Google Docs will “warn you away from inappropriate words”. https://t.co/SwznOx6bSr pic.twitter.com/1WDVdnlNVu
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) April 19, 2022
A tiny, seemingly harmless, reminder that corporations are building an infrastructure that can control the conversations and behaviors of billions of people in real time, and we’re letting them do it.#thelongnight https://t.co/QX9rasF24j
— John Robb (@johnrobb) April 19, 2022
Lest you believe the flap over the recent prohibition on law professor Rob Steinbuch’s long-approved use of guest lecturers during absences on Jewish high holidays has passed, think again.
I say that because a committee at the UALR Bowen Law School recently voted to recommend eliminating the school’s guest lecturer policy to the full Bowen faculty, keeping the issue alive.
For years, policy has allowed guest lecturers to cover Bowen classes when faculty members were legitimately absent (as on religious holidays).
Steinbuch said the action by four fellow professors on the committee was “clearly personal and aimed at my particular situation during the Jewish holidays when for nearly 20 years I have invited legal professionals and judges to educate classes about our practice in the real world.”
A decorated law professor and the state’s leading Freedom of Information Act expert, who also is seeking election to the House of Representatives for District 73 in Little Rock, Steinbuch may be on to something, considering the school’s visiting-lecturer policy wasn’t an issue until challenged by Bowen Dean Theresa Beiner last year. That’s after Steinbuch had invited a federal judge to lecture his class during his religious-observance absence, as he had done many times before.
“These questions include: ‘How can you show that you value the ideas of others?’ and ‘What helps you understand your partner’s ideas?’ The book also encourages students to learn how to ‘work together’ when doing math and to ‘listen to our friends and teachers.’ Florida Reveal Math Grade 5, which was also rejected, uses similar prompts to encourage students to think critically about how they work with others in the classroom setting. ‘When we do math, we listen to the arguments of others and think about what makes sense and what doesn’t,’ the book states in the introduction. Other prompts encourage critical thinking and highlight relationship skills, such as: ‘What can I learn from others’ thinking about the problem?’ and ‘What can you do to help all classmates feel comfortable in math class?’ The textbook encourages students to think about how they can ‘recognize and respond to the emotions of others’ and practice building ‘relationship[s]’ with classmates.”
Why a new school? Confidence in public schools is at historic lows. Parents want a change. And people can sense that the Prussian education system, the model for American schooling, just isn’t working anymore. Perhaps fifty years ago you might well pull the same lever every day on an assembly line, but today you hit a different key every second.
Instruction hasn’t kept up.
You can watch videos on the Synthesis model here, but the fundamental concept is teaching kids how to collaboratively work with information like adults do. In a sense, it’s similar to what American education used to be — namely early apprenticeship in the kinds of activities they’d be doing as adults, the system that educated Ben Franklin.
Synthesis is starting out as a complement to existing schools, but already has thousands of happy students and parents. Over time the plan is to add more and more math and science, until eventually it’s a full-blown alternative to the legacy K-12 system. Ultimately that may involve building physical classrooms.
There are several aspects of Synthesis that I think are worth noting, as they are part of a general set of tactics to build opt-in alternatives to failing institutions.
Human capital is the bottleneck to civilizational progress. It’s our scarcest resource. To increase the supply, the highest leverage place to begin is K-12. If we can fix that system, we have a base for a better world. That’s what Synthesis aims to do.
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 final bell of the school year is the sound of freedom for students, and summer reading assignments can be pushed to the bottom of the backpack and to-do list. Whether summer reading is suggested for fun or required for the next school year, students often see it as dreaded, uninteresting homework. Worst case, it can backfire for kids who already have a hard time reading, like the students in Larissa Hinton’s reading support class at Norview Middle School in Norfolk, VA.
“A lot of my students do not care for reading, and they’ll say all these books are boring,” says Hinton, who has taught sixth to twelfth grade English and currently works with kids at the Title I school to boost their literacy proficiency and reading enjoyment. “It drives me crazy to see these summer reading lists that keep having books that don’t work or appeal at all to students.”
Hinton was one of nearly 100 librarians, classroom teachers, and educators who participated in the SLJ and NCTE’s Summer Survey. The selections and purpose of suggested or required lists have left many teachers and librarians divided, and survey results reflect the split. While teachers’ assignments are often driven by curricular mandates, librarians frequently want kids to read what they enjoy, with the goal of keeping them engaged and turning them into independent readers.
Literacy experts see these programs as a tool to fight the “summer slide,” or the loss of reading achievements gained during the school year. Many respondents agree that the initiatives are a vital way to keep students reading, but others want to get rid of them. Some are dedicated to “the classics”—tried-and-true, yet often dated, books. On the other side, many say that newer titles covering culturally relevant topics resonate better with kids and teens.
To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby were the top books people wanted cut from lists, while favorite titles to add included the graphic novel New Kid by Jerry Craft and the novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Instead of historical fiction, some respondents suggested science fiction and manga. Many wanted books about more diverse characters, by diverse authors, and othersproposed giving students more agency and reading choice. Additionally, respondents noted an availability problem: Old titles can be in low supply in library systems, or be out of print.
Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild:
The Supreme Court assumes that race-preferential admissions policies are the result of a careful academic judgment by colleges and universities that racial diversity has pedagogical benefits for students generally. But evidence shows that the usual motivation for these policies is quite different. In part it is ideological: Such policies are an effort to pay a debt for past or present societal discrimination—a motivation the Supreme Court has rejected as unconstitutional in the past. In part it is practical: Pressure for these policies comes from state legislatures, private foundations, the federal government, accreditors, and other similar sources. Why respond to such pressure? Frequently, that’s where the money is.
When the epidemiologist Johan Giesecke read the paper, it left him a little puzzled. On any normal day, 275 people die in Sweden, he thought. He’d spent a large part of his life studying just that: where, when, and how people die. The way the world currently thought about death was, to him, completely alien. When he’d taken part in an online conference in Johannesburg, one participant had pointed out that, in that year alone, more than 2 million people had died of hunger in the world. During the same period, Covid-19 had claimed between 200,000 and 300,000 lives.
Giesecke felt as though the world was going through a self-inflicted global disaster. If things had simply been left to run their course, it would have been over by now. Instead, millions of children were being deprived of their education. In some countries, they weren’t even allowed to go to playgrounds. From Spain came stories of parents sneaking down into parking garages with their children to let them run around.
Tens of thousands of surgeries had been postponed by healthcare services. Screenings for everything from cervical to prostate cancer were put on ice. This wasn’t just happening in other countries. Sweden had seen its fair share of peculiar decisions, too. The Swedish police hadn’t tested drivers for insobriety for months, out of fear of the virus. This year, it didn’t seem quite as serious if someone were to get killed by a drunk driver.
One can roughly divide mathematical education into three stages:
Steven Johnson Artwork by Nikita Iziev
The missing word jumps into your consciousness almost unbidden: ‘‘the very last word of the first paragraph.’’ There’s no sense of an internal search query in your mind; the word ‘‘paragraph’’ just pops out. It might seem like second nature, this filling-in-the-blank exercise, but doing it makes you think of the embedded layers of knowledge behind the thought. You need a command of the spelling and syntactic patterns of English; you need to understand not just the dictionary definitions of words but also the ways they relate to one another; you have to be familiar enough with the high standards of magazine publishing to assume that the missing word is not just a typo, and that editors are generally loath to omit key words in published pieces unless the author is trying to be clever — perhaps trying to use the missing word to make a point about your cleverness, how swiftly a human speaker of English can conjure just the right word.
KUSI:
The principal, Michelle Irwin, claims she made the decision in the name of “equity.” Irwin also said cutting the honors courses would remove the stigma from non-honors classes and “eliminate racial disparities in honors enrollment.”
In an email thread obtained by KUSI News, Irwin told concerned parents the entire district has been embracing and promoting “inclusive environments.”
KUSI reached out to Irwin for comment on her decision, but we have not heard back.
KUSI News obtained an email thread between a concerned parent of a Patrick Henry student, Principal Michelle Irwin, and Erin Richardson, Superintendent of Area 6 High Schools for the San Diego Unified School District.
The entire thread is below (First email is at the bottom):
On Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 11:44 AM Richison Erin <erichison@sandi.net> wrote:
Dear Ms. OXXXXX,
Thank you for reaching out and inquiring about some of the course changes at our high schools. I understand the concerns you have as you look forward to the success of your student(s). I hope this email will explain some of the reasoning behind those changes. We have scheduled some upcoming opportunities for parents to have their concerns addressed personally by academic leaders.
Our commitment as a district is to ensure that all students will graduate with the skills, motivation, curiosity and resilience to succeed in their choice of college and career in order to lead and participate in the society of tomorrow. Providing all students with access to a broad and challenging curriculum is one of the ways we work towards this goal.
Our schools help prepare students by offering classes that both contain the necessary rigor to maintain their academic growth and provide the necessary credit opportunities for those who plan to attend a four-year university.
Rigor
Though some policymakers continue to propose cancelling some, most, or all student debt, a great deal of student debt has already effectively been cancelled. Overall, we estimate the equivalent of $5,500 per borrower will have been cancelled by the scheduled end of the student loan payment pause on May 1, at a cost of more than $100 billion. Extending the repayment pause further will cost an additional $50 billion per year, and policymakers should reject calls to do so.
Aside from some targeted cancellation by the current and previous administrations, nearly every borrower has benefited from interest cancellation during the current repayment moratorium while higher-than-expected inflation has eroded current balances. However, that benefit has been highly uneven and significantly more regressive than the already-regressive $10,000 across-the-board debt cancellation proposed by then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign.
For example, we estimate a typical recent medical school graduate will effectively receive nearly $50,000 of debt cancellation, a recent law school graduate will get $30,000 of cancellation, and a recent master’s degree recipient will get $13,500. At the same time, a recent bachelor’s degree recipient will get $4,500 of debt cancellation, someone who just completed an associate’s degree will receive $3,500, and a person who was unable to complete their undergraduate degree will get $2,000.
Lessons and coursework will be available through Seesaw and Google Classroom, with paper copies also available.
“Each school will send families follow-up communication with additional details about asynchronous learning time,” the email states.
The district has chosen to use asynchronous learning as its solution. According to an email sent to families Wednesday, K-12 students will have 90 to 120 minutes of asynchronous learning each Monday from April 25 through June 6, with Friday, May 27, also an asynchronous learning day.
Elementary and middle school students’ learning will focus on literacy and math, while high school students will focus on college and career readiness, according to the email.
Wisconsin requires 437 hours of direct instruction in kindergarten, at least 1,050 hours of direct instruction in grades one through six, and at least 1,137 hours of direct instruction in grades seven through 12.
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?
Historically low turnout and tighter margins
The Dane County Clerk’s Office calculates voter turnout by the number of registered voters in the area. So on April 5, 81,104 ballots were cast out of a total of 359,983 registered voters in the county, according to the County Clerk’s office. Here’s how previous years have stacked up.
Running as a “ghost candidate” may be a tactic, and, if so, “it’s sort of a perverse tactic because it’s the opposite of what you would expect,” Burden said.
Oftentimes, local candidates struggle to gain attention and disseminate their names.
“To see candidates shying away from all of that does suggest that it’s a kind of strategy because those things aren’t constrained by costs,” Burden said. “It may be that these candidates were hoping that the low levels of knowledge about all of the candidates might work to their advantage and let some of them sneak into office.”
“For that reason, both Canon and Burden said it’s good practice for voters to show up at polls, even in low-stakes elections.”
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district has had any uncontested races over the past decade.
This is Youtube’s strange way of telling me that I can’t publish interviews with people who oppose US foreign policy. pic.twitter.com/LkpaDlCmuK
— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) April 18, 2022
https://t.co/Srf7fJEcJF pic.twitter.com/P4wmBAlSp5
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 20, 2022
Think about this. The New York Times, in a prominent location – a headline! – used a number that was off by a factor of one thousand. One thousand. Utterly, colossally, absurdly incorrect.
How could that happen? Is their research department using a flawed methodology? Did they fall victim to a misinformation campaign? Did someone accidentally post a headline from way back in early 2020? Were they hacked?
Of course not. Obviously, it’s just a typo. No big deal. But the fact that a factor-of-1000 error is no big deal, is a big deal. It undermines the very idea that numbers mean anything. It rubs our nose in the fact that an incorrect number looks exactly like a correct number. In this case, the number is so wildly incorrect as to reveal itself on casual inspection. But most mistakes aren’t so obvious; and even this “obvious” mistake made it to the front page.
Imagine you’re in line at a restaurant buffet, and you see an employee drop a piece of meat. They pick it up from the floor, brush off the dirt, and plop it into the serving platter. Obviously you’re not going to eat it. Are you going to carefully choose a different piece of meat? Or, having seen their standard of hygiene, are you going to leave that restaurant and never come back? You wouldn’t put that food into your mouth; and you just saw a mainstream news source do the metaphorical equivalent of serving meat that had been dropped on the floor. Don’t put these facts into your mind.
What should happen to a high school principal who can’t educate kids but cheats to pretend that he can? In New York City, he gets a happy handshake and a $1.8 million payday.
That’s the latest from the compost heap masquerading as the city Department of Education — which took two years to boot former Maspeth High School principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir for egregiously inflating graduation rates. Then it turned around and awarded him a seven-year sinecure worth almost $260,000 annually, not counting step raises, a pension and lifetime health insurance.
When I started a commercial cleaning business with my wife in 2011, I didn’t imagine that I would be a plaintiff in a race-discrimination lawsuit against a massive corporation.
In other words, we can see the long arm of history reaching from the times of the Black Death to modern epidemics, where coercion and state control are accepted by a terrified public and conveniently deemed by a power-hungry elite to be the only acceptable way to combat natural disasters, even at the risk of tremendous and unnecessary collateral damage. The disastrous response of many countries to the COVID-19 pandemic is merely the latest reminder that increased power during times of crisis will always tempt leaders, and that this temptation must not be left unchallenged by free people.
Solé’s phone had been infected with Pegasus, a spyware technology designed by NSO Group, an Israeli firm, which can extract the contents of a phone, giving access to its texts and photographs, or activate its camera and microphone to provide real-time surveillance—exposing, say, confidential meetings. Pegasus is useful for law enforcement seeking criminals, or for authoritarians looking to quash dissent. Solé had been hacked in the weeks before he joined the European Parliament, replacing a colleague who had been imprisoned for pro-independence activities. “There’s been a clear political and judicial persecution of people and elected representatives,” Solé told me, “by using these dirty things, these dirty methodologies.”
In Catalonia, more than sixty phones—owned by Catalan politicians, lawyers, and activists in Spain and across Europe—have been targeted using Pegasus. This is the largest forensically documented cluster of such attacks and infections on record. Among the victims are three members of the European Parliament, including Solé. Catalan politicians believe that the likely perpetrators of the hacking campaign are Spanish officials, and the Citizen Lab’s analysis suggests that the Spanish government has used Pegasus. A former NSO employee confirmed that the company has an account in Spain. (Government agencies did not respond to requests for comment.) The results of the Citizen Lab’s investigation are being disclosed for the first time in this article. I spoke with more than forty of the targeted individuals, and the conversations revealed an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust. Solé said, “That kind of surveillance in democratic countries and democratic states—I mean, it’s unbelievable.”
“That was my first-ever protest,” he said. “It was remarkable to see people outside of Door 1, outside of the Castle (what students call the Collegiate-Gothic style façade that faces East Washington Avenue) all together coming as one. We actually made change from it.”
The protests were organized in response to what students saw as an inadequate response by the school administration regarding an alleged sexual assault during Homecoming weekend. East’s principal, Sean Leavy, has since left his position for a job in the district’s administrative office and the school’s interim principal, Mikki Smith, has worked with students to meet their concerns.
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?
In a recent Twitter survey I conducted, nearly 90% of people rated their trust in mainstream media as either “very low” or “low.” And is it any surprise? Ever-mounting media consolidation has narrowed the perspectives the public is privy to, ownership and funding of these corporations are riddled with conflicts of interest, crucial stories keep suspiciously getting buried, and big tech companies are outright censoring and demonetizing independent outlets trying to break through the noise. The media is supposed to function as a power check — and a means of arming us with vital information for shaping the society we want to live in. It’s never been a more important industry. And it’s never been more at risk. In this series, I’ll tackle each factor threatening the media’s ability to serve our democracy — with input from journalists, media critics and professors, and other experts.
TL;DR:
There’s a common question in Silicon Valley about what makes an extraordinary entrepreneur. Experienced investors point to various traits. Perseverance. Grit. Overcoming adversity. Hustle. Innate genius. A good childhood. A bad childhood. Luck.
But the trait that is most meaningful is the hardest to describe. It is the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action that is the physical manifestation of seriousness. It is the belief that God or the universe has bestowed upon you an immense task that no one else can accomplish but you. It is a holy war waged against the laws of physics. It is the burden of having to upend sometimes hundreds of years of entrenched interests to accomplish a noble goal.
When you see that kind of seriousness in a founder, the common response is to laugh or mock it. Who is he to believe he can colonize Mars? Who are they to think people will hop in cars with strangers? Butinvestors like myself run toward such serious people because this rare quality—a potent combination of capability and will—inspires others to reach beyond what seems conceivable.
Gen. H.R. McMaster, the former National Security Advisor, recently described the equation “capability times will” as something else: deterrence. That when nation-states see a dominant country’s technological prowess coupled with the will to defend its way of life, they will not act in a way that hurts the country’s interests.
For 80 years, beginning with the end of World War II, this was mostly the case. American deterrence and seriousness were in some ways synonymous—an undeniable force for growth and prosperity in business, in technology and in culture, making this country’s achievements the envy of the world. But as the century began, the loss of American seriousness accelerated just as our adversaries, Russia and China, became more serious about their own alternative projects.
We can debate the causes of this decline. Some say economic stagnation. Decadence. An unmooring from our founding principles or the natural rise and fall of nation states. But whatever the reason, we all know what unseriousness looks like.
Our next generation of Americans might be ignorant, but they’ll have a full Leftist indoctrination. https://t.co/0hPw249zoT
— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) April 18, 2022
College students still have not recovered from the pandemic. Professors are reporting record levels of disengagement with coursework and trying to find ways to get students motivated again. From a great article in Inside Higher Education, Bethie McMurtrie wrote:
In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. As many as 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.
Does this explain why Biden’s approval ratings with young people are tanking?
We’ve heard a lot about learning lag with K-12 students, but this is also a huge issue with first year students at colleges. They didn’t learn anything for their last year or more at many high schools, so colleges are having to clean up this mess. The Hechinger Report reports that many incoming college students are unprepared to complete college-level work.
While the police report says there was not enough evidence to prove a violation of Wisconsin Criminal Code, it says the school district ignored conflict of interest issues, violated its own policies, and “failed to act” until FOX6 investigated.
A spokesperson for Wauwatosa Police declined an on-camera interview, but a police source not authorized to go on camera said, “There may be no criminal charges, but that doesn’t mean nobody did anything wrong.”
A FOX6 investigation including more than 500 pages of public record emails, invoices, contracts and voicemails, along with interviews with current and former district employees, revealed Wauwatosa School District Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning Kristin Bowers spent years encouraging the district to contract with AVID.
AVID, which stands for “Advancement Via Individual Determination,” is a college and career readiness program. While Bowers advocated for the district’s adoption of AVID, the company was paying her husband, Brett Bowers, first as a part-time staff developer and eventually as a full-time employee.
Thursday, however, he struggled as he returned to school and tried to teach a class, and the principal allowed him to take the day away for his mental health.
“It’s kind of been a whirlwind and there’s been a lot of things that have been upsetting but there has also been an overwhelming amount of positive things that have come out of this,” Kashdan said.
There is one data point that might serve as an exceptional interpretative tool, one that blinks bright through all that narrative fog: excess mortality. The idea is simple: You look at the recent past to find an average for how many people die in a given country in a typical year, count the number of people who died during the pandemic years, and subtract one from the other. The basic math yields some striking results, as shown by a recent paper in The Lancet finding that 18.2 million people may have died globally from COVID, three times the official total. As skeptical epidemiologists were quick to point out, the paper employed some strange methodology — modeling excess deaths even for countries that offered actual excess-death data and often distorting what we knew to be true as a result. A remarkable excess-mortality database maintained by The Economist does not have this problem, and, like the Lancet paper, the Economist database estimates global excess mortality; it puts the figure above 20 million.
As a measure of pandemic brutality, excess mortality has its limitations — but probably fewer than the conventional data we’ve used for the last two years. That’s because it isn’t biased by testing levels — in places like the U.S. and the U.K., a much higher percentage of COVID deaths were identified as such than in places like Belarus or Djibouti, making our pandemics appear considerably worse by comparison. By measuring against a baseline of expected death, excess mortality helps account for huge differences in the age structures of different countries, some of which may have many times more mortality risk than others because their populations are much older. And to the extent that the ultimate impact of the pandemic isn’t just a story about COVID-19 but also one about our responses to it — lockdowns and unemployment, suspended medical care and higher rates of alcoholism and automobile accidents — excess mortality accounts for all that, too. In some places, like the U.S., excess-mortality figures are close to the official COVID data — among other things, a tribute to our medical surveillance systems. In other places, the numbers are so different that accounting for them entirely changes the picture of not just the experience of individual nations but the whole world, scrambling everything we think we know about who did best and who did worst, which countries were hit hardest and which managed to evade catastrophe. If you had to pick a single metric by which to measure the ultimate impact of the pandemic, excess mortality is as good as we’re probably going to get.
Now that the 2000 presidential contest is finally over, let’s try to figure out how we reached the point where national elections are determined by a cadre of lawyers and judges. And more importantly, how we can restore the rule of law not only in elections but in all of American life.
For five long weeks after the election was–or should have been–concluded, the country was paralyzed by a flood of lawsuits challenging George W. Bush’s narrow victory in Florida. As teams of lawyers raced from one courtroom to another, the presidency was up in the air.
Then, following a unanimous remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, plus Judge Sanders Sauls’ rejection of Gore’s election contest, and unambiguous rulings from two circuit courts on the absentee ballot challenges in Seminole and Martin counties, the whole affair seemed on the brink of resolution.
Those hopes were dashed on December 8, when a sharply-divided Florida Supreme Court plunged the country further into confusion by a wholesale re-writing of the Florida election laws and an order to selectively hand count certain ballots, with no uniform standard on whether “dimpled chads” should be counted as votes. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court ended the crisis when it stayed the recount on the next day, and issued its ruling in Bush v. Gore on December 12.
California public school enrollment has dropped for the fifth year in a row — a decline of more than 110,000 students — as K-12 campuses struggle against pandemic disruptions and a shrinking population of school-age kids amid wide concerns that the decrease is so large that educators can’t account for the missing children.
California enrollment stood at 5,892,240 when measured in the fall of 2021, a 1.8% decline, according to state data released Monday. It is the first time since 2000 that the state’s K-12 population has dipped below 6 million, with large urban districts accounting for one-third of the drop.
While public school enrollment has experienced a downward trend since 2014-15, state education officials largely blamed the pandemic for the plummeting numbers over the last two years. This year’s decline, which includes charter schools, follows a huge enrollment hit during the 2020-21 school year, when the state experienced the largest drop in 20 years, with 160,000 students. In March 2020 the pandemic closed campuses in California and across the country, forcing schools into distance learning, many for nearly a year.
“One of the questions that we just have to come back to is, just where are those kids?” said Heather J. Hough, executive director of the Policy Analysis for California Education. “We don’t have satisfying data to answer that question.”
There was some expectation that enrollment would continue to fall, as the state faces declining residential population and birth rates, and out-of-state migration, said Julien Lafortune, research fellow at Public Policy Institute of California. But there was also hope in the education community that enrollment would show signs of rebounding from last school year’s massive loss.
“It doesn’t really look like that happened,” Lafortune said. “If anything, it looks like the declines are bigger than projected.”
Several factors probably contributed to the falling numbers, experts said, although it is hard to pinpoint answers from preliminary state data. Some students entered private schools, which saw an increase in enrollment. Home schooling also increased as families either did not want to comply with pandemic safety measures such as masking or were concerned about the health risks posed by in-person learning.
Our next generation of Americans might be ignorant, but they’ll have a full Leftist indoctrination. https://t.co/0hPw249zoT
— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) April 18, 2022
Most AFT locals are run by officers elected as part of a caucus, which is a sort of internal political party. The United Federation of Teachers in New York City has been the exclusive domain of the Unity Caucus for more than 60 years. Now, an election is underway to see if its reign will continue.
An assortment of opposition factions have coalesced to form United for Change. It constitutes the greatest challenge to Unity’s control in the union’s history. Whether that will amount to a victory, or even a close contest, is an open question.
You can go to each caucus’s website or social media pages to get the platforms, claims and official positions, but I suggest you take a look at two sites run by long-time union activists.
NYC Educator is the home of Arthur Goldstein, a former member of the opposition and fierce critic of the Unity Caucus and what he referred to as its “loyalty oath.” He now sits on the union’s executive board and is running with Unity. Back in 2018, the opposition caucus he worked with staged a sort of a purge, leading to his disillusionment.
Goldstein is a reliable voice for Unity’s positions, but he is not its mouthpiece. If you want a reasonable view of the union’s environment from the Unity side, he is essential reading.
In the last 12 months, WI conservatives had massive ed reform bills vetoed by @GovEvers that would have completely transformed WI K-12 education into a national leader for putting kids and parents first.
Here’s a list of some of the K12 bills @GovEvers vetoed:
— CJ Szafir (@CJSzafir) April 18, 2022
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
In Natasha Sullivan’s AP English class at La Follette High School, students are assigned books by prominent Black authors alongside works like Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
At Memorial High School, English teacher Maureen Mead aims to help her English language learners develop their language skills instead of penalizing them if they enter her class without a strong grasp of the language.
Elsewhere in the Madison School District, history lessons pointedly note that most Black people brought to early America were enslaved, avoiding more anodyne descriptions that refer to “the migration of Black people to America.” Music lessons may include teaching about musicians from different cultures from across the globe.
To many conservatives, such intentional efforts to decentralize whiteness and diversify the curriculum constitutes “teaching” critical race theory, a graduate-level theoretical framework that examines how American political and social systems perpetuate racism.
Baby steps. This time, at least, the Wisconsin State Journal reporter bothered to report the other side: namely, Blaska and Daniel Lennington of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
Two months ago, Elizabeth Beyer “reported” without a single attribution: “Critical Race Theory, an academic framework that focuses on racism embedded in the nation’s laws and institutions … isn’t taught in any of Wisconsin’s K-12 schools.” Today, education reporter Ms. Beyer doubles down on that Woke fiction with these three lies:
CRT is “a wedge issue — “manufactured panic,” according to the State Journal.
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?
was under the warehouse lights at Costco, about a year ago, when Aida Herrera first noticed something had shifted in her daughter, Sofia, who was lingering by the book table.
Neither she nor Sofia’s dad are big readers, Herrera said, and she’d never seen her youngest tackle a chapter book as large as “Charlotte’s Web,” the book Sofia insisted her mother buy that day. Two weeks later, Herrera quizzed her daughter on the plot of the 200-page classic and found that Sofia was following right along with the story of Wilbur the pig and his literate spider friend.
Until this year, Sofia was among the roughly 50% of students in Washington state who were reading below grade level. But under a model of instruction adopted by the Wenatchee School District in 2019, the third grader has now surpassed her age group in reading, according to the district’s assessments. She can rattle off the meaning of “morpheme” (the smallest meaningful part of a word) and spot prefixes and suffixes on the fly. Her teacher last year searched for words to stump her, she said. And when that happens, she knows what to do.
“I just break down the word,” Sofia said. “And clap out the syllables.”
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?
Tina Burnside and Zoe Sottile:
The Florida Department of Education announced Friday that the state has rejected more than 50 math textbooks from next school year’s curriculum, citing references to critical race theory among reasons for the rejections.
In a news release, the department stated that 54 out of 132 of the textbook submissions would not be added to the state’s adopted list because they did not adhere to Florida’s new standards or contained prohibited topics.
The release said the list of rejected books makes up approximately 41% of submissions, which is the most in Florida’s history.
Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to critical race theory, “inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” the release states.
Additional commentary.
Several businesses and residents have filed suit in state court in Pennsylvania seeking to overturn Philadelphia’s renewed indoor mask mandate scheduled to be enforced beginning Monday in an effort to halt a surge in Covid-19 infections.
The lawsuit, filed in Commonwealth Court on Saturday, said Philadelphia lacks the authority to impose such a mandate.
Philadelphia earlier this week became the first major U.S. city to reinstate its indoor mask mandate after reporting a sharp increase in coronavirus infections, with the city’s top health official saying she wanted to forestall a potential new wave driven by an omicron subvariant.
Attorney Thomas W. King III, who was among those involved in last year’s successful challenge to the statewide mask mandate in schools, said the city’s emergency order went against recommendations of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and “imposed a renegade standard unfound anywhere else in the world.”
The suit accuses city health officials of having “usurped the power and authority” of state lawmakers, the state department of health and the state advisory health board.
Kevin Lessard, communications director of the Philadelphia mayor’s office, said officials were “unable to comment on this particular case” but cited a court’s denial of an emergency motion by another plaintiff for a preliminary injunction against the mandate. Lessard said “the courts once again confirmed that city has both the legal authority and requisite flexibility to enact the precautionary measures necessary to control the spread of Covid-19.”
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?
News Thursday morning that the outspoken serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter and take it private has surfaced widespread anxieties within the knowledge-class industries that free speech and even societal peace will be jeopardized if the Tesla CEO lifts content restrictions from journalists’ favorite social media platform.
“I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter,” wrote Max Boot, columnist for The (Jeff Bezos–owned) Washington Post, on Twitter. “He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”
Boot is a longtime apocalyptic troll—past lowlights include declaring that “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” and advocating the Federal Communications Commission go after Fox News to forestall “the plot against America.” But his anxiety about allegedly unfettered free speech is revealingly common in media, academia, Silicon Valley, and the government.
“For somebody with a lot of money to just come in and say, ‘Look, I’m going to buy a part of this company, and therefore my voice as to how your rules are adopted and enforced is going to have more power than anybody else’s’ — I think that’s regressive after years of [Twitter] trying to make sensible rules,” University of California, Irvine, law professor and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression David Kaye was quoted in Vox on Tuesday. “Twitter has stepped away from this idea of it being the free speech wing of the free speech party, and being a more realistic custodian of speech on the platform.”
Those “realistic” and “sensible” rules Twitter has adopted include banning thousands of political provocateurs (including then-President Donald Trump in 2021), suspending entire news organizations for publishing stories that turned out to be largely true, creating warning labels for COVID-19 “misinformation,” strengthening filters for allegedly threatening speech, and so on.
“After all that, bringing Musk onto the board seems like a big step backward,” former Reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao wrote last week in The Washington Post. “Musk calls himself a ‘free-speech absolutist,’ but like many ‘free speech’ advocates, he willfully ignores that private companies are free to establish some limits on their platforms.”
I once worked at a small company of insanely productive engineers. They were geniuses by any account. They knew the software stack from top to bottom, from hardware to operating systems to Javascript, and could pull together in days what would take teams at other companies months to years. Between them they were more productive than any division I’ve ever been in, including FAANG tech companies. In fact, they had written the top-of-the-line specialized compiler in their industry — as a side project. (Their customers believed that they had buildings of engineers laboring on their product, while in reality they had less than 10.)
I was early in my career at the time and stunned by the sheer productivity and brilliance of these engineers. Finally, when I got a moment alone with one of them, I asked him how they had gotten to where they were.
He explained that they had been software engineers together in the intelligence units of their country’s military together. Their military intelligence computers hadn’t been connected to the internet, and if they wanted to look something up online, they had to walk to a different building across campus. Looking something up online on StackOverflow was a major operation. So they ended up reading reference manuals and writing down or memorizing the answers to their questions because they couldn’t look up information very easily. Over time, the knowledge accumulated.
Memorization means purposely learning something so that you remember it with muscle memory; that is, you know the information without needing to look it up.
Today’s 🧵… Redistricting oral arguments happening before the SCOWIS today. Our Executive Director @joeminocqua conducted an extensive analysis of the 6 maps under consideration.
Summary: They all have flaws. But the Legislature’s map performs the best on the legal criteria.— Common Sense Wisconsin (@CSWisconsin) January 19, 2022
States must draw new election maps once a decade after each census to make sure legislative districts have equal populations. Where the lines go can confer advantages on one political party.
Federal law is complicated because it says mapmakers cannot consider race most of the time but must take it into account when they are drawing lines in areas with high populations of minorities. The policy is meant to ensure Black and Latino voters have opportunities to elect the candidates they want.
A rare brand-new nonprofit university, NewU has a comparatively low $16,500-a-year price that’s locked in for a student’s entire education and majors with interchangeable requirements so students don’t fall behind if they switch.
But the feature that appears to be really winning over applicants is that NewU will offer bachelor’s degrees in three years instead of the customary four.
“We didn’t think the three-year bachelor’s degree was going to be the biggest draw,” said Stratsi Kulinski, president of the startup college. “But it has been, hands-down. Consumers are definitely ready for something different.”
A handful of conventional colleges and universities are coming to the same conclusion. Several are adding three-year degrees as students and families increasingly chafe at the more than four years it now takes most of those earning bachelor’s degrees to finish — and the resulting additional cost.
In an analysis of data from the Department of Homeland Security, the new report said that during his presidency so far, President Joe Biden has knowingly released 756,000 migrants encountered at the border, another 146,000 illegal youths to guardians inside the United States, and an estimated 620,000 “got-aways.”
Early results of data gathering by some of the country’s biggest school districts confirm what many had feared: Groups of students that already faced learning gaps before the pandemic, including Black and Hispanic students and those from low-income families, appear to be behind in even greater numbers now.
In Fairfax County, tests given this fall found that 68% of Hispanic elementary school students need intervention in math, up from 55% in 2019. Students learning English saw a similar increase. A quarter of white students were flagged for help, up from 19% in 2019.
Last year, public schools in Houston found that 45% of Black and Hispanic students had at least one failing grade. That was up from 30% in 2019, and nearly three times the rate of white students.
Similar inequities are turning up at schools across the country, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a national research group. It suggests that longstanding inequities are widening, she said, which could translate to deeper learning and income gaps for generations to come.
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?
I draw five lessons. First, we should recognise that a lot of disinformation is absurdly simple. For many decades, people have fretted about “damned lies and statistics”, fearing that cleverly manipulated data was the ultimate weapon of disinformation. More recently there has been something of a panic about “deepfake” video technology. But it doesn’t take a master of video effects to fool us. For a receptive or distracted audience, a simple lie will do.
A lot of the disinformation that is circulating is kindergarten-level stuff: clips from computer games or relabelled footage. UkraineFacts.org, a collaboration between fact-checking organisations, has hundreds of examples, including video of paratroopers filmed years ago in North Carolina, a photo of a Soviet-era missile taken in a museum, and footage from the movie Deep Impact. The camera may not be lying, but the caption is.
Such “recontextualised media” are ideally suited to social sharing. TikTok’s main function, for example, is to make it easy to edit then share clips of media, stripped of their original context.
Second, we should slow down and pay attention both to the claim and to our reaction. We don’t fall for misinformation because we’re stupid but because we’re emotionally aroused. We can often spot the lie if we think calmly. But if we are angry, fearful, lustful or laughing out loud, calm thinking is what we don’t do.
Third, we have allies in our fight for the truth. There’s a growing movement of diligent independent fact-checkers, and there are also people out there called “journalists” whose job it is to figure out what is going on. Some of them are pretty good at what they do, and some of them are risking their lives right now to do it.
Fourth, we must remember that indiscriminate disbelief is at least as damaging as indiscriminate belief. It might seem smart to reject every claim as potential disinformation, but it is wiser to try to figure out the difference between truth and lies.
Indeed, disinformation is often designed less to con the gullible, and more to force us all into a reflexive crouch, instinctively rejecting the very idea that the truth will ever be known. Few people are fooled by clumsy footage of a fake President Zelensky ordering Ukrainians to surrender, but rather more will go on to reject footage that is perfectly genuine.
The non-profit news organisation ProPublica recently reported the phenomenon of fake fact-checking. Social media posts, amplified by Russian state TV, appear to be fact-checkers debunking Ukrainian disinformation. In reality, they are themselves disinformation, debunking claims that were never made.
On a sunny day late last spring, three leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement — Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah — sat around a table on the patio of an expensive house in Southern California. The women were recording a YouTube video to mark the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, and they discussed their racial-justice work and the difficulties they had faced over the year.
“For me, the hardest moments have been the right-wing-media machine just leveraging literally all its weight against me, against our movement, against BLM the organization,” Cullors said. “I’m some weeks out now from a lot of the noise, so I have more perspective, right? While I was in it, I was in survival mode.” She was referring to an April 2021 article in the New York Post that revealed her purchase of four homes for nearly $3 million. The disclosures had contributed to the idea that there is a disturbing gap between the fortunes of the movement’s most visible figures and on-the-ground activists across the country, and Cullors resigned as executive director of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation on May 27, within a few days of the patio chat.
“I think they’ve attempted to cancel us, but they have not been successful in canceling us,” Abdullah said at another point in the conversation. “They’ve attempted to say — and I’m just gonna say it — ‘She bought some damn houses. We gonna cancel her.’” Garza cut in with a comment seemingly addressed to critics: “Y’all don’t know shit about what it takes to live in a box here.”
None of the women acknowledged the house behind them. It’s far from a box, with more than 6,500 square feet, more than half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms, several fireplaces, a soundstage, a pool and bungalow, and parking for more than 20 cars, according to real-estate listings. The California property was purchased for nearly $6 million in cash in October 2020 with money that had been donated to BLMGNF.
The transaction has not been previously reported, and Black Lives Matter’s leadership had hoped to keep the house’s existence a secret. Documents, emails, and other communications I’ve seen about the luxury property’s purchase and day-to-day operation suggest that it has been handled in ways that blur, or cross, boundaries between the charity and private companies owned by some of its leaders. It creates the impression that money donated to the cause of racial justice has been spent in ways that benefit the leaders of Black Lives Matter personally.
Probably the funniest effort along those lines was this passage:
We need regulation… to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.
That was Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, railing against Musk in the pages of… the Washington Post! A newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos complaining about rich people controlling “channels of communication” just might be the never-released punchline of Monty Python’s classic “Funniest Joke in the World” skit.
Many detractors went the Pao route, suddenly getting religion about concentrated wealth having control over the public discourse. In a world that had not yet gone completely nuts, that is probably where the outrage campaign would have ended, since the oligarchical control issue could at least be a legitimate one, if printed in a newspaper not owned by Jeff Bezos.
However, they didn’t stop there. Media figures everywhere are openly complaining that they dislike the Musk move because they’re terrified he will censor people less. Bullet-headed neoconservative fussbudget Max Boot was among the most emphatic in expressing his fear of a less-censored world:
In every newsroom I’ve ever been around, there’s always one sad hack who’s hated by other reporters but hangs on to a job because he whispers things to management and is good at writing pro-war editorials or fawning profiles of Ari Fleischer or Idi Amin or other such distasteful media tasks. Even that person would never have been willing to publicly say something as gross as, “For democracy to survive, it needs more censorship”! A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility, because the whole idea of a free press depended upon the absolute right to be an unpopular pain in the ass.
Things are different now, of course, because the bulk of journalists no longer see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but rather as people who live inside the rope-lines and defend those pieties. I’m guessing this latest news is arousing special horror because the current version of Twitter is the professional journalist’s idea of Utopia: a place where Donald Trump doesn’t exist, everyone with unorthodox thoughts is warning-labeled (“age-restricted” content seems to be a popular recent scam), and the Current Thing is constantly hyped to the moronic max. The site used to be fun, funny, and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious Thought-Starbucks.
My blue-checked friends in media worked very hard to create this thriving intellectual paradise, so of course they’re devastated to imagine that a single rich person could even try to walk in and upend the project. Couldn’t Musk just leave Twitter in the hands of responsible, speech-protecting shareholders like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal?
In March of 2020, shortly after my final interview for a tenure-track position in creative nonfiction at Mississippi State University, I received a note of welcome from the department chair — an affable man named Dan, with whom I’d been in consistent contact throughout the process:
At a meeting today we voted to make you our top candidate. Now I will say that I need to run this through the dean’s office and discuss with them before making an official offer, but I hope that will be coming early next week. Again, this is a report on the faculty vote but the dean pretty much always allows us to go forward with our first pick. Still, the official offer email has to wait until I dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
Conventional wisdom has it that there are only two sides in the culture war over kids’ instruction on race and racism in America. Those on the right want to impose state-level bans on teaching critical race theory in public schools. Some also want to remove particular books from libraries and curriculums. On the left, people want to teach about America’s history of racism and contemporary systemic racism but from only one perspective, with little if any room for debate. They deny CRT is being taught. I don’t believe these are really the only options. Schools can and should teach about race and racism while upholding this nation’s liberal values of free inquiry.
I know firsthand that American public schools are suffering from highly ideological instruction. I recently received an email from Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, where I have two children enrolled in 11th grade, updating parents on an “Antiracist Audit” the school system is undertaking. The report describes a new proposed social-studies curriculum, which “strengthens students’ sense of racial, ethnic, and tribal identities, helps students understand and resist systems of oppression, and empowers students to see themselves as change agents.”
Elizabeth Beyer and Emily Hamer:
Most other Dane County school districts shifted their masking protocol to strongly recommend, as opposed to require, face coverings while in school buildings on March 1, when the Public Health Madison and Dane County emergency masking order expired.
The decision by the city-county health department to lift the mask order was announced earlier in February, after several Democratic governors moved to ease up on mask mandates even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it still recommended masks for students and staff inside school buildings.
The district is one of two known with mask mandates in the entire state. Milwaukee Public Schools announced late last month that it would shift to mask-optional beginning April 18.
MMSD announced in February, shortly after PHMDC shared that it would let its order expire, that mandatory indoor masking would continue through at least spring break, which was the week of March 28. Officials said they wanted to watch the numbers following break knowing some families would travel that week.
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 mockery was understandable. “Libertarian visions” of “uncontrolled” speech haven’t actually been the stock-in-trade of dictators, strongmen and demagogues. Typically, those authoritarian figures want to silence their opponents and ensure that their own voices, and those of their satraps and sycophants, are the only ones heard.
Reich’s defenders, to the extent he has any, might claim the headline is a poor summary of his real argument, which is this: “In Musk’s vision of Twitter and the internet, he’d be the wizard behind the curtain — projecting on the world’s screen a fake image of a brave new world empowering everyone. In reality, that world would be dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science or the common good.”
Elizabeth Hernandez & Jessica Seaman:
The filing alleges that because Wise advocated for students and staff in protected classes under civil rights laws — students and staff with disabilities and students of color — and was fired as a result of that advocacy, his firing is retaliatory and a violation of civil rights laws.
Wise was “intimately involved” with the implementation of an equity policy within the district which stated DCSD would “establish an inclusive culture to ensure all students, staff and community members feel safe and valued” and “offer and afford every student and staff member equitable educational opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity, religion, national origin, marital status, disability, socio-economic status, or eligibility for special education services.”
The filing pointed out when members of the board majority campaigned against the equity policy and complained about Wise’s support of the policy. Peterson, for example, said during school board campaigning that the district was pushing critical race theory — which is not taught in Douglas County Schools –and the board’s “radical agenda…based on division, equal (low) outcomes, and race-based policies that are discriminatory and will only set our kids up for failure.”
When the board majority was elected, they voted to create a new equity resolution that removed the previous initiatives to ensure representation, accessibility, diversity, equity and inclusion within all district-approved curriculum, the filing said.
Reeve was thinking of the people she supervises, most of whom are older than her. She made a point of checking her privilege, pointing out the sad irony of union organizing. “I don’t blame any of my partners for being scared or being against unionizing,” she told me. “I’m in a position where I’m able to say, yeah, you know what, let’s do it either way. But it’s a privilege. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a family I support,” she explained. “I don’t really have anything personally that tethers me. I know that I’m going to be financially and benefits-wise stable, no matter what, so it’s not really a threat they can put against me.”
But it’s not just economic privilege. There is an emerging cultural disconnect between the people who most need unions and the people who sometimes run them. At the national level, union staff—especially on the political and public policy side of things—are very likely to be part of what one longtime union leader called the “revolving door of Democratic operatives in Washington.” They have often been guilty of subordinating core working-class interests to what he called “the permanent culture of progressive college-educated coastal elites.” And they are alienating the workers they’re supposed to be representing—who are much more socially conservative.
A YouGov/American Compass survey of 3,000 workers found that “excessive engagement in politics is the number one obstacle to a robust American labor movement.” “Among those who said they would vote against a union, the top reason cited was union political activity, followed by member dues,” the survey found. “These workers anticipate that unions will focus on politics rather than delivering concrete benefits in their workplaces, and don’t want to pay the cost.” Meanwhile, fear of retaliation was the least cited reason workers gave for why they haven’t unionized.
The problem is not what information kids get. That cat’s out of the bag. It’s how we strengthen kids’ ability to sort through and contextualize the avalanche of information—good, bad, and weird—that they’re getting, not only about sex but about history and politics and culture. Right now, the debate we’re having is whether schools should even be allowed to talk about those topics. It remains to be seen whether this panic, like others in the past, will work in November, but it’s clearly gaining some traction. A recent Dallas Morning Newspoll of Texans of both political parties found that 47 percent of parents said they lacked confidence in school librarians to know what is appropriate material for children—although 65 percent reported they also lacked confidence in elected officials to figure that out.
It’s easy to sympathize with parents who are protective of the innocence of their children. But there’s never been a kid who has made it to adulthood unscathed. When I found X-rated material for the first time, it came from a source no one around me could have guessed: Disclosure, by Michael Crichton, who wrote adventure books such as Congo and Jurassic Park. In the middle of a pretty boring novel about a tech company, I stumbled upon a shockingly explicit sex scene that introduced me to some eyebrow-raising concepts in human anatomy—in the form of a misogynistic parable about a woman who entraps a man into a sexual harassment lawsuit out of spite. Recently I was curious, so I checked: even though Disclosure was not on Krause’s list of questionable books, every high school library catalog I searched around Texas listed a copy.
tspoken racist who railed against whites, Jews, and Hispanics. A careful reader of the New York Times could be forgiven for overlooking that. In a nearly 2,000-word article on the attack, James’s race is not mentioned. The same is true for the coverage offered up by Reuters; the Washington Post only mentionedJames’s race in relation to his condemnation of training programs for “low-income Black youths.”
Media critics on the right say that the conspicuous omission of James’s race from these news reports illustrates a trend among prestige papers, which deemphasize or omit the race of non-white criminals while playing up the race of white offenders. But is it a real pattern?
Yes. A Washington Free Beacon review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years finds that papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders. These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender’s race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the protests that followed.
The Free Beacon collected data on nearly 1,100 articles about homicides from six major papers, all written between 2019 and 2021. Those papers included the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis’s Star-Tribune—representatives of each paper did not return requests for comment for this article. For each article, we collected the offender’s and victim’s name and race, and noted where in the article the offender’s race was mentioned, if at all.
More than two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s time to draw some conclusions about government policy and results. The most comprehensive comparative study we’ve seen to date was published last week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and it deserves wide attention.
The authors are University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan and Stephen Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They compare Covid outcomes in the 50 states and District of Columbia based on three variables: the economy, education and mortality. It’s a revealing study that belies much of the conventional medical and media wisdom during the pandemic, especially in its first year when severe lockdowns were described as the best, and the only moral, policy.
***
The nearby table shows the state ranking based on a combined score of the three variables. Utah ranks first by a considerable margin over Nebraska and Vermont. The Beehive State scored well across all three categories: fourth on the economy, fifth in education (as measured by lost days in school), and eighth in Covid mortality adjusted for a state population’s age and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (leading co-morbidities for Covid deaths). The authors used a regression analysis for the economy that adjusted for state industry composition.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Friday vetoed legislation that would have dramatically overhauled education in Wisconsin by making all children eligible to receive a taxpayer-funded private school voucher, regardless of their household income.
Parents would have been able to sue school districts for violations of a new “parental bill of rights” under another bill Evers vetoed on Friday.
Evers, a former public school educator and state superintendent of the Department of Public Instruction, rejected the legislation as Republicans hoping to unseat him in seven months make the policy idea central to their campaign against him.
Republican lawmakers passed a number of bills this session that would overhaul K-12 education knowing Evers would veto them. Evers has long opposed expanding the state voucher programs without overhauling how schools are funded in Wisconsin.
GOP lawmakers said Friday Evers was siding with school officials rather than parents in issuing his vetoes.
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?
So much nonsense in 1 minute:
1. The lockdowns do not stop transmission (see: Shanghai, HK,…)
2. The vax does not stop transmission. Protection vs. severe disease is the endpoint.
3. Lockdowns as behavior control are unethical..@gbdeclaration & focused protection is the way. https://t.co/BjoZwfoAbF
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) April 14, 2022
In recent years, WILL has represented several public-school parents after their local school established policies and procedures that undermined fundamental parental rights to make decisions about their child’s education, healthcare, and overall welfare. AB 963/SB 962 is a response to this common experience for Wisconsin’s public-school parents.
We are terrible at seeing power. Or in other words: power is great at not being seen.
Because power is a human universal, all thinking is within the field of some power. Thoughts that go along with the field are obvious and soar up instantly like birds. Thoughts that flow against the field are as slow and impossible as arthritic turtles.
The thought of studying itself is inherently foreign to power. Power does not want to know itself. The most powerful powers do not even think of their power as power. If power does know itself, it keeps that knowledge to itself; but mostly, it really does believe its own official myths. The real O’Brien is a rare figure.
The thought of studying its enemies, however, is very satisfying and natural. Power has to know its enemies—any competing power—to fight them; also, to demonize them. Every power structure which is found in the enemy is suffused with a malign glow, as if our doctrinal immune systems were warning us of alien coronavirus spikes. Ideally, this same structure is not also found in itself; if so, the two must be well-distinguished.
This is why people think Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos have power—political power, to be exact. (They obviously have professional power.) They look like something that your immune system is looking for. Actually, they are unimportant, harmless bacteria. You are right that you have a fatal disease. It is one your body recognizes as self.
To the fully enlightened observer, the crackdown of 2021 proves just the opposite: the tech “oligarchs” have no power at all. Mostly, if they could blink T-O-R-T-U-R-E at you in Morse code, they would. You don’t believe me but I’ll show you why you’re wrong.
The principal of San Francisco’s academically elite Lowell High School announced his resignation Wednesday, slamming district leadership in a letter to the community.
Principal Joe Ryan Dominguez, who took the helm of the school in the fall, announced his intent to leave at the end of the school year.
Thank you @nytimes
1/3
“So to end more straightforwardly, I will make a prediction: Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence,— InspiredTeenTherapy (@SashaLPC) April 14, 2022
Concerns about freedom of expression on university campuses around the country are widespread and range across the spectrum. Last month, student protesters disrupted events at Yale Law School on the East Coast and the University of California Hastings College of the Law on the West Coast.
Vanessa Fuhrmans and Kathryn Dill:
As the labor market reorders, more Americans are making the leap from blue-collar jobs and hourly work to “new collar” roles that often involve tech skills and come with better pay and schedules.
More than a tenth of Americans in low-paying roles in warehouses, manufacturing, hospitality and other hourly positions made such a switch during the past two years, according to new research from Oliver Wyman, a management consulting firm that surveyed 80,000 workers world-wide between August 2020 and March 2022. Many of the new jobs are in software and information technology, as well as tech-related roles in logistics, finance and healthcare. New data from the Current Population Survey and LinkedIn also suggest the pandemic has helped catapult more workers into more upwardly mobile careers.
Tech job postings have boomed over the past two years as work, shopping and other aspects of daily life have gone more digital. At the same time, millions of Americans quit their jobs, with some sitting on the sidelines and others finding new ones with higher salaries. Companies have struggled to hire all the talent they need, so many have dropped prequalifications like prior work experience or a four-year college degree.
Those pandemic shifts kicked in as broader macroeconomic forces were already creating new job-market opportunities and pressures. The percentage of retirees in the U.S. population has climbed sharply over the past decade and ticked even higher in the Covid-19 era, with millions of baby boomers leaving the workforce. Declining immigration has added to shortages, particularly in tech, healthcare and other fields that depend heavily on foreign-born employees. Thousands of businesses are in the thick of a digital revolution that is requiring them to fill new roles and adapt existing ones to integrate more data and automation.
Alexa L. Gervasi and Daryl James:
Defense attorneys must wait to hear decisions from the bench, but retired prosecutor Ralph Petty avoided the suspense during his career in West Texas. He often knew what judges would say in advance because he wrote the script.
For 20 years, as USA Today reported last year, Mr. Petty spent his days prosecuting criminal cases and opposing prisoners’ appeals for the Midland County District Attorney’s Office. In the evenings he moonlighted as a law clerk for the judges presiding over those same cases. The conflict of interest allegedly allowed Mr. Petty to shape judicial thinking behind the scenes, draft court documents in his favor, gain access to defense materials generally unavailable to prosecutors, and earn more than $250,000 in the process. He did this on hundreds of cases, and without defendants’ knowledge or consent, while county and court officials kept the arrangement quiet among themselves.
Students in St. Paul will no longer be required to wear masks in classrooms, starting Monday, as long as the spread of COVID-19 remains in check.
The school board on Tuesday changed the district’s mask policy, removing the mandate and allowing students and faculty to choose whether or not to don a face covering in public schools.
The resolution passed 6-1 during a sometimes raucous committee of the board meeting as about two dozen demonstrators at times interrupted the proceedings. Board Member Uriah Ward was the lone dissenting vote.
One man repeatedly shouted, “What about the Constitution?” during the proceedings, then retreated to the back of the room to record video of the board meeting.
The new policy requires students, faculty and staff to wear masks inside school buildings only if coronavirus transmission levels reached the highest mitigation tier as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That is, if the county registers more than 200 infections per 100,000 residents in a one-week period and logs more than 20 hospitalizations or if more than 15% of its hospital beds are occupied by COVID-positive patients.
Typical clinic day now includes a 2-year-old who only has 5 words, an 8-year-old with new-onset obesity, and a preschool-age child with no social skills from being home bound. A disastrous avalanche of child health probs of our own making—not “from the pandemic.” @AmerAcadPeds
— elizabeth bennett (@ebennett74) April 13, 2022
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
America’s fed-up parents on Tuesday sent another set of school board incumbents to the timeout corner to reflect on what they’ve done wrong. This time the elections were in Waukesha, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee. The races were nonpartisan officially, yet it was a win for a slate backed by the state and local GOP.
Three Waukesha school incumbents lost their seats, one in the primary, two on Tuesday. “Our children have endured an awful lot in the past two years navigating a pandemic that unleashed mandates, restrictive rules, remote learning and constant changes to their normal school routine,” one of the winning challengers, Mark Borowski, says on his website. He also criticizes—and he ran against—“equity initiatives” that “infiltrated district curriculum,” while dividing students and “espousing falsehoods about America.”
The incumbents protested that Mr. Borowski and the other challengers were running on national GOP talking points. But the arguments had local resonance.
Democrat Jennifer Loughran spent the pandemic’s early days sewing face masks for neighbors. Last month, as a newly elected school-board member, she voted to lift the district’s mask mandate. That came four months after she voted for the state’s Republican candidate for governor.
After a monthslong political identity crisis, Ms. Loughran decided her opposition to her party’s mask mandates, economic restrictions and school-closure policies outweighed her support for positions on climate change, abortion and gay rights, at least for the moment.
Watching her daughter fall behind in virtual kindergarten, Ms. Loughran had grown so frustrated not knowing when her children would return to the classroom that she joined a group that attracted right-leaning parents in its school-reopening push. She was unhappy that Gov. Phil Murphy didn’t fight to reopen schools sooner, and she associated his fellow Democrats with mask mandates and restrictions.
She hasn’t decided which party to pick this fall in her local House race, a contest expected to help determine control of Congress. “What I do know,” she said, “is that my party-line vote shouldn’t be taken for granted anymore.”
The defection of once-loyal voters like Ms. Loughran—along with disapproval from independents—is among the challenges Democrats face in their bid to retain control of Congress and win state-level races in this November’s midterm elections. These voters say Democratic officials left pandemic restrictions in place too long and mishandled the health crisis, with devastating consequences for their children, while Republicans have generally pushed to minimize school closures and keep the economy open.
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.—Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach.”
In this new series of essays, I’d like to show you whatis being taught in America’s twenty-first-century government schools and the philosophy behind it. The portrait that I will present here is not a pretty one, but it is the reality. The simple truth of the matter is that America’s government schools are intellectually bankrupt and morally corrupt. To suggest otherwise is either disingenuous or a form of head-in-the-sand-ism.
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote in Beyond Good and Evil that the strength of a man’s “spirit should be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’” he could bear. I’m asking you to bear a big dose of truth with this essay, the kind of truth that makes you wince and hurt.
Let’s start at the 30,000-foot level, where we can get a birds-eye view of the main philosophic systems that dominate America’s government schools and drive the content of what it being taught in the classroom.
Officially, America’s schools claim to teach no moral values per se. But that claim is contradicted by the fact that they constantly push moral values such as “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “tolerance,” moral relativism, and egalitarianism. Such “values” are intended to strip children of any standards or principles they may have previously embraced, so that the teachers can replace the sometimes conservative cultural values of the kids’ parents with the political values of today’s postmodern, cultural Left—namely, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, transgenderism, “social justice,” socialism, etc.
The ultimate aim of Critical Gender Theory is to deconstruct the family and replace it with the State as the primary vehicle for educating children. The specific political goal is to create a new class of the “oppressed.” From this new class of victims will come the new revolutionaries who will keep the revolution alive and move it to the next stage of development. This is the ultimate means by which capitalism is to be dismantled and the State is to become the final arbiter of the principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin made an amendment to a bill that could put all nine Loudoun County School Board members on the ballot this November. The bill would still need approval from the legislature.
Loudoun County school board members were set to be on the ballot next year, but the Governor’s proposal would move the elections of the school board up a year.
This move comes after the Governor signed an executive order on his first day in office authorizing the Virginia Attorney General to investigate possible wrongdoing by Loudoun County School Board members and the school district regarding sexual assaults that happened in two Loudoun County schools last year.
Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?
Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.
Gandhi said to the British, you’ve been a guest in our house for too long, it is time for you to leave. He borrowed the line from Oliver Cromwell, and it’s a good one. The left has occupied the high places for too long, promoting dogma even as the occasions for their complaint have decreased (what position is closed to people of color, or women? Inclusion in all levels of the workforce; preference in higher education, a seat in the cockpit, in the Oval Office, in a movie’s cast, or admission to an elite school+? And yet the vehemence of their protests has increased, progressing into blacklisting and even rioting by those claiming to represent “the oppressed.”
Old-time physicians used to speak of the disease “declaring itself.” History teaches that one omnipresent aspect of a coup is acts of reprisal staged by agents provocateurs of the revolutionaries, and blamed on supporters of the legitimate government. It would be a historical anomaly if we were not to see such between now and the midterm elections.
For the disease has declared itself, and we are not now in a culture war, but a nascent coup, with its usual cast of characters. The Bolshevists could have been defeated by a company of soldiers in the suburbs of Moscow, Hitler stopped at Czechoslovakia, and the current horrors confronted at the Minneapolis police station or a meeting of the San Francisco school board. But those tragedies, and our current tragedies, were not just allowed but encouraged to run their course.
As discussions of major events are filtered through algorithmic content delivery systems, more users are bending their language. Recently, in discussing the invasion of Ukraine, people on YouTube and TikTok have used the sunflower emoji to signify the country. When encouraging fans to follow them elsewhere, users will say “blink in lio” for “link in bio.”
Euphemisms are especially common in radicalized or harmful communities. Pro-anorexia eating disorder communities have long adopted variations on moderated words to evade restrictions. One paper from the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology found that the complexity of such variants even increased over time. Last year, anti-vaccine groups on Facebook began changing their names to “dance party” or “dinner party” and anti-vaccine influencers on Instagram used similar code words, referring to vaccinated people as “swimmers.”
Tailoring language to avoid scrutiny predates the Internet. Many religions have avoided uttering the devil’s name lest they summon him, while people living in repressive regimes developed code words to discuss taboo topics.
Early Internet users used alternate spelling or “leetspeak” to bypass word filters in chat rooms, image boards, online games and forums. But algorithmic content moderation systems are more pervasive on the modern Internet, and often end up silencing marginalized communities and important discussions.
As a middle school student in New York, Shekinah Griffith saw a television news report of President Barack Obama visiting an innovative school in Brooklyn. Its program included high school, an associate degree in a technical subject, an internship and the promise of a good job.
“I thought, ‘This is somewhere I need to be,’” Ms. Griffith recalled. “There are not many opportunities like that for people like me.”
She applied, was accepted and thrived in the courses. After school, an internship and an 18-month apprenticeship, she became a full-time employee at IBM at the end of 2020. Today Ms. Griffith, 21, is a cybersecurity technical specialist and earns more than $100,000 a year.
In the last few years, major American companies in every industry have pledged to change their hiring habits by opening the door to higher-wage jobs with career paths to people without four-year college degrees, like Ms. Griffith. More than 100 companies have made commitments, including the Business Roundtable’s Multiple Pathways program and OneTen, which is focused on hiring and promoting Black workers without college degrees to good jobs.How has corporate America done so far? There has been a gradual shift overall, according to a recent report and additional data supplied by the Burning Glass Institute. But the research group’s company-by-company analysis underlines both the potential and the challenge of changing entrenched hiring practices.
At Ivywood Classical Academy in Plymouth, Michigan, fourth-graders are studying early and medieval African kingdoms, dynasties of China, Europe in the Middle Ages and the founding and spread of Islam.
Hillsdale-affiliated schools teach the liberal arts, sciences and the “great works of literature, philosophy, politics, and art” and attempt to “lead students toward moral and intellectual virtue,” says the Michigan college.
“Classical education guides us into freedom by making us self-reliant and responsible, capable of governing ourselves and taking part in the self-government of our communities.”
Some private schools also used the curriculum.
Hillsdale, which is affiliated with 24 schools in 13 states, is “pushing the boundaries on the use of taxpayer money for politically tinged education, according to Stephanie Saul in the New York Times.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee wants 50 new classical charters in the state to teach “informed patriotism.”
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?
Phil Kerpen, Stephen Moore and Casey Mulligan:
Almost exactly two years ago COVID-19 spread to the United States and our federal, state and local governments implemented strategies to mitigate the damage from this deadly virus.
We now know from the responses across countries that the U.S. federal government (and most governments around the world) made many tragic mistakes in responding to Covid 19. But one of the wisest policy decisions was to ultimately let the 50 states and their governors and legislators make their own pandemic response policies. Federalism worked. States learned from one another over time about what policies worked most and least effectively in terms of containing the virus while minimizing the negative effects of lockdown strategies on businesses and children.
In the beginning stages of the pandemic, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity released a widely cited study and early stage report card on how the states were responding to the pandemic, based on how many jobs and how much GDP was lost and how states were performing in terms of reducing Covid infections and deaths.1 This study is an expanded and updated version of that original report card of how the 50 states handled COVID.The study primarily examined three variables: health outcomes, economic performance throughout the pandemic, and impact on education (i.e., the number of days of schooling that children missed).
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?
According to this Detroit News story, Rochester schools called at least two parents’ employers and sent the police to one parent’s house.
Parent protesters @daniela127 & @JenniferSey aren’t the only moms whose advocacy has resulted in serious pushback.https://t.co/BvYv5M947F pic.twitter.com/pCtROwsXq7
— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) April 11, 2022
Some years back I wrote about an authorship scam where papers that had already been accepted, but were still at the proof stage, were offered up to people who wanted to become “authors” on them for a fee. Yep, you could bulk up your publication list the easy way, with cash. That one was run out of China, and that country has been the source of hundreds, likely thousands, of such things (here’s an analysis by Elisabeth Bik). But you will probably not be surprised to hear that the same crap has persisted elsewhere. Retraction Watch has been on this story for years, as you could well imagine, and back in December they published this look at a Russian paper mill, “International Publisher LLC”.
This one’s particularly brazen – they post what are basically advertisements for open authorship slots, pointing out to customers that the fees will vary depending on where on the author list you want to appear and on the quality of the journal the paper is slated to appear in. Naturally. This outfit goes around soliciting for new listings as well, alerting actual authors to the chance to add a bit to their own income by including a total stranger or two. As you’ll see from that article, there’s always a list of a couple of hundred article possibilities for you to browse from, and turnover is constant. Here’s a new preprint examining the same people – it examines 1009 offers in the 2019-2021 period that have appeared (and then disappeared) on the site and finds at least 434 papers that have subsequently appeared in the literature that match up with these. (Here’s an article here at Science on this one). Actually, that should be 419 papers, because several of them appear to have been published twice, which sort of fits. The estimate is that these things have brought in over six million dollars during that period.
The Russian faked-authorship industry appears to have sprung up after changes that directly required publications – the more, the better – as a factor for promotion:
Suppose you have two sticks. The length of one is log x, and the length of the other is log y. If you put the two sticks end to end, the combined length is
log x + log y = log xy.
That’s the basic idea behind a slide rule.
The simplest slide rule consists of two bars with numbers marked on each bar on a logarithmic scale, running from 1 to 10 or maybe 1 to 100.
To multiply x by y, line the 1 on the left end of the bottom bar with x on the top bar. Then the number above y on the bottom bar is xy on the top bar.
This works because the 1 of the bottom bar is positioned a distance log x from the 1 on the top bar. The y on the bottom bar is a distance log yfurther to the right, and so it is a distance log x + log y from the 1 on the top, which is marked with log xy.
Here’s an example. Suppose you want to find the circumference of a circle 5000 ft in diameter. The image below shows how you would multiply π times 5000.
Republican lawmakers criticized the Regents’ decision and have pushed for more transparency in the admissions process. They passed a bill requiring UW campuses to rely only on “objective” admissions criteria and publish the criteria on their websites.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the bill Friday, echoing concerns raised by UW officials that the bill would reduce enrollment and harm workforce development. He also pointed out that nowhere in the bill is the “objective” criteria Republicans want to be used in admissions defined.
Phillip W. Magness and Amelia Janaskie:
The purpose of peer review is to examine the integrity of research, verifying its quality and reliability. This article discusses a failure in basic peer-review mechanisms at the journal Contemporary European History (CEH). In early 2020, the first of the present authors discovered evidence of quotation editing and misrepresentation of original sources in an article about the economist Ludwig von Mises by historian Quinn Slobodian. After the editors of CEH refused multiple attempts to seek corrections, it came to light that similar problems had been flagged during the referee process for Slobodian’s article. Like the correction request after publication, the referee report was ignored by the journal’s editors. This article chronicles the discovery of the misrepresentations, as well as unsuccessful attempts to obtain a correction to the edited quotations from CEH and its publisher Cambridge University Press.
Democrat Jennifer Loughran spent the pandemic’s early days sewing face masks for neighbors. Last month, as a newly elected school-board member, she voted to lift the district’s mask mandate. That came four months after she voted for the state’s Republican candidate for governor.
After a monthslong political identity crisis, Ms. Loughran decided her opposition to her party’s mask mandates, economic restrictions and school-closure policies outweighed her support for positions on climate change, abortion and gay rights, at least for the moment.
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 daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, and a nearly straight-A student, had her heart set on attending Cornell University, the elite campus in upstate New York where her older cousin was already enrolled.
But her SAT scores were discouragingly low.
“It was humbling,” said Cabrera Orozco, 18, a senior at Sleepy Hollow High School in Westchester County, just north of New York City. “I worked hard throughout all my years in high school, and then one test will determine if I’m good enough for a school. I feel like that’s kind of unfair.”
What Cabrera Orozco didn’t realize was that the pandemic that had disrupted her high school years led college admissions offices across the country — including Cornell — to waive standardized testing requirements. The change — perhaps the most significant shakeup in college admissions since the SAT and ACT were first widely required more than 50 years ago — has become a large-scale experiment, with high stakes for both colleges and their prospective students.
“It’s a sea change in terms of how admissions decisions are being made,” said Robert Schaeffer, the executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which is critical of the way standardized testing is used. “The pandemic created a natural experiment. Colleges were forced to see how test optional worked.”
Test-optional and test-blind admissions had begun to gain steam before the pandemic, with proponents arguing that tests hurt the odds of applicants who have traditionally not done as well on them, including students whose first language isn’t English, students whose parents didn’t go to college, Black and Hispanic students, immigrant students and students whose families can’t afford expensive test prep programs.
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:
Dear Community Members,
In November 2019, the Wisconsin Partnership Program, located within the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health, awarded One City Schools a five-year, $1 million grant to support the implementation of our education programs, and the design and launch of a long-term longitudinal evaluation of our organization and schools. We are pleased to share highlights from the first report of the longitudinal study, published by Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and the Center for Research on early Childhood Education (CRECE).
Over the next several years, evaluators will assess the implementation process, outcomes and impact of One City’s organization and schools on children, parents/caregivers, teachers, community partners and systems. The evaluation began in January 2020 and is currently funded through 2024.
We encourage you to review the executive summary of the report, and the initial public announcement of the grant award. Together, they explain the purpose and goals of the evaluation.
The evaluation is designed to (1) inform One City Schools about its areas of strength and need for change and/or improvement, (2) inform the growth and expansion of its schools and educational strategies, and (3) inform the fields of early childhood and K-12 education, nationally and internationally, about the impact and efficacy of One City’s education models and strategies.
The report is a part of a four-year evaluation process, broken up into phases, which began in 2020 and is funded through 2024. UW-Madison researchers in partnership with the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative interviewed teachers, staff, including leadership staff, and families between January 2021 and September; observed preschool and elementary classrooms; sent surveys to staff, teachers and families; and analyzed documents from One City Schools including reports, newsletters and administrative documents to compile the first phase of the report
The first recommendation, to “keep innovating, keep dreaming big,” also recognized “that One City has undertaken a critical task of lifting up all children, but particularly Madison’s Black children who have been long underserved by our community.”
“In a short time, One City has mapped a plan for success by thinking outside of the box to create a unique set of schools,” the report states. “These schools are vibrant places that exemplify innovation.”
The areas for improvement are also often challenges for traditional public schools. Staffing, for example, has become a nationwide challenge for schools exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
About 1,300 students’ Wi-Fi was restricted around the week of March 14 because of their failure to comply with Emory University’s booster vaccine requirements, according to Executive Director of Student Health Services Sharon Rabinovitz. The restrictions caused students’ Wi-Fi to slow down and blocked access to nonacademic sites such as social media and video games.
The consequence motivated over half of the affected students to either submit proof of vaccination or request an exemption, Executive Director for COVID-19 Response and Recovery Amir St. Clair said.
“The WiFi restrictions were a valuable compliance measure to help promote participation,” St. Clair said. “Our hope is that it will continue to have an impact.”
There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don’t use the word “heresy” to describe them, but structurally they’re equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done.
For example, when someone calls a statement “x-ist,” they’re also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That’s one of the reasons they’re used: to end a discussion.
If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they’re admitting to banning the truth. That’s obvious enough that I’d guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it’s easy to show that they’re mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.
Robert Morse, the lead designer of U.S. News & World Report’s rankings methodology, speaks at the professional conference for college data-crunchers every year. And every year, attendees say, his workshop is packed.
“Every time I’ve gone to that session, it’s been standing-room-only and people leaning in the door,” said Jeffrey A. Johnson, director of institutional research and effectiveness at Wartburg College. Conference-goers always ask tough questions, said Todd J. Schmitz, assistant vice president for institutional research for the Indiana University campuses. But Morse’s audience is rapt: “He has this room of 300 people hanging on his every word,” Johnson said.
American architect, writer, and educator Frank Lloyd Wright warned us of the expert when he wrote, “An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an Expert”. I share these thoughts not as an expert but rather, as a public-school educator who has not succumbed to the collectivist commitment to mediocrity in Ontario schools.
This blog is organized around themes related to three pervasive ideologies within Ontario’s education system. These include the myth of academic integrity, the false prophet of equity, and the teacher quality fable.
Speak with any educator and all will proclaim their commitment to academic integrity. Yet, evidence of waning academic integrity manifests itself daily. As one example, students who copy, plagiarize, or cheat are no longer punished. Rather, teachers are to inform the student’s parents of this minor transgression, and reverently advise them that the instance will be ignored, and the assignment or test will be omitted in calculating the final grade.
Aside from snubbing a basic educational value, there are consequences to ignoring cheaters. In fact, Ontario’s education system incentivizes cheaters by allowing them to bypass difficult assignments or tests if they cheat by simply not calculating the grade. The message heard by students? Cheat and we will ensure the assignment never really existed.
On its website, it proclaims its No. 1 ranking this year by Bloomberg Businessweek as the top Public Business School in the Northeast. Fortune bestowed a similar honor in 2021. And U.S. News & World Report rated its MBA program among the top ten for Best Overall Employment Outcomes in the U.S., as well as No. 12 for its Supply Chain Management MBA program.
But in a whistleblower lawsuit filed Friday, a Rutgers administrator charged that the university fraudulently burnished those national rankings by creating totally bogus jobs to show the success its business school graduates had in finding employment.
The lawsuit by Deidre White, the business school’s human resources manager, alleged the program used a temp agency to hire unemployed MBA students, placing them into sham positions at the university itself — for no other reason than to make it appear like a greater number of graduates were getting full-time jobs after getting their Rutgers diplomas.
“The fraud worked,” wrote White’s attorney, Matthew A. Luber of McOmber McOmber & Luber in Marlton. In the very first year of the scheme, they said Rutgers was suddenly propelled to, among other things, the ‘No. 1′ business school in the Northeast.
The analysis, which looks at performance over time, shows that students fell behind each year incrementally even before the pandemic, starting in third grade when tests were first given.
Progress completely stalled last year, when most students were in remote learning. Eighth graders overall scored at the same level that they did when they took the sixth grade test two years earlier.
The state canceled Smarter Balanced tests in the spring of 2020 because of the Covid pandemic, so there are no results from seventh grade for these students.
Progress in math builds on knowledge accumulated in previous years. Missing instruction and skills compound the challenges that elementary and middle school math teachers face moving forward after another disruptive year dealing with Covid variants.
“The results highlight massive gaps in math learning that existed long before pandemic,” said Rick Miller, CEO of the CORE Districts, a multidistrict data and improvement collaborative. “Responding with a one-time fix misunderstands what is happening.”
The analysis, published in an EdSource commentary, was produced by David Wakelyn, founder of Union Square Learning, a nonprofit with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., that works with education organizations on improvement strategies. Wakelyn formerly was executive director for policy development for The College Board, an education policy adviser to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and program director for the National Governors Association.
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?
Smith previously worked with the Gary, Indiana and Chicago Public Schools food service systems. She joined the district amid the COVID-19 pandemic and has had a challenging first year. Those challenges have included scrambling as vendors didn’t deliver the expected food on that day’s school menus and dealing with the district’s own staffing shortages.
She hopes those challenges will fade as next year approaches. Smith wants to bring in a variety of initiatives, from scratch cooking to using fresh products grown at schools. The district recently hired a dietitian and is currently seeking an executive chef.
“We are going to make some stuff that really will give people something to talk about,” Smith said.
Smith recently spoke to the Cap Times about what’s on the menu at Madison’s schools.
Obviously, these results have implications for Wisconsin’s upcoming fall elections. Both of the major candidates for governor on the Republican side, Rebecca Kleefisch and Kevin Nicholson, have expressed support for education reform — both on the public school side and in expansion of school choice. The current governor, Democrat Tony Evers, has rejected several pieces of legislation that would have given parents more of a say in the classroom, including a bill that would have required schools to post instructional materialonline for easy accessibility for parents. The dividing line between Evers and the Republican candidates on these issues is quite stark.
Perhaps most importantly, the election returns highlight a growing belief among conservative voters that they can no longer ignore the policies of their local school boards. While laments about the politicization of school board races were widely voiced, many parents would say that school boards have brought this on themselves by politicizing the classroom in ways that are often at odds with the values of the communities in which the schools are located. The pandemic revealed to parents the indoctrination that occurs in many school districts around the country via at-home education. Parents remain angered by what they discovered, and are refusing to return to complacency.
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?
Yulia bodar’s classroom was once the back bedroom of a large Warsaw apartment. Now it boasts a blackboard, a bright carpet decorated with cartoon animals, and desks at which a dozen small children are learning to write. Her pupils are refugees from Ukraine who have arrived in Poland since Russia invaded their country on February 24th. She is a newcomer herself, having fled western Ukraine with her own two children not long after the bombs began to fall.
Ms Bodar is a teacher at Materynka, a school that teaches the Ukrainian curriculum from several makeshift locations in Poland’s capital. Before the war began it had about 200 pupils, largely children of migrants who had come to Warsaw to work. Now it has around 1,000. Larysa Vychivska, one of its founders, points to a tall stack of forms filled out by newcomers. She says her school is taking in about 20 new pupils each day.
Now the Woke posse is trying to hogtie a student surveythat attempts to quantify how free is speech at Wisconsin’s public universities. The interim chancellor at UW-Whitewater resigned rather than have his campus exposed as a cynosure of Leftist groupthink. Student government leaders like the anti-police regime at UW-Madison also want the survey … canceled.
The question arises, what are they afraid of? (Answer: Exposure!) In January 2021, the UW’s Thompson Center found that “undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus … appear to be fairly hostile to First Amendment principles.” Why? Because “an overwhelming majority of them [75%] identified as politically liberal.”
Sure enough, the Menard Center at UW-Stout was seeded by a donation from Charles Koch. Because conservatives hate free speech, doncha know! The survey’s lead professor tells the Wisconsin State Journal “It might help people to understand the center for me to say I’m a liberal professor being funded by a conservative donor to run a nonpartisan center.” Sorry, professor. Our guess is that it won’t help.
We understand push polling, which telegraphs the answer by the shaping of the question. We ask our platinum subscribers to tell the Werkes if the survey’s questions are biased:
🧵: Charcot’s hysteria and the epidemic of ROGD
In the late 1800s, a brilliant neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, triggered an epidemic of hysteria in women of the French upper-middle class. It is one of the best examples of the medical world’s ability to shape mental illness./1
— Mia💚🤍💜 (@_CryMiaRiver) April 8, 2022
“I find it hard to take seriously the state of Michigan’s contention that racial diversity is a compelling state interest—compelling enough to warrant ignoring the Constitution’s prohibition of distribution on the basis of race,” Scalia began. “The problem is a problem of Michigan’s own creation. That is to say, it has decided to create an elite law school . . . [and] it’s done this by taking only the best students with the best grades and the best SATs or LSATs, knowing that the result of this will be to exclude to a large degree minorities.”
Scalia said that if Michigan wants to be an elite law school, that’s fine. But there are trade-offs involved if the school also wants to prioritize enrolling some predetermined percentage of underrepresented minorities for aesthetic reasons. “If [racial diversity] is indeed a significant compelling state interest, why don’t you lower your standards?” he asked. “You don’t have to be the great college you are. You can be a lesser college if that value is important enough to you.”
Last week, the highly selective Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced with a similar dilemma, apparently chose to maintain its high standards. It became the first prominent school to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, a practice that MIT and many other colleges had abandoned during the pandemic.
MIT explained the reversal in a blog post. “Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT,” wrote Stu Schmill, the dean of admissions. “Our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MITis significantly improved by considering standardized testing—especially in mathematics,” he added. Thus, “not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.”
Concourse is working with secondary school and independent counselors around the globe in assisting students affected by the conflict in Ukraine. Ukraine Match is a free, dedicated Global Match event aiming to bring university options and opportunities to students who are unsure of their academic future.
Weekly Standard article on “Fistgate” conference
Warning America about the homosexual agenda in the schools
In July of 2000 — just weeks after it hit the “Fistgate” scandal hit the national news (mostly Fox reporting, particularly Hannity & Colmes, but also other national media) the Weekly Standard published an article about it. Although the Weekly Standard generally seems to shy away from the homosexual issues, then-staff member Rod Dreher thought it was important enough to write about, and apparently the editors agreed with him.
Below is the article that appeared in the magazine:
“I don’t want to read about another teenager where there were warning signs and we looked the other way,” said Sen. Anthony Portantino, author of a bill that would require all California middle and high schools to train at least 75% of employees in behavioral health. “Teachers and school staff are on the front lines of a crisis, and need to be trained to spot students who are suffering.”
Experts say while childhood depression and anxiety had been on the rise for years, the pandemic’s unrelenting stress and grief amplified the problems, particularly for those already experiencing mental health issues who were cut off from counselors and other school resources during distance learning.
For children, the issues with distance learning were not just academic, said Sharon Hoover, professor of child psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health.
Child abuse and and neglect increased during the pandemic, according to Hoover. For children in troubled homes, with alcoholic or abusive parents, distance learning meant they had no escape. Those who lacked technology or had spotty internet connections were isolated even more than their peers and fell further behind academically and socially.
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?
“CRT is not taught in schools.” West High School in Madison is teaching the basics of CRT once a month to their entire student body. Called “Regent Pride,” the slides explore the basic tenets of CRT. Multiple concerned parents have contacted me. Thread below: pic.twitter.com/qrsRTe65oU
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) April 8, 2022
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Among the kids who went on hormones, there isn’t genuine statistical improvement here from baseline to the final wave of data collection. At baseline, 59% of the treatment-naive kids experienced moderate to severe depression. Twelve months later, 56% of the kids on GAM experienced moderate to severe depression. At baseline, 45% of the treatment-naive kids experienced self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Twelve months later, 37% of the kids on GAM did. These are not meaningful differences: The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems. (Though as I’ll explain, because the researchers provide so little detailed data, it’s hard to know exactly how dire the kids’ mental health situations were.)
If there were improvement, the researchers would have touted it in a clear, specific way by explaining exactly how much the kids on GAM improved. After all, this is exactly what they were looking into — they list their study’s “Question” as “Is gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) youths associated with changes in depression, anxiety, and suicidality?” But they don’t claim this anywhere — not specifically. They reference “improvements” twice (see above) but offer no statistical demonstration anywhere in the paper or the supplemental material. I wanted to double-check this to be sure, so I reached out to one of the study authors. They wanted to stay on background, but they confirmed to me that there was no improvement over time among the kids who went on hormones or blockers.
In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. As many as 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.
“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them learn.”
schoolinfosystem.org