Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Student behavior now the leading cause of teacher burnout
We are not alone in the cosmos. Why isn't UFO hearing tearing up Google trends? | Opinion
House committees hold hearing on "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth"
You would think if anything could break through the noise of our news cycle, UFOs could.
This needs to be a bigger deal folks because the American people, nay people of the world, need this right now.
Last week, for the second time in two years, there was a Congressional subcommittee hearing on UFOs, or as they have been foolishly rebranded “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” shortened to UAPs.
One of the visionaries helping uncover the truth is none other than Wisconsin Congressman Glenn Grothman, R-Fond du Lac, who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs.
Editorial:Hovde's election claims are false. He's blaming Milwaukee – without evidence.
Last week’s hearing, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth," including a new slate of witnesses that provided testimony about UFO sightings and what the government may or may not know about them. One witness, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence officer, went so far to say, "Excessive secrecy has led to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel and the public, all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos."
Alien spacecraft and dead extraterrestrials now in Congressional Record
Last year’s testimony included former Pentagon official, David Grusch, telling a Congressional committee that he’d learned of a decades-long Pentagon program focused on “crash retrieval and reverse engineering” of UFOs from other planets. Grusch also said that remains found at the spacecraft crash sites were “non-human biologics.”
Yes, crashed alien spacecraft and dead extraterrestrials made it to the Congressional Record.
However, neither in the aftermath of last year's and last week's hearing did the terms "UFO" "Alien" "UAP" or even "government cover up" break the 25 most searched terms in Google Trends.
What were people searching for last week? Would it surprise you if I said: "mike tyson jake paul fight."
To be fair, neither of these hearings has provided real evidence to prove UFOs or UAPs are extraterrestrial in nature. But the collection of testimony indicates that UAPs are very real in the sense there are a number of some as-yet-unexplained phenomenal.
And yet, apparently, most of us do not care enough to let that information even make a blip on our news cycle.
All the more reason that right now is the right time for these tight lipped folks in defense and intelligence departments, whose jobs could very well be on the chopping block anyways in Trump's administration, to just let it rip.
Declassify everything. Tell us the truth is out there. Then send Biden and Trump out to do a tag team Bill Pullman-Independence Day-esque speech, where they encourage us to not be consumed by our petty differences and instead be united in our common interests. Give us a new enemy!
Or at the very least, declassify everything just to remind humans of our standing in the universe. I don't know who said it first but right now feels like a good time for everyone to remember that we’re, "just ghosts driving meat coated skeletons made from stardust riding a rock floating through space."
Kristin Brey is the "My Take" columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Monday, November 18, 2024
Former Bozo the Clown, Joey D'Auria, presides over Grand Prize Game for first time since 2001
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Doctors Who Ended Up Behind Bars
Your child may not be doing as well in school as you think. State lowered bar. | Opinion
Previous standards were implemented with bi-partisan support under Tony Evers
This past summer, behind closed doors and under a veil of secrecy that even included the signing of a non-disclosure agreement, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, quietly took several steps that will lower academic standards for Wisconsin’s students – all with zero input from parents or lawmakers. These unilateral decisions by State Superintendent Jill Underly will not only impact how schools are assessed but will ultimately leave parents in the dark about their child’s progress.
The previous standards were implemented in 2012 under Gov. Tony Evers, who was then serving as DPI Superintendent, with bipartisan support. These standards aligned Wisconsin with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and were designed to assess whether students were ready for college and careers. But now, a much lower bar has been created in Wisconsin and NAEP alignment is gone.
Lowered standards can create false sense of academic progress
For example, on the most recent round of the NAEP, about 32% of Wisconsin 8th graders were found to be proficient in reading. This is comparable to the 36% who were found to be proficient on the 2022-23 Forward Exam. But proficiency among this group jumped to 48.4% in 2023-24 on the state exam, creating a 16-percentage point gap. Even Evers has openly criticized these new lowered standards, stating that he believes, “We need to have as high of standards as possible.”
Opinion:MPS suffers death by a thousand cuts while private, choice schools get millions
Even worse than losing the ability to compare Wisconsin students to students nationally on the NAEP is that the changes were so significant that it will make it nearly impossible to compare progress with previous years. In previous years, scores were reported on a three-digit scale, but now a four-digit scale is used. This change means that the new standards cannot easily be mapped onto the old ones, and any hope of measuring year-to-year progress is lost.
That’s particularly problematic in a post-pandemic environment where most students in Wisconsin fell behind academically and have struggled to catch back up. A study by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, found that between 2019 and 2022, Wisconsin student achievement fell by 37% of a grade equivalent in math and 28% in reading. While achievement has rebounded slightly, most districts are still behind their pre-pandemic levels.
DPI even changed the names of categories of results on exam
These shifts are made even more confusing by the curious decision of DPI to change the names of the categories of results on the exam. Instead of the long-used labels of Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, the category names have been changed to Developing, Approaching, and Meeting (the highest category — Advanced — stayed the same under the new formulation).
It is unclear why these changes were made. But what is clear is that they make it more difficult for parents to understand how well their children are doing in school. Telling a parent that their child is “approaching” proficiency may be a more hopeful message that reduces the heat on a child’s school, but it may not be true and could create a sense of complacency rather than urgency in parents about the need to improve.
Opinion:Arguments that Wisconsin schools are underfunded fall flat. Data shows otherwise.
Changes to the Forward exam will also exacerbate pre-existing problems with Wisconsin’s state report cards, which already set a low bar for success. On last year’s report card, 55% of schools with ELA proficiency under 30% —including 54 such schools in Milwaukee — were judged to “Meet Expectations” on the state report card. This includes Hi-Mount Elementary in Milwaukee where zero — yes — zero kids were proficient in ELA.
Rather than the lowered accountability standards brought about by these changes, parents actually want greater accountability and focus on academic results. A recent poll showed that 72% of parents nationwide believe that schools are not focusing on ensuring schools are proficient at important basic skills like reading and math. Furthermore, 81% of parents say that “we should expect more out of our public schools and should hold them more accountable for educating students.” This is ripe opportunity for common ground.
Wisconsin parents deserve an accountability system that provides transparent, honest data and not one that is manipulated for political games. Legislators and the Governor should work together in the upcoming legislative session to reverse these changes, and rein in the ability of DPI to make unilateral changes like this in the future.
Kyle Koenen is the policy director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL). Will Flanders is its research director.
From: https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/2024/11/17/schools-wisconsin-education-tests-dpi/76338666007/
As far as I'm concerned, this is cheating. I'm grateful for the education I received over 60 years ago. I hate the Catholic Church for its lies and pedophilia, but one thing it did right was education. If you disregard the religious propaganda, the teaching was superb. How can present day parents accept a 32% literacy rate in the 8th grade? That means that the vast majority of the students are illiterate. That also explains why kids today are dumb as rocks.
Posts
