School Information System

Dave Cieslewicz:

But the district is not holding itself accountable where it matters: student performance. For whatever reason, Madison taxpayers have never demanded that the school board set goals for the results of all that investment. Last November voters overwhelmingly approved two referendums, totaling $607 million, the largest increase in MMSD history. And they did that on blind faith. The district never tried to trim costs to keep the numbers down and they never once offered to explain how all that new money would result in things like better test scores, lower truancy rates or a narrowing of the racial achievement gap. 

The best of those investments is the focus on reading at an early age. I’m excited for that. But I’d like to see the district announce some specific goals with regard to reading scores in a few years.

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?

Margaux MacColl

Polygenic testing startups are Silicon Valley at its most audacious: promising to make future generations healthier and smarter, while inviting deep controversy over the soundness of the science and its potential for harm. Studies have shown that assigning “risk scores” for polygenic diseases is still a crapshoot, the results “random” and “inconsistent,” while critics claim they over-rely on data from people of European descent and offer parents a dangerous illusion of control. Hank Greely, a bioethics and law professor at Stanford University who taught Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui, said polygenic risk scores are “unproven, unprovable, unclear,” and that couples who have used them to select embryos have “wasted money.” He told me his former student Siddiqui was “very smart” but had likely “gotten ahead of her skis.”

Jack Gillium:

“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” he posted on his Truth Social platform early on Memorial Day. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

The announcement, which provided no further specifics, comes as Trump continues to apply pressure on Harvard as part of a broadside against what he calls “woke” ideology and antisemitism on college campuses. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said it was cutting off Harvard’s ability to enroll international students before a federal judge temporarily halted the move.

Trump’s plan would likely face further legal scrutiny, especially if Congress appropriated the grant money in question for specific purposes.

Harvard has been locked in a battle with the Trump administration since March, when the government said it was reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal funding over antisemitism concerns. Harvard filed a federal lawsuit against the government, arguing the Trump administration has violated the university’s constitutional rights as well as due process.

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).

Mitt Weiss-Blatt:

Funding

Their “AI Existential Risk” ideology had the financial backing of $1.6 billion from a few Effective Altruism billionaires, namely Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn, Vitalik Buterin, and Sam Bankman-Fried (yes, the convicted felon). 

Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy is by far the largest donor to most of the “AI Existential Risk” organizations.

The “AI Existential Risk” Lobbying

Nowadays, the “AI Existential Risk” ecosystem encompasses hundreds of organizations. Many advocate extreme authoritarian measures to stop/pause AI. They include “requiring registration and verifying location of hardware,” “a strict licensing regime, clamp down on open-source models, and impose civil and criminal liability on developers.” 

ControlAI even proposed a 20-year pause, because the “default” is human extinction by Godlike AI, and “two decades provide the minimum time frame to construct our defenses.”

Staying informed about this growing “AI existential risk” ecosystem is important. So, the information below aims to familiarize you with the various players involved.

Thomas Wells:

I want to focus on the ethics: why some students (and non-students) think they have a moral right – or even a duty – to disrupt universities to force them to do certain things. 

Here is my best effort to reconstruct the reasoning behind these occupations.

Premise 1. The Israeli government is doing terrible things in Gaza and should stop

P2. If there is something I can do to make a terrible thing stop then I ought morally to do it

P3. This university in my city has a student exchange programme with some universities in Israel

P4. If I disrupt the operations of this university sufficiently, they may agree to end the exchange programme in exchange for ending the disruption [Intermediate goal]

P5. Ending the exchange programme would [by some mysterious means] make the Israeli government stop doing terrible things [Final goal]

Conclusion. Therefore, I ought to disrupt the university

I think there are three major ethical failures in this argument.

1. Odious ends-means reasoning (P4)
2. Lack of legitimacy (P2)
3. Narcissistic causal reasoning (P5)

Note: Although I am focusing on the case of anti-Israel protestors, the same 3 general ethical failures will apply to other cases, such as the student protests demanding bans on cooperating with fossil fuel companies.

whatifaithist

The World War-era historians—Spengler, Toynbee, Quigley—operated at intellectual levels we can’t match today. Despite our “progress” myth, we’ve intellectually regressed. These giants accurately predicted our 21st century collapse: atheism, caesarism, social alienation, population decline. Their most urgent warning? BUREAUCRACY would destroy Western civilization if left unchecked. We ignored them, and now it’s devouring everything that made our civilization great, exactly as they predicted.

Tim Daly:

This isn’t just wrong. It’s a problem. There are lessons for our education community and for both political parties.

Edu-Snobbery Hurts Us All

• We miss opportunities to help kids. I’m not saying we should go “full Finland” and turn Mississippi into a junket destination and object of hero worship. It’s not perfect. As just one example, Mississippi’s 8th grade reading results are not as impressive as its 4th grade outcomes. But we need to celebrate their thoughtful statewide strategy that has dramatically improved results without a colossal increase in spending. Their progress is not a fluke. It’s a clue.

• 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 outcomes? They’re getting a pass.

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“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. Wisconsin spends about 35 percent more per pupil to achieve worse results.”

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Mississippi’s Momentum for Improving Reading Achievement by Kymyona Burk

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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?

Charlotte Hu:

A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology monitored brain activity in students taking notes and found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing and memory. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that has many experts speaking up about the importance of teaching children to handwrite words and draw pictures.

DIFFERENCES IN BRAIN ACTIVITY

The new research, by Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), builds on a foundational 2014 study. That work suggested that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking, says van der Meer, a professor of neuropsychology at NTNU. “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying,” she says. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.” But when taking notes by hand, it’s often impossible to write everything down; students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it—prioritize it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before. This conscious action of building onto existing knowledge can make it easier to stay engaged and grasp new concepts.

Katherine Mangan:

Along with wearing masks and social distancing, students living on campus would be expected to wear a coin-size “BioButton” attached to their chests with medical adhesive. It would continuously measure their temperature, respiratory rate, and heart rate, and tell them whether they’d been in close contact with a button wearer who’d tested positive for Covid-19. In conjunction with a series of daily screening questions, the button would let them know if they were cleared for class.

Liz Hoffman:

Top universities are financial titans, generating investment profits that mirror those of Wall Street firms. They are health care companies; the University of Pennsylvania gets half its revenue from the hospitals it runs. They commercialize the inventions that spring from their labs. They sell four-year subscriptions for rent and classes to their students and lifelong memberships in an elite club to their donors (posthumous, if the checks are big enough).

By revenue, UPenn is bigger than BNY Mellon; Columbia is as big as Coinbase. But these universities operate on profit margins thinner than those of a grocery store. In short, they make a lot of money but spend almost all of it.

Kevin Chen:

many undergraduate computer science programs, this is the absurd reality we face when trying to combat plagiarism. Everyone agrees plagiarism is wrong. Everyone wishes they could stop it. Everyone has access to the tools that find it. But no one seems willing to take any action.

Why bother?
The most important goal is to keep the course fair for students who do honest work. Instructors must assign grades that accurately reflect performance. A student who grapples with a problem — becoming a stronger programmer in the process — should never receive a lower grade than one who copies and pastes.

Finally, as educators, we also hope that the accused student can learn difficult lessons about ethical behavior in the classroom rather than the workplace.

Paul Vallas

Given the regressivity of property taxes and Cook County government’s overreliance on them, it is fair to say property taxes are a delicate issue for Chicago residents. With billions in federal COVID money squandered and CPS schools’ insatiable appetite for an ever-increasing share of taxes growing exponentially, the burden of property taxes falling on residents, in particular middle-income families, and the poor, will worsen. Illinois residents surveyed in a recent poll cited taxes as the biggest reason for state and local population loss, with almost 50 percent of current residents saying they would leave the state if they could.

In Cook County, it is not simply the weight of overall taxes that is punishing residents, but it is also the confusion and unfairness of the whole system. Taxpayer anger is growing. Meanwhile, Cook County’s political power brokers are playing the blame game and are scrambling to do damage control with property tax relief measures. The gamesmanship is reflected in the finger pointing between County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi over property tax billings and in the most recent efforts by the county to provide targeted relief for residents.

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notes on Madison’s 20.2% Property Tax increase (assessments are up 9.1%); 25k per student

Nicholas Carr:

Because text-generating bots like ChatGPT offer an easy way to cheat on papers and other assignments, students’ embrace of the technology has stirred uneasiness, and sometimes despair, among educators. Teachers and pupils now find themselves playing an algorithmic cat-and-mouse game, with no winners. But cheating is a symptom of a deeper, more insidious problem. The real threat AI poses to education isn’t that it encourages cheating. It’s that it discourages learning.

To understand why, it’s important to recognize that generative AI is an automation technology. You can speculate all you want about computers eventually attaining human-level intelligence or even “superintelligence,” but for the time being AI is doing something that has a long precedent in human affairs. Whether it’s engaged in research or summarization, writing words or creating charts, it is replacing human labor with machine labor.

Thanks to human-factors researchers and the mountain of evidence they’ve compiled on the consequences of automation for workers,1 we know that one of three things happens when people use a machine to automate a task they would otherwise have done themselves:

1. Their skill in the activity grows.
2. Their skill in the activity atrophies.
3. Their skill in the activity never develops.

Andrew Follett:

A once-prominent Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired this week for outright fabricating data on numerous academic studies of dishonesty and unethical behavior. The timing couldn’t be worse for Harvard: The troubled university currently faces a critical dispute over funding and foreign student visas with the Trump administration.

Francesca Gino was regularly cited as an authority by prominent left-leaning outlets such as National Public Radio and the New York Times. Both outlets now admit that Gino’s research was likely fabricated. Disturbingly, the flaws in her research were exposed not by the allegedly robust university system of peer review, …

Steven Sinofsky:

Writing and learning with AI is the typewriter, the word processor, the encyclopedia, and the almanac rolled into one. Seeing it as something scarier than that is just fear of new tools and new paradigms. Again. It is not surprise that we’re seeing so much writing about concerns—writers are the ones who are directly challenged. Just as electrical engineers were challenged by software abstracting out hardware.

Some will say not all abstraction layers are created equally. Not all tools are “harmless”. And they would conclude if they believe that about AI that AI needs more scrutiny sooner and that we should slow down before we understand. The challenge is the future doesn’t just wait around for everyone to come to a consensus. It arrives with new tools in hand. That’s what happened in 1984 when Macintosh arrived. That’s what is happening with AI.

AI is here. It’s already happening.

Jed Rubenfeld:

District courts can announce new law and do so all the time. But they shouldn’t be able to govern the entire country on that basis. They should only be able to rule for the parties before them.

It’s different when the government is violating clearly established law. Why? Because of a problem Justice Kagan identified at the oral argument. Say the president has issued a blatantly unconstitutional order—for example, ordering the detention of anyone who criticizes the administration. Any plaintiff targeted under this order would win in court in a heartbeat. But in each case, the government could simply decline to appeal. The circuit courts and the Supreme Court would never hear the case. If district courts couldn’t enjoin the practice, the administration could legally keep locking people up for as long as it wanted, and the burden would be on every individual victim to sue for his own release.

Christopher Mims:

And though Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 requires four times as much electricity, China has a huge advantage in terms of energy production, says Doug O’Laughlin, an analyst at SemiAnalysis who has studied Huawei’s new AI supercomputers. “China has been adding energy production for the past 10 years, and has the entire supply chain on lock to continue to do that,” he adds.

SMIC, which makes Huawei’s processors, is now the third-biggest chip maker in the world, and has managed to innovate in the manufacture of high-quality chips despite having older-generation, pre-export-ban tech.

Meanwhile, our political class.

Sara Randazzo:

Last fall, Harvard expanded its entry-level math offerings, with a new version of its introductory calculus course that meets five days a week instead of the usual four. Students are given a skills test to determine whether they need the extended course, Kelly said.

The extra time each week is devoted to reviewing algebra skills to make the calculus more accessible, Kelly said. The No. 1 challenge for students in calculus is command of algebra because the knowledge has sometimes faded, he added. “The extra support will target foundational skills in algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning that will help you unlock success,” the class description says.  

The Harvard Crimson student newspaper wrote an article about the new offering in September, saying that it was “aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills,” without noting that it is a calculus course. 

Fast forward to March 18, when Marc Porter Magee, the head of an educational advocacy organization, posted the Crimson article on X, writing: “Meanwhile, for the first time in its history Harvard has been forced to offer a remedial algebra course to its undergrads.”

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A ProPublica editor is defending Harvard against a Trump administration accusation that the school’s own student reporting suggests is accurate.

Democrats (and journalists) defend elite institutions at their political & professional peril.

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more.

Marc Porter Magee:

Harvard PR: “We are not teaching a remedial math class, we are simply remediating math in a class. There is a huge difference between the two you would understand if you went to Harvard.”

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

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Ezra Wallach and Anya Kaiser:

Three days before the start of the 2024-25 school year, the San Francisco Unified School District sent an email telling freshman parents that their kids had been automatically enrolled in a two-semester ethnic studies class. The course — which covers such topics as structural racism, colonialism, and the relative merits of capitalism versus socialism — had been an elective for a decade, but families were now being told it had been made a requirement of graduation. 

What parents didn’t know was that the day before, Lainie Motamedi, the school board president at the time, had sent a different email — this one to the district’s general counsel. In it, she noted that the board had never approved funding for the year-long requirement. Motamedi presented two options: The district could seek immediate approval from the board, or pause plans to teach the course.

Motamedi had been hearing from teachers about how the new mandate could mess with students’ schedules, and parents had begun reaching out to express concern. She was sure the budget didn’t include information on the new graduation requirement and had receipts to back it up.

Jacob Beckwith:

Junior Ashley Poole was named a 2025 Truman Scholar on April 18, marking the first time a Hillsdale student has received the prestigious national award.

Poole, a Texas native, is one of just 54 students selected from across the nation this year for the scholarship, which honors college juniors who demonstrate exceptional leadership potential and a commitment to public service.

“When I heard that I had gotten it, it was a really fun day, and I was very taken aback by how excited everyone was for me,” Poole said.

Each college or university may nominate up to four juniors for the Truman Scholarship. Finalists are chosen from each state based on the student’s home state. Poole was one of 11 finalists from Texas, and was ultimately one of two selected from the state, though most states nominate one scholar per year.

Poole traveled to Texas the first week of March for her finalist interview, held at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library.

DHS

Each jurisdiction listed will receive formal notification of its non-compliance with Federal statutes. DHS demands that these jurisdictions immediately review and revise their policies to align with Federal immigration laws and renew their obligation to protect American citizens, not dangerous illegal aliens.

Note that the list can be reviewed and changed at any time and will be updated regularly. No one should act on this information without conducting their own evaluation of the information.

Oskar Ghate & Sam Weaver

And a private university like Harvard could choose to ignore the administration’s demands — but that means forfeiting federal research funding, which puts it at an unfair disadvantage when competing for students, faculty and donors with universities that continue to receive massive federal payouts. 

If Harvard and other private universities truly seek freedom, therefore, they should demand that federal research funding be phased out altogether.

Harvard should argue that since all federal funding comes with some government strings attached, it infringes on intellectual freedom. Instead, Harvard is demanding more government funding and objecting only to the specific nature of the strings or to the way they are currently being pulled.

David Spector

“The administration and others have said conservatives are too few on campus and their views are not welcome. In so far as that’s true, that’s a problem we really need to address,” Harvard President Alan Garber told NPR.

Garber said the university needed to address a lack of “viewpoint diversity” on its campus, sharing how students don’t feel free to speak their minds. He added how faculty members have to “think twice” before teaching certain subjects. Garber said people have come forward claiming a stifling environment on campus. 

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During an interview with the 25-year-old Chinese student who was Harvard’s valedictorian, two old American men were fighting behind her – it was like some kind of metaphor.😂

Wall Street Journal:

Moody’s downgraded U.S. debt to a notch below its top rating, citing chronic budget deficits and rising debt-service costs. The rating agency lagged behind S&P Global Ratings and Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. in 2011 and 2023, respectively. Moody’s may have been late because it believes in the Keynesian model that government spending lifts economic growth.

Markets on Monday reacted poorly to the downgrade, as well as comments by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that there may be more bad tariff news coming. He said the April 2 “reciprocal” tariffs could return for some countries if they don’t agree to President Trump’s supposedly generous terms. The 30-year Treasury bond yield hit 5% for the first time since autumn 2023, before falling back, and the 10-year appears to be settling near 4.5%.

It’s interesting to compare California elected officials reaction to rigor reduction plans in the taxpayer funded San Francisco Unified School District:

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie:

We owe our young people an education that prepares them to succeed. The proposed changes to grading at SFUSD would not accomplish that.

I have conveyed our view to SFUSD. We are optimistic that there is a better path forward for our kids and their future.

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San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:

I try to stay in my San Jose lane, but as a former East Side public school teacher I have to say — this is a terrible disservice to our students. Lowering standards does not help children. It hurts them.

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Blue tape.

Ro Khanna:

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Seems like a good day to highlight the fact that Superintendent Su pulled her own sons out of SFUSD after middle school and put them into parochial high schools.

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Susan Dyer Reynolds:

San Jose has an annual budget of approximately $3 billion and one city employee for every 112 residents, San Francisco has one city employee for every 21 residents. Despite having 125,000 fewer residents, San Francisco has more than four times the number of public workers.

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Noah Smith:

Starting to realize that education polarization and the shift of rich people to the Democrats turned the entire Democratic party into a scheme to funnel donor money to useless people

Summary:

Regarding your recent post on reading and media, I would be curious for your thoughts about my observations teaching junior high and high school for the last few decades.

I (and some of my other colleagues) have noticed the following:

1. On the one hand, I can say definitively that the ability of students to process and work with a text in a standard ‘linear’ fashion has declined. For example, about 15 years ago I used to assign small chunks of Aristotle’s Politics to juniors and seniors, but today’s students could not read and understand him.

2. On the other hand . . . the ability of students to find patterns or links between texts has increased substantially. Just this past semester I taught a theology class to 9th-10th graders and wanted to introduce them to typological and patterned thinking. I was shocked how fast they picked this up, and many very quickly found plenty of connections in the text that I did not see. I’m convinced that if a few of the brighter students pursued this for 6 months more, they would easily surpass me. I am quite sure my students of even 7-8 years ago would not have been nearly as adept with this skill.

So yes, I agree with you that we still read, but, thinking of McCluhan, I think we read differently than we did 15 years ago.

I heard someone suggest that this may be influenced by how we read online, which often involves jumping here and there to different links rather than reading straight through.

Chris Rickert:

About $478 million, or 20.2% more than last year. It’s a percentage increase that “is more than twice as large as the previous record for the district in our data going back to 1994,” according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum. 

The increase is being driven by several factors, according to the Policy Forum, including the recent referendums, an increase in the amount the district can raise under state revenue limits, and a year-over-year projected decrease in state aid. 

The property tax levy is best compared to the district’s all-funds budget, which includes items such as debt payments and building projects. Spending across all funds is expected to be $661.7 million next year, an 8% year-over-year increase.

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Kayla Huynh

The uptick in participation comes in part from MSCR’s recent expansion to programming, Roth said. The school district added more clubs and middle school athletics options. Over 1,200 middle school students regularly attended MSCR’s after-school activities this year, a 60% jump from last year, according to school district figures.  

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Total planned spending is $661,690,867 for 26,374 students or $25,088 per student. 

Meanwhile, Madison, where we tax & $pend more then most yet have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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?

Jim Bender and Patrick McIlheran

A paper from an insiders’ group offers bad-faith arguments about Wisconsin school choice and the “decoupling” reform that would increase transparency

A reform that wonks are calling “decoupling” — an excellent way to simplify school choice funding and eliminate choice’s impact on property taxpayers — is being opposed by the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials on the grounds it will, among other things, eliminate a source of “negative attention” that choice critics have long used to mount opposition.

Don’t fix the problem, in other words, because then there won’t be an unfixed problem to continue to complain about.

The reform WASBO opposes is logical and straightforward. All funding for Parental Choice Programs and independent charter schools would come from direct state aid, thereby “decoupling” school funding from local funding formulas and preventing any impact on local property taxes.

This is already how it works in Milwaukee, and school reformers are pushing for the same decoupling throughout the rest of the state.

In a recent piece disingenuously entitled “The Price of Parallel Systems,” the WASBO’s research director, Anne Chapman, writes that one of the problems with decoupling is that it would “make the fiscal impact of voucher schools effectively imperceptible to the typical taxpayer.”

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Meanwhile, Madison, where we tax & $pend more then most yet have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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?

Melissa Koenig

Seattle Public Schools is dismantling its gifted and talented program, which administrators argued was oversaturated with white and Asian students, in favor of a more “inclusive, equitable and culturally sensitive” program.

The district began phasing out its Highly Capable Cohort schools and classrooms for advanced students in the 2021-22 school year due to racial inequities, the school district notes.

The program will completely cease to exist by the 2027-28 school year, with a new enrichment-for-all model available in every school by the 2024-25 school year.

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more.

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deja vu over the decades in Madison: English 10 and Madison expands its least diverse schools.

Tyler Cowen:

Another way of putting the nuttiness problem is to note that the importance of oral culture has risen.  YouTube and TikTok for instance are extremely influential communications media.  I am by no means a “video opponent,” yet I realize the rise of video may have created some of the problems that are periodically attributed to “the decline of reading.”  Again, we might have most of those problems whether or not reading has gone done by some amount, or if it instead might have risen.

Maybe the decline of reading — whether or not the phenomena is real — just doesn’t matter that much.  And of course only some reading has declined.  The reading of texts presumably continues to rise.

Daisy Christodoulou

Of those 3,825 human decisions, our AI agreed with 3,118 and disagreed with 707. That’s an 82% agreement rate, which is similar to the typical human-human agreement across our projects.

What about those 18% of disagreements? This is really important. It’s easier than you think to get 82% human-AI agreement. What really matters is what they are disagreeing about! Reassuringly, most of the human-AI disagreements were small. Of the 707 judgements where the human and AI disagreed, 50% were under 21 points, 90% were under 60 points, and 97% were under 80 points. (Our scale is fine-grained, and runs from about 300 – 700).

3% of the decisions – 21 in total – were above 80 points. That is 3% of the total disagreements, but just 0.5% of the total number of human judgements. 

Some element of disagreement is always going to exist with assessments of extended writing, whoever is judging it. This is a very low rate of serious disagreement, and one that we think is acceptable. 

Tim Sullivan

After a failed referendum in April, there was no question that the Watertown Unified School District would have to reduce its number of buildings. Indeed, even before the $7 million recurring operating referendum failed, it was expected that at least one elementary school building would close.

Tuesday evening, a special meeting saw architecture firm Plunkett Raysich Architects (PRA) and construction consultants JP Cullen present the School Board with a number of options as to how the physical footprint may be reduced.

Sarah Karp and Mila Koumpilova

And yet, Chicago Public Schools’ graduation rate has continued to inch up — from 81% in 2019 to 85% in 2024. Part of the reason: School district officials are giving students more chances to make up work and pass their classes even after weeks of absences.

In short, it’s easier now to miss a lot of school and still graduate.

“We as a system have been focused on not punishing students for being absent, but really understanding what are the barriers and trying to work actively to address that and also to support them not to miss learning opportunities,” said CPS Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova.

Dominic Cummings:

The intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it. 

Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.

Lucy Bannerman:

Making technology companies ask artists’ permission before they scrape copyrighted content will “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight,” Sir Nick Clegg has said.

The former deputy prime minister, who spent almost seven years working for the social media giant Meta, sided with technology companies when asked on Thursday about the clash over AI copyright laws.

Quinton Klabon:

Here is who will help set Wisconsin school report card standards.

There is not much they can do. The law is specific and key districts would get mad.

So, wait for 2029 when DPI updates reading/maths standards, raise test cut scores to NAEP, and remake report cards accurately.

———

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?

SCOTUS Blog summary:

Issue: Whether school officials may presume substantial disruption or a violation of the rights of others from a student’s silent, passive, and untargeted ideological speech simply because that speech relates to matters of personal identity, even when the speech responds to the school”s opposing views, actions, or policies.

24-410_o75p.pdf:

JUSTICE ALITO, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins, dis-
senting from the denial of certiorari. This case presents an issue of great importance for our
Nation’s youth: whether public schools may suppress student speech either because it expresses a viewpoint that the school disfavors or because of vague concerns about the likely effect of the speech on the school atmosphere or on students who find the speech offensive. In this case, a middle school permitted and indeed encouraged student expression endorsing the view that there are many genders.

But when L. M., a seventh grader, wore a t-shirt that said “There Are Only Two Genders,” he was barred from attending class. And when he protested this censorship by blocking out the words “Only Two” and substituting “CENSORED,” the school prohibited that shirt as well. The First Circuit held that the school did not violate L. M.’s free-speech rights. It held that the general prohibition against viewpoint-based censorship does not apply to public schools. And it employed a vague, permissive, and jargon-laden rule that departed from the standard this Court adopted in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503 (1969).

IFS:

When a Golden West College student who fled Iran described illegal immigration as a “cancer” and called to eradicate Hamas, the school’s College Disciplinary Officer didn’t defend his free speech rights from those who sought to silence him—she threatened the student with discipline.

Now that student and others are fighting back to defend their First Amendment rights.

The Institute for Free Speech has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of Matin Samimiat, Annaliese Hutchings, and Young America’s Foundation (YAF). The suit challenges the college’s unconstitutional speech policies and their enforcement. The case arises from the students’ efforts to establish a YAF chapter on campus and speak openly about controversial political and social issues.

Jess Huff:

The board closed the schools due to declining enrollment in the East Texas district. The last few months have been spent deciding where the dislocated students, teachers and staff would go.

Lufkin ISD lost about 1,600 students to other nearby school districts and independent charter schools over 15 years. The district now faces more competition in the years ahead. The Texas Legislature in early May approved a private school voucher program that will allow families to use tax dollars to send their students to private schools.

——

Locally, Where have all the students gone?

Scott Adams:

Non-experts have an excellent track record for the past ten years.

The Economist:

The police arrived at Maxie Allen’s door at midday on January 29th. None of the six officers seemed to know much about why they were there, recalls Mr Allen. But they read out a list of charges and searched the house, before arresting him and his partner and taking them to the police station, where they were held for eight hours. The couple’s alleged crime? Disparaging emails and WhatsApp messages about their daughter’s primary school.

Tyler Durden:

A Canadian YouTube channel that was dominating the platform during the country’s recent election has vanished, after the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reached out to the social media giant, and branded it a ‘content farm’ in a Friday hit-piece.

Jill Tucker:

San Francisco school officials killed plans Wednesday to test out alternative ways to grade some high school students after politicians and parents panned the proposal in the wake of misinformation about it. 

An estimated 70 teachers in 14 high schools — about 10% of the educators in grades nine to 12 — were expected to participate in a voluntary program to align grades more closely to student learning rather than attendance, participation or other factors. Some of those factors included whether a student brings in cans for a food drive or whether their parents sign a permission slip, according to the background information provided by the district on the “Grading for Equity” initiative.

That could also mean giving students multiple chances to take tests or redo essays and reconfiguring the grading scale to address inherent problems with a 100-point grading scale — which disproportionately assigns an F for 0 to 59 points, but only 10 points each for the other grades.

——

San Francisco Public Schools Convert F’s to C’s, B’s to A’s in Equity Push

——

Kane:

The “consultants” being paid by SF public schools to implement “Grading for Equity” (no homework, F’s count as C’s) is @CrescendoEdGrp

I am trying to sunshine their contract right now from @SFUnified

——

Pete Skomoroch:

SFUSD is delaying a planned “grading for equity” initiative which was universally condemned online this week.

Why was this even considered? Because @SFUnified is built on a broken foundation of bad ideas that start with SFUSD’s vision, mission, and values.

——-

Insane that SF public schools’ “Grading for Equity, Fs are now Cs” bullshit would have flown under the radar if @TheVOSF hadn’t covered it.

I’m still sunshining the contract by @SFUSD_Supe to pay consultant @CrescendoEdGrp for this “equity” plan despite a $114M district deficit.

——

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie:

We owe our young people an education that prepares them to succeed. The proposed changes to grading at SFUSD would not accomplish that.

I have conveyed our view to SFUSD. We are optimistic that there is a better path forward for our kids and their future.

———

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:

I try to stay in my San Jose lane, but as a former East Side public school teacher I have to say — this is a terrible disservice to our students. Lowering standards does not help children. It hurts them.

———

The great irony of our time is that Mississippi is successfully working to fix one of the most broken school systems in the country while San Francisco works to destroy what was once one of the best school districts in the country.

———

Mike Solana:

the san francisco board of education must immediately fire the superintendent. if they do not, they must all be removed from power.

———

Ro Khanna:

We have a new generation of common sense Democrats with @DanielLurie and me speaking out on this absurd grading for equity policy. I am glad the superintendent took notice after a few hours and backtracked.

———

Walter Kirn:

A guide at the Mark Twain museum in Hartford once told a friend of mine during a tour: “Did you know Mark Twain dropped out of school in his teens to work in print shops and on a river boat? Just think how much greater a writer he would have been if he’d finished high school!”

———

Garry Tan:

San Francisco schools is trying its absolute hardest to make sure all middle income families who could move out of the city do so right away

“Grading for Equity” is going to be a real disaster and I guess this is a boon for SF private schools and Burlingame housing prices.

———

Chamath:

This is, on its face, absolutely retarded.

It’s also a disgrace that this comes from the preeminent tech capital of the world.

This will, however, be very good for housing prices in areas surrounding SF.

———

Todd Davis:

Basketball games played in San Francisco will no longer count the number of baskets scored by each team.

This antiquated measurement of team performance does not take into account team’s vibes and therefore it does not take into account who the real winners are.

———

“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District. Madison elected officials have generally been silent on our long term, disastrous reading results.

John Sailer:

The challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline. If we can reconfigure the academic talent pipeline and ensure that those who believe in the classical mission of the university both choose academia and prosper in it, then the reform movement will succeed. If not, no list of policies, from securing campus free speech to dismantling DEI offices, will restore public trust in our universities.

Academia’s pipeline problem has deep roots. For more than a decade, universities have created special career paths for scholars whose mission is to advance the cause of social justice. In my recent City Journal series, I interviewed more than a dozen scholars and dug into hundreds of pages of public records to unpack this scholar-activist pipeline.

The series shows how administrators have used clever fellow-to-faculty hiring schemes to strong-arm departments and hire hundreds of professors throughout the country. Their tools include: undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral fellowships; faculty “cluster hiring” programs; faculty support grants; and administrator development programs. All have enjoyed ample funding from private foundations and the federal government.

On paper, these programs aim to promote demographic diversity. In practice, they heavily favor scholars whose research demonstrates a commitment to social justice, ensuring that a critical mass of scholar-activists advance through the academic ranks.

Kelly Lecker:

In Tuesday’s preliminary rounds, Ethan correctly spelled promyshlennik, which is a Russian trader or industrialist, and picked the correct definition of tantrum.

Ethan admitted to being nervous, but said he knew how to spell the word as soon as he heard it. He quickly and confidently spelled the word after asking for a definition and the word’s origin.

John Trasviña

Without seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers in August in a system that awards a passing C grade to as low as a score of 41 on a 100-point exam. 

Were it not for an intrepid school board member, the drastic change in grading with implications for college admissions and career readiness would have gone unnoticed and unexplained. It is buried in a three-word phrase on the last page of a PowerPoint presentation embedded in the school board meeting’s 25-page agenda. The plan comes during the last week of the spring semester while parents are assessing the impact of over $100 million in budget reductions and deciding whether to remain in the public schools this fall. While the school district acknowledges that parent aversion to this grading approach is typically high and understands the need for “vigilant communication,” outreach to parents has been minimal and may be nonexistent. The school district’s Office of Equity homepage does not mention it and a page containing the SFUSD definition of equity has not been updated in almost three years.  

Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District’s grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.  

———

more. and.

———

Ro Khanna:

My immigrant dad asked me where the missing 10% went when I scored a 90. He came to America for the chance to work hard & pursue excellence. Giving A’s for 80% & no homework is not equity—it betrays the American Dream and every parent who wants more for their kids.

———-

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie:

We owe our young people an education that prepares them to succeed. The proposed changes to grading at SFUSD would not accomplish that.

I have conveyed our view to SFUSD. We are optimistic that there is a better path forward for our kids and their future.

———

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:

I try to stay in my San Jose lane, but as a former East Side public school teacher I have to say — this is a terrible disservice to our students. Lowering standards does not help children. It hurts them.

———

The great irony of our time is that Mississippi is successfully working to fix one of the most broken school systems in the country while San Francisco works to destroy what was once one of the best school districts in the country.

———

Walter Kirn:

A guide at the Mark Twain museum in Hartford once told a friend of mine during a tour: “Did you know Mark Twain dropped out of school in his teens to work in print shops and on a river boat? Just think how much greater a writer he would have been if he’d finished high school!”

———

Chamath:

This is, on its face, absolutely retarded.

It’s also a disgrace that this comes from the preeminent tech capital of the world.

This will, however, be very good for housing prices in areas surrounding SF.

———

“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District

Thomas Balazas:

So, why do we teach English literature (or “language arts,” as some secondary schools now call it) at all? According to the nineteenth-century British literary critic Mathew Arnold, the purpose of studying and teaching literatureis “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” In Arnold’s day, people had a pretty good idea of what was “the best that is known and thought”: it was Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and The Bible, alongside vernacular works by greats like William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Wordsworth. Writers like Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were later added. 

Fisher Derderian:

The link between funding and the public has frayed.

Federal programs have mirrored that drift. The NEA’s grant language in recent years emphasized “capacity building,” “access strategies,” and “administrative equity plans.” ArtsHERE, launched in 2023, directed over $12 million toward “equity-centered frameworks,” focused more on internal processes than public-facing work. The long-term cultural impact of these efforts remains unclear. But that approach is now being reassessed. Whether or not the Trump administration succeeds in eliminating the NEA and other cultural agencies, the programs funded via these agencies are no longer assumed to reflect the public interest. For the first time in years, there is an opening to reconsider how public funding in the arts should be used and what it should be used for.

Some ventures already point the way. The Lamp, founded in 2020, is a journal of Catholic arts and letters supported by a small team and the Catholic University of America. It has built a national readership through editorial seriousness and clarity of purpose. Wiseblood Books, founded in 2013, is a small Southern press publishing fiction, poetry, and monographs grounded in craft and moral imagination. Both have earned attention through focus and substance, despite working with limited resources. They show what becomes possible when good work is pursued steadily and with conviction. Yet efforts like these remain rare. 

One way to replicate these efforts would be for the NEA to create its own cultural accelerator—a short-term program focused on helping serious new institutions take root. The model exists in other fields. Y Combinator, one of the best-known startup incubators, has launched companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe by offering early-stage ventures structure, mentorship, and a public debut. The goal is to help founders establish the conditions for something lasting. Such a model could serve the arts.

ADH:

Last summer I made the case for bringing the principle of Dune’s Butlerian Jihad — “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” — to our broader discourse on AI. It seemed like a good way to bind together the various felt and thought objections to AI into a common credo. And a good way to distinguish between benign forms of so-called “AI” (spotting tumors, for instance) and the sycophantic imitations of humanity being peddled by the various broligarchs.

Since then, this “hard no” movement against AI has started to take shape. For one the t-shirt game keeps getting better. Traps are being set on the internet to punish AI scrapers and poison datasets. The new Chicago pope bashed AI in his first big speech. Just in my literary corner of the world, anti-AI clauses are becoming standard in book contracts and magazine submission forms. A recent episode of AppleTV’s The Studio ended with a crowd at ComicCon — and Ice Cube — chanting “fuck AI.” Last week there was a WorldCon kerfuffle (sigh) over using ChatGPT in part of the panel selection process.

(My WorldCon take is that, well intentioned though it was, feeding an AI a list of names and asking it to compile dossiers of their scandals and transgressions is a pretty dystopian use-case.)

Solveig Lucia Gold

The story of my undergraduate alma mater’s unofficial motto, coined by Woodrow Wilson in 1896, is illustrative. “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” has always been much more than a slogan. The school’s Nassau Hall served as the nation’s capitol for four months and eight days in 1783. Nine Princeton alumni served on the Constitutional Convention in 1787. And there has not been a year without a Princeton alumnus in the U.S. House of Representatives since its first meeting in 1789.

But not content to serve just our nation in a globalized world, the university revised Wilson’s motto in 1996 by adding “and in the Service of All Nations.” And then, in the wake of controversy surrounding Wilson and inspired by a speech delivered by alumna Sonia Sotomayor, it was changed again in 2016 to read “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.” As one alumnus said at the time in the official university press release, “It captures the latest narrative of world affairs. We are not just nations separated by borders. . . we may even be nationless. . . service to humanity is apt.”

more.

——-

Chris Arnade:

This backlash has been brewing for a long time, and the more surprising thing is it hasn’t happen earlier

Josh Blackman:

The Circuit Justices do not apply uniform rules when it comes to emergency applications. Justice Jackson, for example, refused to promptly call for a response in Libby v. Fectau, a case where the majority ultimately granted emergency docket relief.

I have also been keeping my eye on Trump v. AFGE. On May 9, A federal district court issued a TRO against the Trump Administration to block the removal of certain employees. On May 16, the Solicitor General applied for an emergency stay with Circuit Justice Kagan. And Kagan did absolutely nothing. She didn’t even call for a reply.

On May 22, the District Court entered a preliminary injunction, which the government promptly appealed. On May 23, the Solicitor General filed a letter with the Supreme Court, withdrawing the stay application. The short letter states:

Matthew Gault:

Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”

It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work. As of this writing, Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 is hard to find on Amazon. Searching for it on the site won’t show the book, but a Google search will. 404 Media was able to purchase a copy and confirm that the book no longer contains the reference to copying Bree’s style. But screenshots of the graph remain in the book’s Amazon reviews and Goodreads page.

Will Flanders

Last yr, DPI met behind closed doors to lower the standards for the Forward Exam. Now, they will apparently do the same thing for the state report card. We need transparency in these meetings. Why are these standard settings that effect all WI families held behind closed doors?

——

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”

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”

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

Danielle DuClos

State law requires outside investigators whenever the death of a person involves law enforcement. In these cases, little information is typically released by investigators until a district attorney decides whether to charge officers with a crime.

Last fall, however, Dane County authorities released a 911 call recording that provided new information about the circumstances in a deadly police shooting even while the case remained under review by Ozanne.

In August, a Fitchburg police officer fatally shotKevin Price, 28, sparking questions about what happened before and after the shooting. Then in October, under state open records laws, local news outlet Isthmus obtained a 911 call recording as well as reports on police and ambulance dispatches for the case.

The records were released by Dane County Public Safety Communications, which falls under the county executive’s administration and is a separate agency from the District Attorney’s Office.

Jeff Sovern:

1. Federal grants. Because few, if any, law schools receive substantial federal grants, this lever is not very effective against law schools—directly. But see item 5 below. …

4. Accreditation/bar admission/student loans. The federal Department of Education recognizes the American Bar Association as an accreditor for law schools. In addition, law schools which are a part of a university, as most are, also receive the benefit of the university’s accreditation. This could matter for purposes of student loans and bar admission. Federal student loans and grants are available only to students attending accredited institutions so a loss of accreditation could be devastating to schools that depend on students being able to finance their education through federal student loans, which is probably true of every law school. Students might still be able to obtain private student loans, though those can be more expensive and lack the income-based repayment options available for federal loans. 

I’m not sure how much this matters to bar admission; if states concluded that the federal government had cancelled a law school’s accreditation for inappropriate reasons, I imagine they could change their rules to allow graduates of that school to be admitted. The federal budget bill as it stands at the moment would limit the amount of federal student loans available to students attending professional schools, which might also impact some students, and thus some schools.

5. Impact of being part of a broader university. Even if law schools are not directly affected by the loss of federal aid, etc. they might be indirectly affected if they are part of a broader university. Universities that depend heavily on federal grants, for example, and that lose those grants, or get lower reimbursement rates on those grants will have less resources. That may affect their budgetary arrangement with their law school. …

Chris Rickert:

Want to be a champion speller?

Stick to the basics — like chocolate ice cream and cookies — find a superhero you can identify with, read a lot and, of course, practice, practice, practice until you just don’t want to practice anymore. (And then practice some more.)

These are a few of the things the Wisconsin State Journal learned recently about Jacob Martonito and Ethan Robert, this year’s winner and runner-up, respectively, of the Badger State Spelling Bee. The Wisconsin bee is sponsored by the State Journal.

Jacob, a 12-year-old sixth grader from Classical Charter School in Appleton, and Ethan, a 12-year-old seventh grader from New Berlin’s Eisenhower Middle School, are on their way to the biggest American bee of them all — the 100th anniversary, in fact, of the Scripps National Spelling Bee this week in National Harbor, Maryland, a few miles south of Washington, D.C.

TOSA2030

A rigorously documented, independent, community-led report detailing how Wauwatosa’s school governance has broken down over the past several years—academically, financially, and administratively.

——-

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?

Garrett Leahy:

The electrical engineer’s Solve SF app lets users file 311 reports about issues like graffiti or sidewalk poop in as little as 10 seconds, roughly five times faster than the city’s official app. It’s McCabe’s passion project, it’s free to use, and has been boosted online by the political organization GrowSF.

But the city is about to kill the vital mechanism the app runs on.

Officials from the city administrator’s office on May 13 told McCabe, who lives near the Castro, they’re shutting down the Open 311 API program, which allows third-party apps and other programs to pull from and send data to the city’s 311 service. 

Anumita Kaur and  lJúlia Ledur

More than 1 million international students attend colleges across the United States each year, bringing billions of dollars to the American economy and bolstering the nation’s science and technology sectors. Many of them now find themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s battle to exert control over some of the nation’s elite universities.

Those students have been a critical part of U.S. institutions of higher education for decades, contributing to the nation’s economy and research, experts say.

Ann Althouse summary:

Thompson responds: “Well, this person went on to say that when you’re voting for a President you’re voting for the aides, uh, around him. But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides. These are White House aides. These were unelected people. And one of the things that really I think comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which, I think, is what this person is talking about.”

It’s like fighting fire with fire — fighting the destruction of the democracy with the destruction of democracy. You had to destroy the village to save it. Noted. 

Bill Ackman:

5. Merit-based admissions reform. Harvard must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies; cease all preferences based on race, color, or national origin in admissions throughout its undergraduate, graduate, and other programs; and demonstrate through structural and personnel action that these changes are durable.
6. Merit-based hiring reform. Harvard must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies; cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in hiring throughout its teaching and research faculty, staff, and leadership; and demonstrate through structural and personnel action that these changes are durable.

Graham W. Lee, William C. Mao, and Veronica H. Paulus:

A previous version of this story referred to the Boston-area public radio station that first reported Gino’s tenure revocation by its traditional call letters, WGBH. In fact, the station rebranded to GBH in 2020.

Simon Willison:

Damien’s database has 116 cases from 12 different countries: United States, Israel, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, Trinidad & Tobago.

20 of those cases happened just this month, May 2025!

I get the impression that researching legal precedent is one of the most time-consuming parts of the job. I guess it’s not surprising that increasing numbers of lawyers are returning to LLMs for this, even in the face of this mountain of cautionary stories.

For Memorial Day:
A haunting letter written in 1942 to the Navy by a woman from my hometown, asking if her 5 sons were still alive. (They had died in the sinking of the USS Juneau on November 13 at Guadalcanal.)
An unimaginable sacrifice. pic.twitter.com/BaMjZUdXlg

— Jim (@jim_again) May 26, 2025

PRL:

We show Americans anonymized results from a variety of Large Language Models. We then ask them to assess the partisan slant of the models on 30 of the most salient issues in American politics in a head-to-head comparison.

Michael Burger:

The real battle is over who runs the university anyway. One side claims that universities are independent, and so are free to determine for themselves whether to stay on the DEI trail, and so on. The other claims that universities are responsible to the societies that support them, especially financially. Accordingly, society’s elected representatives can and should actively determine what universities do or teach (e.g., by prohibiting campus DEI programs or mandating certain curriculum).

To understand these arguments better, it’s best to step back, far back, to the Middle Ages. The earliest iterations of what we today call “universities” first appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages, perhaps as early as the eleventh century, certainly by the decades around 1200; it was from them that most other universities sprang. That medieval beginning fundamentally shapes modern conflicts.

What was a university when it first emerged in medieval Europe? To begin with words, when medieval sources refer to a university, they most commonly use the Latin word universitas (plural, universitates). What was a medieval universitas? It could be a lot of different things. It could be a guild: an association of tradespeople in a town that regulated that business. It could also be people who collected money for drinking beer together once a month.

Terry Ryan:

I’ll never forget what one professor said to me: “I don’t need for them to know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. I need for them to understand the impact on the indigenous people.” So that’s a bit ideological too. But the important thing is, as you shared with me the other day, one out of six Americans cannot name a branch of government. There’s a reason why the teachers are not teaching it, because to them, you could always just look it up.

Kirk Carapezza:

Harvard University has stripped a world-renowned scholar of her tenure status. The university’s top governing board, the Harvard Corporation, decided this month to revoke Francesca Gino’s tenure and end her employment at Harvard Business School.

Gino, who was celebrated for her research on honesty and ethical behavior, had faced scathing allegations of academic misconduct and fraud.

Several sources tell GBH News that Harvard administrators notified business faculty of their decision during a closed-door meeting this past week, and a university spokesperson confirmed the move. Gino did not immediately respond to several requests for comment.

In 2023, Harvard launched an internal investigation into Gino’s work after concerns were raised on a blog called Data Colada, run by a group of behavioral scientists who scrutinize academic research. The Harvard investigation concluded that Gino had manipulated certain data to support her hypotheses in at least four of her studies.

At that point, the university placed her on unpaid administrative leave.

Belladonna Rogers:

A little-appreciated aspect of the @Harvard Morgue case, as well as all Harvard -related litigation in Massachusetts is the high number of judges there who are alumni of @Harvard_Law. None of them ever recuses him- or herself because of the potential appearance of bias, but all invariably rule in favor of @Harvard. The families who donated their relatives’ bodies to Harvard’s Morgue tried suing the university for damages but Judge Kenneth W. Salinger (Harvard Law ’90) threw out their case, ruling Harvard was not liable.

1970 Harvard Graduate James Fallows:

A century ago, the Harvard football team was a national powerhouse and even won the Rose Bowl in 1920. As the Trump administration is discovering, this 389-year-old institution can be tougher than it looks. (1907 Edward Penfield illustration, via Getty Images.) 

This post is about the language of civic struggle in our times. Last week, while outside the country, in Greenland (about which more, later), I came across a rapid-fire, three-part sequence of documents, which together tell a revealing tale.

All three involve the Trump team’s escalating and lawless attempts to damage Harvard university: Its people, its research projects, its finances, its global influence, everything about it. 

In reality these are acts of “burn it down!” resentment, comparable to Mao’s unleashing the nihilistic Red Guards during China’s Cultural Revolution 60 years ago. But as a paper-thin pretext, the Trump team has presented its war against Harvard as a way to make Jewish students and faculty feel more comfortable and at home there. 

As outlined many times before (eg by former Harvard president Larry Summers), this Trump pretext is not just cynical but also destructive. It is destructive not simply to the university as a whole but in particular to its Jewish students and faculty. Soon after Trump’s supposed “war against antisemitism” at Harvard began, the student paper, The Crimson, published a column by Jacob Miller, a graduating senior who as president of Harvard Hillel had sounded the alarm about real incidents of antisemitism. He argued that Team Trump’s sudden tenderness toward Jewish students amounted to “seizing on Jews as their perfect political pawns.”¹

Also as outlined many times before, Harvard’s response to this intimidation switched from initial, cowed-seeming compliance, to a resounding “Hell, no!”, which gave courage and cover to other educational leaders—all of whom, by definition, represent institutions with shorter histories and smaller endowments than Harvard has.

This brings us to the one-two-three series of threats, responses, and results last week—and to an examination of the words each party chose. 

Roger Kimball:

The assault today is also more thoroughgoing because it is no longer undertaken in the name of freedom and truth, however spurious, but, strange though it sounds, against both.

George Orwell was right when he observed that the first indispensable step towards freedom is the willingness to call things by their real names. We—which is to say, our masters in the media and cultural establishment—have lost that fortitude. The triumph of “wokeness” and political correctness has encouraged an epidemic allergy to candor.

The hope is that the embrace of euphemism will alter not only our language but also the reality that our language names. And to a large extent, it is working. Unfreedom does not become freedom by calling it free. Reality continues to check the fantasies of our narratives. But the misprision can help spread and reinforce the fog of self-deceit.

There is a sense in which the triumph of political correctness erodes free speech chiefly by negative means. It promulgates speech codes, rules against ‘hate speech,’ and the like. But I suspect that its gravest damage is done by instilling a timidity of spirit, a lack of what the Greeks called θυμός, among its charges.

A reluctance to speak the truth instills an unwillingness or even an inability to see the truth. Thus it is that the reign of political correctness quietly aids and abets habits of complacency and unfreedom.

via a kind reader:

Marcia worked as an educator in Madison schools for her entire career, with a passion for teaching children to read. She earned her Master’s of Education from UW-La Crosse in 2006. Marcia was a member of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church from 1981 until her death. The most important things in Marcia’s life were her faith in Jesus and her love and devotion to her family.

Marcia is survived by her husband, Boris; their children, Katya (Mike Krajewski) Ouchakof, Mary (Sam) Kok, Peter Ouchakof; step-son, Michael Dartt; grandchildren, Joey and Ella Kok; dear sister, Barb (Steve) Kingsland; along with many beloved nieces and nephews, siblings, friends, and students.

A funeral service will be held on Saturday, May 31, 2025, at GOOD SHEPHERD LUTHERAN CHURCH, 5701 Raymond Road, Madison, at 12 p.m. Visitation will be held from 10 a.m. until the time of service, and a luncheon will follow.

Packy McCormack:

My hypothesis is that technology compounds more quickly than the government ossifies, and that entrepreneurship in a broad sense has overtaken institutions as the prime mover of American exceptionalism.  

One (very oversimplified) way to think of progress is as a vector sum of government and entrepreneurial forces. 

A vector is a quantity that has both a magnitude and a direction, like velocity (speed in a specific direction) or force (strength applied in a particular direction). You can think about it like an arrow of a certain length (magnitude) pointing a certain way (direction). A vector sum is what you get when you add the vectors up. 

Government and entrepreneurship can pull in various directions at various strengths. When they’re both pulling in the same direction – up and to the right – progress happens more quickly. But even if the government stagnates, a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem can pull progress ahead on its own. 

This may be easier to look at than imagine, so I asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet to make me a toy model to play around with. 

——-

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? 

FixNOLA:

👏 “Crime skyrockets in cities with consent decrees… Multi-billion dollar industry making America more unsafe.” $200 million cost per city. @HarmeetKDhillon, Asst. US AG for @CivilRights, was interviewed this week and explains why her office is getting rid of consent decrees.

Evie Blad:

Congress retained the measure, formally called the “unsafe school choice option,” when it replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. But the provision has rarely been used.

The issue: The law left it up to states to determine what counted as “persistently dangerous,” and the criteria states chose meant only a handful of schools ever qualifed.

That became clear shortly after No Child Left Behind first took effect. In 2003, 44 states plus the District of Columbia did not designate any schools as “persistently dangerous,” Education Week reported at the time. Among the remaining states, just 54 schools received the label.

That hasn’t changed much in the decades since, Sanon wrote in her recent memo to the states. In the 2023-24 school year, the Education Department counted just 25 persistently dangerous schools in five states, she wrote. Four schools got the label in 2022-23, and no schools were reported as persistently dangerous in 2021-22.

Ulcca Joshi Hansen and Dave Kung:

What Maryland students need is an approach that focuses on conceptual understanding, while building fluency with a few core procedures — exactly the approach laid out in the proposal. Here’s what needs to change to prepare Maryland students with math skills to thrive in today’s world:

1. Update math content: When every phone has a powerful calculator, we should spend less time on computation and more time on helping students make sense of the content. And in today’s digital world, data literacy and statistics are more important than ever — but still largely overlooked. Maryland’s proposal does this by replacing the outdated Algebra/Geometry/Algebra 2 sequence with two years of integrated content grounded in data and focused on conceptual understanding.

2. Change professional development for teachers: Most of us learned in a system that emphasized getting the right answer over understanding concepts. Classes followed an “I do, we do, you do” script. But as educators, we’ve known that when students are asked to explain their thinking — including what led them to wrong answers — mathematicalunderstanding truly grows. Professional learning that helps teachers leverage mistakes into valuable learning opportunities should be the norm. Though Maryland’s proposed policy is light on the details, professional learning is emphasized throughout the proposal.

3. Assess the system without over-testing kids: The specter of constant testing pushes teachers to drill for right answers instead of focusing on understanding. Testing randomly chosen students, classrooms and schools (like NAEP does) helps us measure progress without subjecting all students to a barrage of tests. When we do test, AI can help us evaluate student thinking without overburdening our hardworking teachers. Unfortunately, the proposal doesn’t cut back on the testing Maryland’s students face.

——-

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Ben Cohen:

When this year’s college graduates first arrived on campus, there was no such thing as ChatGPT.

They had to use their own brains for math homework, econ problem sets, coding projects, Spanish exercises, biology research, term papers on the Civil War and the Shakespeare essay that made them want to gouge their eyes out. 

Now they can just use artificial intelligence. 

Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it.

Sam Biddle:

So the government has a plan for a one-stop shop.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.” The documents state spy agencies will use the web portal not just to search through reams of private data, but also run them through artificial intelligence tools for further analysis.

Rather than each agency purchasing CAI individually, as has been the case until now, the “Intelligence Community Data Consortium” will provide a single convenient web-based storefront for searching and accessing this data, along with a “data marketplace” for purchasing “the best data at the best price,” faster than ever before, according to the documents. It will be designed for the 18 different federal agencies and offices that make up the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI Intelligence Branch, and Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis — though one document suggests the portal will also be used by agencies not directly related to intelligence or defense.

Daniel Buck:

One question persists in American education: How pervasive are the stories of kindergartners learning about transgenderism or high-schoolers waving Hamas flags in hallways? Among the four million teachers in the U.S. there will inevitably be cranks and ideologues who mistake their lectern for a pulpit. Examination of a typical American school district in a typical American town reveals that the progressive mismanagement of school districts extends beyond the dark-blue borders of San Francisco and Portland, Ore.

Recent Census data demonstrate that Wauwatosa, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, is about as average as it gets. It’s politically split, helping to elect Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2014 and President Joe Biden six years later. It’s economically middle-class with the median home value sitting at roughly $300,000, just under the $400,000 median value across the country. In other words, Wauwatosa is that fabled “real America.” What happens in San Francisco may be an outlier, but what happens in Wauwatosa likely happens in countless other districts.

So what happens in Wauwatosa?

In 2022 the Wauwatosa school board approved a new sex-education curriculum. Among other things, it expects sixth-graders to define different types of sexual intercourse. Kindergartners learn about genitalia with the help of cartoon drawings and third-graders are informed that, no matter their body parts, they may feel like another “gender.” Notably, the newly adopted units are based on the National Sex Education Standards, which encourage teaching third-graders about puberty blockers, sixth-graders about abortion and students as young as kindergarten about “gender identity.”

The red flags appear in more than the curriculum. Wauwatosa is one of thousands of districts to have adopted a “restorative justice” policy. This is an alternative to traditional discipline structures that emphasizes dialogue over punishment and focuses on revising school policy rather than changing student behavior. In February 2025, the Wauwatosa school superintendent retained a consultant to investigate the “professional culture” at McKinley Elementary School. The final report, dated May 9, reveals that disruptive students received treats “in the form of food and beverages” and a chance to play games in the office instead of a standard detention.

To no one’s surprise, Wauwatosa schools have developed a reputation for permissive discipline and frequent fights. The chaos that results from leniency has led to more expulsion notices than is typical.

——

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?  

Quinton Klabon

WELL.

• MPS will miss May 30th drop-dead finance deadlines
• DPI is not going to do anything about it
• MPS’ and DPI’s strategy to keep late finances undercover backfired, though they did dump it on Memorial Day Friday
  x.com/journalsentine…

——-

2019….. Evers mulligans: My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

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”

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?  

Chris Rickert:

Under current district policy, students in fourth or eighth grade who have failed to meet certain academic standards can be forced to repeat those grades, even over the objections of parents.

A decision to hold a student back can be appealed to the “superintendent or his/her designee,” but that official’s decision on the matter “shall be final,” according to the policy last revised in 2016.

Changes to that policy now under consideration by the board, however, turn that presumption on its head.

———

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?  

Simon Quach & Zhengyi Yu

 paper examines the labor market effects of Florida’s 2022 post-tenure review policy, which weakened tenure protections at public universities. Using a differencein-differences approach, we compare faculty outcomes in Florida to nearby states. We find the policy increased faculty exits-particularly among high-performing researchers-indicating a brain drain rather than improved selection. Additionally, we detect no productivity gains among incumbents and observe a decline in the research output of new hires. Overall, the findings suggest that reducing tenure protections negatively affects the research capacity and competitiveness of public universities.

Sarah Mei:

Because if you were one of those engineers who had spent years mastering the fine art of pointer arithmetic and memory profiling, Java’s abstractions felt like an erasure of your value. Your hard-won skills weren’t just unnecessary – they were almost a liability. The thing that had defined you as a software engineer was being swept away by a garbage collector.

Sound familiar?

Robin Hanson:

If you want to get paid for abstract analysis that is not mainly organized around current cultural or political fights, academia is pretty much the only game in town. So I am quite grateful that academia exists, and has included me.

But I do have a complaint. In most areas of life, activities are typically justifies in some detail in terms of the accepted purpose of that area. E.g., hospitals save lives, businesses serve customers, roads support travel, armies deter fights, and so on. But though the accepted purpose of academic research is to either answer deep important questions, or to help non-academics somehow, academics rarely explicitly justify their work in such terms.

For example, polls found that these goals best explain ~7% of which research projects academics pick, and ~9% of which papers/projects academics approve via peer review. Such choices are instead explained 32% and 58% respectively by topic/methods being in fashion. The remaining 62% of project choice is explained by building on prior work/skills, and the remaining 33% of peer review choice is explained by work showing impressive abilities.

You can also check this yourself by asking individual academics to explain how their work could plausibly contribute to answering deep important questions, or to non-academic value. Most will be surprised by the question, having never been asked, and answer poorly.

Aaron Sibarium:

When a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s executive order targeting Susman Godfrey, long considered the top litigation boutique in the nation, the firm hailed the decision as a win for equality under the law.

“This fight is bigger and more important than any one firm,” Susman Godfrey wrote in a press release on April 15. “Susman Godfrey is fighting this unconstitutional executive order because it infringes on the rights of all Americans and the rule of law.”

One month later, the firm announced the recipients of a prestigious prize that only minorities are eligible to win.

The Susman Godfrey Prize, which includes a $4,000 cash award and “ongoing mentoring” from the firm’s attorneys, is typically given to 20 “students of color” at a handful of top law schools. In his executive ordertargeting the firm, President Donald Trump cited the prize as an example of “blatant discrimination” that should disqualify the firm from government contracts and security clearances.

Madison plans a $49,000,000 (8%) tax & spending increase for the 2025-2026 school year. Total planned spending is $661,690,867 for 26,374 students or $25,088 per student. May, 2025 taxpayer funded Madison School District Budget document. Much more on ongoing Madison K-12 tax & Spending growth, here.

Meanwhile, Washington State:

The largest tax increases in state history, passed by Democrats, will harm people and commerce far more than anything else. It’s over $9B stolen and ripped from our economy to quench the never ending thirst of more Democrat spending. And you know the winners of that spending: politicians, bureaucrats, and criminals.

Carmela Guaglianone

A federal judge on Thursday struck down a lawsuitclaiming that “defective” teaching materials had prevented countless students in Massachusetts from learning to read well.

“The court begins (and ends) its analysis with the educational malpractice bar,” Judge Richard G. Stearns wrote in his order dismissing the lawsuit against educational publisher Heinemann, its parent company HMH Publishing and their best-selling authors Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. For nearly five decades, courts nationwide have repeatedly ruled that educational malpractice is impossible to prove.

The suit, filed by Boston-area mothers Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak on behalf of their children, sought class-action status and argued that the defendants misrepresented their instructional materials as “research-backed,” and “data-based,” despite what the mothers argued was insufficient phonics instruction.

The authors and publishers named in the suit were at the center of the 2022 APM Reports podcast Sold a Story, which investigated why so many schools taught reading using methods that had been repeatedly discredited by cognitive scientists. Benjamin Elga, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview last year that the podcast opened his eyes to “an injustice that cried out for redress.”

——

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?  

MAHA Commission

It presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health, backed by compelling data and long-term trends. More importantly, it seeks to unpack the potential dietary, behavioral, medical, and environmental drivers behind this crisis. By examining the root causes of deteriorating child health, this assessment establishes a clear, evidence- based foundation for the policy interventions, institutional reforms , and societal shifts needed to reverse course.

To turn the tide and better protect our children , the United States must act decisively. During this administration, we will begin reversing the childhood chronic disease crisis by confronting its root causes- not just its symptoms. This means pursuing truth, embracing science, and enacting pro-growth policies and innovations to restore children’s health. Today’s children are tomorrow’s workforce, caregivers, and leaders—we can no longer afford to ignore this crisis.

After a century of costly and ineffective approaches, the federal government will lead a coordinated transformation of our food, health, and scientific systems . This strategic realignment will ensure that all Americans—today and in the future-live longer, healthier lives, supported by systems that prioritize prevention, wellbeing, and resilience.

But real transformation requires more than vision—it requires clarity. Before we act, we must fully understand the scope of the crisis, the conditions that created it, and the mechanisms through which it continues to grow. Without this foundation , interventions risk being reactive, fragmented , or ineffective.

To Make America’s Children Healthy Again, we must begin with a shared understanding of the magnitude of crisis and subsequently what’s likely driving it. This assessment provides that foundation-grounding future efforts in a common scientific basis that identifies four potential drivers behind the rise in childhood chronic disease that present the clearest opportunities for progress:

Poor Diet: The American diet has shifted dramatically toward ultra-processed foods (UPFS), leading to nutrient depletion, increased caloric intake, and exposure to harmful additives. Nearly 70% of children’s calories now come from UPFs, contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.

Aggregation of Environmental Chemicals: Children are exposed to an increasing number of synthetic chemicals, some of which have been linked to developmental issues and chronic disease. The current regulatory framework should be continually evaluated to ensure that chemicals and other exposures do not interact together to pose a threat to the health of our children.

Lack of Physical Activity and Chronic Stress: American children are experiencing unprecedented levels of inactivity, screen use, sleep deprivation, and chronic stress.

These factors significantly contribute to the rise in chronic diseases and mental health challenges

Overmedicalization: There is a concerning trend of overprescribing medications to children, often driven by conflicts of interest in medical research, regulation, and practice. This has led to unnecessary treatments and long-term health risks.

By examining each of these drivers, this assessment equips MAHA Commission stakeholders and partners with the facts needed to identify where and how policy interventions will likely have the most impact.

The sections that follow analyze the evidence, spotlight gaps, and map the terrain: laying the groundwork for coordinated, high-impact solutions.

——

Brenda Goodman:

Trump administration’s MAHA report on children’s health filled with flawed references, including some studies that don’t exist

Associated Press:

Belgium’s Royal Palace said Friday that Princess Elisabeth, who is first in line to the throne, is waiting to find out whether she can return to Harvard for her second year after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a ban on foreign students at the university.

The Trump administration on Thursday revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students in its escalating battle with the Ivy League school, saying thousands of students must transfer to other schools or leave the country.

“We are looking into the situation, to see what kind of impact this decision might have on the princess, or not. It’s too early to say right now,” said the palace’s communications head, Xavier Baert.

Steve Sinofsky:

Harvard case is so fascinating. The filings and quotes keep talking about how crazy it is for the Govt to dictate how Harvard should operate or who it should serve/employ, yet this is exactly how EEOC has been implemented for decades in private sector and advocated by..Harvard.

Adrian Vermeule:

If the universities want to remain open to international students, they should first do a better job of being open to the Other America, which they have mocked and despised for decades.

Stephen Dinan:

The manager of Harvard Medical School’s morgue has pleaded guilty to selling human remains.

Cedric Lodge, 57, admitted he took parts of donated cadavers after they had been used for research and sold them rather than have them disposed of in accordance with the donors’ agreements, the Justice Department said Thursday.

That included organs, brains, skin, hands and faces, prosecutors said.

Stand Columbia Society:

Harvard now faces $1.2–$5.5B in total annual institutional risk exposure—up to 43% of its adjusted operating budget—across grants, medical revenues, student aid, and potential taxes.

The Trump team’s tactics against Harvard recall how the Obama Administration cut off student aid to for-profit Corinthian Colleges on the pretext of its alleged dilatory response to sweeping record demands. Thousands of students’ educations were disrupted so the Obama team could wave a political scalp.

Kayla Huynh:

Last year, during the Madison Metropolitan School District’s campaign for two referendums, the district estimated property taxes would increase by about $1,000 for the average homeowner. Voters in November approved the combined $607 million in school referendums, hiking property taxes to fund school building upgrades and day-to-day operating costs. 

Approval of the $100 million operations referendum was “the only way we survive,” Bob Soldner, the district’s financial leader, told the School Board this month. “Without that, we would not be able to offer the programming nor the services that we provide today based under state law.” 

Next year, the Madison school district’s proposed budget would increase spending to nearly $661.7 million — about $42.9 million more than this school year, according to a draft of the plan released this month. 

The proposed budget is certain to change as federal funding levels remain in flux, Soldner said. State lawmakers this summer are also deciding how much money to provide schools over the next two years in the state budget.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending, despite long term, disastrous reading results. November 7, 2024 latest budget including the (passed) fall referendums. Total spending: $608,824,795 for 26,310 students or $23,140 each

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?

Steve Hsu:

Robots, Small Models, and RL with DeepSeek Alumnus Zihan Wang — Manifold #86

Zihan Wang is an AI researcher at Northwestern University, where he works on vision-language models, robotics, and reinforcement learning. Previously, he interned at DeepSeek, contributing to projects like DeepSeek-V2.

David Margulies

Could it be that the nation’s large fraction of students lacking math proficiency is caused by significant numbers of students not having their multiplication tables memorized?

In a California K-12 district with 15% of students proficient in math, according to state testing, only about 25% of fourth graders were found to have their multiplication facts memorized at the grade’s end. This situation exists despite the California Math Content Standards, the math students are expected to learn, stating explicitly that students are to “by the end of grade three, know from memory all products of two one-digit numbers.”

Should multiplication fact memorization be viewed as a minor standard, only one of many, perhaps de-emphasized in a busy school year, or is it a major foundational skill, like phonics is to reading, the lack of which is causing students’ struggles in this district?

The correlation between student multiplication fact memorization and their CAASPP performance was analyzed for one elementary school in the district. The criteria for having multiplication facts memorized, or multiplication fact fluency, is established by research as meaning students can answer multiplication fact questions faster than three seconds per problem. On the CAASPP, students receive numerical scores, and achievement levels are defined using ranges of scores. These levels, from low to high, are: “Standard Not Met,” “Standard Nearly Met,” “Standard Met” and “Standard Exceeded.”  

Open the Books:

Unlike some of the intermediate steps President Trump has taken through Executive Order, truly closing an agency will require a 60-person majority in a Senate vote, a tall order with only 53 Republicans in the upper chamber.

But there are still some low-hanging fruits left for the administration to pick. Chiefly, it can end relationships with all professional societies promoting principles of DEI and radical gender ideology.

The federal government contracts with a myriad of these organizations across all the major agencies. Professional societies set the atmosphere and guidelines for practitioners in their fields, and they can have hundreds of thousands of members.

Keith Whittington:

A new episode of the Academic Freedom Podcast has been released. The podcast is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School.

This episode features a conversation with Daniel Hemelon President Donald Trump’s threat to rescind the tax exempt status of Harvard University. Hemel is a professor of law at New York University Law School, with an expertise in taxation, nonprofit organizations, and constitutional law.

John Hindraker

As we and everyone else have pointed out, journalists who have belatedly tumbled to the obvious fact that Joe Biden was disabled throughout his presidency (or, at a minimum, most of it) are asking all the questions except the most important one: who ran the executive branch on the Democrats’ behalf, and how did that work?

European journalists are perhaps a little less reticent. The London Times headlines: “Meet the Biden ‘politburo’ accused of running the country in secret.”

Rob Churchill:

Let’s begin with what I perceive to be the difference between a junior engineer and their more experienced counterparts. The biggest difference between junior and senior/staff/lead engineers is the ability to understand a problem from its highest level, break the problem down into smaller pieces, solve the smaller pieces, and then, very importantly, put the smaller pieces together again in the right way to make the final product as efficient and robust as possible.

My view of how this works in the classic tech company is that the higher-level engineer will break down the business problem into smaller problems for more junior engineers to solve. Often, in bigger projects, the lead engineer will break the problem into still-large sub-problems that need to be further broken down. The senior engineer will break that sub-problem down and assign the smaller pieces to junior engineers. The lead and senior engineers work on ensuring that all of the pieces that they broke apart will fit nicely together, and the junior engineers build the bulk of the code.

Junior engineers learn from this experience by watching how their superiors break down these problems and put them back together again. This is particularly effective in in-person environments, and less-so in remote environments (another contribution to the disappearance of junior-level roles). It has been shown over and over that people learn more effectively in in-person environments both in school and out. In conversations that I have had outside of or adjacent to the tech world, this trend towards remote environments reflects issues that are faced by junior lawyers, financiers, and nearly every other industry. If a junior engineer wants to advance their career, they must learn to do the job of their superiors. However, traditionally, the main use case for a junior engineer is to implement the code that would take too much time for a higher-level engineer to build.