schoolinfosystem.org
THURSDAY: Assembly Committee on Education will be hearing testimony on a Parent Bill of Rights. pic.twitter.com/2zPwBJmbwu — WILL (@WILawLiberty) February 9, 2022 Notes: Parent Bill of Rights: In recent years, WILL has represented several public-school parents after their local public schools established policies and procedures that undermined the parent’s rights to make decisions about their […]
Alexander Shur: In vetoing the critical race theory bill, Evers said he is objecting to creating new censorship rules that would prohibit educators from teaching “honest, complete facts about important historical topics.” “Our kids deserve to learn in an atmosphere conducive to learning without being subjected to state legislative encroachment that is neither needed nor […]
Will Flanders: Findings: Counting the Cost: Wisconsin School Closures and Student Proficiency, by Will Flanders and Miranda Spindt, reviewed school closure decisions in the 2020-21 school year and ran an analysis to see their impact on recent Forward Exam data. The findings point towards significant learning loss for students in districts that chose virtual learning over a […]
James Causey: Stop passing kids you know are behind. It sets them up for a lifetime of failure. If they can’t read, nothing else will matter. They will be on the road to dropping out and a life of unemployment or low-paying, dead-end jobs. In Milwaukee Public Schools, only half of the Black boys who […]
Molly Beck: Two Republicans running for governor said this week they would sign legislation that dissolves the state’s largest school district while the Democratic incumbent who spent a career in education said the idea would throw Milwaukee’s children into “chaos.” Gov. Tony Evers, a former state superintendent and public school educator, signaled Tuesday he would […]
Chester Finn Monday’s Washington Post featured a long, front-page article by the estimable Laura Meckler titled “Public schools facing a crisis of epic proportions.” In it, she skillfully summarized a laundry list of current woes facing traditional public education: The scores are down and violence is up. Parents are screaming at school boards, and children are crying […]
“A child who attends a traditional public school in Milwaukee is worth more than $4,000 more in the eyes of government than that same child if they attend the private choice school down the street.”https://t.co/cg2mB7LZ4L — WILL (@WILawLiberty) February 3, 2022 This is a Renaissance painting.No, the opposite of a Renaissance.Dégringolade.20 years.2 stalls.A full press […]
Dylan Brogan: And there is pressure to ignore the realities of missed work: “A kid zones out the entire semester, doesn’t do any work, and we’re being told [from administrators] to get them to quickly make up a couple of assignments and give him a passing grade. It’s a terrible message we are sending.” ….. […]
Wisconsin State Senator Alberta Darling: Wisconsin has a reputation for reform. It’s time we regain our status as a national leader and innovator for education reform,” Darling said, “We are putting parents and their children firstw , we are going to increase transparency and accountability, and we will be funding students, not systems.” Parental Bill […]
Ann Althouse: Said an unnamed 2021 graduate, quoted in “Remote learning led to rampant cheating at NYC’s Stuyvesant High School” (NY Post). Stuyvesant is a phenomenally elite public high school, with admission based on the Specialized High School Admissions Test. Also quoted, an unnamed sophomore: “A lot of people didn’t actually learn as much last year because […]
Rick Mayer: Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had “devastating effects” on economies and numerous social ills. The study, titled “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” said lockdowns in Europe and the U.S. reduced COVID-19 deaths […]
Urgency of Normal: In much of the United States, adults have the option of returning to life essentially as we knew it in 2019. However, children continue to experience disproportionate restrictions, and the costs are mounting. Youth depression, suspected suicide attempts, drug overdose deaths, and obesity have all risen dramatically during the pandemic. The unintended […]
Zachary Stein: The need to rediscover and reinvigorate education as the deeper codes and sources of culture is aided by Zak’s skilful reviving of the spirit of John Amos Comenius, an educator of world-historical importance. But why education exactly? Because education is not just children in uniform with their feet under desks holding pencils expectantly while […]
Benjamin Yount: It’s the latest snapshot of just how many parents in Wisconsin want to explore educational options for their kids. Tuesday was the first day for parents to enroll in the state’s Private School Choice Program. By midday, the state’s website crashed because of a flood of applications. “Due to high volume, the system […]
MARTIN KULLDORFF AND JAY BHATTACHARYA With millions of Americans getting infected and over 800,000 reported COVID-19 deaths, most people now realize that Washington’s pandemic policies failed. Lockdowns just postponed the inevitable while causing enormous collateral damage on cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, tuberculosis, mental health, education and much else. So, the blame game is in full […]
Christopher Ingraham: But in 2021 that all changed. The very-happies plummeted from 31 percent of the population in 2018 down to 19, while the not-too-happies surged by a nearly identical amount, from 13 to 24 percent. The balance is made up by the pretty-happies at around 57 percent, who I omitted from the chart because […]
American Federation of teachers: Notwithstanding the considerable difficulties of the pandemic, public school parents express high levels of satisfaction with the schools serving their children and say that public schools are helping their children achieve their full potential.• More than seven in 10 public school parents give a high performance rating to their children’s schools. […]
Ambika Kandasamy, Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke This systematic review and meta-analysis are designed to determine whether there is empirical evidence to support the belief that “lockdowns” reduce COVID-19 mortality. Lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). NPIs are any government mandate that directly restrict […]
Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya: The pandemic is on its way out, but how many Americans think the U.S. approach succeeded? More than 600,000 Americans died from Covid, and lockdowns have left extensive collateral damage. Trust in science has eroded, and the damage won’t be limited to epidemiology, virology and public health. Scientists in other […]
Randi Weingarten’s union is buying a service to filter news for “misinformation” for millions of students. pic.twitter.com/mAhR9LCkWb — Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) January 25, 2022 What’s happening: The AFT teachers union is buying NewsGuard licenses for its 1.7 million teachers, who will then be able to share it with tens of millions students around the […]
Given the academic and social challenges that students face, many local education agencies are planning to use #Covidrelief money to hire more staff members and beef up training, benefits and pay for those already on the payroll. https://t.co/UiT0INSU8N — FutureEd (@FutureEdGU) January 25, 2022 Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health. The data clearly indicate that […]
Stacey Lance: I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics. I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my […]
Left Voice: Our union members were going in. Some people stopped responding to our chat after the first day. They needed their paycheck, or they didn’t want to ruffle feathers, whatever their reason, they turned their back on us. This was happening everywhere. Since this wasn’t an official strike, people did not see the problem […]
Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis: The long-term closing of schools, and the harm it did to children nationwide, was a decision based not on health, but on politics — thanks to teachers unions and the Democratic politicians they fund. A study by researchers at Michigan State University found that when governors left it up to districts whether to have in-person […]
Stacey Lance: I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics. I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my […]
Will Flanders, DPI itself has also contributed to this problem in a number of ways. Nearly $150,000,000 of state education spending is retained at the state level for operations. In addition, DPI has contributed and created the barriers for teachers to access the classroom. With barrier upon barrier to get licensed to teach, it is difficult to recruit and […]
1. Ok, let’s talk about a different strategy for Biden and Dems, going all the way back to inauguration. Instead of seeing the election as a mandate to expand the safety with weird badly designed programs, what would a good agenda have been? Deal with Covid. What does that mean? — Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December […]
Alison Dirr: The City of Milwaukee Common Council on Tuesday approved a new mask mandate, and Acting Mayor Cavalier Johnson plans to sign it. But it’s not the same mask mandate that residents and businesses had grown accustomed to earlier in the pandemic. This one comes with a likely end date — and a pared […]
Molly Beck: Low-performing schools in Wisconsin would be forced to close under a plan to overhaul K-12 education put forward by Kevin Nicholson, a Republican who is expected to announce this week he is running for governor. Nicholson, who was defeated in a Republican U.S. Senate primary in 2018 by former state Sen. Leah Vukmir […]
Ilya Somin: Georgetown philosophy Prof. Jason Brennan, himself the author of an important book on the morality of resistance to government power, has a useful summary of King’s views on these issues. As Brennan points out, King believed that disobedience to unjust laws is often entirely justified, even when the laws in question were enacted by democratic governments: Many […]
Jonathan Chait: Within blue America, transparently irrational ideas like this were able to carry the day for a disturbingly long period of time. In recent days, Angie Schmitt and Rebecca Bodenheimer have both written essays recounting the disorienting and lonely experience they had watching their friends and putative political allies denounce them for supporting a return to in-person learning. […]
I recently saw a sign prominently posted in a Madison restaurant that said: “Wear a Mask, it’s the law”. This is a teaching moment. The current Dane County Madison Public Health mask requirement is a mandate, not (yet) a law. The status of said mask requirement is the subject of law fare and activism. Some […]
Barry Adams: Almost all of the lessons at the Kickapoo Valley Forest School are held outdoors, even on days when the temperature plunges well below freezing. The nature-based curriculum is central for the 4K and kindergarten students and their teachers, who have had lunch outside all but four days since the first day of school […]
Jesse Kauffman: The greatest casualty of the pandemic era is, without question, America’s public education system. Shuttering public schools in the first panicked days of March 2020 was perhaps understandable. However, many schools—such as those my children attend in Ann Arbor, Michigan—failed to open the following year. Schools closed in defiance of any reasonable accounting […]
mp3 audio (about 3 hours – not the entire session): Machine generated transcript. School and District Report Cards and the recent changes made to those Report Cards Invited speakers include: School Choice Wisconsin Action (Jim Bender) Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (Thomas McCarthy) Stride, Inc. Siena Catholic Schools Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (Prepared […]
Shared via brownstone: Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost […]
Mike Antonucci: The Chicago Teachers Union decided last week to cease in-person schooling until a variety of conditions were met. In response, Chicago Public Schools refused to allow teachers to log in for remote instruction and demanded they return to the classroom. After days of negotiations, the two sides reached a tentative agreement. In-person classes […]
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 […]
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 […]
Helen Lewis: I got my COVID-19 booster shot last week, on the first day I was eligible. My shot was delayed because I caught COVID in early December, an experience that was low-key grim: two days of shotgun sneezing, no taste or smell for a week, and a constant fatigue that didn’t abate until the […]
Scott Calvert: Public-school attendance across the U.S. has dropped to unusually low levels, complicating efforts to keep schools open, as districts also contend with major staff shortages. Many students in kindergarten through 12th grade are out sick because of Covid-19 or are being kept home by anxious parents, as the Omicron variant surges, officials say. Remote learning often isn’t being […]
Joy Pullman: Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and […]
Selena Zito: Some days, people would pull an ornament from their jacket pocket and add it while on their daily stride. On other days, one might see a parent pushing a stroller or with a child on their little bicycle stop and look at the delightful little ornaments. Without fail, each child would look at […]
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 […]
Shannon Whitworth: I work at a high school where the majority of the students are from inner-city Milwaukee. They are confronted almost daily with some form of dysfunction, depravity, or violence. One day, some of my students challenged me as to why they should put a lot of effort into their studies when, from their […]
State Senator Kathy Bernier and State Representative Joel Kitchens: Literacy in Wisconsin is in crisis: 64% of Wisconsin 4th graders can’t read at grade level, with 34% failing to read at even the basic level. As co-chair of Governor Walker’s Read to Lead Task Force, you know that high quality universal literacy screening is the […]
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. […]
Dana Goldstein and Noam Scheiber: Few American cities have labor politics as fraught as Chicago’s, where the nation’s third-largest school system shut down this week after teachers’ union members refused to work in person, arguing that classrooms were unsafe amid the Omicron surge. But in a number of other places, the tenuous labor peace that […]
Liberty Justice Center: – A group of Chicago parents have filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Teachers Union, calling this week’s school closures an “illegal strike” and demanding that teachers return to school for in-person learning. The lawsuit was filed late Thursday by attorneys at the Liberty Justice Center, a national nonprofit law firm 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 […]
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 […]
Someone just sent a picture of their child’s homework to me. Sorry @GovEvers 🤣💗 pic.twitter.com/Kf8iCOpbJu — Katie Rosenberg ✌ (@katierosenberg) January 7, 2022 Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health. The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic” 2017: West […]
Ellen Townsend: The rights and needs of young people have been ignored in this crisis and this is a national and global disaster in the making. The future of our youngsters has been sacrificed in order to protect adults which goes against the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (article 3) states: “In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 thepurposes of school attendance. I recognize that this change may come as a surprise to some after almost two […]
Matt Shapiro: This kind of pronouncement was meant to imply that vaccination rates were responsible for low rates of COVID at Harvard, not the fact that Harvard is in a region that was at a COVID nadir last September. Now that the region is having a COVID outbreak, Harvard has, despite mandatory vaccines (and mandatory […]
Jessica Calefati AMERICA, WE HAVE A PROBLEM — Results from a standardized test taken by elementary and middle school students earlier this school year paint a bleak picture of the harm the pandemic inflicted on their learning. — Performance on the iReady test administered nationally by Curriculum Associates plummeted for all students compared to the last time it […]
NEW: The Chicago Teachers Union says its planned vote tonight would see members refuse in-person work until Jan. 18 or until the city’s COVID-19 wave falls below the threshold Chicago Public Schools set last year, whichever happens first. — Nader Issa (@NaderDIssa) January 4, 2022 Maureen Kelleher: If ever there was a moment to ensure […]
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 […]
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 […]
Scott Girard: Seventeen months passed between the closure of schools in March 2020 and Gordon Allen’s return to learning inside East High School. The Madison Metropolitan School District student senate president and East senior, who opted to finish the 2020-21 school year virtually rather than return via the district’s phased-in return to buildings, said this […]
Laura McKenna: Are we going to shutdown society and schools again? There is enormous pressure from the top to not close schools. That’s why the CDC has shifted its recommendations for dealing with positive people. Now, positive people only have to isolate for five days. Fauci says that positive people are really only contagious two […]
School closings and “remote learning” have caused a massive mental health crisis among teenagers. This, and the disruption to their intellectual development, will be enduring and severe.https://t.co/Q3mtWJ9MnR pic.twitter.com/ONrnYIWBPI — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 26, 2021 I think about whenever I (frequently) see children running around outside, masked. Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public […]
Brad Kirby: I was born with hearing loss in both ears. Since the age of six, I have worn hearing aids. Being hearing-impaired has been a huge life disadvantage. For example, as a child I couldn’t hear the whistle while trying to play sports, and continued playing until I see people laughing or trying to […]
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 […]
Sometimes the best way to evaluate COVID policies and discourse is to tune out the punditry and just spend time looking at CDC data on deaths and hospitalization. Look how few people are dying in a post-vaccine world under 75 and even under 65.https://t.co/kHiNQf9smG https://t.co/7JJmpgOZr4 pic.twitter.com/FCl9HlX07H — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 18, 2021 Notes and […]
Mark Scolforo: They upheld a lower-court decision that the mandate was imposed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s acting health secretary without legal authorization. The practical impact of the decision will depend on what the justices say in the written opinion or opinions they will issue in the case and which schools and school districts impose […]
William Briggs: This is update CIX. Let’s summarize, shall we? My first post on the panic was 27 January 2020: “Taleb Chastises Calm Journalist, Advises Precautionary Panic To Coronavirus“. Taleb almost at once became a shrinking, shrieking hersteric. Which I should have, but did not see, would have become the default position among Experts and […]
Scott Girard McFarland School District students considered close contacts of a person who tests positive for COVID-19 are no longer required to quarantine. The School Board unanimously approved the change to COVID-19 protocols Monday. For most schools in Dane County, students who are considered close contacts and are unvaccinated are required to quarantine for 14 […]
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. […]
Noah Carl: Last year, Britain’s life expectancy fell by about 1.1 years. That means it would have fallen by an additional 1.1 years under focused protection. Is this figure large enough to justify the manifold harms of lockdown? I would argue: no. Although 1.1 years is a large year-on-year change, it only takes us back 12 […]
Allison Garfield: County Board Chair Analiese Eicher told the Cap Times that the resolution takes away from the “real work” the county could be doing to help with the pandemic. “The Dane County Board has been supportive of public health measures since the beginning of the pandemic. For many of us, we look at the […]
Andrew Stiles: Dr. Anthony Fauci was spotted Tuesday nightwithout a mask while he attended journalist Jonathan Karl’s book party at Café Milano, the élite Washington, D.C., bistro frequented by Hunter Biden’s corrupt business partners. “As gawkers tried to snap pictures of [Fauci] indoors not wearing a mask, America’s doc would put it on and take it off depending […]
This is Rhode Island @GovDanMcKee last night at a Gala — just hours after he extended The State of Emergency in Rhode Island for the sole purpose to keep children masked in schools. Fact: the V doesn’t prevent transmission. Where is our General Assembly?#abuse #UNMASKOURCHILDREN pic.twitter.com/419q0U32Br — Jody Stone (@TheStonesEG) November 14, 2021 Related: Dane […]
Scott Girard: The Madison Metropolitan School District expects to continue its mask mandate at least through the end of its second quarter Jan. 21. Superintendent Carlton Jenkins sent a quarterly health and safety update to parents Thursday afternoon outlining that and other guidance updates. That would put the requirement nearly two months beyond the anticipated end of Public Health Madison & […]
Amy Norton: Where did the droplet/airborne distinction come from? It was based on observations regarding proximity. Most respiratory viruses, including the flu, are usually passed among people in relatively close contact. But then there are pathogens like the measles virus, which can also infect people at greater distances: A U.S. measles outbreak in the 1990s, […]
Amy Norton: Where did the droplet/airborne distinction come from? It was based on observations regarding proximity. Most respiratory viruses, including the flu, are usually passed among people in relatively close contact. But then there are pathogens like the measles virus, which can also infect people at greater distances: A U.S. measles outbreak in the 1990s, […]
JD Tuccille: Americans have shifted back to favoring a more hands-off approach for government in addressing the nation’s problems after a rare endorsement of a more active role last year,” Gallup reported in mid-October. “Last year marked only the second time in Gallup’s 29-year trend that at least half of Americans endorsed an active role for […]
Phil Magness and Phillip W. Magness: From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the harms of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and maybe hint at a path back to normal life. Organized by Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, the conference made a scientific case for shifting […]
Future: One thing’s for sure — with this COVID crisis, we’re at an inflection point between old and new technology — whether it’s in how we make vaccines, or how we apply the fields of synthetic biology and genetic epidemiology in public health response. So now’s the time to look both backward, and forward, to […]
David Zweig: At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even […]
Chia C. Wang, Kimberly A. Prather,, Josué Sznitman, Jose L. Jimenez, Seema S. Lakdawala, Zeynep Tufekci, Linsey C. Marr: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted controversies and unknowns about how respiratory pathogens spread between hosts. Traditionally, it was thought that respiratory pathogens spread between people through large droplets produced in coughs and through contact with contaminated […]
Emily Files Hamilton Superintendent Paul Mielke believes his district is following CDC recommendations. “It still came across as a ‘recommend’ and we are strongly recommending [masks,]” Mielke says. “So we’re actually matching their language. If they would have said schools should mandate, we would have looked at that.” Still, Mielke says the masking decision was […]
Contrast the experience of schoolchildren in the Netherlands—no mask mandates or distancing for kids <12, ever—to the widespread US belief that we absolutely must mask kindergartners all day in school for their safety. You owe it to yourself to read the entire thing, I promise. pic.twitter.com/QrLaJSRph5 — Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) August 23, 2021 Related: Catholic schools will sue […]
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 […]
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 […]
Lucy McBride: A recent peer-reviewed study in Britain of nearly 260,000 children (1,700 of whom showed symptoms) reminds us that for most kids, a coronavirus infection will manifest as the common cold—if anything. Also reassuring is that only 4.4 percent of children diagnosed with COVID-19 in this study had symptoms after 28 days (and 1.8 percent after […]
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., […]
Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad: Later in 2020, Fauci participated in a second noble lie. In December, he explained in a phone interview with then–New York Times reporter Donald McNeil that he had been moving the target estimate for herd immunity based in part on emerging studies. But he also said: When polls said only about half of all […]
Jon Miltimore: Weeks later, however, we have an abundance of empirical evidence that show the prognosticators were once again wrong. Cases did not double or quadruple as Ferguson had predicted. Nor did cases “surge,” as many had warned. On the contrary, cases fell—a lot. Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled Notes and […]
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 […]
Daniel Levi: In a 5-minute YouTube video, BILD editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt said:“Millions of children in this country, for whom we are all responsible as a society, I would like to say what our Federal Government and our Chancellor have not dare to say so far: We ask your forgiveness. We ask your forgiveness for a […]
Scott Girard: “Simply put, these are not your children,” the letter states. “They are ours and they too, are Americans with rights. They are our responsibility and our most beloved. They are not yours.” A media contact for the group connected the Cap Times with a member of the Dane County chapter via email. After […]
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. […]
Virat Agrawal: As a way of slowing COVID-19 transmission, many countries and U.S. states implemented shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. However, the effects of SIP policies on public health are a priori ambiguous as they might have unintended adverse effects on health. The effect of SIP policies on COVID-19 transmission and physical mobility is mixed. To understand […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]