School Information System

Michael T. Hartney and Vladimir Kogan

School board candidates supported by local teachers’ unions overwhelmingly win and we examine the causes and consequences of the “teachers’ union premium” in these elections. First, we show that union endorsement information increases voter support. Although the magnitude of this effect varies across ideological and partisan subgroups, an endorsement rarely hurts a candidate’s prospects with the electorate. Second, we benchmark the size of the endorsement premium to other well-known determinants of vote-choice in local elections. Perhaps surprisingly, we show the effect can be as large as the impact of shared partisanship, and substantially larger than the boost from endorsements provided by other stakeholders. Finally, examining real-world endorsement decisions, we find that union support for incumbents hinges on self-interested pecuniary considerations and is unaffected by performance in improving student academic outcomes. The divergence between what endorsements mean and how voters interpret them has troubling normative democratic implications

Joanne Jacobs:

High achievers know how to read, writes Horowitch. “But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.” Like Melville’s Bartleby, they “prefer not to.”

Students are reading fewer “long and boring” books in middle and high school, I noted in a recent post. Common Core stressed using short informational texts, writes Horowitch. “Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea — mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.”

The FIRE:

UPDATE: A federal judge has blocked California’s A.B. 2839—a law banning “deceptive” election-related digital content—on First Amendment grounds.

As U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez said, the law “acts as a hammer instead of a scalpel.” We couldn’t agree more.

OECD Education:

How much should countries spend on education?

More expenditure per student typically correlates with improved outcomes…

…but only up to a point, after which additional investment shows little impact on performance.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Jeff:

Want to see the data? You can easily see results for the whole state or individual school districts by grade & student group here:
public.tableau.com/app/profile/jm…

Abbey Machtig:

Of those 13 successful referendums, Madison residents still are paying for five of them. If voters approve two proposals from the district in November that together total $607 million, that number would jump to seven.

Voters already have authorized the district to increase its spending limit by $72 millionthrough recurring, operating referendums approved during the past three decades.

Recurring school referendums, like those approved by Madison voters in 2020, 2016, 2008 and 1999, allow a district to exceed its spending limit permanently. Districts levy additional property taxes to generate this money, which are then sustained at that level in perpetuity.

How much are those adding to current property tax bills? Calculations are inexact. School finances are complicated and are affected by yearly property values, student enrollment and aid provided by the state.

But for the 2020 referendums, the district estimated owners of the average Madison home would be paying about $480 more in property taxes by the 2023-24 school year.

For the 2016 referendum, district officials at the time estimated the owner of an average-priced home would pay about $143 more in property taxes after four years.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

By Natalie Yahr

Teachers at three Madison Montessori schools have voted to be represented by a union, joining a short list of unionized child care workers in Wisconsin and becoming what may be the state’s first unionized private school teachers.

The 12-3 vote included all eligible staff from the three schools operated by Toad Hill Montessori Inc. — Toad Hill Children’s House, Toad Hill Toddler House and Blooming Grove Montessori — according to Andy Sernatinger, a business representative with Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 39, which will represent the workers. One vote was challenged by the employer and not counted. 

At the time workers filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board in September, 23 teachers were eligible, but Sernatinger said two teachers were fired and six quit. The union will represent around 20 staff, including a few who were hired too recently to be eligible to vote, Sernatinger said.

Nicholas Garton:

Other facility exemptions that would be removed under this fall’s proposal include elementary schools, middle schools, day care centers, nursery schools, places of worship and public safety buildings.

If the exemptions are removed, new developments and places seeking to expand parking could fall under the law. The law may also apply if an existing facility changes its function, such as a property transitioning from a restaurant to a retail business.

Aaron Garth Smith and Jude Schwalbach

Today, between declining birth rates, fiscal chaos, and competition from charter and private schools, public education bears little resemblance to what it was before the pandemic. These challenges will deepen in the coming years, and widespread school closures and staff reductions are likely. But the most daunting task will be convincing parents to enroll their children in public schools.

The birth dearth.

Nationwide, public school enrollment has declined by 1.2 million students—about 2.3 percent—since 2020. Research suggests that 40 percent of these students switched to private schools or homeschooling as parents grew weary of prolonged school closures, masking policies, and curricular battles. But demographics also played a key role, with about one-quarter of it attributable to a declining number of school-aged kids thanks to the birth dearth.

The number of births in the U.S. dropped by 17 percent between 2007 and 2023. This means that 720,000 fewer births occurred in 2023 than in 2007. This baby bust also extends to U.S. immigrants. In 2019, immigrant fertility rates dropped below replacement levels for the first time.

Additionally, some states have experienced significant student attrition because of domestic migration between states. For instance, California and New York lost nearly 342,000 and 244,000 students, respectively, between fiscal years 2021 and 2022 due to outmigration, according to Bellwether.

Emma Camp:

“The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly rejected government attempts to prohibit or punish hate speech,” reads a rundown on hate speech from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment group. “The First Amendment recognizes that the government cannot regulate hate speech without inevitably silencing the dissent and dialogue that democracy requires. Instead, we as citizens possess the power to most effectively answer hateful speech—whether through debate, protest, questioning, laughter, silence, or simply walking away.”

But that wasn’t Walz’s only error. A few seconds later, he said “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.” Again, this is incorrect. It’s a common misconception that shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre isn’t protected by the First Amendment—a myth that originates from a hypothetical used in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1919 Supreme Court opinion in Schenk v. United States. 

Holmes wrote that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” Not only was this a purely hypothetical example used to explain Holmes’ opinion, but the ruling itself was largely overturned 50 years later in Brandenburg v. Ohio.

“The real problem with the ‘fire in a crowded theater’ discourse is that it too often is used as a placeholder justification for regulating any speech that someone believes is harmful or objectionable,” Naval Academy professor Jeff Kosseff wrote for Reason last year. “In reality, the Supreme Court has defined narrow categories of speech that are exempt from First Amendment protections and set an extraordinarily high bar for imposing liability for other types of speech.”

——

The First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Natalie Winters:

Rep. Adam Schiff demands social media companies ramp up censorship of “misinformation and disinformation” ahead of the 2024 election.

Charles Murray:

Last week, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) and three-time recipient of awards for excellence in teaching, was stripped her of her chaired professorship, suspended for a year at half pay, and denied summer pay in perpetuity. Why? As far as I can tell, for telling her students the truth in the classroom and exercising her constitutional right to express her private opinions outside the classroom.

Penn’s administration doesn’t see it that way. In the words of the official letter sent to Wax, these punishments were justified by her “flagrant unprofessional conduct”: 

That conduct included a history of making sweeping and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status; breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of university policy; and, on numerous occasions, in and out of the classroom and in public, making discriminatory and disparaging statements targeting specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify.

The specifics of the allegations against Wax can be found in a twelve-page letter written by the Dean of the law school, Theodore Ruger, in June 2022. I am suspicious of some of them, but most of the things she is alleged to have said sound like the Amy Wax I know. In each of our occasional encounters over the years, I have always had the same reactions. She is brilliant, entertaining, disconcertingly frank, and sometimes abrasive. Her style is not my style, but I have never known Wax to use invective or slurs when she is expressing her opinion. She is just really, really, blunt. 

Christopher Rufo:

Every nation has an operating ideology. In a country that hews faithfully to the principles embedded in its written constitution, that ideology is overt. In a tyrannical government, however, it is concealed, as the regime preaches one set of values in principle but pursues the opposite in practice.

Most Americans believe that our nation today lives up to its founding principle that all men are created equal. The letter of the law seems to provide for colorblind equality, according to which individuals are judged on their talents and virtues, rather than on their ancestry, religion, or place of origin.

This has not held true in practice, however. Most obviously, of course, was the long American history of slavery and disenfranchisement of African Americans. Since 1965, however, when Lyndon Johnson first implemented the policy of affirmative action in federal contracting, the United States has racially discriminated in favor of minority groups—maintaining discrimination, but changing the target.

He added that “we’re better journalists by any standard than The New York Times.”

Kyle Greenberg, Matthew Gudgeon, Adam Isen, Corbin L. Miller & Richard W. Patterson

This paper estimates causal intergenerational occupation transmission in the military using discontinuities in parents’ eligibility for service from the Armed Forces Qualification Test. A parent’s enlistment in the Army increases their children’s military service propensity by between 58% and 110%. Intergenerational occupational transmission rates vary by race and sex—they are highest for demographic groups whose parents gained the most economically from service and for same-sex parent-child pairs. Our findings provide new evidence on the mechanisms driving intergenerational occupation correlations and show that intergenerational transmission is an important channel for getting under-represented groups into high-quality occupations.

Hilary Burns and Mike Damiano

The group found that 51 percent of surveyed faculty and staff reported they would feel very or somewhat reluctant to lead a classroom discussion on a controversial topic. Likewise, 45 percent of students surveyed said they were somewhat reluctant or very reluctant to share their views on controversial issues in the classroom. With regards to academic work, 41 percent of faculty and staff said they were somewhat reluctant or very reluctant to research a controversial subject.

Bill Ackman on Harvard.

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).

David Blaska:

The Madison school board that a dozen years ago rejected Kaleem Caire’s proposed charter school catering to under-achieving minority students is now inflicting death by a thousand paper cuts to another proposal that thinks outside the box. Because of Woke politics.

Local real estate moguls John and Jo Ellen McKenzie want to prepare students for careers in the building trades, health care, info tech, and more. These are jobs that go wanting — and pay well — for all the K-12 emphasis of pushing students to go deep in debt for college degrees that don’t pay off.

But “the involvement of Paul Vallas … may also be a drawback for some board members. “I would say, personally, I do have some concerns about Vallas,” board member Maia Pearson said Monday. — Wisconsin State Journal

 Who is this nefarious Paul Vallas? 

Mr. Vallas only ran the public schools of Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport CT. Was the budget director for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Vallas darn near got elected mayor himself in last year but lost a runoff to teachers union toady Brandon Johnson. And therein lies your dagger! Vallas is a critic of teachers unions. Which is why the McKenzies are seeking a charter, which would allow it to bypass teachers union/school board tentacles.

“The biggest obstacle to improving city schools is the Chicago teachers union,” Vallas wrote for the Illinois Policy organization.

——-

Much more on Paul Vallas.

The taxpayer funded Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school in 2011…

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Bradley Busch:

Retrieval Practice is one of the most well researched learning strategies. For some, it is often associated with older students preparing for their exams. But can it help young students learn both Maths and spelling?

Recent studies suggest that Retrieval Practice can be equally beneficial for younger learners, helping them to grasp foundational subjects. In this blog, we’ll explore how Retrieval Practice works, why it’s so effective and how you can implement it in your classroom to boost your students’ learning outcomes. Read on to learn more about…

Alex Demas

Kirk and Solomon’s claims are correct. Minnesota Department of Health documents show that eight infants were born alive during abortion procedures between 2019 and 2022, and, in 2023, Walz signed legislation that repealed most of a statute designed to protect infants born alive after an abortion attempt.

Born-alive infants in Minnesota.

Minnesota state law explicitly protected children born alive during abortion procedures since at least 1976 when the state legislature adopted Section 145.423. This statute determined that, “A live child born as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law.” It also read, “All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken to preserve the life and health of the child.”

In 2015, the Minnesota state legislature passed additional legislation, signed into law by Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, intended to expand the state’s protections for born-alive infants. The Born Alive Infants Protection Act made minor terminology changes to the existing three subsections of Section 145.423, and added an additional six subsections including those covering civil penalties for medical personnel who did not provide adequate care, privacy protections for court proceedings related to born-alive infants, and the status of born alive-infants who survive following an abortion procedure. The act also formally defined “born-alive infants” as “every infant member of the species Homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.”

Lizzie Presser

Maylia Sotelo arrived in a black Cadillac. It pulled down an alley by the Fox River, which cuts through the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin. On that Tuesday evening in November 2022, she stepped out of a rear door and into another car. Maylia was 15 years old and slight, with a soft, girlish face and large, upturned eyes. For $50, she sold a man five “blues,” round pills stamped with “M30” that passed for Percocet. Narcotics investigators from the Brown County Drug Task Force were listening over a wire and, within minutes, their informant turned over his buy. Like every fake Percocet the task force seized that year, the pills were actually fentanyl. The officers, though, decided to let Maylia leave.

Maylia was comfortable around the business of drugs. Her childhood home had been a hangout for users and dealers; hollowed-out pens littered the floors, and strange men let themselves in at all hours. She had grown up with three older sisters, who had all been kicked out or left because of their mother’s violence. It fell to Maylia to protect Maliasyn, two years younger, from their mom’s unpredictable delusions. She would lose herself in uppers and opioids, start yelling out of nowhere or cry uncontrollably. Sometimes, she locked the girls in the house for days.

Before Maylia sold blues, she sold weed. She had been smoking since fifth grade. The first time she tried weed, she found herself laughing at nothing. “Why would I sit here being sad and sober when I can be high and happy?” she thought. She hated staying home, so after class, she took Maliasyn to a trap house where teens smoked blunts on the first floor and adults met in the bedrooms upstairs. The guys there, a couple of years older, were dropping out of school to sell weed. When Maylia was 13, she started dealing, too, because everyone was doing it.

Dan Proft:

A rather stunning and praiseworthy breaking of the ranks by Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court Iris Martinez. Per her analysis, the Pritzker Purge Law ending cash bail is a public safety disaster with 74% of criminal defendants failing to appear in court to face charges.

Laurel Duggan:

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the top public schools in the US, has seen a major decline in academic achievement since implementing new admissions standards in pursuit of racial equity in 2020.

In the days after George Floyd’s death, leaders began assessing the underrepresentation of black and Hispanic students at the magnet school, and discussed how to move “towards greater equity, to be clearly distinguished from equality.” Soon after, the school updated its highly competitive admissions process, replacing standardised tests with a holistic evaluation that rewarded students on the basis of having attended underrepresented middle schools and qualifying for free lunch — considerations that critics have called racial proxies.

School leaders had repeatedly complained that the student population, which was majority Asian-American, did not match the racial demographics of the surrounding area. After the implementation of new admissions metrics, the admission of Asian students declined from 73% to 54%. Critics, including parents of Asian students, have pointed to this statistic as evidence of discrimination.

Julian Assange:

But all of them were necessary because without them I never would have seen the light of day.

This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.

I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice, after being detained for years and facing a 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else. I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.

As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period when expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished.

I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self censorship. It is hard not to draw a line from the US government’s prosecution of me – its crossing the rubicon by internationally criminalising journalism – to the chilled climate for freedom of expression now.

Frank Jacobs:

It’s wise to reserve judgment on important figures until they’re dead. Only when they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil do their legacies begin to slot into neat categories, assuming their full cultural significance.

Yet, those neat categories often obscure as much as they reveal. We look back on famous past lives through the prism of those mostly fictitious compartments — labeling one as a scientist, another as a pirate — as if they were as neatly separated from life’s complexities as they are from us by time.

This graph perforates that temporal prejudice. Called “The Big Map of Who Lived When,” it shows us which historical figures were contemporaries. The co-aliveness of some of these figures may boggle your mind.

The most satisfying way to use this map is to look for long lives with short overlaps. Like a picture of a great-grandparent holding their great-grandchild, there is something poetic about two lives lived so far apart yet intertwining for a brief period.

Daniel Rothschild:

Costly signals are necessary to differentiate ingroups from outgroups, a designation that’s needed if we’re going to have, well, groups. But such signals are in perilously short supply at the moment. 

For example, it used to be that if one wanted to be a candidate of a political party, it was necessary to signal affiliation with that political party by being a member. This was not a particularly costly signal: All one had to do was change one’s voter registration or perhaps pay a nominal fee to join a local party chapter. 

By doing so, one foreclosed signaling either nonpartisanship or support for another party. The primary cost of being, say, a Democrat was the opportunity cost of being a Republican, a Libertarian, a Green, a non-inscrit. It was a clear way of differentiating who was, say, a Republican from those who were Not-Republicans, which is necessary if being a Republican is to mean anything. You could not simultaneously be a Democrat and a Libertarian, or an independent and a Republican. 

Nik:

One day, the principal ducked into Mr. Edwards’ class and could hardly believe her eyes. “How do you get over a dozen 9-year-olds to lean forward so attentively in their seats?” she asked him during recess. “It’s actually a lesson they taught me, Mrs. Declan,” he admitted. “As it turns out, life is not about finding someone with the answers and then trying to remember what they say. It’s about finding someone who’s not ashamed to fail in front of you—and then figuring out the answers together.”

Wall Street Journal:

Kamala Harris is still keeping most of her agenda incognito, but she gave a strong hint about its direction on Tuesday when she blessed the Democratic plan to blow up the Senate’s filibuster rule. This would turn the Senate into the House for the purposes of passing legislation, which means a wide open door for progressive priorities.

She’s couching this procedural coup as related only to imposing a national abortion law on all 50 states. But anyone paying attention knows that’s a ruse. Once the 60-vote filibuster rule ends for one piece of non-budget legislation, it will end for everything.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, recently said he wants to break the filibuster for a national abortion law and pass a bill that would impose California-style voting rules on all 50 states. Good-bye voter identification, and hello nationwide ballot harvesting.

It won’t stop there. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse says he wants to break the filibuster to restructure the Supreme Court. Sen. Bernie Sanders has recently given up on his former institutional objections and now favors 51 votes to pass his proposals.

Bryan Caplan:

However, instead of siding with X, the law, and Brazilians’ freedom of expression, the academics’ letter condemns Elon Musk for providing the only digital platform in Brazil that refused to censor speech deemed undesirable by some public officials. It seems the signatories believe that governments should be able to decide what their citizens can and cannot hear, and use all their might to silence criticism — essentially endorsing authoritarianism.

The letter portrays X as if it somehow controls over the flow of information in Brazil, rather than being just one of many platforms through which Brazilians access information. It also links X to the incitement of the acts of January 8, 2023, and suggests that its suspension is motivated by its refusal to block accounts involved in this instigation. However, as previously mentioned, X did not refuse to comply with any orders prior to April 2024.

Introducing the unfamiliar concept of “digital sovereignty”, the letter demands that “Big Tech companies cease their attempts to sabotage” Brazil’s “digital agenda”, which they urge the government to implement. It is unclear what this agenda is, but it appears to be a rehash of old industrial policy ideas, which usually create inefficiencies and losses for companies and consumers, while generating significant profits for well-connected businessmen. Even if this outcome does not materalize, there is a greater danger today: the possibility that the government is able to silence opposition, paving the way for an authoritarian regime.

Bill Ackman:

One of the world’s leading educational institutions

Harvard College Total Enrollment: 7,063

Faculty and Staff: 19,777

Endowment Assets: ~$51 billion

Total revenue: $6.1 billion

Total operating expenses: $5.9 billion

Total debt: $6.25bn

slides

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).

Matt Taibbi:

“Most eveyone here has been censored.”

Even the French dandies who were marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Hadens, John Brennan’s, James Clapper’s, Mike McFall’s, and Rick Stengel’s who make up America’s self-appointed speech police. In pre-revolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword fight to the death.

Our aristocrats pee themselves at a mean tweet.
These people have no honor, no belief, no poetry, no art, no humor, no patriotism, which is unique to them, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They are simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

They may have one idea, and it’s not even an idea, but a sensation. Fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat. They’re afraid of each other. But they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set, and they live in near constant dread of being caught with even one original opinion.”

The First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Ann Althouse:

NYT opinion columnist M. Gessen displays shockingly little concern free-speech values…

Alex Berenson.

Welcome to the new age of censorship.

Illinois Policy:

More than a dozen candidates filled out an Illinois Policy questionnaire to give voters a better idea of who is running for office. Read their answers below.

Of the more than 30 candidates running for Chicago school board, 14 filled out an Illinois Policy questionnaire giving voters a better sense of the names that will appear on their ballots.

Look below to see which candidates CTU is endorsing or funding as well as the candidates who pledged to not accept donations.

Dave Cieslewicz

The district used temporary COVID relief funds to pay for 110 permanent positions that they knew they couldn’t afford once the federal money went away. Now, they’re asking voters to pick up the tab. And if they don’t, will they cut the positions? No, they’ll pay for them out of reserves (see above). Also, the district has more positions than it had a decade ago while enrollment has declined by 7%. Along these lines the district gave teachers an 8% pay increase in 2023 while they were still awash in all that federal money — and again they knew full well that they couldn’t afford it. 

This is the same district that would use referendum money to replace schools that are at 50% of capacity with new, bigger buildings. A district that won’t even consider consolidation of facilities. And it’s a district that plans to fix a relatively small $3 million deficit in its school lunch program…. but take a decade to do it. 

There’s certainly some incompetence at work here, but most of all there’s arrogance.

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Rose Horowitch

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Jennifer Berkshire:

Crazy how nobody seems to remember that kids don’t need to read books because in the future they will only encounter information was the basis of an elaborate theory of change just a decade ago

Abbey Machtig:

John McKenzie told the Wisconsin State Journal last week the charter school would go beyond just the skilled trades. He said internship and work-study programs would extend to the airline industry, health care, banking, information technology and more.

No employers have committed to offering internship opportunities yet, however, McKenzie said, adding it is “too early” to form those partnerships.

The involvement of Paul Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and the Philadelphia School District, may also be a drawback for some board members.

Vallas is a longtime proponent of charter schools and military-style academies, earning him fans and enemies around the country. Vallas has run unsuccessfully for public office several times.

“I would say, personally, I do have some concerns” about Vallas, board member Maia Pearson said Monday.

Despite the initial show of support from the School Board, McKenzie said he is keeping his options open.

He told the Wisconsin State Journal via email Monday that he has already submitted an initial charter application to the UW Office of Educational Opportunity and has been invited to move forward in that process as well.

The full application to UW is due in January. The university system could decide on the proposal by May.

—yet….

The taxpayer funded Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school in 2011…

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Danielle DuClos

In Dane County, there is one public defender position open and 40 cases are awaiting representation from the office.

The office’s budget request seeks funding for a tuition reimbursement pilot program to attract attorneys as well as geographic pay incentives to help recruitment in rural areas.

Both prosecutors and public defenders received pay increases in the current state budget, which officials say have helped recruitment and retention. Yet the shortages persist and present potential constitutional rights violations of defendants, Tempelis said.

“You start to see a constitutional level problem that (is) extremely significant, such as people remaining in custody longer than they should or waiting for a defense attorney to be appointed,” she said.

www

As an AI-assisted reporter, you will have the opportunity to develop your news and technical skills, including learning how to manage and utilise AI technology effectively.

You will play a key role in ensuring that our articles meet the highest standards of accuracy, information, and compliance with media law, plagiarism, and privacy, utilising your journalistic expertise alongside AI tools.

Key responsibilities:  
• Check factual accuracy
• Work with an AI system to help write news articles, while also utilising your journalism skills to maintain the quality and authenticity of the content

Jessika Harkay:

When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.

Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.

That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.

Ortiz, who came to Hartford from Puerto Rico with her family when she was young, struggled with language and other challenges along the way. But a confluence of circumstances, apparent apathy and institutional inertia pushed her haphazardly through the school system, according to Ortiz, her attorney and district officials. 

Those officials, in statements that her attorney says display “shocking” educational neglect, have acknowledged that Ortiz never received instruction in reading.

Despite this, she received her diploma this spring after improving her grades in high school — with help from the speech-to-text function — and getting on the honor roll. She began her studies at the University of Connecticut this summer.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Shawn HublerSoumya Karlamangla and Stephanie Saul

In a statement, Mr. Newsom said that “merit, skill and hard work” should determine college admissions. “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few,” he said, “which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”

Schools with legacy preferences have argued that they have not compromised their high standards and that children of alumni who are admitted are highly qualified, or they would not have been accepted.

Joseph Spracklen, Raveen Wijewickrama, A H M Nazmus Sakib, Anindya Maiti, Bimal Viswanath, Murtuza Jadliwala

The reliance of popular programming languages such as Python and JavaScript on centralized package repositories and open-source software, combined with the emergence of code-generating Large Language Models (LLMs), has created a new type of threat to the software supply chain: package hallucinations. These hallucinations, which arise from fact-conflicting errors when generating code using LLMs, represent a novel form of package confusion attack that poses a critical threat to the integrity of the software supply chain. This paper conducts a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation of package hallucinations across different programming languages, settings, and parameters, exploring how a diverse set of models and configurations affect the likelihood of generating erroneous package recommendations and identifying the root causes of this phenomenon. Using 16 popular LLMs for code generation and two unique prompt datasets, we generate 576,000 code samples in two programming languages that we analyze for package hallucinations. Our findings reveal that that the average percentage of hallucinated packages is at least 5.2% for commercial models and 21.7% for open-source models, including a staggering 205,474 unique examples of hallucinated package names, further underscoring the severity and pervasiveness of this threat. To overcome this problem, we implement several hallucination mitigation strategies and show that they are able to significantly reduce the number of package hallucinations while maintaining code quality. Our experiments and findings highlight package hallucinations as a persistent and systemic phenomenon while using state-of-the-art LLMs for code generation, and a significant challenge which deserves the research community’s urgent attention.

Joseph Cox:

Jack Ryan from San Diego was recently being interviewed for a job. On a video call, the interviewer, a woman with red hair, said, “I find it helps when candidates tell me a story in answering the questions.” 

“I’m looking for examples from your work experience,” the woman added. During the conversation, Ryan had a smirk on his face.

That’s because the woman is not real. She is an AI avatar from a company called Fairgo.ai, which uses AI agents to interview job candidates on behalf of other companies.

www

The talk was titled “Restoring Democracy: The Debate Over Judicial Reform in Israel.” Rothman is a member of the far-right Religious Zionism party. ,,,

A representative of the law school opened the event by reciting a “civility statement” and emphasizing the importance of “respectful speech.” …

Rothman was joined on the stage for a conversation with Joshua Kleinfeld, a professor of law at George Mason University and a member of the Federalist Society. …

As a shouting match erupted between the two groups of protesters in the auditorium, Rothman was escorted off the stage by police

Alex Gomez-Martin:

Scientific publishing has been gamed to advance scientists’ careers, not knowledge. While science communication has turned into a means of public indoctrination. In this essay, Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that real experts don’t know “the truth,” and that we should become pilgrims towards the unknown rather than the squatters of the broken records of ideological mantras.

Hannah Miao:

Sure, she has hundreds of thousands of social-media followers, but she isn’t trying to sell them anything, except maybe a book about the economy she published earlier this year. She’s happy with the title “author,” though that only covers part of what she does. “Economic commentator” is what San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly recommended, so that’s what Scanlon has been calling herself.

“Whatever makes sense to people, I suppose, but my goal is economics education,” Scanlon said in an interview. “Social media is just the medium that I use to do that.”

Scanlon, 27 years old, is breaking all the rules for a career in finance and doing things her own way. Forget grinding away for years on Wall Street or getting a Ph.D. in economics. Young people pay attention to her analysis of topics ranging from monetary policy to the housing market to the business of dating apps, all delivered via TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube, Substack and her podcast.

Ethan Weinstein:

The judge considering a lawsuit over the governor’s reappointment of Interim Education Secretary Zoie Saunders signaled a decision could arrive as soon as today.

Sens. Tanya Vyhovsky, P/D-Chittenden Central, and Dick McCormack, D-Windsor, sued Gov. Phil Scott and Saunders in June over the governor’s decision to reappoint the education secretary immediately after the Vermont Senate voted 19-9 not to confirm Saunders. 

The lawmakers have argued that the governor cannot reappoint a secretary in an interim capacity after the Senate has already rejected that appointment in the same biennium. The executive branch said the governor is well within his authority to do so, and that the lawmakers do not have standing to bring a case at all, calling the questions at hand “political.”

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in the New York Post on a growing crisis in higher education as enrollments and trust falls. Despite these trends, administrators and faculty appear entirely oblivious and unrepentant. They continue to alienate many in the country who view schools as pursuing indoctrination rather than education.

Here is the slightly expanded column:

In the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht asked “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” As someone who has been a teacher for over 30 years, I find myself increasingly asking the same question as trust and enrollments fall in higher education.

Trust in higher education is plummeting to record lows. According to recent polling, there has been a record drop in trust in higher education since just 2015. Not surprisingly, given the growing viewpoint intolerance on our campuses, the largest drops are among Republicans and Independents.

There has been a precipitous decline in enrollments across the country as universities worry about covering their costs without raising already high tuition rates. From 2010 to 2021, enrollments fell from roughly 18.1 million students to about 15.4 million.

There are various contributors to the drop from falling birthrates to poor economic times. However, there is also an increasing view of higher education as an academic echo chamber for far left agendas. For many, there is little appeal in going to campuses where you are expected to self-censor and professors reject your values as part of their lesson plans.

That fear is magnified by surveys showing that many departments have purged their ranks of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians.

Martin Enserink

“Editors no longer have confidence in the reliability of the findings and conclusions reported in this article,” the journal said in a retraction note published yesterday.

“The concerns relate to lack of transparency and misstatement of the hypotheses and predictions the reported metastudy was designed to test; lack of preregistration for measures and analyses supporting the titular claim (against statements asserting preregistration in the published article); selection of outcome measures and analyses with knowledge of the data; and incomplete reporting of data and analyses,” the note says.

Graham Piro:

For the first time since the October 7 terror attacks in Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, a tenured faculty member in the United States has been fired for pro-Palestinian advocacy. The firing of tenured anthropology professor Maura Finkelstein by Muhlenberg College, a private, Lutheran school in Allentown, Pennsylvania, marks the third serious attack on tenured faculty this week.

Finkelstein, unenviably, joins both Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who was dealt a major sanction for her in-class and extramural speech, and Joe Gow, fired today from his tenured faculty role at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse for making vegan-themed pornography with his wife in his spare time.

Abbey Machtig:

More referendum money would pay for an estimated $15 million increase in health care costs, and for new teaching and mental health staff.

An additional pay increase for district employees also is tied to the operating referendum. The district and Madison Teachers Inc. already agreed to a 2.06% wage increase, in addition to raises awarded for years of experience and level of education. If the referendum passes, staff would get the full 4.12% increase allowed under state law.

Money from the operating referendum also would be used to invest in 4K programming, bolster multilingual education and enrich career exploration opportunities in middle schools, according to the district’s website. The district has not provided information about the cost of each of these items, or exactly what kind of programs would be expanded or added.

The School Board also may decide to use a chunk of referendum revenue to address student service employees’ salary compression — the term for when newly hired employees with less experience earn close to, or more than, employees in the same job with more experience. The compression is the result of changes made in 2018 to the schedule that dictates salary increases based on years of experience and level of education. Student services employees include social workers, psychologists, occupational and physical therapists, school counselors and speech and language clinicians.

It will cost about $1.8 million to even out the salaries, according to district estimates. The School Board also could opt to fix the compression in the 2025-26 budget.

…..

The district has not committed to reducing expenses before asking taxpayers for more money, unlike, for example, the McFarland School District. McFarland schools made $1.2 million in cuts and the district now is asking voters to approve a $5.25 million operating referendum.

If the operating referendum fails, the Madison School District plans to significantly draw down its reserves, by about $46.7 million, to cover expenses.

That plan would be a short-term fix and comes with added financial risk. Pulling from reserves can hurt the district’s financial rating and increase its need to take out short-term loans.

The school district’s current reserves fund balance sat at just over $114.6 million on July 1, according to information provided to the School Board on Sept. 16. Board policy requires the district to maintain a fund balance that is equal to 10% to 15% of its general operating budget, which currently sits at about $496.6 million.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Gregg Easterbrook

As it becomes fashionable to denounce the Constitution because it inconveniences many in power, I commend this book by historian Sean Wilentz, which shows that, for all its flaws, the U.S. Constitution is the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment

Alan Blinder:

But after Mr. Sewer signed up, he said that Caltech was almost nowhere to be found. Mr. Sewer said his primary instructor, who sometimes vanished during class sessions, lived in Mississippi, not Southern California. A course facilitator, he said, was in India. Neither had any meaningful ties to Caltech, which Mr. Sewer had known as an academic powerhouse and a backdrop of the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”

The university, he learned, had largely outsourced the program to a company called Simplilearn.

“It was just a bunch of bogus,” Mr. Sewer scoffed in an interview. “They just wanted our money.”

Caltech, a private university in Pasadena, Calif., is a highly selective school, but some of its online programs make it merely part of the crowd. Colleges across the country are routinely offering online, nondegree-granting programs that they tout as avenues to offer more educational opportunities to broader audiences. But the programs are largely unregulated and may not feature university faculty members or their curriculums.

Matt Taibbi:

This is every amateur speaker’s dream, to follow Russell Brand. Thanks a lot, God!

I was once taught you should always open an important speech by making reference to a shared experience.

So what do all of us at “Rescue the Republic” have in common? Nothing!

In a pre-Trump universe chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell, Bret Weinstein and I would organically get together for any reason, much less an event like this.

True, everyone speaking has been censored. The issues were all different, but everyone disagreed with “authoritative voices” about something.

Saying no is very American. From “Don’t Tread on Me!” to “Nuts” to “You Cannot Be Serious!” defiance is in our DNA.

Rachel Wolfe:

In Spanish, parents call it encaminado: making sure your children are on the path to an independent adulthood.

Out of Dan and Joana Moreno’s four grown children, only their daughter is encaminada. She recently graduated from business school and got engaged. The Morenos’ three adult sons are still sleeping in their Miami childhood bedrooms. The younger two dropped out of college, and the oldest never went. All three are single. Their only work experience is with the family business.

“Something has gone amiss here,” says their father, Dan, who owns the repair chain Flamingo Appliance Service. “We love them, we love having them around, but that’s not how you build a life.”

The life trajectories of America’s sons and daughters are diverging.

Presented with a more-equal playing field, young women are seizing the opportunities in front of them, while young men are floundering. The phenomenon has developed over the past decade, but was supercharged by the pandemic, which derailed careers, schooling and isolated friends and families. The result has big implications for the economy.

Melissa Korn:

The university, based in Nashville, has signed a 99-year lease for a 2.2-acre property in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The campus currently includes 13 buildings with 150,000 square feet of space.

Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said the property is valued at more than $100 million. The school is still assessing the investment needed for renovations.

Vanderbilt has set its sights elsewhere, too. The university recently pitched a $520 million project in West Palm Beach, Fla. It has an agreement with the city there but is still in discussions with county officials. Programs there would focus on data science, fintech and engineering, the school has said.

Vanderbilt is in a fortunate class of colleges, attracting plenty of students, faculty and research dollars. Last year, it admitted just over 6% of first-year applicants. But it competes fiercely against other top-tier schools for accepted students—about 57% of admitted students enrolled.

Laine Higgins and Jared Diamond:

Quarterback Matthew Sluka announced Tuesday that he was quitting the UNLV program in order to preserve his NCAA eligibility and switch to a different school for next season. The reason, he says, was that he was promised money he never received.

Marcus Cromartie, Sluka’s agent, told ESPN that an assistant coach verbally offered $100,000 if Sluka transferred from Holy Cross to UNLV. The deal never materialized, prompting Sluka to walk away while he could still take advantage of rules letting players retain a year of eligibility if they play four or fewer games in a season.

Cromartie didn’t respond to several requests for comment from The Wall Street Journal.

Tyler Cowen:

Not just on the basis of what you publish, but on what you contribute to the major AI models.  So if you go to a major archive and, in some manner, turn it into AI-readable form, that should count for a good deal.  It is no worse than publishing a significant article, though of course depending on the quality of the archive.  As it stands today, you basically would get no credit for that.  You would instead be expected to turn the archive into articles or a book, even if that meant unearthing far less data for the AIs.  Turning data into books takes a long time — is that always what humans should be doing?

Articles still count under this standard, as jstor seems to be in the literary “diet” of the major AI models.  Wikipedia contributions should count for tenure, and any “hard for the AI to access data set” should count for all the more.  Soon it won’t much matter whether humans read your data contribution, as long as the AIs do.

Christopher Martell:

This is not a post about what standardized tests do. The reality is that educational assessment is a complicated process. High-quality standardized tests can be helpful in assessing what students know, but they do not always measure what they intend to measure. More importantly, they are also only one of many assessments that teachers and schools use to get a fuller picture of what students understand and are able to do (see here for an argument on why standardized tests are problematic and evidence that students already take too many of them). 

Rather, this is a post about what standardized tests can’t do. Standardized tests were never designed (and should never be used) to determine if a student should receive a high school diploma. As an educational researcher, I know a little about this. I remember my quantitative research methods professors as a doctoral student always telling us that “a test only measures what a test measures.” So, you should never try to use that test to measure something it was not designed to do. The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) was designed to measure one thing: basic comprehension in literacy, mathematics, and science. Students may be not only proficient, but advanced in other academic areas, such as history/social studies, world languages, art, music, theater, consumer and family sciences, computer science, vocational fields, or business, but if they do not reach an arbitrary MCAS score in only three subject area tests, they will not receive a diploma in Massachusetts.

The MCAS does not measure workforce or higher education readiness. The MCAS does not measure a student’s ability to think critically or problem solve. The MCAS does not improve student’s individual economic opportunity (but a student’s economic opportunity can predict their MCAS score). The opponents of Question 2 will tell you an MCAS graduation requirement is necessary for all of these things to occur; they are being intentionally disingenuous (in fact many boldly claim that this ballot question will get rid of MCAS altogether, which it does not). Moreover, researchers have long known that social class may influence up to 84% of a student’s MCAS score. In many ways, the MCAS tells us more about how much wealth a student’s family or community has than it measures the quality of that student’s schools or their individual learning.  

Bezos Washington Post

To have children or not to have them? That is the question more and more Americans are asking themselves. Only 26 percent say having children is extremely or very important for a fulfilling life, according to a Pew Research Center survey, whereas 71 percent say the same about “having a job or career they enjoy.” The U.S. fertility ratehas plummeted to 1.6 lifetime births per woman, well below the “replacement rate” of around 2.1, at which point a population remains stable between generations.

Choose life.

Terry Tao:

Traditionally, mathematics research projects are conducted by a small number (typically one to five) of expert mathematicians, each of which are familiar enough with all aspects of the project that they can verify each other’s contributions. It has been challenging to organize mathematical projects at larger scales, and particularly those that involve contributions from the general public, due to the need to verify all of the contributions; a single error in one component of a mathematical argument could invalidate the entire project. Furthermore, the sophistication of a typical math project is such that it would not be realistic to expect a member of the public, with say an undergraduate level of mathematics education, to contribute in a meaningful way to many such projects.

For related reasons, it is also challenging to incorporate assistance from modern AI tools into a research project, as these tools can “hallucinate” plausible-looking, but nonsensical arguments, which therefore need additional verification before they could be added into the project.

Proof assistant languages, such as Lean, provide a potential way to overcome these obstacles, and allow for large-scale collaborations involving professional mathematicians, the broader public, and/or AI tools to all contribute to a complex project, provided that it can be broken up in a modular fashion into smaller pieces that can be attacked without necessarily understanding all aspects of the project as a whole. Projects to formalize an existing mathematical result (such as the formalization of the recent proof of the PFR conjecture of Marton, discussed in this previous blog post) are currently the main examples of such large-scale collaborations that are enabled via proof assistants. At present, these formalizations are mostly crowdsourced by human contributors (which include both professional mathematicians and interested members of the general public), but there are also some nascent efforts to incorporate more automated tools (either “good old-fashioned” automated theorem provers, or more modern AI-based tools) to assist with the (still quite tedious) task of formalization.

Lesley Muldoon:

Four and a half years after the start of the pandemic, it’s time to raise the bar and stop making excuses for sagging achievement. Newly released data show that student growth in 2023-24 lagged behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in nearly every grade. That data follows the big declines in reading and math scores on the most recent Nation’s Report Card and the release of a study showing that high-needs districts have been recovering from the pandemic more slowly than their wealthier counterparts, worsening long-standing achievement gaps.

The pandemic also led to an explosion in chronic absenteeism, and we’ve seen only modest improvements. A recent study by USC researchers found a lack of concern about the issue among parents. School leaders also aren’t as worried as you’d expect, with only 15 percent saying they were “extremely concerned” about student absences in a survey released by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Gregg Easterbrook:

New Justice Ketanji Jackson has said from the SC bench that government should control what opinions the public is allowed to hear and see. the elitist urge to censor dissent is scary.

Christopher Snowbeck

Most carriers in the state’s individual and small markets are raising rates by roughly 9% to 15%.

The rate jumps, revealed in state data Friday, are bigger than during each of the past two years. They will be offset for many in the individual market by larger tax credits from the federal government (taxpayers) if they buy coverage through……

Crazy multidimensional cost and tax growth continues along with ever higher co-pays and deductibles.

Ann Althouse Summary:

JUST IN: New ICE report reveals the Biden-Harris administration has let in 425,000 illegal immigrants who are convicted criminals. That is enough people to fill Michigan’s football stadium 4 times. The report says the following illegals are “roaming the country”: – 13,099 M*rderers – 15,811 R*pists – 425,431 Convicted Criminals “Essentially what that is, is it means migrants who were encountered by DHS but are no longer in federal custody.” “It’s illegal immigrants who are caught and released at the border, released with the court date years away.”

In March, I requested data from the Biden-Harris administration on how many illegal immigrants with a criminal history have been released in our communities.

I just received an answer this week: Over 662,000.

Remember this as VP Harris tries to tout the adminstrations’ “success” during her dog and pony show at the border today.

More.

Lawfare and elections, continued.

Michael Shellenberger:

No matter your politics, these new numbers are shocking. Of the 7 million migrants that ICE released while their cases are being processed, 663,000 have criminal histories, 13,000 were convicted of homicide, 16,000 of sexual assault, and 1,845 face homicide charges.

Alex Karp on the lack of trust in Government.

Elon Musk:

The only thing holding California back from extreme socialism and suffocating government policies is that people can leave California and still remain in America. Once the whole country is controlled by one party, there will be no escape.

Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.

“The 1st Amendment stands as a major roadblock for us right now” (!)

I’m glad Kerry is putting this out there because clearly, their agenda is to rip up the Constitution of the United States of America. Imagine a world where the “elites” shut down and remove your voice. Americans should be prepared to fight to the death to preserve our republic.

 Jim Piwowarczyk & Jessica McBride

A fuller timeline in the case of Alejandro Coronel-Zarate raises serious questions about Madison and Minneapolis police and the Hennepin County Jail. Since the alleged Venezuelan gang member crossed the border in 2023, he’s accused of leaving trail of abused females in his wake. Why did it take until now for ICE to detain him? 

A Minnesota jail took alleged Tren de Aragua Venezuelan gang member Alejandro Coronel-Zarate into custody for almost three days but freed him into the community even though Madison police had already established probable cause that the noncitizen choked, beat, and threatened to burn and kill a terrified Madison woman, new records obtained by Wisconsin Right Now show.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department – which has a “sanctuary” policy of not cooperating with ICE and is located in a sanctuary county – released Coronel-Zarate, 26, of Venezuela, on Nov. 20, 2023, even though court records show that Madison police had already obtained the key evidence that was eventually used to issue felony suffocation charges in Wisconsin on December 1. There’s no evidence they told ICE. By the time Madison filed charges, Coronel-Zarate was in the wind, and a warrant was issued when he did not show up for court.

The key questions:

Why didn’t Madison police go get him when the Minnesota Jail decided to release him? Did they tell ICE that he was accused of a violent crime?

Why didn’t Minneapolis and Hennepin County authorities tell ICE that he was sitting in jail so a detainer could be placed on him?

Nellie Bowles:

The message to the media is very simple: You have to be a huge Kamala fan, you must learn all the lyrics, you must debase yourself as a journalist, and then you’ll get to hear some “answers” to some “questions” and you’ll get one signed pair of Kamala the Cop handcuffs (I would do literally anything for a set, Kamala, I will debase myself more than anyone, please). Kamala, call on me! I know that when you worked at McDonald’s you did fries! Not McFlurries, fries! 

It might sound crass, but as Kamala rises in the polls and journalists tear off their blazers to reveal Kamala Harris chest tattoos, I’ve never been more bullish on The Free Press. My message to mainstream media: Keep on keeping on. I love you guys. And if you’re a CNN anchor thinking about posting a Kamala appreciation TikTok dance to get your own Kamala sit-down “interview,” I love that for you. I’m not here to stop you. I’m here to teach you the dance, and profit from your weakness, which is why, Free Press board, I deserve a raise. 

Michael Hardy and Forrest Wilder:

The anticipation was building. For four months, Houston Public Media had been working on a widely anticipated podcast about the state’s takeover of the Houston Independent School District and its controversial installation of Mike Miles as superintendent. Called The Takeover, the four-part series would be hosted by Dominic Walsh, an award-winning public-education reporter who had spent the past year covering Miles’s ambitious overhaul of the state’s largest school district. He’d broken stories and won awards for his coverage of the intervention. Now he would bring it all together for a national audience. “We’re super-excited,” wrote the podcast editor in an internal email obtained by Texas Monthly. “I don’t think a lot of people understand the significance of what’s happening” in Houston, wrote another employee. “Can’t wait for May 3!” 

In addition to heavily promoting the podcast on its radio station, News 88.7, HPM spent what management identified as a “not insignificant” portion of its annual marketing budget advertising the show to potential listeners. Every major streaming platform planned to offer the podcast; excerpts would run on public radio stations across Texas. But when the release date of May 3 rolled around, the podcast was nowhere to be found. 

Fans of the station were puzzled and frustrated. “Why is the podcast not available?” one longtime listener wrote to HPM in an email. “Where is Dominic Anthony Walsh? What has Houston Public Media done with him???” Several expressed concern that the station had bowed to political pressure. “The immediate suspicion without further explanation is external meddling from someone, somewhere with enough reason and power to stop the podcast,” wrote another listener.

Wall Street Journal:

“But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally, charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States,” the former first lady added.

There’s a novel legal concept. Because Russians can’t be punished in the U.S., she wants Americans to be arrested for their political speech if they happen to utter arguments also uttered by Russians.

Mrs. Clinton seems to be referring to the Americans recently cited by Attorney General Merrick Garland as dupes of Russian attempts to influence the U.S. election. Those folks may be naifs, or even fellow travelers, but they do have First Amendment rights.

Note that Mrs. Clinton is worried about speech she thinks helps Donald Trump. But would her speech standard also apply to the 51 former U.S. intelligence officials who claimed in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”? They were spreading disinformation because the laptop and its contents were real and had belonged to Hunter.

Wall Street Journal:

Chicago can’t afford anything close to that. Rather than disappoint his union buddies, Mayor Johnson wants the school district to take out a $300 million loan to cover higher teacher salaries and pension costs next year. CPS has a junk credit rating, so Mr. Johnson’s loan would end up costing the school district around $700 million.

More.

“Martinez has argued that such demands could bankrupt the (Chicago k-12) system”

The Economist:

The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (gss), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In gss’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left.

More.

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the most darkly hilarious things I’ve seen in politics is how Democrats and media liberals constantly run around warning that if Trump wins, he’ll weaponize the justice system by prosecuting his political enemies, and they do it with zero sense of irony or self-awareness:

Chris Rickert:

The chair of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board tried to prevent police from arresting a family member, demanding of an officer, “Do you know who I am?” and telling him she would call two of his superiors to complain, according to a complaint filed this summer by the vice president of the city’s police union.

Oversight Board Chair Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores showed up at the scene of an Oct. 20 disturbance involving the family member, identified in court records as her 26-year-old daughter, “and attempted to use her position to influence and change the outcome of the police investigation to her own desired resolution,” according to the complaint, which was sworn to by Madison Professional Police Officers’ Association Vice President Emily Samson on July 26 and submitted to the city’s Ethics Board.

Aaron Miller:

I get nostalgic reminiscing on my little league baseball days. I think about long summer days, team bus rides, early close friends, and… private equity.

Wait, private equity?

That’s right. In 2024, we’re seeing a boom of private equity investment into youth sports.

For the longest time, American youth sports programs were largely run as nonprofits and mom & pop businesses. But recently, investors spotted a massive market.

In the US, 30 million kids participate in youth sports and 34 million parents pay – making up a $28 billion total addressable market.

$28 billion: that’s larger than major entertainment sectors, like the box office ($10 billion), recorded music ($11 billion), and online sports betting ($14 billion).

Andrew Bahl:

“There’s no common sense to this at all,” said Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. “This is, in its worst iteration, a nefarious action to minimize our rights. And I think that pig with lipstick is just still a pig.”

When Wisconsin allowed non-citizens to vote

Throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, non-citizens were allowed to vote in local, state and even federal elections in many states across the country.

That includes Wisconsin, where foreign citizens could vote in elections for all levels of government, provided they pledged their intent to become U.S. citizens. That policy lasted until 1908.

“As the United States economy expanded with industrialization and so forth, one of the ways that folks tried to lure immigrants to come westward, aside from access to land, was voting rights,” said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University who researches immigration and voting.

Research from Hayduk and his colleagues shows that 13.5% of the Wisconsin voters in 1900 were foreign citizens.

Those laws fell out of favor in the 20th century. Federal law was eventually changed to bar foreign citizens from voting in elections for president and U.S. Congress, while some states passed laws prohibiting them from participating in gubernatorial and legislative elections.

Noah Hirschl, Christine R. Schwartz and Elia Boschetti

Recent social and economic trends in the United States, including increasing economic inequality, women’s growing educational advantage, and the rise of online dating, have ambiguous implications for patterns of educational homogamy. In this research note, we examine changes in educational assortative mating in the United States over the last eight decades (1940 to 2020) using the U.S. decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, extending and expanding earlier work by Schwartz and Mare. We find that the rise in educational homogamy noted by Schwartz and Mare has not continued. Increases in educational homogamy stalled around 1990 and began reversing in the 2000s. We find a growing tendency for marriages to cross educational boundaries, but a college degree remains the strongest dividing line to intermarriage. A key trend explaining this new pattern is women’s increasing tendency to marry men with less education than themselves. If not for this trend, homogamy would have continued increasing until the early 2010s. We also show substantial heterogeneity by race, ethnicity, and nativity and among same- versus different-sex couples.

Commentary.

Stanley Kurtz

Lozenski is no outlier. On the contrary, he has been the leading voice advocating the addition of a radical version of “ethnic studies” to Minnesota’s social-studies standards (citizenship and government, economics, geography, history, and now ethnic studies). Lozenski is also the key organizer and thought leader for the radical leftist advocacy groups that Governor Walz has effectively put in charge of rewriting Minnesota’s social-studies standards. While Lozenski’s call for the overthrow of the United States is the clearest expression of his radical stance to date, it’s hardly surprising. For years, conservative voices in Minnesota have sounded the alarm over the extremism of Lozenski and his allies. Maybe now, Walz will have to answer for putting Lozenski and his friends in charge of education in the state.

Yet Walz is apparently doing everything possible to avoid accountability. According to an earlier promise by the Minnesota Department of Education’s interim communications director, Anna Arkin, the ethnic-studies implementation framework was supposed to have been released in time for a public comment period from August 9 through August 22. Yet no framework has yet been published.

The most recent public meeting of the committee that is crafting the implementation framework came and went this past Tuesday, September 24. Once again, no framework was produced. (For more, see this important account by Catrin Wigfall.) Increasingly, it appears that, contrary to earlier promises, there will be no public release or public comment period before the October 31 statutory deadline to submit a finalized ethnic-studies implementation framework. There is good reason to believe that the implementation framework is being withheld from the public to prevent it from becoming an issue in the presidential election.

Wall Street Journal:

CBO examined a sample of federal student loans that entered repayment between July 2009 and June 2013 to measure the extent borrowers were making progress on repaying their debt before the three-and-a-half years of pandemic forbearance. Short conclusion: They weren’t.

During the first six years after borrowers were supposed to begin making payments, CBO estimates that loans were in repayment status for only 45% of the time—about 32 months. Borrowers weren’t making payments for most of that time because they were either in default, forbearance or deferment.

It gets worse. CBO says “borrowers made payments greater than $10 in only 38 percent of the months” in which a payment was due. That means that even most borrowers who were making payments were doing so inconsistently and often in token amounts.

One reason is that the Democrats’ 2010 income-based repayment plans capped payments at 10% of discretionary income—i.e., income exceeding 150% of the poverty line—and canceled debt after 10 to 20 years. As a result, many borrowers had negligible required payments. But then their loan balances ballooned as they accrued interest.

Quinton Klabon:

But we spent a lot, even before it, and Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and Saint Paul show spending may not lead to results.

Becky Jacobs:

This fall, UW-Madison reported enrolling 8,516 first-year students — the second-largest freshman class in the institution’s history — and 1,375 new transfer students. The university received a record number of first-year applicants and saw its highest total enrollment, with 52,126 students.

——

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math (2014!)

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Rachel Alexander Cambre

Responding to parental demand for more options and input regarding their children’s education, lawmakers have created or expanded education choice programs in more than a dozen states over the past few years, restoring education freedom for rising numbers of American parents. But parents are not simply seeking education freedom: They are, in increasing numbers, seeking an education for freedom for their children—a classical liberal arts education that aims to form adults capable of understanding, exercising, and protecting their American rights and responsibilities. This report constitutes an inquiry into that model of education by surveying the growing number of classical liberal arts schools committed to it.

Alec Johnson:

The DPI doesn’t seem worried. After raising the alarm in May with a letter to MPS saying it was “incredibly late” in submitting required financial reports, the DPI is now urging patience. Bucher said the department is working with the district on a daily basis and “stands with MPS every step of the way.”

Quinton Klabon:

Based on their flowchart, I think these are the MPS SCHOOLS THEY MAY RECOMMEND CLOSING: Douglas, Assata, Auer, Banner, Brown, Clarke, Groppi, Hampton, Hi-Mount, Holmes, Hopkins-Lloyd, Jackson, Keefe, King Mid, Lincoln Mid, Roosevelt, Sherman, Siefert, Starms Discovery, Westside.

Aaron Sibarium

NEW: Penn tried to buy Amy Wax’s silence by offering her a deal: it would water down the sanctions against her—and take a pay cut off the table—provided she kept quiet about the case and stopped accusing the university of censoring her.

As you might guess, Wax refused.🧵

America First Legal:

/10 Only “government issued or law enforcement email address[es]” were allowed to use this system.

Paul Bedard:

A federal judge scheduled a trial date for a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Jan. 6 protester Ashli Babbitt, who died after being shot by U.S. Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd.

The watchdog group Judicial Watch, which is helping in the lawsuit filed by Babbitt’s husband, Aaron, revealed that Judge Ana C. Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia scheduled a trial date of July 20, 2026, for the $30 million wrongful death suit.

Following a Friday hearing on the case, Judicial Watch also said Reyes is considering a request to move the case to California, where Ashli Babbitt’s family lives.

Wall Street Journal:

More bad news for California, Illinois and New York. A recent analysis finds that their most upwardly mobile millennials are fleeing for lower-tax states. Call it a high-tax state brain drain. The flight of the young and newly affluent promises to compound the states’ budget and economic problems.

Using IRS data, the fintech company SmartAsset ranked states based on net migration of young households (ages 26 to 35) in 2022 that earned at least $200,000 a year. The biggest losers: California (-3,226), Illinois (-1,323), Massachusetts (-1,102), New York (-345) and Pennsylvania (-320).

Michigan, Louisiana, Delaware, Minnesota and Missouri round the top 10 losers. Delaware (6.4%) and Illinois (4%) lost the largest share of their young, higher-earning households.

The biggest gainers were Florida (1,786) and Texas (1,660), which have no income tax. They attracted more than twice as many such households as any other state. “Half of states attracting the most young and rich households don’t charge state income tax,” the study notes. The other big gainers without an income tax are Tennessee (347) and Nevada (162).

Will Flanders:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government shelled out $189.5 billion to school districts across the country via Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding. Wisconsin was no exception. Across three rounds of ESSER funding, the state and school districts received more than $2.4 billion dollars. Despite federal requirements that ESSER money be used to supplement rather than replace existing spending, many school districts are clamoring to keep programs in place that were largely funded with ESSER money. Indeed, DPI has said that they will “be advocating to increase funding for schools to make up for the loss in ESSER funds.” The end of ESSER funds is also being blamed for a record number of school districts going to referendum this Fall.

But a critical question remains: Is there evidence that ESSER funding achieved its intended goal of addressing learning loss? With the deadline for spending ESSER dollars approaching at the end of September, now is an opportune time to assess whether the funding effectively mitigated and reversed the educational setbacks caused by the pandemic. Combining data from the state report card with data on district funding allocations from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, we find that only one area of spending bears a strong relationship to learning loss improvement.

More.

Scott Bauer:

Up to 2,000 voters in Wisconsin’s heavily Democratic capital of Madison were sent duplicate absentee ballots, but a city spokesperson said Tuesday that none had been returned, all affected voters were being contacted and there were multiple safeguards in place to ensure only one ballot is counted.

“This was a mistake,” city spokesperson Dylan Brogan said. “The clerk’s office moved to rectify it as quickly as possible.”

The error in a Democratic stronghold in the battleground state led to a demand for more information from U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican backer of former President Donald Trump whose northern Wisconsin district does not include Madison.

“Voters deserve clear answers regarding the full scope of this blunder, how the city plans to restore public confidence in its ability to accurately administer the election, and assurances that those responsible are held accountable,” Tiffany wrote.

Liam Beran

The problem? Barcodes — also known as certificates — are not printed on ballots themselves. They’re printed on ballot envelopes, and poll workers are required to scan the barcodes prior to even opening the envelope. A ballot won’t be accepted if it’s not in a completed envelope, said Rachel Rodriguez, Dane County Clerk’s Office elections management specialist, meaning that there would be no way for the voter to submit the ballots separately. 

Andrew Bahl:

A press release from the clerk’s office said the mistake happened due to a “data processing error.” Dylan Brogan, communications manager for the city of Madison, said the issue occurred when workers effectively merged two of the same data files into one document, doubling up the names and addresses there.

“1% of voters in the bluest county in a swing state got duplicate ballots”

Maribeth Witzel-Behl, City of Madison Clerk

Letter to duplicate ballot recipients.

Commentary.

Kayla Huynh

Among the changes are lower scoring standards for each performance level and different labels categorizing students. In an interview with CBS 58, state Superintendent Jill Underly said students “appeared to be doing worse than they really were” under the previous system. 

Madison Metropolitan School District leaders this month offered the School Board a sneak peak at the district’s Forward Exam resultsusing the new bars for success. Less than half of third through eighth graders and 14% of Black students were considered proficient in literacy, according to the results.

School Board President Nichelle Nichols said she had a “visceral reaction” seeing the results. The scores show less than 20% of tested students with disabilities and about a quarter of English learners scored proficient in literacy. 

Students fared worse on math portions of the test, with 45% of third through fifth graders and 41% of sixth through eighth graders scoring proficient in math. Among Black students, 8% of sixth through eighth graders and 12% of third through fifth graders scored proficient.

“These percentages look pretty much the same” as previous years despite state Department of Public Instruction officials lowering scoring standards and warning against comparisons, Nichols said in the board meeting.

Marc Andreessen:

If you want to fix a broken system, you have to pull money OUT, not put more money IN.
If you put more money IN, the system interprets it as a reward and uses the money to become even more broken.
We get this for businesses. We forget it for nonprofits and governments. 🤔

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Masterman:

The recommendations in the report were developed by the HSA Board and also were informed by conversations with administration in an effort to gain consensus around some of the main recommendations. One primary recommendation (see page 48) is to end the randomized admissions process and restore human judgment to admissions, preferably with a designated admissions officer and/or committee following best practices to improve diversity, and student choice and fit. The current randomized admissions process failed in its objectives regarding diversity at Masterman (see page 11-15) and failed our children, those leaving Masterman and those newly accepted,  in placing many of them in schools that are not the right fit for them. It should be ended. The District should return admission decisions to the schools and hire a dedicated, full-time Admissions Officer to systematically court the most able students of every demographic from across the city.

We have done our best to represent the array of views in our community about topics that are nuanced and complex. We welcome all comments and suggestions on the report and the process.

More.

Peachy Keenan:

What if the best way to change her mind was not by focusing on votes, elections, candidates, the legality of a 6- or 8-week ban, or technicalities like viability? What if instead of “abortions are bad,” the argument was: “Babies are awesome!” Imagine connecting the clinical concept of “embryo” and “fetus” to “a little human being who will look like you and have the same hair color as you.” 

A friend sent me a link to a disturbing study that involved grafting the harvested scalps of late-term aborted babies onto rats. These “scientists” are literally implanting pieces of human baby scalp onto living rats and regrowing the dead child’s own hair on the rat. Presumably this is some kind of test for curing baldness for men who think they’d look sexier wearing a dead baby’s scalp. (The study also involves fetal thyroid tissues and liver cells, which must be why fully-formed aborted newborns fetch such high prices for livers and thyroids on the market.)

The web page for the study includes nightmarish photos of a baby’s light brown hair growing on a rat’s body. Imagine seeing these images and wondering, “Is that my baby?” Imagine a billboard campaign of these images with the tagline “Is this your baby?” Maybe, just maybe, that message could help connect an inchoate positive pregnancy test to the finished product: an adorable newborn.

Maybe it’s worth a try. Maybe it’s time for babies to get a rebrand. 

Choose life.

Linda Jacobson:

Changing standards and proficiency targets is a routine process for states that some say offers a more accurate reflection of what students know. But given the cataclysmic effects of COVID on student learning, experts say now is not the time to tweak how we measure performance. 

“Many parents are already underestimating the degree to which their children are lagging behind,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard researcher who has been tracking students’ recovery from COVID learning loss. “Lowering the proficiency cuts now will mislead them further.”  

Even Jill Underly, Wisconsins’s education chief, confessed to some bewilderment about the process last year.

“The crummy thing is, I am an educator and I don’t understand it — so how are parents supposed to understand this too?” she wrote in a June 2023 email. “For example, what does Proficient mean vs. Advanced? That they are at grade level vs. the next grade level? I just hate this stuff so much.”

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Robert Schmad:

We leverage a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to private school vouchers across markets as well as students to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. To do this, we estimate several choice models on data only from control markets before turning to the treatment data for model validation. This exercise reveals that a model where school choice is constrained by ability-to-pay achieves better out-of-sample fit but still underpredicts experimental take-up of the voucher offer. We then present evidence from treatment markets that: a) the voucher offer also induced search; and b) private schools used program surplus to incentivize enrollment. Further, we show that a unified model incorporating these features can explain both the control and treatment data patterns. Estimates from that model imply that a targeted voucher program would have a marginal value of public funds (MVPF) of at least 3.

Www summary:

The article discusses the controversial education reforms implemented by Denver Public Schools over a decade ago. The study found that these reforms positively impacted students’ academic outcomes, increasing their likelihood of graduating. However, the improvements were not consistent across all student groups, with students of color experiencing mixed results in their math and literacy test scores and graduation chances.

Katherine Bindley and Joseph Pisani:

Postings for software development jobs are down more than 30% since February 2020, according to Indeed.com. Industry layoffs have continued this year with tech companies shedding around 137,000 jobs since January, according to Layoffs.fyi. Many tech workers, too young to have endured the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, now face for the first time what it’s like to hustle to find work.

Company strategies are also shifting. Instead of growth at all costs and investment in moonshot projects, tech firms have become laser focused on revenue-generating products and services. They have pulled back on entry-level hires, cut recruiting teams and jettisoned projects and jobs in areas that weren’t huge moneymakers, including virtual reality and devices.

At the same time, they started putting enormous resources into AI. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 offered a glimpse into generative AI’s ability to create humanlike content and potentially transform industries. It ignited a frenzy of investment and a race to build the most advanced AI systems. Workers with expertise in the field are among the few strong categories.

A number of professors:

No one should prize the free exchange of ideas more than academics, whose entire purpose is to develop, challenge, and improve ideas. Endorsing state control of pub- lic discourse through the censorship of political opponents should be anathema to any defender of democracy. We are thus dismayed by the public letter “Against Big Tech’s Attack on Digital Sovereignties,” signed by many notable academics, including Daron Acemoglu and Thomas Piketty.

Although the letter mentions “Big Techs” in general, it singles out Elon Musk’s X as an “instance in a wider effort to restrict” Brazil’s (and other nations’) “digital developmental agenda”. We attempt to understand what this means, but first it is worth reviewing the facts.

Brazil’s law establishes that any judicial order to remove content from a social platform must specify what content is to be removed (Law 12.965, Art. 19, §1). The law also affirms the constitutional protection of free speech (Art. 5, IV, IX, and Art. 220
§2). Nevertheless, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension of the accounts of influencers, journalists and even members of Congress, all of whom were critics of the current president. X complied with these orders until April 2024, when Elon Musk stated this would violate laws in Brazil. Moraes’s threats of fines and the jailing of X’s legal representative lead X to close its office in Brazil. Moraes ordered the suspension of X for all Brazilians along with the seizure of Starlink’s assets to cover the fines he imposed. Note that Starlink is a separate company, with no connection to X besides the fact that Elon Musk is a shareholder in both. A report by the U.S. Congress found that “Moraes ordered the censorship of a Brazilian citizen for criticizing Moraes for censoring Brazilians” (p. 5).

However, instead of siding with X, the law, and Brazilians’ freedom of expression, the academics’ letter condemns Elon Musk for providing the only digital platform in Brazil that refused to censor speech deemed undesirable by some public officials. It seems the signatories believe that governments should be able to decide what their citizens can and cannot hear, and use all their might to silence criticism — essentially endorsing
authoritarianism.

More.

WILL:

WILL’s new report Back to the Past: The Fiscal Threat of Reversing Act 10 for Local Governments,estimates the fiscal impact for local and county governments to be at least $480 million annually.

The Quotes: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “Ending Act 10 would bring about $480 million in new costs for local governments statewide.  Localities would be forced to do one of two things, cut crucial services or dramatically increase funding by raising property taxes. Either way, Wisconsinites would be at a loss.”

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann stated, “Local governments have been granted greater flexibility from Act 10, which has resulted in more efficient delivery of services, pay increases for hard-working public servants, and lower property taxes for residents. I cannot imagine going back.”

About Act 10: In 2011, Wisconsin became a leader in public sector union reform with the passage of the Budget Repair Bill—better known nationally as “Act 10.” The law signed by Governor Scott Walker strongly limited the power of public sector unions to extract more and more money from state taxpayers. Today, likely based on the liberal composition of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a lawsuit was recently filed that seeks to reverse the landmark legislation.

Report’s Key Findings: The impact of overturning Act 10 on Wisconsin would be quite dramatic. In education, the law allowed school districts to move away from a ‘steps and ladders’ pay system to systems where teachers can be rewarded for their impact on academics. Terminating Act 10 would likely restore the old system where quality played no role in teacher pay.

More.

Much more on Wisconsin Act 10, here.

The Milwaukee pension scandal lead to the rise of Scott Walker and ultimately Act 10.

And:

Chicago public schools: “already the nation’s largest junk-bond issuer”

Dave Cieslewicz:

And, again, on that score school districts like Madison, which obsess over race, have made zero progress in closing the racial achievement gap. Why do liberals cling so tightly to a system that delivers no results? 

A color blind society was once, not so long ago, the liberal position on the matter. But somewhere over the past decade or two we lost our way. It became fashionable, especially in academia, to employ discrimination as a means of correcting past discrimination. That was a classic example of destroying the village in order to save it.

Because the enemy is discrimination itself. And the answer isn’t to rig the system, but to do a much better job of preparing all students to compete successfully within it.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Richard Phelps:

A less publicized goal of the recentering synchronized the verbal and math score distributions. Over time, the SAT’s math and verbal scales had developed quite different shapes, and College Board worried that that lack of symmetry threatened the SAT’s face validity among its vast non-technical customer base. Despite these explanations, however, critics accused College Board of score inflation and watering down the content of the SAT.

Now, College Board is “recalibrating” some Advanced Placement (AP) exam scales and eliciting similar reactions from critics. College Board invokes a desire to make score distributions similar across AP exams, just as they crafted similar distributions for the verbal and math SAT subtests in 1995-96.

In all, three changes currently transpire. Standards for all AP exams are being set by a new “evidence-based standard setting” (EBSS) method. Score distributions across all AP exams will have similar shapes. And score distributions for a minority of AP exams have been or soon will be adjusted—all upwards thus far.

Does the recalibration really matter for AP exam users—students, schools, teachers, and colleges? To counteract AP exam score inflation, all a college need do is raise the threshold at which it awards course credit. That’s not hard.

Not hard for independent, private colleges, that is. Indeed, some of them no longer award course credit for exam scores of three, four, or five. Public colleges, however, may not be so flexible. According to College Board,

Cap Times:

It is a victory, indeed, and we celebrate it with a great guardian of the Constitution, the rule of law and justice: Lester Pines.

Much more on Lester Pines, here.

Peter Arcidiacono, Karthik Muralidharan & John D. Singleton:

We leverage a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to private school vouchers across markets as well as students to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. To do this, we estimate several choice models on data only from control markets before turning to the treatment data for model validation. This exercise reveals that a model where school choice is constrained by ability-to-pay achieves better out-of-sample fit but still underpredicts experimental take-up of the voucher offer. We then present evidence from treatment markets that: a) the voucher offer also induced search; and b) private schools used program surplus to incentivize enrollment. Further, we show that a unified model incorporating these features can explain both the control and treatment data patterns. Estimates from that model imply that a targeted voucher program would have a marginal value of public funds (MVPF) of at least 3.

Commentary…

Sometimes, though, the public’s views aren’t all that clear.

That’s been the case in staunch Donald Trump territory with the movement to force religion, the Bible and the Ten Commandments into the public education system.

One would guess that in ultra-conservative states that gave Trump 20-to-30-point margins in the last election, requiring school kids to take Bible lessons would be a slam dunk. But Ryan Walters — Oklahoma’s Republican school chief who decreed a few weeks ago that all public schools in his state must incorporate Bible teachings in school curricula — is probably surprised.

His edict, after all, has spawned similar moves in other conservative states. Louisiana, for instance, is requiring its schools to display the Ten Commandments, and others are poised to follow suit.

By Jake Kanter

Deadline understands that London’s historic Evening Standard newspaper has been making plans to revive its former writer using artificial intelligence.

Two sources said AI Sewell has been assigned to review The National Gallery’s new Vincent van Gogh exhibition, titled Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers.

One person said the plans were discussed at the highest level of the Standard and in consultation with Lord Lebedev, the newspaper’s proprietor. Dylan Jones, editor-in-chief of the Standard, did not respond to requests for comment.

Abbey Machtig:

Plus, the combined tax impact of the city’s operational referendum and the two measures from the School District means will likely have to increase monthly rent for tenants living in his rental property. 

“This will mean about $1,500 a year, best-case scenario, which means rent for everybody will go up at least 150 bucks a month,” Freihoefer said.

If the operating referendum is approved by voters, owners of an average Madison home would see a $1,049 increase in their tax bills by 2028. If both the operating and facilities referendums are successful, taxes would increase by $1,376 by 2028.

Former district employee Sherry Barnsley wants more details: She said it’s still unclear what exactly the school district is asking for and worries voters won’t fully understand the questions on the ballot.

She said the $100 million operating referendum — which ramps up over four years but then authorizes the school district to levy taxes above the state caps in perpetuity — is particularly fuzzy. 

The $507 million facilities referendum would pay for updates to 10 schools: Five new buildings, some of which house more than one school, would be built, and two others would be renovated.

——-

In its informational materials about the referendums, the district emphasizes how much more the average homeowner would pay in taxes per month, despite the fact that property taxes are billed annually.

Marc Andreessen:

If you want to fix a broken system, you have to pull money OUT, not put more money IN.
If you put more money IN, the system interprets it as a reward and uses the money to become even more broken.
We get this for businesses. We forget it for nonprofits and governments. 🤔

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Robert Redfield:

Parents reported around 41 percent of children under 18 had “current or lifelong health conditions” when asked about 25 health conditions.

For instance, obesity in American children has increased dramatically since John F. Kennedy’s presidency, from around 4 percent in the 1960s to almost 20 percent in 2024. The causes of childhood obesity are complex, but a primary origin is clearly the modern American diet of highly processed foods.

But our food problem goes well beyond obesity: Pesticides are proven risk factors for neurodevelopmental outcomes in kids, causing maladies like ADHD. If the next president prioritizes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify which exposures are contributing to the spike in chronic disease in children, we will finally find out and end what is slowly destroying our children.

More.