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City, Coronavirus, Education, Open Government, Public Health, School District

Whitewater School Board Meeting, 8.3.20: 6 Points

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At last night’s meeting of the Whitewater Unified School District’s board, the board heard a presentation from the district about fall instruction for the first two weeks of school, and the metrics the district is considering when deciding schools’ status after those initial weeks. The meeting was informational only, so the board took no action. During a discussion period, the board took just under twenty community comments or questions. A decision on the school schedule after the first two weeks of September is likely to come in mid-August.

A few remarks —

 1. The Real Decision Maker. It’s right – as a matter of open government – to have a community discussion period, but no particular point or speaker (from among parents or teachers) will be decisive. The same, quite candidly, is true of the board: the waxing or waning of the pandemic in Whitewater will sweep aside any angle, position, or view. If the pandemic abates, that easing will dictate the district’s response. If the pandemic grows deeper into the community, that natural and social condition will dictate a different response. Note well: some natural conditions are so powerful that they dictate – literally, command – a certain human response. Theories about the novel coronavirus will be put to a practical test. That practical test will drain the blood from political and emotional arguments.

This is no mere matter of aesthetic or political preference: for all the emotion in the debate about school policy this fall, and what the district should do, there will come an answer apart from those preferences.

 2. Convergence. While schools in the same area are now taking different approaches, that won’t last. Conditions within the same area are likely to drive everyone, after a month to two, to a common convergence. Differences between districts in scheduling for two weeks or a month will disappear as like-situated districts individually gather information that will lead to a similar result. When that happens, what the districts did for two weeks or a month will look small compared to the commonly-adopted result.

Not one of these area districts is yet in session, so there are no results by which to claim reasonably that one of them is now managing daily student life better than the others. Having confidence in some districts without seeing how they actually manage with students in class is presumptuous. If anything, there’s reason from across the country to think that many in-person experiences – in schools, universities, companies – will continue to be difficult and disappointing. Public and private organizations across America with far larger budgets find themselves struggling to stay open.

3. Presentation. Overall, this presentation was more informative, and the discussion less fraught, than at the last board meeting on 7.27.20. 

 4. Confusion Over Dates. Some parents last night worried that the board would not make a decision about how classes would be conducted after mid-September, leaving them too little time to prepare adequately. (Video, 1:25:30) In this, one sees an erroneous conflation of two decisions: how to begin the school year and when to decide what to do next. A board member correctly noted that these were different matters. (Video, 2:13:34) While the board decided previously how classes would be held through mid-September, a decision on what to do next was planned before mid-September. It’s right to note that these where different board decisions at the 7.27.20 meeting. (Video of 7.27.20, 2:40:38.)

It’s not hard to see, however, that in the emotion of the late July meeting, some parents would have missed this distinction.

A decision on what to do next month is likely this month. (Video, 2:18:10.)

 5. Criteria for a Fuller Opening. The district listed criteria for a fuller opening, but toward the end of the meeting at least one board member was unsure of those criteria. (Video, 13:00 for criteria.) There’s no substitute for reading and taking notes on the agenda packet in advance. 

 6. Asides —

There was a odd moment when a parent suggested that if the district were truly concerned about university students as a complicating source of additional community spread, then someone from the district should talk to university officials and tell them to close the campus. Well, good luck with that. Tails don’t wag dogs. Decisions about this local UW System campus, like all System campuses, will require approval from the regents and interim president Tommy Thompson.

There’s now a Zoom timer that commenters can see while speaking.

The Zoom chat box from a past meeting is gone – there’s no legal obligation to provide one, and it was nothing so much as a display of questionable literacy and unquestionable vulgarity. It doesn’t matter where (of if) a person went to school, but it does matter that someone trying to advocate in writing – about education, of all things – cares enough about his or her advocacy to pick up a few simple rules of spelling and grammar. Past generations, of people with hard lives, didn’t have to go to college to know how to write properly. Personal responsibility and self-respect begin, so to speak, at home. See generally Facebook Discussions as Displays of Ignorance, Fallacies, and Marginal Literacy.

One should watch or listen on one’s own; the best record is a recording.

This was a smoother night than July 27th. Poise on a recording matters greatly; both emotion and indecision play (and play back) poorly.

Previously: Whitewater Schools’ Community Focus Group, 7.8.20, The Whitewater Unified School District’s Proposed Fall Instructional Plans, and The Whitewater School Board’s Decision on Early Fall Instruction: 4 Points.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 8.4.20

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 19m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9:30 AM via audiovisual conferencing and the Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM via audiovisual conferencing.

 On this day in 1964, civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney are found dead in Mississippi after disappearing on June 21.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Garry Kasparov observes that Authoritarians Come Up With Things We Can’t Imagine:

Garry Kasparov of the Renew Democracy Initiative joins Morning Joe to discuss Trump’s attempts to undermine the coming elections and what can be done to protect the election.

 Amanda Carpenter writes The Blind Oracle of Noonan (‘The wistful, naïve pronouncements of the speechwriter-turned-columnist’):

Good news! All of us who are worried about President Trump and the future of the Republican party can pack it up. Peggy Noonan, our cherished Reaganic oracle, has spoken and has the answer to align the Always Trump, Sometimes Trump, and Never Trump factions of the GOP.

In her latest Wall Street Journal column, Noonan enters the “Burn It Down” debate and argues against voting out all the Trump enablers and sycophants because—are you ready for this?—“persuasion will be key” to saving the Republic. Ah! We can all rest easy, pour ourselves a cool beverage, and retire early. Our work is done! Praise be to Peggy!

That’s the kind of wistful, head-in-the-clouds analysis Noonan is known for, though. Like, wouldn’t everything be better if everyone just played along more nicely? Why all this anger toward a president who lets Russia put bounties on the heads of our soldiers, tear-gases peaceful protesters, and lies and obstructs justice as a way of life? Why on earth should Susan Collins, Martha McSally, and Cory Gardner be sacrificed on the altar of Trump just to prove a point about accountability? Because follow-the-leader Republicans like Collins will surely be the ones to save us from another trillion in deficit spending and finally stop funding for Planned Parenthood! Because Collins, of all people, must have “learned lessons” from Trump. We should all be so, so very concerned about the future of the GOP without Republicans like Collins.

Noonan concedes that “Donald Trump is burning himself down.” Yet she thinks we ought to keep voting for the people who handed him a lighter and kerosene.

Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Jacob Bogage report Postal Service backlog sparks worries that ballot delivery could be delayed in November:

The U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election.

As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by Trump fundraiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.

Why Everyone Is Going To Mars Right Now:

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CDA, City, Economy, Local Government, Poverty, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, Walworth County, WEDC, Wisconsin

Whitewater & Walworth County’s Working Poor, 2020 ALICE® Report

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The 2020 ALICE® report, on those who are “asset limited, income constrained [yet] employed” is now available.  These latest data were collected before the recent recession – one can be sadly confident that hardship reaches farther now.

For Wisconsin, 11% of households were below the poverty level, and 34% (including those below the poverty level) were asset limited.

For Walworth County, 9.5% of households were below the poverty level, and 34% (including those below the poverty level) were asset limited.

For Whitewater 41% of households (of any kind) were below the poverty level, and 59% (including those below the poverty level) were asset limited. Looking only at households with minor children related to the householder, one finds that 23% of households in Whitewater were below the poverty level (relying on the same 2018 American Community Survey five-year estimates that ALICE® does for populations under 20,000).  Some additional households with minor children would also be asset limited, although the American Community Survey does not present that number for a community of Whitewater’s size. Using a households-with-minor-children measurement focuses on those particularly vulnerable.

A portion of the executive summary and the full report appear below —

From 2010 to 2018, Wisconsin showed steady economic improvements according to traditional measures. Unemployment in the state and across the U.S. fell to
historic lows, GDP grew, and wages rose slightly. Yet in 2018, eight years after the end of the Great Recession, 34% of Wisconsin’s 2,359,857 households still struggled to make ends meet. And while 11% of these households were living below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), another 23% — more than twice as many — were ALICE households: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. These households earned above the FPL, but not enough to afford basic household necessities.

….

The number of ALICE households in Wisconsin has increased as a result of rising costs and stagnant wages. There are more ALICE households than households in poverty, and the number of ALICE households is increasing at a faster rate. The FPL, with its minimal and uniform national estimate of the cost of living, far underestimates the number of households that cannot afford to live and work in the modern economy. In Wisconsin, the percentage of households that were ALICE rose from 17% in 2007 to 23% in 2018. By contrast, those in poverty increased from 10% of all households in 2007 to 13% by 2014, before dipping slightly to comprise 11% of all households in 2018.This Report provides critical measures that assess Wisconsin’s economy from four perspectives: They track financial hardship over time and across demographic groups; quantify the basic cost of living in Wisconsin; assess job trends; and identify gaps in assistance and community resources. These measures also debunk assumptions and stereotypes about low-income workers and families. ALICE households are as diverse as the general population, composed of people of all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities, living in rural, urban, and suburban areas.

See ALICE IN WISCONSIN: A FINANCIAL HARDSHIP STUDY (2020).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 8.3.20

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:11 PM, for 14h 22m 03s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets at 6 PM via audiovisual conferencing.

 On this day in 1958, the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, becomes the first vessel to complete a submerged transit of the geographical North Pole.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Carolyn Y. Johnson writes A coronavirus vaccine won’t change the world right away:

The declaration that a vaccine has been shown safe and effective will be a beginning, not the end. Deploying the vaccine to people in the United States and around the world will test and strain distribution networks, the supply chain, public trust and global cooperation. It will take months or, more likely, years to reach enough people to make the world safe.

For those who do get a vaccine as soon as shots become available, protection won’t be immediate — it takes weeks for the immune system to call up full platoons of disease-fighting antibodies. And many vaccine technologies will require a second shot weeks after the first to raise immune defenses.

Immunity could be short-lived or partial, requiring repeated boosters that strain the vaccine supply or require people to keep social distancing and wearing masks even after they’ve received their shots. And if a vaccine works less well for some groups of people, if swaths of the population are reluctant to get a vaccine or if there isn’t enough to go around, some people will still get sick even after scientists declare victory on a vaccine — which could help foster a false impression it doesn’t work.

Wendy Lee reports Microsoft wants to buy TikTok as White House puts Chinese apps on warning:

Microsoft said it is in talks with the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to take control of TikTok in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia. If the deal is finalized, Microsoft plans to bring all American user data to U.S. servers and remove data backed up in foreign countries. Currently, TikTok stores U.S. user information in the U.S. and backs it up in Singapore.

Microsoft said it hopes to complete the discussions with ByteDance no later than Sept. 15. But it is possible that a deal may not go through.

“These discussions are preliminary and there can be no assurance that a transaction which involves Microsoft will proceed,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Will Horner reports Coffee Drinkers Stay Home, Hitting Some Beans Harder Than Others:

Coffee futures linked to arabica, a softer, sweeter variety that is largely produced in Latin America and is popular in cafes and restaurants, have fallen almost 9% in New York trading in 2020.

Robusta futures, which track the beans used largely in freeze-dried coffees or in pods for kitchen-top espresso machines, are down less than 3% in London trading. Those stronger tasting beans are commonly grown in Vietnam.

The pandemic has changed where and how most people in the West consume coffee, with restaurants and cafes shut down because of lockdown measures, complicating efforts to accurately gauge demand, according to analysts. Meanwhile, the coffee market is poised for a glut in supply, in part due to bountiful harvests in Brazil, the world’s largest producer of coffee. That combination is threatening to derail any recovery in coffee prices.

Splashdown – SpaceX Demo-2 crew is back on Earth:

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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 8.2.20

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with late afternoon rain and a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 24m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

 On this day in 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin a project to develop a nuclear weapon.

Recommended for reading in full —

Caroline E. Janney writes The next Lost Cause?:

The Lost Cause offered former Confederates and their descendants a salve for the past. According to this mythology about the Civil War, the South was the victim, even in defeat. Confederate armies were not vanquished on the battlefield but overwhelmed by insurmountable Union resources; Confederate soldiers were heroic martyrs, none more so than Robert E. Lee; defense of states’ rights, not slavery, caused the war; and African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause. Through distortions and omissions, White Southerners constructed a version of history that absolved them of blame. Although they were a defeated minority, they organized to spread their message through monuments, literature, film and textbooks across the country — where it dominated for more than a century, shaping partisan politics, American culture and, of course, race relations.

Even as Confederate monuments tumble this summer, we may be witnessing an attempt to form a new lost cause. Today, President Trump describes his opponents as “unfair,” the pandemic sapping his popularity as a “hoax,” the polls that show him losing to Joe Biden as “fake,” and the election in which he’ll face ultimate judgment in November as “rigged” or potentially “stolen.” His defenders are already laboring to cast him as a righteous, noble warrior martyred by traitors and insurmountable forces. They rely on the same tools that were used to promulgate Confederate myths: manipulating facts, claiming persecution, demonizing enemies and rewriting history. In other words, Trump is laying the groundwork to claim moral victory in political defeat — and to deny the legitimacy of the Democratic administration that would displace him.

Jason Gale and Sybilla Gross report Winter virus surge Down Under shows Europe, U.S. what may come:

Deep into the Southern Hemisphere winter, Australia’s second-most populous city Melbourne is experiencing a virus resurgence that dwarfs its first outbreak back in March. The state of Victoria on Thursday reported a high of 723 new infections — nearly 200 more than its previous record set a few days earlier.

The surge epitomizes a disturbing pattern: that subsequent COVID-19 waves can be worse than the first, particularly when the conditions — like people sheltering from colder weather in enclosed spaces — are ripe for transmission. Epidemiologists, who have warned about a possible autumn resurgence in the Northern Hemisphere, are closely watching the situation in Australia.

 Rebecca Leber asks Could Trump Have Another Reason for Banning TikTok?:

In June, Trump held a rally in Tulsa, in spite of public health experts’ warnings. (There was a subsequent spike in coronavirus cases there.) Before the rally, hundreds of K-pop fans and TikTok teens pranked the campaign by registering for the free tickets, with no intention of showing up. When the campaign could only fill a fraction of the 19,000-seat stadium in a Republican stronghold, the TikTok teens claimed victory: “best senior prank ever.”

Trump was furious that there were so many empty seats, and, quite possibly, resentful that TikTok teens had outsmarted his campaign.

Making Mind-Blowing Rube Goldberg Machines:

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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 8.1.20

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 26m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.0% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

 On this day in 1944, the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi German occupation begins.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Timothy Snyder writes Trump’s ‘Delay the Election’ tweet checks all 8 rules for fascist propaganda:

Just before 9 this morning, President Trump wrote this and pinned it to the top of his Twitter feed: “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

With this tweet, the president both revives fascist propaganda and exploits a new age of Internet post-truth: He follows a trail blazed by fascists, but adds a twist that is his own.

A fascist guide to commentary on elections would have eight parts: contradict yourself to test the faith of your followers; tell a big lie to draw attention from basic realities; manufacture a crisis; designate enemies; make an appeal to pride and humiliation; express hostility to voting; cast doubt on democratic procedures; and aim for personal power.

Trump achieves all eight with admirable concision in this one tweet. He decries voting by mail, but praises absentee ballots, which are nothing else but voting by mail. The blatant contradiction, the test of faith for the true believer, is there right at the beginning, a gatekeeper for the rest of the tweet.

The big lie, in all capitals, is that the coming elections will be the most inaccurate and fraudulent in history. Historically speaking, the greatest source of inaccuracy and fraud in our elections is the suppression of African American votes, which is bad now but has been much worse. Of course, this is not at all what Trump means, and that is the point of a big lie: to replace a familiar reality with a nonexistent problem.

Tyrants in general and fascists in particular like to manufacture crises. Something that is true but of limited significance is transformed into an emergency that requires breaking all the rules.

 Jim Swift writes Where Does Joe Biden Go to Get His Apology? (‘The right mocked Biden for correctly predicting Trump might seek to delay the election’):

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., at a fundraiser: “Mark my words, I think he is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.”

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look back at how some on the right reacted.

At the Washington Examiner, my friend Jim Antle wrote a story on April 28 with the headline: “‘He’ll seize power!’ ‘He’ll postpone the election!’ The Trump schemes that never happen.”

Antle, a keen observer of politics, writes that there is no mechanism for this to happen absent Congress.

Here’s Antle quoting Jonathan Turley: “Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley calls the idea the ‘ultimate conspiracy theory’ and ‘little more than constitutional mythology, used for political advantage.’”

To be clear, Turley is talking about Biden here.

 Tonight’s Sky for August:

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Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Disinformation, Education, Social Media

Facebook Discussions as Displays of Ignorance, Fallacies, and Marginal Literacy

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In communities in the Whitewater area, assorted Facebook pages (particularly) are a significant means of messaging about politics, culture, etc.  Too often, these messages are evidence of ignorance, fallacies, and are poorly written (to the point of only marginal literacy). Over time, as these rural communities have suffered relative economic decline, they have also experienced a cultural slippage that shows itself in these Facebook discussions.

Someone who wanted to write seriously about politics and society in rural America would read widely from these discussions, but would not wade into them. (There’s a difference between studying soil erosion and wallowing in mud.)

At the Pew Research Center, of a broader social media national survey, Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, J. Baxter Olipahant, and Elisha Shearer write that Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable (‘Those who rely on social media for news are less likely to get the facts right about the coronavirus and politics and more likely to hear some unproven claims’):

A new Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted between October 2019 and June 2020 finds that those who rely most on social media for political news stand apart from other news consumers in a number of ways. These U.S. adults, for instance, tend to be less likely than other news consumers to closely follow major news stories, such as the coronavirus outbreak and the 2020 presidential election. And, perhaps tied to that, this group also tends to be less knowledgeable about these topics.

One specific example is exposure to the conspiracy theory that powerful people intentionally planned the COVID-19 pandemic, which gained attention with the spread of a conspiracy video on social media. About a quarter of U.S. adults who get most of their news through social media (26%) say they have heard “a lot” about this conspiracy theory, and about eight-in-ten (81%) have heard at least “a little” – a higher share than among those who turn to any of the other six platforms for their political news.

….

Despite this, Americans who get their political news mostly through social media express less concern about the impact of made-up news. Roughly four-in-ten of this group (37%) say they are very concerned about the effects on made-up news on the 2020 election, lower than every other group except for those who turn mainly to local television (at 35%). Those who rely on other platforms express higher levels of concern, including 58% of those who mainly turn to cable TV.