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Newsletter | 2024 Referendum | Gell-Man Amnesia

civics: The New York Times is fully committed to developing and implementing internal AI tools

Max Tani:

The paper encouraged editorial staff to use these AI tools to generate SEO headlines, summaries, and audience promos; suggest edits; brainstorm questions and ideas and ask questions about reporters’ own documents; engage in research; and analyze the Times’ own documents and images. In a training video shared with staff, the Times suggested using AI to come up with questions to ask the CEO of a startup during an interview. Times guidelines also said it could use AI to develop news quizzes, social copy, quote cards, and FAQs.

Wisconsin 2025 DPI candidate geography summary – work in progress

grok 3

You’re right to push for thoroughness—my previous response might not have captured every possible city visited by Brittany Kinser, Jill Underly, and Jeff Wright in their 2025 Wisconsin DPI campaigns based on all available X posts and media links up to February 18, 2025. The challenge is that campaign travel isn’t always exhaustively documented in real-time on X or in media, especially for smaller stops, and some posts or articles might imply visits without naming exact locations. I’ll dig deeper, leveraging my tools to analyze X posts, linked content, and media references, aiming for a more complete list. Since it’s the primary election day, I’ll focus on 2025 activities reported up to now, critically examining the data for accuracy and avoiding assumptions beyond what’s explicitly stated or strongly implied.

Revised Methodology

Brittany Kinser

Kinser’s campaign emphasizes school choice and has GOP backing, suggesting outreach to conservative and urban areas. Her X activity and media provide more granularity than initially captured.

Gaps: Kinser’s February 16 X post shows late-campaign momentum in western Wisconsin, but earlier stops might be underreported. Her “across Wisconsin” claim hints at more cities (e.g., Racine, Kenosha), but no explicit X or media evidence confirms them by today.

Jill Underly

Underly, the incumbent, balances DPI duties with campaigning, often in Democratic strongholds. Her absence from some events limits X visibility, but media fills gaps.

Gaps: Underly’s X activity might prioritize policy over travel logs. Media focuses on Madison/Milwaukee, but her $4 billion budget push (Web ID: 10) suggests rural outreach (e.g., Eau Claire, Green Bay), though unverified by February 18.

Jeff Wright

Wright, from Sauk Prairie, targets rural educators and bipartisan voters. His campaign is less X-heavy, but media and educator networks provide clues.

Gaps: Wright’s “across the entire state” claim (Web ID: 17) and educator meetings (Web ID: 19) imply stops like Baraboo or Wisconsin Rapids, but X and media lack specifics.

Updated List (as of February 18, 2025)

Critical Reflection

I’ve pushed the limits of available X posts and media links up to 4:11 AM PST today. If you’ve got specific posts or links I’ve overlooked, toss them my way—I’ll refine further! Otherwise, this is the most complete picture I can paint with the data at hand.

Notes on grok 3

Andrew Karpathy

Summary. As far as a quick vibe check over ~2 hours this morning, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI’s strongest models (o1-pro, $200/month), and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch ~1 year ago, this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented. Do also keep in mind the caveats – the models are stochastic and may give slightly different answers each time, and it is very early, so we’ll have to wait for a lot more evaluations over a period of the next few days/weeks. The early LM arena results look quite encouraging indeed. For now, big congrats to the xAI team, they clearly have huge velocity and momentum and I am excited to add Grok 3 to my “LLM council” and hear what it thinks going forward.

an update on Litigation, rule making and lawfare around Wisconsin’s long term disastrous literacy results

Corrinne Hess:

During a recent Assembly committee hearing, Kitchens addressed Act 20 funding.

“We negotiated this deal for months and months, and then he [Evers] went back on his word, saying that DPI should get the money and spend it how they want without any oversight,” Kitchens said. “It’s very unfortunate that the funding for Act 20 has not been released, but it certainly is not our fault.”

——

notes and links on Act 20.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

more

Notes on taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI governance (and outcomes)

Jim Bender & Patrick Mchileran:

More than a bureaucrat, the superintendent is defined in Wisconsin’s constitution. Wisconsin is the only state in the country that elects its superintendent but has no state board of education. This results in a constitutional officer who reports to nobody except the voters every four years.

The superintendent heads the Department of Public Instruction, the state’s regulator of schools from kindergarten through high school. While the Legislature sets education policy through state statute, the DPI has the power to write and change the state administrative rules and policies that add many of the granular details of how state statutes affect schools.

The DPI has a communications division, a team of attorneys and a liaison to lawmakers. It controls teachers’ licenses, it distributes grants, it controls the metrics used in the statewide report card, it approves contracts for tests, and it is in charge of school breakfast and lunch programs.

Atop that, state laws grant specific powers to the superintendent. She or he has the power to set administrative rules on alternate ways for teachers to gain a license, and on licenses for charter teachers and principals. The superintendent oversees teacher preparatory programs, distributes federal aid and creates state curriculum standards.

——-

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

Where does the taxpayer money go? Save the Children

The Questionable Gardner:

Here is part 2 of Save the Children but waste the money. This is a thread 🧵- for the full take open and read down

Yesterday we looked at $234 million spent on operations. Today where the remaining $676 million went – 🤔

Human Mistakes vs AI Mistakes

Bruce Schneier:

”Life experience makes it fairly easy for each of us to guess when and where humans will make mistakes. Human errors tend to come at the edges of someone’s knowledge: Most of us would make mistakes solving calculus problems. We expect human mistakes to be clustered: A single calculus mistake is likely to be accompanied by others. We expect mistakes to wax and wane, predictably depending on factors such as fatigue and distraction. And mistakes are often accompanied by ignorance: Someone who makes calculus mistakes is also likely to respond “I don’t know” to calculus-related questions.

To the extent that AI systems make these human-like mistakes, we can bring all of our mistake-correcting systems to bear on their output. But the current crop of AI models—particularly LLMs—make mistakes differently.

AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats.

And AI mistakes aren’t accompanied by ignorance. A LLM will be just as confident when saying something completely wrong—and obviously so, to a human—as it will be when saying something true. The seemingly random inconsistency of LLMs makes it hard to trust their reasoning in complex, multi-step problems. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it’s not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won’t forget what money is.

The All-City Spelling Bee champion attributes his success to reading

Anna Hansen:

O’Keefe Middle School’s Benjamin Tekin, 12, started his day in Edgewood College’s Anderson Auditorium as one of 38 competitors at the All-City Spelling Bee, sponsored since 1949 by the Wisconsin State Journal, with help from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. (Three of the initial 41 entrants didn’t make it to the bee.)

After almost three hours of figurative alphabet soup, carefully ladled by spelling bee director Jane McMahon, Tekin rose to victory in a vocabulary round, selecting the correct definitions for “trousers” and “ocelot.” After his win, Tekin affirmed that, despite early-morning anxiety, the competition itself was easy on his nerves.

“I wasn’t really challenged that much today — I knew most of the words,” Tekin said, slipping the No. 10 placard off his neck in exchange for a No. 1 trophy, which he proudly showed the many family members who had come to cheer him on.

“There are no consequences for bad behavior anymore …”

David Blaska:

Those are the everyday accounts that don’t make headlines like the case of six high school students who beat and robbed another student at Madison East high school 02-04-25. The victim was hospitalized for his injuries

——

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

How Test Optional Policies in College Admissions Disadvantage High-Achieving Applicants from Disadvantaged Backgrounds

Bruce Sacerdote,  Douglas O. Staiger  & Michele Tine

We find that test score optional policies harm the likelihood of elite college admission for high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. We show that at one elite college campus, SAT (and ACT) scores predict first year college GPA equally well across income and other demographic groups; high school GPA and class rank offer little additional predictive power. Under test score optional policies, less advantaged applicants who are high achieving submit test scores at too low a rate, significantly reducing their admissions chances; such applicants increase their admissions probability by a factor of 3.6x (from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent) when they report their scores. High achieving first-generation applicants raise admissions chances by 2.4x by reporting scores. Much more than commonly understood, elite institutions interpret test scores in the context of background, and availability of test scores on an application can promote rather than hinder social mobility.

more.

civics: Free Speech and Europe notes

David Heinmeier Hansson

The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance’s point, and labeled the speech “not acceptable”. All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest taboos in European politics.

Let’s start with his points on free speech, because they’re the foundation for understanding how Europe got into such a mess on mass immigration. See, Europeans by and large simply do not understand “free speech” as a concept the way Americans do. There is no first amendment-style guarantee in Europe, yet the European mind desperately wants to believe it has the same kind of free speech as the US, despite endless evidence to the contrary.

more.

Notes on redistributed federal taxpayer funds and higher education

Frederick M. Hess and Jay P Greene:

The Trump administration has directed the NIH to slash the amount it pays to universities for “overhead” expenses. Previously, for every dollar universities received for research, the NIH gave them an additional 39 cents for overhead — now, it can’t be more than 15 cents. This means that out of the $35 billion NIH provides in grants, the amount devoted to overhead for things such as administration and facilities would be cut from $9 billion to $4.6 billion. If the injunction currently halting the NIH plan is lifted, the total amount of research funding will remain unchanged, but $4.4 billion will shift from administrators to researchers.

civics: “the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions.”

Josh Blackman:

In recent years, the Department of Justice has prosecuted public officials in high profile cases. In several of those cases, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions.

In McDonnell v. United States (2016), the Court held that an “official act” must involve a formal exercise of governmental power on something specific pending before a public official. DOJ though it knew what was a proper exercise of government power. The Supreme Court disagreed. Could it be said that the scores of DOJ employees who brought this ill-fated prosecution were “fools”? Do you know who was the Chief of the DOJ Public Integrity Section at the time? Jack Smith. Was it foolish for a prosecutor to indict a former Governor in a case that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

Jack Smith also led the prosecution of John Edwards, the former Senator and Vice Presidential Candidate. Smith relied on a dubious theory of campaign finance law, and the case yielded a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. (When Smith reported that he had enough evidence to convict Trump, I thought back to the Edwards case.) DOJ did not try that theory again. Was it foolish to bring this prosecution of a former public official when the jury wouldn’t even convict?

Fast forward to Kelly v. United States (2020). This prosecution arose from the so-called Bridgegate scandal. The United States indicted members of Governor Chis Christie’s administration. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction. Justice Kagan ruled that the scheme, which did not aim to obtain money or property, could not violate the federal fraud law. Was it foolish to indict a public official in a case that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

In 2023, the Supreme Court decided Ciminelli v. United States and Percoco v. United States. These cases arose over scandal involving funding for a Buffalo Bills stadium project. In both cases, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions. Was it foolish to bring these cases that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

———

Dan O’Donnell:

So did Kaul accept a bribe of two “free” attorneys to help lighten his workload and generate positive headlines by filing and joining climate change lawsuits Michael Bloomberg demanded? Again, it sure looks like it.

Fischer King:

So the election was cancelled based on a false premise.

Are PhDs losing their appeal? Why are fewer students enrolling in doctoral programs?

Diana Kwon:

High living costs and stagnant stipends are being cited as the primary reasons for the decline in PhD enrollments in various countries.

Numbers of people enrolling in PhD programmes have dropped in a handful of countries in the past few years, which policy specialists are calling a worrying trend. From Australia and Japan to Brazil and the United Kingdom, there are concerns that high living costs, low stipends and limited job options after graduation are deterring people from pursuing doctoral degrees.

These declining numbers should “act as a wake-up call” for those countries, says Cláudia Sarrico, a project lead at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. “This is a signal you need to reform working conditions and think about diversifying career options — otherwise, you risk a talent drain that will ultimately slow down scientific progress.”

The most recent figures on this trend, released by Universities Australia and the Australian Council of Graduate Research (ACGR) in January, revealed an 8% reduction in the number of domestic PhD enrolments in Australia from 2018 to 2023, although the population of the country grew by more than 7% over the same period.

civics: Getting things done – analysis

Balaji:

You can just do things – high agency
We can just do things – high cooperation
They can also just do things – enemy also gets a move
You can’t do just anything – constraints do exist

Civil Rights and Redistributed Federal Taxpayer Funds

US Dept of Education Civil Rights Office

Discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is illegal and morally reprehensible. Accordingly, I write to clarify and reaffirm the nondiscrimination obligations of schools and other entities that receive federal financial assistance from the United States Department of Education (Department).1 This letter explains and reiterates existing legal requirements under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,2 the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution, and other relevant authorities.3

In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families. These institutions’ embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia. For example, colleges, universities, and K-12 schools have routinely used race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming. In a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history, many American schools and universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories and other facilities.

k-12 tax & $pending climate: Chicago’s debt growth plans

Bill Conway:

Since then, it was revealed that the preliminary plan is for this debt to be issued with zero payments until 2027, followed by interest-only payments through 2045.

Imagine taking out a mortgage on your house, but not making a single payment for the first two years. Then, for the next 18 years, you pay only the interest — never touching the actual loan balance. By the time you start paying off the principal, you’ve racked up so much extra interest that you’re now paying more than double what you borrowed.

That’s exactly what the mayor’s office has proposed. It’ll borrow $830 million today, but between delayed and interest-only payments, taxpayers will ultimately owe more than $2 billion. And conveniently, the real payments don’t start until after the mayor and City Council face reelection.

Cronyism and Lying in Milwaukee Public Schools

CBS58:

‘Afraid even to tell the truth’: Lawyer for MPS whistleblowers, lawmakers react to MPS audit

K-12 tax & $pending climate: Madison School District Accounting Accuracy

Kaylah Huynh:

“We learned that specific system updates may have inadvertently excluded too much income from taxation.” 

Abbey Machtig:

School district spokesperson Edell Fiedler said the district is assuming the error affected all 6,000 employees, although actual tax liabilities depend on a variety of factors, including withholdings. 

“We have taken immediate steps to prevent this error from happening again,” Fiedler said in an email to the State Journal. “This includes ensuring accurate system updates and a mandatory double-checking process for these updates. We are committed to continuously monitoring and improving these systems to safeguard against similar issues in the future.”

k-12 tax & $pending climate: The Deficit & debt spiral explained

The Deficit:

•What’s a Deficit? A budget deficit occurs when the government spends more money than it earns in revenue. For FY 2024, the deficit was about $1.8 trillion. Imagine if you only made $4.9 trillion (the revenue) but spent $6.5 trillion; you’d be $1.6 trillion in the hole, which is essentially what happened with the federal government.
•Why Does the Deficit Matter? A large deficit means the government needs to borrow money to cover its costs, which increases the national debt.

——

Interest on the Debt:

•Interest Payments: In FY 2024, the U.S. spent approximately $950 billion just on interest for the national debt. This is like paying $30,000 every second in interest alone. It’s the second or third largest line item in the budget, only behind or close to Social Security and defense spending.
•How It Works: Just like how you might pay interest on a loan or credit card, the U.S. government pays interest on the money it has borrowed. With a debt level of roughly $35 trillion at the end of 2024, even small interest rates can lead to enormous payments.

The Debt Spiral:

•Borrowing to Pay Interest: Here’s where it gets trickier. When the government can’t cover its costs, including interest on the existing debt, with current revenue, it borrows more money. This borrowing increases the national debt. Now, with more debt, there’s more interest to pay the next year, which might require even more borrowing if revenues don’t increase or spending doesn’t decrease, leading to what’s called a “debt spiral.”

US debt clock

Meanwhile

Ann Althouse:

There was a budget surplus when Bill Clinton left office, and we now have a deficit counted in trillions, and the national debt is in the tens of trillions. Those who don’t like the service Elon Musk is giving to his country — what is their alternative? 

notes on Wisconsin Education standards

via Quinton Klabon

This Senator Jagler address connects setting high standards for kids with recent Milwaukee Public Schools troubles.

——

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

A coaster wagon upgrade

Amy Kyllo:

“We have a lot of sad days dealing with this disease,” Tracy said. “These good days, these fun days give us strength to get through the bad days. You remember the joy felt during these incredible acts of kindness and generosity.”

“Manitoba’s new teacher oversight commissioner also leads Saskatchewan educators’ union”

Jeff Hamilton:

A new commissioner tasked with disciplining Manitoba educators for misconduct since the start of the year was doing so while still maintaining her job as head of the Saskatchewan teachers’ union, the Free Press has learned.

Critics call it a major conflict of interest that brings into question the independence and impartiality of Manitoba’s new teacher oversight commission.

“The fact that she’s doing two jobs at once, and one is the head of a teacher union, when you’re supposed to be adjudicating cases involving teacher misconduct, that’s a massive conflict of interest,” said Cameron Hauseman, an assistant professor of educational administration at the University of Manitoba.

Wisconsin Act 10 Lawfare and litigation update

Andrew Bahl:

A challenge to one of Wisconsin’s most high-profile laws of the last 15 years — restricting the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions — has taken another turn on its way through the court system.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a case involving Act 10 must first proceed through a conservative-leaning appellate court before it may come back to the state’s top justices.

The decision involves a Dane County judge’s ruling last year that large portions of Act 10 are unconstitutional. If ultimately upheld by higher courts, the decision would have a major effect on the working conditions of public employees, such as teachers, state workers and some law enforcement officers. A ruling that ends Act 10 also could affect the finances of state and local governments across Wisconsin.

The decision Wednesday — which was accompanied by Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s decision not to recuse herself from a future ruling on Act 10 — means the case likely won’t be heard by the high court until after an April election that will determine whether left-leaning or right-leaning justices have a majority.

Here’s what to know about the latest court challenge to Act 10.

——

Notes and links on Act 10

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Civics: notes on our three part government system

Tyler Cowen Summary:

Ilya Somin covers this question over at Volokh Conspiracy.  I receive many queries about this, some of them panicky and anguished.  I haven’t covered it, mostly because I don’t feel I have enough insights into the relevant matters of constitutional law, or for that matter what is going on inside the administration (for instance, how should one interpret those Vance tweets?)

I can tell you what I would find useful.  If you are especially pessimistic on this front, which are the securities prices that would indicate an actual constitutional problem?  Particular equities?  Interest rates?  The value of the dollar?  Measures of volatility?  Something else?  Don’t restrict yourself to the absolute level of share prices, surely there are favored and disfavored companies and sectors, right?

Why it is hard for the Executive to disobey the judiciary

“deplatforming”

Sean Stevens & Greg Lukianoff:

The event never happened.

Just as it was about to begin, some student protesters became disruptive. One of them pulled the fire alarm. Windows were broken and objects, including noisemakers, were thrown into the room. Krolczyk and members of the Turning Point USA chapter barricaded themselves inside until they were escorted out by university police and security.

This week, Krolcyzk filed a Title IX complaint against the University of Washington with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights as a result of the disruption and cancellation of the event.

Despite the chaos, University of Washington spokesperson and Assistant Vice President for Communications Victor Balta contends that “the TPUSA organizers made the choice to suspend the event.” In a statement sent to The Center Square, “The Jason Rantz Show,” and other outlets who reached out for comment, Balta said that “[i]nformed discussion and debate are encouraged on our campus, however, it is clear that presenters and disruptors are, in some cases, seeking to antagonize one another in ways that provide dramatic content for their social media feeds,” and that Krolcyzk was “excited” that the event got shut down.

Reviving the joy and honor of working with your hands will strengthen our nation

Mark Holmberg:

For three decades, this mechanical engineer has been dragging, hoisting, cribbing and prying these metal monsters out of old industrial shops in New York, Philadelphia, Erie, Pa. — anywhere and everywhere, as old vocational education programs shut down across the nation.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate:“unemployment is higher, wages are lower and growth less robust than government statistics suggest”

Eugene Ludwig:

What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?

On some level, I relate to the underlying frustrations. Having served as comptroller of the currency during the 1990s, I‘ve spent substantial chunks of my career exploring the gaps between public perception and economic reality, particularly in the realm of finance. Many of the officials I’ve befriended and advised over the last quarter-century — members of the Federal Reserve, those running regulatory agencies, many leaders in Congress — have told me they consider it their responsibility to set public opinion aside and deal with the economy as it exists by the hard numbers. For them, government statistics are thought to be as reliable as solid facts.

In recent years, however, as my focus has broadened beyond finance to the economy as a whole, the disconnect between “hard” government numbers and popular perception has spurred me to question that faith. I’ve had the benefit of living in two realms that seem rarely to intersect — one as a Washington insider, the other as an adviser to lenders and investors across the country. Toggling between the two has led me to be increasingly skeptical that the government’s measurements properly capture the realities defining unemployment, wage growth and the strength of the economy as a whole.

Governor’s taxpayer funded audit: “Milwaukee Public Schools are not in a position to ensure student success”

Corrinne Hess:

The damning 41-page report outlines a number of internal and external factors at the district that have caused multiple failures, including  an “absence of clear vision” and “leadership routinely disempowered to lead.”

“The motivation for this review is clear: MPS must make systemic changes to ensure that students — particularly the most vulnerable — are at the center of every decision,” states the audit by MGT of America Consulting LLC. “Ultimately, this work is in service of students, whose future success hinges on a district capable of delivering equitable, high-quality education.”

—-

Meanwhile, the taxpayer funded DPI, lead by Jill Underly continues its rigor reduction campaign.

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

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

civics: Unconstitutionality Index 18.5

DOGE.gov

This is the number of agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress in 2024

Code of Federal Regulations

98.68M
Total Words

215.23K
Total Sections of regulation

more.

and:

Meet the U.S. Government
Trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.
U.S. Government

Elon Musk:

When not wasting money on bureaucracy, the Department of Education has been funding anti-Americanism, gender nonsense and anti-meritocratic racism

A high schooler from Tennessee, Frannie Block reports, graduated with a 3.4 GPA despite having difficulty reading. Now, he is suing his school district.

Frannie Block:

William, whose last name is listed only as A. in the suit, first enrolled in the Clarksville-Montgomery County school district in 2016 when he was in the fifth grade. For the next seven years, he scored mostly in the bottom first, second, or third percentiles of his reading fluency assessment tests compared to national standards. In 2019 and 2020, he scored in the bottom ninth and sixth percentiles, respectively. But, a year before he graduated, his reading had regressed so much he was scoring below the first percentile.

That same year, William took a simple writing test asking him to spell 31 words in three minutes. According to his suit, he couldn’t spell half of them, including the word school, which he wrote as shcool.

——-

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

Chinese GPUs outperform Nvidia chips by nearly tenfold in supercomputer simulations, according to a recent study.

Zhang Tong:

Computer researchers in China using domestically made graphics processors have achieved a near-tenfold boost in performance over powerful US supercomputers that rely on Nvidia’s cutting-edge hardware, according to a peer-reviewed study.

The accomplishment points to possible unintended consequences of Washington’s escalating tech sanctions while challenging the dominance of American-made chips, long considered vital for advanced scientific research.

The researchers said that innovative software optimisation techniques enabled them to improve efficiency gains in computers powered by Chinese-designed graphics processing units(GPUs) to outperform US supercomputers in certain scientific computations.

“ai” and values

Dan Hendrycks:

AIs also exhibit significant biases in their value systems. For example, their political values are strongly clustered to the left. Unlike random incoherent statistical biases, these values are consistent and likely affect their conversations with users.

LLM Visualization

“experts” and Wisconsin k-12 rigor reduction

Dairyland Sentinel:

Underly, DPI Shrug Off Complaints Over State Benchmarks; Superintendent and Her Department Have Yet to Comply With Open Records Request

Delia Watkins, Madison Metropolitan School District

Civics: open data and governance discussion

Nicole Shanahan:

Exclusive: @DataRepublican joins me for her first-ever interview to discuss DOGE vs USAID, shady NGOs, media manipulation, and more.

More.

According to its latest annual report, RMI gets funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of State, Department of Transportation, General Services Administration, and the US Trade and Development Agency. It is also getting funding from the International Finance Corporation and World Bank.

Civics: more on taxpayer funded censorship

Matt Taibbi:

“Take USAID. Many Americans are now in an uproar because they they learned about over $400,000,000 going to an organization called Inner News, whose chief Jeanne Bourgeault boasted to Congress about training hundreds of thousands of people in journalism. But her views are almost identical to Carrie’s. She gave a talk once about building trust and combating misinformation in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a really beautifully unified COVID nineteen message, vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%.”

“But when, quote, mixed information on vaccine efficacy got out, hesitancy ensued. We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know that the press does not exist to promote unity or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism. Bourdieu also once said that to fight bad content, we need to work really hard on exclusionless or inclusionless and, quote, really need to focus our ad ad dollars toward what she called the good news.”

“Again, if you don’t know the fastest way to erode trust in media is by having government sponsor exclusion lists, you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone 476,000,000 of it. And USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine Michael and I saw across that long list of agencies.”

“Collectively, they bought up every part of the news production line, sources, think tanks, research, fact checking, anti disinformation, commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, straight up censorship. It is a giant closed messaging loop whose purpose is to transform the free press into exactly that consensus machine. There is no way to remove this rod surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.”

$pending more Madison taxpayer funds amidst declining achievement

Dave Cieslewicz

But the scores are even worse in Madison where students are 84% behind on math and 72% behind on reading.

We did, in fact, keep schools closed for too long, but that doesn’t explain the Madison results because hundreds of school districts kept their schools closed as long as Madison did and they’ve recovered faste

——

Madison per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the number used (!)

——

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

commentary on parental school choice and the Wisconsin DPI Superintendent 2025 election (total spending?)

Kaylah Huynh:

In a Marquette Law School Poll last year, about half of Wisconsin respondents said the state’s school choice program was a “complete success” or “mostly a success.” A quarter said the program was “mostly a failure” or a “total failure.”

—-

Jill Underly and ongoing rigor reduction.

Much more on the taxpayer funded dpi.

Notes on property tax growth.

“achievement” and the well funded Madison school district

Abbey Machtig

Madison students are 72% behind comparable 2019 numbers in reading and 84% behind in math, according to the report.

“education recovery scorecard”

——

Madison per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the number used (!)

——

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

K-12 taxpayer funded governance notes

Matthew Nielsen

I scraped US Dept of Education’s website for the word “equity.” There were 333 results on 60 pages.

52 occurrences on one page is the record for the website. Here are the top 10 pages

“How to Dismantle the Department of Education”

Christopher Rufo:

There is a tingle of fear in any corporation whenever the words “restructuring,” “merger,” “acquisition,” or “hostile takeover” spread through the office. Employees work on their resumes, whisper about projected layoffs, and assess their options.

We’re seeing the same phenomenon unfold right now in our nation’s capital. Since taking over last month, President Trump has promised to blitz through federal departments to roll back waste, cut ideological programs, and return fiscal sanity to American governance. While Republican presidents have long promised to “reduce the size of government,” they have usually failed to do so—the bureaucracy always wins. This time might be different.

The second Trump administration has been surprisingly aggressive in its efforts to reform federal agencies, including a controlled demolition of USAID and an audacious buyout plan for government employees. And Elon Musk, leader of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, has a long track record of successful, and sometimes extreme, cost-cutting. When Musk took over Twitter, for example, he fired 80 percent of the employees, and at the same time managed to improve the product and increase its profitability.

The next stage of the conflict between Trump and the bureaucracy looks to be the Department of Education, which the president has correctly identified as a hotbed of left-wing ideologies. Almost every Republican presidential candidate since 1980 has promised either to shrink or abolish the department, but its budget has only grown. When Trump made the same promise on the campaign trail last year, I was skeptical. But Musk changes the calculation: the tech entrepreneur has already routed USAID and, as I can confirm from my own reporting, dispatched his DOGE engineers to investigate the DOE. While the department, as a public entity, does not have the same kind of balance sheet as a corporation, it must nevertheless be broken apart and ultimately shut down.

Notes on k-12 Governance Reform

Andrew Rotherham:

Ann Althouse summary:

“If the bureaucracy’s in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?… It does not match the will of the people.”

and:

Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.

Notes on reducing k-12 rigor

Karen Vaites:

Here’s a topic that doesn’t get enough attention: a number of states are handling pandemic-era student achievement declines by lowering the bar for academic success. 

Most notably, some states have adjusted their ‘cut scores’ for determining proficiency on state tests. It’s a sleight of hand: the share of students considered “proficient” increases, even as student performance doesn’t improve. This makes schools look better, yet it’s controversial even among educators.

Quinton Klabon:

Wisconsin tried to lower state test benchmarks from “college-ready” to “grade level,” but ended up between, making them useless.

What sucks is teachers actually got close to NAEP: 61% P, 26% A versus 66% B, 31% P. Then, they got scared once they saw what their results would be.

Civics: Our three part federal government

Wall Street Journal:

The first category includes the Administration’s decision to pause discretionary spending to ensure it complies with the President’s priorities. Democratic state Attorneys General say this is illegal, and Judge John McConnell on Monday agreed. The Administration is appealing, and judges can’t force a President to spend money that Congress has left to his discretion.

Most of these spending programs don’t include concrete disbursement deadlines. If Mr. Trump is violating the law, so was the Biden Administration, which delayed disbursing grants under the 2021 infrastructure bill and 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to review applications and attach conditions. What Mr. Trump is doing is no different.

Government unions are challenging Mr. Trump’s buyout offers for federal workers on grounds that Congress hasn’t funded them, but this doesn’t make them illegal per se. If Mr. Trump later doesn’t pay these workers, they could sue in federal claims court.

Unions are also challenging Mr. Trump’s Schedule F reform, which removes civil-service protections for some high-ranking career employees. Here, too, Mr. Trump is on strong legal ground. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 exempts positions “determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.”

Mr. Trump has expanded these exempt positions to employees who supervise investigations, develop regulations and exercise power under an agency’s discretion. Congress has expanded the discretion of agencies such that federal workers now boast far more power than they did 50 years ago. A President should be able to hold them accountable for performance to ensure laws are faithfully executed.

…..

Harvard law professor Hal Scott recently argued in these pages that the CFPB is operating illegally because Congress funded the agency with earnings from the Federal Reserve. Because the Fed has incurred losses since September 2022, Mr. Scott says the bureau should close unless Congress appropriates money for it. This argument is plausible.

“ai” conference remarks

Anthropic economic index:

The main findings from the Economic Index’s first paper are:

Civics and the Courts

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

“The Biden Administration should ignore the court” – AOC, 2023

Wispolitics:

The state Dem Party gave Susan Crawford $2 million last month after collecting a $1 million donation from megadonor George Soros and $500,000 from Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Meanwhile, the state GOP gave Brad Schimel $1.675 million in January after it received $975,000 from Beloit businesswoman Diane Hendricks and $850,000 from Illinois businesswoman Liz Uihlein.

k-12 $pending and outcomes in Chicago

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

The speed at which DOGE is pursuing efficiency at the federal government level is both mind-blowing and chaotic. It’s causing elation for some, anxiety for others.

But if you reflect soberly on Illinois and Chicago’s problems – corruption, ever-higher taxes, declining services and a shrinking population – you’ll quickly reach the conclusion Illinois needs a DOGE of its own. 

If you’re not convinced, take a look at the mess at Chicago Public Schools. It’s the perfect example of a bureaucratic machine in Illinois that’s able to drive up costs dramatically year after year despite its obvious and ongoing failure to deliver results. 

Start with CPS’ failed results. Today, just 1 in 5 students are proficient in reading and math on the SAT. For black students, it’s only 1 in 10. Student proficiencies have fallen about 22% since 2017, the first year Illinois administered the SAT. 

That failure has chased away many families from CPS. District enrollment has shrunk by nearly 60,000 students, or about 15%, since 2017. Overall, CPS has lost nearly 25% of its enrollment since 2000. 

Yet costs have been booming. In just seven years spending has jumped 84% – from $15,800 per student to more than $29,000. Hiring is way up, too, with total staff growing by 8,000, or 22%. 

k-12 governance notes: Wheaton, IL school board candidate

Amy Erkenswick for Cusd200 Board of Education via Awake Illinois

My intention was to keep this campaign page a landing spot for positivity and to champion efforts toward our community’s shared goals. I had hoped that the ill-intended efforts of last election season would escape me.

Unfortunately, today during my Meet & Greet I was stalked, accosted, verbally assaulted, physically threatened and harassed by a former CUSD200 employee. Additionally, at least two current district employees have made social media posts that refer to me in a disparaging manner-posts which have been “liked” by current Board of Education members.

Caring about children and their education and committing your time and efforts to civic service should never result in this level of harassment.

Additionally, it should be noted that making disparaging comments about community members and parents of district students is a direct violation of not only CUSD200 Board of Education Policy 5:120 but also the Code of Ethics for Illinois Educators. Do we really need policies to treat eachother like humans? If so, they require enforcement.

The failure of CUSD200 leadership (Board of Education as well as administration) to hold their people accountable to their own policies has resulted in a horribly distorted narrative that has emboldened unwell individuals to pose a direct

Caring about children and their education and committing your time and efforts to civic service should never result in this level of harassment.

Additionally, it should be noted that making disparaging comments about community members and parents of district students is a direct violation of not only CUSD200 Board of Education Policy 5:120 but also the Code of Ethics for Illinois Educators. Do we really need policies to treat eachother like humans? If so, they require enforcement.

The failure of CUSD200 leadership (Board of Education as well as administration) to hold their people accountable to their own policies has resulted in a horribly distorted narrative that has emboldened unwell individuals to pose a direct and immediate danger to me and my family.

Now is the time to end this plotting. I urge you, please discontinue adding fuel to the fire of those who wish to do me harm. Please-stop endangering my family.

**SnoopDogg and Tom Brady say STAND UP TO HATE.**

An undergraduate student has challenged a long-standing data science conjecture that had stood for 40 years.

Nash Weerasekera:

Together, Krapivin (now a graduate student at the University of Cambridge), Farach-Colton (now at New York University) and Kuszmaul demonstrated in a January 2025 paper(opens a new tab) that this new hash table can indeed find elements faster than was considered possible. ln so doing, they had disproved a conjecture long held to be true.

“It’s an important paper,” said Alex Conway(opens a new tab) of Cornell Tech in New York City. “Hash tables are among the oldest data structures we have. And they’re still one of the most efficient ways to store data.” Yet open questions remain about how they work, he said. “This paper answers a couple of them in surprising ways.”

civics: Notes on Licensing Reform

Institute for Reforming Government

more.

The Licensing Racket

Much more on licensing, here.

civics: notes on the grant industrial complex and publishing

Wikileaks:

The author, David Golumbia, who also wrote “The politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism”, has previously received at least $80k in direct US government grants. UMN made no apparent attempt to fact check the book, which is now on the reading lists of two courses at the University of Southern California and Duke.

“ai” and education implications

Hollis Robbins:

“ai” summary:

Universities must reevaluate their faculty and curriculum in light of AGI’s capabilities. Faculty will be retained for their unique expertise, hands-on training, and original research, while lecture courses and general education will be replaced by advanced research seminars and hands-on training.

——-

More.

Notes on taxpayer funds oversight

Eko:

That trail led to staggering discoveries. Programs marked as independent revealed coordinated funding streams. Grants labeled as humanitarian aid showed curious detours through complex networks. Black budgets once shrouded in secrecy began to unravel under algorithmic scrutiny.

By 6 AM, Treasury’s career officials began arriving for work. They found systems they thought impenetrable already mapped. Networks they believed hidden already exposed. Power structures built over decades revealed in hours.

Their traditional defenses—slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests—proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.

The growing gap between college sticker prices and what people actually pay

Oyin Adedoyin>:

At NYU, the published cost including housing and living expenses topped $82,000 in the 2022-23 school year. That is roughly a 20% increase from 2006-07, accounting for inflation. But a separate calculation for those who received aid from the school showed the price they paid dropped by 34% over the same period to roughly $30,700.

Bille, now 24, had wanted to go to NYU since middle school. The Las Vegas native is the daughter of immigrants who never navigated the American college system.

When she got into NYU in February 2019, the lack of aid didn’t deter her. The total cost for freshman year that fall, including room and board, was $75,502, according to NYU.

She had gotten a jump-start bringing the cost down with dozens of scholarship applications before she got accepted. But she kept applying. She color-coded her spreadsheet to track their status. A yellow row meant she was waiting to hear back. Red meant she had been rejected. Green meant she got the schola

A generation of schoolchildren is being exhorted to believe in their brain’s elasticity. Does it really help them learn?

Carl Hendrick:

Over the past century, a powerful idea has taken root in the educational landscape. The notion of intelligence as something innate and fixed has been supplanted by the idea that intelligence is instead something malleable; that we are not prisoners of immutable characteristics and that, with the right training, we can be the authors of our own cognitive capabilities.

Nineteenth-century scientists including Francis Galton and Alfred Binet devoted their own considerable intelligence to a quest to classify and understand human cognitive ability. If we could codify the anatomy of intelligence, they believed, we could place individuals into their correct niche in society. Binet would go on to develop the first IQ tests, laying the foundations for a method of ranking the intelligence of job applicants, army recruits or schoolchildren that continues today.

In the early 20th century, progressive thinkers revolted against this idea that inherent ability is destiny. Instead, educators such as John Dewey argued that every child’s intelligence could be developed, given the right environment. The self, according to Dewey, is not something ‘ready made’ but rather ‘in continuous formation through choice of action’. In the 1960s and ’70s, psychologists such as Albert Bandura bridged some of the gap between the innate and the learned models of intelligence with his idea of social cognitive theory, self-efficacy and motivation. One can recognise that there are individual differences in ability, Bandura argued, but still emphasise the potential for growth for each individual, wherever one’s starting point.

The Licensing Racket

Alex Tabarrok Summary:

Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.

Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”

“As U.S. students keep falling behind, educators keep lowering standards”  

Frannie Block:

What’s more, American students in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles “are performing lower than they did in the early 1990s,” said Martin West, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. This disparity between the highest- and lowest-achieving students is known as the “achievement gap”—and the U.S. now appears to have one of the largest in the world, compared to other wealthy nations.

There are a number of theories as to why proficiency rates are declining. The pandemic lockdowns that started in 2020 and the omnipresence of cell phones in schools haven’t helped.

But instead of trying to solve the problem, a number of educators are actually covering it up—by lowering the educational standards in their states.




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