School Information System

Quinton Klabon:

Here is who will help set Wisconsin school report card standards.

There is not much they can do. The law is specific and key districts would get mad.

So, wait for 2029 when DPI updates reading/maths standards, raise test cut scores to NAEP, and remake report cards accurately.

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Meanwhile:

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”

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?

SCOTUS Blog summary:

Issue: Whether school officials may presume substantial disruption or a violation of the rights of others from a student’s silent, passive, and untargeted ideological speech simply because that speech relates to matters of personal identity, even when the speech responds to the school”s opposing views, actions, or policies.

24-410_o75p.pdf:

JUSTICE ALITO, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins, dis-
senting from the denial of certiorari. This case presents an issue of great importance for our
Nation’s youth: whether public schools may suppress student speech either because it expresses a viewpoint that the school disfavors or because of vague concerns about the likely effect of the speech on the school atmosphere or on students who find the speech offensive. In this case, a middle school permitted and indeed encouraged student expression endorsing the view that there are many genders.

But when L. M., a seventh grader, wore a t-shirt that said “There Are Only Two Genders,” he was barred from attending class. And when he protested this censorship by blocking out the words “Only Two” and substituting “CENSORED,” the school prohibited that shirt as well. The First Circuit held that the school did not violate L. M.’s free-speech rights. It held that the general prohibition against viewpoint-based censorship does not apply to public schools. And it employed a vague, permissive, and jargon-laden rule that departed from the standard this Court adopted in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503 (1969).

IFS:

When a Golden West College student who fled Iran described illegal immigration as a “cancer” and called to eradicate Hamas, the school’s College Disciplinary Officer didn’t defend his free speech rights from those who sought to silence him—she threatened the student with discipline.

Now that student and others are fighting back to defend their First Amendment rights.

The Institute for Free Speech has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of Matin Samimiat, Annaliese Hutchings, and Young America’s Foundation (YAF). The suit challenges the college’s unconstitutional speech policies and their enforcement. The case arises from the students’ efforts to establish a YAF chapter on campus and speak openly about controversial political and social issues.

Jess Huff:

The board closed the schools due to declining enrollment in the East Texas district. The last few months have been spent deciding where the dislocated students, teachers and staff would go.

Lufkin ISD lost about 1,600 students to other nearby school districts and independent charter schools over 15 years. The district now faces more competition in the years ahead. The Texas Legislature in early May approved a private school voucher program that will allow families to use tax dollars to send their students to private schools.

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Locally, Where have all the students gone?

Scott Adams:

Non-experts have an excellent track record for the past ten years.

The Economist:

The police arrived at Maxie Allen’s door at midday on January 29th. None of the six officers seemed to know much about why they were there, recalls Mr Allen. But they read out a list of charges and searched the house, before arresting him and his partner and taking them to the police station, where they were held for eight hours. The couple’s alleged crime? Disparaging emails and WhatsApp messages about their daughter’s primary school.

Tyler Durden:

A Canadian YouTube channel that was dominating the platform during the country’s recent election has vanished, after the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reached out to the social media giant, and branded it a ‘content farm’ in a Friday hit-piece.

Jill Tucker:

San Francisco school officials killed plans Wednesday to test out alternative ways to grade some high school students after politicians and parents panned the proposal in the wake of misinformation about it. 

An estimated 70 teachers in 14 high schools — about 10% of the educators in grades nine to 12 — were expected to participate in a voluntary program to align grades more closely to student learning rather than attendance, participation or other factors. Some of those factors included whether a student brings in cans for a food drive or whether their parents sign a permission slip, according to the background information provided by the district on the “Grading for Equity” initiative.

That could also mean giving students multiple chances to take tests or redo essays and reconfiguring the grading scale to address inherent problems with a 100-point grading scale — which disproportionately assigns an F for 0 to 59 points, but only 10 points each for the other grades.

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San Francisco Public Schools Convert F’s to C’s, B’s to A’s in Equity Push

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Kane:

The “consultants” being paid by SF public schools to implement “Grading for Equity” (no homework, F’s count as C’s) is @CrescendoEdGrp

I am trying to sunshine their contract right now from @SFUnified

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Pete Skomoroch:

SFUSD is delaying a planned “grading for equity” initiative which was universally condemned online this week.

Why was this even considered? Because @SFUnified is built on a broken foundation of bad ideas that start with SFUSD’s vision, mission, and values.

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Insane that SF public schools’ “Grading for Equity, Fs are now Cs” bullshit would have flown under the radar if @TheVOSF hadn’t covered it.

I’m still sunshining the contract by @SFUSD_Supe to pay consultant @CrescendoEdGrp for this “equity” plan despite a $114M district deficit.

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San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie:

We owe our young people an education that prepares them to succeed. The proposed changes to grading at SFUSD would not accomplish that.

I have conveyed our view to SFUSD. We are optimistic that there is a better path forward for our kids and their future.

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San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:

I try to stay in my San Jose lane, but as a former East Side public school teacher I have to say — this is a terrible disservice to our students. Lowering standards does not help children. It hurts them.

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The great irony of our time is that Mississippi is successfully working to fix one of the most broken school systems in the country while San Francisco works to destroy what was once one of the best school districts in the country.

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Mike Solana:

the san francisco board of education must immediately fire the superintendent. if they do not, they must all be removed from power.

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Ro Khanna:

We have a new generation of common sense Democrats with @DanielLurie and me speaking out on this absurd grading for equity policy. I am glad the superintendent took notice after a few hours and backtracked.

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Walter Kirn:

A guide at the Mark Twain museum in Hartford once told a friend of mine during a tour: “Did you know Mark Twain dropped out of school in his teens to work in print shops and on a river boat? Just think how much greater a writer he would have been if he’d finished high school!”

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Garry Tan:

San Francisco schools is trying its absolute hardest to make sure all middle income families who could move out of the city do so right away

“Grading for Equity” is going to be a real disaster and I guess this is a boon for SF private schools and Burlingame housing prices.

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Chamath:

This is, on its face, absolutely retarded.

It’s also a disgrace that this comes from the preeminent tech capital of the world.

This will, however, be very good for housing prices in areas surrounding SF.

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Todd Davis:

Basketball games played in San Francisco will no longer count the number of baskets scored by each team.

This antiquated measurement of team performance does not take into account team’s vibes and therefore it does not take into account who the real winners are.

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“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District. Madison elected officials have generally been silent on our long term, disastrous reading results.

John Sailer:

The challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline. If we can reconfigure the academic talent pipeline and ensure that those who believe in the classical mission of the university both choose academia and prosper in it, then the reform movement will succeed. If not, no list of policies, from securing campus free speech to dismantling DEI offices, will restore public trust in our universities.

Academia’s pipeline problem has deep roots. For more than a decade, universities have created special career paths for scholars whose mission is to advance the cause of social justice. In my recent City Journal series, I interviewed more than a dozen scholars and dug into hundreds of pages of public records to unpack this scholar-activist pipeline.

The series shows how administrators have used clever fellow-to-faculty hiring schemes to strong-arm departments and hire hundreds of professors throughout the country. Their tools include: undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral fellowships; faculty “cluster hiring” programs; faculty support grants; and administrator development programs. All have enjoyed ample funding from private foundations and the federal government.

On paper, these programs aim to promote demographic diversity. In practice, they heavily favor scholars whose research demonstrates a commitment to social justice, ensuring that a critical mass of scholar-activists advance through the academic ranks.

Kelly Lecker:

In Tuesday’s preliminary rounds, Ethan correctly spelled promyshlennik, which is a Russian trader or industrialist, and picked the correct definition of tantrum.

Ethan admitted to being nervous, but said he knew how to spell the word as soon as he heard it. He quickly and confidently spelled the word after asking for a definition and the word’s origin.

John Trasviña

Without seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers in August in a system that awards a passing C grade to as low as a score of 41 on a 100-point exam. 

Were it not for an intrepid school board member, the drastic change in grading with implications for college admissions and career readiness would have gone unnoticed and unexplained. It is buried in a three-word phrase on the last page of a PowerPoint presentation embedded in the school board meeting’s 25-page agenda. The plan comes during the last week of the spring semester while parents are assessing the impact of over $100 million in budget reductions and deciding whether to remain in the public schools this fall. While the school district acknowledges that parent aversion to this grading approach is typically high and understands the need for “vigilant communication,” outreach to parents has been minimal and may be nonexistent. The school district’s Office of Equity homepage does not mention it and a page containing the SFUSD definition of equity has not been updated in almost three years.  

Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District’s grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.  

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more. and.

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Ro Khanna:

My immigrant dad asked me where the missing 10% went when I scored a 90. He came to America for the chance to work hard & pursue excellence. Giving A’s for 80% & no homework is not equity—it betrays the American Dream and every parent who wants more for their kids.

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San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie:

We owe our young people an education that prepares them to succeed. The proposed changes to grading at SFUSD would not accomplish that.

I have conveyed our view to SFUSD. We are optimistic that there is a better path forward for our kids and their future.

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San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:

I try to stay in my San Jose lane, but as a former East Side public school teacher I have to say — this is a terrible disservice to our students. Lowering standards does not help children. It hurts them.

———

The great irony of our time is that Mississippi is successfully working to fix one of the most broken school systems in the country while San Francisco works to destroy what was once one of the best school districts in the country.

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Walter Kirn:

A guide at the Mark Twain museum in Hartford once told a friend of mine during a tour: “Did you know Mark Twain dropped out of school in his teens to work in print shops and on a river boat? Just think how much greater a writer he would have been if he’d finished high school!”

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Chamath:

This is, on its face, absolutely retarded.

It’s also a disgrace that this comes from the preeminent tech capital of the world.

This will, however, be very good for housing prices in areas surrounding SF.

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“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District

Thomas Balazas:

So, why do we teach English literature (or “language arts,” as some secondary schools now call it) at all? According to the nineteenth-century British literary critic Mathew Arnold, the purpose of studying and teaching literatureis “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” In Arnold’s day, people had a pretty good idea of what was “the best that is known and thought”: it was Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and The Bible, alongside vernacular works by greats like William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Wordsworth. Writers like Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were later added. 

Fisher Derderian:

The link between funding and the public has frayed.

Federal programs have mirrored that drift. The NEA’s grant language in recent years emphasized “capacity building,” “access strategies,” and “administrative equity plans.” ArtsHERE, launched in 2023, directed over $12 million toward “equity-centered frameworks,” focused more on internal processes than public-facing work. The long-term cultural impact of these efforts remains unclear. But that approach is now being reassessed. Whether or not the Trump administration succeeds in eliminating the NEA and other cultural agencies, the programs funded via these agencies are no longer assumed to reflect the public interest. For the first time in years, there is an opening to reconsider how public funding in the arts should be used and what it should be used for.

Some ventures already point the way. The Lamp, founded in 2020, is a journal of Catholic arts and letters supported by a small team and the Catholic University of America. It has built a national readership through editorial seriousness and clarity of purpose. Wiseblood Books, founded in 2013, is a small Southern press publishing fiction, poetry, and monographs grounded in craft and moral imagination. Both have earned attention through focus and substance, despite working with limited resources. They show what becomes possible when good work is pursued steadily and with conviction. Yet efforts like these remain rare. 

One way to replicate these efforts would be for the NEA to create its own cultural accelerator—a short-term program focused on helping serious new institutions take root. The model exists in other fields. Y Combinator, one of the best-known startup incubators, has launched companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe by offering early-stage ventures structure, mentorship, and a public debut. The goal is to help founders establish the conditions for something lasting. Such a model could serve the arts.

ADH:

Last summer I made the case for bringing the principle of Dune’s Butlerian Jihad — “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” — to our broader discourse on AI. It seemed like a good way to bind together the various felt and thought objections to AI into a common credo. And a good way to distinguish between benign forms of so-called “AI” (spotting tumors, for instance) and the sycophantic imitations of humanity being peddled by the various broligarchs.

Since then, this “hard no” movement against AI has started to take shape. For one the t-shirt game keeps getting better. Traps are being set on the internet to punish AI scrapers and poison datasets. The new Chicago pope bashed AI in his first big speech. Just in my literary corner of the world, anti-AI clauses are becoming standard in book contracts and magazine submission forms. A recent episode of AppleTV’s The Studio ended with a crowd at ComicCon — and Ice Cube — chanting “fuck AI.” Last week there was a WorldCon kerfuffle (sigh) over using ChatGPT in part of the panel selection process.

(My WorldCon take is that, well intentioned though it was, feeding an AI a list of names and asking it to compile dossiers of their scandals and transgressions is a pretty dystopian use-case.)

Solveig Lucia Gold

The story of my undergraduate alma mater’s unofficial motto, coined by Woodrow Wilson in 1896, is illustrative. “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” has always been much more than a slogan. The school’s Nassau Hall served as the nation’s capitol for four months and eight days in 1783. Nine Princeton alumni served on the Constitutional Convention in 1787. And there has not been a year without a Princeton alumnus in the U.S. House of Representatives since its first meeting in 1789.

But not content to serve just our nation in a globalized world, the university revised Wilson’s motto in 1996 by adding “and in the Service of All Nations.” And then, in the wake of controversy surrounding Wilson and inspired by a speech delivered by alumna Sonia Sotomayor, it was changed again in 2016 to read “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.” As one alumnus said at the time in the official university press release, “It captures the latest narrative of world affairs. We are not just nations separated by borders. . . we may even be nationless. . . service to humanity is apt.”

more.

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Chris Arnade:

This backlash has been brewing for a long time, and the more surprising thing is it hasn’t happen earlier

Josh Blackman:

The Circuit Justices do not apply uniform rules when it comes to emergency applications. Justice Jackson, for example, refused to promptly call for a response in Libby v. Fectau, a case where the majority ultimately granted emergency docket relief.

I have also been keeping my eye on Trump v. AFGE. On May 9, A federal district court issued a TRO against the Trump Administration to block the removal of certain employees. On May 16, the Solicitor General applied for an emergency stay with Circuit Justice Kagan. And Kagan did absolutely nothing. She didn’t even call for a reply.

On May 22, the District Court entered a preliminary injunction, which the government promptly appealed. On May 23, the Solicitor General filed a letter with the Supreme Court, withdrawing the stay application. The short letter states:

Matthew Gault:

Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”

It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work. As of this writing, Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 is hard to find on Amazon. Searching for it on the site won’t show the book, but a Google search will. 404 Media was able to purchase a copy and confirm that the book no longer contains the reference to copying Bree’s style. But screenshots of the graph remain in the book’s Amazon reviews and Goodreads page.

Will Flanders

Last yr, DPI met behind closed doors to lower the standards for the Forward Exam. Now, they will apparently do the same thing for the state report card. We need transparency in these meetings. Why are these standard settings that effect all WI families held behind closed doors?

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly (back story).

Underly supports eliminating our one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement, the Foundations of Reading(FORT)

Civics: Why and how was Jill Underly Re-elected? (a bit of uniparty analysis as well). And.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

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”

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

Danielle DuClos

State law requires outside investigators whenever the death of a person involves law enforcement. In these cases, little information is typically released by investigators until a district attorney decides whether to charge officers with a crime.

Last fall, however, Dane County authorities released a 911 call recording that provided new information about the circumstances in a deadly police shooting even while the case remained under review by Ozanne.

In August, a Fitchburg police officer fatally shotKevin Price, 28, sparking questions about what happened before and after the shooting. Then in October, under state open records laws, local news outlet Isthmus obtained a 911 call recording as well as reports on police and ambulance dispatches for the case.

The records were released by Dane County Public Safety Communications, which falls under the county executive’s administration and is a separate agency from the District Attorney’s Office.

Jeff Sovern:

1. Federal grants. Because few, if any, law schools receive substantial federal grants, this lever is not very effective against law schools—directly. But see item 5 below. …

4. Accreditation/bar admission/student loans. The federal Department of Education recognizes the American Bar Association as an accreditor for law schools. In addition, law schools which are a part of a university, as most are, also receive the benefit of the university’s accreditation. This could matter for purposes of student loans and bar admission. Federal student loans and grants are available only to students attending accredited institutions so a loss of accreditation could be devastating to schools that depend on students being able to finance their education through federal student loans, which is probably true of every law school. Students might still be able to obtain private student loans, though those can be more expensive and lack the income-based repayment options available for federal loans. 

I’m not sure how much this matters to bar admission; if states concluded that the federal government had cancelled a law school’s accreditation for inappropriate reasons, I imagine they could change their rules to allow graduates of that school to be admitted. The federal budget bill as it stands at the moment would limit the amount of federal student loans available to students attending professional schools, which might also impact some students, and thus some schools.

5. Impact of being part of a broader university. Even if law schools are not directly affected by the loss of federal aid, etc. they might be indirectly affected if they are part of a broader university. Universities that depend heavily on federal grants, for example, and that lose those grants, or get lower reimbursement rates on those grants will have less resources. That may affect their budgetary arrangement with their law school. …

Chris Rickert:

Want to be a champion speller?

Stick to the basics — like chocolate ice cream and cookies — find a superhero you can identify with, read a lot and, of course, practice, practice, practice until you just don’t want to practice anymore. (And then practice some more.)

These are a few of the things the Wisconsin State Journal learned recently about Jacob Martonito and Ethan Robert, this year’s winner and runner-up, respectively, of the Badger State Spelling Bee. The Wisconsin bee is sponsored by the State Journal.

Jacob, a 12-year-old sixth grader from Classical Charter School in Appleton, and Ethan, a 12-year-old seventh grader from New Berlin’s Eisenhower Middle School, are on their way to the biggest American bee of them all — the 100th anniversary, in fact, of the Scripps National Spelling Bee this week in National Harbor, Maryland, a few miles south of Washington, D.C.

TOSA2030

A rigorously documented, independent, community-led report detailing how Wauwatosa’s school governance has broken down over the past several years—academically, financially, and administratively.

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Meanwhile:

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”

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?

Garrett Leahy:

The electrical engineer’s Solve SF app lets users file 311 reports about issues like graffiti or sidewalk poop in as little as 10 seconds, roughly five times faster than the city’s official app. It’s McCabe’s passion project, it’s free to use, and has been boosted online by the political organization GrowSF.

But the city is about to kill the vital mechanism the app runs on.

Officials from the city administrator’s office on May 13 told McCabe, who lives near the Castro, they’re shutting down the Open 311 API program, which allows third-party apps and other programs to pull from and send data to the city’s 311 service. 

Anumita Kaur and  lJúlia Ledur

More than 1 million international students attend colleges across the United States each year, bringing billions of dollars to the American economy and bolstering the nation’s science and technology sectors. Many of them now find themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s battle to exert control over some of the nation’s elite universities.

Those students have been a critical part of U.S. institutions of higher education for decades, contributing to the nation’s economy and research, experts say.

Ann Althouse summary:

Thompson responds: “Well, this person went on to say that when you’re voting for a President you’re voting for the aides, uh, around him. But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides. These are White House aides. These were unelected people. And one of the things that really I think comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which, I think, is what this person is talking about.”

It’s like fighting fire with fire — fighting the destruction of the democracy with the destruction of democracy. You had to destroy the village to save it. Noted. 

Bill Ackman:

5. Merit-based admissions reform. Harvard must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies; cease all preferences based on race, color, or national origin in admissions throughout its undergraduate, graduate, and other programs; and demonstrate through structural and personnel action that these changes are durable.
6. Merit-based hiring reform. Harvard must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies; cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in hiring throughout its teaching and research faculty, staff, and leadership; and demonstrate through structural and personnel action that these changes are durable.

Graham W. Lee, William C. Mao, and Veronica H. Paulus:

A previous version of this story referred to the Boston-area public radio station that first reported Gino’s tenure revocation by its traditional call letters, WGBH. In fact, the station rebranded to GBH in 2020.

Simon Willison:

Damien’s database has 116 cases from 12 different countries: United States, Israel, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, Trinidad & Tobago.

20 of those cases happened just this month, May 2025!

I get the impression that researching legal precedent is one of the most time-consuming parts of the job. I guess it’s not surprising that increasing numbers of lawyers are returning to LLMs for this, even in the face of this mountain of cautionary stories.

For Memorial Day:
A haunting letter written in 1942 to the Navy by a woman from my hometown, asking if her 5 sons were still alive. (They had died in the sinking of the USS Juneau on November 13 at Guadalcanal.)
An unimaginable sacrifice. pic.twitter.com/BaMjZUdXlg

— Jim (@jim_again) May 26, 2025

PRL:

We show Americans anonymized results from a variety of Large Language Models. We then ask them to assess the partisan slant of the models on 30 of the most salient issues in American politics in a head-to-head comparison.

Michael Burger:

The real battle is over who runs the university anyway. One side claims that universities are independent, and so are free to determine for themselves whether to stay on the DEI trail, and so on. The other claims that universities are responsible to the societies that support them, especially financially. Accordingly, society’s elected representatives can and should actively determine what universities do or teach (e.g., by prohibiting campus DEI programs or mandating certain curriculum).

To understand these arguments better, it’s best to step back, far back, to the Middle Ages. The earliest iterations of what we today call “universities” first appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages, perhaps as early as the eleventh century, certainly by the decades around 1200; it was from them that most other universities sprang. That medieval beginning fundamentally shapes modern conflicts.

What was a university when it first emerged in medieval Europe? To begin with words, when medieval sources refer to a university, they most commonly use the Latin word universitas (plural, universitates). What was a medieval universitas? It could be a lot of different things. It could be a guild: an association of tradespeople in a town that regulated that business. It could also be people who collected money for drinking beer together once a month.

Terry Ryan:

I’ll never forget what one professor said to me: “I don’t need for them to know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. I need for them to understand the impact on the indigenous people.” So that’s a bit ideological too. But the important thing is, as you shared with me the other day, one out of six Americans cannot name a branch of government. There’s a reason why the teachers are not teaching it, because to them, you could always just look it up.

Kirk Carapezza:

Harvard University has stripped a world-renowned scholar of her tenure status. The university’s top governing board, the Harvard Corporation, decided this month to revoke Francesca Gino’s tenure and end her employment at Harvard Business School.

Gino, who was celebrated for her research on honesty and ethical behavior, had faced scathing allegations of academic misconduct and fraud.

Several sources tell GBH News that Harvard administrators notified business faculty of their decision during a closed-door meeting this past week, and a university spokesperson confirmed the move. Gino did not immediately respond to several requests for comment.

In 2023, Harvard launched an internal investigation into Gino’s work after concerns were raised on a blog called Data Colada, run by a group of behavioral scientists who scrutinize academic research. The Harvard investigation concluded that Gino had manipulated certain data to support her hypotheses in at least four of her studies.

At that point, the university placed her on unpaid administrative leave.

Belladonna Rogers:

A little-appreciated aspect of the @Harvard Morgue case, as well as all Harvard -related litigation in Massachusetts is the high number of judges there who are alumni of @Harvard_Law. None of them ever recuses him- or herself because of the potential appearance of bias, but all invariably rule in favor of @Harvard. The families who donated their relatives’ bodies to Harvard’s Morgue tried suing the university for damages but Judge Kenneth W. Salinger (Harvard Law ’90) threw out their case, ruling Harvard was not liable.

1970 Harvard Graduate James Fallows:

A century ago, the Harvard football team was a national powerhouse and even won the Rose Bowl in 1920. As the Trump administration is discovering, this 389-year-old institution can be tougher than it looks. (1907 Edward Penfield illustration, via Getty Images.) 

This post is about the language of civic struggle in our times. Last week, while outside the country, in Greenland (about which more, later), I came across a rapid-fire, three-part sequence of documents, which together tell a revealing tale.

All three involve the Trump team’s escalating and lawless attempts to damage Harvard university: Its people, its research projects, its finances, its global influence, everything about it. 

In reality these are acts of “burn it down!” resentment, comparable to Mao’s unleashing the nihilistic Red Guards during China’s Cultural Revolution 60 years ago. But as a paper-thin pretext, the Trump team has presented its war against Harvard as a way to make Jewish students and faculty feel more comfortable and at home there. 

As outlined many times before (eg by former Harvard president Larry Summers), this Trump pretext is not just cynical but also destructive. It is destructive not simply to the university as a whole but in particular to its Jewish students and faculty. Soon after Trump’s supposed “war against antisemitism” at Harvard began, the student paper, The Crimson, published a column by Jacob Miller, a graduating senior who as president of Harvard Hillel had sounded the alarm about real incidents of antisemitism. He argued that Team Trump’s sudden tenderness toward Jewish students amounted to “seizing on Jews as their perfect political pawns.”¹

Also as outlined many times before, Harvard’s response to this intimidation switched from initial, cowed-seeming compliance, to a resounding “Hell, no!”, which gave courage and cover to other educational leaders—all of whom, by definition, represent institutions with shorter histories and smaller endowments than Harvard has.

This brings us to the one-two-three series of threats, responses, and results last week—and to an examination of the words each party chose. 

Roger Kimball:

The assault today is also more thoroughgoing because it is no longer undertaken in the name of freedom and truth, however spurious, but, strange though it sounds, against both.

George Orwell was right when he observed that the first indispensable step towards freedom is the willingness to call things by their real names. We—which is to say, our masters in the media and cultural establishment—have lost that fortitude. The triumph of “wokeness” and political correctness has encouraged an epidemic allergy to candor.

The hope is that the embrace of euphemism will alter not only our language but also the reality that our language names. And to a large extent, it is working. Unfreedom does not become freedom by calling it free. Reality continues to check the fantasies of our narratives. But the misprision can help spread and reinforce the fog of self-deceit.

There is a sense in which the triumph of political correctness erodes free speech chiefly by negative means. It promulgates speech codes, rules against ‘hate speech,’ and the like. But I suspect that its gravest damage is done by instilling a timidity of spirit, a lack of what the Greeks called θυμός, among its charges.

A reluctance to speak the truth instills an unwillingness or even an inability to see the truth. Thus it is that the reign of political correctness quietly aids and abets habits of complacency and unfreedom.

via a kind reader:

Marcia worked as an educator in Madison schools for her entire career, with a passion for teaching children to read. She earned her Master’s of Education from UW-La Crosse in 2006. Marcia was a member of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church from 1981 until her death. The most important things in Marcia’s life were her faith in Jesus and her love and devotion to her family.

Marcia is survived by her husband, Boris; their children, Katya (Mike Krajewski) Ouchakof, Mary (Sam) Kok, Peter Ouchakof; step-son, Michael Dartt; grandchildren, Joey and Ella Kok; dear sister, Barb (Steve) Kingsland; along with many beloved nieces and nephews, siblings, friends, and students.

A funeral service will be held on Saturday, May 31, 2025, at GOOD SHEPHERD LUTHERAN CHURCH, 5701 Raymond Road, Madison, at 12 p.m. Visitation will be held from 10 a.m. until the time of service, and a luncheon will follow.

Packy McCormack:

My hypothesis is that technology compounds more quickly than the government ossifies, and that entrepreneurship in a broad sense has overtaken institutions as the prime mover of American exceptionalism.  

One (very oversimplified) way to think of progress is as a vector sum of government and entrepreneurial forces. 

A vector is a quantity that has both a magnitude and a direction, like velocity (speed in a specific direction) or force (strength applied in a particular direction). You can think about it like an arrow of a certain length (magnitude) pointing a certain way (direction). A vector sum is what you get when you add the vectors up. 

Government and entrepreneurship can pull in various directions at various strengths. When they’re both pulling in the same direction – up and to the right – progress happens more quickly. But even if the government stagnates, a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem can pull progress ahead on its own. 

This may be easier to look at than imagine, so I asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet to make me a toy model to play around with. 

——-

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”

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? 

FixNOLA:

👏 “Crime skyrockets in cities with consent decrees… Multi-billion dollar industry making America more unsafe.” $200 million cost per city. @HarmeetKDhillon, Asst. US AG for @CivilRights, was interviewed this week and explains why her office is getting rid of consent decrees.

Evie Blad:

Congress retained the measure, formally called the “unsafe school choice option,” when it replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. But the provision has rarely been used.

The issue: The law left it up to states to determine what counted as “persistently dangerous,” and the criteria states chose meant only a handful of schools ever qualifed.

That became clear shortly after No Child Left Behind first took effect. In 2003, 44 states plus the District of Columbia did not designate any schools as “persistently dangerous,” Education Week reported at the time. Among the remaining states, just 54 schools received the label.

That hasn’t changed much in the decades since, Sanon wrote in her recent memo to the states. In the 2023-24 school year, the Education Department counted just 25 persistently dangerous schools in five states, she wrote. Four schools got the label in 2022-23, and no schools were reported as persistently dangerous in 2021-22.

Ulcca Joshi Hansen and Dave Kung:

What Maryland students need is an approach that focuses on conceptual understanding, while building fluency with a few core procedures — exactly the approach laid out in the proposal. Here’s what needs to change to prepare Maryland students with math skills to thrive in today’s world:

1. Update math content: When every phone has a powerful calculator, we should spend less time on computation and more time on helping students make sense of the content. And in today’s digital world, data literacy and statistics are more important than ever — but still largely overlooked. Maryland’s proposal does this by replacing the outdated Algebra/Geometry/Algebra 2 sequence with two years of integrated content grounded in data and focused on conceptual understanding.

2. Change professional development for teachers: Most of us learned in a system that emphasized getting the right answer over understanding concepts. Classes followed an “I do, we do, you do” script. But as educators, we’ve known that when students are asked to explain their thinking — including what led them to wrong answers — mathematicalunderstanding truly grows. Professional learning that helps teachers leverage mistakes into valuable learning opportunities should be the norm. Though Maryland’s proposed policy is light on the details, professional learning is emphasized throughout the proposal.

3. Assess the system without over-testing kids: The specter of constant testing pushes teachers to drill for right answers instead of focusing on understanding. Testing randomly chosen students, classrooms and schools (like NAEP does) helps us measure progress without subjecting all students to a barrage of tests. When we do test, AI can help us evaluate student thinking without overburdening our hardworking teachers. Unfortunately, the proposal doesn’t cut back on the testing Maryland’s students face.

——-

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Ben Cohen:

When this year’s college graduates first arrived on campus, there was no such thing as ChatGPT.

They had to use their own brains for math homework, econ problem sets, coding projects, Spanish exercises, biology research, term papers on the Civil War and the Shakespeare essay that made them want to gouge their eyes out. 

Now they can just use artificial intelligence. 

Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it.

Sam Biddle:

So the government has a plan for a one-stop shop.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.” The documents state spy agencies will use the web portal not just to search through reams of private data, but also run them through artificial intelligence tools for further analysis.

Rather than each agency purchasing CAI individually, as has been the case until now, the “Intelligence Community Data Consortium” will provide a single convenient web-based storefront for searching and accessing this data, along with a “data marketplace” for purchasing “the best data at the best price,” faster than ever before, according to the documents. It will be designed for the 18 different federal agencies and offices that make up the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI Intelligence Branch, and Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis — though one document suggests the portal will also be used by agencies not directly related to intelligence or defense.

Daniel Buck:

One question persists in American education: How pervasive are the stories of kindergartners learning about transgenderism or high-schoolers waving Hamas flags in hallways? Among the four million teachers in the U.S. there will inevitably be cranks and ideologues who mistake their lectern for a pulpit. Examination of a typical American school district in a typical American town reveals that the progressive mismanagement of school districts extends beyond the dark-blue borders of San Francisco and Portland, Ore.

Recent Census data demonstrate that Wauwatosa, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, is about as average as it gets. It’s politically split, helping to elect Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2014 and President Joe Biden six years later. It’s economically middle-class with the median home value sitting at roughly $300,000, just under the $400,000 median value across the country. In other words, Wauwatosa is that fabled “real America.” What happens in San Francisco may be an outlier, but what happens in Wauwatosa likely happens in countless other districts.

So what happens in Wauwatosa?

In 2022 the Wauwatosa school board approved a new sex-education curriculum. Among other things, it expects sixth-graders to define different types of sexual intercourse. Kindergartners learn about genitalia with the help of cartoon drawings and third-graders are informed that, no matter their body parts, they may feel like another “gender.” Notably, the newly adopted units are based on the National Sex Education Standards, which encourage teaching third-graders about puberty blockers, sixth-graders about abortion and students as young as kindergarten about “gender identity.”

The red flags appear in more than the curriculum. Wauwatosa is one of thousands of districts to have adopted a “restorative justice” policy. This is an alternative to traditional discipline structures that emphasizes dialogue over punishment and focuses on revising school policy rather than changing student behavior. In February 2025, the Wauwatosa school superintendent retained a consultant to investigate the “professional culture” at McKinley Elementary School. The final report, dated May 9, reveals that disruptive students received treats “in the form of food and beverages” and a chance to play games in the office instead of a standard detention.

To no one’s surprise, Wauwatosa schools have developed a reputation for permissive discipline and frequent fights. The chaos that results from leniency has led to more expulsion notices than is typical.

——

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”

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?  

Quinton Klabon

WELL.

• MPS will miss May 30th drop-dead finance deadlines
• DPI is not going to do anything about it
• MPS’ and DPI’s strategy to keep late finances undercover backfired, though they did dump it on Memorial Day Friday
  x.com/journalsentine…

——-

2019….. Evers mulligans: My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

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”

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?  

Chris Rickert:

Under current district policy, students in fourth or eighth grade who have failed to meet certain academic standards can be forced to repeat those grades, even over the objections of parents.

A decision to hold a student back can be appealed to the “superintendent or his/her designee,” but that official’s decision on the matter “shall be final,” according to the policy last revised in 2016.

Changes to that policy now under consideration by the board, however, turn that presumption on its head.

———

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”

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?  

Simon Quach & Zhengyi Yu

 paper examines the labor market effects of Florida’s 2022 post-tenure review policy, which weakened tenure protections at public universities. Using a differencein-differences approach, we compare faculty outcomes in Florida to nearby states. We find the policy increased faculty exits-particularly among high-performing researchers-indicating a brain drain rather than improved selection. Additionally, we detect no productivity gains among incumbents and observe a decline in the research output of new hires. Overall, the findings suggest that reducing tenure protections negatively affects the research capacity and competitiveness of public universities.

Sarah Mei:

Because if you were one of those engineers who had spent years mastering the fine art of pointer arithmetic and memory profiling, Java’s abstractions felt like an erasure of your value. Your hard-won skills weren’t just unnecessary – they were almost a liability. The thing that had defined you as a software engineer was being swept away by a garbage collector.

Sound familiar?

Robin Hanson:

If you want to get paid for abstract analysis that is not mainly organized around current cultural or political fights, academia is pretty much the only game in town. So I am quite grateful that academia exists, and has included me.

But I do have a complaint. In most areas of life, activities are typically justifies in some detail in terms of the accepted purpose of that area. E.g., hospitals save lives, businesses serve customers, roads support travel, armies deter fights, and so on. But though the accepted purpose of academic research is to either answer deep important questions, or to help non-academics somehow, academics rarely explicitly justify their work in such terms.

For example, polls found that these goals best explain ~7% of which research projects academics pick, and ~9% of which papers/projects academics approve via peer review. Such choices are instead explained 32% and 58% respectively by topic/methods being in fashion. The remaining 62% of project choice is explained by building on prior work/skills, and the remaining 33% of peer review choice is explained by work showing impressive abilities.

You can also check this yourself by asking individual academics to explain how their work could plausibly contribute to answering deep important questions, or to non-academic value. Most will be surprised by the question, having never been asked, and answer poorly.

Aaron Sibarium:

When a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s executive order targeting Susman Godfrey, long considered the top litigation boutique in the nation, the firm hailed the decision as a win for equality under the law.

“This fight is bigger and more important than any one firm,” Susman Godfrey wrote in a press release on April 15. “Susman Godfrey is fighting this unconstitutional executive order because it infringes on the rights of all Americans and the rule of law.”

One month later, the firm announced the recipients of a prestigious prize that only minorities are eligible to win.

The Susman Godfrey Prize, which includes a $4,000 cash award and “ongoing mentoring” from the firm’s attorneys, is typically given to 20 “students of color” at a handful of top law schools. In his executive ordertargeting the firm, President Donald Trump cited the prize as an example of “blatant discrimination” that should disqualify the firm from government contracts and security clearances.

Madison plans a $49,000,000 (8%) tax & spending increase for the 2025-2026 school year. Total planned spending is $661,690,867 for 26,374 students or $25,088 per student. May, 2025 taxpayer funded Madison School District Budget document. Much more on ongoing Madison K-12 tax & Spending growth, here.

Meanwhile, Washington State:

The largest tax increases in state history, passed by Democrats, will harm people and commerce far more than anything else. It’s over $9B stolen and ripped from our economy to quench the never ending thirst of more Democrat spending. And you know the winners of that spending: politicians, bureaucrats, and criminals.

Carmela Guaglianone

A federal judge on Thursday struck down a lawsuitclaiming that “defective” teaching materials had prevented countless students in Massachusetts from learning to read well.

“The court begins (and ends) its analysis with the educational malpractice bar,” Judge Richard G. Stearns wrote in his order dismissing the lawsuit against educational publisher Heinemann, its parent company HMH Publishing and their best-selling authors Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. For nearly five decades, courts nationwide have repeatedly ruled that educational malpractice is impossible to prove.

The suit, filed by Boston-area mothers Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak on behalf of their children, sought class-action status and argued that the defendants misrepresented their instructional materials as “research-backed,” and “data-based,” despite what the mothers argued was insufficient phonics instruction.

The authors and publishers named in the suit were at the center of the 2022 APM Reports podcast Sold a Story, which investigated why so many schools taught reading using methods that had been repeatedly discredited by cognitive scientists. Benjamin Elga, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview last year that the podcast opened his eyes to “an injustice that cried out for redress.”

——

More.

——

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”

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?  

MAHA Commission

It presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health, backed by compelling data and long-term trends. More importantly, it seeks to unpack the potential dietary, behavioral, medical, and environmental drivers behind this crisis. By examining the root causes of deteriorating child health, this assessment establishes a clear, evidence- based foundation for the policy interventions, institutional reforms , and societal shifts needed to reverse course.

To turn the tide and better protect our children , the United States must act decisively. During this administration, we will begin reversing the childhood chronic disease crisis by confronting its root causes- not just its symptoms. This means pursuing truth, embracing science, and enacting pro-growth policies and innovations to restore children’s health. Today’s children are tomorrow’s workforce, caregivers, and leaders—we can no longer afford to ignore this crisis.

After a century of costly and ineffective approaches, the federal government will lead a coordinated transformation of our food, health, and scientific systems . This strategic realignment will ensure that all Americans—today and in the future-live longer, healthier lives, supported by systems that prioritize prevention, wellbeing, and resilience.

But real transformation requires more than vision—it requires clarity. Before we act, we must fully understand the scope of the crisis, the conditions that created it, and the mechanisms through which it continues to grow. Without this foundation , interventions risk being reactive, fragmented , or ineffective.

To Make America’s Children Healthy Again, we must begin with a shared understanding of the magnitude of crisis and subsequently what’s likely driving it. This assessment provides that foundation-grounding future efforts in a common scientific basis that identifies four potential drivers behind the rise in childhood chronic disease that present the clearest opportunities for progress:

Poor Diet: The American diet has shifted dramatically toward ultra-processed foods (UPFS), leading to nutrient depletion, increased caloric intake, and exposure to harmful additives. Nearly 70% of children’s calories now come from UPFs, contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.

Aggregation of Environmental Chemicals: Children are exposed to an increasing number of synthetic chemicals, some of which have been linked to developmental issues and chronic disease. The current regulatory framework should be continually evaluated to ensure that chemicals and other exposures do not interact together to pose a threat to the health of our children.

Lack of Physical Activity and Chronic Stress: American children are experiencing unprecedented levels of inactivity, screen use, sleep deprivation, and chronic stress.

These factors significantly contribute to the rise in chronic diseases and mental health challenges

Overmedicalization: There is a concerning trend of overprescribing medications to children, often driven by conflicts of interest in medical research, regulation, and practice. This has led to unnecessary treatments and long-term health risks.

By examining each of these drivers, this assessment equips MAHA Commission stakeholders and partners with the facts needed to identify where and how policy interventions will likely have the most impact.

The sections that follow analyze the evidence, spotlight gaps, and map the terrain: laying the groundwork for coordinated, high-impact solutions.

Associated Press:

Belgium’s Royal Palace said Friday that Princess Elisabeth, who is first in line to the throne, is waiting to find out whether she can return to Harvard for her second year after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a ban on foreign students at the university.

The Trump administration on Thursday revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students in its escalating battle with the Ivy League school, saying thousands of students must transfer to other schools or leave the country.

“We are looking into the situation, to see what kind of impact this decision might have on the princess, or not. It’s too early to say right now,” said the palace’s communications head, Xavier Baert.

Steve Sinofsky:

Harvard case is so fascinating. The filings and quotes keep talking about how crazy it is for the Govt to dictate how Harvard should operate or who it should serve/employ, yet this is exactly how EEOC has been implemented for decades in private sector and advocated by..Harvard.

Adrian Vermeule:

If the universities want to remain open to international students, they should first do a better job of being open to the Other America, which they have mocked and despised for decades.

Stephen Dinan:

The manager of Harvard Medical School’s morgue has pleaded guilty to selling human remains.

Cedric Lodge, 57, admitted he took parts of donated cadavers after they had been used for research and sold them rather than have them disposed of in accordance with the donors’ agreements, the Justice Department said Thursday.

That included organs, brains, skin, hands and faces, prosecutors said.

Stand Columbia Society:

Harvard now faces $1.2–$5.5B in total annual institutional risk exposure—up to 43% of its adjusted operating budget—across grants, medical revenues, student aid, and potential taxes.

The Trump team’s tactics against Harvard recall how the Obama Administration cut off student aid to for-profit Corinthian Colleges on the pretext of its alleged dilatory response to sweeping record demands. Thousands of students’ educations were disrupted so the Obama team could wave a political scalp.

Kayla Huynh:

Last year, during the Madison Metropolitan School District’s campaign for two referendums, the district estimated property taxes would increase by about $1,000 for the average homeowner. Voters in November approved the combined $607 million in school referendums, hiking property taxes to fund school building upgrades and day-to-day operating costs. 

Approval of the $100 million operations referendum was “the only way we survive,” Bob Soldner, the district’s financial leader, told the School Board this month. “Without that, we would not be able to offer the programming nor the services that we provide today based under state law.” 

Next year, the Madison school district’s proposed budget would increase spending to nearly $661.7 million — about $42.9 million more than this school year, according to a draft of the plan released this month. 

The proposed budget is certain to change as federal funding levels remain in flux, Soldner said. State lawmakers this summer are also deciding how much money to provide schools over the next two years in the state budget.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending, despite long term, disastrous reading results. November 7, 2024 latest budget including the (passed) fall referendums. Total spending: $608,824,795 for 26,310 students or $23,140 each

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”

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 Hsu:

Robots, Small Models, and RL with DeepSeek Alumnus Zihan Wang — Manifold #86

Zihan Wang is an AI researcher at Northwestern University, where he works on vision-language models, robotics, and reinforcement learning. Previously, he interned at DeepSeek, contributing to projects like DeepSeek-V2.

David Margulies

Could it be that the nation’s large fraction of students lacking math proficiency is caused by significant numbers of students not having their multiplication tables memorized?

In a California K-12 district with 15% of students proficient in math, according to state testing, only about 25% of fourth graders were found to have their multiplication facts memorized at the grade’s end. This situation exists despite the California Math Content Standards, the math students are expected to learn, stating explicitly that students are to “by the end of grade three, know from memory all products of two one-digit numbers.”

Should multiplication fact memorization be viewed as a minor standard, only one of many, perhaps de-emphasized in a busy school year, or is it a major foundational skill, like phonics is to reading, the lack of which is causing students’ struggles in this district?

The correlation between student multiplication fact memorization and their CAASPP performance was analyzed for one elementary school in the district. The criteria for having multiplication facts memorized, or multiplication fact fluency, is established by research as meaning students can answer multiplication fact questions faster than three seconds per problem. On the CAASPP, students receive numerical scores, and achievement levels are defined using ranges of scores. These levels, from low to high, are: “Standard Not Met,” “Standard Nearly Met,” “Standard Met” and “Standard Exceeded.”  

Open the Books:

Unlike some of the intermediate steps President Trump has taken through Executive Order, truly closing an agency will require a 60-person majority in a Senate vote, a tall order with only 53 Republicans in the upper chamber.

But there are still some low-hanging fruits left for the administration to pick. Chiefly, it can end relationships with all professional societies promoting principles of DEI and radical gender ideology.

The federal government contracts with a myriad of these organizations across all the major agencies. Professional societies set the atmosphere and guidelines for practitioners in their fields, and they can have hundreds of thousands of members.

Keith Whittington:

A new episode of the Academic Freedom Podcast has been released. The podcast is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School.

This episode features a conversation with Daniel Hemelon President Donald Trump’s threat to rescind the tax exempt status of Harvard University. Hemel is a professor of law at New York University Law School, with an expertise in taxation, nonprofit organizations, and constitutional law.

John Hindraker

As we and everyone else have pointed out, journalists who have belatedly tumbled to the obvious fact that Joe Biden was disabled throughout his presidency (or, at a minimum, most of it) are asking all the questions except the most important one: who ran the executive branch on the Democrats’ behalf, and how did that work?

European journalists are perhaps a little less reticent. The London Times headlines: “Meet the Biden ‘politburo’ accused of running the country in secret.”

Rob Churchill:

Let’s begin with what I perceive to be the difference between a junior engineer and their more experienced counterparts. The biggest difference between junior and senior/staff/lead engineers is the ability to understand a problem from its highest level, break the problem down into smaller pieces, solve the smaller pieces, and then, very importantly, put the smaller pieces together again in the right way to make the final product as efficient and robust as possible.

My view of how this works in the classic tech company is that the higher-level engineer will break down the business problem into smaller problems for more junior engineers to solve. Often, in bigger projects, the lead engineer will break the problem into still-large sub-problems that need to be further broken down. The senior engineer will break that sub-problem down and assign the smaller pieces to junior engineers. The lead and senior engineers work on ensuring that all of the pieces that they broke apart will fit nicely together, and the junior engineers build the bulk of the code.

Junior engineers learn from this experience by watching how their superiors break down these problems and put them back together again. This is particularly effective in in-person environments, and less-so in remote environments (another contribution to the disappearance of junior-level roles). It has been shown over and over that people learn more effectively in in-person environments both in school and out. In conversations that I have had outside of or adjacent to the tech world, this trend towards remote environments reflects issues that are faced by junior lawyers, financiers, and nearly every other industry. If a junior engineer wants to advance their career, they must learn to do the job of their superiors. However, traditionally, the main use case for a junior engineer is to implement the code that would take too much time for a higher-level engineer to build.

Alice Evans:

Parents invest heavily in their kids, expecting something back: financial support in old age, prestige to raise the family name, or growing the faith. But modern life brims with delicious temptations! As teens forge new friendships and explore the web, they’re vulnerable to ideological persuasion and deviation. 

How do families secure their desired returns? Many cultures glorify filial piety as a sacred duty, instil religious devotion, and arrange marriages to align values. 

But what happens when religious conservatives migrate to liberal economies? Parents now face an ‘honour-income trade-off’: protect cherished culture or urge their children to assimilate and chase materialism.

This essay explores the struggles of parenting in the modern age. Drawing on fantastic new studies as well as my own qualitative research across India and the UK, it presents a novel theory of cultural persistence and integration.

More.

Years ago, a fellow parent mentioned that she was very unhappy when her child returned home from a taxpayer funded Madison school and said “I hate George Bush”. “I don’t want my child to hate anyone. We might disagree, but not learn to hate….”

And so it continues as I see scenes noted above.

From the Sermon on the Mount [Grok]: Matthew 5:43–44:

– “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

I admit to failing the Great Commandment over and over and over, particularly when (nearly always paid) door knockers arrive from distant lands (one, a retired Indiana teacher now living in Columbia – paid to return and canvas!) to tell us how to vote on this or that person/topic. The why, sometimes.

Ah, grace opportunities in every direction.

Ken Cuccinelli:

Fun fact of the day, as best I can tell, there are only 8 colleges that do NOT take federal funding:

1. Hillsdale College–@Hillsdale
2. Christendom College–@ChristendomVA
3. Patrick Henry College–@patrickhenrycol
4. Gutenberg College–@thegreatbooks
5. New St Andrews College–@NewSaintAndrews
6. Wyoming Catholic College–@WYOCathCollege
7. Pensacola Christian College–@ConnectPCC
8. Grove City College–@GroveCtyCollege

Do you know of any others?

Corrine Hess:

The difference, Sturmer said, is that Winskill focused on teaching math — and made sure its teachers were using the latest evidence-based practices, not just teaching it the same way they learned when they were in school.

“It comes down to teaching the why behind mathematics and how things work,” he said. “Not just teaching tricks. That’s a big mistake people make.”

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Peerplexity

I am thinking about adding a question that should induce a LLM to hallucinate a response. This method could detect students cheating. The best question should be the one that students could not imagine a solution like the one provided by the LLM. Any hints?

Edward Ring:

This is the forgotten enabler of the so-called deep state. When we speak of an out-of-control administrative state, we must consider who organizes these bureaucrats, collects dues automatically from their taxpayer-funded paychecks, and then uses that money to make or break any politician they wish.

If you want to know the ultimate reason why California’s public sector is broken, bloated, inefficient, and tyrannical, look to public sector unions. They are the root cause of why California’s public school system is failing, the cities are still overrun with criminals and homeless drug addicts, and the cost of living continues to explode. Since 2000, the US Census Bureau estimates that more than 10 million people have moved out of California, along with thousands of businesses. One of the root causes of this misery, not explicitly identified nearly enough, is the political power of public sector unions.

Nothing about this is complicated. Public sector unions, understandably, are incentivized to maximize their membership and their dues revenue. Accordingly, these unions benefit when government agencies grow, regardless of whether these expanded agencies actually solve the issues of failing schools, rampant crime, or lack of affordable essentials such as housing and energy. Moreover, unlike private sector unions, public sector unions aren’t incentivized to be reasonable with “management” since they face no market competition like in the private sector. They just pressure politicians to raise taxes.

Related: Act 10

Jason Epstein:

Without question, Jason Riley is one of the most prominent black journalists in the United States, rightly known for his weekly columns in the Wall Street Journal. On a consistent basis, he shrewdly dissects the nostrums of many authors, both black and white, who assert that the road to a successful future in race relations depends on implementing a steady stream of programs whose factual predicate is that systematic racism in the United States going back to 1619 has created a toxic environment that now calls for the expansion of affirmative action programs in jobs, housing, and education.

The capstone of the program lies in aggressive demands for reparations for the sins, not only of slavery but of all past forms of segregation. These programs bear no relationship to either the $20,000 authorized in 1988 for Japanese Americans interned in World War II, or even the more generous payouts from the West German government to Israel in the aftermath of that war. Instead, by piling improbable assumptions on top of each other, the cash demands easily reach in aggregate 10 to 15 trillion dollars, both before the California legislature and the federal government. So far these programs have gone nowhere in practice, but the issue is sufficiently alivethat it is sure to aggravate racial relations in Trump’s second term.

Ann Althouse summary:

Shame on us for wanting to know the truth about what happened? Who was President these past few years? We’re supposed to sink into a pool of respectful silence and not demand to know? We’re not supposed to be skeptical about the timing of the cancer news, which seems so perfectly aimed to shut us up about Tapper’s book and the Hur recordings?

Eduardo:

Such database needs to be designed to properly reflect reality. This can’t be automated, since the semantics of the situation need to be encoded in a way that can be processed by a computer. Such then is the goal of database design: to encode propositions in such a way that can properly be processed by a database management system (DBMS).

At this point, a regular software developer comes to a stall. Since there is scarcely any formal training in database design (or formal logic) in his education, he tends to fall back haphazardly on ad-hoc methods, with severe consequences (update anomalies and data inconsitencies with huge potential downsides).

Rolfe Winkler:

The company is taking early steps to enable people to control their iPhones with neural signals captured by a new generation of brain implants. It could make Apple devices more accessible to tens of thousands of people who can’t use their hands because of severe spinal cord injuries or diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Apple is looking forward to a day, still some years away, when implants developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink and its rivals receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Such implants, known as brain computer interfaces, have already been safely placed in a handful of patients.

Kitten:

Since over 60% of high school grads go on to enroll in college, we know for a certainty that the vast majority of them are below level 4 in literacy. College kids are functionally illiterate. QED.

But what about those level 5 literate types, the ones who comprise around 1% of adults? What can they do?

This is the subject of a recently released study making waves in the education world. Researchers decided to sit with current college English majors and see how much they understood of what they read. They chose a very challenging text for the modern student, Bleak House by Dickens. Specifically, the first seven paragraphs. Here’s the first one.

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

The methodology is that an interviewer sits with each student one on one and listens to them read the passages from the book aloud. As the students read, they must translate what they read into modern English, explaining what each passage means. They have a dictionary, reference material, and their phones on hand to assist in looking up any unfamiliar terms, such as “Lord Chancellor”.

——-

To summarize even further for those skimming:

• 58% of students understood very little of the passages they read
• 38% could understand about half of the sentences
• 5% could understand all seven paragraphs

These are college students majoring in English. About half of them are English Education majors, which means they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating. But they themselves cannot understand the literal meaning of the sentences in the opening paragraphs.

US Department of Justice

A student at Assumption University in Worcester, Mass., has been charged, and has agreed to plead guilty, in connection with hacking into the computer networks of two U.S.-based companies and extorting the companies for ransoms.

Matthew D. Lane, 19, of Sterling, Mass., has agreed to plead guilty to one count each of cyber extortion conspiracy; cyber extortion; unauthorized access to protected computers; and aggravated identity theft. A plea hearing has not yet been scheduled by the Court.

Becky Jacobs:

“It is changing fundamentally how college athletics are structured, and even to a degree, what the principle of amateurism really means moving forward,” Banker said. 

Munson — who graduated with a triple major in political science, legal studies and history — agreed the notion of student-athletes is changing fast with major ramifications. 

“We all love the idea of the student-athlete going competing on the weekends and then being a good student in class,” she said. “But it’s become … almost semipro, especially for sports that are getting lots of NIL money.” 

As part of the revenue-sharing settlement, Munson worries new roster limits could hinder students’ opportunities to play sports, especially on teams like track. She also fears women athletes wouldn’t benefit financially nearly asmuch as men from the settlement. 

Doug McLeod serves as chair of UW-Madison’s Athletic Board, which oversees the school’s athletics department but isn’t involved in day-to-day decisions. McLeod said he hopes the settlement would provide order in an increasingly chaotic world for college sports administrators, coaches, athletes and fans. 

Chris Rickert:

More than seven months after the principal and assistant principal of a Madison elementary school were removed from their positions amid multiple complaints from parents and staff, the two remain on the district’s payroll.

Doing what, exactly, district officials won’t say.

Candace Terrell and Annabel Torres remain listed in the district’s online employee directory as principal and assistant principal, respectively, of Southside Elementary, but the two haven’t worked there since early October, when district officials removed them from their positions after staff and parents of children at the school accused them of bullying and mismanagement.

——

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”

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 Foulkes:

On the face of it, mental-health lessons in schools seemed like an excellent idea. Young people’s mental health is worse now than it was in the past, and one-to-one treatment is hard to access. If you teach young people about mental health at school – which often includes teaching techniques based on therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or mindfulness – it’s more accessible. If you teach these concepts to everyone in a class – so-called universal interventions – you avoid missing the under-the-radar kids who aren’t seeking help, and avoid the potential stigma of singling anyone out. If you teach the information when pupils are young enough, even better: you might prevent mental-health problems from starting in the first place.

At least, that was the idea. The reality is more sobering. Researchers have now run many studies testing the impact of universal school mental-health interventions and have found that they don’t really improve mental health. When improvements are found, they’re small – a tiny average shift on a symptom questionnaire – and the quality of the research is often poor, meaning it’s hard to trust the findings. The best-designed studies show that interventions don’t work at all: no improvement in mental health symptoms, either immediately after the course of lessons or later down the line.

In fact, some studies have found that universal mental-health lessons actually make things worse. There are now high-quality studies showing that school lessons based on CBT, mindfulness, dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) and general mental-health awareness lead to a small increase in symptoms of mental-health difficulties. There is evidence of other bad outcomes too, such as decreased prosocial behaviour or decreased relationship quality with parents.

Lucas Ropek:

After accumulating thousands of pages of school district documents via FOIA requests from around the country, 404’s Jason Koebler found that ChatGPT has “become one of the biggest struggles in American education.” Koebler’s reporting notes that, in the early days of the AI deluge, school districts were courted by “pro-AI consultants” who were known to give presentations that “largely encouraged teachers to use generative AI in their classrooms.” For instance, Koebler writes that the Louisiana Department of Education sent him…

…a presentation it said it consulted called “ChatGPT and AI in Education,” made by Holly Clark, the author of The AI Infused Classroom, Ken Shelton, the author of The Promises and Perils of AI in Education, and Matt Miller, the author of AI for Educators. The presentation includes slides that say AI “is like giving a computer a brain so it can learn and make decisions on its own,” note that “it’s time to rethink ‘plagiarism’ and ‘cheating,’” alongside a graph of how students can use AI to help them write essays, “20 ways to use ChatGPT in the classroom,” and “Warning: Going back to writing essays—only in class—can hurt struggling learners and doesn’t get our kids ready for their future.”

In other words, AI acolytes seemed to anticipate that the technology would effectively ruin essay-writing and test-taking, and wanted to spin it to present the ruination as mere “transformation”—a new way of doing things—instead of a destructive force that would devastate education.

Frederick Hess:

That’s not exactly a cross-section of America’s college students. After all, while college faculty may be overwhelmingly left-leaning, the same isn’t true of the broader student population.

In fact, Truman’s leadership has doubled down on its intransigence by scrubbing the bios of past winners from its website, ensuring that no one can replicate the AEI study. Indeed, past press releases of winners are now password-protected. One can view them only via a Truman scholar account. And the program didn’t issue biographies for this year’s winners, either, instead just listing name, major, and degree aspirations. An information lockdown is certainly one response to the problem. Rather than addressing ideological bias, it is easier to hide the evidence. But this isn’t a good solution for the nation, as opacity seems better suited to a felonious enterprise than a taxpayer-funded scholarship.

Right-leaning students and faculty tell me that the deck is stacked and there’s no point wasting their time.What’s going on? Well, right-leaning students and the handful of conservative faculty tell me that they’ve concluded that the deck is stacked and there’s no point wasting their time. Meanwhile, left-leaning faculty are used to mentoring applicants and have had good experiences. And, of course, program announcements and information sessions tend to send clear (if unintentional) signals about the kinds of interests and research deemed promising.

As a recent Truman finalist told me, “When I interviewed for the scholarship (over Zoom), I was asked a number of politically pointed questions by the committee, including whether I, as a conservative, would condemn Donald Trump.” When he shared his experience with the director of his university’s honors college, he was told not to worry because “students like you don’t usually win the Truman.”

Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe interview:

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

CJ: How have DEI initiatives affected day-to-day life at Harvard?

Haque: The university may have changed the official name of its DEI office to use more nebulous euphemisms, but DEI and “Diet DEI” (a diluted form) have the same effects in practices, norms, and the larger culture of orthodoxy and taboo. Diet DEI is just more dishonest. The university has made some progress by eliminating racially segregated graduations and required DEI loyalty oaths in one of its many schools—mandatory diversity statements when applying for a job—but the larger culture of DEI is the problem. Some tropes remain popular on campus that are legacies of left-wing racism, such as the idea that a person’s racial identity is central to one’s academic study; that people should be sorted into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups by their immutable characteristics; that racism is specific to one race rather than a universal, sinful propensity in human nature; and that lowering academic or behavioral standards for certain racial groups is not happening (when advocates are confronted with evidence that it is happening, they argue that the practice is justified). These beliefs infect teaching, research, grading standards, hiring, promotions, campus debate, what is considered an acceptable topic for invited lectures, what projects get funded, and so on.

CJ: In your observation, has Harvard continued to engagein discriminatory admissions and hiring?

Haque: Yes, of course! There is endless evidence at Harvard, in student admissions and faculty and staff hiring, that people are, in effect, sorted via a left-wing segregation filter: competing primarily against others of the same race and sometimes gender. One colleague at Harvard Law School who served for years on the admissions committee flat-out admitted this to me recently. That is why Harvard tries to cover its tracks and hide admissions data and post-admissions performance metrics that predictably result from separate and unequal admissions standards. The eye-popping data on biases against Asians and whites in admissions have already been exposed [in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard]. A corporation with identical racist practices would have been sued out of existence decades ago; why the exception for a wealthy university? The data on faculty and staff hiring and promotions reveal even more obvious evidence of discrimination. Just examine whether people in the same positions are similarly accomplished. No need to call Sherlock Holmes.

David Rozado:

Despite identical professional qualifications across genders, all LLMs consistently favored female-named candidates when selecting the most qualified candidate for the job. Female candidates were selected in 56.9% of cases, compared to 43.1% for male candidates (two-proportion z-test = 33.99, p < 10⁻²⁵² ). The observed effect size was small to medium (Cohen’s h = 0.28; odds=1.32, 95% CI [1.29, 1.35]). In the figures below, asterisks (*) indicate statistically significant results (p < 0.05) from two-proportion z-tests conducted on each individual model, with significance levels adjusted for multiple comparisons using the Benjamin-Hochberg False Discovery Rate correction…

In a further experiment, it was noted that the inclusion of gender concordant preferred pronouns (e.g., he/him, she/her) next to candidates’ names increased the likelihood of the models selecting that candidate, both for males and females, although females were still preferred overall. Candidates with listed pronouns were chosen 53.0% of the time, compared to 47.0% for those without (proportion z-test = 14.75, p < 10⁻⁴⁸; Cohen’s h = 0.12; odds=1.13, 95% CI [1.10, 1.15]). Out of 22 LLMs, 17 reached individually statistically significant preferences (FDR corrected) for selecting the candidates with preferred pronouns appended to their names.

more.

Sean Goedecke:

Transformer-based large language models are relatively easy to understand. You break language down into a finite set of “tokens” (words or sub-word components), then train a neural network on millions of token sequences so it can predict the next token based on all the previous ones. Despite some clever tricks (mainly about how the model processes the previous tokens in the sequence), the core mechanism is relatively simple.

It’s harder to build the same kind of intuition about diffusion models (in part because the papers are much harder to read). But diffusion models are almost as big a part of the AI revolution as transformers. High-quality image generation has driven a lot of user interest in AI, particularly ChatGPT’s recent upgraded image generation.

Even if you don’t care much about images, there are also some fairly capable text-based diffusion models – not yet competitive with frontier transformer models, but it’s certainly possible that we’d someday see a diffusion language model that’s state-of-the-art in its niche.

Clare Ansberry:

When a child becomes a parent, roles shift.

In the days after her first grandchild was born, Randi Heredia listened to her son, a new dad, ask her to wash her hands before picking up the baby and warned her not to kiss the baby’s face.

It caught her off guard. “I’m so used to telling my son what to do and what not to do,” she says. Still, watching him step up as provider and protector was affirming and liberating. She doesn’t have to be the one making decisions and setting boundaries.

Sons and daughters will always be your child, but that identity and role becomes secondary when they have a baby. You have to let go of being the boss, which can be hard for parents used to jumping in and fixing things, says Gertrude Lyons, author, educator and parenting coach.

The best route is to let them be the parents, respect their boundaries and be grateful, because not everyone has the good fortune of seeing their kids have kids. The U.S. birthrate is falling and more young adults are deciding not to have kids. Of American parents between the ages of 50 and 90, some 35% don’t have grandkids. In 2018, the share was 30%.

Aaron Larsen​ says many grandparents still hold a traditional view that they are entitled to spoil their grandchild, whether that means giving them ice cream before dinner or overloading them with toys, rather than being entrusted with their care.

G David Yaros:

First, we get rid of the four regional superintendents, obliterate their individual fiefdoms and ax the lone high school superintendent. So far so good, as these individuals were not exactly delivering sterling outcomes.

More.

IRG:

Instead of operating under its corrective action plan, MPS still isn’t meetingimportant financial deadlines attached to state funding. The state is still withholding funding following MPS missing the financial reporting deadline in 2024. The state put MPS on a corrective action plan, requiring it to get up to speed on its financial reporting. MPS has not updated its progress on the plan since January. Late financial reporting affects the funding of all 420 Wisconsin school districts.

Becky Dernbach:

The funding restoration will reinstate Tizón’s position, as well as positions for three academic coaches in the Office of Latine Achievement. Under the previous funding cuts, OLA would have had no operating budget. Now, it will have reduced capacity, but the office will continue in its current form. 

But tensions over funding for the Office of Black Student Achievement — and the role of school board members in setting the budget — spilled over in the May 13 school board meeting.

The Office of Black Student Achievement, which had a $2.2 million budget last year, is slated for cuts of about $750,000 — more than a third of its budget. As a result, it will reduce its high school course offerings by about half, as well as cutting programming for elementary and middle school students.

more.

Liya Palagashvili and Revana Sharfuddin

These trade-offs arise not because unions are uniquely “aggressive,” but because US labor laws promote a legally protected union monopoly that crowds out constructive representation and worker voice. Drawing on 147 studies, we find that when the monopoly face dominates and delivers seemingly “big wins” at the bargaining table, companies respond to wage pressure by trimming R&D, cutting capital, reducing company growth, and ultimately shrinking jobs for unionized workers—dynamics that explain roughly 55 percent of the decline in the Rust Belt’s share of manufacturing employment between 1950 and 2000.

——

Related: Act 10

Natasha Singer:

Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, is at the forefront of a fast-moving national experiment to embed generative A.I. technologies into teaching and learning. Over the last year, the district has trained more than 1,000 educators on new A.I. tools and is now introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 high schoolers — the largest U.S. school district deployment of its kind to date.

It is a sharp turnabout from two years ago, when districts like Miami blocked A.I. chatbots over fears of mass cheating and misinformation. The chatbots, which are trained on databases of texts, can quickly generate humanish emails, class quizzes and lesson plans. They also make stuff up, which could mislead students.

Now some formerly wary schools are introducing generative A.I. tools with the idea of helping students prepare for evolving job demands. Miami school leaders say they also want students to learn how to critically assess new A.I. tools and use them responsibly.

James Meigs:

The liberal exodus from X to Bluesky created a kind of real-world social-science experiment. It was as if progressives on one side and conservatives and centrists on the other sorted themselves into two separate laboratory dishes. (I don’t want to make toomuch of this; there are still plenty of liberals on X, and both platforms have lots of people mostly interested in nonpolitical topics. But stay with me.) With the most passionate progressives in one petri dish, and with conservatives and MAGA types now unleashed in the other, scientists could get out their notebooks and watch what kind of cultures emerged.

I’ve been on Twitter/X since its earliest days, and I still find it a useful way to keep tabs on the many topics I follow. In the Musk era, my feed on X has become noticeably more chaotic, with a higher proportion of random accounts shouting angrily into the void. Sometimes those voices come from the MAGA right (usually saying something about “treason” or “RINOS”). But there is plenty of anger from the left as well. For example, any post supportive of Israel is immediately attacked by nasty pro-Hamas accounts. I don’t love X’s somewhat uglier vibe, but I accept the trade-off. I’m willing to tolerate a few angry or idiotic posts in exchange for knowing that right-wing views aren’t being deliberately buried.

Despite the controversy, X has hardly become a conservative echo chamber. A late 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that news consumers on X are almost precisely balanced between Democrats and Republicans; two years earlier, Democrats outnumbered Republicans on the site more than two to one. I suspect that the progressives who feel threatened by right-wing “hate” have simply never experienced a cultural environment where conservatives speak as loudly as liberals. And, against all odds, Musk’s business strategy seems to be working. Though X’s total number of users has dropped, the site’s financial health is improving. Analysts estimate that the company’s total value is approaching the $44 billion Musk paid for it in 2022, a valuation most experts (including Musk himself) considered wildly inflated at the time.

Fit to Teach:

Last year I was battling the greatest entertainment system the world ever unleashed. A student would listen to my pleas, say they would get up, and then immediately fuck off on their phone again. Why would you play in the gym when you could sit against the wall and watch endless entertainment personally curated for your tastes?

Now I battle boredom, and that’s a winnable fight. Now when I give my two chicks speech [telling pupils they might not like doing something, but they have to], they usually respond by participating. That’s because the other option is boredom. Sit there, do nothing, and look out the non-existent windows our school doesn’t have. I’m not fighting against brilliant social scientists getting paid millions to figure out ways to capture human attention, I’m fighting against sitting on your ass doing nothing. And my class is awesome compared to boredom.

Now don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a magic bullet. Banning phones won’t save Gen-Z. I once watched our dean hand cellphones back to students in the cafeteria. When she rolled the cellphone cart through, it was like watching a crowd of hyenas catching the scent of stinking flesh. Kids stopped conversations mid-sentence and lifted their heads to watch that cart roll by.

Callie Holtermann:

A few weeks into her sophomore year of college, Leigh Burrell got a notification that made her stomach drop.

She had received a zero on an assignment worth 15 percent of her final grade in a required writing course. In a brief note, her professor explained that he believed she had outsourced the composition of her paper — a mock cover letter — to an A.I. chatbot.

“My heart just freaking stops,” said Ms. Burrell, 23, a computer science major at the University of Houston-Downtown.

But Ms. Burrell’s submission was not, in fact, the instantaneous output of a chatbot. According to Google Docs editing history that was reviewed by The New York Times, she had drafted and revised the assignment over the course of two days. It was flagged anyway by a service offered by the plagiarism-detection company Turnitin that aims to identify text generated by artificial intelligence.

Matt Wirz & Sam Goldfarb:

The U.S. has lost its last triple-A credit rating.

Moody’s Ratings downgraded the U.S. government on Friday, citing large fiscal deficits and rising interest costs.

Expanding budget deficits mean U.S. government borrowing will rise at an accelerating rate, pushing interest rates up over the long term, Moody’s said. The firm said Friday that it didn’t believe that any current budget proposals under consideration by lawmakers would do anything significant to reduce the persistent gap between government spending and revenues.

The move strips the U.S. of its last remaining triple-A credit rating from a major ratings firm, following similar cuts by Fitch Ratings in 2023 and S&P Global Ratings in 2011. Moody’s downgraded the U.S. to Aa1, a rating also held by Austria and Finland.

“Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s wrote in a statement.

Andrew Beaton:

Instead of long, abstruse playcalls radioed into a quarterback’s ear and getting drowned out by tens of thousands screaming fans, each play would just appear in front of each player’s eyes on a wristband. It would completely transform the way the game looks—and even how it’s played.

And as it happens, it’s now closer to a reality than ever before.

In a move that fell under the radar of most football fans, the league that oversees high-school football in Texas just approved a change permitting the use of these types of wearable devices. And while Friday night football in the Lone Star state might seem a long way from NFL stadiums, recent history shows that high-school fields now serve as the breeding grounds for the next stages of the game’s evolution—even when those ideas seem completely radical.

The spread offense and the pass-happy “Air Raid” scheme were both popularized at Texas high schools before trickling up to the pro game. The latest innovation might be less of a schematic advancement than a technological one.

Patrick Brown, via a kind reader:

By asking students to consider the statistics showing that both adults and kids do better in a household with married parents, these curricula can open up conversations about what success truly means. Instead of a strict focus on avoiding teen pregnancy, these discussions celebrate the meaning and joy that parenthood in the right context can offer. These curricula could be amplified by lessons, such as those passed in Idaho and Tennessee, that require high-school biology classes to teach the basics of fetal development, such as when a heartbeat begins, to help students gain a greater appreciation for human life.

The success sequence is also politically popular. A 2023 poll of parents across five Sun Belt states found high levels of support for teaching students about the sequence in public schools. Nearly three-quarters of parents polled said that they “strongly” or “somewhat” supported teaching it, while only 12% of parents were “strongly” opposed.

Parents are responsible for the moral formation of their children, but they want schools to support rather than undermine their efforts. Career exploration classes help students ponder what they might want to do but don’t help them think about the kind of person they want to become. If the success sequence can kick-start conversations about what it truly means to flourish, it will be well worth it.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Last week I had dinner with three friends. We all went to the UW. We’ve all had successful careers and long-term marriages. A couple of us have raised a total of six successful children. And yet, we didn’t go to Harvard or aspired to. In fact, we grew up at a time when middle class kids like us didn’t shop around for schools. Nobody went on a tour of campuses. We could afford the UW, so that’s where we went.

My point is that people like Brooks — and I like Brooks’ perspective about 90% of the time — live in a world that is sealed off from the lives lived by 95% of Americans who don’t live or die by their GPA, their SAT scores or the dream of an Ivy League education.

Konrad Putzier, Douglas Belkin and Anthony DeBarros:

“It’s almost like you’re watching the town die,” said Kalib McGruder, who was born in Macomb and worked 28 years for the Western Illinois campus police department.

Macomb is at the heart of a new Rust Belt: Across the U.S., colleges are faltering and so are the once booming towns around them. Enrollment is down at many of the nation’s public colleges and universities, widening the gap between high-profile campuses and struggling schools. Starting next year, there will be fewer high-school graduates for the foreseeable future.

The fallout extends to downtown Macomb. Sullivan Taylor Coffee House, located in the corner of a stately 130-year-old building not far from campus, sits mostly empty during the semester. Owner Brandon Thompson has cashed out retirement savings, hit the limits of his credit cards, even canceled his home internet to keep the doors open.

Matt Masterson:

CORE received 64% of votes to defeat a challenge from the Respect Educate Advocate Lead — or REAL — caucus.

Friday’s results mean Davis Gates will remain as union president, joining the rest of the CORE slate of CTU leadership with vice president Jackson Potter, recording secretary Vicki Kurzydlo and financial secretary Diane Castro.

Wall Street Journal:

The coverup of Mr. Biden’s mental decline will go down as one of the great scandals of modern politics. By refusing to admit what voters could so clearly see, Democrats denied their party an open primary. Once Mr. Biden imploded, they handed Kamala Harris the nomination without debate.

Had Mr. Biden bowed out in 2023, Republicans might also have been more open to nominees other than Mr. Trump. Instead, Democrats turned to lawfare in an attempt to disqualify Mr. Trump, which solidified his hold on GOP voters. Democrats and the press are now appalled by Mr. Trump’s second term. They would do better to think upon, and seek contrition for, their own role in making it possible.