104 Page PDF:

The Early Literacy and Beyond Task Force was established in December 2020, charged with analyzing promising approaches to literacy education and making recommendations to Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) and the teacher education programs at the University of Wisconsin -Madison School of Education (UW-SoE) to improve literacy outcomes and reduce gaps in MMSD student’s opportunities and outcomes. The Task Force members met between February and June 2021 to address the charges listed below.

1. Review and become familiar with the best evidence about the most effective ways to teach literacy in pre-kindergarten through Grade 12, and how to best develop future teachers who can better teach literacy in schools.

2. Identify how literacy, especially early literacy, is taught across MMSD, and analyze achievement data for MMSD students with respect to literacy.

3. Examine how literacy, especially early literacy, is taught to teacher education students at UW- SoE and analyze what these future teachers are learning about literacy.

4. Recommend steps that strengthen literacy instruction in the Madison schools and UW-Madison teacher education programs.

The Task Force included 14 members, seven each from MMSD and UW-Madison who were experts in literacy and equity – the central foci of the effort. The project was managed by Dr. Jen Schoepke who holds positions in both organizations. Task Force members worked collaboratively as a whole group focused on the fourth charge listed above and in three subcommittees focused on the first three charges. To facilitate cross-fertilization and leverage our collective knowledge, each subcommittee included representatives from MMSD and UW-Madison.

Task Force members kept children and equity at the center of our work and our recognition that behind every data point was a child and a family with aspirations for success. The Task Force focused on the demand for social justice and the ways that reading can empower young people with the opportunity to create a more just future.2 Several things were abundantly clear through Task Force dialogue: (1) student’s opportunities and outcomes need to be more equitable; (2) all of our children need improved literacy outcomes, and (3) it is our collective responsibility to put systems, processes, and pedagogy in place that allows the excellence within our children to shine.

Building on a long-standing culture of collaboration across MMSD and UW-SoE, this report was developed through a true partnership, with an explicit focus on literacy instruction as an equity strategy. Task Force members agree that we need urgent change grounded in reflective, evidence-based practice. This report is meant to spur such transformation in MMSD and UW-SoE so we can realize the moral imperative to get all of our children to read successfully and at high levels. The Task Force submits this report to MMSD and UW-SoE leadership for their consideration, knowing that its recommendations are just the beginning of the work that needs to be done. This task force report represents the collective work of the Task Force members, not perspectives or viewpoints of any one individual.

Madison’s literacy task force report background, notes and links.

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?

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?

Lindsey Burke and Corey DeAngelis:

Imagine being a second grader in a major city right now. If you entered kindergarten during the 2019-20 school year, COVID-19 first closed your school in March, potentially offering “remote learning.”

As you prepared to enter first grade the following fall, you were one of more than half of students nationwide for whom the school doors were still shut, again having access to remote instruction only.

Incredibly, as you entered second grade, the 2021-22 school year, the district superintendent bows down to the powerful teachers union and shifts back to “virtual learning.”

Another teachers group, National Educators United, is now pushing for a nationwide closure of schools for at least “two weeks.” Yeah, like that worked out so well last time.

In reality, you’ve hardly been in what could pass for “school” since COVID-19 began. Even the days you had access to in-person instruction, learning to read was made harder through masks, your short lunches were spent socially distanced from your friends, and you couldn’t play on the playground equipment during recess.

This scenario has been playing out for millions of children across the country since March 2020. And now, as students return from winter break, school districts across America—including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Newark, New Jersey—have regressed to remote learning once more, foreclosing access to in-person instruction for nearly 200,000 students.

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?

Scott Girard:

MMSD spokesman Tim LeMonds told the Cap Times in an email Tuesday the district’s attendance rate Monday was 80.6%. That’s below the average of more than 90% throughout the 2020-21 school year, according to attendance data received through an open records request.

Other area school districts, which all returned from winter break as scheduled in the first week of January, reported slightly higher attendance rates during the first week of 2022.

In the Verona Area School District, attendance ranged from 85.37% to 89.58%, according to data provided by superintendent Tremayne Clardy.

Waunakee Community School District’s attendance rate was between 87.86% and 89.81% throughout last week, district communications and engagement specialist Anne Blackburn wrote in an email.

Similarly, the Oregon School District saw attendance rates from 82.2% to 87.5% last week, according to an email from district communications director Erika Mundinger.

The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District saw attendance rates stay between 88.5% and 90.2% the week of Jan. 3, director of information and public relations Shannon Valladolid wrote in an email.

Perhaps related: a physician recently mentioned to me that we are living through a phenomena of the worried well.

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?

Thomas Fazi and Toby Green:

All of which has meant that, until the Observer’s interview with Mark Woolhouse, there has been painfully little critical analysis from the mainstream Left as to whether the raft of restrictive Covid measures we have seen over the past two years have indeed served the collective good — or saved lives for that matter. By definition, for something to be considered in the collective interest of a society, it has to be in the interest of at least a significant majority of its members. However, it’s hard to see how lockdowns (and other subsequent measures) meet this criterion.

Their psychological, social and economic impact mighthave been justified from a collective-interest and life-saving standpoint if Covid represented an equal threat to all citizens. Yet soon into the pandemic, it became clear that Covid-19 was almost exclusively a threat to the elderly (60+): in the last quarter of 2020, the mean age of those dying both with and of Covid-19 in the UK was 82.4, while by early 2020 the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) — the risk of actually dying if you catch Covid — in people under 60 was already known to be exceptionally low: 0.5 per cent or less. A paper written late in 2020 for the WHO by professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, one of the world’s foremost epidemiologists, then estimated that the IFR for those under 70 was even lower: 0.05%. As Woolhouse points out in his interview “people over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15”.

Moreover, given the impacts on other aspects of medical care, the preservation (or prolonging) of life of the elderly was certainly being achieved at the expense of the life expectancies of younger sectors of the population — to say nothing of the catastrophic impacts in the Global South. This has indeed been confirmed by evidence which shows that excess deaths in younger age groups rose sharply in 2021, with very little of this attributable to Covid mortality.

If anything, Covid restrictions should have been framed in terms of solidarity: as measures which implied the overwhelming majority of the collective, which risked little or nothing from Covid, paying a price, and a heavy one at that, in order to protect, in theory at least, a minority (in Western countries people aged 60 or older represent on average around 25% of the population). Acknowledging this from the start would have avoided much loss of trust in public institutions down the road, and would have allowed for a rational discussion around important questions of intergenerational equity, proportionality and the balancing of rights and interests.

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?

Angie Schmitt:

I kept hoping that someone in our all-Democratic political leadership would take a stand on behalf of Cleveland’s 37,000 public-school children or seem to care about what was happening. Weren’t Democrats supposed to stick up for low-income kids? Instead, our veteran Democratic mayor avoided remarking on the crisis facing the city’s public-school families. Our all-Democratic city council was similarly disengaged. The same thing was happening in other blue cities and blue states across the country, as the needs of children were simply swept aside. Cleveland went so far as to close playgrounds for an entire year. That felt almost mean-spirited, given the research suggesting the negligible risk of outdoor transmission—an additional slap in the face.

Things got worse for us in December 2020, when my whole family contracted COVID-19. The coronavirus was no big deal for my 3- and 5-year-olds, but I was left with lingering long-COVID symptoms, which made the daily remote-schooling nightmare even more grueling. I say this not to hold myself up for pity. I understand that other people had a far worse 2020. I’m just trying to explain why my worldview has shifted and why I’m not the same person I was.

By the spring semester, the data showed quite clearly that schools were not big coronavirus spreaders and that, conversely, the costs of closures to children, both academically and emotionally, were very high. The American Academy of Pediatrics first urged a return to school in June 2020. In February 2021, when The New York Times surveyed 175 pediatric-disease experts, 86 percent recommended in-person school even if no one had been vaccinated.

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?

Scott Mildred (and others)

Our community didn’t let the district’s tardiness slide without a stern warning. That’s because missing in-person classes for the last week (with two days of online school) badly disrupted people’s lives, especially working parents who don’t have easy options for emergency child care.

The district’s spokesman had told the State Journal on Dec. 20 that moving to online-only learning was not part of the district’s plans for January. Yet an email to parents on the eve of New Year’s Eve informed families that school buildings wouldn’t open the following Monday after all. That left many parents scrambling over the holiday weekend to get time off work, find somewhere safe for their kids to stay, or ask for an impromptu “bring your child to work day.”

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?

Alan Borsuk:

This all said, MPS is in a small club of school districts that have switched to all-virtual schooling during the current surge. The vast majority of American schools are staying in-person, even if it’s a struggle.

One board member, Megan O’Halloran, suggested that schools that were reporting comparatively few COVID cases among teachers and students should re-open on Monday (Jan. 10). She said that the MPS COVID “dashboard” indicated more than half of schools would be candidates for re-opening under the standard that has been used of no more than 3% of the school community testing positive. The idea was voted down 8 to 1.

The lack of urgency about student achievement. This very much predates the pandemic and is a broader issue. But it seems relevant to the tepid push for keeping kids in classrooms now. There just aren’t many people who have called publicly for energetic and fresh ways to raise the longstanding and deeply worrisome proficiency of many thousands of Milwaukee children (not only in MPS) when it comes to

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?

Guilia Heyward:

The possibility of more online school for John Christie’s fourth-grade son, Ian, is enough to bring Mr. Christie to tears.

Mr. Christie said his son, who has been diagnosed with autism, thrived with the schedule that in-person instruction gave him during the fall. But in earlier parts of the pandemic, when school was online, Mr. Christie said, the circumstances were dire for his son and for the family, which tried to assist him with remote school in its Pullman neighborhood on the South Side.

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?

Burbio

Burbio’s tracker shows 5225 schools starting a period of disruption (not offering in-person learning) of one or more days during the week beginning January 2nd,

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?

Scott Girard:

That percentage is well below the unfilled percentages in the last months of 2021: 49.81% in October, 47.37% in November and 43.56% in December. In its press release Thursday, the district acknowledged that closures of schools or classrooms could still be coming this semester.

Elizabeth Beyer:

“We recognize this week has affected our scholars, families, and staff in many ways,” Jenkins said. “We appreciate our school community’s patience and understanding. Although we prefer our scholars to be connecting in-person with teachers and staff while learning in our classrooms, this necessary pause strengthened our ability to sustain remaining open safely.”

Perspective:

“More than 25,000 students attend MMSD schools and more than 4,000 staff members work in the district. All of the cases over the past week occurred while students and staff were on winter break.”

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?

Richard Innes:

Results on both state and na.onal tests raise important ques.ons about the general lack of effec.veness of reading instruc.on in Kentucky’s public schools. Evidence from the federal Na.onal Assessment of Educa.onal Progress (NAEP) indicates that many Kentucky teachers struggle to provide effec.ve reading instruc.on.
The dimensions of this problem are enormous. Impacts were examined in a recent Bluegrass Ins.tute report1 that indicates 200,000 of the state’s public school students, about 31% of the total enrollment, are deficient readers.

But, it doesn’t need to be this way. Data from some eastern Kentucky schools – including in Clay County, one of the na.on’s poorest coun.es – indicate that even in schools with large percentages of students from low-income homes, the challenge of overcoming the impact of poverty and achieving effec.ve reading instruc.on can be met.

An analysis tool from the Educa.on Consumers Founda.on reveals that third grade students in several Clay County schools obtain notably beUer outcomes in reading on state tests than many of their fellow students achieve statewide, even including those in wealthier areas.

Clay County elementary schools benefit from an Elgin Founda.on program to improve reading instruc.on. Elgin’s main program is aligned with scien.fic research on reading and addi.onally is supplemented by elements from a program called Direct Instruc.on, which research shows is especially effec.ve for disadvantaged students.
The stellar reading performance of third-graders in the high-poverty pocket of Clay County stands in stark contrast to lots of other Kentucky students in many other areas of the state failing to achieve adequate results. The impact of Elgin’s program in public schools in an area with some of the state’s highest poverty rates is highly noteworthy and earns the program a closer look and considera.on by educators and policymakers for use statewid

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?

Dear Parents,

Effective upon our return to school after Christmas break, CCCA will be reverting to our pre-COVID health policy (below in bold). Cases of COVID will be treated as equivalent to all other illnesses for the
purposes of school attendance.

I recognize that this change may come as a surprise to some after almost two years of intensive focus on COVID as a special case deserving of special attention. We currently possess all the mitigation
tools necessary to reclaim our normal lives; please avail yourselves to ——- according to personal preference. All that remains is for us to
choose to move forward.

And let me be clear: this is a conscious choice, made in the knowledge that COVID is not gone and that it will likely continue to make its presence felt at CCCA in the future. However, we cannot allow
ourselves to forgo the higher aims of a Christian, classical education indefinitely via disruptive, rolling classroom shutdowns and we cannot
allow the success of our mission to be contingent upon the ebb and flow of this virus. Maximalist measures intended to prevent transmission of
COVID may or may not have been effective toward their stated ends, but they have unquestionably wreaked havoc across our society. CCCA
is committed to modeling the balance of prudence and resilience that will be necessary to put the crisis phase of COVID behind us.

I understand that some of our families might have concerns with this policy change, and I want to emphasize that we are not throwing caution to the wind. Each CCCA family is obviously free to continue to address COVID issues as their conscience dictates; this is a change in our institutional approach only. We ask that every family adhere scrupulously to the health policy below for the remainder of the school year. We do intend to enforce it.

May grace and perseverance abound!

Happy New Year,
Allison Morgan
水水*

CCCA HEALTH POLICY
SPRING 2022
Students may not attend class with any primary symptoms…..

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?

Emily Hamer:

Heinrich also said that “while it is challenging to determine exactly where transmission occurred,” her agency was not aware of any deaths from COVID-19 linked to in-person schooling in Dane County “but it appears that there have been a small number of hospitalizations that appear to be linked to in-school transmission.”

Jenkins confirmed that there have been no deaths related to someone getting infected with COVID-19 at school. Stampfli said a few of the district’s students have been hospitalized, but it’s “hard to tell” whether they got infected at school or somewhere else.

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?

Scott Girard:

Wednesday’s meeting, which begins at 5 p.m., includes a public comment portion, a chance to summarize written public comments and an “update on safe return to school buildings for in-person learning.” The last item will be a discussion, but will not include a vote of any kind.

Those interested in speaking during the meeting must fill out a registration form on the district’s website, which opens two hours prior to the meeting. Written comments can be submitted at any time.

The meeting will be livestreamed on the board’s YouTube channel.

At Friday’s meeting, which shortly followed a press conference from district administrators and health experts explaining the decision, board members expressed a mix of understanding and urgency to get students back inside buildings.

Multiple board members encouraged administrators to offer a more solid commitment to the hopeful Jan. 10 return.

“We need to be committed to reopening on Monday unless something happens where we can’t because like half our staff are out,” Cris Carusi said. “Every day that we keep kids in virtual learning is a day when mental health issues are going to become worse for our students, is a day when students are more likely to disengage from school and I think is a day that is going to lead to several more days of challenges when kids get back into buildings.”

Parents vs Madison’s K-12 Administration.

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?

Brett Healy:

Further proving that we have learned absolutely nothing from the last 22 months, both Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) announced plans to scrap students’ return to the classroom following Christmas break.

Neither sounded particularly optimistic that this would be a temporary move.

“While it is our goal to resume in-person learning Monday, January 10, 2022, we will continue to assess the situation and provide updates as new information becomes available,” MPS Superintendent Keith Posleysaid in an email to families Sunday night.

MMSD, meanwhile, has not released any plans to return to in-person learning following an extended break and virtual learning tomorrow and Friday.

Biden: Schools should stay open despite omicron wave

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?

Alex Nester:

Chicago teachers are preparing to strike over what they say are unsafe working conditions caused by a spike in coronavirus cases.

The Chicago Teachers Union has scheduled a Tuesday vote to determine whether its 25,000 members will refuse to return to the classroom, WBEZ reported. On Sunday, more than 6,000 union members at a virtual town hall said they would not feel safe resuming classroom instruction following winter break. Chicago schools were set to reopen Monday, though some schools have already moved to remote learning without district approval.

Last week, the union called for two weeks of remote learning unless all students and district staff provided a negative COVID-19 test before returning to school. The district distributed 150,000 at-home tests for students to take over the break and mail in by Dec. 28. This weekend, the district pushed the mail-in deadline to Jan. 6, following reports that tests were piling up in FedEx drop boxes.

The Chicago Teachers Union has repeatedly bucked efforts to resume in-person learning. Last January, the union thwarted Chicago Public Schools’ plan to reopen schools, even though studies found viral spread in school settings to be “extremely rare.” Many teachers who followed the union’s decision to switch to virtual learning were declared absent without official leave and didn’t receive pay.

Last year, the union claimed that the “push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” But studies have shown that black and Latino students have been disproportionately harmed by school closures.

Chicago Public Schools maintains the schools are safe for in-person learning and the strike would put students at “increased health risk.”

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?

Will Flanders and Libby Sobic:

In the latest chapter of the seemingly never-ending nightmare of school closures, Milwaukee Public Schools decided Sunday, Jan. 2 to return to virtual instruction for the first week of the spring semester, Jan. 3-7. This follows the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) making a similar decision to delay the start of the semester until January 6th. Both of these delays are planned to be short-term as a result of staffing shortages, but neither district has earned the benefit of the doubt. We find it very likely that this may represent the beginning of a longer-term delay. Only time will tell.

The pandemic has caused many institutions to weigh costs and benefits. But perhaps no institution failed more than the K-12 education system. The long-term consequences of closed schools are profound. WILL estimated an economic cost of more than $7 billion to the state from lost learning—representing lost opportunities for a college education, a good career, and a better life. Even more problematic, the kids facing school closures are the same students who already struggle to keep up academically. A recent Fordham study ranked both districts in the bottom ten when it comes to achievement and growth among disadvantaged students. 

Talk to any educator, and they will tell you that “catching kids up” isn’t as easy as moving through the year’s curriculum faster. It is one of the reasons that Wisconsin’s report card rewards student growth and not just proficiency—arguably to too large of extent. Any return to virtual learning, no matter how short, must acknowledge the costs and disruption of recent experience.

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?

David Blaska:

Neighbors here on the SW side are outraged that the so-called safety coordinator for our public schools blows off police trying to track down kids showing off their illegal firearms in a stolen car a block away from Madison East high school. Doesn’t return their phone calls. Refuses to share photographic evidence with staff who might be able to prevent harm and hurt. (Related here.)

“I fully expect that administrators are held accountable for their actions,” one neighbor demanded. New to Madison, are we?

That’s the problem. Administrators ARE accountable to the elected school board which has made known its antipathy toward safety in myriad ways. Expelling police from our troubled high schools in June 2020 was only the final battle in the progressive war on discipline, fought in the name of equity, diversity, and inclusion.

In other words, Madison schools’ safety un-coordinator is doing exactly what this school board expects. Three of the 7 school board seats are on the ballot this spring; deadline for declaring candidacy is 5 p.m. Tuesday Jan 4. (See sidebar at right for more info.) Two days hence. Based on the candidates who have already announced, we can expect more of the same.

No one is challenging school board President Ali Muldrow. Only one candidate has announced for the seat held by Ananda Mirilli (a DPI equity bureaucrat). That would be Nichelle Nichols, who performed equity for pay for the Madison Metro School District. Her current job: system leader at the National Equity Project.

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?

Elizabeth Beyer:

It’s a complaint echoed by parents across the district Monday, on a day most expected to see their children back at school, as they were elsewhere in Dane County (but not in the state’s largest district, Milwaukee, which also went back to online learning temporarily). Several parents said they didn’t object to the move to online school so much as the short notice by the district.

Most students across Dane County, outside of Madison, returned to their classrooms on Monday. Superintendents at several districts said any pivot to online-only learning would hinge on the number of cases and the level of staffing they’re able to provide.

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 

Here's what VASD superintendent Tremayne Clardy told me via email yesterday when I asked about staffing shortages there, as they have returned in-person following winter break: pic.twitter.com/1b0NMXctFG

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) January 4, 2022

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?

Here is the full press release announcement. Press conference tomorrow morning. https://t.co/BQWW4mAjyf pic.twitter.com/xi94AlnBe8

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) December 30, 2021

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?

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders:

Madison is ranked dead last when it comes to performance among disadvantaged students.

Pre-pandemic, Madison’s overall student proficiency in English/Language Arts hovered around 35% while Milwaukee’s overall student proficiency was even worse at around 19%. Even after accounting for a huge number of students who opted out, proficiency rates plummeted further in the 2020-21 school year.

But concerned parents will find that these shocking results are not reflected in the state’s own report cards. Under the 2020-21 DPI report cards, Madison Metropolitan School District was rated “exceeds expectations” and Milwaukee Public Schools were rated “meets expectations.” You have to be wondering how either of these districts could be considered to meet anyone’s expectations.

DPI, without input from the state Legislature or taxpayers, changed what information was included in the report card scores and how districts are rated. Specifically, DPI changed the cut-off points for the five thresholds that determine a school’s score and changed the manner in which absenteeism is accounted for. Their result? Three hundred ninety-nine of the state’s 421 districts were able to “meet expectations” in a year where student proficiency took a precipitous decline. After a year in which school districts faced extensive criticism for refusing to open despite scientific evidence it was safe, perhaps it makes sense for DPI to give districts cover.

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?

Robert Pondisco:

In some of his first public comments since being named New York City’s incoming schools chancellor, David Banks has drawn cheers from savvy education observers and literacy experts for remarks critical of “balanced literacy,” the city’s long-standing approach to teaching reading.

“‘Balanced literacy’ has not worked for Black and Brown children. We’re going to go back to a phonetic approach to teaching. We’re going to ensure that our kids can read by the third grade,” Banks told CBS2′s Marcia Kramer. “That’s been a huge part of the dysfunction.”

The incoming mayor seems to agree. “We are in a city where 65% of Black and Brown children never reach proficiency and we act like that’s normal, it’s all right,” said Eric Adams, introducing Banks last week. If the same number of white children couldn’t read proficiently, he said, “they would burn this city down.”

Adams citing this inexcusable failure and Banks laying the blame on “balanced literacy” suggests our new mayor and his hand-picked chancellor understand that equity starts with literacy.

That said, keep the champagne corked for now. This is not the first time New Yorkers have heard the supposed death knell of balanced literacy. Former Chancellor Joel Klein, the first person ever put in charge of the system under mayoral control, became convinced of its shortcomings late in his tenure, and wished in his memoir that he’d acted sooner. “Our ‘balanced literacy’ approach wasn’t all that balanced,” he wrote.

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?

Will Flanders & Libby Sobic:

Like an old IPod set on repeat, Milwaukee Public Schools’ attempts to attack and provide misleading data about the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is a song-and-dance that never stops. In their latest salvo against providing families with educational options, the district included information on the “cost” to Milwaukee residents of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) with property tax bills. An image of the mailer appears below.

The information on the cards is accurate, as far as it goes.  But it leaves out key pieces of information which mislead rather than inform about the impact of this program on the city’s residents.

Overview of the MPCP 

The MPCP, founded in 1990, is the nation’s first voucher system for low-income students. Today, students attending a private school on a Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher receive $8,336 per pupil for grades kindergarten through eight, and $8,982 for students enrolled in grades nine through twelve. No public-school student receives funding this low for any students.

In 2021, there were 129 private schools participating in the MPCP with a total enrollment of about 28,770 students. Each one of these 28,000 students live in the City of Milwaukee. With over 100,000 total students in the city of Milwaukee, students participating in the MPCP is still a relatively small percentage of the overall student population. Nevertheless, anti-choice advocates like to claim that the MPCP costs more than it is worth.

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?

Scott Girard:

One City Schools received a $1 million donation from the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation to support the school as it expands to serve students in grades 4K-12.

“The Frautschi family has a long history of investing in initiatives to make Madison a great city for everyone, dating back to their contributions to downtown and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1900s,” One City founder and CEO Kaleem Caire said in a press release announcing the donation. “We are truly grateful to be a part of Mr. Jerome Frautschi’s extraordinary personal legacy of giving to projects that inspire the heart and art of human kindness, community and innovation in our capital city.”

Renovation of a 157,000-square-foot facility at 1707 W. Broadway in Monona is scheduled to be complete by August 2022. The school announced its plan to move there and an initial $14 million donation from Pleasant Rowland in March.

Notes and links on One City schools (Governor Evers latest budget proposal would have aborted the University of Wisconsin’s charter school authorization authority – thus killing One City).

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?

Joseph Allen:

The early evidence from outside the United States suggests that kids will remain low risk during the Omicron surge as well. The latest data from South Africa for the week ending Dec. 12 shows that school-age children (5-to-19-year-olds) had the lowest hospitalization of any age group, and even with the Omicron uptick, the hospitalization rate is four to six per 100,000 — higher than one in 100,000 but still quite low. The latest data from Britain is similar. As of Dec. 12, the hospitalization rate for 5-to-14-year-olds is 1.4 per 100,000 — the lowest hospitalization rate of any age group.

The usual caveats apply: This is early data, and hospitalizations lag cases. On the other hand, the trends are encouraging: The wave in Gauteng, South Africa, is already peaking. Additionally, 7 to 15 percent of children were hospitalized with Covid, not for Covid. This is a key distinction. Covid was an incidental discovery because of routine testing during a hospital visit for some other medical reason, or the patients were there for isolation, not treatment. (This has been seen in the United States and Britain, too, where consistently 15 to 20 percent of hospitalizations are incidental.)

Notes and links on taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public mandates, closed schools and litigation.

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.

Scott Girard:

A Jefferson Middle School teacher is on administrative leave after planning a Colonial-era reenactment lesson that asked students “to assume stereotypical roles which brought racialized harm,” according to an email from the school’s principal.

The incident comes 10 months after officials in the nearby Sun Prairie Area School District apologized to parents for a middle school lesson that asked students to consider a question of how they would punish a slave under Hammurabi’s code in ancient Mesopotamia.

Other lessons around the country asking students to assume the role of slaveholders or slaves have drawn criticism in recent years, with parents expressing concerns that rather than imparting empathy, the lessons are traumatizing for students of color.

In some of the most extreme cases, students have been grouped based on their race and told to treat each other as if they were in their roles in situations like a slave trading exercise. A 2019 Education Week article mentioned two then-recent incidents, one in which a fifth-grade class held a “slave auction” and another with a fourth-grade class sending students “back to the plantation” in a game about the Underground Railroad.

Maxine McKinney de Royston, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Curriculum and Instruction, said innovative classroom activities are important for teachers to try, but that they must be thought through and consider what the learning goals are. Even role-playing and reenactments from times of slavery can be OK, she said, but “context matters” in considering when that is appropriate, and there are important safeguards for teachers to put in place in classrooms.

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?

Alex Nester:

Parents in Virginia’s largest school district collected enough signatures to recall a school board member who ignored parental concerns and kept schools closed during the pandemic.

Open FCPS Coalition, a bipartisan group of parents, on Wednesday filed with a county circuit court a petition to recall school board member Laura Jane Cohen. The group accuses Cohen of ignoring studies that showed reopening was safe and keeping students isolated from peers for more than a year was harmful for their mental health.

Republican candidates swept Virginia’s statewide elections in November, victories many attributed to parents’ frustration with school closures. But that momentum may not be enough to recall Cohen, who was not up for reelection this cycle. A local attorney backed by left-wing megadonor George Soros quashed Open FCPS Coalition’s attempt to recall a school board member.

In a statement Thursday, Open FCPS Coalition founder Dee O’Neal Jackson said the 8,000 signatures gathered show the group’s mission resonates with the community.

“For over 18 months, the Fairfax County School Board has focused on every political issue of the day,” O’Neal Jackson said. “In turn, [it] has not focused on what’s best for our students and families in Fairfax County.”

A judge will verify the authenticity of the signatures and decide whether to hold a trial and special election to replace Cohen. The coalition also wants to recall at-large school board member Abrar Omeish, who in May came under fire after she in two social media posts referred to Israel as an “apartheid” state.

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?

The Economist:

“A school district where one-quarter of students were black spent, on average, 10 more weeks in the classroom than one where three-quarters of students were black.”

A recent working paper by a group of researchers led by Emily Oster, of Brown University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at the results of standardised tests taken by children in grades three to eight (aged roughly eight to 13). The tests, which vary slightly between states, assessed pupils’ grasp of maths and English. The researchers examined 12 states, comparing the results of tests taken in 2019, before lockdowns, with those taken in 2021. They found a 14 percentage-point drop in the pass rates for maths and a six-point drop for English.

Scores in English and maths were falling even before the pandemic(although researchers cannot agree on why). To isolate the effect that remote schooling had on childrens’ performance the authors built a statistical model. For each district the model contained information on the amount of time that pupils spent attending school in person. It also contained information on covid-19 cases, the racial composition of the district and the number of pupils who were eligible for reduced-price lunches (a proxy for income).

The authors found that, even when controlling for these other factors, the amount of in-person schooling in a given school district had a big impact on pass rates. The results suggested that moving from fully virtual to fully in-person lessons counteracted the drop in scores by around ten percentage points for maths, and just over three percentage points for English. In both subjects, the detrimental effect of virtual schooling was largest in poorer areas, where students are more likely to lack the space for undisturbed study or the technology to access online lessons.

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?

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?

Scott Girard:

Ananda Mirilli will not run for reelection to the Madison School Board next spring, meaning two of the three seats up for election will not have an incumbent among the candidates.

Cris Carusi previously announced that she would not run for reelection, while board president Ali Muldrow is running for a second term. Carusi, Mirilli and Muldrow are all in the final year of their first three-year term on the School Board.

Mirilli announced her decision in a video posted to Facebook Monday, sharing that the pandemic “took a devastating personal turn” for her, as her daughter’s father died last year and her own mother died six months ago.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Three School Board seats are up for election in April, and if any of them draw more than two candidates, a primary will be held in February. Candidates were able to begin circulating nomination papers in early December, with the number of required signatures due in January.

Janeway has said they joined the race to protect trans children, including the third- and fourth-graders they teach in two Madison schools through a UW-Madison arts program called Whoopensocker.

Janeway also hopes to focus their campaign on student safety and wellness across the district while exploring ways to get the community involved in area schools to facilitate positive change. They also hope to foster a positive and healthy relationship between the board and school staff by incorporating staff voices in policy decisions.

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?

Mackenzie Mays:

California’s first superintendent of equity lives in Philadelphia and has a separate job there, more than 2,500 miles away from the schools he advises as one of the highest paid officials in the state Department of Education, according to records and interviews.

Daniel Lee, a psychologist, life coach and self-help author, owns a Pennsylvania-based psychology firm and is the president of the New Jersey Psychological Association’s executive board. He has also been serving as a deputy superintendent for the California Department of Education since July 2020, a role dedicated to the success of children of color that was originally backed by a foundation grant but is now funded by state taxpayers.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who was instrumental in the hiring, has known Lee for more than two decades since they were social workers in Philadelphia and included Lee in his wedding party. The Education Department’s nonprofit affiliate initially hired Lee without publicly posting the job that now pays up to $179,832, and Lee’s 18-page resume shows no prior experience in California or relationships with school districts in the state.

Lee, 51, voted in Philadelphia as recently as November and owns a home there, according to local records.California education and taxpayer advocates questioned why the state hired someone living across the country with other duties to address persistent inequities in the nation’s largest school population. The hiring appears to flout California policy, which allows few exceptions for a state employee to live elsewhere.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Elizabeth Beyer:

Madison School Board member calls for action on COVID-19 paid time off for teachers, staff

A Madison School Board member is calling for the full board to address a lack of access to COVID-19 sick leave for district teachers and staff during the next board meeting.

As district policy stands, teachers and staff must use paid time off (PTO) and sick leave to cover COVID-related absences, including a required quarantine period if a teacher or staff member is identified as a close contact to a COVID-19 case, board member Nicki Vander Meulen said in an interview Thursday.

Vander Meulen said she sent an email to the full board and district administration six weeks ago asking the board to include the topic in its regular monthly meeting, but nothing came of her request. She re-sent the email in December and asked that the subject be added to the agenda in time for the board’s Dec. 13 meeting.

“One, that’s a safety risk because people can’t afford to miss work,” she said. “Two, it affects our Black, brown and disabled staff because majority of them are either hourly workers or in a position as an hourly worker with less access to time off and less access to sick days.”

Vander Meulen brought the subject up at Monday’s Instruction Work Group meeting and was told by district human resources staff that teachers and staff are using their personal time off to cover COVID-related absences.

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?

Ed Treleven:

An 18-year-old La Follette High School student accused of bringing a loaded gun to the Madison school last week was charged Monday with two gun possession-related charges, and also faces six additional new unrelated criminal cases.

The seven new cases against Marquan Webb, of Madison, brings to 11 the number of criminal cases Webb now faces, charges that include burglary, fraudulent credit card use, identity theft, driving a vehicle without owner’s consent, misappropriating identification, theft, battery, criminal damage to property and criminal trespass.

Three of the cases are misdemeanors, and the rest are felony cases.

The criminal complaint related to the incident at La Follette charged Webb with possession of a firearm on school grounds, possession of a firearm by a person previously adjudged delinquent as a juvenile, resisting police, two counts of felony bail jumping and two counts of misdemeanor bail jumping.

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?

Emily Hamer:

Janeway said they were “very ignited by” the posts. Janeway wants to protect trans children, including the third- and fourth-graders that they teach in two Madison schools through a UW-Madison arts program called Whoopensocker.

“I go back to school on Tuesday and on Thursday, and I will be face to face with kids who use they/them pronouns,” Janeway said. “I have nothing but an urge and an inspiration to stand up for them.”

Janeway is a prominent activist who used to go by Andi, but recently changed their first name to Shepherd.

Walters, 55, is a mother of three who has experience teaching photography and art, including a program for children at risk. She ran for lieutenant governor in 2014 as a Democrat. She said safety in schools is her biggest priority.

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?

David Blaska:

Yet students of color continue to be disproportionately disciplined. “The simple fact is this: black boys do commit more violent offenses in public schools than other kids,” acknowledges John McWhorter, in his book Woke Racism.

You want “equity”? According to MMSD data from 2017-18, 59% of disciplinary actions were taken against boys, even though they account for 49% of enrollment. To play their game: Why are Madison schools biased against boys? Professor McWhorter, himself black, argues:

To insist that bigotry is the only possible reason for suspending more black boys than white boys, is to espouse harming black students [who are left] not only improperly educated but beaten up.

Trouble at school? School district teachers and staff must navigate a 111-page school safety plan. Its flow chart is no help; it’s a bewildering corn maze of 23 possible action steps that begin with “Notify Central Office.” Try to find “call the cops” despite the mandate of state law to report serious threats.

Time and again, the school district pulls the rug out from under disciplinarians. The most tragic example is the white “positive behavior coach” beaten by an unruly black student at Whitehorse middle school in 2019. He did everything by the book. He still got the hook.

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?

Ann Althouse:

By “put them in a safe place,” I think Ross means put Ethan Crumbleyin custody. He apparently begged “help me.” It sounds as though he struggled with an uncontrollable impulse. I understand the school wanting to defend itself after the fact, but what’s more important is for schools to take action to protect the students who are trapped there and endangered by other students. 

This is part of a larger issue of government declining to keep the peace and attempting to convince us that it cannot keep the peace, something I wrote about last month, after the Rittenhouse verdict and the Waukesha massacre, here:

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?

Dan Lennington and Dr. Will Flanders:

At the top of the list of legitimate parental grievances was the decision to keep many schools closed during the 2020-21 school year, despite strong scientific evidence that it was safe to reopen. Research by our own organization, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), found that it was not the rates of COVID transmission in a community that effected reopening decisions, but rather whether there was a strong union presence in the school district.

This electoral disconnect has continued into the present school year with many schools persisting in their belief that mask mandates are necessary or somehow even legally required. Also, many schools have doubled down on the continued expansion of critical race theory and “equity” policies. Here in Wisconsin, school boards have also eschewed transparency and in some cases attempted to limit public comment at meetings.

In response, parents have certainly escalated the fight by employing unusual and extreme tactics. For example, Wisconsin has had more school-board recall attemptsthis year than any other state except California. While no school board member has yet been recalled, six schoolboard members have resigned in response to recall attempts and roughly 1/3 of incumbents lost in the spring 2021 election. Some parents have also moved to take over annual school board meetings, and in one case, successfully cut school-board member salaries by $6,400 each. Other school board meetings have become colorful, to say the least, and in some circumstances, rather raucous.

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?

Will Flanders and Dan Lennington:

Ask any public high school student: violent in-school fights are on the rise and discipline is on the decline. Just consider one public high school: Madison East in Madison, Wisconsin.

In late September, local media reported a series of “disturbing” cell phone videos depicting vicious fights and beatings occurring in class and on school grounds over the course of several days. Then, several hundred students walked out of school twice in one week protesting the school’s sexual harassment policies.

The protest apparently spilled over to other local high schools, resulting in marauding groups of students causing “harm to others,” damaging “property in the downtown area,” and publicly “calling out” suspected sexual harassers, according to an email from one of the area school districts.

A few days later, on Oct. 20, 10 police officers responded to fights in a “massive crowd” of more than 100 students at Madison East. On Nov. 8, more than 15 police officers responded to what the media described as a “melee” in which five students were taken to the hospital. The next day, more than one-third of all students stayed home out of fear.

In all, Madison police were called to Madison East and its “surrounding area” 63 times during the first few months of the school year.

Madison East is no outlier. A simple Google search reveals similar headlines from around the country: “Woman with gun arrested as IMPD breaks up large fight at George Washington High School” in Indiana, “Big brawl At Woodhaven High School results in minor injuries” in Michigan, “Police investigating after large fight in parking lot of West Mecklenburg High School” in North Carolina, and “Reynolds Middle School is shutting down in-person learning for 3 weeks to address student fights, misbehavior” in Oregon. All these stories originated during the same week.

So what could be causing such a spike? Or perhaps more frighteningly, is this a new normal? Many factors may be contributing to this upward trend, but a few probable culprits require serious scrutiny.

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?

Michael Bloomberg:

American public education is broken. Since the pandemic began, students have experienced severe learning loss because schools remained closed in 2020—and even in 2021 when vaccinations were available to teachers and it was clear schools could reopen safely. Many schools also failed to administer remote learning adequately.

Before the pandemic, about two-thirds of U.S. students weren’t reading at grade level, and the trend has been getting worse. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the nation’s report card, show that in 2019, eighth-grade math scores had already fallen significantly.

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?

Chris Rickert:

16-year-old charged in beating outside Madison West High School

A 16-year-old boy was tentatively charged with substantial battery after he punched another boy in the head outside Madison West High School Monday, police said.

Police said the mother of the victim called them just before 3:30 p.m. to report the attack, which the victim did not fully remember because the punch might have caused him to black out. Madison police spokesperson Stephanie Fryer said the victim and a friend had been walking to a bus stop at the corner of Regent and Ash streets “when three other teens approached wanting to fight.”

“The victim and his friend turned around to leave the area and the victim was punched in the head,” she said.

Regent and Ash streets make up one corner of the block that includes West High, and police reported the attack happened “while at school.” Fryer said the victim and his attacker are West High students.

But Madison School District spokesperson Tim LeMonds said Tuesday morning that no such incident happened on “any of our campuses.”

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?

Shannon Whitworth:

Ensure that kids can read, write, understand the fundamentals of math, science and history. But a lot of public schools appear to be more interested in pushing an ideological agenda than providing children with the skills they need to compete on a global scale. For the first time, many parents started to take note of critical race theory concepts and the sexual and gender ideology being taught at the youngest levels. Then, of course, there are the tanking proficiencies in math and English, closed schools and never-ending mask mandates, and even indescribable levels of violence in our urban schools. The deafness to parents’ concerns, coupled with the arrogance and condescension of a government that appears to have forgotten who is supposed to serve whom, appears to have “awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve” (“Tora! Tora! Tora!”).

The educational establishment should be paying attention to this trend coming into an election period next year. If Wisconsin is going the way of the rest of the country, the establishment is particularly vulnerable. When the state of our public schools is coming under increasing scrutiny, those who have been failing our system for decades are about to be held to account. School choice is now favored by a majority of Americans. Inner city parents have been complaining and trying to get their children out of failing schools for decades. Now with the rest of the country paying attention to the sorry state of our public schools, the rising crescendo will be difficult to ignore. Which leads us to our latest educational outrage here in Wisconsin.

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?

Minneapolis, among the most segregated school districts in the country, with one of the widest racial academic gaps, is in the midst of a sweeping plan to overhaul and integrate its schools. And unlike previous desegregation efforts, which typically required children of color to travel to white schools, Minneapolis officials are asking white families to help do the integrating — a newer approach being embraced by a small group of urban districts across the country.

The changes included redrawing school zones, including for North. “This plan is saying, everyone is going to be equally inconvenienced because we need to collectively address the underachievement of our students of color,” Mr. Moore added.

Research shows that de facto school segregation is one major reason that America’s education system is so unequal, and that racially and socioeconomically diverse schools can benefit all students.

But decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the dream of integration has remained just that — a dream.

Today, two in five Black and Latino students in the United States attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are children of color, while one in five white students goes to a school where more than 90 percent of students look like them, according to the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

Locally, Madison taxpayers recently expanded our least diverse schools (despite space in nearby facilities). Boundaries have not been adjusted in decades.

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?

Aaron Garth Smith:

Nationwide, inflation-adjusted K-12 revenues grew by nearly 24%—or $3,005 per pupil—between 2002 and 2019. During this time, per-pupil revenues increased in all but two states and 23 states plus D.C. increased their education funding by at least 20%. Notably, education spending grew by nearly 68% in New York and more than 50% in New Hampshire and North Dakota. Figure 1 and Table 2 below show the rates at which states have increased their education spending since 2002.

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?

Elizabeth Beyer:

“Folks are ready to change, it’s to what extent that we’re discussing tonight,” board president Ali Muldrow said.

A committee of community members charged with the task of renaming the high school brought their suggestion before a board committee at the beginning of November after a five-month deliberation process. The committee whittled a list of 26 names to four, and finally settled on Phillips in a 10-1 vote last month.

Scott Girard:

The process of renaming began in March, a few months after former Memorial student Mya Berry submitted a proposal to change the name to honor Phillips instead of Madison, a former president and slaveholder.

“To have a high school named after Vel Phillips would feel like a step in the right direction for the community,” Berry wrote in the email to the Cap Times in March. “Instead of honoring historical figures that oppressed and enslaved Black Americans, we will have a school respecting the life of a woman who worked toward bridging racial gaps right here in Wisconsin.

“I also think it is significant to credit a Wisconsin leader as the new name, to demonstrate the possibilities that exist to Black and Brown students specifically.”

Phillips, who died in 2018, has a University of Wisconsin-Madison dorm named after her and could soon have a statue outside the state Capitol building. She has a long list of “firsts” on her resume, as the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the first female and first Black person elected to the Milwaukee Common Council, the first female judge in Milwaukee County, and the first female and first Black person elected to a statewide office in Wisconsin, becoming the secretary of state.

The district formed an ad hoc committee per its school renaming policy. The group discussed 24 initial proposalsfrom community members, including Phillips, late U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis.

The list of possible names was trimmed through a series of rankings and voting by committee members, who eventually narrowed it to four options: Phillips; former Memorial High School principal Bruce Dahmen; the first Black female principal in MMSD, Darlene Hancock; and foregoing a person’s name, instead calling it simply Memorial High School.

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?

The Economist:

“Why are Catholic schools suddenly growing?…When Catholic schools reopened, most provided in-person learning. This appealed to families who struggled with remote learning—many of the new pupils are children whose parents cannot work from home.”

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?

Elizabeth Beyer:

Travis Dobson, a parent of two East students and an assistant varsity football coach, said the school is out of control and the building administration is under an all-hands-on-deck situation constantly. He said he has another child who is nearing high school age but he is considering taking his children out of the district if nothing changes.

“The school needs help,” he said. “The kids are scared to death.”

Additional notes.

David Blaska:

Speaking Monday via Zoom, Michael Johnson called on the Madison school board to restore school resource police officersthat they had jettisoned in summer 2020. But the school board never got around to forming the ad hoc committee that it had advertised would study school safety. As if school safety needed more study. Here is Michael Johnson:

I firmly believe our schools need mental health officer, counsellors, parent outreach workers and school resource officers to keep schools safe and make sure our kids are learning in a safe environment. In an ideal it would be great not to have school resource officers but we don’t live in an ideal world. …

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?

The lengthy 2020-2021 remote experience that Madison’s K-12 students endured made me wonder how the taxpayer funded school district is performing with online services.

I was part of a group that reviewed the District’s acquisition of “Infinite Campus” software in the 2000’s. Having been through many software implementations, I asked the District’s then IT/Chief Information Officer if teachers and staff would be required to use this system, as part of their day to day jobs?

“No”.

I asked how they planned to successfully implement the system?

“with great care”.

I then suggested that they forego the purchase and not spend the money (million$ over time) if the system was not made part of everyone’s job.

How did it go?

2010 Madison School District Usage Report. More.

2012 Infinite Campus Usage Referendum.

2012 Madison Teachers, Inc:

As the District contemplates consequences for those teachers who are not using Infinite Campus, MTI has heard from several members about the difficulty in meeting this District expectation.

2013: Infinite Campus To Cover Wisconsin? DPI Intends to Proceed

Fast forward to 2020. I sent an open records request to the Madison School District on 28 July 2020 requesting the following:

Number of distinct teachers who login daily, weekly and monthly

Number of assignments created weekly

Number of report cards created and updated weekly

Number of distinct parents who login daily, weekly and monthly

Number of distinct students who login daily, weekly and monthly

Total Infinite Campus license, hosting and maintenance costs (2019-2020)

I received the following on 14 September 2021, from Mankah Mitchell:

Number of distinct teachers who login daily, weekly and monthly

• On average, 1,558 unique staff members logged in to Infinite Campus each day in the 2019-20 school year in MMSD.
• On average, 2,885 unique staff members logged in to Infinite Campus each week in the 2019-20 school year in MMSD.
• On average, 3,527 unique staff members logged in to Infinite Campus each month in the 2019-20 school year in MMSD.

Number of assignments created weekly

MMSD teachers created a total of 236,650 assignments in Infinite Campus during the 2019-20 school year. MMSD teachers created an average of 6,396 assignments per week in Infinite Campus.

Number of report cards created and updated weekly

• (In the 2019-20 school year…)13,502 elementary (4K-5th grade) students received 2 report cards each, for an estimated total of 27,004 Elementary report cards.
• 5,486 middle school students received 2 report cards each, for an estimated total of 10,972 report cards. In some cases, students also received quarterly progress reports, totaling a maximum possible count of 21,944 quarterly progress reports and report cards combined.
• 7,891 high school students received 2 report cards each, for an estimated total of 15,782 report cards. In some cases, students also received quarterly progress reports, totaling a maximum possible count of 31,564 quarterly progress reports and report cards combined.

Number of distinct parents who login daily, weekly and monthly

• On average, 42 unique parents logged in to Infinite Campus each day in the 2019-20 school year.
• On average, 133 unique parents logged in to Infinite Campus each week in the 2019-20 school year.
• On average, 256 unique parents logged in to Infinite Campus each month in the 2019-20 school year.

Number of distinct students who login daily, weekly and monthly

• On average, 2,671 unique students logged in to Infinite Campus each day in the 2019-20 school year.
• On average, 6,608 unique students logged in to Infinite Campus each week in the 2019-20 school year.
• On average, 9,295 unique students logged in to Infinite Campus each month in the 2019-20 school year.

Total Infinite Campus license, hosting and maintenance costs (2019-2020)

MMSD spent a total of $149,140.92 on Infinite Campus in the 2019-2020 school year.

## The linked pdf report, includes some interesting notes, as well.

I remain interested in this topic for several reasons:

• I was part of the original review group, and had implementation experience.
• I was and am very concerned about the lack of (consistent) pervasive online learning experiences in our very well taxpayer funded K-12 system, amidst long term, disastrous reading results.
• The inability to do this, effectively, while spending millions reflects much larger organizational challenges.
• The imposition of remote learning on our student population – while many other districts managed to stay in person – has long term consequences for all of us.
• A “successful” implementation of a system such as Infinite Campus would have placed everyone in a much better position for the events of 2020-2021.
• ** I do not mean to suggest that Infinite Campus is the be all/end all. Rather, it is the system we have spent millions on….
• ***** I spoke recently with someone familiar with large scale healthcare software implementations. One of the largest vendors conducts a review with clients on the tools they use, sort of use and don’t use along with the costs thereof (and any 3rd party services that may or may not be useful). With respect to Madison, perhaps it is time to rethink many things….

Related (2011): On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes) [rejected].

And, my 2012 conversation with Henry Tyson.

Elizabeth Beyer:

Michael Johnson, president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County, said the conflicts are likely driven by a combination of factors, including the city and school district’s move to pull police officers, known as school resource officers, or SROs, out of the high schools without a solid plan for what to do without them; students being away from school so long due to the COVID-19 pandemic; youths dealing with a host of problems, including trauma, made worse by the pandemic; issues from the community spilling over into the schools; and some youths losing hope.

One third of Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County staff are working in Madison’s schools, Johnson said, giving the organization firsthand awareness of the issues that are playing out.

Wracked by on-going fighting in Madison’s public schools, the board of education is meeting in special session Monday 11-15-21 at 5 p.m. It can be livestreamed on the Madison School Board YouTube page. Live virtual comment sign-up begins at 4:30 p.m.E-mail comments beginning today. Instructions here. (Do not be so foolish as to list your street address. Just type a generic word.) The school board plans to go into closed session sometime during Monday’s meeting.

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?

Matthew Wilson:

A 19-year-old high school graduate who had the end of his senior year forced online by COVID-induced shutdowns on Tuesday defeated an incumbent school board member in New Jersey.

Nicholas Seppy, a 2020 graduate of Egg Harbor Township High School in South Jersey’s Atlantic County, upset Terre Alabarda for a seat on the township’s school board by an overwhelming 17-point margin.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting as of Wednesday afternoon, Seppy had received 4,042 votes to Alabarda’s 2,830.

After initially closing their doors in March 2020, Egg Harbor Township School District forced most of its students into entirely online learning or hybrid learning models with limited components of in-person instruction for most of the 2020-21 school year.

Logan Rude, Brad Hamilton

More than 600 students did not show up for classes on Tuesday, the district said, more than one-third of the total 1,717 students enrolled at East. As of noon, 277 were excused and 325 had not shown up and were not excused, though secretaries were still updating records at that time.

During Monday’s lunch hour, more than 15 police responded to break up a set of fights that broke out near school grounds. Eight students were pepper-sprayed as police tried to break up the fights.

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds told News 3 Now that an estimated 90% of behavioral issues at the high school have happened during the school’s open lunch period when students can leave campus. Just over two weeks ago, fights involving more than 100 students and parents broke out in a crowd around lunchtime.

MMSD modifies East High School safety plans following student fights and citations

additional Commentary:

The teachers cannot be happy with the situation. I can’t imagine teaching at East High School. I picture the teachers all afraid of the students and the students knowing it and the worst of them exploiting it.

I’m seeing at least 2 comments that say it’s not just Madison and linking to this WaPo article from a couple weeks ago, “Back to school has brought guns, fighting and acting out”:

Elizabeth Beyer and Chris Rickert:

The Madison School Board’s decision to remove school resource officers, or SROs, from the high schools came amid the racial reckoning following the murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, sometimes-destructive social justice protests in Downtown Madison, and a years-long campaign to get rid of SROs that included shouting down School Board meetings and demonstrating outside the School Board president’s home by the local group Freedom Inc. and its allies.

“Even with SROs we still had people bring weapons and threaten to bring weapons to school and we still had fights,” said Allen, the student body president. “It wasn’t like their presence prevented any of that. The East student body in general still does not want SROs in our school.”

In other words, everything but discipline

Ambulances respond to school yard brawls because Madison outlawed discipline

“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?

Wisconsin State Journal:

But the open seat on the Madison School Board was created when the board president retired after being taunted in foul ways outside her private home. Can you blame her? A school board member in Beaver Dam similarly resigned this fall, citing safety concerns for his family.

Madison’s schools were closed most of last year to in-person instruction, which frustrated many parents and students. Most other districts found ways to safely educate their children in person despite the virus.

Since police officers were pulled from Madison’s high schools, troubling violence has occurred. Property taxes are up 9%. Achievement gaps persist.

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?

Adam Harris:

And it’s not all about CRT. Although that fight has garnered a lot of attention, the current animus toward school boards, and the members who sit on them, goes back to the start of the pandemic, when many schools shut down, prompting intense anger from some parents. Pamela Lindberg, a six-year Robbinsdale, Minnesota, school-board member, was on the receiving end of some of that ire. This past summer, on July 19, at the close of the board’s regularly scheduled meeting, Lindberg announced that she was resigning. “I will not continue to accept that hateful and disrespectful behavior with my service to the community,” she said. “The hate is too much. I no longer feel respected nor effective.”

Lindberg is one of the dozens of school-board officials who have left their positions in the past year. In Minnesota, nearly 70 members have resigned or retired since August 2020—a typical year would see fewer than 20 such departures, according to the Minnesota School Boards Association. In Wisconsin, three board members left the Oconomowoc Area School Board in unison, calling the board’s work “toxic and impossible to do.” And in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, a board member who had voted twice in favor of requiring masks for children resigned after receiving several threats and observing a vehicle idling outside his home late at night.

School-board meetings, once ho-hum affairs punctuated by lengthy conversations over public-works projects and curricula, and presentations about the successes of local students, have, over the past 20 months, become one of the most prominent outlets where people feel they can voice their opposition to everything including masks, vaccine mandates, and equity initiatives. From 2006 to 2020, Ballotpedia, which tracks elections, covered an average of 23 recall efforts against 52 school-board members each year; this election, they tracked 84 efforts against 215 officials.

And school-board elections are typically low-turnout events. But that was not the case this go-round. When Wendy Francour, who faced a recall in Mequon-Thiensville, was first elected in 2014, she received 2,300 votes—this year she received nearly 6,800. These elections are disproportionately attended by interested parties such as parents and teachers, a slice of the public but not one broadly representative of the larger public’s interests. But this year’s turnout numbers suggest a wider swath of people were motivated to vote on education—an issue that, though important, rarely polls highly among voters’ most pressing concerns.

Scott Girard:

Madison Metropolitan School District high school students got a higher percentage of A grades in the 2020-21 pandemic school year than they did during the 2018-19 school year, new data show.

The data provide another measure of academic progress during one of the most challenging years in education in recent memory. It’s a valuable piece of a complex puzzle that also includes statewide student assessments.

Those, however, were difficult to evaluate for last school year, with 13% of eligible students statewide not participating, including 50.3% on English Language Arts in MMSD. State officials stressed during a media call following the public release of the assessment results that they should be considered with the necessary caveats.

MMSD provided its response to a June 15records request Monday, Nov. 1. The district charged $427.92 to locate and compile the records, which also included attendance and suspension data.

The percentage of A grades received rose from 42.9% in 2018-19 to 44.7% in 2020-21. In 2019-20 the percentage had dipped to 21.7% of grades received, but that was mostly a result of the change in systems at the end of the school year.

But there were significant differences among the schools.

At West, for example, 49.6% of grades given in 2018-19 were As. That rose to 51.3% in 2020-21.

At East, the percentage went from 39.4% of grades given as As in 2018-19 to 40.6% in 2020-21. Similarly, at La Follette, 38.2% of grades given in 2018-19 were As, with a jump to 40.3% in 2020-21.

Memorial fell in the middle, with 42.2% of grades given in 2018-19 being As and 44.5% of grades given in 2020-21 being As.

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?

Abbi Debelack:

The latest data on testing and proficiency rates for Wisconsin’s children were recently released by the Department of Public Instruction and it is not pretty. Yet despite the alarmingly low test scores, there appears to be little to no outrage by the media and education establishment.

Each year, Wisconsin students, in various grades, take a series of standardized tests to assess their proficiency in a range of different subjects. Test results are a useful tool to track a student’s academic progress and gauge the overall effectiveness of Wisconsin’s K12 education system. The Forward Exam is given to students in grades three through eight and ten. The ACT Aspire test is given in grades nine and ten. The ACT writing test is given in grade eleven and the Dynamic Learning Maps is given to students with cognitive disabilities. This year, the tests were administered to students in the spring. The tests were not administered in 2020 because of COVID-19.

This year, English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency is 27.5%, down 5.4 points or a 16.41% reduction from 2019. Math proficiency is at 27%, down 7 points from 2019 or a 20.59% reduction. These figures look at proficiency rates as a percentage of TOTAL Wisconsin students, not just those tested as Superintendent Underly reported in her press release.

We must point out that this is not a particularly difficult or rigorous grading metric. A student who is graded as being proficient on the Forward Exam means the child is operating at grade level. Let that sink in. Shockingly, less than one-third of Wisconsin students are proficient in math or English Language Arts.

Related: Wisconsin AB446.

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.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Removing police from Madison’s public high schools never made any sense. It was destined for disaster. Today’s news brings evidence that the disaster is upon us. 

On Wednesday afternoon about 100 people brought an altercation that began inside East High School onto a street that borders the school. Ten Madison cops and a supervisor had to respond to quell the situation. To make matters worse, members of the crowd fled the scene after refusing to cooperate with the police. That suggests gang connections or other criminal activity that the perpetrators didn’t want revealed. 

Would it have come to this if the Educational Resource Officer (the bureaucratic title for a cop imbedded in a school) was still there? Of course, there’s no way to be sure, but it’s a fair bet that that officer would have defused the situation long before it became a near riot. 

ERO’s had been in Madison’s high schools for almost three decades and their service had been exemplary. There were no problematic incidents involving them. In fact, most were women or people of color and they served as positive role models.

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.

Scott Girard:

The board added an addendum to the Behavior Education Plan for grades 4K-5 outlawing out-of-school suspensions beginning Tuesday.

District officials and board members hope the change will keep more students in school, especially the Black students who have been disproportionately disciplined using suspensions.

A presentation last month along with the proposal to eliminate the suspensions showed that in grades 4K-3, 45% of those suspended in 2017-18 were Black, though Black students currently make up just 19% of the overall student population. The number rose to 60% in 2018-19 and 50% in 2019-20.

For fourth- and fifth-grade, it was 50% in 2017-18, 53% in 2018-19 and 60% in 2019-20.

Overall, the total number of out-of-school suspensions in these grades has been relatively small in the district’s overall population — 146 affecting 79 students in 2017-18, 191 affecting 99 students in 2018-19 and 174 affecting 97 students in 2019-20.

While the policy passed unanimously, board member Cris Carusi expressed concerns that the change was coming “at a time when our schools are understaffed” and supports like social workers are busy filling in for others and less able to support students than normal.

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.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The total budget increases expenditures by 11.41% over the previous school year, which includes one-time federal and local COVID-19-related funding. The district expects a 4.5% increase in general state aid, or $40.2 million, even though the state provided no increase in the revenue limit. Enrollment, used to calculate the amount of state aid given to the district, was down 405 students during 2021-22 compared to the previous school year. The district’s total tax collections are a 1.96% increase from last year.

Scott Girard:

The Madison School Board approved a $538 million budget for the 2021-22 school year Monday night.

The budget is a $55 million increase over last year’s actual expenditures, but includes $18.9 million from federal COVID relief funds and about $20 million in unspent money that had been budgeted last year but was not needed for things like unfilled staff positions or transportation costs.

“This budget relies on re-evaluating prior year budgets and repurposing existing funds to new uses,” interim chief financial officer Ross MacPherson told the School Board Monday.

It also comes with a tax rate increase.

The tax rate had been projected in this summer’s approved preliminary budget to drop to $10.87 per $1,000 of property value from last year’s rate of $11.13. Instead, it will rise to $11.40, as the city of Madison’s equalized value unexpectedly dropped by 1.1%, even as surrounding municipalities saw a rise in valuation.

MacPherson said he is working with city officials and state Department of Revenue staff to determine why this happened, but even if they determine it was a mistake, nothing could change in time for this year’s budget.

“While we have no control over equalized valuation, we continue to work with the city of Madison and the Department of Revenue to identify the cause of this trend in future budget years,” he said.

The 27-cent jump from last year equals $81 more for the owner of a $300,000 home in the MMSD portion of their property tax bill.

WORT looks at the City of Madison’s budget.

Wisconsin “Equalized Value” report: 2021 | 2020

Taxpayer supported Madison School District tax & spending history.

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.

Philip Hamburger:

The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it?

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, said in a Sept. 28 debate. The National School Boards Association seems to agree: In a Sept. 29 letter to President Biden, its leaders asked for federal intervention to stop “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” against public school officials. Attorney General Merrick Garland obliged, issuing an Oct. 4 memodirecting law-enforcement agents and prosecutors to develop “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”

The pub­lic school sys­tem, by de­sign, pres­sures par­ents to sub­sti­tute gov­ern­ment ed­u­ca­tional speech for their own. Pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion is a ben­e­fit tied to an un­con­sti­tu­tional con­di­tion. Par­ents get sub­si­dized ed­u­ca­tion on the con­di­tion that they ac­cept gov­ern­ment ed­u­ca­tional speech in lieu of home or pri­vate school­ing.

I have long been amazed at the lack of lawfare addressing our long term, 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.

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.

Jeff Richgels:

More than 10 police officers and a supervisor responded to fights amid a crowd of more than 100 students and parents outside East High School Wednesday afternoon, Madison police said.

Police found no one with injuries from the incident, although several people left the scene shortly after police arrived, Officer Ryan Kimberley said in a statement. 

You’ve installed your home security system, but are you getting the most out of it? Here are four easy tips to keep your home extra safe.

At about 12:30 p.m., police were dispatched to a fight involving students and parents at the Fourth Street entrance to East High, 2222 E. Washington Ave., Kimberley said.

As officers were responding, police received reports that a gold van had left the area containing the students who were fighting, Kimberley said.

The first officer at the scene found more than 100 people gathered in the middle of Fourth Street, with some appearing to want a fight. The lone officer used the public address system on his squad car and its sirens in an attempt to disperse the crowd, which ignored the officer’s efforts, Kimberley said.

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.

Joe Schoffstahl:

The records further show that the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the two largest teachers unions in the U.S., received a copy of the guidance before the CDC released it to the public. The guidance included a phased reopening approach for K-12 schools based on coronavirus cases in the area.

“These documents are further evidence that instead of following the science, the White House and the CDC allowed politics to influence policy,” Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, told Fox News.

Sutherland’s group obtained the emails as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services and provided them to Fox News. The group filed the litigation after the government failed to provide records on the decision-making process regarding school guidance.

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.

Scott Girard:

Key findings include that classroom and school belonging are distinct and that teachers with more confidence in their ability to teach math had a stronger sense of classroom belonging among their students. The research also found there was no systematic difference in math classroom belonging across racial/ethnic groups or by gender.

“I’m heartened to know that second finding, that teachers’ sense of their efficacy has an impact on kids,” said Madison Metropolitan School District executive director of research and innovation Beth Vaade. “That’s what we want, we want to know as educators that what we do in a classroom is going to be connected to what scholars feel.”

MEP, which is a partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and MMSD, initially hoped to use observations and interviews with students and staff to complement the data from the surveys. But the COVID-19 pandemic prevented that extra step, something researcher and MEP co-director Eric Grodsky called “disappointing.”

Specifically, they explored that feeling in middle school math classrooms. Grodsky said that decision came partly because of the “stereotype threat” surrounding the subject, with the assumption that women and students of color are worse at math creating a psychological threat as soon as they enter a classroom. MMSD STEM director Patti Schaefer said math was an “appealing” subject for this type of research.

“We see math as I’m either a math person or I’m not, a very split way of seeing ourselves in math,” Schaefer said.

To measure belonging, researchers surveyed 1,887 students and 60 teachers at five MMSD middle schools.

Math curriculum/rigor and student performance are not new topics. A few links: Connected Math, Discovery Math, Math Task Force, 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math, UW-LaCrosse’s Remedial Math Courses and Math forum.

What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level mathematics placement? (Traditional math curriculum students placed higher).

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.

Maud Maron:

I am a mother of four, a criminal defense attorney and a lifelong liberal who is deeply concerned about the direction of New York City’s public schools. I’ve been outspoken about my views, along with an untold number of frustrated parents. For that, the FBI is considering using the PATRIOT Act against me. 

Let me explain: late last month, the National School Boards Association, an umbrella organization representing thousands of local elected school board officials, sent a letter addressed to President Biden. It warned that “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.” But not just any threat: “the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” The letter implored the White House to enlist the support of Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate the threat — adding that the alleged crimes fall under the purview of the “PATRIOT Act in regards to domestic terrorism.”

I read the letter with grave concern, as would any American who cares about our public schools and the safety of teachers and students. What was the nature of this threat? And would my own children be at risk?

As it turns out, the threat is me. The threat is parents showing up to dress down school boards over their dereliction of duty. That is what the NSBA considers a crime.

I urge you to read the letter in full. You will see that it contains 24 footnotes. The worst of the so-called crimes include prank calls; a single individual in Ohio yelling a “Nazi salute in protest of masking requirements”; another individual in Washington State whose disorderly conduct prompted the board to call a recess; “spreading misinformation” online, and disorderly conduct arrests. In New York, where I live, disorderly conduct is not even a criminal offense. 

And yet within days of the NSBA letter, the top law enforcement official in the country, Attorney General Merrick Garland, publicly responded to the letter with a memorandum to the director of the FBI. Garland agreed with the NSBA that “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against board members — without providing any evidence. He further announced specialized training for board members to “aid in the investigation and prosecution of these crimes” and, more worryingly, the creation of a task force composed of FBI and Justice Department representatives to “determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes.” The FBI’s clear message to parents is that the NSBA is on the right track.

Commentary.

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 Benjamin:

We ask that question of any parent whose child attends a city Department of Education school and more broadly of families (especially urban ones) all across the nation. And not just elementary-school children, but even middle- and high-schoolers.

Because all too many public schools not only fail to teach basic skills; they promote students with decent grades without ever alerting families to how bad things really are. If there was a silver lining to the sick farce of remote learning this last year and a half, it was that it forced many parents to get more involved in their children’s education. And lots and lots of them woke up to the horrible truth.

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.

In her State of Education Address, State Superintendent Jill Underly commented on the divestment of schools in WI. But schools don’t have a funding crisis. With COVID aid coming into WI, schools received a record amount of funding in the 21-23 budget. https://t.co/h3IP4iCwYq pic.twitter.com/zHwFCpNTgu

— MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) September 23, 2021

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.

Phew. Now that I have a school-aged child of my own I’m seeing just how fraught it is to advocate for your kid when also trying to maintain a cooperative relationship. Makes me rethink how I’ve thought about that issue when reporting.

— Nichole Dobo (@nicholedobo) September 22, 2021

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.

Erica Pandey:

Charter schools picked off hundreds of thousands of public school students across the U.S. during the pandemic, according to a new analysis from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Why it matters: The pandemic has weakened America’s public education system, as Zoom classes, teacher fatigue and student disengagement take their toll. And that hobbled system is shedding students to charter schools, private schools and homeschooling.

• Those dynamics are exacerbating inequities in American education, as it’s typically wealthier and white students who make the switch.

By the numbers: Charter school enrollment increased by 7.1% in the U.S. between the 2019-20 school year and the 2020-21 school year, per the analysis. That’s a jump of about 240,000 students.

• During the same period, non-charte

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 Hendrix:

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Scott Girard:

Madison Teachers Inc. president Michael Jones said earlier Tuesday the union was working with the district on staffing the program.

“The discussions for planning have been positive and we’re hopeful that we’ll have a model that’ll meet the needs of our kids, staff, and families,” Jones wrote to the Cap Times.

The district sent a letter to families that had applied Tuesday, explaining it had received “better than anticipated interest” in the program that “has far exceeded our predetermined enrollment limit.” It promised to let parents know if their student would be in the program by Wednesday — the day before the year begins for students in grades 4K, kindergarten, first, sixth, seventh, ninth and 10th.

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.

Chris Rickert:

Enrollment has dropped by about 75 students at a prominent Madison Catholic church’s school amid questions about the new principal’s connections to a controversial Cross Plains priest and whether the school would require masks to guard against a resurgent COVID-19 pandemic.

The dust-up is the latest source of tension in Dane County’s Catholic community, where more liberal-leaning rank-and-file Catholics have at times been at odds with a more conservative Diocese of Madison leadership, most notably former Bishop Robert Morlino, who died in 2018.

St. Maria Goretti parish on Madison’s Southwest Side has seen its membership slip by more than 200 people to about 6,700 since the Rev. Monsignor Mike Burke stepped down from full-time ministry in 2017. He was ultimately replaced in 2019 by the Rev. Scott Emerson, who some at the parish see as trying to impose a more traditional approach to Mass, including moving toward using only male altar servers in some cases and getting rid of contemporary music.

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.

Steven Potter:

A new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found huge increases in student enrollment in virtual charter and homeschooling last year. We discuss what that means for students, parents and school districts.

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.

NY Times:

An analysis by N.W.E.A., a nonprofit that provides academic assessments, for example, found that Latino third graders scored 17 percentile points lower in math in the spring of 2021, compared to the typical achievements of Latino third graders in the spring of 2019. The decline was 15 percentile points for Black students and 14 percentile points for Native American students, compared with similar students in the past. As Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times describes the situation, the pandemic amplified disadvantages rooted in racial and socioeconomic inequality, transforming an educational gap into a gulf.

A sobering report by the consulting firm McKinsey sounds a similar alarm. Among other things, it notes that the pandemic has widened existing opportunity and achievement gaps and made high schoolers more likely to drop out. As the authors say: “The fallout from the pandemic threatens to depress this generation’s prospects and constrict their opportunities far into adulthood. The ripple effects may undermine their chances of attending college and ultimately finding a fulfilling job that enables them to support a family.” Unless steps are taken to fill the pandemic learning gap, the authors say, these people will earn less over their lifetimes. The impact on the U.S. economy could range from $128 billion to $188 billion every year as the cohort enters the work force.

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.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

The fiscal insanity at Chicago Public Schools continues. Officials there plan to hire another 2,000 part-time and full-time workers this coming school year, never mind the district has racked up the biggest pension debt of any school district in the country. Moody’s already puts CPS’ pension shortfall at $22.8 billion, more than any other school district in the country.* More workers mean more salaries and even more pension debts. 

To make matters more insane, those same officials warn the school district could lose up to 100,000 students this coming school year – about 29% of the district total – as a result of the multi-pronged crises facing Chicago. Those student losses would be on top of the 95,000 the district already lost between 2000 and 2021.

It’s madness any way you slice the numbers, making it clear Mayor Lori Lightfoot and city leaders either don’t understand or don’t care about Chicago’s finances.

A March 2019 Moody’s report laid out for Lightfoot just what a mess she was inheriting when she took over as Mayor. That report showed City of Chicago debts consumed more of city revenues than any other major city in the country, by far. About 32% of the city’s budget was consumed by fixed costs including debt repayments, retiree health obligations and pension contributions – and 57 percent when Moody’s added in the additional amounts Chicago should have been contributing to pensions, called the tread water gap, simply to keep its debts from getting larger that year.

David Zweig:

Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms. Conspicuously, there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. These countries, along with the World Health Organization, whose child-masking guidance differs substantially from the CDC’s recommendations, have explicitly recognized that the decision to mask students carries with it potential academic and social harms for children and may lack a clear benefit. To date, the highly transmissible Delta variant has not led them to change this calculus. (Many experts I spoke with told me that while the Delta variant represents a major and concerning new development in the Covid pandemic, it probably shouldn’t change our thinking on a mask requirement for schools.)

Here in the United States, the message looks different. On July 9, a little more than a month after the study was published, the CDC released updated guidance for schools, including the recommendation that masks should be worn indoors by all individuals (age 2 and older) who are not fully vaccinated. Ten days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics took the guidance a step further and said that everyone in school over age 2 should wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. (The CDC later matched the AAP’s guidance.)

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.

Jason Bedrock and Ed Tarnowski:

With 18 states enacting seven new educational choice programs and expanding 21 existing ones, 2021 has rightly been declared a “breakthrough year” for school choice. In the wake of all this progress, the one question we at EdChoice are most frequently asked is: how many students are newly eligible to receive a voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or K–12 education savings account?

Estimating Student Eligibility in Educational Choice Programs

Estimating the number and percentage of students eligible for a given educational choice program may seem straightforward, but it’s not so simple. For example, when a state makes multiple categories of students eligible (e.g., low-income, foster care, or special needs), even if it were easy to calculate the number of students in each category, it’s impossible to precisely determine the number of students who are in multiple categories. Without accounting for the overlap, adding up the number of students eligible for each category would produce an overcount.

Moreover, just because a child is eligible for a scholarship does not mean she is guaranteed access to a scholarship. That’s why it’s important to look at the maximum participation, or the number of scholarships that are actually funded. For example, the state of East Freedonia might have a universal school voucher program for which every one of its 2 million K–12 students is eligible, but if the program is capped at 50,000 vouchers, then its level of maximum participation is only 2.5 percent.

Another complicating factor is that that the limitations on participation are not always set in terms of number of scholarships. This is particularly the case with tax-credit scholarship programs, which often have a total credit cap (which may or may not be reached) and give scholarship-granting organizations discretion in terms of scholarship size. Under a given total credit cap, a larger average scholarship size will translate into fewer scholarships granted overall.

Given all of the above complications, we must make reasonable assumptions to produce realistic estimates. When calculating income eligibility, we will assume that the distribution of students is even across the distribution of families. (In reality, lower-income families are more likely to have more children than higher-income families, so this assumption will produce a conservative estimate.) For new tax-credit scholarship programs, we will assume that the total credit cap is reached and that the average scholarship size is equal to the maximum amount allowed. For new programs, we will also assume that scholarship-granting organizations will use the maximum allowed administrative expenses, but we will not factor this in for expanded programs. Finally, we will assume that the most recent quantity of scholarships actually issued was the previous maximum level of participation in order to calculate the new level of maximum participation.

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.

Noah Diekemper and Will Flanders:

A new poll of likely Democratic Primary voters in Milwaukee County provides an interesting window into the divides over school choice and the Democratic coalition. The poll, commissioned by Milwaukee Works, a 501c4 organization with a focus on good governance in Milwaukee, asked respondents about a variety of issues, but school choice and charter schools – and the demographic breakdown in responses – provides a valuable view into the divides on education reform.

The majority of Democrat primary voters polled are opposed to the concepts of private school choice and charter schools. Just 37% support the concept of vouchers, while 35% support charter schools. 54% of white Milwaukee Democrats polled stated their opposition to public charter schools; and for school voucher programs the opposition was an overwhelming 62%. But 52% of African American respondents support school voucher programs, compared to a mere 30% who oppose (18% were “not sure”). And public charter school support captured a plurality of 44%, compared to 31% who again oppose (25% this time were “not sure”).

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.

Dylan Brogan:

The Madison school district has repeatedly refused to release a report detailing its own investigation into whether district policies were followed during a field trip to Minneapolis in December 2019, when hidden cameras were found in the hotel bathrooms of students. Those events would lead a month later to the arrest of East High educator and trip chaperone David Kruchten. But the district, without explanation, recently released the full report of its internal investigation to Isthmus as part of an open records request related to another hidden camera incident at East. 

In spring 2020, the district paid private attorney Malina Piontek roughly $8,000 to conduct the independent administrative review of how the district responded to events during the field trip to Minnesota. Isthmus reported in March 2021 that the district cited “attorney-client privilege” in keeping the full report secret — a move that angered parents and open government advocates. Even school board members weren’t allowed to read it. Only a two-page summary was released publicly, finding “no failure on the part of district staff” to follow district policy. It also determined that statutory requirements for mandatory reporting of child abuse were met. 

Unlike the summary of the internal investigation, the full report states that mandatory reporting requirements on child abuse didn’t need to be met: “Based on the present facts, there was no sexual abuse or exploitation warranting” district employees to follow mandatory reporting laws, it says. The full report also notes that “due to the trauma experienced by the EHS students, a determination was made not to interview students for this review.” 

Isthmus asked the district why it released the full report now after months of refusing requests from parents, the media, and school board members. We also asked who made the decision not to interview affected students or their parents and whether district officials agreed with Piontek’s claim that mandatory reporting laws didn’t need to be followed because hidden cameras found in the hotel bathrooms of students doesn’t fit the legal definition of child abuse. 

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds has refused to answer these questions and has uncharacteristically not responded to several requests for comment.

Additional commentary:

The district had also rejected open records requests from the State Journal for the full report regarding the second East High camera incident, also citing attorney-client privilege.

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 incarcer

Frederick Hess:

Despite these numbers, some on the left have decided that the answer is not to insist that schools use the $190 billion in emergency federal COVID school aid to help students catch up and even excel, but to launch a nihilistic crusade in service to a warped mantra of “equity.” This is the same notion of equity that has spurred California’s move to eliminate advanced math instruction and Oregon’s Department of Education urging that teachers learn to abandon “racist” math practices like asking to students “show their work” or worry about “getting the ‘right answer.’” 

What’s going on? To be blunt, too many grownups on the American left have thrown in the towel. Many of the same Democratic leaders who, just a few years ago, were cheering Common Core and Obama’s Race to the Top, now nod along as the woke fringe and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” officialdom insist that schools frequently serve as little more than engines of systemic racism. This line of argument turns out to be surprisingly convenient for Democratic officials, as it permits them to placate the woke base, back away from the kinds of demands that offend their teacher union allies, and suggest that the disappointments of grandiose school reform were a product not of their missteps or excessive faith in bureaucracies but of the public’s own moral failings. 

While it may help Democrats finesse a political squeeze, this tack marks a troubling break with the recent past, when right and left agreed about the perils of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” While the sweeping, bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) born of that consensus proved to be a mess as a statute—undone by unrealistic dictates and its cavalier expansion of the federal footprint—it represented a powerful, shared conviction that America’s schools must strive to educate every child; that every student should (at least!) learn how to proficiently read, write, and do math; and that we must reject those who would set different expectations for students based on their color creed—whether those are fueled by bigotry or misplaced benevolence.

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.

Alyssa Lyons:

According to Wisconsin’s Policy Forum, virtual charter enrollment rose 84% in 2020-21. Here in Eau Claire that trend holds true. 

Last year, while offering virtual school in addition to the district’s online COVID-19 cohort, the Eau Claire Virtual School had 40 students enrolled in grades four through 12.

This year, now offering K-12, that number has jumped to over 120, and since ECASD is not offering an online cohort for COVID-19 this school year, enrollments could still climb.

“I think this last year has really shown families that there are different learning models and different options. Virtual learning is not for every child, nor every family. And so, in order to be successful, there have to be those supports in place, that learning coach, the ability of the student to be a little more independent. But for the right student, this is a great, a great option for them,” said Laura Schlichting, principal of Eau Claire Virtual School.

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

Chris Papst:

“My son is really in desperate need of tutoring in math,” Gray told Project Baltimore. “And, how did my son pass if he didn’t know none of this math?”

Now, Project Baltimore has obtained student assessment scores from just one class, in one high school, that show how widespread the problem appears to be.

iReady is a system schools use to measure at which grade level a student is performing. In Baltimore City Schools, iReady assessments are given in math and reading, three times a year, to measure a student’s progress. The scores we obtained show some students are performing 10 grade levels below their age.

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 Policy Forum:

Yet some schooling options did see sizable enrollment increases during the pandemic, DPI data show. Homeschool enrollment increased by 47% in the 2020-21 school year, following several previous years of much more modest increases (see Figure 2).

This enrollment increase was the largest since at least 1984, the earliest year for which data are available, and likely the largest single-year increase ever. While homeschool students still account for a small share of all students in Wisconsin, that share increased from about 2.2% in the 2019-20 school year to about 3.25 % in 2020-21.

Wisconsin charter schools also saw enrollment rise nearly 14% in the 2020-21 school year, after years of remaining roughly flat. This trend appears to have been driven by an explosion of enrollment at virtual charters – not surprising given the widespread shift to remote instruction. Virtual charter enrollment shot up 84% in 2020-21, from 8,696 to 16,020.

These trends appear to have mirrored in large part what took place across the country, according to new data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Additional commentary.

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.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The state’s $0 increase in each district’s per-pupil spending limit coupled with the district’s unprecedented 3.7% drop in enrollment during the 2020-21 school year could have a long-term negative effect on Madison’s budget, MacPherson said.

A district’s enrollment affects how much money it receives in state aid. Madison could have lost more state funding for next year because of declining enrollment — about 1,000 students, or 3.7% of its student population last year — but it is benefiting from two stopgap exemptions that limit how much aid a district can lose each year.

The district anticipated the first stopgap exemption being only a one-year fix in the 2021-22 budget and going away next year, as well as an anticipated continued decline in enrollment but, “what we didn’t expect was $0 per pupil surviving in the state budget,” MacPherson said in his report.

The Madison School District is set to receive $70.6 million over the course of three ESSER payment installments. The district’s first installment, ESSER I, was approximately $9.2 million and had already been exhausted by the end of the 2020-21 school year. District planning for the use of funds from ESSER II and III had been put on hold as finance officials awaited the outcome of the state budget battle.

The article fails to include total taxpayer spending, (> $20k per student) much less annual growth, in light of declining enrollment.

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

Tyler Cowen:

This “head in the sand” approach is highly imperfect. Still, it is preferable to panicking and closing the schools every year.

It is difficult to calculate how many children have died of Covid, but perhaps the best estimate comes from England, where it caused 25 deaths of people younger than 18 in the year ended in March. The final tally is certainly higher in the more populous U.S., but as of July seven states still were reporting zero Covid deaths among children. This recent estimate suggests 358 deaths, though it is based on only 43 states.

Yes, it is worth considering whether school reopenings will lead to unacceptably high levels of Covid in the non-school population. It is also worth pointing out that Covid is spreading very rapidly in states with low vaccination rates — without the schools playing a role. In any case, it does not justify focusing solely on the safety of children in discussions of school reopening.

Economists have long studied the tendency of people to assign more value to a “known life” than to a “statistical life.” When a baby is trapped down a well, for example, many millions of dollars will be spent trying to save her. Her photo will appear on the evening news and on social media. Yet when it comes to saving lives in the aggregate, such as by installing more and better smoke detectors, there is only modest interest.

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.

Free exchange

We talk to a Milwaukee native who helped lead school reform in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Now back home, Colleston Morgan Jr. tells us whether Milwaukee can follow the same path in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

Alan Borsuk:

So why does the education system — especially Milwaukee Public Schools — treat them the way it does? Each of these schools has a long and discouraging history of getting hassled (or worse) by the system.

You want to know what’s wrong with Milwaukee’s overall response to its education crisis? Start with looking at the situation of these schools. Start with what happened — and didn’t happen — at the Milwaukee School Board meeting Thursday night.

Since it opened in 2016 serving sixth graders in a building owned by MPS at 4950 N. 24th St., Excellence has lived up to its name. One year, it had the highest score on Wisconsin’s school report cards of any school in Milwaukee and one of the highest scores in the state. It has grown a grade a year and this year expects to serve 650 students in sixth through 11th grade.

And then the item was deleted from the board agenda on Wednesday.

Why? Thomas said he has not been told. A likely explanation is that the union objected to the “co-location” of having two schools share the same building. It has objected strongly to co-locations involving the Carmen charter schools in the past. The union is staunchly opposed to charter schools, whose teachers are not unionized.

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.

McKinsey:

Our analysis shows that the impact of the pandemic on K–12 student learning was significant, leaving students on average five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading by the end of the school year.”

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

Katie Lobosco:

A small provision tucked into a massive federal budget proposal put forth by the House Appropriations Committee would cut money for charter schools by $40 million and could potentially limit many charter schools from receiving federal funds altogether. 

The National Alliance for Public Charters Schools is calling the cut “particularly egregious” and said that the move would impact a majority of 3.3 million charter school students, who are overwhelmingly children of color and from low-income families. 

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but usually run independently from local school districts, had the support of the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. But some Democrats have targeted charter schools in recent years, arguing that they take away money from other public school students. On the campaign trail last year, now-President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren opposed federal funds going to “for-profit charter schools.”

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.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The DeForest, Middleton-Cross Plains, Monona Grove, Mount Horeb, Stoughton, Verona and Wisconsin Heights school districts have not yet made a decision regarding mask requirements in school buildings for the 2021-22 school year. Most of the Dane County districts that responded to requests for comment said they plan to finalize safety plans in August. Belleville administrator Nate Perry said the district will begin the school year with masks optional in classrooms but will follow Public Health Madison and Dane County guidelines should they change. The Waunakee Community School District will also make masking optional for students at the start of the year. District administration is exploring the possibility of providing mandatory masking in some classrooms for students under 12, spokesperson Anne Blackburn said.

Scott Girard:

Public Health Madison & Dane County, which had a mask mandate that applied to schools through June 2 this year, anticipates announcing its guidance next week, according to an email from PHMDC communications manager Sarah Mattes.

More:

That leaves decisions to local school boards or district administrators. Local officials are in a position to hear complaints no matter what decision they make, as evidenced by the mixed feedback from parents at a recent Waunakee Community School Board meeting.

Julie Willems Van Dijk, deputy secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), said during an afternoon press conference that wearing masks is not a “black and white” issue of vaccination status, but depends on factors like disease spread in a given area. She acknowledged that in elementary school settings, where most students are not vaccine-eligible, it might be easier for everyone to wear a mask regardless of vaccination status.

“In terms of how schools will enforce this, as we’ve talked about throughout the pandemic, schools are led by local school boards and local superintendents and we encourage them to think about the most protective way to ensure the safety of their students,” Van Dijk said. “But those decisions are decisions that will be made at a local level.”

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.

Joe Hong:

Some school officials are flouting the updated state rules, saying students will be allowed to return to the classroom with or without a mask.

California’s smallest school districts say they will refuse to send kids home for not wearing a mask despite a new state mandate. 

Superintendents in these tight-knit and typically more conservative communities want the state to let local districts make their own decisions, considering the success some of them have had with reopening their campuses last year without triggering COVID-19 outbreaks.

“These districts were in class all year, and they just don’t believe masks are needed to teach children,” said Tim Taylor, executive director of the Small School Districts Association, which represents hundreds of districts with fewer than 5,000 students.

On Monday afternoon, the California Department of Public Health went back and forth on updates to its masking rule. Health officials first said students who refuse to wear masks without a valid medical excuse won’t be allowed on campuses. Four hours later, the agency revised the guidelines to say local districts will be responsible for enforcing the mask mandate.

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.

Heather Knight:

Siva Raj often receives gifts of thanks when he’s at farmers’ markets collecting signatures to qualify a recall effort of three San Francisco school board members for the ballot. Coffee, doughnuts, cookies, strawberries. “Everything!” he said with a laugh.

But a new memo from a top Bay Area pollster outlining very grim unfavorable numbers for the three board members and strong support for recalling them, particularly among parents of kids in the city’s public schools, proved especially validating.

“It doesn’t surprise us,” Raj said. “On the streets that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Pretty much anyone who is remotely aware of the situation is eager to sign.”

Raj and Autumn Looijen, his partner, launched the recall effort of Commissioners Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga last spring after a dire year of distance learning and a number of sideshows at the board, including renaming 44 schools that weren’t open, and changing the way students are admitted to Lowell High which, like all public middle and high schools in the city, has remained shuttered to the vast majority of kids since March 2020.

The recall campaign has until Sept. 7 to turn over 51,325 valid signatures of San Francisco registered voters to the Department of Elections. So far, they’ve collected about 26,000 through weekend volunteers and are now fundraising to hire professional signature gatherers.

If students return to school like normal or close to it on Aug. 16, the anger may ease. But dropping enrollment numbers and a looming budget crisis for the school district could make the picture even worse.

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 incarceratio

Chris Papst:

Project Baltimore obtained a chart assembled by Baltimore City Schools. The chart shows the average GPA for every high school grade in the city – freshman through senior. In the first three quarters of this past school year, according to the chart, 41% of all Baltimore City high school students, earned below a 1.0 grade point average. In other words, nearly half of the 20,500 public high school students in Baltimore earned less than a D average.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Patterson. “If almost half of our kids are failing, what options do they have after high school? This is really disheartening. It’s sad to see this.”

On the other end of the chart, 21 percent of city high school students earned a GPA of 3.0 or better; a B average. That’s about half as many who earned below a D. We can also see the district lost 706 high school students during the first three quarters of the year.

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.

Shannon Whitworth:

School Choice advocates across the nation were given a gem of an opportunity this past year to prove the value of their programs when teachers unions refused to return teachers to classrooms when it was demonstrably safe to do so. In fact, across 30 states nearly 50 school choice bills were introduced this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers showed again on June 18 that he does not care about children’s education — except to the extent that he can continue to bolster Wisconsin’s failed public school establishment — when he vetoed a bill which would have expanded school choice in the state.

The bill would have broadened the income restrictions to three times the poverty level for the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, which would have increased access for students and parents desperate to get their kids out of failing Wisconsin public schools.

Wisconsin voters should remember that Evers, immediately prior to becoming the state’s highest elected official, was the superintendent of Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction for a decade. Presiding over public schools with the worst achievement gap between Black and white students in the nation and a Milwaukee Public School District in which his own agency graded nearly 75% of the schools as failing to meet expectations for over 50,000 children, Evers is also a staunch school choice opponent.

Expanding school choice would not only benefit urban children. According to a study the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty put out last summer, 44,000 rural students in Wisconsin do not live within 10 miles of a high-quality school. By vetoing this bill, Evers has not only failed inner-city Black children, but children in rural Wisconsin.

Evers’ rationale for the veto was that expansion of the choice program would necessarily take funds away from the public school system. This argument has been debunked a myriad of times. In fact, after a student leaves a district, the public school still receives funds for the student for a rolling period of three years. The real question is, why give a school that is continuing to fail children even more taxpayer money? Outside of government, employees must improve their skills and productivity to merit being paid more money by their employer, and our schools should be no different.

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.

Scott Girard:

The School Board approved $840,000 in the 2021-22 budget to fund MPA, covering teacher and administrator costs for one year of the program.

Many school districts in Wisconsin and around the country are considering virtual options, an acknowledgement that some parents and families preferred online learning.

Online learning has been around for decades.

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.

Don Surber:

The parents of 1 in 9 students believe public schools are so terrible that they would rather keep the kids home and teach them themselves.

Well, it is just the white kids, right? They don’t matter because whites will soon be a minority. Black and Hispanic kids will easily displace them in unionized public schools.

The story also said, “The largest increase in homeschoolers was especially notable among minority groups, including black and Hispanic learners.

“In African American households, the proportion of homeschooling quintupled from 3.3% in spring 2020, to 16.1% in fall 2020.

“In Hispanic households, the number of homeschooling households doubled in the same time, from 6.2% to 12.1%.”

You can be darned sure parents aren’t teaching their kids CRT. Why, some may even be reading The Bible.

Liberals are alarmed.

1 in 6 black kids stay at home to learn instead of going to school to be indoctrinated.

PBS reported, “If schools fail to secure the trust of parents, advocates and educators worry that the public education system could see a falloff in enrollment, particularly among families of color. Some advocates also fear that schools faced with a larger proportion of students who are struggling or frequently absent will respond with overly punitive approaches, worsening racial inequality.”

Digital learning and sharing offers plenty of opportunities to grow e-commerce experiences, particularly fast, 2 tap purchases, services, fundraising, donations and contributions.

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.

Rasmussen Reports:

At a time when many schools are embroiled in controversy over the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT), voters still think it is important that kids learn traditional values in school.

A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 78% of Likely U.S. Voters say it’s at least somewhat important for schools to teach the traditional values of Western Civilization, including 52% who say it’s Very Important. This is virtually unchanged from four years ago, and in line with surveys dating back to 2013.

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.

Bruce Murphy:

The study also found a significant racial difference in the percent of students getting full-time, in-person instruction: nationally an average of 75% of non-Hispanic white students were getting in-person instruction as of April versus 63% of Black students and 59% of Hispanic students. In 43 states, access to in-person learning was higher for non-Hispanic white students compared to those of color.

The highest racial disparities were in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where on average, students of color were 21% and 23% less likely to have access to in-person instruction. In Wisconsin students of color were 12.9% less likely to receive full-time, in-person instruction. That was a bigger gap then all but 13 states in the nation.

This, too, may largely reflect different approaches to social distancing. Urban areas like Milwaukee, with high percentages of minority students, were often more careful to restrict social distancing, given statistics showing a higher incidence of COVID-19 among Black and Hispanic families, and were slower to return to in-person instruction.

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

Scott Girard:

“There is this saying that MMSD has kind of always wanted to do it the MMSD way, whatever that means,” Nichols said. “Sometimes, you’re trying to find a balance of the things that are important to our Madison school district and our educators and at the same time wanting to push sometimes in a different or new direction.

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.