Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 45. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 7:16 PM for 12h 34m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 44.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1862, in the Battle of Glorieta Pass, Union forces stop the Confederate invasion of the New Mexico Territory.  

In one week, Whitewater will choose three school board candidates from among a field of six.

This might have been an election merely about educational fundamentals. So much to the good. 

This might have been an election, also, about the managerial approach of this superintendent and her administrators. There have been oblique references from some of the candidates to these concerns, but nothing so direct as someone who favors candid conversation would have wanted. Last year at FREE WHITEWATER, I wrote that the community needed direct, blunt discussions on managerial policy. See from 8.1.22 Two Postures, Two Approaches and my comments under that post. Everyone would have benefitted from that approach, however uncomfortable at first. It was a road not then taken. 

A discussion of a managerial approach, like one of educational fundamentals, would have been all to the good. Fair, calmly addressed, dispassionately considered.

As a rule, especially of the worst possibilities, it is better to know than to remain ignorant. Therein lies the outlook of the tragic optimist: fundamentally hopeful but expecting that life will present occasional losses and dangers.

Of all that this community did not need, it did not need bad interpretations and vulgar impositions. Those who wish to teach others would do well to first display a fundamental  and moral foundation. It would have been better — indeed, joyous to me — if prior warnings about shoving children into closets and banning books had been false and overwrought. 

They were not. 

Success begins as individual success, and rights are, fundamentally, individual rights. No horde with bad reasoning, bad reading, and bad interpretations has the right to impose a revanchist and retrograde policy on vulnerable and harmless students. No one wants a fight, but so help me this would be a fight worth fighting, for principles worth defending. 

The extreme populists think that a dominance and submission ritual, with repeated conniptions that no well-behaved child would dare exhibit, will cow others. It will not. 

A school board race, on terms of conventional educational and managerial policy? Fair enough, that’s much needed here.

An internecine culture war in this district, with a candidate who calls for regression? Wrong to begin, but right to defend against. Supporters throwing anything and everything at the wall — a torrent of lies, fallacies, and substandard English — to see what sticks? These overwrought men who flinch and squeal at even the slightest critique must think others are made of sugar.

So be it; it doesn’t matter half so much how these men think as how one responds. 

Reform, a new day, a fresh approach, etc.? some candidates are calling for as much. 

Reagan, quoting an old Russian proverb (doveryay, no proveryay) was right: trust, but verify.

This libertarian blogger will wait and assess specific and definite policies & actions, hoping for the best but, like all sensible residents, preparing otherwise. 

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 43. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 7:15 PM for 12h 31m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 33.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1915, Typhoid Mary, the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the United States, is put in quarantine for the second time, where she would remain for the rest of her life.

Parents reasonably hope that their children receive education in language, mathematics, and science. Determining how much they’ve learned often falls to standardized tests, including the ACT. These standardized tests are imperfect yet useful measures of overall performance. 

In today’s Wisconsin, where the ACT is administered to high school students (almost) universally, the test is not simply a measure of college readiness. That test is, instead, now a measure of high school students’ readiness of graduation. Some test like this, the ACT or another, is important to answer this question: what have high school students learned, and how well have they learned it?

If too much is made of college, then too little is made of high school. Whitewater High School should, regardless of a graduate’s next destination, teach language, mathematics, history, and science so that ‘every graduate [remains] an engaged, lifelong learner.’  (A fine motto the Whitewater district should not have abandoned.)

And so, and so, the community has legitimate concern over test scores. At the March 11th school board candidates’ forum, the second question was about measurement of academic performance: 

Question 2, 30:17: How do you plan to address low ACT scores, and below proficient scores in math and reading?

(Some years ago, when the ACT was not administered universally, a few gentlemen in this town thought that boosting scores among a small number of test takers would reflect well on Whitewater.  Certainly not. The success or failure of a high school program is measured among all, not among a few. Now that larger numbers of high school students are required to take the ACT, opportunities for cherry-picking have thankfully vanished. See Whitewater’s ACT Participation Rate Near the Bottom of Area Schools, The Better, Reasoned Approach on ACT Scores, and Whitewater’s ACT Scores.)

It’s not school board candidates, however, who have the key obligation to assure that students’ understanding of fundamentals is sound. It’s the superintendent, administrators, and faculty members. They are the ones who are employed full-time in our district. Each and every regular school board meeting in this district should have a report on academic progress, and what is being done to improve learning, and support those who are teaching. 

Broken boilers, quotes for new doors, etc. — those are brief discussions. (Someone gets three quotes, the board votes after a quick review, and the matter is settled. Time is irrecuperable.) 

There should be a place at meetings for awards and recognitions, but that place should not be larger or longer than a regular discussion of substantive academic progress. 

When progress toward better scores becomes the centerpiece of each and every regular meeting, leaders in the district will have an unavoidable opportunity to offer improvement plans. The more industrious and creative among them will seize that opportunity. 

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered snow and rain showers with a high of 38. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 7:14 PM for 12h 28m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 25% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1812, a political cartoon in the Boston-Gazette coins the term “gerrymander” to describe oddly shaped electoral districts designed to help incumbents win reelection.

These recent years have seen discussion after discussion of liberty, of freedom. Liberty has been as misused these last few years as any noun in memory. Liberty is an individual right or it’s no right at all. The liberty of a person that depends on the group, the mob, the horde, is not a right of being free from others’ control. That sort of liberty is a mere chance, a favor from the group to the individual that may be pulled away at the group’s discretion. 

The populists talk much about liberty so long as they describe it in their own exaggerated, group terms. See Defining Populism and Extreme Populism Presents as Trolling. They insist they represent all people, all families, overwhelming majorities, etc., and invert a traditional burden of proof to demand that others disprove them. 

The supposed rights of an exaggerated majority aren’t an expression of individual liberty; they’re a justification of mob rule.

There’s a view in Whitewater that our schools should let students (or their parents) settle disputes about behavior on their own. (That’s not merely the view of one candidate, but of backers of some of the other candidates.) 

Quite plainly: the extreme populists hope that if they can do whatever they want they’ll be able to intimidate others into conformity (students in the hallways, parents in meetings). All the while, these extremists will duplicitously describe themselves and their children as the real victims. 

The plain truth is that they’ve had some success with this approach already. Some of them crave more. So close they can almost taste it: what books can they ban, into what closets can they shove a harmless minority? 

Not everyone sees matters this way, even on the right. 

Consider a portion of the response of candidate Stephanie Hicks to Question 4 from March 11th school board candidates’ forum, video at 1:01:07 (“Minority and LGBT students exist in this community and deserve respect and to not feel ostracized. Can you commit to supporting all Whitewater students and making sure they have a voice? And then how would you work to make sure all students are accepted and supported?”):

Well, of course, my answer is yes. I mean, I think we forget, these are children, these are children 18 years and younger, who are sitting in our schools, who are coming to our educational institutions, wanting to learn, the desire to learn, the desire to be included, the desire to make friends. And of course, we have to, we have to be able to support all of those realms of whatever it is in. And so I always get hung up on the idea of like, we are there still children.

And I mean, no matter what your sexual preferences, your race, your religion, whatever the case is, it still remains the same. Like we have to be welcoming to all that enter our schools, we have no idea what happens outside the walls. And in some we do, what happens the other 20 hours that they’re at home, and all the things that they’re bringing in all those places, they’re bringing all that trauma they’re bringing, we have to be able to acknowledge that and support that.

And I think what I would do, again, I don’t disagree, I think we have to have policies in place that make sure every student that walks through that door is safe, and that they feel supported, and that they feel welcomed. And it is a safe haven. I mean, I’ve said this millions of times, and I’m a teacher, myself, sometimes the only safe haven a child has is school, because when they leave that school, we have no idea what they are facing, and it basing things that no child should have to face. Those are adult issues that most children are facing on a daily basis. And so we need to make sure that there is at least one place that they feel safe.

Stephanie Hicks and this libertarian blogger might have a hundred ideological differences, but there would be no disagreement between her remarks here and my own views. (Note well: education is not my field, and in contrast to her background as a teacher, I approach all this from a different professional perspective,) 

Now consider this portion of the closing remarks from candidate Chuck Mills, video at 1:29:03:

Well, I think that we need to get down to the business of building morale. In our school system, we got to pick it up. You got to make people proud of what they’re doing. You got to make people looking forward to coming to work every day in teaching and learning. We need to reward the exceptional people, students, faculty, administration. We need to celebrate this.

We need to get away from all these distractions. We have a lot of resources, a lot of good teachers and faculty administration and we need to get back to the to a model of simply educating and let’s make it fun. And let’s, let’s not worry about micromanaging every little single thing that’s happening around us or following a narrative, whether it be federal or union or whatever, it all comes down the pipeline, it sounds the same in every community. I don’t know where it came from, it wasn’t here 10 years ago, and all of a sudden, in 10 years, we have all this going on. Could we be the first ones to say, No, we don’t want to do it anymore. That’s kind of where I’m at with this thing. If we could all just get along and get back to the teaching these kids, making them feel comfortable.

These aren’t the same sort of answers. The former accepts that students are as they are; the latter erroneously speculates that students are what external forces have made them.

No and no again: the fundamental natures of these students come from within, not from without. One sees more of their natural expression because they have been, rightly, free to express themselves in their natures.  They’re not made; they’re born.

Now here’s a political truth about these two candidates. If Mills should win, he’ll receive less ongoing criticism for his views from the center-left (as they’ll write him off as out-of-touch) than Hicks will for her views from the extreme populists (as they’ll expect her to conform to their views despite her professional background).  

Upside down.