Melissa Korn:

The University of Chicago has agreed to pay $13.5 million to settle a lawsuit in which it was accused of illegally colluding with other top universities to limit financial aid to students, making it the first defendant in the case to settle, according to a court filing Monday. 

The lawsuit, filed in Illinois federal court in January 2022, accuses 17 colleges and universities, including most members of the Ivy League, Duke University, Vanderbilt University and the California Institute of Technology, of engaging in price fixing by using a shared methodology to calculate applicants’ financial need.

Frederick Hess

Across the land, parents are starting to get their kids ready for the new school year. In talking to parents, you can hear relief—and an undercurrent of angst. The last few years have been tumultuous for the relationship between parents and schools. The disruptions of school closure and spotty remote learning were followed by masking fights, learning loss, and fierce culture clashes.

It’s been a trying time for parents and educators, alike. But it’s one that also offers the much-needed opportunity, as I suggest in The Great School Rethink, to reset the dysfunctional relationship between families and schools.

AbdulAzeez Sherif

In programming, an algorithm is a set of instructions or a procedure for solving a specific problem or achieving a specific task. Algorithms can be expressed in any programming language and can be as simple as a sequence of basic operations or as complex as a multi-step process involving different data structures and logic. The main goal of an algorithm is to take in input, process it and provide an output that is expected. Algorithms can be classified based on the time and space complexity, the technique used for solving the problem, and the type of problem it solves. Examples of algorithm are sorting, searching, graph traversals, string manipulations, mathematical operations, and many more.

Algorithms we will be talking about:

Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, John Friedman

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

JT Cestkowski

A report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum (WPF) found that the Madison area lost over 8,000 jobs between 2019 and 2022, led in part by declines in the technology sector.

WPF released the report, which broke down the statewide labor market using data from the federal Department of Labor Statistics, Thursday.

It showed Wisconsin lost 52,220 jobs compared to pre-pandemic employment levels. This despite the fact that the state unemployment rate remains near a historic low of 2.5 percent.

Joe Peterangelo, a senior researcher with WPF said that Wisconsin workers made wage gains that outpaced inflation over the three year period focused on in the report. 

The report also broke down employment numbers for Wisconsin’s three largest metropolitan areas: Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.

Chase:

In English, it turns out that how a word is spelled has some confusing and often inconsistent rules with respect to how the word should sound. A notorious example of this incongruity is with the letters “ough”. It turns out that this can be pronounced in 9 different ways, as shown by these representative words: rough, plough, through, though, thought, thorough, cough, hiccough, and lough (ends in a “k” sound!).

You may have heard of the “long” and “short” vowels, perhaps in elementary school. These words aren’t that precise, because these phonemes aren’t always stated for a longer or shorter time. But it’s a quick way to remember 10 phonemes – the long and short versions of “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u”. With respect to spelling, I did want to point out one surprising thing. In the American dialect, the “short o” phoneme (/ɑ/) does not involve rounding your lips. Say “top” or “box” out loud, and you’ll see what I mean. “Nacho” and “father” also use this, too. In British english, “top” and “box” use the rounded version of this phoneme: /ɒ/. It’s possible you’re slightly in between the two.

Ed Pozzuoli:

As public schools across Florida get ready to open, parents have greater choices and control than ever for their children. This state policy providing parents more and better educational choices started over 20 years ago and continues today. The focus on student achievement, as opposed to adult interests, has launched Florida students to the top of class. 

According to U.S. News & World Report, Florida ranks No. 1 nationally this year for education, with higher education, in particular, top-ranked. The state recently earned its highest-ever NAEP rankings for grades 4 and 8, with top-five scores in key categories — all along with the continuation of two decades of narrowing “achievement gaps” for minority, low-income and disabled students. 

While high-profile national political leaders take issue with a couple words in Florida’s new 216-page Black history curriculum, Florida continues to make learning and achievements gains on behalf of all students, particularly students of color. Florida is one of only a few states committed to teaching Black history as an expressed part of the required curriculum.

Keri Ingraham:

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

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

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

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

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

By Reihan Salam

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

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

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

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

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

By Paulina Cachero and Claire Ballentine

Federal student loan bills return in October. But a growing chorus of borrowers say they simply can’t, or won’t pay.

That includes Amanda Acevedo, 37, who is raising three kids on a radiographer’s salary and has $40,000 in student debt. For the past three years, she and millions of other Americans didn’t need to worry about student loans after payments were paused at the start of the pandemic. The forbearance allowed her to pay off credit card debt and save for a down payment on a house in Orlando.

Mpsprd:

We have two kids who were raised essentially screen-free until 3, then on a 1hr a week diet until 6. We worried all the time about the transition to school, and the cultural norm of allowing a lot more screen time. This was an imagined dragon – this has not been an issue at all. My oldest just got a Switch, she plays less than 1/2hr a day – then she walks away without issue. She has friends with phones and iWatches (she has neither) and her envy level is zero.

My point here is not that we’ve done anything right, or wrong, or to emulate. Instead, I say this point out the I’ve had to learn to worry about, and address, the real issues – when they become real. There are not enough hours in the day to worry about all theoretical mistakes I’m making as a a parent. I choose to focus on the actual, observable, issues we are having.

For what it’s worth – many of our neighbors have kids that play all the time on the Switch, have phones, and watch TV every car ride anywhere, and those kids are LOVELY. They aren’t screen demons – and they aren’t behind in math, reading, eating vegetables… I think it could be it doesn’t really matter as much as it gets focused on.

Samuel Velasco:

They looked exactly as expected: a wall of white, peppered with black specks for smaller integers. “We expected the black dots to peter out,” Stange said. Rickards added, “I thought maybe it would even be possible to prove they peter out.” He speculated that by looking at charts that synthesized many packings together, the team would be able to prove results that weren’t possible when they looked at any one packing on its own.

While Stange was away, Haag wound up plotting every pair of remainders — about 120. No surprises there. Then she went big.

Haag had been plotting how 1,000 integers interact. (The graph is bigger than it sounds, since it involves 1 million possible pairs.) Then she cranked the dial up to 10,000 times 10,000. In one graph, regular rows and columns of black specks refused to dissolve. It looked nothing like what the local-global conjecture would predict.

The team met on a Monday after Stange returned. Haag presented her graphs, and they all focused on the one with the weird dots. “It was just a continual pattern,” Haag said. “And that was when Kate said, ‘What if the local-global conjecture isn’t true?’”

"Crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried was scheduled to speak to a Stanford class this winter, The Daily has learned. The topic of the course? Tech ethics." This and more previously unreported details in my latest piece:https://t.co/ObbD8alY4z

— Theo Baker (@tab_delete) August 13, 2023

Amelia Ferrell Knisely

West Virginia University leaders have recommended discontinuing 32 of its majors at its Morgantown campus as the school is feverishly working to make up for a multi-million budget shortfall. 

The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts. 

Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources.

The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.

“My colleagues and I are still in shock; it’s inconceivable that our state flagship, R1, land-grant university, the place where we’ve all built our homes, careers and lives is completely eliminating the teaching of languages,” said Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian Studies. 

The university is also reviewing plans to eliminate the language requirement for all majors. “Eliminating language instruction will close avenues of opportunity, career advancement, and personal fulfillment for current and future WVU students,” she added.

Kansas Reflector:

In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.

Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.

The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.

Chris Freeland:

Four months after the disappointing decision on summary judgment in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a number of papers were filed today in the district court, and then the judge is expected to make his final judgment. We expect that, at least while the appeal is pending, there will be changes to our lending program, but the full scope of those changes is a question pending with the district court. We will provide an update on those changes once the district court decision is final.

Our fight is far from over—We remain steadfast in our belief that libraries should be able to own, preserve, and lend digital books outside of the confines of temporary licensed access. We believe that the judge made errors of law and fact in the decision, and we will appeal.

New Reform:

Would not an argument for wrongful harassment depend on your showing that Wax made the alleged disparaging statement to Allen precisely because Allen was a Black person? But you do not allege that—in fact, the real “problem” is not that Professor Wax had singled out Professor Allen or other Black members of the Penn community, but that Professor Wax makes these statements in public, all the time, to one-and-all. The real “problem” is that you disagree with the purportedly illiberal content of her alleged statements.

If your point is that Professor Wax broke an academic norm because she made a disparaging statement about gay people to Professor Wolff, a gay person, but her statement would otherwise be A-OK had her audience been entirely absent any gay person, then you are (again) advocating intellectual apartheid for your university. Would not an argument for wrongful harassment depend on your showing that Wax made the alleged disparaging statement during the panel discussion precisely because Wolff, her fellow panelist, was a gay person? But you do not allege that—in fact, the real “problem” is not that Professor Wax had singled out Professor Wolff or other gay members of the Penn community, but that Professor Wax makes these statements in public, all the time, to one-and-all. The real “problem” is that you disagree with the purportedly illiberal content of her alleged statements.

Your framing the issue here, i.e., Professor Wax’s speech, in terms of discriminatory conduct or harassment is simply a cover—to make the censorship of ideas in an academic setting appear palatable.

William Jacobson:

Varney (00:04): The University of Nebraska Lincoln was just hit with a civil rights complaint. It’s over a program for black filmmakers. William Jacobson is the Cornell University law professor and joins me now. Professor, is it legit that a university in America today has a program specifically for black filmmakers? Is that okay with you?

WAJ (00:28): No, it’s not okay. And that’s why we have filed a complaint over it, because this is a program which is racially exclusionary.  You can only apply for it if you are a black filmmaker. If you just reverse the roles, if they had a program that was only for white filmmakers, it would be a national story. It would be outrage everywhere. But for some reason, universities seem to think discrimination is okay, depending which direction it targets.

Varney (00:54): It seems like we’re trying to end all racial preferences, whether it’s in corporations or colleges or high schools or wherever. Is that your goal?

Dave Karpf:

Let’s dip back into the pages of 90s-era WIRED magazine. There are a pair of articles that illustrate who the old WIRED ideology was aligned against . Both stories use grandstanding wagers to make a broader point about the expected trajectory of society.

I’ve written previously about who the heroes were in the 90’s tech optimist narrative. I’ve also written about the continued relevance of the worldview. The magazine is no longer the intensely ideological outfit that it once was, but today’s tech moguls are staunch disciples of its teachings.

So today I want to talk about the people who get framed as villains in this narrative. The villains represented everything that WIRED’s masthead thought was ailing contemporary society. They were worriers, instead of optimists. They believed governments, not entrepreneurial capitalists, ought to be the main arena for sorting through social transformations. Instead of showing faith in the emancipatory potential of Moore’s Law and the gospel of abundance economics, they fretted over the “limits to growth.”

It’s something that has occasionally bogged me down while reading through the WIRED back catalog.

Arbesman

Searching for Computing Wonders

Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder. Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it’s creative coding and simulated cities, code poetry and bulletin board systems. It’s websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart sing. And it’s sometimes even spreadsheets, coerced to dance and do all manner of weirdness. All of these approaches to computing are what am collecting here, and bundling under the term “garden of computational delights.” This is a list of places that collect or catalyze sources for being enraptured by the web, programming, and the wider world of computing. Or, as per Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan, this is a garden of all the different places you might discover where “the computer is a feeling.”

Matt Taibbi:

“[Judge] Willett put the mob analogy in even plainer language, saying the government’s behavior was a “fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming,” as in, “That’s a really nice social media platform you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.””

more:

that statements from White House officials about content like, “[I’m] wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP” do not constitute coercion. At one point Tenny was among other things saying the state couldn’t be coercing social media companies if, for instance, the FBI only succeeded in getting material taken down 50% of the time. “The idea that social media companies had to bend to the FBI’s will, when half the time they didn’t, just doesn’t support those theories.”

This inspired the following exchange between Tenny and Judge Don Willett:

WILLETT: Does coercion necessarily entail a threat, either overt or covert? Isn’t a directive itself enough to constitute unconstitutional coercion, absent an “or else” consequence?

TENNY: I guess I’m not sure what a directive means without a threat like—

WILLETT: “Do this, why haven’t you done this? Get this done. F-bomb do this.”

Willet was referring to a series of emails that included a July 15, 2021 communication from White House official Rob Flaherty reading, “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today”:

Eric Winsberg:

In 2023, nothing seems more obvious than the fact that doctors should wash their hands in between patients. But this wasn’t always the case. And we owe our knowledge of this “obvious” fact to one of the most famous scientific dissidents in history: Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1846, the Vienna General Hospital had two free obstetric clinics, where underprivileged women, including prostitutes, could go to receive not only child-birthing services, but also free postpartum care for their infants. In return for the free services, the new mothers agreed to be used as subjects for the training of doctors (in the first clinic) and midwives (in the second). But giving birth in the first clinic was extremely dangerous.

Matt Taibbi:

Two sets of figures, collected four years apart by the research firm SSRS, for CNN: 

• Donald Trump, September, 2019: Strongly Disapprove, 48%. Strongly Approve, 28%
• Joe Biden, August, 2023: Strongly Disapprove, 42%. Strongly Approve, 15%

Plunging numbers for Trump prompted stories like, “Tldr: Trump’s in 2020 Trouble.” Biden headlines this week try to speak an upbeat narrative into reality, the most humorous probably being “Biden Heads West For a Policy Victory Lap” and “Biden Goes West to Tout The Economy.” According to a slew of reports the president’s “touting” trip celebrates “growth in manufacturing,” and opportunities afforded by the Inflation Reduction and Chips and Science Acts. “You can expect us to highlight more groundbreakings of projects, more ribbon-cuttings,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian told the Washington Post.

Laura McKenna:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annika Bahnsen

Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified will leave the California School Boards Association, a statewide coalition that provides school districts with training, advocacy and policy analysis assistance, a school board majority decided Tuesday, Aug. 8.

PYLUSD will be the only district in Orange County that is not a member of the CSBA. According to the CSBA’s website, more than 96% of California school district . . .

Denise-Marie Ordway

Resourceful journalists find other ways to get that information. Here are eight of them.

1. Go to the Library

Public libraries often subscribe to academic journals and anyone with a library card can read them. The good news for busy journalists is some libraries allow their users to access online databases of peer-reviewed research from any location.

US colleges and universities provide online access to academic journals through their academic libraries. State university libraries generally are open to the public. Private institutions often extend library privileges to alumni.

2. Ask Academic Journals for a Free Account

Many of the most popular journals give journalists complimentary access, although some limit free accounts to journalists covering specific topics or beats. The American Economic Association (AEA), for instance, offers news media professionals free access to all eight of its journals, including the American Economic Review. You can request an account through the association’s press page.

Meg Kinnard;

Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamyon Thursday voiced support for changing the overall U.S. voting age to 25, unless younger Americans fulfill at least six months of service in the military or as a first responder — or pass the same citizenship test administered to those seeking to become naturalized citizens.

Ramaswamy’s campaign announced the biotech entrepreneur and “anti-woke” activist’s push for a U.S. Constitutional amendment promoting “civic duty voting,” which he announced in a news release and detailed during a campaign event in Urbandale, Iowa.

Revising the Constitution is no simple task, requiring overwhelming support in Congress and in state legislatures. Still, Ramaswamy said in his release that the “absence of national pride is a serious threat to the future of our country” and argued his proposal “can create a sense of shared purpose and responsibility amongst young Americans to become educated citizens.”

On Twitter during his Iowa event, Ramaswamy acknowledged, “I understand not everyone will like this proposal and that it will take persuasion to convince many of its merits, but I’m ready to take that on.”

BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS

Across the country, students have been absentat record rates since schools reopened during the pandemic. More than a quarter of students missed at least 10% of the 2021-22 school year, making them chronically absent, according to the most recent data available. Before the pandemic, only 15% of students missed that much school. 

All told, an estimated 6.5 million additional students became chronically absent, according to the data, which was compiled by Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee in partnership with The Associated Press. Taken together, the data from 40 states and Washington, D.C., provides the most comprehensive accounting of absenteeism nationwide. Absences were more prevalent among Latino, Black and low-income students, according to Dee’s analysis.

The absences come on top of time students missed during school closures and pandemic disruptions. They cost crucial classroom time as schools work to recover from massive learning setbacks.

Absent students miss out not only on instruction but also on all the other things schools provide — meals, counseling, socialization. In the end, students who are chronically absent — missing 18 or more days a year, in most places — are at higher risk of not learning to read and eventually dropping out. 

“The long-term consequences of disengaging from school are devastating. And the pandemic has absolutely made things worse and for more students,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit addressing chronic absenteeism.

Related: Taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public health mandates and closed schools.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Why is a teachers union impeding the ability of a private group to meet? Is it because that group would highlight the literal decades of failure in Milwaukee overseen by the MTEA? https://t.co/drkUYuySuS

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) August 10, 2023

Larissa Phillips

If it wasn’t the Covid closures, maybe it was the recording of a contentious school board meetingthat went viral. Or a TikTok video posted by a woke teacher. Or perhaps the relentless reports of declining academic standards. Given the heated discourse around almost every aspect of public education, it’s hardly surprising that more and more families are opting out. According to the Census Experimental Household Pulse survey, in the last three years, the families of 1.8 million children made the switch, totaling 4.3 million American children homeschooled in 2022. The growth is steady and expected to continue. But glib calls to jump ship gloss over some persistent challenges inherent in homeschooling.

I discovered these challenges firsthand thirteen years ago when my family moved from Brooklyn to rural upstate New York and began homeschooling our kids, then six and eleven. We were less motivated by school board battles or declining academic standards than a general dissatisfaction with the one-size-fits-all classroom model. In Brooklyn, my kids had gone to a lively, sought-after public school that emphasized project-based learning within an otherwise traditional classroom. Even that school had been a poor fit for my quirky older child. I thought he was neither nurtured to his full potential nor assisted in his difficulties coping with the rhythms of the school day. My younger child was sociable, poised, and academically adept, which meant she was often ignored by teachers and partnered with difficult kids to keep them focused. The fault, I thought, lay not in the choice of teachers or curriculum, but in the very concept of assembly-line education for children, a common complaint of homeschooling enthusiasts. Coloring my opinion was the memory of my own uninspiring school years. We were ready for something different. We jumped in.

Paul Sperry:

The original article by the Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, was published the same day as the New York Post’s pre-election scoop revealing that Joe Biden had attended a 2015 dinner with a top executive of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, which was paying his son $83,000 per month. Kessler’s fact-check involved interviews with a host of Biden aides who vehemently disputed the vice president’s attendance at the dinner and advanced the theory that the source of the information – a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop – was untrustworthy and possibly a Russian plant.

That conspiracy theory was quickly embraced by 51 former intelligence officials, who signed an open letter dismissing the New York Post’s scoop as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This letter and the Washington Post fact check were used by the Biden campaign, other media outlets, and social media platforms to discredit the information contained on the laptop in the final days of the campaign. The article, Kessler would later boast, was “one of the most read articles in our 13-year history” of the fact-checking feature.

But Kessler’s fact check has not aged well. Just last week Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, testified before Congress that the article was “not correct reporting.” Instead of retracting the article – as the Post did with some of its debunked Russiagate coverage – or running a straightforward correction, the paper has appended a series of “updates” to its reporting.

More, here.

David Mastio

This fall, the University of California system is growing its freshman class by 3,017 slots from 85,268 students to 88,285. Black students aren’t getting a single one of the new slots according to preliminary University of California data analyzed by The Center Square.

• Hispanics gained 1,435 slots in the newly expanded freshman class.
• Whites gained 982 spots in the class.
• Asian Americans grew by 359 positions.
• Native Americans obtained 60 additional admissions.

African-Americans remained exactly the same with 4,855 spots in the freshman class in 2022 and 2023 while their percentage of those admitted to the freshman class declined 17% from 6% of all incoming freshmen in 2022 to 5% of freshmen in 2023. If Blacks had remained the same proportion of the class, they would have gained more than 150 seats in freshman classrooms.

Jimmy Ewing:

It worked like this: an enterprising homeschool mom compiled a list of all the moms’ home phone lines because nobody, except rich dads, had cell phones. She would take that list to Kinko’s and make duplicates to distribute at the next homeschool gathering. When something interesting happened, whoever discovered the interesting thing would call the next person on the list and tell her all about that thing with breathless abandon. At no point were dads involved, ever. A man’s voice on the other end of the line would have caused panic and a run on the local banks. Thus, the dissemination of vital information was effected and dads were kept entirely in the dark for as long as possible. 

Unfortunately, hardly anyone owned answering machines until well into the 90s, so number 6 on the list might be forced to skip number 7 and go straight to 8 who sent her to 10 because she knew 9 was out of town and 7 had kids with strep. This went on in a round-robin format until, finally, the voice on the other end of the line said “Yes, I know about the thing; I’m the one who initiated the phone tree.” It was pure chaos. This phenomenon is likely being actively studied in laboratory rats today. I don’t know. 

Fortunately for me, Katherine Koonce’s generous offer to teach literature to homeschoolers trickled through the phone tree to my house, and I was sent up to the front lines. I have no idea what could possibly have possessed her to want to help us, but she did, and to say that the impact she had on my life was “profound” would be a dramatic understatement.

Great conversation about the meteoric explosion of high schoolers taking college classes with @MLynchOnAir at @KMOX, one of the largest talk radio stations in the country. Listen to the 7-min segment on dual enrollment here: https://t.co/Q9OgAYlRHw

— Jill Barshay (@jillbarshay) August 9, 2023

Kelly Meyerhofer:

In Wisconsin, few colleges and universities consider “legacy” status in admissions decisions, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel review. And because most Wisconsin schools accept far more students than they reject, it’s likely many legacy students would have gotten in regardless of their family’s history of attendance.

But there’s another way in which legacy can benefit already advantaged students: Some schools offer scholarships specifically for students with a family member who graduated from there. At least 13 Wisconsin institutions do, according to the news organization’s review of 28 school scholarship websites.

Richard Kahlenberg, a nonresident scholar at Georgetown University and longtime critic of legacy preference, called legacy scholarships “equally troubling.” He urged institutions to phase them out, especially if scholarship criteria don’t consider other factors, too, such as financial need.

“To the extent that (schools are) trying to diversify in new ways after the Supreme Court ruling, then having a scholarship for legacy students seems counterproductive,” he said.

Melissa Korn, Andrea Fuller and Jennifer S. Forsyth

The nation’s best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. 

Then they passed the bill along to students.

The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one of America’s poorest states, paid an average $18,693 to attend in 2021-22. 

Pennsylvania State University spent so much money that it now has a budget crisis—even though it’s among the most expensive public universities in the U.S. 

The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program.

The spending is inextricably tied to the nation’s $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges poured out money in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects.

“Students do not have the resources right now to continue to foot the bill for all of the things that the university wants to do,” said Crispin South, a 2023 Oklahoma graduate. “You can’t just continue to raise revenue by turning to students.”

Rather, they raised prices far beyond what was needed to fill the hole. 

For every $1 lost in state support at those universities over the two decades, the median school increased tuition and fee revenue by nearly $2.40, more than covering the cuts, the Journal found.

SHOCK: Livingston, NJ @LivSchools school board called the police on me after I revealed I had been secretly recording their board meeting led by Superintendent Matt Block @DocBlockLPS exposing his diversity, equity and inclusion “audit” conducted by a mysterious firm called “A2Z” pic.twitter.com/qRjOpQtnpY

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) August 10, 2023

Conor Friedersdorf

Though accused of naked partisanship, the Court handed down multiple significant rulings where justices appointed by presidents of different parties were in the majority and minority together. Multiple majority decisions featured GOP-appointed justices ruling against the actions of GOP legislators. The Court generally ruled in ways that were consistent with the popular will, not at odds with it. (Polls aggregated by The New York Times suggest that just one ruling strayed significantly from public opinion––a case that recognized the Environmental Protection Agency’s statutory jurisdiction over permanent bodies of water while ruling that the Clean Water Act does not give it jurisdiction over wetlands.)

As for ideology, the Court’s judicial reasoning and outcomes alike suggest majorities that are more informed by small-l liberal values than the “right wing” or “extremist” values some antagonists allege. The justices safeguarded election integrity and voting rights in decisions that many Democrats cheered. And in two of the decisions that progressives complained about most, the Court stopped two powerful institutions from flagrantly discriminating against a racial-minority group and reined in a president who willfully exceeded his lawful authority by forgiving debt in a way that transferred wealth, overall, from poorer Americans to richer Americans.

Taken together, the majority decisions of 2023 reflected the justices reasoning their way to legally defensible and practically workable conclusions, whether or not you happen to agree with them. Nothing about those rulings provides any basis at all for calling the legitimacy of the Court into question, and those doing so are being as misleading as they are shortsighted and imprudent.

Jack Smith not only demanded access to Trump’s Twitter account, he demanded Twitter be barred from telling anyone about it for at least 6 months. Notice when these privacy-invading demands are made by countries such as Turkey, no one has any trouble decrying it as “authoritarian” pic.twitter.com/PwjpKg7Pza

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 9, 2023

"Why do we act more on Trump's tweets… and less on some clearly violating tweets from other world leaders?"

Twitter's Internal Communications head forwarded this from an employee to CEO Jack Dorsey on October 30, 2020. Trump was being "visibility filtered" before the vote. pic.twitter.com/Vd8DF5kypk

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) August 9, 2023

Today, @GovRonDeSantis suspended State Attorney Monique Worrell for dereliction of duty and incompetence.

Here are some examples of her policies or practices in action.

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 9, 2023

Daton Viel was arrested in March 2023 for sexual battery on a minor, as well as Lewd and Lascivious Molestation.

That arrest was made while Viel was on probation for another offense. Viel was still let out on bond.

This past weekend, Viel shot two Orlando Police Officers. pic.twitter.com/gMTIVgZvcS

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 9, 2023

Mr. Larry was released after all these arrests.

Worrell’s office did not act on any of these charges until *after* he killed his girlfriend and their unborn child.

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 9, 2023

.@Mike_Pence says today he was “deeply offended” that I don’t trust that the government told us the full truth in the 9/11 Commission Report. Well, I find it offensive that our government repeatedly lies to us. Here’s the TRUTH: the FBI quietly declassified documents in 2021… https://t.co/cfCAc44mJi

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) August 9, 2023

Thomas McKenna:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology used funding from a twice-sanctioned Chinese company to advance components of facial recognition technology, which its Chinese benefactor has reportedly used to track and imprison Uyghurs, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

China’s largest facial recognition company, SenseTime, donated an undisclosed amount of money to MIT in 2018. Twenty of the 22 research papers that donation funded, the Free Beacon found, focused on or mentioned “neural networks,” which are used in facial recognition technology. Fourteen of the papers, meanwhile, covered image data or image recognition algorithms. Two researchers associated with Zhejiang University, which works on classified projects for the Chinese military, co-authored one paper with MIT researchers on “artificial neural networks.”

While it’s unclear how SenseTime may have used the research it funded, the company’s facial recognition technology has reportedly helped China commit genocide. SenseTime’s tech is part of a “vast, secret system” the Chinese use to “track and control” Uyghurs, the New York Times reported in 2019. The Trump administration that year blacklisted SenseTime for its role in the “repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance” of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, preventing it from receiving technology or exporting it to the United States. Two years later, in 2021, the Biden administration banned U.S. investment in SenseTime.

Joanne Jacobs:

Juab School District in Utah focused on supporting students emotionally when schools reopened in fall of 2020. “We took care of our kids,” said Royd Darrington, assistant superintendent for Juab Schools. “I’ll be honest, academics was not at the forefront of what we were pushing our teachers to push to their students. It really wasn’t. It was, how do we build a sense of community?”

Wasatch School District, 100 miles away, focused on academics and continuity. “Our academic goals did not change one bit throughout the pandemic,” said Superintendent Paul Sweat. Extra Covid funding went for teacher training.

Ashlynn Warta:

In July of 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor sent an email to the university’s leadership cabinets requesting responses to three questions regarding “structural racism.” Through public records requests, the Martin Center obtained a copy of the many responses submitted over the following days by Chapel Hill’s academic and administrative units. Our previous article on this subject introduced the chancellor’s DEI questionnaire and examined some of the more extreme proposals supplied by respondents. Below, we look in greater detail at the “solutions” proposed by Chapel Hill’s various divisions and schools.

The questions posed by Chancellor Guskiewicz were as follows:

1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Carolina’s scholarly, co‐curricular, administrative and service efforts to identify and eliminate structural racism on our campus and beyond?

2. What should we be doing/what can you do to stand against structural racism and stand for equity within our/your school/unit?

3. How can we learn from and partner with other schools/units, institutions, organizations or communities in the region to be agents of change against structural racism?

The original email was sent to 40 people and garnered 38 responses. Those who submitted responses included (but were not limited to) the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the School of Information and Library Science, the UNC School of Government, the Office of the Provost, the UNC School of Nursing, the UNC School of Medicine, the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and the UNC School of Law.

Nearly all of the replies to Chancellor Guskiewicz’s questions were long-winded word salads.

Wall Street Journal:

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro disappointed thousands of parents on Thursday when he vetoed a $100 million voucher proposal he had supported before caving to unions and the Democratic-run House. But a pair of defections from anti-voucher ranks suggest the scholarships aren’t dead if Republicans use their legislative leverage.

Jared Gould:

With the Supreme Court recently banning the use of affirmative action in college admissions, some Americans are exploring alternative approaches to diversify university campuses, with some even supporting a shift toward income-based admissions.

A recent Intelligent.com survey involving 1,095 American respondents reveals that 1 in 3 Americans support the idea of college admissions taking an applicant’s socioeconomic status into account.

Support for using socioeconomic background hinges on the idea that lower-income students face greater educational challenges, lessening a poorer applicant’s chance of being admitted into college.

A small but positive development in the Massachusetts budget – @maura_healey vetoed the Reading Recovery earmark! Great call. More & more #MaEdu embraces early literacy instruction supported by the evidence. pic.twitter.com/xEXKl1Dgeo

— Michael Moriarty (@mmoriarty61) August 10, 2023

Notes and links on Reading Recovery (Madison is a long time user).

Scott Girard:

“I think that calculators are more similar to spellcheck than this,” said Edgerton High School English teacher Sue White. “This feels different because people are tricked into thinking that it can think.”

ChatGPT, which can be accessed online, allows users to ask a question or submit a prompt and receive an artificial intelligence-generated response. The language model, launched in November, is “capable of generating human-like text based on context and past conversations,” according to its developer, OpenAI.

Mars Subola, who teaches English at Madison East High School, described themself as somewhat naive about the artificial intelligence chatbot throughout the last school year. That changed in the year’s final weeks, as Subola noticed a “huge influx of writing that just didn’t seem like my kids’ writing.”

Subola discovered that more than a dozen students had ChatGPT write their papers for them.

“It just kind of felt like … they didn’t have the trust in themselves or in myself that we could create a solution to whatever problem they were facing,” Subola said. “They didn’t have to resort to ChatGPT and it just felt like these are really, really, really talented, intelligent, skilled writers who found a way out, I guess.”

The next time someone argues “public schools are for everyone,” show them this. Some are so desperate to keep families locked out of options that they hire PIs to investigate them. https://t.co/VMB8LL3SHo

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) August 9, 2023

David Zweig:

On April 17, 2020, with much of the country still in some form of lockdown and news of overwhelmed hospitals dominating the headlines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, was asked a question toward the end of a White House press briefing: Was there a possibility that this novel virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China?

“There was a study recently,” Fauci said confidently, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations that it took to get to where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” In other words, it wasn’t from the lab.

This moment set the template for much that would follow from Fauci over the next three years. That is, evasion, deception, and misdirection about his support of high-risk virology research and its connection to the possibility that a lab leak in Wuhan caused a worldwide catastrophe.

Fauci, who was the face of the public health community during the crisis, pushed the idea that the evidence strongly indicated that the virus was just a tragic, natural occurrence. He insisted, repeatedly, that an epidemic that started in Wuhan was unlikely to have been the result of an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). 

But Fauci had an incentive to arrive at his conclusion about the deadly pandemic that started in Wuhan. The WIV was known for doing high-risk virology research studying and manipulating coronaviruses. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for almost 40 years, had funded such research at the WIV.

Fauci’s posture—dismissive toward the theory of the lab leak, and later, condescending toward those who entertained it—set what became the accepted narrative about the origins of the pandemic. It was a narrative that was parroted by the government, public health officials, and the media, and even enforced by social media platforms at the request of the Biden White House.

But last month, a trove of explosive emails and other documents were released by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. These revealed evidence of Fauci’s and other officials’ behind-the-scenes involvement with scientists and journalists, demonstrating their efforts to quash the lab leak theory.

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

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

Commentary.

Sebastian Gutierrez:

Math is amazing in that there is a very clear learning path from 6 years old until a Math Ph.D. qualification exam, with everything in between.

So when you start to help a kid who loves math, do more math, it is very easy to start accelerating your kid down the math path from arithmetic to Calculus and beyond.

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically arithmetic all the way to pre-algebra, then algebra, geometry, algebra II, trigonometry, pre-calculus, and then calculus. You can more in-depth information about the USA’s  Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (PDF, Nov 2022) in the linked document.

This works great until the kid starts to get too far ahead of the school and then your kid runs into a bunch of related problems:

by JILL BARSHAY

Around 370 B.C., Plato wrote that his teacher Socrates fretted that writing things down would cause humans to become ignorant because they wouldn’t have to memorize anything. (Ironically, the only reason we know this is because it was written down in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” still available today.)  

Albert Einstein argued the opposite in 1921. “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts,” the Nobel laureate said, according to his biographer Philipp Frank. “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

But neither of these great thinkers could anticipate how the debate would play out in the Age of Google. Not long after the search engine company was founded in 1998, psychologists began to wonder how the ability to have so much information instantly available was changing our brains. A seminal 2011 paper established the so-called “Google effect,” our tendency to forget information that we can easily look up on the internet.

The researchers didn’t actually study how people use Google or any internet search engine. Instead they drafted a list of trivia items, such as the fact that an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. Then, in a series of experiments, they documented how university students were less likely to recall these facts when they thought they had saved them in a computer file for future reference. Students who were told they wouldn’t be able to refer to the trivia later did much better on recall assessments.

Eugene Volokh:

“Unfairly treated,” I take it, means in context treated in ways that the law recognizes as unfair and therefore civilly actionable. Who might benefit from that? (I focus here on American law, since that’s the only sort of law I know.)

[1.] Many people are unaware of this, but many states, counties, and cities ban even private employers from firing or otherwise disciplining their employees based on the employees’ speech or political activity. What’s covered varies widely: Some jurisdictions protect a very broad range of speech; others protect “political activity” defined broadly enough to protect a wide range of speech related to political matters; others protect only election-related speech (whether about candidates or ballot measures). There’s a map available here, and I also tried including it in this post (right after this paragraph), but a glitch is keeping it from appearing for at least some readers.

I lay out many such statutes in Private Employees’ Speech and Political Activity: Statutory Protection Against Employer Retaliation (2012) (note that Utah has since enacted such a statute), and discuss the policy arguments for and against such statutes in Should the Law Limit Private-Employer-Imposed Speech Restrictions?(2022). It’s also possible that a federal statute would protect people who Tweeted for or against political candidates, though that’s not clear (see pp. 320-24 of my 2012 article).

Scott Girard:

The complaint was made public in May following a public records request by NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas, whom LeMonds allegedly said was “quickly becoming the sleaziest journalist in Madison” and whom he called “a pig of a journalist.” LeMonds tried to fight the release of the complaint, which was responsive to Wadas’ records request, in court, arguing it did not meet the balancing test for what the public needed to know compared with the damage it would cause.

A judge ruled against him, however, and the documents related to the initial investigation were released in late May.

He remained working in his role until mid-June, when he was placed on paid leave. The letter placing him on leave, dated June 12, was also provided as part of Tuesday’s released records.

Chris Rickert:

The staff also told district investigators that LeMonds frequently expressed his disdain toward certain reporters, all of them women.

On Oct. 6, 2022, he allegedly told members of the district’s communications department that there was “no way” he would respond to three interview requests from an unnamed reporter, described as a woman of color, because he “didn’t like her.” In that same meeting, he asked staff to share any negative experiences they had with former Wisconsin State Journal reporter Elizabeth Beyer, whom he called “a horrible human being.”

He also reportedly called WMTV (Ch. 15) reporter Elizabeth Wadas “a pig of a journalist,” who was “quickly becoming the sleaziest journalist in Madison.”

LeMonds in June pointed to the district’s initial investigation findings as proof absolving him of the claims. Two months earlier he’d sued his employer to prevent the release of the records including those claims. That bid was denied in late May.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004–

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard:

Community members can now weigh in on the type of leader they’d like as the next Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent.

The district’s website now includes a “leadership profile” survey that will help the Madison School Board and its consultant on the search, Alma Advisory Group, develop a job description for the position when it’s posted this fall. Alma will also hold focus groups in early October with staff and “other stakeholders.”

The 14-question survey, open until early October, asks respondents to rate on a 1-5 scale the importance of various listed priorities for a superintendent and skills required for someone in the position.

Priorities listed on the survey include developing leaders, maintaining district financial health, closing the achievement gap, meeting student social and emotional needs, preparing students for college or careers, supporting staff, improving academic performance and ensuring student safety.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004–

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Victor Davis Hanson:

We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.

Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.

Free expression. In large swatches of American society—particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university—it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely. At a DEI workshop, politely object that “whiteness” does not account for all the challenges of “marginalized peoples,” and you will become either ostracized, reprimanded, or perhaps fired.

Suggest to a class that man-made climate change and the state remedies for it, are still under debate—and your career and livelihood are endangered. In 2020, state that Covid lockdowns would do more eventual damage than the virus—and your career was through. Express doubt that there are more than two biological sexes, and if an athlete or high school principal you will be shunned or rendered professionally inert.

The government, in league with social media, censors the news. “Liberal” universities often first require McCarthy-era type “diversity” statements for one to be hired. Commissars review syllabi to spot incorrect or improper speech or insufficient DEI zeal.

The Left now seeks to modify the First Amendment, and its empowerment of “hate speech,” defined as most anything impeding the progressive project. The state and the universities properly issue word lists of approved vocabularies.

The old ACLU or Sen. Church Committee would now probably be deemed rightwing. The methodologies of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are the preferred models, once they were rebooted to the right cause.

Christopher Rufo:

America is trapped in the loop of 1968. The politics of that fateful year have set the patterns and bounds of our national life for decades.

It’s as though we have lived an endless recurrence: the Black Panther Party reappears as the Black Lives Matter movement; the Weather Underground pamphlets launder themselves into academic papers; the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas trade in their bandoliers and become managers of an elite-led revolution in manners and mores. The ideology, narrative, and aesthetics of the left-wing social movements of that earlier time, though now often degraded through cynicism and repetition, have maintained the position of a jealous hegemon.

The cultural revolution that began a half-century ago, now reflected in a deadening sequence of acronyms—CRT, DEI, ESG, and more—has increasingly become our new official morality. Many conservatives have made an uneasy peace with this transformation of values, even as the culture around them has, in many places, collapsed.

This attitude no longer suffices. It is time to break the loop of 1968. We need a counterrevolution.

This is the word that haunts the revolutionary mind. The French Revolution fell to the forces of Thermidor; the Revolution of 1848 fell to the empire of the bourgeoisie; the Bolshevik Revolution fell to the democratic-capitalists, the imperialist-backed juntas, and the forces of global capitalism. Marx himself viewed counterrevolution as an overwhelming threat. “Every important part of the revolutionary annalsfrom 1848 to 1849 bears the heading: Defeat of the revolution!” he lamented.

The urgent task for the political Right today is to comprehend the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution and to create a strategy for dislodging the New Left ideology of 1968, which has solidified control over the most fundamental structures of American society. The challenge must be met not solely in the realm of policy debate but on the deepest political and philosophical grounds.

Committee to unleash prosperity

In the last fifty years, California has done ONE thing right. In 1978, against the advice of almost all the politicians in BOTH parties, almost two-thirds of CA voters approved Howard Jarvis’s Proposition 13 – which constitutionally capped runaway property rate increases. This tax revolt launched the big California Miracle of the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, thanks to the highest income and sales taxes in the country, California’s economy has stalled out, and now there are renewed calls from Democrats to repeal Prop. 13.

A new study by Laffer Associates and CTUP shows the damage of property taxes. When property taxes rise, home values fall because the higher taxes get capitalized into the value of the house.

This pattern exists all over the country, including in Wisconsin. The next time teachers want a pay increase, they'd be better served going to their district office and asking this question than demanding more money from taxpayers. https://t.co/FPWPMlDFVp

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) August 7, 2023

Mike Lofgren:

This story of high prices and poor outcomes is true almost across the board for vital services, and there is none more vital than health care. The U.S. spends 17.8 percent of GDP on health care, nearly twice as much as the average OECD country. Health spending per person in America is almost twice as high as in the next most expensive country, Germany, and four times higher than in South Korea.

Does that high cost lead to better health? It does not. Probably the best proxy for the adequacy of health care is longevity; according to the UN, the U.S. ranks No. 70 out of 227 sovereign or semi-sovereign state entities. That’s below most European NATO members, South Korea, Japan and Israel, just to name three countries the U.S. has pledged to defend militarily, at potentially huge expense. It’s also below China.

As expected, lower longevity has implications for many other statistics, such as infant mortality; America’s ranking among developed countries is abysmal: “U.S. maternal mortality in 2020 was over 3 times the rate in most of the other high-income countries.” So much for the pro-life charade of the religious right. 

During World War II, American GIs were generally taller than their counterparts from other countries, thanks to better nutrition. Today, Americans are bigger in a different sense, with the highest rate of obesity in the developed world.

Notes and links on MTEL.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004–

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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