Briveal Le Pogam:

These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.

That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.

It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

Brad Wilcox, Grant Bailey, Sophie Anderson, Peter Gentala and Bob Trent:

The state motto, “Ditat Deus” (Latin for “God Enriches”), has been part of Arizona’s history since Abraham Lincoln recognized the Arizona Territory in 1863. The motto reflects the belief that the desert territory and the faithfulness of its inhabitants would yield remarkable prosperity. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the state attracted waves of pioneers drawn by promising opportunities: agriculture, ranching, mining, tourism, and more recently, a business-friendly and attractive retirement ethos. Throughout its history as a territory and state, Arizona has been a destination for Americans and immigrants seeking a new and prosperous life in the beautiful Southwest.

Today, the realization of the Arizona Dream depends, in no small part, on strong families. Children from healthy, thriving families and adults who head up such families are more likely to flourish socially, emotionally, and financially in the Grand Canyon State. 

This new, ground-breaking report explains how strong families matter to the fortunes of those seeking the Arizona Dream and what public policy can do to strengthen marriage and family life across the state.

Section I: Thriving Children

Getting off to a strong educational start is essential to realizing the Arizona Dream. This report shows that Arizona kids are more likely to get a good education when they come from strong and stable families. Teachers and school administrators will attest to this because they see its truth demonstrated every year in the students who pass through their classrooms. Children coming from intact families where the mother and father are both involved in their children’s lives are, on average, more likely to have the social, emotional, and financial resources they need to flourish in Arizona. 

This is consistent with what leading think tanks and scholars have found in the research on child well-being over the years. The Annie E. Casey Foundation notes, for instance, that children:

growing up in single-parent families typically do not have the same economic or human resources available as those growing up in two-parent families. Single parents also are more likely to experience high stress and depression–especially single moms–as well as limited social support. These factors can affect kids, with those growing up in single-parent families facing greater risks of academic, emotional and behavioral problems. 

Likewise, family scholars find that marriage boosts the welfare of children in a range of ways. In the words of economist Melissa Kearney:

… [S]tudy after study suggests that a married-parent family tends to confer benefits to children in the form of greater resources during childhood, and that these increased resources then translate into better opportunities and greater educational attainment, among other outcomes.

Michael Bruner:

ABSTRACT

Reviews of the research literature provide ample evidence of the link between academic failure and delinquency.

It can also be shown this link is welded to reading failure. It is proposed that research-based reading instruction can be used to reduce recidivism and increase employment opportunity for incarcerated juvenile offenders.

A re-examination of the research literature and interviews with reading instructors teaching juvenile offenders in correctional institutions in five states, was undertaken to determine:

1) in fact, it is sustained frustration, rather than academic prevent all educationally at-risk students from learning to read accurately and fluently and write legibly and grammatically what they can talk about and aurally understand; and 4) what steps must be taken to supplant current instructional practices with methods that can be validated by experimental research in order to prevent reading failure as well as help disabled readers become competent readers.

The research revealed: 1) reading failure is most likely a cause, not just a correlate, for the frustration that can and does result in delinquent behavior; 2) an inordinately high percentage of wards are unable to decipher accurately and fluently and write legibly and grammatically what they can talk about and aurally comprehend; 3) a high percentage of wards are diagnosed learning disabled with no evidence to indicate any neurological abnormali-ties; 4) handicapped readers are not receiving the type of instruction recommended by experimental research; 5) reading teachers, as a result of preservice reading methods courses, have been denied a working knowledge-of the reading programs and methods of instruction that are most successful in preventing reading failure as well as meeting the needs of handicapped readers.

In order to remove the barriers to improved reading instruction so as to allow handicapped readers to become proficient readers in the shortest time possible, it will be necessary to provide reading teachers with opportunity to acquire a knowledge of the alphabetic principles governing English spelling as well as becoming confident in using instructional programs that incorporate intensive, systematic phonics methods.

For this to be accomplished, this inservice training most likely will have to come from private sector literacy providers because departments, schools and colleges of education have a poor track record in providing this type of instruction.

Jeffrey Degner:

In North Carolina as elsewhere, federal largesse has made things worse. 

When the United States began its experiment with federally backed student loans in the 1960s, no one predicted that, by the early 21st century, students would have run up over $1.8 trillion in debt and that many of them would be unable to repay what they owe. We were told over and over that college debt was good debt because of the huge increase in lifetime earnings that a degree was supposed to guarantee.

The Tar Heel State has its own set of unique problems when it comes to student debt loads. North Carolina ranks among the top 10 states in debt per borrower, approaching $39k per student-debt holder. One unique feature is the state’s Research Triangle (UNC, NC State, and Duke), which both creates and attracts high-debt graduate and professional students. These individuals carry the largest debt loads of all, often reaching six figures. Nationally, a government-supported increase in individual educational demand enables tuition hikes. This is a well-known relationship: Every $1 in new student debt offered drives a $0.60 increase in tuition. North Carolina ranks among the top 10 states in debt per borrower.

Alexander Russo

For the past three years, I had been the Post-Gazette’s K-12 education beat reporter. This is a story that I unquestionably would have covered for the Post-Gazette.
 
But not that day.

That day, I was reporting for the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the publication of striking Post-Gazette workers.
 
I had been on strike since October alongside many of my colleagues from the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, the union that represents newsroom employees at the Post-Gazette, as well as workers in four other unions. 
 
And it incensed me that the Post-Gazette was hiring replacement workers rather than negotiating a deal.
 
I had seen some of the new hires at picket lines outside of the Post-Gazette newsroom, but this was the first time I had seen one at an assignment.  
 
“Are you with the Post-Gazette?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “are you Andrew Goldstein?”
 
“I am,” I said, and then added “you know, you’re welcome to come out on strike with us.” She said that she understood. We stood around awkwardly for a few minutes until the governor arrived. I covered the press conference, but in the back of my mind, I knew I needed to say more.
 
When the press conference ended, the reporter quickly made for the exit. I caught up with her just before she got to the door.
 
“Hey,” I said. “One more thing.”

I had been anticipating a moment like this for months, waiting to give someone a piece of my mind.

I remember the day I signed my Newspaper Guild union card.

It was early March 2015, and I was pulled into a side office just off the Post-Gazette newsroom to write my name on a small manila-colored piece of paper. I didn’t really know what to think about it.

Topaz, M ∙ Roguin, N ∙ Gupta, P ∙ et 

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

Report the first systematic evaluation of the authenticity of references. The authors initially identified 125 615 773 references from 2 471 758 papers drawn from PubMed Central’s Open Access platform published from Jan 1, 2023, to Feb 18, 2026. Of these references, only 77% (97·1 million) carried a PubMed ID and were further evaluated. References, after passing through several filters to account for spelling errors in names or incorrect titles, were then verified against PubMed, Crossref, OpenAlex, and Google Scholar. References not found in any of these four databases were considered fabricated. Of the 97·1 million references evaluated, 4046 from 2810 papers were considered fake. This number was shown to have increased with time, from one in 2828 papers in 2023, to one in 458 papers at the end of 2025.

Charlie Barone:

The loudest fights over K-12 education can make it seem as if American voters in general, and parents in particular,1 are split into warring camps: back to basics v. SEL; school choice v. neighborhood schools; college v. career. But polling tells a less polarizing and more complicated and instructive story. Parents do not primarily want schools to serve as ideological battlegrounds. They want schools to work across a number of different areas.

Start with the basics. In Pew’s 2023 survey, 51% of U.S. adults said public K-12 education was headed in the wrong direction; among those respondents, the most common major reason was that schools were not spending enough time on core academic subjects, cited by 69%. National Parents Union 2024 polling points in the same direction: only 48% of public school parents said their child was definitely prepared academically for the next school year, and that figure dropped to 43% among middle school parents. ExcelinEd’s 2025 national survey found that 86% of respondents rated students being on grade level in reading, math, and writing as veryimportant, higher than for any other single aspect of schooling.

The reading data are especially clear. NPU’s poll found that 81% of public school parents supported setting a national goal for all public school students to read at grade level by third grade. The highest-supported reading-related policies were: free tutoring for students not reading at grade level (91%); research-backed reading curriculum and methods and teacher training and coaching (both at 89%); and, guidance for families on supporting reading skills (88%).

Chad Aldeman

For much of the past three decades, education reform rested on a surprisingly durable bipartisan foundation, from the standards and accountability movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s through No Child Left Behind and into the Obama-era push for more rigorous teacher evaluations. That consensus was never without tension, but it held long enough to engender significant progress. Over time, however, it began to wear down, arguably reaching its last gasp in Washington with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act. What followed was a mix of reform fatigue, rising polarization, and declining confidence in testing and accountability mechanisms, alongside a broader shift away from technocratic problem-solving. As that consensus frayed, so too did the assumptions that had long governed who should control what in public education.

The erosion of that confidence is visible in public opinion data. In the early 1970s, nearly two-thirds of Americans, across party lines, reported having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools. Fast forward to today, that figure has fallen to less than one-third overall, with confidence declining sharply in both parties, especially among Republicans. What has followed is not a clean ideological reversal, but something more fragmented and harder to categorize—one that is increasingly visible in debates over local control. The familiar lines that once structured education policy—between state and local authority—have blurred, and the red-blue divide on local control has begun to shift in a couple of unexpected ways.

First, the traditional red-blue roles around local control no longer map neatly onto today’s reality. Historically, red states prioritized local autonomy, framing it as a defense against state and federal overreach. That commitment has become far more selective. Several red states have taken a more prescriptive approach to schooling, from requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms to using funding incentives and state-vetted lists to steer districts toward preferred instructional materials. At the same time, many blue states now default to a posture of deferencetoward schools and districts, often reinforcing the influence of teachers unions.

Susan Svrluga

The Justice Department on Thursday accused Yale School of Medicine of discriminating based on race in its admissions, by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian ones. 

The department’s allegations are based on a year-long investigation that sought to determine whether Yale’s admissions practices were in compliance with federal civil rights law. The agency determined that the medical school “continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race,” despite a 2023 Supreme Court ruling rejecting race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.

Wyatt Eichholz:

By the numbers

Wisconsin’s state spending to help school districts pay for special education has been surging in recent years. Under the tax-and-schools deal between Gov. Tony Evers and legislative leaders, rejected in the Senate Wednesday, those appropriations would rise even further.

From 1975 to the mid-1990s, Wisconsin’s state appropriations to help districts cover special education costs were characterized by a gradual increase, with one period, 1995 to 2019, when increases slowed, with several periods when spending was held virtually constant.

Over the same time, the number of pupils served by the special education program increased dramatically, from 58,021 in 1976-77 to 128,290 in 2005-06, a 121 percent increase, before receding to 120,602 in 2018-19. The state defines such students as those who are disabled because of cognitive disabilities, hearing impairments, speech or language impairments, visual impairments, emotional disturbance, orthopedic impairments, autism, traumatic brain injury, learning disabilities, or significant developmental delay.

Sally Kornbluth:

Outside of Sloan and the EECS MEng program, still in the midst of admissions, compared with 2024, our departments’ new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%.

That means that, in total, outside of Sloan, we could have about 500 fewer graduate students. Which means we’ll have many fewer students advancing the work of MIT, and undergraduates will have fewer grad students as mentors in their research.

Matthew Yglesias:

I do not think of myself as an especially permissive or relaxed parent — I only seem low-key and non-anxious compared to Kate. But I was shocked by this Institute for Family Studies survey of what contemporary American children are and are not allowed to do unsupervised at various ages. 

The fact that a quarter of 11-year-olds are not allowed to leave the house unsupervised doesn’t seem all that shocking, until you realize that this means they’re not allowed to play in their yard unsupervised.1 Leaving the yard is a whole separate category. 

I’ve also been surprised to see so much skepticism about the idea that nine- and 10-year-olds can be left home alone. We are a family with two parents who both have flexible schedules and just one child, so it’s not like our kid is left home alone all that frequently. But sometimes it’s the logistically reasonable course of action and what’s the problem? 

The thing that really makes us outliers, though, is that our child is allowed to “leave the street” in the parlance of this poll and walk to places in the neighborhood. 

Yet even though that’s the answer I would give to a pollster (because it’s accurate), I have to confess that in practice, he doesn’t often walk places in the neighborhood without an adult.

Micaiah Bilger

The college’s president created the taskforce in December after conducting an investigation into Professor Trotter’s actions around the turn of the 20th century, according to an announcement on the college website. Trotter taught at the private, Pennsylvania college for more than 30 years. 

“No matter the educational intentions or that these practices may have been commonplace at the time they occurred, these remains should have been treated with dignity and respect and should never have been removed from their burial site,” President Smith stated. 

“Considering these actions today, with our values, convictions, and compassion, the act of collecting any Native American remains is unethical and inexcusable. I deeply regret these actions, and on behalf of Swarthmore College, I apologize for the harm they have caused,” she stated. 

The Inquirer characterized Trotter’s work as legal but likely unethical:

Roshan Fernandez:

The University of California, Berkeley had almost 6,500 students on its wait list last year. It ended up admitting none of them.

The only thing harder than getting into college, it seems, is getting off the wait list. At some schools, the wait list is far more selective than the college’s overall acceptance rate. That’s a tough reality for thousands of wait-listed students across the country now, still holding out hope of getting into their dream schools after the May 1 commitment deadline passed.

For colleges, it’s harder than ever to predict who will enroll because students are applying to more schools. Colleges have always used wait lists to manage enrollment, but the lists have ballooned in recent years. It’s part of many colleges’ elaborate cat-and-mouse game to manage yield, or the share of admitted students who enroll. And wait lists have turned increasingly unruly, with fewer standard protocols than traditional admissions.

Harrie Ryan:

Ah’Mari Stevens, a 16-year-old football player from South Florida, boarded a helicopter with a videographer one day last spring. As the chopper circled Miami, the cameraman explained the purpose of the shoot: “Everybody and their mama wants to know where he’s going to play ball next year.”

Ah’Mari, a whip-fast sophomore wide receiver with two state championships under his belt, peered out the window as various high-school campuses passed below. He listed their attributes—NFL alums, college stars, state titles—and then pointed out Edison High, an inner-city public school whose coach at the time boasted of negotiating multimillion-dollar deals, where he planned to enroll.

“Sometimes a man gotta create their own path,” he said in the video, made by social-media company Footballville. Edison would be Ah’Mari’s third high school, but not his last. After a few games, he switched to a rival Catholic powerhouse known for star receivers.

Suiting up for four different high schools would be impossible in most of the country, thanks to state interscholastic rules that can require transfer students to sit out a year of competition.

Florida is different. School-choice laws mean athletes transfer easily, often without losing a moment on the playing field. In the age of Name, Image and Likeness compensation, the result is a first-of-its-kind high-school transfer portal that some insiders warn may be the future of scholastic sports in America.

A crowdsourced field guide to finding state court records.

Rob Henderson

A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions. 

In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.

The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.

Roland Fryer:

Hampshire College, alma mater of filmmaker Ken Burns, announced in April that it will close after the fall semester. Sterling College, a 130-acre working farm in northeastern Vermont, will graduate its final class in May. The Huron Consulting Group projects that 442 private nonprofit colleges enrolling roughly 670,000 students are at risk of closing or merging within a decade. The instinctive response is elegiac: lament the shuttered campus, mourn the futures it might have made, hope for rescue. Mr. Burns called Hampshire’s closing “an extraordinary loss.”

Is it just me, or is this good news for America? Closing these institutions means students are slowly ceasing to overpay for scant added value. If more market correction is to come, that tells us something important—about higher education and about other education sectors we have built to avoid correction altogether. The question isn’t how to save these institutions. It is how to accelerate market forces.

The private-college sector didn’t rise in a laissez-faire market. It was built by federal loan programs, the postwar college wage premium and decades of expanding demand. In that environment, “more college seats” and “more social value” came to mean the same thing. They weren’t.

Paul Schofield:

Imagine an unassuming medium-sized college, dotted with red brick buildings, situated at the outskirts of a small American town. It is staffed with an earnest and devoted faculty, committed to providing students with an education that will equip them to flourish both as citizens and as human beings. Its teachers belong to departments organized by discipline, within which curricular decisions are made collectively and pedagogical challenges are addressed together. They are imperfect, of course, and often disagree among themselves. Nevertheless, together they possess the kind of practical wisdom that comes with years spent in their specific disciplines, educating students.

William Langley:

Chinese spies have blamed “anti-China forces abroad” for the rising number of disaffected young people turning their backs on the long hours required to build their careers and spur economic growth.

The Ministry of State Security, the country’s spy agency, this week said foreign forces were seeking to “erode the minds of Chinese youths” by disseminating anti-work propaganda online, encouraging them to drop out or, in Chinese internet parlance, “lie flat”.

“They want only for our youth to ‘lie flat’, handing over our development dividends, strategic opportunities, and the future of our nation,” the MSS said in a statement and an accompanying promotional video on WeChat.

“May every young person uphold their original aspirations, stand firm on their principles, remain undisturbed by noise and unclouded by confusion, and thrive in the prime of their lives.”

The warning underscores the anxiety felt in Beijing over high youth unemployment and the growing ranks of alienated workers. China this year set its lowest growth target outside of the coronavirus pandemic in decades, aiming for a rate of 4.5 to 5 per cent.

Chris Rickert:

Following a series of scandals involving Sun Prairie School District employees, the district’s incoming superintendent is pledging to improve communication and ensure a clear chain of command when bad situations arise.

Antoine Reed was formally hired on May 7 and officially takes over July 1. He currently serves as chief of culture and student engagement for Rockford Public Schools and has been a principal in Milwaukee; South Bend, Indiana; and Chicago. He will make $230,000 a year in his role with the 8,518-student Sun Prairie district.

Reed’s hire comes as criminal cases against two former West High School staffers continue to wind their way through state courts.

People are also reading…

Former Dean of Students Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier faces child pornography and exploitation charges for allegedly victimizing two students at West and downloading images of a third girl whose nude photos he found on the internet. He also was sentenced last month in federal court to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of creating child pornography in connection with the same allegations.

By Annie Gaus:

San Francisco parent advocates are furious over what they call an “unvetted and illegal” ethnic studies course that was rammed through without meaningful input — citing divisive lesson plans like a “privilege wheel” that sorts student into an “oppressor/oppressed framework,” according to a legal warning sent to city leaders.

The Friends of Lowell Foundation, which advocates for academic merit at San Francisco’s premier public magnet school Lowell High, blasted a year-long ethnic studies course just permanently adopted by San Francisco Unified School District — making it a requirement for ninth graders.

The scathing letter accuses the San Francisco Board of Education and district leaders of quietly pushing a $7 million, required course for ninth graders called “Voices”that has largely been concealed from concerned parents. 

Lindsay Ellis:

AI is making “A” grades easier to come by, a new study shows—and making them less useful to employers trying to size up college graduates. 

The share of A’s in college classes heavy on writing and coding—in other words, work more prone to artificial-intelligence use—has grown more significantly than in other classes since ChatGPT’s debut, according to a paper from the University of California, Berkeley, released Wednesday. Professors teaching AI-exposed classes gave out about 30% more A’s and fewer A-minus and B-plus grades.

The results suggest that students have relied on generative AI to do better in their studies, not that these classes of students are learning more, says 

George Weigel:

Before joining what once imagined itself the world’s greatest deliberative body, U.S. senator Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) was a decorated naval aviator, test pilot, and NASA astronaut with four space shuttle missions to his credit. Now, like approximately 80 percent of his senatorial colleagues, Sen. Kelly looks in the mirror in the morning and sees a future president. Before he takes the plunge, however, I hope Sen. Kelly finds the political courage to match the physical courage that won him two Distinguished Flying Crosses.

Recently, Sen. Kelly got twenty-nine fellow senators to support his bill to repeal the federal tax credit scholarship program that was created in 2025 and will come into effect next year. A Wall Street Journal editorial quoted Sen. Kelly’s claim that scholarships funded by this program will take “money out of public schools and giv[e] to private ones.” That is false. It was also a rather blatant pander to the teachers’ unions—arguably America’s most reactionary social force, but organizations whose ground game and financial help Kelly surely wants if he makes a run for the White House in the 2028 election cycle.

So, what does this new federal tax credit scholarship program actually do?

Details may be found at the website of the Invest in Education Foundation, but here’s the gist of the program.

Howard Schultz

Washington state has been my home for more than four decades. I arrived in Seattle with dreams and ambition and ended up building Starbucks into a company known around the world. Many Pacific Northwesterners joined me in shaping the culture, benefits and brand of Starbucks—contributing not only to a business, but also the civic and entrepreneurial life of the area. 

I am no longer a resident of Washington. My decision to leave had much to do with family choices and my stage of life. Still, I feel a responsibility to speak up about the business and job climate in a city and state that gave me so many opportunities. 

Jessica Riedl:

After the federal deficit reached a post-World War II peak of 6% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1983, deficit reduction became a leading issue in American politics. Several deficit-reduction laws were passed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Billionaire and 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot earned a surprising 19% of the popular vote thanks to a quirky campaign that focused heavily on fiscal responsibility.

The winner of that 1992 race, Bill Clinton, subsequently made deficit reduction a centerpiece of his first budget submission and tax increase enactment. The following year, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) led Republicans to their first House majority in 40 years on a promise to balance the budget within seven years.

The resulting clash between the GOP’s aggressive timetable and President Clinton’s more gradual approach produced contentious government shutdownsin 1995 and 1996. And yet by 1998 the budget had achieved balance for the first time since 1969—and remained balanced through 2001. A dominant political narrative emerged: High-profile belt-tightening budget deals negotiated by Clinton and Gingrich reduced the deficit and balanced the budget just a few years later.

But budget deals contributed relatively little to balanced budgets

The surprising reality: The elimination of the deficit was largely a temporary historical accident, driven by forces mostly beyond the control of the politicians who claimed credit for it.

Chart 110 (Figure 1 below) maps the path from 1992’s deficit of 4.5% of GDP to the peak surplus of 2.3% of GDP in 2000—a swing of 6.8 percentage points. Nearly the entire improvement in the federal government’s fiscal position resulted from two events: the end of the Cold War and a temporary stock market and tax revenue bubble.

Ron Zimmer, Joseph J. Ferrare, Stephen M. Ponisciak, Adam Kho, Mark Berends, Shelby Smith, Julie W. Dallavis and R. Joseph Waddington:

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted schooling nationwide and contributed to substantial declines in student achievement. At the same time, enrollment patterns shifted and charter school sectors expanded in several states, raising questions about whether charter schools were better positioned to support student learning during and after the pandemic. This study estimates the effect of attending a charter school on student achievement growth in Indiana during and after the pandemic using statewide longitudinal administrative data from 2017-18 through 2023–24. We compare charter school students with observationally similar traditional public school students using regression models with inverse probability weighting based on propensity scores and controls for prior achievement and student characteristics. During the 2020–21 school year, charter school students performed similarly to traditional public school peers in mathematics and modestly outperformed them in English/language arts. In post-pandemic years, charter school students experienced greater achievement growth in both subjects, with moderate effect sizes. These gains were concentrated among Black, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, and lower-performing students. Differences in chronic absenteeism or instructional modality do not explain these patterns. The results are similar in magnitude to a companion study in Tennessee, suggesting charter schools may have contributed to stronger post-pandemic academic recovery.

——-

Commentary.

Lauren Weber:

For much of high school, Savannah Gannaway figured she would work after graduation at the gas station five doors down from her house in Fair Play, a town of 600 in southwest Missouri.

There was no money for college, and no expectation of it either. Gannaway lived with her father, who had dropped out of school and worked as a garbage collector before an injury landed him on disability. None of her siblings went to college.

This month, though, the 20-year-old will receive an associate degree in early childhood education, a credential that will bump her from hourly to salaried employee, at higher pay, at the preschool where she works. She’s considering a bachelor’s degree next.

A big reason she’s on a sturdier path is her career adviser, who was installed at Fair Play High School through a program started by billionaire investment banker Byron Trott. Gannaway’s adviser, Unity Seay, helped her find jobs, tap a state program that pays community college tuition and weather rough patches—such as when juggling a full-time job with school almost pushed her to drop out.

Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.

The latest study of cellphone bans caused shockwaves as it appeared to be really bad news for advocates of the bans. This study basically compared a specific type of ban, lockable pouches (such as Yondr pouches) with schools that did not use them. Across the board this was basically a null study…no benefits to standardized testing scores, classroom attention, bullying, and the mental health outcomes were “statistically significant”, though wobbling in both directions, and so close to zero in effect size to be more likely due to methodological noise than “real” effects (which would also explain the wobble)1.

“Skeptic Research Center”:

Americans with the highest trust in educators are twice as likely to (falsely) believe that Europeans introduced the concept of war and conflict to Native Americans. (see graph below)

Dave cieslewicz:

What an interesting mess this has become. 

My guess is that if the surplus spending deal, cobbled together by Gov. Tony Evers, Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, had been introduced a year ago it would have easily passed. But last night it went down in the Senate and is, at least for now, dead.

Essentially, the Democrats killed it. All the Democrats on the Joint Finance Committee voted against it, most of the Dems in the Assembly did the same and then all the Democratic Senators voted ‘no.’ When three Republican Senators joined them, it was over. 

It’s hard to see how this can be rearranged in a way that could clear the Senate now. Evers, Vos and LeMahieu are all lame ducks and so have no real political leverage. That’s why I think, had they advanced the very same compromise before they announced their retirements, this would have passed.

———

David Blaska:

The check is NOT in the mail

Could Republicans be so lucky?

Poor Tony Evers. Democrats kicked their own governor one last time on his way out the door. The lame duck governor cobbled together a bi-partisan deal for $600 million more dollars for schools! Big fat check in the mail for taxpayers — $600 for joint filers. No tax on tips and overtime! No way, said Democrats who stood together in that familiar, righteous pose: solidarity! Against their own governor! 

Manfully, to the extent that Tony Evers can muster testosterone, the governor attempted to blame Republican governor candidate U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany for “blowing up a bipartisan plan.” But Tiffany left the state legislature for the U.S. Congress years ago.

Let the record show: Republican state legislators overwhelmingly voted YES. Every one the Assembly Republicans who answered the roll call supported the deal — $1.8 billion in property tax relief!  Only 10 of the 45 Democrats in the Assembly sided with their own governor — and taxpayers! None of them represent the Madison area, dooming the measure to a 61 to 32 defeat.

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“still more dollars going into public schools with no requirement for better results”

Erin Gretzinger:

The district “had identified early on, for the thousands of people who now live there, that there would be a school in that area. Here we are, 25 years later, with nothing there,” Gothard said at a November School Board meeting. “Part of our impetus for doing this work is to avoid ever having that happen again in MMSD.”

In survey comments obtained by the Cap Times, dozens of respondents called on the district to make boundary changes to reduce overcrowding at Kennedy Elementary, while others asked for a new east side school following development in the area.

“We have seen the population at Kennedy Elementary grow and change. It looks like there will be more housing developments starting up past Sprecher Road, which means there could be even more students coming to the area,” one respondent wrote. “Please consider balancing populations evenly if there is foreseeable growth in the future. Consider the possibility of needing a new elementary school.”

The idea of a new school at Sprecher Road received a cool reception this week from some participants at a district-hosted listening session at Kennedy Elementary. Parents, teachers and staff at the school have advocated in recent years for more support to help its student population, which includes many students of color and economically disadvantaged students. 

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Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

JMann:

The “Mississippi Miracle” – the transformation of one of the country’s worst school systems into one of the best – was more of a marathon than a sprint, insiders say.

Three people involved in education in Mississippi discussed how the state changed its policies and practices over time to dramatically improve results. 

“The story of Mississippi is often misunderstood,” said Robert Pondiscio, who hosted the American Enterprise Institute webinar. “It’s been called the Mississippi miracle, a phrase that’s catchy, flattering and, in my view, deeply misleading.” 

Pondiscio explained that miracles “suggest sudden transformation, mysterious causes or outcomes too extraordinary to be replicated,” but Mississippi’s gains were the product of “years of policy coherence, sustained leadership, literacy reform, accountability, implementation, support and persistence over time. 

“That matters, because if Mississippi’s success is a miracle, there’s little to learn from it except amazement. But if it’s a marathon, then there may be lessons here for every state willing to undertake difficult, sustained work.” 

The reforms took the Magnolia State from 42nd in the nation in reading to ninth in a little more than a decade. When adjusted for poverty, “Mississippi rises even higher,” Pondiscio said.

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Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Hannah Waight, Eddie Yang, …Joshua A. Tucker

State media control shapes LLM behaviour by influencing training data

State control of the media is shown to alter the training data of large language models (LLMs) through its impact on the information environment. This has a substantial effect on the output of LLMs, with states rated more favourably in their own language when they have tighter media control.

Cory Turner

The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long “learning recession” that began years before COVID-19’s arrival. That’s according to the latest Education Scorecard, an annual deep-dive into student data from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research.

The new Scorecard, released Wednesday and in its fourth year, offers several revelations for families, educators and policymakers looking for clarity — and hope — at a time when public education has been blamed and battered for those persistent declines in student performance.

Among the report’s takeaways: Most states are finally making gains in math; federal relief dollars likely helped the lowest-income districts mount a hearty comeback; and, while most states have yet to make gains in reading, those that have all made legislative changes to how it’s taught in their schools.

Before we dive in, one caveat: The annual Education Scorecard includes data from the vast majority of states and Washington D.C. drawn from their own state tests — as opposed to the Nation’s Report Card. But some states were excluded for various reasons, including if their state assessments had changed recently (Illinois, Kansas), if test opt-out rates were too high (New York, Colorado) or if a state didn’t publish district-level data with enough detail.

Pat Garrett:

The News: WILL has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Terri Koschnick and Joy Buchman, Wisconsin-licensed counselors, challenging a Wisconsin rule banning consensual, client-driven Christian counseling. The challenge follows an 8-1 Supreme Court ruling that Colorado’s identical law was unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination,” the “most blatant” kind of First Amendment violation.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Rebecca Furdek, stated, “Wisconsin’s rule is materially indistinguishable from Colorado’s statute held to be viewpoint discrimination by SCOTUS. When we notified the Evers administration of this fact, we were met with a blatant refusal to follow the Supreme Court holding, along with inflammatory, baseless rhetoric accusing WILL of ‘bullying’ children and Wisconsinites. However, Wisconsin counselors have every right to provide Christ-centered talk therapy to the clients who seek them out for that type of counseling.”

WILL Client, Terri Koschnick, stated, “Government officials should not be allowed to police the private conversations I have with my clients who voluntarily seek out my advice as a Christian counselor. They have no right to punish me for saying something they disagree with. That was again confirmed by our nation’s highest court.”

Ted Alcorn:

With data from @nytimes API, I analyzed all national+local coverage since 2000—224K articles— to see which topics in each state get covered out of proportion to the rest of the country. A portrait of how the paper of record sees America, one state per tweet, alphabetical. 👇

Katherine Bowser:

In this District Trendline, we focus on one of education’s most persistent examples of ineffective and inefficient spending—automatic salary increases for teachers who hold a master’s degree (i.e., master’s degree premiums). Drawing on data from our Teacher Contract Database, we examine master’s degree premiums across four areas:

• State policy landscape: how state mandates influence district implementation of master’s degree premiums.
• Longitudinal trends: changes in the average master’s degree premium through time.
• District policy landscape: how master’s degree premium structures and costs vary across districts.
• Opportunity cost: the financial investment required from districts to pay for master’s degree premiums—and what they’re giving up in exchange.

Education leaders must think strategically and spend district funds efficiently and effectively—maximizing outcomes per dollar invested, not spending the least amount possible. Savvy district leaders can use financial pressure as a catalyst to eliminate inefficient practices that have gone unchecked, like investing in a compensation structure that has no clear goals or return on investment.¹

This isn’t to suggest that investing in teachers is unimportant—quite the opposite. Teacher compensation is the largest educational expense,²and rightfully so as they are the most critical within-school factor affecting student achievement.³ Yet many districts allocate these substantial resources without any systematic approach to ensure that students benefit. We find that 90% of large school districts pay teachers more for master’s degrees, and nearly a third of states require districts to, despite the evidence that master’s degree premiums are bad policy for almost everyone:

Craig Barton:

Bibi Groot started her career at the Behavioural Insights Team – the government unit that became famous for getting people to pay their taxes on time by changing a single line in a letter. She ran randomised control trials in further education colleges, earned a PhD in Behavioural Public Policy at UCL, had twins in 2022, and then joined Eedi as our first behavioural scientist because, as she put it, education is where her heart is.

I have wanted to get Bibi on the podcast for a while, partly because she is one of the smartest people I work with, but mainly because listeners have been asking me to go deeper into the Google DeepMind study that we published earlier this year. The one that made the news. The one that Daisy Christodoulou, Carl Hendrick, and others all held up as the gold standard of AI tutoring research. Most importantly, the one that was the subject of our first-ever (no doubt AI-generated) hype Tweet.

Ray A. Smith, Jason French and Stephanie Stamm:

A string of cities across America’s Sunbelt are emerging as graduate-hiring hot spots in an otherwise challenging job market for young professionals, an exclusive analysis shows.

Birmingham, Ala., tops the list of the places where newly minted graduates are landing jobs with a college-level career track, followed by Tampa, Fla., according to the new study by payroll processor ADP. In fact, six of the list’s top 10—including Raleigh, N.C.; Tulsa, Okla.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Charlotte, N.C.—are in the South.

Other pockets of the country also punch above their weight as early-career launchpads for their mix of 20-something hiring, pay and affordability. Columbus, Ohio, and California’s San Jose area unexpectedly got top scores this year—evidence that even places with so-so earning potential or high costs of living can be prime locations for landing that first job postgraduation.

Altogether, the ADP analysis—which measured 53 of the country’s biggest metro areas—shows that what looks like a nascent recovery in graduate hiring is happening unevenly. Recent data shows companies are boosting entry-level hiring this spring after holding back for several seasons, but their appetite hinges a lot on the kind of role, sector and location.

Blaise Mesa:

Wisconsin students have struggled to recover since the pandemic, leaving the state ranked toward the bottom for academic growth in math and reading, a new report says.

The state ranks 33rd out of 38 states in math and 30th out of 35 states in reading, according to the Education Scorecard. The report, released annually, is a collaboration between the Harvard University, Stanford University and Dartmouth College.

There are no findings for Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Vermont due to data limitations, the report says.

The report describes a “learning recession” in the United States that began years before the pandemic in 2013, when math and reading scores stalled and then began to decline.

What does the report say about Wisconsin schools?  

The report included mixed news for Wisconsin schools.

Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than 10% of classes, dropped from 22% in 2022 to 17% in 2025, but remains higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Wisconsin students are performing better at math than in 2022, but are 0.35 grade levels behind their peers from 2019. Students are reading 0.24 grade levels below 2022 levels and are about half a grade level behind 2019 numbers.

The Sun Prairie Area, Oshkosh Area and West Allis-West Milwaukee school districts are a full grade level behind 2019 math scores, the report says. Meanwhile, Kenosha, Green Bay Area and Sheboygan Area districts are a full grade level behind 2019 reading scores.

But Fond du Lac, Cedarburg, and Waukesha are above average in math and reading, and Racine is emerging as a leader in reading. Hamilton, Elmbrook and Verona Area students are excelling in math.

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⬇️Public-school kids in Milwaukee are 3.6 (!) grade levels behind in reading.

💰This year they spent over $25k per student.

——

Your School District Is Probably Scoring Worse Than 10 Years Ago

More.

“That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines…. [No Child Left Behind] set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties.

——-

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Claire Cain Miller, Francesca Paris, Sarah Mervosh:

The drops in U.S. scores go beyond the pandemic and cut across income, geographic and racial divides, new data shows.

Something troubling is happening in U.S. education.

Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesdayby the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.

Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.

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More.

“That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines…. [No Child Left Behind] set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties.

——-

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Nicholas Bagley, Robert Gordon:

The left has two competing impulses: Expand high-quality government services and embrace the public sector union agenda.

But those two impulses are in tension with one another — and too many Democrats are in denial about that. At its core, the problem is that public sector unions generally fight to minimize differences among employees, including both standouts at the top and weak links at the bottom.

That means governments cannot recruit and retain the best workers or manage up or out the worst performers. That, in turn, badly degrades the quality of government service in ways that damage the Democrats’ own cause.

In California, for example — as Zach Liscow at Yale Law School and two coauthors recently showed — higher-quality engineers saved the state a ton of money on transportation projects. When these engineers retired, project costs rose by six times their wages.

And no wonder those excellent engineers retired. Good engineers can earn much more in the private sector. The same is true for excellent technologists, who can savegovernments millions on vendors but are often paid far below average market levels. Higher pay for effective teachers has likewise been a part of performance gains for schools in the District of Columbia and Dallas.

But labor serves to compress pay across jobs and reject salary differences based on performance altogether. Excessive job protection for poor performers has an even greater effect on government results.

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Commentary.

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WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Related: Act 10.

“pressed state Superintendent Jill Underly on how she planned to address educator sexual misconduct and grooming in Wisconsin”

More on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and educator sexual misconduct.

Boston Globe:

To Yee, the “precedent-setting” ruling is a win for tenure and an affirmation of what universities owe their highest-ranking faculty. But it also reveals the fragility of an academic ideal that has become onerous for more and more schools struggling with financial pressures. While the battle plays out nationwide, the Tufts case stands out for its size and scope. 

Colleges concerned with political scrutiny and their own bottom lines today are unwinding protections for experienced faculty. And though it’s still uncommon for universities to strip tenure from professors entirely, fewer tenured faculty can rely on the financial stability the status once ensured in uncertain times. 

In April, after seven years in court, a Middlesex Superior Court judge ultimately ruled in the professors’ favor,finding that Tufts had breached their tenure contracts and wrongly cut their salaries and full-time faculty status based on the amount of external grant funding they were awarded.

But as the suit dragged on, roughly a dozen tenured Tufts faculty left the university or elected to take untenured contract positions to avoid salary cuts, plaintiffs told the Globe. One professor in the lawsuit, unable to afford his mortgage here, took another job in Florida. And Yee saw her salary cut by more than half, from $140,000 in 2017 to $66,000 in 2026, court documents show.

Douglas Belkin:

Princeton University faculty voted to require proctoring in all in-person exams, reversing an 1893 policy.

The change came after “significant numbers” of students and faculty requested it, citing fears of widespread cheating made easier by AI.

A student newspaper survey found 30% of Princeton seniors cheated, with less than 1% reporting violations.

For more than a century, Princeton University prided itself on an honor code so revered that proctoring during exams was banned. Students’ pledge not to cheat was enough.

Those days are over—largely because of AI. 

On Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring in all in-person exams starting this summer, reversing a policy set in place in 1893 when Princeton introduced its honor code. The change came after “significant numbers” of undergrads and faculty requested it, “given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread,” according to a letter from Michael Gordin, Princeton’s dean of the college.

Larry Sand:

States are starting to push back against the extensive perks granted to the teachers’ unions.

A May 4 Wall Street Journal editorial argues that the single biggest problem in state governance is the “political dominance of public-sector unions.” These include the SEIU, AFSCME, and, notably, the teachers’ unions. But now, several red states are pursuing reforms to curb their influence and give taxpayers a much-needed break.

In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little recently signed a bill that will end public support for teachers’ unions. The new law will prohibit school districts from deducting dues directly from teachers’ paychecks and will limit unions’ ability to recruit members during school hours. It will also end the practice of granting teachers paid time off for a range of union activities, including supporting candidates for office, soliciting membership, and participating in protests or advocacy.

This procedure is officially labeled “release time,” but more accurately, it’s “union time on the taxpayer’s dime,” a common practice across the country at all levels of government. This racket allows public employees to conduct various types of union business during working hours, with the taxpayer footing the bill.

Arizona is developing guardrails for public-sector unions through a proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit school districts from collecting union dues through payroll deductions. The bill, which must be adopted by the legislature to appear on the November ballot, would also ban teacher strikes and require unions to distribute communications off school property.

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WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Related: Act 10.

James Shuls:

On X, Marc Porter Magee, CEO of 50CAN, posted a graph showing where people send their kids to school broken out by household income. He asked, “When money is no object, where do parents send their kids to school?” The implication is that most wealthy families, those earning more than $500k, usually don’t send their kids to the local public school. But, as Robert Pondiscio responded, the graph overestimates public school buy-in because, “When money is no object, parents don’t need to pay for private schools. They can buy multi-million dollar homes in exclusive neighborhoods that are unaffordable to most Americans.”

While I get what both Marc and Robert are saying, I think they have missed the even more interesting take-a-way from this graph—taxpayers are subsidizing the education of the rich!

As Tennessee Democratic State Senator, Jeff Yarbro, has said, “This is about subsidizing the wealthy.” Oh wait. He said that about private school choice programs.

Why is it that no one complains about subsidizing the rich when they are in public schools? It’s almost as if they aren’t upset about publicly funding education for the wealthy, but about funding educational choice.

Will Flanders

Misinformation from school choice opponents that doesn’t get highlighted often enough is the claim that most were already in private school. To get that number, they include kids who were on a VOUCHER the previous year. The true percentage is under 5% who were private-pay.

Kevin Wallsten:

The faculty, administrators, and trustees who establish graduation criteria at America’s most prominent colleges and universities have made a clear set of judgments about what every educated citizen should know. Their choices suggest that familiarity with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is more essential than an understanding of economics, American history, and the Constitution.

City Journal’s College Rankings track graduation requirements across a wide range of prominent colleges and universities, including top public flagships, elite private research universities, leading liberal arts colleges, and the Ivies. While none of the 120 schools currently ranked requires an economics class to graduate, and only 15 percent stipulate a course in U.S. government or American history, 51 percent mandate coursework organized around the conceptual vocabulary of diversity, equity, and inclusion. These schools—which have long produced a disproportionate share of the nation’s lawyers, judges, editors, executives, and senior civil servants—make clear to their students that material centered on race, gender, power, and inequality is essential, while material on the U.S. Constitution, American history, and sound economics is not.

Corri Hess:

During a round-table discussion with Wisconsin reporters Monday afternoon in Bascom Hall, Mnookin said she hopes her successor will benefit from “the enormous number of people who care deeply about the institution.” 

She also said it is important that UW-Madison continues to promote pluralism and free expression by welcoming and encouraging a variety of perspectives and viewpoints on campus.

“While you can be a fierce advocate for what you believe, you should also bring curiosity to conversations with people who may not see the world exactly as you do,” Mnookin said. “Often you have something to learn from people who don’t exactly share your point of view.”

Mnookin has led the university since 2022. Before coming to Wisconsin, Mnookin served as dean of the UCLA School of Law, where she spent 17 years on the faculty.

Prior to joining UCLA, she was a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law and a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School. Mnookin received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, a law degree from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in history and social study of science and technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dissident Teacher:

It’s not a question of if your child will be harmed at school but when. The question is why American parents are putting up with it. 

The typical American parent sees public school as a resource. Parents are a child’s primary educator; it is our right, privilege, and obligation to inscribe values, morals, and character on the hearts of our children. The primacy of feeding, clothing, and sheltering them notwithstanding, these three responsibilities form the bulk of the mental and emotional labor of parenting. We send our children off to school so that professional teachers of content can play a supporting role in helping our children develop the academic skills, cultural literacy, and scientific knowledge that will help them succeed — a necessary part of educating the whole child. 

But just a part.

Over the last ten years of my teaching career, I’ve watched three school districts,  incentivized by the state, increasingly encroach on parents’ territory. This encroachment comes from people who have no stake in the long-term success and happiness of your child. 

This tendency is now policy. It is pronounced and aggressive. There are hundreds of examples across our country of teachers using their classroom authority and the hours they spend with our children to instruct them in matters of sexuality, self-perception, and personal beliefs.

Grooming as Policy

Robby Soave

The employee, a white male, and an editor at the Times, had applied for a more senior position as a deputy real estate editor. He did not get the job, despite extensive relevant experience, including with real estate news, according to the lawsuit.

This is not dispositive on its own, of course. However, the lawsuit also claims that he did not even make it to the final round of interviews, losing out to “a white female, a black male, an Asian female, and a multiracial female.” The candidate who did receive the position, the “multiracial female,” did not meet the stated qualifications for the position, since she did not have experience in real estate journalism. Nevertheless, the hiring manager sent an email to herself signaling an intent to choose this person before even interviewing her.

These facts become more concerning in light of the Times‘ stated desire to increase the number of minority and female employees in leadership positions. The lawsuit cites various diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plans, as well as the Times‘ 2021 proposal, “A Call to Action,” which lamented that “people of color—and particularly women of color—remain notably underrepresented in its leadership.” The proposal explicitly endorsed the idea of gradually replacing existing leadership with women of color, to the specific exclusion of “white and unspecified” ethnicities. Leaders at the Times would be judged “by how well they ‘create pathways’ for a ‘diverse’ group of deputies to succeed them,” according to the proposal.

Jesse Apple:

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law is in the midst of a free-speech emergency.

When a major American law school teaches its students that the right way to respond to political opponents is to silence them, something has gone wrong. 

And when it then attempts to protect those disruptive students from public criticism by threatening other students’ speech, it’s a crisis.

Natalie Eilbert:

The period of academic prosperity, as Kahloon notes in his October article, was 2000 to 2007. That window corresponds with then-President George W. Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind law, which set higher standards for education and used test scores as the measuring stick for academic progress. It also captures the last generation — mine — to grow up largely without cellphones.

Kahloon isn’t convinced screens are the true poison pill of American education. He argues that test scores and grades haven’t changed significantly for high-achieving students and that low expectations, the kind Bush cautioned against, are the real culprit. Phone bans during instructional time, he said, may not be enough to exit “the malaise of the past decades.”

But it would be naive to think the decades-long malaise of which Kahloon speaks is only ruining education. Few beyond luddites have been spared the wave of malaise from screens — and it is dulling every single facet of our lives. More on that in a moment.

Wisconsin has become the latest state to institute a ban on phones during instructional time, giving school boards less than two months to adopt policies by the July deadline. On May 4, the Madison school district floated a cellphone ban proposal that would restrict phone use all day for K-8 children and enforce a more lenient ban for high school students. The proposal is based on the work of five student researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Over commencement weekend, I spoke with Carlos Puga, one of the student researchers behind the study. Puga graduated Friday with a law degree and a master’s in public affairs. By the end of May, he’ll be a sworn attorney.

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Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

Conservative Republican Sen. Steve Nass, points out correctly that this is still more dollars going into public schools with no requirement for better results. But Madison senator and gubernatorial candidate Kelda Roys also blasted the deal as irresponsible and she has been endorsed by the state’s largest teachers union. She wouldn’t have made that statement if WEAC disagreed. Two other Democratic hopefuls, David Crowley and Joel Brennan, were also critical of the deal as was Senate Democratic leader Dianne Hesselbein. 

Given the very blandness of the compromise, it’s not clear what’s going on. Does WEAC want even more? 

Things are complicated by the fact that Evers, Vos and LeMahieu have all announced that they’re retiring. So, they have no leverage. They won’t be around to punish the opponents to their grand deal. 

Also curious is the absence of any money for the Stewardship land conservation program. Democrats, including Evers, turned down $28.5 million on offer from Republicans in the budget, meaning that the program will go dark at the end of June. But none of the critics mentioned that, suggesting that it’s not an item of political leverage. Those environmentalists who thought that they’d win a game of brinksmanship here have, it appears, been proven wrong once again.

As a matter of politics, this doesn’t look like it will have much impact on the fall elections. The refund checks aren’t big enough to get noticed much and what property tax relief might occur won’t show up until December.

——-

Notes on growing redistributed state taxpayer funds and k-12 systems

Bob Lang: Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau Report LRB-6707 and LRB-6710

———

Here’s something you don’t see every day: The spokesperson for Democratic @GovEvers getting into a public spat with a Democratic state senator over a tax cut-school aid bill that’s hung up in the Legislature today:

——-

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Helen Andrews:

Cash on the Block: The Broken Promise of Reinvestment in Black Urban Neighborhoods
by Beryl Satter
Harvard University Press, 416 pages

Beryl Satter is one of the most influential historians in the country, even if you don’t recognize her name. Her book Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009) was a major influence on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blockbuster essay “The Case for Reparations,” published in The Atlantic in 2014. The book’s subject, contract lending to black homebuyers in Chicago, formed the basis of Coates’s case that white wealth is based on “plunder.” Coates first learned about Clyde Ross, the black Chicago man who lost his home in an unscrupulous contract deal, around whom the “Reparations” essay is structured, from Satter’s book.  

Now Satter is back with a new book on a similar theme. Cash on the Block applies the thesis of the earlier book—that the racial wealth gap is the deliberate result of government policy—to a wider range of anti-poverty programs, from the Great Society to subprime mortgage lending. 

Adam Omary, Jennifer Huddleston:

AI in Health Care: A Policy Framework for Innovation, Liability, and Patient Autonomy—Part 8

The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Senator Josh Hawley’s Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act. The bill would require every American to verify their age before using a generative AI chatbot and would bar anyone under eighteen from using a “companion” chatbot at all. In the room during the markup were the parents of children who died by suicide after conversations with AI products. Their grief is unimaginable, and their motives are beyond reproach. But, concerningly, such a policy might quietly cost rather than save lives.

The strongest claim animating this bill is the belief that restricting minors’ access to AI chatbots will prevent suicide. On the available evidence, that claim is closer to a hypothesis than a finding—and a hypothesis that runs against several decades of data on how young people die. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American suicide rate began climbing around the year 2000—before ChatGPT, smartphones, or social media even existed. It accelerated through the 2010s, then, contrary to popular narrative, plateaued and modestly declined after 2018—even as generative AI moved from research labs into the pockets of nearly every teenager in the country. If chatbots were a meaningful driver of adolescent suicide, the curves should have moved together. They have not, and, importantly, suicide rates among young Americans remain the lowest among any age group. 

By Emma Nelson

When the Minneapolis City Council approved a controversial $15 minimum wage in 2017, no one knew what would happen next.

Workers and business owners made dueling predictions of boom or bust that would result from the citywide wage hike. Cities with similar policies were still phasing in the $15 minimum, so it was impossible to say who was right. 

Nearly a decade later, businesses in Minneapolis and St. Paul — which passed its own similar law in 2018 — say they’re stretched thinner than ever, and both cities have lost thousands of jobs.

Pressure on the hospitality industry is particularly acute. Restaurants and other leisure-related businesses say shrinking margins have left them less able to weather economic shocks, such as the federal immigration crackdown that forced many to temporarily close this winter.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which has studied the effects of the $15 minimum wage in Minneapolis since 2018, recently reported minimum wage policies have resulted in higher hourly pay but fewer available hours and positions. That has meant lower earnings: Between 2017 and 2021, the average decline in wage earnings across all industries was 1% in Minneapolis and about 2% in St. Paul. The research controlled for the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and unrest after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

——-

Nate Hood:

The results are in:

Minimum wage raises wages for those who can find jobs, but reduces the number of hours & the number of jobs.

You can still support this as a policy agenda, but when passed, I think cities policy makers pretended that the trade-off didn’t exist

Peachy Keenan

Karen Bass likely cheated in the last election over Rick Caruso, and she will cheat again, but it’s possible that Spencer and his campaign have finally, at long last, cracked the code for how to win in this bright blue hellhole.

The magical winning formula? It’s not an election about politics. It’s about survival. Left and right don’t matter anymore. Either we continue to get chased out of our own neighborhoods by gangs, fentanyl zombies, and robbed by the city’s corrupt homeless-NGO elite, or we put a stop to it. We either get the tents off our streets, or we never will. We either keep on dying, or we start living. 

No new laws are required. We simply enforce laws and homelessness disappears. “But where do these poor homeless junkies go?” Answer: wherever they want, as long as its not on the public byways of Los Angeles. Santa Monica doesn’t seem to mind being overrun by the zombies: the Third Street Promenade has plenty of room for more tents!

So to me, he’s basically a blank slate. I became aware of him immediately after the fires when he started using X to post outraged rants about the destruction of his home and Pacific Palisades neighborhood. 

The fire that took his home also took my own childhood home on Via de la Paz, which we lived in until I was five, and my mother’s longtime home in Malibu. My preschool burned down (Methodist). My childhood library is gone. All the local stores I remember. An entire community in ash.

UC Irvine:

UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business has made the bold move to drastically lower tuition of our Flex MBA by $30,000 and Executive MBA by $48,000 in an effort to expand access and deliver the value of a world-class education to working professionals. This significant tuition decrease is part of a broader strategy to provide exceptional return on investment. The Merage School is not simply cutting costs; it is enhancing every dimension of the MBA experience. Updated offerings integrate AI across the curriculum, expand flexible learning options, and shorten time to completion — all while reducing tuition.

FacultyLeaks.com:

The DEI apparatus that’s a staple throughout higher ed isn’t just legally dubious. It’s also a layer of red tape that can undermine its own goals. A FacultyLeaks.com reader at a large public university recently shared with us an anecdote that illustrates this.

Their social science department needed to hire a professor. The job ad was ready to post. Under normal circumstances, it should have gone live within days.

It didn’t. First it had to clear a DEI review committee run by the college’s new Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which took about two weeks. Then it went to a second DEI committee, this one created by a newly hired Vice Provost, for another two weeks.

What were they reviewing? Boilerplate stuff — the same equal-opportunity language that appears on every faculty job posting at the university, which had already been approved by legal, already approved by HR. Yet, it took two committees four weeks to rubber-stamp a form that should have been pro forma.

In this field, timing matters. While this department’s ad sat in a queue for a month, competitors were already scheduling interviews. Three or four strong candidates of color had accepted jobs elsewhere during the delay. The math was simple: a four-week holdup in a fast-moving job market means the best candidates are gone before you’re allowed to even evaluate their CV.

What remained, according to a committee member, was a pool of highly qualified white men and a handful of less-qualified white women — the stronger female candidates, like the candidates of color, were already gone. One went to an Ivy.

Cremieux:

Our society is obsessed with credentials. People with PhDs, MDs, JDs, and even Ed.Ds are lauded as if the credentials they’ve earned signify that they’re more generally capable than their uncredentialed peers. The fact that they are on average because there’s a correlation between real-world qualification and educational attainment is the kernel of truth that has allowed people to be misled into thinking that the credential, the degree itself, is what matters. But it’s not, and you’ll realize it’s obviously not if you think about it for even a moment:

Have you never met a bad doctor? A shoddy lawyer? A barista with a PhD?

Nevertheless, laws have been written, policies have been crafted, and decisions have been made on the basis of credentials that frequently don’t even matter and should instead be downweighted in favor of other, fairer and more important criteria.

Daniel Buck:

This academic year, Harvard has endured a dark night of the soul, including (among other troubles) facing down the consequences of grade inflation and searching for curricular absolution. In a much-publicized fall report, the university confessed that its current grading system is, in fact, a “problem”—an admission that reportedlyleft students “soul-crushed” and crying in their beds.

Undeterred, America’s oldest institution released in February a new plan to deflate grades. Will the new plan lead Harvard from the dark of inflated GPAs and into the light of more accurate grading, or will the institution “continue in Oblivion lost?”

Harvard Has a Plan

The primary recommendation of the new plan is a simple cap on the number of A’s. Professors can now assign only 20 percent of their students (plus four additional A grades, regardless of class size) the top mark. While I applaud just about any effort to curb grade inflation, Harvard’s reform gives reason for skepticism. Harvard is not the first university to try such a scheme.

First, Harvard is not the first university to try such a scheme. In 2004, Princeton noted similar problems with grade inflation and prohibited professors from rewarding A’s to more than 35 percent of their undergraduate classes. And it worked—at least a little. In the decade in which the policy existed, the percentage of A’s droppedfrom 47 to 41.8. A comparable policy, capping most course averages, led to similar results at Wellesley College.

Alas, both colleges reversed course. A report from a faculty committee at Princeton bemoaned increases in student anxiety and poor comparisons to peer universities that had not adopted similar grade caps. In response, the faculty voted in 2014 to remove the cap, and grades once again crept inexorably upward. If past is prologue, then this current initiative from Harvard could be destined for similar tragedy.

Kamden Mulder

Minnesota parents can be kept in the dark about important developments in their child’s life by school administrators and teachers who have broad authority under a widely adopted Minnesota School Boards Association (MSBA) policy to withhold information they deem sensitive.

At least 229 school districts in Minnesota maintain a “Protection and Privacy of Pupil Records” policy, according to the watchdog group Defending Education.

Based on language put out by the MSBA, the policy lists several categories of information educators are entitled to withhold from parents at a student’s behest, including, crucially, information related to the child’s health, which can only be released …

Steven Pinker:

The innumeracy of narrative journalism: Long NYT essay on the fertility decline blames it on uncertainty due to rises in mortality, inequality, unemployment, work vulnerability, poverty, etc., without citing a single datum on how any of these have changed over time, nor even the simplest correlations with fertility. | Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.

——

Choose life.

Rebekah Wanic:

Many have discussed the rapid decline in trust and esteem for institutions of higher education. Most settle on the fact that it is a problem of their own making. This is true: exorbitant prices, activism, suppression of speech, and discrimination in admissions. These are all problems created from within. So is the guiding ideology that views masculinity as toxic.

As Helen Andrews has pointed out, the damaging effects of wokeness coincide with the increased presence of women in institutional leadership. Universities were once factories of progress—not to be mistaken with progressive—led by innovative risk-takers. Today, they operate more as re-education camps designed to stamp out any hint of masculinity, labeling it as toxic. The feminization of higher education is an ideological takeover that has declared war on the characteristics of the “alpha male,” letting intellectual curiosity and excellence melt in the acid bath of cancel culture.  

Look at the numbers, because they don’t lie even if the administrators do.

Women now dominate college enrollment, graduate programs, and entire fields like psychology, education, and the humanities. Recent reports show that female representation in college leadership has also increased steadily. Meanwhile, the share of men on campus has dropped precipitously. Men now account for roughly 41 to 44 percent of U.S. undergraduates, down from an even split in the 1970s. Fewer men are enrolling in college, and those who do enroll are more likely to drop out. This shift is generally celebrated, and any area where women make up less than 50 percent is often treated as a problem to be solved. Why aren’t there more female university presidents?, activists bemoan. Instead, we should be asking what to do about the missing men.

Samuel Moyn

In Greek myth, Eos falls in love with Tithonus. She is the goddess of the dawn. He is a Trojan prince, yet still a mere mortal. Eos asks Zeus to give her mate the gift of eternal life—­but, foolishly, she forgets to ask for eternal youth too.

Tithonus never dies; he just grows older and older. “Ruthless age,” goes the Homeric hymn recounting his story, is “dreaded even by the gods.” Tithonus becomes more decrepit and wizened with each passing year. Eventually, when he can no longer move, Eos has to shut him away, in a place where “he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.” Eternal life amid the decline of one’s faculties is not a blessing but a curse. “Me only cruel immortality / Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,” Tithonus complains in Alfred Tennyson’s rendition of the myth (published in these pages in 1860), in a rare moment of lucidity that emerges from his everlasting gibberish.

The story of Tithonus no longer feels so outlandish, because our society postpones death to an unprecedented degree. Unlike immortals, we still pass. But the great majority of us, and not only the bad, now die old. In whatever nursing home he was parked in, Tithonus must have looked much like we increasingly do, as doctors continuously defer our mortality. We are approaching a time when a legion of Tithonuses will live in our midst. We have already felt the social and political consequences.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink. The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless. Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-­the-­job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us. Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-­one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-­living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down. Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-­five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year. Last year, a seventy-­five-­year-­old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.

Olivia Herken:

The $1.8 billion deal comes after months of negotiations that were first sparked by a desire from both sides of the aisle to lower property taxes. The package, which lawmakers will vote on this week, includes a historic increase in the state’s special education reimbursement rate and more than $850 million in stimulus checks sent to Wisconsin residents to help them pay for rising costs.

“After months of hard work, I’m proud we were able to put politics aside on a plan to use a portion of our historic state surplus to do the right thing for Wisconsinites across our state,” Evers said in a press release.

The deal adds $300 million to the state’s special education fund, helping bring the reimbursement rate to 50% of school districts’ costs starting next school year. The funding will also help ensure the rate meets 42% this school year, as was promised in the state budget, up from 32%.

An additional $300 million in general school aid will also be part of the legislation, and that funding increase will begin next school year and will in turn provide property tax relief to residents. In total, the package directs over $600 million to K-12 schools. Evers told reporters the school funding was the biggest win of the compromise.

Jesse Opoien & Molly Beck:

• Wisconsin Democrats are criticizing a bipartisan deal for school funding and property tax relief.
• The $1.8 billion plan was negotiated by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and GOP legislative leaders.
• Critics, including Democratic gubernatorial candidates, called the agreement a “backroom deal” and an “election year bribe.”
• Evers called the deal a compromise. “That’s how government is supposed to work.”

———

WisPolitics:

The state previously had a projected surplus of nearly $2.5 billion at the end of the 2025-27 budget. The price tag of the deal would be offset somewhat by new revenue projections from the Evers administration suggesting the state could take in $300 million to $350 million more in tax collections than what was previously projected.

The election-year deal includes the money for education that Evers wanted, the property tax relief that Assembly Republicans sought and the rebates that Senate Republicans demanded be part of any deal.

Mitchell Schmidt & Kimberly Wethal:

While the state’s two-year spending plan held general school aid steady, lawmakers did agree to raise the reimbursement rate for special education costs to 42% in the first year and 45% by 2027. However, due to increased costs, those funds will not reach the rate lawmakers had intended.

Evers’ office said the new deal would bring funding to 42% in a matter of weeks, to achieve that goal before the current fiscal year ends at the close of June. Special education funding would reach 50% the following year.

“Although we are waiting to see the final language of the agreement, initial conversations indicate that this is a significant increase in the state’s support of public schools,” Madison Schools Superintendent Joe Gothard said in a statement. “It is also a direct response to the fiscal crisis that I and other district leaders have shared for months.”

Wisconsin Technical College System spokesperson Katy Pettersen said in a statement the additional funds will only offset property taxes and will not strengthen the colleges’ ability to invest in workforce needs or expand enrollment.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Bob Lang: Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau Report LRB-6707 and LRB-6710

“still more dollars going into public schools with no requirement for better results”

50Can:

The “State of Educational Opportunity in America: A Survey of 23,000 Parents” is the second edition of a 50-state study from 50CAN and Edge Research. The survey report offers an unprecedented, state-by-state examination of the current education landscape and what is important to parents.

The 275-page report is available for download in full and by question or state.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT

Erin Gretzinger

But between the years where scores jumped, the state Department of Public Instruction adjusted testing benchmarks and lowered the threshold to score proficient. The number of students reading and writing proficiently statewide went from 39% to 51%.

The department cautions the public against comparing test scores before and after the change because the results “cannot be directly compared to prior years.”

Critics of the benchmark changes have arguedthe move obscures school performance over time and inflates the number of students meeting grade-level expectations. The Department of Public Instruction, led by state Superintendent Jill Underly, has defended the changes.

Got a news tip?

The Cap Times welcomes tips from readers to help us inform our community. Email tips@captimes.com or visit captimes.com/tips for more options.

In statements to school staff and supporters, as well as lawmakers, One City often hasn’t cited the change in benchmarks alongside its boost in scores. Asked this week about that omission, Caire said the school doesn’t reference the change because it’s “hard to tell how this impacted schools.”

“Some schools saw no growth from it while others saw some. DPI made those changes. That’s up to them,” Caire wrote in an email to the Cap Times. “States make changes to their assessments all the time.”

Under the new benchmarks, One City’s scores the past two school years show the percentage of Black students who were proficient in reading and writing remained roughly the same.

——-

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. in 2026,

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

The single biggest problem in state governance is the political dominance of public unions. These include the SEIU, Afscme and the teachers unions. Several states are now pressing reforms that curb their coercive hold over their members.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little recently signed a bill that will end taxpayer support for teachers unions, notably the Idaho Education Association. The bill will prevent school districts from collecting dues directly from teachers paychecks and limit unions’ ability to recruit members during school hours. It will also end the practice of giving teachers paid time off for “union activities” like supporting candidates for office, soliciting union membership or joining union protests or advocacy.

Public unions count on the ability to mobilize members for political causes while still on the public payroll. Teachers unions swing political weight because their political spending overwhelmingly favors Democrats and because the left knows unions can turn out their members for political causes on short notice. The new legislation will prevent school districts from sharing teachers’ personal information unless the teacher authorizes the disclosure.

Arizona is working on similar guardrails for public unions with a proposed constitutional amendment that would prevent school districts from collecting union dues through a payroll deduction. The bill, which has to be adopted by the Legislature to get onto the November ballot, would ban teacher strikes and require unions to distribute communications off school property.

—–

Related: Act 10.

Jane Mangelli:

Gnōthi seauton—know thyself!—was the maxim at Delphi that Socrates famously adopted. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) commends Yale University for its willingness to take a hard look in the mirror with its newly released Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. While so many others avoid taking any responsibility for the decline of American higher education, Yale has acknowledged the need to make changes in the face of the American people’s deep dissatisfaction with our colleges and universities: “Those of us in higher education have too often resisted calls to critically examine our own institutions, professions, and modes of thought,” the Report states. “We must be willing to admit where we have been wrong and where we might improve, even as we defend what is essential about higher education and its academic mission.” This admission alone is a sign of wisdom.

So is the Report’s acknowledgement of Yale’s mission drift:

In 2016, departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, Yale expanded its mission statement to include “improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” These are all worthy goals. But they are not what makes a university a university.

We recommend that Yale adopt a focused university-wide mission statement such as the one currently articulated in its own Faculty Handbook: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”

Steering Yale’s course back to its core academic mission is an act of courage in American higher education today.

A slide from a recent Madison School District Presentation:

Shipwreck:

The idea that the legislature would lower the retirement age to 53 in order to remove them all is just beyond wild.

Then they would install 7 new Justices who would have to commit in advance to reversing the prior Court’s decision — that tells you everything you would ever need to know about anyone who would pledge to do that.

Three Justices voted in the minority, but you can’t exempt them from the retirement because they might object to a corrupt process to remove their colleagues for no reason other than naked partisan politics.

Brooks Summary:

When Wisconsin women thrive—and when Wisconsin moms thrive—our families thrive, our communities thrive, and our state thrives. 

After years of fighting to get this done, I was proud to sign this expansion into law for our state.

——-

When Tony is trying to take credit for a bill passed because of the hard work of people like @RepSnyder85 and @reptoddnovak, they’re called “moms.”

When he’s trying to pander to liberal activists, they’re called “inseminated persons.”

———

Wisconsin Governor Defends Push To Redefine ‘Mother’ as ‘Inseminated Person’

Kyle Saunders:

In two weeks, a Department of Education rulemaking committee most Americans have never heard of will vote on what could be the most consequential restructuring of the federal accreditation framework since the 1992 Higher Education Amendments, assuming the rule survives implementation, litigation, and the next administration. The committee is called AIM(Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization). Its first session of negotiations wrapped April 17. Its second and final session runs May 18-22, and the vote on draft regulations comes at the end of that week.

If you’ve been following the bifurcation argument I’ve been making about American higher ed (or the shorter, broader-stakes version aimed at readers who don’t usually track the sector), this is one of the four converging vectors I’ve been tracking. The honest framing is parallel rather than causal. AIM has its own policy genealogy running from the Spellings Commission (2006) through conservative reform think tanks, and it would have happened with or without the degree-hacking phenomenon. What’s notable is that the rulemaking and the market are pushing in the same direction at the same time: outcomes-based accountability that collapses the credentialing function down to measurable outputs.

AIM is also a piece of policy most of the sector hasn’t quite reckoned with. So before the vote, here’s a primer on what AIM is, what it’s about to decide, and why the inside-baseball framing understates the stakes.

Greg Lukianoff:

Every attempt to shut down campus speech should trigger an independent investigation asking two questions:

1) Did administrators do anything to stop the censorship?

2) Did administrators do anything to encourage, excuse, or facilitate it?

Students are responsible for their own actions. But the deeper scandal is administrative complicity.

In a healthy university, the answer to right-wing demands to fire a professor would be: “No way.” And the answer to left-wing attempts to shut down a speaker would be: “Not on my watch.”

Does that sound fanciful? At this point, probably. Because it has become hard to imagine administrators actually acting this way.

The dirty little secret is that too many of them have enabled this for years. Some are hired into ideological jobs built around policing speech, running BRTs, and managing “harm” rather than protecting open inquiry. Sometimes the damage comes through omission: refusing to punish obvious censorship. Sometimes it comes through commission, as at Stanford Law School several years ago, when administrators actively helped the shutdown along. Here, it looks like a combination of both.

Wall Street Journal Comment:

Your editorial “Making Public Unions More Accountable” (May 5) shows that many states make it easy for public employee unions to use taxpayer resources to advance their political agendas. That dynamic was on display last week when Chicago Public Schools caved to Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union, allowing teachers and students to ditch school to attend socialist-backed labor rallies.

There’s never a good excuse for taxpayer-funded field trips to one-sided political rallies. In Chicago, where so many students are already missing school, it’s particularly indefensible. Roughly a quarter of Chicago high-school students missed more than a month of school in the 2023-24 school year, and chronic absenteeism has persisted. Graduation rates, meanwhile, continue to rise—even as dozens of the city’s schools have failed to educate a single student to grade-level proficiency, according to the watchdog group Wirepoints.

WisPolitics:

MILWAUKEE — A new statewide survey of 1,658 likely Wisconsin voters by City Forward Collective and CFC Action Fund finds Wisconsin voters deeply concerned about the performance of the state’s public schools and ready to support candidates who treat accountability and outcomes as the central education issue heading into the 2026 election cycle.

“Wisconsin voters are sending a clear signal, and it isn’t a partisan one,” said Colleston Morgan Jr., CFC’s Executive Director. “They want schools that prepare kids for real jobs and real futures. They want accountability: public dollars tied to public results. The candidate for office – Democrats and Republicans alike – who listen to this signal early, especially the ones still introducing themselves to primary voters, will have an opening to lead on an issue that matters to our state’s future.”

Half of voters statewide say the state provides too little K-12 funding. At the same time, 63% say Wisconsin’s academic standards are too low, and 63% oppose the Department of Public Instruction’s 2025 decision to update school report-card benchmarks. Just 26% of Wisconsin voters believe their public schools are doing a good job preparing students for jobs and careers.

Gregory Conti:

Several years ago, one of my colleagues at Princeton University hosted a lecture on religion and free speech. The talk didn’t seem to be landing with the students. Finally, he realized why: The speaker had made repeated reference to the Ten Commandments, and several students didn’t know what they were.

This isn’t an isolated problem. It’s increasingly common on college campuses to encounter students who are unfamiliar with the most basic features of Christianity, such as the difference between the Old and New testaments or between Catholics and Protestants. They seldom recognize the allusions to the Bible that appear in Shakespeare’s work or in Lincoln’s second inaugural address (or in Obama’s first, for that matter). These students are bright, conscientious and curious. But they lack religious literacy — and their ignorance of religious ideas means they struggle to understand a wide array of Western art, literature and philosophy.

This is a development that even nonbelievers like myself should find troubling. A little over a century ago, the influential legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt wrote that “all political concepts are theological concepts secularized.” Even if one thinks this is an exaggeration, it points to the difficulty of attaining any real understanding of the tradition of Western political theory without religious literacy. The same goes for other subjects: Neither Shakespeare nor Austen nor Mozart nor Rembrandt nor John Ford nor Oscar Wilde can be appreciated absent a grounding in Christianity.

Secularization is sometimes (wrongly, in my view) celebrated as a victory for reason over superstition. But a lack of contact with religion — and particularly with Christianity and its history — is an obstacle to mastering many subjects and to attaining the kind of broad cultural competency that higher education is expected to provide. Take my field, the history of political thought. This subject is at the center of many general-education curriculums, for it goes to the core of liberal education’s promise to help train responsible citizens. But it is hard to appreciate even basic truths about the Western political inheritance without grasping the ways in which thinkers of the past reacted to, or against, the Christian faith.

Ed.gov:

Thanks to President Trump’s Working Families Tax Cuts Act (the Act), new loan limits taking effect this summer will curb excessive borrowing and force institutions to evaluate their costs. These reasonable caps will help prevent borrowers from taking on debt they may struggle to repay while putting downward pressure on institutions to lower costs, making higher education more affordable for America’s students.

How does the Act impact federal student loans?  

The Act affects both the Grad PLUS and the Parent PLUS loan programs and introduces reasonable loan caps on graduate-level federal student borrowing. Undergraduate student limits remain unchanged.  

The Grad PLUS loan program, established in 2006, allows graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance with no aggregate or lifetime limit. When introduced, it effectively removed federal borrowing caps for graduate students. Since then, both tuition and loan debt for graduate students has skyrocketed. Although graduate students make up a relatively small share of total borrowers, they account for a disproportionate share of the loan portfolio. For example, in 2024-25, graduate students represented 16.8% of borrowers but received 46.6% of total loan disbursements that year. 

The Act eliminates the Grad PLUS program, and instead responsibly reinstates borrowing limits for graduate programs by introducing new annual and aggregate limits on federal student loans for graduate and professional students beginning on July 1, 2026. Sensible limits will help curb overborrowing and put pressure on institutions to reduce costs, including unnecessary administrative spending. 

Michael Shellenberger:

At the heart of the case for progressivism is compassion. New York’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, paused the police sweeps that had moved homeless people indoors in winter. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass cut the fire department’s budget while expanding city services and proposing cash assistancefor people in the country illegally. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that would have allowed taxpayer dollars to support sober housing.

The result of those policies is death and destruction. In San Francisco, a mentally ill homeless woman lived on a sidewalk until her feet rotted from gangrene, after which the hospital amputated them and discharged her back to the same block. After Mayor Mamdani paused the sweeps, at least 19 mentally ill or drug addicted homeless people died outdoors in a single cold snap. In Los Angeles, the underfunded fire department failed to stop the fires in Malibu and other neighborhoods last year, and encampment fires continue to shut down freeways.

FacultyLeaks.com

On Tuesday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a federal lawsuit against The New York Times, alleging the newspaper passed over a white male employee for a promotion because of his race and sex. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, says the Times’s “stated race and sex-based representation goals” drove the decision not to advance his candidacy for a deputy editor role.

The Times called the suit “politically motivated.” On X, Harvard professor Maya Sen posted the complaint with a punchy observation: “Very short hop, skip & jump to academia.”

Whether others view that as a warning or a welcome, the connection is hard to argue with. More on that later. But let’s stay with journalism for a moment — because the EEOC lawsuit isn’t the revelation. It’s the confirmation. The discrimination has been happening in plain sight, announced in press releases and class photos, for years. The only news is that a federal agency finally decided to look.

The Class Photos

If you want to understand what’s happening in American journalism hiring, skip the mission statements. Look at the pictures. Try finding a white male in a recent intern class photo. It’s like a game of Where’s Waldo — except in most of these cohorts, Waldo isn’t hiding. He’s just not there.

This has been visible for years. In 2016, a Huffington Post executive editor tweeted a photo of an all-female editors meeting as a celebration of diversity. The backlash wasn’t about the absence of men — it was that the women were too white. The missing men weren’t the bug. They were the feature. A decade later, the pattern has only intensified.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora

On Aug. 5, 2025, FCPS Chief of Schools Geovanny Ponce, who earns an annual salary of $289,565, emailed hundreds of district administrators to announce the program. “FCPS is launching a district-sponsored doctoral cohort program in partnership with George Mason University,” he wrote. “This program will lead to an Education Leadership PhD concentration, providing an opportunity to deepen your expertise and advance your career.” 

On Dec. 16, 2025, Kathryn Blackburn, a program assistant at George Mason University, emailed dozens of selected FCPS administrators to notify them about the program’s upcoming virtual orientation. “During this orientation,” she wrote, “students and leadership will learn about program requirements and expectations, student responsibilities, as well as answer questions about the program.”

The Executive Limitation 4 Monitoring Reportopens in a new tab—intended to demonstrate and certify whether the district’s superintendent is complying with School Board policy on human resources, specifically how the district manages its workforce—was presented at the Dec. 4, 2025, meeting of the Fairfax County School Board. It describes the district-funded program, stating, “FCPS supports high-achieving leaders through this rigorous academic experience, which will include dedicated FCPS-led in-person and hybrid sessions.” 

The report, which appears to be the only publicly available information on the program, does not outline its cost to taxpayers or the application process for interested administrators. It does, however, specify that eligible participants must have at least five years of experience as a principal, director, or above, and “must commit to remaining in FCPS for a period of time following completion of the program.” 

Jenny Peek:

The gravity of Madison’s literacy crisis didn’t come into focus for Patterson until she became a literacy teacher leader with the Madison Metropolitan School District; before that she had been teaching fourth and fifth grade for 15 years.

“You kind of know as a teacher but once you have an admin-type view you start seeing it at a district-wide level and a nationwide level and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Patterson says. “So that’s when my journey to literacy really began.

……

College students will get training, online and in person, from both Morgridge and the district on social-emotional learning, mentoring, and the science of reading, though the exact details of that training are still being figured out.

Despite building strong relationships, and its long tenure, it’s unclear how effective Schools of Hope has been in improving reading. Over the course of its two-plus decades, literacy rates in Madison have remained relatively unchanged.

During the 2024-25 school year, 51.2% of the district’s third through fifth graders were not meeting grade level expectations in reading, according to the Forward exam, which is given to all third through fifth graders in the state.

It’s even worse for students of color. That same school year, 83.6% of the district’s Black elementary school students and 73.8% of the district’s Hispanic elementary school students were not meeting literacy expectations. That’s in comparison to 23.6% of the district’s white students.

—-

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Minnesota Department of Education Summary:

“This concerning number of increases in risk behavior (18 across 79 programs) raises the question of the possible influence of “risk compensation,” a phenomenon in which the perception of condoms as being highly effective would lead to increased risk behavior. Evidence for this has recently been documented in international school populations.74

Perhaps of equal importance, the credible scientific evidence reported here contradicts the oft-repeated claims that research shows abstinence education (AE) is ineffective and/or harmful.13 • 75 • 76 • 77 Seven studies judged to be of adequate scientific rigor by either UNESCO, the CDC, or HHS found that AE produced a long-term delay in sexual initiation (three of these also found long-term reductions in sexual activity by sexually experienced teens). The rate of AE success was about one of two (47%) and the rate of harmful impact (6%) was about what could occur by chance. And there was strong evidence (nine studies) negating the concern that AE does harm by reducing the use of condoms.

Given the claims cited above, it may surprise some people that this database appears to show better evidence for AE than for CSE in U.S. schools. This is especially noteworthy considering the markedly fewer number of available AE studies, and the fact that unlike the CSE results, most of the AE evidence was produced by independent evaluators. The amount of evidence of effectiveness appeared somewhat greater for AE than for CSE in U .5. schools (seven AE studies vs. three CSE studies) and the success rate for AE programs (47%) appeared to be much higher than that of school-based CSE (15%).”

——

More:

“It might be worth your time to search “oppose” to see what opposition there is to the proposed health standards.”

Madeleine Kashkooli:

Protesters interrupted and shut down a Berkeley Forum and College of Engineering event featuring Google chief scientist and Gemini lead Jeff Dean this afternoon, criticizing the use of Gemini AI in the genocide in Gaza.

Approximately 20 protesters marched over from the May Day rally held at noon in front of California Hall. After the rally concluded, a student organizer announced that a speaker from Google’s Gemini AI was speaking at the Grimes Engineering Center and called on rally attendees to join him in disrupting the event, which had started at 1 p.m. The group of protesters headed over to Grimes and entered the event, held in the Eugene Jarvis Auditorium, at 1:37 p.m.

One of the student protesters, a member of Students Organizing for Liberation at UC Berkeley, walked onto the stage with a megaphone and interrupted Dean’s speech. The student led the other protesters, who lined up in the aisle of the event, in a chant of “UC, UC, you can’t hide, you are funding genocide.”

“What do you say for your AI being used to kill Palestinians?” the student asked Dean.

Dean responded that he appreciated the students’ message but was trying to deliver a “scientific lecture.”

During a 10-minute back-and-forth between the protesters, event organizers and attendees, the audience largely expressed support for Dean, chanting his name and cheering when asked if they wanted to hear from him, and booed the protesters.

——

This Berkeley incident is part of a much bigger problem.

@TheFIREorg has already recorded 108 campus deplatforming attempts in 2026, and it’s only May 7.

Sean Stevens breaks down the latest deplatforming data here.👇

Wall Street Journal:

Parents currently don’t need the state’s permission, and the state doesn’t mandate annual reviews for homeschooled students. That freedom makes it appealing for many parents. About 1,800 students left public school for homeschooling in Connecticut in the last fiscal year.

Roughly 3% of the state’s nearly 500,000 K-12 students are homeschooled, according to a 2025 Johns Hopkins analysis. Nationwide, homeschool students perform at least as well as, and often better than, public-school peers on tests.

Yet the state House passed a bill last week that would mandate parents notify the state if they want to homeschool. The bill makes all parents declare their children’s enrollment status annually. But starting in the 2027-28 school year, parents withdrawing a child to homeschool would have to appear in person at the local school district office to sign a form.

The bill would also subject those parents to an inspection by the state’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) that can take up to seven days. If a parent is on the state’s child abuse and neglect registry or otherwise caught up in a case with the DCF, even an unresolved one, the family would be forbidden from homeschooling.

Anyone who’s had experience with government bureaucracy knows how this can go. Inspectors who have a bias against homeschooling can easily find a reason to bar such instruction. Using an open case—which could be unresolved for a variety of reasons—as a criterion looks like a violation of due process.

Michael Ford

In communities across the United States, citizens are paying a hidden tax. No, it is not some new fee or utility hike. It is the cost of local government dysfunction. Here in Wisconsin, historically known as a good-government state, news headlines contain stories of local city councils and school boards plagued by infighting, culture war conflict, partisan politics, pettiness and sometimes worse. Ultimately, a dysfunctional governing board hurts the very residents our municipalities and school districts are designed to serve.

For the past 12 years, I have taught Master of Public Administration (MPA) students working in local government. When they consider a job as a city administrator, department head or even an entry-level employee, the first thing they do is Google the municipality, watch a board meeting and talk to others in their professional network. They are looking for red flags. Red flags include:

• Board conflict that is personal or partisan
• Elected officials undermining colleagues during or outside meetings
• Board meetings that feel like congressional hearings with public employees in the hot seat
• Frequent turnover in management positions
• Persistent negativity

When qualified professionals see these red flags, they look elsewhere. Cities and school districts quickly develop reputations as no-go zones for top-tier candidates. The result is often less-qualified employees and employees who view the position as a temporary stop until something better comes along. Either way, the municipality or school district pays the opportunity costs of more training, more job searches and lower organizational capacity.

——-

Early Literacy Screener Map.

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

by Michael Toscano, Lyman Stone and Grant Bailey

On February 19, 2026, we released a new report, Resilient Children, Struggling Parents: Mapping American Parenting, based on a new survey of almost 24,000 U.S. parents of over 40,000 children, including 2,600 teenagers. This large national sample of parents and teenagers enabled us to analyze parenting cultures around the country on the state level. We found that states where a concentration of parents are actively seeking to raise their children to be independent, free-spirited, resilient adults also tend to be the states where parents say their parenting approach is less supported by surrounding cultural norms.

Comparing parenting cultures by state is an invaluable tool for parents, educators, civic leaders, and policymakers who want to come along side families to help them raise resilient children. With this brief, however, we assess parenting practices on a national level. Below, we analyze the distance American kids are allowed to venture from home, how much time they spend online, what devices they use, the level of restrictions on their smartphones, and how much time they spend with friends. 

We find that American kids spend enormous amounts of time online with very few significant restrictions. Yet, they have very strict limits on their activities in the real world, often not allowed to go far from home. These kinds of norms and rules are strongly shaped by social class, such that higher socioeconomic-status parents tend to restrict screen use more.

Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris and Claire Cain Miller

With fewer students, many public school districts are confronting unfilled classrooms, and hard choices about school closures.

As American women have fewer babies each year, the number of young children in the United States is dwindling. The trend is now catching up to the nation’s public school districts.

There are simply fewer children to attend school in America today: The number of public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade has fallen in 30 states since the mid-2010s.

Enrollment in U.S. public schools plunged during the pandemic. Public schools lost more than a million students.

——

Choose life.

It is interesting to observe the organizations and fund$ that support anti birth and family policies.

Gillian Tett:

A few months ago a New York financier told me he had just experienced a “first”: his 2025 summer interns “were the first true AI natives I have seen”. This meant they had grown up not only among digital tech, but AI too.

So how did it go? He winced. While those wannabe masters of the universe initially seemed wildly impressive, when senior financiers later probed their ideas they found them alarmingly shallow.

Consequently this person’s company made fewer return offers and is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and more humanities students instead.

“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” he explains. Human brainpower is needed to handle the silicon variant.

Now, this is just one tiny anecdote in a tsunami of emerging AI-linked stories and I daresay there are counter-examples. But it illustrates a bigger point: as AI fever sweeps finance, it is neither delivering the profit nirvana predicted by tech evangelists nor hastening the doom the Cassandras have warned about. Or at least not yet

Mark Gilson:

Well, what I’ve been predicting for several years now happened.

MDE has eliminated the ability to compare MCA reading results to past results:

“Because the standards and assessments have changed, results from the Reading MCA-IV/Alt
MCA cannot be compared to results from the Reading MCA-III/MTAS.”

Why do the hard work of trying to restore academic performance in Minnesota when you can just eliminate the ability to compare to past results.

William Deresiewicz

It’s no coincidence, it seems to me, that the decline of liberal democracy, as a fact and value, has succeeded the decline of liberal education as a fact and value. If we are ever to revive the first, an essential step will be to resurrect the second. The two “liberals,” after all, are the same. They refer to political liberty, as understood by ancient Athens, republican Rome, the American Founders: not libertarian freedom from individual constraint but collective self-government by civic equals. Its opposite is tyranny, arbitrary rule by a single will, a dispensation we’re becoming more familiar with than we had ever thought we’d be.

Liberal education is that form of education that prepares individuals for the exercise of political liberty—in other words, for citizenship. (Its opposite, in Aristotle’s account, is servile education, that which aims at mere utility, the performance of an economic function.) For generations, its importance was a governing idea in American higher education. In 1945, to pick a single milestone, Harvard published what became a widely influential volume, General Education in a Free Society (known from its color as the Redbook)—a pedagogical program, as the war neared its end, for the emerging era of mass political participation. “A republic, if you can keep it,” said Benjamin Franklin, and liberal education, which the Founders also championed, is part of how you keep it.

But citizenship, too, is a concept in long-term decline (along with republic, for that matter). On campus, as a goal of education, it has given way to mere utility, salaried servility, veiled, at selective schools, beneath the drapery of “social justice,” the language of changing the world, which bids young people be not citizens but activists.

Forrest Bohler:

When I applied to medical school in the midst of the pandemic and in the wake of the death of George Floyd, I had reason to think I was a competitive applicant, particularly for my state’s public medical school, which favors in-state candidates with strong academic records. I didn’t assume I was entitled to admission, but I thought I would get in somewhere. I didn’t.

So I did what failed applicants are told to do: I sought feedback. Eventually, I spoke with an admissions officer at one of the schools that rejected me. He told me that I was extremely qualified and had everything the school looked for in an applicant. He said he couldn’t give me a concrete reason I wasn’t accepted, other than that I didn’t fit the demographic the school was prioritizing, and that other applicants were viewed as having “traveled a longer distance” to medicine. My application, he said, was evaluated through that lens.

That conversation unsettled me in a way I didn’t immediately recognize. I was being told I was qualified, capable, and deserving but simultaneously that those qualities were not enough due to certain immutable characteristics. I had spent years learning about discrimination as something that happened to other people. Nothing in my education had prepared me to think that it could happen to people like me. 

Then it did.

Perhaps I should have seen it coming. The requirements for admission into medical school vary markedly depending on who the applicant is. According to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the academic thresholds required for acceptance differ substantially between racial groups. The average MCAT score of a white applicant who is accepted into a medical school is 512.4, approximately the 85th percentile nationally. By contrast, the average MCAT score for accepted American Indian applicants is 502.2 (56th percentile), for accepted black applicants 505.7 (67th percentile), and for accepted Hispanic applicants 506.4 (69th percentile).

The disparities are even more pronounced when we look at the applicant pool as a whole. White applicants overall, including those who are rejected, have an average MCAT score of 507.8, roughly the 73rd percentile. In other words, accepted black, Hispanic, and American Indian medical students matriculate with lower MCAT scores, on average, than white applicants who have not yet been accepted to medical school. The same pattern appears when we turn to undergraduate GPA. White applicants apply with an average GPA of 3.7, but require an average GPA of 3.8 to gain admission, while accepted black, Hispanic, and American Indian applicants matriculate with average GPAs of 3.59, 3.66, and 3.64, respectively.

Christina Buttons

Governor Gavin Newsom used California’s youth mental-health crisis to build a sprawling therapeutic bureaucracy rooted in the idea that white supremacy was driving children’s distress—and committed billions in taxpayer dollars to it.

Beginning in 2021, the Newsom administration justified a major overhaul of the state’s youth mental-health system by invoking “an escalating behavioral health crisis” marked by “severe outcomes,” including a dramatic increase in hospital visits for self-harm and suicide during the Covid pandemic. California was failing the children in greatest need, leaving them boarding in emergency rooms, traveling hundreds of miles for treatment, and cycling through short-term programs that failed to stabilize them. And this remains the case today.

But the system that Newsom’s effort has built over the past five years, with heavy input from progressive activists, did not focus primarily on those breakdowns in care. Instead, the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI) was organized around “behavioral health,” a legitimate term encompassing mental illness and substance abuse, but broad enough for activists to exploit in service of a statewide equity agenda. The effort centered on “prevention”—the screening, surveillance, and medicalization of children who were not the ones driving the crisis in the first place.

Created through the 2021 Budget Act, the CYBHI was a five-year, multidepartment project with an initial $4.7 billion price tag and a mandate to “reimagine and transform” the behavioral-health system. It became the centerpiece of Governor Newsom’s Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health. As part of a buildout costing more than $15 billion, the state turned schools into sites of mental-health service delivery, expanded Medi-Cal to reimburse social services, and offered grants for “community-defined” practices in place of evidence-based ones, making programs centered on progressive activism and “gender-affirming” services eligible for public funding.

reddit link:

AIO? My classmate reported me to the DEI office because I said I was “exhausted” during a group project and she claimed it was ableist 

I am in a 4-person group project for my sociology class. Last Tuesday during our meeting I said “guys I’m exhausted, can we wrap this up?”

My classmate J went quiet immediately. The next day I got an email from the DEI office saying a complaint was filed against me for “ableist language” because apparently the word exhausted can be harmful to people with chronic fatigue conditions.

———

Will Flanders:

Decades of over diagnosis with mental disorders, safe spaces and DEI at universities has led us to a place where college students can’t even use the word “exhausted” without fear of retribution from the DEI bureaucracy.

Scott Kupor:

When Sir John Templeton coined the phrase – “The most dangerous words in investing are: ‘This time is different’” – he was not thinking about AI. In fact, Templeton uttered these fateful words in October 1987, just a short time before the Black Monday stock market crash. For nearly the past 40 years, Templeton’s words have been a warning to those who ignore history and precedent and instead assume things may play out differently this time than they have previously – often to one’s financial detriment.

The AI “doomers” have now adopted Templeton’s words, arguing that in fact this time is different. That is, the doomers claim AI will destroy jobs – and potentially destroy civilization – reducing us to a labor-less society in which we will have gobs of free time but without delivering significant enough economic growth to sustain our society.

Ok – I am exaggerating a bit for effect – but the arguments are not far off from this. But let’s focus on the core job destruction argument because that is the key doomer worry – AI will inevitably cause unemployment to spike and standards of living to fall precipitously.

I also understand from talking to many of my OPM colleagues that this is of concern to some of you. It’s completely understandable to feel angst about this topic – impending change often fosters such feelings. My goal with this post is to try offer a historical perspective on the jobs question. I don’t pretend to know all of the answers – and reasonable minds disagree on this topic – but hopefully this provides some food for thought and shows the opportunity we have to better serve our customers and the American people.

A quick disclaimer before we go further. I am trying to make a balanced historical argument in this post, but admittedly I am biased by my experiences. I have spent my entire professional career in the technology industry – as an operator and investor – and believe strongly in the power of technology, both to do well and (in the wrong hands) to facilitate evil. Technology is not the panacea for all of the world’s problems, but I do believe technological innovation is a key factor in our ability to enjoy long-term economic, job and productivity growth, stable economies, consumer surplus, and national security. So, you’ve been warned!

Beatrice Lawrence:

Kate Archer Kent: How do you plan for this college to interact with the rest of the university?

Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau: There’s a research side of that, and there’s an educational side of that. The research side is through partnerships. For example, we’re about to launch a new interaction on health and AI and the future of research and education, in that space between us and the School of Medicine and Public Health. That’s such a great example of the type of possibilities that are there because so much is changing about what it means to be a person working in health tech. What does it mean to be an MD in the future? How much do you have to know about the world of AI to be a successful doctor in the future? We’re going to address that directly. 

It also has an educational bent. We’re hoping that, as we develop new classes, we think about not just classes for our students … but we also hope to be in partnership with all other colleges as a center point for education in what students need to know today that’s going to help them when they leave here to enter the workforce. That’ll probably start with a class or two and eventually be a certificate. I’m hoping we can do a lot of dual majors and dual degrees across all the other colleges, and I think we’ll be really well-positioned to do that.

KAK: What is your approach to teaching ethical issues in AI?

RAD: (This is) exactly why a university has to have a strong unit that is at the center of this world. The world is changing and a lot of it seems …  like the industry is shaping this. Where’s the voice of something other than the tech industry? I think a university can be a lead in that. 

I’m a computer systems expert, so my expertise is not in ethics, and there’s people in our college that have that expertise. And of course, we’ll be working with others on campus that have expertise, (like) the Department of Philosophy. There’s a lot of places where we’ll work together to think about what kind of ethical training students should have here.

It’s one thing to have a class, and it’s quite another thing to make the hard decisions when you’re faced with an ethical conundrum in the real world. So what we can hope to do here is expose students to these ideas and thoughts in class — and as much as we can in real-world situations. Like much of campus, we’ll be doing more experiential learning, where you work in more industry settings, so you see real problems. Hopefully we can give students enough courage of their own conviction, so when they leave here and they’re faced with a tough ethical choice, that they can know what the right thing to do is.

Angie Schmitt

The decline is unsustainable. We’re in uncharted territory.

I was thinking about this mom I used to know today because I happened to be driving down her street.

Our kids attended pre-school together for a while. We got to know each other a little bit because every day we would arrive at the back door of the school at pickup. She and another mom and I usually hung around after school and let the kids play on the playground. 

I had recently quit my job to finish my first book. I was planning to start a business when it was finished. So my schedule allowed for that. 

The moms and the kids got to know each other. We were building community, investing time in getting to know each other. We would talk. This one mom, she was visually impaired. She couldn’t read real well. Couldn’t really use a computer. Sometimes she would ask for help filling out a school form. But she was faithful about bringing her daughter to school and she was a sweetheart. She had attended the school herself as a child, she told me and lived just a few blocks away. 

Then one day, without warning, I never saw her again. The school closed for covid and did not open again until very late the following year. A full year later, when the school reopened, my son only returned for a few days before I yanked him for another school that was offering 5 day a week in person instruction (I was lucky to be able to find). (The school we had been attending was only offering kids two days a week in person learning, which meant me paying $700 a month to put my son — who’d missed a year of school — in daycare three days a week where he would “learn” on Zoom. It was truly the dumbest and most insulting thing in the world. The daycare teachers weren’t immune to covid! In fact they were offered vaccines later than K-12 teachers.)