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Search Results for: Dane county madison

The Mayor & Madison Schools

Jason Joyce publishes a useful summary of Madison Mayor Dave’s weekly schedule. Tomorrow, Cieslewicz meets with retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater, after recently meeting with incoming super Dan Nerad.
I don’t recall such frequent meetings (if any) in my years observing Joyce’s weekly posts.
Related: Madison Mayor Proposes Expansion of Low Income Housing Throughout Dane County in an Effort to Reduce the MMSD’s Low Income Population.

Dane County Transition School Fights for Survival

Andy Hall:

To try to save his high school, student John Kiefler took an unusual approach this month that revealed both his commitment to the school and his level of desperation.
He contacted Oprah.
“Now I know that because I am a student that had problems in a normal school that if this place closes down that I will have problems getting a diploma,” wrote John, a junior who rides a van 45 minutes north from Milton to Dane County Transition School in Madison.
“I hope you can help us.”
After 15 years of educating students with fragile futures, Transition School itself faces a test of survival.
The publicly funded alternative school is in danger of closing as early as this summer.
“Our school system was set up for a factory model that has not changed in 100 years and it’s growing more and more distant from what we need,” said Deedra Atkinson, United Way of Dane County senior vice president of community building and an Oregon School Board member. Her daughter, Audra, is a graduate of Transition School.
Alternative education programs are part of United Way’s countywide strategy to curb dropout rates, which according to the state Department of Public Instruction ranged from 1 percent in Belleville to 15 percent in Madison during the 2006-07 school year.

“The Factory Model” of Education via Frederick Taylor’s “Scientific Management”. A teacher friend lamented some time ago that we’re still stuck in this model, making sure that our students are in and out of school around the milking and field work schedule….
Dane County Transition School Website.

Numbers Don’t Tell Whole Story at Madison’s Glendale Elementary

Susan Troller:

Glendale Elementary may be failing by test-based standards, but it’s succeeding by human ones.
The question of how we recognize good schools and bad ones has become a pressing issue.
In Washington, Congress is debating the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind legislation. Locally, Madison and Sun Prairie parents have recently been upset over boundary changes that some see as sending their children to less desirable schools.
At the same time, the movement toward inclusivity in special education, a growing minority population and increasing poverty rates throughout Dane County, particularly in Madison, have put a sharp point on some important questions:

• Do advanced students suffer when they share a classroom with struggling students?
• How should schools address the stresses of poverty?
• Are test scores a reliable measure of a school’s effectiveness?

This story doesn’t attempt to answer those questions; educational researchers have been struggling with them for decades. Instead, it puts one Madison elementary school under the microscope where all those currents come together — a school that by No Child Left Behind’s test-based standards is clearing failing. Yet, by the assessment of a number of parents, volunteers and other fans, the school is succeeding beyond all expectations.
A closer look at Glendale Elementary, a 50-year-old Madison school within the noisy shadow of U.S. 51, shows a school where success is occurring in ways that test scores can’t measure and poverty rates don’t reveal.

New report card for Madison middle schoolers draws praise, criticism

Andy Hall:

Congratulations, dear seventh grader, for nailing science class.
Your science grade this quarter is A, 4, 3, 3, M, S, R.
Now, let’s take a look at your English grade…
That’s a preview of how, beginning in the fall, parents of middle school students might read a new type of report card coming to the Madison School District.
The change will make Madison one of the first districts in Dane County to adopt middle school report cards based directly upon how well students are mastering the state’s standards that list what they’re supposed to learn in every subject.
In some ways, Madison’s change isn’t radical. The district is retaining traditional report card letter grades. And the district’s elementary students, like many around the state, already receive report cards based upon the state’s academic standards.
The shift is being met, however with a mixture of criticism and hope.

Related: Madison Middle School Report Card/Homework Assessment Proposed Changes.

Graphic novels enliven literature for Dane County students

Gena Kittner:

Move over Melville — comic-style books are popping up in classrooms throughout Dane County, giving educators a new tool to teach literature.
Graphic novels, a literary form that marries bold art and often edgy text, have persuaded reluctant students to open books and are providing a new way to teach visual learning, area educators and librarians say.
Libraries have long been aware of the value of such “sequential art” in helping students become better readers, said Hollis Rudiger, a former librarian at UW-Madison’s School of Education. “It’s the classroom teachers that are finally starting to see the value,” she said.
This fall, students at Monona Grove and DeForest high schools studied graphic novels in English classes. Next year, if there’s enough interest, Monona Grove plans to offer an art class focusing on the novels and cartooning.
“I’m very, very excited about teaching this class because it’s a step in a different direction,” said Judith Durley, a Monona Grove High School art teacher who proposed the class.

Where to Educate Your Child? Madison Area is #2

Via a reader’s email: David Savageau (Contributing Editor of Expansion Management Management):

Three out of 10 of us either work in an educational institution or learn in one. Education eats up 8% of the Gross National Product. Keeping it all going is the biggest line item on city budgets. Whether the results are worth it sometimes makes teachers and parents–and administrators and politicians–raise their voices and point fingers.
In the 1930s, the United States was fragmented into 130,000 school districts. After decades of consolidation, there are now fewer than 15,000. They range in size from hundreds that don’t actually operate schools–but bus children to other districts–to giants like the Los Angeles Unified District, with three-quarters of a million students.
Greater Chicago has 332 public school districts and 589 private schools within its eight counties. Metropolitan Los Angeles takes in 35 public library systems. Greater Denver counts 15 public and private colleges and universities. Moving into any of America’s metro areas means stepping into a thicket of school districts, library systems, private school options and public and private college and universities.

Here are some of their top locations:

1. Washington, DC – Arlington, VA
2. Madison, WI
3. Cambridge-Newton-Framingham
4. Baltimore -Towson
5. Akron, OH
6. Columbus, OH
7. Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY
8. Syracuse, NY
9. St. Louis, MO
10. Ann Arbor, MI

The Madison area has incredible resources for our children. The key of course, is leveraging that and being open to working effectively with many organizations, something Marc Eisen mentioned in his recent article. Madison’s new Superintendent has a tremendous opportunity to leverage the community from curricular, arts, sports, health/wellness, financial and volunteer perspectives.
Related:

• Where have all the students gone?
• Madison School District small learning community Grant application(s) and history.
• My Life and Times with the Madison Public Schools.
• Update on Credit for Non-MMSD Courses.

The Capital Times:

The Madison area, which includes all of Dane County as well as immediately adjoining areas, was awarded A+ for class size and spending per pupil in public schools, and for the popularity of the city’s public library.
The greater Madison area scored an A for being close to a college town and for offering college options.
Private school options in the greater Madison area were graded at B+.
There has been some confusion in the response to the rankings because they lump together numerous school districts — urban, suburban and rural.

Channel3000:

The engineering-based program is just one example of the district’s willingness to bring college-level learning to his high school students. That effort appears to be paying off nationally, WISC-TV reported.
“It reinforces that what we’re trying to do as a district and as an area is working,” said Granberg. “And it’s getting recognized on a national level, not just a local or state level.”
“This is not a community that accepts anything but the best and so that bar is always high,” said Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Art Rainwater.
Rainwater also credits the ranking to teacher development programs.
“We spend an awful amount of time and an awful amount of effort working with our teachers in terms of how they deliver instruction to individual children,” said Rainwater.
He said the school district will continue to improve techniques, focusing on the needs of every student.

Madison Teacher Safety: Going to Court

WKOW-TV [Watch Video | mp3 Audio]:

February 13 became a tense day in two, separate Madison schools.
Police reports show a fifteen year old student at Memorial High School became angry with special education teacher Tim Droster. Another staff member told officers the student made motions to mimic the act of shooting Droster. The student was arrested.
At Cherokee Heights Middle School, police reports show a thirteen year old student reacted to being denied laptop computer priveleges by posing this question to special education assistant Becky Buchmann: “Did you want me to gun you down?” Juvenile court records show the student had previously shot an acquaintance with a BB gun, and Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) information stated the student had also brought a BB gun to school and had gang affiliation.
Buchmann went to court and obtained a restraining order against the student.
Droster worked through school officials and his threatening student was given a different school schedule and new conduct rules.
Attorney Jordan Loeb has represented teachers seeking restraining orders to protect themselves in the classroom. “It’s controversial,” Loeb told 27 News.
But Loeb said teachers are no different than someone from any other walk of life when it comes to needing the authority of a judge to insure a threatening person does not cause harm.
“When it’s your safety on the line, you have to do everything you believe is necessary to keep yourself safe.”
Loeb estimated an average of ten teachers and other school staff members per year over the past decade have obtained restraining orders against threatening students and adults in Dane County courts.
But school district statistics show a more than five fold increase in teacher and staff injuries caused by students in the past three years.
In 2003, of 532 injury reports submitted by teachers and staff members, 29 were the result of student assaults.
In 2006, 540 teacher and staff injury reports involved 153 student assaults.
School district spokesperson Ken Syke said the most recent student assault numbers may be inflated by the inclusion of teacher injuries incidental to fights between students.

Related:

• Madison Board of Education School Safety Discussion
• Gangs and School Violence Forum
• Dane County information page on obtaining restraining orders.

Madison parents can track kids’ grades, records online

Andy Hall:

By Friday, the system, known as Infinite Campus, will be available to all parents of Madison School District middle and high school students. Those students, and parents of elementary students, will be able to tap in sometime after the first of the year.
Parents and students receive individual passwords. Parents can e-mail teachers and see whether their children owe any fees. They also can view, on a single calendar, a summary of important upcoming assignment deadlines and school events for all of their children.
With the arrival of Infinite Campus, Madison becomes the 13th of Dane County’s 16 school districts to offer around-the-clock electronic access to student information.
Officials at the three remaining districts — Marshall, Deerfield and Stoughton — plan to install similar systems soon and Stoughton already permits parents to receive frequent e-mail summaries of their children’s grades. More than 80 percent of Stoughton parents have signed up for the e-mail updates.

The Madison School District should be quite pleased with this effort. Initiatives on this scale are never easy. Certainly, much remains to be done, but lifting off, getting a great deal of staff buy in and opening it up to parents is a significant win.

Dane County, WI AP High School Course Comparison

A quick summary of Dane County, WI High School 2007-2008 AP Course Offerings (source – AP Course Audit):

• Abundant Life Christian School (3 Courses)
• Cambridge (1)
• DeForest (7)
• Madison Country Day (International Baccalaureate – IB. However, Madison Country Day is not listed on the approved IB World website.)
• Madison East (11)
• Madison Edgewood (11)
• Madison LaFollette (10)
• Madison Memorial (17)
• Madison West (5+1 2nd Year Calculus which “prepares students for the AP BC exam”)
• Marshall (5)
• McFarland (6)
• Middleton – Cross Plains (7)
• Monona Grove (7)
• Mount Horeb (5)
• Oregon (9)
• Sauk Prairie (10)
• Stoughton (6)
• Sun Prairie (13)
• Verona (10)
• Waunakee (6)
• Wisconsin Heights (6)

Links and course details are available here.
Related: Dual Enrollment, Small Learning Communities and Part and Full Time Wisconsin Open Enrollment.
Via a kind reader’s email.

Madison’s charter schools offer unique options

Andy Hall:

n its fourth year, the Madison school district’s Spanish-English charter school is so popular that the parents who helped found the East Side school are having trouble getting their children in and there’s talk of expanding the program.
The district’s other charter school, Wright Middle, is one student above capacity and this year has a waiting list for the first time.
A growing number of residents say Madison needs more places, like charter schools Nuestro Mundo and Wright, that offer unique options to students. In response, the School Board has begun probing possibilities.
“The critical issue is, ‘What do we need to do to engage a broader range of students in what’s happening in school?'” board member Carol Carstensen said at an Oct. 22 Performance and Achievement Committee meeting that examined ways the district could create programs or schools.
In Dane County, charter schools operate in the Madison, Verona, Middleton-Cross Plains, Monona, Marshall and Deerfield districts.

Dane County High School Rankings and ACT results

While the rankings of high schools in Madison Magazine (MM) have been out for awhile, they’ve continued to stick in my craw. That may have something to do with my involvement with the school that’s ranked 21st of 21. Top-ranked Edgewood, I’m sure, has a different take on the rankings, which it highlights on its […]

Madison Parents Seek Court Order to Open Enroll into Monona Grove School District

Andy Hall: Madison resident Allison Cizek, 5, is about to enter kindergarten, but a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that restricts the use of race in assigning children to schools may influence which school district she attends. Allison ‘s parents, Jeff and Jennifer Cizek, filed a petition in Dane County Circuit Court on Thursday seeking […]

Madison Country Day’s Upper School Adds International Baccalaureate Program (IB) Beginning in Fall, 2008

Madison Country Day School Letter to local parents: [550K PDF]. MCDS web site, more on their IB program. Their letter to parents begins: Dear Parents, Open up the newspaper and it’s hard to miss what is happening in our local schools. In the effort to leave no one behind, many of our most talented students […]

A Comparison of Madison Elementary, Middle & High Schools to other Wisconsin Districts

Madtown Chris: This blog will contain my personal analysis of Dane County schools primarily based on the state testing data. The posts are really intended to be read sequentially, more or less. So far it’s not really a stream-of-consciousness like a normal blog; rather it’s more of a straightforward analysis. Why bother with this? Our […]

March Madison BOE Progress Report

March Madness is approaching! On the board level, madness can be characterized by the large assortments of topics and decisions that have been or will need to be made such as the superintendent search, budget, and other serious issues that require time, analysis and public discussion. I would like to give you a brief report […]

Beth Moss and Rick Thomas Advance in Tuesday’s Madison School Board Primary Election

Sandy Cullen: Beth Moss and Rick Thomas will face off in the April 3 election for one of three open seats on the Madison School Board. They came in first and second in Tuesday’s primary for the seat being vacated by Shwaw Vang. Pam Cross-Leone came in third. Results here.

Concessions Made in Advance of MTI Negotiations by a Majority of the Madison School Board

It will be interesting to see how voters on February 20 and April 3 view this decision by a majority of the Madison School Board: Should the Board and Administration continue to give away their ability to negotiate health care benefits ($43.5M of the 2006/2007 budge) before MTI union bargaining begins? Read the 2005 MMSD/MTI […]

Madison’s Kindergarten Climate & Student Support

Andy Hall: A drop in Hispanic children’s scores is largely responsible for fewer students beginning kindergarten with the skills needed to succeed in Madison schools. Just 26 percent of Hispanic children in this year’s kindergarten class passed a screening test designed to show whether they were ready to start school, down from 29 percent four […]

UW-Madison hosts summer youth activities fair

Jonathan Zarov: The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Summer Youth Activities Fair will be held from noon-2 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 17, at the Villager Mall, 2300 S. Park St. [map] Parents and students will find exhibitors from many of the skill-building programs — academic, recreational and athletic — offered by postsecondary educational institutions in Dane County […]

Pam Cross-Leone Seat 3 Madison Board of Education

Since 1992, Pam Cross-Leone has quietly, effectively and tirelessly worked as a parent volunteer in the Madison schools. Pam welcomed the homeless children at Emerson Elementary, working to make them part of the school in every way. When Sherman Middle School and East High School experienced the problems that come with rapid changes in students […]

Dane County health insurance costs are lowest in Wisconsin

A new study by the Institute for One Wisconsin found that Dane County had the lowest regional health insurance cost in the state, as did the Madison metropolitan area compared to other metro areas. The analysis by the nonprofit research and education organization, which supports a progressive agenda, found that there was a nearly 30 […]

Facts & Questions about the 2006 Madison School District Referendum

Questions: What is the anticipated cost of equipping the Leopold addition and the elementary school at Linden Park? Are those projected costs included in the referendum authorization or not? What is the anticipated cost of operating the Leopold addition and the elementary school at Linden Park? How will those costs be appropriated/budgeted (and in what […]

2006 / 2007 Madison School Board & Committee Goals

The Madison School Board meets June 19, 2006 @ 5:00p.m. to discuss their 2006 / 2007 goals for our $332M+ schools. A friend wondered what goals readers have in mind. I thought it might be useful to consider the Board’s goals in light of the District’s strategic plan [450K pdf]: Instructional ExcellenceImproving student achievement Offering […]

Announcement from Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (and the 04 / 07 elections)

Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. MMSD email: It is with great humility that I announce that I have been elected to serve as President of the Madison School Board. I am honored to have the opportunity to provide leadership to our school district and community. Serving as President is the culmination of part of a […]

Madison Schools Make Effort to Close the Achievement Gap

Sandy Cullen: Working in conjunction with the Schools of Hope project led by the United Way of Dane County, the district has made progress in third-grade reading scores at the lowest achievement levels. But racial and income gaps persist among third-graders reading at proficient and advanced levels. Other initiatives are taking place in the middle […]

Bigelow: County Democrats Support Silveira

Wayne Bigelow: Dear Editor: On March 8, almost 100 members of the Dane County Democratic Party endorsed Arlene Silveira for Madison School Board. Although it had been more than a decade since the Democratic Party made an endorsement in a School Board race, we felt that Silveira was an extraordinarily well-qualified candidate who will be […]

Young Madison Activists Reflect On Resistance

Three years ago, a group of fifth-graders at Madison’s Crestwood Elementary School took on “The Man,” as they like to put it. The students, dubbed the “Recess Rebels,” tried to restore an outdoor recess that administrators had removed in a restructuring of the school day. They didn’t win, but they claimed a few victories along […]

UW Madison Hosts Summer Opportunities Fair

University of Wisconsin News: How can middle- and high-school students get a leg up on preparing for college? In many cases, summer recreation, academic and athletic programs play a valuable role. The Youth Opportunity Fair, designed to promote summer youth activities, will be held from 10 a.m.-noon on Saturday, March 4, at the Villager Mall, […]

Madison Schools 5 Year Budget Forecast

The Madison School District’s Finance and Operations Committee reviewed a 5 year financial forecast, starting with this year’s $320M+ budget, prepared by the Administration Monday evening. Video and mp3 audio. Local media comments: Susan Troller: Roger Price, business services director for the district, cautioned that projections beyond the next two years are simply a forecast, […]

New Dane County Gangs Task Force

Channel3000: Concerns about the growth of street gangs in the Madison area are prompting authorities to create a new task force that will target Dane County’s top gang leaders and drug dealers, WISC-TV reported. Federal, state, and local police will play a key role in the new gang unit. There’s a great deal being planned […]

2006 Candidate Forum Audio/Video: Dane County Public Affairs Council

Dane County Public Affairs Council2006 Madison School Board Candidate Forum.View [video] or listen [mp3 audio] to the entire event, or read each question below and view the candidate responses.

Speaking up about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. & King Events in Madison

The Madison Times (now owned by former school board member, Ray Allen) recently asked various members of the Madison community to comment on the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was honored to do so. These comments can be seen in this weeks issue. I’m also including dates and times of […]

NEW ART DOLLARS TARGET MADISON SCHOOLS

American Girl and an anonymous donor contribute $20,000 to grants program The Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools and the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission have secured $20,000 in new grant funds designated exclusively for arts programs in Madison schools. The two organizations have forged a unique grantmaking partnership to distribute the funds supporting guest artist […]

MMSD and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Dane County Expand Mentoring Program

The Madison Metropolitan School District and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Dane County are expanding the SOL Mentor Program to Leopold Elementary and Cherokee Middle Schools. The SOL Mentor Program continues to serve Latino, Spanish-speaking students at Frank Allis Elementary and Sennett Middle Schools and aims to match an additional 75 students with adult volunteers […]

Dane County United Calls for Child Care Funding

More day care funding urged for low-income kids By Pat Schneider, the Capital Times November 17, 2005 Every kid deserves a piece of the pie. That was the message Wednesday, when members of Dane County United joined with the Bright and Early Coalition to put out the message that more public money is needed to […]

Madison Leaders Discuss Gang Issue Saturday

Channel3000: “In the 80s, we had African-American gangs really hit the scene here in Madison,” said Madison Police Chief Noble Wray. “But what we’re looking at today is that we have more young ladies involved in gangs, we have Asian gangs, and a real increase in Latino gangs.” Dane County Executive Assistant Ken Haynes said […]

Suburban Dane County School District Growth

Gena Kittner posted a useful article on the growth, both in student population and facilities of suburban Dane County School Districts. Eleven of 16 school districts in the county have shown increased enrollment between 2001 and 2004, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.Madison is grappling with growth in more than half of its […]

The Gang Scene in Madison

Doug Erickson takes a useful look around Madison’s gang scene, including the recent events in Oregon. Erickson also mentions this Wednesday’s SIS supported event, lead by Rafael Gomez on Gangs and School Violence (9.21 @ 7:00p.m.): “It sets a watershed mark for the number of individuals involved in one event,” said Stephen Blue, who has […]

State Budget Provides Over $26 Million to Dane County Districts

Governor Jim Doyle announced that the 2005-2007 State Budget he signed into law on Monday will prevent more than $26.5 million in funding cuts to Dane County schools that the Legislature’s budget proposed. Following are the cuts that Governor Doyle restored, by district: • BELLEVILLE $368,424 • CAMBRIDGE $397,800 • DEERFIELD $305,592 • DEFOREST $1,273,368 […]

100 Black Men of Madison Golf Outing

100 Black Men of Madison seeks individual golfers/foursomes for it’s 5th Annual Golf Outing on Monday July 25th at Cherokee Country Club.

Property Taxes Biggest Share of Income in Milwaukee and Madison Areas

Wistax: The other part of the state where the property tax burden was high was Dane county, according to WISTAX. The city and town of Madison led the area with property taxes at 8.8% and 8.2% of income, respectively. Five suburbs surrounding Madison also made the top-50 list: McFarland and Mt. Horeb (both 7.4%); Sun […]

Madison Girls Hockey Not On Thin Ice Anymore

Message from Mitch Wolfe, parent organizer for the program: The WIAA Board of Controls approved a 7 school co-op which includes all four Madison city schools, Middleton, Waunakee, and Monona Grove for the upcoming 2005-6 season.

Shephard: Madison Schools WPS Insurance Proves Costly

Jason Shephard emailed a copy of his article on Madison Schools’ Healthcare costs. This article first appeared in the June 10, 2005 issue of Isthmus. The Isthmus version includes several rather useful charts & graphs that illustrate how the Madison School District’s health care costs compare with the City and County. Pick it up.

Madison Board of Education Should Not Rush to Vote on Layoffs

In the aftermath of the votes on the May 24th Madison School referenda, it is critical that the Madison School Board not rush to vote on layoffs of teachers and other staff. Currently, the Board is scheduled to vote on layoffs at noon on Thursday, May 26. This deadline for layoff votes is self-imposed by […]

Budget Time: Madison School District’s Credibility

The credibility of the Madison Metropolitan School District comes into serious question with the public when Board of Education members and district staff present erroneous information through the media to the public. Recent examples include: May, 2005 Special Election Costs:1. Bill Keys, President of the Board of Education, on the TV Channel 27 early morning […]

Dane County School Funding Forum Followup

Margaret Stumpf sent a followup message to the recent Dane County School Funding Forum. Please check with Channel 10 on the televised version of the State Budget Information Seminar held on WED, Jan 12 at Monona Grove HIgh School if you did not attend. It was very informational. I also have hard copies (as daoe […]

Cell Phones R Us: Avoiding Fiscal Responsibility the Madison School Board Way

Recently Governor Doyle directed state agencies to �examine all operations to bring accountability and fiscal responsibility to government�. As a result, the state has reduced the use of cell phones and saved thousands of dollars. The Department of Administration characterized the use of cell phones before this change as �part of the carelessness� that marked […]

A Pro Lockdown Ohio Gubernatorial Candidate

Liz Skalka There’s no existing model for Acton’s candidacy — she’s the only Covid-era health director using that experience as a springboard to run for a top statewide office, at a time when the only sitting U.S. governor who was previously a physician is Democrat Josh Green of Hawaii. How voters ultimately assess her will […]

The Deadly Cost of Ideological Medicine

Megan McArdle: In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe. But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout […]

Who Is to Blame for the Catastrophe of COVID School Closures?

Alexander Nazaryan You wrote about this issue a lot at the time. Why, years later, did you feel compelled to write a book? I very early observed my kids just withering away in the gray light of their Chromebooks alone in their bedrooms. And while it seemed reasonable initially to have schools closed, particularly because […]

Public Health’s Sacrificial Lambs

Ivy Exile To significant extents, the pandemic was exploited as the most tremendous of opportunities, and it’s not hard to understand why. Culturally and institutionally, public health has increasingly attracted and rewarded zealous and literal-minded technocrats who feel that achieving a rationally equitable global society is mainly just a matter of funding and empowering enough […]

covid era mandates, open records and outcomes

Alina Chan: Resulting subpoenas uncovered a conspiracy to avoid legally mandated oversight by deleting all emails “relating to origin”. The ranking Democrat called this a “stain on the legacy”. It’s not partisan. —- A substantive analysis of taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue

Following the junk science: How a health crisis became an educational disaster

Joanne Jacobs Summary: Toppo asks the key question: “By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no […]

The Disaster of School Closures Should Have Been Foreseen

David Zwieg: At the time of the initial closures, in mid-March, COVID was spreading quickly, but large areas in the U.S. were absent any known cases. Still, to the extent that a planned response to influenza was an appropriate universal pandemic guide, these closures were aligned with the CDC’s most recent update to its pandemic […]

The Democrat Party, Schjools, Outcomes and Truth

Raul Emanuel “Democrats need to be honest with parents, too: We shuttered schools for too long in response to the pandemic, and we need to stop looking at our shoes and hoping no one highlights our role in the devastating consequences.” —— Covid era Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate and Lockdown policies. Waiting for an analysis of […]

How scientists misled the world about Covid’s origins

Matt Ridley: Let me place you inside a taxi travelling to Geneva airport on 12 February 2020. Inside the cab are two people. One is Dr Peter Daszak, the $400,000-a-year head of the EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation that boasted about funnelling millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to harvest wild bat viruses and do […]

“Five years after lockdowns began, those who opposed them from the start remain unredeemed and “cancelled,” despite being correct, leaving me angry”

Jennifer Sey: The Boston Globe published a review of the book “In Covid’s Wake” about a week ago. The book, while being praised as redemptive for those of us who pushed back early and often, provides no such redemption. While I’ll admit I haven’t read it, I’ve read the review several times now. It allows […]

Covid mandates: “When they ran into dissent, they squelched it”

David Sharfenberg: And the people who should have held them to account — the academics and journalists charged with speaking truth to power — too often fell down on the job. The costs of the shutdowns were enormous: trillions of dollars in deficit spending to stave off economic ruin; massive learning loss, concentrated among the […]

Covid Response at Five Years: Introduction

Brownstone Institute: “This is the way the world ends,” T.S. Eliot wrotein 1925. “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Ninety-five years later, the pre-Covid world ended with a nationwide sigh of submission. Democrats remained silent as government mandates transferred trillions of dollars from the working class to tech oligarchs. Republicans dithered as states criminalized church […]

How the pandemic response destroyed the learning culture in one Baltimore high school

Jennifer Gaither The name Baltimore City College may not mean much to the rest of the world, but it means a whole lot to people who live in Baltimore. Baltimore City College, or “City,” founded in 1839, is the third oldest public high school in the nation and is typically ranked in the top high […]

Wellness: “Gain of Function Research“

By W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric: What worries us is the insufficient safety precautions the researchers took when studying this coronavirus. Research laboratories have different levels of security, based on its categorization on a biosafety level scale, from BSL-1, the lowest, to BSL-4. Lower-security labs are used for studying infectious agents that either don’t cause disease in […]

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Falling property values and rising taxes in Chicago

JD Busch: According to Chicago Contrarian, a property currently paying $25,000 in annual property tax (common for properties worth $750K-$1.25MM) will fork over an additional $4,685 annually based on the proposed 18.75% tax hike. And while the real estate market hasn’t yet processed this latest curveball (it’ll take a few months for closed transactions to reveal […]

“Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health”

Jay Bhattacharya: The House report on HHS covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden admin spent almost a billion dollars to push falsehoods about covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence. More: taxpayer funded Dane County Madison Public […]

The Fauci Conspiracy

James B. Meigs In other words, our public health officials, abetted by a politicized media, manufactured an airtight consensus on both Covid science and policy. This consensus was largely immune to scientific evidence or concerns about the real-world impacts of draconian policies. But not everyone joined the lockstep march on Covid. Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, […]

Fauci Stumped on Child-Masking Evidence in Testimony, Admitted Lack of Scientific Basis for Six-Foot Distancing

James Lynch: “Did you see any studies that supported 6 feet?” a subcommittee staffer followed up. “I was not aware of studies that — in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do,” Fauci conceded. Upon further questioning, Fauci said six feet was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even […]

Covid policy review: Dr. Anthony Fauci transcribed interview

Select Subcommittee: SOCIAL DISTANCING: The “6 feet apart” social distancing recommendation forced on Americans by federal health officials was arbitrary and not based on science. Dr. Fauci testified that this guidance “sort of just appeared.” MASKING: Dr. Fauci testified that he did not recall any supporting evidence for masking children. Mask-wearing has been associated with […]

“Collins implored a group of esteemed international scientists to produce a paper that would discredit the lab leak theory of COVID-19’s origins”

Peter Laffin: Twice during the call, Fauci prodded Dr. Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist, to lead the effort.  In a subsequent email obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Collins urged the swift production of the paper. In his view, the absence of a strong case for a “natural origins” theory […]

“I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives”

Kevin Bass; I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not […]

“There is actually no role for lockdowns,” 

Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean Michael Osterholm, the prominent epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, also doesn’t think lockdowns did any good. “There is actually no role for lockdowns,” he says. “Look at what happened in China. They locked down for years, and when they finally relaxed that effort, they had a million deaths in two weeks.” […]

How Sweden proved the world wrong about lockdown

Fredrik Andersson and Lars Jonung The evidence is clear: authoritarian restrictions did not save more lives. In 2020, countries across the world followed in the footsteps of China and locked down hard against Covid-19. Liberties were drastically curtailed. As was economic activity, forcing governments to borrow tens if not hundreds of billions of pounds each to […]

Civics: Canada’s Trudeau overturned on use of the “emergencies act”

Elizabeth Nickson: And just like that, Canada’s storied Liberal Party, in power for one hundred years, the country’s self-described “natural governing party,” is done. Before the ruling this week, Pierre Polievre’s Conservatives were projected to win 222 seats, according to Angus Reid’s January 21st poll, with the Liberals at 53 seats. Trudeau’s partner-in-crime, the fetching […]

New documents strengthen—perhaps conclusively—the lab-leak hypothesis of Covid-19’s origins.

Nicholas Wade: The day is growing ever closer when Washington may have to add to its agenda with Beijing a nettlesome item it has long sought to avoid: the increasingly likely fact that China let the SARS2 virus escape from the Wuhan lab where it was concocted, setting off the Covid-19 pandemic that killed some […]

Covid Lockdowns: “another mistake we made”

This is absolutely astonishing 😳 Francis Collins admits the massive, unnecessary “collateral damage” from their botched covid public health response was due to an elitist beltway-centric myopic POV …oopsie! pic.twitter.com/ofXggcz5jB — Erich Hartmann (@erichhartmann) December 28, 2023 I watched the full Francis Collins interview about masking, lockdowns, school closure, Great Barrington Declaration and what he […]

Diving into the disastrous response to the Covid pandemic

John Tierney: Today I’m joined by the author of a terrific new book on this subject, Joe Nocera, a journalist whose work I’ve admired for decades in magazines and books. Joe is a longtime op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He’s now a columnist for The Free Press, and he’s the co-author of the new book, The […]

“Why the Covid inquiry is a farce”

Jonathan Sumption: The Covid-19 inquiry’s terms of reference are as broad as could be, but it has only one useful purpose. Lockdowns and other aggressive government interventions were an unprecedented and untested experiment with the lives and wellbeing of each one of us. We need to know what they achieved, if anything. We need to […]

‘The Singular Cruelty of America Toward Children’

James Freeman: The best way to prevent politicians and bureaucrats from ever again inflicting on American kids the learning losses, social isolation and staggering financial burden of the Covid lockdowns is to ensure a just reckoning for the destruction they caused. Perhaps this is beginning to happen. John Fensterwald reports in the Bakersfield Californian: This […]

Yes, the pandemic-era school closures were a disaster

James Pethokoukis: A brief reminder: Back in the summer of 2020, I tried to hammer home the point that preventing kids from going to school full-time and in-person during the coming school year would be a terrible idea with serious consequences for the kids and the country. School is more than just a place where […]

Sweden during the Pandemic: Pariah or Paragon?

Johan Norberg: Sweden was different during the pandemic, stubbornly staying open as other countries shut down borders, schools, restaurants, and workplaces. This choice created a massive interest in Sweden, and never before have the foreign media reported so much about the country. Many outsiders saw it as a reckless experiment with people’s lives. In April 2020 President […]

Our pandemic outcome would have been better with more debate, less censorship.

Holman Jenkins: Our steps did not significantly impede its spread even as our efforts miraculously quashed the annual flu. In year two, despite vaccination, as many Americans died as in year one. Yet further healthcare meltdowns were avoided. Vaccines clearly saved lives; if lockdowns and masking mandates contributed by keeping people alive until they could be vaccinated, […]

Millions of kids are missing weeks of school as attendance tanks across the US

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

Wisconsin schools that went remote for longer saw expanded gaps in graduation rates

Baby Vinick: Wisconsin schools that had a longer period of virtual or hybrid learning during the pandemic saw graduation rates rise among wealthier students and fall among those at an economic disadvantage, a new study found. The study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the journal Educational Researcher, analyzed data from 429 public high schools in […]

Civics: Power Grabs and Covid era mandates

The biology of a virus shouldn’t be political. Medical questions in general shouldn’t be. Like, there isn’t a left- and right-wing way to do a heart transplant. The problem arises when “science” is used to justify a power grab. A good discussion would separate the two. — Balaji (@balajis) June 18, 2023 Mandates, school lockdowns […]

Civics: taxpayer funded Facebook censorship

Mark Zuckerberg says it was challenging to censor COVID misinformation because the scientific establishment was frequently wrong, which ultimately undermined public trust: “Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health… pic.twitter.com/y0ZaX4kmCE — KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 9, 2023 Related: Dane County Madison Public Health mandates.

Commentary on lockdowns and their implications

The bigoted prejudice of American public health that kids were covid superspeaders – even after early evidence from Iceland and Sweden showed otherwise – is the root cause of the tsunami of accelerated learning loss and generational inequality the US will face in coming years. — Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) May 23, 2023 Related: “mandates” from […]

“Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear”

Gorsuch redeemed himself today. What a glorious indictment of our governments and leaders — and our sheepish people. On the record. Preserved for history. pic.twitter.com/YMj29rKPeG — Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) May 19, 2023 Taxpayer supported mandates via unelected administrators: Dane County Madison Public Health.

The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?

Bret Stephens: The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous. “There is just no evidence that they” — masks […]

The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?

Bret Stephens: The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous. “There is just no evidence that they” — masks […]

Commentary on trust in taxpayer supported “public health authorities”

Aaron Carroll: Too many messages are still centered on trying to frighten people into compliance by arguing about worst-case scenarios and ‌‌convincing them that things are as dangerous as ever. They amplify every new variant and predict future worsening. They point to charts of the unvaccinated and vaccinated and marvel at the differences in deaths. Such charts […]

Officials made public-health bets that students will have to pay for

Nat Malkus: What Weingarten conveniently leaves out is the reason for “two years of disruption.” Time and again, cautious state and school leaders — disproportionately Democrats in concert with teachers’ unions — extended school closures or strict Covid protocols, demonstrated little responsiveness as new evidence on Covid emerged, and minimized the trade-offs. Many red-state leaders […]

A rather curious article on K-12 COVID era health policies

Sharon Luyre and Collin Binkley: The Verona School District plans to start its school year in the same manner the last year ended. Its 2021-22 goal was to remain open for in-person instruction five days a week, district spokesperson Marcie Pfeifer-Soderbloom said. “We were able to meet that goal, and that will continue to be […]

Governance: Cashiered Navy Officers (consequences! No Mulligans?)

Jeff Schogol: The Navy believes it is worth publicly disclosing whenever admirals in particular have been disciplined for misconduct in order to maintain the public’s trust and confidence in the Department of the Navy’s integrity, Mommsen said. Generally, that standard also applies in cases when allegations of misconduct against commanding officers, executive officers, and senior […]

“Expert” idiocy on teaching kids to read

Robert Pondiscio: Calkins’s work mostly disregards this fundamental insight, focusing students’ attention in the mirror instead of out the window. For low-income kids who are less likely to grow up in language-rich homes and don’t have the same opportunities for enrichment as affluent kids, the opportunity costs of Calkins’s “philosophy” are incalculable. Endless hours of class time […]

“anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools”

Ruy Teixeira: Finally, there is perhaps the key issue for many Asian voters: education. It is difficult to overestimate how important education is to Asian voters, who see it as the key tool for upward mobility—a tool that even the poorest Asian parents can take advantage of. But Democrats have become increasingly associated with an […]

Mulligans ignored: The U.S. News and World Report rankings don’t consider any of the scores or metrics from Wisconsin’s public schools since then.

Benjamin Yount: “As proficiency has plummeted under his tenure, Governor Evers is forced to point to outdated data to back up his claims that he has been an effective leader on education,” Will Flanders with the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty told The Center Square. Flanders added that Gov. Evers’ approach to public schools […]

Taxpayer supported Wisconsin DPI and free speech

MD Kittle: The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has long been a haven of leftist thought and policy. Increasingly, the agency has become politically weaponized in the pursuit of its woke diversity, equity and inclusion agenda. Most recently, DPI launched an investigation into a Milwaukee Public Schools counselor whose alleged crime is that she spoke passionately in […]

New ‘discoveries’ of the harm caused by school closures are as disingenuous and politically motivated as the original policies themselves

Alex Gutentag: The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 […]

“no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates”

Ambarish Chandra and Tracy Beth Høeg Our study replicates a highly cited CDC study showing a negative association between school mask mandates and pediatric SARS-CoV-2 cases. We then extend the study using a larger sample of districts and a longer time interval, employing almost six times as much data as the original study. We examine […]

Civics: “Covid Truth…“

Russel Blaylock: The federal Care Act encouraged this humandisaster by offering all US hospitals up to 39,000dollars for each ICU patient they put on respirators. despite the fact that early on it was obvious that the respirators were a major cause of death among these unsuspecting, trusting patients. In addition, the hospitals received 12,000 dollars […]

Mulligans all around

Chris Rickert: After failing to get a waiver from the state’s minimum instructional hours requirement, the Madison School District has devised a plan for the last week of this school year that will allow students getting Cs or better at its four main high schools to forgo getting that minimum amount of instruction. The district […]

“Little evidence was found that more spending affects student performance”

Will Flanders: Here are the biggest findings: Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public-school peers. Proficiency rates in private choice schools were 4.6% higher in English/Language Arts (ELA) and 4.5% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee. Charter school students in Milwaukee continue […]