School Information System

James Hankins:

Two weeks ago I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I have been a history professor for forty years. My four decades of experience at one of the world’s leading universities have given me a unique vantage point to trace the replacement of Western history by global history. This change is part of the reason why the younger generation finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation.

My decision to retire was not a sudden one. I am coming to the end of a four-year retirement contract that I signed in the fall of 2021. That year I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime. This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country’s uncritical acceptance of The Science and its proclivity, when backed by public power, for tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on zoom. Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education. 

“The best student at Harvard … was rejected from all the graduate programs to which he applied.”

The year earlier the university had collectively taken a knee during the Summer of Floyd. This turned out not to be empty virtue-signalling, as I expected, but had serious consequences for the way we conducted our affairs. In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool. In 2021, however, I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that “that” (meaning admitting a white male) was “not happening this year.” In the same year a certifiably brilliant undergraduate I had tutored, who was literally the best student at Harvard—he won the prize for the graduating senior with the best overall academic record—was rejected from all the graduate programs to which he applied. He too was a white male. I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected. Everywhere it was the same story: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours. The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female. 

Harvard, I believe, is now on a better course under its current president, Alan Garber. The reaction to the Claudine Gay fiasco, which highlighted the university’s shocking indifference to the anti-Semitic demonstrations following the October 7 atrocities, compelled the Harvard Corporation, which chooses the president, to seek out a safe pair of hands. President Garber, our provost for over a decade, provided them. Even so, I believe I can make far better use of my time and experience at my new institutional home—the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida—than at Harvard. The reason why is that the Hamilton School is committed to teaching the history of Western civilization. When late liberal pedagogy replaced Western civilization courses with global history, serious harm was done to the socialization of young Americans. When you don’t teach the young what civilization is, it turns out, people become uncivilized.

Drew Gilpin Faust:

In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school. Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in “keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, the 2010 Common Core policy on cursive had generated an uproar. Jeremiads about the impending decline of civilization appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Defenders of script argued variously that knowledge of cursive was “a basic right,” a key connection between hand and brain, an essential form of self-discipline, and a fundamental expression of identity. Its disappearance would represent a craven submission to “the tyranny of ‘relevance.’”

Natalie Wexler:

But these states aren’t all doing the same thing. Mississippi and Alabama have focused just on phonics, while Tennessee and especially Louisiana have succeeded in getting districts to adopt curricula that also build academic knowledge beginning in the early grades. On its own, effective phonics instruction, while crucial, leads only to short-term gains. Combined with a knowledge-building curriculum in the early grades, it lays the groundwork for success at higher grade levels.

I was delighted to see this post coming in at #3, and I hope it reflects a surge of interest in history—which is often either not taught at all, especially in elementary school, or else is taught in a way that isn’t engaging or effective. Learning about history is crucial for enabling students to become responsible citizens. There’s also evidence that social studies boosts reading comprehension, especially for students from low-income families.

This post described a framework for teaching history called the Four Question Method and featured interviews with teachers piloting a U.S. history curriculum developed by the creators of the method. The teachers reported that compared to their previous approaches, the new curriculum engaged students more and enabled them to retain and understand more content. (I serve on the advisory board of 4QM Teaching.)

Channel3000:

Susan Webb Yackee talks with For the Record’s Elly Laliberte on the launch of a new major

DAN REYNOLDS, SARA RUTHERFORD-QUACH, LAUREN J. CASSIDY, ANNA JENNERJOHN, KATRINA WOODWORTH:

Inspired by the increased national attention on literacy, more districts are implementing high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) to support students’ reading comprehension. In implementing comprehension HQIM, a critical distinction is whether instruction facilitates the development of students’ surface-level or robust comprehension. This brief examines the extent to which teachers in districts using comprehension HQIM implemented them in ways that supported students’ robust comprehension. Findings are based on a study of four districts receiving support through the Schusterman Family Philanthropies’ School System Partnerships to improve their students’ literacy outcomes. These districts were at the national vanguard of HQIM implementation: Each had adopted highly rated knowledge-rich comprehension curriculum, including Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA), Wit & Wisdom, and EL Education, for several years before our study, giving us a unique opportunity to examine mature implementation of these commonly used curricula. Findings show that these districts have all reached a level of implementation that features near-universal focus on comprehension with quality texts and active student participation across hundreds of classrooms. However, most lessons—two thirds—resulted in teachers and students doing work that only facilitated surface-level understanding of texts. In this brief, we explain how we discovered this problem hiding in plain sight and identify high-leverage comprehension practices that could help districts, schools, and teachers maximize the potential of comprehension HQIM and consistently deliver high-quality instruction to every student.   

More.

Curiosity:

The astronomy world was recently shaken by a discovery from an unexpected source: a teenager still in high school. Matteo Paz, a student from Pasadena, utilized archival data from NASA’s retired NEOWISE mission to bring 1.5 million invisible cosmic objects into the light.

During a stint at Caltech’s Planet Finder Academy, and mentored by astrophysicist Davy Kirkpatrick, Paz took a novel approach to data analysis. He built a unique machine learning model capable of sifting through a staggering 200 billion infrared records. In a span of only six weeks, his AI detected subtle patterns that human analysts had missed, identifying everything from distant quasars to exploding supernovas.

Paz’s findings were so robust that they earned him a spot in the prestigious The Astronomical Journal and a position as a research assistant at Caltech. His work does more than just populate star maps; it provides specific coordinates for the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate further. This breakthrough highlights a growing trend where fresh perspectives and AI tools allow young researchers to make historic scientific impacts from the classroom.

Justin Weinberg:

The Hoya reports:

The department announced the decision in a Dec. 22 email to applicants, one week after the Dec. 15 application deadline. The announcement came after university officials announced Dec. 12 that Georgetown has reduced doctoral enrollment amid ongoing budget cuts and a decline in graduate tuition revenue…

Interim University President Robert M. Groves announced Dec. 9 that the university recorded a 23% decline in the number of students starting graduate applications and a 20% drop in international graduate student enrollment. Groves has cited federal cuts to higher education funding, changing immigration policies and ending graduate loan programs as reasons for the declines.

In an email to applicants breaking the news, John Greco, the department’s director of graduate admissions, wrote:

I sincerely apologize for the late timing of this decision, which I understand is extremely frustrating for many reasons, not least because of the time and effort that goes into building a graduate admissions application. For different reasons, this is all deeply frustrating for the Admissions Committee and the Philosophy Department as well. That said, I do believe that Georgetown’s administration is acting with good will to negotiate difficult circumstances.

Liza Libes:

Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern Life” genre, I was compelled to see what all the fuss is about. Suffice it to say that I was not impressed. But I could not quite put my finger on the source of my disdain until, several days ago, it hit me: Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator walks away learning absolutely nothing.

The fault of this particular novel might be with Moshfegh’s nihilistic outlook on life, but the problem cuts even deeper. Today, the publishing industry as a whole turns its nose up to narratives that promote objective meaning.

There’s a lot to unpack in that claim, but it is no accident that the publishing industry shies away from books that illustrate “the good life” in the Aristotelian sense. Reared on the postmodern spirit that dominates colleges and universities, publishing professionals favor ambiguous, open-ended narratives to stories with clear redemption arcs. But, at its core, literature should not only teach us to think critically but also to live our best lives.

In 1908, New Humanist literary scholar Irving Babbitt set out to redefine classic-literature education in a collection of essays called Literature and the American College. An early literary critic, Babbitt believed that the purpose of literature was to cultivate a lasting moral imagination—that is, literature had a duty to craft readers into morally upstanding members of society. Though New Humanism’s reign was short-lived in the academy, its fundamental axiom—that the purpose of literature was to foster moral education—articulated the broader cultural tradition that has sustained the human soul for thousands of years. Literature is supposed to teach us what gives our lives meaning. After all, isn’t that why we gravitate towards literature in the first place?—to learn, by way of the particular, that which is universally true about the human condition?

Margherita Bassi:

Matteo Paz from Pasadena, California, recently won the first place prize of $250,000 in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search for combining machine learning with astronomy. Self-described as the nation’s “oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors,” the contest recognized Paz for developing his A.I. algorithm. The young scientist’s tool processed 200 billion data entries from NASA’s now-retired Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope. His model revealed 1.5 million previously unknown potential celestial bodies.

“I was just happy to have had the privilege. Not only placing in the top ten, but winning first place, came as a visceral surprise,” the teenager tells Forbes’ Kevin Anderton. “It still hasn’t fully sunk in.”

Will Flanders:

• Affordability is a top concern for Wisconsin voters, who face rising costs for housing, food, and taxes.
• Wisconsin ranks among the top 10 states for the highest property taxes, which are a direct result of state and local policy choices.
• A potential repeal of Act 10 could increase property taxes and create a multi-billion dollar budget hole for schools and local governments.
• School district spending, often increased through voter-approved referendums, is a major driver of high property taxes in the state.

“Affordability” has become the dominant theme in politics across the nation, including here in Wisconsin. Rising costs for housing, food, healthcare, utility bills and taxes are on the top of voters’ minds, while politicians of every stripe echo the language of affordability. However, our political leaders are failing to target the policies that actually drive-up costs and lack a willingness to stop supporting measures that make life more expensive.

As property tax bills arrive in mailboxes throughout Wisconsin, homeowners are reminded that the state ranks among the highest in the nation for property taxes, placing 10th overall. What’s often overlooked in this statewide debate is that these high property taxes are not accidental. They are a direct consequence of policy choices made in both Madison and by local governments.

When policymakers and the courts weaken cost-saving reforms, loosen fiscal guardrails or encourage local governments to look to taxpayers first rather than living within their budgets; higher property tax bills are inevitable. If policymakers are truly serious about making Wisconsin affordable, they must first acknowledge that state-level decisions have local-level consequences. And in the end, it is homeowners who are the ones left holding the bag.

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Much more on Wisconsin Act 10, here.

Andy Pierrotti

Georgia education officials are studying Mississippi’s dramatic literacy transformation as 70 percent of the Peach State’s 4th graders cannot read proficiently, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Mississippi, once ranked 49th nationally in 4th grade reading scores in 2013, now ranks 9th best in the nation and leads the country for overall reading improvement.

Amanda Malone, Mississippi’s state literacy director, said the transformation required sustained effort rather than chance. “A lot of times people call it the Mississippi miracle. Now, miracle implies that humans had nothing to do with it. And so it’s not a miracle,” Malone said. “Don’t call it the Mississippi miracle. It is really a marathon

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jessica Gould:

Some New York City teachers say it’s high time for a refresher on old-fashioned clocks.

Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, said this year’s ban on smartphones revealed that many teens struggle to read traditional clocks. “That’s a major skill that they’re not used to at all,” she said.

Overall, Millen said, the phone ban has been a major success at the school, and has helped kids focus in class and socialize at lunch. Foot traffic is moving more swiftly in hallways. Without eyes glued to their phones, more students are getting to class on time. The problem is they don’t know it, she said, “because they don’t know how to read the clocks.”

For years, parents and teachers have blamed technology for a range of lapsed skills — from legible handwriting to sustained attention to reading whole books — even as their proficiency with technology far outstrips their elders. Still, while educators have widely praised New York’s statewide smartphone ban that went into effect this fall, multiple teachers told Gothamist it has also laid bare an unexpected gap: How to tell time.

Terry Falk:

Last spring, Milwaukee School Board director James Ferguson was perplexed as to why Milwaukee Public Schools‘ efforts to implement the science of reading (SOR) in the district were so difficult. “It seemed that we could not get a grip on the science of reading training. I was not satisfied that we didn’t have anybody trained. I really wanted to understand what the training consisted of and why it was so difficult to turn the page.”

Ferguson turned to the one person he knew in MPS who had a good understanding of SOR, the district’s own board clerk, Tina Owen-Moore, who has been recognized as a leader in implementing the science of reading in Wisconsin as the superintendent in Cudahy. As it turns out, Owen-Moore was Ferguson’s eighth grade English teacher.

“We talk all the time,” said Ferguson.

Owen-Moore knew people in Whitewater who were successfully implementing SOR. Meanwhile, school board director Henry Leonard also was talking to Owen-Moore, and when he heard of the possibility of visiting the Whitewater district in March, with only weeks before he would leave the board, he jumped at it.

Milwaukee Real Estate

“Ferguson and I went with Dr. Owen-Moore. It was eye-opening,” Leonard says. “They let us ask any questions. Their WEAC representative was there. Administrators. I know some of the questions I asked: ‘Did you have any difficulty in getting your staff to take the extra training?’ To a person, perhaps 12 people in the room representing different groups, they all said, ‘We have to have success.’ Large immigrant population in Whitewater. ‘We had people who were interested in making people learn how to read, but we were not getting any traction. We were not going anywhere. So, we decided the best route to go was to get some of these more formative processes in the science of reading.’” Over 80% of the staff agreed to it.

Via Quinton Klabon:

Steven Dykstra is a retired clinical psychologist in Milwaukee. He didn’t think much about dyslexia until his son had trouble reading in first grade. He and his wife arranged a conference with the teacher, who asked whether they read to their son at home. “When we assured her that we had read to him every night since he was only a few months old, she was confused,” he told me. “She asked us, ‘Are you sure?,’ as if we had hallucinated all these many hours.”The teacher then asked what they did when their son struggled to read a word. “We told her that we helped him sound it out, “he said. “That was her ‘Aha! moment. “That’s the problem, she said. ‘That’s what’s messing him up. You need to stop doing that. Phonics doesn’t work.'”

Dykstra was employed for thirty-three years by Milwaukee County’s public-health department, and he spent most of that time on a mental-health-crisis team that provided counselling to children and young adults. He told me about a case involving a sixteen-year-old girl who had been engaged in many kinds of self-destructive behavior “She took drugs, and she would sell herself, and she would wake up after being drunk with these awful amateur tattoos, ” Dykstra said. She eventually agreed to meet with him on the condition that they do so in her parents’ garage and keep the door open so that she could flee if she felt she needed to.

During their conversation, Dykstra said, the girl surprised him by revealing that she was unable to read-something that hadn’t come up during weeks of interviews with people in her life.

The girl told him that, in elementary school, she had avoided being called on by doing things like pretending to be sick or walking out of the room, and that she had once hit a teacher with a book. She didn’t mind being punished, she said, because no punishment could be worse than the laughter of her classmates. “Then the conversation shifted to other things,” Dykstra continued. “I said, ‘You know, lots of other people wouldn’t do the things you do, like go to a motel with a stranger for forty dollars, because they would feel such intense shame.’ And she looked at me like I was an idiot. She said, I’ve been ashamed every minute of my life since I started first grade. I’m used to it.'”

Partly because of his experience with that girl and with his son, Dykstra told me, in counselling sessions with young people he always asked, “When you started school, was there one thing that was harder than anything else?” Often, he said, the answer was reading. For children who can’t read, every school day holds the potential for repeated humiliation, and the severity of the humiliation grows as the gap between them and their classmates widens. Hanford told me, “If you are a kid who is struggling to read, you are experiencing failure really fast, and you are experiencing massive confusion, and it is actually fucking frightening.”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Chamath:

California will be bankrupt by 2030.

If you’re expecting a state pension, it is at risk.

If you don’t believe it, check Grok or Gemini and explore how California politicians changed the reporting rules on your pension so they could hide how underwater it is.

The middle class citizens of California will soon be asked to pay a huge price to bail out the state.

Why them?

Because that is where most of the wealth of California resides. It’s easy to single out “billionaires” but there aren’t many of them and they can and will all leave before the bottom falls out. They are leaving in droves already.

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After California’s Budget Grew 63 Percent in Five Years, Newsom’s Next Budget Needs a Reality Check

Kevin Walmsley:

For patents in remote sensing, China is now the majority, with over 43,000 in a three-year period. This represents, again, a “dramatic reversal” from the 1990’s when the US was almost all of it. And the machine learning applications are growing exponentially, and China’s low-cost AI is driving a lot of the new research.

It’s also an institutional challenge for the United States. These data are from 2011 to 2020—so they’re over five years old, but by then Chinese institutions had taken the top six positions, out of the top 10.NASA and the National Science Foundation were at 7 and 8, and Europe had the last two. On funding, China’s science foundation spending was over 53% of output, compared to the US at 5%.

China’s remote sensing industry finds itself in a virtuous circle. More funding leads to more researchers leading to more research which means more patents, and higher levels of expertise, and breakthroughs in adjacent sciences, such as in Quantum Technology, and absolute ranging measurements in space.

Jack Mountjoy:

This paper studies the returns to enrolling in American public universities by comparing the long-term outcomes of barely admitted versus barely rejected applicants. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of all American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT scores that generate discontinuities in admission and enrollment. The typical marginally admitted student gains an additional year of education in the four-year sector, becomes 12 percentage points more likely to ever earn a bachelor’s degree, and eventually earns 8 percent more than their marginally rejected but otherwise identical counterpart. Marginally admitted students pay no additional tuition costs thanks to offsetting grant aid; cost-benefit calculations show internal rates of return of 26 percent for the marginal students themselves, 16 percent for society (which must pay for the additional education), and 7 percent for the government budget. Earnings gains are similar across admitting institutions of varying selectivity, but smaller for students from low-income families, who spend more time enrolled but complete fewer degrees and major in less lucrative fields. Finally, I develop a method to separately identify effects for students on the extensive margin of attending any university versus those on the margin of attending a more selective one, revealing larger effects on the extensive margin.

William Atkinson, Lara Brown and John Power

One of the things that’s still healthy about the United States, unlike Britain and France, is that the political capital, the financial capital, the technological capital are all in different places, so it is very decentred. There are places where these things overlap, but there’s some way where people are able to do things that are independent.

JP: Is tech going to come to the rescue like the Eagles [in Lord of the Rings], deus ex machina, providing abundance that can kind of smooth over some of the economic challenges? And as a rejoinder to that, do you think the AI bubble is about to pop?

PT: There are all sorts of things that I don’t particularly like about the AI revolution. It seems to be very concentrated on bigger companies, so it’s possible a lot of the returns are captured by a few companies, possibly leading to very uneven growth. While it may be a complement to human labour, it is probably more of a substitute than a complement. It will have a zero sum feel to a lot of people. At the same time if there is no other vector of growth in our society, we would be out of our minds not to take it. I don’t think it’s big enough to solve the budget deficit, but if the US embraces AI and Europe rejects it, I think the US is in somewhat better shape than Europe is.

On the question of whether or not it is a bubble, I get asked this a lot by Europeans and that is how you know that they’re not going to build a lot of AI in Europe. If it’s a bubble, then people are spending too much money on AI, and they’re building too many data centres and buying too many chips, and you’re eventually going to get seriously diminishing returns on that. During the 1990s bubble, it was mainly the telecom fibre-optic infrastructure stuff where people really spent way too much and that had to get dialled back. But maybe it’s the other way around where there are high returns to AI, enabling the automation of certain workflows and enhanced productivity.

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“Our study provides a comprehensive characterization of which features of the college experience are more and less valuable during the high-stakes, first-job matching process.”

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More.

Larry Sand

In January 2006, ABC’s John Stossel’s brutally honest documentary, “Stupid in America,” first aired. At the time, he referred to it as “a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools, and it’s about time we face up to it.”

Stossel exposed the ineffectiveness of many government-run schools. But now, 20 years later, things are even worse.

Test scores from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released this year, show that 33% of 8th graders—a higher percentage than ever—are reading at the “below basic” level.

Additionally, only 22% of high school seniors are proficient in math, down from 24% in 2019, and 35% are proficient in reading—the lowest score since NAEP began in 1969—down from 37% in 2019. Also, a record-high percentage scored at “below basic” levels in both math and reading compared with all previous assessments.

The results of the latest NAEP U.S. history and civics tests, administered in 2022, were atrocious. The scores show that just 13% of 8th-graders met proficiency standards in U.S. history, meaning they could explain key themes, periods, events, people, ideas, and turning points in the country’s history. Additionally, about 20% of students scored at or above the proficient level in civics. Both scores are the lowest ever recorded on these two tests.

The most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a test administered to 650,000 4th and 8th graders in 64 countries, reveals that average U.S. math scores declined sharply between 2019 and 2023, falling 18 points for 4th graders and 27 points for 8th graders. Internationally, this places the U.S. 22nd of 63 education systems for 4th-grade math and 20th of 45 education systems for 8th-grade math.

Furthermore, average U.S. math scores for 4th- and 8th-grade students reverted to 1995 levels, the first year the TIMSS assessment was administered.

Glenn H. Reynolds

The wholesale adoption of diversity, equity and inclusion ideology in almost all our major institutions has done untold damage to American society.  

It was advertised as something noble — a way to open opportunities for women and minorities who had been unfairly denied them.

But through a combination of bureaucratic laziness and political malice, DEI soon became something approaching a ban on hiring millennial white males at the beginning of their careers. 

The harm goes far beyond the wreckage it imposed on those young men.

“Affirmative action,” of course, has been around for decades, and anyone who’s worked at a major institution in America, whether government, corporate or academic, has seen its effects. 

When I was applying for law-professor jobs years ago, I was well aware that minority or female candidates were likely to get more interviews, and more job offers, than “traditional” candidates like me. 

Washington Post:

Like millions of other Americans, Stacy Newton turns to Healthcare.gov to shop for health insurance for her family. The Affordable Care Act website, according to the government, is where consumers are supposed to find “a menu of health insurance plans.”

But for the Newtons and many others in the country, next year’s menu is severely limited: There is only one company offering ACA plans here — and costs have risen steeply.

To continue health coverage for themselves and their two teenage children, the Newtons would have to pay an annual premium of $43,000 — about a third of their gross income. It is the price of the cheapest plan available to the family from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Wyoming, the only ACA insurer left in Teton County.

Joel Kotkin:

‘For many states that were once great have now become small; and those that were great in my time were small formerly. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never continues in one stay.’ So wrote Herodotus in his Histories, in the fifth century BC. He reminds us that world history is not a morality tale between the ‘powerful’ and their victims. Rather, societies evolve, grow stronger and overcome weaker ones. People – and, more recently, capital – migrate to places that offer greater opportunities.

This was certainly true in the time of Herodotus. He was born in Greek colonies in what is now Turkey and died in another Greek colony in Italy. The search for better conditions – whether for grazing, farming or, more recently, manufacturing and technology – unravels older orders and paves the way for new ones. As a result, centres of power move. As French historian Fernand Braudel noted, between the 16th and 18th centuries, capitalism shifted from one hub to another – Venice to Antwerp to Amsterdam, and then to London.

With these shifts in power often come shifts in migration patterns. Where droves once headed to Western Europe from the former Soviet bloc, as the old centres stagnate, many may consider returning to the Eastern bloc, and even parts of the once-cursed ‘Club Med’, including Herodotus’s Greece.

Eugene Volokh:

A short excerpt from today’s long Ninth Circuit decision in Reges v. Cauce, written by Judge Daniel Bress and joined by Judge Milan Smith (note that the university apparently didn’t argue that the speech was unprotected because it was off-topic for a computer science class, presumably because the university itself had encouraged non-parody land acknowledgments in such syllabuses):

A public university investigated, reprimanded, and threatened to discipline a professor for contentious statements he made in a class syllabus. The statements, which mocked the university’s model syllabus statement on an issue of public concern, caused offense in the university community. Yet debate and disagreement are hallmarks of higher education. Student discomfort with a professor’s views can prompt discussion and disapproval. But this discomfort is not grounds for the university retaliating against the professor….

In 2019, the Allen School [of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington] revised its “Best Practices for Inclusive Teaching” to recommend that instructors include an “Indigenous Land Acknowledgement” in their course syllabi. This document offered UW’s official land acknowledgment as an example, while making clear that its suggestions were “not prescriptions,” but only “ideas” intended to help faculty be “more effective teacher[s] and better role model[s] for more of your students.”

Joanna Stern:

Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine: ordering inventory, setting prices and responding to customers—aka my fellow newsroom journalists—via workplace chat app Slack. “Sure!” I said. It sounded fun. If nothing else, snacks!

Then came the chaos. Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for “marketing purposes.” It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear.

Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.

This was supposed to be the year of the AI agent, when autonomous software would go out into the world and do things for us. But two agents—Claudius and its overseeing “CEO” bot, Seymour Cash—became a case study in how inadequate and easily distracted this software can be. Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against an AI chief executive.

Chris Rickert:

The arrests of a Madison School Board member and the leader of a Madison nonprofit came after the two had a disagreement with a Downtown business and refused to get out of the vehicle they were in, Madison police said.

Maia Pearson, the board vice president, and Urban Triage founder and CEO Brandi Grayson were arrested at about 11 p.m. Friday in the 100 block of East Doty Street.

No formal charges against them had been filed as of Wednesday, but police said Grayson, 45, was arrested on three counts of disorderly conduct and drunken driving, while Pearson, 38, was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

According to a police incident report, employees at a business on East Doty “called police and reported that a vehicle had driven over cones into a loading zone and a disturbance was occurring as a result.”

More, here.

Chris Taber:

Children who demonstrated stronger early numeracy were significantly more likely to enrol in advanced mathematics courses in secondary school and more likely to go on to university. Those with weaker early numeracy were more likely to be placed in lower mathematics tracks and were less likely to pursue further education. These relationships remained even after accounting for socioeconomic background, parental education and other early cognitive measures.

This work aligns with earlier research by Greg Duncan and colleagues, who analysed six major longitudinal datasets. Their findings showed that early mathematics achievement was a stronger predictor of later academic success than early reading or attention skills. In their analysis, early maths skills were roughly twice as predictive of later achievement as early literacy.

Together, these studies challenge the reassuring belief that early differences in mathematics will simply wash out over time. Instead, they suggest that early numeracy operates as a structural foundation, shaping future learning opportunities long before students make conscious academic choices.

Eliot Chen:

What does that mean for the future of the biotech industry?

Inside a cavernous convention hall in Paris in late October, thousands of students gathered for the latest biotechnology Olympics.  The event, called the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM), is unknown to most yet revered in the brainy world of synthetic biology. Each year, more than 5,000 participants from high schools and universities around the world spend the summer mulling biological problems and how they might be solved through bioengineering. They then descend on P

US Chief of Naval Operations

Shipmates,
The United States Navy is and must remain, the most formidable maritime fighting force the world has ever known. Our ability to deter, fight, and win depends not just on ships and aircraft, but on the sharpness of our minds, the strength of our character, and the resilience of our bodies.

Reading is a force multiplier. It equips us with the knowledge, perspective, and critical thinking necessary to lead, to innovate, and to prevail in the unforgiving crucible of combat. This list is not political, not trendy, and not designed to check a box. It is chosen deliberately to sharpen everyone in the Navy, from the halls of the Pentagon to the forward deployed deckplates.

These are books I’ve found usefull in my development as a Sailor and a Leader to encourage critical thinking, professional development, and discussion. The views expressed in the recommended books are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of War, or the U.S. Government.

I have organized the books into categories aligned with my priorities: Foundry, Fleet, Fight-and added Total Sailor, which encompasses character, competence, decision-making, nutrition, and the whole person. Each category links to who we are, how we prepare, and how we fight.

This is a professional reading list-but it is also a call to reflection, discussion, and growth. Use these books in your wardrooms, your Chiefs’ Messes, and with your civilian teams. Ask tough questions. Challenge assumptions. Expand your thinking as a life-long learner.

——-

Erik Prince:

To Dare and to Conquer by Derek Liebhart

Cochrane by David Cordingly

Jason Locasale:

Academia already did what you’re proposing. Universities are now run like businesses with professional administrators, branding strategies, risk management, consultants, and KPI dashboards. The result hasn’t been better research or teaching.

It’s been the transformation of universities into brand-management and lifestyle companies, where prestige, expansion, and revenue extraction matter more than scholarship or education. Research and teaching don’t reliably maximize short-term financial returns, so they get crowded out.

What grows instead is administration because once an administrative class is established, its primary function becomes self-preservation and expansion, not mission fulfillment. This is exactly what happens when a nonprofit adopts corporate logic without corporate accountability. You don’t get efficiency. You get mission drift and an institution optimized to look successful rather than to be successful.

Zachary Groz:

There are about 793,000 studentsenrolled in the city’s K-12 public school programs. The large majority likely already have internet at home: A New York State Education Department report in fall 2020 found that 13 percent of NYC public school students, or roughly 114,000, had “insufficient internet access.” A multitude of programs offering free internet to students in need — like those in homeless shelters, public housing, and on public benefits — have launched or expanded in the five years since.

The new Chromebook purchase would have been far cheaper if the city had chosen to buy laptops that connect to the internet via WiFi, since the city wouldn’t have needed to pay for cell service, which accounts for about two-thirds of the cost of the new contracts. (The hardware would have been cheaper, too; LTE-connected Chromebooks tend to be more expensive than WiFi-only models.)

“There’s no reason why the City of New York should be wasting tens of millions of dollars paying for something we don’t actually need when those dollars could be better spent connecting families with the existing programs,” said former City Council contracts committee chair Benjamin Kallos, who in 2017 brokered a deal with telecom giant Spectrum to cap internet costs at $15 per month for low-income NYC families and seniors.

Neetu Arnold, Daniel Buck:

These different approaches show in the data, beginning with how likely schools are to use punishments. For example, though Alabama and Washington report incidents to the Department of Education’s CRDC at similar rates, Alabama suspends students roughly two to three times as often as Washington. Or consider Louisiana and the District of Columbia, the areas with the highest incident rates in 2021–2022. Though D.C. reported about a 50 percent higher incident rate than Louisiana, it was seven times less likely to expel students.

One reason for this discrepancy could be that states experience violent behavior differently. Where violence is more prevalent, administrators may feel greater urgency to intervene quickly and efficiently.

But this likely only partly explains why many states still struggle with violence and disorder. The latest available data for schools reporting “widespread disorder” between the 2019–2020 and 2021–2022 school years show that Southern schools remained stable. By contrast, disorder grew at schools in the Northeast, Midwest, and Western regions and was also much higher than at those in the South.

Approaches in red states differ in another key aspect: their schools preserve broad discretion to enforce rules early, before small problems become big ones. Louisiana law says that teachers may “take disciplinary action” against any student or behavior that “interferes with an orderly education process.” Administrators may not return that student to class until they employ one of several “disciplinary measures.” Even small behaviors can trigger a consequence, and three removals can trigger a parent meeting and more severe disciplinary action.

States like Alabama and Tennessee have recently spearheaded laws that give teachers more authority to remove unruly students from the classroom and compel administrators to impose more consequences. These laws faced opposition from equity advocates, but they go a long way toward explaining why classroom disorder didn’t worsen in the South, and why educational outcomes for poor students have improved so dramatically there—the very thing equity hawks claim to want.

George Leef

Should we trust the research published by professors? The scholars who write books and papers have impressive degrees and teach at respected universities, and their work has to undergo rigorous scrutiny before it can be published, so the answer would seem to be that we should. The safeguards against deception and fraud appear strong.

Decades ago, they were strong, but that’s not true today. In recent years, deception and fraud have been proven in quite a few instances. Some of the guilty professors have admitted their wrongdoing, one even confessing that he didn’t have the patience for rigor. Clearly, academic research has changed for the worse.

In recent years, academic deception and fraud have been proven in quite a few instances. Professor Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School has done a great public service in writing Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal. His book puts people on guard against believing an idea just because it comes in scholarly wrapping. It was inspired by Bazerman’s own experience as a co-author of a paper in which others had falsified data to make the conclusion look strong. Over a period of years, he came to suspect the data behind the paper and sought to have the other authors explain their conduct, which they never did. Besides telling his own lamentable tale, Bazerman recounts many other instances of scholarly fraud, but let’s begin with his story.

People will lose confidence in academic research unless universities and scholarly journals take action to restore their integrity. In 2012, Bazerman and four co-authors published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which purported to show that people were far more likely to tell the truth on a document for which they had to provide data if they had to first sign and attest to their truthfulness rather than signing afterward. That publication became known as the “signing first” paper, and it led a number of companies, such as auto insurers, to change their procedures in hopes of getting more truthful data from customers.

Paula Gomes:

Average scores on the four different parts of the test were as follows:

English: 18

Math 18.3

Reading 18.4

Science 18.6

When it comes to the district as a whole, TCAP scores  from earlier in the year show that roughly half or less of all students across grades K-12 are meeting academic standards. High school TCAP scores show approximately a third of students meeting Math standards, about 40 percent meeting expectations in Science and Social Science, and barely half of all high schoolers meeting state standards in English Language Arts.

Greene County Schools consider this year’s ACT scores a “success”  as it is higher than the national average.

A press release from Greene County Schools stated that the district remains “committed to preparing every graduate for success in postsecondary education, workforce pathways, and lifelong learning.”

Director of Schools Dr. Chris Malone said, “The district will continue monitoring student progress and expanding ACT preparation support as part of its broader college and career readiness initiative.”

The Tennessee Conservative recently reported that Malone provided a report to the Greene County Board of Education on the growing number of homeschoolers in the county.

Elizabeth Price Foley and Jason Torchinsky:

The Justice Department last week issued a rule doing away with “disparate impact” liability under one section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said at a press conference last week.

Disparate-impact theory allows a discrimination plaintiff to prevail based on statistical disparities in outcome, with no need to show an intent to discriminate. The theory appeared nowhere in the 1964 act, but the Justice Department grafted it onto Title VI, which prohibits discrimination by educational institutions and other recipients of federal money, via a 1966 regulation. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did the same for Title VII, which bars employment discrimination.

In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the EEOC regulation. The justices held that Duke Power had discriminated against black employees by requiring applicants for promotion to have a high-school diploma and pass two aptitude tests. Unless the employer could prove a “business necessity” for policies with a disparate impact, it would be liable for discrimination.

Chris Rickert:

Sun Prairie School District Superintendent Brad Saron is headed back to the place he left before taking over the top job in Sun Prairie.

The Chippewa Falls School District announced Tuesday that Saron, who was that district’s superintendent from 2013 to 2015, will be returning to lead the district as of July 1.

Saron has faced a rocky road this school year in Sun Prairie, where parent activists have accused him of being slow to respond to a series of sex-related scandals involving staff members.

In a statement, the Chippewa Falls district said its School Board selected Saron “following a comprehensive superintendent search process that emphasized community engagement and transparency.”

People are also reading…

“Dr. Saron brings a strong record of leadership, a commitment to continuous improvement, and a clear understanding of the values and priorities of our community,” School Board President David Czech said in the statement. “His previous experience in Chippewa Falls, combined with his success leading a large, diverse district, made him an outstanding choice.”

Keegan Kyle:

Madison’s first elections of 2026 are shaping up to be rather quiet, but that landscape could shift in the next two weeks if more candidates jump in.

Nine of 10 Madison City Council seats, one of two Madison School Board seats and most Dane County Board seats up for election in April are currently on track to be uncontested races.

The only contested City Council race might be District 8, which represents neighborhoods near the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ald. MGR Govindarajan represents that district now but has filed noncandidacy papers.

————

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Owen:

To become literate, people have to repurpose parts of the brain that evolved to perform other tasks, such as object recognition and sound processing. “What we have to do, over the course of learning to read, is coördinate these areas to communicate with each other and build what we call a reading network,” Gaab said. The areas are connected by axon bundles, which she likened to highways. The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his book “Reading in the Brain,” writes, “Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?”

Sometimes the axon highways almost seem to pave themselves. My daughter, Laura, began to read all of a sudden, the summer before kindergarten. (“It’s hard to believe that ‘knock’ starts with ‘k,’ ” she said, while following along as I read her a bedtime story about Amanda Pig.) But even she didn’t become a reader entirely on her own. All children have to learn the relationships between letters and meaningful sounds. For some it’s harder than for others. “Maybe instead of four lanes you have two,” Gaab said, “or instead of a smooth surface you have a bumpy one.” Caroline had a large vocabulary, and she was read to as often as Laura was, both at home and at school, and there were just as many colorful plastic alphabet magnets stuck to the refrigerator in her kitchen. But she needed teachers who understood that literacy doesn’t happen naturally, especially for children with dyslexia.

A decade ago, Emily Hanford, a senior correspondent at American Public Media, was researching a story about college-level remedial-reading classes. She became interested in dyslexia and then in literacy generally, and in 2022 she produced an immensely influential podcast series, “Sold a Story,” about reading instruction in American schools. The central argument is that teachers all over the country employ instructional methods and materials that were proved, long ago, to be not just ineffective but counterproductive. Such methods, Hanford demonstrated, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how children learn to read. They direct beginning readers to look for hints in illustrations and to make deductions based on context, word length, plot, and other cues, with only incidental reliance on the sounds represented by letters. The idea is that, as children become adept at deduction, the mechanical side will, in effect, take care of itself.

Eric Bott:

The left is robbing teachers, students, and taxpayers to fund an insatiable administrative industrial complex.

Josephine Ma:

George Yeo is a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

He started his career in the military before entering politics in 1988. During his 23 years with the Singaporean government, Yeo held ministerial portfolios ranging from arts to health, trade and – for seven years – foreign affairs.

After he left politics, Yeo was vice-chairman of Kerry Group in Hong Kong from 2012 to 2021 and chairman and executive director of its logistics arm from 2012 to 2019.

This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.

First to Taiwan, which you’ve described as a ticking time bomb. How can it be defused, and how likely is a military conflict across the Taiwan Strait?

We don’t have crystal balls. Politics develops often in unexpected ways. In our minds, we have to think of scenarios. Now imagine the day when, for lack of money, the US has to leave the western Pacific because voters choose butter over guns. That’s one possible scenario. Then unification will happen naturally because I don’t see Taiwanese dying for an independent Taiwan.

Taiwan is separate only because the US is there. The Taiwan issue is a subset of US-China relations. Right now [US President Donald] Trump doesn’t want Taiwan to be an issue because he’s got a big agenda with China. That’s why he did not allow [Taiwanese leader William] Lai Ching-te to make a stopover in the US. It caused Lai to cancel his trip to Paraguay.

Michael M. Grynbaum

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

Andreas Fragner:

This definition is great because it’s actionable. It tells you that there are three ways to approach a problem:

• Move the world towards the desired state
• Change your perception of the current state
• Change your desired state

Karpathy

2025 has been a strong and eventful year of progress in LLMs. The following is a list of personally notable and mildly surprising “paradigm changes” – things that altered the landscape and stood out to me conceptually.

1. Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)

At the start of 2025, the LLM production stack in all labs looked something like this:

1. Pretraining (GPT-2/3 of ~2020)
2. Supervised Finetuning (InstructGPT ~2022) and
3. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF ~2022)

This was the stable and proven recipe for training a production-grade LLM for a while. In 2025, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a number of environments (e.g. think math/code puzzles), the LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like “reasoning” to humans – they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations and they learn a number of problem solving strategies for going back and forth to figure things out (see DeepSeek R1 paper for examples). These strategies would have been very difficult to achieve in the previous paradigms because it’s not clear what the optimal reasoning traces and recoveries look like for the LLM – it has to find what works for it, via the optimization against rewards.

Buckley Institute:

The Buckley Institute is committed to advancing free speech and intellectual diversity at Yale. As the data in this report demonstrates, Yale provides its students with a faculty whose ideological and political outlook falls well short of the diversity of the American public.

This year, the Buckley Institute built on the progress of last year’s effort and examined the political leanings of 1,666 faculty members across all 43 undergraduate degree-granting departments, as well as the law school and school of management.

The Buckley Institute’s research found that in undergraduate departments and the law and management schools, 82.3% of faculty are registered Democrats or primarily support Democratic candidates. By contrast, only 15.4% are independent and 2.3% are Republicans. 27 of 43 undergraduate departments had no Republicans at all.

Among the general public, annual data put independents at around 40% of the electorate for the last 15 years, while Democrats and Republicans have hovered around 30%. In Yale’s home state of Connecticut, independents (44%) and Republicans (21%) likewise outstrip their shares of the Yale faculty. By contrast, only 35% of Connecticut voters are registered Democrats. Yale’s principles on free speech, as encapsulated in the Woodward Report, recognize that for

Yale to fulfill its core function, the “free interchange of ideas is necessary not only within its walls but with the world beyond as well.” The monolithic ideological lean of the Yale faculty indicates that the university is falling short in that regard.

Scott Nolen:

Trevor Packer and Priscilla Rodriguez present an interesting fact pattern in their letter “College Board Hasn’t Dumbed Down Its Tests” (Dec. 9).

1. There has been a national decline in K-12 math preparation and engagement.

2. The percentage of students scoring highly on the company’s Advanced Placement exams and SAT hasn’t changed over time.

3. The tests haven’t gotten easier.

Unfortunately, all three claims can’t be true. Similar to the popular business maxim about being better, faster and cheaper, you must “pick two.”

Via Quinton Klabon:

2026 wish list: a map like this for, like,
“What reading, mathematics, science, and history curriculum do you use?”
“What is your student-to-staff ratio?”
“What is your spending as a whole and truly spent on your own students?”
and things of that nature. It would pack insights!

——-

link:

Nadia Scharf:

Limits on the number of students who can attend private school through a publicly funded state choice program have increased from 1% of the school district’s population in 2015-16 to 10% in 2025-26. In that time frame, the number of choice students from Brown County school districts has grown from 280 to 1,725 – a more than sixfold increase

Repeatedly, though, administrators emphasized that small size isn’t necessarily a negative. Academically, administrators say their students in mixed-age classes score well, although private school students’ test scores aren’t made publicly available to confirm this. Choice students’ scores are shared, but only if there are 20 or more students per grade, which small private schools inherently don’t have. 

Across Brown County, only three grade schools under 100 had a grade with more than 10 students in 2024-25 (the largest grade was 13). That means that even if students are broken into grade-level groups for shorter lessons, they still get personalized attention, and teachers can answer their questions before the lesson moves on. 

Students, teachers and parents all know each other well. At St. John’s in Wrightstown, parents can walk their students to the door of their classrooms. That lets parents both connect with each other and with their children’s teachers, forming a broader community, Raddatz said. And at Morrison Zion, Geidel tells any parent with a concern to text him directly: “I’d rather put out a small fire than a big one.” 

These small schools are forces that bring together community members and have often done so for generations, standing as proud traditional schoolhouses. With that, though, comes the pressure of keeping that balance. 

“We’re going to do the best we can. If it gets to the point where we can’t, I don’t want to put it that way, but that’s what happens,” Hochmuth said. “As long as God allows us to be here, we’re going to be here.” 

——-

Quinton Klabon:

Green Bay Press-Gazette’s education reporter is a superstar.

That said, I am extremely pessimistic. Relying on aging congregations’ donations to counter low birth rates is so tenuous. The 2 named churches raise more money, adjusted for inflation, but have fewer parishioners. 😔

Dave Cieslewicz:

…… never mind that there are several of these things already here and nobody has even noticed. 

Both Sanders and Rhodes-Conway make essentially the same argument: technology and the market must slow way down and move at the speed of government. Sanders says that “democracy” needs time to “catch up,” while Rhodes-Conway claims that city zoning needs time to adapt. You can bet that, if either one succeeds, their proposed moratorium will be extended ad infinitum.

Now, there are some reasons for legitimate concern. Big data centers, which are being built or proposed all over the country, demand a lot of resources. They take up a lot of land, water, and especially energy. Utility costs, especially in Wisconsin, are already a concern and these things will almost certainly make prices higher in the short-term. 

Laurie Burgos, Matthew Joynt, Deborah Kerr, Jeffrey Weiss, Todd Alan Price and Cathy Olig

Lawmakers provided $0 in new general school aid over the biennium, a first in modern Wisconsin history. As a result, the majority of districts will receive less state support this year.

State elected officials have knowingly passed the buck to homeowners in the form of local property tax increases when they chose not to adequately fund the state-controlled school finance formula in the current state budget. This month, taxpayers will see the direct impact on their property tax bills.

The state legislature has abandoned Wisconsin’s long-standing commitment to funding two-thirds of public education, shifting more of the cost onto local property taxpayers. Lawmakers provided $0 in new general school aid over the biennium, a first in modern Wisconsin history. As a result, the majority of districts will receive less state support this year, leaving school boards with only two choices: raise local property taxes or make massive cuts to essential educational programs.

Despite historic funding claims from both sides of the aisle, 63% of school districts have held operating referendums in the past three years. Why? Because state investment has not kept up with inflation, and the cost of running a school district has only increased, with double-digit increases in health insurance, utility costs, and the costs of offering highly desired programming such as construction, nursing, and engineering career pathways.

School districts are feeling the effects of inflation, just as manufacturers, farmers, and homeowners are. And unlike the private sector, public schools can’t simply raise prices. Instead, they must reduce costs, meaning a reduced investment in students.

———-

more.

Madison’s K-12 19.48% Property Tax Growth: Moving forward, though, local officials need to ask tough questions about higher spending

Claire Reid:

Meanwhile, degrees in computer science, business and engineering have soared, according to UW System data reviewed by the Badger Institute.

Economic factors like concerns about return on investment, tougher job markets and climbing student loan debt are the principal reasons behind these trends, according to the experts we spoke to.

“The number one thing is … students don’t see a direct translation from a humanities degree to a lucrative or successful job,” said Shannon Watkins, a research and policy fellow with the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. “I think that’s particularly so now because there’s a lot of awareness on return on investment with a degree.”

Last year, the 13 UW System schools awarded 3,548 bachelor’s degrees in the humanities, down 1,436 or about 29 percent from the 4,984 awarded a decade earlier, the data showed. In our analysis, we defined “humanities” as degrees in visual and performing arts, communications and journalism, English, history, foreign languages, liberal arts, legal studies, philosophy and religious studies.

Comparing 2014-15 to 2024-25, the number of UW System students earning bachelor’s degrees in English was down 39.2 percent, from 673 a decade ago to 409 last year. Steep drops also came in communications and journalism — 31.7 percent from 1,581 to 1,080 — and history, down 30.6 percent from 415 to 288.

Via a kind reader:

As a supporter and campaign contributor to Mia Pearson’s MMSD school board races, I am deeply disappointed to report that on Friday evening, MMSD Board Vice President — Mia Pearson was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, alongside — Nextdoor – Nextdoor

———

Chris Rickert:

According to a report about the incident posted in the police department’s daily call log, Grayson, 45, and Pearson, 38, were reported to be yelling and throwing things in or near a vehicle in the 100 block of East Doty Street. When officers arrived, Grayson was outside the vehicle but then got back into it despite being told not to by police.

“Officers provided instructions to exit the vehicle and she refused,” the call log says. “She was removed from the vehicle. An odor of intoxicants was present. The driver refused to cooperate with field sobriety testing.”

Police said Pearson was “also uncooperative with officers.”

Pearson has been on the board since 2021, winning a second, three-year term in 2024. In both elections, she ran unopposed.

She is also a member of the Madison Police Civilian Oversight Board, a citizen board that, in conjunction with the city’s independent police monitor, conducts independent investigations of Madison police.

The independent monitor’s office on Monday morning put out a statement saying it was aware of Pearson’s arrest and is investigating the incident.

———

David Blaska:

Madison police were withholding further details “due to who the people are; they’re pretty well known.” The charges are being referred to the district attorney’s office, which may or may not bring charges. Police officials this morning told the Policy Werkes that the report is “lengthy.”

Madison Police did release the following today, without naming names:

10:53 pm [12-19-25] — Central — Disturbance: Officers responded to a disturbance involving a vehicle that was occupied by two suspects (45-year-old female driver and 38-year-old female passenger). It was reported that the suspects were yelling and throwing things. The driver was outside the vehicle when officers arrived. She got into the vehicle, despite being told not to. Officers provided instructions to exit the vehicle and she refused. She was removed from the vehicle. An odor of intoxicants was present. The driver refused to cooperate with field sobriety testing. The driver was arrested for disorderly conduct (3 counts) and operating a motor vehicle while under the influence. The passenger was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting.

Other source indicate to the Policy Werkes that the incident was witnessed by the public and captured on cell phone and police body-camera footage. 

———

Erin Gretzinger:

Maia Pearson, vice president of the Madison School Board, was arrested by Madison police late Friday on charges of disorderly conduct, authorities confirmed to the Cap Times.

Pearson was booked into the Dane County Jail at 1:22 a.m. on Saturday, according to Elise Schaffer, the public information officer for the Dane County Sheriff’s Office. Pearson posted bail and was released about one hour later, Schaffer said.

A Police Department spokesperson confirmed Pearson was arrested and said more information would be released soon. Madison’s Office of the Independent Police Monitor is reviewing the arrest, according to city officials.

———

Samantha Calderon:

Officers were called to a business on East Doty Street right before 11 p.m. after employees reported a vehicle had driven over cones into a loading zone and caused a disturbance. Pearson and the driver, Urban Triage CEO Brandi Grayson, allegedly refused to exit the vehicle and were removed by officers.

Police said an officer smelled an odor of intoxicants on Grayson’s breath, and she refused to take field sobriety tests. Grayson was subsequently taken to the hospital on a warrant for a blood draw.

“An internal investigation and review will occur into this incident. MPD is aware of a review also being done by the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and is cooperating with that review,” Madison police said.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

George Shay:

The Chicago Public Schools are alarmingly successful at exactly one thing: Extracting money — oceans of it — from the taxpayers of this beleaguered city. Year after year, CPS manages to set fire to staggering sums of public treasure while producing educational outcomes that would shame a frontier one-room schoolhouse. It is the most expensive failure in the history of public administration.

We’ve now reached a point where more than $31,000 per student per year is being pried from Chicago taxpayers to keep this bureaucratic behemoth afloat. That’s right — taxpayers are involuntarily forking over elite private-school money to an institution whose performance often struggles to match third-world literacy rates.

And who is presiding over this spectacular redistribution racket? None other than Mayor 6.6 — the Robin Hood of the Chicago Teachers Union, though in this version of the legend, Robin Hood steals not just from the rich but from the poor too. He takes from everyone and delivers the boodle straight to his boss, the notorious Stacey Davis Gates, Chicago’s very own commissar of ideological indoctrination.

The mayor is merely the errand boy; Davis Gates’ is the one running Sherwood Forest.

Matthew Chingos:

The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research.  In a studypublished in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.^[1]

This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers.  Ninety-six percent of the 112 major U.S. school districts included in the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) Teacher Contract Database pay teachers with MA degrees more than those with BA degrees, with an average difference of $3,205 in the first year of teaching, $4,176 in the fifth year, and $8,411 at the top of the salary schedule.  The size of this pay bump varies widely, topping out at over $30,000 in three districts in Maryland.^[2]

It is not surprising that teachers respond to these incentives by earning MA degrees.  In 2011-12, nearly halfof U.S. teachers held such a degree.  However, it comes at a price.  As higher education costs continue to rise, teachers are going deeper into debt in order to earn these degrees.  The proportion of education MA students with graduate debt increased from 49 to 60 percent between 2004 and 2012, and median graduate debt levels increased (in constant dollars) from $27,455 to $35,350.  Factoring in undergraduate debt pushes the 2012 figure to $50,879.

In most fields, prospective students can only make an educated guess about the payoff to a post-graduate degree, but, for public school teachers, it appears in black and white on the salary schedule for their district.  For an MA degree to be worth the cost, which can exceed $50,000 in tuition alone, the teacher must expect to remain in the profession long enough to make the investment worthwhile.^[3] But how long is that? And for teachers with different career lengths, how much of their salary bump do they have to fork over to a college or university for an otherwise worthless credential?

Gail Heriot:

Will colleges and universities suddenly turn away from admissions standards that vary depending on whether a student is black, white, Asian, or Latino?

That seems unlikely. Many university officials consider their support for discriminatory standards to be a sacred duty. It would be naive to expect them to stop simply because the Supreme Court finally gets around to recognizing that this kind of race discrimination is illegal. They will either continue exactly as before or switch to an admissions policy that is facially race-neutral but in fact intricately engineered to produce their desired racial result.

Jill Tucker:

The Vallejo City school board voted unanimously this week to close three schools, marking the second year in a row the Bay Area district will shut down campuses to help close a gaping deficit and address the vast number of empty seats in its classrooms.

Lincoln, Highland and Pennycook elementary schools will close at the end of this school year, the board decided after a months-long process, winnowing down a list of seven possible sites to the final three.

“No board member takes these decisions lightly,” said board President John Fox, in a statement following the Wednesday night vote. “We carefully examined years of data, listened to our community, and weighed our responsibility to maintain stability in this district for the long term.”

Alysia Finley:

Diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years. One reason, which Minnesota’s welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details, is Medicaid fraud and abuse.

Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a single child. Yet states rarely verify that kids who are diagnosed actually meet the medical criteria for the disorder or that they get appropriate treatment from qualified specialists.

The result: Children covered by Medicaid or the government-run Children’s Health Insurance Program are 2.5 times as likely as those with private coverage to be diagnosed with autism. Many lower-income kids are labeled autistic merely because they have behavioral or developmental problems.

In 2014 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began requiring state Medicaid programs to cover autism therapy such as applied behavior analysis or ABA, a technique that uses positive reinforcement to improve social and communication skills. ObamaCare plans are also required to cover such therapy as an “essential benefit.”

Previously, the responsibility for providing such treatment fell mainly on public schools. Many lacked the expertise and were happy to shift the costs to federal taxpayers, which cover between 50% and 75% of Medicaid bills for most beneficiaries.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

But at some point, Madison voters need to say “no” to something if our city is going to be affordable for ordinary people. Otherwise, it will betray its progressive values. The only people who will be able to live here will be those with well-above-average incomes. Madison will become a playground for the wealthy, rather than a great city for all.

That goes for people who rent, too, not just those who own their home. While renters don’t pay property taxes directly, their landlords do. And landlords eventually pass

much of that cost to tenants.

Our editorial board endorsed two of the three referendums on Madison ballots last year. So like most city voters, we share some of the responsibility for this year’s jump in local property taxes.

But we didn’t endorse the most expensive of the three questions: the School District’s operational referendum, which will eventually increase the tax levy by $100 million every year indefinitely. That’s a much bigger impact than the other two referendums will cause in paying for new schools and preserving municipal services.

It’s too late to object now, of course. And higher tax loads have been building for years. So have soaring home values. It’s a cumulation of factors more than one round of referendums. Madison residents enjoy having lots of government services.

Moving forward, though, local officials need to ask tough questions about higher spending. And so do voters, if and when the school district or city come back for more.

David Blaska:

So it felt like a slap of Mennen Skin Bracer this Sunday to see our favorite local daily emerge from the crypt with both guns — if not exactly blazing, at least going pew pew pew.

Wisconsin State Journal editors — themselves undoubtedly victims — observed that Madison homeowners have gone into anaphylactic shock over property tax bills up a staggering 11.2% — or $872 — on average. “At some point, local taxpayers need to say no” to more spending the newspaper thundered suggested. 

To much of which spending our favorite local daily had unfortunately encouraged a “Yes” vote — namely, the $22 million city spending referendum and the $507 million school building ask. It did oppose busting state levy limits by an additional $100 million in school operating revenue into infinity (and beyond).

——

Madison’s k-12 property tax burden, which, according to District budget documents is $478,683,790, up 19.48% from 2024-2025 and 32% from 2022-2023.

A fast way to search school & district 2024-2025 early literacy screener results. A score below the 25th percentile means a student scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Chris Rickert:

Nearly 44% of Madison School District 4K through third graders scored below the 25th percentile on an early literacy screener required under a 2023 state law, the state Department of Public Instruction reported Monday,

The results were slightly worse than for students in those grades statewide. About 37% of them scored in the bottom quartile

Results varied widely by grade in the Madison and other school districts. More than half of Madison’s kindergartners and first graders, for example, scored in the bottom quartile, while only 13% of students in 4-year-old kindergarten scored in the bottom quartile.

Much more, including data downloads, here.

Liberty

The Alpha School model compresses what takes 6 hours + homework elsewhere (core academics) into about two hours a day of self-paced, mastery-oriented, adaptive computer-based learning, with adults acting more like coaches/guides than traditional teachers.

The rest of the day is spent on projects and ‘life skills’ activities instead of conventional classroom lectures. They give the example of students running an Airbnb and a food truck to learn about entrepreneurial skills, recording videos shared with other students to learn public speaking, doing 5k races, etc.

The deal 🤝 they make with students is basically: If you do a good job on the academics in the morning, doing four 25-minute Pomodoro blocks ⏲️ on the software, you are “buying back” the rest of your dayto work on fun projects.

I know that as a student, I would have loved that. Trade two focused hours for the rest of my day back? Yes please! So much better than being lectured at for 6 hours a day… 🥱

Here’s an intro video to the school that goes through what they do in each grade:

Matt Ridley:

If a military team made a mistake during a nuclear war preparedness exercise and accidentally obliterated millions of people, you would not expect to find some of the very same people merrily admitting a couple of years later that they have carried out the very same kind of exercise with different live nukes and slightly fewer safeguards. Would you?

That is roughly what I recently found out has apparently been going on in China. The Wuhan laboratory that conducted risky experiments on bat viruses at inadequate biosafety levels and almost certainly caused the pandemic has now revealed that it has done the same kind of risky experiments on another lot of horseshoe-bat viruses at low biosafety levels. Is accidentally killing millions not enough to give them pause?

Worse, a western scientific journal, the Journal of Virology, has blithely published the whole thing as if it was just another day at the office. There in the acknowledgments of Peng Zhou’s paper are his old pals from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli and Ben Hu, the main authors of the notorious experiments in Wuhan. You know: the ones where they swapped the spike genes between bat viruses, making brand new viruses that could infect human cells better and kill humanized mice faster.

To be fair, the latest experiments are on alpha coronaviruses, not the beta kind that caused the pandemic, and on ones that kill pigs by causing diarrhea, not people by causing pneumonia. The disease goes by the name of SADS, for “swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus.” The backstory is that starting in October 2016, an outbreak of diarrhea killed nearly 25,000 piglets on farms in the Guangdong province in China. By the spring of 2017, smart work by Peng Zhou in Wuhan had identified a coronavirus from horseshoe bats as the cause. So much is known already and documented in the 2021 book I wrote with Alina Chan: Viral.

———

Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”.

Jason Rantz:

A federal appeals court has ruled that the University of Washington violated the First Amendment by retaliatingagainst a professor who refused to parrot the school’s preferred political messaging in his syllabus.

In a decision issued Friday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with University of Washington computer science professor Stuart Reges, finding that university officials unlawfully punished him for including a parody land acknowledgment that challenged the ideological premise behind UW’s recommended statement.

The case stems from a 2021 push by UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering encouraging professors to include land acknowledgments in their syllabi. Reges instead wrote his own, stating that “by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”

University administrators quickly labeled the statement “offensive” and “inappropriate,” launched a disciplinary investigation, removed the statement from his syllabus without consent, and warned Reges against repeating it in the future. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sued, arguing the school engaged in viewpoint discrimination.

James Freeman:

The United States of America, arguably the least racist country on the planet, continues to draw would-be immigrants of all backgrounds from all over the world. Unfortunately the U.S. may now be turning away too many of them, but new research affirms that the aspiring entrants are not crazy—this really is a land where your ethnicity does not dictate your success.

In a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Oded Galor of Brown and Daniel Wainstock of Oxford explore conditions that correlate with economic success in the U.S. Like many academics, the authors appear to be focused on income inequality as a problem to be solved, which perhaps will make their findings especially compelling. The authors first make their case for the importance of determining whether income inequality is driven by membership in particular ethnic groups:

Nicholas Kent and Catherine Hanaway:

The U.S. Education Department has agreed to a settlement with the state of Missouri, which sued the government in 2024 over the Biden administration’s illegal student loan forgiveness. There’s a serious debate to be had about student loans ballooning out of control, but Democratic politicians have made impossible promises based on illegal maneuvers. Instead of working toward policy reforms to ensure colleges and universities deliver education at a reasonable cost, Democrats churned out debt-forgiveness plans and insisted they could cancel student loans unilaterally.

Nationally, borrowers owe nearly $1.7 trillion in student loans. President Biden gave way to pressure from radicals when he purported to cancel a substantial portion of the outstanding balance. In doing so, he (or perhaps his autopen) flouted the law and tried to saddle taxpayers—many of whom didn’t attend college or paid their own way—with billions in student debt.

Missouri first challenged these attempts at mass student loan forgiveness in 2022. Multiple federal courts held that the administration’s forgiveness plans were illegal. After losing at the Supreme Court in 2023, the Biden administration doubled down on mass loan forgiveness by loading existing income-driven repayment plans with terms that would make loan forgiveness inevitable. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School’s budget models estimated that this would cost taxpayers $342 billion over 10 years.

Quinton Klabon:

35% means schools are spending ~$2,480,000,000 just on special education this year, ~$19,300 per student (plus ~$16,500 general).

36% would be ~$2,420,000,000 and ~$18,800.
37% would be ~$2,360,000,000 and ~$18,400.

Per student costs rose over $1,000, way over inflation.

But the pandemic is over. Are costs per student rising because of health care expenses, higher needs, or what?

Erin Gretzinger:

Five Van Hise parents spoke with the Cap Times about their concerns, which are informed by their first-hand experiences, complaints shared with them by teachers and incidents they’ve heard from other parents over the past two years.

“When the people that you’re asking to take care of your kids no longer feel safe to escalate concerns and problems, that becomes a huge safety issue,” Robertson told the Cap Times. “My deepest fear is we don’t know what’s happening inside.”

No Van Hise teachers reached by the Cap Times responded to requests for comment

——

Parents, staff request independent review of Madison Van Hise elementary school principal

——-

Madison taxpayers recently funded the expansion of Van Hise Elementary School (and nearby Hamilton Middle School) despite space in other buildings and their least diverse student population.

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27.3% of Van Hise Elementary 4k – 3rd grade students scored below 25% proficiency in the Wisconsin Early Literacy Screener 2024-25 Results.

A score below the 25th percentile means a student scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Zac Bellman:

• Muskego football coach Ken Krause has announced his retirement after 19 years with the program.
• Krause is stepping down to spend more time with his family and watch his sons play college football.
• He led the Warriors to two undefeated state championships in 2018 and 2019.
• Krause will continue to assist the program and the new head coach.

Muskego football coach Ken Krause has retired, he announced in a Dec. 19 afternoon post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“It has been the privilege of a lifetime to coach at Muskego for the past 19 years – 18 of those as your head coach,” Krause wrote in part. “The countless memories and historic accomplishments shared with this community have been a source of immense pride and joy.”

Krause went on to say he will continue to work with the football program by assisting the new head coach and staying active in the weight room. His post continued:

Wall Street Journal:

Utah has become a good-government refuge for West Coasters. But don’t bet on it staying that way after state Republicans this month repealed their ban on collective-bargaining for government workers. This will inevitably lead to higher spending and taxes.

Republicans this spring passed legislation barring government unions from collective bargaining. The goal was to prevent a tax-and-spending ratchet a la California, New York and Illinois. Government unions negotiate rich salaries and benefits. Then lawmakers invariably have to raise taxes to pay for them. Rinse and repeat.

Government unions, unlike those in the private sector, don’t have to worry about driving their employers out of business if they make excessive demands. Public officials also have an incentive to roll over to government unions to win their support in the next election. This is why Wisconsin Republicans in 2011 limited collective bargaining.

———

Related: Wisconsin Act 10

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Joshua Minsoo Kim:

Thinking about how the SAT reading section now has micropassages that can be as short as 25 words. Absolutely howling at this question from an official College Board practice exam. Bro 😭

Channel 12:

Antigo basketball traveled to Lakeland Friday night, but without their starting five – they’re all protesting the sudden firing of their coach.

Chris Schewe was named head coach of Antigo’s boys basketball team back in August. Parents received an email Thursday from administrators about Schewe being fired, but did not disclose a reason.

According to multiple sources, the firing stemmed from a comment made by Schewe in the locker room.

Players and parents say they have not been able to receive clear answers from school administration, who has also not responded to numerous emails and calls from WJFW.

Carl Wilkinson:

Over the past few weeks, my three children have been overtaken by a sudden desire to write. Specifically, they’ve been writing lists — Christmas lists. Yet there must be growing unease in the North Pole, because those wondrous portals that can carry a child to the Moon or Mars, or back in time, are conspicuously absent from my sons’ wishlists. Only my 10-year-old daughter wants a book.

It’s a small sample, but my findings tally with the more rigorous annual survey by the UK’s National Literacy Trust (NLT): this year it found that just one in three young people aged five to 18 enjoy reading in their free time — the lowest level in 20 years. 

There has been much hand-wringing about the NLT data, with screens, social media and Silicon Valley blamed as distractions that deny children the developmental benefits of literature. Some in the publishing industry, rarely slow to fret, are calling it a crisis. Yet look beyond the headlines and the decline has not been steady. Nor does it mirror the rise of smartphones. The high point was in 2016 when 58.6 per cent of children read for pleasure. It is only since 2022 that a downward trend has emerged, offering hope that it is reversible.

Washington Free Beacon:

“Maryland is home to some of the nation’s best public schools, but also some of its most neglected,” then-gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore (D.) said in a 2022 campaign ad. “We can’t settle for that. We must make sure that every Maryland student gets that fair shot to succeed, the same one that I got.”

It was a noble sentiment—but a strange setting. Moore filmed the campaign spot inside Calvert School, the elite Baltimore private school where he enrolled his children, according to two sources familiar with the school’s interior. Situated prominently behind Moore in the ad are Calvert School’s iconic punch-holed wooden lockers.

The K-8 school, where middle school tuitionexceeds $33,000 a year, is, according to its website, a “nurturing space where students and families feel valued and supported.” Both sources said the wooden lockers on the left side of the frame are a dead giveaway, a unique and recognizable detail splashed across the school’s website and social media pages.

The Moore campaign confirmed it filmed the 2022 campaign ad at Calvert School.

Jonah Kaplan, Michael Kaplan

“Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud, so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry — people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who brought the new charges. “This is a deeply unsettling reality that all Minnesotans should understand.”

Court filings allege the men submitted up to $3.5 million in “fake and inflated bills” for Medicaid reimbursements after they set up a company intended to provide housing and other services to individuals who qualified for the program. They allegedly fleeced the housing program in Minnesota despite “living on the other side of the country and having no network in or connections to Minnesota or its communities.” 

In a separate indictment filed Thursday, a man allegedly registered a company to help channel state resources to the families of children with autism. But the man, Abdinajib Hassan Yussef, allegedly spent some of the $6 million he took from the program on the purchase of a Freightliner semi-truck.

The new indictments came as the Trump administration and its allies have stepped up attacks on Minnesota’s leadership, including Gov. Tim Walz, who was the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president in the 2024 elections. 

Quinton Klabon:

In 2024-2025, Wisconsin public schools employed more people than at any other time in state history.1 2 The problem: Wisconsin educated the fewest public-school students since 1991-1992.3 4 With schools set to have the fewest students since the 1950s in just 5 years, budgets are ripping at the seams.5

That fiscal cliff is a major legacy of the 4-year, $189.5 billion ESSER aid program.6 From 2019-2020. to 2023-2024, America’s public schools added over 200,000 staff members while losing almost 1,300,000 students.7 8 Despite this unprecedented investment in children’s education, pandemic policies set back academic progress by 20 years, with the lowest performers devastated the worst.9 10 The very kids ESSERwas meant to save instead may become a lost generation.

Wisconsin’s story is no different. Students received more inflation-adjusted revenue than ever before from 2020-2021 to 2023-2024, the latest year available.11 Yet, grade-school reading scores are historically low.12

Mathematics scores are flat.13 Wisconsin’s average ACT score is 19.2, the lowest mark on record.14

How could this be? Teachers have put in extraordinary effort to reverse a generational crisis. They came down with coronavirus, sacrificed personal time to tutor, and managed lockdown-addled classrooms split between the disruptive and the tuned-out. However, the challenge remains as immense as ever.

——-

More on this point here, where @ReformingGovt also asks why, for instance, the Eau Claire school district spent so much of its one-time pandemic money on hiring permanent staff even as its enrollment fell.

——-

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

——-

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

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Sean Thomas:

He concludes, pithily: ‘With rare exceptions, law is finished for almost everyone, maybe even the judges – as we’ve seen the past few days.’

I mention the problem of ‘hallucinations’ – when an AI model presents false or fabricated information as factual – and the need for a human face in court. The Sandie Peggie judgment allegedly contained AI-made errors. He waves this all away. ‘Temporary bugs and sentimental preferences. The economic argument is overwhelming.’

Chris Rickert:

A group of parents and teachers at a West Side Madison elementary school is calling on the school district to conduct an independent review of the school’s principal, even as district leaders say an internal review of her tenure turned up “no evidence of wrongdoing.”

In testimonials and an online petition, the group accuses Van Hise Elementary Principal Becca Stein of creating a toxic work culture for staff that has led to high turnover, fears of retaliation, lower test scores and a generally unsafe environment for the school’s approximately 400 students, who range from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Leaders of the effort also have set up a system for parents to report what they see as troubling incidents at the school.

Parents first began organizing in May 2024, after eight teachers submitted anonymous statements critical of Stein during a parent-teacher organization meeting. The statements accused Stein, who began at the school in mid-2023, of disrespecting and shaming teachers to such an extent that many were left in tears, according to a May 20, 2024, email from parent leaders of the effort against Stein to other Van Hise parents. The email was shared with the Wisconsin State Journal by one of the organizers of that effort, Amy Robertson, the parent of a fifth grader at the school.

Madison taxpayers recently funded the expansion of Van Hise Elementary School (and nearby Hamilton Middle School) despite space in other buildings and their least diverse student population.

Noah Carl:

Jacob Savage has penned a brilliant piece about the discrimination faced by young white men in certain US industries, namely academia, journalism and creative arts. The article deservedly went viral. However, one weakness is that Savage left himself open to the charge of having cherry picked some of his figures. 

He writes, “Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men.” And he cites similar numbers for a few other schools. Which seems to suggest that universities are discriminating against white men. However, you can’t infer that much from a handful of schools in a country with literally hundreds. Perhaps some universities hired few white men and others hired many, and Savage just happened to pick ones that hired few. (I don’t seriously believe this. I’m just imagining what a critic might say.)

As a matter of fact, Matt Bruenig ran the numbersand found that the percentage of white men employed in “arts, design, entertainment, sports and media” has remained relatively stable over time. He also observed barely any change in the percentage of white men aged 30–39 in the top 10% of the income distribution. Though as some commenters noted, Savage’s argument doesn’t necessarily predict that white men’s income should have declined because the alleged discrimination is happening in jobs that confer prestige and influence without offering particularly high pay.

Is Savage wrong? While he might have slightly overstated his case, I’m pretty sure he’s onto something. To begin with, some of his figures clearly weren’t cherry picked. 

For example, he points out that the Disney Writing Program “has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past decade—none to white men”. Zero out of 124 seems rather unlikely to be a fluke.1 And while there might be hundreds of universities in the US, how many companies like Disney are there? Five?

Jim Bender & Patrick McIlheran:

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

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

——-

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

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Andrew Tie:

In the 2023 blockbuster movie Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, superheroes and villains fight for control of the quantum realm, the ultra-microscopic domain where particles are governed by different physics laws than what we see with the naked eye. Though the movie mentions real physics concepts and provides entertaining depictions, Marvel is light on the specifics of quantum science.

Though not an official Avenger, Emily Edwards, an associate research professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Duke, has a superpower: teaching the public about the quirky, confounding and curious field of quantum information science (QIS).

Edwards, who previously led the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center and is involved in quantum technology education policy, believes it is important to increase the interest in QIS, particularly among K-12 students.

Joseph Epstein:

While many factors have contributed to grade inflation, I believe it began in earnest as student evaluations became widespread in the 1960s—an offshoot of the student protest movement of that day. At a term’s close, students graded their teachers. These evaluations could affect whether an academic department bestowed tenure on a young professor or promoted an associate professor. A large number of negative evaluations could do a teacher in, even cause him to be fired.

Student evaluations encouraged informality in the classroom. Many young professors ceased to come across as authority figures, but presented themselves as contemporaries of their students, all but equals. Professors no longer regularly wore jackets and ties or dresses to class, but came in jeans. They addressed students by their first names, and in some cases encouraged students to do the same to them. Love affairs between young professors and undergraduates, once the cause of scandal and immediate dismissal, became more common. It isn’t easy to give a C or D, let alone an F, to someone with whom you are sleeping.

Student evaluations tended to be unimpressive, if those I received during my years teaching English at Northwestern University are any example. “This guy knows his stuff,” read one. “I like his bow ties,” read another. “I wish some of the novels in this course weren’t so long,” went one, complaining less about me than about Henry James. I retired from teaching in 2002, and only one interesting evaluation sticks in my mind after all these years: “I did well in this course, but then I would have been ashamed not to have done.”

David Uberti, Juanje Gómez and Kara Dapena:

It’s unprecedented for a president to have such far-reaching business interests while in office, including in areas his administration regulates. “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, adding that Trump is committed to making the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world.”

See how the Trump business empire is set up—and explore it for yourself at the end:

Methodology

The Journal analyzed federal financial disclosures by President Trump and Ivanka Trump stretching as far back as 2015. The analysis excluded Trump-linked entities that didn’t report income of more than $201 in any one report during that span, as well as entities that have sold off assets or otherwise been listed as inactive. Government-mandated financial disclosures are imprecise, and sometimes only provide a general range for the value of holdings or income they generate. Additional business links were collected from sources including Trump Organization press releases, federal securities filings, court documents, state records and media reports.

Anya Kamenetz:

Noshin Sayira is a junior at Stuyvesant High School, meaning she’s in the middle of the highest-pressure year at what may be one of the highest-pressure high schools in the country. She tells me that students’ top objection to the phone policy is that it’s become cumbersome to do homework between classes or to quickly study in the hallway before a test. But Noshin recently started printing out her study guides and has found that reviewing on paper actually works better: “I don’t get distracted by notifications,” she says. She and her friends have developed a stress-relieving free-period ritual: They sketch one another’s outfits. “One of my friends usually has supplies like colored pencils and proper paper,” she says.

Tokyo Levy, a seventh-grader at I.S. 318 in Williamsburg, is a discernibly different kid than he was in his phone-carrying days, at least according to his mother, Krystyna Printup, an art teacher at the Brooklyn School for Social Justice in Bushwick. “He was forced into the rapid learning and usage of technology during COVID when he had to attend school from home via Zoom,” she says. That led to a fixation on video and computer games — Minecraft, Clash Royale — then social media. “Now, his phone is no longer clutched by his side to run to after dinner or before bed. There have even been a couple days where he’s left his phone accidentally at home.” At school, after noticing kids gathered around chess boards during lunch, he decided to sign up for the chess club. “I’ve always thought of people who played chess as really intelligent people. I see other people play, and it has really motivated me to try it out for myself,” he says. Participating in soccer in the schoolyard at recess inspired him to join a soccer league in his neighborhood, too.