schoolinfosystem.org
Laura Meckler and Matt Viser: Democratic governors have responded by dropping mask mandates, urging that schools remain open and emphasizing there is a light at the end of the dark covid tunnel. They also are trying to change the subject, with a focus on education investment and recovery and warnings about the consequences if Republicans […]
Jeffrey Mervis: A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded. U.S. scientists also have serious competition from foreign researchers in certain fields, it finds. That loss of […]
Elizabeth Beyer: In solidly Democratic Madison there’s markedly less enthusiasm for running for School Board than in other parts of the state. Of the three seats up for election this year, only one is contested after two incumbents opted not to run again. Madison School Board President Ali Muldrow, who is up for reelection but […]
Terry Gross: The origins here … go back to that summer of 2020. There’s a researcher there named Christopher Rufo, who was then with the Discovery Institute in Seattle. This is in a conservative educational institute centered around the promotion of intelligent design. And Christopher Rufo wrote a series of articles for an online website […]
The Blogocarian: Not long ago, Mary Beard graced us with a bit of honorable honesty in the Times Literary Supplement, in which she confessed to what is a bit of an open secret among most classicists. She can’t sight-read a complex Latin text all that well. Most classicists can’t. This admission — from someone like Beard — […]
Washington Post Editorial: Announcing his selection of Aimee Rogstad Guidera as education secretary, Mr. Youngkin cited her work in “advocating for innovation and choice, data-driven reform, and high standards.” Ms. Guidera is a national expert on the use of data in education policy. She headed up the Guidera Strategy consulting firm and is the founder and former […]
Christopher Rufo: This year, the new segregation has extended itself into new domains: public education and public-health policy. In Denver, Centennial Elementary School launched a racially exclusive “Families of Color Playground Night” as part of its racial equity programming. In Chicago, Downers Grove South High School held a racially exclusive “Students of Color Field Trip” as part of its […]
Johann Hari: When he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me […]
Nate Hochman: The conservative education-reform movement has long evaluated itself in quantitative terms. Right-leaning educrats calculate their successes and failures as one would assess a tax cut or an infrastructure bill, measuring the effects of their reforms in terms of proficiency rates in math and reading, graduation and dropout numbers, and cost efficiency. That, in turn, […]
Scott Girard: Ananda Mirilli will not run for reelection to the Madison School Board next spring, meaning two of the three seats up for election will not have an incumbent among the candidates. Cris Carusi previously announced that she would not run for reelection, while board president Ali Muldrow is running for a second term. Carusi, Mirilli […]
Kaylee McGhee: Conservatives must make education a policy priority — not only because it will help us win elections, as we saw in Virginia last month, but because education lays the very foundation for this movement and what it’s trying to do, which is to preserve the principles that founded this nation and the documents […]
Emily Hamer: Janeway said they were “very ignited by” the posts. Janeway wants to protect trans children, including the third- and fourth-graders that they teach in two Madison schools through a UW-Madison arts program called Whoopensocker. “I go back to school on Tuesday and on Thursday, and I will be face to face with kids who […]
Andy Kessler: Public-school education has gone from bad to worse. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 26% of 11th-graders were at grade level in reading and math in 2019. Remarkably, the school system had a record-high graduation rate of nearly 84% in 2021. Those students must have had strong senior years! This is why over […]
James R. Copland John Ketcham Christopher F. Rufo: In 2021, public school parents vaulted to the forefront of America’s fractured political landscape. Around the country, parents objected both to Covid-related school closures and to racially divisive curricula. Parental frustration helped secure sweeping GOP wins last month in Virginia, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin’s victory over former […]
Dan Lennington and Dr. Will Flanders: At the top of the list of legitimate parental grievances was the decision to keep many schools closed during the 2020-21 school year, despite strong scientific evidence that it was safe to reopen. Research by our own organization, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), found that it was […]
Christopher Rufo: The school board was able to do this because the Round Rock Independent School District has its own police force, with a three-layer chain of command, patrol units, school resource officers, a detective, and a K-9 unit. The department serves under the authority of the board and, through coordination with other agencies, apparently has […]
Jonathan Turley: We have previously discussed the worrisome signs of a rising generation of censors in the country as leaders and writers embrace censorship and blacklisting. The latest chilling poll was released by 2021 College Free Speech Rankings after questioning a huge body of 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities. It found that sixty-six percent of […]
WILL: Reform proposal would arm parents with the ability to access, review controversial curriculum material The News: A new report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is urging the adoption of curriculum transparency legislation to arm parents and taxpayers with the ability to access and review controversial curriculum material in public schools. WILL recently issued […]
ALG Research: 4. Voters think we are focused on social issues,not the economy. They aren’t hearing us talk about the economy enough, and the things they are hearing about our agenda (people mentioned the child tax credit, paid leave, free college) don’t have to do with getting people back to work or taking on the […]
Christopher Rufo: The school board was able to do this because the Round Rock Independent School District has its own police force, with a three-layer chain of command, patrol units, school resource officers, a detective, and a K-9 unit. The department serves under the authority of the board and, through coordination with other agencies, apparently has […]
Marc Thiessen: It’s not just Loudoun County. In 2019, Virginia state superintendent of public instruction James F. Lane sent a memo to all school districts promoting critical race theory training materials, and declaring “CRT has proven an important analytic tool in the field of education, offering critical perspectives on race, and the causes, consequences and manifestations of […]
Ryan Lanier: In one of the most stunning examples of relief fund abuse, the Whitewater, Wis., school board voted to allocate 80 percent of its $2 million Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) grant toward the construction of synthetic turf fields for football, baseball, and softball. When asked why the funds should be used for athletic fields […]
New Business Item 39: The NEA will, with guidance on implementation from the NEA president and chairs of the Ethnic Minority Affairs Caucuses: A. Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) — what it is and what it is not; have a team of staffers for members who […]
Dave Cieslewicz And the third issue that hurt the Dems was education. They’re badly misreading and misplaying this whole issue of Critical Race Theory, The official party line is that CRT isn’t taught in the public schools, that it’s just some obscure graduate school seminar topic. But that’s nowhere near true. While something called CRT […]
Maribah Knight & Ken Armstrong: The police were at Hobgood because of that video. But they hadn’t come for the boys who threw punches. They were here for the children who looked on. The police in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, had secured juvenile petitions for 10 children in all […]
Glenn Reynolds: American parents are organizing to fight racist critical race theories being taught in their kids’ schools. Attorney General Merrick Garland, once touted as a moderate, has responded by asking the FBI to treat them as domestic terrorists. As befits the Biden administration, this over-the-top authoritarianism is accompanied by the stench of corruption, as […]
George Leaf: Law schools in the U.S. used to be run by no-nonsense individuals who, whatever their personal politics, thought that their institutions existed to teach students about the law, not to engage in advocacy or speculation. That began to change in the 1980s, as some younger law professors started to push into previously forbidden terrain, […]
Washington free beacon: Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has discovered a new group that poses a pressing threat to the country’s safety and wellbeing. Their potential crimes are heinous: Objecting to the propagation in our schools of critical race theory and anti-white racism. How deep does this criminal behavior go? We can’t say. Announcing a […]
Ulrike Malmendier: Personal experiences of economic outcomes, from global financial crises to individual-level job losses, can shape individual beliefs, risk attitudes, and choices for years to come. A growing literature on experience effects shows that individuals act as if past outcomes that they experienced were overly likely to occur again, even if they are fully […]
In defense of liberty: Under the legislation, prospective parents will no longer have to guess and gamble about whether a nearby school is informally slipping into the classroom content such as the New York Times 1619 Project, or assigning literature like Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, which tells students, “The only remedy to past discrimination […]
Paul Mirengoff: Earlier this year, Gov. Kristi Noem signed a pledge to bar “action civics” (mandatory political protests for course credit) and critical race theory (attacks on “whiteness,” “Eurocentrism,” etc.) from South Dakota schools. For doing so, she drew praise from conservatives, including Stanley Kurtz, a leader in the fight against action civics. Stanley warned, however, that […]
In today’s New Yorker, critical race theorist Patricia Williams accuses me of “definitional theft.” The irony is too rich: the same people who believe in the infinite elasticity and social construction of language are mad that their techniques are being used against them. Sad! pic.twitter.com/1F3jNrAcFI — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 13, 2021
Jack Cashill: In reading the “overview” of Dr. Jill Biden’s 2006 doctoral dissertation from the University of Delaware, I am reminded just how rotten, from top to bottom, are America’s schools of graduate education. That a doctor of anything could write a sentence like the one that follows speaks to the historic worthlessness of most graduate programs in […]
Edmund DeMarche: Heated school board meetings on topics that include critical race theory have prompted some school board members to look for the exit due to the clashes that some say lead to threats and harassment, according to a report. Critical race theory has been the center of debate in D.C. and local school districts. It is […]
Christopher Rufo: Technology giant Google has launched an “antiracism” initiative that presents speakers and materials claiming that America is a “system of white supremacy” and that all Americans are “raised to be racist.” I have obtained a trove of whistleblower documents from inside Google that reveal the company’s extensive racial-reeducation program, based on the core […]
Daniel Pipes: For some years, select historians have bemoaned the direction of their discipline. They regret the turn away from war, diplomacy, economics, and ideas in favor of gender, environment, race, and sexuality as they bemoan the decline in student interest. Niall Ferguson titled his critique “The Decline and Fall of History.” Hal Brands and […]
Joanne Jacobs: Parents fear their children will be told they are oppressors or victims because of the color of their skin. Banning ideas or ideologies is a bad idea, argue Robert Pondiscio and Tracey Schirra of the American Enterprise Institute. They suggest a “teacher code of conduct” on how to discuss multiple sides of controversial topics. After […]
Shannon Whitworth: My problems with the letter are legion, particularly as an African American man myself. The one that stands out for me is that this does absolutely nothing to advance the causes of people of color. In fact, it would diminish the credibility of any movement on top of creating resentment and division by […]
William Jacobson: As someone who spent 22 years as a civil litigator prior to joining Cornell Law School, including 13 in Rhode Island, I understand well that lawsuits frequently do not turn out as the plaintiff intended, sometimes catastrophically so. I’m not making a prediction, but I am sounding a warning, that the lawsuit by […]
Krithika Varagur: Matt Haynes anticipated a grand round-the-world itinerary when he decided to become a digital nomad in January 2020. The 32-year-old marketing consultant from York, England, would work remotely, spending a few weeks each in Bali, Thailand, a few Eastern European cities and beyond. Instead, the world shut down while he was visiting a […]
Shira Ovide “Data privacy” is one of those terms that feels stripped of all emotion. It’s like a flat soda. At least until America’s failures to build even basic data privacy protections carry flesh-and-blood repercussions. This week, a top official in the Roman Catholic Church’s American hierarchy resigned after a news site said that it had data from […]
Joel Kotkin: Over time, our educational deficit with other countries, notably China, particularly in the acquisition of practical skills in mathematics, engineering medical technology, and management, has grown, threatening our economic and political pre-eminence. Our competitors, whatever their shortcomings, are focused on economic competition and technological supremacy. In math, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International […]
Matt Taibbi: Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t […]
Scott Girard: The committee that will make recommendations on renaming James Madison Memorial High School already has its hands full as its first meeting approaches. The Citizens’ Naming Committee will convene virtually at 5 p.m. Wednesday to begin the next step in the renaming process, 10 months after the School Board received a proposal from a Memorial graduate to […]
Jonathan Turley: The plunging level of trust reflects the loss of the premier news organizations to a type of woke journalism. We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. Even journalists are leading attacks on free speech and the free press. This includes academics rejecting […]
Alex Nester and Santucci Ruiz: Asra Nomani, vice president of Parents Defending Education, the watchdog group that obtained the emails through a public records request, called Amazon’s prioritization of “antiracism” efforts during a pandemic “shortsighted” in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon. “Instead of donating Kindles and hot spots to students in Arlington Public […]
Last night, Ibram Kendi told Joy Reid he had zero connection with critical race theory. But two weeks ago, he said critical race theory was “foundational” to his work. Their philosophy is collapsing and they’re all running from the debris.https://t.co/N7wXCypZGz pic.twitter.com/pCuSJ4ah7W — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 24, 2021
Victor Davis Hanson: First, remember that wokeism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars. These ‘theories” are merely adolescent delusions that […]
Joel Breakstone: Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming […]
Brittany Bernstein: Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer,” according to faculty. Last month, faculty members approved changes to the […]
Christopher Rufo: Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege,” according to documents I have obtained. The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, […]
Elena Debre: Government reliance on the manual entrance of COVID-19 data into basic software has caused data errors and civilian confusion across the globe. The U.K. used a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track COVID cases—until the high caseload became too large for the software to handle. The maxed-out file stopped loading cases into the government’s system and […]
Heather Mac Donald: Turn on CNN or open the New York Times, and you may encounter someone explaining how exhausting it is to be a black person. The idea that systemic racism is leaving blacks scarred and spent has been embraced across mainstream America, articulated by corporate CEOs and university presidents. The latest performative assertion […]
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty: The News: A new report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is urging the adoption of curriculum transparency legislation to arm parents and taxpayers with the ability to access and review controversial curriculum material in public schools. WILL recently issued identical open records requests to nine large Wisconsin school […]
Jason Riley: What should take priority in K-12 education, the physical safety of students or racial balance in school suspension rates? Barack Obama and Donald Trump had different answers to that question, and it probably won’t surprise you where President Biden comes down. In 2012, the Education Department released a study showing that black students were more […]
Naomi Schaefer Riley: In a startling new report, Bethany Christian Services, one of the largest adoption agencies in the country, announced that allowing white families to adopt Black children from the foster care system “can cause a lot of harm to children of color.” As a result, the agency favors “overhauling” the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, which […]
Luke Rosiak: Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The […]
For the last (and actually only) diversity session I attended before leaving The Intercept, the highly-paid outside consultant emailed everyone before saying employees would be divided by race into different rooms (white room & POC room) and it was shocking. Now it’s standard: https://t.co/0c6YmFMCX0 — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021 Top donors, 2019-20:@GeorgeSoros: $490,000Facebook […]
Asra Q. Nomani: New York City’s gifted and talented students are in the crosshairs of woke activists who seek to impose “racial justice” in the city’s school system, not by improving education but by destroying opportunities for the city’s most advanced learners. And we can’t let them win. A consortium of activists, including celebrity lawyer […]
Douglas Newby: I have left for last this tax advantage, which is the most obvious economic reason Fortune 50 companies and individual families are moving from Los Angeles to Dallas. A fourth generation Angelenos family who belongs to the most prestigious Los Angeles beach club, have their children in the finest preparatory schools, and live […]
Wisconsin Democracy: Liberal groups are winning the money race in the so-called “nonpartisan” state school superintendent race, where Pecatonica Area School Superintendent Jill Underly faces Deborah Kerr, a retired Brown Deer schools superintendent. Three groups that generally back Democratic candidates in partisan elections – A Better Wisconsin Together, Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin – […]
Luke Rosiak: A group of current and former teachers and others in Loudoun County, Virginia, compiled a lengthy list of parents suspected of disagreeing with school system actions, including its teaching of controversial racial concepts — with a stated purpose in part to “infiltrate,” use “hackers” to silence parents’ communications, and “expose these people publicly.” […]
Jim Geraghty: A Lot of What the Media Told You Was Wrong, Part One The New York Times, February 27: “Hate crimes involving Asian-American victims soared in New York City last year. Officials are grappling with the problem even as new incidents occur.” PBS: “How to address the surge of anti-Asian hate crimes.” USA Today: “Hate crimes […]
Bari Weiss: What does it say about the current state of that meritocracy, then, that it wants kids fluent in critical race theory and “white fragility,” even if such knowledge comes at the expense of Shakespeare? “The colleges want children—customers—that are going to be pre-aligned to certain ideologies that originally came out of those colleges,” […]
Christopher Rufo: The story of Buffalo Public Schools is a sad and familiar one: a dying industrial town, underperforming inner-city schools, and high rates of failure among racial minorities. Instead of focusing on improving academic achievement, however, Buffalo school administrators have adopted fashionable new pedagogies: “culturally responsive teaching,” “pedagogy of liberation,” “equity-based instructional strategies,” and […]
Christina Zhao: Coca-Cola, facing mounting backlash from conservatives online, has responded to allegations of anti-white rhetoric after an internal whistleblower leaked screenshots of diversity training materials that encourages staff to “try to be less white.” On Friday, Karlyn Borysenko, an activist who supports banning critical race theory, shared images from an internal whistleblower of the […]
Michael Crichton: The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful — and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing — that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well know to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated. The theory of eugenics […]
Jonathan Turley: Alison Collins, the Vice President of the San Francisco Board of Education, has declared meritocracy to be racist even in the selection of students at advanced or gifted programs. As we have previously discussed, this has been a building campaign in academia as educators and others denounce selection based on academic performance through testing. At issue […]
Shepherd Barbash: It is a sad irony that the teaching of science in American schools is so unscientific. In a more rational world, children would learn about nature and a mode of inquiry—the scientific method—that would awaken them to the awe, fascination, and surprise that the universe should inspire. Instead, the chronic problems afflicting K–12 […]
John Kass: When I was a boy about 11, I committed a crime that changed my life. I stole a book. I was a book thief. I found it in another kid’s desk and began reading, hiding it behind some boring textbook, and couldn’t give it up. And when the last bell rang, I hid […]
Scott Girard: Three Madison Metropolitan School District staff members are vying to be the next Madison Teachers Inc. president. One week after the most contentious presidential transition in generations, a much friendlier race is playing out with millions fewer voters. “It is actually a very healthy part of our union to have these sorts of […]
Devi Shastri: State Superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor announced a year ago that she would not seek another term. Gov. Tony Evers named Taylor as his replacement in the post in 2018, when he was elected governor. This is the first open race for the position in 20 years. The candidates are: Deborah Kerr, the former superintendent of […]
Tom Slater: For me, the defining image of 2020 was also the funniest: that of Democratic lawmakers in the US taking the knee, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, draped in Ghanaian kente cloth. Watching thoroughly establishment politicians, House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to the fore, literally kneeling before […]
Paul Brian: Capitalism is getting all sorts of makeovers these days. There’s woke capitalism, crony capitalism and now there’s also the burgeoning industry of woke crony capitalism. Basically it’s a nexus of corporations, government bureaucrats, public universities, and lawyers working to push expensive mandated diversity and anti-racism training on as many workers and students as […]
Ben Farrell, Lauren Henning and Anna Walters: Editor’s note: This story came about through a partnership between the Cap Times, Local Voices Network and a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism class. Students analyzed the Cap Times People’s Agenda and chose to report on non-police solutions for community issues, one of the topics readers identified as a priority. Specifically, the student […]
John Murawski: The president of the Lower Merion School Board on Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line declared to families: “We need to eradicate white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in all of our institutions.” In Maine, a coastal public school district where 3.7% of the 2,100 students are African American or Hispanic, the superintendent declared war on “the intentional barriers white people have built […]
Rana Foroohar: Race is often a central issue in American political life. But, as the 2020 presidential election has just shown us, class is a topic that matters just as much, perhaps even more, at least in terms of votes. While the Republican incumbent, Donald Trump, won a majority of small towns and rural areas, […]
Brendan Nyhan: Misinformation presents a challenge to the American political system. Unsupported claims can distort debate, deceive voters and encourage contempt for the other party. In the final days of the presidential race, for instance, hundreds of thousands of people in key states received mysterious text messages with falsehoods about Democratic nominee Joe Biden (including that he wants to […]
Jessica Murray: Schools which teach pupils that “white privilege” is an uncontested fact are breaking the law, the women and equalities minister has said. Addressing MPs during a Commons debate on Black History Month, Kemi Badenoch said the government does not want children being taught about “white privilege and their inherited racial guilt”. “Any school which teaches […]
Hi, I’m cap tines K-12 education reporter Scott Gerard. Today. Our cap times IDFs panel will discuss how will COVID-19 change K-12 education. I’m lucky to have three wonderful panelists with me to help answer that question. Marilee McKenzie is a teacher at Middleton’s Clark street community school, where she has worked since the school was in its planning stages.
She’s in her [00:03:00] 11th year of teaching. Dr. Gloria Ladson billings is a nationally recognized education expert who was a U w Madison faculty member for more than 26 years, including as a professor in the departments of curriculum and instruction, educational policy studies and educational leadership and policy analysis.
She is also the current president of the national Academy of education. Finally dr. Carlton Jenkins is the new superintendent of the Madison metropolitan school district. He started the districts top job in August, coming from the Robbinsdale school district in Minnesota, where he worked for the past five years, Jenkins began his career in the Madison area.
Having worked in Beloit and at Memorial high school in early 1990s before moving to various districts around the country. Thank you all so much for being here. Mary Lee, I’m going to start with you. You’ve been working with students directly throughout this pandemic. How has it gone? Both in the spring when changes were very sudden, and then this fall with a summer to reflect and [00:04:00] plan, it’s been interesting for sure.
Um, overall, I would say the it’s been hard. There has been nothing about this have been like, ah, It’s really, it makes my life easy. It’s been really challenging. And at the same time, the amount of growth and learning that we’ve been able to do as staff has been incredible. And I think about how teachers have moved from face-to-face to online to then planning for.
McKinsey: The COVID-19 pandemic has upended school systems around the world. The pace has been frenetic as systems have had to stand up remote learning overnight, plan whether and how to reopen schools amid changing epidemiological circumstances, and support students academically and emotionally. The scope of the challenge has thus far left little time for deeper […]
Wall Street Journal: The folks at Princeton are supposed to be smart. But you have to wonder about the intelligence of inviting federal scrutiny by declaring their own school guilty of racism. Amid a struggle session with progressive faculty and students this month, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber published an open letter promising to combat “systemic […]
Joanne Jacobs: I remember the fight over national history standards in 1994. The standards, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which would have been available for state adoption, if they wished, were attacked for for anti-Americanism. They crashed and burned. History isn’t about good and evil, writes Natalie Wexler in Forbes. History is complicated. President Trump wants […]
Kelly Meyerhofer: The best way to reduce the number of infections, Blank said, is “not by issuing press releases calling for students to leave, but to partner in developing collaborative solutions for the benefit of all residents.” She warned that the county is unlikely to see a rapid decline in cases until agencies with jurisdiction […]
Mark Niesse: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Tuesday that 1,000 Georgians voted twice in the state’s June 9 primary, a felony that he said will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. These voters returned absentee ballots and then also showed up to vote on election day June 9, Raffensperger said. County […]
Taxpayers have long supported the Madison School District’s far above average spending, while tolerating our long term, disastrous reading results. The district has placed substantial tax and spending increase referendums on the November, 2020 Presidential ballot. A presenter [org chart] further mentioned that Madison spends about $1 per square foot in annual budget maintenance while […]
Rod Dreher: A reader who works for a federal agency (he asked me not to disclose which one) writes about his recent experience in a leadership training program. Twenty percent of the training, 1 day’s worth, is devoted to woke diversity. I have attached the sanitized version of the power point that was presented to […]
Breaking the Code: I just finished reading Anthony Pedriana’s Leaving Johnny Behind, an enormously important and under-appreciated book that I discovered by chance, thanks to a post on Facebook. (Social media certainly does serve a purpose other than being a black hole of procrastination from time to time!) The author is a retired teacher and principal […]
Jodi Cohen: One afternoon in mid-June, Charisse* drove up to the checkpoint at the Children’s Village juvenile detention center in suburban Detroit, desperate to be near her daughter. It had been a month since she had last seen her, when a judge found the girl had violated probation and sent her to the facility during […]
William Jacobson: Yesterday I posted about the proposed elimination of “blind auditions” for symphony orchestras, so that race and gender could be used as selection criteria to help diversify orchestra musicians. It would be the elimination of what previously was a meritocracy: For decades leading symphony orchestras have used “blind auditions” to hire musicians. That is, the […]
Josh Mitchell: The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a yearslong shift in bargaining power away from colleges and toward families, which are quite prepared to treat tuition as they would a car’s price: something to haggle over. When a college accepted Frances Marcel’s second child several years ago, she pleaded for a discount. It wouldn’t budge, […]
Jay Schweickert: This morning, the Supreme Court denied all of the major cert petitions raising the question of whether qualified immunity should be reconsidered. This is, to put it bluntly, a shocking dereliction of duty. As Cato has argued for years, qualified immunity is an atextual, ahistorical judicial invention, which shields public officials from liability, even when they break […]
Hans Taparia: Forty years ago, going to college in America was a reliable pathway for upward mobility. Today, it has become yet another 21st-century symbol of privilege for the wealthy. Through this period, tuition rates soared 260 percent,double the rate of inflation. In 2019, the average cost of attending a four-year private college was over $200,000. For a […]
Elissa Nadworny: Most campuses in the United States are sitting empty. Courses are online, students are at home. And administrators are trying to figure out how to make the finances of that work. “The math is not pretty,” says Robert Kelchen, who studies higher ed finance at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. “Colleges are […]
Logan Wroge: As a member of the School Board, Gomez Schmidt, 48, is looking to prioritize the selection of a new, research-based reading curriculum for elementary students, building trust in the district with families, improving accountability and transparency, and effectively managing the budget. The 32-year-old Pearson had made finding ways to expand 4-year-old kindergarten to […]
Public Policy Forum: The level of competition varies in these counties, but in none are even half the seats contested. Eleven of Brown County’s 26 seats (42.3%) are contested placing it at the top of the list, while none of Waukesha County’s 25 seats are competitive. In Wisconsin’s two largest counties, few seats are up […]
Wisconsin State Journal: With a pandemic closing schools, protesters disrupting board meetings and a new superintendent starting June 1, the Madison School District needs stability and experience. That’s what Christina Gomez Schmidt, seeking Seat 6, and Wayne Strong, running for Seat 7, will provide on the Madison School Board. The Wisconsin State Journal editorial board […]
Jenny Peek: It’s been a difficult year for the Madison school district. A barrage of high-profile incidents has taken over the narrative of what it’s like in Madison’s schools, from the use of racist language, to a teacher being arrested for attempting to produce child pornography, to issues of safety at a district middle school. The district is […]
Logan Wroge: Three candidates for an open Madison School Board seat aligned on several issues facing the school district while offering their own solutions to other topics during a forum Tuesday. The trio seeking the board’s Seat 6 — Karen Ball, Christina Gomez Schmidt and Maia Pearson — spoke of rebuilding trust between the community […]
David Blaska: Board of education president Gloria Reyes demands “the conversation around school discipline needs to be centered on race,” according to the WI State Journal. Those who counter that school discipline needs to be centered on behavior will be asked to leave the conversation. Maybe the answer is pick out some white kids and toss them […]