• 2023 was likely the first year in human history when our fertility rate fell below the replacement rate.
• The world population will start falling c. 2055.
• Never seen before, even compared to wars and pandemics.
• The consequences for the world are momentous.
• Let me describe a few of them.
“In most college classrooms,” wrote Alison King in a seminal 1993 article, “the professor lectures and the students listen and take notes. The professor is the central figure, the ‘sage on the stage,’ the one who has the knowledge and transmits that knowledge to the students. […] In this view of teaching and learning,” King argued, “students are passive learners rather than active ones.” And, she continued, “such a view is outdated and will not be effective for the twenty-first century.”
Instead of the transmittal theory described above, King championed a constructivist theory of learning according to which “knowledge [is] constructed—or reconstructed—by each individual knower through the process of trying to make sense of new information in terms of what that individual already knows”—a process called “active learning.” What students need, according to this view, is not a “sage on the stage” but a “guide on the side.” “Essentially,” King explained, “the professor’s role [as a ‘guide on the side’] is to facilitate students’ interaction with the material and with each other in their knowledge-producing endeavor.”
What students need, according to constructivists, is not a “sage on the stage” but a “guide on the side.”King’s article is a somewhat more modest proposal than contemporary readers familiar with the terminology might expect. But reformation efforts often trigger more revolutionary impulses in others. By 2014, Charles D. Morrison of Wilfred Laurier University was not only referring to “the now-clichéd shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’” but was also declaring that it was only “a good start.” Four years later, Ted Dintersmith even approvingly described a school that “has no teachers, just a few adult ‘guides’ who aren’t expected to be subject-matter experts or allowed to answer questions.” Since then, there has been no shortage of academic papers, magazine and journal articles, and blog posts calling for or celebrating the death of the sage on the stage.
China plans to exclude Tibetan as a core subject from the national college entrance exam for the majority of students in the autonomous region, a senior official has said, raising concerns over the future of the language.
Gama Cedain, chair of the Tibet Autonomous Region, told a press briefing this week that the change was part of reforms to the national examination and would improve Tibetans’ career prospects.
“Tibet, like other provinces and regions,” would have “unified exam subjects”, he said, such as Chinese and mathematics, and foreign languages including English, Russian, Japanese, French, German and Spanish. But Tibetan will no longer be a core subject in the exam.
“This helps students of all ethnic groups to enjoy fairer access to high-quality education, enhances minority students’ ability to learn and improves their overall scientific and cultural literacy,” he said of the changes.
Kill shot: seizing Harvard’s patents for inventions developed with federal funds, due to Harvard’s failure to disclose them, failure to commercialize them in America before other countries, and failure to convert them into practical use. From Commerce Secretary Lutnick. Not a good look for former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker — the soon-to-be-former Senior Fellow (board chair) of Harvard Corporation.
“ The passage of Fair Share, which this year is bringing in $3 billion for public education and transportation from less than 1% of taxpayers, demonstrates how a fairer, more equitable tax system can generate billions of dollars for the common good,” Page said. “Massachusetts has more millionaires — and they are wealthier — than before voters passed a constitutional amendment to place a 4 % tax on income above $1 million. Fair Share has made our state a more attractive place to live by investing in the foundations of a prosperous Commonwealth.”
The MTA Board also voted to explore ways to achieve universal access to public, preK education and debt-free access to public higher education for any resident who wants to pursue post-secondary education or career training.
“Our state Constitution guarantees the right to an appropriate public education, which has been interpreted by the courts to mean kindergarten through grade 12, Page said. “That right must be expanded to include preK and public college to be meaningful in the 21st century. If we truly want to get all children the head start they need, we must provide every child with the opportunity to attend a high-quality, public prekindergarten program. And if we are serious about social and economic justice and nurturing a culturally rich and welcoming state of involved citizens, we will provide all residents with the best vehicle for a prosperous future – public education.”
The Board of the MTA also reiterated its commitment to organize and involve all educators across the 400 local associations in the statewide union, and to remain at the forefront of defending public education against the attacks by the authoritarian-leaning administration in Washington.
——
Massachusetts is already in the top ten highest tax jurisdictions.
ORDER
For the reasons stated in the memorandum opinion issued today, it is this 7th day of August,
2025, hereby ORDERED:
1. 2. 3. The plaintiffs’ motion for class certification, ECF 97, is GRANTED.
A class is CERTIFIED under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(2) consisting of:
Any child who has been born or will be born in the United States after February 19, 2025, (1) whose mother was unlawfully present in the United States and whose father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) whose mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary and whose father was not a United
States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
Liza, as next friend to L.B.; Ashley, as next friend to K.K.; Andrea, as next friend to E.T.P.; Niurka, as next friend to L.G.; and Juana, Trinidad Garcia, and Monica, as next friends to their future children, are DESIGNATED as class representatives.
4. Counsel for the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and the Asylum
Seeker Advocacy Project are APPOINTED as class counsel.
Deborah L. Boardman
US District Judge
———
more.
Choose life.
Her hand in deploying these levers of power was evident from the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term. As his ambitions around reshaping higher education expanded, so did her remit. She is credited as an animating force behind a strategy that has intimidated independent institutions and undercut years of medical and scientific research.
The policies Ms. Mailman helped devise — and is now leveraging as she leads the White House’s negotiations with colleges — have sent shock waves through higher education, dividing faculty and alarming some students who see an effort to silence dissent. The aggressive tactics could have far-reaching implications for the future of academic freedom, the admissions practices at the most competitive colleges and the global reputations for some of the crown jewels of the nation’s university system.
——-
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.
2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).
While the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey can estimate undercounts and overcounts in the census, PES data cannot answer why a particular state may have experienced one.
In a shocking report that has not received the attention it deserves, the U.S. Census Bureau recently admitted that its 2020 Census count of the American population was incorrect in at least 14 states.1 And those mistakes were costly to certain states in terms of congressional representation, number of electors, and money those states are likely to receive from the federal government during the next decade. To put the scope of these mistakes into perspective, contrast the errors in the Census Bureau’s latest recount (the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey, or PES) with the recount from a decade ago (the 2010 Post-Enumeration Survey)—in which there was a net overcount of a mere 0.01 percent (36,000 people), a statistically insignificant error.2
——-
Implications of over and under counts census results: grok // perplexity
“Go to a 10 year old softball game and watch the parents,” Lewis said in March at the Project Play Summit. “They care about that more than anything.”
Across campus at the University of California, another author, Richard Reeves, raised within a British youth sports system much more infatuated with playing than the material things you can get from sports, offered this reading of the landscape: “Travel sports is the work of the devil.”
Reeves’ three sons were around middle school age when he and his wife brought them over from the United Kingdom to America, and into the so-called youth sports industrial complex.
“You’ve got these kids being hauled around the country and thinking they gotta do this, parents shouting at the kids and they had scouts there and individual coaches,” he tells USA TODAY Sports. “I was horrified by the culture around it.”
Lewis had two softball-playing daughters and, like so many of us, gave himself to their careers.
“The most pathetic character inside it is the one who’s paying for it all,” Lewis writes in “Playing to Win,” his 2020 audiobook that details life in the complex.
The Early Decision process for college admissions limits price competition for wealthier students and chance of admission for those who need financial aid, not to mention the added stress for students it creates. A new antitrust lawsuit seeks to blow it up. Good riddance.
If you read the full report, you will see even more evidence that NAEP, not most watered-down state standards, relates better to what our students need for solid success. Very simply, if we want students ready for living wage careers or college, we need the sorts of performances the NAEP is scoring Proficient or better.
There’s been a lot of discussion from some teachers and Ed school professors about how the National Assessment for Educational Progress’ (NAEP) standard for reading proficiency is simply set too high. These naysayers claim this creates a false sense of crisis when things actually are pretty much OK. But are the attacks on NAEP valid? Or, do the cautionary tales NAEP is telling us need to be taken very seriously?
I took a look at that question some time back by comparing the message from Kentucky’s NAEP scores to data for the state from two different tests from ACT, Inc. Those ACT tests provided statistics on the proportion of students that had reasonable chances of earning either a “C” (75% chance) or “B” (50% chance) on related college freshman courses. ACT calls these Readiness Benchmark scores and has reported them for a number of years.
Kentucky offered a unique opportunity to conduct this study because the state tested all public school students with the ACT’s Explore test for many years and also has tested all public school students with the ACT College Entrance Test for many years, as well.
So, how did that turn out? You can read this report for the full story: https://tinyurl.com/76uwaee8, but here is one example of what you’ll find. In these figures, the correlation between the percentages of Kentucky public school students scoring NAEP Proficient or Above and the percentages of the same cohorts of students reaching the ACT’s Readiness Benchmark scores are compared.
Whether we use NAEP or state assessments, reading performance in the US is a serious problem, and trying to excuse this away just doesn’t work.
There’s been a lot of discussion from some teachers and Ed school professors about how the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) standard for reading proficiency is simply set too high. Some of that discussion centers on a NAEP process that develops equivalent NAEP scores for each state assessment’s proficiency standard (accessible here: https://tinyurl.com/4hspr6y5).
The results of that study for 2022 Grade 4 NAEP Reading are found in the graphic below. You can see that state standards very widely. Virginia, for example, set a proficiency standard below even the threshold score required to be rated a NAEP “Basic” performance. Massachusetts, at the other end of the scale, actually set a standard slightly above the threshold NAEP uses to declare a student proficient in reading.
About 1/3 of the way up the standards graphic from the least demanding state you will see Kentucky, highlighted with a blue arrow, set a proficiency standard about in the middle of the scoring range NAEP only considers to be only Basic level reading.
Given its easy standards, those who want us to believe there is no crisis in reading would surely want to be able to say that Kentucky is reporting far better results than what the NAEP reported.
There is a lot of discussion of late about Lucy Caulkins’ Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP)to teach reading. It got me thinking.
Back in 2003, then New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein really pushed TCRWP as THE program to be used to teach reading in the Big Apple.
Rather conveniently, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) started doing what is called its Trial Urban District Assessments (TUDA) around the same time. Basically, the same NAEP used to create state reporting would also be used in some of the nation’s largest school districts. New York City has been in the TUDA for several decades.
TCRWP is on the way out in New York City, but a Chalkbeat study indicated about 48% (maybe more) of the city’s schools were still using TCRWP as of 2019 (https://tinyurl.com/3tesmv48).
With the above information in hand, I decided to look at how the city did on NAEP between 2003 and 2019. The table below has the results (note: years are listed in reverse order with 2019 at the top).
Richard Innes, via a kind email:
One of the more notable problems with much that is written about the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) regarding relative state performances is that far too often, only overall average scores are compared. Whether we are talking college professors, state education agencies, local educators, members of the press, and more, far too often some important parts of the real story are ignored because only overall average scores are compared.
This isn’t a new problem. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has cautioned about overly simplistic analysis that only looks at overall average scores for many years. NCES even included special comments on the topic in the 2009 NAEP Science Report Card (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2009/2011451.pdf).
Below is a partial extract from Page 32 in that report card that highlights some examples of how the picture can be VERY different once more thorough analysis of NAEP is conducted.
The first example used by NCES is Kentucky’s performance in the 2009 Grade 8 NAEP Science Assessment. When you only look at overall average scores, Kentucky scores statistically significantly higher than the national public school average. However, when you only consider scores for White students in each state, Kentucky’s score statistically significantly lower than the national average. Once you learn that in this assessment Kentucky’s NAEP student sample was 85% White, the importance of this additional information becomes far more apparent.
In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging classes.
When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those six semesters of requirements.
Then, as Kimo suggested, I bought the course materials for other required classes and taught myself, doing the homework in my own time. Then I went to the department head and took the final exam, getting full credit for those courses.
By doing this in addition to completing my full course load, I graduated college in two and a half years. I got my bachelor’s degree when I was twenty.
Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
At least when you have multiple strong private sector players, that gets harder. By contrast, winner-take-all dynamics are more likely to produce Orwellian outcomes.
— There is likely to be a major role for open source. These models excel at providing 80-90% of the capability at 10-20% of the cost. This tradeoff will be highly attractive to customers who value customization, control, and cost over frontier capabilities. China has gone all-in on open source, so it would be good to see more American companies competing in this area, as OpenAI just did. (Meta also deserves credit.)
— There is likely to be a division of labor between generalized foundation models and specific verticalized applications. Instead of a single superintelligence capturing all the value, we are likely to see numerous agentic applications solving “last mile” problems. This is great news for the startup ecosystem.
— There is also an increasingly clear division of labor between humans and AI. Despite all the wondrous progress, AI models are still at zero in terms of setting their own objective function. Models need context, they must be heavily prompted, the output must be verified, and this process must be repeated iteratively to achieve meaningful business value. This is why Balaji has said that AI is not end-to-end but middle-to-middle. This means that apocalyptic predictions of job loss are as overhyped as AGI itself. Instead, the truism that “you’re not going to lose your job to AI but to someone who uses AI better than you” is holding up well.
———
The plan would mandate that messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, must scan every message, photo and video sent by users starting in October, even if end-to-end encryption is in place, popular French tech blogger Korben wrote on Monday.
Denmark reintroduced the proposal on July 1, the first day of its EU Council presidency. France, once opposed, is now in favor, Korben said, citing Patrick Breyer, a former member of the European Parliament for Germany and the European Pirate Party.
Belgium, Hungary, Sweden, Italy and Spain are also in favor, while Germany remains undecided. However, if Berlin joins the majority, a qualified council vote could push the plan through by mid-October, Korben said.
Boaler’s co-faulty member in the Stanford Education dept is credited with the “research” that minority students can only learn from teachers who share their skin color/ identity. Through layers of idea laundering, it is now considered “best practice,” and many many K-12 school districts have developed strategic plans to make the staff “reflect student diversity” Except, his dissertation research is based on a super flawed 1980s TN research project that in no way reflects his conclusions.
Anyone who works in security will know why this is a bad idea! It’s the root cause of SQL injection, XSS, command inection and so much more.
I coined the term prompt injection nearly three years ago, in September 2022. It’s important to note that I did not discover the vulnerability. One of my weirder hobbies is helping coin or boost new terminology—I’m a total opportunist for this. I noticed that there was an interesting new class of attack that was being discussed which didn’t have a name yet, and since I have a blog I decided to try my hand at naming it to see if it would stick.
Jonathan Schedler:
I’m the author of the paper @grok describes here. It’s among the most read and cited articles on psychotherapy outcome—required reading in grad programs around the world
Grok gets literally everything wrong
The paper shows psychodynamic therapy is as or more effective than CBT. Grok says the exact opposite
The title of the paper is literally, “The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy.”
The effect size for psychodynamic therapy for the major study in the paper was .97. Grok says it’s 33. The number .33 does not appear anywhere in the paper.
In recent years, there has been a significant focus on the mental health of young people, accompanied by substantial financial investment in Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs designed to support the mental well-being of students. According to a 2017 report, schools are estimated to have spent between $21 billion and $47 billion annually on SEL. That number grewexponentially during and after COVID school closures. While these programs may have been adopted with good intentions, they have not proven to be effective, and research suggests that they may be causing harm. In addition to the lack of evidence supporting the use of SEL, these programs place an added burden on teachers who are overburdened and on school budgets that are already stretched thin.
We believe that there is a better way to improve the mental well-being of students, and the best part is that our solution doesn’t place any additional work on teachers, nor does it burden school budgets. We propose that schools adopt Outdoor Unstructured Recess (OUR) instead of SEL. Giving students daily time outdoors to interact with their peers, engage in physical activity that isn’t organized or directed by an adult, and learn organic conflict resolution would do wonders to boost their mental and physical well-being. The fresh air and pause from instruction time would likely be a welcome respite for teachers as well.
A recent study conducted by Heather Macpherson Parrott and Lynn E. Cohen highlights the benefits of unstructured play that spill over into the classroom. One teacher involved in the study commented that, “For most students, they’re able to focus more during the day because they know a play break is coming, and they can save their socializing and their energy for that time. They look forward to it, and they physically need it.”
Just one problem: At this very moment, a D.C. police commander has been suspended and is getting investigated for allegedly tweaking crime stats to make them look lower than reality.
And D.C.’s police union says that his suspension is just the tip of the iceberg. The union says its investigation has revealed that cops all over the city are routinely pressured by command staff to downgrade felonies so they don’t appear on the MPD or FBI’s violent crime database statistics.
How much of the “crime drop” is just Democrat machine politicians lying to the public?
——-
If you major in philosophy, as I did, you will inevitably get jokes about whether they’re hiring at the philosophy factory. The truth, though, is that philosophy majors have above-average earningscompared to the typical college graduate. And that’s not just a function of would-be philosophers going to law school. People whose terminal degree is a bachelor’s in philosophy earn pretty good money.
Most philosophy departments have a line about this, pitching students on the very real value of the skills that philosophy undergraduates practice.
I don’t think those departmental lines are wrong, exactly. Skills like reading texts closely, understanding the logical structure of arguments, and writing persuasively certainly do come in handy in a wide range of settings. That said, I don’t think this explains much about the relative earning power of a philosophy degree. The skills you learn studying history — reading documents, evaluating evidence — are also broadly applicable. What’s interesting isn’t that philosophy-type skills have some utility, it’s that philosophy majors earn more than history majors or English majors or students of other traditional, non-STEM academic topics.
And I think Scotty Hendricks nailed the explanation in a Big Think piece he wrote a couple of years ago: philosophy majors earn more because philosophy majors are smarter, on average, than students of other traditional liberal arts disciplines.
But why are philosophy majors smarter?
A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks.
Forty years ago, researchers designing shortest-paths algorithms ran up against this “sorting barrier.” Now, a team of researchers has devised a new algorithm that breaks it(opens a new tab). It doesn’t sort, and it runs faster than any algorithm that does.
“The authors were audacious in thinking they could break this barrier,” said Robert Tarjan(opens a new tab), a computer scientist at Princeton University. “It’s an amazing result.”
The Problem: WILL’s analysis exposes significant flaws in the current reporting system where schools and districts appear to perform above average:
To verify these findings, WILL compared DPI’s ratings to GreatSchools, an independent school rating system widely used by parents when choosing a school. A review of 309 Wisconsin schools across the state’s six largest districts showed that 50% of schools were rated higher by DPI, while only 3% were rated higher by GreatSchools. We believe that this demonstrates DPI’s ratings are overly generous and fail to accurately reflect declining student achievement.
———
Dozens of schools “meet” or “exceed” expectations in Wisconsin when 3 out of every 4 students can’t read at grade level. In some schools, it’s 9 out of 10 students.
———
Wisconsin’s public school districts got $18,592 of revenue per pupil in the most recent state figures.
It’s an all-time high, even after you account for inflation.
And it’s more than double what they got in 2000.
———-
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Citadel’s workforce once numbered 1,100 in downtown Chicago, most of whom were compensated well above the $200,000 threshold Mayor Johnson now wants to tax. In a few short years, Citadel’s Chicago headcount now is at just 250, we understand.
Once company bosses make up their minds that the “privilege of doing business” in a certain place is no longer worth the expense and headache, it doesn’t take long for them to act.
Progressives who lack respect for billionaires like Citadel CEO Ken Griffin may feel they can afford to sniff at the loss of hundreds of his highly paid employees. But the departure of those 850 Citadel workers has meant hundreds of millions in lost spending power, including tax receipts.
Keep chasing folks like that out of town, and that 5% tax soon will need to be raised to something like 7.5% and surely more later.
That’s how once-flourishing cities like Chicago end up circling the drain.
Public, Parents & K-12 Education
KEY FINDINGS
Over 60% of parents feel “hopeful” about the future, and more than half feel “a sense of purpose,” “optimistic,” and “happy.” More than half of non-parents feel “hopeful,” and at least one-fourth feel “frustration,” pessimistic,” or “overwhelmed.”
When it comes to voting in federal and state elections, adults and school parents care mostly about economic issues. School parents place much higher importance on education issues than other adults.
The general public and school parents greatly underestimate per-student spending in public schools. The public and parents are much less likely to say their state’s per-student spending is “too low” when given a publicly reported statistic – by 16 point and 14 points, respectively.
Nearly 2 in 3 parents say their child’s school schedule aligns with their work schedule “always” or “often.” High school parents are the least likely to have aligned schedules with their children. About 3 in 4 parents prefer their child’s school time to start between 8:00 am and 9:00 am. Nearly half of school parents prefer their child’s school time to end between 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm.
Overall support levels for choice-based policies remain high among school parents and the general public:
• Education savings accounts (ESAs) – 76% / 70%
• School vouchers – 69% / 61%
• Charter schools – 72% / 64%
• Open enrollment – 79% / 70%
Three in four school parents believe ESAs should be available to all families regardless of income or special needs. This is over 20-points higher than the percentage of parents who want to determine ESA availability based on financial need.
Large majorities of school parents and non-parents believe ESA funds should be used for educational materials like textbooks, tutoring, online classes, and technology. Sports-related expenses, entertainment tickets, and toys are the expenses least supported by parents and non-parents alike.
Private school parents are much more likely to say that they are “very satisfied” with their child’s schooling experiences than district school parents. Parents are consistently more likely to say they are “very satisfied” with private schools than public district schools. Strong satisfaction has risen among both types since last month.
Methodology
This poll was conducted between August 2-6, 2024 among a sample of 2,252 Adults. The interviews were conducted online and the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of Adults based on gender, educational attainment, age, race, and region. Results based on the full survey have a measure of precision of plus or minus 2.32 percentage points..
According to a 2024 national poll, Americans (including parents) underestimate the amount we spend on education.
———-
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
You would think it’s shocking that schools would rather pay $900+ per pupil in “finder’s fees” than just listen to parents and improve academic outcomes – but nope, that’s par for the course with US public ed administrators.
Surveillance systems in American schools increasingly monitor everything students write on school accounts and devices. Thousands of school districts across the country use software like Gaggle and Lightspeed Alert to track kids’ online activities, looking for signs they might hurt themselves or others. With the help of artificial intelligence, technology can dip into online conversations and immediately notify both school officials and law enforcement.
Student enrollment is falling at public schools across the country, impacting funding streams and threatening financial solvency, as schools continue to be on the hook for considerable fixed costs like loans or debts. Having to pay out teacher pensions (mostly using current revenue to pay retired teachers) is contributing to this growing problem. But even though teacher pension plans are tremendously expensive, they’re still not serving the majority of their members. There are better ways to provide benefits in a more sustainable way.
Nationally, teacher pension costs amount to around $83 billion a year, or about one out of every ten dollars that taxpayers provide for public education. That works out to almost $1,700 per student.
These pension payments are eating up a growing share of the funds that taxpayers think are paying for teaching and learning. This millstone weighs down districts and hampers their ability to be responsive and flexible to falling enrollment levels or other changes in student needs.
States and districts are contributing nearly 20% of each current teacher’s salary toward pension costs. That figure is much, much higher than what a typical private-sector employer pays toward retirement benefits and does not include Social Security contributions.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s refusal to close near-empty schools and push for more “sustainable community schools” is hurting student achievement. CTU is about adding members and escaping accountability, not about what’s best for Chicago students.
The Chicago Teachers Union recently marked the 10th anniversary of the celebrated “hunger strike” victory that prevented the closure of the nearly empty Dyett High School.
Lost on the CTU is the harsh reality that despite Dyett boasting an 87% graduation rate and winning a 2A state boys basketball championship, only 2% of its graduates are proficient in reading. None are proficient in math. An alarming 75% of Dyett students were chronically absent – missing more than 10% of the school year.
For far too many Dyett students, education remains a broken promise.
The fight to save Dyett was focused solely on keeping the school open, not on improving its quality. This reflects the CTU’s broader approach to public education: prioritize keeping schools open, expand union membership, increase member benefits and dues, reduce workload and protect jobs.
Student achievement? Not CTU’s priority.
Standardized testing is demonized. As a result, neither schools nor teachers are held accountable for performance.
The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for every 747,000 or so Americans. That’s by far the highest population-to-representative ratio among a peer group of industrialized democracies, and the highest it’s been in U.S. history. And with the size of the House capped by law and the country’s population continually growing, the representation ratio likely will only get bigger.
In the century-plus since the number of House seats first reached its current total of 435 (excluding nonvoting delegates), the representation ratio has more than tripled – from one representative for every 209,447 people in 1910 to one for every 747,184 as of last year.
But in the real world, the right move is worthless if your internal model of the world is wrong.
You never have the full picture. You never will. Every decision is a working theory. Every action is an experiment in real-world complexity.
And here’s the key: you don’t stop and make a decision, then pause again to evaluate it. That’s how you lose. The enemy is trying to make you freeze. Don’t do their job for them. Keep moving. Keep testing. Keep adjusting.
Strategy is not about certainty. It’s about continuous experimentation under fire.
Friction, failure, and surprise don’t loop you back, they change you. All feedback flows directly into Orientation. That’s how you evolve judgment.
If you’re not reorienting, you’re not orienting.
This is not repetition, it’s mutation. Signals, results, and mismatches hit the orientation system directly. Your perception reshapes. Your actions shift. Your predictions improve. And those changes alter the next round of feedback in return. It’s a feedback flow, not a cycle.
Discrepancies in financial records. Inaccurate reporting of financial activities. Missing documentation to justify expenditures.
An audit initially prompted by two Canyon Crest Academy seniors who last year investigated their school’s nonprofit foundation has found a number of instances of financial mismanagement by San Dieguito Union High School District’s school foundations.
———
more.
At issue is the Trump administration’s much-criticized deportations policy, specifically efforts by Marco Rubio and the State Department to revoke visas of students and other foreigners deemed threats. Trump officials in February announced an intention to “root out” those guilty of “anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” and Rubio followed up in March with an announcement that he’d personally revoked over 300 visas. “We do it every day,” Rubio said. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” Using a seemingly Charlie Murphy-inspired metaphor many Trump supporters found convincing, Rubio added:
We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to be a social activist that comes in and tears up our university campuses…
If you invite me into your home because I say, “Oh, I want to go to your house for dinner,” and I come into your house and I start putting mud on your couch and spray-painting your kitchen, I bet you you’re going to kick me out.
The signature cases involved activist Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, whose presence Rubio said would create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States,” and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, who aroused displeasure via an editorial she wrote for the Tufts Daily demanding that the school “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.” Both cases aroused massive media furor, with video of agents grabbing Öztürk off the streets going viral, triggering instant comparisons to a smorgasbord of secret police regimes. Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton told the Boston Globe, “It’s like the Gestapo. That’s what the Gestapo was established to do.” Joe Rogan, bashed as a Nazi-booster by MSNBC in March, came back into the station’s good graces when he ripped the deportations as “fucking crazy.” Amid the frenzy, few commentators noted the controversial policy’s unusual legal genesis.
Warnings about declining public school enrollment have grown louder recently—and for good reason. Between fall 2019 and fall 2023, enrollment fell from 50.8 million to 49.5 million, a loss of more than 1.2 million students, or 2.5 percent, in just five years. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the decline, erasing more than a decade of modest national growth. But enrollment was already falling in some grades and communities before the pandemic, driven by factors including falling birth rates and shifting family preferences. And the trend is expected to continue: The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) projects enrollment will fall below 47 million by 2031.
Yet a FutureEd analysis based on data from NCES, the Center for Disease Control, and other sources, finds that while public school enrollment is declining overall, the trends vary widely by race, grade level, geography, and schools. And that variation offers important insight into how the education landscape is shifting, where the challenges are most acute, and what it means for the future of a public school system designed to serve a larger student population.
And if you care about the plight of the poor, which all good people should, consider studying the structure of the financial system in which they operate. Consider, as Bernie shows, that from the 1970’s something seems to have happened, structurally, that has lead to increasing wealth disparity.
This disparity has little to do with Elon’s momentous achievements, and much to do with money being perverted into a fiat institution when it was severed from gold in 1971.
Civilization is sick because money itself—that blood which courses through its productive veins—was perverted.
And it was perverted by people very much like Bernie, who, being unable to produce themselves, advocate for the wholesale theft of what others produce. That overt theft is somewhat distasteful, many insidious methods have been devised… most notably, the debasement of currency, which not one citizen in a hundred even diagnoses as the problem.
The new “AI Plus” initiative aims to integrate Chinese models into key industries and export Chinese AI and hardware to the Global South—no export license, no questions asked.
The results are already clear. China has racked up more than 1,500 models, many of which are open-source. Many outperform or match the math and coding benchmarks of Western models. Huawei’s GPUs are quickly filling the gap left by the Biden administration’s adoption of stricter export controls. The research firm Bernstein projects that Nvidia’s global AI market share will drop a whopping 12% this year alone, if restrictions largely remain in place. China’s foundry capacity has vastly surpassed Washington’s expectation, and China is shipping chips abroad several years ahead of schedule. While U.S. politicians compete to see who can be more hawkish on China, Beijing is increasing international dependency on its models and hardware.
What’s the American response to a clearly failing strategy? In many parts of Washington, it’s still restrictions. But happily that isn’t true in the White House.
After accepting then wasting $6 billion in COVID funds, the city increased its budget 70%, schools per pupil funding 40% and the CTA 30%. Mayor Johnson is now demanding a massive state bailout.
Johnson and CTU President Stacy Davis-Gates claim city schools — which spend $30K per pupil — are shortchanged $1.6 billion.
Johnson and Davis Gates’ school funding demands are not related to improving student performance. Their demands are to pay for the second straight $1.5 billion CTU teacher contract.
To Johnson and Davis Gates, Pritzker is their new political piñata for failing to call a special session to rescue the city. Pritzker can’t bail out Chicago. He has his own problems: The governor is facing a $3.2B budget hole next year.
——-
K-12 Tax & $pending climate: Chicago’s pension crisis is heading for a Detroit-style collapse.
“Universities can hardly claim the right to be free from external pressure if they insist on launching campaigns to force outside organizations to behave as their students and faculties think best. Sooner or later, governments, corporations and other groups will decide that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and begin exerting pressure of their own. When that happens, universities will learn to their dismay that they stand to lose far more than they can gain from trying to joust with the outside world.”
Dana Goldstein traversed Orlando with a team of public school recruiters who were searching for families.
A decline in the number of babies being born and a boom in private school vouchers and home-schooling have combined to create an enrollment crisis for public education.
The threat is so great that some school districts are trying something that would have once seemed unthinkable.
School systems in Orlando, Newark, Memphis and dozens of other cities and towns have hired consultants who aggressively woo parents to convince them to enroll their children in local public schools.
Brian J. Stephens has built a business around this new reality. Mr. Stephens, a political consultant based in Memphis, runs Caissa K12, a consulting firm for public school districts with the tag line “We recruit students.”
Caissa K12 has taken off, with over 100 district clients. Its popularity illustrates some of the challenges facing public education.
Two-thirds of traditional public schools lost enrollment between 2019 and 2023, according to federal data. Low fertility rates mean that the number of children in the United States is starting to shrink. At the same time, policymakers have introduced more competition than ever, meaning many families have options beyond their neighborhood school.
more.
First, let’s talking about how you improve your academics. That’s Step Zero.
Our job is to adjust the perception.… There’s always some positive stuff in every school.'”
———
“Thousands of more families are choosing to leave the Madison district than to transfer here”
Enrollment growth in Madison schools has not kept pace with population growth in Madison and its suburbs, or with enrollment growth in surrounding districts. Why is that?
———
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
We must adjust, not abandon, reading curricula
Calkins’ curriculum uses a workshop-style model that prioritizes student choice and independent learning. I taught her reading and writing units in 3rd and 4th grade, and across my 30-year career, they were among the most meaningful tools I used, not because they were easy, but because they came alive when taught with intention. They opened things up.
And yet, Lucy Calkins has become a lightning rod for literacy criticism in the education world.
Much of the criticism is likely spurred by low scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In 2019, only 34% of 4th graders in my state of Missouri and 26% in the nation performed at or above the “proficient” level in reading. And while critics point to low NAEP scores, I can tell you my students were deeply engaged with the content.
———
———
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
A former Sun Prairie West High School administrator accused of having inappropriate relationships with two students and possessing child pornography was ordered held for trial during a preliminary hearing Tuesday.
Robert E. Gilkey-Meisegeier, 30, faces two counts of sexual exploitation of a child and 13 counts of possession of child pornography — all felonies — for victimizing two students at the school and downloading images of a third girl whose nude photos he found on the internet, according to a criminal complaint in the case and police testimony.
The two students are between the ages of 15 and 17, according to the complaint, and the girl in the photos investigators found on his phone lived in South Carolina and was 12 at the time the photos were taken, Sun Prairie detective Cody Ennis testified Tuesday.
NYTimes: Columbia and Brown to Disclose Admissions and Race Data in Trump Deal
It took an existential threat from Trump to get them to release this data. Years ago a faculty committee of the University of California system examined just this kind of data and produced the graphs below. If you look at the data you will understand the monstrous nature of affirmative action as practiced in the US for ~50 years.
NYT: … Columbia and Brown will have to maintain “merit-based admissions policies,” according to their settlements, which codify the administration’s broader aims in legally binding language.
The universities “may not by any means unlawfully preference applicants based on race, color or national origin in admissions throughout its programs,” both agreements state in identical language. “No proxy for racial admission will be tolerated.”
… “The Department of Justice will put an end to a shameful system in which someone’s race matters more than their ability,” Chad Mizelle, the acting associate attorney general, said in March. “Every college and university should know that illegal discrimination in admissions will be investigated and eliminated.”
The language used in the settlements with Columbia and Brown hammers home contested assertions about the Supreme Court admissions case that the Trump administration has been making since February.
It insists that the decision goes beyond admissions and bars any consideration of race in university life.
🚨ACT 20 READING UPDATE🚨
——-
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Last week, the DOJ released guidance for federal funding recipients.
The memo—which clarifies how nondiscrimination law should be applied—is a huge development for universities. A lot of their worst policies are looking more fragile than ever
The modern conservative movement began after William F. Buckley Jr. chronicled perceived left-leaning biases at Yale in 1951, where he attended as an undergraduate. He published a book called “God and Man at Yale,” which accused the school of being anti-Christian and preaching “collectivism.”
But Campus Reform updated the strategy for the internet era, and others followed. A similar website, The College Fix, started around the same time. A much larger group, Turning Point USA, started a watch list of professors it deemed purveyors of “leftist propaganda” and launched Charlie Kirk to conservative stardom.
“When we started,” said John J. Miller, the founder of The College Fix, “we didn’t feel like we had a ton of competition.”
Campus Reform “mainstreamed the strategy” of using anecdote to craft a narrative of higher education, said Isaac Kamola, a Trinity College political science professor who has studied the group.
“In the last few years, especially after the Black Lives Matter protests, that’s been taken up by lots of organizations,” he added.
Yet she routinely faces intentional hits, excessive fouling and uncalled abuse while referees look away. Teammate Sophie Cunningham said what fans already know: “The star player of the league is not being protected.” Ms. Clark herself noted: “Everybody is physical with me. They get away with things others don’t.” Three injuries have sidelined her for 10 games and the All-Star Game, with ratings plummeting 55% without her.
Is it because Ms. Clark is white? A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces, a three-time league most valuable player, thinks so. She has said that race is a “huge thing” and that “it boils my blood when people say it’s not about race because it is.” Under civil-rights law, race-motivated patterns trigger scrutiny even without explicit discriminatory intent.
Systemic missed calls include viral replays of Ms. Clark being fouled multiple times in a single possession. “Every single one of them is a foul,” analyst Rebecca Lobo said. Ms. Clark absorbed 17% of flagrant fouls last season—double her peers’ rate. This isn’t merely bad officiating—it’s dangerous and unequal. She endures blindside checks and midair collisions—plays that trigger reviews in other leagues. She is a flagrant foul away from a career-altering injury.
The league has fostered a hostile workplace for Ms. Clark through excessive fouling, targeting, and hostile comments from other players and owners. These aren’t isolated—they’re documented, continuing and ignored by officials. The disparity in treatment invites real scrutiny. Not a single player has been suspended for flagrantly fouling Ms. Clark.
Melinda Heinritz is the president of the Madison Public Schools Foundation, a nonprofit that spent nearly $223,000 on a campaign to support the facilities referendum, as well as a $100 million operations referendum in the same election, which voters also passed.
“We see Madison Metropolitan School District as a destination district. We want it to be seen as the district to go to if you’re in Dane County, if you’re in the state of Wisconsin. We want it to be viewed as such nationally,” Heinritz said. “And one of the ways in which we continue to move toward that is we have to have 21st century facilities.”
Renovation and reconstruction efforts will focus on modernizing critical infrastructure, improving heating and cooling systems, enhancing accessibility and sustainability, and creating learning environments designed to support creativity and innovation. Many of the buildings targeted for updates lack air conditioning, rely on aging boiler systems or fall short of federal accessibility standards.
Chehak said when the projects are complete, the community can expect to see school buildings that are fully modernized — designed with sustainability, accessibility and community use in mind. Upgrades will include new space for recreational programs, opportunities for career and technical education, and the integration of green energy systems and green spaces.
——-
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Giorgio Tripodi, Ziang Zheng, Yifan Qian, and Dashun Wang
Tenure is a defining feature of the US academic system with significant implications for research productivity and creative search. Yet the impact of tenure on faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. We analyze the careers of 12,000 US faculty across 15 disciplines to reveal key patterns, pre- and post-tenure. Publication rates rise sharply during the tenure-track, peaking just before tenure. However, post-tenure trajectories diverge: Researchers in lab-based fields sustain high output, while those in non-lab-based fields typically exhibit a decline. After tenure, faculty produce more novel works, though fewer highly cited papers. These findings highlight tenure’s pivotal role in shaping scientific careers, offering insights into the interplay between academic incentives, creativity, and impact while informing debates about the academic system.
more.
The audit also shows $175 million in liabilities, mostly for grants and contracts.
I sent an email to CPB on Friday asking what the plan is for the remaining money. I’m particularly interested in what CPB meant by saying it will make “final distributions.” Grants will surely be fulfilled, but will stations get another round of cash? CPB hasn’t responded. I’ll update this post if it does.
NPR and WaPo, however, did provide this quote from buffoon NPR CEO Katherine Maher:
The ripple effects of this closure will be felt across every public media organization and, more importantly, in every community across the country that relies on public broadcasting.
Here are some financials on other organizations that were the subject of headlines above.
American Public Media, which oversees Minnesota Public Radio, is one of the giants in public media, with about 500 employees. It announced cutbacks of 5-8% on July 24, or about 25-40 employees. According to its most recent 990 form, a required IRS filing for nonprofits, it carries liabilities of $48 million, but also $178 million in assets, including $75.7 million without donor restrictions!
Seventy-five million is a lot more than what 40 employees cost. That amount would cover all 40 of those employees even if they were paid $725,000 a year, the compensation rate of APM’s president and CEO.
“We needed to take some pretty quick action.” Those were the words of WGBH CEO and President Susan Goldberg in discussing layoffs of 13 people who work for the excellent documentary series “American Experience.” The Boston Globe points out that the legendary Boston public outlet GBH (formerly WGBH) has had two other rounds of layoffs since 2024.
An audit completed in November 2024 shows GBH has $375 million in liabilities, but $576 million in assets, and about 75% of that amount is without donor restrictions!
Even though the U.S. is still ahead, China has tremendous momentum with its vibrant open-weights model ecosystem and aggressive moves in semiconductor design and manufacturing. In the startup world, we know momentum matters: Even if a company is small today, a high rate of growth compounded for a few years quickly becomes an unstoppable force. This is why a small, scrappy team with high growth can threaten even behemoths. While both the U.S. and China are behemoths, China’s hypercompetitive business landscape and rapid diffusion of knowledge give it tremendous momentum. The White House’s AI Action Plan released last week, which explicitly champions open source (among other things), is a very positive step for the U.S., but by itself it won’t be sufficient to sustain the U.S. lead.
Now, AI isn’t a single, monolithic technology, and different countries are ahead in different areas. For example, even before Generative AI, the U.S. had long been ahead in scaled cloud AI implementations, while China has long been ahead in surveillance technology. These translate to different advantages in economic growth as well as both soft and hard power. Even though nontechnical pundits talk about “the race to AGI” as if AGI were a discrete technology to be invented, the reality is that AI technology will progress continuously, and there is no single finish line. If a company or nation declares that it has achieved AGI, I expect that declaration to be less a technology milestone than a marketing milestone. A slight speed advantage in the Olympic 100m dash translates to a dramatic difference between winning a gold medal versus a silver medal. An advantage in AI prowess translates into a proportionate advantage in economic growth and national power; while the impact won’t be a binary one of either winning or losing everything, these advantages nonetheless matter.
Illinois has the nation’s worst public pension crisis. Nationwide analysis from the Equable Institute shows Illinois state pensions remain fiscally unstable and threaten retirees and taxpayers, underscoring the need for reform.
The Equable Institute’s annual report on the state of public pensions nationwide reaffirms that Illinois pensions continue to lag the nation in funding and are in desperate need of reform.
If the state fails to fix its pension issues, the budget will continue to be strained, people will continue leaving the state over high taxes and future pension benefits could be at risk. Preserving the cost savings of Tier 2, offering retirement choice to state employees and constitutional pension reform should all be implemented if Illinois is to have any hope of gaining fiscal stability.
Comparing pension debt to the state’s gross domestic product helps measure the state’s ability to pay based on the local tax base. By that measure, Illinois ranks as the nation’s worst: unfunded obligations equal 19.02% of state GDP, up from 18.52% a year ago. In other words, roughly one-fifth of everything produced in the state would be required just to erase the shortfall.
That’s driving up the burden on taxpayers, whose contributions to state pension systems have grown nearly 20-fold, from $614 million in fiscal year 1996 to $11.2 billion in fiscal year 2025. The heavy pension bill explains why Illinoisans pay the highest effective property tax rate in the country.
——-
Chicago’s pension crisis is heading for a Detroit-style collapse
As we shall see, in the wake of the Southport stabbings, there are even now proposals to ban knives outright, or at least all sharp and pointy ones—you may have thought no other kinds of knives would even be possible. It’s all ban this, ban that, ban the other in the country these days…ban everything, in fact, other than that which truly does need banning: the continued uncontrolled inrush of those who wield the knives, not the wholly inanimate and therefore innocent knives themselves.
“Maybe the best class of persons to ban would be the idiot politicians who repeatedly impose new and unnecessary problems upon their own people.”
A Matter of Knife and Death
There is a desperate pretense among the U.K. ruling class that, by opening the country up to mass immigration over the past few decades, they have DEFINITELY NOT also simultaneously opened the place up to massive and intractable problems that, like the immigrants themselves, were previously largely alien to it. But this is just not true.
On June 27, 2025, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark decision reaffirming that parents have a constitutional right to control the religious upbringing of their children, even when their children attend a public school. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled that the Montgomery County School District in Maryland violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by revoking parents’ ability to opt their children out of reading books with LGBTQ+ themes that conflicted with their religious beliefs.
The Court emphasized that parental rights do not end at the schoolhouse gate. The ruling establishes a nationwide requirement: when public schools include instructional materials on controversial topics such as gender identity, they must accommodate families with sincere religious objections by offering and respecting an opt-out right to parents.
This decision has immediate implications for parents across the country as they prepare for the 2025-2026 school year. Parents should know their rights and take proactive steps to protect them. WILL offers a parental opt-out form, a template notice letter for teachers to inform families, and a model school board policy that parents can share with their local board to ensure schools comply with the ruling and respect religious liberty.
Why was this case brought?
——
more.
Why do so many teachers abandon their teaching careers, and what strategies can we employ to retain them?
You’ve probably heard the stat: half of all new teachers leave within five years. It’s been doing the rounds for years, quoted in policy papers, union speeches, and the more despairing corners of Twitter. The truth is a little less stark. The most recent Department for Education figures show that around 32% of teachers in England leave within five yearsof qualifying. Nearer to a third than half, but still a staggering number.
According to the best estimates we have, around 900,000 people under 60 in England and Wales hold qualified teacher status. Yet only about 492,000 of them are currently teaching in state-funded schools. That means roughly 400,000 qualified teachers – nearly half – are doing something, anything, else.1
And the trend is getting worse. In 2023–24, for the first time in over a decade, more teachers left the profession than joined. According to the School Workforce Census, 41,736 full-time equivalent teachers entered the state sector, while 41,212 left—a wafer-thin net gain of just 524 teachers. But once part-time staff are accounted for, the workforce actually shrunk by around 400 teachers overall. In practical terms, schools are now losing teachers faster than they can hire them.
Powerful speech by Bret Weinstein: “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we must zoom out if we are to understand the pattern that we are gathered here to explore, because the pattern is larger than federal health agencies and the COVID cartel. If we do zoom out and ask, what are they hiding?” “The answer becomes as obvious as it is disturbing. They are hiding everything. It will be jarring for many to hear a scientist speak with such certainty. It should be jarring. We are trained to present ideas with caution as hypotheses in need of a test. But in this case, I have tested the idea, and I am as certain of it as I am of anything. We are being systematically blinded.” “It is the only explanation I have encountered that will not only describe the present, but also, in my experience, predicts the future with all but perfect accuracy. The pattern is a simple one. You can see it clearly and test it yourself. Every single institution dedicated to public truth-seeking is under simultaneous attack.” “They are all in a state of collapse. Every body of experts fails utterly. Individual experts who resist or worse in an attempt to return their institutions to sanity, they find themselves coerced into submission. If they won’t buckle, they are marginalized or forced out.” “Those outside of the institutions who either seek truth alone or who build new institutions with a truth seeking mission face merciless attacks on both their integrity and expertise. often by the very institutions whose mission they refuse to abandon. There is a saying in military circles, once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.” “I have no doubt that given an hour, the people on this panel could point to 100 examples of the pattern I have just described, while finding even a handful of exceptions would pose a significant challenge. We are left in a fool’s paradise. Our research universities spend huge sums of public money to reach preordained conclusions.” “Professors teach only lessons that are consistent with wisdom students have picked up on TikTok, even when those lessons contradict the foundational principles of their disciplines. Once proud newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post only report important stories after they have become common knowledge.”
“Morticians must now raise the alarm over patterns missed by medical examiners. The CDC has become an excellent guide to protecting your health, but only for people who realize you should do the opposite of whatever it advises. The courts, the last holdout in this ongoing inversion of reality, are now regularly used as a coercive weapon of elites against those who threaten them.”
“We have literally witnessed the Department of Homeland Security attempt to set up a truth ministry and declare accurate critique of government as a kind of terrorism. To my fellow patriots in the West, The pattern is unmistakable.
———
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
“Generally, when we see local district enrollment stagnant as population of a city increases, that is often an indicator to check the school choice environment,” said Rachel Williams, an assistant professor studying education policy at UW-Madison.
Progressive Madison likes to blame private school vouchers for siphoning students and revenue away from public schools. We understand that concern.
Yet Rickert’s reporting found that open enrollment among public schools accounts for far more students leaving. The Madison district lost a net total of 13,000 students through open enrollment over the last two decade — along with $90 million in state funding that followed them. State voucher programs for private schools reduced Madison’s school aid by far less: $20.5 million.
———
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Because Treasury saw the elephant in the room. As Janet shopped around bonds to anyone that would take a meeting, China, Japan, Europe — there was no appetite for 30 year U.S. bonds with interest rates under 2% when Debt-to-GDP was above 120% following COVID stimulus. The market wouldn’t touch them — even if we asked.
So it wasn’t worth asking — because again, at this point, Treasury and Fed are just managing optics. So instead of refinancing our liabilities at historic lows, we front-loaded the interest burden. Which means the window for monetary discretion — raising or lowering rates, modulating the money supply, nudging inflation — is effectively closed.
At this point, lowering rates will be seen as an inflationary signal, and the bond market will punish us in turn. Just ask Japan.
But. If you stand idly by as an academic while your university engages in illegal and immoral racial discrimination, I don’t think you have any actual grounds for complaint when your failure to oppose that discrimination comes back around to bite you in the ass.
Would I like to live in a world where research funding for titans like Tao isn’t subject to political winds? Why yes, I would.
I’d also like to live in a world where the Marxists who corrupted the university system are all dead or exiled and institutions of higher learning have returned to affirming the highest values of the civilization they serve.
The 45-year-old lawyer in Boulder, Colo., today is a homeowner with ample retirement savings but worries his wealth could suddenly disappear. He keeps an emergency fund that could cover his expenses for years.
Gardner misstated the facts, which were long available. I wrote critically about the lab deception myself in 2022:
In the early 1970s, J.B. Rhine’s then-independent lab (faced with declining institutional support his center had migrated off [Duke University’s] campus) was itself rocked by a fraud scandal. A charismatic and driven medical student handpicked by Rhine as his institutional successor was caught faking results. Rhine was resolute and transparent in rooting out and exposing the fraud and laying groundwork for improvements.
But Rhine cannot wholly be spared blame. He handpicked his own Judas. “He had barely been there three years,” wrote authorized biographer Denis Brian, “when, in 1973, Rhine appointed this man in his early twenties director of the institute.” [5]
It is possible that Rhine, a former Marine with square-jawed good looks and poised manners, saw in this “bright young dynamo” a formidable newcomer who could take parapsychology to its next stage of public acceptance. From my perspective, it would have been wiser for Rhine to place his stock in the less-Olympian looking but more integral and erudite Charles Honorton (1946–1992) with whom Rhine never seemed to personally connect. Although Honorton’s career was cut short by ill-health, the scientist proved the field’s natural intellectual heir, but without the garland of institutional inheritance. [6]
Minnesota was once a progressive trailblazer. Now it is a case study in how not to govern. We didn’t get here overnight. A toxic mix of political naïveté, bureaucratic laziness and ideological vanity has flung open the gates to fraudsters who now treat Minnesota taxpayers like a bottomless ATM.
Hyman Rickover, also known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy”, built the first nuclear-powered submarine and civilian nuclear reactor.
As the U.S. returns once more to an era of shipbuilding and building nuclear energy infrastructure, understanding Rickover’s management methods is of even greater importance.
This website is a searchable digital archive of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s speeches, congressional testimonies, and memos. It includes over 2,500 pages of documents, including over 1,800 pages of never before seen digitized artifacts from the U.S. Naval Academy Archives
Sawyer Merritt summary:
@xAI is donating millions of dollars to help four schools in the Memphis, Tennessee area with years of deferred maintenance.
For each of the schools, xAI is offering project management, construction, installation, replacement, and/or repair of the following:
• General School – Painting of hallways, common areas, and classrooms; windows; lighting upgrades or modernization; plumbing and restroom modernization; HVAC and A/C units; landscaping and beautification upgrades and modifications.
• Outdoor Athletic/Outdoor – Turf or natural grass football, baseball, soccer, and open play fields with associated bleachers; an athletic track; scoreboard; fencing or barriers; landscaping and beautification upgrades and modifications.
• Indoor Athletic – Indoor basketball court with associated bleachers, a weight room and exercise area, lighting upgrades or modernization, and a scoreboard
• Specialized Areas (library, cafeteria, auditorium, etc.) – Chemistry and technology labs with associated materials and resources; modular walls for individual study or collaborative work; furniture, wayfaring signage, and audio-visual equipment; lighting upgrades or modernization; and climate control systems and supportive technology.
xAI is not asking for anything in return from these communities. They just want to help and invest in the community where they have their AI supercomputer. xAI referred to these as “in-kind donations,” meaning the company would pay for them directly, with no funds changing hands between the company and the school district.
———
more.
———
Memphis spends about $1,900,000,000 for students 106,000 students or $17,924 each.
Madison taxpayers spend more than $25,000 per student, this despite long term, disastrous reading results.
A congressional investigation has uncovered new ties between Harvard University and the Chinese Communist Party, including the school’s years-long role in training rising CCP elites, three top Republicans revealed Wednesday.
Reps. John Moolenaar (Mich.), Tim Walberg (Mich.), and Elise Stefanik (N.Y.)—who chair the Select Committee on the CCP, the Committee on Education and Workforce, and House Republican Leadership, respectively—told Harvard president Alan Garber in a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that whistleblowers detailed the Ivy League university’s partnerships with CCP entities, which have been in place for at least a decade.
Will Flanders and Cory Brewer:
For decades, Wisconsin has been a pioneer in providing educational options to families, but this has generally only been available to those who choose to opt out of traditional public schools via private school choice or programs like open enrollment. A new federal option could open funding opportunities for all Wisconsin kids, but the state must choose to participate.
Provisions in the recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” created the first-ever federal K–12 tax credit scholarship program. Under the bill, individuals can receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700 per year for donations to certified Scholarship Granting Organizations, or SGOs.
SGOs, in turn, award scholarships to families for a wide range of qualifying expenses. This could include tuition at a private school but many services for other kids as well. For example, an SGO could be created to provide special education therapies or tutoring for public school students, homeschool curriculum, books, software, transportation and other supports already permitted under federal Coverdell accounts.
——-
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping young people’s schooling experiences, opportunities, and outcomes, and the role of schooling experiences in shaping young people’s notions of gender and sexuality. In many ways, the course is about the “hidden curriculum” of heteronormativity and cisnormativity, or the subtle practices in schools that privilege heterosexual, gendered identities and ways of being. As such, students in the course will apply the concept of the hidden curriculum to the study of gender and schooling in order to understand why and how children and youth with different gender identities experience schooling differently and why and how heteronormative schooling detrimentally impacts all students.
It’s understandable, and rational, that the American people don’t trust the media. Time and time again the media have proven themselves to be untrustworthy.
Still, I sometimes find myself wondering how different things might have been, how the press could have saved itself, had reporters just been willing to work with honor and walk down the painful road of introspection when they were wrong.
That last phrase, “walk down the painful road of introspection,” is not my own. It belongs to Bob Woodward, the “legendary” Washington Post reporter. Woodward became famous for his coverage of Watergate in the 1970s. A lot of conservatives dislike Woodward, and I understand why. Yet if we completely ignore the legacy media we overlook some gold.
In this case, the gold is “The Press vs the President,” a long series of articles by Jeff Gerth published in January 2023 in the Columbia Journalism Review. It is the most comprehensive, well-written, and damning indictment of the media I have ever read, and the kind of reporting that makes one consider all news events in a new light. For example, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s release of formerly classified documents revealed the truly deep and evil extent of the Russiagate hoax. The documents detail how the intelligence community set up President Trump for failure in 2016 by falsely claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin. The media peddled garbage, ignored contradictory evidence, and sometimes flat-out lied. For me, Gabbard’s revelations put an exclamation point on “The Press vs the President.” (Seriously, go read it.)
One of the people interviewed in Gerth’s series is Bob Woodward. In January 2017, Woodward went on Fox News to dismiss the Steele dossier, which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, as a “garbage document.” The Steele dossier was opposition research that claimed Trump was hanging out with prostitutes in Moscow and was in the pocket of Putin.
You’d think that such a statement coming from the media’s Watergate hero would have had some effect on the Washington Post—but it didn’t. Jeff Gerth describes what happened next:
Freedom of the press should mean freedom from government control that comes via funding. Spectrum license renewal still overhangs over-the-air TV network owners. The Fairness Doctrine, adopted in 1949, forced media to run opposing views. Its repeal in 1987 allowed media to pick sides and flourish, from Rush Limbaugh to MSNBC. Government-funded media—politicized and with raw momentum of swamp support—was always asking for trouble and should have also ended in 1987.
Video killed the radio star, and now social media has been killing broadcasters. Ask Stephen Colbert and his $40 million-losing “Late Show.” Artificial intelligence will stir the pot in new and not yet imagined ways. Such is progress. Of course, digital media inherits many old problems. Social media censored posts about Covid vaccines, often goaded by the Biden administration. Republicans and the Trump administration want to break up Big Tech for stifling conservative voices.
The First Amendment’s press freedoms should be absolute, including freedom from government-funded outlets. Freedom of thought and expression and freedom from government interference are critical to a functioning society. Even Oscar the Grouch would agree.
