School Information System

Teagan King:

The district’s overall revenues and expenses would be roughly even, at about $706 million each. That represents a 5.6% increase in revenues from the current school year, largely boosted by higher property tax revenue generated from the referendums voters approved in 2024, and a 4.1% increase in spending.

The district is planning a $38.5 million increase in revenues from property taxes next school year, with $441.6 million from property taxes going toward the operating budget. Year to year, that’s up 9.5%.The school-based property tax levy will increase by 8.3%, bringing the school portion of the property tax bill for an average Madison home to $5,186.28, according to the proposed budget. It follows a 20.4% increase for the 2025-26 school year, which the report indicates was the largest in more than 30 years.

The report also said voters are likely to support future referendums, but they could grow tired of doing so while the tax levy continues to increase.

“The accumulating levy increases may dampen that enthusiasm over time. One important consideration for MMSD officials is whether and how to lobby for legislative changes that would increase state aid to the district and offset some of these local tax increases,” the report said. “District leaders may also look to offset some of their spending increases with cuts and changes similar to the decision to require employees to pay more for their health insurance in 2027.”

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Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

John Sailer:

Interestingly, the report immediately narrows its scope down to that last complaint, that scholarship has been overrun by political goals, distorting disciplinary standards and producing bad research.

…there are limits. If an astronomy department becomes an astrology department, deference would obviously be a bad thing. This raises the question of when outside scrutiny is warranted, and what that scrutiny should look like. (The report’s own stance here is v moderate.)

The State of Scholarship.

This report is addressed to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences and who may wish, within their purview, to promote excellent scholarship in these vital fields. The charge to the committee, submitted in August 2025 and formulated by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University, reads as follows:

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Greg Lukianoff:

Yes. It is an anti-intellectual practice to do an end run around reason and rigor by appealing to quasi-mystical political dogmas that cannot be challenged.

It replaces Liberal Science with something far easier and far older: substituting what must be true according to their own simplistic moral certainties for the harder discipline of asking whether their own political dogmas might be false.

Freddie deBoer:

Recently a bunch of young people have been using the term “point of view” in a way that’s unhelpful. I say unhelpful rather than wrong because I have zero interest in jumping into the grammar wars, which aren’t actually much of a war. Just about zero people out there are actually strict grammarians, and the collective essaying world has taken sides against “grammar Nazis” at a scale of at least 1000 to 1, so it’s a war against almost no human enemy. You see that with this whole POV business; there’s ten billion essays and tweets and YouTube videos defending the practice and like one guy on the bus who hates it, but we have to pretend that he’s the hegemonic force or whatever. It’s weird stuff, but the impulse ultimately has a clear source: fear of looking old.

The deal is that much of Gen Z (and “Gen Alpha,” which is the dumbest generational name ever devised) uses “point of view,” or “POV,” to mean simply “look at this,” rather than “this image or video is shown from the point of view of X,” the traditional usage. Apparently it’s all over TikTok in particular – a video will be labeled “POV: an elephant,” and what you see is an elephant and not something seen from the perspective of an elephant. “POV: you rollerskated for the first time” but it’s just video of the TikTok user rollerskating rather than rollerskating from the perspective of the rollerskater. You get the idea. This usage is unhelpful and impractical, if you ask me, whether or not we want to call it incorrect! As is so often the case with imprecision in language, this behavior gets rid of a very useful construction and puts in its place something we already could say in many different ways. As with turning “literally” into an empty intensifier often applied to metaphorical use, the mass meta-sanctimony of the anti-grammarian set on this issue has left the English language weaker than it was and called it progressive. And now here the NYT trots out a linguist to tell you that you’re a reactionary for maybe preferring the more useful version.

Scott Atlas:

Editor’s Note: Below is the keynote address of Dr. Scott Atlas at the Chicago Thinker’s 2026 American Identity Summit. Dr. Scott Atlas MD is an American radiologist, health policy scholar, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution affiliated with Stanford University. Atlas served as a Special Advisor to President Trump and was a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020.

Good morning! It’s great to be here at my training ground, my medical school alma mater, the University of Chicago—the highlight of my academic background. It’s great to be here among many friends and colleagues and to see the students here to talk about reforming higher education. The Thinker has some of the boldest students who are committed to freedom, regardless of pressure from their own professors and peers. It is true—this is the generation that is going to save the country. 

And it’s exciting to see a common theme emerging all over the country, including outside the United States: the need to reform institutions. Several months ago in London, Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference invited me to address the broader topic, “Can Institutions Be Reformed?” As many of you know, ARC is bringing together voices from all over the world to discuss how to reinstate and preserve the institutions and best values of Western heritage, particularly the West’s unique commitment to freedom. 

The sudden emergence of this theme is also something to ponder. Why, at this moment in history, is it particularly important to consider how America’s institutions—here, colleges and universities—should be reformed, or whether they can even be reformed? 

After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing: editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and colleges and universities increasingly abandoning their essential purpose of fostering the free exchange of ideas and critical thinking in favor of agenda-driven social advocacy, particularly advocacy unbalanced toward the left. 

My answer? The tipping point finally came in 2020. COVID—the pandemic—fully exposed the massive institutional failure that could not be denied: the most tragic, the most blatant hijacking of freedom and breakdown of leadership in free societies in our lifetimes. 

Yet, oddly, the pandemic fiasco—the spark of this heightened focus on institutional reform—remained invisible at that weeklong ARC conference, unmentioned by dozens of speakers except for me. It was the elephant in the room, just as the truth about the death and destruction from the lockdowns remains missing from virtually all of America’s political discussions, including those in this administration and on university campuses today. Why has the page been turned with no accountability? Something to contemplate. 

Simon Kuper:

It feels as if they were only born half an hour ago, but my enormous twin sons are now 17 and preparing (I hope) for the French end-of-school exams, “le bac”. Come September, they should follow their sister to university in the UK, leaving my wife and me in an empty nest in Paris.

While you’re in the thick of parenthood, it seems eternal. Family life is repetition: the nappies, bedtime stories, football games and thousands of dinners. But as Nicholas Lemann wrote, it’s only a “(long) season of life”, and for us it’s ending. I remember what our cohort of new parents expected from parenthood 20 years ago, when my daughter was born. Instead we were ambushed by reality, which took on forms we hadn’t imagined.

My parenting peers in the early 2000s were mostly educated urbanites (commenters, please fill in own epithet), who thought we could shape our children through our individual decisions about parenting. The cohort’s chief metric — inevitably a point of unspoken competition — was hours spent doing childcare. The dominant ambition was to speed children up the educational ladder, teaching them to read aged three, etc. Looking back at that era, just before the financial crisis, there was still a frank admiration for success. People badly wanted their kids to make it.

Cavalier Johnson, Howard Fuller, Gregory Wesley and JoAnne Anton

• Milwaukee’s fourth-grade reading scores are among the worst for large urban districts in the nation.
• A coalition of public, charter, and private schools was formed to train educators in the science of reading.
• Wisconsin Act 20 mandates science-based literacy instruction and allocates state funding for it.
• The Milwaukee Reading Coalition says the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is needlessly delaying the release of funds.

In Milwaukee, nearly three out of four fourth graders cannot read at a basic level. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — the nation’s most respected measure of student achievement — only 9% of Milwaukee’s fourth graders scored as proficient in reading, and the city posted the largest decline in fourth-grade reading scores among major urban districts since 2019. Of the 25 large urban districts tested, only Detroit performed worse than Milwaukee.

Behind those numbers are thousands of children being failed by a system that knows this, and yet refuses to act. Wisconsin has the widest achievement gap between Black and White students of any state in the country — a distinction it has held for decades. Black fourth graders in Wisconsin score an average of 50 points below their White peers on the NAEP reading assessment. In Milwaukee, where Black students make up a significant share of enrollment, this gap represents not just a statistic but a generational crisis.

Litong Deng

The percentage of failing grades in multiple UC Berkeley computer science classes in spring 2026 is significantly higher than past semesters and marks a departure from the department’s grading guidelines.

Instructors point to students’ increased reliance on AI, lack of mathematical preparedness and understaffing as potential contributing factors.

According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F’s did not exceed 10% for either class. The electrical engineering and computer sciences department’s grading guidelines state that 7% of students in lower division courses, including CS 10 and CS 61A, should receive D’s and F’s.

Zachary Small:

The Education Department is finalizing guidelines for an earnings test that would punish nearly half of all graduate programs in visual arts, music and performance based on the low income of recent alumni, according to the government’s calculations.

The proposed guidelines apply to all university programs, and institutions whose alumni fail to meet them twice in three years could lose their ability to enroll students using federal loans. Those students would most likely need to transfer to other programs or quit their education. According to experts, that would lead to a sharp decrease in enrollment and the likelihood of school closures.

For master’s degree programs, the agency would calculate the earnings of alumni four years after graduation to see whether they earn more than the median salary for working adults aged 25 to 34 who have a bachelor’s degree. Previous tests measured all programs against the salary of working adults with high school diplomas — a lower threshold for universities to pass.

“They are taking a DOGE approach to education,” said Tom Eccles, who runs the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, adding that most universities were just learning about the guidelines. “They are deciding what the metric is, as though there were an objective way to measure the value of an arts education.”

Most students pursuing an arts degree know that becoming the next Picasso or Lady Gaga is a long shot, and that an arts degree is unlikely to have an immediate payoff. A preliminary analysis of the economic data released by the Education Department shows that many of the country’s top arts programs would not pass the revised earnings test.

Anthony Bradley:

I have watched an evangelical college close up close. Not from a distance, not through press releases, but from inside the institution. I have seen the faculty meetings where optimism slowly curdled into anxiety. I have seen the administrators who genuinely loved their students continue planning programs for a future that had already expired. I have seen the students who had no idea they were studying on borrowed time.

When The King’s College in Manhattan shut its doors in 2023, the explanations came quickly: compromised leadership, financial mismanagement, and poor decisions. These explanations were not entirely wrong. But they were convenient, because they located the problem in people rather than in the system. They allowed everyone else to feel safe. If this just was a leadership failure alone, then competent leadership could prevent it from happening again.

Here’s the hard truth folks: it can’t. And until the evangelical world is willing to say that plainly, people will be blind to what is happening nationally. 

Here it is plainly: the evangelical college system that emerged after World War II is structurally finished.Not declining. Not under pressure. It’s a wrap y’all and we’re going to see many Christian colleges close over the next few years. What we are watching across the country is systemic unraveling. The conditions that made these institutions possible have changed, and most of them are not coming back.

This is a structural argument, more so than an anecdotal one. Every declining system produces visible outliers. Late-stage contraction often concentrates enrollment in a shrinking number of institutions as weaker ones disappear. The presence of thriving schools does not refute this analysis some would argue that actually confirms it. Growth inside a collapsing pipeline is not evidence of health. It is evidence of consolidation, mergers, and shifts in brands.

By Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews:

The billing abuses run wide. Aetna said the number of investigations that found likely fraud or abusive billing by autism-therapy providers in its private-plan business shot up by 300% between 2024 and 2025—and is on track to rise by another 50% this year. 

The issues detected by the insurer’s probes include poor documentation, billing for multiple services for the same hour and claiming to provide care at home addresses that don’t really exist, said Katerina Guerraz, Aetna’s chief operating officer.

“We’re seeing just a massive inflation,” especially when providers are not in-network, Guerraz said. 

In bills reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, a daily charge for one child reached more than $30,000. 

Maciej Cieglowski:

Our intelligence level, cognitive speed, set of biases and so on is not predetermined, but an artifact of our evolutionary history.

In particular, there’s no physical law that puts a cap on intelligence at the level of human beings.

A good way to think of this is by looking what happens when the natural world tries to maximize for speed.

If you encountered a cheetah in pre-industrial times (and survived the meeting), you might think it was impossible for anything to go faster.

But of course we know that there are all kinds of configurations of matter, like a motorcycle, that are faster than a cheetah and even look a little bit cooler.

But there’s no direct evolutionary pathway to the motorcycle. Evolution had to first make human beings, who then build all kinds of useful stuff.

Ira Stoll

The Sanders plan is also a good case study of how universities and foundations are feeding left-wing ideas into the political system. Sanders acknowledges that he got the idea from two law professors, Jeremy Bearer-Friend of George Washington University Law School and Sarah Polcz of UC Davis School of Law. Bearer-Friend is a former aide to Warren, who herself is a former law professor. He’s also written for the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank funded by the Hewlett Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the Ford Foundation that published a Bearer-Friend paperproposing a $1 trillion tax to fund racial reparations. (”As with any new trillion-dollar tax, we should expect litigation. But the power to tax has been a part of our Constitution since our founding and is not on its face legally dubious.”)

Bearer-Friend and Polcz published their article on December 30, 2025, in the Columbia Journal of Tax Law, proposing, “a unique in-kind tax payment structure that would require firms with ownership of AI to remit equity shares to the public.” Their article doesn’t specify a rate. “The actual rate to be adopted will largely be a political question,” it concedes. It does say the ideal rate “will provide the adequate level of public voice in corporate decisions to address public harms of AI” and “will provide a sufficient profit interest to compensate injured workers and creators,” while only “minimally” crowding out private investment.

In April, Polcz posted to social media a version of the law journal article that was adopted for The Hill, a Capitol Hill publication that’s a frequent fallback resort for opinion pieces written by academics that have been rejected by higher-profile outlets. “Know any lawmakers looking to tax AI? We’ve got a proposal for them,” she said, with remarkable candor about the motivation of the legislators.

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An Oligarchy of Old People

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“Seize the means of production”? What would the Middle Eastern Studies graduate do if she got hold of a semiconductor fab? Could she and Ayatollah Mamdani run an oil refinery after reading Chemical Engineering for Dummies? How many New York City progressives could keep even the simplest modern factory in operation?

Dave Mass & Rindala Alajaji:

An EFF analysis of millions of searches of Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) data by police has uncovered a troubling pattern: in the absence of a warrant requirement to search ALPR databases, law enforcement agencies have moved beyond specific investigations to use these surveillance networks for virtually any whim.

Our findings suggest that the absence of a warrant requirement has fostered a culture of unrestricted access to sensitive location data, allowing agencies to leverage that data beyond the scope of specific criminal investigations.

As a refresher: Law enforcement agencies lease or purchase camera systems from Flock Safety and then mount them by the side of the road and at intersections to document every vehicle that passes, including the plate, make, model, color and distinguishing characteristics, along with the date, time and location of where it was seen. 

Law enforcement’s talking points—often scripted by the company itself—trumpet their role in solving high-stakes crimes. But the data reveals a different story. What they’re not saying is that ALPRs are also frequently used for extremely low-level investigations, such as verifying whether a student lives within a particular school zone. In some cases, police have even used this tech to conduct employment background checks and investigations into loud music complaints. Recently, a motorcyclist was even targeted for simply holding a cell phone while riding.

Max Planck Institute:

New study by Emanuela Campisi (University of Catania) and Anita Slominska and Asli Ozyurek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) reveals that Italian and Dutch adults adapt their hand gestures in remarkably similar ways when explaining new concepts to children.

New study by Emanuela Campisi (University of Catania) and Anita Slominska and Asli Ozyurek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) reveals that Italian and Dutch adults adapt their hand gestures in remarkably similar ways when explaining new concepts to children.

When adults teach children something new, words are only part of the story. A new cross-cultural study shows that adults from different cultures instinctively modify their gestures in similar ways to help children learn, suggesting that spontaneous human teaching may rely on a shared, deeply rooted communicative strategy.

Researchers found that although Italian adults used more gestures overall than Dutch adults, both groups increased the use of visually rich, two-handed gestures when demonstrating unfamiliar logic puzzles to children. The findings highlight how humans naturally adapt communication to support young learners, regardless of cultural background.

Jo Ellison:

Lately, I’ve been spending time with Bunny Mellon. The American Listerine heiress, society swan, gardener and horticulturist Rachel Lambert Mellon, nicknamed Bunny by her mother, was born in New York in 1910. Although she was from a wealthy background, her worth became stupendous upon her second marriage, to the banking heir Paul Mellon, with whom she became one of the most prolific art collectors of the 20th century. He bought Monets. She got Rothkos. Plus baubles, baskets and dozens of porcelain cauliflowers. When she died at the age of 103 in 2014, the sale of her possessions brought in $218mn.

I have been reading her biography, by Meryl Gordon, because I am intrigued by her influence on the world of luxury. Mellon was one of the most important patrons of the era, the tastemaker of her day. In particular, she shared an intense — and rumoured romantic — attachment with the Tiffany designer Jean Schlumberger, from whom she commissioned an estimated 140 jewels. These included a golden sunflower, beaded with emeralds and set in a terracotta plant pot (1960), and the first Bird on a Rock brooch — one of the US jeweller’s best-known designs.

Paul Alivisatos:

As a next step in the University of Chicago’s overall approach to artificial intelligence (AI), the University is partnering with Anthropic to provide Claude Enterprise for all academics and staff starting in July, and for all students before the fall term. Claude Chat, Cowork, and Code will be made available to the campus community. Spanning the domains of research, education, and operations: these are powerful tools that are being made available to help individuals find ways to improve our pursuit of knowledge, our commitment to teaching students how to think independently, and the ability of our staff to support this work efficiently. Access will be granted to the newest versions of Anthropic’s tools—for those who choose to use them—with improved integration with university resources and tools and more data protection than is available with private accounts.

This is a time of rapid change due to the advent of AI, and the University has been thoughtful in navigating it. Indeed, there is inspiration to be drawn from our faculty’s report on AI and Education that calls on us to be skeptical, ethical, and ambitious when it comes to AI, while remaining grounded in the habits of mind and standards of judgment that define this university. In some cases, it is clear that AI tools can be brought to bear with the desired results. In others, we will do better by retaining our previous approaches or even developing new policies to expressly protect against misuse. In all cases, our highest priority in making these tools available is to center our respect and commitment to each individual human being who is part of this community.

Linda Kinstler:

Last spring, newly admitted students to San Jose State University received an unusual video message from the institution’s president, Cynthia Teniente-Matson. Her caramel curls were tucked behind her shoulders, her hands clasped neatly at her torso. Dressed down in a royal blue hoodie, she appeared composed and approachable. “Congratulations on your admission,” she said. “At S.J.S.U., you’ll have opportunities to dive into the technologies shaping the world today, and redefine what’s possible for tomorrow.”

This was not, in fact, Teniente-Matson addressing the new class, but her brand-new custom A.I. avatar. “I’m thrilled to share this special moment with you,” the avatar said. “It’s only fitting, isn’t it? After all, technology is a cornerstone of what makes San Jose State University such an incredible place to learn, innovate and grow.”

The avatar is one feature of S.J.S.U.’s A.I. Everywhere strategy, which was formally announced in the fall of 2025 and aims to integrate the technology across campus life. Teniente-Matson devised A.I. Everywhere as part of the California State University system’s broader A.I. Initiative, introduced in February 2025. Anchored by a $16.9 million deal with OpenAI, the initiative provides a total of 500,000 licenses of ChatGPT.edu to be issued to all students, faculty and administrators. At the time, this was the largest single-institution deployment of ChatGPT in the world, billed as an attempt to turn C.S.U. — the biggest four-year public higher education system in the United States, comprising 22 distinct campuses and educating 1 out of every 10 workers in the state — into “the nation’s first and largest A.I.-powered public university system.” (The terms of the deal stipulate that OpenAI may not train its model on data from the C.S.U.)

At San Jose State — the oldest public university in the California State University system — evidence of the shift toward A.I. is evident across campus. The university now has an A.I. librarian, and its main library features a new A.I. Center for Civic and Social Good. The business school runs an A.I. boot camp for high school students; the campus career hub is sponsored by Adobe; A.I. literacy training is an orientation requirement and, last year, an A.I. agent helped coordinate commencement logistics.

BBC:

This is a privacy problem that can cost you money. Among the biggest customers for car data are insurance companies, and they’re using it to charge some people higher prices. But there’s no telling where your information is going. Some car companies admit they sell your data, but they don’t have to say who’s buying. That’s to say nothing of the fact that you might find it a little creepy. Most consumers, experts say, have no idea it’s even happening. 

“People would be shocked at the number of data points that their car collects and transmits to other people, either the manufacturer or third-party applications,” says Darrell West, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC. “It basically means your life can be recreated almost on a second-by-second basis.” 

Feeling uncomfortable yet? A federal law is about to increase the amount of data your car can gather about you. It will soon require American car companies to install infrared biometric cameras and other systems to scan your body language, track your eyes or other aspects of your behavoiur to detect whether you’re too drunk or tired to drive. But it will also open up a whole new trove of data about your health and your habits. There are no rules limiting what the car companies can do with that information. 

Ko Envangilst

Specialized small models are their strategy.Mistral showed several examples where small, fast and focused models outperform the big general-purpose ones when it comes to energy efficiency and speed: Document AI for OCR (used by the EU Patent Office to do large scale OCR), Voxtral for multilingual voice (powering Amazon’s Alexa+ in Europe), and Robostral for industrial robotics with ASML. And also in token-heavy agentic applications, speed and efficiency are becoming as important as raw capability.

Sovereignty and on-prem are their selling points. BNP Paribas runs Mistral models on-prem for KYC in Belgium, with sensitive data staying within the bank’s walls. Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (more than 1 million customers in their app). For European companies in regulated industries, this is a good alternative to relying on US hyperscalers.

A talk that was a bit out of the ordinary and that I really enjoyed was about ancient papyrus documents: a research team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences finetuned a coding LLM by Mistral (Codestral) to read tiny snippets of millennia-old discarded papyri that had sat unpublished for decades. This work helps make a collection of 180,000 documents found in the Egyptian desert accessible, a job that would have taken more than 2000 years without AI. A beautiful exampleof how AI can also help the humanities.

Brian Rosenberg

Imagine if the Mayo Clinic suddenly announced that it planned to field a professional football team, or if the Dallas Cowboys broke ground on a hospital, or if Pfizer launched a liberal-arts college. Well, no need to imagine, really. Simply enter into the world of the contemporary American research university.

Tim Harford:

What is the value of high-quality, trustworthy official statistics? Given the number of things that statistical agencies measure, we might expect that they have attempted to put a number on this too. In fact, they have often been rather coy. A UN report, “Promoting, Measuring and Communicating the Value of Official Statistics”, published in 2018, was packed with qualitative ideas about how statistics were useful: they were said to build trust in government, improve decision-making, promote equality and “help us understand who we are, have been and are becoming”. All reasonable enough, but cost-benefit analysis was thin on the ground.

A cynic might suggest this near silence speaks volumes. Maybe official statistics have little value? That was the radical view of Sir John Cowperthwaite, who was the financial secretary of Hong Kong throughout the 1960s, when it was a rapidly growing, laissez-faire British colony. Cowperthwaite thought the value of official statistics wasn’t merely minimal, but negative: he told the economist Milton Friedman that he didn’t collect economic data, because it would only encourage the Whitehall variety of mandarin to interfere.

In context, Cowperthwaite’s position was understandable: few economies were more at risk of clumsy meddling than Hong Kong, a colonial possession pursuing a libertarian path on the opposite side of the world from soft-left imperial rulers. Still, there are at least two weaknesses in his argument. The first is the hope that ignorance might restrain the interventionist impulses of governments. It might simply make those interventionist impulses clumsier. The second is the unexamined premise that only a government might find official statistics useful.

Vicky Yang:

Between 1985–2023, MIT’s faculty grew 9%. Administrative staff grew 189%. 📈 Why? In new @PNASNews paper, we use dynamical system model to show administrative bloat can emerge without empire-building–just from well-intentioned problem-solving gone awry

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What Leads to Administrative Bloat? A Dynamic Model of Administrative Cost and Waste

Svetlana Jitomirskaya And Zvezdelina Stankova:

“At UC San Diego, the number of freshmen failing to meet high-school math standards grew nearly 30-fold between 2020 and 2025. By fall 2025, 1 of 12 entering students was placed into remedial math to learn material taught in elementary and middle school”

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more.

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21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Tyler Jagt:

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

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more.

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Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

T. Keung Hui:

Thousands of teachers and supporters gathered in Downtown Raleigh on Friday for the NCAE “Kids Over Corporations” May Day march demanding higher pay and increased school funding. (The video has been updated to correct the name of NCAE President Tamika Walker Kelly). By Robert Willett | Ethan Hyman| Travis Long 

The North Carolina Association of Educators has the power to bring thousands of protesters to Raleigh, but a new report also says the state has one of the weakest teacher unions in the nation.

A new report this week from the Fordham Institute ranked North Carolina 48th in teacher union strength nationally out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report found that North Carolina had the second-largest drop in union membership since 2012, dropping from 49% of the state’s teachers to 21%.

The conservative think tank found that teacher union membership has dropped in 45 states and the District of Columbia since its last state-by-state look in 2012.

“Though it may sound fanciful to education reformers in Chicago, where the teacher union is as militant and powerful as ever, overall the data suggest that teacher unions are weaker than they were a decade ago,” according to the report.

NCAE, the state affiliate of the National Education Association, says it’s growing in strength. Tamika Walker Kelly, NCAE president, said the group has added 1,000 new members since its May 1 march in downtown Raleigh.

——

Related: WEAC

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty

In Episode 10 of the “If You Can Keep It” Podcast, we shift our focus to America’s classrooms to examine the current state of education in Wisconsin and beyond. We dive into why the traditional “assembly line” model of public schooling may be out of date, how the birth rate collapse is driving school consolidation, and the balance between public education and school choice.WILL President Rick Esenberg is joined by Dr. Will Flanders, the architect behind WILL’s most impactful reports and data-driven research on academic achievement. They look ahead at a new model for schools, exploring the technological impact of AI, and the “Southern Surge” in literacy to see what lessons Wisconsin can learn from unexpected success stories across the country.

———

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Steve Yegge:

It turns out interviewing was broken long before I learned the trade, and despite the many attempts to band-aid it, it’s still broken today. It has managed to survive in spite of that. But it is finally dying on its own. People are a bit unclear on what’s next, so we’ll talk about some of our options.

But it’s not an easy path I bring you, no silver bullet. Remember that, grasshopper, when you get to the end and come back to yell at me.

Two Big Dogs

Back at Amazon, we had this elite group, the Bar Raisers, which I hear is similar to a role at Microsoft they call As-Appropriate (AA). In both cases, a trusted interviewer (the BR/AA) is assigned to every interview loop, and has the power to veto any unqualified people the interviewers try to sneak through. I was a BR, and also part of “Bar Raisers Core”: a small group Bezos and Dalzell tasked with defining the BR role itself, choosing new bar raisers, training them, and reporting on the program’s efficacy.

The BR and AA roles are a tacit acknowledgement that you can’t trust your interview teams to make good hiring decisions. Which even more broadly, suggests that if every single interview loop needs a babysitter, then it is a flawed process. But we were doing our best.

Wall Street Journal:

Union leaders like to pitch “solidarity” among their members, but it’s often a political fiction. So it was last week when the rank-and-file of the Chicago Teachers Union rejected a union ballot question seeking a dues increase. Take that, comrade.

CTU president Stacy Davis Gates and vice president Jackson Potter told their colleagues that, while votes are still being counted, “the results seem clear—a majority of CTU members have elected not to implement the proposed dues restructuring at this time.” The memo, reported by the Chicago Policy Center, says that with some 80% of schools counted, 60% or so of members had rejected the plan.

The union tries to explain away the rejection by noting the CTU has been busy and that “even with 72 wins the ’96 Bulls still lost 10 games.” Why insult Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen?

The CTU, one of the most left-wing unions in the nation, had sought the restructuring to “make our dues more equitable.” But members understood the change would have meant snatching up to $800 a year more from their paychecks.

Eleanor Olcott:

China is overhauling the world’s largest surveillance network with advanced AI, giving the state more automated powers to track people, analyse behaviour and predict potential unrest in real time. 

An FT analysis of more than a dozen procurement documents and interviews with people familiar with the contracts found that local governments across China were deploying new AI-powered surveillance systems as Beijing pushed police forces towards so-called predictive policing. 

The upgrades mark China’s most significant push in years to modernise a surveillance apparatus built a decade ago that authorities already use extensively to monitor the public, reduce street crime, suppress dissent and manage social stability. 

While Beijing’s surveillance state has long been touted as cutting-edge, its systems have become constrained by ageing hardware, fragmented software platforms and limited AI functions. 

It is now investing in new generations of AI-enabled cameras and software that can interpret scenes, identify patterns of behaviour and retrieve footage using written prompts, sharply reducing the need for manual police review. 

Ashlea Ebeling:

In the Lyon family’s case, big tax benefits are at stake. Ed died in 2019, when rules let people take minimum distributions from inherited retirement accounts over their lifetimes, allowing the balances to grow tax deferred for decades.

Under federal law, employers are generally required to pay out workplace retirement accounts to a surviving spouse, or the last recorded beneficiary if the spouse has signed a waiver forgoing the funds. In most cases, these designations trump what’s spelled out in a will or trust.

That can result in protracted legal fights among competing heirs.

In one recent case, for instance, a man’s $1 million-plus 401(k) went to an ex he had split from decades earlier instead of his brothers, because her name was on a 3×5 card. In another, an electrical engineer’s four children were listed as the designated beneficiaries for his $3 million 401(k), but his new wife’s spousal rights took precedence and she got the money.

Muriel Blaive, PhD:

The greatest intellectual failure of the Covid years was not that experts and intellectuals made mistakes. Mistakes were inevitable in a crisis marked by fear, uncertainty, incomplete knowledge, and real danger. Governments faced difficult choices. Scientists worked with imperfect data. Citizens had to act without knowing what would come next. No serious person should pretend that the pandemic presented simple decisions. The failure was different: it came afterward.

Having claimed extraordinary moral authority during the emergency, many of the intellectuals, experts, journalists, academics, and commentators who helped define the meaning of the crisis have shown remarkably little interest in examining that authority once the emergency ended. They were willing to speak in the name of science, reason, solidarity, responsibility, and public morality. They were indeed willing to divide the social world into the responsible and the irresponsible, the enlightened and the benighted, the rational and the dangerous. Yet now that the consequences of the Covid response have become clearer, many of the same figures appear eager to declare the matter closed. We are told that Covid is behind us. The world has moved on. There are new crises, new wars, new elections, new emergencies, new objects of anxiety. Why reopen old divisions? Why relitigate decisions made under pressure? Why continue arguing about a crisis that has passed?

The answer is simple: because the crisis has not passed in the only sense that matters historically. Covid is not behind us if its consequences remain unexamined, if emergency practices altered the relationship between citizens and institutions, if children lost years of education and social development, and if loneliness, distrust, surveillance, censorship, bureaucratic overreach, and social fragmentation became normalized. It is not behind us if the people who claimed authority during the crisis have not yet reflected on how they used it.

———

Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”

Svetlana Jitomirskaya, Zvezdelina Stankova:

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, the University of California system in 2020 abolished the requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. That was contrary to the unanimous recommendation of the Standardized Testing Task Force, a faculty group that had studied the issue for more than a year. This temporary policy became permanent under pressure from the state of California. 

As mathematics professors at UC Berkeley, we have seen the results: a yawning preparation gap among students that undermines the goals of access and equity for which the change to a test-blind admissions system was made.

———

: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Teagan King:

As the Madison School District mulls its first districtwide cellphone use policy, some of Madison’s high school teachers and parents are pushing for stricter rules, particularly in the high schools.

The current proposal would set a bell-to-bell phone ban for elementary and middle school students and an off-and-away approach for high schoolers.

Wisconsin’s public school districts are required to create a cellphone policy restricting use during instructional time by July, under a state law passed in October. Madison’s proposed policy classifies “instructional time” as classes, assemblies and labs.

Under the district’s proposed policy, which would cover “wireless communication devices” including smartphones, e-readers and smartwatches, kindergarteners through eighth graders would be prohibited from accessing devices during the school day, including free times like lunch and recess.

The policy would be less strict with high schoolers, who would be prohibited from phone use during instructional time but could use their devices during passing periods and lunch. It would require a phone storage system such as a schoolwide system or boxes in individual classrooms.

———

More.

Chris Rickert:

A Dane County judge on Monday dismissed a child sex crimes case against a former Sun Prairie School District dean of students who was sentenced in April to 18 years in federal prison.

Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier, 31, was sentenced on April 28 for creating child pornography after he pleaded guilty to soliciting and receiving a video of a partially clothed Sun Prairie West High School student.

The Dane County District Attorney’s Office on Monday morning moved to dismiss its state case alleging similar behavior by Gilkey-Meisegeier and Judge Nicholas McNamara signed an order to do so.

The state’s July 28 criminal complaint charged Gilkey-Meisegeier with 13 counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of child sexual exploitation.

According to that complaint and police testimony in his case, Gilkey-Meisegeier victimized two students at West and downloaded images of a third girl whose nude photos he found on the internet.

In the federal case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Gilkey-Meisegeier groomed multiple female students and put photos of students’ faces on hundreds of nude photos of adults he found on the internet. He also had a nude photo of a 12-year-old girl on his phone, a sentencing memorandum says.

Also charged in connection with Gilkey-Meisegeier’s case is his former boss, former West Principal Jennifer Ploeger.

——-

More.

Matthew J. Slaughter and David Wessel:

One road leads to historic opportunity. Taking this route requires continuing to discover and harness innovations like artificial intelligence and clean tech to boost productivity and to yield widely shared prosperity and, thus, to restore confidence in the American dream. The other road is potholed by further widening of the chasm between economic winners and losers and narrowed by walls that the U.S. is building to block the global flows of products, capital, people and ideas that the nation promoted for decades after World War II.

Americans increasingly voice anxiety and skepticism about the forces of innovation, globalization and competition. Too many have not experienced, or do not expect their children to experience, the growth in income, wealth and opportunity they consider adequate—relative to their memories of earlier decades, and relative to those at the top of the income distribution, and relative to their aspirations.

Three questions confront American capitalism at this crossroads, the resolution of which will shape the lives of future generations. Will America deliver economic opportunity to more of its people—or will the gap between the extraordinarily successful and struggling widen? Will America continue building walls to the world—or will it build new bridges? And will America strike the right balance between competition’s creative destruction and the government’s regulatory guard rails—or will it tilt too far in one direction or the other?

Jackson Woodward:

Public records turned up by The Ellis Collective, a student-led research group, have revealed that the UC system shared data collected by automated license plate readers at multiple campuses with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal agencies, in apparent violation of state law.

The collective also raised concerns about the possibility that UC Berkeley, which maintains data-sharing agreements for its system of six ALPR cameras, may have shared data that could have potentially wound up in federal hands.

In California, sharing data collected by ALPR systems with out-of-state agencies is illegal and could incur fines of up to $2,500 per instance of illicit sharing.

Reports from ALPR provider VehicleManager at UC Riverside and UC Merced show that data collected on campus was forwarded to “CBP – NTC,” an acronym for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center.

UC Office of the President spokesperson Stett Holbrook did not respond to a request for comment on the apparent violation of state law.

Justin LaHart:

“Young people with college degrees are more likely to be employed, they are more likely to be earning money,” said Hershbein.

Among young people who don’t have bachelor’s degrees, there is a larger share who are sitting out—meaning, not even looking for work. The Labor Department doesn’t count them in the unemployment rate. Rather, the unemployment rate includes only people actively looking for work.

Hershbein found that in the first quarter the labor-force participation rate—the share of the population either working or looking for work—averaged 75.9% for people whose educations span high school through associate degrees. That was down from 77.1% in the first quarter of 2019. Meanwhile, the participation rate for young people with bachelor’s degrees was 86.7%, up from 85.7%.

So it looks as if the narrowing gap in the unemployment rate for young college graduates and their less-educated peers has come about because the college crowd is participating more actively in the labor market while others are moving to the sidelines.

Adam Ellwanger

One of my most memorable experiences as a college student was an insult I received from my professor. I had missed an exam due to work, and I asked him if I could make it up on another day. He reluctantly agreed. But when the day for the make-up arrived, I forgot about it. I needed an excuse: if I got a zero, I’d fail the course. I should have told him the truth and asked for mercy. But I lied. I told him that I had to work again. To my surprise, he looked at me and said, “If your work interferes with college, then you shouldn’t be incollege.”

I was offended (which is ridiculous, since I had lied). His remark struck me as “classist” and “exclusionary”—words I wouldn’t have used at the time. How much students are required to work in college depends on their family income. Should people be excluded from higher education because they can’t afford to study full-time? What an elitist! 

The thing was that I didn’t have to work much in college. My parents made sacrifices to pay for my tuition, room, and board. They didn’t give me any discretionary money, so I had to work some. But about ten hours a week at the library was enough to keep the drinks flowing and a pack of cigarettes in my pocket. 

Cyril Hedoin

This is not completely new. The “empirical turn” of economics has been well documented for quite a while now. It is explained by a conjunction of factors: the low- hanging fruit of economic theory has largely been picked, access to large datasets has been democratized, and computational power has been exponentially increasing. These factors have contributed to raising the opportunity costs of theoretical innovation to such a level that it now hardly pays off for junior economists to specialize in theoretical economics. However, what Cowen is describing is more than that. He’s describing a process whereby economists are progressively forgetting the marginalist roots of their discipline, roots that are still taught in introductory economics classes. It is a process in which economists are substituting machine-learning methods to build incredibly complex models (up to 360,000 factors, as Cowen documents) for economic—marginalist— reasoning based on basic concepts such as supply and demand and opportunity cost. In a way, we seem to be back to the old “measurement without theory” debate of the 1940s, but in a radically different context with more access to data and more computing power.

Katie Baker:

On this day a year ago, I was feeling pretty despondent. The 8th grade Social Studies STAAR test preliminary results had just been released, and I felt like I had done my students a disservice. While 75% of my students had reached Approaches (passed), only 37% had achieved Meets (on grade level), and even more demoralizing merely 16% accomplished Masters (above grade level). The state of Texas established this three tier system of grading for its yearly exam since the establishment of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test. Earlier in the spring of 2025, I had watched the Steplab Documentary, Great Teaching, Unpacked, and knew I wanted to employ certain aspects of the teaching within my own classroom. However, after receiving my results, it no longer felt like a choice, it was a necessity. 

To give the reader a little background, the 8th Grade Social Studies test is one that Texas students historically have struggled to pass since its inception in 2013.

While my scores last year were better or equal to the state average, I knew I had to do a better job of planning, asking questions, creating lessons and activities that mirrored the learning goals for each unit and would mimic the type of thinking needed to digest a question and decipher the best answer. In other words, I needed to grow my students’ knowledge and make it more durable.

Kiran Pfitzner

Thomas Carlyle famously claimed that “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” In his view, history only really “progressed” when a “great man” through his actions ushered in a new epoch. Napoleon was the archetype for this model, a man who seemingly came from nothing to leave an indelible mark on world history. This model places extreme focus on individuals and thus on elite politics. The theory does not account for mass politics or leave room for the histories of those far from the levers of power. The clear deficiencies of a focus on “great men” led to its abandonment in favor of a broader approach to history, more interested in historical forces than in personalities. This historiographical turn led to the exploration of many important and previously neglected areas, yet “history from below” came with problems of its own. By emphasizing the role of structural forces, it deemphasized the role of individuals. With this approach, the course of history begins to appear inevitable. If it was the social and political forces of the French Revolution that made Napoleon successful, the logical conclusion is that it would have made no difference to the course of history should he have, say, suffered a fatal stroke in 1801, a premise few would accept. It is clearly untrue when applied to specific cases. Not only who ends up in power, but the specific decisions they make are deeply consequential. Who would really contend that the 20th century would remain unchanged had Hitler been killed in WWI?

The synthesis position is what I call here the “mediocre man” theory of history. The idea of this mediocre man theory is that history is not just shaped by great men or by mass sociological forces that make individual irrelevant. Instead, while it is shaped by structural forces, it is also shaped by ordinary people who end in positions of extraordinary importance. Sometimes those individuals have vision and the character to try to impose that vision on the world and constitute the “great” figures of history. Others are complete incompetents you wouldn’t trust to run a lemonade stand. As su, history is not shaped by the talented alone and mundane failures may be as consequential as grand successes. Dilettante monarchs neglect crucial reforms, awkward diplomats reinforce prejudices, military thinkers become set in their ways, etc. These idiosyncratic, average figures shape history not necessarily any less than their more talented counterparts. 

The Globe & Mail:

That should have been the starting point for the media in May, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation first issued a press release announcing the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” through the use of ground-penetrating radar that identified subterranean anomalies.

The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion. The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found. Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made reference to “mass graves” (a historically fraught phrase that does not appear in the Tk’emlúps 2021 press release).

Perhaps it will be proven, some day, that there are hundreds of unmarked graves at Kamloops. But it was not proven to be true in May, 2021. It is not proven to be true today.

Jordan Schachtel:

Something curious is happening in town halls and zoning meetings across America. From suburban Maryland to the Arizona desert, from Wisconsin’s statehouse to California’s San Gabriel Valley, the same pattern keeps repeating: residents show up worried about water use, power demand, or noise from a proposed data center—and standing next to them, megaphones in hand, are organizers from Code Pink and a Marxist-Leninist political party headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Share

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) has quietly become one of the most visible forces in the rapidly escalating war on American AI infrastructure. By a conservative count, PSL chapters have led or organized anti-data center protests in at least nine to ten distinct campaigns since late 2025. The Dossier found a significant presence in Prince George’s County, Maryland; East Charlotte, North Carolina; Tucson; Springfield, Illinois; Madison and Milwaukee; St. Louis; the Puente Hills; Atlanta’s DeKalb County; and northern Minnesota, among others.

Jackson Walker:

According to Forward Literacy, however, some 150 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools appear to be failing in the execution of early literacy remediation plans, which lay out exactly how parents will be notified and what steps will be taken to help students.

While schools are supposed to alert parents when new testing data is released, executive director Katie Kasubaski said the information is often merely uploaded to schools’ internal grading systems. Often, she said, parents either can’t access these or aren’t taught how. This, she said, leads parents to go uninformed about key deficiencies in their child’s education.

Instead of being instructed on how to find their students’ data, Kasubaski told Badger Institute “some parents are unaware.”

“Parents were technically notified but just didn’t know to look in the system for the scores,” she said.

Even the scope of how much information parents are missing isn’t clear. Kasubaski compiled a list identifying nearly 150 school districts and some charter schools as not meeting the law’s requirement that they publicly post their early literacy remediation plans detailing how they ensure that struggling readers progress toward reading proficiency and communicate that information to families.

———-

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Julie Jargon:

“Catching people doing embarrassing things has been going on for some time, and this is the more recent iteration of that,” says Catherine Bradshaw, a professor and senior associate dean for research at the University of Virginia.

School cafeterias are a common place for bullying to occur, she says, because the student-to-staff ratio is much higher than in a classroom. Bradshaw, who studies children’s mental health and bullying prevention, has been collecting data on 25,000 students. When asked where at school they’ve been bullied in the past month, 14% of elementary students and 18% of both middle- and high-school students reported it happening in the cafeteria.

Eating in a classroom

Recent graduate Nihar Patel hadn’t eaten lunch in the cafeteria at his Fairfield, Ohio, school since his freshman year because of lunch-shaming. He says he personally was never a target, though. One of his good friends was biting into a turkey sandwich when she noticed a flash: A group of other girls had taken her photo and posted it to the school’s Class of 2026 Snapchat page.

“She stopped eating at school,” 18-year-old Patel says, explaining that his friend didn’t want to talk about it but gave him permission to. “I know she’s always had body issues.”

Brian Potter:

Elon Musk calls the ratio of the final cost of a product to the cost of its raw materials the “idiot index.” A high idiot index suggests a highly inefficient process with a lot of wasteful operations that could be dramatically improved. A low idiot index suggests a process with much less room for substantial improvements. (It was allegedly the high idiot index of rockets that convinced Musk he could beat existing aerospace companies and that SpaceX was worth pursuing.)4

Armed with this concept, let’s look at the cost breakdown of a typical US single-family home, courtesy of Craftsman’s National Construction Estimator. The chart below shows the hard costs of construction: what it takes to put up the actual, physical building.

Jason Locasale:

The problem is that the erosion of academia did not stem from a lack of conservative viewpoints. It came from an administrative takeover and the corporatization of universities. Bureaucracies expanded. Administrators accumulated power. Scholarship, research, and teaching became secondary. The same administrators continue moving from institution to institution, getting promoted along the same career track while outsiders, independent thinkers, and the strongest scientists are marginalized.

Conservatives should not assume that changing the values statement changes the institution. The values statement was never the institution.

Rory Truex:

The Semester That Shook My Faith as a Professor

As I write this, my students are taking an in-person exam on Chinese politics. Three hours, closed book, no computers, pencil and paper. It’s Saturday morning. I am sitting outside a lecture hall, and they are emerging, slowly, with cramped hands, glad to be done with the test and the semester.

——

More.

Sherman Criner

In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier. What are Americans, particularly those concerned about the state of higher education, to make of these findings? Are they just one of many societal indicators of an “empire in decline,” or are they more localized signs of a defect in the American system of higher education?

To answer this question, one must first understand that this skepticism is not exactly borne out in the decisions of these young Americans. Data on immediate college enrollment rates of American high school completers—provided by the National Center for Education Statistics—demonstrates a fairly constant trendof high schoolers enrolling in college from 2002 to 2022. Though it is true that 3.2 percent fewer high school graduates immediately enrolled in college from 2002 to 2022, these numbers are rather deceptive. 

“ai” weekly:

What does adversarial use look like? You treat the AI output as a first draft from a smart-but-overconfident junior engineer. You don’t reject it reflexively and you don’t accept it wholesale. You interrogate it.

Here’s a prompt pattern I’ve baked into my actual workflow:
Here's the solution you proposed: [paste output] Now argue against it. What are the edge cases this doesn't handle? What assumptions did you make that might not hold in a production system? What would you change if you knew this code would be read by a senior engineer in a security audit?

Run that after any non-trivial AI-generated solution. What comes back is almost always useful — missed error states, implicit assumptions about input shape, security surface area that got glossed over. And critically: you are now thinking alongside the tool, not just consuming its output.

That loop — generate, interrogate, revise — is where judgment lives. It’s where you stay sharp.

Owen Yingling:

Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.

Take the infamous photograph of a UCLA student showing off a ChatGPT window at graduation. What exactly does it mean? There are a million silly articles and think-pieces that unwittingly engage with it at the most charitable level: the student is showing off how he used ChatGPT to cheat on his essays, complete his final project, whatever, in order to graduate. Cheating on examinations is not particularly interesting or new. “Perhaps,” these pieces seem to chide in a stern parental voice, “the schools need to really crack down on AI because it makes cheating so much easier.” This is a cozy and noble sentiment that conflates a difference in kind with a difference in degrees. I do not think anyone over the age of 23, even if you are a teacher, graduate student, or professor, understands the extent to which AI usage affects every appendage of the university system.

The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at “elite” universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training.

I did not really notice the sing-songy cadence in the voice of one of my professors until my friend pointed it out: “Do you think he’s writing his lectures with Chat?” I am a tired and lazy student. The senior slump has started a quarter too early for me. “Who cares,” I thought.

Douglas Belkin:

University commencement speeches used to send graduates into the world with a boost of optimism and a dollop of advice. Now the events have become a political minefield.

Georgetown University’s law-school speaker stepped aside, the school wrote in a letter Wednesday, after students challenged his support for Israel. At South Carolina State, a rescinded speaker invitation ignited a DEI fight that now threatens the school’s funding.

At Utah Valley University, where a gunman killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk last year, the commencement speaker considered wearing a bulletproof vest under her gown—before pulling out altogether. New York University colleges have limited student speeches to prerecorded remarks.

Political violence, clashes over race and diversity, and geopolitical tensions have put many Americans on edge. Now that friction is spilling into commencement, a ceremony long reserved for good cheer.

Schools are generally steering away from partisan speakers but threading the needle is tough, said Robert Shibley, a lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The underlying threat of violence, including a recent gunman at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, “has given schools an excuse to use safety concerns as a kind of catchall to do what they want.”

John Psmith:

Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers, Alexander Zvonkin (Moscow Center for Continuing Mathematical Education, 2007).

To me, one of the greatest historical puzzles is why the Cold War was even a contest. Consider it a mirror image of the Needham Question: Joseph Needham famously wondered why it was that, despite having a vastly larger population and GDP, Imperial China nevertheless lost out scientifically to the West. (I examined this question at some length in this review.) Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1with the United States for so long?

The puzzle was partly solved for me, but partly deepened, when those of us who grew up in the ‘90s and ‘00s encountered the vast wave of former Soviet émigrés that washed up in the United States after the fall of communism. Anybody who played competitive chess back then, or who participated in math competitions, knows what I’m talking about: the sinking feeling you got upon seeing that your opponent had a Russian name. These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking. Today, those same Russians are all over Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Ivy League math departments, still overrepresented in technical fields. What explains it? Are Russians just naturally better at math and physics?

When I related these questions to an Ashkenazi-supremacist friend of mine, he immediately suggested that “maybe it’s because they’re all Jewish.” (I’ve noticed that the most philosemitic people and the most antisemitic people sometimes have curiously similar models of the world, they just disagree on whether it’s a good thing.) My friend’s question wasn’t crazy, since there are definitely times when asking “were they all Jewish?” yields an affirmative answer. But in this case I had to disappoint him with the knowledge that many of these Russian math and chess superstars were gentiles.2 What’s more, by the ‘60s and ‘70s the Soviets had an entire discriminatory apparatus dedicated to keeping Jews out of the scientific establishment, so it would be impressive indeed if they were the foundation of its success.

Another possible explanation actually hinges on the relative poverty of the Soviet Union. Assume there are a lot of people out there with natural mathematical talent, but who given their druthers would major in underwater basket-weaving instead. The United States, because it’s so wealthy, can afford to “waste” a huge proportion of our talented population on humanities, arts, and other stuff that doesn’t involve you sitting in the school library until 3am. In other words, not going into a technical field is a form of luxury, which America can afford to consume. The Soviets, rather like the Chinese today, were forced by their underdog status to allocate human capital more efficiently (and had the authoritarian means to do so by force if necessary). This theory is related to the curious fact that, on average, the more feminist your society, the fewer women there are in math and science — which makes total sense if you assume that on average women are good at math but uninterested in it.

Miranda Dunlap:

Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development officials say whether the program continues or grows depends on if districts get on board and sponsor trainees to join up. But district leaders say a major hurdle is the cost — a key appeal of an apprenticeship is the employer paying them for the time they spend learning, but many public schools are already strapped for cash. Some want more funding tied to the program. 

“(It’s) stalling a little bit,” said Trent Sorensen, a Fox Valley Technical College dean. “We don’t have any (students) coming in for the fall. … There’s plenty of time, but it’s not taking off like it did in other states, and it’s simply because of the funding.”

A new way to train teachers

Wisconsin schools struggle to find enough teachers needed to lead classrooms — a problem largely fueled by poor retention and new workers moving to other states after graduating.

In 2024, Congress came through with some assistance: $570,000 in federal funds earmarked for establishing a teacher apprenticeship program in Wisconsin. 

Officials from DWD, the Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Technical College System, and two universities teamed up to debut the pilot in January 2024. They praised the “earn-while-you-learn” approach to establishing a pipeline of workers: Districts could guarantee they’d have future teachers, while also filling lower-skilled jobs in the meantime. 

Brad Stulberg: 

A popular podcaster recently said drinking a few glasses of wine “ruined the next three days of his life.”

He specified he “didn’t get drunk,” but “got worse sleep that night” and said that when he looked at his wrist-worn device it messed up his score and “dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol” and he podcasted worse as a result.

Y’all—this optimization stuff can make you super fragile.

Before I go any further, an important disclaimer: alcohol is not good for you, especially if you are someone who struggles to stop after a drink or two. If you have a substance-use disorder or family history of substance-use disorders then a few drinks can absolutely ruin your week (or worse). There is nothing wrong with choosing to abstain for any reason at all. And yes, of course, getting drunk can derail a day or two.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Rather, it’s the latest example in a long line of internet optimization culture: eat this way, sleep that way, wake at this time, do that single exercise, follow this guru, take that supplement… This content is more about the performance of being great than the actual pursuit of greatness itself. It can even lead to anxiety.

Clayton Burns:

This is staggering and unbelievable, but Harvard has done nothing:

… Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. (The End of the English Major in The New Yorker.)

How would these chronic grammar problems be solved by the SAT? Garber has no sense.

Pamela Paul:

Brandon Webb is talking the way parents do when their kids aren’t around—tallying their strengths and foibles, failures and wins, and the extent to which his own shortcomings as a father may have contributed.

Much of this self-appraisal is detailed in his tenth book, “Puddle Jumpers: Powerful Mental Techniques from a Navy SEAL Performance Coach and Father of Three,” which comes out next week.

About halfway into the conversation, over Zoom from an Airbnb in the French Alps, it becomes clear that two of those kids, Jackson, 24, and Madison, 21 (both pseudonyms used in the book), have been flitting in and out of the room the whole time. They occasionally pop on screen to fact-check or elaborate on their father’s responses to questions.

“This was the most fun and fastest book I’ve ever written,” Webb, 51, says. The author of the memoir “The Red Circle” and “The Killing School: Inside the World’s Deadliest Sniper Program,” never imagined he’d write a parenting book. “I cried three or four times while writing.”

What made him cry? “Just these vulnerable moments with my kids,” he says. Madison failing to pass her purple belt test in Taekwondo. His son Tyler (also a pseudonym), now 19, getting kicked off the basketball team. The letter Jackson wrote to his parents explaining why he was going to the prom despite being grounded over an incident the family dubbed “Operation Weed.”

WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty today announced the launch of its statewide student contest, “What America Means to Me,” celebrating the 250th anniversary of American Independence.

The contest invites Wisconsin students in kindergarten through 12th grade to submit an original 30-60 second video reflecting on freedom, America’s founding principles, and the opportunities afforded by living in a free society. The contest is open to all public, charter, private, and homeschool students who are U.S. citizens and reside in Wisconsin.

“We want students to think about what America means to them personally and why our founding principles still matter today,” said Cory Brewer, Deputy Counsel at WILL. “As our nation approaches its 250th anniversary, this is an opportunity for the next generation to reflect on freedom, opportunity, and civic responsibility in their own words.”

Winners will receive cash prizes of $2,026 for first place, $776 for second place, and $250 for third place. Additionally, the first-place winner and his or her parents or guardians will receive complimentary tickets to WILL’s annual Celebration Dinner this fall, where the winner will be recognized.

Nick Mark: 

»

Human athletic achievement is impressive. Elite marathoners sustain ~75–85% VO₂ max [the maximum rate of oxygen consumption during peak exercise] for hours. Humans can outrun horses in extreme heat and over distance. But evolution has optimized humans for endurance efficiency rather than for maximum oxygen flux. How do we compare to other animals and what can we learn about physiology from their adaptations?

Every March, teams of sled dogs depart Willow, Alaska on the Iditarod: a 938 mile race to Nome, run in legs totaling roughly 16 hours of effort per day, over 8–11 days (the current record is 7 days, 14 hours). The dogs run in temperatures that can drop below −40°C, consuming 10,000–12,000 kcal per day. They do not develop the rhabdomyolysis [destruction of striated muscle cells] that would destroy a human athlete attempting equivalent work.

Scott Allen:

For the educational establishment and their advocates, there is never enough money. For the rest of Wisconsin, we expect better results with the money spent.

Comparatively, MPS receives more aggregate total revenue than the four next-largest school districts combined and more than the lowest 191 school districts combined. MPS’s per-pupil revenue is the 82nd highest out of 421 school districts in Wisconsin, effectively in the top 20%. 

Chris Mellor:

Norway’s National Library is developing a large language model (LLM) that understands the Norwegian language and is using 2 PB of Huawei OceanStor Dorado flash storage in its AI training data pipeline.

Marius Husnes, the Head of IT Platform at the library (Nasjonlbiblioteket) discussed the project at Huawei’s ID Forum 2026 in Paris, saying that no commercial LLM provider was developing a local (Norwegian) language LLM. He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language.

Norway’s Ministry of Culture tasked the National Library with building a sovereign AI (LLM) as the library has the single largest digital collection of Norwegian books, newspapers, web pages and so forth in the country. Like many state libraries it is entitled to receive copies of every published book and broadcasted content. Its legal deposit mandate in this area extended beyond books, as it was duty-bound to collect and preserve all of Norway’s cultural heritage. 

An agreement with Norwegian newspapers permitted LLM training on copyrighted content and, Husnes said: ”No private company has this.”

The library was also well-placed to do this as it had been digitizing its collection since 2005 and had amassed 20 PB of unique data stored in 3-2-1 form (3 copies, 2 media types, 1 off-site), meaning some 60 PB overall. The digitization process for the raw text, sound, moving pictures, still images and web content involved much OCR scanning, and generated a lot of metadata, and also APIs for online access.

neeraj@ente.com

Some secrets are too important to trust to one person, and too important to lose if that person disappears.

A company wants three officers present before the master key is used. A family wants account recovery to need more than one envelope. A team wants a backup that survives a missing member without handing anyone the whole thing.

Adi Shamir (the S in RSA), published a way to do this in 1979. Split a secret into pieces so that some number of them can recover it, and any smaller number reveals nothing at all. Not “is hard to crack.” Reveals nothing.

The core idea fits on a page.

Jack Despain Zhou

I was surprised at the vehemence of the pushback I got. Some of it was inevitable—there are always a few genuine Maoists around—but a lot of generally good-faith left-leaning people in my circles reacted with harsh skepticism. One representative reply from a friend, Elijah, put it like this:

Seeing a holistic picture of a great and terrible figure and responding with rage is what happens when ideological defenses are triggered and feel it necessary to shut down critical thinking. Having this kind of response to this paragraph is a red flag for your reasoning.

Another popular reply came from a self-described “Bernie Sanders–Bill Clinton Democrat”: 

I’m genuinely confused by people’s objections to this. Seems like a pretty objective and well balanced account of Mao

And another from a friend, @NaMesoAtta:

this seems pretty balanced to me, especially from a global perspective. It would be one thing if it didn’t prominently mention the millions he killed or his abusive totalitarian reign, but it does. It just also mentions other things that undeniably matter historically!

Now, I should be clear that people are absolutely correct to note that I am no fan of Mao. I view him alongside Hitler and Stalin as one of the three most catastrophic leaders of the twentieth century, a murderous tyrant whose greatest contribution to human well-being was his death. But my objection is not that the article doesn’t uncritically represent my own view. I’m not asking Wikipedia to make a prosecutor’s case against the man; I can do that myself. I’m upset because the section looks precisely how I would approach a statement were I Mao Zedong’s defense attorney.

Roxanne Egan-Elliott:

“The government never had a lawful basis to fire us,” says Nicole Duncan, the chair of the Greater Victoria School Board.

The Greater Victoria School Board’s chair is calling the province’s decision to concede its case against nine trustees who were challenging their firings on Monday “complete vindication.”

“The government never had a lawful basis to fire us,” Nicole Duncan said.

The province’s dispute with the board stemmed from the board’s decision to cancel the school police liaison program in the district. The Education Ministry demanded a school safety plan but said it was unsatisfied with what was submitted.

The trustees had requested a judicial review of their terminations, which was expected to begin on Monday.

Instead, after text exchanges involving a senior Education Ministry official were disclosed to the trustees’ lawyers over the weekend, the province agreed to an order that means the trustees were effectively never fired.

Greg Lukianoff:

We need to do disconfirmation on an absolutely massive scale.

I think about this all the time now. The first step is to go after scholarly misconduct, plagiarism, falsified data, and p-hacking. Then we need to investigate which scholarship rely on studies that have since been refuted, discredited, or retracted.

The result will be that we discover we know a lot less than we think we do. But that is how reliable knowledge is created.

AI will allow us to do this on an epic scale, and we should lean into that. One of the great discoveries in the history of the species is that our brains lie to us about how simple and clear the world appears. We are extraordinarily good at self-deception. It is only through disconfirmation that we can complete the arduous process of seeing the world as it is.

We have been handed a huge opportunity to vastly improve our understanding of the world. We must not shrink from it.

Owen Tucker-Smith:

A vocal band of Colorado software engineers and venture capitalists are increasingly grumbling that their tech haven in the Rocky Mountains is devolving into the place of their nightmares: California.

During the 2010s, the stretch from Boulder to Colorado Springs, dubbed “Silicon Mountain” for its concentration of founders, was minting a new startup every 72 hours. Now a collection of more than 300 business leaders say burdensome regulations are hindering growth—and that as a result, dozens of companies are skipping town.

A widely circulated report last month from the state’s chamber of commerce reported a loss of publicly traded companies based in the state, estimating that Colorado had lost workers from some 98 firms to relocations or failed site-selection opportunities since 2019.

In an interview, Gov. Jared Polis said that “far more” firms are moving to the state than leaving, and that Colorado was home to 21 “unicorns,” or startups valued at more than $1 billion.

Still, some founders remain unnerved.

Companies’ latest complaint is over a landmark state bill regulating artificial intelligence. A previous version of the bill would have required companies to take steps to reduce the risk that AI-based algorithms used for high-stakes decisions such as employment or healthcare discriminate against users.

Kaylah Huynh:

The Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education think tank, ranked Wisconsin 36th among 50 states and the District of Columbia for teacher union strength, falling 18 spots from its previous 2012 study. The rankings factored in union resources and membership, involvement in politics, the state’s labor and bargaining policies, policy wins and losses, and the perceived influence of teacher unions in the state.

The report said teacher unions across the nation are weaker than they were over a decade ago, with the percentage of teachers who are union members declining in all but four states.

In Wisconsin, membership declined from 98% in 2012 to 45% in 2025, a nearly 54 percentage point decrease and the largest drop in membership nationwide. The state ranked 43rd overall for union resources and membership compared to 13th in 2012.

———

Wisconsin teacher participation (including dues) in unions declined from 98 percent in 2012 — one year after Act 10 was signed into law — to 45 percent in 2025. 

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Lucy Hodgman

Hundreds of University of California faculty members signed an open letter this week calling for the return of standardized testing requirements for applicants to math and science majors by next year. 

The UC system disbanded the decades-old standardized testing requirement in 2020, under a legal challenge from students who argued that the metric gave students who could afford test prep services and travel to exam sites an advantage. The system’s nine undergraduate campuses were among hundreds of colleges nationwide that made the test optional during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But more than five years later, a coalition led by UC Berkeley math professors argues the drop in students’ math levels is “severe.” 

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” read the letter, which was signed by more than 600 professors from faculty across STEM disciplines. 

The letter cites a November report from UC San Diego’s Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions, which concluded that the number of students whose mathematical abilities were below the typical high school level had increased thirty-fold in the past five years.

——-

More.

Rebecca Winthrop

But I’ve recently drawn a sharp line in the sand: no A.I. for writing. I’m not talking about expense reports or routine emails. I mean actual writing, and the creative brainstorming that precedes it to explore different perspectives or develop novel insights. Increasingly, many people I talk to — from students to teachers to peers — tell me that they think it’s OK to use A.I. chatbots for brainstorming as long as they do the “real work” of writing.

But this misunderstands something critical: Brainstorming is the work that’s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.’s effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas — what we call creative thinking. This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories.

The erosion of creative thinking means young people will struggle to navigate uncertainty. Workers will strain to adapt to a shifting labor market. And society will miss out on the new ideas that can solve complex problems and enhance lives.

For the past eight years, the Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has been leading a national research team tracking the range of novel ideas that college-bound high school students present in their application essays, before and after the introduction of ChatGPT. In one study, he and his team examined personal statements from more than 370,000 students, and found that after ChatGPT became available, their essays suddenly used diverse and colorful language, but lacked truly creative ideas. And the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more “creative” by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory.

Cantrill:

Where does that juxtaposition leave us? As I have outlined in Oxide RFD 576, I believe that LLMs are but a tool, albeit an exceedingly powerful one. When we cease to believe this — when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord — we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it. Yes, LLMs mean a lot of changes to domains that may be unaccustomed to technological change, and yes, some of those changes will leave us wistful for a bygone era — but I also believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.

As for BattleTris itself, yes, we know — and yes, stay tuned!

Cindy Harper:

The paper even floats a “legal quota” for how much state-approved content must appear in feeds.

The paper warns of “disinformative, polarizing, or merely attention-grabbing content” dominating algorithms. The entity defining “disinformation” and the entity selecting “reliable” sources are, functionally, the same network of politically appointed regulators.

Since 2025, outlets granted “public value” status have already gotten preferential placement in app stores and smart TV interfaces, with ARD and ZDF ranked at the top. The new proposal extends that system directly into social media feeds.

The regulatory apparatus making these decisions already has a track record of targeting inconvenient outlets.

The Berlin-Brandenburg media authority used Paragraph 19 of the Interstate Media Treaty to sanction Nius, a right-leaning outlet, over a report about refugees. Independent journalist Alexander Wallasch was told to delete three articles and audit his entire archive. Since 2020, the authorities have sent 94 formal warning letters to online media, overwhelmingly aimed at smaller, independent publications.

Matthew Yglesias:

Last week, interest rates on long-term U.S. government debt reached their highest levels since before the Great Recession of 2008. 

How exactly inflation, interest rates, and the budget deficit relate is unfortunately one of those technical economics questions that experts disagree on. Trying to puzzle through the relationships here seems unlikely to persuade anyone or sell newsletter subscriptions. 

Specifics aside, however, everyone does agree that they are in some way intertwined. And so far this year, they’re all moving in the wrong direction more or less in tandem. 

The increase in government borrowing costs mechanically pushes up spending, which makes the budget deficit worse. A rising budget deficit generates inflationary pressure. And inflation drives up interest rates since investors demand more compensation. 

The proximate cause of last week’s bond market action, in which rates rose sharply, was almost certainly the war in Iran delivering an inflationary impulse to the economy rather than anything that happened on the fiscal side. But it clearly does not help that rich countries all around the world not only borrowed extensively during the pandemic, but have done very little to consolidate their balance sheets since then. Britain is probably the clearest example. 

Amidst the meltdown of Keir Starmer’s premiership, the rise of Reform on the right and the Greens on the left, and everything else that’s happening in British politics, nobody’s calling for a new program of fiscal austerity. And you see something similar in France and the United States and many other places: There’s a new populist right that is very focused on immigration and relies on the votes of older, less-educated people, and there’s also an insurgent left calling to expand state spending commitments. Nobody wants to spend political capital making the numbers add up!

But the problem is growing severe, to the point that bond market reactions to policy announcements have become a major factor in British policymaking. 

We aren’t quite there yet in the United States, but we’re pretty close, and it’s high time that policymakers start taking this seriously.

Eigen:

first pass on a list of 20C-21C slippery slopes that were identified by contemporaries as slippery and which in fact turned out to be slippery

Laura Schulte:

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is, at times, taking nearly five years to respond to records requests — an unacceptable amount of time according to open records advocates and those stuck waiting for their requests to be fulfilled.

Some records have taken more than 600 days to release, while others have stretched to nearly 1,800 days in recent years.

Attorney General Josh Kaul, who is running for reelectionthis fall against Republican Eric Toney, pointed to the long waits for some requests as outliers. Some cases, due to ongoing court action, or a need for redactions, take longer than others. Generally, the agency said, most requests are resolved within the 10-day guideline.

Records are presumed to be open to the public unless there is a specific statutory exemption or the public interest balancing test applies. Agencies are required to respond to requests “as soon as practicable and without delay,” but the state guidelines do not set a specific amount of time a request must be fulfilled.

Alesha Guenther, a former employee of the state’s Republican Party, requested records related to protests in Madison in 2020, along with others. It took until this year to receive the responsive records, including one request that was handed over after the Journal Sentinel asked the agency about the length of time the department was taking.

Steve Magness:

What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.

When I was 11 and 12, I’d ride my bike to meet friends at the local sandlot baseball field 1.5 miles away, or to a friends house to go play pickup football in the street. When I was 14, I’d go on 10+ mile runs, exploring every bit of road, sidewalk, and path I could find. Exploration was a rite of passage.

Today, 84% of 11 year olds aren’t allowed to leave their street, with 53% not even allowed to leave their front yard. For 14 year olds? 92% aren’t allowed to leave their neighborhood, and 55% can’t leave their streets.

In England data shows that in 1971, 86% of primary-age children traveled home from school unaccompanied. By 1990, that had fallen to 35%. By 2010, it was 25%.

What in the world happened? Why are we so afraid to let kids explore?

There’s a temptation to read this as a story about phones, screen time, or modern danger. It isn’t. It’s a story about us. The parents, coaches, and grownups who decided, somewhere in the last two decades, that the right amount of freedom for a 10-year-old is to be visible from the kitchen window.

Open Rockets Foundation:

PART, the Project for Accessible Radio Telescopes, was created by five students from Narrabundah College in the Australian Capital Territory: Narayan Dwan-Holland, Aliana He, Kevin Fang, Emma Enyu Zhang, and Yanfu Fan. Working through the Science Mentors ACT program, they are trying to solve a problem that is at once technical and deeply practical: how do you make serious astronomy possible in classrooms far from major cities, without making it expensive, fragile, or impossible to learn from?

Their answer is a design that is deliberately unglamorous in the best possible way. Instead of exotic observatory hardware, PART uses a weather satellite dish, a conductive base, low-noise amplifiers, bandpass filters, a software-defined radio, and a motor system. That mix is important because it reflects the project’s philosophy: accessibility does not mean lowering ambition. It means stripping away cost and complexity until the essential science is still there.

Jaclyn Skurie & Roberto Ferdman:

Hockey rinks are notoriously difficult businesses. They’re expensive to operate, and tend to only last about 25 years before running into major mechanical issues. And yet Black Bear Sports Group has spent the past decade buying them up, building both an empire of hockey real estate and a much broader—and lucrative—youth hockey business.

Today, Black Bear is the largest owner-operator of hockey rinks in the country—it now runs almost 50 across 12 states. The company says its business model is helping save rinks and grow the sport of hockey, but its rapid expansion is also making lots of enemies. Watch the video above to learn about what happens when a for-profit company changes a world that’s traditionally been run by nonprofits and community-led organizations.

Josh Chin, Merrill Sherman, Jason French and Ievgeniia Sivorka:

With drones revolutionizing the battlefield in Ukraine, Iran and beyond, the U.S. is striving to dominate this latest evolution in military technology the way it has with previous wartime innovations. There is just one problem: China got there first.

Teardowns of drones recovered in Ukraine hint at the extent of China’s stranglehold on production. A recent dissection of a Russian first-person-view, or FPV, quadcopter by the Bulava unit of Ukraine’s Presidential Brigade found numerous parts manufactured at least partially in China: batteries, motors and an unmarked central “brain” chip that Bulava traced to a Chinese supplier. Like Bulava’s own similar drones, the Russian version couldn’t have been built without China’s supply chain, according to the unit’s chief drone specialist.

The degree to which China has helped build the suicide drones Iran is using to cause havoc in its war with Israel and the U.S. is less clear. But defense analysts and industry experts say Chinese control over global drone production means Iran is likely just as dependent as Russia and Ukraine.

“It has already won World War III because everything is in its hands,” Bulava’s drone specialist, who goes by the call sign Udav, said of China. “No one will be able to change that in the near future, or even in the long run.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has vowed to break China’s dominance in drones with a $1.1 billion program he calls Drone Dominance. The initiative aims to rev up American drone production and bring down costs by pledging to buy more from U.S. suppliers. A breakdown of the parts that go into a typical FPV drone shows where the Pentagon might succeed, and where it is likely to struggle.

Mike Solana:

Let’s start with the terrain. LA’s economy has been weakening for years. This is partly due to general Sacramento idiocy, from high taxes, union thuggery, and the total disregard for businesses under Covid to the “mansion tax” that froze development and the recent hostage-taking of the very concept of wealth. Now, the city is facing a major ($1 billion+) budget deficit, with few options left but an increase to the draconian taxes levied against the dwindling number of productive citizens in order to fund the least productive net recipients in American history, or finally reducing the number of useless bureaucrats / professional Democratic Party voters who control the local political machine. I’ll let you take a wild guess at which one of these things is more popular among the net recipients.

Homelessness, which is obviously not a housing problem but an enormous, endemic drug problem, is visibly out of control. The media insists crime is down, but the average person has eyes, and still remembers when the Santa Monica promenade was a nice place where people actually shopped. Red tape continues to hamstring rebuilding throughout the Palisades, and the city still has no coherent plan to prevent another fire of the magnitude that took the Palisades out, or anything even remotely resembling an honest account of what led to the single most destructive fire in the city’s history.

Nonetheless, our story here, according to the professional bootlickers who circle machine Democrats like those little suckerfish that live off the dead skin of a blue whale, is moderate, reasonable, experienced Karen Bass vs. radical, populist, Trumpian Spencer Pratt.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of the Pratt campaign is how angry his opponents have become in the face of the unbelievable controversy that is the mere existence of a Pratt campaign, with, from what I can tell, no actual controversial statement from Pratt. How is he “MAGA-coded” (Daily Beast)? What, specifically, makes him a “cosplaying” “everyman” racist (ESPN)? And does anyone in the press truly believe their message — that the city is “safer than it’s been in decades” — is going to resonate (LA Times)?

If you had to distill all of this criticism into something coherent, I think it might just be that Pratt reminds libs of Donald Trump, who they hate, and he talks about crime, which is bad for lib politicians? People also have a lot to say about the AI-generated campaign advertisements fans have produced on Pratt’s behalf, which many pundits incessantly credit to the candidate himself. But it’s not clear why they hate these things other than their general appearance of effectiveness, and, again, Pratt has nothing to do with them. Still, I do agree the guy’s a little bit like Trump, just not in terms of disposition or, from what I can tell thus far, any of Trump’s most popular positions.

Courtney Gustafson

Wisconsin public schools now employ 1 adult for every 7 students, breaking the all-time record from 2025. Wisconsin public schools employ 113,171 staff in 2026. Unfortunately, Wisconsin educates just 791,794 public-school students, the fewest since 1991. Educating fewer students with more staff is a major cause of school referenda.

This information comes from the 2026 Public School Staff Reports released in May by the Department of Public Instruction, which the Institute for Reforming Government (IRG) analyzed.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Staff additions largely are not teachers. From 2020 to 2026, DPI says Wisconsin public schools lost 187 licensed staff, added 1,581 other staff, and lost 63,165 students. From 2010 to 2025, NCES says Wisconsin public schools added 973 teachers, added 11,108 non-teachers, and lost 65,381 students. Wisconsin public schools now employ 1 adult for every 7 students.

Special needs diagnoses are contributing to hiring. In 2010, 12% of Wisconsin public-school 1st graders received a disability IEP. In 2020, 15% of 1st graders did. In 2026, 19% of 1st graders did.

However, many school districts purposely have increased staffing. As IRG demonstrated in its COVID-19 aid report, some districts have passed referenda to maintain staff once supported by 1-time federal pandemic aid. Districts that did so like Eau Claire and Wauwatosa now face difficult cuts next year – arts, physical education, elementary educators – that still leave them with far more staff and far fewer students than in 2020.

When enrollment declines, adding staff suppresses teacher pay. Teacher compensation is down significantly in inflation-adjusted dollars from 2010 to 2024. But states like Iowa and South Dakota, which have kept staffing ratios stable, have raised teacher pay.

———-

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

alephic:

In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, was aware of this. What they didn’t know was that their blueprint for sabotaging Nazi operations would become the operating manual for modern corporations.

This re-publication comes from a deeply uncomfortable recognition. Open to Section 11 and you’ll find instructions that could have been lifted from yesterday’s management consultant: “Refer all matters to committees.” “Haggle over precise wordings of communications.” “Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.” The saboteurs’ playbook has become our best practices.

We puzzle over our economic stagnation, wondering why the technological revolution hasn’t made our organizations faster. Since the 1970s, productivity growth has limped along at roughly half its post-war pace, except for a brief internet-fueled surge in the 1990s. The answer stares at us from these pages.

Emma Ma & Mandy Zuo:

For the first time in records dating back to 1949, China is now home to more people aged 65 and above than children, the latest official data showed, underscoring the country’s deepening demographic pressure.

By November last year, 15.87 per cent of China’s roughly 1.4 billion-strong population was aged at least 65, compared with 15.25 per cent aged between 0 to 14, according to the results of a nationwide sample survey released late last week.

That meant China’s traditional family-based model of elderly care was under immense pressure, said independent demographer He Yafu, while the burden on social security pension payments was growing heavier.

The data was extrapolated from a November “mini-census” – a sample survey of 1 per cent of the nationwide population held between the once-a-decade national censuses – that covered over 20 million people, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

“In pension provision, the population aged 65 and over – the main users of pensions and elderly care services – has now overtaken the child population, adding further strain to social security pension payments,” He said.

“At the family level, the rising number of elderly people and the trend towards smaller households are placing immense pressure on the traditional family caregiving model.”

Anonymous:

Last week, I was teaching the scene in Macbeth when our hero sees an illusionary dagger. It was a lower ability group in Y9. The scene was homing in on the quotation ‘Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/ That summons thee to heaven or to hell’ and the question my Academy booklet, which all teachers are required to work from, wanted me to ask was ‘Why might Shakespeare have used rhyming couplets?’

The booklet said the reason was to bring the scene ‘closure’ and so the students copied this down from my visualiser, then repeated it verbatim and in unison, shared the exact wording in their pairs and even wrote it again on a whiteboard. The belt and braces of obedience had been completed. I was compliant with the Trust-wide policy. Time for me to move to the next page of the booklet.

Although this was a satisfactory interpretation, it didn’t seem sufficient. The class hadn’t given it any thought of their own and, as an experienced teacher, I could tell the students didn’t fully understand what they were being asked to write down. So I decided to deviate from the booklet.

I turned the visualiser off, moved to stand with the students in the middle of the room, where I would have naturally stood before being required to teach in a formulaic way, asked them ‘why else do you think Shakespeare used a rhyme here?’ and prompted them to write down their own ideas. They looked terrified.

The Economist:

Not ago Wicker Park, a neighbourhood on the north-west side of Chicago, was among America’s hippest neighbourhoods. On summer weekends young people with weird haircuts mobbed nightclubs. Vintage stores did a roaring trade in faded T-shirts from the 1980s. A few Puerto Rican restaurants, remnants of a poorer neighbourhood, sat uneasily alongside the new cafés serving cronuts and unlimited mimosas.

Ariel Kalil, Derek Rury

Many, if not most, of them are wrong.

Actual proficiency rates among eighth graders are 30 percent in reading and 28 percent in math, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or N.A.E.P. The gap between grades and test scores is particularly pronounced in schools serving higher proportions of low-income students, according to a 2023 study.

This problem has gotten worse over the past 15 years or so as grade inflation has increased. Between 2010 and 2022, average high school grade-point averages rose significantly — especially in math, to 3.32 from 3.02.

Meanwhile, standardized testing — one of the few independent checks on schools — is being undermined. Under federal law, states must administer annual standardized tests in math and reading in grades three through eight. But several states have recently loweredthe score a child needs to be deemed “proficient,” producing big gains on paper without any change in the classroom.

Wisconsin redesigned its assessment, and English proficiency in the state increased to 48 percent from 39 percent. Illinois and Kansas have followed suit. In more than half of the states, proficiency rates on state reading tests now exceed the rates on national tests by 15 percentage points or more, and in some states the gap is much larger.

The federal government is making the problem only worse. In 2025, the Trump administration gutted the Education Department, which is behind the national test. Although some reports indicate that the agency has begun to rebuild, certain assessments have already been scaled back.

——-

Quinton Klabon:

most staff per student in -Wisconsin history-, 1 adult per 7.0 kids

• staff down -747 since 2025, but did not keep up with student drop
• teachers soon to be <50% of school workforce
• major cause of referenda and low teacher pay

———

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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”

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

UC Student Success:

“The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”

———

Via Neetu Arnold.

ni5arga:

I first posted a rough write-up of these vulnerabilities to r/CBSE using a throwaway reddit account, but I figured a proper write-up on my own blog would be a better home for it. The tweet (X post) where this is being discussed can be found here.

These vulnerabilities were initially discovered on 25 February 2026 and were promptly reported to CERT-In.

What is CBSE and On-Screen Marking?

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is one of the largest national education boards in India. It operates under the Government of India and runs major examinations like the Class 10 and Class 12 board exams for millions of students every year.

CBSE is affiliated with over 28,000 schools in India and several hundred more abroad, which makes it one of the most influential educational bodies in the country. Every year, millions of answer sheets are evaluated by thousands of teachers and examiners as part of the board exam process.

To streamline all of that, CBSE has started moving to a digital On-Screen Marking (OSM) system for the Class 12 board exams (circular). Instead of checking physical answer sheets, examiners log into an online portal where scanned copies of answer scripts are assigned to them for evaluation.

——-

More.

Tuhin Chakrabarty: 

The last two days have been a bit crazy, thanks to a certain short story published in Granta magazinethat has now been awarded a prize by the Commonwealth Foundation. Nabeel Qureshi was the first on my feed to highlight that it was AI-generated. As I write, his tweet has 1.5M views which is roughly 1.4M more than anything I have ever written. For us fortunate, or if I may say unfortunate, professors whose inboxes are inundated by AI-written emails, it is not exactly detective work to recognize that this short story was completely AI-generated.

Pangram’s AI detection confirmed this. For those who don’t know me, I should admit I am a bit of an AI-detection maximalist, so obviously I got into arguments on X with people who were quick to dismiss the detection results and insist detectors don’t work. 

Tyler O’Neil:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has spread its woke activist agenda in education to at least 169 school districts in 42 states, according to a new report, and the impact of teachers unions helps explain this expansive influence.

Learning for Justice, the SPLC’s education arm, promotes “social justice” activism, pushes racially divisive messaging, and advocates transgender ideology. The program, launched as “Teaching Tolerance” in the 1990s, dropped the emphasis on “tolerance” amid the Great Awokening in February 2021. Around that same time, the program removed its own impact statement from the website, which had previously bragged that “more than 500,000 educators” read its magazine, screened its films, visited its website, and used its curricula.

The parental rights group Defending Education exposedLearning for Justice’s broad influence in an exhaustive report Tuesday. 

“Unbeknownst to parents, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been poisoning pupils’ minds around the country for years with its toxic curriculum,” Nicole Neily, the group’s president, told The Daily Signal. “SPLC lesson plans on issues such as queer theory, white privilege, and anti-racism have supplanted traditional coursework in history, social studies, and other core classes—teaching children to view themselves and others through the lens of identity politics, and that America is forever stained by its original sin.”

How did the SPLC spread its tentacles this far? America’s two largest teachers unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—help explain it, as does the American School Counselor Association.

“By promoting and integrating Learning for Justice content and standards into mental health programming and curricula, the teachers unions and ASCA are giving the far-left organization credibility,” Rhyen Staley, director of research at Defending Education, told The Daily Signal. “This is deeply troubling for a variety of reasons, especially since the SPLC has put parents on its ‘hate map’ for simply raising concerns with their local school districts.”

Zach Goldberg:

“We have a hard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large … When you truly believe that racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.”-Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning 

The idea that persistent outcome disparities between racial groups necessarily reflect or result from discrimination rests on a narrow, misleading, and politically motivated portrayal of the empirical reality. In what follows, I introduce and briefly discuss a number of data points that call this narrative into question. 

Disparities between groups are the norm, not the exception—even among ‘whites’. 

Binary white vs. black comparisons merely obscure disparities that obtain between virtually all ethnic/ancestry groups while promoting the illusion that white-black disparities are somehow exceptional. Indeed, large disparities in socioeconomic outcomes are observed even between US-born whites of different European ancestry. For example, Figure 1 below graphs the age and sex-adjusted median personal income among US-born respondents (so as to exclude the distortive influence of first-generation immigrants) by self-reported ancestry. Overall, nearly half (47.8%) of all European ancestry groups reported below-average median incomes in the 2015-2019 period, which is almost identical to the share (48.4%) among their non-European counterparts. Among the lowest US-born ‘white’ earners are those of Spanish, Dutch, Acadian, French, and British/English ancestry.