schoolinfosystem.org
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 […]
Joanne Jacobs: In Chicago’s Old Town, children who live north of North Avenue go to top-rated Lincoln Elementary (63 percent white, 14 percent low-income), while those south of the line go to low-rated Manierre (96 percent black, 4 percent, Latino, 93 percent low-income). “At the end of the 2018–19 school year, not a single eighth […]
Larry Alex Taunton: Seduced by the communist promise of earthly bliss, Muggeridge and his pregnant wife, Kitty, moved to Moscow in 1932. The rumors that Stalinist Russia was anything but a “workers’ paradise” did not dampen their spirits in the least. Shaking the dust of London and the West off of their shoes, they were […]
David Blaska: “Teachers are very very afraid.” — former teacher* Parents are mobilizing for a showdown at Madison’s Jefferson middle school, which they describe as ruled by virtue-signaling administrators and out-of-control students. The flash point was on December 3 when a 13-year-old boy shot a girl with a BB gun outside from a bus window. The student […]
Evan Sernoffsky: The following is a transcript of Sotomayor’s message to Boudin: Chesa, my court sessions resume next week so I am unable to join your inauguration ceremony. I sent you this message to tell you how much I admire you, and to wish you well in your new endeavors. A little over ten years […]
Scott Girard: For the past seven months, Strong has been a program associate with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Strong said in an interview Thursday he considers school safety and racial disparities in discipline and achievement to be the top issues facing MMSD. “We have to make sure that our schools are safe […]
Scott Girard: The Madison School Board seat left open by incumbent Kate Toews choosing not to run for re-election has a candidate. Maia Pearson, a Madison native who has three children in Madison schools, will run for Seat 6. She filed her declaration of candidacy and campaign registration statement with the city clerk Monday and […]
Nicolas Granatino: Knowledge management (KM) is defined in Wikipedia as ‘the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organisation’. It originated in the early 90’s as a scientific discipline and its practice was adopted in enterprise to manage and leverage an intangible asset which was increasingly seen as being strategic. […]
Michael Poliakoff: For $73,000 per year, top students with SAT scores well north of 1,500 count themselves lucky to be accepted by Williams College. There, however, despite the chilly Massachusetts climate, they are in danger of melting with their fellow snowflakes. Last year, the school canceled a play for alleged racial insensitivity, notwithstanding its African American authorship, […]
John Judis: As the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, so too, it seemed, did the dream of socialism. The German sociologist Rolf Dahrendorf declared, “The point has to be made unequivocally that socialism is dead and that none of its variants can be revived for a world awakening from the double nightmare of Stalinism and […]
Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, Tyler Ransom: Over the past 20 years, elite colleges in the US have seen dramatic increases in applications. We provide context for part of this trend using detailed data on Harvard University that was unsealed as part of the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit. We show that Harvard encourages applications from many students who […]
Musa al-Gharbi: Members of the press need to rethink their instinct to write endless Trump stories. That doesn’t mean a more aggressive posture; the alignment between the press and Trump’s ‘resistance’ has been part of the problem: In terms of endorsements and direct financial support, reporters and media organizations rallied behind Clinton’s candidacy (and against Trump’s) in a manner […]
Sharon Roznik: The Nesvacil sisters of Ashwaubenon take their handwriting seriously. Grace Nesvacil, now a freshman in high school, was named the nation’s top fifth grade hand-writer in the 2016 Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest. Her sister Evelyn was a semifinalist as a third grader, and another sister, Claire, earned a state award in the competition. […]
Johnny Rodgers The library at Glasgow School of Art has—or had—special status for connoisseurs of the work of architect-artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Its ineffably graceful timbers garnered a totemic value as a symbol of the workaday genius of their creator. It was said that this exquisite room could be created by any competent craftsman under […]
James Flynn: I was notified of Emerald’s decision not to proceed by Tony Roche, Emerald’s publishing director, in an email on 10th June: I am contacting you in regard to your manuscript In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor. Emerald believes that its publication, in particular in the United Kingdom, would raise serious […]
Rachel Lu: It’s an interesting conundrum. It seems obvious that many of these regions need help. Even our most desperate and impoverished citizens, though, seem to prefer the dignity of a free exchange to the discomfort of being patronized by people with an agenda. Who is able and willing to provide the goods they want […]
Rebecca Lurye: Democrats, in leadership in Hartford since 1971, are responsible for the city’s educational failures, Lewis said. “[The party] doesn’t serve black people, it doesn’t serve middle-class or poor white people, it doesn’t serve Hispanics,” Lewis said. “It serves people at the top tier of the party. “No matter how many times people from […]
Betsy Morris and Tawnell D. Hobbs: When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping the district reach the “one-to-one” ratio of one for each child that […]
Ryan Grim And Aida Chavez: HOUSE DEMOCRATS ARE woefully behind on dues owed to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to an internal party document provided to The Intercept. The rank-and-file’s lagging participation in the party’s money chase is being made up for, however, by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s prolific buckraking. By the end of […]
Greg Ashman: Let me lead you through a portal created in the basement of some secretive and sinister government laboratory and into the Educational Upside Down. The Educational Upside Down is a parallel dimension where elementary school children are captivated by street signs and bored rigid by myths and tales of heroes. It is a […]
Christopher Mims: Over a period of three months in 2016, a small aircraft circled above the same parts of West Baltimore that so recently drew the ire of President Trump. Operated by a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, the plane was equipped with 12 cameras which, at 8,000 feet, could take in 32 square miles […]
mp3 audio – Machine Transcript follows [Better transcript, via a kind reader PDF]: I’m Carousel Baird and we have a fabulous and exciting show lined up today. Such a fabulous guy sitting right across from me right here in the studio. Is Madison metropolitan school district current superintendent? She still here in charge of all […]
Michael Cummins: aybe kids are disrespecting their teachers because adults have taught them to. If, as Muldrow asserted during her campaign, the “theme” in Madison education is “how do we blame black children, how do we hurt black children, how do we get rid of black children, how do we not listen to black children,” […]
HARRY STEIN: It may be that the best book that will ever be written about today’s progressive mind-set was published in 1941. That in The Red Decade author Eugene Lyons was, in fact, describing the Communist-dominated American Left of the Depression-wracked 1930s and 1940s makes his observations even more meaningful, for it is sobering to […]
Tim Harford: Mr Woodford isn’t the only star to fade. Fund manager Anthony Bolton is an obvious parallel. He enjoyed almost three decades of superb performance, retired, then returned to blemish his record with a few miserable years investing in China. The story of triumph followed by disappointment is not limited to investment. Think of […]
Jane Coaston: This is a highly unusual level of disdain for a word that until several years ago was a legal term in relative obscurity outside academic circles. It was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. “Intersectionality” has, […]
Chris Arnade: I wasn’t in the mood to listen to anyone, especially other bankers, other academics, and the educated experts who were my neighbors. I hadn’t been for a few years. In 2008, the financial crisis had consumed the country and my life, sending Citibank, the company I worked for, into a tailspin stopped only […]
C.J. CIARAMELLA: It’s been quite a day for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Atlantic announced that Emanuel is coming aboard as a contributing editor to the venerable magazine’s “ideas” section. Meanwhile, ABC News announced it has hired Emanuel as a contributor. All within 48 hours of his leaving office. The former Obama White House […]
Christina Samuels Employing experienced and fully-credentialed teachers is one of the major factors contributing to California school districts that are producing higher-than-expected academic achievement among their Hispanic, black, and white students, says a new report from the Learning Policy Institute. In the report California’s Positive Outliers: Districts Beating the Odds, released Thursday, the Palo Alto-based […]
Joel Kotkin: The French nobility, observed Tocqueville in The Ancien Regime and The Revolution, supported many of the writers whose essays and observations ended up threatening “their own rights and even their existence.” Today we see much the same farce repeated, as the world’s richest people line up behind causes that, in the end, could […]
David Blaska: We see that the Madison Board of Education is going to take its show on the road next Monday, April 29, in a desperate attempt to evade the F-bombing mob that disrupts their every meeting. They’re hoping that the race-baiters can’t find Chavez school, 3502 Maple Grove Drive, Madison, WI 53719. (Starting with […]
Rod Dreher: Over the weekend, I met a friend in Cambridge, Mass., for lunch. He’s a foreigner studying at Harvard. He told me that his experience there has been quite an education in how the American elite constructs its worldview and reproduces itself. In fact, that is perhaps the most important lesson he has learned […]
David Blaska: I met many people throughout the city (and reconnected with sister Jane). Gratified at the many educators, teaching support staff, and mainstream Democrats who said they voted for me. Another shout-out to liberal downtown Madison blogger Greg Humphrey. That took courage. We started a long overdue conversation in this community. That will continue. […]
Moriah Balingit: If you are driving east on Florin Road toward Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, you will pass under a pedestrian bridge that has a message permanently affixed to it: “If you dream it, you can do it.” It’s the kind of message I have seen in neighborhoods where aspirations far surpass resources […]
Joshua Chaffin: The young woman was nearly hyperventilating 30 minutes later. “So, it’s been like half an hour, and I’m like, semi-calmed down — to the point where I’m not shouting expletives any more . . .” she explained, addressing her camera phone. “But, yeah. I got into Yale. Oh, my God! I got into Yale!” In the […]
Frederick Hess: Here’s another way to look at this: This isn’t an indictment of America but of the elite college cartel and the pathologies that it has enabled and exploited. It’s an indictment of the way elite colleges sell fast-passes to lucrative jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, of the manufactured scarcity that […]
Kaleem Caire: Our School District has an obligation to learn from these incidents and to ensure that our staff, students and parents have clear guidelines about how to address similar situations when they arise, and how they can also avoid such challenges as well. After reading the police reports, it is clear to me that […]