schoolinfosystem.org
Luke Andrews: Dr Melissa Kearney, an economic professor at the University of Maryland, previously told DailyMail.com: ‘There has been a greater emphasis on spending time building careers. Adults are changing their attitudes towards having kids. ‘They are choosing to spend money and time in different ways… [that] are coming into conflict with parenting.’ There are […]
Scott Girard: In total, nearly 9,000 children in Madison public schools missed more than 10% of the school year, a rate of absenteeism that can indicate broader problems facing children and puts them at risk of a serious, long-term disadvantage in learning. Grelinda Isom’s four children are among those considered chronically absent. Isom herself has […]
Kendra Hurley: Call it the end of an era for fantasy-fueled reading instruction. In a move that has parents like me cheering, Columbia University’s Teachers College announced last month that it is shuttering its once famous—in some circles, now-infamous—reading organization founded by education guru and entrepreneur Lucy Calkins. For decades, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project […]
The Economist: Ho Chi Minh is the founding father of Vietnam, was clear about the route to development. “For the sake of ten years’ benefit, we must plant trees. For the sake of a hundred years’ benefit, we must cultivate the people,” was a bromide he liked to trot out. Yet despite years of rapid […]
Quinton Klabon: 1 year and $1 BILLION in federal relief later, it’s still tragic. •6,000 fewer kids on college track•101,000 kids below grade level•Green Bay, Janesville stuck at pandemic low•Milwaukee Black kids not catching up Scott Girard: In the Madison Metropolitan School District, proficiency rates in both subjects are well above the state for white […]
David Leonardt Among the reasons the Defense Department schools do so well: “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 […]
Mandy McLaren and Naomi Nartin: Learning to read is the greatest gift a school can give a child. And yet here, in the birthplace of public education, outmoded teaching methods leave thousands of students struggling to gain this critical skill. It bears repeating: The vast majority of Black and Latino children and kids with disabilities […]
Bloomberg: Nearly four years into America’s learning-loss crisis, perhaps the biggest challenge facing the country’s schools is a basic one: getting students to show up. Rates of absenteeism have surged since the start of the pandemic, across nearly all regions, income levels and age groups. School leaders need to act now to solve the problem, […]
Eliza Mondegreen: Deep in the comments section, someone raises an uncomfortable question: “If the use of puberty blockers are more beneficial than harmful, why did Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the UK rethink their use?” But—never fear—Alexander’s got this covered, too—not in the sense that’s actually looked into but in the sense that he’s decided in […]
Jason Riley: Melissa Kearney’s new book, “The Two-Parent Privilege,” is an attempt to explain the importance of marriage to her fellow liberal intellectuals. Sadly, she has her work cut out. The author is an MIT-trained economist, and as the book jacket explains, she makes “a provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution’s […]
Erika Edwards and Kate Snow A new report about kids and their smartphone use may offer other parents a warning: Children like Armita are inundated with hundreds of pings and prompts on their phones all day and all night — even when they should be paying attention in class or getting a good night’s rest. […]
Steven Morris: Criminal justice and antiracist campaigners have raised concerns over an app being used by schools in Bristol to “monitor and profile” pupils and their families. The app, which is being used by more than 100 schools, gives safeguarding leads quick, easy access to pupils’ and their families’ contacts with police, child protection and welfare services. […]
Corrinne Hess: But data shows that most teacher education programs at colleges and universities are still not fully teaching the science of reading. Instead of learning how to read through pictures, word cues and memorization, children will be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on sounding out letters and phrases, with the hope of addressing […]
Melissa Kearney: Earlier this year, I was at a conference on fighting poverty, and a member of the audience asked a question that made the experts visibly uncomfortable. “What about family structure?” he asked. “Single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones. Does family structure play a role in poverty?” The scholar […]
David Blaska: Jill Underly is Wisconsin’s superintendent of public instruction. The position is elected for four years on the Spring non-partisan ballot along with city alders and circuit court judges. We are one of only 12 states to elect them. One of Jill Underly’s predecessors was Tony Evers, now governor of Wisconsin. A Democrat. If […]
Andy Haldane: I am suffering from PESD (post-examination stress disorder). This is a new condition — indeed, I have just invented it — but it afflicts millions of parents whose children are put through the psychological mangle of school examinations. The trauma is, of course, not confined to parents. Pity the students each year facing […]
Wall Street Journal: Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates has called school choice racist and made it her mission to kill an Illinois scholarship program for low-income children. So how did Ms. Gates try to explain herself this week after press reports that she has enrolled her son in a private Catholic high school? […]
Karol Markowicz The lives of our children were destroyed by lockdowns — and long lockouts — from school during the pandemic. This policy was largely forced through by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. But we now know that President Biden and his wife-teacher, Jill Biden, were the ones who overruled their own medical […]
Diana Fleischman, Ives Parr, Jonathan Anomaly, and Laurent Tellier: This is where a new technology comes in: preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) or polygenic screening, which may inform which embryo parents choose and who is born. Because embryo choice is so consequential, polygenic screening—like other, new reproductive technologies before it—attracts more than its […]
Paul Tough: In the fall of 2009, 70 percent of that year’s crop of high school graduates did in fact go straight to college. That was the highest percentage ever, and the collegegoing rate stayed near that elevated level for the next few years. The motivation of these students was largely financial. The 2008 recession […]
Sandra Palma: It was March 2022, and with my best friend’s baby shower approaching, I knew the gift I wanted to make: a stuffed whale or two. My friend loves whales and I love sewing. The mother-to-be received the plush cetaceans with delight, but as I’d worked, my own satisfaction waned. Most children’s toys have […]
Wall Street Journal: One goal of robust school choice programs is to broaden quality education alternatives. A new report brings evidence that this is happening in Florida, where Catholic PreK-12 schools are defying national trends. Of the 10 states with the highest Catholic school enrollment, Florida is the only one where Catholic school enrollment has […]
Laura Mechler: Her program is part of a company called Prenda, which last year served about 2,000 students across several states. It connects home-school families with microschool leaders who host students, often in their homes. It’s like Airbnb for education, says Prenda’s CEO, because its website allows customers — in this case, parents — to enter their criteria, […]
Joseph De Avila: “I really resent being forced into a position where my role as an educator is all of a sudden somebody who is in charge of censorship,” said Cleaver, who teaches at Ferry Pass Middle School. “That’s not my role as an educator.” Teachers in Florida said a wave of recent educational-policy changes […]
Matt Barnum: In the long-running reading wars, proponents of phonics have won. States across the country, both liberal and conservative, are passing laws designed to change the way students are taught to read in a way that is more aligned with the science of reading. States, schools of education, districts, and — ultimately, the hope is — teachers, are placing a […]
Danyela Souza Egorov: Tim Castanza admits that he was “triggered.” The year was 2016, and Castanza, then working for the New York City Department of Education, attended a Community Education Council meeting in Staten Island, where several mothers of kids with dyslexia spoke. The public schools didn’t have any programs for their children, they said, […]
Theresa Macphail Elizabeth, an engineer in her late-30s, has three children, all with some form of allergy. Her eldest daughter, Viola, 12, had eczema as a baby; has environmental allergies to pollen; and allergies to corn, tree nuts and peanuts. Her youngest son, Brian, 3, also had eczema as a baby and subsequently developed allergies […]
The Economist: In the southern city of Huizhou an electronics factory is hiring. The monthly salary on offer is between 4,500 and 6,000 yuan (or $620 and $830), enough to pay for food and essentials, but not much else. The advertisement says new employees are expected to “work hard and endure hardship”. The message might […]
Sara Randazzo & Scott Calvert: In the race to fix a nationwide reading crisis that worsened during the pandemic, more states are threatening to make students repeat third grade to help them catch up. Tennessee, Michigan and North Carolina are among at least 16 states that have tried in recent years to use reading tests […]
Liv Finne: The COVID school shutdowns are being blamed for current shortages of nurses, engineers, customer service representatives, seasonal workers, and army recruits. A recent WSJ article notes that since 2020 the pass rates on certification exams taken by engineers, office workers, soldiers and nurses have all fallen. This means fewer engineers and other skilled workers on the […]
Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, John Friedman Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use […]
By Reihan Salam I don’t begrudge Biden for doing whatever he could to secure his granddaughter’s admission to a prestigious university, an admirable act of grandfatherly devotion, or Gutmann for having been receptive to his entreaties, as her job was in no small part to add luster to the University of Pennsylvania. The relationship between […]
Keri Ingraham: Teachers unions and education bureaucrats hail public schools for being open to all children while condemning private schools for limiting access. But most “public” schools aren’t public at all. In most communities, children are restricted to a single assigned school based on their home address and arbitrary boundary lines. Private schools often have […]
Laura McKenna: Has the Neurodiversity Movement Forgotten The Most Disabled and Their Parents? When Ian was three, the local school district sent him to a neurologist to see why he couldn’t talk. After a few background questions for me about my pregnancy and his birth, she turned to Ian, and said, “okay, let’s see what’s […]
Joshua Grossman, Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay C. Page, and Sharad Goel. we estimate the odds that Asian American applicants were admitted to at least one of the schools we consider were 28% lower than the odds for white students with similar test scores, grade-point averages, and extracurricular activities. The gap was particularly pronounced for students of […]
Jeff Davidson With school about to commence around the country, in two to four weeks, a friend mentioned that her granddaughter has been home-schooled for her whole academic career. She is currently in her 9th year, yet, by all indications, she is academically on par with most high school seniors. Curiously, when the young lady […]
Anna Mutoh: Jaclyn Ohmer couldn’t wait to have a baby. Before she was pregnant, she bought onesies and beagle-shaped booties. She and her husband, her high-school sweetheart, found out they were having a son and prepared a Star Wars-themed baby room. The 26-year-old from Parma, Ohio, was ready for his arrival. Things got harder after […]
Jill Barshay When you think of a college student, you might imagine a young adult leaving home, moving into a dorm, navigating a campus and maybe attending a fraternity party. That’s an outdated image. We’ve written a lot about how older adults with jobs and children are a giant group on campus. But a more […]
Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman: Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? […]
Jill Barshay: When you think of a college student, you might imagine a young adult leaving home, moving into a dorm, navigating a campus and maybe attending a fraternity party. That’s an outdated image. We’ve written a lot about how older adults with jobs and children are a giant group on campus. But a more […]
Jim Hinch: Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When […]
Alisa Rosenbaum: The old idiom, “if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck,” directly applies to the Latin School of Chicago for what increasingly appears to be a hostile, bullying environment for both students and parents alike. Both Chicago Contrarian and many other media outlets have covered the story of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 — […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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, […]
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 4th graders who scored […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 — […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.) […]
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 […]
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 […]