School Information System

Anna Stokke:

Kudos to parent Celia Valel for calling out Louis Riel School Division’s support of ungrading. @winnipegnews published an article by retired educator Ken Clark that gaslights parents. LRSD won’t share Glenlawn performance data—why? 🤔 Tip: Ask for one research article that shows ungrading improves student academic outcomes. It doesn’t exist.

——-

Madison’s grading schemes over the years are worth a look as well.

and, via Chris Rickert:

It’s also laid bare what could be an inequity in the new guaranteed-admission regime because most Dane County public high schools also don’t weigh their grades for difficulty — meaning that, in theory, students who get straight A’s in all regular-level classes could have a better chance at getting in to UW than students who take more challenging honors and advanced placement classes but also have a few B’s sprinkled in with their A’s.

Te-Ping Chen:

Rios, 17 years old, is a junior taking welding classes at Father Judge, a Catholic high school in Philadelphia that works closely with companies looking for workers in the skilled trades. Employers are dealing with a shortage of such workers as baby boomers retire. They have increasingly begun courting high-school students like Rios—a hiring strategy they say is likely to become even more crucial in the coming years.

Employers ranging from the local transit system to submarine manufacturers make regular visits to Father Judge’s welding classrooms every year, bringing branded swag and pitching students on their workplaces. When Rios graduates next year, he plans to work as a fabricator at a local equipment maker for nuclear, recycling and other sectors, a job that pays $24 an hour, plus regular overtime and paid vacations.

“Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming—like, this company wants you, that company wants you,” says Rios, who grew up in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington around drug addicts and homelessness, and says he was determined to build a better life for himself. “It honestly feels like I’m an athlete getting all this attention from all these pro teams.”

Stanford Review:

This summer, a CCP agent impersonated a Stanford student. Under the alias Charles Chen, he approached several students through social media. Anna*, a Stanford student conducting sensitive research on China, began receiving unexpected messages from Charles Chen. At first, Charles’s outreach seemed benign: he asked about networking opportunities. But soon, his messages took a strange turn.

Charles inquired whether Anna spoke Mandarin, then grew increasingly persistent and personal. He sent videos of Americans who had gained fame in China, encouraged Anna to visit Beijing, and offered to cover her travel expenses. He would send screenshots of a bank account balance to prove he could buy the plane tickets. Alarmingly, he referenced details about her that Anna had never disclosed to him.

He advised her to enter China for only 24 to 144 hours, short enough, he said, to avoid visa scrutiny by authorities, and urged her to communicate exclusively via the Chinese version of WeChat, a platform heavily monitored by the CCP. When Charles commented on one of her social media posts, asking her to delete screenshots of their conversations, she knew this was serious. 

Under the guidance of experts familiar with espionage tactics, Anna contacted authorities. Their investigation revealed that Charles Chen had no affiliation with Stanford. Instead, he had posed as a Stanford student for years, slightly altering his name and persona online, targeting multiple students, nearly all of them women researching China-related topics. According to the experts on China who assisted Anna, Charles Chen was likely an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), tasked with identifying sympathetic Stanford students and gathering intelligence.

James Walsh:

Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI. Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.

Peter MacKinnon:

I must disclose my background here; I was employed by the University of Saskatchewan for 40 years including 13 years as president. The institution’s distinctive origins combined the development of liberal education with a responsibility to build the province’s agricultural industry, and it did the latter with world-class agricultural programs and research institutes, and with faculty and students of many backgrounds from around the globe.

Now, we are told, the academic personnel in this worldly environment require mandatory trainingon racism: an Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression and Unconscious Bias Faculty Development Program. It is compulsory; those who decline its offerings will be shut out of collegial processes previously thought to be their right as tenured faculty. It was earlier reported that the program emerged from collective bargaining at the initiative of the university’s faculty union; if so, this does not relieve the administration from responsibility; it signed the collective agreement.

Steve McGuire:

NPR host Meghna Chakrabarti wanted to cover the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, but was told by a colleague that “even talking about it in a rigorous objective manner is spreading misinformation.”

Michael Milken

Many people believe in myths lacking any demonstrably factual basis. Put “urban legends” into a search engine and hundreds of such irrational beliefs appear. So perhaps it’s not surprising that widespread misunderstanding persists about the facts of Mike Milken’s life. For an interesting view of how and why such myths about Milken arose, read the Introduction by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz in the 1992 book, Fall From Grace. A more recent book by Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies a Day, includes an equally revealing nine-page section about Milken’s legal prosecution.

Richard Phelps:

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has urged the Trump Administration to spare the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) from its planned dismemberment of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), IES being the research and data collection wing of ED. In a March 31, 2025, article, the NAS wrote:

Much of what ED does is useless or counterproductive. IES actually produces useful material. The National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is particularly useful. Whatever the ultimate disposition of ED, we believe that much of IES ought to be preserved in some administrative home.

If the U.S. Education Department dissolves and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) must move, the U.S. Census Bureau would serve as a more logical destination than the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which the NAS suggests. NCES and the Census Bureau have often worked together in the past, with the Census Bureau responsible for much of the data collection on which NCES relies. Though many may be unaware, the Census Bureau does most of the actual survey work—i.e., sampling, interviewing, data collecting, and cleaning—for the Education Department’s K-12 data.[1]

I agree with NAS that most non-political and non-ideological data collection efforts should continue. But the IES is more than just the NCES. Its other components manage more subjective work.

Gail Heriot:

A few of the policies in the order warrant special comment.

Ending Illegal Race Preferences. In what could end up being its most consequential provision, the order zeroes in on accreditors that encourage institutions to engage in race-preferential admissions that violate the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2023).

If I didn’t know better, I might wonder what all the fuss was about. Surely, accreditors know that they should not encourage colleges and universities to violate the law. They can’t possibly be doing that, can they? But, alas, some are. It’s a problem with a long history.

Race-preferential admissions policies have always been in conflict with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But when accreditors began pressuring schools to engage in them, the Supreme Court had not yet mustered the courage to issue a prohibition. The Court’s fractured decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke(1978) left colleges and universities enough wiggle room to discriminate by race if they wished. But many accreditors went further. They sought to make such discrimination mandatory.

The first case to come to public attention involved Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and its threat to de-accredit Baruch College, a constituent college of the City University of New York. In 1990, when the threat was issued, there was nothing wrong with Baruch’s library or its student-faculty ratio. Its science labs were tidy and well-equipped, its finances were in order, and its faculty, which included a Nobel laureate in economics, was excellent. Instead, Middle States faulted the school for an alleged failure to hire enough minority faculty members and to try hard enough to retain a racially diverse student body. Fortunately for Baruch, then-Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander came to its rescue by administering Middle States some of its own medicine—deferring the renewal of federal recognition of its status as an accreditor.

——-

Definitions of accreditors.

Marc Eisen:

“Those communities are still building single-family homes in places where people can develop generational wealth, which they can’t do when they’re renting. That’s my biggest concernquite frankly. Apartments don’t build generational wealth.” 

That’s one big reason Bauman thinks the economic inequality gap “hasn’t improved one bit” in the Madison area. 

The Rev. Alex Gee’s “Justified Anger” essay is a powerful document for exploring the underpinnings of that racial dichotomy. Triggered in part by the singular Black-male experience of being wrongly pulled over by police in his own church parking lot, Gee says his anger is not with individuals but with ignorance, prejudice and systems of oppression. 

Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway calls Gee a “visionary” for how he parses Madison’s racial politics. Steve Goldberg, who ran the well-regarded CUNA Mutual Foundation for 13 years before retiring in 2016, credits Gee’s Justified Anger initiative and the “Race To Equity “ reports for highlighting the gross disparities in the lives of white and Black residents of Dane County. 

……

That targeting the cops is mostly performative politics to rally the team rather than substantive politics to change the game. 

Education reformer Kaleem Caire, the founder of One City Schools, had the temerity to venture into this thicket in 2019 when, aghast at students cursing out School Board members over stationing SROs in the schools, he posted an essay that begins:

“I have had enough! Last evening, I sat in a Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education meeting only to listen yet again to a number of young people in middle and high school curse out and demean Madison School Board members in front of an audience of 200 people, and do so to the applause of other adults in the audience. I thought I was in ‘The Twilight Zone.’” 

While Caire praised the students for “articulating their ideas and concerns with depth and precision,” he warned them that the power of their words is “lost and undermined by their foul, abrasive and derogatory language.” 

This caused a stir. 

Four UW-Madison academicians who, like Caire, are African American fired off an unrepentant response to the website Madison 365. They accused Caire of practicing “respectability politics” by telling young Black students they should “stay in our place and to push for justice in ways that suit our oppressors.” 

Quite the charge. Caire, whose advocacy history includes a stint with Milwaukee civil rights titan Howard Fuller, brushes off the criticism. “I’m teaching our kids not to cuss people out,” he says. “Respectability politics? I’m sorry. Maybe you don’t like your elders, but I think there is something to learn from them.” 

Caire has had his share of setbacks over the years, including lagging student achievement at One City and premature expansion into a high school program. Criticism has come his way. He says he can deal with it. In fact, Caire says he has no problem saying all local schools and nonprofits need to show more accountability. 

“The Madison school system will never get better if it doesn’t have somebody pushing it,” he says. The fact that so many incumbent School Board members are returned to office without a challenge “is what you would expect in a system … where 90% of the Black kids can barely read,” he adds. 

Chalk it up to the collateral damage of our stifled public debate. 

——-

David Blaska commentary:

Questions we never expected to see askedin The Capital Times: “Progressives have full control of the city and its schools. Is it for the better?” Figures that it is a freelance journalist, not a CT staffer, posing the question — Marc Eisen, formerly editor of Isthmus

———

Meanwhile:

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?

Kayla Huynh:

The district will reduce the number of half-day classes held at its elementary schools, according to district figures. The district is instead adding half-day programs at four day care sites, including Here We Grow, the Red Caboose, the Playing Field and Pequeños Traviesos, according to Folger. 

Green said Stephens Elementary is offering four new full-day classes next year, including one Spanish section. Lincoln Elementary will also add one class. 

Elvehjem Elementary, which previously offered half-day options only, will add five classes. Four of the classes at Elvehjem are sections originally held at Kennedy Elementary School. 

Green said district leaders are removing the classes at Kennedy Elementary to alleviate overcrowding at the east side school.  

Parents suggested relocating the 4K classes earlier this year because a lack of space had contributed to a “chaotic” and unsafe environment for students, the Cap Times previously reported. 

The district’s full-day 4K program has continuously grown since launching in 2021. Over 575 students enrolled in the program last year, compared with about 260 in the first year, according to a report from the Madison Education Partnership. 

The district’s full-day classes included more students of color, students from low-income backgrounds and children learning English compared with the half-day programs, the Madison Education Partnership reported.

——-

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Michael Walsh:

But as the demand for degrees (not learning) grew and higher education became monetized, American universities became more akin to Renaissance Italian city-states than socially philanthropic organizations, metastasizing, gobbling up real estate and taking it off the tax rolls, thus helping to destroy the nearby neighborhoods — hello, Columbia, hello University of Chicago, hello University of Southern California! Ever-expanding, they added fashionable if not downright imaginary “disciplines” to the curriculum, abandoning all pretense to original scholarship, scrapped Western Civ courses as arbitrary and racist, and increasingly viewed their role as political activists instead of teachers.

Wholly conquered by the sappers of the Frankfurt School, they poisoned the minds of generation after generation with cultural self-contempt. The staggering financial concomitants beggared parents or sold their children into a form of indentured servitude known as “student loans,” justified on the grounds that their doctorate in LGBTQ+ Studies, aided in its attainment by heaping helpings of plagiarism and, latterly, AI monkeys, would surely put them on Easy Street, but instead it put them on Queer Street, where many remain today.

Nabeel Qureshi:

The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking.

After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved. 

I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since I’d “gotten the answer”. 

Afterwards, he’d come out with three or four proofs of the same thing, plus some explanation of why each proof is connected somehow. In this way, he got a much deeper understanding of things than I did.

I concluded that what we call ‘intelligence’ is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about ‘raw intellect’.

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.

Agnishom Chattopadhyay:

The freedom of physical movement is the prototypical example of a fundamental human right. To affirm this, you do not have to go as far as Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Instead, look at prisons: taking away the physical liberty of people is among the most serious punishments that is exercised only after careful judicial review.

At Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), and presumably many other Indian colleges, students are not free to leave. If a student walks up to the gate, a guard in uniform tells them that they may not leave. If the student tries to leave anyway, we can speculate what happens – the guard presumably would physically stop them, or the students would get into trouble with the college authorities. To exit the campus, the student must obtain permission from their parents, which they must communicate to a faculty member, who would then notify the guards. When the student leaves or re-enters the campus, the parents are notified in real time via text. These students are not in the campus for just a few hours – some of them live in the (in-campus) college hostel, and have to abide by these rules for a semester at a time.

Why might the colleges be interested in tightly regulating the movement of their students? The conventional wisdom among the admirers of these systems seems to be that this keeps the students safe. If the student doesn’t go out, then they aren’t going out drinking. They aren’t going out to do drugs, participate in casual sex or associate with gang members, either. Inside the premises, the campus security can keep students under constant surveillance. The red-tag annas call out couples spending quality time. Not only can the rooms of students’ can be searched, but they can be peeked into via miniature windows which are required to be kept uncovered.

Chad Aldeman:

“The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin. Just think about that for a moment.

Tim Daly:

Mississippi Can’t Possibly Have Good Schools
And yet it does. Are we ready to deal?

Underperforming states escape scrutiny. Our biases prevent us from asking, for instance, what’s going on in Oregon. Or Vermont. Or Maryland. There’s a case to be made that their instructional quality is among the weakest in the country based on their performance trends over the past decade. And yet, when’s the last time you heard them being pressed to defend their poor results.

Blue states are losing population. Estimates vary, but states Kamala Harris won in 2024 will probably surrender 12 congressional seats – and electoral votes – after the next census. 

Given that reality, Democrats picked a terrible time to go AWOL on the issue of education. Harris barely mentioned schools during her campaign and did not put forth any plan to address the incredible academic losses of the COVID era. What was once a double-digit lead in voter trust on education has now become a dead heat or a slight advantage for Republicans.

There is a future where blue states are left behind electorally, through declining clout, and educationally, through stubborn refusal to accept that a number of red states are solving important problems and expanding opportunity for kids while wealthier, complacent Democratic strongholds phone it in. If Republicans start running – and winning – on their education track records, look out.

—-

Dale Chu:

School spending is way up, but teacher pay? Not so much. In Los Angeles, spending soared 108% while salaries rose only 5%. What are we really prioritizing: higher pay or more staff? Because we can’t have both.

——

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?

Steven Davidoff:

Stanford brags that “it’s pretty ‘sweet’ to be connected with Stanford” thanks to the perks its professors and staff receive. Perhaps the sweetest perks Stanford and other elite universities provide are the multimillion-dollar tax-free housing and tuition stipends they lavish on faculty, staff and their children. They’re tax giveaways most Americans don’t get to enjoy, though they effectively cover the cost. It’s long past time to close these tax loopholes.

The exact benefits universities provide to staff and their children vary but are consistently extravagant. Schools such as Columbia pay a significant portion of K-12 private school tuition for professors and senior administrators, often covering about 50% of tuition costs—which can run upward of $65,000 a year at New York’s top private schools. …

The problem is that because these gifts are all exempt from income tax, taxpayers foot the bill.

And K-12 education is hardly the only university perk taxpayers cover. Columbia, Northwestern, Stanford, Penn and others offer tuition benefits for faculty children attending colleges of their choice, paying up to 50% of tuition bills. Some schools cap this assistance at their own tuition rates; others don’t. Princeton pays 100%. There is also generally no limit on the number of children who can qualify.

——-

More.

Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin:j

Foreign donors have given as much to U.S. universities in the last four years as they did in the previous 40, according to a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute shared exclusively with The Free Press. The study shows an explosion in overseas funding for American schools between 2021 and 2024, with nearly $29 billion in foreign money donated during that period.

Qatar and China are among the largest sources of funding.

That $29 billion figure is more than double the total for the preceding four years, and accounts for half of the estimated $57.97 billion in foreign funding since 1986, when the federal government began tracking the data.

Secretary Linda Mcmahon:

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

More. Commentary.

Richard Phelps:

Two outstanding situations sometimes warrant government intervention in the marketplace. First, “natural monopoly” providers, such as public utilities, would charge all the market could bear without government regulation. Second, unprofitable markets, such as those for orphan drugs and certain types of research and development, would not exist to meet certain public needs absent government subsidies or donor contributions.

Yet, confusion and “market failures” abound when government-subsidized or nonprofit entities compete in the marketplace with private, taxpaying entities. Consider the mid-20th-century prospects of private U.S. railroads, which purchased all the land and laid all the rail on their own roads, competing against truckers operating on government-provided roads.

Richard Phelps:

Anyone intimately familiar with U.S. education research of the past half century recognizes its marked difference from that of other fields. Some attribute the difference to an inferiority of methods, implying that education professors are not quite as bright as, say, economists. I would argue, instead, that bias is, by far, a greater problem—that bias is fueled by both progressive education ideology and professional self-interest.

On April 24, with the assistance of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the country’s most elite education researchers in the National Academy of Education(NAEd) sued the U.S. Department of Education (ED).

Wenyuan Wu:

2,105 vs. 44. As of April 25, 2025, 2,105accredited universities and colleges in the U.S. are test-optional or test-free in their undergraduate admissions, while a paltry 19 private and 35 public colleges require SAT or ACT scores for admission. An astounding ratio of 48 to one! With the exception of a few high-profile cases—MIT, Stanford, and the University of Austin, i.e.—standardized testing faces an increasingly bleak future in higher education.

If you talk to an average high school teacher today about college admissions, you’d find some garden-variety, anti-test responses: “Well, research shows tests don’t measure academic success.” “High-stakes tests are not as reliable as GPA.” “SAT unfairly disadvantages marginalizedstudents.”

In my writings over the years, I have made some humble attempts to debunk “anti-testism” with empirical research, literature reviews, news commentaries, and data analysis. There are a handful of others, more prominent and credentialed scholars who have also published works calling for a return to tests. But given the finite reach of our platforms and the somewhat esoteric nature of the issue, we are mostly preaching to the choir. In the meantime, the test-free movement undergoes exponential growth and now has the potential to co-opt even supporters on the right.

Quinton Klabon:

WHY are school districts going to REFERENDUM? DPI just revealed a huge part of the explanation.
Since 2020, schools added 2,140.79 staff!
Unfortunately,

1. Pandemic aid ended.
2. Enrollment decreased -47,092, from 852,973 to 805,881.
3. Schools already added staff AFTER Act 10.

——

Additionally, districts actually –added– staff in the years after Act 10.

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“An emphasis on adult employment”

Charles Hayes

The nation’s most prestigious universities are making a rare and risky move: selling significant portions of their endowments. Harvard and Yale, two institutions with combined endowments exceeding $90 billion, have announced plans to offload private equity stakes amid political pressures, liquidity strains, and a shifting financial landscape. These sales, the largest in decades, reveal vulnerabilities even in the most well-funded academic institutions—and could signal a broader reckoning for endowment-dependent schools

Harvard’s $1 billion private equity secondary sale, facilitated by Jefferies and Lexington Partners, underscores a desperate bid for cash. The university faces a dual crisis: federal funding freezes and an endowment structure overly reliant on illiquid assets. With 83% of its $53.2 billion endowment allocated to private equity and hedge funds—compared to just 14% in public equities—the school risks being trapped in a “liquidity crunch.” 

The Trump administration’s decision to freeze $2.2 billion in research grants and label Harvard a “political entity” has exacerbated cash flow concerns. To bridge the gap, Harvard issued $1.2 billion in municipal bonds in early 2025. But the bigger move is its shift from long-term holdings to secondary sales.

——-

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Alexander Nazaryan

You wrote about this issue a lot at the time. Why, years later, did you feel compelled to write a book?

I very early observed my kids just withering away in the gray light of their Chromebooks alone in their bedrooms. And while it seemed reasonable initially to have schools closed, particularly because I’m close to New York City, soon it dawned on me that there was no long-term plan and this was not going to work.

Childhood is achingly brief, and for a little boy or girl who’s 8 years old to miss a year, or even more than a year, of the experience of putting an arm around a friend, of chatting with other kids at lunchtime, of running around in a playground with friends … the idea that that wasn’t a tremendous harm is absurd.

People are still missing the larger point here about what was lost.

The conventional wisdom was that we needed to keep schools closed until it was safe to reopen them, and even then, it could be done only in communities where the spread of the virus had abated and educators took certain concrete steps to keep teachers and kids safe. You’re saying all of that was wrong?

I recognize that intuitively many of these interventions seem like they would be beneficial. School closures in particular and then, more broadly, mask mandates and barriers on desks and six feet of distancing — but the evidence shows none of this did anything.

Europeans had announced in the spring that there was no observable negative impact to reopening schools, yet for some reason this information was ignored.

——-

A substantive analysis of taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue

Roger Kimball:

A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals, “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license.

More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. One of the great ironies that attends the triumph of political correctness is that in department after department of academic life, what began as a demand for emancipation recoiled, turned rancid, and developed into new forms of tyranny and control. As Alan Charles Kors noted in an essay from 2008,

Martin Center

Key Findings:

• Disproportionate Growth in Non-Faculty Staffing: While enrollment rose 10.2% and faculty headcount rose 9.5%, non-faculty staffing grew by 14.6%, increasing the staff-to-faculty ratio from 2.18 to 2.28 systemwide.
• Largest Staffing Increases by Function: Fiscal Affairs positions grew by 53.8%, followed by Academic & Student Affairs and IT. In contrast, Executive Administration and Office/Clerical staffing remained flat or declined.
• Escalating Salary Expenditures: Faculty salary spending rose by 44.78%, while non-faculty salary expenditures jumped 55.53%—both surpassing the 32.72% inflation rate over the same period. The fastest-growing salary categories were Research (86.5%), Communications & Fundraising (81.1%), and Fiscal Affairs (90.9%).
• Institution-Level Variability: Changes in staffing and expenditures varied significantly among the 16 UNC institutions. Some, such as UNC Greensboro and UNC Asheville, experienced enrollment declines yet maintained or expanded staff. Others, like Elizabeth City State and Fayetteville State, increased enrollment while reducing or maintaining faculty numbers.

Carter & Mark:

In life, you can choose to be G(rouchy) or you can choose to be J(olly).

It’s way too easy to be G. To complain. To wake up in a bad mood. To find little flaws in everything you see in the world, and focus on those. You can spend hours fighting with random strangers online and policing the behavior of the people around you. You can default to thinking big, difficult ideas are impossible, raining cynicism down on the world. You can become one of those folks who is somehow surrounded by “toxic people”, yet cannot find a single flaw in themselves. This is the lazy path to living life.

Arctotherium:

The elephant in the room of the college admissions grind

There’s a small cottage industry of articles, blog posts, and essays pointing out how much more difficult, time-intensive, and “grindy” upper-middle class American childhoods have become in the 21st century [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. All of these identify the same cause: elite university admissions are far more competitive. This has led to much more intensive helicopter parenting to stop kids from falling behind in the increasingly important education-status race. It’s not just money. The social decay afflicting America since the 1960s is far worse among the non-college-educated (as Charles Murray showed in Coming Apart) so avoiding downward mobility is much more important than it once was.

Helicopter parenting has gotten so intense that it even continues into university, turning what was once the start of independent adult life into a further extension of childhood. The effects of this are widely lamented: the pressures of Ivy League admissions are said to be crushing kids into status-obsessed zombies. And the effort it requires from parents is even blamed for falling birth rates. Setting aside the broader societal implications and long-term effects, isn’t making kids unnecessarily miserable for 13 years of their lives bad enough in and of itself?

One might reply that it’s all worth it. Feeding 30% of kids into the college admissions meatgrinder might be bad, but stagnation is the default state of humanity and avoiding that is imperative. If it takes heroic efforts on the part of 12-year-olds to develop the skills needed to keep technological civilization running, then that’s a sacrifice that must be made. But is that really what’s going on?

Giselle Redmond:

Both Ithaca College and the Ithaca City School District are currently being federally investigated in response to complaints filed by the Equal Protection Project, an organization founded by Prof. William Jacobson, a Cornell Law professor. 

Jacobson created the EPP in 2023. In a statement to The Sun, Jacobson wrote that he founded the organization in response to “discrimination done in the name of DEI,” which they view as “a dehumanizing group ideology that reduces people to proxies for their group.”

Matt Taibbi:

The station doubtless thinks it’s engaged in “public service journalism” by cranking out piles of stories with headlines like Trump nominee gives misleading testimony about ties to alleged ‘Nazi sympathizer,Trump cuts demolish agency focused on toxic chemicals and workplace hazards, Asian American voters backed Trump in Nevada. Here’s how they feel about him now, The U.S. set the global order after WWII. Trump has other plans, A legal architect of Guantanamo questions Trump’s El Salvador plan, and on, and on. Its editors either don’t realize they’ve built an abjectly partisan political operation, or, more likely, they’ve been at this so long, they believe ideological uniformity is truth, and by extension, just “the news.”

It would be depressingly easy to create a 2025 edition of the Dictionary of Received Ideas just by tweaking NPR texts:

• JOURNALISM – Advances the conversation. Stands out for its thorough research, diverse sourcing, fairness, and fact-checking. George Clooney says the press has a duty to “always question authority.”
• THIN – It’s back in, but did it ever leave? It’s easier for thin people when it comes to employment and education. With fatphobia, why are so many people comfortable saying the quiet part out loud?
• RACISM – A public health issue. The accumulated stress from institutional racism has documented effects. Mentorship for Black medical students is crucial as they navigate a healthcare system that is not always welcoming. There’s a new computer algorithm that more accurately illustrates Black hair. If we don’t keep talking about it, whiteness becomes the default for everything.
• AWKWARDNESS —Part of our lives whether we like it or not. But what if we put the embarrassment aside and embraced our awkward selves?

If Flaubert had access to NPR’s search tool, he could have a sequel book in six hours. The only challenge would be figuring out how to limit the most important entry:

——-

Civics: Redistributed Federal Taxpayer $, “public broadcasting” and the first amendment

David Duncan:

Last week, I got a message from someone I’ve known for ten years. It was articulate, thoughtful…and definitely not written by him.

It’s one example of what has increasingly unsettled me about the way people interact – myself included – as we all participate in this vast, unprecedented, AI-enhanced communication experiment.

It’s not just the style of communication that’s changed. It’s the sense of authorship. The idea that you can read something and know who wrote it—and whether they meant it—feels like it’s breaking down.

It shows up everywhere – emails, text messages, social media, blog posts, even casual check-ins. A few weeks ago, I opened a message that seemed technically perfect – well-structured, insightful, sophisticated. But I couldn’t tell if the sender had written it, prompted it, pasted it – or even read it. And I wasn’t sure what to respond to, or how.

What part was real?

What part was meant?

Shannon Watkins:

Public institutions have a unique responsibility to serve their students well and use their taxpayer-funded resources effectively. Some states, however, produce better outcomes than others. This is made clear in the Martin Center’s 50-State Comparison on college graduation rates, which evaluates each state on four key metrics of institutional success: the first-year retention rate, the 4-year graduation rate, the 6-year graduation rate, and the transfer-out rate among public universities. 

This comparison is aimed at informing policymakers, university administrators, and the public on the state of public higher education and recommending concrete ways it can be improved.

The data presented in this 50-State Comparison underscores a wide variation of state outcomes. For example, the average 4-year graduation rate in Alaska is 18 percent. That number jumps to 53 percent in Delaware and 52 percent in Virginia. Nationally, the average 4-year graduation rate at public universities is 34 percent. 

Too many institutions, even in the highest-performing states, are failing to help students complete their degrees on time. The Martin Center outlines cost-effective and evidence-based reforms that states and institutions can undertake to boost student achievement. 

Jovan Tripkovic:

A recent Inside Higher Ed Student Voice survey found that over 60 percent of college students view themselves as customers, an alarming sign for anyone concerned about the integrity and future of American higher education. This growing trend, increasingly normalized by both students and institutions, undermines the university’s original mission of educating informed citizens and upholding academic excellence.

Traditionally, universities have provided education, conducted research, and advanced knowledge, all while engaging with the broader community. From the beginning, colleges and universities have served as cornerstones of the American republic, preparing future leaders, educators, and public servants.

As early as the 1950s, Russell Kirk was already describing colleges as expensive social clubs for the young.

In post–World War II America, a mix of factors—including a demographic boom and a surge in government funding—gradually pulled colleges and universities away from their original mission. Flush with G.I. Bill dollars and enrollees, institutions began broadening and democratizing their offerings, a shift that eventually led to today’s near-total emphasis on job training. Today, rather than cultivating civic and moral character or encouraging intellectual curiosity, many institutions have become little more than diploma mills and hedge funds with campuses.

When administrators treat their institutions like businesses, it’s no surprise that students begin to see themselves as customers.

Frederick Hess and Greg Fournier:

American colleges and universities are being scrutinized as never before. From rising tuition costs and allegations of plagiarism at the highest levels to concerns about low rates of completion and the state of free inquiry on campus, four-year colleges in the U.S. are under the microscope. Yet one crucial issue that is too rarely accorded the attention that it deserves is simply what colleges expect of their students.

Students spend far less time studying than they used to, with full-time students reporting 20–25 combined hours in class and doing schoolwork.[1] American colleges need to reset their expectations for students. Full-time students should expect to devote a full 35-hour week to their classes and related studies. Boards of governors and campus trustees have a vital role in resetting this expectation and helping colleges put it into practice.

——

more.

DOGE:

Interview with the DOGE team

—-

Whether you are a Republican or Democrat, this should anger you. Over 500 million individual payment transactions made by the US Treasury in 2024 (1/3 of the total), cannot be traced to any Congressional appropriation. This is not a partisan or ideological issue.

——

Nothing to see here 👀

Charles Mann:

For as long as our species has lived in settled communities, we have struggled to provide ourselves with water. If modern agriculture, the subject of the previous article in this series, is a story of innovation and progress, the water supply has all too often been the opposite: a tale of stagnation and apathy. Even today, about two billion people, most of them in poor, rural areas, do not have a reliable supply of clean water — potable water, in the jargon of water engineers. Bad water leads to the death every year of about a million people. In terms of its immediate impact on human lives, water is the world’s biggest environmental problem and its worst public health problem — as it has been for centuries.

Larissa Phillips

Despite this alarming statistic, some educators believe it’s impossible to teach these adults to read. However, this notion is misguided and requires a different approach.

Marian* was in her late 30s when we first met, and she asked me to help her learn to read. This was in 2007. I was the new-ish supervisor of a tutoring program in Manhattan aimed at adults who were trying to get their GED. Most students came in for help with essay-writing or algebra. But Marian, who had seen her three daughters through high school and into college, wanted to get better at reading.

She told me she was at third-grade level. Once we started working together, I discovered it was more like first grade.

This isn’t as unusual as you might think. Forty-eight million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level, and many of them struggle in ways that are almost impossible for a fluent reader to imagine: They can’t order off a menu, check in for a telehealth appointment, or fill out a job application. Low literacy skills correlate heavily with poverty and crime, and are associated with an estimated $2.2 trillionper year of social services, healthcare, and lost wages. This is an issue both sides of the political spectrum would love to address. The question is: How?

In April, a bill was introduced in Congress to expand funding for adult education programs. It’s called the WORKS Act—the Adult Education Workforce Opportunity and Reskilling for Knowledge and Success Act—and it would nearly double current funding for programs, to $1.35 billion, by 2029. The bill mentions digital literacy, college advisers for adults, and “foundational skills.” But there is no plan for the most foundational and intractable problem in adult education: teaching grown-ups to read.

———

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

We’ve long felt that NPR and PBS have been biased, but in the last decade or so that bias has gotten out of hand. It’s not just that they’re liberal. They’ve taken on that specific kind of academic, identity-obsessed point of view that has been the main thing that has driven voters away from the Democrats. 

I challenge anyone to listen to a single hour of NPR news programing — or much of the rest of their programs, for that matter — that does not include at least one (usually more) of the following:

• A story on transgender issues portraying them as victims and told from the point of view of rights activists.
• A story on immigration told from the point of view of immigrants as victims while being dismissive (if even mentioning) their legal status. 
• A story on climate change told in a breathless — and sometimes ludicrously reaching — fashion. How is climate change impacting transgender immigrants?!

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that at production meetings the first agenda item is: what’s our climate change story today, our transgender story and our migrant story? Sometimes, NPR and PBS will “balance” these stories by throwing in a quote from somebody right of center, but it’s an afterthought as in, “Yeah, we’ll touch that base so when we get accused of bias we can wave it around.”

I get more push back from my liberal friends about this than anything else. Either they just don’t hear the bias or they do and they defend it with something like, “but Fox News…” 

There are two issues here. First, obviously, Fox News doesn’t get public funding. And second, one thing liberals used to stand for was unbiased reporting. They didn’t want to be told what they already believed. They wanted solid information that even ran the risk of changing their minds. They didn’t want to be told what to think. They wanted to do that for themselves. But recently, since the whole country has fallen into a fierce tribalism, too many liberals have abandoned their principles. If the other side does it, they want to do it too. They don’t want to be informed, they want to be armed to do (usually imagined) intellectual battle with the enemy.

——

Taxpayers will no longer support a media executive who believes that the First Amendment is the “number one challenge” to advancing left-wing propaganda.

James Pierson

The Trump administration is trying to fix what ails American universities by freezing billions of dollars in pledged research grants due to be paid to Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and other prominent institutions, on the grounds that the schools have not done enough to counter anti-Semitism on their campuses or have evolved into left-wing hothouses with little diversity of opinion. The administration froze the funds as the first step in negotiations designed to address practices that conflict with federal policy or impede the effectiveness of federally supported research. Trump took the confrontation further by calling on the IRS to suspend Harvard’s tax-exempt status because, he said, the institution has turned into a partisan political operation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the task force handling the negotiations for the administration told Harvard that to unfreeze the funds, the school would not only have to address anti-Semitism but must also begin “to reform the campus culture by making structural changes to governance, student admissions and faculty hiring.” Harvard’s leaders, apparently taken aback by demands that went beyond addressing anti-Semitism, rejected the administration’s approach. Attorneys for the university replied to the task force by letter, declaring that the school would “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” Harvard president Alan Garber promised to take the battle to federal court, where he hopes a judge will order the administration to unfreeze the money—and he might get his wish, since the funds have already been pledged (though not yet paid).

——

When @Harvard is puzzled as to why taxpayers question sending billions of dollars of their money to the University, Harvard need only consider what they are teaching our future educators at the Harvard Ed School.

Corrine Hess:

This year, that money has been used to increase the recruitment, retention, and diversification of school counselors, school psychologists and school social workers.

DPI learned Tuesday the grant would be canceled. At this time, DPI believes the state will still be able to access the initial funding of $2 million through Dec. 31, 2025. But the remaining four years — totaling $8 million — will be canceled.

“At a time when communities are urgently asking for help serving mental health needs, this decision is indefensible,” State Superintendent Jill Underly said in a statement. “These funds – which Wisconsin used to make meaningful change for our schools – were helping districts and our higher education partners develop new mental health professionals, providing a career opportunity for our current high schoolers.”

But the Trump administration says the Biden administration, in awarding the grants, violated “the letter or purpose of Federal civil rights law.”

——

more.

Edited by Helen Rose Fives and Michele Gregoire Gill

Teachers’ beliefs play a fundamental role in the education landscape. Nevertheless, most educational researchers only allude to teacher beliefs as part of a study on other subjects. This book fi lls a necessary gap by identifying the importance of research on teachers’ beliefs and providing a comprehensive overview of the topic. It provides novices and experts alike a single volume with which to understand a complex research landscape. Including a review of the historical foundations of the field, this book identifi es current research trends, and summarizes the current knowledge base regarding teachers’ specifi c beliefs about content, instruction, students, and learning. For its innumerable applications within the fi eld, this handbook is a necessity for anyone interested in educational research.

—-

more.

AJ Bayatpour

Waukesha is the latest school district dealing with Wisconsin’s demographic problem.

Declining birthrates are fueling declining enrollments. Administrators are presenting their plan to reduce the buildings footprint here by up to 15%. With 23 schools, that could be 2-3 closures

——-

Meanwhile, Madison is expanding buildings and taxes amidst declining enrollment.

David Clarey:

Milwaukee police are mulling a trade: 2.5 million mugshots for free use of facial recognition technology.

Officials from the Milwaukee Police Department say swapping the photos with the software firm Biometrica will lead to quicker arrests and solving of crimes. But that benefit is unpersuasive for those who say the trade is startling, due to the concerns of the surveillance of city residents and possible federal agency access.

“We recognize the very delicate balance between advancement in technology and ensuring we as a department do not violate the rights of all of those in this diverse community,” Milwaukee Police Chief of Staff Heather Hough said during an April 17 meeting.

Quanta:

Asking scientists to identify a paradigm shift, especially in real time, can be tricky. After all, truly ground-shifting updates in knowledge may take decades to unfold. But you don’t necessarily have to invoke the P-word to acknowledge that one field in particular — natural language processing, or NLP — has changed. A lot.

The goal of natural language processing is right there on the tin: making the unruliness of human language (the “natural” part) tractable by computers (the “processing” part). A blend of engineering and science that dates back to the 1940s, NLP gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies another way to target us with ads. It was also ground zero for the emergence of large language models — a technology that NLP helped to invent but whose explosive growth and transformative power still managed to take many people in the field entirely by surprise.

Jay Bhattacharya:

I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.

To be clear, maximum transparency regarding the research we support is our default position. Since the release of NIH’s 2008 Public Access Policy, more than 1.5 million articles reporting on NIH-supported research have been made freely available to the public through PubMed Central. While the 2008 Policy allowed for an up to 12-month delay before such articles were required to be made publicly available, in 2024, NIH revised the Public Access Policy to remove the embargo period so that researchers, students, and members of the public have rapid access to these findings.

NIH is the crown jewel of the American biomedical research system.  However, a recent Pew Research Center study(link is external) shows that only about 25% of Americans have a “great deal of confidence” that scientists are working for the public good.  Earlier implementation of the Public Access Policy will help increase public confidence in the research we fund while also ensuring that the investments made by taxpayers produce replicable, reproducible, and generalizable results that benefit all Americans.   

Christopher Rufo

Harvard Graduate School of Education is an ideological disaster, but, even worse, a verified midwit factory. Imagine ascending to the supposed pinnacle of “elite institutions” and having to slurp up the same slop as some left-wing junior-high teacher training in Topeka.

——-

Related: Jennifer Cheatham and what’s different, this time?

citizen vs machine

YLE:

Finnish Parliament voted on Tuesday to approve a law that restricts the use of mobile devices by pupils at primary and secondary schools.

The new rules are expected to come into force after the summer break, in August.

The law does not entirely ban the use of mobile phones at school, and their use will be permitted in certain situations. But generally, the use of phones during class time will be prohibited.

Pupils will need to get special permission from teachers to use their phones, to assist them in studies, or to take care of personal health-related matters, for example.

Karl Zinsmeister:

“It has always been like this.”

“You can’t possibly change that.” 

“We don’t work that way here.” 

“That’s not how it’s done.”

Administrative resistance to reform has left Washington littered with dysfunctional tar pits. For literally 20 years the FAA has been “rolling out” NextGen, its desperately needed tech modernization of air traffic control, and still nothing is properly automated. The Pentagon has failed its annual audit for the last seven years running, yet no heads have rolled. The federal retirement system is administered, in the year 2025, on paper forms hand marked in ink and stapled together. The VA has more than doubledits staff and quintupled its costs (the budget soaring from $67 billion to $370 billion in the last two decades), yet backlogs, service lapses, and administrative scandals abound. 

In My West Wing, a new book drawing lessons from my years in the White House, I describe many encounters with governmental dead zones like these. Take, for instance, air traffic control. In the first 60 days of this year, there were 100 dangerous aviation incidents in the U.S., including one that killed 67 people when an American Airlines flight smashed into a helicopter at Reagan National Airport in D.C. Those 100 incidents and close calls were actually less than we experience over two months of a typical year. Last-minute interventions by our skilled pilots and ground controllers prevent most such emergencies from taking lives, but the longstanding reality is that we are enduring more peril in the air than we ought. This all stems from the failure of our federal government to maintain a modern air traffic control system.

——

more.

——

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

That led to all kinds of silliness. Here in Madison the culmination of the ludicrousness happened when a student stumbled on the fact that a big rock on the UW campus had been referred to by an offensive name… once… a hundred years ago. So, the UW spent $50,000 to move the rock to an undisclosed location where it could no longer do “harm.”

That incident was just slap stick, but real harm was done when the UW was complicit in trashing the reputation of one of its most accomplished alums. Frederic March was not only a great actor, but he was an early champion of civil rights. For reasons that will remain a mystery, he was briefly a member of a campus group calling itself the Ku Klux Klan. The chancellor ordered up an investigation which found that it appeared to be a sort of academic honors society and it never engaged in any racist activity. Nobody knows why they chose that unfortunate name, but March was not a racist. In fact, quite the opposite. No matter. At the height of this madness, March’s name was stripped from a campus theatre and responsible adults in the campus administration refused to replace it, disregarding the sifting and winnowing done by their own study. 

All of that was at the height of the terror. One thing Donald Trump has accomplished is to change the atmosphere so that it’s hard to imagine that this kind of madness would take place in the current environment. To be sure, Trump has done this the way he’s done everything else: he’s used a sledge hammer when a scalpel was called for. Nonetheless, an environment where administrators might feel free to say that they were not going to move a rock because somebody once called it by a bad name and they weren’t going to trash a good man because he once belonged to an organization with a similarly bad name would be a refreshing change.

So, while I don’t agree with everything that’s being done at the Federal and state levels to push back on DEI, I do very much welcome a broad adjustment back to sanity.

But one place that is as resistant to change as any is public education. We don’t have to look hard for an example. See the “unconference” sponsored by DPI. To quote last Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal story on this:

——

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?

Will Flanders

Last year, (taxpayer funded Wisconsin) DPI changed Forward Exam standards-lowering the bar for proficiency in WI. Curiously after the election, DPI released data that “unrigs” the results to show what trends would have been. We put that data into district-by-district graph. 🧵

—-

14% reading proficiency in Beloit on the Forward Exam turned into 22% through standards changes.

——

Proficiency before & after DPI changes

——

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly (back story).

Underly supports eliminating our one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement, the Foundations of Reading (FORT)

Civics: Why and how was Jill Underly Re-elected? (a bit of uniparty analysis as well). And.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Maggie Macintosh:

Manitoba’s largest school division has removed a rare entry exam used to sort graduating elementary students into different academic streams.

Tomas Apodaca and Colin Lecher 

The website that lets Californians shop for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, coveredca.com, has been sending sensitive data to LinkedIn, forensic testing by CalMatters has revealed. 

As visitors filled out forms on the website, trackers on the same pages told LinkedIn their answers to questions about whether they were blind, pregnant, or used a high number of prescription medications. The trackers also monitored whether the visitors said they were transgender or possible victims of domestic abuse. (See the data on our Github repo.)

Helen Raleigh:

The secret of Mississippi and Louisiana’s educational success is not secret at all; it is about returning to the fundamentals and following the evidence. Mississippi’s Republican-led legislature has implemented effective education reforms in 2012 that prioritize phonics — teaching students to sound out words — and enforce a retention policy for third graders who do not meet essential reading benchmarks. Furthermore, the state invests $15 million each year, or approximately $32 per student, into training teachers on literacy and providing dedicated reading coaches in schools.

The reform has produced remarkable results, with Mississippi’s fourth graders’ reading scores rising from 49th in the nation in 2013 to the top of the rankings (after adjusting for demographics) in 2024. The progress among black students is particularly impressive. According to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, the reading scores of the state’s black fourth graders have improved from 45th to third place during the same period. This reflects the effectiveness of Mississippi’s literacy program, which has provided a learning gain equivalent to a full year of schooling. Moreover, the state’s graduation rate has seen a significant rise from 72 percent in 2013 to 89.9 percent in 2024.

This drastic improvement has been dubbed as the “Mississippi Miracle,” and even caught the attention of Vice President J.D. Vance, who praised Mississippi’s education success on X.com: “This is pretty incredible. Smart education reform drastically improved Mississippi’s schools.”

Gov. Reeves declared in an interview that the education outcome in his state “is really not a miracle at all. It’s really a result of conservative reforms implemented in public education — they’re making a huge difference for kids.”

Ron DeSantis:

Per capita debt trends — federal vs Florida Florida’s per capita debt is declining and the per citizen share of the state debt is less than $500. The per citizen share of the federal debt: $105,000

Rick Esenberg and Dan Lennington:

In addition to facing charges for battery, Flores-Ruiz had another problem: he was an illegal immigrant. ICE officers were alerted by Milwaukee County to his arrest, and they matched his booking fingerprints to another set taken at his prior deportation.

Knowing Flores-Ruiz would probably be in court, ICE agents went to the courthouse on the morning of April 18, checked in with court personnel, identified themselves and explained their plan to arrest Flores-Ruiz after the hearing. Law enforcement officers frequently arrest individuals in county courts and jails. The reason is simple: it’s a safe and controlled environment, free of weapons and with a significant law enforcement presence nearby.

This was all routine and there were no objections. ICE agents explained and agreed to arrest Flores-Ruiz in the hallway after the hearing was complete.

Ivy Exile

To significant extents, the pandemic was exploited as the most tremendous of opportunities, and it’s not hard to understand why. Culturally and institutionally, public health has increasingly attracted and rewarded zealous and literal-minded technocrats who feel that achieving a rationally equitable global society is mainly just a matter of funding and empowering enough credentialed experts to supervise. By January 2021, with a new administration in charge, new standards of respectability and cooperation were becoming ever more standardized. All the norms were largely based on assumptions circa the beginning of 2016, when Brexit was but an unthinkable lark to be vanquished and Hillary Clinton was an inevitable shoo-in to break the glass ceiling and usher in six or seven Supreme Court seats for whatever we, the global intelligentsia, knew was needed.

From an establishmentarian perspective, it was supposed to be a new year zero, and an irresistible chance to restore the natural order. It was, of course, inevitable that the nation-state would wither away, and that soon we elites in the know would more or less enact the enlightened United Federation of Planets as seen on Star Trek. It was not that people such as Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Francis Collins were monsters, but that they acted monstrously in their arrogance and imperiousness and hubris in striving to enact what they felt they might achieve.

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A substantive analysis of taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue

Alex Tabarrok:

Yale has approximately one administrator for every undergraduate student (see also here and here). Years of simmering tension about the growth of administration relative to faculty has now been brought forward. President Trump has threatened to cut funding to Yale, the Yale administration has threatened to stop hiring faculty and raises, some faculty are now threatening to revolt.

Over 100 Yale professors are calling for the University administration to freeze new administrative hires and commission an independent faculty-led audit to ensure that the University prioritizes academics.

In a letter written to University President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel, signatories addressed the “collision of two opposing forces: extraordinary financial strength and runaway bureaucratic expansion.”

…Professor Juan de la Mora, a letter’s signee, said that a significant number of Yale professors believe that the institution is using funding for “improper” purposes and neglecting the school’s founding principles of emphasizing faculty and students.

Aaron Sibarium:

The Harvard Law Review has made DEI the “first priority” of its admissions process. It routinely kills or advances pieces based on the author’s race. It even vets articles for racially diverse citations.

And guess what? Editors at the top journal put all this in writing.🧵

Corrine Hess:

Artificial intelligence enables a computer system to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as problem-solving, decision-making, translation and written language. 

Trump’s order establishes the White House Task Force on AI Education. The task force will establish “public-private partnerships to provide resources for K-12 AI education, both to enhance AI-related education but also to better utilize AI tools in education generally.” 

In Milwaukee Public Schools, teachers have been encouraged to use AI tools. Osborn has a subscription to a service that allows her to use AI to create images for her classes. 

MPS was going to block ChatGPT but later decided against it. 

Osborn thinks AI can be useful for students at times. But when her students are writing, she turns it off. 

“If you want to use AI to proofread something, I think that’s OK,” she said. “But if you want to use AI to write your whole essay, not so much.” 

In July 2024, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released AI guidance for schools and libraries. 

Stanford Report

A civics education helps students see for themselves why democracy is important,” said Coyne, an advanced lecturer in political science and the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching. “We take that idea and spend some time talking together about what it means and give them the tools to be critical in a constructive way. I believe that’s also a civic skill.”

SCI is also about to launch a senior honors program.

SCI currently supports three postdoctoral fellows who combine teaching seminars on civic history and thought, constitutionalism, and political economy with their own research on topics relevant to the education of citizens. For example, postdoctoral fellow Simon Luo is examining the rise of China and how political actors shape its future. Next academic year, the number of SCI postdocs will grow to five. 

Meanwhile, SCI collaborates with other campus efforts such as ePluribus Stanford and the Democracy Hub, which seek to cultivate a campus culture in which open and constructive dialogue thrives and learning across differences flourishes.

“Disagreement about politics – about the basic terms on which we should live together – is a feature and not a bug of a democratic society,” said Satz, the Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of H&S, faculty director of the Democracy Hub, and university liaison for ePluribus Stanford. “That said, there are skills and values that need to be in place to make such disagreement productive. SCI will continue to build on what students have learned in COLLEGE, further preparing them for lives of engaged citizenship.”

Karen Mulder:

Hillsdale is the only college in Michigan that does not accept federal funding, operating completely independently of government handouts and subsidies. Schools like Michigan State University and the University of Michigan are learning that federal dollars come with strings, and those strings are taught.

The two colleges—the biggest in the state—are both members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and have passed, or are urging their faculty senates to pass, a “mutual defense compact” out of fear of retaliation from the administration.

Rutgers University initiated the charge, urging Big Ten schools to pass similar resolutions to commit funding and legal resources to defend the schools against potential federal funding withdrawal.
Hillsdale, however, requires no such compact because, since 1984, the college has rejected federal funds.

“Hillsdale does not accept even one penny of federal or state funding for student grants, loans, or scholarships,” the college’s website reads. “Being steadfastly and completely independent of taxpayer support is essential to being a truly independent institution—one not beholden to government regulations that conflict with our educational mission.”

Some of Hillsdale’s Michigan neighbors fail to recognize those same principles yet assert that the Trump administration meets their demands, not the other way around.

The administration cites pro-Palestinian protests and rhetoric, as well as destructive DEI measures on campus, as reasons for pulling funding.

“Shouting, preventing people from going to class, threatening them personally. That breaks down the academic community,” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn said. “They shouldn’t be doing that. And it’s, you know, because the [1964] Civil Rights Act is written in a certain way; if they permit that kind of activity, Harvard is in violation of that act, and that act applies to every organization in America.”

Ironically, Hillsdale’s financial freedom is rooted in similar frustrations about the federal government asking the college to do things it didn’t want to do. In Hillsdale’s case, it was recording and collecting diversity statistics.

Kimberly Wethal

On April 9, nonprofit Defending Education, also known as Parents Defending Education, filed a complaint with the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights over UW-Madison’s Lawton Undergraduate Minority Retention Grant program. Though only UW-Madison is named in the complaint, the Lawton grant law applies to all Universities of Wisconsin schools and has been codified in state law for more than 40 years.

The Lawton grant, which provides up to $4,000 annually for members of some minority groups for up to four years of their college education, was created in 1985 to help improve graduation and retention for in-state students. Qualifying races and ethnicities include those who are Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and of specific Southeastern Asian heritage, including those from the nations of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Becky Jacobs

In the lawsuit, a group of Wisconsin taxpayers — including some from Madison — argue the grant program is discriminatory and violates the equal protection clauses in the U.S. and Wisconsin constitutions by narrowing eligibility based on race.

Wisconsin’s Second District Court of Appeals sided with WILL and the taxpayers in a February decision, determining the program is unconstitutional.

“If only white and Asian students were eligible for the … grant program — obviously then automatically excluding Black American, Hispanic and American Indian students — such a program would not withstand constitutional scrutiny for two seconds, and properly so,” the unanimous decision, written by Judge Mark Gundrum, says.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul then filed a petition last month asking the state Supreme Court to weigh in.

John Hindraker:

The crime, such as it was, was never solved, which I assume means that, like nearly all instances of campus racism, it was an inside job. When it became clear that no progress was being made, I wrote the dean of the law school an email suggesting some investigatory tips. For example, the portraits were covered with glass which in all likelihood bore fingerprints. The dean did not respond to my email, nor, as far as I could tell, was the “crime” looked into any further.

That incident gave rise to some soul-searching the part of the law school’s dean, Martha Minow. Quoting myself, at the link above:

The Dean of the law school, Martha Minow, said that racism is a “serious problem” there. Really? Minow has been the Dean since 2009. Why has she allowed racism to flourish? Where has this “serious problem” been manifested, and what has she done about it? Who, exactly, are the “racists” who have created this serious problem?

I expressed skepticism as to Dean Minow’s sincerity. She certainly didn’t think that she, or anyone on the Harvard Law School staff, was a racist. So why would racism be a “serious problem” at the law school? Through the magic of “systemic racism,” racism without racists. 

This is what we still see today. Harvard thinks it has a duty to combat racism. But why? Are there a lot of racists on Harvard’s faculty, or in its administration? If so, they should be fired. But of course, that isn’t what they mean. It is “systemic racism”–racism in the air–that they are combatting through their superior virtue. This is why Harvard and so many other institutions have engaged for many years in affirmative action, DEI, in other words, race discrimination. They do it to reverse the effects of “systemic”–i.e., non-existent–racism. Discriminatory policies on Harvard’s part are a sign of virtue.

Brad Nguyen:

Memorising addition and subtraction facts is vital for making progress in maths and helps students access more complex tasks.

When I speak to teachers who are concerned about the maths proficiency of children, a common theme is that they are seeing too many students who cannot fluently recall basic addition and subtraction facts. Parents, too, are often surprised that schools are not helping their child to memorise addition and subtraction facts.

Let’s define what I mean by memorisation. I mean that when prompted with something like 8 + 4, they can respond with 12 quickly and effortlessly. What is not memorisation is applying a strategy to effortfully work out 8 + 4, say, by counting on using your fingers.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: being able to apply a strategy to derive a fact is a worthy instructional goal. My sense is that there is consensus amongst teachers that teaching students strategies is a good thing. Is there the same consensus around memorising facts? No, but there should be! So, why should children memorise addition and subtraction facts?

Alexander Furnas, Timothy Lapira and Dashun Wang:

Science has long been regarded as essential to policy-making, serving as one of the primary sources of evidence that informs decisions (1, 2) with its particular epistemic authority (3). Its role has become especially vital, as many pressing societal challenges today—from climate change to public health crises to technological advancement—are intricately linked with scientific progress. However, amid rising political polarization (4), a fundamental question remains open: Is science used differently by policy-makers in different parties? Here we combine two large-scale databases capturing policy, science, and their interactions to examine the partisan differences in citing science in policy-making in the United States. Overall, we observe systematic differences in the amount, content, and character of science cited in policy by partisan factions in the United States. These differences are strikingly persistent across fields of research, policy issues, time, and institutional contexts.

Will Flanders

DPI still claims they didn’t lower the standards, but this data release proves that to be a lie. It’s time we stopped allowing DPI to lie to us on the continuing failures of our public schools.

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Quinton Klabon:

DPI uploaded scores in the least usable way possible, so I did it for you!

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more.

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly (back story).

Underly supports eliminating our one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement, the Foundations of Reading(FORT)

Kasen Stephensen:

During my junior year at Stanford, I remember an assignment where we filled out a five-year plan with a professional and personal goal for each year. I planned to marry my then-fiancée that year, so my personal goals were straightforward: have a wedding and start having kids over the following years. I knew my situation in life relative to my classmates was unusual, but I didn’t realize how different my approach was until I shared my plan in a small group setting.

Out of the four or five students, only one other person mentioned anything related to dating or relationships, and that was to “start thinking about dating” four years out of college. They all described getting married as an objective for later and were surprised I would consider marrying so young. Shouldn’t I establish myself financially or professionally first, then seek a spouse? 

In sociological research, this perspective is known as the “capstone” conception of marriage. Adherents see marriage as a culminating achievement sought after some time exploring sexually, establishing a financial base, and maturing. As the median age at which Americans get married for the first time has crept steadily upwards for the last 40 years—to almost 29 for women and just over 30 for men—this perspective has become the de facto norm. 

While this seems like a reasonable approach, it comes with two major risks. First, it assumes that one can successfully get “established” before getting married. With soaring home prices, record student debt, persistent inflation, and a competitive job market, obtaining the independence or financial stability thought “necessary” may be perpetually out of reach for many individuals, particularly among the working class. Secondly, waiting until an indefinite later can force one’s hand when biological and social deadlines converge in the early 30s. One woman, interviewed by clinical psychologist Meg Jay for her book, The Defining Decade, described this convergence as “musical chairs”:

Austin Berg

According to polling conducted earlier this year by M3 Strategies – the most accurate pollster in the 2023 Chicago mayoral election – public opinion on the CTU has flipped.

For the first time in modern city history, the union is underwater with Chicago voters.

Just 29% of Chicagoans had a favorable opinion of the CTU while 60% had an unfavorable opinion (-31 net). Asked about CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, 18% had a favorable opinion while 55% had an unfavorable opinion (-37 net).

Gates and CTU Vice President Jackson Potter are now facing a unified opposition slate in the May 16internal elections for union officers. In the race for CTU president, members will decide between Gates and veteran CPS educator Erica Meza.

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“An emphasis on adult employment”

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the very first times I’ve ever heard a journalist with a corporate outlet tell DC journalists that they themselves bear responsibility for the collapse in public trust in this part of the media, due to the elevation of a partisan mission over reporting. Kudos @AlexThomp:

CJ Womack:

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 mandates that all U.S. institutions annually report foreign gifts exceeding $250,000, a requirement the the department claims Harvard has failed to fulfill. 

The letter demands comprehensive records from the school, including lists of foreign gifts, grants, contracts, communications with foreign governments, and details on expelled foreign students or faculty with foreign affiliations. 

The Department is also seeking names and backgrounds of Harvard affiliates tied to foreign governments, following reports that Harvard received $150 million from foreign sources between January 2020 and October 2024. 

This demand follows a December compliance agreement between Harvard and the department, which required the university to improve its reporting practices, as noted by The Harvard Crimson.

Arjun Panickssery

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”
— 107-word sentence from Stuart Little (1945)

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen(died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

So the decline predates television, the radio, and the telegraph—it’s been going on for centuries. The average sentence length in newspapers fell from 35wps to 20wps between 1700 and 2000. The presidential State of the Union address has gone from 40wps down to under 20wps, and the inaugural addresses had a similar decline. (From Jefferson through T. Roosevelt, the SOTU address was delivered to Congress without any speech, and print was the main way that inaugural addresses were consumed for most of their history.) Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders dropped from 17.4wps to 13.4wps between 1974 and 2013.

Michael Fragoso

And that could pose a problem for fans of the filibuster in the Republican-led Senate. Senate Republicans are highly motivated to address immigration. Having negotiated the last two significant, bipartisan immigration deals in the Senate, I have the scars to prove it. Republican senators are unlikely to sit by while the courts prevent Trump from using his broad immigration and national-security powers to enact his core agenda. Expecting them to cater to the demands of seven Democratic senators in order to fix a problem created by Democrats may be a bridge too far.

The Supreme Court is a governing body, just like Congress and the executive. The timely resolution of the controversies surrounding Trump’s immigration agenda is as much a question of governance as of jurisprudence. If the Supreme Court dithers and allows the judiciary to play politics with immigration enforcement, it may well raise the political temperature until 50 senators see no choice but to abandon the filibuster.

Leader McConnell protected the filibuster in no small part to protect the Supreme Court. It would be a tragic irony if the Court’s indecision and timidity precipitated the filibuster’s demise.