Taylor Nicole Rogers and Gary Silverman:

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When US civil rights campaigners of the last century took to the streets, they dreamt of a day when black Americans would enjoy the same educational opportunities as everyone else in the country. Sabrina Cannon has lived that dream — and it has landed her deep in debt.

Cannon, 33, was the first member of her African-American family in Buffalo, New York, to go to college, using $100,000 in federal student loans to obtain a marketing degree in 2010 from Niagara University, a nearby private institution.

But she struggled to find work in her field during the tough times that followed the financial crisis, and only earned enough from other jobs to make minimum payments on her borrowings, leaving the principal untouched.

So, Cannon switched gears. She decided her future was in healthcare — specifically, mastering the alphanumeric code doctors use to keep track of patients — and she went back to school part-time to obtain a second degree in 2017 from State University of New York Polytechnic Institute. Resuming her studies allowed her to put payments on her first student loan on hold while she was in school, but it also required her to take on more debt to obtain new credentials.

Tyler Kingkade and Mike Hixenbaugh:

“Some of these kids, they’re just trying to get through the day, get through compacted math, get through algebra, go to cotillion on Sunday,” Eddins said. “They are not thinking about these issues.”

Two days after Eddins made the remarks, Southlake Families PAC — a group that has fought to stop a diversity plan at Carroll — sent an email to supporters calling on the school district to “Leave mental health and parenting to parents.”

Christina Edmiston, a Southlake resident and mother of two, was outraged when she saw the email. Earlier that month, Edmiston had pulled her 12-year-old son out of the Carroll district after he reported thoughts of suicide after having been bullied by classmates for his sexuality.

John Hindraker:

Critical Race Theory has become the number one political issue in the U.S. So, needless to say, it is the top issue in school board elections that are taking place across the country. Thus, in one of Minnesota’s largest school districts, the administration emailed talking points to school board members, telling them how to answer questions about CRT from concerned parents. No doubt many other districts have done the same. Remarkably, this particular email included no fewer than six attachments with talking points on CRT. 

These six pro-CRT missives are pretty much interchangeable, although they come from a variety of sources: the school district itself; Education Minnesota, the teachers’ union (this one includes an attack on American Experiment); the Minnesota School Boards Association; the University of Minnesota; the Minnesota Association of School Administrators; and the Council of the Great City Schools. 

These six sets of talking points exemplify the liberal orthodoxy on CRT: It doesn’t exist, and it’s awesome! They assert that CRT is found only in law schools (parenthetically, if that is true it is a serious problem in itself) and certainly isn’t taught in K-12 classrooms.

October 21 WisPolitics Event (about 41 minutes into the video clip). A followup questioner, at 47:10, mentioned that the response to my question was money and in fact the school districts that spend the most money (Milwaukee and Madison) have among the worst results.

mp3 audio

Transcript (Machine generated).

Related: AB446.

Ben Wikler and a Teacher Union rally.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Gerard Baker:

Merrick Garland’s got a little list.

The attorney general is compiling a steadily lengthening register of “society offenders who might well be underground and who never would be missed,” as Ko-Ko, the hypervigilant lord high executioner, sings in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado.”

Mr. Garland’s list of society offenders is compendious. At the top are right-wing extremists who’ve been officially designated the greatest domestic threat to U.S. security, but whose ranks seem, in the eyes of the nation’s top lawyer, to include some less obviously malevolent characters, including perhaps anyone who protested the results of the 2020 election. Then there are police departments not compliant with Biden administration law-enforcement dicta, Republican-run states seeking to regularize their voting laws after last year’s pandemic-palooza of an electoral process, and state legislatures that pass strict pro-life legislation.

They’d none of them be missed.

Bob Woodson and Ian Rowe:

With a new school year underway, parents, teachers, and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians, and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity.

Last week, the U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution to support the teaching of critical race theory in public K–12 schools. The resolution initially listed among its sponsors liberal mayors like Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, Portland’s Ted Wheeler, and Louisville’s Greg Fischer.

Over the summer, Oregon governor Kate Brown suspended a requirement for students to demonstrate reading, writing, and math proficiency in order to receive a high school diploma, in a supposed effort to build “equity.” The governor’s office said the new standards for graduation would aid the state’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

These efforts by politicians to push critical race theory distracts from a real analysis of educational achievement in their states and cities. The real issue in American education is a failure to enable the majority of students—regardless of race—to achieve academic excellence or even, in many cases, basic skills.

Bob Woodson and Ian Rowe:

With a new school year underway, parents, teachers, and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians, and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity.

Last week, the U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution to support the teaching of critical race theory in public K–12 schools. The resolution initially listed among its sponsors liberal mayors like Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, Portland’s Ted Wheeler, and Louisville’s Greg Fischer.

Over the summer, Oregon governor Kate Brown suspended a requirement for students to demonstrate reading, writing, and math proficiency in order to receive a high school diploma, in a supposed effort to build “equity.” The governor’s office said the new standards for graduation would aid the state’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

These efforts by politicians to push critical race theory distracts from a real analysis of educational achievement in their states and cities. The real issue in American education is a failure to enable the majority of students—regardless of race—to achieve academic excellence or even, in many cases, basic skills.

Antonio García Martínez:

Christopher Rufo is a political activist who has been leading a very prominent media war against ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT), a concept I won’t even dare to define but which Pull Request readers have surely seen in various guises all over their feeds.
This post is for paying subscribers

Michael Hendrix:

Six out of ten say that crime is increasing in their area—including a majority of all racial and ethnic groups. Among those who live in urban cores but who express an interest in moving to a less dense area, crime rates are a top-three motivator. More than two in five respondents also see a lack of police presence as a problem in their area. Community policing and other reforms that would empower police are broadly supported.
Few say that local schools are doing a good job, and most support school choice and charters. Additionally, just over half of those in America’s fastest-growing metros are wary of critical race theory (CRT) in school curriculum.
Still, slightly more than half of respondents think that things in their metro are generally headed in the right direction, with roughly two in three agreeing in Boston, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Tampa metros. Similarly, many say that the quality of life in their metro area is good or very good (46%), and somewhat smaller shares say so about local economic conditions and the quality of public schools. But there is little sign of enthusiasm behind these votes of confidence: more than a third still chose “average” across these categories. Public safety, the quality of roads and bridges, and public transportation receive similarly tepid ratings (Figure 2). Though Americans in the fastest-growing metro areas are generally happy with their city’s quality of life, they worry about the costs to live there.
The spread of Covid-19 infections also remains a concern for some 60% of respondents, but nearly equal shares are worried about traffic, public safety and crime rates, and high taxes.
In all, nearly a third said that their local area is on the wrong track, and another 17% are unsure. Minneapolis and Seattle have the highest shares believing that their city is on the wrong track, with some 48% and 46% saying so, respectively. On quality of life, responses varied considerably by metro. Coastal areas such as Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle were all more likely to have local respondents rating their quality of life as poor, while residents of Sunbelt and Mountain West hubs such as Tampa, Orlando, Charlotte, and Denver were much more likely to have a positive outlook.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

This is a lie. Almost 20 years ago, the founder of critical race theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, boasted that “critical race theory” has been “used as interchangeably for race scholarship as Kleenex is used for tissue.” It’s their own definition; now they are being exposed. https://t.co/7kdFD0rSno

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 27, 2021

Christopher F. Rufo:

Critical race theory is the latest battleground in the culture war. Since the murder of George Floyd last year, critical race theory’s key concepts, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility,” have become ubiquitous in America’s elite institutions. Progressive politicians have sought to implement “antiracist” policies to reduce racial disparities, such as minorities-only income programs and racially segregated vaccine distribution.

The ideology has sparked an immense backlash. As Americans have sought to understand critical race theory, they have discovered that it has divided Americans into racial categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed” and promotes radical concepts such as “spirit murder” (what public schools supposedly do to black children) and “abolishing whiteness” (a purported precondition for social justice). In the classroom, critical race theory-inspired lessons have often devolved into race-based struggle sessions, with public schools forcing children to rank themselves according to a racial hierarchy, subjecting white teachers to “antiracist therapy,” and encouraging parents to become “white traitors.”

Peter Wood:

Is the popular outrage against CRT truly a pro-censorship movement? Is it disrespectful of education?

The way to tell is to look at what vexes the anti-CRTers — and what they favor instead. Among the more widely watched videos is one of a citizen opposing his school board’s pro-CRT stance: the T-shirted, tattooed British expat Simon Campbell sticks it to the Pennsbury, Pennsylvania school board. The audience cheers as Mr Campbell charges the school board, ‘It seems to me that you think you can supersede the United States Constitution.’ As the cheers die down, he continues, ‘I’ve got news for you school board president Benito Mussolini, your power does not exceed that of the US Constitution and the First Amendment Rights of the citizens of this great nation.’ His five minute bravura performance needs to be savored in the original.

Mr Campbell was moved to speak by an email from the district’s director of ‘Equity, Diversity & Education’ in which she advised the superintendent on how to censor public comments she disagreed with — and the president of the school board agreed with that proposal. This is a good place to pause on the terminology. The defenders of critical race theory frequently create a maze of distinctions. If you challenge the 1619 Project as an instance of CRT, they loftily inform you that you don’t know what you are talking about. CRT is an exquisitely refined doctrine that has been crafted by law professors over the years — and has nothing to do with Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’s confected fantasy about the slave origins of American society. Or if you challenge the Ibram X. Kendi’s virulently anti-white ‘anti-racism’ agenda, the proponents of CRT sneer that Kendi’s approach differs entirely. In schools, the rubric under which CRT is most commonly deployed is ‘DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’. And once again, school officials intone from Olympian heights that DEI and CRT are as different as apple pie and applejack.

Maciver:

The Superintendent of Germantown Schools, Brett Stousland, has been adamant that Critical Race Theory is not present in the school district, save for two elective courses offered at the high school. In a letter to parents dated April 29, 2021, Stousland said “Currently, CRT is presented as a theory in just two high school elective courses; AP Literature & Composition and Critical Thinking & Writing. CRT is one of many critical theories that the students are exposed to in these classes.”  

According to Christopher Rufo, Director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute, says “There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including ‘equity,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘culturally responsive teaching.’ Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that ‘neo marxism would be a hard sell.” 

So even though the education establishment will adamantly state “we do not teach Critical Race Theory”, they are often teaching Critical Race Theory to their teachers and their students under a different name.

Thanks to a FOIA request from a group of parents in the district, we can confirm that Critical Race Theory is more widespread in the district than Stousland is letting on. In fact, the very next day after Superintendent Stousland assured parents CRT was only “presented as a theory in just two high school elective courses”, many Germantown teachers participated in a “Cultural Responsiveness” seminar on April 30th, 2021 that studied books like Me and White Supremacy and Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching.

Virginia Allen:

As a lawyer defending religious liberty, a wife, and a mother of four school-age children, Smith says, she was enjoying life and had plenty to keep her busy. But she felt compelled to run for school board to try to stop the agenda of critical race theory, which she says would “radically change our school district.”

Now a school board member in Southlake, Texas, just outside Dallas, Smith says she is committed to keeping far-left ideology out of classrooms.

Smith joins the show to discuss how critical race theory is making its way into more schools across the country and what her priorities are as a new school board member.

Commentary:

Why can’t that be done clearly and straightforwardly? People are right to feel anxious and suspicious about something so big and powerful that can’t be talked about. To say “In fact, I don’t even believe that most people have any real concept of what critical race theory is” is to blame the people for failing to understand what isn’t being discussed clearly. That’s perverse and elitist.

Christopher Rufo:

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

During the twentieth century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered for gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Christopher Rufo:

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

During the twentieth century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered for gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

Bion Bartning:

We started to ask questions. I have always felt a strong connection with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s dream of an America where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I advocate genuine antiracism, rooted in dignity and humanity. But the ideology underlying the “racial literacy” guide distributed by the school wasn’t like that. Instead of emphasizing our common humanity, it lumps people into simplistic racial groupings. It teaches that each person’s identity and status is based largely on skin color, and leaves no place for people like me, who are of mixed race or don’t place race at the heart of their identity.

After confirming that the curriculum, obtained from a nonprofit called Pollyanna Inc., was “one of many resources” the school was using, I became concerned by the emphasis on grievance over gratitude and by the stated goal of turning young children into committed activists. “By the end of the unit,” one section of the curriculum explains, “students will set commitments for rectifying current social ills, such as learning and planning how to carry out anti-racist activism and/or social advocacy in their communities.”

My concerns multiplied when, going off the Pollyanna curriculum, our fourth-grade daughter and her 9- and 10-year-old classmates were given “The Third Chimpanzee for Young People,” a book intended for middle and high schoolers that covers mature topics such as adultery, self-mutilation and suicide. After we and other parents argued that it was inappropriate, the teachers backtracked and asked students to return the books. But school administrators didn’t want to hear our questions.

Less than a week later, concluding an unrelated email exchange, the head of the school wrote to us: “I wonder if this might be a good moment to think whether or not this is the best school for you and your family—being philosophically misaligned is never a very good experience for all concerned.” It took him almost a month to respond to the letter we wrote in reply, explaining that our philosophy hadn’t changed and asking if our children were still welcome at the school.

Rod Dreher:

The headmaster eventually asked the Bartnings if their kids wouldn’t be happier elsewhere. More:

Evita Duffy:

If you think state and federal government COVID-19 policies are too restrictive, you haven’t been to a college campus lately. Schools across the country have imposed extreme, micromanaging rules on 19-22 year olds—a demographic more likely to die from the seasonal flu and pneumonia than COVID.

Paying top dollar at already overpriced institutions for vastly inferior remote learning, university students remain unnecessarily isolated and barred from using the services and facilities they and their families are paying for. 

Many schools, like Southern Methodist University, forbid students from having guests in their dorm rooms. Others have even installed security cameras in the hallways aimed at residents’ doors to monitor adherence. 

Most institutions have isolation dorms or, as some students call them, “isolation prisons,” where students who test positive for COVID are forced to live alone for two weeks (sound familiar?). 

Many students must wear masks at all times, including outdoors and in gyms. This is an ironic twist for institutions that train scientists and house overwhelmingly leftist professors and students who chastise anyone for questioning the ever-changing government COVID guidelines and screech at all of us to “follow the science” as though science is a religion with no growth, questioning, or margin of error.

Sonia Sodha:

Is it deeply offensive to lambast a black or an Asian person for not being “black” or “Asian” enough? Yes. Is it offensive to assume that someone black or Asian criticising the politics of another black or Asian person is motivated by such sentiment? Yes.

Last week, the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien blundered into the latter under the guise of defending his black colleague, equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, from the former. Badenoch had tweeted screenshots of two private right-of-reply emails the black journalist Nadine White had sent her, accusing her of “creepy and bizarre” behaviour for putting to her claims made by a source.

This triggered a torrent of abuse directed at White. There is no question that Badenoch has faced unpleasant racism, but that does not excuse her behaviour towards White, a journalist doing her job, nor her undermining the confidential right-of-reply process that is critical to accurate journalism.

That did not stop O’Brien weighing in to try to justify Badenoch’s behaviour. In order to do so, he misrepresented White’s work and conflated her journalism with some of the abuse Badenoch has received on Twitter that has accused her of being a “race traitor”, which has nothing to do with White. All this tends to depict White’s journalism as being motivated by a belief that Badenoch, as a Conservative, isn’t truly black.

He didn’t stop there: he also accused the Labour MP Naz Shah of “straight up racism” for claiming that the home secretary, Priti Patel, was gaslighting ethnic minorities by talking about her own experiences of racism. Again, O’Brien misrepresents what happened to give the impression that Shah’s critique of Patel is motivated by a belief that her politics make her less Asian. What actually happened was that the black MP Flo Eshalomi asked Patel a question that referenced her experiences of anti-black racism and the structural racism of policies such as those behind the Windrush scandal.

Bocar A. Ba, Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo and Roman Rivera:

Diversity in policing

In the wake of high-profile police shootings of Black Americans, it is important to know whether the race and gender of officers and civilians affect their interactions. Ba et al. overcame previous data constraints and found that Hispanic and Black officers make far fewer stops and arrests and use force less than white officers, especially against Black civilians. These differences are largest in majority-Black neighborhoods in the city of Chicago (see the Perspective by Goff). Female officers also use less force than male officers. These effects are supportive of the efficacy of increasing diversity in police forces.

Dave Huber:

A state representative in New Hampshire is picking up where the former Trump administration left off — he’s introduced legislation which would ban trainings based on critical race theory.

Keith Ammon’s bill (via Christopher Rufo) would prohibit — in state contracts, grants and training programs — the teaching of “divisive concepts” such as “one race or sex [being] inherently superior to another race or sex” and that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

The bill goes directly to the heart of philosophies espoused by those like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi as it would forbid making “any individual […] feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

Wisconsin Democracy Campaign:

Seven candidates who want to be the state’s next top school chief in the upcoming spring elections collectively raised more than $200,000 last year.

The seven candidates will face off in the Feb. 16 primary. The top two finishers will vie for a four-year term as state school superintendent in the April 6 elections. The winner succeeds Carolyn Stanford Taylor, who is not running for election. Taylor was appointed state school superintendent in 2019 to fill out of the term of Tony Evers after he became governor.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the candidates and their 2020 fundraising:

Deborah Kerr, a retired Brown Deer School District superintendent, accepted $68,460 and had about $50,140 in her campaign account as of Dec. 31.

Sheila Briggs, an assistant state school superintendent, raised about $53,300 and had about $44,345 in her campaign coffers at year’s end.

Jill Underly, Pecatonica Area School District superintendent, raised about $38,330 and had about $20,525 in her campaign account as of Dec. 31.

Troy Gunderson, retired West Salem School District superintendent, raised $20,505 and had $13,240 in his campaign coffers on Dec. 31.

Shandowlyon Hendricks-Williams, director of Gov. Tony Evers’ Milwaukee office, raised about $18,320 and had about $7,840 in her campaign account at year’s end.

Joe Fenrick, a Fond du Lac High School science teacher, raised about $8,600 and had about $8,575 in his campaign account on Dec. 31.

Steve Krull, principal of the Garland Elementary School in Milwaukee, raised about $3,460 and had about $2,450 in his campaign account as of Dec. 31.

Here are the contributors who gave $1,000 or more to the candidates in 2020, according to a preliminary review of their campaign finance reports. The employers of these contributors were identified by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign because state law no longer requires candidates to identify the employers of their large donors:

Kerr

Ted Kellner, of Mequon, retired founder of Fiduciary Management, and his wife, Mary, $5,000,

Gary and Janet Henseler, of Racine, owners of Accounting & Business Services, Inc., $5,000,

Michael Perrone, of Antioch, Ill., president of The Deli Source, and his wife, Karen, $5,000,

Cristal Bemont, of Redwood City, Calif., chief executive officer of Talend, about $1,900,

Patrick English, of Wauwatosa, chairman of Fiduciary Management, about $1,400,

Michael Kass, Brown Deer police chief, $1,000,

Kathy Wilson, an optometrist in Ringwood, Ill., $1,000,

The campaign committee of GOP State Sen. Alberta Darling, of River Hills, $1,000,

In addition to the contributions, Kerr loaned her campaign $21,000.

Briggs

Lillian Lowery, of Yardley, Penn., $1,000,

Katie Rainey, of Madison, a Department of Public Instruction director, $1,000,

Pamela Arp, of DeForest, retired, $1,000,

James Dahlberg, of Madison, University of Wisconsin emeritus professor of biochemistry, $1,000,

Anupam Mishra, Hillsborough, Calif., a director at Aspire Public Schools, $1,000,

Bonnie Dykman, of Monona, retired Madison public school teacher, $1,000.

In addition to the contributions, Briggs made about $3,000 in in-kind contributions and loans to her campaign.

Underly

Jill Gaskell, of Blanchardville, a Pecatonica school board member, $1,200,

Charles Semko, of Munster, Ind., $1,000,

Jeff Semko, a Crown Point, Ind. attorney, $1,000,

Kaye Gilbertson, of Barneveld, owner of J&R Underground, $1,000.

In addition to the contributions, Underly made loans and in-kind contributions to her campaign totaling about $11,200.

Gunderson

Del Gunderson, of Colfax, a retired accountant, $5,000,

Jill Gunderson, of West Salem, a retired teacher, $4,000,

Trevor Gunderson, a St. Paul, Minn. attorney, $1,500,

Cheryl Gunderson, a Minneapolis, Minn. paralegal, $1,000,

William Hubbard, of Monroe, a retired teacher, $1,000.

In addition to the contributions, Troy Gunderson made $2,480 in in-kind contributions to his campaign.

Hendricks-Williams

Doris Reaves, of Milwaukee, retired, $1,000.

In addition to the contribution, Hendricks-Williams contributed $10,000 to her campaign.

Fenrick

Fenrick made loans and contributions to his campaign totaling about $7,600.

Krull

Pamela Gustafson, Milwaukee public school teacher, $1,000.

More, here.

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

Jarrett Stepman:

“Critical race theory and its parent, critical theory, are rooted in a worldview that wants to dismantle social and governmental norms,” Butcher said.

While racism and other prejudices still and will continue to exist, Butcher said this does not mean that we don’t have to ignore the intolerance and “dogmas” of critical theory.

“Critical theory is not a sympathetic perspective with policy goals that lead to racial reconciliation, freedom, and opportunity,” Butcher said. “It’s talking about subjugation and retribution.”

Proponents of critical theory, Butcher explained, even acknowledge that their ideas counter the values of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, which were essential elements of the American founding.

These ideas are not just consigned to the margins of academia, however, as explained by Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at Discovery Institute and fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Instead, they have become pervasive in countless private and governmental institutions.

Rufo conducted research into human resource departments and governmental agencies that have become increasingly reliant on critical race theory.

ARMAND A. FUSCO, ED.D.:

As the newly appointed Literacy Task Force begins its quest to unravel why 20 years of efforts to improve reading were mired in a whirlpool of disastrous reading results to determine what went wrong (so that past mistakes are not repeated) there are critical lessons for learning from the Reading Champion. This is critical because Part 1 of this reading series provided the information that was available to a previous task force to improve reading outcomes that were piled sky high and available at no cost; but, obviously, they were not viewed as lessons to be learned to promote success. Worse yet, there were a number of districts with successful reading turnarounds to copy from (available at no cost); but no lessons were learned.

Lesson #1:
Learn from successful reading outcomes of other schools, districts and states; past failure to do so is probably the biggest mistake that has to be learned.

One such example of success involved not just a district but the entire state. However, improvement may be applauded, but only because the rest of the nation did not do as well in comparison. Although Madison has been crowned as having the largest achievement gap in the U.S., CT had that distinction (and still is at the top) as a State because of the significant disparities in scores of minorities as will be seen in the results to follow. It’s also an example of how the use of average or total scores hide lots of shameful disparities until disaggregated.

Since 1992, Connecticut has had the highest reading achievement scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) reading exam and it is the most improved state in reading scores. As a result of being “crowned the reading champion,” the National Education Goals Panel commissioned a study to determine what Connecticut was doing right that could account for its success. The report, Exploring High and Improving Reading Achievement in Connecticut, looked at a variety of statewide factors.

Before getting to the findings of the study, just how well did Connecticut perform on the 1998 assessment? In grade 4, it had the highest average score for public school students with 46% scoring at or above proficiency. However, in spite of the constant improvement, only 55% of Whites, 17% of Hispanics, and 13% of Blacks achieved at or above proficiency. In Connecticut’s major cities, only 21% achieved at the proficiency level or above (compared with 25% nationally) which means that 79% scored at the basic level or below. Rural towns did much better with students scoring 57% at or above proficiency. What is also significant is that grade 4 scores improved while national scores stayed rather stable.

In grade 8, 42% scored at or above proficiency with 50% of Whites, 16% of Hispanics, and 10% of Blacks scoring at that level; the scores were lower than those in 4th grade. In the major cities, only 20% scored at proficiency or above (compared with 29% nationally), and in the rural towns 50% scored at that level.

Related: Inside Education Column: Madison’s Literacy Task Force: Reading Renaissance or Recycling?

CDC.gov:

What is already known about this topic?

As of October 15, 216,025 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported in the United States; however, this might underestimate the total impact of the pandemic on mortality.

What is added by this report?

Overall, an estimated 299,028 excess deaths occurred from late January through October 3, 2020, with 198,081 (66%) excess deaths attributed to COVID-19. The largest percentage increases were seen among adults aged 25–44 years and among Hispanic or Latino persons.

What are the implications for public health practice?

These results inform efforts to prevent mortality directly or indirectly associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, such as efforts to minimize disruptions to health care.

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Run for Office: Dane County Executive is on the Spring, 2021 ballot.

Jessica Custodio:

The University of Colorado announced to its communications staff through a memo that, in order to prevent biased language, any speech surrounding what it deems as delicate language must be approved by the office of the president first.

Such topics include COVID-19, race, and the First Amendment.
“…clear effort to regulate speech on some of the most important issues we face today.”

The memo was reportedly sent to top administrators in communication positions throughout the University of Colorado system, according to The Denver Post. The office of President Mark Kenned would have the final say on all communications on “sensitive topics.”

“I do not have the inclination, ability or authority to influence dean or faculty communication. CU is a large, complex organization and does not have a single communication strategy or structure. I asked the communication vice-chancellors to share the desire for measured communication on sensitive topics with those on campus they engage with, but campus communication is their purview, not mine,” McConnellogue told the Denver Post.

Christopher Rufo:

My reporting on critical race theory in the federal government was the impetus for the president’s executive order, so I can say with confidence that these training sessions had nothing to do with developing “racial sensitivity.” As I document in detailed reports for City Journal and the New York Post, critical race theory training sessions in public agencies have pushed a deeply ideological agenda that includes reducing people to a racial essence, segregating them, and judging them by their group identity rather than individual character, behavior and merit.

The examples are instructive. At a series of events at the Treasury Department and federal financial agencies, diversity trainer Howard Rosstaught employees that America was “built on the backs of people who were enslaved” and that all white Americans are complicit in a system of white supremacy “by automatic response to the ways we’re taught.”

In accompanying documents, Mr. Ross argues that whites share an inborn oppressive streak. “Whiteness,” employees are told, “includes white privilege and white supremacy.” Consequently, whites “struggle to own their racism.” He instructs managers to conduct “listening sessions” in which black employees can speak about their experience and be “seen in their pain,” while white employees are instructed to “sit in the discomfort” and not “fill the silence with your own thoughts and feelings.” Members of “the group you’re allying with,” Mr. Ross says, are not “obligated to like you, thank you, feel sorry for you, or forgive you.” For training like this, Mr. Ross and his firm have been paid $5 million over 15 years, according to federal disclosures.

At the Sandia National Laboratories, which develops technology for America’s nuclear arsenal, executives held a racially segregated training session for white male employees. The three-day event, which was led by a company called White Men as Full Diversity Partners, set the goal of examining “white male culture” and making the employees take responsibility for their “white privilege,” “male privilege” and “heterosexual privilege.” In one of the opening exercises, the instructors wrote on a whiteboard that “white male culture” can be associated with “white supremacists,” “KKK,” “Aryan Nation,” “MAGA hat” and “mass killings.” On the final day, the trainers asked employees to write letters to women and people of color. One participant apologized for his privilege and another pledged to “be a better ally.”

Incredible: @Twitter is now adding a content warning to my @WSJ op-ed, which was deeply researched and sourced with original documents. Apparently, “telling the truth about critical race theory” is heavily discouraged during this election season. pic.twitter.com/4j5oQfexx5

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 5, 2020

SG Cheah:

10 years ago, if you told someone they’d be watching children depicted pornographically on a mainstream media service, they’d tell you to get lost and stop your fear-mongering. Fast forward today, and we have “Cuties” on Netflix. What happened?

The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is what happened. 

Recently, the White House issued an executive order to stop funding the instruction of Critical Race Theory at the federal level. Why is this a controversy? In order to answer that question, we’ll have to understand the Frankfurt School’s influence on American institutions.

Just a Conspiracy Theory?

But before we dive into the world of Critical Race Theory, let’s first examine a peculiar trend you might be familiar with today. Have you noticed how often questions that may lead to uncovering uncomfortable truths are quickly deemed to be “conspiracy theories” by the media establishment? 

Chris Stewart:

Are they a saving grace for families displaced from traditional schooling or yet another mirage hiding serious educational inequities.

Like most things it matters who you ask. 

Much of the media coverage of pods has shown a deceptively white face which predictably has drawn significant warnings of widening gaps in educational outcomes. 

I understand the concerns, but it’s still a damned shame there is more vigilance about hamstringing solutions rather than finding them. 

The idea of self-determined home-based solutions for education has barely made it into the mainstream. The public has only a slight idea of what pods are, but already the always-on social justice naysayers and self-interested bureaucrats are breakdancing chicken little suitsall over pod news stories.

Of course we should care if the unintended consequences of educational trends will hurt societies most marginalized children, but that fear shouldn’t immobilize creative attempts to stem the learning loss school shutdowns have caused.

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Davide Castelvecchi:

The tide of reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality that has been sweeping through institutions — including scientific ones — has reached universities’ normally reclusive mathematics departments. A group of mathematicians in the United States has written a letter calling for their colleagues to stop collaborating with police because of the widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat people of different races and ethnicities. They concentrate their criticism on predictive policing, a maths-based technique aimed at stopping crime before it occurs.

William Turvill:

Will Lewis, the former boss of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, and ex-Financial Times editor Lionel Barber have also spoken of their uneasiness about the “blurring” of opinions and facts in journalism. 

Lewis – who recently left his role and missed out in the race to become the BBC’s next director general – said that in “this increasingly resource-constrained time… journalistic standards are inevitably slipping. And we’re beginning to see the blurring of facts and comments in a way that I think is extremely worrying and extremely challenging.” 

He exempted the FT, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and New York Times from his criticism.

Barber, who was speaking with Lewis on a video conference (see below) organised by the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, said: “I would make a more general point – we’ve seen this particularly at the BBC: We have to be very careful in the way journalists are using social media. 

“They are essentially seeing [their social media pages as] their own platforms, and it’s definitely comment. And therefore this blurring that Will rightly identifies has been massively accentuated by social media. 

“And it’s not good enough for journalists to say: Oh, by the way, on my Twitter handle, these views are [my own] – because they do work for an organisation.”

Boundless:

Millenarianism is is defined as “the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which “all things will be changed”.

I ran across this concept in a fascinating book by John Gray called “Black Mass” where he explored how humans have consistently been drawn toward millenarianist movements. He goes through the history and characteristics of these movements and also applies it to the then current movement to go to war against Iraq during the GW Bush presidency. He showed how their campaign and the associated propaganda embodied many of the traits of these kind of movements.

If you read the book, you can probably skim the parts about the early 2000s, but the broader perspective on these movements and how they continue to occur throughout history was eye opening. Once you become aware of these tendencies you see them everywhere.

Gray highlights many historical examples of religions, social movements and political regimes that embrace a certain way of thinking. Over the last ten years, it is easy to see how many of these same tendencies have become supercharged and A/B tested through social media.

Tony Room:

More than 2,100 U.S. cities are anticipating major budget shortfalls this year and many are planning to slash programs and cut staff in response, according to a survey of local officials released Tuesday, illustrating the widespread financial havoc threatened by the coronavirus pandemic.

The bleak outlook — shared by local governments representing roughly 93 million people nationwide — led some top mayors and other leaders to call for greater federal aid to protect cities now forced to choose between balancing their cash-strapped ledgers and sustaining the public services that residents need most.

“There’s no question that the coronavirus pandemic has had, and will have, a major impact on cities of all sizes,” said Clarence Anthony, the executive director of the National League of Cities.

Notes, links and commentary on Madison’s planned 2020 tax and spending increase referendum plans.

Scott Girard:

For the past seven months, Strong has been a program associate with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Strong said in an interview Thursday he considers school safety and racial disparities in discipline and achievement to be the top issues facing MMSD.

“We have to make sure that our schools are safe and that they’re safe learning environments for our kids to learn and for our teachers to teach in,” Strong said. He stressed the importance of “tackling the achievement gap and just making sure that all of our students are given the best possible opportunity to get the quality education they deserve.”

He said he dislikes having to choose a seat to run for in Madison’s at-large system, but determined Seat 7 was the “most comfortable” for him at this time. As someone who had children go through Madison schools and will have grandchildren in them in the future, Strong said he thinks he can provide leadership on the board and that he has a “passion for education.”

Vander Meulen said Thursday she was “glad to have a challenger” so that voters can make a choice based on what they value. She said the board’s three jobs are to make a budget, listen to constituents and write policies — and that they need to do more on the last of those.

Logan Wroge:

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

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

Commentary

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

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

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

Lionel Shriver:

Riddle: when is discrimination against a historically disadvantaged racial minority perfectly legal? Answer: when they do too well.

The first ruling on the Students for Fair Admissions suit against Harvard University is in. A federal judge in Massachusetts concluded last month that for America’s be-all-and-end-all university to discriminate against Asian applicants in order to serve the all-hallowed goal of ‘diversity’ is constitutional. (Or strictly speaking, if you can follow this logic, the university did not discriminate against Asians by discriminating against them.) The reasoning: ‘Race conscious admissions will always penalize to some extent the groups that are not being advantaged by the process.’ The decision has already been appealed, and the case is likely to land in the Supreme Court.

For American schools, the sole purpose of turning ‘diversity’ into a crowning educational asset has been to disguise the affirmative action that these same universities once openly pursued and now can legally enforce only by calling the practice something else. Fifty years ago, the notion took hold in the US that racial equality would never evolve naturally, but had to be socially engineered by giving historically disadvantaged groups an active leg up, especially in higher education. Bald racial quotas and substantially lower admission standards for minorities became commonplace. Yet using racism to combat racism obviously doesn’t sit easily with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so multiple previous cases of this nature have ended up in the Supreme Court — whose rulings on the matter have been, to use a technical jurisprudential term, a big mess.

Nat Malkus and Hannah Warren:

School discipline has long been at or near the top of the list of public concerns about education. Indeed, polls show that student discipline was the public’s top concern 50 years ago, in 1969, and for 15 of the next 16 years. More recently, education reformers’ concerns have focused more on how students are disciplined than how disciplined they are. Arguments that suspensions are unproductive, harmful to recipients, and unfairly administered by race led the Obama administration to tackle the issue through 2014 federal guidance encouraging leaders to seek alternatives to exclusionary discipline and reduce racial disparities in suspensions. This was criticized as a top-down overreach, and subsequently scrapped by the Trump administration without any further substantive action. Despite the federal walk-back, pressure for centralized solutions remains, as evidenced by the pending California legislation that would ban all suspensions for disruptive behavior.

That noted, polls also reveal a great deal of support for alternatives to suspension. Fordham finds that 81% of teachers view restorative justice practices as somewhat effective alternatives, and PDK finds that two-thirds of all adults see mediation as more effective than detention or suspension. One of the drivers of this appeal for alternatives is pronounced distrust of disciplinary practices. PDK finds that only 59% of all parents trust their child’s school to administer discipline fairly—a number that falls to a mere 40% among black parents. This racial disparity is understandable given that 15% of black parents report having a child suspended or expelled from schools, double the percentage of white parents. These views are aligned with the pressure in education reform circles to move away from suspension and reflect some sympathy for the Obama and California regulatory moves.

Dave Zirin:

Then there is the palpable fear in the offices of the National Football League about what the retirement of Luck represents and the attendant public relations hit. Behind the pageantry, the war planes flying overhead, and the tailgating keg stands, this is a game largely played by black people from poor backgrounds for a largely white affluent fan base in the stands. Seventy percent of the league is black, and top tickets cost hundreds of dollars. A player like Andrew Luck masks that reality. He graduated from Stanford. He comes from an affluent family. He is white. He played football because he wanted to, not because he had to. And he chose to walk away. He decided that he didn’t need this anymore: that the game he loved—not to mention the fans he loved—didn’t love him back.

Luck also highlights the fact that the more we know about head injuries, concussions, and the toll that the game takes on the human body—“the only workplace with a 100 percent injury rate” as the union is fond of saying—the more middle-class parents are keeping their kids from the sport. As the San Francisco Chronicle observed last year in a devastating exposé, “The number of high school boys playing tackle football has been in slow but steady decline for nearly a decade. The trend has coincided with heightened concern about the frequency and lasting impact of head injuries on young athletes—with former NFL stars among those questioning whether they’d let their sons play football, and some states weighing whether to establish minimum age limits for the sport.”

The piece shows how the sport has declined dramatically in the last decade in onetime hotbeds like Ohio and Michigan, with the overall number of players dipping nationally by 75,000 at a time when high school sports on the whole have expanded. The numbers of young people playing also dropped, Forbes reported, as affluent white families are much more likely to focus their male children on lacrosse: fewer concussions and a greater social cachet for parents who want a future Wall Street raider rather than an Oakland Raider.

Losing players like Andrew Luck promises a future when the mask is ripped clean off the NFL and the sport is plainly poor black players playing for wealthy white fans living vicariously through fantasy football and a violence that they don’t have to personally endure.

As for Luck, when he cried through his press conference, one couldn’t help but think he wasn’t crying only over losing his team, and the harsh reaction of fans, so quick to show him that their bond was only as strong as his next touchdown pass. Andrew Luck was crying for a sport that over a generation has changed culturally, even if the violence is the same. A league that once depended on a community’s coming together to collectively cheer a team now demands poverty to produce players and disposable wealth among fans whose identity revolves around the violent collisions they consume as voyeurs. It’s a sport that’s sustainable only on the ugliest possible terms: the denial of the humanity of players and the acceptance of that denial by the league and the fans themselves.

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“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”.

Mark Pulliam:

Utopian social movements often degenerate into unruly—and sometimes vicious—mobs. During the French Revolution, the slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” quickly led to the guillotine as the Jacobins unleashed the Reign of Terror. We are witnessing a softer version of this at Harvard, America’s most elite university, where Ronald Sullivan, an African-American law professor, faces professional retribution for the sin of representing a (presumed innocent) client (Harvey Weinstein) accused of sexual assault. Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz denounced the incident as “The new McCarthyism comes to Harvard.”

Capitulating to the noisy complaints of a small number of undergraduates, and a sit-in protest at the dining hall, the Harvard administration recently announced that, effective June 30, Sullivan and his wife, Stephanie Robinson (who likewise teaches at Harvard Law School), would be removed as “faculty deans” at the school’s Winthrop House—a student residence where Sullivan and Robinson also lived. (Sullivan remains as a law professor.) When appointed as residential deans in 2009, Sullivan and Robinson were the first African-Americans to hold that position at Harvard, according to The Harvard Crimson. The decision to remove Sullivan and Robinson was made by Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana, who had reportedly joined the students’ sit-in protest, dubbed “Reclaim Winthrop.”

Students absurdly charged that Sullivan’s representation of a criminal defendant charged with sexual assault—by itself—made them feel upset, and contributed to an unsafe and hostile educational environment. Never mind that procedural due process (including the right of criminal defendants to zealous representation) is a critical tenet of the Anglo-American legal system, and that criminal law professors have long practiced criminal defense on the side, without controversy. Never mind that Sullivan previously represented other high-profile clients without incident, including accused terrorists and former New England Patriots tight-end Aaron Hernandez in his 2017 double murder trial. That was then.

The #MeToo movement sweeps away such precedents as inconvenient impediments to achieving a higher state of virtue, just as the Robespierre-led Committee of Public Safety eliminated many “enemies of the people.” It is tempting to ignore the horrors of the French Revolution, or to dismiss them as an aberration of history, but then—as now—idealistic reformers believed with moral certainty in the righteousness of their cause.

Liel Leibovitz:

As soon as I woke up that first morning, I took the train to 116th and Broadway, got off, strolled through the gates of Columbia University, and stood there gazing at the bronze Alma Mater sculpture guarding the steps to Low Library. Her face was serene, her lap adorned by a thick book, and her arms open wide, to embrace, or so I imagined, folks like me who were reasonably smart and wildly motivated and ready to work as hard as was needed to make something of themselves. In a year, maybe two, I thought, I’d find my way into the ivied cloister, and when I emerged on the other end I’d no longer be just another impoverished newcomer: A Columbia degree would accredit me, would validate me and suggest to those around me, from members of my family to potential employers, that I was a man in full, worthy of my slice of the American pie.

It wasn’t a story I had made up on my own. It was, in many ways, the foundational story of American Jewish life in the 20th century. Surveying the student body in major American universities between 1911 and 1913, the newly founded intercollegiate Menorah Association discovered 400 Jews at Cornell, 325 at the University of Pennsylvania, and 160 at Harvard; by 1967, The New York Times reported that 40% of the student body in both Penn and Columbia were Jewish, with Yale, Harvard, and Cornell lagging behind with a mere 25%. For a minority that today is still just three or four generations removed from the deprivations of the old continent and that never rose much further above the 2% mark of the population at large, education—especially at renowned universities—was a magical wardrobe that led into a Narnia of possibilities. All you had to do was open the door.

Liel Leibovitz:

When I immigrated to America, 20 years ago this fall, I had just over $2,000 in my pocket that I’d saved working as a night watchman at a factory back home in Israel. I also had an inflatable mattress on the floor of a friend’s one-bedroom in White Plains, New York, and a promise that I could stay for two weeks, maybe three, until I found a place of my own. But most importantly, I had a story about my future.

As soon as I woke up that first morning, I took the train to 116th and Broadway, got off, strolled through the gates of Columbia University, and stood there gazing at the bronze Alma Mater sculpture guarding the steps to Low Library. Her face was serene, her lap adorned by a thick book, and her arms open wide, to embrace, or so I imagined, folks like me who were reasonably smart and wildly motivated and ready to work as hard as was needed to make something of themselves. In a year, maybe two, I thought, I’d find my way into the ivied cloister, and when I emerged on the other end I’d no longer be just another impoverished newcomer: A Columbia degree would accredit me, would validate me and suggest to those around me, from members of my family to potential employers, that I was a man in full, worthy of my slice of the American pie.

It wasn’t a story I had made up on my own. It was, in many ways, the foundational story of American Jewish life in the 20th century. Surveying the student body in major American universities between 1911 and 1913, the newly founded intercollegiate Menorah Association discovered 400 Jews at Cornell, 325 at the University of Pennsylvania, and 160 at Harvard; by 1967, The New York Times reported that 40% of the student body in both Penn and Columbia were Jewish, with Yale, Harvard, and Cornell lagging behind with a mere 25%. For a minority that today is still just three or four generations removed from the deprivations of the old continent and that never rose much further above the 2% mark of the population at large, education—especially at renowned universities—was a magical wardrobe that led into a Narnia of possibilities. All you had to do was open the door.

Nikki Graf:

hen asked about eight admissions criteria that colleges may consider, high school grades top the list. About two-thirds of Americans (67%) say this should be a major factor; 26% say it should be a minor factor. And while many colleges have stopped requiring standardized test scores as part of the application process, 47% of Americans say these scores should play a major role, while an additional 41% say they should play a minor role. Most Americans also think colleges should take into account community service involvement.

The public is more divided, however, over whether being the first person in the family to go to college should factor into admissions decisions. Some 47% say this should be considered, while 53% say it should not be a factor.

In addition to race or ethnicity, majorities also say that colleges should not consider an applicant’s gender (81%), whether a relative attended the school (68%) – a practice known as legacy admissions – or athletic ability (57%) when making decisions.

Across several of these items, views vary by education, with those holding at least a bachelor’s degree generally more likely than those with less education to say they should be at least a minor factor in college admissions. For example, college graduates are more likely than those with less education to say colleges should consider race (38% say it should be a major or minor factor vs. 22% among those without a bachelor’s degree) or being a first-generation college student (57% vs. 43%) in admissions decisions.

Tom Hancock & Nicolle Liu:

Several senior Chinese officials have apparently copied portions of their university thesis from other authors without citation, an FT analysis has found, highlighting how an “academic arms race” among the political elite may be fuelling plagiarism.

China’s politicians are on paper among the world’s best educated: the elite politburo, composed of the 25 most senior Communist party officials, boasts seven doctoral graduates including Xi Jinping, the president, who obtained a law doctorate from Beijing’s Tsinghua University in 2002.

But the doctoral dissertation by Chen Quanguo, a politburo member and head of the Communist party in the northwestern Xinjiang region, features dozens of paragraphs identical to earlier works that are not cited.

Avi Wolfman-Arent:

The small parent rebellion forming in one of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest school districts began at a Starbucks in suburban Chester County.

Over coffee, three moms — Kate Mayer, Jamie Lynch, and Wendy Brooks — swapped stories about how their kids struggled to read as they moved through the Tredyffrin/Easttown school district, located about 30 minutes west of Philadelphia on the Main Line.

They decided to start a local awareness campaign, beginning with an event where they passed out flyers and donuts to teachers. It seemed as benign as a bake sale.

That was a little less than two years ago.

Today, their group, “Everyone Reads T/E,” pushes a more subversive idea: that their acclaimed district doesn’t know how to teach reading. They’ve rallied a growing group of parents around this notion, and joined a national effort.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques on Madison’s disastrous reading results:

Children who are not proficient readers by fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of school. Additionally, two-thirds of them will end up in prison or on welfare.

Though these dismal trajectories are well known, Madison School District’s reading scores for minority students remain unconscionably low and flat. According to the most recent data from 2017-18, fewer than 9 percent of black and fewer than 20 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were reading proficiently. Year after year, we fail these students in the most basic of our responsibilities to them: teaching them how to read.

Much is known about the process of learning to read, but a huge gap is between that knowledge and what is practiced in our schools. The Madison School District needs a science-based literacy curriculum overseen by licensed reading professionals who understand the cognitive processes that underlie learning how to read.

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

Routing around Madison’s non-diverse K-12 legacy governance model:

In March 2016, Cheatham said that it was her intent to make OEO “obsolete — that our schools will be serving students so well that there isn’t a need.”

Since then, the district has tried to keep tabs on any new charter proposals for Madison, going so far as to send former School Board member Ed Hughes to a September meeting of the Goodman Community Center board of directors to express the district’s opposition to another proposed charter school, Arbor Community School, which was looking to partner with the Goodman center.

Hughes gave the board a letter from Cheatham to UW System President Ray Cross that expressed the district’s dismay at allegedly being kept out of the loop on Arbor’s plans, pointed to alleged deficiencies in Arbor’s charter proposal, and asked that Arbor either be rejected or at least kept out of Madison.

Hughes also told the board that as a Goodman donor, he did not think other donors would look kindly on a Goodman partnership with Arbor.

Becky Steinhoff, Goodman executive director, later told the Wisconsin State Journal that Goodman was “experiencing a period of enormous change,” including the recent opening of a new building, and chose not to work with Arbor.

“I understand the climate and the polarizing topic of charters” in Madison, McCabe said, but he wasn’t concerned the district would attempt to thwart Milestone and he said it would “be a dream come true” if Milestone were one day folded into the district.

He said Community—Learning—Design has an application due to the state Feb. 22 for a federal planning grant.

Much more on our 2019 school board election:

Seat 3

Kaleem Caire, 7856 Wood Reed Drive, Madison

Cristiana Carusi, 5709 Bittersweet Place

Skylar Croy, 502 N. Frances St., Madison

Seat 4

David Blaska, 5213 Loruth Terrace, Madison

Laila Borokhim, 2214 Monroe St., Madison

Albert Bryan, 4302 Hillcrest Drive, Madison

Ali Muldrow, 1966 East Main St., Madison

Seat 5

TJ Mertz, 1210 Gilson St., Madison

Ananda Mirilli, 1027 S. Sunnyvale Lane Unit A, Madison

Amos Roe, 5705 Crabapple Lane, Madison

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

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

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

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

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

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

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

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

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

2013: What will be different, this time?

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

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

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

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

Sarah Manski and Ed Hughes “withdrew” from their respective races in recent elections. The timing, in both cases was unfortunate for voters, and other candidates.

Sophia Bollag:

When former charter school executive Marshall Tuck called Assemblyman Tony Thurmond to concede over the weekend, it marked another defeat for charter-school advocates in California.

Thurmond was elected California’s top education official in the wave that led more liberal-leaning voters to cast ballots. Although both are Democrats, Thurmond had the party’s endorsement.

He also was backed by teachers unions, who were outspent more than two-to-one.

Independent groups supporting Tuck spent more than $36 million this cycle. Prominent education reform supporters, including frequent political donor Bill Bloomfield, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and philanthropist Eli Broad were among the biggest contributors to those efforts. Tuck’s official campaign raised another $5 million.

Janie Har:

Time and again, Chinese-American students consistently delivered top academic scores, only to be denied admission to their dream school. Parents bemoaned what they saw as an unfair racial advantage given to black and Latino children while their own children were overlooked.

“Every year hundreds of Chinese-American parents would be in anguish,” said Lee Cheng, a 46-year-old intellectual property attorney, who sought to end the practice. “I remember the disappointment in some of my friends who were the kids of immigrants, of very, very poor people who worked in Chinatown.”

This may sound like the fights going on today over testing in elite public schools in New York City or lawsuits against prestigious universities such as Harvard over affirmative action.

But the scenario played out more than three decades ago on the other side of the country over a public high school, demonstrating the enduring nature of a controversy in which Asian-Americans have played a key role despite some feeling shut out of the broader conversation.

David Blaska:

Bad Language + Bad Manners = Bad Policyat the Madison school board’s ad hoc committee on educational resource officers Monday afternoon

Who, exactly, is demanding cops out of schools? I noted that the crowd seated in Room 103 were pretty much the same mob who shouted down the Dane County Board of Supervisors when that ultra-liberal body discussed building a smaller and more humane county jail, one that would treat mental illness and address substance abuse.

Apologizing to the disrupters

It was at this point that the hullaballoo reached a deafening crescendo. One board member, T.J. Mertz, bugged out entirely. Committee chairman Dean Loumos (whom I was seated behind) shouted into my ear (to be heard above the cacophony) if I would be willing to stop right there. Given the pandemonium, I did so. Still had 17 seconds left of the allotted three minutes, but Blaska is public spirited.

Then Dean Loumos did the unforgivable. He apologized to the disrupters! Dean Loumos said he did not know Blaska would use “coded language.”

What coded language? The protestors were black, white, hispanic, and east Asian. Very few are parents. All but a handful are very young, very loud, and very obnoxious. I intend for Dean Loumos to explain or apologize. (We have video at Part #2.)

Related: Gangs and School Violence Forum (2005).

Police calls, Madison Schools 1996-2006.

Hilde Kahn, via Will Fitzhugh:

One of few bright spots in the just-released National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results was an increase in the number of students reaching “advanced” level in both math and reading at the 4th- and 8th-grades.

But the results masked large racial and economic disparities. While 30 percent of Asian students and 13 percent of white students scored advanced on the 8th-grade math test, for example, just 2 percent of blacks, 4 percent of Hispanics, and 3 percent of low-income students reached that level.

The highly selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in suburban Washington, D.C., known as TJ, offers a window into a significant source of the disparity, and suggests a solution to the problem.

A recent survey of TJ parents revealed that Asian-American students, who make up a disproportionate percentage of students admitted to elite public STEM schools like TJ, are spending their afternoons, weekends, and breaks learning math.

Most of them enroll in advanced math classes as early as possible in their school careers, even though by their parents’ admission fewer than one third of them are highly gifted in math. But more importantly, their parents do not rely on school programming to prepare their children for TJ admissions or any other milestone on their way to top STEM careers.

Instead, they make sure that at every step of the way their children have access to high-quality extra-curricular math that prepares them for, clarifies, complements, and extends the instruction they’re obtaining in their accelerated public school programs.

If we’re really serious about increasing the number of low-income students and students from underrepresented groups who are learning math at the level required to contribute to our increasingly computational world, we should take a page from the playbook of those who are already successful: We should provide high-quality math enrichment for many more kids, as early in their educational lives as possible.

In focusing in recent years on raising the bottom of the learning curve, the nation has neglected those at the top, essentially ignoring the growing “excellence gap” between groups of high-performing students. But this is not the only reason that the gap has been growing.

Even when policymakers and administrators have made closing the excellence gap a priority, they have had little success because they have focused almost exclusively on expanding access to public school advanced programs. Unfortunately, increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups in advanced programs has not automatically led to increased achievement. That’s because, as the families of the most successful students recognize, even the most advanced programs at the best public schools are insufficient to prepare students to achieve at the highest levels.

In focusing in recent years on raising the bottom of the learning curve, the nation has neglected those at the top, essentially ignoring the growing “excellence gap” between groups of high-performing students. But this is not the only reason that the gap has been growing.

Even when policymakers and administrators have made closing the excellence gap a priority, they have had little success because they have focused almost exclusively on expanding access to public school advanced programs. Unfortunately, increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups in advanced programs has not automatically led to increased achievement. That’s because, as the families of the most successful students recognize, even the most advanced programs at the best public schools are insufficient to prepare students to achieve at the highest levels.

Nor are the families of successful students the only ones who know the secret to STEM success. Education experts have long been aware that extra-curricular math is essential for high-level math achievement.

Almost 20 years ago, a College Board task force found that “some of the most academically successful groups in our society have created a network of supplementary opportunities for their children that may best be described as a parallel educational system.” The panel recommended that “a much more extensive set of supplementary education institutions and programs…for minority students should be deliberately designed to provide the breadth of supplementary opportunities available to many youngsters from more educationally advantaged and successful groups.”

The reason we haven’t implemented the suggested programs is because providing students from underrepresented groups with years of quality math enrichment takes time, money, faith in the ability of students to prevail against all odds, and a willingness to acknowledge the limits of our educational system—all of which are in short supply. It is far more politically expedient to heed repeated calls for quick-fix measures such as admission quotas for exam schools like TJ that alter the numbers while doing nothing to provide students with needed skills.

In addition to the above challenges, misguided beliefs about the causes of the excellence gap hinder our ability to reverse it.

Myth 1: The excellence gap is primarily a result of socioeconomic disparities.

At New York City’s elite Stuyvesant High School, the school with the City’s most competitive admissions process, 68 percent of students admitted to the Class of 2022 were Asian; and at TJ, 65 percent of students admitted to this fall’s class were Asian. In both cases, most of these Asian students were the children of immigrants.

But the similarities end there. At TJ, 61 percent of families with two Asian immigrant parents have incomes over $200,000 per year and 76 percent have advanced degrees. In fact, only seven of the 485 students admitted to this fall’s class were eligible for free or reduced lunch. At Stuyvesant, however, Asian students make up the overwhelming majority of the 45 percent of students who are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Yet, despite financial and other constraints, Stuyvesant’s low-income Asian students obtain high-quality math enrichment, and it is perhaps even more critical to their success than it is to the success of TJ’s upper-middle-class Asian students.

Myth 2: The excellence gap is primarily a result of cultural, or even innate, differences.

Asian immigrant parents have high expectations for their children’s academic performance and believe hard work matters more than natural ability. They prioritize education, sacrificing time, money, and other goals in order to give their children the best chance at a better future. And they bring a competitive approach to education from their home countries.

These factors undoubtedly contribute to their children’s academic success. But cultural norms do not automatically lead to learning. Whatever the bright children of Asian immigrant parents are doing to master challenging math topics at younger and younger ages, other bright children can do as well.

Every diverse urban and suburban school district in this country would benefit from an intensive STEM enrichment program that targets capable students from underrepresented groups and begins as early as possible. Such programs should also embrace features of successful extra-curricular academies that serve low-income Asian students, including outreach to parents and an emphasis on fostering an environment where it’s not only OK to be good at math but where students are admired for their genuine interest, aptitude, and perseverance. Sadly, very few such programs exist, and most of them are underfunded.

One is Boston’s well-financed Steppingstone Academy, which provides summer, after-school, and weekend enrichment to low-income students, beginning in 5th- or 6th-grade. It has been phenomenally successful in increasing opportunities for students, 90 percent of whom gain admission to their schools of choice, including competitive public magnet schools.

Another promising program is New York City’s BEAM (Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics) program, which identifies 6th grade students from low-income neighborhoods and provides intensive math instruction, relying heavily on curriculum from Art of Problem Solving (AoPS). Thanks to a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation grant, BEAM recently expanded to Los Angeles.

In a pilot program intended to test the benefits of reaching students at younger ages, an AoPS academy recently partnered with the foundation that supports the STEM magnet at Montgomery Blair High School (Blair Magnet) located across the river from TJ in Montgomery County, Maryland. The program, the Magnet Pipeline Project, aims to provide three years of after-school or weekend math enrichment to select students, beginning in 3rd grade, with the goal of increasing the number of underrepresented students admitted to the middle-school program that feeds into the Blair Magnet. The foundation has raised about $20,000 toward the cost of the program, largely from Blair Magnet alumni.

For its part, TJ provides summer STEM courses, mentorships, and test-prep for underrepresented 7th- and 8th-graders through a program launched with Cooke Foundation funding. And a company run by a TJ alum provides free test-prep for 8th-graders applying to the school. But these programs have had limited effect because they aren’t reaching students early enough with the kind of math enrichment that makes a real difference.

We’re going to need a lot more leadership and significantly more funding to ensure that programs like these succeed, and to spread the most successful ones to other school districts. We’ll need the support of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who know very well what it takes to achieve at the highest levels and who constantly complain of the lack of diversity in their applicant pool.

We’ll also need buy-in from other STEM industry leaders who consider themselves stewards of their communities and likewise suffer from a lack of available talent. Closing the excellence gap should be the highest philanthropic priority of all who value what is most precious about this country, the unlimited opportunities it provides to those willing to put in the hard work.

Thirty-five years ago, A Nation at Risk linked the end of America’s industrial dominance to a scarcity of workers with sufficient technological training and blamed both on our educational system, which it recognized as the institution responsible for ensuring that all children fulfill their potential. The report’s warning is no less compelling today.

It is both a moral and political imperative that every student be able to reach his or her potential. In an era when Americans compete for jobs against, as well as work alongside, the graduates of educational systems from around the world, it is no longer enough that our strongest students graduate from college; they must enter the workforce with the skills necessary to succeed in a global economy.

Now that technology is available to do much of the easy work, our best graduates must be prepared for the complex work of building, training, and working with existing technologies, inventing new ones, and mastering any number of unknown and unpredictable challenges. Eliminating excellence gaps is therefore nothing less than “an issue of equity and social justice, community development, economic advancement, and national security.”

Instead of viewing the excellence gap as a symbol of systemic failure, we should follow the lead of parents of the most successful students and aim to provide students from underrepresented groups with the most powerful extra-curricular interventions money can buy—even as we redouble our efforts to ensure that schools provide advanced course work for talented students of every background.

Hilde Kahn is the parent of three Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology graduates and served for nine years on the board of the school’s private foundation.

Related:

“They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!.

English 10

TAG Complaint

Small Learning Communities

Round and round and round and round we go.

LA Times:

There are few sights in the world like nighttime in skid row, the teeming Dickensian dystopia in downtown Los Angeles where homeless and destitute people have been concentrated for more than a century.

Here, men and women sleep in rows, lined up one after another for block after block in makeshift tents or on cardboard mats on the sidewalks — the mad, the afflicted and the disabled alongside those who are merely down on their luck. Criminals prey on them, drugs such as heroin and crystal meth are easily available, sexual assault and physical violence are common and infectious diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis and AIDS are constant threats.

Skid row is — and long has been — a national disgrace, a grim reminder of man’s ability to turn his back on his fellow man. But these days it is only the ugly epicenter of a staggering homelessness problem that radiates outward for more than 100 miles throughout Los Angeles County and beyond. There are now more than 57,000 people who lack a “fixed, regular or adequate place to sleep” on any given night in the county, and fewer than 1 in 10 of them are in skid row.

Homelessness burst its traditional borders several years ago, spreading first to gloomy underpasses and dim side streets, and then to public parks and library reading rooms and subway platforms. No matter where you live in L.A. County, from Long Beach to Beverly Hills to Lancaster, you cannot credibly claim today to be unaware of the squalid tent cities, the sprawling encampments, or the despair and misery on display there.

Joe Kotkin:

The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in airports and on our phones.

Redesigning cities has become all the rage in the tech world, with Google parent company Alphabet leading the race to build a new city of its own and companies like Y Combinator, Lyft, Cisco, and Panasonic all vying to design the so-called smart city.

It goes without saying, this is not a matter of merely wanting to do good. These companies are promoting these new cities as fitter, happier, more productive, and convenient places, even as they are envisioning cities with expanded means to monitor our lives, and better market our previously private information to advertisers.

This drive is the latest expansion of the Valley’s narcissistic notion of “changing the world” through disruption of its existing structures and governments and the limits those still place on the tech giants’ grandest ambitions. This new urban vision negates the notion of organic city-building and replaces it with an algorithmic regime that seeks to rationalize, and control, our way of life.

In reality, Google is entering the “smart city” business in no small part to develop high-tech dormitories for youthful tech workers and the cheaper foreign noncitizen workers in the U.S., including H1B indentured servants; overall noncitizens make up the vast majority of the Valley’s tech workforce. Even as the tech fortunes have grown ever larger, the companies own workers have been left behind, with the average programmer earning about as much today as she did in 1998 even as housing costs in tech hubs have exploded.

David Cyranoski:

Getting time with Qiao Jie is not easy. At 7:30 a.m., the line coming out of the fertility centre that she runs blocks the doorway and extends some 80 metres down the street. Inside, about 50 physicians on her team are discussing recent findings, but Qiao, a fertility specialist and president of Peking University Third Hospital in Beijing, is still in an early-morning consult.

When she finally emerges, she jumps to the topic at hand: spreading awareness of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a procedure that helps couples undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) to avoid passing on genetic mutations that could cause disease or disability in their children. Qiao typically refuses interview requests, but she’s concerned that people aren’t getting the message about PGD fast enough. “Now, more and more diseases can be stopped — if not immediately, in the generation after next,” she says.

Economist:

To have an equal chance of admission as a black applicant, an Asian applicant to a top college needs as much as 450 additional points out of 1600 on the SAT (a whopping amount to those unaccustomed to American psychometrics). Encouragingly, research by David Card and Alan Krueger, two economists, shows that talented minority students apply at the same rate to leading universities with or without affirmative action.

Elizabeth Berhman::

In particular, friction is growing between workers who build combustion vehicles — still the mainstay of most carmakers’ profits — and managers seeking to position their companies for a battery-powered future.
 
 Sedan Shifts
 
 The latest sign of the tough road ahead came on Thursday. To protest conditions offered by Mercedes parent Daimler as it negotiates adding new battery-making facilities at its Untertuerkheim plant in Stuttgart, Germany, the company said staff will stop working overtime next month. That will will slow engine output, forcing it to cancel shifts for assembling the E-Class sedan, Daimler said.
 
 Mercedes, which is investing 10 billion euros ($11.4 billion) as it prepares to roll out 10 electric models, expects as much 25 percent of its sales to come from the new technology by 2025, stoking concerns about job security particularly at engine plants.
 
 “The changes that’ll happen over the next eight to fifteen years will directly hit plants like Untertuerkheim,” said Wolfgang Nieke, worker representative at the site, which employs 19,000 people. “If we don’t lay the groundwork for this shift now, the harder it’ll be down the line.”

Alex Arriaga:

Students at Northwestern University disrupted a sociology class on Tuesday to protest the visit of an officer from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Daily Northwestern reports that members of student groups gathered outside the campus building where the ICE representative was beginning a guest presentation. The sociology course focuses on “inequality in American society with an emphasis on race, class, and gender,” its syllabus says.

According to the student newspaper, the protesters carried banners and yelled profanities. Administrators told the protesting students they would be allowed into the classroom if they did not disrupt the presentation. The students entered, and the officer left. Protesters asked the sociology professor, Beth Redbird, why the officer had been invited.

Judy Newman:

The fourth time proved to be the charm for Madison seventh-grader Martius Bautista.

Bautista, 12, a student at Edgewood Campus School, outspelled 45 competitors from around Wisconsin to win the first-place prize at the Badger State Spelling Bee on Saturday after correctly spelling “rhizograph,” a device that traces the movement of roots in the soil.

As other students stumbled over words more popular a few decades ago — such as “kahuna” (an important person), “nosh” (snack) and “gestapo” (a reference to the Nazi secret police), Bautista soldiered on, mastering esoteric words such as “jacamar,” a type of tropical bird; “serdab,” an ancient Egyptian tomb; and “benzoin,” a balsamic resin.

In the 25th round at Madison Area Technical College’s Mitby Theater, only Bautista and Hanna Ghouse, a Kenosha seventh-grader, remained on stage. Ghouse tripped on the word “apteryx,” a flightless kiwi bird. Bautista spelled it correctly and took on the next word, rhizograph, to win the top award.

Molly Beck:

“I think our track record is pretty good,” Evers said, citing decreased suspensions and expulsions, increased number of students taking college-level courses while still in high school and modest increases in reading proficiency.

“Is it where we want? Absolutely not,” he said.

Reading a key issuefor Humphries
The state’s reading proficiency levels have been a key issue for Humphries, who has said the DPI must have new leadership in order to improve those levels and students’ skills in other subjects.

Since the early 2000s, Wisconsin’s ranking for reading skills has dropped, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

He said DPI is not aggressive enough in translating their priorities to school officials in an effort to combat some persistent academic problems.

“Unless DPI is held accountable in making sure schools understand the importance … we’re not likely to have an impact, Humphries said. “We’ve seen that with academic achievement gaps.”

Humphries and Holtz have proposed writing new state academic standards, and Humphries said he would introduce a process that would allow persistently low-performing schools to be converted into new ones under new administration, including private voucher schools and charter schools, as long school boards agree.

Notes and links on Tony Evers and John Humphries.

WisPolitics: Lowell Holtz John Humphries Tony Evers

Kate Bellows:

Several groups on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9.

In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future they want for themselves.

“Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes,’” Sullivan said in the email. “I encourage today’s U.Va. students to embrace that responsibility.”

Some professors from the Psychology Department — and other academic departments — did not agree with the use of this quote. Their letter to Sullivan argued that in light of Jefferson’s owning of slaves and other racist beliefs, she should refrain from quoting Jefferson in email communications.

“We would like for our administration to understand that although some members of this community may have come to this university because of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, others of us came here in spite of it,” the letter read. “For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotations in these e-mails undermines the message of unity, equality and civility that you are attempting to convey.”

Lauren Kirchner

The five teenage boys were sitting in a parked car in a gated community in Melbourne, Florida, when a police officer pulled up behind them.

Officer Justin Valutsky closed one of the rear doors, which had been ajar, and told them to stay in the car. He peered into the drivers’ side window of the white Hyundai SUV and asked what the teens were doing there. It was a Saturday night in March 2015 and they told Valutsky they were visiting a friend for a sleepover.

Valutsky told them there had been a string of car break-ins recently in the area. Then, after questioning them some more, he made an unexpected demand: He asked which one of them wanted to give him a DNA sample.

After a long pause, Adam, a slight 15-year-old with curly hair and braces, said, “Okay, I guess I’ll do it.” Valutsky showed Adam how to rub a long cotton swab around the inside of his cheek, then gave him a consent form to sign and took his thumbprint. He sealed Adam’s swab in an envelope. Then he let the boys go.

The Economist:

The story of the Melungeons is at once a footnote to the history of race in America and a timely parable of it. They bear witness to the horrors and legacy of segregation, but also to the overlooked complexity of the early colonial era. They suggest a once-and-future alternative to the country’s brutally rigid model of race relations, one that, for all the improvements, persists in the often siloed lives of black and white Americans today. Half-real and half-mythical, for generations the Melungeons were avatars for their neighbours’ neuroses; latterly they have morphed into receptacles for their ideals, becoming, in effect, ambassadors for integration where once they were targets of prejudice.

The two big questions about them encapsulate their ambiguous status—on the boundaries of races and territories, and between suffering and hope, imagination and fact. Where did the Melungeons come from? And do they still exist?

Last of the Phoenicians

At a recent gathering of the Melungeon Heritage Association (MHA), in Vardy, a hamlet in the valley, and over in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, family trees and photographs of swarthy ancestors were compared. But the underlying preoccupation was the Melungeons’ origins—a subject comprised more of legend than of evidence. They are said to be the progeny of Phoenicians who fled the Roman sacking of Carthage, or of pre-Columbian Turkish explorers (making them America’s first Muslims). They descend from wayward conquistadors, from a doomed colony established on Roanoke Island by Sir Walter Raleigh, or from Moorish galley slaves abandoned there by Sir Francis Drake. They were sired by shipwrecked pirates or by Madoc, a 12th-century Welsh explorer. They are a lost tribe of Israel.

Native Americans often feature as consorts in these narratives, such as the fable in which Satan briefly cohabits with a Cherokee woman in the mountains of Tennessee. Etymology is as vexed as genealogy. The name Melungeon derives from mélange, an appellation bestowed by early French settlers on the Clinch river. Alternatively, Italian pioneers in Virginia used their word for aubergine to disparage the Melungeons’ skin colour. It comes from melas, Greek for dark or black, from the Turkish expression melun can, meaning “cursed soul”, or from melungo, a West African term for shipmate. Or from an old English word for trickery found in Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”.

One of the most widespread beliefs is that they are offspring of Portuguese mariners who arrived in early colonial times; or, as some 19th-century Melungeons would have put it, on the rare occasions when they spoke for themselves, they were “Portyghee”. A newspaper report of 1848 said the community was established by “a society of Portuguese Adventurers”, and now lived in “a delightful Utopia” of primitive disinhibition. (The Melungeon story has mostly been told in the calumnies and hearsay of outsiders.) A sub-theory sees them as exiled conversos, Iberian Jews who hid their faith to escape the Inquisition before fleeing to the New World.

Trevor Griffey:

Popular discussions of higher education in the United States today are primarily organized around narratives of decline—from “The Fall of the Faculty” to “The Last Professors”, from “University Inc.” to “The University in Ruins.” Writing about the more than 70 percent of all college instructors who are off the tenure track—with poor pay and little if any job security—tends to fall squarely within this framework. Journalists’ exposés frequently make problematic popular comparisons between fast food workers and college instructors, and turn the humbling of white collar workers into a spectacle of misery that naturalizes the low status of blue collar work through titles like “The Academics Who Are Treated as “Less Than Janitors””.

If this narrative of decline is presented as anything other than inevitable, it tends to promote labor unions for the knowledge economy as the primary solution to address faculty exploitation and contingency. For example, every contributor so far to the Process series on labor and academia has so far promoted labor unions, labor law, and labor history as means to resist the race to the bottom for faculty in higher education.

Christine Campbell, via a kind Robin Lake email:

Teachers have been at the center of most states’ talent discussions to date. Although principals play a critical role in virtually all school-improvement reform efforts, most states lack a coherent school leadership strategy. This is a major oversight.

But a few forces are afoot that may help refocus state attention on principals:

Education policy leaders increasingly realize that policy alone won’t trigger desired changes in schools and student performance. Principals are a key lever to influence any policy’s success since they sit at the nexus between policy and practice: implementation starts with principals.

A growing body of research demonstrates real inequities for students when they are not taught by educators of similar races and backgrounds. While roughly 40 percent of public school students are black or Latino, just 17 percent of principals are, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. States have a vested interest in ensuring their pipelines deliver the number, quality, and diversity of school leaders needed.

Carimah Townes:

After eight years as the Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez may be voted out of the office on Tuesday for her role in Chicago’s scandalous police culture.

In the past few months, she’s been the subject of public outrage for her handling of Laquan McDonald’s shooting, which inspired calls for her resignation. But during her tenure as Chicago’s lead attorney, Alvarez has routinely covered up police violence and failed to prosecute cops for misconduct, including but not limited to deadly shootings, harassment, and making bogus arrests. She’s refused to reopen the cases of people who are likely innocent, criminalized people for recording officers, and bullied college students who were critical of her office.

Considered one of the most aggressive prosecutors in the country by Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, Alvarez has also gone to great lengths to prosecute Chicago’s school children. That’s why the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU), which boasts 27,000 members, endorsed one of Alvarez’ opponents in February — the first time the union ever endorsed a state’s attorney candidate. In February, CTU president Karen Lewis said, “Kim Foxx is (the) only candidate with a real plan to invest in our next generation that will help end the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Xiani Zhong:

University of Wisconsin is looking at increasing its non-need-based financial aid for students earlier in their academic career, but some say it is just another move in the “arms race” among schools competing for top students in the nation.

Historically, UW’s non-need-based aid, or merit aid, has sat at the lower end among Big Ten schools, according to Inside Higher Ed. The competitive higher education market, however, calls UW to adjust its financial aid policy to maintain its appeal to high-performing students, both in Wisconsin and out of state, Chancellor Rebecca Blank said in the article.

Asma Khalid:

Amanda Durio, 31, is a union carpenter. She plans to caucus for Bernie Sanders because she likes his message on “race” and “social classes.”
Amanda Durio, 31, is a union carpenter. She plans to caucus for Bernie Sanders because she likes his message on “race” and “social classes.”
Asma Khalid/NPR
So far this campaign season, much of the political conversation involving millennials has centered around college debt.

And, no doubt, as we’ve reported previously, student debt and college affordability are major concerns for many young people.

But a majority of young people do not have a bachelor’s degree, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by CIRCLE, the Center for Research and Information on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, for NPR. CIRCLE found that, in fact, about two-thirds of millennials between the ages of 25 and 34 do not have a bachelor’s degree.

Stephanie Saul:

free?

That is the provocative question posed by a slate of candidates running for the Board of Overseers at Harvard, which helps set strategy for the university. They say Harvard makes so much money from its $37.6 billion endowment that it should stop charging tuition to undergraduates.

But they have tied the notion to another, equally provocative question: Does Harvard shortchange Asian-Americans in admissions?

Daniel Hannan:

Ah, well, you might say, after the monstrosities of apartheid, race is an understandably charged issue in South Africa. Perhaps a little bit of overshoot is only to be expected: a guilty conscience, allied to fear of a self-righteous mob, can be a powerful thing.

Except that this isn’t just happening in South Africa. Cecil Rhodes also handsomely endowed his – and, as it happens, my – old college: Oriel, Oxford. Having made a fortune in diamonds, Rhodes became a keen philanthropist and, among many similar bequests, left Oriel two per cent of his estate on his death in 1902. Part of that sum was used to fund a new building, to which a statue of the dapper nabob was added on its completion in 1911.

Now, an Oxonian mob, using the same cretinous #RhodesMustFall hashtag as in South Africa, has complained that walking past that statue inflicts violence on them. Incredibly, rather than telling them to mind their own business, Oriel has rushed out a statement to the effect that it is talking to the planning authorities about removing the effigy and, in the mean time, has put a notice next to it, with the following text:

Matthew Hennessey:

For Wade and her husband, and for city dwellers with concerns ranging from classroom environment to the Common Core, public school is out of the question. And for them, as for many urban middle-class families, paying hefty private school tuition is not a realistic option, either. “It wasn’t so much a decision of what we were going to do—it was what we weren’t going to do,” she says. In the end, the Wades opted to homeschool. “Homeschooling is in some ways the easiest option. We’re driving our children’s education. We’re giving up a lot to do it, but in the end we thought it would make us most satisfied.”

At first, the Wades knew no other homeschoolers, and, like many young parents in the city, they had no family nearby, so they prepared themselves to go it alone. Before too long, however, they found a growing network of urban homeschoolers. “In a city like this, you can find your tribe,” says Wade. “You can find your homeschoolers. And there are a lot of us.”

Not so long ago, homeschooling was considered a radical educational alternative—the province of a small number of devout Iowa evangelicals and countercultural Mendocino hippies. No more. Today, as many as 2 million—or 2.5 percent—of the nation’s 77 million school-age children are educated at home, and increasing numbers of them live in cities. More urban parents are turning their backs on the compulsory-education model and embracing the interactive, online educational future that policy entrepreneurs have predicted for years would revolutionize pedagogy and transform brick-and-mortar schooling. And their kids are not only keeping pace with their traditionally schooled peers; they are also, in many cases, doing better, getting into top-ranked colleges and graduating at higher rates. In cities across the country, homeschooling is becoming just one educational option among many.

Zheping Huang:

While many of his peers get their sense of achievement from online video games, Li Shengyao, a 21-year-old sophomore at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, gets it from playing the stock market. He describes himself as a short-term trader who “can’t stop my fingers from making orders.”

Li spends at least three hours every night dissecting day-trading activity and company disclosures to prepare for the next morning. “When everyone else is losing like a dog,” he said. “I’m still making money.”

One thing Li is not: an outlier. In China, it’s surprisingly common for college students to be active traders on the nation’s volatile stock markets, often with their parents’ money and consent, and sometimes at the expense of their studies.

Molly Hensley-Clancy

Not long ago, Amber Brown, a student at Everest University, saw an article on Facebook about one of the many lawsuits against her school. The story, she wrote to BuzzFeed News, “dumbfounded” her: It mentioned former students facing mountains of debt for their degrees, but that didn’t seem to apply to her. Brown believed that she was “on a 100% Pell Grant through the government” and didn’t owe a cent.

Everest even paid for her books and her laptop, she wrote, and sent her a stipend check every semester. “Will I have to pay this back or am I one of the few students being treated genuinely by Everest University?” she asked.

In reality, most of what Brown believed to be a Pell Grant was actually loans: A review of documents she provided showed she owes more than $26,000.

Brown, 29, who lives in Kentucky and enrolled at Everest in 2011, has yet to learn that she is going into debt for her degree. (Her last name has been changed because she is a current student.) She no longer has a phone because she is unable to pay the bills, and she sent her student loan documents from a computer at a nearby food bank where she accesses the internet. She has since been hospitalized, unreachable by phone or email.

Caroline Porter:

The campaign for California’s top education post, typically a low-wattage contest, has become this state’s hottest race because of a division among Democrats over tenure rules and other policies that diminish teachers’ union power.

One sign of the high attention: Nearly $30 million has been spent on campaigns for the post—of state superintendent of public education,—compared with $13 million on the contested race at the top of the ticket, for governor.

The amount of direct campaign contributions, donations to independent groups and advertisements is more than triple the amount spent in the last superintendent’s race, in 2010, according to Autumn Carter, executive director of California Common Sense, a nonpartisan think tank.

The two candidates for superintendent,–incumbent Tom Torlakson and challenger Marshall Tuck, both Democrats,–are squaring off on hot-button issues in education, such as tenure laws, teacher evaluations and the role of testing in schools. Recent polls suggest voters are evenly split between the two men.

“The fact that the superintendent race is an almost $30 million race,…that’s a little mind-boggling,” said Ms. Carter.

Dive in:

Tom Torlakson: duckduckgo | Candidate Website.

Marshall Tuck: duckduckgo | Candidate Website.

Stephanie Simon:

It was just a primary — and the results aren’t even final yet, with mail-in ballots still being counted to determine if there will be a runoff.
But advocates for traditional public education are jubilant that Bill de Blasio came out on top Tuesday in the Democratic mayoral race in New York City after a campaign in which he promised to yank support from charter schools, scale back high-stakes standardized testing and tax the wealthy to pay for universal preschool and more arts education.
De Blasio’s education platform boiled down, in effect, to a pledge to dismantle the policies that Mayor Michael Bloomberg enacted over the past decade in the nation’s largest school district.
Those policies, emphasizing the need to inject more free-market competition into public education and weaken the power of teachers unions, are not unique to New York City; they’re the backbone of a national education reform movement that has won broad bipartisan support. Yet the reform movement has also triggered a backlash from parents and teachers who see it as a threat to their schools, their jobs and the traditional concept of public education as a public trust.

Evan Salinger:

There’s a widely shared image on the Internet of a teacher’s note that says: “Dear students, I know when you’re texting in class. Seriously, no one just looks down at their crotch and smiles.”
College students returning to class this month would be wise to heed such warnings. You’re not as clever as you think–your professors are on to you. The best way to stay in their good graces is to learn what behavior they expect with technology in and around the classroom.
Let’s start with the million-dollar question: May computers (laptops, tablets, smartphones) be used in class? Some instructors are as permissive as parents who let you set your own curfew. Others are more controlling and believe that having your phone on means your brain is off and that relying on Google for answers results in a digital lobotomy.

Neal McCluskey, Williamson Evers and Sandra Stotsky:

The Common Core — effectively national math and English curriculum standards coming soon to a school near you — is supposed to be a new, higher bar that will take the United States from the academic doldrums to international dominance.
So why is there so much unhappiness about it? There didn’t seem to be much just three years ago. Back then, state school boards and governors were sprinting to adopt the Core. In practically the blink of an eye, 45 states had signed on.
But states weren’t leaping because they couldn’t resist the Core’s academic magnetism. They were leaping because it was the Great Recession — and the Obama administration was dangling a $4.35 billion Race to the Top carrot in front of them. Big points in that federal program were awarded for adopting the Core, so, with little public debate, most did.
Major displeasure has come only recently, because only recently has implementation hit the district level. And that means moms, dads and other citizens have recently gotten a crash course in the Core.
Their opposition has been sudden and potent — with several states now considering legislation to either slow or end implementation, and Indiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan having officially paused it.

Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Post-Secondary Education (2.6MB PDF):

To answer the guiding research questions, we developed a comparison group of academically and demographically similar non-participants to compare outcomes with AVID/TOPS students based on 8th grade pre-participation data. Using a statistical matching method called propensity score matching, we matched every AVID/TOPS student with a similar non-AVID/TOPS student at the same high school to create the comparison group.
Using these groups, we test for statistically and practically significant differences on key measures of academic preparation (cumulative GPA, enrollment and GPA in core courses, enrollment and GPA in AP/Honors courses, and credit attainment), college knowledge (test-taking rates and performance on the EXPLORE, PLAN, and ACT tests), and student engagement (attendance rates and behavioral referrals).
Statistically significant differences are differences that are unlikely to have occurred through random chance and are large enough to reflect meaningful differences in practice. In this report, we highlight statistically significant differences with a red symbol: .To focus attention on underrepresented students’ achievement, we disaggregated the measures by income and race. Though we report disaggregated findings, many of these groups are not mutually exclusive; for example, low-income students may also be African-American and therefore also represented in that data disaggregation. We do not report data from disaggregated groups that have fewer than five students in them. We then analyze this data at the program, grade cohort, and high school levels.
This assessment does not make causal claims about AVID/TOPS, nor does it present a longitudinal analysis of AVID/TOPS student achievement. Rather, the findings represent a single snapshot for achievement during the 2011-12 school year of the program’s 9th, 10th, and 11th graders.

Maureen Downey:

First up is Dr. Dana Rickman, policy and research director for the partnership, on the Top Ten Education Issues to Watch in 2013.
Please note that all these comments are from the speakers today, not from me. (I did add a few comments, but I clearly designate them as mine.) I am writing as folks speak and may miss a typo but will go back during the breaks and clean this up.
Top 10 issues, says Rickman:
Race to the Top: Halfway through implementing grant. Where do we stand?

Claudio Sanchez:

As part of Virginia’s waiver to opt out of mandates set out in the No Child Left Behind law, the state has created a controversial new set of education goals that are higher for white and Asian kids than for blacks, Latinos and students with disabilities.
Virginia Democratic state Sen. Donald McEachin first read about the state’s new performance goals for schoolchildren in a newspaper editorial.
“And I was shocked to find that the state board of education [was] putting in place permanent disparities between different subgroups — Asians at the top, African-Americans at the bottom,” says McEachin.
Here’s what the Virginia state board of education actually did. It looked at students’ test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities.

Matthew DiCarlo:

One claim that gets tossed around a lot in education circles is that “the most effective teachers produce a year and a half of learning per year, while the least effective produce a half of a year of learning.”
This talking point is used all the time in advocacy materials and news articles. Its implications are pretty clear: Effective teachers can make all the difference, while ineffective teachers can do permanent damage.
As with most prepackaged talking points circulated in education debates, the “year and a half of learning” argument, when used without qualification, is both somewhat valid and somewhat misleading. So, seeing as it comes up so often, let’s very quickly identify its origins and what it means.
This particular finding is traceable to a 1992 paper by economist Eric Hanushek, one which focused primarily on the relationship between achievement and family composition in Gary, Indiana (the data are from the early- to mid-1970s, and include only low-income students). After reviewing his (very interesting) main results on the relationship between student achievement and family size, birth order and the interval between births, Hanushek presents an analysis of test-based teacher effects.

Miriam Jordan:

Asians are the fastest-growing, most educated and highest-earning population in the U.S., according to a new report that paints the majority-immigrant group as a boon to an economy that has come to rely increasingly on skilled workers.
The number of Asians in the U.S. quadrupled between 1980 and 2010 to about 18 million, or 6% of the total population, according to “The Rise of Asian Americans,” a study released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The bulk of Asians in the U.S. trace their roots to six countries: China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam.
As a group, Asians place more value than Americans overall on marriage, parenting, hard work and careers, according to the report. Irrespective of their country of origin, Asians overall believe that American parents are too soft on their children.

Debra Monroe:

In the mid-1990s I set out to adopt a baby. I made phone calls to adoption agencies, and staff members asked warily if I’d consider a transracial adoption. I said yes. At one agency, the receptionist snapped: “Do you understand what transracial means?” Her tone startled me. “I think so,” I said, parsing syllables, “adoption across races.” Impatient, she said, “You’ll get a black baby!”
I lived in a small town without internet access and had done my research–on adoption laws, policy, advice–at a library twenty miles away. I’d found references to a 1972 position paper issued by the National Association of Black Social Workers that objected to transracial adoption as “cultural genocide,” an understandable position, given the state of race relations in 1972. The few agencies that had been doing black-white adoptions stopped because of the position paper. I didn’t find references to a time when agencies started doing transracial adoptions again because the Metzenbaum Act–passed in 1994 to address the fact that children of color were overrepresented in the child welfare system–had been amended, making “race-matching” as the sole determinant for the placement of a child unambiguously illegal.
Some staff members welcomed the change but weren’t sure if adoptive parents would. Other staff members objected to the change–take the receptionist who’d thought I must not know what transracial meant based on my answer. In the end, I used an agency whose staff members were able to discuss race without anger or recoil.

Matthew DeFour, a local education reporter:

Nichols said declining test scores and low graduation rates for minority students over the past six years have been a reflection of the board and superintendent not having shared priorities. She said a change in board leadership is necessary “because we can’t afford to lose more precious time.”
Silveira did not respond Wednesday to a request to discuss Nerad’s departure.
Burke said she would have liked to see Nerad stay and worries his departure could expend the momentum for addressing the achievement gap that has built up over the last year.
Hiring Nerad’s replacement, she said, is “probably the most important issue now facing the board.”
Flores said he has mixed feeling about Nerad’s departure. On one hand, the district now has a new issue to address on top of the achievement gap and the budget. At the same time, there arises the potential for finding a leader who the community embraces and will make difficult decisions.

Related:

• Omaha Superintendent Search: Wisconsin educator dealt with unions, protesting teachers
• Madison Superintendent Candidate Dan Nerad’s Public Appearance: January, 2008
• Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad to Leave when Contract Expires in 2013
• Oh, the Places We Go, Madison Superintendents…
• Is $14,858.40 Per Student, Per Year Effective? On Madison Superintendent & School Board Accountability…

Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichelle Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira & Michael Flores Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Q & A