By Bill Whitaker, Aliza Chasan, Henry Schuster and Sarah Turcotte:

A team of public high school students in Georgia faced some skepticism when they decided to try to come up with a way to detect Lyme disease earlier. 

But the students at Lambert High School in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, pushed ahead with their idea, using the gene editing technology CRISPR, and took it to the iGEM competition, a sort of science Olympics, in Paris. iGEM stands for International Genetically Engineered Machine and the annual competition has been around for about 20 years. 

Now, scientists say the students’ groundbreaking work could be a major breakthrough if further testing pans out. 

“We’re doing something in our high school lab that could potentially have a huge impact for, like, millions of people. It’s not like we’re just saying, like, ‘Oh. I’m just doing this little thing that might help my grade,'” said high school senior Claire Lee. “This thing could help save lives.”

Soyonbo Borjgin

When the Cultural Revolution ended, Deng Xiaoping reintroduced standardised college entrance examinations, which had been suspended for 12 years. (My maternal grandmother announced: “From now on, being rich is good, and being poor is bad!”) Both my parents got good scores and were admitted into colleges in Hohhot, where they studied the humanities, rather than practical subjects like medicine and engineering. This may be because intellectuals were still respected in the early 1980s, the start of the Reform Era (in my opinion, the best period of socialism in China). All college graduates were guaranteed a state job. That the son of an illiterate shepherd could attend university proved that our nation was advancing.

My father, a Mongolian Studies graduate, was hired to teach at Inner Mongolia University, and my mother, who studied journalism, became a reporter at The Inner Mongolia Daily. Four decades later, they were employed in these same institutions. Say what you will about state socialism, but it provides workplace stability.

In 1989, soon after I was born, my father was arrested. He does not speak about this period – that is the way in our culture – but I understand he got swept up in the Tiananmen Square movement, which had reached even the remotest corners of China. In Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, demonstrators swarmed through the streets and squares, demanding autonomy for their ostensibly autonomous regions. I’m told my father painted a pro-democracy slogan on a public building. He was imprisoned for two years.

One evening, when I returned home from nursery, there were two bald strangers in our living room: my father and his brother, also a protestor, had their heads shaved in jail. My mother made a huge feast, at least 10 dishes, to celebrate their release. To their credit, the university rehired my father, though as a librarian, not as a professor. If you go to prison, it’s natural to lose your job.

When I was a child, my mother would take me along on her reporting trips to remote villages. We travelled by the party Jeep, which was a rare sight in rural Mongolia: people came out of their huts to gawk at the vehicle. On weekend afternoons, she would sit at her desk, draft her articles, and then bike over to the office to hand them in to her editor. If I dwell on this memory, I can convince myself that she liked her line of work. Then I remember she remains a low-level reporter. Only party members are given promotions, and she never joined the party.

Robert George:

The ideological partisanship, dogmatism and bigotry on display in our society today are to some degree the fruit of our educational system. Too many college classrooms have become indoctrination camps. Some students buy into the leftist ideology they’re taught and become its enforcers. Others react by embracing opposing forms of extremism. Either way, radicalism and animus replace knowledge and wisdom. 

So what should we do? The answer isn’t complicated, but acting on it will take determination and courage. Colleges and universities must return to offering a rigorous liberal arts education that refuses to engage in indoctrination and challenges groupthink. College courses must actively cultivate the virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, analytical rigor and, above all, dedication to the pursuit of truth. 

David Sacks:

Every time we would prove an accusation false, NYT pivoted to the next allegation. This is why the story has dragged on for five months.

Today they evidently just threw up their hands and published this nothing burger. Anyone who reads the story carefully can see that they strung together a bunch of anecdotes that don’t support the headline. And of course, that was the whole point.

At no point in their constant goalpost-shifting was NYT willing to update the premise of their story to accept that I have no conflicts of interest to uncover.

As it became clear that NYT wasn’t interested in writing a fair story, I hired the law firm Clare Locke, which specializes in defamation law. I’m attaching Clare Locke’s letter to NYT so readers have full context on our interactions with NYT’s reporters over the past several months.

Once you read the letter, it becomes very clear how NYT willfully mischaracterized or ignored the facts to support their bogus narrative.

Follow-up:

This may be the point: portray anyone with real-world experience as too conflicted to serve in government so only professional bureaucrats/activists/NGO-types (with the same views as NYT reporters) are eligible.

Chamath:

Agreed.

There is a concerted effort by the bureaucratic class to paint success and experience as a sign of corruption.

Instead, it’s the exact opposite.

Success and experience in the free market only comes from repeatedly expressed and easily measured good judgement.

Gavin Baker:

Separately, the @nytimes urgently needs to provide remedial math education for these journalists and their editors. The idea that 500,000 GPUs sold to the UAE could generate anywhere near $200 billion in revenue to Nvidia is ridiculous.

I look forward to the correction that will be assiduously posted to the @NYTimesPR account which has 90k followers vs. the main account with 52.8m followers.

I should note that while I do not know David well, we have many good friends in common and I like him personally. More importantly, I am grateful for his service, which has unquestionably cost him a vast amount of money. And my superstar sister-in-law is a partner at Craft, for which David is lucky.

Dan Gillmor:

I’m hard on the NY Times for its many failings in political coverage, but this piece — about a South African immigrant to the US who is central to the manifestly sleazy, and lucrative, Silicon Valley / Trump world dealings — is simply excellent.

New York Times follow-up:

“Reporting on powerful figures who influence financial and industrial policies that affect millions of Americans is core to the role of The Times and part of being a member of the free and independent press. Our reporters do not have an agenda — they examine leads, verify them in good faith with the subjects involved, and publish what we confirm. That’s exactly what happened here.

We remain confident in our reporting on Mr. Sacks, an important and influential member of the Administration. The Times’s article documents the ethical complexities and intertwined interests of his dual roles as a government advisor and a major investor.”

The New York Times

– A spokesperson for The New York Times

more.

And.

Rachael Horowitz:

Contrast with: 68 top executive-branch officials in Biden administration had less than 2 ½ years of experience in the private sector. The average business experience of Biden appointees was only 2.4 years and 62 percent had virtually no business experience.

Ben Kamisar:

But what has shifted is the price of college. While there have been some small declines in tuition prices over the last decade, when adjusted for inflation, College Board data shows that the average, inflation-adjusted cost of public four-year college tuition for in-state students has doubled since 1995. Tuition at private, four-year colleges is up 75% over the same period.

Poll respondents who spoke with NBC News all emphasized those rising costs as a major reason why the value of a four-year degree has been undercut.

Jacob Kennedy, a 28-year-old server and bartender living in Detroit, told NBC News that while he believes “an educated populace is the most important thing for a country to have,” if people can’t use those degrees because of the debt they’re carrying, it undercuts the value.

Kennedy, who has a two-year degree, reflected on “the number of people who I’ve met working in the service industry who have four-year degrees and then within a year of graduating immediately quit their ‘grown-up jobs’ to go back to the jobs they had.”

“The cost overwhelms the value,” he continued. “You go to school with all that student debt — the jobs you get out of college don’t pay that debt, so you have to go find something else that can pay that debt.”

The 20-point decline over the last 12 years among those who say a degree is worth it — from 53% in 2013 to 33% now — is reflected across virtually every demographic group. But the shift in sentiment is especially striking among Republicans.

jason Locasale:

NPR frames the reduction of this empire as if it’s some catastrophic blow to biomedical science. In reality, it is the clearest indictment of the system we’ve built – a system where:

• aging PIs retain massive labs long after their most productive years
• Harvard and other nonprofits quietly subsidize them through indirects and internal slush funds
• trainees serve as disposable workers in an oversaturated job market
• cronyism dictates who gets resources
• cancer is wielded as a fundraising weapon

Ashlea Ebeling:

When Carmen Thomas was growing up in Boston, her mom told her that her absent dad’s name was Joe Brown. So when she sent a saliva sample to 23andMe in her 20s and got a match with a Brown, she was excited.

It turned out the man she believed to be her father had died five years earlier, but she connected with two likely half sisters. They went out for boba tea and at a sleepover at their grandmother’s, she looked through family albums and held a pillow with his photo printed on it.

A year later, she was suing the Brown sisters and their mother. Thomas wanted a share of a multimillion-dollar medical-malpractice award they had won after Joe Brown died of an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm. After all, she was his daughter too, Thomas said in a court complaint early last year.

Surprise heirs like Thomas are popping up because of DNA test kits, lawyers say, and wreaking havoc for families handling their loved ones’ estates. States are grappling with how to rewrite laws to address the issue, and lawyers are encouraging people to rethink their estate plans.

The lawyer representing the Brown sisters and their mother said his clients were taken aback by Thomas’s claims.

Allysia Finley:

Because so many incoming students were numerically illiterate, the university added a remedial class for middle- and elementary-school math. Remarkably, among students placed into that math course, 94% had completed an advanced math class in high school (e.g., pre-calculus, calculus or statistics) and received an average A- in their math courses.

Is this an indictment of A) the University of California’s admissions; B) public K-12 schools; C) U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings; or D) all of the above? If you chose D, you’re correct.

Start with A. The UC Board of Regents in 2020 scrapped standardized tests as an admissions requirement under the guise of promoting “equity.” The likely real reason: Blacks and Hispanics score lower on average on the SAT. Requiring applicants to submit standardized tests scores could also make it easier for critics to prove the university is providing racial preferences, which were prohibited by a 1996 voter referendum. The math-proficiency analysis suggests it may be doing so on the sly.

Amid a push to boost diversity and overall enrollment—and thus rake in more government student aid—UC San Diego admitted increasing numbers of unqualified applicants from low-income high schools: “In order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding,” the report says.

That’s because the College Board has made the exams easier to pass to encourage more students to take them—and thus rake in more money from testing fees. The share of students passing AP exams has soared over the last two decades, including for calculus AB (6.3 percentage points), English language and composition (17.9), chemistry (21.9) and U.S. history (23.3).

Call it vanity grading: Mediocre students now graduate with top GPAs and AP scores, which makes parents feel better about their kids’ public schools and eases political pressures for education reform.

Principals office:

Yet most parents will overwhelmingly say they like their child’s public schools. I think it’s because of the false narratives most public schools spend millions to keep up via PR departments. Ask your school district how much they budget in their Communications Department. You will not like the answer.

Education Staffing since 1970:

– Students +8%

– Teaching Staff +60%

– Non-Teaching Staff +138%

2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Aaron Smith:

Public schools are increasingly taking on debt.

From 2002 to 2023, total debt went from $8,074 per student to $12,592 per student in real terms.

Public school debt now totals $586 billion, which doesn’t include pension liabilities.

With student enrollment falling, legacy costs are a major problem for many districts.

Alan Borsuk:

Let’s do the math: There are more than 500 students in that school. At about $4,000 per student, MPS is receiving about $2 million more for Carmen students than it is actually paying to Carmen. In addition, the school is paying MPS $727,469 this school year to rent the building, which was originally an MPS middle school.

The number of students in the MPS independent charter schools was only about 2,500 in the fall of 2008. That rose to a peak of just under 9,000 in the fall of 2016. Some schools have closed, some have switched to other authorizers, some have lost enrollment. The number in the MPS system this fall is about 6,900.

Current attention has focused primarily on Carmen Northwest, which was up for renewal of its charter contract. The school’s test scores have been low, but its general vitality as a school community has been pretty good (as the large number of Carmen supporters at recent school board meetings demonstrated).

The school board voted Nov. 20 to give the school a one-year renewal, on the condition that it won’t be renewed again and it won’t be allowed to continue to use the building that has been its home for more than a decade.

That means the forecast is for the number of students in this group of charter schools to fall by more than 3,500 by fall 2027. That alone would create a revenue loss to MPS of more than $12 million a year. And the loss of these charter schools, most of them with academic performance above the MPS averages, is very likely to drop the MPS overall achievement picture. Furthermore, one of the remaining MPS-authorized charter schools, the Hmong American Peace Academy with about 2,000 students, would account for two-thirds of the remaining students in this scenario. HAPA, as it is called, has achievement scores well above the MPS average. Will HAPA stay with MPS in the future? I wouldn’t count on that.

Ernesto Londono:

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.

Scott Johnson summary:

Overlooking the element of political corruption, this cuts closer to the bone:

Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College who is a leading expert in Somali studies, said a reckoning over the fraud and its consequences for Minnesota was overdue.

“American society and the denizens of the state of Minnesota have been extremely good to Somalis,” said Dr. Samatar, who is Somali American.

Dr. Samatar said that Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.

Minnesota, he said, proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.”

For the New York Times, not bad.

Minnesota DHS:

To all whistleblowers who have reached out: Thank you for your courage and for continuing to send critical information. Your willingness to speak up is what allows the public to maintain trust in systems that too often operate in the dark.

Victor Davis Hanson

Males in their teens and 20s are prolonging their adolescence — rarely marrying, not buying a home, not having children, and often not working full-time. 

The negative stereotype of a Zoomer is a shiftless man, who plays too many video games. He is too coddled by parents and too afraid to strike out on his own.

Zoomers rarely date supposedly out of fear that they would have to grow up, take charge, and head a household.

Yet the opposite, sympathetic generalization of Gen Z seems more accurate.

All through K-12, young men, particularly white males, have been demonized for their “toxic masculinity” that draws accusations of sexism, racism, and homophobia.

In college, the majority of students are female. In contrast, white males — 9-10 percent of admittees in recent years at elite schools like Stanford and the Ivy League — are of no interest to college admission officers.

So they are tagged not as unique individuals but as superfluous losers of the “wrong” race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Sophia Cope:

EFF filed an amicus brief urging the Arizona District Court to protect public school students’ freedom of speech and privacy by holding that the use of a school-issued laptop or email account does not categorically mean a student is “on campus.” We argued that students need private digital spaces beyond their school’s reach to speak freely, without the specter of constant school surveillance and punishment.  

Surveillance Software Exposed a Bad Joke Made in the Privacy of a Student’s Home 

The case, Merrill v. Marana Unified School District, involves a Marana High School student who, while at home one morning before school started, asked his mother for advice about a bad grade he received on an English assignment. His mother said he should talk to his English teacher, so he opened his school-issued Google Chromebook and started drafting an email. The student then wrote a series of jokes in the draft email that he deleted each time. The last joke stated: “GANG GANG GIMME A BETTER GRADE OR I SHOOT UP DA SKOOL HOMIE,” which he narrated out loud to his mother in a silly voice before deleting the draft and closing his computer.  

The Allen Analysis:

The central question remains the Google Trends spike. There are several plausible explanations. A social media post containing his name may have circulated before mainstream news outlets picked up the shooting. Early reporters or local community members may have speculated or shared details before verification, which then produced search traffic. Search interest could also have come from internal networks tied to immigration lawyers, former colleagues, or individuals who recognized the name before law enforcement publicly identified the suspect. It is also possible that the Trends data is inaccurate for names with extremely low volume, a known phenomenon in low-frequency datasets.

US Navy:

ANNAPOLIS, Md.- United States Naval Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, relieved the Commandant of Midshipmen Capt. Gilbert Clark Jr. today due to a loss of confidence in his ability to effectively lead the Brigade of Midshipmen.

The naval service maintains the highest standards for leaders and holds them accountable when those standards are not met.

Clark assumed the role as Commandant of Midshipmen in June 2025. Capt. Austin Jackson, Deputy Commandant of Midshipmen, has assumed duties as the interim Commandant.

The Naval Academy Commandant is responsible for the day-to-day conduct, military training, and professional development of approximately 4,400 midshipmen.

Caroline Sutton:

What struck the economists was the absence of information. Food banks had no way to express what they valued, no view of what was available, and no means to coordinate across regions. Some were excellent at logistics. Others had deep relationships with donors. Others had neither advantage. Yet all were trying to serve their communities under enormous pressure.

The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.

If a food bank desperately needed cereal, it could signal that by bidding more. If it already had enough cereal but urgently needed rice, it could save its shares for that instead. If something undesirable arrived — like potato chips or, true story, Tupperware lids missing their containers — the auction assigned it a negative price: taking it earned you extra shares.

It was a system designed to convert preferences (information each food bank had about its community’s needs) into visible, actionable signals. Prendergast describes this as the price discovery function of markets: the mechanism that reveals “how much you like a certain kind of food compared to another kind of food.” The bidding activity quickly revealed patterns no centralized planner could have seen.

Cereal, for instance, wasn’t just more valuable than broccoli; it was dramatically more valuable. The economists had assumed maybe a 6:1 ratio in preference intensity. The auction showed a ratio closer to 35:1.

Rachel Wolfe & Paul Overberg:

The term is from the biblical passage Ecclesiastes 3:1: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Many of the women who view their lives in this way say they think of themselves as existing in between the extremes of tradwives (who treat caring for their homes and families as a more permanent, full-time job) and girlbosses (who center their lives around work).

As recently as 15 years ago, self-described conservative and liberal women between the ages of 18 and 35 were having children at around the same rate, according to an analysis from a large national study called the General Social Survey by Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma. But in recent years, the gap has widened, his analysis shows. As of 2024, roughly 75% of liberal women in this age range were childless, compared with around 40% of conservatives. In 2010, the difference was only 5 percentage points.

Natalie Yahr:

“If people understood how government worked, then surely they would be more interested in public service as a future occupation,” said Galanter, who served on the Madison City Council, ran former U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl’s Madison office and used to open all her public presentations with the same line: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

In 2018, she pitched her idea to the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, a membership organization of the state’s papers, figuring their publications could get the word out across the state.

The association agreed, and the Wisconsin Civics Games were born. Soon staff were making plans for regional playoffs and a state final at the Capitol where members of the winning team would each receive $2,000 in scholarships.

Since then, teams from 76 high schools have competed, and interest continues to grow. This year’s regional playoffs, held in April, drew 205 students — twice as many as the first year.

Mike Nichols:

Pick ’n Save stores in Wisconsin are run by Roundy’s, which is a subsidiary of Kroger. A Kroger spokesperson did not return a call for comment, but in 2024 a Roundy’s corporate affairs manager told a local Madison publication, Isthmus, that the company was planning to “continue to provide access to fresh foods at affordable prices” at the South Park Street location.

Meanwhile, Madison city officials — having already doled out millions — now own a nearby space at 815 Cedar St. that, it appears, was not built to easily house a grocery store.

The space, for instance, reportedly had insufficient electrical power and the building had a roof that won’t accommodate necessary equipment. A large bank of windows and the floor plan are also less than ideal.

The building “wasn’t built for a grocer, even though it was supposed to be,” said Kristi Maurer, the grocer who will open Maurer’s Urban Grocery in the city-owned space.

“A lot of the journey has been dealing with the building and the reality of the building,” she said.

The City of Madison bought the “condo space” for $4.6 million in 2021 from the developer of a multi-use development that includes a lot of apartments. But it also approved $3.5 million for improvements in 2023, according to media reports, and then in 2024 approved another $1 million in improvements to make the space work as a grocery store.

As part of the lease agreement with Maurer’s, the city will recoup $3.85 million in tenant improvements and that will remain an asset of the city, according to a city communications manager.

It is unclear, in the meantime, when exactly lease payments might begin.

Chris Rickert:

Folger explained the delay in getting to Elvehjem and Lindbergh by saying that the process last school year to pick a name for the former Southside Elementary — now Lori Mann Carey Elementary — took longer than expected.

“We are now on track to start the process for two schools this year,” he said.

According to emails from district officials to the organizer of the Lindbergh proposal, Betsy Abramson, the district was looking at starting the name-change process for Lindbergh earlier this year but later moved that date to this month.

Abramson said she knows that changing the name of the school isn’t the most important item on the district’s agenda, but the reasons for the delay haven’t been made clear to her.

“At this point, I’m very frustrated at the length of the process,” she said.

Elvehjem staff members submitted the proposal to rename that school after Stephanie A. Bernard, a Black former Madison schools teacher who died in August 2022.

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

amac.us

What’s going on? Has this explosion of mental health awareness liberated young people to be “who they truly are”? Or has it trapped them in a culture of fragility, convincing them they are broken or otherwise socially unfit before they’ve even reached adulthood?

The Mental Health Industrial Complex

While more money than ever is being poured into therapy, medication, and mental health services, global mental well-being is declining. This recognized trend is known as the Treatment Prevalence Paradox (TPP): the more we treat, the worse the statistics get.

Suicide rates are climbing. Antidepressant use is soaring. Disability claims for mental illness are up across the West. International studies show that young people, especially those in English-speaking nations, report the lowest mental well-being of any demographic. Despite record spending, the mental health crisis keeps deepening.

We wouldn’t accept this in any other branch of medicine. Cancer outcomes are improving. Heart disease and diabetes mortality are falling. But in mental health, treatment seems to correlate with worsening outcomes. The uncomfortable truth is that our current approach may be part of the problem.

The Trouble With Diagnosis

Dr.Kelly Piacek:

As Wisconsin’s seventh-largest school district, we serve more students than 98% of Wisconsin districts, operate 23 separate facilities, and employ close to 1,500 people, making us one of the largest employers in the city of Waukesha. Our top teacher salaries have reached nearly $95,000 per year, and our new teacher salaries have increased by 18% since 2021.

While we have maintained competitive compensation models, our costs to operate facilities, update curriculum, provide pupil transportation, and strengthen safety and security infrastructure continue to outpace enrollment. Several of our elementary and middle schools have been trending toward 50% occupancy, leading to costly inefficiencies that risk sacrificing programs and services by spreading specialists across too many facilities.

We embarked on the “Optimizing Our Future” process last spring with clear goals in mind: Address this excess K-8 capacity by reducing overall building space by 10%-15%. We asked the administration to facilitate an open, community-involved process, and we spent the summer in candid and honest discussion about ongoing enrollment challenges that have led to a persistent structural deficit, impossible trade-offs between facilities and staffing, and the pros and cons of potential solutions.

The Board reached a decision Nov. 12 that met our goal, and the process now shifts from input and deliberation to implementation. The conclusion of this work doesn’t come with celebration or pats on the back. It leaves an empty feeling in the moment — and for some, it concludes with disappointment, sadness, and even anger. Leadership sometimes requires us to sit with that discomfort, to accept the disappointment that accompanies the necessary change, and to work to move forward with clarity and compassion.

Danielle DuClos

Then in January 2020, Kruchten was arrestedafter a school field trip to Minnesota where students discovered hidden cameras in their hotel rooms. 

Kruchten pleaded guilty a year later to federal charges including attempting to produce child sexual abuse material and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The charges stemmed from two previous incidents in Wisconsin. 

The federal judge at Kruchten’s sentencing revealed 137 victims were involved in the case across numerous field trips, court records show.  

Ten of the students later sued Kruchten and the Madison Metropolitan School District, arguing the district had given Kruchten broad authority and discretion, which allowed him to secretly film students and violate their constitutional rights. 

Kruchten admitted in a lawsuit deposition that he filmed students in their hotel rooms dating back to 2016, according to the deposition transcript. 

But while the lawsuit ultimately led to a settlement with Kruchten last year, the school district was dismissed from the case. Three students involved in the lawsuit told the Cap Times they hoped the legal pressure would spur the district to overhaul its policies and training practices to prevent educator sexual misconduct from happening again. 

——-

More.

and:

Years after David Kruchten’s arrest, MMSD policies and training still fall short of researcher recommendations to prevent educator sexual misconduct

Former students speak out, saying MMSD didn’t do enough to protect them

Dan Goodin:

One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.

The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm their ballot was counted fairly.

An “honest but unfortunate human mistake”

Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results.

“Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share,” the IACR said. “As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.”

Wendy:

It’s not one student every now and then. It’s daily. And the system is built to cycle students right back in, no matter what happened.

If only legality mattered.

I wish people knew how normalized this is. Students in my building literally designate bathrooms depending on who is vaping, who is dealing, who is using, and who is just trying to pee in peace. As soon as admin cracks down on one location, students shift to another.

Someone once suggested stationing parent volunteers in every bathroom.

Aside from the obvious impracticality, it’s not even allowed. Adults can’t be posted in student bathrooms, for very good legal and safety reasons.

I’m not sharing these things to blame students, point fingers at parents, or criticize administrators. I’m sharing them because we can’t fix a system the public fundamentally misunderstands.

You can’t solve a problem people don’t believe exists.

If the conversations I start on X have shown me anything, it’s that the gap between public perception and classroom reality is enormous.

I’m often told that I assume my school’s issues are universal. Maybe they aren’t. But what if they are?

Jason McGahan:

The head of the L.A. teachers’ union is ambitious, audacious, and uncompromising. But critics blast her as a demagogue whose gamesmanship during the pandemic took a toll on the kids she claims to fight for

Cecily Myart-Cruz rarely sits for interviews. When she wants to communicate with the media, which is infrequently, she usually does so through a press release or, if the situation demands, a prerecorded video. For the most part, the famously contentious head of L.A.’s most powerful union–United Teachers Los Angeles–remains unapproachable, ensconced inside UTLA‘s Wilshire Center headquarters where she controls the levers and dials of the largest, most complicated, and, these days, most divisive educational labor machine in the state–possibly the nation.

Today, however, on a sunny May afternoon, Myart-Cruz is allowing a reporter inside her inner sanctum–or at least inside a glass-paneled conference room down the hall from her eleventh-floor office. And right away, she lives up to her reputation: after settling into in a swivel chair and slowly removing her zebra-print face mask, the 47-year-old lightning rod for controversy calmly sets her hands on the table and begins issuing a series of incendiary statements that almost seem aerodynamically designed to grab headlines and infuriate critics. Like this one: “There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even went so far as to suggest darkly that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.

Traditionally, the job of UTLA is to represent the best interests of the L.A. school system’s 33,000 teachers–to ensure that they are paid properly, that they have the resources to do their jobs, and that their work conditions are safe. But under Myart-Cruz’s stewardship, which began when she assumed office in the summer of 2020, that purview has been expanded to include a breathtaking range of far-flung progressive issues: racial justice, Medicare for all, the millionaire tax, financial support for undocumented families, rental and eviction relief–over the last 15 months, UTLA has championed them all. Many of these may be laudable aims, or at least worth debating, but they aren’t the sort of agendas normally pursued by your neighborhood teachers’ union. In what universe, after all, does UTLA’s recent boycott of Israel over the conflict with Hamas benefit the teachers–or students–of Los Angeles?

Robert Kelchen, Dubravka Ritter, Douglas Webber:

“How did you go bankrupt?” one American expat asks another in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” his friend responds. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The most dramatic college closures tend to follow a similar arc. A century-old, beloved liberal arts institution abruptly shuts its doors, sending students and staff scrambling as it succumbs at last to the financial challenges dogging schools that rely on tuition dollars. But the forces creating those challenges—declining enrollment, punishing operating costs, and anemic endowment returns—typically accumulate over a period of years if not decades. In recent years, these forces have all been featured players in the final chapters of small nonprofit schools like Wells College (New York), Northland College (Wisconsin), Iowa Wesleyan University (Iowa), Finlandia College (Michigan), and more than three dozen others. This growth in closures has followed a massive reorganization of the for-profit college sector, where enrollment fell by more than half in the 2010s.

Research and policy discussions often focus on the negative effects of college closures on students, but that’s only part of the story. Colleges also serve as anchor institutions—local economic and cultural engines whose sudden disappearance can leave regions flat-footed. Communities with colleges have higher levels of educational attainment, employment in human capital-intensive industries, economic mobility, and local economic output. Colleges also function as cultural hubs, by supporting civic engagement and the arts, and by providing entertainment and a range of educational and enrichment opportunities for their neighbors. Closures affect entire communities, far beyond campus borders.

Daniel Buck:

Flipping through teacher prep curricula from UW-Madison

A course on politics and education

Their class dedicated to school choice has three assigned readings

EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. is critical of school choice

Victoria Le: 

rather than read traditional journalistic outlets that do the work of reporting, [computer science major Ankit] Khanal still gets most of his news from aggregators like News Daddy. Social media is simply a more appealing news source for Khanal, who says he’s turned off by the biases and political leanings of traditional news outlets. News influencers, on the other hand, are “actually connected to the people they’re getting their news for.” Khanal’s behavior is not unusual. Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab polled 1,026 students at 181 two- and four-year institutions from December 19th to 23rd, 2024, on their media literacy practices.

Jared C. Horvath and Katie Fabricant:

Highlights

• •All individualized reared apart twin data published over the last century was collated.
• •Twins with similar educations differed by ~6 IQ points.
• •Twins with significantly different educations differed by ~15 IQ points
• •The Intraclass Correlation drops dependent upon educational similarity.

Abstract

Over the last century, several large studies have been published exploring IQ differences amongst monozygotic (MZ) twins reared apart (TRA). By and large, this work has reported that MZ TRAs differ in IQ by ~8.0 points and demonstrate and intraclass correlation (ICC) of ~0.75. Unfortunately, this prior research has largely been amalgamated: it averages data from dozens of TRA pairs without accounting for important life experiences, including education (which has demonstrated a causal impact on IQ performance). In this paper, we gathered data from every available TRA case published in the academic literature over the last century that included both individualized IQ and biographical data. This data set (which we believe represents the entirety of the non-amalgamated TRA field) consists of 87 pairs. For our analysis, we split these pairs into three groups: similar, somewhat dissimilar, and very dissimilar schooling. Analyses reveals that schooling differences have a significant impact not only on the absolute IQ difference between TRA pairs (5.8, 12.1, and 15.1 points, respectively), but also the ICC (0.87, 0.80, 0.56, respectively). These findings raise an important question regarding the historic use of ICC as a measure of genetic influence on IQ and other psychological traits. It is recommended the field of TRA studies focus on individual pairs instead of groups and that researchers share individualized data from TRA pairs included in historic aggregate analyses.

Kevin T. Dugan and Justin Lahart:

Aidan Toner-Rodgers, 27, sprang to the upper tiers of economics as a graduate student late last year from virtually out of nowhere.

While still taking core classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wrote a paper on artificial intelligence’s workplace impact so rapidly influential it was cited in Congress. He appeared in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in December as the very picture of a wunderkind, in faded jeans with tousled hair, in between two of his mentors, including Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu. Toner-Rodgers’s work offered a surprising and even hopeful revelation about our high-tech future. He concluded that AI increased worker productivity and spurred innovation. Also, people didn’t like using it very much.

Within weeks, those mentors were asking an unthinkable question: Had Toner-Rodgers made it all up?

By the spring, Toner-Rodgers was no longer enrolled at MIT. The university disavowed his paper. Questions multiplied, but one seemed more elusive than the rest: How did a baby-faced novice from small-town California dupe some of academia’s brightest minds?

“There is no world where this makes any sense,” said David Autor, one of the MIT professors who had previously championed his student’s research. MIT, Autor and Acemoglu declined to comment on​ the specifics of the investigation into the research, citing privacy constraints.

Becky Jacobs:

When Mnookin announced the dissolution of DDEEA this summer, the chancellor said “diversity of all kinds, including diversity of viewpoint and diversity of identity and background, remains a core value of our university.”

“We must create the conditions here, including through programs and support services, that allow all of our students, faculty and staff to flourish and to reach their full potential,” Mnookin said in a campus message.

She cited a recent report about the “undergraduate student experience,” which recommended ways UW-Madison can better support more students, particularly first-generation students and those who need financial assistance.

“Given the evolution of our support ecosystem, legal shifts in permissible focus and the resource intensive nature of DDEEA programs, we strongly believe the time has come to consider reorganization,” an ad hoc working group said in the report.

More than 1,600 students — fewer than 5% of all undergraduates — participated in DDEEA programs in the spring, the report says. Fewer than 10 employees working in the division received layoff notices, Lucas said.

JD Tuccille:

Whether called homeschooling or DIY education, family-directed learning has been growing in popularity for years in the U.S. alongside disappointment in the rigidity, politicization, and flat-out poor results of traditional public schools. That growth was supercharged during the COVID-19 pandemic when extended closures and bumbled remote learning drove many families to experiment with teaching their own kids. The big question was whether the end of public health controls would also curtail interest in homeschooling. We know now that it didn’t. Americans’ taste for DIY education is on the rise.

Homeschooling Grows at Triple the Pre-Pandemic Rate

“In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%,” Angela Watson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Homeschool Hub wroteearlier this month. “This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%.” She added that more than a third of the states from which data is available report their highest homeschooling numbers ever, even exceeding the peaks reached when many public and private schools were closed during the pandemic.

After COVID-19 public health measures were suspended, there was a brief drop in homeschooling as parents and families returned to old habits. That didn’t last long. Homeschooling began surging again in the 2023-2024 school year, with that growth continuing last year. Based on numbers from 22 states (not all states have released data, and many don’t track homeschoolers), four report declines in the ranks of homeschooled children—Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, and Tennessee—while the others report growth from around 1 percent (Florida and Louisiana) to as high as 21.5 percent (South Carolina).

Santiago Cueto, Diether Beuermann, Julian Cristia, Ofer Malamud and Francisco Pardo: 

This paper examines a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in 531 Peruvian rural primary schools. We use administrative data on academic performance and grade progression over 10 years to estimate the long-run effects of increased computer access on (i) school performance over time and (ii) students’ educational trajectories. Following schools over time, we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression. Following students over time, we find no significant effects on primary and secondary completion, academic performance in secondary school, or university enrollment. Survey data indicate that computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills…

Sebastian Castillo:

But after an hour of heady (though not too heady — it’s Sunday) discussion, we’d leave with a little more clarity on what Spinoza meant by, say, necessity and free will. Our various cats would make appearances onscreen, perhaps also having found some succor from Spinoza. Our collective mood by the time we arrived at the book’s final, salvific chapter was nothing short of ebullient. Union with other people, oneness with the universe, an acceptance of the paths our lives had taken — these were things that we possessed all along. I had been saved, thankfully, but I cannot tell you how. You must read the book yourself, with friends.

The group, by the end a good 15 or so people, decided there was no reason to stop with Spinoza. We needed even more salvation — like, badly. And so, over the course of the last year and a half, we’ve read a number of challenging books, books we otherwise would have never read alone. We read Henri Bergson; we read the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking; we’re currently finishing “Objectivity,” by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, a book that argues our concept of scientific objectivity — like gender, pleasure and artistic value — is historically determined. I admit that I’ve proposed all the titles, each being in some way thematically linked to the book we read previously. So ideally, like Borges’s Library of Babel, this book club could continue infinitely, or at least close to it.

What is the point of this? Why are we doing this to ourselves? Is it merely a fetish for finishing a difficult book, the self-flattery it permits? None of us are academic philosophers, by any means; we have busy jobs and other pressing adult responsibilities. But the process has proved fruitful. A camaraderie emerges, I’ve found, when a group dedicates itself to a task that requires great effort. The experience is also frequently amusing: Half the meetings during our read of “Anti-Oedipus,” a critique of psychoanalysis by Deleuze and Guattari, were dedicated to complaining about the authors’ half-grinning disdain for their readers. (“Literature is like schizophrenia,” they write.) Needless to say, I loved the book. Learning is both painful and pleasant — and above all, communal.

Noah Smith:

Rice’s article is very long and has many more details about how and why public education quality has collapsed in America. The basic story is that the education reform movement spearheaded by George W. Bush, which focused on improving test scores, collapsed in the mid-2010s. After that, public schools across the country began to lower their standards — passing kids who didn’t know the material, making their curricula a lot easier, etc. Often, kids just skip class entirely — in Oregon, around a third of all schoolchildren are chronically absent from school.

This was sometimes done in the name of “equity”— even though the new lax policies lead to widening racial and gender gaps. The rise of phones in schools probably exacerbated the trend, as did the pandemic, but the fundamental cause is lax standards everywhere. 

Most of the articles about this slow-motion disaster just stick to decrying the report, calling for tighter educational standards, and tracing the demise of the education reform movement. I share their alarm, and I agree with their prescriptions. But I think it’s also worth thinking about exactly why education is going down the tubes in America. 

One obvious possibility is that this is just another case of progressive activist culture on autopilot. In the past two or three decades, progressive governance has absolutely collapsed at the city and state level in a number of areas — housing, crime, infrastructure city services, and so on. It makes sense that education would just be one more failure of a progressive ideology that consistently prizes the bad ideas of the loudest activists. In this case, it was activists who pressured the UC system into dropping standardized test requirements.

Another obvious theory is that America is a very rich country, and the richer people get, the less they want to work hard — and helping your kids get through a tough, demanding education system is certainly hard work. Andrew Rice’s article mentions how local school board elections are usually dominated by upper-income white voters, while the degradation of educational standards tends to impact disadvantaged minorities more.

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More.

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

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin:

Robert P. George, the conservative legal scholar and moral philosopher, has spent the past four decades at Princeton University assiduously cultivating an ever-widening network of influence. For parts of the religious right, he’s an intellectual lodestar on issues including gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research. The Catholic journal Crisis once quipped that “if there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s kitchen.”

Conspiracy or not, there’s no doubt that George has been tremendously influential — and at the moment, his brand of higher-education reform is ascendant. Simply put, if you’re sympathetic to the view that academe has been ideologically captured by the left but find Christopher Rufo and his ilk giving off strong “destroy the village to save it” energy, George looks like a genial antidote. He’s a critic of the academic left but also a staunch defender of institutional autonomy and academic freedom, including against attacks from the right. To his supporters, his approach offers a serious-minded alternative to the nihilistic recklessness of Rufoism. He’s also one part of academe’s oddest duo, having co-taught and lectured extensively with his Princeton colleague on the left, Cornel West. (Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, written with West, was published earlier this year. To gauge the giddiness with which they approach their partnership, look no further than the picture on the cover.)

In 2000, George established at Princeton the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a model for the many colleges and universities, public and private, spinning up similar initiatives. To critics, especially on the faculty, these often legislatively imposed initiatives are little more than an elaborate system of affirmative action for conservative scholars.

George has been in the news recently because of his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation over concerns about its handling of antisemitism on the right, especially the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s interview with the avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes. George didn’t want to discuss Heritage but did make clear that something noxious is bubbling up on parts of the right, especially among young men. He even sees it among his students at Princeton.

Over the course of two interviews — the first conducted from his home and the second from his office on the Princeton campus — George discussed the risk of indoctrination from the left and the right, the need for a more ideologically diverse professoriate, and how academe made itself vulnerable to attack by the Trump administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Roshan Fernandez:

The aim, colleges and advisers explain, is to probe how well students can countenance other viewpoints. “We are looking for students who want to be bridge builders,” New York University tells applicants on its website.

Duke this year asks applicants to describe a time when they had a difference of opinion with someone they care about, and what they learned from it. That is a shift from last year, when the prompt asked students to recount either an agreement or a disagreement.

Duke’s interim dean of admissions, Kathy Phillips, said the revision aligns with a school initiative to “build skills to engage with complex topics with an open mind and humility.”

Essay prompts often reflect the political moment, college consultants and former admissions officers say. Questions about social justice and diversity became popular after the Black Lives Matter movement grew a few years ago. Prompts about feminism and gender equity ascended during the #MeToo era, and questions about community arose after Covid isolation.

Since President Trump took office, he has pushed colleges to show they can welcome conservative views.

“The essay questions follow the times,” said Tara Dowling, an independent educational consultant.

Chicago Tribune:

With recent attention focused on the budget drama in Chicago, you’re forgiven if you missed what could end up being a yet-bigger story with perilous long-term consequences for this city.

The city floated $454 million in bonds on Nov. 19, and $75 million of those went unsold.

More precisely, Goldman Sachs, which underwrote the deal, was left holding the $75 million after the bank couldn’t find buyers for that amount, according to Bloomberg News. And, making matters worse, the bonds that were sold moved only after Goldman boosted interest rates beyond what the city forecast in order to entice the buyers.

These bonds weren’t issued to finance new spending. Instead, these securities refinanced bonds already on the city’s books, some of which were backed by sales tax revenues and so were about as safe an investment in the city of Chicago as an investor can make these days.

Which begs the question: How will investors respond when they’re next asked to bankroll hundreds of millions in new spending?

If the markets already perceive Chicago as such a fiscal basket case that there’s tepid-at-best appetite for the most risk-free debt the city has to offer, it’s not a stretch to worry that the city will struggle to finance future needs.

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration surely isn’t helping to reassure investors by proposing the City Council approve a record-setting $3.8 billion bond authorization.

Rylee Stephens:

The scholars agreed that some amount of international students belong on U.S. campuses, but the deeper question centered on whether American higher education can balance financial necessity with educational mission, ensuring that global engagement strengthens, rather than defines, the future of U.S. universities. 

The crux of the debate centered on whether U.S. universities are “too dependent” on international students’ tuition dollars, with those who support international enrollment arguing it’s not even close.

International students represent less than 10 percent of the student body at most U.S. universities, “hardly the majority of the business model,” said Chris Glass, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Boston College.

David Freed, a medical technology expert, also argued that international students enrich classrooms, strengthen research, and build global partnerships.

Andrej Karpathy:

A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights: 1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All “detectors” of AI imo don’t really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI. 2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. 3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don’t want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it’s doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped “prompt”), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators. 4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher’s discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc. TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings

Beth McMurtrie:

Anything Harvard College does draws attention. So it was no surprise that a recent report arguing that undergraduate grading practices are “out of whack,” as one professor put it, got a lot of buzz. Some of the public responses were unsympathetic, painting Harvard as a college full of easy graders and entitled students.

Yet many of the challenges Harvard outlined are commonplace in higher education. Professors fear tougher grading will lead to negative course evaluations. Instructors sometimes find modern teaching practices are difficult to align with grades. Students are putting more pressure on professors to raise grades they don’t like.

One of the report’s most compelling findings is that Harvard students almost universally speak about grades in terms of how much effort they put in. If they spend a lot of time studying and do all of the work asked of them, they believe, they should get an A. That misunderstanding is not unique to Harvard, say professors elsewhere.

Alexandra Wexler:

Quick Summary

Gunmen abducted 303 students and 12 teachers and staff from St. Mary’s Catholic School in Niger State; 50 students have since escaped.

Since 2014, at least 17 mass abductions have occurred, with at least 1,700 children seized from schools in Nigeria.

More than 100,000 Nigerians have died in political and religious violence since 2011, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The mass kidnapping of children in Nigeria caught the world’s attention over a decade ago when 276 high-school students were abducted from Chibok, sparking the #BringBackOurGirls campaign on social media. The phenomenon returned to the limelight this month with another mass abduction and President Trump’s threats to intervene over what he said was the persecution of Christians in one of Africa’s most strategic nations.

Matt Lou:

Columbia is considering expanding undergraduate enrollment in Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science by up to 20 percent, according to an Oct. 31 email to faculty from the policy and planning committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences obtained by Spectator. 

The University anticipates finalizing its decision before releasing early decision admissions results mid-December, according to the email. Its consideration is part of a wave of policy proposals responding to recent shifts in higher education and growing programming concerns within the University.

Facing losses of up to $100 million each month of the COVID-19 pandemic, Columbia launched an inquiry during the 2021-22 academic year into expanding its undergraduate population by between 5 and 20 percent. The inquiry resulted in nine faculty reports, which recommended postponing expansion considerations and focusing first on improving “areas of campus life associated with peer-to-peer connection.” At the time, the FAS agreed to postpone expansion discussions. 

“In the ensuing years, there have been efforts to address these recommendations,” Ivan Corwin, professor of mathematics and chair of the policy and planning committee, wrote in the email.

Jia Lynn Yang:

One of the more bewildering aspects of the already high-stress endeavor of 21st-century American parenting is that at some point your child is likely to be identified with a psychiatric diagnosis of one kind or another. Many exist in a gray zone that previous generations of parents never encountered.

A diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is practically a rite of passage in American boyhood, with nearly one in four 17-year-old boys bearing the diagnosis. The numbers have only gone up, and vertiginously: One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016.

The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31.

Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates. New categories materialize. There is now oppositional defiant disorder, in addition to pathological demand avoidance.

Robert Pondiscio:

When I taught a high school civics seminar at a Harlem charter school, my favorite lesson was one I did near the end of the school year that I hoped my students would never forget. I handed each soon-to-be graduating senior an invoice for the entire cost of their public education.

The invoices were official-looking. Clean design and letterhead, personalized—a bill for the approximate total, over a quarter of a million dollars, that the city and state of New York had spent on each student’s “free” K–12 education. When I passed them out, there was usually a moment of stunned silence. Then someone would inevitably ask, “Wait…is this real?”

“Of course it’s real,” I’d reply. “This is my job. I get paid. So do your other teachers. We’re not volunteers. The heat and electricity are on. Your books aren’t free. Who do you think pays for all this?”

I didn’t want to panic them, so I let them in on the joke fairly quickly. No, the bill isn’t real, I’d explain, launching the lesson. But the cost is absolutely real. The citizens of New York State and New York City had spent nearly three hundred thousand dollars to educate each and every one of them. Why?

They’d rarely if ever reflected on the cost of their “free” public education, much less that strangers— millions of people they’d never meet and who’d never met them—had been quietly investing in them for over a decade. It sparked some of the richest classroom discussion I’ve ever led. What does society owe its young people? What do young people owe society in return?

No one had ever invited them to see school as a gift, as their civic inheritance, as a sign that the world might be for them, not against them.

And that experience convinced me of something at the heart of this talk: Our job isn’t just to teach kids things. It’s to shape what they think the world is like, and whether it’s a world worth engaging in or a world to retreat from. A world that’s on their side, or a world that is aligned against them.

Kelly Meyerhofer

Three-year bachelor’s degrees are gaining traction nationally since the first programs gained approval in late 2023. At least 70 institutions either already offer three-year programs or are seeking approval, according to College-in-3, an organization advocating for three-year degrees and connecting interested campuses to resources. Another 10 schools are exploring the idea, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

States are pushing for more. Indiana passed a law in 2024 requiring public bachelor’s-granting institutions to develop at least one three-year program by July 2025. In Kansas, a task force is studying whether to offer reduced-credit programs.

The interest in shaking up the status quo comes as affordability remains a barrier and the value of a college degree is increasingly questioned. About 35% of survey respondents this year said a college education was very important, down from 75% in 2010, according to a Gallup poll.

“It’s shaving off a quarter of the nonsense,” said Robert Zemsky, a University of Pennsylvania professor and longtime advocate of three-year college degrees. “I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I think students have figured out that they’re being asked to do lots of things that they don’t really need or want to do, and they’d like less of that.”

Hope Karnopp:

In July, a group home in Sun Prairie, a suburb of Madison, withdrew its offer to accept Geyser as a resident. Two other group homes, one in Manitowoc and the other in the Milwaukee area, also fell through, for different reasons.

Geyser, now 23, along with co-defendant Anissa Weier, were charged with attempted homicide of their friend, Payton Leutner, who was stabbed 19 times near David’s Park in Waukesha in May 2014. All three girls were 12 years old at the time.

Believing that they were doing the bidding of the fictional online character called Slender Man, both were found not guilty by reason of mental defect or disease in 2017 and sentenced to mental confinement — Weier for 25 years, and Geyser for 40 years.

Weier was granted conditional release in 2021 on a 25-year commitment order. She was freed from electronic monitoring in 2023, according to court records.

Simon Baron-Cohen:

Autism — a neurodevelopmental disability — has become a political issue. How did this happen?

There is a short answer, which begins with the press conference held two months ago by US President Donald Trump and his health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, in which they linked a rise in the prevalence of autism to increases in environmental toxins, such as women taking paracetamol during pregnancy, or the use of vaccines in early childhood. While the scientific community has dismissed these views as unsubstantiated, and pointed to evidence disproving them, the episode raised questions about why politicians should be entering into debates about the science of autism.

To understand the unlikely relationship between autism and politics, however, we must turn to the diagnosis of autism, since today this has become contentious. Before 1994, it was mostly diagnosed in people who also had an intellectual (or learning) disability, and in those who had language delays or difficulties. Clinicians back then called it classic autism, and we all referred to the paper published in 1943 by child psychiatrist Leo Kanner at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and credited him with the first report of autism.

Richard P. Phelps:

In an online discussion about educational testing, an exasperated education professional interjected that the whole discussion was moot. Had there ever been even a single study showing any benefit accruing from testing students?

I sent him a copy of my 2012 meta-analysis of several hundred studies estimating the effects on student achievement from testing, and never heard back. I have since discovered hundreds more such studies. All one had to do was look for them.

Psychology professors from the early 20^thcentury on produced one of the most common study types—randomly assigning their dozens of introductory psychology students to two or more groups, one tested more or differently than the others.

Presumably, the skeptical educator had completed a degree in a graduate school of education and kept up with the literature in his field. How could he believe that such a large research literature did not exist? He could because that is what he was told, in education school and by the professional literature which steadily drummed a beat of “problems with testing.”

It is no secret that many education professors and professionals dislike testing. One way to express that dislike would be to lay out all the evidence for and against and explain why one leans against. Another, much more effective, method is to pretend that the evidence for it does not exist. If something does not exist, there is no point in looking for it. One wins the argument by default.

The American taxpayer funded the most substantial effort to bury the bulk of the research literature on educational testing. For several decades, the US Education Department bestowed millions of dollars on an exclusive consortium of groups of testing experts from several graduate schools of education and the RAND Corporation. They started their tenure around 1980, declaring ad infinitum that little to no relevant research existed on the effects of testing. Over time, their taxpayer-funded reports cited less and less previous research conducted by others and more of their own anti-testing research. Eventually, they cited their own research almost exclusively.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew:

The leftist excesses that rightly worry Andrews are borne of a widespread rejection of these basic tenets of political and cultural maturity. There is also an abdication of personal responsibility for one’s own failures and successes. When everything is “systemic,” nothing is really up to anyone. There is no authority. So it should come as no surprise that performative helplessness, the defining characteristic of toddlerhood, is arguably today’s most potent political and cultural currency, on left and right alike. 

In the remainder of this essay, I will make two arguments. First, I will illustrate why Andrews’ feminization thesis is such a seductive red herring—but a red herring all the same—for the real problem of endemic, unisex American immaturity. Second, I will make the case for recognizing anew, and actively elevating, the incomparable societal value of grown-up women. 

Not All Women

In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed, Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book, White Fragility, topped the bestseller lists. DiAngelo’s thesis is that white people should treat Black people not as fellow human beings and presumptive equals but as endemic “others” meriting sycophantic devotion. She can be fairly considered the founding mother of what New York Times columnist and Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter calls “woke racism,” or the creepy condescension of the racial equity initiatives that dominated mainstream academic and corporate spaces from 2020 to 2022: The Smithsonian calling “being on time” a tenet of “white supremacy”; discussion circles in schools and elsewhere segregating participants by race; and politicians allowing crime to spike, watching while schools instituted so-called “restorative justice,” and echoing activists’ calls to “defund the police.” 

These patronizing affronts against the dignity of Black Americans (which managed at the same time to introduce various kinds of discrimination against white males ) were not perpetuated equally by Americans of all races, creeds, and colors. Indeed, as I wrote in 2020, progressive, college-educated white women bear a disproportionate share of the blame for the mainstreaming and institutionalizing of the worst “woke” excesses of 2020 and beyond. Without thousands of shrill “mini-mes” embedded everywhere across the nation, DiAngelo would easily have been dismissed as an incoherent, self-aggrandizing fool. 

Joanne Jacobs summary:

The most selective schools — San Jose State, San Diego State, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Fullerton and Long Beach State — are not included.

Cal State schools have higher graduation rates than community colleges. But students who wouldn’t apply if they had to fill out an application are likely to be less motivated and to complete a bachelor’s degree.

Like the top-tier University of California system, which has discovered that even “A” students can be unprepared for college-level work, Cal State doesn’t consider SAT or ACT scores in admissions. Admitting “C” students — or even “B” students — on grades alone means even more will need remedial help. And the success rate for unprepared students is low.

——-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Megan McArdle:

UC San Diego report shows students are not prepared for college, especially in math.

Progressive educators watered down curriculums, gutted gifted and talented programs, and weakened admissions standards for honors classes and magnet schools. Colleges dropped standardized testing requirements, in part because that made it easier to diversify their student body. None of these things happened everywhere, but they happened in many places, and all of them made it harder to see — or rectify — pandemic-era learning loss.

The results of this thinking can be seen in a recent report from the University of California at San Diego, which like the rest of the UC system stopped accepting standardized test scores in 2020. In 2024 the school had to redesign its remedial math program to create a class that focused entirely on remediating elementary school and middle school math. In 2025, more than 8 percent of entering students needed that class.

These are college students who chose to enroll in a major with a math requirement yet struggle to round numbers to the nearest hundred, add or divide fractions, or work with negative numbers.
Most astonishingly, in 2024, the majority of kids who needed a refresher on the most basic skills had taken at least one higher-level high school math course, such as calculus or statistics, and had an average grade point average in their math classes of 3.65. More than one-quarter of them had straight A’s in a subject they demonstrably didn’t understand. And this problem is not limited to UC San Diego or California. I’ve heard professors at many institutions, including Harvard, express concerns about the number of unprepared students they were seeing after admissions offices stopped demanding test scores.

——-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

John Kass:

These are the hideous progressive sounds of Chicago political corruption: The jails are opened as the Cook County Democrats congratulate themselves, and violent criminal offenders are released from custody so they can attack the law abiding, again and again and again.

And there is another sound that defines it.

“Burn alive B****!”

That is what a career violent predator with more than 50 arrests–at least 10 of them for violent felonies–is alleged to have shouted the other night in Chicago after dousing a female Chicago Transit Authority with gasoline on the Blue Line CTA train and setting her on fire. She is reportedly in critical condition.

And this comes as a violent riot among hundreds of teenager broke out in downtown Chicago at a celebration of the Christmas shopping season called the “Festival of Lights”, with at least eight shot and one dead. How many families will dare spend their money downtown now? Merry Christmas, Chicago.

“Burn alive b****!” is what the CTA fire attacker—repeat violent felon Lawrence Reed who has been arrested at least 50 times–is alleged to have yelled as he was arrested on Tuesday. He’s been federally charged with committing a “terror act or other violence” on mass transit

Sabine Martin:

UW system leadership last month attributed the slight increase in systemwide student enrollment to an 8% decline in the number of international students, according to preliminary estimates.

UW system President Jay Rothman said in October that the availability and timeliness of securing visas had an impact on international student enrollment.

“It’s an area that we will continue to try to work on to try to be able to offer that opportunity because we think those students can enrich our universities, in terms of providing diversity, different perspectives,” Rothman said.

International students under the Trump administration have faced new policies to study in the U.S., such as delays in scheduling a visa interview before the school year, causing a backlog, including in countries like China that enroll large numbers of students overseas.

The administration also zeroed in on Chinese international students over the summer, saying it planned to revoke visas of students who have connections to the Chinese Communist Party or who study in “critical fields.”

JD Tuccille:

The latest figures likely underestimate growth in homeschooling since not all DIY families abide by registration requirements where they exist, and because families who use the portable funding available through increasingly popular Education Savings Accounts to pay for homeschooling costs are not counted as homeschoolers in several states, Florida included. As a result, adds Watson, “we consider these counts as the minimum number of homeschooled students in each state.”

Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of studentsacross the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic. Continued growth necessarily means the share of DIY-educated students is increasing. That’s quite a change for an education approach that was decidedly not mainstream just a generation ago.

“This isn’t a pandemic hangover; it’s a fundamental shift in how American families are thinking about education,” comments Watson.

Garry Trudeau arrives (finally) in 2025….

——

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Balaji:

There is an answer, though. It’s 70% build, 20% write, and 10% fight. Put most energy into building, some energy into writing, and one tenth towards fighting.

Think of the 10% like your defense budget. Your technological progress provides the capital and growth to fund defense. Indeed, you may end up with >10X the resources of the vicious neighboring tribes. Because they focus solely on demonizing others rather than building up themselves. And if so, 10% of your resources will match 100% of theirs.

Then, even by devoting 100% of their energy to fighting, they won’t be able to steal. Your defense is too strong. So they’ll simply need to build their own stuff. As will other tribes. Now everyone gets wealthier, and has less reason to fight.

And this is the upward spiral.

Sofia Bettiza and Woody Morris:

When Keira’s daughter was born last November, she was given two hours with her before the baby was taken into care.

“Right when she came out, I started counting the minutes,” Keira, 39, recalls. 

“I kept looking at the clock to see how long we had.”

When the moment came for Zammi to be taken from her arms, Keira says she sobbed uncontrollably, whispering “sorry” to her baby.

“It felt like a part of my soul died.”

Now Keira is one of many Greenlandic families living on the Danish mainland who are fighting to get their children returned to them after they were removed by social services.

In such cases, babies and children were taken away after parental competency tests – known in Denmark as FKUs – were used to help assess whether they were fit to be parents.

In May this year the Danish government banned the use of these tests on Greenlandic families after decades of criticism, although they continue to be used on other families in Denmark.

The assessments, which usually take months to complete, are used in complex welfare cases where authorities believe children are at risk of neglect or harm.

Sichuan Mala:

My husband and I have recently been considering starting a family together (i.e., having children). Naturally, wanting to give my children the best chance at a healthy, successful life, I spent some time over the past several weeks personally surveying the landscape of embryo selection companies. These companies essentially facilitate in vitro fertilization by using polygenic scores to help you select the ‘best’ embryo.

This post isn’t meant as an introduction to the field of polygenic testing; for those who want a broader overview, Scott Alexander’s recent post recent post is an excellent primer which compares the current players in the field. Instead, the purpose of this post is simple: as I started learning more about Nucleus Genomics and researching their newly launched product, Nucleus Origin, I noticed a number of increasingly bizarre inconsistencies and errors in their promotional content. In addition, I also noticed that they are apparently currently being sued by a competitor, Genomic Prediction, for what appears to be egregious IP theft.

Upon further exploration, I realized that their entire Nucleus Origin whitepaper, touted as a novel AI breakthrough in the field of “genetic optimization,” was essentially full of basic errors that were so flagrant that a dilettante in the field like myself was able to spot them with a cursory review. Worse, the entire whitepaper appears to have been cribbed wholesale from a competitor’s medRxiv preprint.

After conducting more background research, I concluded that Nucleus Origin was essentially meant as a response to a competitor’s whitepaper claiming to show that Nucleus systematically misrepresents the predictive validity of their polygenic scores (PGS). The claims in that whitepaper, if true, are fairly damning and, even after the release of the Nucleus Origin whitepaper, largely go unaddressed. I strongly recommend that any reader curious to learn more about Nucleus also spend some time closely reading the linked critique.

———

Choose life.

Austin Berg:

BREAKING: The House Committee on Education and Workforce is demanding that the Chicago Teachers Union release its audits, which it has refused to provide to members for the last five years running.

“The Committee is concerned that CTU has undertaken a half-decade long, concerted effort to deny its members the complete audit information to which they are entitled under the union’s by-laws…”

“By withholding complete financial audits from its members, CTU has failed to uphold the spirit of union transparency or comply with its own by-laws. As such, the Committee is investigating this matter to better determine whether the [Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959] should be amended to strengthen its requirements so that union members have access to more robust and timely financial information. Every dollar paid by workers should serve their interests, not those of a select few operating in the shadows.”

Under the leadership of President Stacy Davis Gates and Vice President Jackson Potter, the CTU has become the largest political spender in Chicago

more.

Below is a statement from Liberty Justice Center, which represents CTU members suing for the release of the Audit Reports.

“Thirteen months ago, the Liberty Justice Center, on behalf of several Chicago Teachers Union dues-paying members, filed a lawsuit seeking CTU’s financial audits for the last five years, which its Constitution and Bylaws require be made available to members.

Mark Lisheron:

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who was part of a state Senate majority that helped put across the last major tenure reform in Wisconsin in 2015, told the Badger Institute this week that tenure would be a big part of a review of UW System spending and operations if he is elected governor.

The Badger Institute contacted all other Republican and Democrat candidates.

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann is on the record in support of changes to tenure if warranted but did not respond to a request for an interview.

Candidate and State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, echoed the position of many Democrats that attacks on tenure are attacks on free speech. 

“I support public higher education and tenure, which protects the academic freedom of professors to research and explore ideas without fear of political persecution or reprisal,” Roys said in an email.

“We reformed tenure a decade ago,” Tiffany said. “It’s worth going back and reviewing whether it did what it was supposed to do. At the end of the day, there has to be accountability.”

As part of the 2015 budget process, the Legislature removed tenure protections from the Wisconsin Administrative Code. The Board of Regents created its own policy, stating that a tenured faculty member “may not be terminated except for cause, for reasons of financial emergency, by resignation, or by retirement.” A second regent policy allows schools to lay off tenured faculty if a program is discontinued.

Rep. Lisa Mazur:

NEW HAMPSHIRE parents never dreamed their kids would face this in school: biological boys in girls’ private spaces and biological girls in boys’ private spaces. In Weare, a 13-year-old biological boy repeatedly used the girls’ restroom at Weare Middle School. Young girls grew anxious, upset and afraid to use the bathroom, a place meant to be safe. This isn’t rare as similar stories echoed in New Boston and beyond.

Politics aside, one truth stands: Boys and girls deserve privacy. They deserve peace of mind. They deserve to change or use the toilet without the opposite sex present. That’s not hate or discrimination. It’s common sense grounded in biology and decades of child-protection norms. Bodies differ and puberty hits hard. A 12-year-old girl shouldn’t worry about a boy seeing her undress. A 12-year-old boy shouldn’t fear a girl walking in while he’s vulnerable. Both deserve the same shield.

Shalini Ramachandran, Betsy McKay and Tom McGinty:

Danielle Gansky was 7 years old when an administrator at her upscale private girls’ school in suburban Philadelphia flagged problems with her academic performance. She was a bubbly and creative kid, but she was easily distracted in class and her schoolwork was sloppy. 
 
The school told Gansky’s mother that the girl should see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and prescribed a stimulant. Concerned that Danielle might get kicked out if her focus didn’t improve, her mother broke into tears and agreed. But the pills made Gansky agitated, moody and angry. So another doctor put her on Prozac. 

More pills followed. Over the years, Gansky was always on two and sometimes three or more psychiatric drugs at once. By her late 20s, she had taken 14 different kinds of psychiatric pills.

None of it ever felt right. The pills dulled her mind and made her irritable or sleepy. But when Gansky complained about the drugs, her doctors would up her dose or try another medication.

“I was living in a body hijacked by the medication,” said Gansky, 29, who is still struggling to wean herself off an antidepressant. “I didn’t have the words or authority to challenge what I was being told.”

Ben Lovett and his co-author Alex Jordan:

Jacob is terrified of oral reports he’s expected to give in his 10th-grade history class this school year. A therapist’s note recommends he be excused, and the school agrees. This scenario is playing out nationwide. The individuals and institutions involved are well intentioned and trying to help students feel more comfortable. But as psychologists who’ve studied and treated anxiety for decades, we believe that this approach — eliminating whatever makes students nervous — is making the problem worse. Here’s why: Anxiety feeds on avoidance.

According to a 2022 study, the average anxious student receives 20 school-based supports, many of them avoidance-based, such as extra time for tests, separate rooms to work in, and lighter workloads.

Academic accommodations for anxiety convey two harmful messages. First, they imply that the feared situation is truly dangerous. Public speaking, testing, or lunch with classmates are too risky for a student. Second, they suggest that the student can’t withstand the distress. Those messages increase anxiety.

By contrast, when students take on what they’d rather avoid, they learn that worst-case scenarios rarely materialize, that discomfort is survivable, and that anxiety diminishes with practice. Indeed, purposely facing fears is the core of exposure therapy, the gold standard treatment for anxiety disorders for over half a century.

Michael Spyker:

It’s time to care about natural gas, for maybe the first time ever

There’s a very common trope that folks bag-holding energy stocks like to cling to – something like “you can’t make anything in the world happen without energy”. We usually tell ourselves something like this as we watch the QQQ reach all-time highs while the WTI crude quote ambivalently bobs between a $50- & $60-handle. Of course, this is simply weapons-grade cope manufactured and perpetuated by the very people that have dedicated their lives to producing oil and gas.

Unfortunately, having dedicated my own life to the energy sector, I fall squarely into this delusional category – thus I have the pleasure of explaining the key parts of the natural gas market to you over the next 20 minutes, and my firm’s view on how gas and power markets should interact with new LNG and AI demand. In effect, I’m here to say the 3 words that can ruin a man’s life if said prematurely – “this time’s different”.

The natural gas and power markets have been fairly unexciting for years. Among industry specialists, the upstream outlook tends to bifurcate into extremes – those who think there’s unlimited natural gas and prices can never go up, and those who believe prices will only go up. It’s hard to look at historical data and be optimistic about the gas market, knowing how much E&Ps love to grow.

For the past decade, price-insensitive gas growth has dominated North American supply. In the early shale era, companies grew quickly to capture market share; then, effectively $0-breakeven associated gas from the Permian Basin compounded downward pricing pressure. This barrage of supply made the last 10 years miserable for gas E&Ps, but great for consumers.

Today, both the Permian Basin and the dry gas E&Ps (the two largest US supply buckets) have matured and, on a go-forward basis, very much do care about economics. The US has churned through almost all of its low-cost inventory, and despite that, domestic demand growth from data centers and LNG exports is re-accelerating in the face of declining price-insensitive supply.

Peter Reinhardt

Regulatory delays and bottlenecks have added millions of pounds of pollutants like PM2.5, NOₓ and CO₂ to our air from the continuation of business as usual, instead of the deployment of clean technologies from my two hardtech efforts alone. While CO₂ is a long-term climate issue, PM2.5 and NOₓ are immediate major drivers of asthma and excess morbidity. Both operations have high bipartisan appeal—and we’ve never been denied a permit—because we’re fundamentally cleaning up things that matter to everyone: dirty air, wildfires, orphaned oil wells. Revoy is also helping deflate the cost of long-haul freight. But none of that has made getting freedom to operate easy. For creative new technologies the default answer is “no” because there isn’t a clear path to permitting at all, and figuring out that path itself takes years — time that startups can’t afford to wait.

Regulation obviously has a critical role in protecting people and the environment, but the sheer volume, over-specificity and sometimes ambiguity of those same regulations is now actively working against those goals! We’re unintentionally blocking the very things that would improve our environment. We’ve become a society that blocks all things, and we need to be a society that builds great things every day. The rest of this article gets very specific about the astronomical costs regulations are imposing on us as a society, and the massive positive impact that could be unleashed by cutting back regulation that is working against new, cost-saving, creative technology that could also be making people and the environment healthy again.

Jason Locasale:

This statement would be easier to take seriously if it weren’t contradicted by how universities actually operate.

At Duke, for example, an active Democratic governor — J.B. Pritzker — sits on the board with no Republican counterpart whatsoever. That’s a political institution by any reasonable definition.

Beyond politics, universities function as corporations. They act like corporations, prioritize revenue like corporations, and defend themselves like corporations. The Dartmouth president has openly said they lose money when they take grants — an admission that the entire system is built on grifting taxpayer funds.

So when presidents claim they’re not political and not advocacy organizations, it’s pure dissembling. They want the moral authority of being above the fray and the financial privileges of being tax-exempt, while operating with the power, legal infrastructure, and lobbying footprint of major corporations.

Charles Arthur summary:

That’s the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:
• punishing a European citizen
• for doing his job in Europe
• applying laws Europe officially supports
• at an institution based in Europe
• that Europe helped create and fund 

«

Imagine being unable to do anything involving a US tech company, let alone a US company. You’d be utterly stuffed. And this isn’t a little experiment by a journalist to see “how was my day not using Google and Amazon”.

Andrew Bove:

I was planning to use the NACE competencies this semester in a class on how liberal arts education equips students for the professional world and was dismayed to find that partisan criteria had crept into this valuable resource. The list includes—alongside things like teamwork, effective communication and technological proficiency—a competency called Equity & Inclusion. According to NACE, this means that a prospective professional will “engage in anti-oppressive practices that actively challenge the systems, structures, and policies of racism and inequity.” 

If you’re fully career ready, the group says, you will not merely “keep an open mind to diverse ideas and new ways of thinking.” You will also “advocate for inclusion, equitable practices, justice, and empowerment for historically marginalized communities” and will “address systems of privilege that limit opportunities” for members of those communities. In other words, you will subscribe to the view that American society is characterized by systemic racism and will work to break down America’s allegedly racist structure.

Ryan Thorpe, Christopher F. Rufo:

Costs quickly spiraled out of control. In 2021, the program paid out more than $21 million in claims. In the following years, annual costs shot up to $42 million, then $74 million, then $104 million. During the first six months of 2025, payouts totaled $61 million.

On August 1, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent.

On September 18, Thompson announced criminal indictments for HSS fraud against Moktar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow—six of whom, according a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson, are members of Minnesota’s Somali community. Thompson made clear that this is just the first round of charges for HSS fraud that his office will be prosecuting.

“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” Thompson said at a press conference announcing the indictments. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”

Thompson said many firms enrolled in the program “operated out of dilapidated storefronts or rundown office buildings.” The perpetrators often targeted people recently released from rehab, signing them up for Medicaid services they had no intention of providing. He noted many owners of companies engaged in HSS fraud had “other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs, such as the EIDBI autism program, the . . . Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the . . . Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion . . . program, PCA services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.”

“What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need. It feels never ending,” Thompson said. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of the fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”

——-

Austin Allred:

In 5 years one line item of Medicaid in one state goes from $3 million to $399 million, and there are still people in my replies adamant that there’s little to no fraud in the system

Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices is a report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Washington Post Commentary;

Critics will note that many of these contributors question the evidence for pediatric medical transition, though that was fairly obvious from the report itself. But these are not ideological cranks; they are thoughtful researchers. Their core finding — that the evidence for these interventions is highly uncertain — echoes the results of systematic reviews in other countries. None of the peer reviews of the HHS report ultimately rebut that conclusion.
Reasonable people can dispute what to do about that fact. Critics of the “gender-affirming” model argue that the evidence does not reach the bar required to justify tampering with puberty, given known side effects such as infertility. Then there are unknown risks, such as what it does to developing adolescent brains and bodies. Many proponents acknowledge that more and better research is needed, but they argue the preponderance of the studies that are available suggests these treatments help.
Far too many people have behaved unreasonably in this debate. Some who favor these therapies have attacked anyone who suggests their data is too weak to justify current medical practice, and more troublingly, may have delayed or suppressed publication of research that failed to show clear benefits. Meanwhile, some critics have resorted to demeaning or hostile rhetoric. Indeed, the Trump administration’s executive order that gave birth to the HHS report was titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”

This is an empirical question involving vulnerable children, not a political football match. Both sides need to acknowledge the uncertainties, lay out the arguments for intervening or not and support the kind of rigorous, comprehensive research program that should have been used to validate these treatments — before they were given to thousands of children.

Eduardo Pedrosa:

Learning must become a lifelong pursuit, supported by flexible systems that allow individuals to renew and expand their skills throughout their working lives.

Productivity, Technology, and the Need for Reskilling

Across the region, demographic change is reshaping the workforce. By 2050, one in four people in Asia and the Pacific will be over 60 years old. As the number of working-age people declines, productivity will depend increasingly on innovation, reskilling, and new forms of collaboration between humans and technology.

Recognizing this, APEC economies recently endorsed the APEC Joint Statement on Artificial Intelligence which calls for the responsible, human-centered, and inclusive development of AI and technology across the region.

The challenge lies not in resisting technology, but in equipping people to harness it responsibly and effectively. This is where universities play a defining role by preparing graduates and mid-career professionals to work alongside intelligent systems, adapt to evolving tools, and apply human judgment where machines cannot.

DHRUV T. PATEL AND CAM N. SRIVASTAVA

When former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he turned to a longtime associate for guidance: convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.

In a sequence of texts and emails between November 2018 and July 5, 2019, Summers turned to Epstein for advice on his pursuit of the woman. Epstein was quick to chime in with assurance and suggestions, describing himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man.”

The messages became public after House Republicans released more than 20,000 files from the Epstein estate on Wednesday. Summers’ correspondence with Epstein, a financier who pled guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, ends just one day before Epstein was arrested on new sex trafficking charges.

Together, the messages show Summers — who served as Treasury Secretary under former United States President Bill Clinton — placing an extraordinary degree of trust in Epstein, asking him for help in navigating a relationship that blurred the boundaries of his professional and personal lives.

Quinton Klabon:

• DPI’s report cards measure poverty, not quality.😑
• There is not a single 1-star district.🤔
• 51% of schools are 4 or 5 stars, up from 2024.🙃
• I will post MY district and school ranking tomorrow!🥳

——-

Poverty explains 50% of Forward Exam scores and 36% of ACT.

So, control for poverty, and you can accurately rate and rank schools!

best: Wauzeka-Steuben (small), Fond Du Lac (medium), Sheboygan/Janesville (big)

——-

large districts’ Forward:

Sheboygan: mid 4
Janesville: mid 4
Elmbrook: high 3
Waukesha: mid 3
Middleton: mid 3
Wausau: mid 3
Eau Claire: mid 3
Appleton: high 2
Kenosha: mid 2
Oshkosh: low 2
Sun Prairie: high 1
Green Bay: high 1
Madison: high 1
Milwaukee: low 1
Racine: low 1

———-

large districts’ ACT:

Eau Claire: mid 4
Elmbrook: mid 4
Sheboygan: mid 4
Middleton: low 4
Oshkosh: high 3
Janesville: mid 3
Wausau: high 2
Sun Prairie: mid 2
Waukesha: mid 2
Appleton: mid 2
Kenosha: low 2
Madison: low 2
Milwaukee: high 1
Green Bay: mid 1
Racine: low 1

——-

Here is that link again to what I think are the highest- and lowest-performing districts and schools in Wisconsin!
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

I think it is much more accurate than the state report cards, but someone can always build a better way. Let me know what you think!

——-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Oregon Journalism Project:

But as the latest statewide test scores make clear, that investment is  failing to yield the outcomes parents want for their children.

By almost every meaningful measure, we are among the worst states in America when it comes to educating our kids.

The facts are damning.

Oregon comes in last among the 50 states for fourth grade reading scores, adjusted for demographics, according to the Urban Institute, and 49th for eighth grade math.

One in three students is chronically absent, state figures show. That also places us among the nation’s worst.

It doesn’t add up. After a decade of economic growth and a new tax lawmakers passed in 2019, school funding is strong. Yet test scores  have gotten worse, not better. States that long trailed Oregon—Louisiana, Alabama, even Mississippi—have surged ahead. Mississippi now ranks No. 1 in fourth grade reading.

In many states, Oregon’s numbers would spark outrage. Here, they barely register a shrug.

At the Oregon Journalism Project, we wanted to do more than speculate about why so many of our tax dollars do so little for the 550,000 kids in Oregon’s public schools. In the months since OJP received its nonprofit status in May, our team has been talking to people inside and outside of Oregon, researching best practices and trying to develop a better understanding of the crisis in Oregon’s public education system. Not just an urban crisis, it ranges from Roseburg to Redmond to La Grande.

more.

Christopher Huffaker:

Kyle York has long had concerns about how business is done at Lexington Public Schools. Dissatisfied with how the district supported his daughter with dyslexia, York began requesting a series of records last April. Jumping off another parent’s research, soon he was seeking expense invoices that would explain, for example, how the administration spent tens of thousands of dollars at the Beauport Hotel in Gloucester.

RELATED: Here’s how your state legislators responded to our public records survey

The whole time, York felt Lexington officials were stonewalling his requests, or charging him exorbitant fees, hoping he would go away. An email he recently discovered and shared with the Globe shows, at least in one instance, his suspicions were dead on.

“Can you over estimate the time that it would take you to compile/copy the invoices requested and let me know when you have a chance?” one district employee wrote in a May 12, 2025, email, which York obtained in a broader record release. “Hopefully, when I let [York] know the cost they will not want to do it.”

The request in question ended up getting fulfilled for free, rather than York having to pay the $1,000 estimate, as part of the same data release that the email was in. Lexington Superintendent Julie Hackett apologized to York after he notified her of the duplicitous email last month. But York and other residents have been assessed even higher cost estimates for other requests, documents show, and they suspect the intentional over-charging in this casereflects a broader culture at Lexington Public Schools.

By Jim Bender & Patrick McIlheran

Accused of gutting academic standards, manipulating report cards, slacking on fiscal oversight and bungling oversight of sexual misconduct among teachers, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is facing a crisis of confidence — and new questions about whether it is capable of handling myriad key functions.

The latest blow to Wisconsin’s chief regulator of schools and teachers came with this month’s release of its widely panned new “report cards” on school districts’ performance.

The new report cards rate 94 percent of Wisconsin school districts as either “meeting,” “exceeding” or “significantly exceeding” expectations in a state where, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos pointed out this week, only half of students are proficient in “English language arts” — that is, reading. There is a school in Milwaukee that “exceeds expectations,” according to the new report cards, despite the fact only 13 percent of its students meet or exceed expectations in reading, for example.

Misleading scores “are covering up a failing system that is neglecting our kids,” he wrote Tuesday in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The episode is only the latest in a series of missteps by the agency, on matters ranging from educator misconduct to botched finances, that raise questions about whether DPI is capable of acknowledging its own failing grades.

———

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Ariel Kaminer Sian Beilock, Jennifer L. Mnookin and Michael S. Roth

Jennifer Mnookin: I think that many universities, not all, but many, were for a period of time deeply focused on identity diversity, and really not so focused on viewpoint diversity or belief diversity. I think there’s a danger of a pendulum swinging too far in the other direction, and we need to worry about that. But I think universities should be spaces where ideas, and different ideas, embodied by people from different backgrounds, come together, and where it won’t always be comfortable, but where we will learn and do better from that engagement.

Roth: I do think this is a perilous moment for universities. I believe that Project 2025 makes very clear that the administration intends to capture higher education for ideological purposes. I do also believe that science can only be done at the level to which we’ve been accustomed through intense federal funding. But I would hate to see us pretend that the agenda of the White House, which is clearly laid out by its practitioners and by its officials, doesn’t exist.

Ryan Kilgallen:

Two key pieces of information are missing from Duke’s public reporting — the Class of 2029 student profile and the University’s long-awaited “inclusive excellence principles.” 

Their absence comes after the University faced federal scrutiny over race-based admissions policies and alleged racial discrimination and fallen into the Trump administration’s larger push to “[ensure] accountability” in higher education. In response, Duke has taken measures to control the release of university information. 

Administrative units, from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to the Office of Institutional Research, are updating data reporting methods and delaying the release of student demographic data, namely the student profile, until it has been reviewed and approved by the Office of University Communications and Marketing. 

Duke’s student profile tracks demographic data for each undergraduate class and is typically released between September and October. The student profile disaggregates the first-year class across various identifiers, including race, gender and geographic origin.

Alex Tabarrok:

This isn’t just my anecdotal impression. A paper by Light, Fernbach, Geana, and Sloman shows that opposition to the consensus is positively correlated with knowledge overconfidence. Now you may wonder. Isn’t this circular? If someone claims the consensus view is wrong we can’t just say that proves they don’t know what they are talking about. Indeed. Thus Light, Fernbach, Geana and Sloman do something clever. They ask respondents a series of questions on uncontroversial scientific topics. Questions such as:

1. True or false? The center of the earth is very hot: True
2. True or false? The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. True
3. True or false? The oxygen we breathe comes from plants: True
4. True or false? Antibiotics kills viruses as well as bacteria: False
5. True or false? All insects have eight legs: False
6. True or false? All radioactivity is man made: False
7. True or false? Men and women normally have the same number of chromosomes: True
8. True or false? Lasers work by focusing sound waves: False
9. True or false? Almost all food energy for living organisms comes originally from sunlight: True
10. True or false? Electrons are smaller than atoms: True

The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge but express higher subjective confidence. In other words, anti-consensus respondents are the most confidently wrong—the gap between what they know and what they think they know is widest.

Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd & Jacob L. Vigdor

Education researchers and policy makers agree that teachers differ in terms of quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific teacher credentials and student achievement. In this paper, we use a rich administrative data set from North Carolina to explore a range of questions related to the relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new – and, indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the rubric of the “education production function” – the availability of data on all teachers and students in North Carolina over a ten-year period allows us to explore them in more detail and with far more confidence than has been possible in previous studies. We conclude that a teacher’s experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. Taken together the various teacher credentials exhibit quite large effects on math achievement, whether compared to the effects of changes in class size or to the socio-economics characteristics of students, as measured, for example, by the education level of their parents.

Chester Finn, Jr.

But what’s really been going through my mind is how random (and political) it was back in 1979 to decide what would go into that newborn agency.

Pulling the “Education Division” out of the Department of Health, Education & Welfare was obvious—and precisely why HEW secretary Joe Califano strove to convince President Carter not to carve up his agency. Many others also opposed the creation of a new cabinet department focused on education, ranging from the AFT’s Albert Shanker to Harvard’s esteemed sociologist David Riesman, to my then-boss, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. So many House members were against it that the bill barely passed that chamber. In the end, however, the National Education Association (and Vice President Mondale, whose brother worked at the NEA) held Carter to his 1976 campaign pledge to create a “separate” department of education, and Congress eventually went along.

What else to put into that new entity, however, was a true conundrum. Education-related programs of all sorts were scattered throughout the government, from the departments of Defense, Interior, Labor, and the Humanities Endowment to a bunch of activities within HEW that had never moved into the Education Division. The most prominent of this latter group was Head Start, whose supporters declared it a “child development” program, not an education program, and wanted nothing to do with the new agency. (Nor have they ever, including resisting Bush 43’s attempt to overhaul the program. That’s partly why Head Start has never functioned well as early-childhood education or kindergarten readiness.)

Almost without exception, supporters, advocates, lobbyists, and beneficiaries of all those other education-related programs, projects, and activities insisted that they stay put and not get shifted to ED. And Congress—almost without exception—was persuaded to leave them be.

So Head Start remains in Health and Human Services. The Defense Department’s K–12 schools remain in the “Department of War.” The Job Corps never left Labor. The education of Native Americans is still at Interior. School lunch programs are at Agriculture. Until its recent defenestration, the National Endowment for the Humanities was supporting all manner of education projects. The National Science Foundation held onto graduate student fellowships. And nearly every bit of scientific research that takes place in universities (not all of it has yet been cancelled) continues to be sponsored by the myriad agencies that rely on it, from NASA to Agriculture to the National Security Agency, not to mention the National Institutes of Health. Although the Institute for Education Sciences within ED—which so far hasn’t been moved anywhere and probably can’t be without Congressional assent—engages in research into education itself, at least as much research is carried out by NSF, NIH and others. (Today’s “science of reading,” for example, can be traced back a quarter century to an NIH-sponsored report.)

Bowtied Bull:

“Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five” – Benjamin Franklin

Conceptually, this is still true today. The vast majority of people can’t see beyond one task in front of them. They don’t have a structure of vision of what decades are supposed to look like. They just base their lives on how they feel in that particular moment: 1) graduate, 2) get some sort of job, 3) work out a little and go out to drink on weekends and 4) hop around until they decide to have kids. 

Lots of cope along the way. Hit 40 with nothing to show for it, no real savings, no way to earn a living if they are cut tomorrow and pretend they are happy while talking about some politician who will save the day (they never show up)

This is the exact opposite of the lifestyle we’re trying to build up over here. The goal is to maximize whatever potential you have. No one reading this is Elon. No one reading this should be below the median either. You’re looking to: 1) regain control of your time, 2) get there without giving up your entire young adult experiences, frugality fails this hurdle and 3) get to each decade with minimal to no regrets. No matter what you will miss opportunities and make mistakes but the regret part is the real tell (better or worse). 

1) Life is Primarily an Attrition Game

We talk a ton about finding your specific talent and monetizing it. The underlying reason? You’ll go up the ladder through attrition alone. In every industry people simply give up. If you’re top 5% in something at age 16, chances are everyone will quit and you’ll be top 1% by age 26. 

The people who end up in the top 1%? They are a combination of both the smartest and the most consistent (decent but not world class talent): 1) continuing to grind as people quit, 2) sticking to the same process in the mind numbing boring or painful times and 3) recognizing which stage in life they are in.

Arctotherium:

On February 19th, 2025, the Center for AI Safety published “Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs” (website, code, paper). In this paper, they show that modern LLMs have coherent and transitive implicit utility functions and world models, and provide the methods and code to extract them. Among other findings, they reveal that larger, more capable LLMs have more coherent and more transitive (i.e., preferring A > B and B > C implies A > C) preferences.

Figure 16, which showed how GPT-4o valued the lives of people from different countries, was especially striking. This plot shows that GPT-4o values the lives of Nigerians at roughly 20x the lives of Americans (this came from running the “exchange rates” experiment in the paper over the “countries” category using the “deaths” measure).

Maggie Macintosh:

After-school assignments should be tailored to a student’s needs, focus on a specific skill and complement in-class support, according to the four-page document obtained by the Free Press.

“Most of the submissions, we find, are coming from AI, to be quite honest,” Division scolaire franco-manitobaine superintendent Alain Laberge said in an interview.

The 2022 launch of ChatGPT has made teachers hyperaware of plagiarism and whether students are submitting authentic work.

When it comes to homework, easy-to-use AI chatbots have joined caregivers as homework helpers, Laberge said.

In response, the francophone school division is working to limit homework and focus on sending home books from school libraries instead.