Peter Gray:

I have previously written much about the decline, over decades, in children’s freedom to play and explore independently of adults and how that has contributed to well-documented declines in children’s mental health, creative thinking, and internal locus of control(e.g., here, here, and here). Recently I came across a book that documents brilliantly how adults’ attitudes about children’s competence, duties, and responsibilities have changed over the past hundred years. I wish I had discovered it earlier, as it was published 11 years ago and would have been a great reference for some of my writings over the past decade. 

The book, entitled Adult Supervision Required, is by Markella Rutherford, an associate professor of sociology at Wellesley College. It is based primarily on her systematic qualitative analysis of 565 articles and advice columns about childrearing that appeared in popular magazines—especially in Parents and Good Housekeeping—from the early 20th century on into the early 21st century. Here, under separate headings, are four of her main conclusions.

1. Children’s public autonomy declined greatly.

If you are considerably younger than I, you might be amazed to read articles for parents written prior to the 1970s, in which the prevailing assumption is that children, even young ones, will spend much of their time outdoors away from adults. Here are three examples from Rutherford’s book:

• An article in Parents, in 1956, expressed approval of a mother’s decision to acquiesce to her 5-year-old’s desire to walk to school by himself, about four blocks from home. The article made it clear that a child old enough for kindergarten is old enough find his or her own way to and from school and can be trusted to make that trip without an adult. The article implicitly judged the child’s desire for such independence to be healthy and normal, something the parent should encourage.

RT Watson:

The more success the kids have found, the swankier the toys and outings have become. In one video, Vlad and Niki snub mom and the Range Rover she bedecked in fluffy pink boas for a ride in dad’s hot red Ferrari. In another video from this year, the “Kids Diana Show” hits the road, staying in a resort in Maldives where the kids and parents hop aboard a yellow submarine.

Videos feature lots of “oohs,” “aahs,” applause and minimal dialogue—which makes it easy to redub the YouTube posts, which are mostly in English, into other languages including Arabic, Spanish or Indonesian.

“Kids feel that Vlad and Niki are their friends,” says their mother, Victoria Vashketov, of her children, who are 9 and 7 years old, respectively.

Toy makers pay the young celebrities to play with their products. Rates can range anywhere from $75,000 to more than $300,000, according to a person familiar with such deals.

The YouTubers also have exclusive lines of playthings branded with their names and likenesses. There’s a caped Vlad action figure and palm-sized figurines of Diana’s entire family, which can be purchased at big U.S. retailers like Walmart and Target as well as in countries including Sweden and Mongolia, according to the channels’ representatives.

Matthew Ladner:

Emily Hanford’s podcast Sold a Story tells the disturbing tale of how schools have come to embrace patently absurd and ineffective methods for literacy instruction. I could summarize one such method, known as “three-cueing,” in one sentence: Teach children how to guess the meaning of a sentence rather than how to read it.

(You can listen to all six episodes of Sold a Story here.)

Despite the implausibility of this strategy – as well as multiple decades of neurological research confirming just how destructive these techniques are – it has a cult-like following among many public-school teachers. As EdWeek reported in 2020:

In 2019, anEdWeek Research Center survey found that 75 percent of K-2 and elementary special education teachers use the method to teach students how to read, and 65 percent of college of education professors teach it.

Episode 4 of Sold a Story, titled “The Superstar,” focuses on Lacey Robinson, an African-American girl in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1970s whose mother insisted she be retained in first grade so she could learn to read. Lacey’s second first-grade teacher taught her to decode words and then Lacey taught her grandmother to read. Inspired, Lacey years later became a teacher with a mission to teach children, especially Black children, how to read.

Lacey Robinson began her career at a Georgia public elementary school where her superiors quashed her efforts to establish a reading program. She moved to a suburban school, hoping to learn what children were offered there, so she could bring it back to inner-city schools.

Along the way, Robinson attended graduate school at Columbia Teacher College and went to work for Lucy Calkins, a leader in three-cueing training. Hanford includes videos in “The Superstar” of teachers fawning over Calkins that are obsequious enough to make 12-year-old Taylor Swift superfans blush.

Robinson found Calkins’ three-cueing system prevalent in suburban schools. got her suburban teaching job and found that Calkins three-cueing was prevalent. But she discovered that her affluent students’ ability to decode words was made possible because they had tutors.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Alex Blasdel:

During the past two centuries, educators, psychologists, toy companies and parents like us have acted, implicitly or otherwise, as if the purpose of play is to optimise children for adulthood. The dominant model for how to do that has been the schoolhouse, with its reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. The more book learning we could doll up as play, and then cram into our children, the better. Then, with the rise of neuroscience in the second half of the 20th century, toys were increasingly marketed and purchased for the purpose of building better brains in order to build more competitive and successful grownups – to make Homo sapiens that were a little more sapient.

The pressure to do that has been felt most intensely with the youngest kids, aged five and under, and in recent decades the market has bestowed upon us such brands as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius and Fat Brain (tagline: “Toys that Matter to Their Gray Matter”). By 2020, the broad category of educational toys was making nearly $65bn (£55bn) worldwide, a figure that is forecast to double within the decade. Toys that teach – from the Speak & Spell and the See ’n Say to an entire phylum of learn-to-code robots – now pervade many young lives. “This generation of parents is asking toys to provide an end product, and that end product is prosperity,” Richard Gottlieb, an influential toy industry consultant, told me. “They want toys to get their children into Harvard.”

Casey Briggs

“We have now reached peak child,” Dr Charles-Edwards says. “There will never be more children alive on the Earth than there is today.”

Fertility peaked in the 1950s when women were, on average, having five children each.

That number varied dramatically between regions of the world.

But since then, fertility rates have reliably fallen. In fact, in some parts of the world, including Australia, Europe, North America, and some parts of Asia, fertility rates are already below that replacement number.

Robert Kuttner:

Kids have suffered during the coronavirus pandemic in ways whose long-term effects are only starting to become evident. And the reliance on screen time, whether for distance learning or for babysitting, has only worsened things.

I am no fan of standardized testing. But as a gross measure, tests can tell you how well children are learning. According to results of national exams released last week, between 2019 and 2022, students in fourth and eighth grade experienced unprecedented declines in math and reduced reading achievement.

Schools and teachers have been whipsawed between concerns for the health of students and teachers and the need to devise some reasonable form of pedagogy. Teachers also suffered. That’s why they are leaving the profession in droves.

A more subtle cost has been on the socialization of young children. Kids born just before the pandemic are now three and four years old, and starting to attend preschool. The results are not pretty.

Charmaine Mok

“The most valuable lesson I have learned [from children] is that cheese goes with pretty much everything,” seasoned food writer Melissa Leong tells me. She is only half-joking.

“Dairy is never a bad idea. Cheese and pasta – no matter where you come from, it’s pretty special if it’s the right combination of squidgy textures and pungent flavours.”

“Like Kraft instant macaroni and cheese?” I ask.

“Long live the blue boxes,” she replies, with a grin.

Kevin DeYoung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose life.

National Geographic:

Three Inca mummies found near the lofty summit of in Volcán Llullaillaco Argentina were so well preserved that they put a human face on the ancient ritual of capacocha—which ended with their sacrifice.

Now the bodies of 13-year-old Llullaillaco Maiden and her younger companions Llullaillaco Boy and Lightning Girl have revealed that mind-altering substances played a part in their deaths and during the year-long series of ceremonial processes that prepared them for their final hours.

Under biochemical analysis, the Maiden’s hair yielded a record of what she ate and drank during the last two years of her life. This evidence seems to support historical accounts of a few selected children taking part in a year of sacred ceremonies—marked in their hair by changes in food, coca, and alcohol consumption—that would ultimately lead to their sacrifice.

In Inca religious ideology, the authors note, coca and alcohol could induce altered states associated with the sacred. But the substances likely played a more pragmatic role as well, disorienting and sedating the young victims on the high mountainside to make them more accepting of their own grim fates.

Julie Jargon and Andrea Petersen:

For busy families, gathering together for dinner can feel like an impossibility. Children could use it now more than ever.

Robin Black-Burns’s teenage daughter has after-school activities that fall over dinnertime, making evening meals at home a thing of the past. The SUV has become their de facto dinner table.

Ms. Black-Burns’s daughter, 14-year-old Athena Burns, has dinner in the car four nights a week, eating during the hourlong drive home from robotics-club meetings. Ms. Black-Burns usually arrives at her daughter’s school 15 minutes early to eat her own dinner in the front seat while waiting for Athena.

Athena, a freshman at a private high school in Virginia, had a similarly demanding evening schedule in middle school. The mother and daughter have been eating on the go for years. Their dining table was so underused that two years ago Ms. Black-Burns donated it, converting the family dining room into a lounge.

“We wonder why so many kids have anxiety,” Ms. Black-Burns says. “Well, gee, they have a rigorous academic schedule and after-school activities and they’re eating in the car.”

Nicholas Casey:

On a balmy October day in 2017, Ana Belén Pintado decided to clear out some space in her garage. Her father, Manuel, died in 2010, followed by her mother, Petra, four years later. Their belongings sat gathering dust at her home in Campo de Criptana, a small town in the countryside south of Madrid. As she carefully opened the boxes, she marveled at the objects inside — her childhood dresses, a doll, an old dictionary — each so familiar, reminding her of a life the three of them once shared.

But then she came across some papers she had never seen: medical records from decades ago, including a note from her mother’s doctor. Petra Torres, the note said, had been married for eight years. She was 31 years old and had been trying to have a family. But a set of X-rays indicated that she had a uterine anomaly and obstructed fallopian tubes.

In other words, Pintado’s mother had been sterile. The diagnosis was dated April 1967, six years before Pintado was born.

Pintado had long believed that the couple who raised her were her biological parents, but there were a few puzzling aspects about her family. She had no brothers or sisters, which was rare in a small, Catholic town like Campo de Criptana — Pintado herself, who was then 44, had three children of her own. There was also an odd incident that happened after her father died: A lawyer handling the estate found some papers that showed she was born with a different last name, but before anyone in the family could have a closer look, her mother snatched the documents away and refused to speak about them again.

As Pintado sat in her garage, sifting through the papers, she found another document that was just as confounding as the doctor’s note. It was a birth certificate, which indicated that her mother had given birth to a girl in the Santa Cristina maternity clinic in Madrid. “Good appearance and vitality, good coloration,” a hospital staff member wrote. The paper was dated on Pintado’s birthday, July 10, 1973. There was even a room number: 22.

Roger Simon:

“Fight Fiercely Harvard!” as Tom Lehrer used to sing in a mock football fight song. “Demonstrate to them our will.” However, that will—a university devoted to even-handed intellectual inquiry for the public good—no longer exists. The truth has an inconvenient way of interfering with propaganda.

The Ivy League schools that once did so much to help build our country along with others conventionally highly ranked by U.S. News and World Report are now doing their best to undermine its principles and destroy it.

So why is this a good thing?

Because when they do something so stupid, and almost ludicrously anti-intellectual, as to hire the likes of Stelter and de Blasio, they expose the nature of who they really are, what their institutions have become.

More people, including reluctant alumni, have to face reality. Many aren’t giving as much—and they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t give at all, yet “alma mater” continues to exert a significant pull on the emotions and values of many. They work hard to make it that way.

In our house, we know this well, since my wife is a graduate of Princeton and I’m a graduate of Dartmouth and Yale. We are bombarded with alumni newsletters, magazines, and so forth. All are now written, clone-like, in the same contemporary left-wing politically correct style. That makes them seen oddly unsophisticated and, again, almost deliberately anti-intellectual, as if created by “woke” robots.

They immediately fill our waste baskets, just as we no longer donate to the schools’ alumni funds—not that the latter matters. Most of these institutions are so rich that you have no influence unless you are prepared to donate in the millions.

But we have more power than we think. Not just alumni, all parents do. It could be put succinctly: Are you so stupid you would send your children to be educated by Stelter for 75 grand a year? (Dorothy Parker could have written a great limerick about that. )

Wishkub Kinepoway

I wanted diversity. I wanted my children to see, like, different nationalities. I wanted them to feel included. And I also wanted, like – I’m an educator, so I have an education background with early childhood, and I just wanted intentional learning experiences for my children.

I was actually unfamiliar with what a choice school was. I really didn’t have a connection. I didn’t have a source. I didn’t have anybody to say, “Do step one, two and three.” It was an emotional rollercoaster. I wanted the best for my kids, but how do I get there?

I really truly – I went down on my hands and knees praying, like I need something different for my children. And I spent days crying, trying to figure X, Y, and Z out. I kind of like did everything, and then I just, kind of like, threw my hands in the air, and I just left it to the universe. Whatever happens from here, I did my part. 

And so, we did it, and we got accepted, every child got accepted, and I was like, it’s a weight that lifts off of you. Like you’ve been accepted to the choice.

I have a 10-year-old who is going into fifth grade starting tomorrow, and I have a 13-year-old who will be entering eighth grade tomorrow at St. Marcus. My son attends Martin Luther High School in Greendale.

Without Choice, I could not have afforded to send my children to St. Marcus or Martin Luther. It’s money well spent. I would agree, both as a professional, as a parent and from a personal standpoint. I couldn’t be more thankful for this opportunity.

It would just be the over-excelling academic piece that I was like, this is what they need – the challenge. And he (my son) plays sports, so for us choosing Martin Luther specifically is their academics are really high, but their sports program is really good, too.

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”

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

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

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

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

Robert Pondiscio

In 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring that parents or guardians send their children to public school in the districts where they lived. The Society of Sisters, which ran private academies, claimed that the law interfered with the right of parents to choose religious instruction for their children. The Court agreed, unanimously. States are permitted to run and regulate schools, even to require that all children receive an adequate education. But the Justices held that the state may not “unreasonably interfere with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

The decision in Pierce v. the Society of Sisters featured one of the more memorable turns of phrase in Supreme Court history. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” wrote Justice James C. McReynolds. “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”

The notion that the state must not interfere with parents and their right to direct their children’s upbringing and education has cast a long shadow over U.S. education. But now, nearly a century after Pierce, the state seems increasingly inclined to relitigate the matter—if not in court, then in practice and policy in America’s public schools. There is a rising and unmistakable tendency on the part of teachers and school districts to assume that government is better positioned than a child’s parents to judge what’s best for children and to act on that assumption, often aggressively, making critical decisions about children’s upbringing and well-being without their parents’ consent or even their knowledge.

There have been myriad recent examples of schools imposing their staffs’ ideological preferences, and in so doing being disingenuous or openly dishonest about critical race theory, trangenderism, “social and emotional learning” programs, and other controversial aspects of school curriculum and culture. The picture that has begun to emerge is of an education establishment straying beyond its remit, emboldened to ignore parents, and determined to subvert local control of schools to advance a social-justice agenda. “It’s infuriating, it’s harmful to children, and it’s unacceptable,” says Vernadette Broyles, an attorney and the founder of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign. “And it’s contrary to law.”

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”

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

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

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

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

Douglas Belkin:

Now, as the pandemic disruptions wane, many of these families aren’t going back, opting instead to stick with personalized curricula and private instruction. The model, once limited to the very wealthy, is being adopted by families in the upper middle class, according to private-tutor placement companies and their clients.

Many children have endured months of stalled academic progress as a result of the disruptions caused by the pandemic. Last week national fourth-grade reading and math scores revealed the worst decline in decades, one that some educators said could hobble a generation of children.

That stalled progress, combined with teacher shortages, school-board political divisions and classroom disruptions, has for many fueled a flight out of K-12 schools to home schooling and private schools.

Adam Caller, who founded Tutors International in Oxford, England, 23 years ago, said too few schools impart the skills necessary to succeed in a rapidly evolving society, and his clients want a more forward thinking approach to prepare their children to be leaders.

Walter Kirn:

It does impart information, strictly speaking, but not always information about our world. Or not good information, because it’s so often wrong, particularly on matters of great import and invariably to the advantage of the same interests, which suggests it should be presumed wrong as a rule. The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class. They’re not the ruling class — not quite — but often they’re married to it or share therapists or drink with it at Yale Bowl football games. They’re cozy, these tribal cousins. They cavort. They always have. What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public. It didn’t hire ex-CIA directors, top FBI men, NSA brass, or other past and future sources to sit beside its anchors at spot-lit news-desks that blocked our view of their lower extremities. But it gave in. 

I’m stipulating these points, I’m not debating them, so log off if you find them too extreme. Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths. Comfort yourself with the thoughts that the same fortunes engaged in the building of amusement parks, the production and distribution of TV comedies, and the provision of computing services to the defense and intelligence establishments, have allied to protect your family’s health, advance the causes of equity and justice, and safeguard our democratic institutions. Dismiss as cynical the notion that you, the reader, are not their client but their product. Your data for their bullshit, that’s the deal. And Build Back Better. That’s the sermon.

Pious bullshit, unceasing. But what to do?

One reason to stick with the premium name-brand bullshit is to deconstruct it. What lines are the propagandists pushing now? Where will they lead? How blatant will they get? Why are the authors so weirdly fearless? The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom. One wire-service headline used the protests to raise concerns about viral spread in crowds. A puzzling message. It wasn’t meant for the defiant Cubans, who weren’t at liberty to read it and whose anger at their rulers clearly outweighed their concerns about contagion. It had to be aimed at English-speaking Americans. But to what end? American protests of the previous summer hadn’t raised such cautions from the press. To the contrary. Our riots, if one could call them that (and one could not at many companies) were framed as transcendent cries for justice whose risks to public health were negligible, almost as though moral passion enhances immunity. And maybe it does, but why not in Cuba, too? To me, the headline only made sense in the context of the offensive against domestic “vaccine hesitancy” and its alleged fascist-bumpkin leaders. The Reuters writer had seen in Cuba’s revolt a chance to glancingly editorialize against rebelliousness of another type. The type its staff abhors day in, day out, no matter what’s happening in Cuba, or, for that matter, in America. The bullshit is consistent in this way, reducing stories of every kind into nitrogen-rich soil for the same views. These views feel unusually ferocious now, reflecting the convictions of those on high that they should determine the fates of those on low with minimal backtalk and no laughter. Because science. Because Putin. Democracy. Because we’re inside your phones and know your names.

Hannah Natanson

We have all heard, by this point, that school closures during the first year of the pandemic damaged children. We have heard that children slid behind where they should be academically, with the most vulnerable slipping fastest; that many children with disabilities did not learn anything at all and began regressing; that the nation’s youngest citizens spent years feeling upset, angry, sad, frustrated and oh so alone.

Bethany Mandel:

Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high school has never had a normal high school experience.

Over two years into the pandemic, we know that the effects of “long Covid” are basically nonexistent in kids. Following the release of a study published in the Lancet, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious…

Christopher Rufo:

I have obtained insider documents that reveal this troubling collaboration between gender activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and school administrators throughout the Chicago area. According to these documents, and a review of school district websites, Lurie Children’s Hospital has provided materials to school leaders promoting radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit materials in at least four Chicago-area public school systems: District 75, District 120, District 181, and District 204. According to a whistleblower, these documents were circulated to administrators, teachers, and other staff at the middle school and high school level as part of ongoing employee-training programs.

The primary training document, “Beyond Binary: Gender in Schools,” follows the basic narrative of academic queer theory: white, Western society has created an oppressive gender binary, falsely dividing the world into the categories of man and woman, that has resulted in “transphobia,” “cissexism,” and “systemic discrimination” against racial and sexual minorities. Versions of the document were attributed toJennifer Leininger, associate director of Lurie’s Community Programs and Initiatives, and Hadeis Safi, a “nonbinary” gender activist who uses “they/them” pronouns and works for the hospital’s LGBTQ and Gender Inclusion program—which advertises its care for children with “gender expansive” identities and offers “gender-affirming” medical procedures, including puberty blockers for children.

The presentation encourages teachers and school administrators to support “gender diversity” in their districts, automatically “affirm” students who announce sexual transitions, and “communicate a non-binary understanding of gender” to children in the classrooms. The objective, as one version of the presentation suggests, is to disrupt the “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” and facilitate the transition to a more “gender creative” world.

The Washington Post would have you believe that “gender-affirming surgery” for minors is a myth, but the research is clear: American doctor are performing sex change operations on children as young as 15 years old.https://t.co/gzXoWpZj0v pic.twitter.com/5Xw9Md7Lf4

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 27, 2022

Ann Althouse:

The removal of healthy, functioning organs from children is shocking. True threats of violence are wrong, but they don’t cancel out the wrongs that provoked the death threats. But did the hospital do wrong? We’re told the recording was real — “not disputed” — but “employees provided inaccurate information.” How inaccurate?

Dale Chu:

In the 1840s, Horace Mann, known as the “father of American education,” argued that children should be taught to read whole words instead of individual letters, which he described as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” that make children feel “death-like, when compelled to face them.” This malformed opinion morphed into the broader whole-language theory, whose proponents hold that learning to read is analogous to learning to speak, coming naturally, as if through osmosis. Disciples of whole-language instruction believe that if a word is unfamiliar to a child, it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from context. To wit, Kenneth S. Goodman, the founder of whole language, once referred to reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game.”

Phonics takes exactly the opposite approach. Mastery of a set of symbols is the initial step; an analogy for learning how to read might be learning music notation or Braille. Children should be taught that words are made up of discrete parts and shown how different letters and letter combinations convey the English language’s 44 phonemes. Also dating back to the 1800s, the theory behind phonics is that learning to read requires knowledge and understanding of the relationships between letters and sounds, with the aim of helping early readers develop decoding skills (i.e., sounding out and recognizing words) that will eventually become automatic.

Those with allegiances to either phonics or whole language have ever since fought to determine how reading is taught in America’s classrooms. By the 1980s, the debate had become so intense that people began referring to it as “the reading war.” Things got so hot between the two opposing camps that Congress was pulled into the fray, convening the National Reading Panel in the late 1990s to review all the research on reading in the hopes of facilitating a truce. The upshot from the panel’s report was that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. The same could not be said for whole language.

The myths about the efficacy of whole language / balanced literacy are legion nonetheless. Its proponents assert that children don’t all learn to read in the same way and that a whole-language approach meets their different needs, and they confidently claim that kids learn more when teachers use this method. Research has shown that neither is true. On the contrary, reading researchers have found that, unlike learning to speak, a natural process that occurs by being surrounded by spoken language, learning to read does not come naturally. That’s because the written word is a relatively recent addition in human history, dating back just a few thousand years. To crack the code of how the spoken word connects to the word on a printed page, children need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. This is the premise undergirding the science of reading.

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”

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

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

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

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

Captain Beckett:

Last Friday, gun shots rang out in the West District. When this happens, dispatch airs alert tones over our air indicating that something serious has happened. Sometimes it’s a panic alarm, sometimes it is someone armed with a weapon during a fight and sometimes it is someone with a gun. After 17 years on this job and still to this day, my heart skips a beat when I hear these and I wait to hear the address. On Friday, the address aired was on Balsam Rd. Our officers and detectives arrived quickly, put up crime scene tape, talked to witnesses and began their investigation. A short time later, a person showed up at a local hospital with a gunshot wound, which they said was acquired on Balsam Rd.

We refer to this person who was shot as a victim, and they are, they truly are. But do you know who else is a victim? Everyone that witnessed this, everyone that heard the shots, the kids playing in Meadowood Park, the people who are trying to get into their residence but can’t because the place where they live is now a crime scene. I could go on and on.

After this shooting occurred, I asked one of our analysts to pull some statistics on that area. Our data indicate that to date in 2022, we have had one reported shots fired incident thus far compared to 7 total in 2021 in the Meadowood neighborhood. Our reported violent offenses have dropped as well, from 28 in 2021 to 13 thus far in 2022. I looked at these numbers and thought to myself, that’s great, we are overall trending in a positive direction.

But then my thoughts turn to the mother I met on Wednesday at a community conversation who told me that her kids are afraid to go to the park now. Or another mother who lives in fear that her own children will be collateral damage due to violence they never asked for.

 As a parent, these disclosures shake me to my core. As the Captain of the West District, it makes me want to send all our officers to that area and form a perimeter around it so nothing bad gets through. Except I cannot do that. We are also called to other places.

On Wednesday afternoon, I attended (along with Meadowood Neighborhood Officer Lucas Hale and West Patrol Officer Alyssa Souza) a violence prevention table talk put on by Meadowood Health Partnership. They are doing some great work in the neighborhood and want to start having some honest conversations about how to thwart violence in their community.

It was a productive 2 hours. Productive because it afforded the opportunity for people who live in the Meadowood Neighborhood to articulate what they care about and what they worry about. It’s always good for our police personnel to hear the concerns, but it is also important in turn that the neighborhood knows as much about us as possible, about our processes and our staffing and how we simply cannot be everywhere all the time.

I have used this blotter space to promote community events because strong neighborhoods can counteract violence. They can band together and lean on each other and support each other. It’s actually pretty cool! Opportunities abound in this city for neighbors to congregate and engage with each other.

For example, this Saturday (8/13) the third session of Love Your Neighborhood: Reinvigorating Southwest Madison is happening at Good Shepherd Church from 11:30am to 1:30pm. Register at www.southwestmadison.org.  

We can’t just want safe neighborhoods. We have to work for them, all of us, together.

Lucy Kellaway:

In less than two weeks, 250,000 18-year-olds in England will turn up at school for one last time to collect a piece of paper on which three letters of the alphabet will be printed. These grades will sum up their academic achievement so far, will affect the rest of their education — and possibly the rest of their lives. Twenty-five of them will be students of mine. 

I don’t know how they’ll feel on the day, but I am full of doubt. Since last September I have done my best to teach them monopolistic competition, the Laffer curve and the rest of A-level economics. But have I given them the support they need in any broader sense? 

Across the country, these teenagers are probably the most fragile, inadequately prepared and unhappy group of Year 13 students ever to collect A-level results.

Perry Stein:

D.C. students who are 12 and older must be vaccinated against the coronavirus to attend school this upcoming academic year.

The youth vaccine mandate in D.C. is among the strictest in the nation, according to health experts, and is being enacted in a city with wide disparities in vaccination rates between its White and Black children. Overall, about 85 percent of students between the ages of 12 and 15 have been vaccinated against the virus, but the rate drops to 60 percent among Black children in this age range.

Marty Makary:

At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,” one NIH scientist told us. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.) 

The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political, so what are we there for?” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”

Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.  

The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.

Nowhere has this problem been clearer—or the stakes higher—than on official public health policy regarding children and Covid. 

First, they demanded that young children be masked in schools. On this score, the agencies were wrong. Compelling studies later found schools that masked children had no different rates of transmission. And for social and linguistic development, children need to see the faces of others. 

Next came school closures. The agencies were wrong—and catastrophically so. Poor and minority children suffered learning loss with an 11-point drop in math scores alone and a 20% drop in math pass rates. There are dozens of statistics of this kind.

Neeraj Sood, Shannon Heick, Josh Stevenson, Tracy Høeg;

There is still considerable debate about whether mask mandates in the K-12 schools limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in children attending school. Randomized data about the effectiveness of mask mandates in children is still entirely lacking. Our study took advantage of a unique natural experiment of two adjacent K-12 school districts in Fargo, North Dakota, one which had a mask mandate and one which did not in the fall of the 2021-2022 academic year. In the winter, both districts adopted a masks-optional policy allowing for a partial crossover study design. We observed no significant difference between student case rates while the districts had differing masking policies (IRR 0.99; 95% CI: 0.92 to 1.07) nor while they had the same mask policies (IRR 1.04; 95% CI: 0.92 to 1.16). The IRRs across the two periods were also not significantly different (p = 0.40). Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students.

John Schuppe:

In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.

That search of Google’s records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea.

The 17-year-old’s lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users’ queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.

“People have a privacy interest in their internet search history, which is really an archive of your personal expression,” said Michael Price, who is lead litigator of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Fourth Amendment Center and one of the 17-year-old’s attorneys. “Search engines like Google are a gateway to a vast trove of information online and the way most people find what they’re looking for. Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy.”

Ian Miller:

But a new study out provides some important new evidence with regards to the efficacy of mask mandates.

The Study Design

The study authors included several credentialed experts like Tracy Høeg and USC’s Neeraj Sood, along with one extremely qualified data analyst, Josh Stevenson. 

You may know Josh from his fantastic work on Twitter as well as Substack, and this study could very well be his most important contribution yet.

Their detailed examination of North Dakota has created more advanced academic level research similar to the data comparisons that myself and many others have shared.

The introduction explains the methodology and goals:

Kaleem Caire:

I have grave concern for our children in Dane County and Wisconsin.

We face no greater long-term crisis in America than the widespread underperformance, diminishing motivation and poor preparation of children and young people in our nation’s K-12 schools, and the rapidly declining number of educators available to teach our children.

Student performance in Dane County is troubling. In spring 2021, near the conclusion of our first full pandemic-impacted school year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s website shows that the percentage of proficient readers in grades three, four and five of public elementary schools across Dane County’s 16 school districts was only:

7% of Black students (5% in Madison alone).
13% of Latino students (7% in Madison).
37% of Asian students (25% in Madison).
42% of white students (41% in Madison).
26% of multiracial students (16% in Madison)

This means they tested at or above grade level on the English language arts section of the state’s Forward exam, administered annually to children in Wisconsin in grades three through eight and 10. The remaining students tested below grade level.

The results were very similar statewide in grades three through eight, across all 423 public school districts and 32 independent public charter schools in Wisconsin.

If the percentages above aren’t shocking enough, consider this: When you look at the educational performance of Black students in Dane County by the conclusion of third grade — when reading shifts from learning how to read to reading to learn — just 10% move on every year to fourth grade as proficient readers. Among the remaining 90%, 30% have a partial understanding of reading and language arts while the remaining 60% struggle to read well at all.

We are talking thousands of children attending public schools in Dane County and our state who are way behind academically. Every demographic is affected by this. The matter has only been made much worse by the pandemic, and by the lack of enough educators to effectively address the problem. The situation is worsening by the day and year. It is not getting any better.

All in favor of teaching civics in Wisconsin high schools, say aye — ‘Aye!’

The future of our community hangs in the balance. The massive numbers of job openings across our region and this country are not because people don’t want to work. We haven’t prepared our young people well enough for the jobs that are available, and we have not helped enough of them develop the skills to create a job for themselves.

We cannot build a future and solve the growing numbers of geopolitical, environmental, housing, food insecurity and public health crises with thousands of children who cannot effectively read a restaurant menu, or who attend schools that aren’t preparing them to solve these problems.

We must do better, and I welcome that conversation.

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”

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

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

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

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

Anthony LaMesa:

Findings highlight importance of “normalcy” for children

A recently published journal article concluding Swedish primary school children suffered no learning loss drew international attention, but foreign observers of Sweden’s responsible decision to keep most schools open may have missed a journal article published in December 2021 with good news about the emotional well-being of the country’s middle school students: they didn’t suffer more emotional problems during the early pandemic than would otherwise be expected “due to typical mean-level changes during development.”

Analyzing data from 30 middle schools in western Sweden, the “study’s aim was to compare Swedish middle school students’ (grade 4–5) psychosocial well-being before the pandemic to approximately a year into the pandemic.” The authors concluded that “when students continue attending school, their psychosocial well-being does not worsen as it does for students experiencing school closures.”

Students’ emotional problems showed no differences, whilst small differences in student’s relationships to significant others and factors of psychological adjustment may be partially due to typical mean-level changes during development (Meeus, 2016). Meaningful differences in students’ school adjustment are plausibly attributed to disruptions caused by the pandemic. Holistically, students do not seem to be doing poorly. This study together with Chen et al. (2021) has shown that when students continue attending school, their psychosocial well-being does not worsen as it does for students experiencing school closures (Cresswell et al., 2021; Viner et al., 2021).

The researchers compared data from October 2019-January 2020 (T1) to data from November 2020-February 2021 (T2):

Pedro Gonzalez:

Last week, Hawaii high school teacher Alden Bunag was arrestedand made his initial court appearance on June 16. Among other things, he admitted to prosecutors that he made a sex video with a 13-year-old boy who was a former student and sent it to others, including another teacher in Philadelphia.

This sordid case has brought to the fore of the culture war the terms “grooming” and “groomer” to describe efforts to sexualize children. The controversy around them stems from the fact that they cut to an uncomfortable truth: those championing the latest sexual revolution often have sexual improprieties they project onto others, as was the case with Bunag, whose social media posts display outspoken opposition to the use of the word “groomer.”

This story began last year with a different investigation. Federal agents received a tip about a teacher, Andrew Wolf of Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, a private school in Philadelphia, who had allegedly uploaded child pornography.

Alex Gutentag:

The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 policy choices exacerbated inequality perversely led many public school systems to try to hide their mistakes by dismantling programs for gifted and talented students along with entrance tests and other standardized testing regimens—piling on more bad policy choices that deprive economically disadvantaged students of opportunity.

The available numbers tell a worrying story of educational slippage that is likely to keep large numbers of kids from acquiring the basic skills, both intellectual and social, that they will need to hold decent jobs. Recent test scores have dramatically declined, with one report finding that in districts offering distance learning, the decline in passing rates for math was 10.1 percentage points greater than in districts that offered in-person instruction. In Maryland, 85% of students now are not proficient in math, and in Baltimore the figure is 93%. Michigan, Washington, and other states have found dramatic declines in their test scores. In Los Angeles, the decline has been worse for younger students, with 60% of third and fourth graders not meeting English standards compared to 40% of 11th graders. Overall, the youngest children were most profoundly impacted by lockdowns and school disruptions, and some of them now lack basic life skills.

Claire Cain Miller and Bianca Pallaro

American schoolchildren’s learning loss in the pandemic isn’t just in reading and math. It’s also in social and emotional skills — those needed to make and keep friends; participate in group projects; and cope with frustration and other emotions.

In a survey of 362 school counselors nationwide by The New York Times in April, the counselors — licensed educators who teach these skills — described many students as frozen, socially and emotionally, at the age they were when the pandemic started.

“Something that we continuously come back to is that our ninth graders were sixth graders the last time they had a normative, uninterrupted school year,” said Jennifer Fine, a high school counselor in Chicago. “Developmentally, our students have skipped over crucial years of social and emotional development.”

Nearly all the counselors, 94 percent, said their students were showing more signs of anxiety and depression than before the pandemic. Eighty-eight percent said students were having more trouble regulating their emotions. And almost three-quarters said they were having more difficulty solving conflicts with friends.

Share of school counselors who said they noticed these student behaviors more often, compared with before the pandemic

Charles Mitchell and Scott Walker:

The goal of Act 10 was to remove unfair powers wielded by government union executives over state budgets, education policy, and politics.

A recent study from the Commonwealth Foundation found that Act 10 saved Wisconsin taxpayers nearly $7 billion in 2018. Other analyses from a free-market think tank in Wisconsin suggested it helped resolve a $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes, while the savings produced by Act 10 enabled future tax cuts that helped create 42,000 new jobs — including 20,000 jobs in manufacturing. Thanks to the reduced influence of government unions over state education policies, the number of low-income children benefiting from Wisconsin’s school choice program has increased nearly thirtyfold, to almost 15,000 students.

“As seen in Wisconsin, where public-sector labor reform leads, prosperity follows.”Charles Mitchell and Scott Walkernone

Pennsylvania and other similarly situated states could benefit from following Wisconsin’s example. The Keystone State has more government union workers than any other state except California, New York, and Illinois. Most of these workers lose a chunk of their paychecks each month to pay union executives who often prioritize a political agenda ahead of the workers they claim to represent. And look at what those government unions are achieving: Pennsylvania has the country’s fourth-highest unemployment rate and the second-highest business tax rate, while ranking 45th in economic performance.

As was the case in Wisconsin before Act 10, government unions are the largest campaign contributors in Pennsylvania. Since 2007, these groups have spent more than $150 million on politics, with 90% of campaign contributions going toward Pennsylvania Democrats. These government unions lobby for more government spending, against reforming the state’s pension system, for a government-run liquor monopoly, and against educational options for children and families.

Pennsylvania is not alone. A recent analysis showed that during the last academic year, the nation’s largest teachers’ union spent more on politics than on representing its own members.

Those interested in the rise of Scott Walker might find the Milwaukee County Pension Scandal illuminating.

Beth Hawkins:

As four-fifths of the district’s federal COVID recovery funds are taken up by the new teacher contract and to keep educators on the payroll despite dramatic enrollment losses, Graff’s successor will have to find a bare-bones solution to dire learning losses. 

In some populations, more than 90% of children are now behind, but there’s very little money to pay for the long-term changes the district has long said it needs to close the achievement gap. 

The new leader will likely have to take charge of the painful and long-postponed process of closing perhaps a dozen low-attendance schools.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

David Leonhardt

Across much of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, school buildings stayed closed and classes remained online for months.

These differences created a huge experiment, testing how well remote learning worked during the pandemic. Academic researchers have since been studying the subject, and they have come to a consistent conclusion: Remote learning was a failure.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll cover that research as well as two related questions: How might the country help children make up the losses? And should schools have reopened earlier — or were the closures a crucial part of the country’s Covid response?

“It’s too early to debate whether long term school closures hurt kids, let’s wait for all the data to come in.”

[Data comes in, research is published.]

“Why are we debating this now? Stop looking backward. Those decisions are in the past.”

— Marc Porter Magee (@marcportermagee) May 5, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak

The new, federally funded study found that children who received Reading Recovery had scores on state reading tests in third and fourth grade that were below the test scores of similar children who did not receive Reading Recovery. 

“It’s not what we expected, and it’s concerning,” said lead author Henry May, director of the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy at the University of Delaware, who delivered the findings at the prestigious, annual gathering of education researchers being held this year in San Diego.

The findings could prompt school districts nationwide to reexamine their investment in Reading Recovery and consider other ways to help struggling first-graders. 

May was the principal investigator of an earlier federally funded study of Reading Recovery, one of the largest ever randomized experiments of an instructional intervention in elementary schools. That study, which began in 2011, found evidence of large positive gains in first grade, as has other research. The program’s advocates have pointed to that research as evidence that the instructional approach is based on sound science and is effective. 

But whether the initial gains last and translate into better performance on state reading tests remained a question. The new study on the long-term impact of Reading Recovery is the largest, most rigorous effort to tackle that question, according to May. 

The fact that students who participated in Reading Recovery did worse in later grades than similar students who did not get the program surprised May. “Was Reading Recovery harmful? I wouldn’t go as far as to say that,” he said. “But what we do know is that the kids that got it for some reason ended up losing their gains and then falling behind.”

At least 2.4 million students in the United States have participated in Reading Recovery or its Spanish-language counterpart since 1984, when the program first came to America from New Zealand. The program is in nearly 2,000 schools in 41 states.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

Christopher Hooks:

The problem is not what information kids get. That cat’s out of the bag. It’s how we strengthen kids’ ability to sort through and contextualize the avalanche of information—good, bad, and weird—that they’re getting, not only about sex but about history and politics and culture. Right now, the debate we’re having is whether schools should even be allowed to talk about those topics. It remains to be seen whether this panic, like others in the past, will work in November, but it’s clearly gaining some traction. A recent Dallas Morning Newspoll of Texans of both political parties found that 47 percent of parents said they lacked confidence in school librarians to know what is appropriate material for children—although 65 percent reported they also lacked confidence in elected officials to figure that out.

It’s easy to sympathize with parents who are protective of the innocence of their children. But there’s never been a kid who has made it to adulthood unscathed. When I found X-rated material for the first time, it came from a source no one around me could have guessed: Disclosure, by Michael Crichton, who wrote adventure books such as Congo and Jurassic Park. In the middle of a pretty boring novel about a tech company, I stumbled upon a shockingly explicit sex scene that introduced me to some eyebrow-raising concepts in human anatomy—in the form of a misogynistic parable about a woman who entraps a man into a sexual harassment lawsuit out of spite. Recently I was curious, so I checked: even though Disclosure was not on Krause’s list of questionable books, every high school library catalog I searched around Texas listed a copy.

Christopher Buckley

The first point is that human children face a monumental learning task, which has resulted in the evolution of a much longer childhood than that exhibited by other animals. They must acquire and reproduce a very large amount of cultural information and skills related to language, human society (kin and non-kin relationships), subsistence activities (hunting, agriculture, dwelling construction), tool and clothing manufacture and use, ritual observances (to name but a few).

 The second point is that innovation is detrimental to the learning process. If (for example) you are learning to use a bow and arrow (an essential tool in many pre-modern societies) you should attend to copying precisely the actions of your elders, who embody several thousand years of experience and innovation. You don’t deviate from their practice, and if (as a novice learner) you try to make changes, they will reprimand you. The ethnographic literature on these kinds of apprenticeship-like processes in cultural transmission is extensive (I recommend David Lancy’s “First you must master pain” as a starting point). Your job as a learner is to acquire all the knowledge you can from your elders, and to practice it until you are perfect, since your survival may depend on it. For younger children, practice takes the form of play, so (for example) young boys in Highland New Guinea play a game where they attempt to shoot an arrow through a rolling cane hoop. Children’s play is often ‘creative’ (a poorly defined term, admittedly), but it is not ‘innovative’. Most play is imitative, it consists of rehearsing skills that have been taught or are in the process of acquisition, such as play-acting adult roles. The BaYaka children used the pipe cleaners to imitate adult adornment (necklaces and bracelets).

I am not exaggerating when I say: ‘your survival may depend on it’. Kirai hunters in New Guinea were taught to hunt wild boar with a bow and arrow. If they succeeded in hitting the animal they are taught to climb a tree as fast as possible, since the boar would not die immediately and would often attack the hunter. Similarly, if you are learning to drive a car, you will fail your test (for good reasons) if you add an innovative element. And would you like to be operated on by a novice surgeon who has this ‘weird new trick’ she’d like to try?

Darcy Moore:

The year 1937 was a seminal one for both men and useful for highlighting their different lifestyles, politics and literary experiences.

Tolkien, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford published The Hobbit – a quaint novel for children with dwarfish miners, dragons and wizards – in a modest print run of 1500 copies. Orwell was serving with a Marxist militia in the fight against fascism, in Spain, when The Road to Wigan Pier was published that same year. Commissioned for The Left Book Club, it examined the appalling living and working conditions of miners in the North of England.

Vagabondish and restless, Orwell was iconoclastic, eschewed academia and rejected religion. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. Orwell could not have despised this tradition more vehemently, often mocking adherents with jibes such as:

‘In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree.’

Orwell especially doubted the usefulness of this faith to novelists:

George Packer:

What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,” Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”

School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens. Education is a public interest, which explains why parents shouldn’t get to veto any book they think might upset their child, whether it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved. Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think. In an authoritarian or rigidly meritocratic system, schools select the elites who grow up to make the decisions. A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.

If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime. In 1960, when Richard Nixon chose not to contest an extremely narrow loss to John F. Kennedy, and Nixon partisans didn’t storm the Capitol looking to hang the speaker of the House, 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees. By the time of last year’s insurrection, that proportion had surpassed one-third. Law degrees from Harvard and Yale didn’t keep Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley from trying to tear up the Constitution. Americans with college degrees are likelier to vote and otherwise participate in civic life than those without; they’re also likelier to spend hours throwing clever online darts. One study found that college-educated Democrats were more likely to hold false views about their political enemies than those without four-year degrees. More education generally makes people more Democratic, but not more democratic.

We owe our beleaguered children, the victims of our inadequacy, a chance to be better than we are.

Dana Goldstein:

The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency.

As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.

In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”

In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

“We’re in new territory,” Dr. Hogan said about the pandemic’s toll on reading. If children do not become competent readers by the end of elementary school, the risks are “pretty dramatic,” she said. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of high school, earn less money as adults and become involved in the criminal justice system.

Please get this straight: It wasn't just an awful pandemic that "compounded" an unfortunate situation but also a series of school system actions including prolonged shutdowns, inadequate remote, & failure to prioritize vulnerable kids.
https://t.co/XrST2EyGJ9

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) March 8, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

Martha Fulford, J. Edward Les and Pooya Kazemi

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Throughout North America, it is not uncommon to encounter parents who are absolutely terrified of their children contracting COVID. This is because many parents significantly overestimate the potential harms of COVID to their children.

These parents are overcome by worry despite massive amounts of reassuring medical data that tell us that children are very unlikely to be harmed by this virus.

Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of biased and distorted media coverage — coverage that should be deemed misinformation, but which seems to get a free pass from “fact-checkers” and from many in the public.

We are not trying to draw moral or any other equivalencies to misinformation being spread by anti-vaxxers or COVID-deniers. We have many words of reproach for these people, too, but plenty has already been written about them.

Anya Kamanetz:

Kerry Dingle is a mother of two. She thinks masks should be optional for kids in schools and child care. And that makes her feel pretty lonely in Silver Spring, Md.

“As soon as you question ‘Is it a good idea to put a 2-year-old in a mask all day?’ you’re suddenly a psychotic, anti-vax right-winger,” she says. “Which really couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Dingle says she loves vaccines and thinks everyone should have them. “And the fact that high-risk people can protect themselves with vaccines and boosters now is fantastic and means that they should do that. And we should stop burdening little kids with protecting other people.”

Her 3-year-old son is in a preschool that mandates masking, although the children are almost always outdoors. “He keeps the cloth mask on, but he sucks on them and he chews holes through them,” she says. “Really, within five minutes of him putting it on, it’s wet.”

Her 6-year-old son, a first-grader, has a tic disorder that she says is exacerbated by a mask. “He makes facial movements that pull it down.” He kept getting in trouble for it until Dingle asked his pediatrician for a letter explaining that, but she says his teachers still correct him all day long.

Urgency of Normal:

In much of the United States, adults have the option of returning to life essentially as we knew it in 2019. However, children continue to experience disproportionate restrictions, and the costs are mounting. 

Youth depression, suspected suicide attempts, drug overdose deaths, and obesity have all risen dramatically during the pandemic. The unintended consequences of pandemic restrictions are now a greater risk to our children than COVID, and we must act on that reality. 

Meanwhile, children’s already-low risk from COVID has become even lower. Vaccines are available to children aged five and up, the Omicron variant is causing milder disease, and vaccines continue to be extremely protective against severe disease in the Omicron era.

Based on a careful review of all of this evidence, we believe it is time to allow children the same return to normalcy that adults have enjoyed. Children’s schools, athletics, and activities should be restored to their 2019 norms. Masks should become optional in US schools (we suggest, by February 15), and we can also return to pre-pandemic norms for quarantines: if you are sick, stay home. 

We can and should protect medically-vulnerable children and adults using focused protection strategies that protect individuals with risk, as we did in the years before COVID, rather than prolonging harmful restrictions on all children.

In order to make these shifts, we must reassure families about the low risk to children from COVID infections in the Omicron era, and also from long COVID. We must also share the best available evidence on the benefits and harms of COVID mitigation measures affecting children, which can reassure families, educators, policymakers, and all who care for children’s well-being about the safety and healthfulness of a return to normalcy for kids.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

Margery Smelkinson, Leslie Bienen, and Jeanne Noble

But in America about half of the country’s 53 million children remain compulsorily masked in school for the indefinite future. Sixteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia follow the CDC guidance closely and require masks for students of all ages, regardless of vaccination status; other states rely on a patchwork of policies, usually leaving decisions up to local school districts. (Nine states have banned school mask mandates, though in five of them, lawsuits have delayed implementation of the ban.) Many deep-blue areas such as Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; and New York City have gone beyond CDC guidance and are masking students outdoors at recess, in part because of byzantine rules that require an unmasked “exposed” student to miss multiple days of school, even if the putative exposure is outside.

Read: The CDC’s flawed case for wearing masks in school

Many public-health experts maintain that masks worn correctly are essential to reducing the spread of COVID-19. However, there’s reason to doubt that kids can pull off mask-wearing “correctly.” We reviewed a variety of studies—some conducted by the CDC itself, some cited by the CDC as evidence of masking effectiveness in a school setting, and others touted by media to the same end—to try to find evidence that would justify the CDC’s no-end-in-sight mask guidance for the very-low-risk pediatric population, particularly post-vaccination. We came up empty-handed.

To our knowledge, the CDC has performed three studies to determine whether masking children in school reduces COVID-19 transmission. The first is a study of elementary schools in Georgia, conducted before vaccines became available, which found that masking teachers was associated with a statistically significant decrease in COVID-19 transmission, but masking students was not—a finding that the CDC’s masking guidelines do not account for.

Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis:

The long-term closing of schools, and the harm it did to children nationwide, was a decision based not on health, but on politics — thanks to teachers unions and the Democratic politicians they fund.

A study by researchers at Michigan State University found that when governors left it up to districts whether to have in-person education in the fall of 2020, the “decisions were more tied to local political partisanship and union strength than to COVID-19 severity.”

This despite the fact that politicians already knew children were less at risk for COVID.

Follow the science? More like follow the political science.

Mental, physical harm

Freedom of Information Act documents showed major teachers unions lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on school reopenings. In fact, e-mails The Post acquired revealed that the CDC adopted Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers’ suggested language for this guidance nearly verbatim at least twice. Government officials were also told to factor teachers union contract negotiations into their reopening guidance. 

These union-induced school closures harm students academically, mentally and physically, with virtually no reduction in overall coronavirus transmission or child mortality.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

C Bradley Thompson:

The fundamental question of our time is: who is responsible for educating children, parents or the government?

And only after we answer this question can we address two related questions: what should children learn and how should they learn it? The “who” determines the “what” and the “how.”

But the “who” question is partly dependent on how we answer an even more basic question: do children have a right to an education, which is in turn dependent on the most fundamental question of all: do children have rights and if they do what kind of rights do they hold? This last question is the subject of this essay. In the next and last essay in this series, I will address directly the question of whether children have a right to an education.

In my seventh essay in the series on “Who Shall Educate the Children?” I demonstrated philosophically that parents—and only parents—have the sole right, authority, and responsibility to determine how and in what their children will educated. I have made it clear in this series that government should have no role in the education of children. The very idea is grotesque and immoral.

And in the eighth essay on “The Redneck Guide to Children’s Rights,” I established, in a general way, the metaphysical conditions of childhood and how the concept of rights applies to children given their natures.

But now we need to drill down much further than we have thus far to determine what sort of claim, if any, children have on their parents to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated? 

Children and the Right to Life

With the birth of a child a complex amalgam of interconnected and interdependent rights is created. Let’s begin with the foundational right—the right to life.

Jonathan Chait:

Within blue America, transparently irrational ideas like this were able to carry the day for a disturbingly long period of time. In recent days, Angie Schmitt and Rebecca Bodenheimer have both written essays recounting the disorienting and lonely experience they had watching their friends and putative political allies denounce them for supporting a return to in-person learning. Bodenheimer’s account is especially vivid:

“Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labeledadvocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy,” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda.”

The fevered climate of opinion ruled out cost-benefit thinking and instead framed the question as a simple moral binary, with the well-being of public schoolchildren somehow excluded from the calculus. Social scientists like Emily Oster who spoke out about the evidence on schools and COVID became hate targets on the left, an intimidating spectacle for other social scientists who might have thought about speaking up.

The failed experiment finally came to an end in the fall of 2021. (A handful of districts have shut down during the Omicron wave, but this is mainly a temporary response to staff shortages rather than another effort to stop community spread.) The Chicago Teachers Union, one of the more radical unions, did stage a strike, but it was met with firm opposition from Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and ended quickly.

But the source of the sentiment has not disappeared. The Democratic Party’s left-wing vanguard is continuing to flay critics of school closings as neoliberal ghouls carrying out the bidding of the billionaire class. Bernie Sanders aide Elizabeth Pancotti claims that “the loudest and most ardent supporters of keeping schools oepn [sic] (& those who dismiss legit concerns about teacher/child health risks) are largely those with remote work options/resources for alternative child care arrangements,” as if only some selfish motive could explain the desire of an American liberal to maintain public education. A story in Vice praises a student walkout in New York as a national model.

The ideas that produced the catastrophic school-closing era may have suffered a setback, but its strongest advocates hardly feel chastened. Whether educational achievement can or should be measured at all remains a very live debate within the left.

Most progressives aren’t insisting on refighting the school closing wars. They just want to quietly move on without anybody admitting anybody did anything wrong.

One of the grievances that critics of the Iraq War nursed after the debacle became clear was the failure of the political Establishment to draw any lessons broader than “don’t invade Iraq without an occupation plan.” Their anger was not unfounded. The catastrophe happened in part because the structure of the debate allowed too many uninformed hawkish voices and ignored too many informed dovish ones. (As a chastened Iraq War supporter myself, I’ve grown far more cautious about wading into foreign-policy debates for which I lack adequate understanding.)

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

Max Edén:

History never quite repeats itself. But if we don’t learn from it, then it can quickly rhyme in hideous couplets. First, tragedy. Then, farce. Last year’s coronavirus school closures were an unspeakable tragedy for schoolchildren. After the first viral panic, these closures were not driven by the prevalence or danger of the disease, but rather the power and political self-interestof teachers unions.

This dynamic was once again on display this month after teachers with the Chicago Teachers Union unilaterally refused to show up for in-person instruction on the pretext of concerns about the omicron variant. Chicago Public Schools was forced to cancel five days of class. School could only reopen after officials gave major concessions to the union.

The lesson from this tragicomic farce is that we must call a spade a spade. America does not really have “teachers unions” in the traditional sense — that is, democratically representative entities promoting the collective will of schoolteachers. Instead, these “unions” are structurally, operationally, and essentially cartels. These K-12 cartels were in the business of taking students hostage for ransom well before COVID-19. Yet the past two years of naked self-interest and hypocrisy from those who claim to be the guardians of our nation’s children have been laid bare for all to see. And it must not be forgotten.

The reason it had been difficult to learn before is because the K-12 cartel aims for a monopoly on moral language. During the first round of school closures, for example, the Chicago Teachers Union tweeted : “The push to re-open schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” (Hey, what isn’t these days?) In service of protecting its own power and influence, the K-12 cartel has adopted the leftist obsession with framing everything in American life through an “equity lens.” “Equity” is a remanufactured Trojan horse word intended to smuggle the ideology of critical race theory and other such cultural radicalism into schools. A “lens” refracts light so that you see objects differently. When you can only see the world through an “equity lens,” which blends every object into a grand conspiracy of so-called “racism,” “sexism,” and “misogyny,” what you see is what you’ll get.

Nicola Woolcock:

Forcing pupils to wear masks in the classroom is dystopian and critics should not be smeared as Trumpian Covid-deniers, the children’s author Julia Donaldson has said.

The creator of The Gruffalo said that she feared that the use of face coverings in schools was becoming normalised and was concerned that children’s education should not be “sacrificed” to protect the NHS.

Donaldson, 73, has written about 200 books, many of which have been adapted for television and stage. The Gruffalo has sold more than 13 million copies and been translated into more than 100 languages.

Julia Donaldson has written about 200 books, including The Gruffalo, which has sold 13 million copies

The Economist:

Over the past two years America’s children have missed more time in the classroom than those in most of the rich world. School closures that began there in early 2020 dragged on until the summer of 2021. During that time the districts that stayed closed longest forced all or some of their children to learn remotely for twice as long as schools in Ireland, three times longer than schools in Spain and four times longer than in France.

In recent weeks American schools have started closing once again, as the Omicron variant of covid-19 has brought a fresh wave of infections. About 5,000, equivalent to roughly 5% of schools, were shut for part or all of the first week in January. Sometimes that was because staff had been forced into isolation, but other closures were pre-emptive. In Chi cago teachers refused to turn up between January 5th and 11th. Some staff in California urged healthy colleagues to call in sick. America’s shrill debates about schooling continue to set it apart. The new term met with much less fuss in England—even though the country had a higher national infection rate than America and has vaccinated fewer young children.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

Joy Pullman:

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

Dana Goldstein and Noam Scheiber:

Few American cities have labor politics as fraught as Chicago’s, where the nation’s third-largest school system shut down this week after teachers’ union members refused to work in person, arguing that classrooms were unsafe amid the Omicron surge.

But in a number of other places, the tenuous labor peace that has allowed most schools to operate normally this year is in danger of collapsing.

While not yet threatening to walk off the job, unions are back at negotiating tables, pushing in some cases for a return to remote learning. They frequently cite understaffing because of illness, and shortages of rapid tests and medical-grade masks. Some teachers, in a rear-guard action, have staged sick outs.

In Milwaukee, schools are remote until Jan. 18, because of staffing issues. But the teachers’ union president, Amy Mizialko, doubts that the situation will significantly improve  and worries that the school board will resist extending online classes.

“I anticipate it’ll be a fight,” Ms. Mizialko said.

She credited the district for at least delaying in-person schooling to start the year but criticized Democratic officials for placing unrealistic pressure on teachers and schools.

“I think that Joe Biden and Miguel Cardona and the newly elected mayor of New York City and Lori Lightfoot — they can all declare that schools will be open,” Ms. Mizialko added, referring to the U.S. education secretary and the mayor of Chicago. “But unless they have hundreds of thousands of people to step in for educators who are sick in this uncontrolled surge, they won’t be.”

The view from Madison, via David Blaska:

Madison Teachers Inc. claims that two-thirds of its members surveyed “either did not support a return to school buildings on January 10 or would only do so if COVID-19 infection rates were stabilizing or decreasing.”

“Not only have we started this school year short-staffed, but we are losing an extraordinary number or staff due to burnout and disrespect from leadership and community stakeholders.”

Disrespect from “community stakeholders?” Whom might that be? Parents? Taxpayers? At least, they have the support of the Madison-area Democratic Socialists. The Far Left group today blamed Covid on capitalism:

Hello comrades,

I am sure you are all thinking about Omnicron and how it yet again illustrates the blatant failings of capitalism, the state, the U.S. healthcare system, and so many other oppressive institutions. … (MTI) is calling on MMSD leadership to make basic commitments to staff members. Please read their statement, sign their petition, and share it.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

STOP Award

More than 340,000 Chicago Public School students have been forced to stay home by self-interests who dominate the Chicago Public School system. The failure of Chicago’s leadership to open school even after receiving more than $1.5 billion from the federal government in the past year to ensure they are always open safely to students is outrageous and unacceptable.

But there are thousands of great educators and education providers who can and are ready to help more children get educated. We want to help them, immediately, to take kids in from the Chicago public schools and give them the education they need and deserve, both now and into the future.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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

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

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

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

Amy King:

From how we say ‘hello’ to the side of the road we drive on, all societies have norms – or ‘rules’ – that shape people’s everyday lives. 

Now a new study – the first of its kind – has shown that children worldwide will challenge peers if they break the ‘rules’, but how they challenge them varies between cultures. 

Led by the University of Plymouth, UK and Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, the study analysed the behaviour of 376 children aged five to eight from eight societies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America.

The children were each taught to play a block sorting game – with half taught to sort the blocks by colour, and half taught to sort them by shape. They were then put into pairs, with one playing the game and the other observing. 

The research showed that observers intervened more often when the other child appeared to play by the wrong set of rules. The more a child intervened, the more likely their partner was to change their behaviour. 

The study also showed that the type of intervention varied – with children from rural areas using imperative verbal protest more than children from urban areas.

Sabrina Tavernise:

Demographics are changing too. Growing numbers of Hispanic people and Asian people from the Marshall Islands call Enid home. The county of Garfield, in which Enid is the seat, was 94 percent white in 1980. Last year, that figure was about 68 percent. The county experienced one of the largest increases in racial diversity in the country over the past decade, 2020 census data show.

Teachers and administrators in Enid’s school system have worked hard to integrate growing numbers of immigrant children. But everyone else interviewed in Enid, including Ms. Crabtree, who is white, expressed surprise when told of the scale of this change. Immigrants tend to live in certain parts of town and work in certain jobs, like at the meat plant, and do not yet have high-profile positions of power.

Still, she could feel that change overall was accelerating, and that was making her feel like she was losing her country, like it was becoming something she did not recognize.

“I truly think that what we are doing is pulling our republic apart at the seams,” she said.

So when she heard about the indoor mask mandate proposal last year in her city, she jumped to get involved. She discovered that she liked bringing people together, people whose thinking she shared. It felt good to learn together, and to belong to this group she was building with urgent purpose. Eventually she made a Facebook page called Enid Freedom Fighters.

School closings and “remote learning” have caused a massive mental health crisis among teenagers. This, and the disruption to their intellectual development, will be enduring and severe.https://t.co/Q3mtWJ9MnR pic.twitter.com/ONrnYIWBPI

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 26, 2021

I think about whenever I (frequently) see children running around outside, masked.

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health’s mandates (via unelected taxpayer funded administrators).

David Zweig:

The debate over child masking in schools boiled over again this fall, even above its ongoing high simmer. The approval in late October of COVID-19 vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds was for many public-health experts an indication that mask mandates could finally be lifted. Yet with cases on the rise in much of the country, along with anxiety regarding the Omicron variant, other experts and some politicians have warned that plans to pull back on the policy should be put on hold.

Scientists generally agree that, according to the research literature, wearing masks can help protect people from the coronavirus, but the precise extent of that protection, particularly in schools, remains unknown—and it might be very small. What data do exist have been interpreted into guidance in many different ways. The World Health Organization, for example, does not recommend masks for children under age 6. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recommends against the use of masks for any children in primary school.

Seen in this context, the CDC has taken an especially aggressive stance, recommending that all kids 2 and older should be masked in school. The agency has argued for this policy amid an atmosphere of persistent backlash and skepticism, but on September 26, its director, Rochelle Walensky, marched out a stunning new statistic: Speaking as a guest on CBS’s Face the Nation, she cited a study published two days earlier, which looked at data from about 1,000 public schools in Arizona. The ones that didn’t have mask mandates, she said, were 3.5 times as likely to experience COVID outbreaks as the ones that did.

VICTORIA THOMPSON, ELIZABETH WOLFSON, AND MANDY HOLLISTER:

“Teaching reading is rocket science,” Louisa Moats is well known for saying. It is something we frequently referenced during our guided reading professional development for teachers. Sadly, until we started on our Science of Reading journey two-plus years ago, we had no idea how bereft our instruction was of the benefits of that science.  

Our collective awakening started as a result of listening to Emily Hanford’s podcast, “At a Loss for Words,” in which Hanford reveals that reading instruction in America has led children to read poorly based on a flawed theory of the mechanics of reading. While the three of us had different emotional reactions to hearing it, our powerful common experience was, “We have to do something!” 

The “do something” started with a lot of reading from Google searches, Facebook groups, and blog posts. Then came reflections on our own practices as teachers — practices we’d learned in our teacher prep programs and in professional development sessions in the years that followed — much of which has now been disproven (if, indeed, it was ever actually founded in evidence). As administrators, we came to recognize that we’d passed many of these ill-founded notions on to teachers at our school — and that has produced no small amount of guilt. How could we have taught students to read this way for so many years?!

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”

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

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

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

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

Denisha Merriweather, Dava Hankerson, Nathaniel Cunneen and Ron Matus:

The shift to an increasingly choice-driven education landscape for Black students in Florida has been driven by Black parents, who have enrolled their children in choice programs in growing numbers and made it so they cannot be ignored politically. “Options make it so that I can have school that works for my child,” said Brandi Evans, who has three children at Icon Preparatory School, a predominantly Black private school, pictured above, that is serving choice scholarship students in Tampa. With education choice, “I get to control the narrative.” PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

It has been 31 years since the first modern private school choice program began in Milwaukee, 29 years since the first charter school opened in Minnesota, and 10 years since Arizona created the nation’s first education savings account program.

Yet in many states, the opportunity for America’s 7.7 million Black public-school students to access these potentially life-changing learning options remains out of reach.

Florida is a notably bright exception.

Florida has more than 600,000 Black students, among the highest number of any state. It has among the most expansive suite of education choice options. And now it has among the highest number of Black students enrolled in those options.

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”

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

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

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

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

James Freeman:

Since the start of the pandemic, some media folk have continued to insist on making obscene comparisons between the number of Americans who have died with Covid and the number of Americans killed in various wars, as if it’s irrelevant whether one dies at age 80 or age 18. But there is one way in which Covid really is similar to combat. In both cases, aging policy makers demand disproportionate sacrifices from the young. 

Fortunately children age 0 to 17 in the U.S. are always at comparatively low risk of death relative to their elders. When children have died in 2020 and 2021, the website of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in 99% of cases the kids have died from something other than Covid.

James R. Copland John Ketcham Christopher F. Rufo:

In 2021, public school parents vaulted to the forefront of America’s fractured political landscape. Around the country, parents objected both to Covid-related school closures and to racially divisive curricula. Parental frustration helped secure sweeping GOP wins last month in Virginia, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin’s victory over former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has promised to rein in public-school radicalism and “ban critical race theory” on his first day in office.

Perhaps the central moment in the Virginia gubernatorial race was McAuliffe’s comment during a debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Like most Virginia voters, we couldn’t disagree more. Research shows that greater academic success follows when parents actively engage in their children’s education. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that we should decide the finer points of curricular design by plebiscite; nor does it mean that a minority of objecting parents should dictate school pedagogy. But public schools are institutions created by “We the People” and should be responsive to the input of parents and the broader voting public at the state and local level.

At a minimum, parents should be able to know what’s being taught to their children in the classroom. Transparency is a virtue for all of our public institutions, but especially for those with power over children. To that end, we have drafted a template—building on one of our earlier efforts at the Manhattan Institute and the work of Matt Beienburg at the Goldwater Institute—to inform state legislatures seeking to foster school transparency. The policy proposal is designed to provide public school parents with easy access—directly on school websites—to materials and activities used to train staff and teachers and to instruct children.

I find it interesting that this is an issue. University course syllabus are easily available. Perhaps college professors and lectures have a personal marketing, accomplishment and industry incentive – that unionized k-12 teachers lack. “They are all good”.

Schools aren’t the problem. They never have been.

One of the frustrating things about the pandemic has been our inability, even at this late date, to understand why surges occur. They hit communities with mask mandates, and communities without. Last year, we believed that the surge from October through February was caused by seasonal changes. The cold drove everyone indoors, where COVID was much more likely to spread, and therefore cases developed more quickly. This year, though, the surge began long before the weather turned cold. Vaccines are certainly protective and likely mitigate the severity of surges locally. Even so, things may worsen again—the data right now aren’t looking good for much of the country, and many people fear more hardship to come from the emergent Omicron variant—but no predictable pattern has emerged to explain what sets off periods of dramatic increases.

What is pretty certain, however, is that schools are not to blame. They didn’t cause the surges. They didn’t cause the massive numbers of hospitalizations and deaths that Florida experienced this summer and thatMichigan appears to be experiencing now. They haven’t done nearly as much damage as bars, restaurants, and indoor events (including kids’ birthday parties), which never seem to receive the same amount of attention.

This doesn’t mean that kids aren’t getting COVID, of course. It doesn’t mean that kids aren’t in danger,haven’t gotten sick, haven’t been hospitalized by the thousands, and even died. Kids catch COVID, and transmission does occur in schools, but it is rare when precautions are taken. Because of this, the level of school transmission is sometimes lower than that of the surrounding community. Most schools are on guard, at least. Many require masks. More are being thoughtful about close contacts and group dynamics, and they enforce isolation and quarantine as much as they can. That may be inconvenient, but it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t made a difference.

Notes and links on Public Health Dane County Madison

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

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

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

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

Andy Kessler

California government becomes less trustworthy by the minute. It lifted most Covid restrictions in June based on 70% of adult Californians receiving at least one vaccine dose, meaning you could go maskless in Trader Joe’s. By August, however, health officials, blaming the Delta variant, reimposed mask mandates in California’s big cities. Then in October, the same health officials said that restrictions will be lifted when 80% are vaccinated. No problem, 80% of adults had gotten jabbed. But wait, the new target is 80% of the entire population, including children under 12, who weren’t eligible for shots. Talk about moving the goal posts.

Robin Lake:

What happened during the past 20 months should have been entirely predictable for anyone who was advocating for students and families before the pandemic struck.

A rigid system designed for sameness cracked under the pressure of a crisis. Despite the exhaustive work of many well-meaning people, schools and school systems were largely unable to meet individual student needs. Children who had already been struggling were subjected to even more hardship. People were rightly outraged that some students did not have access to Wi-Fi and portable devices. To many, such inequities were enough to cause them to first call for schools to remain open, then for them to remain closed.

But where was the outrage over unequal access to technology before the pandemic struck? Why were people not furious over the decades of research that shows historically marginalized students — Black, Hispanic and low-income, in particular — are taught by less effective teachers? Or the large and persistent gaps in academic outcomes by race and income?

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”

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.

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

Joe Setyon:

Rhode Island mom Nicole Solas found this out the hard way. When Solas emailed the principal of her daughter’s public school earlier this year, asking for the kindergarten curriculum, she was stonewalled. Then, she got hit with a bill from the school district for $74,000. Solas, who the Goldwater Institute is defending in court, was even sued by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest public sector teachers union, all because she thought she had a right to know what her daughter would be taught about America. 

“Parents have enough on their hands raising their children—it’s a full-time job,” said Sandefur. “They shouldn’t have to fight self-righteous administrators and scheming special interests just to find out what their kids are being taught in classrooms that their tax dollars pay for.”

It would have been easy for Solas to give up. But she didn’t. 

“Nicole won’t be bullied, intimidated, or silenced. She’s still fighting for her daughter—and for all our children,” Sandefur said. “And she’s showing parents across the country that they’re not alone.

Solas, this year’s recipient of the Goldwater Institute Freedom Award, offered a roadmap for all Americans interested in battling the growing wokeness in our schools. “You will be retaliated against,” she said, adding, “Embrace dissent.”

Jacey Fortin:

If everything had gone according to plan, California would have approved new guidelines this month for math education in public schools.

But ever since a draft was opened for public comment in February, the recommendations have set off a fierce debate over not only how to teach math, but also how to solve a problem more intractable than Fermat’s last theorem: closing the racial and socioeconomic disparities in achievement that persist at every level of math education.

The California guidelines, which are not binding, could overhaul the way many school districts approach math instruction. The draft rejected the idea of naturally gifted children, recommended against shifting certain students into accelerated courses in middle school and tried to promote high-level math courses that could serve as alternatives to calculus, like data science or statistics.

The draft also suggested that math should not be colorblind and that teachers could use lessons to explore social justice — for example, by looking out for gender stereotypes in word problems, or applying math concepts to topics like immigration or inequality.

Just read this NYT piece on proposed California state education standards that demand that teachers change curriculums to bring racial identity politics into everyday math lessons. So I click the draft standards and the first section cited this CRT paper. https://t.co/tGoJ3nmsB9 pic.twitter.com/qCTEtqzG3T

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) November 6, 2021

K-12 Math links:
“Discovery math” (Seattle lawsuit)
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Discovery+math

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level math placement?

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/pdf/2009/05/wollack_fishwmc2009.pdf

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Connected+math

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=singapore+math

Math forum
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/?s=Math+forum+audio+video

Oh my God she’s amazing. No wonder the Media Party ignored her. pic.twitter.com/DHpDLv38Mb

— Ezra Levant 🍁 (@ezralevant) November 3, 2021

about 5:30:

Our children are going to get a good education, because education lifted my father out of poverty, education lifted me out of poverty, education will lift us all out of poverty. We must have marketable skills because our children should not just survive but thrive – and will create generational wealth.

"Instead of trying to elevate all of our students they want quotas and so that means we're going to sacrifice the Asians for the black kids. Now who's going to benefit from that? That's not living in harmony." – Winsome Sears campaigning against racial preferences in education. pic.twitter.com/amS5BCgI0W

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 3, 2021

James Freeman:

The story of the Covid era is largely about a political class imposing one burden after another on the young for the theoretical benefit of the old, with little effort to conduct serious calculations of risks and costs. Kids who were never in great danger from the virus have been forced into isolation and quarantine, forced to suffer lost educational and cultural opportunities, and forced to accept an expanded federal debt burden that will haunt them through their taxpaying lives. Many children remain masked all day thanks to edicts from politicos with hardly a care for the long-term consequences to mental health or development.

Now we have Sen. Bernie Sanders (socialist, Vt.), who has been an elected official for nearly 40 years, preparing to add to the federal debt burden once again but claiming that his massive new program is for the children. Mr. Sanders is on the brink of achieving his dream of a federal universal pre-kindergarten program. No doubt it will be costly for taxpayers, but parents should not assume it will benefit their kids.

Like everything else in the pending reconciliation bill, the highly consequential details remain hidden from the public. Reporting on the back-room negotiations for the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar plan, the Journal’s Andrew Duehren, Kristina Peterson and Natalie Andrews write that the next draft “is still set to include several party priorities, such as universal prekindergarten.” They add that according to a source, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) told House Democrats on Tuesday that Congress was on “the verge of something major.”

Hillfaith:

This will undoubtedly come as a shock to a lot of folks reading this post, but an examination at the history of college and university education reveals that Christianity played the key role in the history and development of higher education in the Western world, according to J. Warner Wallace in his latest book, “Person of Interest.”

Wallace is the former Los Angeles Police detective who specialized in cracking murder cases that had defied being solved for decades. He got so good at it that he was often featured on NBC’s “Dateline” new feature program. He’s now the founder and president of coldcasechristianity.org and one of Christianity’s most effective apologists.

With “Person of Interest,” Wallace sets out to demonstrate that without depending on the New Testament scriptures, Jesus is the dominant personality in all human history. That’s saying something, but Wallace does it and in the process compiles an amazing amount of historical facts that demonstrate the profound influence Jesus and Christianity have had on the world we live in today.

Higher education is one of the areas that Wallace focuses on and it is fascinating to see and read these facts, which are rarely, if ever, mentioned in classrooms today. The truth is Christianity sparked “a movement driven by ‘People of the Book’ who wanted to share their book with others. This revolution initiated a series of events that led directly to the creation of humanity’s greatest educational institution, the modern university,” Wallace writes.

Very early in the history of the church, Christian leaders began emphasizing the importance of teaching men and women to read, so they could read and study the Word of God, in both the Old and New Testaments.

“It wasn’t long before Christian students were being taught more than theology and godly living. Ignatius of Antioch [a student of John the Apostle] encouraged teachers in Christian communities to ‘bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and teach them the Holy Scriptures and also trades, that they may not indulge in idleness,’” according to Wallace.

James Hankins:

In 2020 the American educational system was attacked by two viruses: Covid-19 and an unusually virulent strain of hyper-progressive ideology. Many parents and educators have been shocked and disoriented to find that institutions they trusted appear to have been taken over by zombie Marxists, filled with self-righteous anger. Unless they are from “URMs” (under-represented minorities), their children are likely to be told that their heritage makes them racist, the spawn of oppressors, and that they need to renounce their “white privilege” or be made outcasts in their own schools. They are being taught to despise their own country as well as the literature, philosophy, and arts of the Western tradition. Even mathematics teaching now has to be filtered through a social justice lens.  

But every crisis is also an opportunity, as activists on the left frequently remind us. There are even grounds, dare one say it, to have hope for the future. Both the health crisis and the ideological crisis of American education have left the radical progressives’ near-monopoly of K-12 schooling considerably weaker than in pre-Covid times. It is now exposed as never before to competition from innovators who are introducing new ways to learn. Some of these innovators are giving us new ways to connect with older and sounder educational traditions, the very traditions hyper-progressives have been aiming to poison or supplant.

There is no doubt that the part of K-12 public education controlled by the teacher’s unions—the schools directly supervised by public school districts—took a serious hit after 2019. Exact numbers are hard to verify, but the trend is clear. According to figures supplied by National Center for Education Statistics, run by the Department of Education, the total enrollment in K-12 public education grew gradually from about 47 million in 2000-01 to more than 50.33 million in 2019. Since 2019 it has dropped by over two million. The actual number of students lost by unionized public schools is probably closer to 2.5 million, since public charter schools have markedly increased their share of enrollments since 2019—the only part of the public system to experience growth. Public charters are also the one part of the public school system that has demonstrated a commitment to in-person teaching during the pandemic. In the last fourteen years (the only period for which statistics are available), public charter school enrollment increased by more than three times, growing from less than 2.1% of all public school students in 2005 to 6.5% in 2019. For the school year 2020-21, the National Alliance for Public Charters (NAPC) reports an increase of about 240,000 new students, a year-over-year increase of about 7%. This represents a doubling of the rate of increase over the previous period.

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.

Jason Riley:

During a recent appearance on “The View,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in on the national debate over teaching racial propaganda to schoolchildren. In the process, she made a broader point about the mindset of a previous generation of black people when it came to dealing with racial adversity.

“My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice,” said Ms. Rice, a product of segregated Birmingham, Ala. “But they also told me, ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it, and you are going to be anything you want to be.’ ” Ms. Rice said that blaming whites today for past racism strikes her as unproductive. You don’t help black kids by making “white kids feel guilty for being white.”

The contrast with the current woke approach to racial inequality is stark. In that earlier era, there was an expectation among blacks that advancement would take place despite racial barriers, that discrimination was no excuse for not trying. The generations that produced such civil-rights luminaries as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that whites had a role to play in changing a fundamentally racist system. Yet they also understood that blacks had a role to play, and they were willing to hold black people accountable for their behavior.

Ann Bauer:

Since Bettelheim took his life, the Orthogenic School has undergone major changes. Their own Family Handbook makes glancing reference to Bettelheim’s “highly controversial” theories and credits him (briefly) for drawing attention to the problem of autism. In 2014, the school moved from the somber brick buildings where it had been housed for almost 100 years to a sunny campus in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Earlier this year, they announced they are closing their residential program for good.

At some point—I cannot say when, because there were years that went by like dark water—I went to Chicago and visited the site of the old Orthogenic School where Bruno Bettelheim once ruled. A psychiatry fellow I’d contacted showed me around, talking gravely about the bizarrely ignorant methods that had once dominated his field. He showed me the rooms where the children lived, far from their parents, and the courtyard where in Bettelheim’s era there had been a statue in the shape of a mother that he’d encouraged his young male students to urinate on.

I don’t know what I thought I’d find there. Maybe I was looking for the answer to how terribly and repeatedly we as people can get our responses to nature so wrong. The courtyard was empty, brilliantly sunny. The brick buildings were old and graceful, like hallowed monuments to science. I had to remind myself there were decades of abuse, psychological terror, and forced separation from parents within the walls of this place. And for all those years, staff watched and participated without a single one of them speaking out.

Leslie Bienen and Eric Happel~

An Oregon high school ordered all 2,680 of its students to stay home for a week and a half in September—two days of complete shutdown, followed by a week of online classes. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that the district sent a “flash alert message” to parents at Reynolds High at 5:35 a.m. informing them that their children wouldn’t be allowed in school that day.

It’s not hard to guess why. OPB reports that in the first two weeks of school “875 high school students and staff members . . . had to quarantine” before the shutdown. All that was in response to a mere four positive tests for Covid-19. Oregon is following the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite the disease’s low risk to young people and the widespread vaccination of adults, the CDC continues to recommend seven- to 14-day quarantines for schoolchildren who are suspected of having been exposed to the virus.

Thirty states have set aside the CDC’s guidelines, according to our research, and the agency itself has published studies suggesting that such measures are unnecessary. Yet the CDC has dragged its feet in considering a less-restrictive alternative known as “test to stay.”

Maribah Knight & Ken Armstrong:

The police were at Hobgood because of that video. But they hadn’t come for the boys who threw punches. They were here for the children who looked on. The police in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, had secured juvenile petitions for 10 children in all who were accused of failing to stop the fight. Officers were now rounding up kids, even though the department couldn’t identify a single one in the video, which was posted with a filter that made faces fuzzy. What was clear were the voices, including that of one girl trying to break up the fight, saying: “Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay.” She was a fourth grader at Hobgood. Her initials were E.J.

The confusion at Hobgood — one officer saying this, another saying that — could be traced in part to absence. A police officer regularly assigned to Hobgood, who knew the students and staff, had bailed that morning after learning about the planned arrests. The thought of arresting these children caused him such stress that he feared he might cry in front of them. Or have a heart attack. He wanted nothing to do with it, so he complained of chest pains and went home, with no warning to his fill-in about what was in store.

Tawnell D. Hobbs and Andrea Fuller:

Some of the wealthiest U.S. colleges are steering parents into no-limit federal loans to cover rising tuition, leaving many poor and middle-class families with debt they can’t repay.

Parents at Baylor University had the worst repayment rate for a type of federal loan called Parent Plus among private schools with at least a $1 billion endowment, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of available Education Department data. Only about a quarter of Baylor parents paid down any of what they originally borrowed after two years.

Unlike undergraduate loans that have limits, there is no cap on what parents can borrow through the fast-growing Parent Plus program, no matter their income. Some parents wanting the best schools available for their children sign on the dotted line unaware how the debt can burden them into retirement.

Baylor increased its tuition sharply to transform itself from a regionally known Baptist college into a national brand that now has a $1.8 billion endowment. The central Texas school has added facilities, built a sports powerhouse and climbed college-ranking lists in a push to become a world-class research institution.

“They told me it was ‘good debt’—that it will pay itself off,” Ms. Massey said of family members who encouraged her to attend Baylor. “I honestly haven’t found anybody that cares about where I went to school.”

Melissa Korn:

Amherst College is abandoning its policy of giving preference to applicants whose parents attended the Massachusetts liberal-arts school, placing it among the first elite private colleges to ditch legacy admissions.

Selective schools like Amherst have been under intense scrutiny in recent years for putting a thumb on the scale for legacy applicants, with critics arguing the programs do little more than cement the privilege of students, and leave fewer slots for applicants from less-represented backgrounds.

“We’re doing what we can to examine where the barriers are and change what we can change” as the school pushes forward on efforts to broaden access, said Amherst President Biddy Martin.

The school, which this year had an 8.5% acceptance rate, historically gave preference to any children of graduates who were academically qualified. Dr. Martin said legacies are often among the top applicants, so many may still be admitted without considering their familial ties.

AAP:

The AAP, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and Children’s Hospital Association have declared a national emergency in children’s mental health, citing the serious toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on top of existing challenges.

They are urging policymakers to take action swiftly to address the crisis.

“Young people have endured so much throughout this pandemic and while much of the attention is often placed on its physical health consequences, we cannot overlook the escalating mental health crisis facing our patients,” AAP President Lee Savio Beers, M.D., FAAP, said in a statement. “Today’s declaration is an urgent call to policymakers at all levels of government — we must treat this mental health crisis like the emergency it is.”

Before the pandemic, rates of childhood mental health concerns and suicide had been rising steadily for at least a decade. By 2018, suicide was the second leading cause of death for youths ages 10-24 years.

Paula Bolyard:

** I recall a former Madison Superintendent occasionally using these words “we have the children”. **

Moms and dads, you know what’s best for your own children. That’s long been my mantra, harkening back to my early blogger days when I fiercely defended a parent’s right to determine the course of his or her child’s education. Although I’m an unapologetic advocate for homeschooling, I recognize that it’s not the best option for every family. But regardless of my personal views, I trust you, as parents, to do what’s best for your own personal children. How you educate your children is none of my business, just like it’s none of my business whether you choose to breastfeed or bottle-feed or whether or not you believe in spanking. It’s not any of the government’s business, either. God gave your children to you, not to the state, and He’s tasked you, not the government, with the task of raising them.

I’m always disappointed when I hear parents ceding the education of their kids to teachers and school boards, believing that the schools know best. After all, many of you reason, teachers and administrators at your kids’ school have advanced degrees in education! Surely, they know better than you do what your kids need. Only trained professionals are qualified to decide what kids should be taught, right? And lest you think I’m exaggerating, this poll offers proof that many parents trust the schools more than they trust their own judgment:

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.

Stephen Parker:

Sight Words

Ehri distinguishes 4 ways to read words:
“The first three ways help us read unfamiliar words. The fourth way explains how we read words we have read before. One way is by decoding, also called phonological recoding. We can either sound out and blend graphemes into phonemes, or we can work with larger chunks of letters to blend syllabic units into recognizable words. Another way is by analogizing. This involves using words we already know to read new words – for example, using the known word, bottle, to read throttle. Another way is by prediction. This involves using context and letter clues to guess unfamiliar words. The fourth way of reading words is by memory or sight. This applies to words we have read before. We can just look at the words and our brain recognizes them.” [1] [boldface mine]

[Note: If you’re unfamiliar with the terms “decode,” “blend,” “segment,” “grapheme,” or “phoneme,” you can find easy-to-understand definitions here. Understanding these terms is a necessity for reading this blog.]

Since the first 3 strategies for reading (above) all involve conscious effort and time, using any of them will impede reading comprehension. Reading by sight, however, requires no conscious effort – all the brain’s resources can be directed toward comprehending the text.

“Given that there are multiple ways to read words, consider which way makes text reading most efficient. If readers know words by sight and can recognize them automatically as they read text, then word reading operates unconsciously. In contrast, each of the other ways of reading words requires conscious attention. If readers attempt to decode words, to analogize, or to predict words, their attention is shifted from the text to the word itself to identify it, and this disrupts comprehension, at least momentarily. It is clear that being able to read words automatically from memory is the most efficient, unobtrusive way to read words in text. Hence, building a sight vocabulary is essential for achieving text-reading skill.” [2]

If you’re a skilled reader, you’ll likely read every word in this blog effortlessly – by sight. A mere glimpse of each word will immediately link to that word’s pronunciation and meaning. The brain’s ability to do this is astonishing. How does it happen?

A traditional view of how sight words are created holds that beginners memorize some type of association between a visual characteristic of the word (perhaps its overall shape) and its meaning. The pronunciation of the word is activated only after the meaning of the word has been retrieved. Ehri calls this notion “incorrect.”

Glenn Reynolds:

The pandemic has been a disaster for public education. Closed schools and self-serving teachers unions have undermined parents’ faith in the system. The result has been a massive move to private schools and to homeschooling. More than 11 percent of American households are homeschooling their kids. The numbers among black and Hispanic households are now even higher than this average.

There are a lot of reasons for this — I wrote a book on the trend, “The New School,” almost a decade ago. But COVID has accelerated things dramatically.

Homeschooling is safer from infection and, Moreland she important, from the ever-changing whimsof the educational bureaucracy. Rather than put up with the increasingly intrusive and authoritarian behavior of educrats, parents are taking control. Thanks

They’re also finding out that their kids are learning more and faster. (My own daughter wasn’t homeschooled, but after concluding that her public high school was wasting a huge chunk of her day, as she switched to an online program and graduaras early, starting college at 16.)

Now a federal court in my hometown has provided another reason: You’re not only under the thumbs of intrusive educrats; you’re also subject to whatever diktats activists can persuade a federal court to issue. In the case of Knox County, Tenn., schools, that consists of an order to mask all children, despite orders from Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, and the Knox County Board of Education to the contrary.

The court’s order is based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some parents whose kids have medical conditions that might make them particularly at-risk if they contract COVID sued, demanding the school board order all students to wear masks as a way of accommodating their kids’ disabilities. The school board argued that the ADA requires only a “reasonable accommodation” for disabilities, and that it was prepared to provide that by offering online classes or classes apart from the general student body.

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst:

There is a strong and politically bipartisan push to increase access to government-funded pre-K. This is based on a premise that free and available pre-K is the surest way to provide the opportunity for all children to succeed in school and life, and that it has predictable and cost-effective positive impacts on children’s academic success.

The evidence to support this predicate is weak. There is only one randomized trial of a scaled-up state pre-K program with follow-up into elementary school. Rather than providing an academic boost to its participants as expected by pre-K advocates, achievement favored the control group by 2nd and 3rd grade. It is, however, only one study of one state program at one point in time. Do the findings generalize? The present study provides new correlational analyses that are relevant to the possible impact of state pre-K on later academic achievement. Findings include:

no association between states’ federally reported scores on the fourth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in various years and differences among states in levels of enrollment in their state’s pre-K program five years earlier than each of those years (when the fourth-graders taking NAEP would have been preschoolers);
positive associations (small and typically not statistically significant) between NAEP scores and earlier pre-K enrollment, when the previous analysis is conducted using NAEP scores that are statistically adjusted to account for differences between the states in the demographic characteristics of students taking NAEP; and
no association between differences among states in their gains in state pre-K enrollment and their gains in adjusted NAEP scores.
Under the most favorable scenario for state pre-K that can be constructed from these data, increasing pre-K enrollment by 10 percent would raise a state’s adjusted NAEP scores by a little less than one point five years later and have no influence on the unadjusted NAEP scores.

The Economist:

It seemed like a blustery overpromise when President Joe Biden pledged in July to oversee “the largest ever one-year decrease in child poverty in the history of the United States”. By the end of the year, however, he will probably turn out to have been correct. Recent modelling by scholars at Columbia University estimates that in July child poverty was 41% lower than normal.

America has long tolerated an anomalously high rate of poverty among children relative to other advanced countries—depending on how it is measured, somewhere between one in six or one in five children counted as poor. The reason why is not mysterious. The safety-net has always been thinnest for the country’s youngest: America spends a modest 0.6% of gdp on child and family benefits compared with the oecd average of 2.1%. What would happen if this were to change? The rush of cash Congress made available to cushion the economic fallout of covid-19 provided an experiment.

Garrick Stride:

I am an emergency physician and father of three young children. Last month, public health authorities suddenly imposed a two-week at-home quarantine order on two dozen kids from my son’s preschool class due to a COVID-19 exposure. Like all parents of those kids, I lost over $800 in unreimbursed preschool tuition and was forced to rearrange my work schedule. Ironically, these children were probably exposed to more people in those two weeks from attending different day-care and social events than if they had simply remained in their classroom cohort, but, unfortunately, public health orders don’t seem to account for actual human behavior.

Health authorities have two justifications for imposing these kinds of afflictions on the public. Originally, the goal was “to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed.” In other words, to prevent suffering and death from lack of access to health care, we discouraged people from going to hospitals, shut down medical clinics to in-person visits, and suspended all non-emergency procedures. The implementation was clearly illogical, but at least the goal was rational.

Now that the vast majority of the country has natural or vaccine-mediated immunity to COVID-19 and our health care systems have improved surge capacity, our hospitals are no longer at risk of being truly overwhelmed. Busy? Sure. Systemically overwhelmed and unable to compensate? No chance.

David Zweig:

At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even worse in certain places: Some states, including Arkansas and Oregon, recently saw their COVID hospitalizations rise to higher levels than at any prior stage of the pandemic. But how much do those latter figures really tell us?

From the start, COVID hospitalizations have served as a vital metric for tracking the risks posed by the disease. Last winter, this magazine described it as “the most reliable pandemic number,” while Vox quoted the cardiologist Eric Topol as saying that it’s “the best indicator of where we are.” On the one hand, death counts offer finality, but they’re a lagging signal and don’t account for people who suffered from significant illness but survived. Case counts, on the other hand, depend on which and how many people happen to get tested. Presumably, hospitalization numbers provide a more stable and reliable gauge of the pandemic’s true toll, in terms of severe disease. But a new, nationwide study of hospitalization records, released as a preprint today (and not yet formally peer reviewed), suggests that the meaning of this gauge can easily be misinterpreted—and that it has been shifting over time.

If you want to make sense of the number of COVID hospitalizations at any given time, you need to know how sick each patient actually is. Until now, that’s been almost impossible to suss out. The federal government requires hospitals to report every patient who tests positive for COVID, yet the overall tallies of COVID hospitalizations, made available on various state and federal dashboards and widely reported on by the media, do not differentiate based on severity of illness. Some patients need extensive medical intervention, such as getting intubated. Others require supplemental oxygen or administration of the steroid dexamethasone. But there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, too, who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath. Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission. How many patients fall into each category has been a topic of much speculation. In August, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System decided to find out.

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

Notes and commentary from Scott Girard: 

“While Heinrich allowed schools to use their premises for child care and youth recreational activities, the government barred students from attending Mass, receiving Holy Communion at weekly Masses with their classmates and teachers, receiving the sacrament of Confession at school, participating in communal prayer with their peers, and going on retreats and service missions throughout the area.”

Additional commentary:

“Reasonable” should mean that the public health authorities followed their own internal guidelines for evaluating regulations. These include posting the scientific evidence leading to the regulation, receiving community input, and studying the effectiveness and sustainability of the regulation. In the case of Covid and the schools all this was ignored in Dane County. There was no evidence of transmission in children of school age at the start, the community’s wish to have the schools open was ignored and, over time, it was seen that surrounding counties kept their schools open without increasing Covid transmission – and this last point was completely ignored by Dane County. But the Supreme Court didn’t address the issue of irresponsible public health officials. Perhaps it cannot as Owen pointed out. Perhaps dereliction of duty must be addressed by criminal courts. Instead the Supreme Court answered a different question which might be put as follows: suppose a majority of children in a given community refused the regular vaccines – or refuse the covid vaccine – can the public health authorities close the school? The answer was no. This is significant because racism has been defined as a public health issue. Suppose a majority of parents refused to allow their children to attend a CRT seminar defined as immunization against racism and required for admittance to school. Could the public health authorities close that school. No. In the past certain religious tests have been required before attendance at universities was allowed and non-conforming universites have been closed. If racism is a public health issue the Test Acts may return as public health tests and if that happened we may be sure Dane County would adopt Test Regulations closing non-conforming public schools if it could. Then this Court decision, barring such Test Regulations, would seem far-sighted.

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.

John McWhorter:

In a word, phonics. About one in four words is spelled in an illogical way, and the phonics teacher stirs these words into the curriculum gradually, like little Sno-Caps into ice cream. But the ice cream itself is learning what sounds the letters stand for.

Scientific investigators of how children learn to read have proved repeatedly that phonics works better for more children. Project Follow Through, a huge investigation in the late 1960s led by education scholar Siegfried Englemann, taught 75,000 children via the phonics-based Direct Instruction method from kindergarten through third grade at 10 sites nationwide. The results were polio-vaccine-level dramatic. At all 10 sites, 4-year-olds were reading like 8-year-olds, for example.

Crucially, the method works well with poor as well as affluent children. Just a couple decades ago, the method was still kicking serious butt where it was implemented. In Richmond, Va., the mostly Black public school district was mired in only a 40 percent passage rate on the state reading test until the district started teaching the phonics way, upon which in just four years passage rates were up to 74 percent.

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.

Michael Shellenbergersschsh

Rather than address racial disparities the governor’s appointees are lowering educational standards for all children. Most nations, including developing ones like Zimbabwe, require students to have three or more years of algebra, and require students seeking science and technology careers to have five. But the governor’s appointees on the State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Commission recently recommended that public school students should take the same math classes in middle school through their sophomore year of high school instead of allowing high-achieving students to take advanced or even traditional math courses starting in the sixth grade.

People rightly worry about the cost, but there is plenty of money. California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax, and highest sales tax in the United States. It spends significantly more than other states on homelessness and mental illness. We have a $80 billion budget surplus. And yet we have the worst outcomes.

Michael Shellenberger:

Rather than address racial disparities the governor’s appointees are lowering educational standards for all children. Most nations, including developing ones like Zimbabwe, require students to have three or more years of algebra, and require students seeking science and technology careers to have five. But the governor’s appointees on the State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Commission recently recommended that public school students should take the same math classes in middle school through their sophomore year of high school instead of allowing high-achieving students to take advanced or even traditional math courses starting in the sixth grade.

People rightly worry about the cost, but there is plenty of money. California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax, and highest sales tax in the United States. It spends significantly more than other states on homelessness and mental illness. We have a $80 billion budget surplus. And yet we have the worst outcomes.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

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.

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.

Max Hodak:

The last 30 years have been an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity for much of the world. It’s easy to miss just how anomalous this is historically. There is absolutely no guarantee that the future will be so bright, and on the contrary, there are now many plausible scenarios in which we head into highly stable dystopias. The most we can do for our children is to prevent this.

This is not my favorite thing I have posted on this site, since as should be clear, CSAM is indefensible, and I know that some will confuse my position as somehow protecting it. And further, given how seats of power all over the world know how valuable it would be to kill strong encryption, it seems foolish to draw attention to myself as being across the table from them. But, given the kind of products I work on, I felt it was important to make a statement of principle here. I believe strongly in these principles, and if we’re not willing to defend our freedom when it is threatened, we don’t deserve to keep it.

DiDi Tang:

The gesture of defiance came after a crackdown on dissent and free speech in the territory under Beijing’s new security law. Hong Kong’s protest movement has been shut down by the threat of jail and independent media outlets have been hounded into closure.

The suspects, two men and three women aged between 25 and 28, were accused of “inciting hatred among the public, especially

Mark Lorch:

Children are always going to find cunning ways to bunk off school, and the latest trick is to fake a positive Covid-19 lateral flow test (LFT) using soft drinks. [Videos of the trick have been circulating on TikTok since December and a school in Liverpool, UK, recently wrote to parents to warn them about it.] So how are fruit juices, cola and devious kids fooling the tests, and is there a way to tell a fake positive result from a real one? I’ve tried to find out.

First, I thought it best to check the claims, so I cracked open bottles of cola and orange juice, then deposited a few drops directly onto LFTs. Sure enough, a few minutes later, two lines appeared on each test, supposedly indicating the presence of the virus that causes Covid-19.

It’s worth understanding how the tests work. If you open up an LFT device, you’ll find a strip of paper-like material, called nitrocellulose, and a small red pad, hidden under the plastic casing below the T-line. Absorbed on the red pad are antibodies that bind to the Covid-19 virus. They are also attached to gold nanoparticles (tiny particles of gold actually appear red), which allow us to see where the antibodies are on the device. When you do a test, you mix your sample with a liquid buffer solution, ensuring the sample stays at an optimum pH, before dripping it on the strip.

Tim Odegard

As a result, a push to transform reading instruction is underway in classrooms across the nation. A transformation motivated by an honest acknowledgment of reality – most children in the United States struggle to read. These struggles are not the exception reserved for the minority of kids with a disability – such as dyslexia. No, they are the status quo. And sadly, this has been the case for decades. Sure, we can quibble over tests used to make this claim. But at the end of the day, multiple data sources indicate that most students in the nation struggle to read words strung together into text passages and answer questions about what they read. This is a fundamental problem and one that is largely preventable. Yet, we have not found the collective will to prevent this calamity that breaks parents’ hearts, teachers’ backs and causes untold suffering for children.

To be clear, the reality facing parents as they painfully watch their children struggling to read has not gone unseen. Their pleas for help are palpable, and the desperation of parents in the U.S. has led to laws being passed across the nation in an attempt to help their children. As a result, almost every state in the U.S. now has some form of legislation specifically addressing the needs of students with dyslexia – a trend that alarmed me from the start. I am leery of such laws. However, I am not a skeptic who does not “believe” the overwhelming science indicating that a minority of students have extreme difficulties learning to read and spell. The science in this regard is vast and compelling.

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.

Alexandra Olins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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

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

Channel3000:

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a demand letter, on behalf of a group of concerned parents, to Elmbrook Schools urging immediate action to remove sexually explicit materials available through the district’s online library that violate state law and parents’ constitutional rights. At least three books and ebooks in the Elmbrook School system, which were until very recently available to children as young as 3rd grade, feature graphic instructions on sex acts and the use of online sex apps. The books are still available to 6th graders.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, said, “School districts have an obligation to know if their library collections feature sexually explicit material available to young children. Elmbrook needs to immediately address this content and make clear to District parents that they take this matter seriously.”

Background: Recently, the parent of a sixteen-year-old Elmbrook student used that student’s school-issued Chromebook to access Sora, a school-sponsored app that makes available Elmbrook’s ebook and audiobook collection to students “for all levels – preschool to adult,” and confirmed access to sexually explicit material. Another book is available in a middle school library.

The content that has parents concerned include:

David Wallace-Wells

This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease. The preliminary mortality data from China was very clear: To children, COVID-19 represented only a vanishingly tiny threat of death, hospitalization, or severe disease.

Yet for a year and a half we have been largely unwilling to fully believe it. Children now wear masks at little-league games, and at the swimming pool, and when school reopens in the fall they will likely wear masks there, too. But the kids are not at risk themselves, and never were. Now, thanks to vaccines, the vast majority of their parents and grandparents aren’t any longer, either.

But first: the kids. Over the course of the pandemic, 49,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died of all causes, according to the CDC. Only 331 of those deaths have been from COVID — less than half as many as have died of pneumonia. In 2019, more than 2,000 American kids and teenagers died in car crashes; each year about a thousand die from drowning. More American children die in an average year from RSV — another respiratory ailment, whose prevalence is now growing because 18 months of quarantine have deprived young children of immune exposure — than died in either of the last two years from COVID-19.

Some of these comparisons aren’t so neat, since the extraordinary precautions against COVID-19 prevented significant additional spread (and also suppressed the spread of other diseases). But, last year, fewer kids died of COVID-19 than of heart disease, “malignant neopolasms,” suicide, and homicide — not to mention birth defects, which killed hundreds of times more. All told, 600,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID over the course of the pandemic; just 0.05 percent of those were under the age of 18, a population that represents more than 20 percent of the country’s population as a whole.

Risk is a tricky thing, the spread of the Delta variant and the complications of “long COVID” both real concerns, and all parents should assess their own comfort, and those of their children, in making plans and taking precautions. But very few of them, two summers ago, were sending their children to parks and pools and camps in masks out of fear of pneumonia or flu. Probably fewer were keeping them home entirely.

This summer, the calculations are very different than they were even last year, when the virus was still spreading wildly in an entirely unvaccinated population. That’s because, in the depths of a pandemic as we were then, individuals are not just individuals but links in a chain of transmission, which is the main reason why, for much of the last 18 months, public-health officials have worried over infections in the young — assuming they would eventually help bring the disease back to those much more vulnerable.

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

Simon Sarris:

Agency is the capacity to act. More subtly: An individual’s life can continue, with a certain inertia, that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most people today more-or-less know what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life—being in some kind of school (the “doing” is almost more “being told what to do”). Beyond that age there is of course the proverbial worker, in modern stories usually an office worker, who is often so inert that he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality (that forces him out of his inertia, and in doing so the story begins).

Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a message boy is one opportunity, asking how to operate the telegraph is another. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan. And of course no one has to write a book, or start a company. But imagine instead if Carnegie or Da Vinci were compelled to stay in school for ten more years instead. What would have happened?

Lant Pritchett in conversation with Ann Bernstein:

Ann Bernstein: Let’s move to education now. You’ve made a controversial statement, which forms part of the title of your book, that ‘schooling ain’t learning’. And more recently, you’ve followed that up with ‘spending ain’t investment’. What do you mean by these phrases and why are they so important?

Lant Pritchett: In the post-World War II period, at the start of the ‘development era’, there was a UN Declaration of Human Rights, which declared in Article 26 that every child had a right to education. What everyone meant by ‘education’ was that children would acquire the skills and capabilities they needed to be successful adults in their society: literacy, numeracy, thinking skills, and an array of other skills.

Subsequently, in countries around the world, there have been huge successes in putting ‘butts in seats’. Unfortunately, this has not, by and large, been accompanied by increases in the levels of education. There are many countries in the world where the skills acquired per unit of time in school is so small that children emerge from up to 10 years of schooling fundamentally ill-equipped for the world they face. So, we cannot simply assume that schooling is learning.

The extension of that idea is ‘spending ain’t investment’. It is only ‘investment’ if it works. If I worship a god of the ocean, and I throw gold into the ocean, and call that investment in my prosperity, I have made a mistake because there is no causal link between my spending and my prosperity. Unless you are causally right about the chain of events that leads from your spending to the desired outcomes, you can spend all you want and not actually improve outcomes. In Indonesia, which is a reasonably well functioning country, teacher’s pay was doubled and the amount of spending per child tripled over the past 20 years, yet learning has not budged a bit; if anything, it has deteriorated. I think people have confused ticking the box of spending money on a budget item called ‘Education’, with true investment in human beings.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

The Economist:

The immense harm this has done to children’s prospects might be justified if closing classrooms were one of the best ways of preventing lethal infections among adults. But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. Many have kept schools shut even as bars and restaurants open, either to appease teachers’ unions, whose members get paid whether they teach in person or not, or to placate nervous parents.

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.

The Economist:

n the first three months of the pandemic Shawnie Bennett, a single mother from Oakland in California, lost her job and her brother, who died of covid-19. Grief made the trials of lockdown more difficult—including that of helping her eight-year-old daughter, Xa’viar, continue her schooling online. In November Ms Bennett signed her daughter up for online classes provided by a local parents’ group, which arranged for her to see a tutor every Saturday morning. A test this month showed that her reading skills are improving fast.

The weekend lessons are among several online services created over the past year by The Oakland Reach, an advocacy group. Less than a third of black and brown children in Oakland read at their grade level, says Lakisha Young, its co-founder. For five years her group has lobbied for improvements to their schooling. But when learning shifted online it began hiring teachers to work with children directly. Ms Young thinks families who have benefited from this will demand more from their schools in future; the local district has already found cash to adopt and expand some of her group’s work. She says the pandemic brought a moment “to create the things we have been fighting our asses off for”.

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.