School Information System

Ron DeSantis:

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

Rick Esenberg and Dan Lennington:

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

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

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

Ivy Exile

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

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

——

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

Alex Tabarrok:

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

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

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

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

Aaron Sibarium:

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

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

Corrine Hess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stanford Report

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

SCI is also about to launch a senior honors program.

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

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

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

Karen Mulder:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kimberly Wethal

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

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

Becky Jacobs

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

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

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

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

John Hindraker:

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Nguyen:

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

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

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

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

Alexander Furnas, Timothy Lapira and Dashun Wang:

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

Will Flanders

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

——

Quinton Klabon:

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

——

more.

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

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

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

Kasen Stephensen:

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

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

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

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

Austin Berg

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

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

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

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

——-

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Glenn Greenwald:

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

CJ Womack:

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

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

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

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

Arjun Panickssery

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

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

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

Michael Fragoso

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

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

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

Matthew Ygelsias:

The dumbing of America

Nat Malkus from the American Enterprise Institute observes that, to the extent they are available, test scores for American adults are also in decline.

In other words, the flagging performance of American students isn’t just about something that’s happening in schools; it’s about something that’s happening in our society at large. He glosses a few different theories, but I think it’s pretty obviously a combination of smartphones, social media, and short-form video. If you give people more stuff to do, they read less. Our son loves to read, but he obviously loves playing Fortnite and watching Minecraft streamers on YouTube even more. He reads a lot anyway because he loves it, because he was taught well at school, and because we make books available for him at home. But mostly he reads a lot because there are large swathes of time when gaming and watching videos are simply off-limits.

——

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?

By D. Graham Burnett

Let me offer a dispatch from the impact zone. When I first asked a class of thirty Princeton undergraduates—spanning twelve majors—whether any had used A.I., not a single hand went up. Same with my graduate students. Even after some enthusiastic prodding (“Hey! I use these tools! They’re incredible! Let’s talk about this!”), I got nowhere.

It’s not that they’re dishonest; it’s that they’re paralyzed. As one quiet young woman explained after class, nearly every syllabus now includes a warning: Use ChatGPT or similar tools, and you’ll be reported to the academic deans. Nobody wants to risk it. Another student mentioned that a major A.I. site may even be blocked on the university network, though she was too nervous to test the rumor.

In one department on campus, a recently drafted anti-A.I. policy, read literally, would actually have barred faculty from giving assignments to students that centered on A.I.(It was ultimately revised.) Last year, when some distinguished alums and other worthies conducted an external review of the history department, a top recommendation was that we urgently address the looming A.I. disruptions to our teaching and research. This suggestion got a notably cool reception. But the idea that we can just keep going about our business won’t do, either.

On the contrary, staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: “We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness. And it won’t hold for long. It’s time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular.

San Francisco Chronicle:

But for an even bleaker example of how state leaders are failing to rise to the urgency of the moment, Californians should consider the response to AB1121 from Assembly Member Blanca Rubio, D-Baldwin Park (Los Angeles County).

The seemingly uncontroversial bill would require California teachers in transitional kindergarten through fifth grade to be trained in the “science of reading,” which emphasizes the importance of foundational literacy skills, including phonics — or sounding out words. It would also require schools to adopt an evidence-based reading curriculum in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade. Backed by decades of interdisciplinary research, this approach has proven to be particularly effective in teaching young kids how to read — regardless of their mother language. 

———

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?

Don Surber:

So why not just answer the questions? 

Retraction Watch says it is “tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process.” Among the retractions it watches are NEJM’s.

The journal had a doozy one.

On January 10, 1980, NEJM published a letter from Jane Porter and Hershel Jick, M.D., of the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance, Program Boston University Medical Center, Waltham, Massachusetts, under the headline, “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.”

The letter said, “Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively. Although there were 11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The addiction was considered major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.”

Michael Ford:

The concept of academic freedom, however, is operationalized via bureaucratic documents such as university policies and, in some cases, law. But, as those of us in public administration know, bureaucratic policies and procedures are only as strong as the willingness of people to buy into them. In other words, a policy and even a law loses meaning if it conflicts with culture and action. I wonder, is it possible to attack something that does not really exist in practice? OK, to be fair, academic freedom exists on paper, but in practice the culture of higher education does not (in my and many others’ experiences) reflect the stated commitment.

Culture reflects institutional norms which are an outgrowth of institutional realities. One such reality is a never-ending cycle of austerity, especially at non-flagship institutions, that has left little room for the fearless advancement of knowledge so crucial to the mission of higher education. When there is a constant risk of program and resource cuts, faculty will seek to keep their head down to avoid falling victim to those cuts. Now is not the time to be perceived as a troublemaker on a college campus. Those of us in public administration often research and comment on the political institutions that oversee our public universities, putting us in an awkward position of weighing the pros and cons of pursuing research that may generate a backlash.

This is not to say the recent attacks on higher education are not real, nor am I suggesting that we collectively give up on academic freedom. I am suggesting that it is time to evolve past the goal of defending academic freedom and instead define and build a new culture of academic freedom. The challenge facing higher education mirrors our larger democratic challenge: We have a generation of people being asked to defend something that they never truly experienced or fully benefited from. The mid-career academic at most universities has known only austerity, political interference and a crisis of confidence in higher education throughout their professional career.

Alina Chan:

Resulting subpoenas uncovered a conspiracy to avoid legally mandated oversight by deleting all emails “relating to origin”.

The ranking Democrat called this a “stain on the legacy”.

It’s not partisan.

—-

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

Jill Barshay:

DOGE has been demanding 50 percent cuts to the $190 million a year testing program. Nearly all the work is handled by outside contractors, such as Westat and ETS, and five-year contracts were awarded at the end of 2024. But instead of paying the vendors annually, DOGE has diced the payments into shorter increments, putting pressure on the contractors to accept sharp cuts, according to several former Education Department employees. At the moment, several of the contracts are scheduled to run out of money in May and June, and DOGE’s approval is needed to restart the flow of money. Indeed, DOGE allowed one NAEP contract to run out of funds entirely on March 31, forcing ETS employees to stop work on writing new questions for future exams. 

Reading and math tests are scheduled to start being administered in schools in January 2026, and so additional disruptions could derail the main NAEP assessment altogether. NAEP is taken by a sample of 450,000 students who are selected to represent all the fourth and eighth graders in the nation, and each student only takes part of a test. This sampling approach avoids the burden of testing every child in the country, but it requires Education Department contractors to make complicated statistical calculations for the number of test takers and the number of test sections needed to produce valid and reliable results. Contractors must then package the test sections into virtual test booklets for students to take online. The Education Department also must get approval from the federal Office of Management and Budget to begin testing in schools — yet another set of paperwork that is handled by contractors. 

William Jacobson:

We then go on, as we always do, to explain in detail why the classification of “students of color” violates federal and state law, and even Drake’s own nondiscrimination policy, and we ask OCR to open an investigation.

The filing generated substantial media coverage in Iowa and beyond.

Dan:

Boggle is a word search game. You form words by connecting adjacent letters, including along diagonals. Longer words score more points. Good words on this board include STRANGERS and PLASTERING. After you spend three minutes trying to find as many words as you can, you’ll be struck by just how good computers are at this.

Using the ENABLE2K word list, this board has 3,625 points on it coming from 1,045 words. This board has more points than any other. Try any other combination of letters and you’ll get a lower score. While I’ve long suspected this board was the winner, I’ve now proven it via exhaustive search.

Many people have searched for high-scoring boards before, but no one has ever constructed a computational proof that they’ve found the best one. This is a new, first of its kind result for Boggle.

Christopher Rufo

No, Alex, I’m mocking the idea that our universities resemble anything like “neutrality, fairness, and openness.” The real question is what to do when they become hyper-ideologized and openly discriminatory. And the answer cannot be “keep sending them unlimited public funding.”

Alex Tabarrok:

A powerful but grim essay by John McGinnis, Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern. For decades, the federal government—driven by the left—expanded its control over universities. The right, most notably Ronald Reagan, tried to resist, shielding civil society from state overreach. They failed. Now, a new right has turned to the left’s playbook and is imposing its own vision of the good society. Chris Rufo mocks classical liberals like myself and their naive ideas of neutrality, fairness and open institutions. Principles are for losers. Seize power! Crush your enemies. Rufo does know how to crush his enemies. But what happens when the devil turns? Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization. Hayek’s civil society dies in the rubble.

——

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.

 Scott Slocum

Ted joined Scott to talk about why so many Illinois metro areas dominate the rest of the country when it comes to property taxes, why the celebration over the state’s latest job numbers is so wrong, why Gov. Pritzker should focus on promoting literacy in schools instead of his pet issues, and more.

Holly Baxter:

“I have a couple of problems with that attitude,” says Oster. “One, I think it’s not respectful. I mean, my general sense is that… women are adults, pregnant women are also adults, and we should tell people actual evidence so they can make choices for themselves. That’s a core belief. But I also think even from an efficacy standpoint, I am not sure that this approach is actually delivering the thing you want. In part because if you tell people a thousand rules and you express them as if all of them are equally important, and people are just like: ‘Well, I can’t do all of them. Like, I can’t do all of those things,’ or like, ‘Well, I guess probably doing half of them is fine. I’ll just sort of pick whatever half I think I would like,’ then you’re actually not in a good position. Because you haven’t helped people prioritize.” A person who gets told a fully abstinent approach to cigarettes and alcohol is equally important might reason they can only achieve one, so they’ll smoke lightly throughout their pregnancy, for example. And we know that the babies of people who smoked in pregnancy have much worse outcomes than the babies of mothers who had a glass of wine a week.

Addy Osmani

What happens if this trend continues unchecked? For one, you might hit a “critical thinking crisis” in your career. If an AI has been doing your thinking for you, you could find yourself unequipped to handle novel problems or urgent issues when the tool falls short. 

As one commentator bluntly put it: “The more you use AI, the less you use your brain… So when you run across a problem AI can’t solve, will you have the skills to do so yourself?”. It’s a sobering question. We’ve already seen minor crises: developers panicking during an outage of an AI coding assistant because their workflow ground to a halt.

Over-reliance can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Microsoft study authors warned that if you’re worried about AI taking your job and yet you “use it uncritically” you might effectively deskill yourself into irrelevance. In a team setting, this can have ripple effects. Today’s junior devs who skip the “hard way” may plateau early, lacking the depth to grow into senior engineers tomorrow. 

If a whole generation of programmers “never know the satisfaction of solving problems truly on their own” and “never experience the deep understanding”from wrestling with a bug for hours, we could end up with a workforce of button-pushers who can only function with an AI’s guidance. They’ll be great at asking AI the right questions, but won’t truly grasp the answers. And when the AI is wrong (which it often is in subtle ways), these developers might not catch it – a recipe for bugs and security vulnerabilities slipping into code.

Fox6 Milwaukee

The Brief

• • A teacher at Milwaukee’s Rufus King High School has been charged with four felony counts of sexual misconduct, accused of sexually harassing students.
  • Students described sexually explicit remarks and inappropriate touching by Erica Allemang-Reinke.
  • Allemang-Reinke was scheduled to have her initial court appearance on Thursday, April 24.

Ann Althouse summary

Speaking of frustrated, I’m frustrated. I want to know a lot more about the praise Zuckerberg received years ago for his grandiose promises of charity — especially in the field of education. But who got the money? Chan and Zuck’s friend Liu, now departed? Give me some tough reporting. Don’t just waft the anti-DEI suspicion that fits the general anti-Trump slant of the newspaper. “Some families wonder” — ugh.

Elizabeth Bratton

A Cambridge professor was paid over $1 million by the FBI between 1991 and 2017 for his assistance to the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC), according to recently published de-classified documents.

The documents reveal that the FBI used a Confidential Human Source (CHS) by the name of Halper to investigate potential ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A 2016 payment request of $5,000 revealed that Halper had been “integral in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” while a $25,000 payment request from the same year was labelled as being “for services performed on the Crossfire Hurricane / Typhoon investigations”.

“Crossfire Hurricane” was a counterintelligence investigation into potential links between Russian intelligence and members of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, with Crossfire Typhoon being a sub-operation that formed part of the wider Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

The report stated that the CHS had provided the FBI “with unique access to targets who are very difficult to gain access to” and had been “more than willing” to do “whatever [he] could do in order to assist the FBI in its mission”.

Glenn Greenwald:

When Hillary was in the Obama Admin, they invented one of the most radical powers in US history: to drone-assassinate US-born citizens with no due process.

It not only claimed that right but carried it out, murdering al-Awlaki in Yemen and, 2 weeks later, his 16-year-old son.

Stefanie Waldek, Katherine McLaughlin, Elizabeth Stamp, Maya Chawla

Though all of these schools are beautiful, for a college campus to be considered the coolest, we think it has to transcend aesthetics alone. Perhaps the award should go to Mount Holyoke with its strong focus on sustainability. All new constructions on campus are built to meet LEED silver requirements, and older ones have been renovated where appropriate to conserve energy. However, a modernist devotee may push back and say Florida Southern College is the coolest—not just because of the 13 beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright–designed buildings on the ground, but because it’s the site with the highest volume of Wright structures in one place. But nature lovers might argue for the scenic setting of the University of California, Santa Cruz, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. And, of course, when it comes to cool, it’s hard to beat a campus surrounded by the energy of a big city such as Columbia. All 64 schools on this list are AD-approved; after reading, decide for yourself which campus should be crowned the coolest.

Joanne Jacobs Summary:

Toppo asks the key question: “By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no significant increase in infections. Why weren’t we in lockstep with Europe?”

“A uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment in America is one large reason,” Zweig responds. Schools seemed set to reopen in fall of 2020. The American Academy of Pediatrics was all for it. Then, on July 6, President Trump tweeted: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL.” Four days later, the pediatricians reversed course and opposed reopening. 

Trump hatred “so dramatically distorted the lens through which they were seeing the world that they conducted themselves in a fashion that was completely disconnected from reality,” says Zweig, who once considered himself on the the left.

——

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

Liz Essley Whyte, Douglas Belkin and Sara Randazzo:

Columbia University’s president had already been hounded out of office, but her ordeal wasn’t over.

Four days after she stepped down under government pressure during fraught federal funding negotiations, Katrina Armstrong spent three hours being deposed by a government attorney in Washington, D.C. The lawyer grilled Armstrong over whether she had done enough to protect Jewish students against antisemitism.

As she dodged specifics under questioning, the lawyer said her answer “makes absolutely no sense” and that he was “baffled” by her leadership style.

“I’m just trying to understand how you have such a terrible memory of specific incidents of antisemitism when you’re clearly an intelligent doctor,” he said.

The attorney in the room during the April 1 deposition, a senior Health and Human Services official named Sean Keveney, is part of a little-known government task force that has shaken elite American universities to their core in recent weeks. It has targeted billions of dollars in federal funding at premiere institutions such as Columbia and Harvard, with cascading effects on campuses nationwide. Now it is pressing to put Columbia under a form of federal oversight known as a consent decree.

Quinton Klabon:

Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Act 20 science of reading moment; watch both parts!😭

• pick Amplify: Core Knowledge!
• admit past mistakes (11th-biggest district, bottom quartile results)
• CKLA does 80% of work for teachers, advances slow and fast readers, builds background knowledge

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has issued a warning to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and its Superintendent, Jill Underly, to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, or potentially lose federal funding. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has set a deadline for Thursday, April 24th, and DPI has said they plan to disregard the Trump Administration’s request, which is causing a negative reaction from school districts who rely on these federal funds.  

WILL’s Guidance to School Boards: WILL is building a coalition of districts that want to affirm compliance with federal non-discrimination laws and is encouraging them to reach out to ED directly to seek guidance on how to secure their federal funding. 

The Quotes: WILL Education Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “If Underly doesn’t reverse course by the deadline today, Wisconsin school districts could lose access to critical federal funding. And when that happens, expect calls for more state funds from Wisconsin lawmakers, program cuts and even more referendums resulting in higher property taxes on hardworking Wisconsin families.” 

Chad Aldeman:

Oof, look at these staffing versus enrollment trends in Los Angeles Unified. Percentage change from 2012-13 to 2024-25:

Student enrollment: ↓ 29%
Classified staff: ↑ 42%
Teachers: ↓ 11%
Other certificated support: ↑ 90%
Certificated admin: ↑ 15%

———

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Robin Wigglesworth, Kate Duguid, Costas Mourselas and Ian Smith

 “It’s unstable because there is a lot of supply [of US government debt].”

Indeed, the conundrum confronting those regulators and policymakers that might still want to neuter these strategies is that the Treasury market has come to depend upon them. 

The gross US government bond holdings of all hedge funds that report to the SEC stood at nearly $3.4tn at the end of 2024, and has roughly doubled just since the beginning of 2023, according to the OFR. Much of this will be held through myriad other strategies, but judging by the size of the short Treasury futures positions, most estimates are that fixed-income relative-value hedge funds in aggregate probably hold roughly $1tn of Treasuries.

That would mean that these strategies now hold almost as much US government debt as Japan’s central bank, the single biggest overseas holder, and more than China’s official holdings. With foreign investors already nervous about the Trump administration, it means the health of the Treasury market might be hostage to the very same trades that occasionally cause it palpitations. 

A senior executive at one of the world’s largest trading firms concedes that the growing presence of hedge funds and trading firms in the Treasury market would inescapably make it more volatile. This in turn could lead to investors demanding higher yields as compensation. However, given the scale of US government debt issuance, their involvement is necessary.

Heather Peske

It’s nearly universal: Teachers with master’s degrees almost always get paid more than teachers without. The presumption is that the master’s degree signals a greater level of knowledge and skill. But what if I told you that aspiring elementary math teachers who go through graduate-level teacher prep are often less prepared than teachers who go through an undergraduate program?

That’s just one of the big takeaways from the National Council on Teacher Quality’s (NCTQ) new report, Teacher Prep Review: Solving for Math Success. In our analysis of over 1,100 elementary teacher preparation programs across the country, only 2% of graduate programs earned an A or A+, meaning they dedicate sufficient time to preparing teachers on how to teach math and on the essential math content.

The average graduate program dedicates less than one course credit to foundational math content knowledge, reaching barely more than 10% of the minimum recommended by math experts, practitioners in the field, and the research. In fact,because of this paucity of time, more than 8 in 10 graduate programs earned an F in our review. 

Undergraduate programs are doing better on average, but many still fail to meet the minimum expectations for math content instruction. 

——-

Notes and links on singapore discovery connected math.

John Sailer

This is fascinating. More than 100 Yale professors have called for an audit of the university’s sprawling bureaucracy.

The audit, they say, would “preempt potential federal intervention” and send the message: “Yale prioritizes intellectual vitality over bureaucratic inertia.”

Heather MacDonald:

Disparate-impact theory holds that if a neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately negative effect on underrepresented minorities (overwhelmingly, on blacks), it violates civil rights laws. It has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions, the use of grades for medical licensing exams, credit-based mortgage lending, the ability to discipline insubordinate students, and criminal background checks for employees and renters. It has been used to eliminate prosecution for a large range of crimes, including shoplifting, turnstile jumping, and resisting arrest; to end police tactics such as proactive stops (otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk); and to purge safety technologies like ShotSpotter and speeding cameras from police departments.

In none of those cases has it ever been demonstrated that the disfavored standard was implemented to exclude blacks or other minorities from a position, opportunity, or right. The genius (if a diabolical one) of disparate-impact theory was that it obviated any need to show discriminatory intent on the part of a targeted employer or institution. Discrimination was inferred simply by the effect of the colorblind standard.

Disparate-impact theory preserved the hegemony of the civil rights regime long after the original impetus for that regime had all but disappeared. One would be hard-pressed today to find any mainstream institution that discriminates against blacks in admissions, hiring, or promotion. The reality, in fact, is the opposite: every mainstream institution is desperate to hire and promote as many remotely qualified blacks as possible; it is white males who are disfavored and excluded from positions based on their skin color.

——-

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?

Duty News:

Ten-month-old babies and toddlers who grew up during the coronavirus crisis were unable to distinguish between frightened and happy faces, research by Utrecht University has shown.

The researchers wanted to find out if the social restrictions during the pandemic, such as mask wearing and lockdown, influenced the early neurological development of babies.

“It’s the age when babies learn much from facial expressions,” researcher Carlijn van den Boomen said. “They learn to distinguish and interpret emotion.”

Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe

According to several Princeton faculty members, “demographic evolution” is a euphemism for racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring. A 2021 internal report outlining best practices for faculty recruitment described how staff were trained to “increase the diversity of the applicants at every step in the process.” The report advised search committees to discount negative references for minority candidates and to ensure that every shortlist included at least “two women and/or two underrepresented minority candidates.”

The implicit message from Eisgruber and the administration: don’t hire white men unless absolutely necessary. According to one professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, this meant abandoning merit-based hiring in favor of race-based preferences—the only way, given the current pipeline, to accomplish Eisgruber’s stated goal of increasing “by 50 percent the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members from underrepresented groups over the next five years.”

Though many of these policies relied on euphemism, some were openly and explicitly discriminatory. The university’s Target of Opportunity Program, which was cancelled shortly before the 2024 presidential election, made funding available for departments to hire “candidates from groups that are underrepresented on campus.” According to conversations with Princeton professors, this referred primarily to racial minorities and women. The program covered half of each hire’s salary, allowing departments to bring on new faculty without bearing the full financial burden. In effect, the administration created financial incentives to prioritize hiring racial minorities.

Brian Potter

You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting someone trying to build humanoid robots. The Humanoid Robot Guide lists 47 different humanoids made by 38 different manufacturers, and this Technology Review article claims 160 companies worldwide are building humanoids. Many of these manufacturers are startups that have raised (or are raising) hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. 1X Technologies has raised around $125 million in funding, Apptronik has raised $350 million, and Agility Robotics is looking to raise $400 million. Figure AI has raised $675 million, and is aiming to raise $1.5 billion more. Since 2015, humanoid robot startups have raised more than $7.2 billion.

Other manufacturers are existing companies trying their hand at humanoids. Tesla is developing its Optimus humanoid, Unitree its G1, Boston Dynamics its Atlas. A variety of Chinese EV manufacturers, such as Xpeng, Xiaomi, and Nio, are also trying their hand at humanoids (and why not, as both electric vehicles and humanoid robots are fundamentally collections of batteries, electric motors, sensors, and control electronics).

These humanoids are also getting increasingly capable. Boston Dynamics has been showing off its humanoid capabilities for years, with the most recent Atlas iteration displaying the ability to run, crawl, somersault, and cartwheel. Unitree has shown off its G1 doing kung fu, boxing, flips, and kip ups. Booster Robotics has shown its T1 kicking a soccer ball, and EngineAI has shown its humanoid doing elaborate dance routines. And while not quite as showy, a variety of humanoids now have the ability to walk with a smooth, human-like gait, including (but not limited to) Figure’s 02, Tesla’s Optimus, and Xpeng’s Iron. This past weekend, a humanoid half marathon was held in Beijing, where 21 humanoid robots competed to complete the race (though only 6 finished, and they did so with significant help from human assistants).

William Jacobson

The ABA proposal to force DEI into mandatory law school education has been back and forth over the years as the political winds shifted, with the ABA Temporarily Suspending DEI Enforcementafter Trump’s Inauguration. In March 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi Warned American Bar Association To ‘Immediately’ Abandon Diversity Mandates.

So the current EO on ABA accreditation has been a long time in the making. I’m proud that I was against the ABA before it was cool to be against the ABA.

Harold Ristau:

The public space has never been a theologically or morally neutral one; therefore, the Church has and will continue to heed the divine obligation to speak into it the holy Word of God. Only a godless culture would dare to claim that the public sphere is somehow neutral. The New Testament clearly announces the darkness of this present age (Eph 6:12). Yet, those who boldly lift their voices on behalf of the Church and her Lord in the public sphere, which is more important now than ever as we approach the final parousia (The second coming of Christ), are facing intensifying persecution for doing so. Over the last few years, a frenetic buzz around Christian Nationalism has spread throughout our churches. Just as the apostle Paul evangelized more boldly in his most fiery trials, so also must we defend the traditional Christian and Lutheran response to anti-Christian public policy, rhetoric, and other subversive actions against Christendom in our Christian vocations within all three estates.

In contrast to active Christian participation, the quietistic response of Christians today places a wedge between Church and state, claiming the role of the Church is limited to prayer and that the role of a Christian is, at most, voting. This is neither Biblical nor Lutheran. It appears that those who most strongly advocate against Christian activity in the public sphere are the ones who failed to respond appropriately to the “pandemania” during the recent pandemic. They appear to hide behind screeds on Christian Nationalism as a reason to avoid participation in the public sphere and to justify what amounts to a soft-antinomian behaviour.

AAC&U

More than 1 in 3 faculty say they have less academic freedom today when it comes to teaching content without any interference (35%), speaking freely as citizens (36%), and speaking freely when participating in institutional governance (38%).

More than half (53%) are concerned about their ability to express what they believe as scholars to be correct statements about the world and worry that their beliefs or activities as faculty members may make them targets of online harassment.

Significant percentages of faculty have faced restrictions on what they can say in faculty and department meetings (36%) or on social media (33%) and what they teach in their courses (24%).
52% of faculty have altered the language in something they have written in order to avoid controversy; most refrain from using terms or words they believe might be perceived as offensive by their students (62%), by administrators (57%), by other faculty members (57%), or by institutional staff (54%).

53% believe classroom discussion of controversial topics or issues should be encouraged and should occur frequently because of its educational value.
93% believe faculty should intentionally invite student perspectives from all sides of an issue.
57% encourage mutually respectful disagreement among the students in their courses either “quite a bit” or “a great deal,” and 70% believe that the amount of mutually respectful disagreement among their students is “about right.”

Just 12% believe classroom discussions should be halted if views are expressed that some students feel causes harm to certain groups of people, and just 5% believe a required reading or other assignment should be dropped if it includes such views.

Annie Linskey:

Last June, as President Joe Biden sequestered himself in the presidential retreat at Camp David to prepare for a crucial first debate against challenger Donald Trump, one of his top advisers noticed that something was off.

Though Biden had been a voracious political animal for decades, he didn’t know details about what Trump had been saying about him on the campaign trail. At one point the president left debate prep and “shuffled out the door to the pool,” where he “sank into a lounge chair and fell asleep,” according to Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, who helped to run his debate preparation efforts.

Biden, who at 81 was the oldest person ever to hold the presidency, seemed “befuddled” by discussion of his own domestic agenda. Klain was “struck by how out of touch with American politics he was.”

This account comes from “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” a book by journalist Chris Whipple published in January. It’s one of several new books about the 2024 campaign that at least partly address the question now at the center of assessing Biden’s legacy: What was the true state of his mental faculties while he served as president?

Justin Lahart:

In the 1950s, around 35% of private-sector jobs in the U.S. were in manufacturing. Today, there are 12.8 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S., an amount equal to 9.4% of those private-sector jobs.

President Trump says his sweeping tariff regime is aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. Economists are skeptical that tariffs could make that a reality, and worry that the damage they create will outweigh any benefits.

To understand whether restoring manufacturing to the U.S. is possible, it helps to first understand how the U.S. lost its place as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse.

Starkey comics

The diversity of English dialects in the United Kingdom is enormous.

It’s common for people from either side of a river, mountain, or even town to speak noticeably different ways, with particular features that immediately mark someone out as being from a specific area, to those who have an ear for it.

This is pretty normal in any large region that has been speaking a language continually for 1600 years. You will find the same thing in Germany, Norway, France, and countless other countries. Languages evolve over time, and physical distance between regions means that new features often spread slowly, leading to dialectal differences. Sometimes these differences are small, and only easily recognised by people from the relevant region. Other times there are very clear distinctions, with neighbouring dialects sounding almost like different languages to those unaccustomed to them.

Here I have tried to capture as much nuance as possible. I’ve spent the last few years pooling together every study, survey, map, and database I can find, and then subjecting my image to several rounds of peer feedback. The members of my Facebook group, “Ah yes, the British accent”, were also a huge help in trying to make these borders as accurate as possible. The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made. But it is still very much unfinished, and it always will be.

Molly Hennessy-Fiske

Several faculty and university senates have approved resolutions asking their leaders to sign a NATO-like agreement that would allow the institutions to share attorneys and pool financial resources in case President Donald Trump’s administration targets one of its members.

The Washington Post reached out to all 18 senates and administrations at schools in the Big Ten for comment. Many professors contacted said the proposed compact was vital to ensure they are protected from a White House that has cut research funding, revoked visas of international students and tried to direct curriculum at some institutions. Most administrators, with whom the final decision will lie, did not directly address the issue.

The faculty and university senates at six schools have signed resolutions asking their administrators to join the effort, including Indiana University, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Rutgers University and University of Washington.

———

Emily Glazer, Douglas Berlin and Juliet Chung:

The group comprises figures at the highest levels, including individual trustees and presidents. Maintaining close contact, they have discussed red lines they won’t cross in negotiations and have gamed out how to respond to different demands presented by the Trump administration, which has frozen or canceled billions in research funding at schools it says haven’t effectively combated antisemitism on their campuses.

——-

MAD (mutually assured destruction)

Warsaw Pact

NATO

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more

Jenny Jarvie:

Nearly two months after hundreds of prospective California lawyers complained that their bar exams were plagued with technical problems and irregularities, the state’s legal licensing body has caused fresh outrage by admitting that some multiple-choice questions were developed with the aid of artificial intelligence.

The State Bar of California said in a news releaseMonday that it will ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took its February bar exam.

But it declined to acknowledge significant problems with its multiple-choice questions — even as it revealed that a subset of questions were recycled from a first-year law student exam, while others were developed with the assistance of AI by ACS Ventures, the State Bar’s independent psychometrician.

“The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined,” said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at UC Irvine Law School. “I’m almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”

——-

More.

Kayla Huynh:

The Madison Metropolitan School District has long calculated high schoolers’ GPAs on a 4.0 scale. A weighted system would take into consideration the difficulty of coursework, assigning higher value to grade points for Advanced Placement or honors classes.

Students, parents and staff have shown interest in switching to weighted grades, according to district spokesperson Ian Folger. District leaders have been gathering input this past school year and could change the system as soon as next school year depending on the feedback, Folger said.

Two high schoolers interviewed by the Cap Times said the potential change has elicited mixed reactions but overall curiosity among their peers. 

——-

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Sean Davis:

The change would allow student-athletes to receive money, compensation, endorsements or gifts of monetary value, as long as they are not affiliated with their “school team, school, Conference or WIAA (scholarships to institutions of higher learning are specifically exempted),” according to the amendment.

That means a student-athlete cannot appear in their school uniform nor utilize the school’s marks, logos, school, conference or WIAA in any endorsement. Prohibited activities and products include “gaming/gambling; alcoholic beverages, tobacco, cannabis, or related products; banned or illegal substances; adult entertainment products or services; weapons (i.e. firearms),” according to the amendment.

Sean Salai

Brown University has filed disciplinary charges against a student journalist who sent a Department of Government Efficiency-inspired email asking administrators to explain what they do all day.

Mimicking an email that Elon Musk’s DOGE sent to federal workers, sophomore Alex Shieh asked 3,805 administrators at the Ivy League campus in a March 18 email to “describe what tasks you performed in the past week.”

In a phone call Wednesday, Mr. Shieh said the Ivy League university has summoned him to answer charges of misrepresenting himself as a reporter for the Brown Spectator, an unrecognized conservative student publication.

Samuel Negus:

Many in the higher-ed world fear for its future. Two recent columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education are typical.

In one, Robert Shireman, a Democratic appointee to the committee that advises the secretary of education on the recognition of accrediting agencies, warns of an “accreditation war” driven by “Christian nationalism.” Republican “Christian nationalists,” Shireman believes, “don’t want their own, separate, accrediting agency; they want to force the rest of higher education to accept their radical beliefs.” The implicit premise here is that higher education’s status quo is value-neutral and purely rational and that conservative would-be reformers—not, say, Shireman and his colleagues at the progressive Century Foundation—are the extremist radicals.

Anti-reformers’ implicit premise is that higher education’s status quo is value-neutral and purely rational.In the second, Gardner-Webb University associate provost Greg Pillar and accreditation consultant Laurie Shanderson imagine the consequences of President Trump’s campaign promise to “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs.” They fear that new accrediting agencies created by Republican-controlled states and recognized by the Trump administration would not garner the respect of “employers and graduate programs,” thus “disadvantaging students in affected states.” In such a “politicized,” “bifurcated accreditation system, … institutions aligned with traditional accreditors [would] maintain credibility while those accredited by new, politically driven agencies [would] face skepticism.”

Grant Bailey and Wendy Wang

The family structure debate has finally arrived on the right, and Elon Musk’s unorthodox (to put it mildly) pronatalism is the occasion.

Highlights
Children from wealthier families are more likely to graduate college and stay wealthy when raised in an intact family.

For some on the right, family structure is relatively unimportant, especially at the upper echelons of society. But this view is not consistent with the evidence.

Children from married intact families enjoy better mental health, graduate from college at higher rates, and earn more money. This pattern applies even to kids with every apparent material advantage.

Musk’s approach to family life indicates that some on the right do not think family structure matters for kids. Over the decades, primarily left-leaning commentators have discounted the importance of marriage and family structure. But now, on the other end of the political spectrum, there are those on the right suggesting that kids will do fine, so long as their parents have money or the right genes. From this corner of the right, family structure is relatively unimportant, especially at the upper echelons of society.

But this view is not consistent with the evidence. Children from wealthier families are more likely to graduate college and stay wealthy when raised in an intact family. As documented in Brad Wilcox’s book, Get Married, among children raised in upper-income families, those who lived with both biological parents are twice as likely to graduate from college as their affluent peers who did not.1 This comes from an analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), a survey that followed the lives of nearly 9,000 teenagers into their adulthood. The same data also suggests that rich kids whose parents stick together have 73% higher odds of remaining rich as adults compared to their peers whose parents do not.2

Josh Blackman

So much happened on Good Friday with A.A.R.P. v. Trump that one item has slipped through the cracks. The ACLU made a request for an injunction after hours on the voicemail of Judge Hendrix’s chambers. At the time, I found that request problematic, but had bigger fish to fry. Judge Hendrix has now issued an order addressing that voicemail.

First, it is prohibited to engage in ex parte communications with judges.

The Code of Conduct for United States Judges explains that judges should not permit or consider ex parte communications “or consider other communications concerning a pending or impending matter that are made outside the presence of the parties or their lawyers.” Code of Conduct for United States Judges, Canon 3(A)(4). Even when circumstances may require such communications, the Canon limits such communications to situations where “the ex parte communication does not address substantive matters and the judge reasonably believes that no party will gain a procedural, substantive, or tactical advantage as a result of the ex parte communication.” Code of Conduct for United States Judges, Canon 3(A)(4)(b).

This rule is well known to anyone who has spent time in a district court. When I was clerking, lawyer would routinely call to ask about cases. As a clerk, the most I could discuss were procedural matters, like scheduling hearings or deadline extensions. If there was any sort of substantive question, my response was “put it in a motion.” That way, all of the parties could see the request, have a chance to respond, and there would be a public record. Nine times out of ten, they never filed a motion, because they didn’t want to actually make the request public. In rare cases, there was some urgent matter that needed the judge’s attention. At that time, the courtroom deputy would try to get at least one lawyer from each party on the phone. When all of the lawyers were present, then and only then would the judge join the conference call. (These were the days before Zoom.) The court reporter was also present. That call was then treated as an official proceeding, that would be docketed. All of these rules are designed to eliminate the risk of ex parte communications about a case.

Zach Greenberg:

It seems GMU has forgotten its namesake’s legacy. So here’s a reminder: calling the cops over political commentary has no place at an American university bound by the First Amendment. 

On April 16, GMU student Nicholas Decker published a Substack essay titled “When Must We Kill Them?,” a provocative piece exploring whether violence is ever justified as a last resort against what he perceives as tyranny under the Trump administration. The essay explicitly warns that force is only defensible when all peaceful and legal avenues have been exhausted. Decker invokes the founding fathers to argue that violence “is to be employed only in defense of our Constitution, and of democracy.”

The next day, GMU referred Decker to “state and federal law enforcement for evaluation of criminal behavior” and denounced his essay as “not the Mason way.” Then came a knock at Decker’s door from the Secret Service. After reviewing his words, they agreed he broke no laws.

Melanie Asmar

Palmer is one of 10 Denver schools that will close or partially close at the end of the school year due to declining enrollment, mostly driven by lower birth rates and gentrification.

But Denver Public Schools took a different approach to finding new schools for displaced students in this latest round of closures. Instead of matching each closing school with a receiving school, the district gave students multiple options and top preference at the school of their choice, leapfrogging even siblings and the children of teachers.

“It felt like an important offering we could make to families because we were disrupting their experience,” said Andrew Huber, executive director of enrollment and campus planning for DPS.

Paul Fournel:

Well… you probably shouldn’t.

This is my one rule: if my son ever says he doesn’t want to do math, we simply stop. No arguing, no bribing, no pushing. We do something else instead.

Why? Because math is not a chore—it’s a way of experiencing the world. Just like tasting new food, enjoying music, or feeling amazed by nature, math should always feel like play, never like work.

Kids are born explorers. They naturally want to discover new things, including math. My main goal is simply to keep that natural curiosity alive and growing.

Before my son could even talk—as every parenting book suggests—I talked to him constantly. Counting stairs, naming colors, explaining everything around us. I emphasized numbers because I genuinely enjoy them. And that’s perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned: children sense your true passions and naturally want to join in.

Just play. A simple wooden game with numbers and colored bars was our playground. At first, it was sorting by colors or matching bars to numbers. Attention spans started short, a few moments here and there. But gradually, these moments grew into twenty or even thirty delightful minutes.

Preston Cooper | Armand Alacbay | Lindsey Burke | Paul Carrese | Andrew Gillen | Jay P. Greene | Adam Kissel | Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill | Michael Poliakoff | David Randall:

Key Points

• For decades, the position of university trustee was largely a public honorific. This is changing. Republican governors are increasingly selecting trustees to lead and shape their institutions.
• This volume aims to generate and disseminate the knowledge necessary for conservative trustees to effectively govern their institutions.
• We asked eminent education scholars to address topics such as intellectual diversity, civic education, financial management, academic rigor, teaching quality, and the proper role of a college trustee.

Introduction

Intellectual historians date the launch of the modern American conservative movement to the publication of a critique on our universities. In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” William F. Buckley Jr. lamented that his alma mater was shirking its responsibility to transmit the cultural and moral heritage of the United States and instead embracing moral relativism and economic collectivism. He called on Yale University’s trustees to exert more administrative control and intellectual direction over their institution. They didn’t. And we know what happened next.

Cory Brewer and Dan Lennington:

This civil rights law protects all students from discrimination based on race. But Underly is determined instead to push racially divisive “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies, and to blame the Trump administration for “dictating” education policy.

But this isn’t some novel federal overreach — it’s longstanding federal law.

The U.S. Department of Education last month asked all state education officials to certify compliance with Title VI, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin. As recently interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, Title VI prohibits schools from using race as a “negative” or “stereotype,” effectively prohibiting discriminatory DEI policies and programs, such as those programs that target only Black or Native American students for special help. Title VI also prohibits “racial balancing,” which is the policy of attempting to sort students based on race or close down schools or programs, as planned in Wauwatosa.

——

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

Victor Davis Hanson:

Harvard has refused to accept the orders of a Trump administration commission concerning its chronic problems with anti-Semitism, campus violence, and racial tribalism, bias, and segregation.

Yet, unlike some conservative campuses that distrust an overbearing Washington, Harvard and most elite schools like it want it both ways. They do as they please on their own turf and yet still demand that the taxpayers send them multibillion-dollar checks in addition to their multibillion-dollar private incomes.

Aside from the issues of autonomy and free expression, there are lots of campus practices that higher education would prefer were not widely known to the public.

But soon they will be, and thus will become sources of public anger. Perhaps envision elite private colleges as mossy rocks, which seem outwardly picturesque—until you turn them over and see what crawls beneath.

So, if there are protracted standoffs, our elite campuses will be hard-pressed to defend the indefensible. This effort will be difficult because public confidence in higher education has already plummeted to historic lows in the most recent polls.

Kayla Huynh:

Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” he said, citing federal test scores that show K-12 students behind in math and reading. “The federal education bureaucracy is not working.” 

Wisconsin joined 20 other states last month in suing to block plans to close the department. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, a former state superintendent of public instruction, called Trump’s efforts “ridiculous.” Evers placed blame on Congress, though, for “doing absolutely nothing.” 

Some members of Wisconsin’s congressional delegation, including Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, have hailed the changes as giving states more control and limiting the federal government’s role in education.  

“I’m with President Trump,” Johnson posted on social media last month. “Shut it down.” 

Wisconsin education officials and education policy researchers say the changes could affect students and families in Madison through funding, financial aid, civil rights protectionsand other areas. 

However, schools would still fall under state education regulations and might be able tomaintain their largest sources of funding, such as local taxes, state aid and student tuition. 

…..

The Office for Civil Rights has also opened investigations at UW-Madison and 44 other universities “for allegedly engaging in race-exclusionary practices in … graduate programs.” The office says it is examining ties to an organization called The Ph.D. Project, which aims to help students from historically underrepresented backgrounds earn advanced degrees in business. 

While UW-Madison is no longer affiliated with the Ph.D. Project, according to campus spokesperson John Lucas, the federal investigation remains ongoing. 

……

Bell said a majority of the grants the Wisconsin Center for Education Research receives come from federal funds, which are used to support projects and pay researchers’ salaries.  (it is useful to have a look at the WCER’s substantial taxpayer funded budget)

———

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:

China’s universities produce about 350,000 mechanical engineering graduates per year, as well as electricians, welders and other trained technicians.

By comparison, American universities graduate about 45,000 mechanical engineers each year.

Jonathan Hurst, the chief robot officer and a co-founder of Agility Robotics, a leading American robot manufacturer, said finding skilled employees had been one of his biggest challenges. As a graduate student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Mr. Hurst said, he was one of two mechanical engineers.

Liana Wait:

Platforms such as iNaturalist and eBird encourage people to observe and document nature, but how accurate is the ecological data that they collect?

In a new study published in Citizen Science: Theory and Practice March 28, researchers from the University of California, Davis, show that citizen science data from iNaturalist and eBird can reliably capture known seasonal patterns of bird migration in Northern California and Nevada — from year-round residents such as California Scrub-Jays, to transient migrants such as the Western Tanager and the Pectoral Sandpiper.

“This project shows that data from participatory science projects with different goals, observers and structure can be combined into reliable and robust datasets to address broad scientific questions,” said senior author Laci Gerhart, associate professor of teaching in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology. “Contributors to multiple, smaller projects can help make real discoveries about bigger issues.”

Isaac Stone Fish:

The Communist Party of China, through partnerships and collaborations, influences Harvard University to sometimes promote Beijing’s policy agenda. The below report by Strategy Risks raises doubts about Harvard’s effectiveness in limiting the Party’s authoritarian influences.

To access the full report click Read More below.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner.

It should be an embarrassment for every one of our legislators and government leaders. The latest report from ATTOM Data Solutions shows that Illinois’ counties and metro areas dominate the list of the nation’s highest property tax rates.  

Illinois has 27 of the nation’s top 50 counties* for highest property tax rates. And five of Illinois’ metro areas are in the nation’s top 10, including the four highest in the country. 

The Rockford metro area takes the nation’s crown as the heaviest-taxing place in the country when measured as a share of home value. The average Rockford resident pays nearly 2.1% of their home value in property taxes every year – or about $4,500. Last year Rockford had the nation’s second-highest taxes, beaten only by Akron, Ohio.

The Chicago metro area took 2nd-place with an effective rate of 1.91% and a tax bill of nearly $7,800.

Sarah McLaughlin

Guilty finding for German editor’s doctored “I hate freedom of opinion” image

Germany’s speech policing can’t stay out of the spotlight for long, apparently. This month, David Bendels, editor-in-chief for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)-affiliated Deutschland Kurier, received a seven-month suspended sentence for “abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life.”

The offense? Bendels had edited and posted a photo of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser so that a sign she held said, “I hate freedom of opinion.” (Just think of how many different versions you saw of the Michelle Obama sign meme here in the U.S.) A Bavarian district court found Bendels guilty under a provision giving advanced protections to political figures against speech. Bendels’ sentencing has provoked criticism outside of his political circle, with figures like former Green Party leader Ricarda Lang questioning the “proportionality” of the ruling.

Alex Nguyen and Chase Rogers

Jeff Metcalf has been among those urging the public to avoid speculation about the case. The day after his son’s death, he appeared on a Fox News program, where he described Anthony as someone who had “made a bad choice” — one that would forever change the lives of both families.

Those found to make swatting calls can face criminal charges, which can range in severity in part based on whether the targets of the false calls are injured or killed.

Cottingham said he did not yet have information on whether Frisco police would open a formal investigation but noted that such investigations “generally take place in cases of swatting and other false reports.”

Matthew Yglesias:

Democrats often seem reluctant to propose ideas that teachers’ unions don’t like, because they want their support (or at least non-hostility) in a primary. But I’m pretty sure the NJEA is going to back Spiller no matter what Sherrill or Gottheimer or Fulop say, so why not be bolder? 

Democrats could use fresh thinking on education

As covered previously on Slow Boring, one of the most underrated developments in recent political history is that Democrats have lost their traditionally large issue advantage on education. 

——

Interestingly, this happened around the same time the Democrats outsourced their education policy to school teachers’ unions and have decided schools are mostly just adult employment agencies.

I wonder if the two could be related?

——

2009 (!) “an emphasis on adult employment”

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

Chris Rickert

The father of a Cherokee Heights Middle School student is facing a felony battery charge for allegedly attacking a security assistant at the Near West Side Madison school.

According to a criminal complaint filed Monday:

The 44-year-old Madison man went to the school just after 5 p.m. Wednesday along with his son and another man after his son was involved in a dispute with the security assistant earlier in the day. 

Surveillance video of the incident shows the student and the two men banging on the school’s doors until the security assistant lets them in, at which point the men and the student followed the security assistant inside.

——-

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Andrew Waugh

The government says it’s going to lower provincial assessment targets in New Brunswick schools because it deflates everyone involved when they aren’t hit.

Article content

The current target is for 90 per cent of students to “achieve appropriate or higher levels on provincial language, mathematical and scientific literacies on provincial assessments at the elementary, middle and high school levels.”

While assessment scores are showing an upward trend – in 2023-2024, percentages rose in 10 of 15  subjects on a year-over-year basis – the 90 per cent mark isn’t being hit anywhere.

And in most cases, it’s not close to being achieved.

Education Minister Claire Johnson revealed the news while talking to Brunswick News during a break from her department’s appearance before a legislative committee on Thursday.

——-

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)

Louis Bonham:

Yet as I and others have long noted, many schools (including almost all “elite” universities) view their maintenance of Kendian “discrimination for the right reasons” programs in admissions, hiring, promotions, tenure, and funding to be moral imperatives, and thus either are flatly refusing to abide by the Trump administration’s demands, and/or are continuing their discriminatory programs sub rosa.  As National Association of Scholars’ President Peter Wood has observed:

“Our colleges and universities are the moral and practical equivalent of the Jim Crow South. They are privileged, in some cases immensely wealthy, and, because they act as a law unto themselves, are practically lawless. The battle at hand is whether we will have lawful higher education or rule by these well-entrenched cultural warlords. They amount to a state-within-a-state dedicated to perpetual discrimination and authoritarian illiberalism. They are, moreover, the Jim Crow South of the 1910s rather than the 1950s, which engages routinely in arbitrary persecution of dissenters and does not even follow its own laws. If we follow our ordinary rules, it will be DEI today, DEI tomorrow, DEI forever.”

To its credit, the Trump administration is employing a wide array of sanctions on such recalcitrant schools. Billions in federal funding are being frozen or withdrawn, revocation of schools’ tax exempt status is being considered, and even their eligibility to enroll foreign students may be yanked.

Jon Emont:

Starting in 2015, Nike poured millions into an ambitious effort to partly automate what has always been a highly labor-intensive industry. At the time, rising labor costs in China and advances in manufacturing techniques such as 3-D printing opened the possibility of finding a new way to make shoes that would rely on fewer workers.

The shoe giant turned to Flex, an American manufacturer that had helped Apple set up a complex factory in Texas to make Mac Pros. The goal: Make tens of millions of Nike sneakers at a new high-tech manufacturing site in Guadalajara, Mexico, by 2023.

The plant would still include thousands of workers, but far fewer than are needed in Asia to make the same number of sneakers. If successful, the project could be a model for production in the U.S., according to some involved in the effort.

Jennifer Watling Neal & Zachary P. Neal

Birth rates in the United States (US) have been declining (Hamilton et al., 2024) and many US adults ages 18–49 who currently do not have children also do not expect to have them in the future (Brown, 2021; Livingston & Horowitz, 2018; Minkin et al., 2024). This means that many US adults are likely to remain non-parents throughout their lifetime. Non-parents vary in their attitudes toward having children and in whether they face circumstantial barriers to having children. However, demographic research often treats all non-parents as a single undifferentiated group (Verweij & Keizer, 2021).

Understanding different types of non-parents in US demographic data can help with planning for the different needs of this heterogeneous population. For example, non-parents who do not want children may have different reproductive health care needs from non-parents who want but face biological barriers to having children, with the former sometimes seeking opportunities for voluntary sterilization (Campbell, 1999) and the latter sometimes seeking opportunities for fertility treatments (McQuillan et al., 2003). Additionally, non-parents who do not want children may have divergent financial planning needs from non-parents who are planning to have children in the future, with the former requiring financial advice for self-managed retirement and long-term care, and the latter requiring financial advice related to having a child (Zigmont, 2024). Finally, non-parents who do not want children may have divergent work-life balance needs from non-parents who are planning to have children, with the former being interested in more flexible work-life balance policies that include personal time off policies, and the latter being interested in future use of parental leave policies (Verniers, 2020).

Murong Xuecun

It is 2013. For four full months, Liu Lipeng engages in dereliction of duty. Every hour the system sends him a huge volume of posts, but he hardly ever deletes a single word. After three or four thousand posts accumulate, he lightly clicks his mouse and the whole lot is released. In the jargon of censors, this is a “total pass in one click” (一键全通), after which all the posts appear on China’s version of X, Sina Weibo, to be read by millions, then reposted and discussed.

He logs on to the Weibo management page, where many words are flagged. Orange designates sensitive words that require careful examination – words like freedom and democracy, and the three characters that make up Xi Jinping’s name. While such words regularly appear in newspapers or on TV, that does not mean ordinary citizens can use them at will.

Red is for high-risk words that cannot be published and must be deleted: “Falun Gong”, the banned spiritual group; “64”, representing June 4, the date of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre; the names of Liu Xiaobo and the Dalai Lama; “Jasmine”, because, after the Tunisian revolution of 2011, several small-scale demonstrations that have come to be known as China’s “Jasmine revolution” have made the Chinese government nervous.

After three years as a censor, Liu detests his job. He detests the white office ceiling, the grey industrial carpet and the office that feels more like a factory. He also detests his 200-odd colleagues sitting in their cubicles, each concentrating on their mouse and keyboard as they delete or hide content.

Edward Frankel:
Abstract: Mathematics is something immutable, something we can hold on to in this volatile world. Its truths are objective, necessary, and timeless. For example, Pythagoras theorem means the same to everyone today as it did 2,500 years ago and there’s no reason to believe this will ever change. So, where does mathematics come from? I will describe a novel approach to this question, which points to a unification of math and Jungian psychology.

Joanne Jacobs summary:

Only one in three fourth-graders reads proficiently in Georgia, reports Atlanta News First. Gov. Brian Kemp is expected to sign new laws requiring schools to use research-based reading methods and teacher-ed programs to train teachers in the “science of reading,” reports Andy Pierrotti.

Two legislators who are former teachers, a Democrat and a Republican, led the charge to ban “three cueing,” which encourages children to use pictures and context clues, rather than decoding, to understand what they read.

“This method did not teach him to read,” said state Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, who read a letter from a parent on the Senate floor. “It taught him to guess, leaving him anxious, struggling, and believing he wasn’t capable for his first five years of school.”

The law also prohibits Georgia schools from using Reading Recovery for struggling first-graders, citing a 2023 University of Delaware study which found the program left students worse off in the long run.

——

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?

Via Quinton Klabon:

If you have not checked out this list from Forward Literacy, it appears to be the most complete database of what reading curricula districts are using under Act 20 compliance.

Corrinne Hess:

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Washington County campus was permanently closed in June 2024.

It’s one of six two-year campuses in the Universities of Wisconsin system to close or announce closure plans due to declining enrollment and budget shortfalls.

The buildings and land where these campuses are located are typically owned by the counties, leaving elected officials with the task of deciding what’s next.

Scott Henke, Washington County treasurer and chair of the University Campus Task Force, said it costs $750,000 a year to maintain the 200,000-square-foot former campus building and 80 acres it sits on.

Henke said the plan is to create a “social capital” campus, where each of the building’s four corners has an anchor tenant that would benefit the community.

In addition to the charter school, a theater group, a day care and a senior citizen group are interested in the campus, Henke said.

“Kind of a diapers-to-depends type of campus,” Henke said.

Superintendents from the five public school districts in Washington County are also looking at leasing about 5,000 square feet that the districts would use as collaborative space.

As far as the charter school, Henke said the discussions are just beginning.

“We’re about one inch on a 12-inch ruler,” Henke said.

Group letter to a task force.

More: Gov. Evers vetoes required merger of UW campus and technical college in Washington County

County executive says they’ll continue talks about consolidation in light of 66 percent enrollment decline over past decade

Limited background amidst Wisconsin (and Madison’s) long term, disastrous reading results:

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).

Perhaps this forensic thread offers a few partial answers (post election summaries: grok gpt4)

Former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz raises substantive points:

What’s needed, I think, is a continuous focus, month after month, about the performance of our schools and how they might be improved – something like the way the State Journal once focussed on nonpartisan redistricting, but even more intense.

I do try to provide that kind of focus here in my blog for Isthmus and on my own site. I make it a point to write critically about the schools as often as I can, but I’m a relatively small player these days. It’s not just the newspapers that aren’t up in arms — as I believe they should be — about the performance of our schools. We don’t hear much about it from the mayor or the county executive or the Chamber of Commerce or other civic groups either.

The quality of our schools impacts everything in our community — our long-term civic capacity, our workforce, even our property values. And, by most measures, those schools are underperforming, especially by the standards of a community that values education as much as we do.

And our schools are a lot more important than the freedom to step off the sidewalk on State Street.

The following may provide some clues for those interested in a deeper dive.

The first is worth forensic analysis:

Gavin Michaelson [Linkedin bio]:

On Tuesday, Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (district map) will join an in-person town hall hosted by Opportunity Wisconsin and other grassroots organizations in La Crosse.

The town hall will focus on potential cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security and other federal programs.

“We’re grateful that Congressman Pocan is willing to have an open and direct conversation with Wisconsinites about the harmful cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and more that Republicans in Congress continue to pursue just to pay for tax breaks for billionaires and corporations,” said Meghan Roh [Linkedin bio Spector-Roh Strategies], Opportunity Wisconsin program director. “Many families across the state are worried about how these devastating cuts would make everyday life more difficult by cutting services and increasing costs.”

As an aside, a deeper dive into Derrick Van Orden’s ascent to Wisconsin’s 3rd District [map] is worth a look as well. (Summaries: grok gpt4 claude)

Rich Kremer [wpr bio, could not immediately find a deeper resume]:

The top Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives says Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election is vital because the only way to challenge “gerrymandered” congressional voting maps is “if you have an enlightened Supreme Court” overseeing a legal challenge.

Republicans say it’s proof Democrats are planning to redraw maps if liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford wins on April 1. Crawford’s campaign says she’s never commented on congressional redistricting and the GOP is trying to distract from Elon Musk’s support for conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel.

During a Democratic National Committee update Monday afternoon, New York House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries talked with DNC Chair Ken Martin about the importance of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election next Tuesday. Martin said Democrats “have to win” it.

Jeffries elaborated on why.

“Because there are gerrymandered congressional lines right now in Wisconsin,” Jeffries said.

A look at potential candidates for the 2026 Wisconsin Third Congressional District election.

In closing, the Wisconsin League of Women Voters lobbied against recent reading reform legislation….

Guoguang Wu

A growing technocratic and elitist trend is evident in the rise of a younger generation of CCP elites represented by the prevalence of Tsinghua graduates taking the lead in career advancement within the party-state hierarchy. This trend appears to strengthen Xi Jinping’s control of CCP elites and benefit China’s governance, though it contradicts Xi’s emphasis on the CCP’s traditional political criteria and populist values. To overcome this dilemma, Xi’s leadership has prioritized loyalty to the CCP in the recruitment and promotion of young cadres and has developed organizational measures to enhance their grassroots experience.

——-

More:

Fascinating statistics of the CCP’s young cadres. Out of 60 bureau-level ones for whom there’s data, at least 29 hold STEM degrees, 47% are Ph.Ds. Tsinghua increasingly dominates (23% bureau-level, 52% in the 1985-1989 deputy-bureau cohort).
CCP is becoming more meritocratic. And

Anthony DeBarros and James Benedict:

Federal spending is higher since President Trump took office even as the Department of Government Efficiency slashes contracts, cuts jobs and ends diversity programs.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of daily financial statements issued by the Treasury Department found government spending since the inauguration is $154 billion more than in the same period in 2024 during the administration of former President Joe Biden.

DOGE claims cuts of $150 billion so far, but the Journal analysis found those efforts have yet to affect the bottom line.

And while the government’s income—taxes and revenues including tariffs—is also up, it isn’t enough to keep pace with higher spending.

Alex Crowe:

Myers returned to university where she completed a second master’s degree that focused on how students learn, with detailed and specific knowledge of how to teach reading and writing.

It has been almost two years since a sweeping review of teacher education recommended 14 reforms to radically reform training courses.

Backed by the nation’s education ministers, 37 Australian universities have until the end of this year to modify some 280 courses to embed “core content” in all teaching degrees.

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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?

Ann E. Marimow

The lawsuit over story time and books with titles such as “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” and “Love, Violet” touches on the type of diversity and inclusion efforts the Trump administration has targeted on college campuses, and in government and private businesses. It is one of three major religious-rights cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term.

The court will consider next week whether states can directly fund religious schools, in a closely watched case involving a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma. The justices are also set to decide whether Wisconsin must extend a tax exemption to the social services arm of the Catholic Church — a decision that could have implications for other large, religiously affiliated employers such as hospitals.

For the past decade or so, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s conservative majority have consistently ruled in favor of strengthening religious freedoms and expanding the role of faith in public life.

The court has recognized that parents have an interest in directing their children’s religious and educational upbringing and affirmed parents’ rights to choose alternatives to public schools. But the court has not previously recognized a broad right to pick and choose aspects of a public school’s curriculum based on religious objections, which is the issue they will consider Tuesday.

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Megan McArdle:

Puzzling quote from the ACLU’s David Cole, defending Montgomery County’s refusal to let parents opt their young kids out of reading LGBT-themed storybooks:

“No one is obligated to send their kids to public school, but if the court rules that religious parents can micromanage the education of their children in public school even where the effect is to undermine the school’s ability to do the job it needs to do for all of its students, that will seriously undermine the ability of public schools to do the work they need to do,”

This gets to the parents’ second argument, which is that the district’s policy isn’t neutral, and the ending of opt outs was targeted. Their brief cites a member of the school board saying it’d be an impossible disruption if teachers had to “send out notices so white supremacists could opt out of civil-rights content.” The implicit comparison is between religious families and racists. Who needs a tolerance lesson?

Jason Kottke:

In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the government takes a dislike to you for any reason, they’ll dig in and find a felony you’re guilty of.

The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

In response to a question about what happens to big company CEOs who refuse to go along with government surveillance requests, John Gilmore offers a case study in what Silverglate is talking about.

Jennifer Sey:

Buried deep in today’s article in @NYTmag about Blaire Fleming and @SJSU women’s volleyball team, is the fact that @Nike is funding a study to understand how much they can hamper male advantage in pre-pubescent boys to allow for “meaningful competition” despite those advantages.

1. why is @Nike funding research (yes we knew this already but here it is in the @nytimes) about how to disfigure and sterilize little boys sufficiently such that they retain male advantage but not so much that it would be unfair to girls?
2. Girls/women are not hampered or impaired males. It’s never ok. The mere debate about how much impairing is the right amount is demeaning and degrading to women.
3. @Nike — just make sneakers and focus on bringing your business back to life. This is, at best, a distraction from your fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders and divisive for your consumer base. At worst, it is criminal. It is most certainly grotesque and unethical and outside the scope of business goals to be in the business of destroying the bodies and sexual function of little boys.

Matthew Gault:

U.S. District Juste Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11. “That said, because the Court appears to be the first court within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception otherwise applies, the Court will not order any evidence suppressed.”

Du argued that the officers acted in good faith when they filed the warrant and that they didn’t know the search was unconstitutional when they conducted it. According to Du, the warrant wasn’t unconstitutional when a judge issued it.

Du’s ruling is the first time the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled on the constitutionality of tower dumps, but this isn’t the first time a federal judge has weighed in. One in Mississippi came to the same conclusion in February. A few weeks later, the Department of Justice appealed the ruling.

Jakob McWhinney:

She’s far from the only professor dealing with this trend. Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors like Smith. 

The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.  

That has put teachers on the front lines of an ever-evolving war on fraud, muddied the teaching experience and thrown up significant barriers to students’ ability to access courses. What has made the situation at Southwestern all the more difficult, some teachers say, is the feeling that administrators haven’t done enough to curb the crisis. 

Tim Daly

• Cities have fewer children than they did a generation ago. Eighty percent of metro areas are trending downward in terms of kids aged 0-14. In the three years immediately following the arrival of COVID, our three most populous regions – New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago – lost an astonishing 600,000 children. Rising costs for housing and child care, among other necessities, has made big cities unaffordablefor many families. So they raise their children elsewhere.
• Birth rates are way down. Let’s use Chicago as an illustration. In 2000, it recorded 50,885 births to city residents. In 2024, there were only 27,627. This decrease of 45 percent is often overlooked because Chicago’s overall population dropped only 8 percent in that same time span.1 U.S. families are getting smaller everywhere. The average number of children born per woman dropped more in 13 years between 2007 and 2020 than it did in 37 years from 1970 to 2007. Think about the magnitude of that data point for a moment.

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Meanwhile Madison is adding bricks and mortar (and raising property taxes) amidst declining enrollment..

Jon Marcus:

“When you think of an average family thinking of where to send their son or daughter, that rent-plus-food piece is getting to be a bigger chunk,” said Jay Hartzell, president of UT Austin.

Though students and their families often focus on tuition, the cost of housing is going up much faster. Annual increases in college and university tuition have been shrinking, new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds. Tuition actually fell, when adjusted for inflation, between 2020 and 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But the cost of room and board rose by 14 percent more than inflation between 2010 and 2020, the College Board reports. At public universities, in-state students now pay more for room and board than for tuition.

Gerald Sussman:

Serving as a TA for Professor Sussman will get you three things: great advice, spectacular reading recommendations, and lots of high quality tea. I can’t share the advice or the tea, but I can compile a reading list. Some of the materials on this list represent research paths that lead to unexplored territory. Some are textbooks that express concepts so clearly they will change your life and make you weep for joy. I hope that you will get something interesting out of this reading list, wherever you are in life – there’s stuff I wish I knew about in middle school, and there are things I can’t wait to read this summer. Enjoy! (and send corrections to reading-list@aurellem.org!)

ars technica

Reaching this conclusion does not require reading any tea leaves or consulting any oracles; one need only listen to people like Vice President JD Vance, who in 2021 gave a speech called “The Universities are the Enemy” to signal that, like every authoritarian revolutionary, he intended to go after the educated.

“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country,” Vance said, “and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Or, as conservative activist Christopher Rufo put it in a New York Times piece exploring the attack campaign, “We want to set them back a generation or two.”

Freya India:

Understandably, since we live in a culture of doubt. Generations before us had it harder, at least materially, but in their world, even as it sometimes fell apart, something beneath stayed intact: customs, understanding, a shared floor and foundation. Ours is one where all that underneath has been destroyed. We have everything, except anything that holds humans together. Whatever we try to have faith in is mocked, destroyed, or disappears too fast. And so we doubt. We question everything. We doubt what it means to live, what it means to love, what it means to be a good person, why any of that matters. Nothing is certain. And so, no, we aren’t so much in doubt as to whether we will live tomorrow, but whether there is any point to.

What is it like, to grow up this way? It’s hard to do justice to it. It’s a feeling of constant confusion and indecision. Never knowing the right choice, always unsure of ourselves, checking with others over and over. Immediate distrust of everyone. Suspicious of anything good; hardly surprised by hurt. Heart never fully in things, always holding back. Some of us are stronger in defending ourselves against doubt; others are completely consumed. They doubt everything: who they are, what they want, what they think, what they feel, what they are supposed to feel. Doubt shadows over anything good. Doubt clouds promises or proof. It is draining, exhausting, to exist in disbelief.

We doubt God, for an obvious example. This is the least religious generation in history. Apparently young women have “abandoned” religion, are “fleeing” the pews, and forgetting faith, when really I think many of us never knew it. This is a generation that doesn’t understand how to have faith, never learnt the habit. And adults shrug this off because they think this is simply doubting the existence of God, but no, this is more than that, this is doubting good. This is not just a lack of faith in religion; this is a lack of faith in right and wrong. More and more of us doubtingmorality, seeing no benefit to being a better person, because why, what does it matter?