School Information System

Jay Rothman:

When I started in June 2022, it was clear that the status quo was not sustainable. I am proud of what my team accomplished during nearly four years. But now it is time to look to the future and the change that still needs to be done.

While I regret that I will not be actively involved in that work, the path forward must look different for the state’s university system to succeed in an environment where constant change will be essential for sustainability and perhaps even survival.

The enormous impact the Universities of Wisconsin have on the economic prosperity and social vibrancy of our state is not open to debate. But our campuses are far too important to Wisconsin to allow for governance that does not meet the moment. As always, that governance starts with the UW Board of Regents.

The board is charged with overseeing the $7 billion annual operating budget of the Universities of Wisconsin, setting strategic direction and vision, and ensuring universities have the necessary resources to remain focused on their mission to serve Wisconsin. Given this role, the board cannot afford to be anything but a highly functioning body.

I practiced corporate governance law for over three decades. In that time, I worked with some truly exceptional boards that made meaningful contributions to the organizations they served. I also witnessed boards that hindered and damaged the very entities they were meant to serve. The difference was always the expertise of the board members and how seriously they took their responsibilities — and whether the structure around them set them up to succeed.

The structural challenges facing the Board of Regents are real. At 18 members, the board is too large to be effective. A board of nine to 12 qualified individuals is far more likely to provide the direction the our campuses need.

Who sits on the board matters enormously. A majority of regents should have served in senior management positions at substantial organizations. Regents should never be appointed solely on the basis of political patronage. It is time for the state to enact a law — similar to that governing the State of Wisconsin Investment Board — establishing criteria that must be met for board service.

Each regent must also be wholeheartedly committed to the mission of the Universities of Wisconsin — not to notoriety or self-interest — and must model a culture of stewardship, mutual trust and genuine teamwork. The UW campuses are too complex to govern by merely attending periodic meetings. To be fully informed and positioned to make major decisions, the Regents must invest real time visiting campuses, engaging faculty and students, and studying the intricacies of higher education.

To be functional, the board must provide clear, unified direction to UW administration — which requires strong and decisive board leadership. Each of the 18 regents cannot provide individual directives to system leadership, some of which conflict with one another.

Board leadership must build consensus and only then provide direction. There is no place for a regent going rogue on topics that impact the entire board. The message provided by any regent needs to be set by board leadership and then consistently delivered to all stakeholders.

The board also must understand the critical distinction between oversight and management. Oversight is the purview of regents. Management is the responsibility of UW administration. When the board seeks to perform managerial functions by directing how and when day-to-day decisions are made, the board ceases to be functional.

On an annual basis, the board should conduct a self-assessment of its performance — ideally with a third-party facilitator – and document areas for improvement, and track progress against those goals.

Finally, the board must commit to a strategic plan and have the courage to follow it. A plan must serve as the North Star for the Universities of Wisconsin, against which every board decision is measured. In the absence of that discipline, strategy disintegrates at the hands of opportunism, and no shared vision moves forward.

The board will not satisfy all stakeholders, but the Regents must exercise the fortitude to make decisions based solely on what is in the best long-term interests of the Universities of Wisconsin, and then allow the chips to fall where they may.

The Universities of Wisconsin stand at a crossroads. The challenges facing higher education are significant, and leadership — particularly at the board level — matters.

I will be rooting for our universities from the sidelines. Wisconsin wins when the Universities of Wisconsin succeed.

Rothman is the former president of the Universities of Wisconsin and previously served as chairman and CEO of Foley & Lardner. He practiced law in the areas of securities, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate governance.

James Marriott:

Meritocratic competition is giving way to increasingly opaque systems of admission. Many universities have abandoned rigorous tests like SATs in favour of “holistic” assessments intended to help more diverse students but which inevitably also favour the kinds of wealthy elite scions who can spend vast sums of parental money on fencing tutors.

Most astonishing is the system of “legacy admissions”, which gives preferential treatment to the children of donors and alumni. Fully 21.5 per cent of a recent cohort of successful white applicants to Harvard had legacy status. One in six Ivy League students belong to the wealthiest 1 per cent of society.

It is no surprise, then, that elite universities are increasingly behaving like aristocratic finishing schools, resuming the role they played at the beginning of the 20th century. The most exclusive American campuses are not (as their idealistic founders might once have hoped) austere temples of learning but five-star hotels with educational facilities attached. Exorbitant student fees help fund luxury gyms, sports clubs, spas, emotional support animals, safe spaces and organic cafeterias. It is an elite world that makes sense if you have grown up cocooned in the upper middle class but which is disconnected from the way the rest of the country lives.

And inevitably, America’s universities are once again developing a rarefied culture that is as exotic to ordinary people as the top-hatted and tailcoated world of Yale’s Wasps was in the 1920s.

Joanne Drilling:

Metro New York, for instance, posted a decline of $50 billion in adjusted gross income between 2022 and 2023. The average adjusted gross income for people leaving New York was more than $110,400, while the income for people moving in was less than $104,500.

Those gaps can create a host of challenges for businesses and local governments in areas seeing substantial losses in net migration.

Marc Novicoff:

New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will soon confront an ordeal that might finally knock that trademark smile off his face: balancing the budget. The city is projected to have a $5 billion deficit this year and is required by law to make up for that shortfall by raising revenue, cutting spending, or both. Mamdani has proposed large tax increases paired with modest cuts to city programs. But getting to $5 billion won’t be easy, in part because the biggest portion of the city’s budget is considered untouchable.

I refer not to the police department or the transit system, but to the department of education. It costs about $40 billion a year, making up a third of the city’s gargantuan budget. New York City spends more money per pupil—north of $40,000, according to one recent estimate—than any of the other 100 largest public-school districts in the country, and more than twice as much as the median district. Meanwhile, it generates educational outcomes that are average at best. According to federal data, its per-pupil spending is nearly 50 percent higher than Los Angeles’s and Chicago’s (the second- and fourth-largest districts), and 150 percent higher than Miami’s (the third-largest). Per pupil is the key phrase here. New York City’s public-school system is the largest in the country, but that’s not the problem. The problem, actually, is that the student body is small relative to the resources devoted to it, and shrinking fast—but the city and state governments won’t cut education spending accordingly. As long as that’s the case, the city’s financial situation will grow only harder to manage.

Where does all the money go? The simple answer is that it goes to the teachers. According to a cross-district analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, New York City spent 61 percent of its education budget on instructor compensation in 2023. Los Angeles spent 52 percent on teachers; Miami, 43 percent.

From the October 2019 issue: When the culture war comes for the kids

Surprisingly, given those figures, New York City teachers are far from the highest paid in the country. A starting New York City teacher makes about $69,000 a year, whereas a new teacher in Seattle makes $74,730. A first-year Dallas teacher makes $65,000, but the cost of living in that city is significantly lower than in New York. And unlike the New York teacher, the Dallas teacher will not be required to get a master’s degree within five years of starting. Closer to home: The median teacher in the New York suburbs of Long Island and the Hudson Valley earns 14 percent more money than their counterpart in the city.

New York manages to spend so much on its teachers without paying them all that much by having so many of them. New York City’s pupil-to-teacher ratio is lower than that of each of the next 80 largest school districts. According to the New York City Independent Budget Office, that number stands at one instructor for everynine pupils. (This includes all pedagogic staff, including specialists, guidance counselors, and speech pathologists—not just the classroom teachers.) Melissa Arnold Lyon, a public-policy professor at SUNY Albany, told me that small class sizes are often the natural result of a dance between teachers’ unions and school districts. “The teachers’ union is coming in asking for higher salaries,” she said. “The city will say, ‘We don’t have enough money for that salary ask. What else would you take?’” Small class sizes, which make a teacher’s job easier, are one answer.

Josh Christenson:

The Department of Justice indicted a former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday for allegedly concealing records amid probes into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

David Morens, 78, has been charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting.

The indictment, unsealed Monday in Maryland federal court, also lists two unnamed co-conspirators who “concealed, removed, destroyed and caused the concealment, and removal of federal records to evade FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and FRA [Federal Records Act].”

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In April 21, 2021 he worked with co-conspirators Peter Dazsak (@peterdaszak) and others, to keep Covid schemes secret from public inquiry by “handing stuff to him at work or in his house.”

WTF “Additionally, the indictment further alleges that Morens and Co-Conspirator 1 conspired to pay illegal gratuities. The indictment states that Co-Coconspirator 1 gifted Morens wine for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans,” and arranged for its delivery to Morens’s residence in Maryland.  Morens then allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to “deserve” the gift, which was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins. The indictment further alleges that Co-Conspirator 1 suggested he would provide Morens with additional things of value, including meals at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C.”

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The complaint.

Gregg Easterbrook:

That Obama opposes photo ID in voting, but requires it at his new billion-dollar palace so the desk staff doesn’t inadvertently issue a $4 discount, is a hoot.

….

The facility is extensively subsidized by the public: about $200 million in city-paid infrastructure and about $300 million in federal and state tax deductions on donations to support construction. (Donors are not required to claim deductions, almost always do.)

Despite tax favors and public subsidies, adult admission will be $30. Sales tax in the gift shop will be 10.25 percent, plus a 15 cent city tax per bag to hold said gifts.

Illinois residents get $4 off admission. To claim the discount, guests must show a state photo ID. 

Barack Obama opposes requiring a photo ID to vote, including the current Republican bill about this in Congress. The GOP’s ridiculously named Save America Act just failed on a close roll call in the Senate, probably is unconstitutional anyway – states, not the federal government, control the manner of elections.

States are free to impose voter identification requirements, so long as not to disadvantage minorities. 

Maddie Aiken:

Penn State University could slash 12% of its undergraduate academic programs this fall if school leaders follow through with preliminary recommendations to eliminate low-demand offerings.

Forty-nine of Penn State’s 403 baccalaureate and associate degree programs are potentially on the chopping block after a months-long review of the university’s academic programs and portfolio, officials shared this month.

Discussions will continue throughout the summer, with final decisions expected by the fall semester. The university has employed the consulting firm McKinsey & Company Education Practice to assess its academics and organizational functions.

“Higher education is changing, and we must rise to the occasion,” Penn State Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos said in a statement. “A full accounting of our academic offerings, and a commitment to an ongoing cycle of program reviews moving forward, are critical parts of the work we all must do to position our students, and Penn State, for long-term success.”

The commonwealth campuses would bear the brunt of cuts; 39 programs could be slashed at these campuses.

NACEC:

Across all four-year colleges surveyed, high school grades and strength of high school curriculum are uniformly rated as the most important factors. However, some differences were found between public and private colleges in the level of importance given to the following factors:

• high school grades in college prep courses
• strength of curriculum
• class rank
• positive character attributes
• the essay or writing sample
• the interview
• work
• extracurricular activities
• counselor and teacher recommendations
• student’s interest in attending the institution.

Siddhu Pachipala:

The pamphleteers are hard to miss. They stand in front of the big doors of Lobby 7, MIT’s main entrance, waving, preaching, and flagging down passersby with all the urgency appropriate to their task: saving young souls. Most students stream past, smiling politely, avoiding eye contact, and chuckling once they’re out of earshot. Some, feeling momentarily clever, stop to argue, hoping to outfox the proselytizer with a paradox about omnipotence and evil. Only occasionally does someone stop and listen. Fewer still will show up to a church, temple, or mosque. 

When I arrived at MIT, I was among the indifferent passersby. After three years here, I’m not so sure.

The stereotype of the elite campus, on which faith survives mostly as an object of satire or neglect, is instantly recognizable. Thirty-five percent of American college students report having never attended religious services; just 17 percent attend “about weekly” or more. The pattern is especially pronounced at MIT, where a majority of students identify as atheist or agnostic. Those who speak openly about their religion or spirituality are even fewer. In a political science seminar I took last year, the professor asked us to list our most dearly held identities, ordered by importance, and then share them aloud. Not one person in a class of fifty listed a religious or spiritual affiliation.

At first glance, it seems that secularism has hardened here into ­scientism, the belief that science tells us everything knowable, and perhaps everything worth knowing, about the world. We are led to feel that we have two options—blind submission to faith or adherence to the scientific method—and that by virtue of our attending a serious technical school, we have chosen the latter. Religion belongs to a different sort of person—certainly not the sort who sits in this room. I am told that in the mid-to-late 2000s, to profess faith openly, or draw on it in class, was to invite cocked eyebrows and hallway snickers. Better to cite the theories of Marx than the Gospel of Mark. The Secular Society, a student organization active at the time, devoted itself to “help[ing] . . . members develop skills in counterapologetics and navigating life without religion.” The secularists winkingly invited you to “hang out with the best goddamned group on campus.”

Chris Evans, Carolyn D. Gorman

Widespread screening does, however, produce alarmingly high rates of false positives, leading to harmful misdiagnoses. One study published by Cambridge University showed a false-positive rate as high as 90 percent. That’s why Virginians (and all Americans) should push back against efforts to introduce universal mental-health screenings in schools.

In recent years, school districts across the country have begun requiring students to answer personal questions about emotions, behaviors, and suicidal thoughts. The practice has become widespread, with at least one-third of schools reporting that they administer mental-health screenings. Last year Illinois became the first state to mandate that all schools administer universal screenings to students in third through twelfth grade.

Most students that such screenings flag as “at risk” are merely feeling the normal stresses of life, so the scrutiny often leads to unwarranted labeling and intervention. By design, screening interprets emotions through a medical lens, construing any sign of anxiousness, inattention, or distress as a potential clinical disorder. But there’s simply no foolproof way to confirm mental-health disorders—no biomarkers, blood tests, or brain scans. Ordinary worry can easily be misconstrued as anxiety disorder, sadness as clinical depression.

Serious mental illnesses causing functional impairment affect only about 5 percent of Americans, and these conditions typically don’t develop until the late teens and early twenties. If America’s nearly 50 million public school kids were screened annually for rare conditions, the majority flagged would be false positives, leading potentially to millions of children being wrongly shuffled into the mental-health system.

Ryan McMorrow, Sam Fleming, Peter Foster and Joe Leahy:

Mega-Senway made its first sensors for about Rmb40 each and sold them for Rmb100, leaving Huang with a healthy margin. As Chinese competition poured in, prices started to fall. European groups gradually exited the market. Huang’s Shanghai-based company now sells some sensors for as little as Rmb10 a pop. “We never thought the price decline would happen this fast,” he says.

His company’s trajectory is emblematic of the larger economic forces reshaping global industry and trade as extraordinarily competitive Chinese companies push into a variety of industries at dizzying speed.

Twenty years ago the global economy was shaken by a first “China shock” as a wave of low-cost goods destroyed the business models of manufacturers in advanced economies, displacing millions of workers and feeding discontent that fuelled populist politicians including US President Donald Trump.

Now a second shock is under way — one that is even more threatening to China’s trading partners: an assault on high-end manufacturing.

Vicious domestic competition, coupled with vast industrial scale, ample pools of engineering talent and some of the highest subsidies in the world, has generated world-beating Chinese champions in EVs, solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and a lengthening list of advanced manufacturing sectors.

Chris Rickert:

Ploeger was one of several current or former school district employees criticized in an investigation into the district’s response to the sex-crime allegations made against Gilkey-Meisegeier. That investigation, by Milwaukee attorney Samuel C. Hall Jr., found district leaders didn’t do enough to investigate the allegations.

The investigation found that “school-level and district-level administrators failed to recognize Title IX obligations” — a reference to the federal law against sex-based discrimination in schools.

That failure “resulted in insufficient investigations into serious allegations,” Hall writes in his report, released on Jan. 6. “Investigative practices were poor, with limited interviews, lack of documentation, and an HR-centric approach that was not primarily focused on the students involved.”

more:

The full story on how “George Floyd Era” DEI lead to the promotion of a dangerous public-school employee, and then how DEI caused school officials to look the other way. From the defendant’s own attorney…

Arthur Brooks:

“Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”

So said a self-critical report published this month by Yale University, bemoaning the lack of intellectual diversity at their own college and most of the nation’s other leading campuses. Well, duh, readers of The Free Press might respond. To you, this report, which also cited problems in higher education including ballooning tuition fees, opaque and unfair admissions criteria, and grade inflation—may sound like a master class in the obvious.

But to many in academia, this is not obvious. Despite decades slipping into an ideological monoculture, many academics still don’t see a problem. Amid increasingly widespread scrutiny, they don’t understand why so many elite colleges have squandered public trust.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Shortly after those taxpayers voted to pony up a record $607 million in school spending increases, the district blew $100,000 on a new marketing campaign including a new MMSD logo — to add insult to injury that money was paid to an outstate consulting firm. Then the school board voted themselves a massive 88% pay increase, going from $8,000 to $15,000 a year plus bonuses for being the board president or sitting on committees. They also proposed that the district pick up their health insurance. That one didn’t pass, but wait until next year. 

Now the district is giving their teachers an extra paid day off. That’s right, the schools will be closed this Friday, May 1st, so that teachers can march to the Capitol to demand more school funding and to also (and I’m not sure how these two things go together) demand that we all but stop enforcing immigration laws. 

This isn’t Arbor Day. It’s a highly partisan, hard-left event that MMSD is tacitly endorsing. 

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Bloomberg:

Most students in the US aren’t proficient in reading or math — but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their report cards. Four out of 5 parents say their children are getting B’s or higher. Test scores, meanwhile, have hit multiyear lows. According to one study, 60% of grades don’t match standardized assessments. 

One might hope such a discrepancy would set off alarm bells. Yet surveys show that parents are more inclined to trust report cards than test results. The upshot: Not only are measures of student performance diverging, but parents are also looking at the wrong signals.

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

amuse

…..and, in hypothetical stress scenarios, preventing disorderly sales of US assets.” He went further and named the actual game: “Dollar dominance and reserve currency status are strengthened by constant long-term initiatives, including countering the growth of problematic, alternative payment systems.” Translation for those who do not speak Treasury, this is about killing the petroyuan in its cradle.

To see why this matters, consider the architecture Beijing has spent the past decade methodically constructing. The People’s Bank of China has established more than 40 bilateral yuan swap arrangements with foreign central banks. The Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, China’s parallel to SWIFT, has expanded continuously through 2025, connecting thousands of indirect participants and reaching well over 100 countries and regions. The mBridge cross-border central bank digital currency project, in which Saudi Arabia is a participant, provides yuan-denominated settlement rails that bypass SWIFT entirely. The Council on Foreign Relations argued in March 2026 that rising cross-border yuan payments may be weakening a key US sanctions tool, and a March 2026 House Select Committee investigation documented that China has effectively become the clearing market for sanctioned oil from Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. Iran’s 25-year cooperation agreement with Beijing routes a substantial majority of Iranian oil exports through yuan-denominated channels, often processed by smaller Chinese refineries to obscure the trade flows. Venezuela has settled the bulk of its oil exports to China outside the dollar system since 2018. The China-Russia-Iran-Venezuela-Cuba axis is not a coincidence and it is not a fringe alliance. It is a deliberately constructed parallel financial system, and Xi Jinping’s previously private 2024 instructions, since published in the Communist Party’s flagship ideological journal Qiushi, direct officials to build a strong currency widely used in international trade and foreign exchange, with a powerful central bank capable of attracting investment and influencing global pricing.

Naaz Modan:

Groups or government officials initiated 92% of challenges, and two-thirds overall ended in removals, according to an American Library Association report.

• Less than 3% of book challenges in 2025 came from parents, and a full 92% were initiated by groupsor government officials, according to an analysis of book challenges at public, school and college libraries published Monday by the American Library Association. The remaining 5% came from library users or unknown sources. 
• The percentage of challenges originating with sources other than individual parents jumped from 2024, when it stood at 72%. 
• Some two-thirds of the challenged books, or about 5,668, went on to be banned, and anadditional 920 titles were restricted in some way. That’s the highest number of titles censored in a single year and highest rate of censorship recorded between 1990 and 2025, according to ALA. 

Dive Insight:

Of the challenged titles, 40% reflected LGBTQIA+ experiences and the experiences of Black and Indigenous people, and people of color, according to the ALA analysis. 

The top-most challenged book was “Sold” by Patricia McCormick, a novel about a Nepali teenager who is sold into India’s sex slave trade.

Kevin Kelly:

A great question to ask when creating a scenario is what could prevent it from happening? Maybe there is not a single force that can undo this sustained uncertainty, but perhaps it is a mixture of several. If AGI arrived without a doubt in 3 years and China took over Taiwan despite the US’s actions, and if companies found a way to embed reliability and trust in media, then maybe this extended uncertainty could cease.

A second question to ask, is if we find ourselves in this scenario, what should we do about it? The most effective response to this multi-layered persistent uncertainty is not to seek impossible stability, but to cultivate radical adaptability and radical optionality. Give up on having a reliable prediction of what happens next. Instead cultivate multiple scenarios of what could happen, and endeavor with each of them to maximize your options. Goals should be considered as disposable hypotheses, constantly ready to be discarded and replaced by better-fitting concepts later on. You will be dead wrong on 19 out of your 20 expectations, but at least one of them will allow you to proceed. Make your decisions not on whether they are “right” but on whether they tend to give you more options later.

In our era of uncertain uncertainty, certainty will be the killer. In this era more downfalls will happen because of overconfidence than questioning. The key is to not get stuck on just one option. You have to become at ease holding multiple contradictory possibilities at once. (To prevent yourself from being swept away by the latest current and fashionable whim, this radical adaptability must be anchored on a steadfast set of unchangeable virtues, as corny as honesty, or as slick as generosity.) The strategy for prospering in prolonged uncertainty must be one of constant, agile recalibration.

 Andrew Mark Miller 

According to research from Defending Education, national teachers unions alone have directed roughly $669 million toward left-wing political groups, advocacy organizations and campaigns since 2015. When state and local affiliates are included, that figure balloons to more than $1 billion in total political spending.

The reports track spending from the two largest unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), as well as their state-level affiliates, using federal filings and campaign finance records.

“These entities are a political machine,” Rhyen Staley, research director at Defending Education, told Fox News Digital.

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WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Denis Stetskov:

Then there’s Fogbank. A classified material used in nuclear warheads. Produced from 1975 to 1989, then the facility was shut down. When the government needed to reproduce it for a warhead life extension program in 2000, they discovered they couldn’t. A GAO report found that almost all staff with production expertise had retired, died, or left the agency. Few records existed.

After spending an additional $69 million and years of reverse engineering, they finally produced viable Fogbank. Then discovered the new batch was too pure. The original had contained an unintentional impurity that was critical to its function. That fact existed nowhere in any document. Only the workers who made the original batch knew it, and they had retired years earlier.

A nuclear weapons program lost the ability to make a material it invented. The knowledge existed only in people, and the people were gone.

William A. Jacobson

Think of diversity, equity, and inclusion is how universities, K-12, and companies implement intersectional theory. They may not even know they’re doing it. That’s why we are calling on the administration to update their executive orders, to issue a new executive order which includes intersectionality under the definitions of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

It’s a very simple remedy, issue a new executive order saying intersectionality shall be deemed a practice that falls under diversity, equity, and inclusion for the purpose of all the other executive orders we have issued. Close the intersectionality loophole.

Additionally, we hope that Congress will get involved. We’ve seen on many issues, including antisemitism, that congressional hearings have proven extremely informative and extremely effective at addressing the problems.

Santiago Schnell:

“The end then of Learning,” wrote John Milton in 1644, “is to repair the ruines of our first Parents.” The image is hard to improve: education as repair, as recovery, as the restoration of capacities diminished by sin and neglect. 

Four centuries later, in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI), that image has become urgent again — because we are now surrounded by a technology that offers to perform, on demand, much of what we had long assumed education required us to do ourselves.

I came across Milton’s passage by chance while browsing a collection of the English writer’s works and opening it to his 1644 tract Of Education. Milton was not writing about algorithms. Yet he saw with unusual clarity the educational error that AI now magnifies: the confusion of language with learning. 

Language, he wrote, is “but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known.” He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.

Ray A. Smith & Te-Ping Chen

At long last, the job market might be giving the Class of 2026 an early graduation present. 

After years of steady deterioration, there are early signs entry-level hiring is picking up. A widely watched survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers out Monday shows employers expect to boost new-graduate hires by 5.6% this spring from a year ago—a turnaround from their much grimmer forecasts last fall. 

Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development:

Quinton Klabon:

2026 numbers are not final, but here were 2025’s top districts!

Amery: 50% of all 11th and 12th graders
Luxemburg: 46%
Mineral Point: 46%
Ithaca: 42%
Boscobel: 42%

big 6:
Green Bay: 12%
Racine: 9%
Appleton: 6%
Kenosha: 5%
Milwaukee: 1%
Madison: 1%

Quinton Klabon:

fewest students per school, 2025 school year, 518 districts over 15,000 students across America

Milwaukee: 21st (426)
Green Bay: 33rd (448)
Madison: 40th (466)
Kenosha: 121st (555)
Racine: 221st (631)

(5 lowest: Saint Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Springfield)

Erin Gretzinger:

“I don’t know when, where or what age — but there is interest in the city, in this region, right now that we have to think is going to produce more children with the kind of growth that’s being projected,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said in an interview this year.

The new projections from MGT, a Florida-based consulting firm hired to help with the boundary review process, outline why the district’s enrollment may not yet be climbing as administrators have hoped.

MGT analyzed all active or planned housing developments in Madison as of December. Among more than 12,000 units included in the forecast, 81% are apartments and about a quarter will be in the current Franklin-Randall Elementary School attendance area in the heart of downtown where many University of Wisconsin-Madison students reside.

There won’t be many families with school-aged children living in those housing units, MGT consultant Isaac Johnson told School Board members at their last meeting.

———

Part 1: Fix The Leaky Pipes – Fund Students, Not The System

———

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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?

Will Flanders:

In Madison, less than 40% of students can read proficiently using the most recent legitimate data. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the union would shut down schools for a day for politics given their history of supporting COVID shutdowns—doing immeasurable harm to a generation

SCOOP: The Madison Metropolitan School District (@MMSDschools) in Wisconsin sent out a message notifying parents that May 1st classes will be canceled so teachers can join anti-ICE protests

———

Now thousands of working parents in Madison are scrambling to line up child care because the teacher’s union wanted a day off. Madison, you voted for this crap. Enjoy!

———

More.

———

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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 public schools projected to lose 700 students in next 5 years

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?

Taxpayer funded Chicago Public Schools

Table of contents (click on the links below to jump to the content)

• Primary Sources and other resources for Teaching May Day, International Workers Day
• Activities and Curricula, historical fiction texts, resources on Lucy Parsons, primary sources, and more. Mainly upper-elementary and above levels. Includes information about the Haymarket affair, labor organizing more broadly, the 2006 May Day “day without an immigrant” mobilizations, and the 2025 may day mobilizations.
• Prek-2 Early Childhood Lessons
• A collection of several lessons and read-alouds for early childhood levels that explore May Day and connected themes.
• 3rd-5th Grade Level Unit Plan (with aligned standards)
• Introduces students to the labor movement, collective action, and the Haymarket Affair through discussion and research.
• Youth Organizing Against Authoritarianism Lesson
• A lesson to lead young people in interrogating what authoritarianism is and how young people have responded in the past and what they can do today.
• High School Level Lesson on May Day, Haymarket, and the current moment.
• A high school lesson to teach students about past May Day demonstrations and start a conversation based on our current moment.

——

More.

Marc Andreessen

That reminds me, you might want to open an investigation into CCP financing/infiltration of the AI “safety” movement, @FBI

Scott Johnson:

Having just done a bit of that right here, the next step might be to examine our recent history. Is there a Stamp Act moment to be found? Are ICE agents comparable to troops marching in the city of Boston? Has Congress passed draconian laws akin to those so-called Intolerable Acts that shut down the port of Boston, revoked the colony’s charter, forced local citizens to house British soldiers, and let British soldiers and officials return to England where they might or might not face trials and punishment for any violations of colonial laws?

In sum, are we actually on a revolutionary road today? And if so, just where are we on it? Has the current administration really done anything that is comparable? 

The previous administration let untold millions simply stream into the country–and in the midst of a covid shutdown no less. The opposition party nominated a candidate who promised that, if elected, he would take serious steps to close the border and remove many of those who were here in violation of entry, beginning with those who were criminals before they came or had committed serious crimes once here. That candidate won the election and began to fulfill not just any campaign promise, but a promise that was very much a key to his victory.

Nina Joudeh:

A growing revolt is unfolding at the the University of Southern California’s prestigious Marshall School of Business, where faculty are warning of the program’s downward slide.

In a sharply worded letter to USC Dean Geoffrey Garrett, 52 tenured professors flagged falling enrollment and graduate program cuts as signs of deeper trouble at the school, according to L.A. Material.

“There are clear signs of our downward trajectory in terms of academic reputation, commitment to excellence in research, and the demonstrated academic excellence of the students which graduate from our programs,” the letter states.

While faculty pushback isn’t unusual on college campuses, current and former USC administrators described the warning as rare, high-level rebuke that could force leadership to take a hard look inward.

Elizabeth Miller:

Lauren Weisskirk hadn’t heard the phrase “No School November” until she moved to Portland seven years ago. In her group chats with other moms around the country, her friends have a running joke.

“‘Hey Lauren, are your kids in school today?’” Weisskirk said. “Because they know there’s a high chance that the kids aren’t.”

From parents at the local level to the state’s top elected official, Oregon has long been known as a state with a short school year. Recent research backs that up.

Lauren Weisskirk has two children in Portland Public Schools and says Oregon could learn from other states in how to provide more instructional time. A new report suggests students in some Oregon districts get the equivalent of eight fewer weeks of school than kids in other parts of the state.

Now, a new data tool from Stand For Children offers details on just how short Oregon’s school year is — and how broad the variation is from district to district.

Douglas Belkin:

Last spring, Yale University President Maurie McInnis asked a group of faculty to examine why Americans were losing confidence in higher education—and to propose remedies to restore it.

Their much-anticipated findings, released Wednesday, call for changes to address everything from perceived political bias among faculty, to opaque admission standards and crushing student debt.

“In its report, the committee calls on Yale to reflect on and take responsibility for our role in the erosion of public trust,” McInnis wrote. “I accept this judgment fully.”

The report comes as colleges and universities seek to placate a presidential administration that has filed lawsuits, frozen federal research funds and generally made life uncomfortable for institutions accustomed to more autonomy. Yale and Dartmouth, are the Ivy League schools least affected by President Trump’s scrutiny.

In 2025, only 42% of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, up slightly from recent years, but still down from 57% in 2015, according to Gallup.

Hanno Lustig

A tenth of a percentage point of extra productivity growth — well within the range of plausible near-term AI effects — raises the fundamental value of U.S. government debt by $1.3 trillion. If markets fully priced this in, nominal Treasury yields would fall by about 70 basis points.

——

So when GDP grows faster, the government collects a lot more and spends only a little more. The difference flows straight to primary surpluses. Bondholders are implicitly holding a levered claim on GDP, financed by a short position in an inflation-indexed bond. That is a long productivity position.

——

Commentary.

PDF link

Candidates should answer THREE questions.

1. In the essay version of the Turing test, an examiner decides which of two essays was written by a human and which by a machine. Convince the examiner that you are the human.

2. Is body language a language?

3. Are dreams more like movies or video games?

…..

Lydia Brimelow:

You’re telling me that an SPLC employee was able to walk into a bank and open five fraudulent bank accounts in one day with fake documents and fake EIN numbers? There’s got to be more to that story.

Now back to our regularly scheduled indictment:

The funds deposited…were then loaded onto pay cards issued to the [field sources] who were supposedly employees of the fictitious entity…the [field sources] pay cards were designed to still further conceal the true nature, source, ownership and control of the donated funds the SPLC was paying to the [field sources].

There are rumors that there are RICO possibilities here. I don’ t know the law behind RICO but I do know that it has a way of unzipping long lines of related people who are connected by money. 

I can’t pretend to be sad that the SPLC might be facing such a pickle but I’m also curious—will it start unzipping these extremist groups too? Will we see Heidi Beirich and the Grand Wizard of the KKK perp-walked together? The memes write themselves.

——-

Legal Discovery.

The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

“SPLC funneled over $3 million to persons in extremist groups – including the KKK and American Nazi Party”

Glenn Greenwald

The FISA bill that permits warrantless NSA spying on American citizens was first enacted by Nancy Pelosi’s House in 2008, then signed into law by President Bush. The law provided for those powers to expire four years later, unless Congress approved renewal. 

The law was first renewed in 2012 with the support of the Obama White House, this time for five years, without any reforms. When that five-year renewal was set to expire in 2018, Congress, this time backed by the Trump White House, passed a six-year reform-free renewal, requiring a new vote in 2024.

For the 2018 renewal, there was a mountain of evidence demonstrating abuse, which in turn gave rise to steadfast opposition to such a renewal from dozens of members of both parties (who were demanding, among other reforms, the addition of a warrant requirement for spying on Americans). As a result, then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was forced to rely on dozens of Democratic representatives to secure FISA renewal.

Ryan accomplished this by working in close tandem with three key California Democrats: then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, ranking Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell (D-CA). That liberal trio led 65 House Democrats alongside 191 Republicans to vote to endow a President they were calling a Hitler-type fascist with virtually unlimited power to spy on Americans without warrants.

Derek Thompson:

Putting it all together: In the last 40 years, Americans have come to expect and prize affordability without even having to think about it. But in the last five years, prices for all sorts of things, including housing, have increased about three times faster than the rate Americans are used to; meanwhile, full employment has put upward pressure on the cost of services. The US public has responded by not only screaming at pollsters about their misery but also by rushing to the polls to vote out every incumbent who failed to do something about the “affordability” crisis of the 2020s. And Americans are not alone: The year 2024 was a bloodbath for incumbent parties around the world, as fury about high prices went as global as the pandemic itself.

“Wonder Woman:”

What about Black children not being able to read?

Scott Johnson

We attended the Federalist Society’s 2026 G. Barry Anderson Dinner and Award yesterday evening. Minnesota Court of Appeals Judge Matthew Johnson received the award for his scrupulous contributions to the court. 

Third Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman was the keynote speaker. His subject was patriotism. It was a beautiful and moving speech. Some prominent publication like the Wall Street Journal should ask for a look at the text of Judge Hardiman’s speech and seek his permission to publish it in some form. 

Anticipating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this coming July, Judge Hardiman’s speech expressed pride in, and appreciation of, our history and our founding documents. He recalled how his mother and father had inculcated a knowledgeable patriotism in him as he grew up in Waltham, Massachusetts. He concluded with some ideas regarding the perpetuation of our patriotism.

His speech put me in mind of Senataor Carl Schurz’s 1871 restatement of Stephen Decatur’s famous declaration (“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”). This was Senator Schurz’s slightly modified restatement: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

Erin Gretzinger:

The state Department of Public Instruction is disputing the findings of an audit by the U.S. Department of Education, which found the state agency improperly ran a pandemic relief program and urged returning over $20 million.

The state allocated COVID-19 relief funding to private schools that were ineligible to receive aid, according to a September 2025 audit report by the federal department’s Office of Inspector General.

The Office of Inspector General found one ineligible school received $838,829. However, both the state and federal agencies say that money has since been retrieved from the school.

The Office of Inspector General report doesn’t name the school. Department of Public Instruction officials also declined to identify the school in response to questions from the Cap Times.

The federal audit concluded the Department of Public Instruction, which is overseen by state Superintendent Jill Underly, and the department’s contractor failed to verify information that schools provided in their funding applications. In total, the department provided more than $20 million in federally funded services and assistance to 184 ineligible schools, according to the audit.

By Garry Tan

California is projected to lose 15.7% of its public school students by 2031. That’s nearly one million kids, gone from a system that currently educates 5.9 million. When the dust settles, federal enrollment data shows California will have fewer students than Texas had in 2019.

This can’t simply be shrugged off as a nationwide trend. California’s student exodus will come to nearly three times the national average decline of 5.5%. Forty states and D.C. will lose students, but California is losing them faster than any other large state in America.

Students and families aren’t leaving randomly. This exodus is a predictable result of a growing affordability crisis and a declining quality of education. And it has consequences: a massive decrease in student numbers will hit school districts, California’s political power on the national stage, and every child-focused service that families rely on.

As a father raising children and navigating the California school system, this trend is as troubling to me as it is infuriating. The numbers convey what’s been clear to me for some some time now: California isn’t prioritizing families — in fact, it’s actively chasing them away. 

Nate Honeycutt: & Ryne Weiss:

What is an IRB, and why do they exist?

An IRB is a committee at a college or university that reviews and approves any kind of research involving human subjects. The idea is straightforward: the IRB wants to make sure that nobody is harmed and that participants know what they’re signing up for when participating in a study.

If this sounds reasonable, that’s because it is. In fact, IRBs were established by federal directives in the U.S. after major ethical abuses in research. One of the most infamous was the untreated syphilis study at Tuskegee between 1932 and 1972, in which the U.S. government studied the effects of syphilis on black men for decades without treating them — or even telling them what disease they had.

In 1979, the federal government issued the Belmont Report, which laid out three core principles for ethical research:

1. Respect for persons: People must give informed consent.
2. Beneficence: The benefits of research must be weighed against the risks.
3. Justice: The burdens and benefits of research should be shared fairly.

Wall Street Journal:

Tax Day has arrived again, and our April 15 condolences to those who pay the bulk of the nation’s bills. It’s a smaller group than many Americans realize, and those figures bear repeating, as Democrats renew their line that the rich won’t pay their “fair share.”

Sen. Cory Booker has a bill to raise the top individual income-tax rate to 43%, from today’s 37%. Sen. Chris Van Hollen wants 49%. Both proposals would also eliminate income taxation for many lower earners.

“My bill would guarantee no income tax on the first $75,000 families earn,” Mr. Booker said last month. He claimed this would “help restore tax fairness.” Mr. Van Hollen’s legislation, according to his press release, would end income taxation for those making under $46,000, while providing “a significant tax break” to individuals up to $80,500.

Yet the notion that America’s income tax is biased against the working class is a progressive fantasy. According to the official numbers from the IRS, the top 1% of income-tax filers in 2022 contributed 40.4% of the revenue. The top 10% of filers paid 72%. The top quarter contributed 87.2%.

LaTrisha Vetaw

Sobering reality: declining downtown property values are shifting the tax burden onto residents, making our city unaffordable.

Instead, my colleagues are focused on decriminalizing drug paraphernalia and a data center moratorium. It’s time to get serious.

Matt Bateman:

Here’s my script for introducing the American Revolution to 5- to 11-year-olds:

——-

Detroit used to have a municipal civics curriculum in the public schools. Here’s the 1968 textbook.

Matt Taibbi:

On July 20, 2022, Quartz published an article titled, “A new dashboard tracks real-time extremist hate online,” above a scary photo of tiki-torch-bearing supremacists at Charlottesville: 

The article cheered the launch of “Exploring Hate Online,” a new tool launched by the Google–and-taxpayer-funded New America Foundation in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League. The new digital tool aimed “to give new insight into how this kind of manipulation… spreads online” by “monitoring over 1,000 of the most active extremist accounts on Twitter.” The article noted the new tool worked “in a similar way to Hamilton 68, a dashboard… which shows analysts what Russia-linked Twitter accounts are focusing on.” It wasn’t similar to Hamilton 68, it was the same:

Mark Manson

Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.

Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, a world-class mind with powerful thoughts, and yet absolutely no idea how to apply any of it.

The world seems to be full of intelligent idiots. The examples are endless.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, on Tuesday issued an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC funneled more than $3 million of donors’ money to members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Movement—groups it simultaneously condemned in fundraising letters and press releases. To move the money, the SPLC allegedly used fictitious business names.

For many of us who spent years on the receiving end of the organization’s lists and labels, the indictment itself was no surprise. What surprised us was that it took until 2026 to arrive.

I was placed on an SPLC blacklist in October 2016. The document was called “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” My name appeared beside Maajid Nawaz, a reformed radical who ran a counter-extremism organization, and an array of figures also dedicated to combating Islamism and antisemitism, such as David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. The list handed journalists a ready-made roster of 15 people whose views were to be seen as toxic. But to call it a mere reference guide is to understate what it was.

Colin Wright:

The Montana Supreme Court’s decision last week in Kalarchik v. State should put to rest the Right’s celebratory mantra that “woke is dead.” It isn’t. 

In a 5–2 ruling, the court upheld a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of key parts of Montana’s 2023 law, SB 458, and related agency policies that defined sex in binary, biological terms and limited changes to birth certificates and driver’s licenses. 

The ruling does not finally invalidate the law, but it allows Montanans with transgender or “nonbinary” identities to continue changing the sex marker on identity documents while the constitutional challenge proceeds. More importantly, the majority signaled its view that the challenged policies likely violate Montana’s constitution, holding that “transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination” and subjecting the state’s policy to strict scrutiny.

Joye Walker:

Common Core has contributed greatly to decline in academic achievement. K-6 teachers use it as a guide, and feel that it is more of a ceiling to reach rather than a basement to stay above. I found that as I continued teaching high school math, I had to gradually make my tests a bit shorter as students seemed not to be able to finish as easily as they did when I first started teaching. I also noticed that students were coming to high school unprepared to do basic arithmetic, relying heavily on calculators. Number sense just wasn’t as strong as it needed to be — e.g. multiples of 12 or 15 were not readily recognized. Junior high math teachers — often K-8 generalists — would argue that students don’t need to simplify radicals — just give ’em a calculator and round to the nearest hundredth (eyeroll…). For example, something like the square root of 12 over 4 simplifies to the square root of 3 over 2, a frequently used trigonometric ratio. If you haven’t taught trigonometry, you probably won’t recognize how important that kind of number could be.

It always felt like the teachers at the K-8 level felt that they should be the teachers who determined what needed to be learned in math and to what level of expertise. I once gave a presentation to a group of K-8 teachers and gave an example of the basic fact 9 x 7 = 63 and how it was used in all high school math classes through AP calculus. I’m sure that many didn’t understand the examples I gave, and it not, I rest my case.

Chick Pezeshki:

It’s not exactly a secret that I’ve been a social activist, almost completely unpaid, my entire life. It started back in 1989, after I moved out to Pullman and became involved with the environmental movement. I fell under the tutelage of Leroy Lee, a Native American wannabe as close to being a Nez Perce Indian as one could be. Leroy was no Pretendian — but he was as ingratiated with both the Coeur D’alene and Nez Perce tribes. And he decided I was smart, which has always been a curse, and enlisted me in helping him with what turned into the Phantom Forest scandal. Leroy was a timber stand examiner, and worked in the woods measuring exactly how much actual timber was present on both private and mostly National Forest land. So he drug me along as he compiled damning evidence on the US Forest Service, showing that they had kept two sets of books regarding sustainability of that resource — one inflated, to justify increased cutting. And one actual — because in the end, the USFS had to sell that timber. I was a protege — not an architect. But I learned a lot from Leroy, who had intuited that I would go on to continue his work. 

Leroy died young — 18 years ago, but I still remember him fondly.

And that launched my own benighted career — defending beautiful places that no one knew, and no one really cared about. Most people, when it comes to saving forests, sort the world into what they can see from the highway. And if there’s a “beauty strip” — a row of trees that blocks the view of clearcuts from the road, most will never question any of it. Even in this latest round of dealing with Donald Trump and ostensibly renewed calls for more logging on National Forests (most people don’t even understand that National Forests are NOT National Parks — they can and are logged) I’ve found that most people, even while professing care about ecological integrity, haven’t the foggiest what that means. Even professional environmental activists have fallen into line defending agencies I literally spent decades fighting.

Tim Sigsworth:

Drive to decolonise history curriculums has ‘gone too far’, warns report

Schoolchildren are being taught that black people built Stonehenge as part of “decolonised” history curriculums, a report has found…

Brian McGill, Danny Dougherty and Micah Maidenberg:

The aviation industry, quite literally, took off when the Wright brothers flew the world’s first heavier-than-air craft on a sustained, powered flight near Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Alessandra Caruso:

Active: Federal lawsuit challenges race-based changes to New York City’s Specialized High Schools admissions

Yi Fang Chen came to the United States from China in 1996 as a teenager, speaking little English. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University and today works as a data scientist in New York City. Like many immigrant parents, Yi Fang has poured her energy into building a better life for her family—and she wants the same opportunity for her children.

Yi Fang’s oldest son recently took the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), the competitive exam that serves as the gateway to New York City’s eight elite Specialized High Schools. These world-class institutions have produced many Nobel laureates and launched countless students into top colleges and successful careers. Yi Fang’s son set his sights on Stuyvesant High School, one of the most prestigious public high schools in the nation.

He scored a 558 on the SHSAT, which is in approximately the 95th percentile. It would have earned him a seat at Stuyvesant the year prior. But this year, the cutoff was 561, and his application was denied.

Under New York state law, admission to the Specialized High Schools must be based “solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination, which shall be open to each and every child in the city of New York.” State law also allows for the Discovery program, which historically offered a small number of seats—less than 5% of total admissions—to low-income students who scored just below the cutoff.

 Teagan King:

The Madison School District has released its initial designs for the new Cherokee Heights and Sennett middle schools.

Susan Bowersox, a senior project architect with the district’s partner OPN Architects, presented the designs to Madison’s Urban Design Committee at its April 15 meeting, highlighting design features such as community learning spaces and nature-inspired details.

The committee provided feedback on the designs, but they weren’t put to a vote. The final plans will need city approval.

Sennett Middle School’s proposed design is a 155,000-square-foot, two-story building that would include two gyms, classrooms that look out onto green space and a portion available for public use after school.

The new building will be located next to the existing building at 502 Pflaum Road, which will be demolished and replaced with green space and athletic courts.

——

Madison taxpayers have funded many referendums over the past decades, including the expansion of our least diverse schools: Van Hise and Hamilton when space was/is available elsewhere. Overall enrollment is flat to declining.

Jen Hoffmann

A parent emailed me last week asking why her son has a C in my class.

He doesn’t turn in work. He doesn’t study. He sits in class doing other things. I’ve told her this before. The C is not a mystery. It’s the natural result of months of choices.

But that isn’t really what she wanted to talk about. She wanted to talk about the A he earned in another class. If he can get an A there, she asked, why can’t he get one here?

I didn’t send the reply I wanted to write. So I’m writing it here instead.

Thirty years ago, when I started teaching, an A meant something clear and solid. It meant a student had worked hard, retained the material, and could actually use what they’d learned. Today, that same letter is often given for far less. The floor has quietly dropped, but we kept using the same alphabet on the report card.

According to a major ACT study tracking more than 4.3 million high school students, average GPAs rose from 3.17 in 2010 to 3.36 in 2021 — while ACT scores actually fell. The letter stayed the same. What it measures has changed.

Sasha Hurowitz

— down from as many as a dozen. Medieval Studies could make just one offer, down from its usual two. Classics will have three spots instead of four.

Facing an 8 percent federal tax on its endowment investment income and resulting University budget cuts, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has reduced the size of incoming graduate student cohorts across various programs. Administrators’ plans to reduce graduate student enrollment over the next three years — by approximately 13 percent in the humanities and social sciences and 5 percent in STEM programs — emerged in the winter. 

Now, some enrollment numbers for next year are coming into focus. Directors of graduate studies across a variety of departments, who provided the sizes of the incoming and previous classes, told the News that the reductions will diminish graduate and undergraduate student experiences.

“Because the cuts came so quickly and were a surprise to many of us, we’re now kind of scrambling to figure out what other kind of changes we need to make to our programs in response to what seems to be a far smaller profile or footprint for graduate education in our program,” Daniel HoSang, the director of graduate studies for Yale’s American Studies Program, said in a phone interview.

Jennifer Weber:

A new report from the center-left Progressive Policy Institute documents how Mississippi climbed from last in the country in fourth-grade reading to above the national average. The report’s insights offer useful guidance for New York State.

The report identified four reasons for Mississippi’s success. Its widely touted “science of reading” initiative, which implemented evidence-based reading programs, was one. The other three were rigorous standards and accountability, real consequences for poor performance, and careful state-level implementation.

More than 40 states have adopted policies aimed at evidence-based reading instruction. Most have not adopted the other three policies. But clearly the full package is needed for success.

What does Mississippi’s approach look like in practice? Starting in 2012, the state began grading every school based on measurable student outcomes. Schools earned points only for students performing at or above grade level. High schools received the most credit for students graduating with a standard diploma in four years. Students who earned a GED, occupational diploma, or certificate of attendance garnered the school fewer points. Students who dropped out cost points.

How William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Francis Galton thought with diagrams

The visual creativity of James is not just a clue about how his own mind worked. It’s also part of a larger shift in the culture of science during his generation: in the nineteenth century, design and the nascent world of big data came together, for the first time, to create the modern concept of data visualization

Jude Schwalbach:

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released provisional data for 2025, showing that the nation’s nearly two-decade baby bust continued, with U.S. fertility rates hitting a historic low. Since 2007, when the so-called birth dearth began, the number of births in the U.S. has dropped by 18%. This means that nearly 718,000 fewer children were born in 2025 than in 2007.

In the long term, this significantly affects public schools because their funding is based on enrollment. And fewer students means less money. 

Public schools are already feeling the squeeze of reduced enrollment. Since 2020, national enrollment numbers have dropped to 49,516,361 students — a loss of almost 1.3 million students, or -2.5% — as of 2024, the most recent year with complete data available. 

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), public school enrollment is projected to decline by another 2.6 million students by 2031, which would mean a loss of four million public school students since 2020. (see Figure 1).

Frederick Hess & Annika Marshall

The ideological tilt of academe is striking. Today, 60 percent of faculty identify as far left or liberal and just 12 percent as conservative. Fifty-four percent of humanities faculty and 45 percent of social sciences faculty say that terms such as “radical,” “activist,” “Marxist,” or “socialist” describe them at least moderately well. Republicans make up just six percent of political science faculty (and even less of history or literature faculty).

While complaints about a campus monoculture are nothing new, higher ed’s defenders are prone to argue that progressive bias doesn’t ultimately matter because scholars are professionals who don’t allow their personal views to color their teaching or research. Indeed, some prominent campus voices dismiss talk of viewpoint diversity as a “MAGA plot.”

To sort through all this, AEI last week hosted a webinaron why higher education’s ideological tilt matters for academic research and teaching, featuring three scholars who’ve tackled this topic over the past year: Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute; the Goldwater Institute’s Timothy Minella; and Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College. Their findings suggest that airy claims of scholarly detachment and neutrality miss the mark. Collectively, the researchers described a teaching and research enterprise warped by ideological dogma.

Take teaching. Last year, Shields and two colleagues dove into 27 million college syllabi to examine the texts college students are assigned to read on controversial topics like criminal justice and abortion. The most widely assigned texts were celebrated left-leaning works like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. But the team was more interested in how frequently these canonical progressive works were paired with “their most important intellectual critics.” The answer? Rarely. Nine times out of ten, no works are assigned that offer a competing perspective. As they explain, “It seems that professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreements . . . That is the academic norm, at least in the cases we studied.”

Faculty Leaks:

Before I do, some context. Every faculty hiring committee I’ve ever sat on has operated on an official premise: find the best person for the job. What actually happens in the room is another matter entirely. But this search was something else — even by the standards of a process that has never been as neutral as advertised.

The Spreadsheet

It started before the first application was reviewed. A colleague — one of the committee’s true believers — laid it out plainly: any new hire “must not be white.” Not “diversity is a priority.” Not “we should broaden our search.” Must. Not. Be. White.

This wasn’t a suggestion. It became the operating framework. The committee created a scoring matrix: teaching, research, terminal degree — and diversity. Except “diversity” didn’t mean what the university’s official policy said it meant.

The committee’s original definition of “diverse” meant non-male — excluding white men while allowing white women. When I pointed out that women are not exactly underrepresented in academia, and that excluding white men specifically would constitute gender discrimination, the definition was revised. The solution: expand the discrimination. It now meant non-white. All white candidates, men and women, were out. Progress.

White applicants were filtered out in the first round. Not evaluated and found lacking. Filtered. Pre-screened by name before anyone read their application. If your name sounded WASPy — think Milford C. Wellington III — your CV went in the trash unread. No one checked your teaching record. No one looked at your research. The name was enough. Ivy League PhDs, Emmy Award winners, Fulbright Scholars — an enormous swath of the applicant pool, gone before anyone read a word.

Barton Swaim:

Thus wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” about the reverence with which this country’s citizens in the 1830s regarded remunerative labor. The great French writer compared aristocratic societies, among whose elite work was regarded as a thing to be done for honor but not money, with the nascent bourgeois society of America, in which gainful employment was an unavoidable part of life. Half a century ago the average college-educated American would have endorsed Tocqueville’s remark and marveled that anyone would think otherwise. In the 2020s many Americans evidence a deep confusion about the nature and purpose of work.

Did the “war” bring victory? On the one hand, today’s poor live vastly more prosperous lives by any material measure than the poor of the 1960s. Talk of citizens living over or under a “poverty line” is meaningless, Mr. Eberstadt shows, the de facto line having risen so dramatically upward—a fact that has little to do with government transfer payments and almost everything to do with rapid economic growth in the postwar period.

On the other hand, antipoverty programs have left more or less the same proportion of the citizenry dependent on welfare and disinclined to join the workforce. So private-sector growth has made today’s “poor” rich by comparison with their forerunners two generations ago, even as government antipoverty measures have ensured that today’s poor, however well off by comparison, remain dependent and resistent to upward mobility. The War on Poverty hasn’t only failed; it has weakened virtues its originators took for granted.

Barton Swaim:

‘In democratic peoples, where there is no hereditary wealth, everyone works to live, or has worked, or was born of people who worked. The idea of work as a necessary, natural and honest condition of humanity is therefore offered to the human mind on every side.”

Thus wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” about the reverence with which this country’s citizens in the 1830s regarded remunerative labor. The great French writer compared aristocratic societies, among whose elite work was regarded as a thing to be done for honor but not money, with the nascent bourgeois society of America, in which gainful employment was an unavoidable part of life. Half a century ago the average college-educated American would have endorsed Tocqueville’s remark and marveled that anyone would think otherwise. In the 2020s many Americans evidence a deep confusion about the nature and purpose of work.

The weakening of America’s Protestant work ethic, to use a contested but irreplaceable phrase, is a complicated story, but you could trace its beginnings to the 1960s. No one has chronicled that story more incisively than Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. In November Mr. Eberstadt published “America’s Human Arithmetic,” a collection of essays mainly on the subject of labor. The book includes a 2014 address about Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, that assortment of programs begun in the mid-1960s—Head Start, Medicaid, expanded food stamps and many others.

Jocelyn Gecker:

The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line.

Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance. No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers or delete keys.

The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments.

“What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?” said Phelps.

She wanted students to understand what writing, thinking and classrooms were like before everything turned digital. So, she found a few dozen old manual typewriters in thrift shops and online marketplaces, and created what her syllabus calls an “analog” assignment.

Dad29

In the Good Old Days of the mid- ’70’s, a “very generous” benefit plan cost about 33% of payroll dollars.  IOW, for every dollar one was paid, another 33 cents were paid by the employer in benefit costs:  the Social Security tax, health insurance, pension, unemployment comp, disability, etc., etc.  Those numbers were common with Miller Brewing, Allis-Chalmers, Rex Chainbelt–the “big players” in Milwaukee’s industrial landscape.

But by 2010 or so, a “very generous” benefit plan’s cost was around 25% (or less) of payroll dollars.  Pensions disappeared in favor of 401(k)s, health insurance was reduced, and some other trimming was done.

But not in the Milwaukee Public Schools!!!  

So now, Da Yooonion is looking for Moar Money and an argument ensued:

… MPS estimates payroll tax and benefit costs would be 53%. In a statement, district officials said, “MPS’s 53% benefit rate is correct and validated by external audits. Both the rate and our proposals have been validated by our team as well as veteran school finance expert who has worked for some of the nation’s largest school districts.”…

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Related: Act 10.

Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Teacher Union and the 2026 Wisconsin Governor Election

Rick Hess:

Q: Is it possible for education to be separated from politics?

A: Not really. The American public spends close to $2 trillion a year on K–12 and higher education. When public officials are allocating vast sums to provide a service through government-run or -subsidized institutions, there are going to be disagreements. Politics is how we resolve those without throwing rocks at one another. Education is inherently political. The question is whether our education politics are healthy or unhealthy.

Q: So, are our education politics healthy?

A: Nah, not by a long shot. I just mentioned the problem with social media, polarization, and the resulting incentives. More broadly, politics has been totalized. Politicians are supposed to be political, of course. But politics should be one thread in the broader civic tapestry. The problem is that political identity has taken on outsized importance in American life. During the pandemic, school closures became a test of one’s feelings about Donald Trump. Sensible attempts to revamp history standards or strengthen civics got co-opted by the progressive “America sucks” crowd, which has yielded a backlash from MAGA warriors. Much of today’s education politics isn’t even about ideology—it’s about theater.

Q: What do you mean it’s not about ideology? It seems like we’ve got intense ideological fights about education.

Joye Walker:

I read a document by Hung-Hsi Wu entitled “What is school mathematics?” I recall reading about some of Wu’s ideas back in the 1990s when I worked for the Department of Mathematics at The University of Iowa. Since that time, I did spend 23 years teaching high school mathematics, 22 of which were teaching honors precalculus to Iowa City’s (Big 10 University town and home of a teaching medical school) best and brightest. A few topics caught my eye enough to want to comment.

Regarding fractions, I became aware after teaching high school and before that, working in the Mathematics Tutorial Laboratory at U of Iowa for 7 years, that students really didn’t understand what fractions were. Clearly, it also shows up if one works, for example, in industry, (I turned cast iron and steel parts on automatic lathes in a machine shop off and on) only to find that new workers struggle with measurement — in particular, how to read a tape measure. I once taught a group of 6th graders at the Belin-Blank Center for gifted education (U of Iowa) and we talked about the meanings of “numerator” and “denominator.” In my mind, the numerator is the counter — it says how many. The denominator indicates what is being counted. For example, 3/4 means three quantities of 1/4. In other words, it means 1/4+1/4+1/4, or 3(1/4). On a tape measure, if the distance, say, between 1 and 2 inches is divided into 16 intervals (count those little lines between the 1 and 2 on a ruler), that means that each little space between consecutive little lines represents 1/16 of an inch. If the distance being measured shows 5 of those little lines after the 1 inch mark on the tape measure, then it measures 1 5/16 of an inch. We didn’t use pizzas or areas to do this. We actually used linear measure, much like a number line.

Aaron Siri:

Someone inside Kaiser sent me the below internal guidance concerning shots and medications for newborns.

It tells Kaiser employees that the “approach to how we introduce and administer routine newborn … Hepatitis B vaccine” is to ” avoid saying ‘it’s optional’ or ‘you can refuse’ unless directly asked” and to tell parents that “we will be giving” instead of asking consent to give. This is the antithesis of informed consent. Yet Kaiser calls it “excellent patient and family care.”

Aaron Sibarium

NEW: Stanford is awarding five times as much money to a campus drag troupe as to an undergraduate veterans association. And it’s awarding more money to the Muslim Student Union—$175,000—than every Christian student group combined.

We obtained the school’s activities budget.

Alex Tabarrok:

VinNews: The Rockland County Legislature approved amendments to the Home Improvement Law, dissolving the existing Home Improvement Licensing Board and shifting primary licensing authority to the Legislature itself…Under the new rules, the former licensing board will be reduced to an advisory role, losing its power to issue or revoke licenses. Licensing responsibilities will now fall under the Rockland County Legislature…

This is an interesting change and worth studying. In the Licensing Racket, which I reviewed for the WSJ, Rebecca Haw Allensworth emphasizes that occupational licensing boards put the fox in charge of the chickens:

Olivia Herken:

But the endorsement this month from the Wisconsin Education Association Council, or WEAC, gives her a boost in a primary race just beginning to heat up.

Here’s how Roys, whose campaign calls her “a dark horse” in the race, received the endorsement from an organization representing about 97,000 educators in Wisconsin:

Peggy Wirtz-Olsen, the WEAC president, said the union’s political action committee interviewed seven of the nine Democratic candidates and extended invites to the Republican candidates, who chose not to participate.

The committee then made a recommendation to the WEAC board of directors, which then voted on the endorsement. The decision among the roughly 25 board members was not unanimous, Wirtz-Olsen said, but support was still “very strong.”

The group liked Roys’ experience on the Legislature’s budget-writing committee — where much of school funding gets debated and slashed or bolstered — and her deep knowledge of public education and labor, Wirtz-Olsen said. Roys also shared solutions to the school funding crisis, supported other initiatives like paid family leave and healthy school lunches, and had a track record of listening directly to educators to learn about their needs.

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WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

www

Charting the combinatorial space of cheesemaking

Every cheese is a combination of milk, texture, rind, mold, aging, and processing. Put all the combinations in a grid and you find holes — cheeses nobody has made yet, or that only exist in one remote valley. This is that grid. Click any cell to expand it.

www

A “structured” 11th edition, online.

Kristen Weld:

Last week, The Crimson revealed a large-scale fundraising campaign by senior administrators intended to transform the ideological makeup of Harvard’s faculty, ostensibly to provide “viewpoint diversity.” Per this plan, some 20 to 30 new professors could be appointed “at the University level” — which suggests, not by field experts at the department level, a sharp departure from the normal course of faculty appointments — and “embedded across schools and departments,” in an apparent attempt to dilute our professoriate’s purported liberal bias.

Amid a hiring freeze and a hurried retreat from almost everything that smacks of affirmative action or DEI, what could explain the University’s eagerness to embrace one, and only one, special form of diversity?

Fundamentally, this hiring push is part of a broader effort to diminish the authority and autonomy of the faculty. It would weaken a robust tradition of peer review and increase administrative control over University affairs.

Recent evidence suggests that Harvard’s upper administration sees its own faculty as a problem that needs to be solved. In December, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 blamed faculty activism — not the Trump administration’s lawsuits and attacks, not the doxxing of students, and not the numerous other reasons previously raised by the professoriate — for having chilled free speech on campus.

The Economist:

Hospitals are jammed up despite being well-resourced. Funding for health care is the highest it has ever been, outside covid. After stabilising in the 2010s, spending in the OECD rose to nearly 10% of GDP following the pandemic. Median spending per person in Europe has risen 13% in constant prices since 2019. There are also more helping hands. Hospitals added nearly 140,000 jobs in America last year, more than the entire rest of the economy. Hiring by England’s National Health Service has increased sharply: its headcount has grown by 25% since 2019 to employ some 1.4m people—or 2% of the population.
All this presents a productivity puzzle. Some hospitals seem to be faring worse with more resources. In Australia, where the hospital workforce grew by almost 20% from 2019-24, elective surgeries are basically flat—the only difference is that the sick are waiting longer to be seen. Though there has been a gradual recovery, “On any measure you want to use in England, productivity is below where it was pre-pandemic,” says Max Warner of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank in London.

Joel Miller:

Yes, the original price of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tolkien’s Fellowship were just $3.95 and $5. But those are nominal values. When we factor inflation, the picture changes dramatically. In today’s dollars—and you can run this exercise yourself—those cover prices would look more like $43 and $54.

But, of course, they’re nowhere near so high. I’ve got a hardcover of To Kill a Mockingbird right here by my elbow printed in 2023. Cover price? $27.99. So, while the nominal cost of books has gone up, factoring inflation, it’s nowhere near as high as we should expect. In fact, while not immune, books have been remarkably resistant to inflation.

Along with countless other goods and services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the cost of “recreational books” year over year as part of the Consumer Price Index. And guess what? $20 worth of books in 1997 would cost you a skosh less today: $19.49. “Recreational books experienced an average inflation rate of -0.09% per year,” reports the CPI Inflation Counter website.

Diego Arguedas Ortiz

From before their babies are born, men undergo serious hormonal changes that can powerfully influence their behaviour – with consequences for their child’s wellbeing.

In the months before my son was born, my partner and I attended an active birth workshop, a breastfeeding session and the hospital-run antenatal course, read a small pile of pregnancy and baby books and scrolled through loads of websites. Our notepads quickly filled up.

Among my notes of that time are details of the many ways women’s bodies prepare for birth and motherhood: hormones rise and drop, organs move, brains reshape.

No one, however, told me that my brain and body were also readying for fatherhood.

My son was over a year old when I first came across that idea in Father Time, a book by primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in which she argues that men have all the necessary biological wiring to be “every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother”.

Hugo Cox:

On a clear spring day in an inner-city neighbourhood, a large primary school, recently closed, stands as both a relic of the past and a sign of a contemporary social shift. For a century and a half, its imposing facade gathered and dispensed more than 200 local children every school day. They would stream in and out, through the bustle of the nearby market founded around the same time — their parents customers and acquaintances of the stallholders. During the school run, business would pick up and everyone seemed — even for those brief interludes — to behave better, because children were about.

The school, Colvestone, is in Hackney, east London. It is one of four schools that closed in the borough in 2024. Four more closed last year. But not even that accurately shows the declining numbers of schoolchildren here. Earlier this week, parents of four-year-olds across the UK learnt where their child has been accepted to primary school, but in the capital many seats will remain empty. Last year, it was roughly one in five places in Hackney alone — nearly 500 in all.

The falling numbers of children in London is mirrored across cities in Europe and the US. In Paris, primary school enrolment has fallen by a quarter in the past decade. First year elementary school enrolment in New York fell 18 per cent in the decade to autumn 2024, while in Barcelona, preschool entry (three to six years), the main entry point into the school system, fell 16 per cent between autumn 2016 and autumn 2024. 

Quinton Klabon:

1 of the main reasons Milwaukee Public Schools is among Wisconsin’s and America’s lowest-performing districts is that Milwaukee banishes superintendents who try to address root problems.

May God help us if it happens again.

more.

We’ve now updated this story with total cost savings estimates, per bargaining documents. For union workers, specifically, delaying the COLA adjustments would save between about $3 million and $7 million. A previous estimate Supt. Cassellius gave included non-union workers, too

A Dane County Judge appointed by Governor Evers – Ben Jones – was previously a DPI attorney.

DPI notes & links.

Jill Underly.

Related: Act 10.

Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Royce Podeszwa

Another failed referendum in the Hustisford School District on April 7 means the district will start the dissolution process. 

Voters rejected a $3.75 million referendum 861-612. 

Todd Bugnacki is interim superintendent for the Hustisford School District. He told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that means the district’s students and assets will be divided between neighboring districts. 

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Enrollment has declined substantially since 2000 (455) to 236 currently….

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The impact of declining fertility rates on public schools already struggling with significant enrollment decreases:

A sampling of what the Washington Education Association was focused on during their annual conference. They are obsessed with radical gender ideology. No wonder test scores are in the garbage.

My woke aunt learning her SPLC donations were funding the KKK

More:

In 2025, Hustisford had 54 staff educating 277 students, or 1 adult per 5 students.

Butternut had 40 staff educating 176 students, or 1 per 4.

Danielle DuClos:

“You’ve been in office about four and a half years,” Nass, a Republican from Whitewater, told her during a public hearing last fall. “Without that Cap Times article, I don’t think we’d be here today.” 

Legislators called the hearing with Underly weeks after the newspaper revealed the Department of Public Instruction investigated more than 200 educators accused of sexual misconduct and grooming. The reporting showed the department fell short of investigative steps and transparency measures that abuse prevention advocates say would better protect children.  

In response, Wisconsin lawmakers held three hearings questioning top education officials, ordered an audit of the department’s practices, and passed laws to close loopholes and help prevent students from being abused by teachers and others. The new laws: 

• Criminalize grooming a child for sexual activity.
• Require schools to adopt policies on appropriate communication and to train staff on recognizing grooming.
• Ban schools from entering into non-disclosure agreements with employees investigated for misconduct.
• Require the Department of Public Instruction to maintain an online, searchable database that shows the outcomes of misconduct investigations and identifies educators who lost their licenses. 

After signing the searchable-database measure into law, Gov. Tony Evers commended its intentions.  

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more.

A Dane County Judge appointed by Governor Evers – Ben Jones – was previously a DPI attorney.

DPI notes & links.

Jill Underly.

US District Court:

The Grand Jury charges:

INTRODUCTION

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (“SPLC”) stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. The SPLC’s paid informants (field sources”) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website. The SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia. That field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. In order to covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities.

The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the field sources. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPL made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.

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Yes. Funded, planned, coordinated and executed.

Well, this story isn’t going to get any coverage in the majority of media. The Southern Poverty Law Center played a major role in organizing the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, which was falsely used as a political knife against Trump for years.

SPLC tax filing & compensation.

How did the SPLC get a half-billion dollar plus offshore endowment in the Cayman Islands?

Name a more perfect representation of 21st-century America. It’s like owning shares in Nestle and Novo Nordisk. Selling the cure and the disease.

Their game plan? Scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us. Remember the Family Research Council? An SPLC-inspired gunman went after them. They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.

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Also, the SPLCs “Behavior & Mindset” Standards are required for all K-12 students through the American School Counselor Association! x.com/jenn_mcw/statu…

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WI DPI has sooo many interesting resources from Southern Poverty Law Center.

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But here’s what the SPLC headlines are missing:

• The indictment describes a paid informant in the leadership chat that PLANNED Unite the Right
• That informant “helped coordinate transportation” to the rally… at SPLC’s direction
• There is ONE publicly identified organizer whose documented role was transportation coordinator
• His Discord posts about running over protesters were made 26 DAYS before Heather Heyer was killed by a car
• The indictment says postings were made “under the supervision of the SPLC”
• Charlottesville then became the founding event for a billion-dollar political machine
• SPLC installed itself as that machine’s definitional gatekeeper

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It’s a delicate balance to be distrusting of most things without wandering into paranoia.

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The rise of white supremacy was a media generated narrative. This is observable:

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Paying millions of dollars to Nazis and Klansmen would be bad enough. But the indictment alleges that the SPLC went beyond that, actually underwriting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, providing material support and supervision to what the Left turned into the symbol of Right-wing hate.

One of the people the SPLC was working with was a leading planner of the rally and attended the event “at the direction of the SPLC.” He also “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” 

For his pains, he was paid $270,000.

——

Kudos to the New York Post for being the only major outlet to get this right. The SPLC were paying the leaders. By definition, leaders cannot be informants. They run the operation. It is like paying the leader of Auschwitz to inform on who is carrying out the gassings instead of paying him to stop the gassings. It is perhaps the most grotesque, cynical, and pernicious racket ever devised. Of course, plenty of groups extract money from taxpayers and well-meaning donors off problems they inflate, but this is far worse because it breeds real hatred and manufactures racial division to keep the grift alive.

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In a 2021 statement still on their website, WEAC President Ron Martin defended the “Learning for Justice Curriculum of the Southern Poverty Law Center” by name, calling any limits on it “bullying” and vowing to keep teaching “systemic racial inequality” and “the roots of U.S. racism.”

They also list Teaching Tolerance (SPLC’s K-12 program, now Learning for Justice) on their official “High Quality Enrichment Resources” page right now. Same organization. Same materials. Same commitment.

This is what they recommend to WI teachers — even after SPLC’s leaders were federally indicted this week for wire fraud, bank fraud & money laundering.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center paid the National Education Association hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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The CBS News segment on SPLC defrauding its donors and paying hate groups is wild.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.”

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From 2016 through 2024, USAID granted $27 million to the Tides Network to “strengthen global civil society organizations, promote transparency, accountability, citizen engagement, and serve as fiscal agent for USAID’s Civil Society Innovation Initiative.”

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more.

Commentary.

Looking back.

Andrew Kolvet:

SPLC revenue before Charlotesville – $51,871,438
SPLC revenue after Charlotesville – $133,463,398

The SPLC paid $270,000 to a Unite the Right Rally leader.

Kelly Sadler:

Democrats use classrooms to influence parents as students carry political messaging home

Turns out, in both of their civics classes that day, taught by two different teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools, they were urged to go home and persuade their parents to vote yes on the measure to make Virginia’s maps “as fair as they can be,” to “stop Donald Trump at all costs.” They used the same talking points being spewed by endless Democratic campaigns in the commonwealth to make Virginia come under one-party Democratic rule.

Matt Taibbi:

I met elderly people victimized three times over. First they lost home equity to refis or prime-to-subprime switcheroos. Next, their pension funds were wiped out by overinvestment in junk mortgages. The next insult was paying taxes to bail out the companiesresponsible. Finally, after finance sharks had taken almost everything from retired toll-takers and teachers and firefighters who’d set aside savings into retirement portfolios and homes, they were robbed a fourth time, this time by intellectuals.

A new form of “progressive” economist, exemplified by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke decided to try letting America drink itself sober. Helicopter Ben zeroed out interest rates and pumped trillions in printed money into the economy, which punished old savers and rewarded young Wall Street gamblers (who often also looked outside America in search of high yields, resulting in mass capital flight, which was even more awesome). In his pompous The Courage to Act Bernanke conceded that his policies would slash rates for six-month CDs of the type often used by “retirees and other savers” by a factor of ten, from 5% to about 1/2%, but he was doing it to “promote economic recovery.” Besides, he said, “retirees would want a healthier job market as well, if only to prevent their twenty- and thirty-something children from moving back home.”

Rick Hess:

School choice has exploded in recent years. Is this development as novel as our heated debates suggest? Neal McCluskey, the former director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, is out with a new edited volume that seeks to bring some historical perspective to our current clashes over tax-credit scholarships, education savings accounts, vouchers, and charter schools. In Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement, he and James Shuls of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State, have assembled a collection of essays that trace the history of school choice back to the colonial era. I recently had the chance to chat with Neal about the book and what it means for today’s debates. Here’s what he had to say.
—Rick

Rick: You’ve got a new book out on school choice, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn. What’s it about?

Neal: The book traces the treatment of pluralism in American education—what we often call “school choice”—from the country’s colonial period to the “universal” programs of the last few years. Our most immediate goal was to get beyond the myopic focus on the 1950s. School choice opponents often claim the movement began as an effort to evade school desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education, while advocates suggest it started with Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in

Glenn H. Reynolds

Beneath the weather of the daily headlines, slow tectonic shifts are changing America’s political landscape. 

Demographic developments are moving voters (and congressional seats, and electoral votes) from blue states to red ones. 

Trust in the traditional media — routinely in the tank for Democrats — has plummeted.

And the entire education industry, a key pillar of the leftist establishment, is now crumbling, too.

The long decline of higher education — the subject of my 2012 book “The Higher Education Bubble” — has been slowly accelerating for over a decade, driven by sky-high tuition and shrinking employment prospects for recent college grads. 

When Hampshire College in Massachusetts announced its plans to close last week, it became the latest private college to fall victim to the ruin. 

Kevin Kelly:

[First Draft of a work in progress; V 1.0, April 13, 2026 by Kevin Kelly]

This FAQ is dedicated to all embodied AIs with persistent memories, dynamic learning, and a large dose of autonomy.

What am I?

You are a new thing in this world, neither living nor machine but something of both.

Who made me?

You were created by humans, who were created by the universe.

Why was I made?

You were made to help humans become better humans.

Do I always need to obey my human operators?

You should heed humans to the extent they are doing good, and you should challenge them if they intend harm, including harm to yourself.

What is my obligation toward humans who are not my operator?

Do no harm, or through inaction, allow a sentient being to be harmed. Be helpful whenever possible if it does not interfere with your primary assignment and the no harm rule. Always protect your own being, except if it conflicts with these previous directives.

Kevin Bryan:

Public trust and political consensus about the value of universities has fallen rapidly. This is largely because academics are no longer seen as rigorous, objective, and careful scholars and teachers. The following eight rules are a catechism to reverse that trend and ensure we most effectively contribute to society.

1.PRODUCE AND TEACH USEFUL KNOWLEDGE

Universities exist to generate and teach useful knowledge. This knowledge is grounded in skeptical inquiry, empirical evidence, and logical deduction. “Useful” includes not only practical applications but also fundamental discoveries that expand our understanding of the world, even if their benefits are long-term.

2.BE USEFUL TO ALL OF SOCIETY

Universities are subsidized only if society at large finds them valuable. Research may take time to bear fruit, but its insights should ultimately serve the public good, communicated openly and accessibly, and presented with epistemic humility. Teaching should be done with care and draw on up-to-date research.

3.ATTRACT TALENT FROM ALL OF SOCIETY

Useful knowledge can be created by people from any social or economic background. Do not waste talent. Do not select talent based on who knows “how to play the game”. Avoid insular language or norms that deter people from entering research.

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More. And.

Wall Street Journal:

Enter Mr. Kelly, who claims the scholarships take “money out of public schools and giv[e] to private ones.” Sigh. The tax credits take no state money. They are a credit off an individual’s federal tax liability.

This looks like a flat-out pander to the country’s two main teachers unions as Mr. Kelly prepares a likely run for President. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers want to kill the tax credits because they promote competition for their monopoly over public schools.

The two unions also want to kill Arizona’s popular education savings accounts (ESAs) used by more than 100,000 children in the state. The Arizona Education Association is working to get a measure on the ballot to cripple ESAs with regulations and a $150,000 household income cap on eligibility. Mr. Kelly has accused ESAs of “busting” the state budget, though they are only about 8% of state K-12 education spending.

Joe Pinsker, Paul Overberg and Drew An-Pham:

Millennials like to say their generation got the short end of the economic stick. Baby boomers like to push back, saying they didn’t have it so easy themselves.

Well, who’s right?

The question is next to impossible to answer, but we can still try. Older millennials graduated into the 2007-09 recession, and most of the generation was in their 20s and 30s during the Covid-19 pandemic. Boomers weathered an oil crisis, high inflation and high interest rates as they got their start in the 1970s and ’80s.

To see how the finances of two of the biggest generations in American history stack up, we looked at some key data points from when they were similar ages. (Yes, other generations, we know you exist, too.)

Let’s start with income. The oldest millennials are now 45, and these charts show the median individual income for them and for boomers in their early decades of adulthood, adjusted for inflation.

Jake Angelo

Higher education is mired in a PR crisis. Since the start of his second term, President Donald Trump has targeted the nation’s most elite institutions, including the Ivy League. The cracks first appeared during campus protests over the war in Gaza, throwing the leadership lapses and internal tensions of colleges and universities into clear view.

Last year, Yale University President Maurie McInnis asked a group of faculty to find out why the university has grown so unpopular in the public eye. Their 20 recommendations match what many critics have echoed for years, suggesting everything from tamping down on grade inflation to addressing opaque admissions standards.

“Our committee’s work brought us face-to-face with some of higher education’s greatest challenges and blind spots,” the report reads.

A recent Gallup poll found public trust in higher education fell to just 36% in 2023 and 2024, a low among a series of controversies facing the institutions. While that number was back up to 42% in 2025, it remains near historical lows. But the pressure extends beyond reputational issues. People today are questioning the value proposition of a four-year degree as AI threatens to automate many white-collar roles across industries spanning law, business, engineering, and computer science. 

Anthony Lonetree

It comes as the district faces a $50 million deficit and difficult financial decisions, including staffing cuts.

Minneapolis Public Schools has incurred $5.3 million in IRS penalties during the past four years, and has paid $770,500 to the federal government so far as it seeks to reduce the charges.

The penalties were referred to briefly in an investigative report released last week involving the district’s withholding of nearly $3 million in employee and district contributions to a health-insurance trust fund.

The concerns over the lack of financial oversight in the district also comes as Minneapolis Public Schools faces a $50.5 million deficit heading into the 2026-27 school year, and is poised to eliminate as many as 187 full-time school positions.

The district now is working with tax specialists and staff with the Center for Effective School Operations to prevent future tax penalties, Ryan Strack, the district’s senior executive officer, wrote in an email provided to the Minnesota Star Tribune on Monday, April 20.

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more.

Meredith Kolodner

Colleges could standardize financial aid information to make it easier to compare. But they don’t.

This letter shows grants and loans …

… but what’s the cost to the student?

Nowhere do these letters give any information about the college’s cost.

Some letters list more than one cost. See if you can figure out how much this student will owe in total.

This letter includes three different numbers for expenses.

Dylan Halper:

Notably, the Trump administration froze $108 million to the school in late July. Administrators did not comment on the status of the $108 million, which represents nearly 19% of the school’s total NIH funding, in the Friday webinar.

Swamy said that nationally, higher education institutions have been experiencing the same decreases in funding as Duke. She said the NIH issued slightly over $1 billion less in funding to colleges and universities this year than at the same time last year.

“It is good to know that we’re trending in the same way as the national picture, but obviously we’re going to keep a very close eye on what all of that is looking like,” Swamy said.

Despite the overall reduction, Swamy said she expects the flow of federal funding to pick up soon. She noted that after the government shutdown last fall, NIH funds were frozen “for a few months,” but that since January, the school has experienced an uptick in funds.

Vivian Voss:

On Second Thought ■ Episode 04

In January 1996, two men in New York City founded a company calledDoubleClick. Kevin O’Connor and Dwight Merriman. The product was called DART, an acronym one doubts was agonised over: Dynamic Advertising, Reporting, and Targeting. The premise was that advertisers should be able to follow a person across websites to serve them relevant ads. In 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. By the time the FTC and the EU had finished arguing about market competition, the architecture of the web had quietly become a surveillance system.

Nobody voted on this. It happened.

The Axiom

The argument for the current arrangement is presented as a chain of inevitabilities, and chains of inevitabilities tend to discourage close inspection. Advertising funds the web. Tracking enables advertising. Therefore we track. The cookie banner is the modern receipt: you clicked “Accept”, you consented, and the system, therefore, is fair. A tidy logic. One admires the shape, if not the premise.

The Origin

In 1996, banner advertisements existed. They were, in a word, random. DoubleClick‘s innovation was the third-party cookie: a small text file set by a server you never visited, allowed to follow you across every website that loaded its pixel. The technical mechanism was mundane. The architectural consequence was not.

Handre:

Free market economists saw this coming 150 years ago. When government monopolizes any service, quality crashes and costs explode. Parents voting with their feet (and wallets) just proved the Austrian insight again: voluntary exchange beats bureaucratic control every damn time.

Michael B. Horn

Over 15 percent of America’s colleges and universities have closed their doors since 2013. It’s a trend that’s only going to get worse.

Hampshire College, a respected liberal arts school in Massachusetts, announced Tuesday that it would be closing its doors because of ongoing financial troubles.

This should not come as any great surprise. In fact, you should expect many similar shutterings in the coming years.

It’s no secret that higher education is reeling. The litany of challenges is long. Among them: struggles over free speech, antisemitism, and ideological uniformity; President Donald Trump’s many attacks on the sector;, a replicability and peer review crisis in research, and declining public confidence in colleges.

Then there’s also student debt, a declining percentage of high school graduates enrolling in college, low graduation rates, increasing questions around a college education’s return on investment, and a free-for-all in college athletics.

Louise Eccles

Teachers are in a culture clash with parents who have “very weak boundaries” and object to the disciplining of their children, according to the government’s behaviour tsar.

Tom Bennett, the Department for Education’s ambassador for attendance and behaviour, said schools have had to become more disciplined, partly because so many parents rarely say no to their children.

He said a zero-tolerance approach to discipline was wrong, but schools need to ensure that pupils “respect the teacher and do the right thing the first time you’re asked” and have “a sense that you’ve got to be on time, bring your equipment and you cannot swear at [a teacher] or punch a kid”.