School Information System

Erin Gretzinger:

The Madison School Board approved a $165,500 contract for a compensation study at its Monday meeting following months of mounting calls from the teachers union to address salary compression for veteran teachers.

The Madison Metropolitan School District’s board green lit a proposal from Evergreen Solutions, a Florida-based consulting firm, to conduct a study of about 4,500 employees’ compensation. Set to begin in February, the work is scheduled to conclude by the end of June.

The study aims to “ensure the district’s compensation practices are internally equitable, externally competitive and align with modern job market standards,” according to a memo to the School Board.

The study comes after Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, has spent the past few months lobbying for the school district to address salary compression for veteran educators. While the district has raised the starting pay for new teachers in recent years, the union has argued the pay scale doesn’t fairly compensate loyal veteran teachers who stay at the district.

Teachers who leave and come back to the district would make more than those who stayed with Madison schools during the same period, union representatives say.

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite 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?

Aanu Adeoye and Patrick Temple-West:

Investors in western biotechs face the prospect of lower valuations as Chinese start-ups attract growing investment from global drugmakers looking to replenish their pipelines.

China has emerged in recent years as a hub for drug development, particularly early-stage candidates, with faster timelines allowing companies to reach proof of concept ahead of western rivals.

Because the country’s biotechs can run clinical trials more quickly and cheaply, rivals from elsewhere risk being “undercut in licensing or partnering discussions”, said Oliver Kenyon, senior director at life sciences investor RTW.

This was particularly the case for “fairly crowded therapeutic areas”, he added, noting the trend “might compress long-term returns” for investors.

Aaron Schaffer, Will Oremus and Nitasha Tiku:

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude.

Maggie Switek, PhD, Brock Smith and Abigail Humphreys, PhD:

Our report and interactive online tool break down the components of the BPC index, delivering actionable insights into the factors driving short- and medium-term economic performance in US metropolitan areas. Policymakers, government officials, and business leaders can leverage this analysis to craft targeted strategies for fostering sustainable growth in the metros that drive America’s economy.

Benjamin Yount

The latest conversation about rising property taxes in Wisconsin has nothing to do with Gov. Tony Evers’ 400-year veto.

The Institute for Reforming Government has accused the Wisconsin Association of School Boards of refusing to lower property taxes by voting against the latest decoupling plan at the state capitol.

“School board members from across the state met in Milwaukee this week and officially agreed to advocate against decoupling school choice funding,” IRG said in a statement.

Decoupling would separate state support for choice schools and traditional public schools. In addition to making it easier to track which school gets what, IRG said decoupling could lower property taxes.

“Instead of separating district and choice, the state deducts state funding from your local district for choice students. District students do not lose a single dollar, but your district makes up the difference by raising property taxes,” IRG said. “Proponents say Wisconsin should ‘decouple.’ Districts could lower their property taxes. [And] Families could choose schools that best fit them, supported by the state.”

The WASB didn’t offer any explanation for its opposition to decoupling. The official resolution on the question is locked behind a members-only firewall. But as recently as 2004, there was some support for decoupling among WASB members.

Jolynda Wang:

This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence.

Many English professors have identified the use of chatbots as harmful to critical thinking and writing. Now, professors who had previously allowed screens in class are tightening technology restrictions.

Professor Kim Shirkhani, who teaches “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” explained that for about a decade prior to this semester, she did not require printed readings. This semester, she is requiring all students to have printed options.

“Over the years I’ve found that when students read on paper they’re more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries,” Shirkhani wrote to the News. “This improves the quality of class time by orders of magnitude.”

As the course director for “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” Shirkhani leaves the decision of allowing technology in the classroom up to each individual instructor. Yet others have followed her practice.

Last semester, professor Pamela Newton, who also teaches the course, allowed students to bring readings either on tablets or in printed form. While laptops felt like a “wall” in class, Newton said, students could use iPads to annotate readings and lie them flat on the table during discussions. However, Newton said she felt “paranoid” that students could be texting during class.

Shanaka Anslem Perera:

In 1994, the United States Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requiring telecommunications carriers to design their networks with built-in capabilities for government wiretapping. The law emerged from FBI concerns that digital switching technology would render traditional surveillance impossible. CALEA’s solution was elegant in its naivety: force every carrier to build a standardized interface through which law enforcement could access communications pursuant to court order. The interface would be secure because it would be secret, protected by access controls, audited by compliance regimes. No adversary would find it because no adversary would know to look.

Twenty-two years later, the United Kingdom enacted the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, colloquially known as the Snooper’s Charter. It went further than CALEA, mandating that technology companies retain communications data and provide access mechanisms for intelligence agencies. The architecture was the same: centralized access points designed for authorized users, protected by the assumption that authorized users would be the only ones using them.

Salt Typhoon was the adversarial audit that the system failed.

Andrew:

In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process:

For a long time, I [King] resisted the accumulating evidence that our institutions for curating trustworthy science were failing.

I believed our academic gatekeepers–editors, reviewers, and research-integrity officers–were quietly doing their jobs. Overstretched, but nevertheless, curating a trustworthy scientific record and correcting it when problems appeared.

That belief ended when I attempted to replicate an extraordinarily influential article “The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance,” by Robert Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, and George Serafeim. The paper has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it.

Uh oh . . . I have a horrible sense that I know what’s coming next:

It contains serious flaws and misrepresentations.

Mike McIntire:

They also promised that the children’s sensitive data would be closely guarded in the decade-long study, which got underway in 2015. Promotional materials included a cartoon of a Black child saying it felt good knowing that “scientists are taking steps to keep my information safe.”

The scientists did not keep it safe

In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.”

In response to the fraudulent access by a Chinese researcher, she said, the N.I.H. “made enhancements that will prevent this type of incident” from happening again.

“N.I.H. has a longstanding commitment to make the results of N.I.H.-funded research available,” she said, noting that it has approved more than 92,000 access requests since 2007. “At the same time, N.I.H. takes the protection of all human data very seriously and has numerous safeguards in place.”

But the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, reported last April that the N.I.H. did not have the resources to properly monitor all the downloads of genetic data and “may be missing violations that go unreported by researchers.”

Ramona Bessinger:

The term “collectivism” is one I know well from my tenure as a Providence school teacher. Back in 2021, teachers at my school, Esek Hopkins in Providence, Rhode Island, were given new DEI pedagogy to use in the classroom. We were told to embrace a concept called the “Whole Child” and to familiarize students with the term “collectivism”.

It wasn’t long before I noticed that “collectivism” had far reaching consequences that meant the abandonment of American values, history, and literature. It was pressed upon teachers and staff that all students “belonged” to the school. Policies usurping parental authority were created, classic literature was thrown out into dumpsters at the back of the school. Absent from my curriculum and classroom library were my books on the Holocaust like Anne Frank and classic American novels like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and many more.

In place of the classics we were mandated to use curriculum platforms that included hundreds of cartoon paperbacks with zero literary merit, instead the books mocked America and reflected racial division, class division and religious division.

The American flag was disappearing from the classroom, while flags from other countries were flown.

Oversight project:

Governments have pushed propaganda on their citizens since the days of Ancient Greece.

It is not a new concept. Whether dictatorship or democracy, governments have imposed propaganda on their own citizens in peacetime for purposes of reinforcing or changing national identity and behavior, and in times of war to promote noble causes of patriotism, national pride, and unity to defeat a common enemy. That propaganda is often assisted by ideologically aligned institutions.

The first half of the 20th century saw the maturing of the study of psychology, and the industrialization of psychology through journalism, entertainment, education, and advertising to condition people’s thoughts and influence their behavior.

President Woodrow Wilson utilized domestic propaganda after winning his second term to generate enthusiasm for U.S. entry into World War I, and to change America’s traditional values as part of his progressive agenda to transform America. Most of this propaganda was open. The Department of War became the first federal agency, during World War I, to institutionalize relations with Hollywood for the purpose of producing domestic propaganda.

At about this time, industrial-scale scientific manipulation of the mind became a political and business tool. Pioneers on this scale included Edward Bernays (“Bernays”), the nephew of Sigmund Freud (“Freud”) known as the “father of public relations.” Bernays’ 1928 book, Propaganda, laid out a philosophy for democratic governments to manipulate the public.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society,” he wrote as the opening words of Chapter 1, titled “Organizing Chaos.” To Bernays, “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”1Bernays mainstreamed the idea of what he called “Engineering of Consent.”2

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more.

Pavel Durov:

You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026. When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its “encryption”, we found multiple attack vectors.

Jukka Savolainen:

Academic sociology has been stifled by ideological capture. To restore its credibility, I advocate for the kind of external intervention once undertaken in Denmark. In 1986, the Danish government closed the University of Copenhagen’s sociology departments after finding them irreparably compromised by neo-Marxist activism. Rebuilt in the 1990s, Danish sociology now enjoys international distinction. This precedent suggests that academic freedom can be legitimately curtailed when its abuse undermines a discipline’s scientific integrity. Drawing analogies to other institutions that enjoy wide autonomy but face intervention when trust is violated, I argue that higher education should not be exempt. In American sociology, critics have long observed that the discipline operates less as an impartial science than as an instrument of progressive activism. Examples include the treatment of politically inconvenient findings, such as Mark Regnerus’s contested study of same-sex parenting, contrasted with leniency toward outright misconduct when it supports fashionable narratives. Research agendas on crime, gender, and race display systematic blind spots, privileging ideologically charged explanations while marginalizing alternative perspectives. As enrollments decline and sociology ranks among the “most regretted” majors, the discipline risks further irrelevance. Drawing inspiration from the Danish model, I call for reforms grounded not in partisan retaliation but in the principles of open science, intellectual pluralism, and Mertonian norms. Competitive grants, heterodox research centers, and independent advisory boards can help realign sociology with its mission: the rigorous and impartial study of social life. 

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more.

Dave Cieslewicz:

There’s a fundamental dishonesty to all this. If you get a “D” you’re not “emerging.” Emerging implies improvement. But there’s a good chance you’re treading water at best. In any event, you’re falling behind, not meeting standards. You need to be told so. Honestly. In clear language. You need to hear that you need to shape up. Because when a kid emerges from the warm embrace of MMSD, he’ll find himself in a world that does evaluate him, does pass judgement on his performance and sometimes does so in harsh terms that don’t spare his feelings. 

How we deal with failure is probably the best test we can have. Do we allow it to ruin us? Do we accept the evaluation, figure out how we need to improve and get going? Or do we blame the system? 

My real concern about all this is that at MMSD it’s about that last point. Nobody fails, but those whose work is incomplete are the victims of a system, not subject to their own shortcomings. 

Failure can be a valuable thing. God knows I’ve had enough of it in my life — including in my early years in elementary school. Avoiding that experience — feeling bad about yourself, about how you’ve performed, but taking responsibility for your own shortcomings and resolving to do better — is robbing kids of something valuable. It looks to me like MMSD’s understanding of that material isn’t even developing.

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite 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?

Dario Amodei:

In fact, that picture probably underestimates the likely rate of progress. Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems. This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next. This loop has already started, and will accelerate rapidly in the coming months and years. Watching the last 5 years of progress from within Anthropic, and looking at how even the next few months of models are shaping up, I can feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.

In this essay, I’ll assume that this intuition is at least somewhat correct—not that powerful AI is definitely coming in 1–2 years,⁷ but that there’s a decent chance it does, and a very strong chance it comes in the next few. As with Machines of Loving Grace, taking this premise seriously can lead to some surprising and eerie conclusions. While in Machines of Loving Grace I focused on the positive implications of this premise, here the things I talk about will be disquieting. They are conclusions that we may not want to confront, but that does not make them any less real. I can only say that I am focused day and night on how to steer us away from these negative outcomes and towards the positive ones, and in this essay I talk in great detail about how best to do so.

Jim VandeHei:

All of you must figure out how to master AI for any specific job or internship you hold or take. You’d be jeopardizing your future careers by not figuring out how to use AI to amplify and improve your work. You’d be wise to replace social media scrolling with LLM testing.

• Be the very best at using AI for your gig.

Plead with your friends to do the same. I’m certain that ordinary workers without savvy AI skills will be left behind. Few leaders are being blunt about this. But you can. I am. That would be a great gift to your friends.

• I don’t want to frighten you, but substantial societal change is coming this year. You can’t have a new technology with superhuman potential without real consequence. You already see the angst with friends struggling to find entry-level jobs. Just wait until those jobs go away. It’ll ripple fast through companies, culture and business.

Martin Preib:

A sign of this transformation is Northwestern University giving a tenure track job to Bernardine Dohrn, founding member of the terrorist group Weather Underground. A few people protested when a former terrorist bomber was hired at a prestigious university to “educate” American youth, but not very many.

Crepeau is a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, a department within Northwestern University that became a hotbed of radicalism. She was hardly the only one. A large swath of zombie journalists cranking out the same ideological rants in the name of journalism throughout Chicago also graduated from Medill. They roam the city like a band of hyenas, carefully barking the same story and turning on any of their own kind who should stray from the party line.

One of the most appalling chapters in Crepeau’s decade-long stint at the Tribune powerfully revealed how much this movement influenced her reporting. It was the case of a man once convicted for his role in the 1982 murder of two police officers on the South Side of Chicago.

Jackie Wilson’s saga of receiving a life sentence into garnering his freedom, then becoming a millionaire, could not have taken shape without the media, including Crepeau, kowtowing to the forces of the radical left that worked so hard to free Wilson from prison, claiming he was tortured into confessing.

The most chilling example of the refusal by the media to inform the public about what was truly taking place in the release of Wilson was their refusal to address the Soviet-style commission called TIRC that paved the way for Wilson to get out of prison. Created by the state legislature, TIRC was granted, incredibly, the authority to overturn convictions by a collection of unelected members appointed by the governor. One of the most blatant attacks on constitutional government, TIRC has freed scores of convicted murderers on often trumped-up claims of innocence and abuse, claims that were rejected throughout the entire judicial process, only to have the TIRC tribunal suddenly endorse them. Many of the TIRC commissioners stood to benefit from the release of maniacs like Wilson.

Kathleen Delaski:

We keep hearing about this potentially crippling shortage of high skilled workers needed to keep America at the forefront of innovation and world leadership. Meanwhile, our graduating college students can’t find jobs in the broader or entry level versions of these fields. What gives?

I am not an expert in AI, quantum computing, robotics or cybersecurity, some the fields where we need these high skilled workers. For example, there are apparently three AI job openings worldwide right now for every skilled AI worker.

But I am tracking the two debates which demonstrate the supply and the demand side of this picture and if you put them together you can see: “Houston, we have a problem,” (to harken back to the glory days of an earlier moonshot). 

The first debate. Importing talent

Since the space moonshot, we have come to rely on significant foreign expertise to fuel America’s innovation. How do we switch horses now when we are running at such speed, with trillions invested and an international race to world dominance in manufacturing and new technologies? 

We don’t, for now.

We’ve watched the President wrestle out loud with this conundrum all year. His base, and many others, argue we should be saving the highly paid roles for Americans, like the 1.6 million open AI jobs in the US. In fact, exactly a year ago, the first intra-MAGA fight boiled to the surface, before Trump even took office, when Elon Musk tried to convince the President-elect that he couldn’t run his rocket company or his electric car company without importing foreign expertise. We just didn’t have the talent stateside.

Naglaa Abu-Mandil Hassan, Keri A. Brown, Jill Eyers, Terence A. Brown and Simon Mays:

As noted above, infanticide was identified at the Roman Ashkelon brothel site where remains of nearly 100 perinatal infants were found (Smith and Kahila, 1992). There, aDNA analyses identified an excess of male infants, the suggestion being that prostitutes selectively reared girls to join the trade, with the mostly male remainder being discarded (Faerman et al., 1998). A finding of an excess of males among the Yewden infant burials would be contrary to a general preference for male offspring in the Roman World, but would potentially be consistent with the brothel theory.

Joshua Hochschild

1. Berry and Lewis critique modernity’s displacement of traditional relationships through technological and bureaucratic systems.
2. Catholic social teaching arises as a response to new social realities rather than presenting new moral principles.
3. The principle of subsidiarity emphasizes local governance and the importance of scale in human organization.
4. Berry’s vision integrates ecological ethics with a theological understanding of human dignity and community.
5. Literary imagination enriches socio-political discourse, as seen in Berry’s and Lewis’s works addressing modern challenges.

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“What happens when a cabal of secular progressive technocrats takes over an historic, traditional liberal arts college?”

Arnold Kling:

Austin Scholar writes,

When you think about a stereotypical teenager, these things probably come to mind:

• Sleeps until noon
• Fights about everything
• Glued to their phone
• Hates school…

But Matt points out that these “typical” teenage behaviors are actually symptoms of developmental dysfunction. Here’s how Matt explains what a developmentally healthy teenager looks like:

She wakes up with things she wants to accomplish. Not because someone’s making her, but because she’s genuinely excited about her projects.

She links to a presentation by Matt Bateman. 

Matt explains that teenagers who do real things now become adults who thrive. Teenagers who do fake things become adults who… need therapy to figure out what they actually want.

Barton Swaim:

The unfolding debacle in Minneapolis captures an underappreciated fact about the Democratic Party: It is configured to react in unreasoning rage to everything President Trump does. The challenge of “messaging”—how to condemn roundups of illegal migrants without defending protesters’ lawlessness—is only a symptom of the problem. The problem itself arises from the Byzantine network of activist nonprofits created and fostered over the past decade and a half by liberal foundations and progressive billionaires.

The Democrats’ nonprofit problem began more or less in 2010, when a cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate. Wealthy foundations and donor-class ideologues, animated by fears of global catastrophe, decided they couldn’t achieve their goals by democratic persuasion and had to create an army of nonprofit groups to wage legal and political war on the imagined enablers of climate change.

———

MADISON (WKOW) — Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett is responding to accusations made by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) surrounding an undocumented woman accused of the deaths of two Minnesota teenagers.

Noelia Martinez is in the Dane County Jail after reportedly driving the wrong way on the interstate near Deforest, hitting a car with 18-year-old Hallie Helgelson and 19-year-old Brady Heiling.

Martinez is charged with nine crimes, including homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle, operating while intoxicated, and operating a motor vehicle while revoked causing death.

Navroop Singh:

This pattern war debts, reserve loss, deficits, devaluation, creditor dependence, and asset liquidation is not uniquely British. It is imperial mathematics. Rome followed it over centuries; Britain compressed it into decades. The United States now shows early but unmistakable signs of the same trajectory.

America was consciously founded as a New Rome. The Founders studied Roman history obsessively, borrowing its republican ideals, symbols, architecture, and warnings. The Capitol, the eagle, Latin mottos, and the Senate were not aesthetic choices but ideological ones. America saw itself as Rome reborn wiser, restrained, immune to imperial decay. Yet Rome itself believed the same thing.

Like Rome and Britain before it, America’s strength rested on a broad middle class, a credible currency, and global financial privilege. Today, all three are under strain. Federal debt stands around $38.4–38.5 trillion, with debt-to-GDP near 124 percent. Interest payments approach $1 trillion annually, rivalling defence spending. Since abandoning gold peg in 1971, the dollar has lost roughly 86 percent of its purchasing power. The dollar’s reserve share, while still dominant, has declined to around 57–58 percent as alternatives slowly emerge.

Mark Atwood:

If you want to learn how machines actually work, go watch a mid-century industrial film. The ones shot in black and white, with the clipped narration and the cutaway diagrams. The ones that assume you can pay attention for twenty minutes, remember a sequence, and behave like an adult around rotating mass and stored energy.

Then compare that to most “training” made today. It is either infantilized entertainment, compliance theater, or vendor marketing in a lab coat. It tells you what to click, not what to understand. It teaches substitution, not diagnosis. It gives you a vibe, not a skill. It is worse than useless because it produces the confident incompetent.

This is not because people got dumber or because cameras got better. It is not because “the culture changed.” It is not because we forgot how to teach.

It is because the legal system made truthful instruction radioactive.

The moment you treat instruction as a liability surface, you stop teaching and start lawyering. That is the whole story. Everything else is downstream.

JD Busch:

Latin isn’t the first NAIS school to face antisemitism scandals while maintaining sprawling DEI bureaucracies. The Shipley School (another NAIS member) previously relieved its headmaster and DEI director following antisemitic controversies, according to published reports. Both schools share a common thread: Carney Sandoe & Associates, the executive search firm that’s become prominent in DEI recruiting for elite independent schools.

At Latin, the crisis has reached critical mass.

Nazi music, take two

In early January 2026, a teacher overheard two Latin middle school students discussing their practice of “Erika” — a 1938 German marching song that was the Wehrmacht’s most popular tune during World War II, according to historian Major General Michael Tillotson. The lyrics describe a soldier missing his sweetheart (innocuous enough), but the song’s inextricable association with Nazi Germany is hardly subtle.

This marked the second time in fourteen months that “Erika” appeared at Latin, according to school communications and media reports. A New York Post article reported that some middle school band members allegedly played the anthem in November 2024. Parents and documents reviewed by the New York Post claim that the school disregarded the incident.

Dr. Thomas Hagerman announced his resignation on Wednesday, January 14, less than two weeks after the second “Erika” incident surfaced. His departure letter cited “health concerns” and the need to “attend more intentionally to my health and overall sustainability.” Translation: He makes for a convenient scapegoat, though the school remains under severe pressure.

David Phillips

The current situation has come about because of the uneasy marriage of two related but ultimately distinct missions: the traditional mission of the university to transmit knowledge and mold character and the mission of the academy to discover, produce, and test that knowledge. The issue isn’t merely that the present arrangement allows ideologues and recalcitrant administrators to use research projects as human shields, howling miserably when failures to comply with federal regulations and their underlying values result in the withholding of federal funds. It is that the current arrangement is bad for both the education of students in the university and the pursuit of knowledge through research in the academy.

An issue brief published this past summer by the Manhattan Institute describes “the frustrating reality that,” as authors Frederick Hess and Richard Keck write, “at far too many of the nation’s 2,000 four-year colleges, the work of teaching and mentoring is only a secondary concern.” Per Hess and Keck, “University of Pennsylvania education professor Jonathan Zimmerman notes that faculty tend to characterize ‘research as their “work” and teaching as their “load,”’ a habit that, as Zimmerman dryly observes, says ‘volumes about academic priorities.’” What it says, of course, is that college and university administrators are far more concerned with maintaining a stable of widely published, grant-winning faculty celebrated for their research and writing than they are with the quality of teaching on campus. And this can come only at the expense of student learning and real education.

Chris Rickert:

After testing a new grading system at East High School that downplays traditional letter grades, the Madison School District plans to extend the system to its three other traditional high schools.

The district’s communications office, however, wouldn’t reveal a timeline for when “standards-based” grading will make its way to West, La Follette and Memorial high schools.

“We are reviewing the implementation at East and working with leaders and staff across the other high schools in the district to finalize the plan for when we will expand this to the other schools,” district spokesperson Ian Folger said.

The district’s two alternative high schools, Shabazz and Capital High, will not be affected by the shift to standards-based grading, he said.

…….

After the ninth and 13th week of a semester and at semester’s end, students’ ratings are converted to traditional letter grades A, B, C, D and I, for incomplete, and those are used to calculate students’ grade point averages.

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Top Bay Area schools embrace controversial grading system

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite 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?

Meer:

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables AI applications to connect with external tools and data sources in a standardized way.

Think of it as a universal language that lets AI models talk to the outside world.

Before MCP if you wanted Claude or another AI to access your Google Drive you’d need custom code.

Want it to also read from Slack?

More custom code.

Each integration required its own unique solution.

MCP changes this by providing a single consistent protocol.

Build once. Connect to everything.

Pasha Kamyshev:

To understand America you MUST understand the perspective and incentives of the most important people in America: the people to whom the state gives all of the taxpayers’ money.

You see, when the state is $40 trillion in debt, this money didn’t just magically disappear into a black hole. Rather, it was spent on projects the government was somehow convinced were useful or necessary at the time. Some people got that money, and it flowed into their bank accounts. Some of these people who get money from the government are quite rich. I am going to call them “state oligarchs,” who are different from “market oligarchs.” Not every person paid by the state is an oligarch. There are some people who simply collect an upper-middle-class paycheck inside an agency that doesn’t do anything.

“Market oligarchs” are usually well-known founders of new firms who stay in the spotlight. “State oligarchs” are less well known. However, they exist and their incentives and actions are the key to shaping the past, present, and future of America.

The key insight you need to grasp is that as a collective, the “state oligarchs” benefit from higher taxes, even if those taxes predominantly fall on the “rich.” While it may sound counter-intuitive at first why some rich people would advocate for “higher taxes,” consider this: if you are a defense contractor or a healthcare provider who gets 100% of their revenue from the government, then raising taxes gives the government MORE money to pay you, even after you take into account your own tax bill.

Roberta Schaefer:

Massachusetts undertook sweeping education reforms in 1993 that linked funding increases to comprehensive reforms, ranging from curriculum and accountability changes to a new three-part teacher licensure test whose pass rate was initially just 41 percent.

Massachusetts has put greater emphasis than New York on high-quality curriculum. In fact, the standards and curriculum frameworks developed by Massachusetts in the late 1990s and early 2000s have been praised as the nation’s best. When those standards go unmet, Massachusetts officials appear to intervene more aggressively in underperforming school districts than their New York counterparts do. The Commonwealth follows a specific set of interventions and monitoring protocols.

Teacher education programs in Massachusetts are accredited directly by BESE, while New York’s Regents rely on outside accrediting agencies.

Policymakers in Albany might better meet their obligations, both to students and to taxpayers, by closely studying the reasons why Massachusetts consistently produces better outcomes than New York at a significantly lower cost. This report recommends several key changes:

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Ken Girardin:

Massachusetts owes much of its high student performance today to its 1990s ed reforms which included an overhaul of the teacher pipeline (accreditation and licensure). Roberta Schaefer (fmr MA school board member) did a good analysis a few years ago.

Related:

MTEL

Foundations of Reading, Wisconsin’s one attempt at teacher content knowledge requirements – often waived by Tony Evers and others.

Susan Shelley:

Behested payments have funded the California State Protocol Foundation. In 2025, Newsom “behested” a payment of $220,000 from the University of California Berkeley for the “charitable” purpose of paying the costs of attending the Vatican climate summit. He “behested” the U.S. Energy Foundation out of $150,000 to pay for his “delegation” to the COP30 climate change conference in Brazil, also described as a “charitable” purpose.

Newsom hit up Zoox, Inc., an autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Amazon, and Centene Management Company, LLC, of St. Louis, “a leading provider of government-sponsored healthcare,” for $25,000 each “in support of general operations” of the Protocol Foundation.

Hope Karnopp:

The report found net property taxes — which accounts for credits to help taxpayers — grew by 4.6% in 2025 to nearly $12 billion, the highest rate since 2008. The forum previously forecasted another increase in property taxes in 2026.

“Limiting property tax growth has lowered the state’s tax burden, but it has also stressed local budgets and services. That in turn has led to a number of referenda to exceed state revenue and levy limits, helping push property tax growth higher in 2025 than previous years,” the report said.

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Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students.

Mel:

The same Democrat politicians who have been calling the Trump admin & ICE a bunch of fascist jackboot thugs just voted to give the federal government even MORE power to surveil and control our movements.

Why would they vote to give “fascists” more power?

——

Madison’s Marc Pocan voted for more federal power.

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Meanwhile:

VIRAL PROPAGANDA: This video of a girl weeping as she watched ICE detain a man in her neighborhood went viral

REALITY: ICE was detaining a man who lived at the same address as two convicted child rapists and he refused to comply with officers

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Paul Vallas:

More striking is the fact that there has been a four-fold increase in the number of times the police have been shot at on average this decade compared to the last.

Ryan Walters

The CTU continues to prioritize left-wing politics over learning, acquiring knowledge, critical thinking and problem-solving skills

Chicago parents expect Chicago Public Schools educators to teach reading, writing, and critical thinking skills — not to use classrooms as staging grounds for foreign and domestic political activism.

Yet, that’s exactly what happened when union-backed activists used taxpayer-funded schools to promote protests tied to Venezuela, all while displaying a poster that misspelled the word “governor” as “governer.” This gaffe would be funny if it weren’t so alarming. 

This wasn’t a typographical error scribbled by a student in a rush. It was part of a professionally organized political display, endorsed by the same education establishment — the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) — that insists it knows what’s best for America’s children.

Reagan Allen:

This gap in knowledge is reinforced by the limited emphasis on financial literacy in American high schools. Students are carefully guided through college applications, essays, and standardized testing yet often receive little instruction on how loans work, how interest accrues, or how to evaluate debt relative to income. As a result, student borrowing is often treated as routine and manageable at the outset, even though its consequences can prove inescapable later.

When young people are asked to make one of the largest financial decisions of their lives without the tools to assess it, confusion is almost inevitable. Until families, schools, and policymakers are willing to discuss higher education in concrete financial terms, including its costs, risks, and realistic returns, student borrowing will continue to be driven more by faith than by calculation. Reintroducing basic financial reasoning into the college decision would not diminish the value of education, but it would force more honest decisionmaking around a choice long insulated from scrutiny.

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more.

Greg Lukianoff

The actions of protesters and politicians, during and in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have become real-world lessons in the law of speech. The clashes have demonstrated which types of speech aren’t protected, along with passionate, angry, and unsettling speech that isprotected. We’ve also gotten a chilling reminder of what goes wrong when the government pretends not to know the difference.

For starters, the Justice Department has issued grand jury subpoenas to Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, and at least three otherDemocratic officials in the state, as part of an investigation into whether state and local officials obstructed federal immigration enforcement. Grand jury matters are secret, so we may never see the subpoenas themselves. But the public justification keeps circling back to speech. Federal officials have portrayed Walz’s and Frey’s criticisms of ICE as incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment.

Tim Harford: 

»

there is a more general lesson to be learnt about our puzzling relationship with work, and a lesson that will prove particularly useful if AI dislocates the labour market.

The puzzle is that we have a love-hate relationship with working for a living. Look closely and you find that people do not tend to enjoy their work. Step back and you find that they can’t do without it.

Twenty years ago, a team of social scientists, including Alan Krueger, an economist, and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate psychologist, investigated the wellbeing of nearly 1,000 employed women living in Texas. Kahneman and Krueger asked these women to reconstruct a recent day, episode by episode, and to rate the emotions experienced during meals, stretches of childcare, commuting and so on. Emotional labels included “happy”, “enjoying myself”, “annoyed”, “depressed” and “anxious”.

A Douglas Adams character once ruefully reflected about his job that the hours were good but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The point of Kahneman and Krueger’s research was to examine that distinction, directing people away from grand evaluations of their lives and towards the moment-to-moment experiences of which life is made.

Channel3000 Obituary:

Marcia Lynn Rainwater beloved wife, mother, grandmother, teacher and friend passed away on January 18, 2026 surrounded by her loving family. She was born August 15,1945 to Olan and Marguerite Nincehelser in Topeka Kansas.

Marcia held a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from the University of Central Arkansas and a Master’s Degree in Education from Mid-American Nazarene College. A dedicated career elementary school teacher she loved teaching and enriched the lives of hundreds of young people.

A square dance class at the University of Central Arkansas in 1964 changed the direction of two lives. Marcia met Art Rainwater and they began a lifelong partnership. After marriage in 1966 they began a journey that included 5 states, world-wide travel and finally ended in Madison WI in 1994. Marcia loved everything about Madison and after her retirement from the Verona Area School District in 2008 she enjoyed an active and fulfilling retirement. Marcia made friends everywhere she went. Of all her many retirement activities she was particularly attached to her Mahjong friends and the Zentangles ladies at Oakwood Village.

Molly Beck

Gov. Tony Evers is pushing back against arguments Madison city officials made in a recent lawsuit contending they can’t be sued for failing to count nearly 200 mail-in ballots in 2024 because absentee voting is not a right but a privilege.

A group of Madison voters represented by the liberal law firm Law Forward sued city and county election officials in March over the city’s failure to count 193 absentee ballots cast during the 2024 presidential election.

Mitchell Schmidt:

Attorneys for Witzel-Behl and the city have argued in court filings seeking to dismiss the case that, by voting absentee, the affected voters “exercised a privilege, rather than a constitutional right,” and there is no “legal basis upon which they could be entitled to monetary damages for the failure of defendants to properly count their absentee ballots.”

Evers, who does not take a position on any other dispute within the case, pushed back at that argument, writing in a statement that “Wisconsinites should have the opportunity to cast their ballot, and if they follow all of the rules, then their vote should count just like everyone else’s.”

Theodore Dalrymple:

But for many years now, the name “Rotherham” has meant only one thing to the rest of the country: the sexual abuse scandal of the first decade and a half of this century, in which gangs of men of Pakistani origin—descendants of immigrants to the town—sexually abused white girls in an organized and systematic fashion. This activity was ongoing, unbeknown to me, though not to the authorities, during my brief residence in Rotherham.

I cannot do better to describe the scandal than to quote the first five paragraphs of the executive summary of the independent report into it, published in 2014. Written by a professor of social work, Alexis Jay, it has the power to shock, as few official documents have:

No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.

In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect. It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.

This abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day. In May 2014, the caseload of the specialist child sexual exploitation team was 51. More CSE cases were held by other children’s social care teams. There were 16 looked after children who were identified by children’s social care as being at serious risk of sexual exploitation or having been sexually exploited. In 2013, the Police received 157 reports concerning child sexual exploitation in the Borough.

Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham. This came from those working in residential care and from youth workers who knew the young people well.

Maggie Appleton

When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko  pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.” Many people have talked about what large-scale, automated agent orchestration systems could look like in a few years, and no one else attempted to sincerely build it.

Mike Solana:

The ballot proposition was constructed in such a way as it can technically not solve any of the stated problems it was ostensibly written to address — chief among them, filling a massive budget hole in Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid program) following California legislation that guaranteed permanent funding for illegal immigrant healthcare. That promise was never tenable, but following federal Medicaid cuts it has dragged California into crisis. The futility of the ballot proposition has left most men impacted with a sense that the ballot proposition’s true purpose is to humiliate them, disrupt their personal lives, and hurt their companies. Given especially the proposition’s dangerous language surrounding control, which I detailed extensively last week, founders of private companies in particular, with their armies of lawyers investigating this thing, believe the proposition, as written, could actually bankrupt them. Obviously, there is now real danger in appearing successful in the state of California, as the far left, imbued with a great deal of power, and benefiting now from several years of wealth scapegoating throughout the mainstream press, attempts to liquidate its perceived enemies in business.

But first, are these guys staying and fighting, or are they leaving? And how many have already left? While there’s been a great deal of reporting on the matter, nobody seems to agree on the number.

Three men I spoke with in the largest billionaire Signal chat said they ran an informal poll, and seventy percent of the chat (around sixty people, not all of whom were billionaires) indicated they would leave the state if the ballot proposition passes. According to that same poll, around 15% have already left the state.

I’ve spoken with around ten percent of billionaires in the state myself. Of the 21 men I interviewed, 20 would have been impacted by the ballot measure. All 20 of them, including the Democrats, as well as several of the most committed diehard proponents of revitalizing San Francisco, are now developing an exit plan. (Three have already left.) Almost all of them have either purchased property out of state or are in the process of buying property out of state now; almost all of them have engaged lawyers to help them navigate what they see as a potentially years-long legal battle; and, among the men I spoke with who are presently running companies, almost all have deployed business ops leaders to focus on opening offices out of California.

While, without exception, every founder of a private company I interviewed mentioned the ballot proposition’s confusing and confounding “control” language, their focus is generally directed to the overall uncertainty surrounding legislation in the state. Concern has much less to do with this single ballot proposition than the question of how companies will be targeted in the future, and everyone believes they will be targeted again. There is also nobody who believes the introduction of architecture for a legalized asset seizure, something we’ve never before seen in this country, will conclude with an exclusive targeting of billionaires over the years to come. Once the concept is normalized, everyone assumes wealth taxes of this kind will ultimately target every “wealthy” person in the state, with the term “wealthy” redefined in whatever manner leftists find useful from election cycle to election cycle.

———

Balaji:

Because after the dollar ends, DC is out of money.
So: Carney, Newsom, Walz, Mamdani turn to Xi.
And MAGA, Elon, Texas, Miami turn to Satoshi.

Dave Hewitt:

There is little doubt these days that social media has had a hugely toxic effect on political discourse. Cancel culture, dehumanisation and bullying, purity spirals and echo chambers: some of our most tribal behaviour has been supercharged and now plays out on an unprecedented scale. What is less clear is how much of this is driven by human dynamics playing out over a new communication medium, and how much is down to the ubiquitous algorithmic feed of recommendations and suggestions employed by the social media giants. 

At their most simple, machine learning recommenders are optimising for some specific goal. The classic and most easily understandable example is monetisation, ie how to get people to spend as much as possible. 

For example it is common to target the conversion rate – what percentage of users turn from non-spender to spender – and treat increasing this figure as one primary goal for system optimisation. The approach then is to run experiments, using everything from changes to user interface, to the variety of recommendations presented, to user-specific high-value deals, to the timing and rate at which these are presented to the user, all of which will produce different rates of conversion. When an experiment produces a higher conversion rate, then that is deemed a success and becomes the default, and further experiments are run against that, in a relentless, automated drive to optimise the target metric: converting non-spenders into spenders.

Kat Rosenfield:

the “5 year-old detained by ICE story” really highlighting how much the information landscape has fractured into multiple disparate narrative ecosystems, with impermeable borders, that do not overlap at all

“truthiness”

and:

ICE did NOT target a child. The child was ABANDONED.

Imani Cruzen:

More than 6,000 St. Paul public school students have registered to learn online in the past week as the federal government’s immigration enforcement operation continues.

St. Paul Public Schools’ temporary online learning option takes effect Thursday and the deadline for families to register was Sunday. All 69 district schools have been closed through this Wednesday to give teachers time to prepare an online curriculum. Students registering late for the virtual option may have a delayed start time. The district has 33,000 students in total.

The district introduced the temporary online learning option last week which allows students to register without transferring out of their school. Prior to that, students could request enrollment in the district’s online school if they felt unsafe attending class, which required transferring into SPPS Online School.

The percentage of students who have enrolled in virtual learning ranges from a low of under 10% at some schools to up to 75% at others, said district superintendent Stacie Stanley. A school likely would need for 80% to 90% of its students to enroll in the option before moving to a fully-online option would be considered, Stanley said.

by Ploum:

What I like most about teaching “Open Source Strategies” at École Polytechnique de Louvain is how much I learn from my students, especially during the exam.

I dislike exams. I still have nightmares about exams. That’s why I try to subvert this stressful moment and make it a learning opportunity. I know that adrenaline increases memorization dramatically. I make sure to explain to each student what I was expecting and to be helpful.

Here are the rules:

1. You can have all the resources you want (including a laptop connected to the Internet)
2. There’s no formal time limit (but if you stay too long, it’s a symptom of a deeper problem)
3. I allow students to discuss among themselves if it is on topic. (in reality, they never do it spontanously until I force two students with a similar problem to discuss together)
4. You can prepare and bring your own exam question if you want (something done by fewer than 10% of the students)
5. Come dressed for the exam you dream of taking!

At a Dem. candidate forum this week, Francesca Hong said Wisconsin should sunset the voucher program.

Does Mandela Barnes support a voucher sunset?

“I support a system of accountability, of a certain set of standards. If you have public money, you should have public scrutiny” pic.twitter.com/EHEWgLimoO

— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) January 23, 2026

Notes on Education & the 2026 Wisconsin Governor’s Race

Marisa Rodriguez:

A local crossing guard went above and beyond to help a student get across a flooded Chicago street on Thursday. 

Joe Sass is a crossing guard at Jamieson Elementary School, located at 5650 North Mozart Street on the city’s North Side.

When a water main break occurred near West Bryn Mawr Avenue and North California Avenue early Thursday morning, it led to some flooding at the intersection.

Ryan Mac, Theodore Schleifer and Heather Knight:

The Google founders’ shrinking connections to California underscore the impact of a potential ballot measure that would affect the state’s wealthiest residents. Proposed by a health care union, the measure calls for Californians worth more than $1 billion to pay a one-time tax that would be equivalent of 5 percent of their assets. If the measure gains enough signatures to reach the state ballot in November and wins approval, it would retroactively apply to anyone who lived in the state as of Jan. 1 and they would have five years to pay it.

The potential wealth tax has already caused some California billionaires to establish more ties outside the state. Last month, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel announced that he opened an office for his family investment firm in Miami. David Sacks, the tech investor and White House adviser on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, unveiled a new office for his venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, in Austin, Texas.

But the actions of Mr. Brin and Mr. Page stand out because of their wealth — their combined net worths total more than $518 billion, as estimated by Forbes — and how closely identified they are with California. While both stepped down from day-to-day management of Google and its parent, Alphabet, in 2019, they remain on the board of the company and Mr. Brin has recently become more active in Google’s A.I. efforts.

Mr. Brin and Mr. Page still have connections to California, including homes across the state. It’s unclear how much time they will be spending in the state this year.

Mailee Smith:

In a win for transparency and union member rights, the Chicago Teachers Union finally released “annual” audits to members after a five-year lapse in providing the required records.

But CTU’s leaders didn’t do so willingly. It took the mounting pressure of a lawsuit filed by members, an inquiry by a U.S. Congressional committee and a potential investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor to get union leaders to follow their own internal rules.

Why would CTU leaders fight so hard to keep members in the dark?

Maybe because at least two of the union’s combined financial statements were seriously flawed, accordingto The Last Ward, which obtained exclusive copies. An independent auditor issued adverse opinions about the statements, which means the auditor concluded the union’s finances were misstated in a material and pervasive way.

Specifically, two combined financial statements include the union and its two political action committees. The union “elected to omit” activities of the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation and the Children and Teachers Foundation of the Chicago Teachers Union. As a result, the auditor found the combined financial statements “do not represent fairly the financial position of the Chicago Teachers Union.”

Danielle DuClos:

Dane County’s drug task force seized a sedan as part of a narcotics investigation, while Madison police seized $7,700 in cash in another case.

In neighboring Sun Prairie, officers seized a total of $77,700 cash in two cases that took more than 100 hours of investigation combined.

Each seizure last year was made under a state law allowing Wisconsin law enforcement agencies to keep cash and property related to crimes they are investigating. Agencies may keep or sell the seizures to help recoup investigation or prosecution costs.

In some cases — like the $7,700 Madison police seizure — agencies may keep up to half of the money and must deposit the rest into the state’s Common School Fund, which supports public school libraries.

A Madison police spokesperson said the department itself doesn’t keep any seized funds, rather depositing that money into the city’s general fund. The department reported $3,800 in investigation and prosecution expenses related to the $7,700 seizure.

J.p. Morgan:

The U.S. dollar is the world’s primary reserve currency, and it is also the most widely used currency for trade and other international transactions. However, its hegemony has come into question in recent times due to geopolitical and geostrategic shifts. As a result, de-dollarization has increasingly become a substantive topic of discussion among investors, corporates and market participants more broadly.

What are the potential implications of de-dollarization, and how is it playing out in global markets and trade? 

Committee For A Responsible Budget:

The U.S. national debt is approaching record levels as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and currently stands at 100% of GDP, while interest costs are surging to new records and budget deficits remain elevated at around 6% of GDP.

High and rising deficits and debt can have many consequences, including that they can put upward pressure on inflation, boost interest rates, slow income growth, reduce fiscal space to respond to needs or emergencies, and weaken our national security. Perhaps most concerning, excessive debt could lead to a fiscal crisis.

A fiscal crisis – sometimes called a sovereign debt crisis – is a sharp economic shock or downturn caused or sparked by high levels of current or expected public borrowing. A fiscal crisis can take many forms but is most likely to occur if investors lose confidence in the Treasury market.

In this paper, we discuss and illustrate what a fiscal crisis might look like. The crisis types we survey – several of which could happen simultaneously – include:

Laura Meckler:

“We’ve got a 30-year low in reading scores,” he said. “Has a single governor called for an emergency meeting of the governors association?”
Left unsaid was that he might run against some of those governors in a 2028 Democratic primary.
Emanuel brought a film crew with him, and within a day of leaving the state, he had posted video from the visit to his social media accounts.
An education evolution
Emanuel likes to hark back to an era when education reform was in vogue. A national movement centered on standards and accountability began in the states and culminated with the bipartisan passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. Schools were required to make progress on annual tests or face escalating consequences.

Cary Spivak & Mary Spicuzza

And evidence of fraud throughout the program has soared, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation has found. 

Created to combat Wisconsin’s dire problem of babies dying before their first birthday, a growing group of for-profit and nonprofit companies collected more than $22 million last year alone.

Yet Wisconsin continues to have one of the nation’s worst records for Black infant mortality, a troubling rate that has shown little improvement over the years despite the rapid growth of the prenatal care industry. 

A review of thousands of pages of documents and interviews with dozens of people, including regulators, clients, social services experts and those who own or work for prenatal care coordination companies, uncovered financial mismanagement and revealed an industry raking in millions with little government oversight. Indications of fraud included fictitious billings, forgeries and coordinators claiming to be in two places at once, the Journal Sentinel investigation found.

Among the newspaper’s findings: 

Unbekoming:

But examining what these films show reveals something equally important about what they don’t show. Children appear as plot devices or not at all. Fertility is never discussed. The protagonists—women in their late twenties to mid-thirties—are presented as having unlimited time to optimize their romantic choices. The films teach a particular life script: finding the right partner matters more than timing; passion justifies upheaval; stability is a warning sign.

This analysis examines both the technique—how Ephron builds justification for leaving—and the pattern: what these films normalize about relationships, timing, and the proper priorities for women in their most fertile years.

Hanna Bechtel:

Higher education is approaching a period of profound disruption, and many colleges may not survive, Arthur Levine, the newly appointed president of Brandeis University, said during a recent event.

Levine estimated that between 20 and 25 percent of colleges will close in the coming years, while community colleges and regional universities move increasingly online. 

He made these remarks during a recent American Enterprise Institute event titled “Tackling Higher Education’s Challenges: A Conversation with Frederick M. Hess and Brandeis University President Arthur Levine.” 

Wealthier institutions may have the resources to withstand the transition, but many others do not. Levine said that elite schools, such as Harvard, can afford to wait out disruptions, while smaller institutions face immediate pressure to adapt. 

“Higher education is undergoing a transformation. Our whole society is undergoing a transformation,” Levine said, pointing to the shift from a national, industrial economy to a global, digital, knowledge-based one. 

The Economist:

McPherson Middle School in Kansas had been burned before by education technology, but in 2022 school leaders were ready to try again. They selected a digital programme called ixl from a statewide recommendation list. It promised instruction tailored to each student’s level, igniting quick gains. The school used it to assign most in-class independent maths work. “We thought it was going to be really magical,” says Inge Esping, the principal.

Jordan McGillis:

“Contemporary liberalism’s equity concerns cut directly against the widely shared preference among technologists to let students progress, particularly in math and science, at the greatest rate their abilities allow.”

What liberals have failed to internalize is the earnestness of techno-populist godfather Peter Thiel’s hostility to established institutions. Thiel sees tech, the Democratic Party, and elite institutions writ large as having devolved into stolid enforcers of the status quo.

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A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite 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?

Michael Every:

However, we argue a close comparison is 1985-1991: Trump is in many ways an inverse version of former Soviet President Gorbachev.

Both superpower leaders introduced radical structural changes to shake up their political economy. Gorbachev failed badly. Can Trump succeed – and what does it mean if he does or doesn’t?

To answer that, we must briefly compare the key fundamentals of the Soviet and US economies, and what happened to the former.

Patrick Michleran

From history to poverty to treating kids like wildlife, errors compound

Bungling facts is bad enough. The harm’s far greater when you’re paid by taxpayers to profess them at Wisconsin’s flagship state university.

A case in point: A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of education policy revealed a grave misunderstanding of school choice as practiced here — and in the process slandered the Wisconsinites who educate more than 60,000 children.

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite 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?

The Long View:

The Great Rebalancing is not a return to nationalism or the end of globalization. It is its maturation—an effort to align values with resilience and strategy with sustainability. What comes next may be messier and slower, but it will be more honest. And it may, in time, prove more stable.

by Andrew Handel, Jonathan Williams, Lee Schalk & Christian Whittle

As we celebrate America’s Semiquincentennial, we find ourselves reflecting on the distinct virtues that have sustained our Republic for the past 250 years. There is perhaps no policy area where the spirit of 1776 is more vibrant or necessary than education. Just as the founders sought to liberate the colonies from distant, centralized control, the education freedom movement is doing the same by returning authority to parents and allowing them to choose the best school suited to their child’s needs.

The 2026 Index of State Education Freedom ranks each of the 50 states based on how well they provide different educational options to families. There are five categories that each state is assessed in: student-centered funding, charter schools, home schools, virtual schools, and open enrollment. Our goal is to not only make parents and policymakers aware of the education freedom environment in their state, but to also highlight what changes they can implement to make more learning options available to families.

For the third time in a row, Florida earns the #1 spot in the rankings and is the only state to earn an A+ overall grade. In addition, Texas climbs 15 spots to #9, and Wyoming climbs 11 spots to #17 after both passed legislation to create universal education freedom programs in their state.

Nikita Mazurov

In this case, however, the affidavit reveals that Perez-Lugones’s employer could see not only the typical metadata stored by printers, such as file names, file sizes, and time of printing, but it could also view the actual contents of the printed materials — in this case, prosecutors say, the screenshots themselves. As the affidavit points out, “Perez-Lugones’ employer can retrieve records of print activity on classified systems, including copies of printed documents.”

Sarah Maslin Nir

With a swooping P, a curling H, a slanted I and a looped L, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey — on his last full day in office on Monday — signed into law a bill requiring that all third, fourth and fifth graders in the state learn cursive.

Though script is little used these days beyond checkbooks and autographs, New Jersey joins roughly two dozen other states that have inscribed similar rules in recent years, bucking a drop-off in cursive instruction that began in 2010, when the federal government removed it from the Common Core Standards for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Proponents of cursive cite studies that link handwriting to better information retention and writing speed, and say — as Mr. Murphy did in a statement released as he signed the bill — that knowing script can help people read the original U.S. Constitution.

Learning cursive will provide New Jersey students with “the skills they need to read our nation’s founding documents,” as well as write checks and improve cognition, Mr. Murphy said on Monday, a day before relinquishing his office to the state’s new Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill.
The requirement takes effect immediately and applies to the next full school year, according to Kevin Dehmer, the state’s education commissioner. “Ensuring that all students learn cursive handwriting reinforces not just a traditional skill, but developmental foundations that support fine motor development, literacy skills and student confidence,” Mr. Dehmer said in a statement.

Elie Dolgin:

AI is turning scientists into publishing machines—and quietly funneling them into the same crowded corners of research.

That’s the conclusion of an analysis of more than 40 million academic papers, which found that scientists who use AI tools in their research publish more papers, accumulate more citations, and reach leadership roles sooner than peers who don’t.

But there’s a catch. As individual scholars soar through the academic ranks, science as a whole shrinks its curiosity. AI-heavy research covers less topical ground, clusters around the same data-rich problems, and sparks less follow-on engagement between studies.

Salena Zito

Propel charter schools were founded 22 years ago in the basement of an old homestead hospital. Since then, the network has grown to serve more than 4,000 students across a dozen school districts in Pennsylvania.

This incident comes 18 months after Trump was shot and injured in western Pennsylvania at the Butler County Farm Show complex and four months after Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on a college campus in Utah. After both events, teachers nationwide faced disciplinary action for controversial social media posts either lamenting the assassination attempt for being unsuccessful or celebrating Kirk’s death.

In July 2024, days after Trump was shot, Cassandra Olson, a Sioux Falls School District middle school behavior specialist, wrote, “Shoot—if only he would’ve had his scope sighted correctly” on Facebook. The South Dakota school district acted swiftly, saying in a statement that the staff member “was no longer employed” at the school.

Olson was one of several educators who either lost their jobs or had their teaching licenses pulled for wishing or celebrating harm on Trump.

George Leef:

If ever a case made plain the clash of values between freedom of speech and the desire of college administrators to compel everyone to support their “progressive” beliefs, Reges v. Cauceis it. This is an important First Amendment case, one in which the Martin Center joined in an amicus brief in support of a professor who was targeted with official retaliation because he spoke out against his university’s “land acknowledgement” policy and substituted his own views for the school’s.

What nerve!

Why do so many college leaders (and faculty members) use their influence to promote ideological points of view?Before getting into the details of the case, let’s examine the background. Specifically, why do so many college leaders (and faculty members) use their influence to promote ideological points of view?

They do so because they see it as their mission to undermine the legitimacy of Western civilization in the minds of students. They want students to reject everything in our culture because they see it as responsible for endless trouble: It’s destroying the environment; it’s exploitative of “marginalized people”; it favors the rich at the expense of the poor; it’s racist, sexist, and homophobic; and it stands in the way of social justice and equality. Progressives want everyone to regard America as utterly rotten—irredeemable. The only thing to do is to undertake a radical transformation of the nation by putting it under the control of those who are “woke.”

Ben Fritz:

All nations are held together by culture, but the U.S. is unique for the power of its pop culture. Our music, television shows and movies are a multitrillion-dollar business and the first way that billions of people around the world get to know us.

For most of the 20th century, they were also the glue that held the country together. In a sprawling nation founded on the precept of individual liberty and populated primarily by immigrants from around the world, there was hardly one American experience. Maids in Boston, factory workers in Chicago and farmers in California lived much different lives despite being part of the same country.

Cinemas, radios, television sets and records changed all that. Americans might do different things during the workday, but at night and on weekends, we were watching and listening to the same things—things made in America, primarily for Americans, by the first modern celebrities.

It was the birth of the monoculture—a word that captures the historically unique power of American entertainment in the 20th century. An estimated 200 million tickets were sold for “Gone With the Wind,” which came out in 1939, when the population of the U.S. was 130 million. The “Amos ’n’ Andy” radio show was so popular that movie theaters scheduled around it and piped the audio in on their speakers. In 1983, more than 100 million people watched the finale of “M*A*S*H.”

Jeffrey Selingo

Only now are colleges realizing that the implications of AI are much greater and are already outrunning their institutional ability to respond. As schools struggle to update their curricula and classroom policies, they also confront a deeper problem: the suddenly enormous gap between what they say a degree is for and what the labor market now demands. In that mismatch, students are left to absorb the risk. Alina McMahon and millions of other Gen-Zers like her are caught in a muddled in-between moment: colleges only just beginning to think about how to adapt and redefine their mission in the post-AI world, and a job market that’s changing much, much faster.

What feels like a sudden, unexpected dilemma for Gen-Z graduates has only been made worse by several structural changes across higher education over the past decade.

First, a huge surge of undergraduates shifted to majoring in fields now being upended by AI. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, a long-running survey of college freshmen by UCLA found students much more focused on going to college to “get a better job” than on what they previously wanted most: to learn more about things that interested them. That new mind-set showed up in what they picked as a major in college. Between 2010 and 2020, fields such as philosophy, history, and English saw a big drop in popularity. The latter two majors fell by one-third in that ten-year period while overall humanities enrollment declined by almost a fifth. Where did they go? A lot pivoted to computer science and related fields.

Leslie Sattler:

The numbers back up this change. Data from the Burning Glass Institute shows that in 2017, degree requirements were part of 93% of job postings at Google. By 2022, that figure had dropped to 77%.

Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon expressed similar views in 2024. “If you look at skills of people, it is amazing how skilled people are in something, but it didn’t show up in their résumé,” he said.

Rebecca Redelmeier:

Still, only around one-quarter of students in grades 3-8 achieved proficient scores on last year’s math state test, called the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA. That’s far from the district’s goal of more than half of the students in those grades achieving proficient scores in math by August 2030.

The gains come as the district struggles with declining scores in reading. 

Philly schools began implementing a new math curriculum from Imagine Learning Illustrative Mathematics during the 2023-24 school year, following a $45 million overhaul. The district also recently expanded its high-impact math tutoring program for middle school students.

Deputy Superintendent of Academic Services Jermaine Dawson said scores in third grade math were particularly promising, with more than one third of those students achieving proficient scores last year. That indicates that both teachers and students are becoming more familiar with the new curriculum, Dawson said.

Jennifer Pignolet

The Michigan Department of Education is lobbying the Legislature to take the state’s science of reading laws two big steps further.

The department sent legislators its annual legislative priorities letter on Jan. 14, advocating for making it harder for districts to avoid teaching the science of reading, a way of teaching reading that aligns with how the brain learns to read.

The state already adopted two laws aimed at pushing districts in that direction, but the Michigan Department of Education, led by new Superintendent Glenn Maleyko, is calling for a stricter mandate.

Brian Freed

University of Austin (UATX) is a hot topic after the hit piece by Politico.

My son is in his second term there; his brother(s) will start in the fall. Every single person I’ve met at UATX is more articulate than myself, and certainly more qualified to speak. But if the goal of the piece was to scare off applicants, then I think a parent’s perspective is worthwhile.

TL;DR: If your kid is smart and works hard, send them to UATX. Go tell them to submit their test score. Do it now. It’ll take less than 10 minutes and there’s no downside.

I’ll attempt to explain the upside, probably in excruciating detail. Just do it; they can be friends with mine and you can skip the rest of this long post.

Politico wandered widely; there’s much to respond to. I’ll start with the central claim which seems to be that UATX is “a right-wing project”, is “less concerned about the neutral pursuit of truth” and has “drifted further away from pluralism and toward a more rigid, hard-right orthodoxy.” Nate has more pluralism and less orthodoxy in his friend group than I did at Drexel in 1999. The “My Fellow Liberal”

meme comes to mind…

Olivia Herken:

Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers cast doubt on repealing a partial veto he made nearly three years ago to increase school funding, a move that has been in the crosshairs of Republican legislators as both sides explore ideas for property tax relief.

When signing the 2023-25 state budget, Evers used his powerful veto authority to increase annual per pupil funding for schools each year until 2425. Republican lawmakers have wanted to repeal the so-called 400-year veto ever since, and when Evers unveiled a legislative plan last week that included a proposal to provide property tax relief to residents, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said he was willing to negotiate, but that first, Evers would need to help repeal that veto.

When asked during an interview with the Cap Times if he had plans to undo the veto, Evers was hesitant, and instead shifted the focus to negotiating property tax relief with Republicans.

“I don’t know,” Evers said. “We need to get more money into the property tax (relief), that will help our schools. I’d like to hear what (Vos) has to say about that personally.”

——-

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

David Blaska:

Monday, January 19, we honor America’s historic struggle for civil rights and human dignity. We do so in the name of Martin Luther King Jr. Blaska admires the guy for his courage as much as for his noble cause. (Great wordsmith, too!) History records many allies — some white, like Wisconsin’s own Col. Hans Christian Heg, the Civil War abolitionist. But all the BLM mob knew or cared was that he was a white male, likely cis-gendered.

The civil rights movement, as the Rev. King knew it, has been decapitated like Heg’s statue. Scam artists like Al Sharpton and Robin DiAngelo hijacked the righteous cause to milk their guilty white marks for Benjamins and ratings. Because the actual toxin is almost extirpated, the supposed racism whitey suffers, they hold, is unconscious — the legacy of 1619, found in the unlikeliest places, even a 42-ton glacial boulder!
Behavior, not race?

Someone tell the UniParty Capital Times that Bull Connors isn’t our sheriff. The voice of progressivism could not report the arrest of two influential and prosperous black women without sounding the klaxon of racism. Forty (40) percent of people booked on disorderly conduct in the county jail are black, the progressive outlet scolded, disproportionate to their population. The scurrilous implication being that Madison police are racist. In a metro area with a disproportionate (we can use that word, too!) number of minority-race police, district attorneys, alders, supervisors, legislators, and school superintendents? After 60 years of civil rights legislation, affirmative action (voluntary or not), and countless sensitivity seminars?

Francesca D’Annunzio

The software has been met with criticism from civil liberties advocates, especially given that its WebLoc add-on enables warrantless device tracking. Normally, when U.S. police officers seek cell phone records or location data, they must obtain a warrant by presenting probable cause of a crime to a judge. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that warrants are required for obtaining location data from cell phone providers. But the rise of the multi-billion dollar data broker industry has created a free-for-all that enables police and others to purchase massive amounts of cell phone location data without judicial review.

Nathan Wessler, an ACLU attorney who argued the Carpenter case, said data broker-built services like Tangles pose the same privacy issues as those decided in the Supreme Court case and that law enforcement’s ability to buy location data constitutes an erosion of constitutionally protected rights. “Police are doing an end run around this well-articulated system of judicial oversight by just paying money instead of going to a judge,” he said. “There’s just no checks of police abuse against that.” 

Cheyenne Mumphrey:

At a time when productivity means optimizing every second and screens blur the line between work and home, some people are slowing down and disconnecting by looking to communication devices from the past.

Tactile activities ranging from writing letters and typewriter clubs to TikTok communities showcasing calligraphy skills and wax seals are giving retro writing instruments a resurgence. More than quaint throwbacks, the pursuits provide their enthusiasts with opportunities to reduce their technology use, be more intentional with time and build meaningful connections with others.

“I feel as though my pen pals are my friends. I don’t think of them much differently than if I were chatting with a friend on the phone, in a coffee shop or at another person’s house,” said Melissa Bobbitt, 42, a devoted letter-writer who corresponds with about a dozen people from her home in Claremont, California, and has had up to 40 pen pals at one time. “Focusing on one person and really reading what they are saying, and sharing what’s on your heart is almost like a therapy session.”

Ink, paper and other tools that once were the only way to send a message from afar are continuing to bring people together from around the world. Below, some of them explain the appeal of snail mail and give recommendations for getting started.

Writing can be an escape

Jonathan Wells

It’s been 200 years since the word “hello” was first used in print – though its beginnings date back to the 15th Century. How has the language of greetings evolved around the world – and what does it tell us about ourselves?

We use “hello” dozens of times a day without thinking – during phone calls, emails and face-to-face encounters. We sing it along with Adele and Lionel Richie, and we have watched it spun into moments of screen gold in Jerry Maguire (“You had me at hello”), and Scarface (“Say hello to my little friend!”). It’s been used to sell everything from mobile phones (Motorola’s “Hello, Moto”) to lingerie (Wonderbra’s iconic “Hello boys”), and it has been borrowed to name computer programs and celebrity magazines. 

Rory Linnane and David Clarey

School Board members on Tuesday, Jan. 20 will consider a resolution from School Board President Missy Zombor that could set limits on officers’ involvement in non-criminal behavior at school and require more detailed public reporting of their activity.

The program has been in place since March last year, after a state law forced 12 Milwaukee police officers to be assigned to MPS buildings, despite local objectionsfrom School Board members and other community leaders.

Since then, the program has been lauded by some school administrators and police for building relationships between officers and students. At a Jan. 12 meeting to educate parents about the program, Marshall High School Principal Steven Howell said it was making schools safer.

“If you’re not safe or you don’t feel safe, it’s hard to learn,” he said.

Capt. Vynetta Norberg, who oversees the school resource officer program, said officers strive to mentor students and refer them to supportive services, with the aim of keeping arrests and citations down.

Students with Youth Empowered in the Struggle, a student arm of immigrant and labor rights organization Voces de la Frontera, are skeptical of the program’s claims. They told the Journal Sentinel they’ve felt less safe since it started.

Paul Vallas:

It’s not surprising to learn the CTU audits, hidden from CTU members for five years; reveals potential criminal conduct.

This is just another example of the CTU’s damaging behavior, which betrays both members and students and families.

Consider the following:

•The CTU has been silent about a shocking OIG report detailing an avalanche of misconduct cases, including 335 sexual misconduct cases in 2025, with 55 substantiated findings.

•The CTU has forced schools to abandon academic standards and return to social promotion.

•The CTU shuttered schools for 78 weeks Disrupted learning with repeated strikes and a 78‑week COVID shutdown, devastating students and working families.

•CTU members took extravagant, often unapproved trips across the globe, costing taxpayers millions ($23.6M over six years).

•The CTU lobbied to end the state’s private school scholarship program for low‑income families and bar students from a new federal scholarship program.

Tyler Durden:

“The US is basically not a good credit and long-term the US government finances are not sustainable,” Anders Schelde, chief investment officer at AkademikerPension, told Bloomberg on Tuesday, which is hilarious because this has been the case for years if not decades. Amusingly, it was another Dane, Hans Christian Andersen, who first pointed out that the Emperor is naked. Two hundred years later, Denmark has done it again. 

Erin Gretzinger:

Between state open enrollment, some of our charter school opportunities, private school, home schooling — even more popular out of the pandemic than before — there are definitely downward pressures on enrollment. It’s one of the reasons that we have to look very carefully at areas where we’re vulnerable. So if we see a school in our city that we’re experiencing declining enrollment, we have to look at all factors considered and see what we can do to strengthen our ability to enroll students here.

The state’s most recent open enrollment numbers show MMSD had a net loss of 1,258 students last school year — about 200 more students than the year prior. What factors are you really thinking about or worried about driving open enrollment out of the district?

There’s a lot of reasons that families and students choose open enrollment, and I think that perception and personal choice are likely the two biggest. ‘The school isn’t good enough for me. … It’s unsafe. I’m not challenged. The test scores aren’t as good as this other school that I have the chance to go to.’ Or, just a personal choice of, ‘I’m choosing to go to this school district because it’s a school or a type of program that I want.’

We don’t see as many specialized school(s) or magnet or charter personal choices like that here as I’ve experienced in other places, but I know on a larger scale what that means to have options. And what I want to try to do is create additional options in Madison so that people don’t have to look elsewhere for them.

———

Where Have All The Students Gone? 1995-2024

——

30 October 2025 Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students & around 7,000 employees.

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite 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?

Corrinne Hess:

That’s the caption Amanda Vogel wrote on the TikTok video she posted depicting her 4-year-old daughter on stage during a school concert. 

Her daughter is in a wheelchair, sitting on the side of the stage, as the other children perform on risers.

WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” newsletter keeps you connected to the state you love without feeling overwhelmed. No paywall. No agenda. No corporate filter.

“We did not plan to homeschool. We tried our best to set up a good foundation for her to be successful and included at school,” Vogel wrote. “Unfortunately, there is only so much parents can do on their end. Watching her placed off to the side while her peers stood together and realizing no one noticed before the end of the concert was it for us.” 

Vogel uploaded the video of the 2023 concert in December 2025, after pulling her daughter from the School District of Pittsville in Wood County.

The video has 917,500 likes and has been shared nearly 28,000 times as of Friday afternoon.

According to the school district officials, Vogel’s video is harassment. 

On Dec. 19, 2025, two days after the video was posted, attorneys for the district sent Vogel a letter demanding she “cease and desist from engaging in any additional harassing and intimidating behavior toward District educators and support staff.”

Shruti Singh

It would be the first time since the payment policy took effect in 2023 that the city isn’t planning to pay the full amount in January. The move underscores the financial stress that Chicago is facing. Local property tax distributions from Cook County have arrived late and the city’s expenses including for labor, pensions and material continue to rise.

Three years ago, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot had implemented the advance pension payment policy to reduce interest costs on the city’s large unfunded pension liability. Between 2023 and 2025, the city contributed $820.5 million in advance pension payments, according to budget documents. 

The payments, separate from the required annual contributions that Chicago needs to make to the retirement systems, help curb future costs and serve as a supplement to the mandated contributions. The city’s goal is to bring its pensions to 90% funded in the next three decades. Chicago’s required pension contribution tops $2 billion annually, accounting for about 38% of revenue.

Johnson had proposed a roughly $120 million advance pension payment for this year. A number that a bloc of aldermen decried.

By Rob Schneider 

So, while executives pat themselves on the back for their “virtue,” their studios are plunged into debt. According to public filings, as of late 2025, Disney’s debt is roughly $35.3 billion and Warner Bros. Discovery’s debt stands at approximately $33.5 billion. Cinema attendance continues to decline, with annual box office receipts in North America struggling to reach $9 billion. In a world where production and marketing costs have skyrocketed, these numbers represent a dying industry.

It turns out that audiences prefer to be entertained rather than hectored. If people wanted a sermon, they’d probably just stick to church. I’ll make a prediction right now: if things don’t change, they won’t be making movies on those legendary big studio lots in five years’ time — they’ll be selling them off as prime real estate for luxury condos. You can’t continually patronize and insult your customers and expect to keep the lights on.

Jeffrey Mervis:

In an unprecedented step for a major research university, Purdue University has begun to curb the flow of Chinese graduate students to its Indiana campuses. The policy follows pressure from Congress and President Donald Trump for U.S. institutions to monitor Chinese scholars more closely but goes far beyond those demands.

The directive, which was first reported in early December 2025 by the Lafayette Journal & Courier and the Purdue student newspaper, has never been put in writing. But several faculty members confirmed to Science that it is in effect. Last spring it apparently led Purdue to rescind departmental letters of acceptance to more than 100 graduate students, most from China. More recently it is impacting students that faculty members would like to employ as research assistants in their lab but whom the university has not admitted into a doctoral program.

“The policy doesn’t make any sense,” says one faculty member, who like others requested anonymity because faculty have been ordered not to talk to the media. If it continues, “we’ll experience a huge brain drain of talented students simply because the university is willing to capitulate to avoid being targeted by this administration.”

Esther Wickham:

Educators for St. Hope Public Schools in Sacramento are requesting a vote to end the Sacramento City Teachers Association’s authority over their school.  

Earlier this month, St. Hope educator Beth Simonton filed a petition, backed by a majority of her coworkers, asking the National Labor Relations Board to hold a vote to decertify the union as the educators’ bargaining representative.

SCTA is an affiliate of both the California Teachers Association and the National Education Association.

The National Right to Work Foundation is providing legal representation for Simonton.

In the next few weeks, the NLRB will hold a hearing regarding Simonton’s petition and schedule a vote since the petition meets all the requirements to trigger a decertification election. However, the process could be significantly delayed if SCTA officials pursue legal challenges aimed at blocking or postponing the vote, according to Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation.

Daisy Christodolou:

We ran a project like this last year, but gave schools very short notice about the redraft. This meant that whilst approximately 36,000 students from 900 schools took part in the original assessment, only 3,851 from 73 schools took part in the follow up. This year we have given schools more notice, so we hope that we’ll get more taking part in the redraft. 

The project is not a gold-standard randomised controlled trial, but it will still provide schools with rapid and useful information about how students respond to feedback. It would also be possible to use the same Comparative Judgement plus AI write-feedback-redraft model as part of an RCT. 

Improving the feedback

We’re also planning a couple of changes to the feedback that students get.

Phillip Rogaway

We stand today at the brink of civilizational and environmental collapse. What role have we computer scientists been playing in alleviating—or exacerbating—this threat? What role should we be playing? These are questions that many of us reflexively shun. At the same time, proceeding with business-as-usual, as most of us do, seems like madness.

Austin Berg:

It happened on Friday, Jan. 16, when leadership at the Chicago Teachers Union published financial information that they had kept hidden for years.

The CTU’s internal bylaws require leadership to produce an audit for members every year. But the last audit ever shown to members was posted Sept. 9, 2020.

So members concerned with basic transparency—especially as the union transformed into the city’s largest political spender and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s top financial backer—had been demanding to see those audits ever since.

In return, those members endured lies and bullying from CTU leadership.

But their persistence paid off.1

The newly published audits reveal several inconsistencies in union reporting that may have led to misstatements to members and the federal government, according to information published exclusively by The Last Ward.

CTU members saw something new when opening up their member portal on Friday.

The website now hosts 11 audits members have never seen before. And the content of those audits suggest several reasons why leadership may have kept them hidden for so long.

Centennial Rye:

lannone: What was your dissertation on?

Wolfe: It was on the League of American Writers, which was a Communist front. That was a very hazardous subject for a dissertation at that time. We are talking about the 1950s, when the debate over McCarthyism was still going strong. Most of the major writers in the country belonged to the League from 1935 to 1939. On the surface it was merely one of many anti-Fascist organizations and had nothing to do with the Communist Party directly.

lannone: Or it said that it didn’t or you believed that it didn’t?

Wolfe: Oh, no, a Communist fraction ran it.

The party used the word “fraction,” not

“faction.” I did a lot of reporting for that dissertation. I interviewed the principals, Communist and non-Communist, and they told me exactly how it was done. You should read it—or maybe you shouldn’t. Talk about a dry piece of sociology. It dealt with political issues only insofar as they affected how the fraction ran the front. That dissertation is so diligently dull and puritanically objective, it’ll dry up your skin and make your teeth fall out.

But I got my Ph.D. My sole interest was in how the Party could turn writers, people who pride themselves on their independence, into what they called “a manipulable mass.” |

The Standard 英文虎報:

China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to a record low, official data showed on Monday, with experts warning of further decline. Li

The country’s population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster decline than 2024, while the total number of births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025, down 17 percent from 9.54 million in 2024. The number of deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.

China’s birth rate dropped to 5.63 per 1,000 people.

Births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million,” said Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

China’s death rate of 8.04 per 1,000 people in 2025 was the highest since 1968.

——

I knew this trend would continue. Still, the figures released this morning left me genuinely speechless. China’s government announced on Monday (see screenshot below) that births in 2025 fell to 7.92 million, a staggering 1.62 million fewer than in 2024, and that the total fertility rate has dropped to 0.93.

——-

Choose life.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity:

The Financial Times and Harvard Crimson report that 38% of Stanford University students claim a disability. Wait, these are about the most privileged kids on the planet and nearly two of every five have a learning disability? That percentage is up an amazing tenfold since 2014.

As the chart below shows, many other elite Ivy League schools have at least two to three TIMES more “disabled” students than a decade ago.

Do we suddenly have an epidemic of mental and physical health problems afflicting our kids, or do we have another burgeoning scandal with colleges labeling as many students as disabled as possible to chase down more government money? Or is everybody just discovering medical reasons they need extra time on tests?

Bartemy Jones:

I’ve been stewing on this for years. As someone who went to Public school and then had my own kids in a combination of homeschool, private school and public school, I watched kids struggle through a public school system that feels more like indoctrination than inspiration, it’s clear education isn’t what it used to be.

Remember when schools built thinkers, that knew not only a lot of facts, but also how those facts related to life? Those days are gone, largely thanks to a left-leaning agenda that’s twisted learning into a vehicle for socialist ideals. But let’s dive in.

History shows us the way back

Education has always been the bedrock of a free society. It’s how we pass on wisdom, foster independence, and build a nation of self-reliant citizens. But over time, it’s been co-opted. In world history, socialists saw schools as prime real estate for their collectivist dreams. Take this gem from early Marxist thinkers: “He who has the school has the future.” That’s from a 1918 piece by Eden and Cedar Paul, emphasizing how socialists aimed to mold kids through education to align with their ideals.

Melanie Phillips:

Key points from her 4:37 clip:

• Challenge them → you’re not just wrong; you’re evil, standing against human/planetary betterment.
• Dissent must be silenced: no platform, no debate, no hearing.
• Evidence contradicting the ideology is dismissed as lies or “not facts.”
• Universities—once crucibles of reason—are now engines destroying it, while claiming moral superiority.

Cory Turner:

At the top of Brookings’ list of risks is the negative effect AI can have on children’s cognitive growth — how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems.

The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.

Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.“

Cognitive off-loading isn’t new. The report points out that keyboards and computers reduced the need for handwriting, and calculators automated basic math. But AI has “turbocharged” this kind of off-loading, especially in schools where learning can feel transactional.

Unexpectedly, I was recently prompted to consider 2026 Wisconsin Gubernatorial candidates and education.

Herewith are my 2 big goals. Focus:

1. All hands on deck to improve Wisconsin literacy.

a. 97,414 4k-3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group. Data via the 2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener (Act 20)

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

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Big Goal: Drive a Wisconsin Miracle to vault us into the top 5 within 3 years (NAEP). Understanding Our Literacy Crisis.

b. Education Budget:

Increase teacher pay with funds redirected from 99% of the Wisconsin DPI budget. Implement MTEL over the next 2 years.

Alan Borsuk (2018): But consider a couple other things that happened in Massachusetts: Despite opposition, state officials stuck to the requirement. Teacher training programs adjusted curriculum and the percentage of students passing the test rose.

c. Change teacher prep requirements to an emphasis on subject matter competency.

Mark Lilla:

One of the peculiarities of the American educational system, compared with those in other democracies, is that most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed.

2. All hands on deck to make Wisconsin among the top 5 affordable states for living, learning, starting and growing a business.

a. Simplify in every direction. Eliminate programs, regulations and costs designed for 1950 as we look ahead to 2030, God willing.

b. Zero based budgets at the local, regional and state level. Model the choices to be made with 50% less tax income. Refine and improve. Repeat.

c. Benchmark with China, India, Austin TX, Ann Arbor, Boston and Raleigh – Durham.

Ai Wei Wei:

So you enjoyed 40 years of globalisation and the money China accumulated rises up like water. Their level is getting high. And the West is only realising it too late.” He chuckles. “History is a rollercoaster. Now you’ve passed your peak — enjoy going down. In 200 years, you will go up again.”

Bonus: Implement opportunities for all high school students to earn credit at UW System schools equivalent to the first two years of higher education.

Bonus 2: US debt Clock.

Supreme Court Decision PDF

An Arizona statute known as S. B. 1070 was enacted in 2010 to address pressing issues related to the large number of unlawful aliens in the State. The United States sought to enjoin the law as pre-empted. The

District Court issued a preliminary injunction preventing four of its provisions from taking effect. Section 3 makes failure to comply with federal alien-registration requirements a state misdemeanor; § 5(C) makes it a misdemeanor for an unauthorized alien to seek or engage in work in the State; § 6 authorizes state and local officers to arrest without a warrant a person “the officer has probable cause to believe . . . has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States”; and § 2(B) requires officers conducting a stop, detention, or arrest to make efforts, in some circumstances, to verify the person’s immigration status with the Federal Government. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, agreeing that the United States had established a likelihood of success on its pre-emption claims.

Held:

1. The Federal Government’s broad, undoubted power over immigration and alien status rests, in part, on its constitutional power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” Art. I, § 8, cl. 4, and on its inherent sovereign power to control and conduct foreign relations, see Toll v. Moreno, 458 U. S. 1, 10. Federal governance is extensive andcomplex. Among other things, federal law specifies categories of aliens who are ineligible to be admitted to the United States, 8 U. S. C. § 1182; requires aliens to register with the Federal Government and to carry proof of status, §§ 1304(e), 1306(a); imposes sanctions on employers who hire unauthorized workers, § 1324a; and specifies which aliens may be removed and the procedures for doing so, see § 1227. Removal is a civil matter, and one of its principal features is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials, who must decide whether to pursue removal at all. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for identifying, apprehending, and removing illegal aliens. It also operates the Law Enforcement Support Center, which provides immigration status information to federal, state, and local officials around the clock.

Pp. 394–398.

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Back in April 2000, under President Bill Clinton, federal agents stormed a home in Miami with guns drawn to seize six-year-old Elián González.

They sent the boy back to Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba, all in the name of diplomacy and following the rules.