke) June 2, 2023

In examining who Wisconsin excludes from school choice, we’ve seen how private voucher schools discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and those w/ disabilities.

Here, @MarioKoran examines how public schools reject kids w/ disabilities from open enrollment https://t.co/gsNYBO6ocX

— Jim Malewitz (@Jmalewitz) June 1, 2023

Yeah, @WisconsinWatch has long leaned left and can easily be similarly accused of avoiding introspection. Lol https://t.co/GBseKikRh6

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) June 3, 2023

Their literal next piece (by a different reporter, true) was on inadequate special needs funding, so it’s suspicious to overlook that when critical of voucher schools and special needs.

The sexuality piece was bad journalism with unfounded logical leaps.https://t.co/A8WQgg2bdP

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) June 3, 2023

Why might civics minded have an interest in funding sources (such as Wisconsin Watch, WILL, ActBlue and so on)?

Two examples:

Billionaire George Soros is taking a stake in the Bernalillo County district attorney’s race, backing Raul Torrez with a $107,000 contribution to an independent expenditure committee.

George Soros, a multibillionaire who has only the most tenuous connection to Colorado, is paying for negative ads against incumbent District Attorney Pete Weir, a Republican, pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the effort.

Alex Gutentag:

What makes the NEA’s bargaining approach so remarkable is the fact that this union and its counterpart, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have recently inflicted profound racial and social injustice on the country’s school children in the form of extended school closures.

As an Oakland public school teacher, I was a staunch supporter of the teachers union and was a union representative at my school for three years. In 2020, however, I began to disagree with the union when it prevented me from returning to my classroom long after studies proved that school reopening was safe, even without COVID-19 mitigation measures. In my experience, the union’s actions were not motivated by sincere fears, but rather by a desire to virtue-signal and maintain comfortable work-from-home conditions.

Although union bosses like Randi Weingarten continue to obfuscate their role in school closures, the historical record is clear: The union repeatedly pushed to keep schools closed, and areas with greater union influence kept schools closed longer. Politicians, public health officials, and the media certainly had a hand in this fiasco, but the union egged on dramatic news stories, framed school reopening as a partisan issue, and directly interfered in CDC recommendations. Teachers saw firsthand that virtual learning was a farce and that children were suffering. While there may be plenty of blame to go around, teachers’ abandonment of their own students was a special kind of betrayal.

I am well aware that there were many problems plaguing public education before school closures, and that teaching was a challenging and exhausting job. Today, however, the crisis teachers face is an order of magnitude worse than it was in 2019, and this crisis is almost entirely self-inflicted. Public school enrollment is plummeting, kids are refusing to go to school, and disciplinary problems are spiraling out of control.

Many districts are in freefall. In Baltimore, one high school student told the local news that, “The rising number of violence within city public schools has been unfathomable.” More than 80% of U.S. schools have reported an increase in behavior issues. Nearly half of all schools have teacher shortages, and teachers continue to leave in droves.

Nationally, the chronic absence rate doubled, and it is not showing signs of improvement. In one San Francisco elementary school, almost 90% of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year. In New York City, 50% of all Black students and 47% of all Latino students were chronically absent. Parents have no idea how far behind their kids really are, and schools cannot repair learning loss on a mass scale because the available workforce is simply not up to the task.

Eugenia Cheng:

The basic problem, in my view, is that in our haste to convey content – fractions, percentages, algorithms – we don’t pay enough attention to feelings. Typical curriculums fail to imbue children with a love and appreciation of maths. This is not the teachers’ fault – the education system judges students on performance, not enjoyment. However, if we focus on content at the expense of feelings then that content is unlikely to stick. Worse, we end up producing maths-phobic or maths-sceptical people who then find it difficult to apply important logical and quantitative reasoning techniques in the real world. Just how dangerous this can be became clear during the pandemic. In the early days, people who did not understand exponentials thought that predictions of future widespread infection were just fearmongering. Later on, the fact that there were a large number of infections among vaccinated people was interpreted by some as a sign they weren’t working – rather than exactly what you would expect if the majority of the population had received their jabs.

As scientist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago, I’ve been teaching art students at undergraduate level for eight years. Most of them were badly put off maths at school. I ask them what they found so disagreeable, and there are clear recurring themes: memorisation, especially of times tables, timed tests, right-and-wrong answers, and being made to feel stupid for making mistakes. Often they felt alienated because they had searching questions – such as why does -(-1)=1; do numbers exist; is maths real – but they were told these were silly or irrelevant, and they should get back to their repetitive, algorithmic homework assignments.

When five-year-olds first encounter maths, it’s as a creative, open-ended activity, involving play and exploration

I sometimes think that the current educational approach turns so many people off that it would be better not to teach maths at all, because at least then we’d be having no effect rather than a negative one. Prime minister Rishi Sunak has a point when he says we have an “anti-maths” culture, but he is wrong to think we can improve the situation by extending compulsory maths to 18. The last thing we need is more years of trauma-inducing maths lessons. Those who like it already carry on with it, so we’d just be forcing the disillusioned to continue studying something they don’t enjoy.

Peter Jamison:

Across the country, interest in home schooling has never been greater. The Bealls could see the surge in Virginia, where nearly 57,000 children were being home-schooled in the fall of 2022 — a 28 percent jump from three years earlier. The rise of home education, initially unleashed by parents’ frustrations with pandemic-related campus closures and remote learning, has endured as one of the lasting social transformations wrought by covid-19.

But if the coronavirus was a catalyst for the explosion in home schooling, the stage was set through decades of painstaking work by true believers like those who had raised Aaron and Christina. Aided by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a Christian nonprofit that has been dubbed “the most influential homeschool organization in the world,” and is based less than five miles from the Bealls’ house in Northern Virginia — those activists had fought to establish the legality of home schooling in the 1980s and early 1990s, conquering the skepticism of public school administrators and state lawmakers across the country.

Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.

## I’ve known a number of people who chose home schooling. In many cases, academic rigor was a significant factor. Religion was for some as well.

Perhaps these links might offer a bit of background:

“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?

Niraj Warikoo:

As the father of twin boys with differing academic abilities, Krit Patel, of Troy, said honors classes are helpful in improving the learning of all students.

“I love them equally,” Patel said of his twins in middle school. “They’re not academically on the same end of the spectrum. I have a son that’s a special needs student and I have a son that’s in the honors class. They are not equal. They should not be in the same class. … Not all kids learn at the same speed and have the same ability.”

So when the father of four children in Troy Public Schools heard the district had canceled its honors English program for ninth graders and was planning to end its honors-track math classes for some grades in middle school, he and others grew concerned. A petition asking the district to keep the current system garnered almost 2,900 signatures. And hundreds have jammed meetings in recent weeks voicing their opposition.

Shades of Madison’s failed English 10 expedition…

Christopher Peak:

For decades, schools all over the country taught reading based on a theory cognitive scientists had debunked by the 1990s. Despite research showing it made it harder for some kids to learn, the concept was widely accepted by most educators — until recent reporting by APM Reports.

Now, state legislators and other policymakers are trying to change reading instruction, requiring it to align with cognitive science research about how children learn to read. Several of them say they were motivated by APM’s Sold a Story podcast.  

Six states passed laws to change the way reading is taught since Sold a Story was released last fall. At least a dozen other states are considering similar efforts.  

The surge in activity is part of a wave of “science of reading” bills that more than half the states passed into law over the last decade — as parents, teachers, researchers and other advocates pushed legislators to make changes. But since Sold a Story, lawmakers are taking a closer look at what curriculum schools are buying and, in some states, attempting to outlaw specific teaching methods.  

Three states had already effectively banned cueing, the discredited practice covered in Sold a Story. The cueing theory holds that beginning readers don’t need to learn how to sound out written words because they can rely on other “cues” to figure them out, like the pictures on a page or the context of the sentence. This year another 10 states are seeking bans, three of which have already passed. 

The legislative efforts come at a time when fourth-grade reading scores in the United States have declined consistently since 2015, according to a nationwide achievement measurement conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics.

“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?

Troy Closson:

As New York embarks on an ambitious plan to overhaul how children in the nation’s largest school system are taught to read, schools leaders face a significant obstacle: educators’ skepticism.

Dozens of cities and states have sought to transform reading instruction in recent years, driven by decades of research known as the “science of reading.” But the success of their efforts has hinged in part on whether school leaders are willing to embrace a seismic shift in their philosophy about how children learn.

Already in New York City, the rollout has frustrated principals. The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, is forcing schools to abandon strategies he says are a top reason half of students in grades three to eight are not proficient in reading.

But principals will lose control over selecting reading programs at their schools, and their union has criticized the speed of change. And many educators still believe in “balanced literacy,” a popular approach that aims to foster a love of books through independent reading time but that experts and the chancellor say lacks enough focus on foundational skills.

“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?

Ben Cohen:

“The most interesting problems to do in the world are the ones where nobody has told you how to do them,” he told students. “And the problem I’ve been thinking about recently is how to help people flourish in a world with ChatGPT. Do you guys know what that is?”

Every hand in the auditorium shot up.

After his talk, I asked how his message to a room full of fifth-graders applies to someone in an office, and he replied faster than ChatGPT. “The future of jobs is figuring out how to find pain points,” he said. “And a pain point is a human pain.” Loh would tell anyone what he told the students and what he tells his own three children. It’s his theorem of success. “You need to be able to create value,” he said. “People who make value will always have opportunities.”

He is living proof. Born in California and raised in Wisconsin, the 40-year-old Loh was a child prodigy who attended the California Institute of Technology, where he met his wife on the first day of freshman orientation and got married on the day before graduation. After earning his graduate math degrees from Cambridge University and Princeton University, he joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon in 2010. He was named coach of the U.S. team in 2013. American teenagers hadn’t won the International Mathematical Olympiad in nearly two decades. They have since won four times.

He’s soon returning home and moving into dorms to start training for this summer’s world championship in Japan with his team of the nation’s top six high-school students. But first he’s barnstorming across the country on a tour so exhausting that I got tired just typing out his itinerary.

“This machine is the world’s most powerful tool at repeating things that have been done many times before,” he tells students. “But now I want to show you something it cannot do.”

Loh asked ChatGPT to find the largest fraction less than ½ with a numerator and denominator that are positive integers less than or equal to 10,000. It was a question that it almost certainly hadn’t seen before—and it flubbed the answer. (It’s 4,999/9,999.) This might sound familiar to anyone who has spent enough time with a chatbot that has a nasty habit of being confidently wrong: It made up a bunch of nonsense and apologized for its errors.

Wisconsin coalition for education freedom:

Wisconsin Watch has released its third article in a series attempting to discredit the great work choice programs do in Wisconsin. Their latest article misrepresents admission policies of choice schools while ignoring the fact that public schools often engage in admission practices that would be illegal for schools participating in the state’s choice programs.
Wisconsin Watch is again making false claims.

• In their most recent article, Wisconsin Watch again misrepresents school choice admission practices and now adds a false narrative that schools “expel” students with disabilities at will. Their claims don’t match reality, nor is a single example provided.
• Fact: Schools in Wisconsin’s choice programs may not discriminate against any eligible family based on a student’s disability.i
• As with many individual public schools, individual private schools are not required to provide a full range of disability services. Parents who choose to enroll their student do so only after being fully informed of available services.
  Some Wisconsin public schools have admissions processes that would be illegal for private choice schools.
• Public school districts often have specialty public schools, in addition to their residentially assigned schools. Public schools are permitted to create admission requirements for these schools.
• Public schools having admission requirements is not a new phenomenon, with the practice being documented in Wisconsin for decades.ii (Link)
• Today, specialty schools like those in Milwaukeeiii (Link) use a points system to admit students based on their report card scores, attendance, standardized test scores, and an essay. In Green Bay,iv (Link) students must complete a test for admission to a school for the gifted.
  1
• Choice schools must admit students on a random basis if there is excess demand with few exceptions, primarily related to being in the same family as an existing student.v (Link)
  Public schools reject students in the public school full-time open enrollment program.

Phoebe Petrovic:

As an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, Joanne Juhnke regularly finds herself on the phone with parents concerned about their children’s treatment at school.

Most complaints concern public schools, which enroll the majority of students. State funding for special education has shrunk, forcing districts to struggle to provide services, and disparate treatment of students with disabilities at public schools persists. But in public school, families have a state body to appeal to: the Department of Public Instruction.

DPI is far less helpful in disputes with private schools, which under state law can legally discriminate against students who need certain disability accommodations — or even kick them out. This applies even to private schools that receive taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers to educate students.

The calls Juhnke receives from voucher families often contain the same story. A family has enrolled a child with disabilities in a private school. Administrators have begun pressuring the student to leave or have kicked them out, something public schools cannot do. The parents are shocked. They’re sure the schools can’t do that.

Many times, Juhnke has to tell them: Yes, they can.

“You went into this school choice program thinking that you were the one, as the parents, who have the choice,” she said. “Really, on the other end, the school holds more choice cards than you do, and you’re coming out on the wrong side of that.”

I find the timing of Wisconsin Watch’s articles curious, amidst budget season. Ideally, the writer might dive deep and wide into the effectiveness of our well funded k-12 system. Reading would be a terrific place to start.

This Wisconsin Watch article was referenced in a recent St Marcus (Milwaukee) podcast. St Marcus operates an extraordinarily successful choice school on the City’s near north side. Read more, here.

Governor Evers’ most recent budget proposals have attempted to kill One City Schools’ charter authorization……

“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?

Phoebe Petrovic

As an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, Joanne Juhnke regularly finds herself on the phone with parents concerned about their children’s treatment at school. 

Most complaints concern public schools, which enroll the majority of students. State funding for special education has shrunk, forcing districts to struggle to provide services, and disparate treatment of students with disabilities at public schools persists. But in public school, families have a state body to appeal to: the Department of Public Instruction.

DPI is far less helpful in disputes with private schools, which under state law can legally discriminate against students who need certain disability accommodations — or even kick them out. This applies even to private schools that receive taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers to educate students.

The calls Juhnke receives from voucher families often contain the same story. A family has enrolled a child with disabilities in a private school. Administrators have begun pressuring the student to leave or have kicked them out, something public schools cannot do. The parents are shocked. They’re sure the schools can’t do that. 

Many times, Juhnke has to tell them: Yes, they can. 

“You went into this school choice program thinking that you were the one, as the parents, who have the choice,” she said. “Really, on the other end, the school holds more choice cards than you do, and you’re coming out on the wrong side of that.”

Far more important, however, is the context not provided. There are plenty of good-faith Americans who have legitimate concerns about how COVID was handled and how gender and sexuality are currently being handled in schools. 99.99% of them don't do what this man did.

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) May 21, 2023

Philip Ball:

This September my eldest daughter starts secondary school, a prospect that, like many parents, I regard with a mixture of excitement, pride and trepidation. But when she heads off, it will be a bigger change for my partner and I than for many others—because for the past two years we have been schooling her and her sister ourselves. When I tell people that we have been home-educating my children, a common response is: “I could never do that!” It’s pitched somewhere between an awestruck, “I could never imagine being able to do that!” and a horrified, “I would never do that!” Homeschooling is generally perceived to be both hard and risky. I won’t pretend it’s easy. My partner and I were constantly juggling schedules so that one of us was free, if not to be “teaching” then to be ferrying the children between activities. And practicalities aside, there’s a constant inner voice: “Do you really know what you’re doing?” (Answer: of course not.) But having had previous experience of several schools, both state and independent, I know that many of the worries about children’s education—Are the kids happy? Do they have friends? Are they keeping up?—are the same, whether they are taught at home or in a school. The difference is that we have more chance of doing something about it. Anxieties about children’s education and well-being have become pathological for many parents, and the school system is a big part of the cause. The fixation on choice and constant assessment has created a mad scramble to get to the top of the pile, without, to my mind, any overall improvement in education—possibly quite the reverse. Instead, the results are insecurity for parents and institutions alike—panic, constant tinkering with curricula and teaching methodologies, and an obsession with ranking and tests. These are not just interfering with education but subverting its purpose.

“Many British parents express surprise when they discover that they have a right to home-educate” 

Home education offers an alternative. But while freedom from the madness of SATs, fronted adverbials, catchment areas and league tables is tremendously relieving, we’re not really fleeing oppressive schools and “bad teachers” (trying to teach kids yourself only increases your respect for teachers). We just figured our children might be happier this way. As Fiona Nicholson, who runs the home-education website edyourself.org, says, one of the main benefits is “taking charge of your own life.” It is rewarding, exciting, scary and frustrating. It wouldn’t—probably couldn’t—work for everyone. And perhaps it’ll never work unless you accept that there are no perfect answers. In my experience the greatest satisfaction comes from having to decide for yourself (and of course for your child) what a “good education” really means, and to figure out how to get somewhere close to delivering it. That might sound hubristic. Isn’t this, after all, what teachers are trained to do? Sadly, many teachers will tell you that it is not. Their training in child development is minimal, and there is scant opportunity to put such insight as they develop into practice while maintaining order in class and marching through the national curriculum. If you think home education is grossly presumptuous about what goes on in schools, consider that many of the parents I know who home-educate are teachers. They do it precisely because they do know what goes on. The arguments for a role for homeschooling are not just about rights and responsibilities for giving children an education. They are about what education should be. While some teachers, educationalists and most education ministers believe they know the answer already, many employers, university lecturers and developmental psychologists are less convinced. The world that young people enter on leaving school is profoundly different from what it was several decades ago. Homeschooling offers one way to think differently about the requirements and objectives, and can catalyse an urgent and overdue debate. What is an education? It is a question I have been forced to confront and one that should be asked more widely.

Emily Hanford notes the “surge in legislative activity” amidst our long term, disastrous reading results [link].

via NAEP 4th grade results 1992-2022.

Longtime SIS readers may recall a few of these articles, bookmarking our times, so to speak:

2004: [Link]

“In 2003, 80% of Wisconsin fourth graders scored proficient or advanced on the WCKE in reading. However, in the same year only 33% of Wisconsin fourth graders reached the proficient or advanced level in reading on the NAEP.”

2005: [Link]

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

2008: “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”

2010: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

2010: WEAC $1.57M !! for four state senators.

2011: A Capitol Conversation:

1. How teachers are taught. In Wisconsin as in much of the US, prospective teachers are not exposed to modern research on how children develop, learn, and think. Instead, they are immersed in the views of educational theorists such as Lev Vygotsky (d. 1934) and John Dewey (d. 1952). Talented, highly motivated prospective teachers are socialized into beliefs about children that are not informed by the past 50 years of basic research in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.

Wisconsin adopted MTEL for elementary reading teachers only. Our version is known as the Foundations of Reading Test…

2013: Alan Borsuk:

The Massachusetts test is about to become the Wisconsin test, a step that advocates see as important to increasing the quality of reading instruction statewide and, in the long term, raising the overall reading abilities of Wisconsin students. As for those who aren’t advocates (including some who are professors in schools of education), they are going along, sometimes with a more dubious attitude to what this will prove.

2017: Foundations of Reading Test Results…

May 2013 – August 2014 (Test didn’t start until January 2014, and it was the lower cut score): 2150 pass out of 2766 first time takers = 78% passage rate .xls file

September 2014 – August 2015 (higher cut score took effect 9/14): 2173/3278 = 66%

September 2015 – August 2016: 1966/2999 = 66%

September 2016 – YTD 2017: 1680/2479 = 68%

2017 [3 minute transcript]:

2018: Wisconsin DPI efforts to weaken the Foundations of Reading Test for elementary teachers.

Also, 2018: “We set a high bar for achievement,” DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy said.

Still 2018: Alan Borsuk:

But consider a couple other things that happened in Massachusetts: Despite opposition, state officials stuck to the requirement. Teacher training programs adjusted curriculum and the percentage of students passing the test rose.

More 2018: “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”

2019: My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results.

2019, continued – Alan Borsuk:

The latest report on reading was really bad. here are some possible solutions. Mississippi got a lot of attention when the NAEP scores were released. It was the only state where fourth grade reading scores improved. Mississippi is implementing a strong requirement that teachers be well-trained in reading instruction. Massachusetts did that in the 1990s and it paid off in the following decade.

2020: Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration

2021: Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Jill Underly:

All right. Um, as far as the Foundations of Reading (FORT) test is concerned, I would support eliminating it. And I’ll tell you why. I believe it’s an unnecessary hoop. Um, it makes it difficult and much harder for people to become teachers, particularly when we are already struggling. Right. With recruiting and retaining teachers.

2021: Wisconsin Governor Evers vetoes AB446 and SB454 (Friday afternoon):

The bill would mandate school boards and independent charter schools to assess the early literacy skill of pupils in four-year-old kindergarten to second grade using repeated screening assessments throughout the year and to create a personal reading plan for each pupil in five-year-old kindergarten to second grade who is identified as at-risk. It would also mandate the Department of Public Instruction establish and maintain lists of approved fundamental skills screening assessments, universal screening assessments, and diagnostic assessments on its Internet site based on alignment with model academic standards in reading and language arts, and a mandatory minimum sensitivity rate and specificity rate.

2023: Wisconsin Legislative hearing on our long term, disastrous reading results: “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.”

2023: Further attempts to kill our only teacher content knowledge requirement: elementary reading “!”. Corrinne Hess:

“Only 54 percent of first-time Teacher test takers passed for the 2020-21 school year. That’s down from 66 percent in 2014-15”

2024: Ongoing Wisconsin Literacy Legislation Litigation…. Governor Evers’ partial veto – (mind the Governor’s mulligans)

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in The Hill on the continued media blackout on evidence of influence peddling and corrupt practices by the Biden family. The coverage of the recent disclosure of dozens of LLCs and bank accounts used to funnel up to $10 million to Biden family members captured the growing concerns over a de facto state media in the United States. Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story.

Here is the column:

This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.

The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”

For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members, including Biden grandchildren.

What I find depressing about RussiaGate is not the collusion of police & intel with Democrats to cripple a president, participation of the press, nor the passivity of the GOP. That’s just the Left winning, BAU. That so many Americans believed this nonsensical story is a bad omen.

— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) May 16, 2023

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in The Hill on the continued media blackout on evidence of influence peddling and corrupt practices by the Biden family. The coverage of the recent disclosure of dozens of LLCs and bank accounts used to funnel up to $10 million to Biden family members captured the growing concerns over a de facto state media in the United States. Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story.

Here is the column:

This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.

The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”

For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members, including Biden grandchildren.

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in The Hill on the continued media blackout on evidence of influence peddling and corrupt practices by the Biden family. The coverage of the recent disclosure of dozens of LLCs and bank accounts used to funnel up to $10 million to Biden family members captured the growing concerns over a de facto state media in the United States. Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story.

Here is the column:

This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.

The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”

For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members, including Biden grandchildren.

Tom Kane and Sean Reardon

Parents have become a lot more optimistic about how well their children are doing in school.

In 2020 and 2021, a majority of parents in the United States reported that the pandemic was hurting their children’s education. But by the fall of 2022, a Pew survey showed that only a quarter of parents thought their children were still behind;  another study revealed that more than 90 percent thought their child had already or would soon catch up. To hear parents tell it, the pandemic’s effects on education were transitory.

Are they right to be so sanguine? The latest evidence suggests otherwise. Math, reading and history scores from the past three years show that students learned far less during the pandemic than was typical in previous years. By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.

Paul Lockhart:

As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”

In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifths. “I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”

Jessica Winter:

Travis came to live at his ninth home the day before he started kindergarten. When his new foster parents, Elizabeth and Dan, enrolled Travis at their neighborhood public school, in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, they learned that Travis was eligible for special-education services. (Some names in this story have been changed.) Several languages had been spoken in Travis’s past homes, which had included foster-care placements and homeless shelters, and he had not begun speaking until he was three and a half. A neuropsychiatric evaluation of Travis, conducted when he was four, estimated that he had a grasp of twenty words; it also noted that he still wore pull-up diapers and “tends to speak very loudly to his peers.”

Elizabeth noticed a line in Travis’s paperwork that read “Disability Classification,” and, next to it, the initials “E.D.” The school’s principal told her that they stood for “emotional disturbance.” Elizabeth and Dan, who later adopted Travis and his infant brother, Kieran, did not yet know that Travis had suffered abuse and neglect in previous homes. Nor did they know that Travis had been kicked out of two preschools for violent behavior. But, Elizabeth told me, “it was almost immediately apparent that he had aggressive and violent coping skills. That was how he interacted with the world, because that was how the world had interacted with him.”

That fall, when Elizabeth visited Travis’s kindergarten classroom for her first parent-teacher conference, one of the teachers gestured toward a comfy reading nook, piled with pillows. “See that calm-down corner? We built that for Travis,” the teacher said. Elizabeth, who is a stay-at-home mother, began receiving frequent calls about Travis acting out at school: tantrums, hitting other children, throwing books. A behavioral paraprofessional was assigned to Travis, but the incidents persisted. “We started getting calls like, ‘There’s a field trip coming up, and it would probably be best if Travis stayed home.’ Or, ‘Could he not come into school tomorrow? It would just be easier,’ ” Elizabeth said.

Will-Law

Recently Wisconsin Watch released articles criticizing the Wisconsin parental choice programs and incorrectly claiming that private schools may “discriminate.” This memo provides resources and information about the false claims made in the article and talking points to refute them. 

The claims that private schools may “discriminate” are false. 

These claims are false. Wisconsin Watch claims that federal law “allows religious entities to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students” and that schools in the parental choice program may discriminate against LGBTQ+ students or those with disabilities “once that student is enrolled.” 

Private schools are governed by different laws than public schools.  There are specific prohibitions of discrimination that apply to private schools participating in the parental choice program. For example, Wisconsin law requires private schools in the choice programs to do a blind admission process. Schools are not permitted to create barriers for enrollment for student based on anything other than the DPI application and income verification forms. Private schools are allowed to give existing students and their siblings eligibility preferences.  

Private schools are not permitted to “discriminate” against students with disabilities. 

The Obama Administration began a misguided investigation into private schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in 2011. DPI, at that time, correctly stated that private schools in the program have a different legal standard to serve students with disabilities. Despite a three-year investigation, there were no instances of discrimination found. 

Private schools have a different legal standard than public schools for students with disabilities. 

Public schools are subject to several state and federal laws regarding the education of students with disabilities including the requirement that public school districts may not deny any student access to a “Free and Appropriate Public Education” and receive specific funds to educate children with disabilities. Even within public school districts, not all individual schools are required to provide a full range of special education services.

Private schools must meet a different legal standard. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Title III of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) set forth requirements for private schools. 

Title III of the ADA requires private schools to make “reasonable modifications” for individuals with disabilities to access the facility and prohibits private schools from discriminating against individuals based on their disability. Changes to accommodate may not fundamentally alter the nature of the goods and services provided by the private school or impose an undue financial or administrative burden on the private school. Similarly, Section 504 requires private schools to make “minor adjustments” for individuals with disabilities to access the facility. Private schools may consider  the nature of the program provided and the expense of accommodations sought when serving individuals with disabilities under Section 504. 

Furthermore, private schools participating in the Wisconsin Special Needs Scholarship Program, to specifically serve students with disabilities, must meet with families to complete an agreement to discuss the educational needs of each student and to explain special education resources available at the school. Participating private schools are also required to provide reports to parents about student progress.

The Wisconsin Watch articles do not specifically claim a private school violated the federal laws regarding students with disabilities. 

Private schools in Wisconsin serve hundreds of students with disabilities.

Academic research found that private schools in Wisconsin parental choice programs serve many students with disabilities. Reported disability rates are often lower because choice schools lack the financial incentive public schools have for identification.

This is further supported by the growing participation in the Special Needs Scholarship Program, a state-funded program to give students with disabilities funding to attend a private school of their choice. Since the program’s creation in 2015, participation has grown by 815%, from 215 to 1,986 students. 

Private schools in the choice program welcome all students. 

Private schools in the choice program choose to participate in the program, with full knowledge that they are opening their doors to students and families from all different backgrounds and beliefs. Many of these schools participate because they want to serve as many students as possible. 

Private schools in the choice program may not require participation in religious classes. 

Once enrolled, all students are subject to the policies of the school, religious policies included. If families disagree with the religious beliefs of the school, state law permits families to opt their children out of religious instruction. 

Additionally, the choice program is a voluntary program that empowers families to choose the school that best fits their child’s needs. Families are always free to choose to send their children to a school that matches their values.

Religious schools have a constitutional protection to serve students based on their beliefs. 

The U.S. Constitution protects the free exercise of religion. This allows religious schools to teach and make decisions based on their religious beliefs. For private, religious schools, this includes decisions relating to policies and procedures at the school. 

Both the Wisconsin Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court have determined that parental choice programs are legal. 

The claims that taxpayer dollars should not go to schools that enforce their religious beliefs has been litigated both in Wisconsin and most recently in the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that if states choose to create and provide a parental choice program the state may not discriminate against faith-based schools and may not bar students from using public funds to attend religious schools. 

With private schools, the choice ultimately lies with the student, parent, and family. 

All families deserve to access high-quality schools that meet their child’s needs. Far too many families are stuck in their assigned public schools, but school choice provides families with the option to attend the school that is the best fit for their child.

Ultimately, parents and students have every right to go to a school that matches their moral convictions.  The whole idea behind school choice is if a parent or student is upset with how a school is run, then they can in fact go somewhere else and take their money with them. 

For additional questions, please contact:

Nic Kelly, kelly@parentchoice.org

Libby Sobic, libby@will-law.org

Notes and links on “Wisconsin Watch”

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Robert Nozick:

What percentage of people would choose to live under socialism? The communist countries do not help us to answer this question, for neither through elections nor through emigration do they offer their people any choice. What about the electoral experience of democratic societies such as England or Sweden? Even this does not enable us to disentangle (imagined) self-interest from our topic: the desire to participate in socialist interpersonal relations of equality and community.

To find out what percentage of people especially want to live under socialism, we need a situation where people have a reasonably attractive socialist option and also a reasonably attractive nonsocialist one. If it is not precisely the optimal experiment to answer our question, the Israeli experience with kibbutzim comes as close as the real world can.

Not only have the kibbutzim offered socialist personal relations in a socialist community, but these communities have been widely admired for performing the important functions of reclaiming the land, aiding Jewish self defense, and “normalizing” the occupational structure of the Jewish people. Unlike 19th-century utopian communities in America or 20th-century “communes, membership in a kibbutz brought respect and support from the wider society, aiding members through difficulties. Furthermore, no natural population provides a more fertile ground for socialist commitment than the Ashkenazi Jewish population. No people is more prone to being captured by an “idealistic” ideological position, especially one emphasizing group solidarity. Indeed, there was selective entry into Israel early in the century; many came in order to help build socialism and did their best to instill their ideals in their children.

Dave Utbanski:

A California public school teacher said she was told to deceive “suspicious” parents about their children’s stated gender identities at school — and now she’s suing.

What are the details?

“It’s unfortunate that I have to go toe-to-toe and stand up against a community of people that I love,” teacher Elizabeth Mirabelli told Fox News. “I’ve been there for 25 years. This is a community of people I care about, people I’ve served for a long period of time. And so that gives me pause to have to stand up, but I felt that I had to make that choice.”

The cable network said attorneys for Mirabelli and fellow teacher Lori Ann West — both of whom taught for decades at Rincon Middle School in Escondido — filed a federal lawsuit last week against the school’s leadership, claiming they were effectively required to lie to parents whose children assumed different gender identities at school.

Anna Hansen:

hen Danielle Hairston-Green first moved to the Madison area, many people told her they hoped she didn’t have any children, warning her to avoid the Madison School District.

So, when the Urban League of Greater Madison held an event on the State of Black Students in the Madison School District on Saturday, Hairston-Green — now a grandmother— joined many others in calling for accountability among educators and government officials at local, state and federal levels.

“Change is hard for anyone,” Hairston-Green said. “We will (create) change if we trust the change-makers.”

Black educators, parents and community leaders gathered in Madison College’s Goodman Community Center to strategize over issues that include literacy and graduation rates, teacher recruitment and retention, and communication between faculty and families.

Anna Hansen :

When Danielle Hairston-Green first moved to the Madison area, many people told her they hoped she didn’t have any children, warning her to avoid the Madison School District.

So, when Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County held an event on the State of Black Students in the Madison School District on Saturday, Hairston-Green — now a grandmother— joined many others in calling for accountability among educators and government officials at local, state and federal levels.

“Change is hard for anyone,” Hairston-Green said. “We will (create) change if we trust the change-makers.”

Black educators, parents and community leaders gathered in Madison College’s Goodman Community Center to strategize over issues that include literacy and graduation rates, teacher recruitment and retention, and communication between faculty and families.

Dr. Judith E. FitzGerald:

Wisconsin has a reading problem, especially for those whose home language is not mainstream English, which is the language of instruction, government and business.

Every year we have watched our literacy scores and state ranking suffer as other states pursue teacher training and education legislation. Illiteracy has multiple causes including poverty and other socioeconomic factors. But inadequate teacher preparation leading to poor classroom reading instruction is one of the most glaring but fixable conditions.

Many states have conducted extensive reviews of their educator preparation programs to ensure that they are aligned with modern reading research. In Wisconsin, an independent consultant (TPI-US) has been awarded a contract to conduct a statewide literacy “landscape analysis” in which all 13 of the University of Wisconsin educator preparation programs could voluntarily opt-in for a comprehensive review of early literacy instructional practices. Each institution would receive a “confidential no-cost assessment of reading coursework quality and how well course instructors model evidence-based early reading instructional practices” and “where appropriate, institutional reports will offer specific recommendations for improvement.”

The Department of Public Instruction will grant $50,000 to the institution on completion of its landscape analysis and another $50,000 on the adoption of a “program improvement plan.”

Wisconsin’s children and future educators deserve UW’s full participation.

Dr. Judith E. FitzGerald, Madison

Sara Randazzo:

Las Vegas high-school English teacher Laura Jeanne Penrod initially thought the grading changes at her school district made sense. Under the overhaul, students are given more chances to prove they have mastered a subject without being held to arbitrary deadlines, in recognition of challenges some children have outside school. 

Soon after the system was introduced, however, Ms. Penrod said her 11th-grade honors students realized the new rules minimized the importance of homework to their final grades, leading many to forgo the brainstorming and rough drafts required ahead of writing a persuasive essay. Some didn’t turn in the essay at all, knowing they could redo it later.

Freddie deBoer:

I also saw students go from quietly doing work to lifting a heavy desk off of the ground to bash one of their peers within a matter of seconds. There too I had to physically intervene, or else another kid would have been badly injured. In that year I think I probably had to physically restrain a kid less than a half-dozen times, but it did happen. Nobody liked it. Everyone would have rather done anything else. But sometimes there was just no choice; the idea of verbally de-escalating a kid who’s genuinely trying to kill another kid is not a serious response to an immediate problem. But there’s been a number of arguments in the media that insist that physical restraint is 100% unacceptable at all times. I wrote about this frustrating tendency here.

I got an opportunity to hash this out with a critic of physical restraint late in my grad school experience. There was a symposium or conference or whatever that I attended about special ed, and there was a panel about physical restraint. One of the people on the panel was a crusading type who insisted that there was never a moment when educators had to physically intervene to stop a child from hurting themselves or others. I brought my personal experience to bear, asking her what she would have done when one of my students was already engaged in violence. She said that she would have verbally de-escalated them. I told her that these were moments where harm was already being done, by children with serious documented behavioral issues who were often so exercised that they were incapable of listening at all. She said that she would have verbally de-escalated them. I said that there were legitimately situations where the choice was between physically intervening or allowing a child to endure major injury. She simply said, once again, that she would verbally de-escalate any child.

Sarah Mervosh:

About one in three children in the United States cannot read at a basic level of comprehension, according to a key national exam. The outcomes are particularly troubling for Black and Native American children, nearly half of whom score “below basic” by eighth grade.

“The kids can’t read — nobody wants to just say that,” said Kareem Weaver, an activist with the N.A.A.C.P. in Oakland, Calif., who has framed literacy as a civil rights issue and stars in a new documentary, “The Right to Read.”

Science of reading advocates say the reason is simple: Many children are not being correctly taught.

A popular method of teaching, known as “balanced literacy,” has focused less on phonics and more on developing a love of books and ensuring students understand the meaning of stories. At times, it has included dubious strategies, like guiding children to guess words from pictures.

The push for reform picked up in 2019, when national reading scores showed significant improvement in just two places: Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Both had required more phonics.

But what might have remained a niche education issue was supercharged by a storm of events: a pandemic that mobilized parents; Covid relief money that gave school districts flexibility to change; a fresh spotlight on racial disparities after the murder of George Floyd; and a hit education podcast with a passionate following.

“There is this urgency around the story, this unbelievable grief,” said Emily Hanford, a journalist at American Public Media. Her podcast, “Sold a Story,” detailed how stars of the literacy world and their publisher diverged from scientific research. It racked up nearly 5 million downloads.

The movement has not been universally popular. School districts in Connecticut and teachers’ unions in Ohio, for example, pushed back against what they see as heavy-handed interference in their classrooms.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Joseph Workman, Paul T. von Hippel, Joseph Merry

It is widely believed that (1) children lose months of reading and math skills over summer vacation and that (2) inequality in skills grows much faster during summer than during school. Concerns have been raised about the replicability of evidence for these claims, but an impression may exist that nonreplicable findings are limited to older studies. After reviewing the 100-year history of nonreplicable results on summer learning, we compared three recent data sources (ECLS- K:2011, NWEA, and Renaissance) that tracked U.S. elementary students’ skills through school years and summers in the 2010s. Most patterns did not generalize beyond a single test. Summer losses looked substantial on some tests but not on others. Score gaps—between schools and students of different income levels, ethnicities, and genders—grew on some tests but not on others. The total variance of scores grew on some tests but not on others. On tests where gaps and variance grew, they did not consistently grow faster during summer than during school. Future research should demonstrate that a summer learning pattern replicates before drawing broad conclusions about learning or inequality.

Robert Pondisco:

A remarkable long-term study by University of Virginia researchers led by David Grissmer demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge sequence. The working paper offers compelling evidence to support what many of us have long believed: Hirsch has been right all along about what it takes to build reading comprehension. And we might be further along in raising reading achievement, closing achievement gaps, and broadly improving education outcomes if we’d been listening to him for the last few decades.

I’ve described countless times how teaching fifth grade in a low-scoring New York City public school made me a Hirsch disciple and a Core Knowledge enthusiast. Hirsch’s work—and only Hirsch’s work—described uncannily what I saw every day in my South Bronx classroom: children who could decode written text but struggled with reading comprehension. 

My school’s staff developers, district consultants and coaches, ed school professors, and the literacy gurus they assigned us to read and study had different explanations for students’ reading struggles: Children were bored by required texts that didn’t reflect their interests and personal experiences. If we let them read what they wished, it would be more pleasurable and they’d spend more time at it. Classroom instruction was built around an all-purpose suite of reading “skills and strategies” that students could apply to any book. We were to “teach the child not the lesson,” make them fall in love with books and develop a “lifelong love of reading.” When students who appeared to be successful under this “child-centered” vision of literacy struggled on standardized tests, there was an answer for that, too: test anxiety and “inauthentic” assessments.

For more than four decades, Hirsch has responded to all this with a simple, cognitively unimpeachable, hiding-in-plain sight rejoinder: No, it’s background knowledge. Sophisticated language is a kind of shorthand resting on a body of common knowledge, cultural references, allusions, idioms, and context broadly shared among the literate. Writers and speakers make assumptions about what readers and listeners know. When those assumptions are correct, when everyone is operating with the same store of background knowledge, language comprehension seems fluid and effortless. When they are incorrect, confusion quickly creeps in until all meaning is lost. If we want every child to be literate and to participate fully in American life, we must ensure all have access to the broad body of knowledge that the literate take for granted.

David Zweig:

The Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca, set amid a pastoral idyll of rolling fields, a pond, and dandelion-stippled meadows, is just a few minutes’ ride from Ithaca College and Cornell University. Serving more than 220 students from preschool through eighth grade, the school features classrooms bathed in natural light, populated with the offspring of professors, doctors, and lawyers. And since the fall of 2020 through today, those children must be masked during class and on the playground, and have been barred from speaking during lunch.

Like every other school in the country, this private school—which charges between $11,000 to $18,000 a year, depending on the student’s age—closed to in-person classes in the spring of 2020. That fall, around the time the local public schools brought kids back, so did EACMSI, but with a list of mitigations. Some were typical and required by the state, such as distancing and indoor masking. But others, at least after a while, were less common or not recommended by health authorities—specifically, outdoor masking and a ban on speaking during lunch.

Anna Nawaz:

• Well, clearly not enough. And it is a time of unprecedented resources.There are lots of things we can debate in education, but we know high-dosage tutoring, whether it’s physically, virtually, hybrid, works well. What our children need now is more time. So, what is more time? Being tutored after school, on weekends, or summer school. Our children missed so much time during the pandemic.I think we’re in a sprint between April and August, April and September, the next four or five months, to close this gap as much as we can, so children can enter the next school year ready to be successful. It’s got to be a massive sense of urgency on this. It’s not something we can wait on or discuss or debate.We have to get to work, use those resources to help parents and help kids get where they need to be.
• Amna Nawaz:There are some folks who look at the way the money’s been spent, and they see there are tutoring programs available. There have been virtual help lines set up.And the uptake has been pretty low in a number of places.Secretary Spellings, when you just look at staffing shortages, right, recent numbers from the end of last year showed 45 percent of public schools were operating without a full teaching staff. So, what can parents be advocating for, when most of them don’t seem to be taking up the virtual learning or the help lines that are there right now, and teaching staff isn’t at capacity?

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

The heroes in Nashville were the police, who were on the scene quickly. With great discipline and courage, they entered the building, ran toward the shots, and killed the attacker once she was cornered. Two have been identified as Officer Rex Engelbert and Officer Michael Collazo. A timeline posted by the Tennesseean says the attacker entered the elementary school at 10:11 a.m., shooting out the glass doors. A call to police came at 10:13.

By 10:23, officers were inside the school. They shot the attacker at 10:25. Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters that “someone took control and said, ‘Lets go, lets go.’” The department has released body camera footage that is harrowing.

Waiting to confront the attacker was the mistake last year in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed. “Three minutes after the subject entered,” the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety later testified, “there was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract and neutralize the subject.”

Ingrid Forsler and Carina Guyard

In recent years, excessive screen time has been widely discussed not least in relation to children and young people. Parents are advised to limit the amount of time their kids spend using digital devices, such as smartphones, tablets or computers, and there is a wide selection of apps that parents can use to monitor and manage their children’s screen time. The arguments against spending too much time in front of different screens include fear of addiction, depression and other medical conditions, but also an increasing focus on how excessive screen time and constant connection affect social and cognitive abilities. Compulsory engagement with online technologies is assumed to make individuals absent- minded, easily distracted and indifferent to whatever goes around in the physical environment (Blum- Ross & Livingstone 2016; Kardefelt-Winther 2017). The latter debate emanates from the assumption that people, especially children and adolescents, are unable to control their impulsive behavior in relation to digital media. This inability among young people to resist their smartphones, although it might have negative outcomes, has sometimes been referred to as a contemporary moral panic in the media debate (c.f. Malik 2019; Orben, Etchells & Przybylski 2018; Therrien 2018).

Moral panics often occur when a new media technology is introduced and the users of these new media show disapproved forms of behavior, such as passivity or aggression. Historically there have been panic campaigns over a wide range of so-called low culture; comic books, rock ‘n’ roll, video nasties, et cetera, that is believed to degenerate in particular the younger generation due to violent or vulgar content (Buckingham & Strandgaard Jensen 2012; Carlsson 2010; Drotner 1999; Critcher 2008). Increasingly, though, the concerns in relation to new media technologies focus specifically on the use of the media rather than with any particular content. As Alicia Blum-Ross and Sonia Livingstone (2016; 2018) has shown, the term “screen time” indicates a homogenization of media activities that does not take different practices or modes of engagement into account, but only considers the amount of time spent online (see also Kardefelt-Winther 2017: 14). Indeed, the evidence cited in reports about screen time is dominated by short-time, quantitative studies that do not consider the broader life contexts of children. Additionally, in line with previous moral panics, they tend to focus on risks rather than on the opportunities of new media practices (Blum-Ross & Livingstone 2016: 13; Kardefelt-Winther 2017: 10). Other more qualitative inclined studies on children and media use have responded to this imbalance by highlighting the particularities of different media forms and uses as well as how parents react differently to advices on screen time depending on socio-economic and cultural factors (e.g. Blum-Ross & Livingstone 2016; 2018; boyd & Hargittai 2013; Clark 2012; Lee 2013; Livingstone, et al 2015; Livingstone & Byrne 2018). In this chapter, we wish to contribute to this body of research by questioning the dominant perspective on the impacts of excessive screen time on young people.

Mark Seidenberg:

My heart sank. Why would a person need to ask this? The goal of teaching children to read is reading, not phonemic awareness. We know that learning to read does not require being able to identify 44 phonemes or demonstrate proficiency on phoneme deletion and substitution tasks because until very recently no one who learned to read had to do these things. Instruction in subskills such as phonemic awareness is justified to the extent it advances the goal of reading, not for its own sake. 

If a student is reading–if they’ve “broken the code,” as Phil Gough¹ put it years ago–instruction can focus on the many more things that need to be learned to become a skilled reader. Instructional time is limited and the clock is ticking down to 4th grade.Time spent jumping through PA hoops could instead be spent on activities that expand the knowledge that supports comprehending texts of increasing complexity and variety.

These conclusions seem obvious to me, given my understanding of the relevant research literature and the conditions under which children learn to read. They weren’t obvious to the questioner, or to the people who posted to “chat” thanking them for asking, and they won’t be obvious to many people reading this document.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jackie Valley:

So what’s driving all of this? Will Estrada, president of the Parental Rights Foundation, says the pandemic accelerated parents’ desire to have more say in children’s schooling, regardless of political inclinations.

“There’s varying degrees of what parents want as a response,” he says. “But I think the fact that you have such a broad range of parental rights legislation really speaks to the fact that the legislators and elected officials are trying to respond to the concerns.”

As of mid-March, proposed parental rights legislation has emerged in at least 32 states, up from 18 states in 2022, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In some states, lawmakers are considering two or more pieces of such legislation.

Jill Barshay:

Many major cities around the country, from New York and New Orleans to Denver and Los Angeles, have changed how children are assigned to public schools over the past 20 years and now allow families to send their children to a school outside of their neighborhood zone. Known as public school choice or open enrollment, this policy gives children in poor neighborhoods a chance at a better education. Many supporters hoped it could also be a way to desegregate schools even as residential neighborhoods remain racially divided.

However, a new study of public school choice in Charlotte, North Carolina, finds a deeply troubling consequence to this well-intended policy: increased crime. 

Three university economists studied the criminal justice records of 10,000 boys who were in fifth grade between 2005 and 2008. Thousands wanted to go to highly regarded middle schools, some of which were in nearby suburbs of the large Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. Seats were allocated through a lottery.

Zach Winn:

Words have always played a central role in Barry Duncan’s life. He’s worked in bookstores for more than 40 years, reads often, and has tried his hand at writing novels, children’s books, song lyrics, and plays.

But it wasn’t until he stumbled onto the book “An Almanac of Words at Play” that Duncan realized words could go backwards. The discovery, which he made in the early 1980s, set him on a course he would follow for decades. For fun, and then out of habit, he began reversing words he saw in print, noticing words that took on new meaning when flipped, and writing sentences that could be read backward and forward — palindromes.

Today Duncan, who works as a staff member at the MIT Press Bookstore in Kendall Square, has developed a reputation as a professional palindromist. His creations have been featured in galleries, selected anthologies, and are the subject of an upcoming documentary. He’s written 800-word epics that don’t lose their meaning when flipped. He’s written reversible poems and tributes that were used as auction prizes. And he’s written countless palindromes to serve as gifts for birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions.

Mostly, though, Duncan just writes palindromes for fun.

“I hope it gives people an idea of what can be accomplished in two directions,” he says. “Of course, I also hope that people will appreciate them. It’s always better if the person or organization for whom you’ve written a palindrome replies in a positive way. “

Brendan Case and Ying Chen

When European travelers first encountered the Warlpiri of Australia’s Outback or the Kalapalo of the Amazon Basin in the 19th century, at least one institution would have been familiar amid the welter of cultural differences. As in the West, life among the Warlpiri and Kalapalo is profoundly shaped by marriage. In their own ways, the members of both of these societies strive to attract desirable spouses and then to raise children and forge a life together. As anthropologist Joseph Henrich observes, despite important variation in its form across cultures, “marriage represents the keystone institution for most (not all) societies, and may be the most primeval of human institutions.” 

Marriage might be nearly ubiquitous, but does it still matter today? As reliable contraception has lowered the stakes of sex, and women have achieved political and, in some cases, economic equality with men, perhaps marriage has now become merely optional, a capstone rather than a cornerstone of a successful life. Still, there are good reasons to doubt the benefits of a post-nuptial society, as comparisons of married people either with the never-married or the divorced have generally found that the former are healthier and happier than the latter, even today.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Glenn Reynolds:

Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel are the authors of a new book, Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.  Writers, thinkers, and mothers, the pair look at what’s being done to children today by schools, Hollywood, government, and the medical profession.  Because Helen is interested in this stuff too – she stole the review copy when it arrived and I had to work hard to get it back – she’s contributed some questions to this interview, too.

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Glenn:  You had rather a rough childhood both before and after immigrating. Can you tell us a little about it? Does that have something to do with your concern for how today’s kids are treated?

Karol: It’s funny because while it was rough, in so many ways, I always felt like being a child was an important time and that childhood was something the people around me were trying to protect for me. What I saw during the pandemic was a reverse of that. Children were put last, again and again, especially in New York City where we were living. I knew I could save my own kids but because I had grown up poor, in a bad neighborhood, I knew there were so many people who couldn’t just easily form a pod for their kid or get them a tutor or move to their beach house to have space and sanity. I couldn’t forget about those people and I could not forget about their children. 

Helen: I was stunned when I read about the hardships you dealt with as a child.  You had to endure a lot of childhood trauma with a sick mom and an absent Dad yet you proved yourself resilient. Why are so many young people unable to cope with life these days?

Bethany: My mother was a social worker and prided herself on raising me tough. There was no wallowing, there was only moving forward. I was praised for working hard and she deeply resented the participation trophies they handed out to us as kids. In the last chapter, I talked about the therapist that “tough loved” me into not just self-identifying as an orphan and a victim. Now, kids are praised for their victimhood status; they’re encouraged to marinate in the bad parts of life.

James Pogue:

“When people who would abort a baby the day it’s born, threw kids under the bus during the pandemic, take kids to drag shows, and saddle our children with crippling debt,” Mr. Massie tweeted in October, “tell you how to live because they’re concerned about sea levels in 100 years, hide your children.”

It’s a debate that cuts to the heart of American politics. Mr. Massie’s version of being the “greenest member of Congress” is an explicit throwback to a Jeffersonian vision — of America as a country of people who live and work close to the land, with minimal government interference and a maximum of personal responsibility for the future of the nation. It is also a vision of rugged self-reliance that has long informed back-to-the-landers on the left, but that many on that side of politics now regard as the most insidious of American political poisons, one that has made collective action on issues like climate change impossible to achieve in this country.

“If Thomas Jefferson could have had solar panels at Monticello, he’d have had solar panels,” Mr. Massie told the libertarian economist and podcaster Matt Kibbe in 2019. “The less you have to go to the store and buy, the less dependent you are on Walmart — it’s not just that you’re greener, but you’re more independent.”

Kadjata Bah, age 18

new documentary film called The Right to Readadds to growing national debates about literacy and the science of reading. This timely and compelling film is streaming for free until March 9, 2023.

Directed by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar Burton, the film follows a long-time activist, a teacher, and two families as they navigate the future of education.

Kareem Weaver is an Oakland-based activist with the NAACP. He is an experienced educator, and his mission is to create a world where 95% of children can read. Working with Sabrina Causey, a rookie first grade teacher in Oakland, the two make a case for a new curriculum for their students based in the science of reading.

The film comes right as the “reading wars” of the 1990s have come to another head. The debate between the research-based science of reading and the whole language or balanced literacy approach now holds more dire consequences for the crisis American children face.

Currently, 37% of fourth graders in the U.S. read below grade level. While literacy is a concern for all children, gaps are especially pronounced among children of color. In fact, about 50% of all Black students graduate high school reading below grade level. Illiteracy is not only an academic burden as research shows that people who cannot read proficiently are more likely to end up in prison, homeless, and unemployed.

“Imagine being in the Stone Age and you ain’t got no stone. Imagine being in the Bronze Age and you ain’t got no bronze. We’re in the Information Age right now—and you can’t read the information,” said Weaver while explaining the current reading crisis.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Bianca Vasquez Toness

“I’m sad and disappointed,” Joseph said through an interpreter. “It’s only because I was assigned an educational advocate that I know this about my son.”

It’s widely known from test scores that the pandemic set back students across the country. But many parents don’t realize that includes their own child.

Schools have long faced criticism for failing to inform certain parents about their kids’ academic progress. But after the COVID-19 school closures, the stakes for children have in many ways never been greater. Opportunities to catch up are plentiful in some places, thanks to federal COVID aid, but won’t last forever. It will take better communication with parents to help students get the support they need, experts say

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Heidi Ledford

Despite that tantalizing future, it will be impossible to shake the shadow cast by the previous summit, in 2018. That meeting convened just a day after biophysicist He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of three embryos that developed into living babies. The stunt ultimately earned him three years in prisonfor breaking China’s laws on medical experiments.

Nearly five years later, researchers tell Nature that they do not expect a similar revelation at this year’s summit — if only because He’s experience will dissuade rogue researchers from going public with controversial genome-editing experiments. But that doesn’t mean that such experiments aren’t happening: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other children that have been created with CRISPR–Cas9 in the years since 2018,” says Eben Kirksey, a medical anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Since then, technological aspects of using genome editing to alter human embryos for reproductive purposes have not fundamentally changed, says Robin Lovell-Badge, a reproductive biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is chairing the summit. “It’s still an unsafe technique,” he says, echoing a widespread scientific consensus that genome-editing technology is not ready for use in human embryos.

Heidi Ledford

Despite that tantalizing future, it will be impossible to shake the shadow cast by the previous summit, in 2018. That meeting convened just a day after biophysicist He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of three embryos that developed into living babies. The stunt ultimately earned him three years in prisonfor breaking China’s laws on medical experiments.

Nearly five years later, researchers tell Nature that they do not expect a similar revelation at this year’s summit — if only because He’s experience will dissuade rogue researchers from going public with controversial genome-editing experiments. But that doesn’t mean that such experiments aren’t happening: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other children that have been created with CRISPR–Cas9 in the years since 2018,” says Eben Kirksey, a medical anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Since then, technological aspects of using genome editing to alter human embryos for reproductive purposes have not fundamentally changed, says Robin Lovell-Badge, a reproductive biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is chairing the summit. “It’s still an unsafe technique,” he says, echoing a widespread scientific consensus that genome-editing technology is not ready for use in human embryos.

Kaleem Caire, via email:

February 28, 2023

Dear One City Parents,

This is an important time for One City Schools and for education across the state of Wisconsin. Over the next several months our legislature and governor will be engaging with one another and individuals and organizations from across the state to inform what will be Wisconsin’s state budget for the 2023-2025 Biennium. In order for One City to sustain our public charter schools and build upon our mission, we must secure more state funding for our schools.

To do this, we must convince our state legislators and governor that schools like One City and the children and families that are part of our community, deserve equal funding! Students who attend independent public charter schools should not be funded at a rate lower than students attending traditional public schools. In 2020-21, One City received just $10,203 per student in public funding to support our “public” charter school compared to the $25,877 in public funding that the Madison Metropolitan School District received. Yet, we both spent a similar amount per student, with One City spending more on innovation in the classroom, on our healthy school meals program, and our longer school day and year.

How does One City currently fill this significant funding gap? We do so through private fundraising – by asking local businesses, philanthropy and supporters like you to give financially to our schools. In 2020-21, we had to raise $15,000 per student privately to educate our students. We are now joining together with other independent public charter schools statewide to tell our legislature why it is not fair to require us to raise so much money for our “public” schools.

Convincing our legislature and governor requires telling our story. They must know why One City is special, why families choose One City and why the state should invest and fund schools like One City.

We need your help over the next few months to tell One City’s story!

If you are interested in this opportunity to be one of our Parent Advocates please complete this form.

During this Spring session we will organize to engage in direct advocacy activities such as meetings with legislators, attending public hearings and more.

We are partnering with City Forward Collective who will offer a series of zoom trainings during the month of March to get us started. Please mark your calendars for March 2, March 9, March 16, and March 23rd. See this flier (and below) for more details about these training sessions. Those who sign up via the link above will be added to the list for the training.

Please consider joining us to do this important work on behalf of our One City community. If you have any questions regarding this information, please contact One City’s Chief of Staff, Latoya Holiday at lholiday@onecityschools.org.

Onward.

Latoya Holiday
Chief of Staff
One City Schools

Marilyn Ruffin
VP of Family and Student Engagement
One City Schools

Kaleem Caire
Founder and CEO/Superintendent
One City Schools

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Meghan Cox Gurdon:

He, like his contemporary Roald Dahl, came from an era when people valued clarity in speech and writing and believed words should reveal meaning rather than conceal it. Puffin Books has made the passing of that era obvious by subjecting Dahl’s books to a ghastly process of social-justice blandification.

The Telegraph reports that Puffin functionaries and hired “sensitivity readers” have combed through Dahl’s works for children—including whizbang novels such as “Matilda,” “The Twits,” and “James and the Giant Peach”—and cut all references to fatness, craziness, ugliness, whiteness (even of bedsheets), blackness (even of tractors) and the great Rudyard Kipling, along with any allusion to acts lacking full and enthusiastic consent. Some male characters have been made female; female villains have been made less nasty; women in general have been socially elevated; while mothers and fathers, boys and girls have dwindled into sexless “parents” and “children.”

Dahl, who died in 1990, didn’t agree to these changes—consent came from Netflix, which bought Dahl’s estate in 2018. Many of the edits reveal a total failure to understand why children love the spiky and opinionated British writer and why they gobble his stories as fast as his porcine characters eat sweets. Dahl’s writing flashes with menace and tenderness; it’s funny, exciting and unpredictable.

Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya:

When an airplane crashes, the Federal Aviation Administration conducts a detailed and thorough investigation. The purpose is not to find a scapegoat, but to ensure the same problem never resurfaces again.

Our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic constituted history’s biggest public health mistake. We did not properly protect older high-risk Americans, while many ineffective COVID restrictions have generated long-term collateral public health damage that is now upon us. Both have yielded excess deaths. Public health crashed.

It is now imperative to form a commission to conduct a thorough and open-minded COVID inquiry. To help such a commission, we have produced an 80-page blueprint with essential questions that such a commission should ask. We wrote this document with six colleagues with expertise in infectious disease, epidemiology, immunology, health policy, and public health. We call ourselves the Norfolk Group.

Here is a sample of the questions from that report:

• Limiting COVID Transmission in Nursing Homes: It was common for staff to work multiple jobs at different facilities during the same day or week. Were there any efforts from nursing care companies, state health departments, or the CDC to reduce staff rotation?
• Natural Immunity: Why did the CDC routinely downplay infection-acquired immunity, despite robust scientific evidence demonstrating its importance?
• School Closures: In July 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine published an articleconcerning “reopening primary schools during the pandemic” without mentioning data from Sweden, the only major western country that had kept schools open throughout the 2020 spring semester. Why?
• Excess Deaths: The U.S. had around 170,000excess non-COVID deaths through 2021, while countries with fewer restrictions, such as Sweden and Denmark, had negative excess deaths over the same period. Why did the U.S. focus almost exclusively on COVID, while Scandinavia took a more balanced approach that considered all aspects of public health?
• Estimating Disease Spread: In early 2020, it was critical to quickly estimate disease prevalence. Why did the CDC fail to conduct seroprevalence surveys in representative communities?

Thompson Center Summit on Early Literacy Event Archive:

Over one third of Wisconsin students are unable to read at grade level and our state’s Black children have the lowest reading scores in the nation. Reading below grade level brings both short term and long term challenges, from a lower chance of graduating high school to a higher chance of living in poverty.

Join the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership for a luncheon discussion with state and national experts on how Wisconsin can address our literacy crisis.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Matt Barnum:

Maybe — most insidiously — poor children of color weren’t likely to succeed in school no matter how well-funded their schools. This idea was spreading, appearing in academic journals and publications like the Atlantic and the Washington Post. A New York Times news article from 1970 included this startling line: “In the case of a slum child,” it read, citing supposedly cutting-edge research, “his chances of learning to read were quite limited, even though large amounts of money might be devoted to his education.” 

Fifty years ago this year, the Supreme Court cited some of that same research to rule against the Rodriguez family. The racist notion that children in poverty could not benefit from additional or even equal resources may well have influenced the court’s decision. 

“The poor people have lost again, not only in Texas but in the United States, because we definitely need changes in the educational system,” Demetrio Rodriguez told one of the reporters that Alex recalls descending on their home. The media soon left, and Alex went back to the same underfunded school. “It was famous for a day or two — then that was it,” he says now. 

Admittedly, the legal and practical merits of the Court’s 1973 decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez are complex and up for legitimate debate. In the long run, the ruling was not the devastating blow to funding equality efforts that many advocates feared. Funding gaps due to property taxes have narrowed or fully closed, in part because state courts stepped in after the Supreme Court stepped aside.

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

Lindsey Burke, Ph.D. and Jonathan Butcher

The U.S. Department of Education opened its doors on May 4, 1980. Forty years after its establishment, academic achievement remains largely unimproved, and gaps in achievement outcomes between low-income children and their higher-income peers persist. Elevating education to Cabinet-level status has not led to education excellence; rather, it has codified education decision making in Washington among government officials who have less knowledge than state and local school leaders of the needs of local schools. Devolving the department and housing remaining programs at other agencies can make space for a return to education subsidiarity, enabling local actors to determine which policies meet local needs. Remaining federal involvement should focus primarily on gathering education statistics. In the spirit of the “Education at a Crossroads” report published in 1998, this Backgrounder maps out a plan for eliminating the agency and restoring state, local, and parental control of education.

Lindsey Burke, Ph.D. and Jonathan Butcher

The U.S. Department of Education opened its doors on May 4, 1980. Forty years after its establishment, academic achievement remains largely unimproved, and gaps in achievement outcomes between low-income children and their higher-income peers persist. Elevating education to Cabinet-level status has not led to education excellence; rather, it has codified education decision making in Washington among government officials who have less knowledge than state and local school leaders of the needs of local schools. Devolving the department and housing remaining programs at other agencies can make space for a return to education subsidiarity, enabling local actors to determine which policies meet local needs. Remaining federal involvement should focus primarily on gathering education statistics. In the spirit of the “Education at a Crossroads” report published in 1998, this Backgrounder maps out a plan for eliminating the agency and restoring state, local, and parental control of education.

The Free Press:

Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble under the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.

But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily causethese structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with. 

How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read. 

American Public Media’s Emily Hanforduncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ben Cohen:

One way to learn how the world’s biggest building projects work—or don’t—is to start with some of the smallest building blocks: Legos.

In the 1950s, when Lego decided to make one product the centerpiece of its business, the Danish company went looking for a single toy that could be the foundation of an empire. It picked the colorful plastic bricks that have captured the imagination of children ever since. It was a wise choice. It was also a fitting corporate strategy: Lego turned a small thing into something much bigger.

“That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing?” says University of Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg. “What’s our Lego?”

He understands the power of Legos better than anybody, and not just because he is also Danish. Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning and management of “megaprojects,” his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called “How Big Things Get Done.”

Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly.

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in the Hill on moves by some states to create greater choice and control for parents over the education of their children. The move to use funding to change the status quo could soon be used in higher education. Not only are alumni beginning to withhold contributions to schools with little or no diversity or tolerance on their faculties, but states could reduce their levels of support.

Here is the column:

What if they offered public education and no one came? That question, similar to the anti-war slogan popularized by Charlotte E. Keyes, is becoming more poignant by the day.

This month, Florida is moving to allow all residents the choice to go to private or public schools. Other states like Utah are moving toward a similar alternative with school vouchers. I oppose such moves away from public schools, but I have lost faith in the willingness of most schools to restore educational priorities and standards.

Faced with school boards and teacher unions resisting parental objections to school policies over curriculum and social issues, states are on the brink of a transformative change. For years, boards and teacher unions have treated parents as unwelcome interlopers in their children’s education.

Scott Girard:

“Most teachers are still learning how to teach reading from the commercial materials that they’re being supplied,” he said. “These materials are defective. What teachers have traditionally learned from them is poor practices.

“What’s the effect? Some kids are going to learn to read anyway, but for a lot of children it makes it harder to succeed.”

Kymyona Burk, a senior policy fellow for early literacy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, also presented on the changes other states have made to surpass Wisconsin in reading growth over the past three decades.

She showed during her presentation that on the latest “nation’s report card” exam results, while Wisconsin students remained ahead of the national average for reading scores, they were falling behind states like Mississippi, which invested in early interventions for struggling readers in 2013.

“In order for us to improve we have to know where we are,” Burk said. “This is not data-shaming, this is an opportunity for us to learn from where we’ve been, to know where we need to be.”

Burk, noting Mississippi’s rise “wasn’t overnight,” stressed that while funding is important, it has to be targeted at the right things. Once it is, it takes a lot of people to make it effective.

“It’s going to take an interconnected system from policy to practice,” Burk said. “Legislators have the job of passing policy, the rest of us have the job of ensuring that we’re making it work and that we’re actually doing it and implementing it effectively.”

The conversations included state legislators, who attended both events. Sen. John Jagler, R-Watertown, suggested he and his colleagues want to do something about this, but aren’t certain what the state’s role should be and whether they can come to agreement with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Seidenberg said it’s key to not cast blame on anyone in the conversation about what’s happened in the past and instead focus on working together to solve the problem. Hanford, the journalist, suggested state legislators visit schools in Wisconsin “that are making changes and trying to figure it out and start there.”

“Don’t feel like you have to go back to your office and do something today,” Hanford said. “Go learn some more, go give this some more thought. Talk to your colleagues, but go and talk to the educators who are really trying to do something good; they might not be doing the perfect thing, but they’re trying and they’re dealing with what’s hard.

“They can tell you what they need.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jonathan Turley:

I recently wrote about how public schools and boards are making the case for school choice advocates with failing scores and rising controversies. The latest shocking statistic was released this week that 23 schools in Baltimore City had zero students who tested proficient in math. Those schools include 10 high schools, eight elementary schools, three Middle/High schools and two Elementary/Middle schools. The state found that 2,000 students who took the state test could not do math at grade level.

We previously discussed the Baltimore public educational system as an example of where billions of dollars have been spent on a system that continues to have appalling scores and standards. Recent data now offers another chilling statistic: 41 percent of students in the Baltimore system have a 1.0 (D) GPA or less.

We also discussed how a high school student almost graduated near the top half of his class after failing every class but three in four years. He had a 0.13 GPA. His mother objected and went public.

The top spending public school districts are also some of the worst performing school districts.  New York topped the per capita spending at $24,040 per kid. Washington, D.C. is close at $22,759.  Baltimore is often ranked in the top three per capita spending districts. The total budget for Baltimore public schools is roughly $1.2 billion. That is for a city with a total population of roughly 600,000 (The greater Baltimore metropolitan area is 2.8 million). In 2015, the school population was 84,000 kids.

Faced with school boards and teacher unions resisting parental objections to school policies over curriculum and social issues, states are on the brink of a transformative change. For years, boards and teacher unions have treated parents as unwelcome interlopers in their children’s education.

Monica Sager and Susanti Sarkar Medill News Service:

Since the COVID-19 pandemic forced children to stay at home for months on end, students lagged in social development. This was especially seen in kindergartners entering school for the first time, and it put an extra strain on teachers. One of the reasons students with disabilities fell behind is because it was harder to meet their needs online, educators say. Platforms like Zoom, Google Classrooms and Google Meet are not always suited for people with hearing or visual impairments.

Pandemic effects

Some exhausted parents see Individualized Education Programs as a way to fix the effects of the last two years, Kling said.

“Our only concern is that people are doing that out of a knee jerk reaction because of the pandemic where kids might be behind in their learning or might have exhibited some behavioral issues, but it might not be indicative of a disability,” said Eisenberg.

Before the pandemic, about 12% to 13% of students across the country were in special education, Eisenberg said. Now, more children are frequently evaluated for consideration.

I did not see geographic differences mentioned vis a vis taxpayer funded mandates.

Rev. David Buchs:

It has never been a question of if, but how.

The last several years, many parents have found themselves wondering if they should homeschool their children. Whether it was on account of Covid policies or Marxism or mere inefficiency, lots of folks who had never considered homeschooling started to wonder: should we? If we were to homeschool, how would we know if we succeeded? If we were to take full responsibility for the formation of our children into well-adjusted adults, would we be up for it?

Buried in all those questions is a faulty premise extraordinarily common in our day, which is hard to shake. The premise is that there’s some question of if, when, in fact, it’s only a question of how.

The idea that the home is not the primary place for child-rearing is strange and senseless. This is true even when children spend the majority of their time outside the home. When dad and mom choose to bus their kids to the neighborhood elementary school or to the local Lutheran school or to the classical academy in the next town over, that choice is made in the home. And it’s a choice that teaches. It is that choice which sets the stage for everything that follows. That choice comes first, long before any instruction takes place in a classroom or any homework gets discussed around the dinner table. From the outset parents are teaching their children at home. That is why there’s never been a question of if families should homeschool, but rather of how.

To be clear, this is not an article about homeschooling. It is an article about home catechesis. Entertain a thought experiment with me. Consider a typical Lutheran parish in the Midwest. Worship is followed by Sunday School for the kids and Bible class for the adults. Maybe there’s a weekday Bible Study, and on Wednesday afternoon during the school year there’s Confirmation. Attendance is fairly dutiful, at least for Sunday School and Confirmation. In fact, even when families miss Sunday worship or don’t stick around for Bible Class, they’ll drop their kids off for Sunday School and consider Confirmation attendance non-negotiable.

Laurie Roberts:

Charter schools would be exempt from the cuts. They didn’t exist in 1980 and so they aren’t subject to the spending cap. Ditto for the state’s universal voucher program. The kids who are getting public money to attend private schools would see no decline in state support.

Only the children who attend traditional public schools would be penalized.

Horne told legislators that would be a “travesty,” but some of the Legislature’s most conservative members aren’t likely to see it that way.

“Eliminating and/or lifting the Aggregate Expenditure Limit (AEL) is a betrayal of our duty to every taxpayer in the state,” Rep. Jacque Parker, R-Mesa, tweeted last month. “Lifting taxpayer protections so government schools can spend endlessly without transparency is unacceptable.”

Sure, penalize the children.

Some Republican leaders say not to worry. (It’s worth noting that Senate President Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, was among the 20 Republicans who opposed waiving the spending cap last year.)

“Hear us now: Schools will not lose out on the money we have allocated for them,” House Majority Leader Leo Biasiucci, R-Lake Havasu City, said on Jan. 11. “We will address this. But we will not rush the process.”

Zach Weissmueller and Nick Gillespie

Public schools have failed to teach kids to read and write because they use approaches that aren’t based on proven techniques based on phonics. Many schools have been influenced by the work of Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins, who is the subject of a new podcast series from American Public Media, Sold a Story, “an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences—children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.”

“The South Bronx elementary school where I taught 5th grade for several years was a proponent of Calkins’ approach,” Pondiscio wrote in a 2022 New York Post op-ed. “We adopted her teaching methods and employed her literacy coaches for years, to very little effect. Her greatest sin against literacy comes after kids learn to ‘decode’ the written word, whether or not they are taught with phonics, which is just the starting line for reading.”

How did this happen? Is the solution school choice—a system in which parents can opt out of traditional public schools and their flawed approaches to teaching reading? As Pondiscio argues, is withdrawing “concern for traditional public schools” equivalent to withdrawing “concern for our republic”?

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

WILL:

Did you know that statewide choice students outperform their public-school peers by 3.2% in ELA and 2.1% in math? It is no wonder that their enrollment continues to increase compared to traditional public schools. However, it can be a lengthy and complicated process for parents to enroll their children in a choice program. That’s largely due to the many bureaucratic obstacles that are currently in place such as income limits, restrictive enrollment periods, grade-level entry points and regulatory requirements. 

Income Limits  

Not all families in Wisconsin have access to a parental choice program because of income limits that determine eligibility. Not only are the income limits restrictive (as a family of four in the statewide program cannot earn more than $58,300), but they are inconsistent. For instance, family incomes must be within 300% of the federal poverty limit in order to participate in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and Racine Parental Choice Program. But for the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, also known as the statewide program, family incomes must be within 220% of the federal poverty limit.