School Information System

Keegan Kyle:

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

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

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Owen:

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

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

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

Eric Bott:

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

Josephine Ma:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael M. Grynbaum

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

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

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

Andreas Fragner:

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

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

Karpathy

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

1. Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)

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

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

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

Buckley Institute:

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Nolen:

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

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

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

3. The tests haven’t gotten easier.

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

Via Quinton Klabon:

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

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link:

Nadia Scharf:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Quinton Klabon:

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

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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more.

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

Claire Reid:

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

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

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

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

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

Via a kind reader:

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

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Chris Rickert:

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

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

Police said Pearson was “also uncooperative with officers.”

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

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

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

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David Blaska:

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

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

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

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

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Erin Gretzinger:

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

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

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

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Samantha Calderon:

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

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

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

George Shay:

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

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

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

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

Matthew Chingos:

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

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

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

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

Gail Heriot:

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

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

Jill Tucker:

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

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

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

Alysia Finley:

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

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

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

much of that cost to tenants.

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

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

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

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

David Blaska:

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Rickert:

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

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

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

Much more, including data downloads, here.

Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Ridley:

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Rantz:

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

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

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

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

James Freeman:

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

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

Nicholas Kent and Catherine Hanaway:

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

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

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

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

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

Erin Gretzinger:

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

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

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

——

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

——-

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

——-

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

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

Zac Bellman:

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

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

———

Related: Wisconsin Act 10

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Joshua Minsoo Kim:

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

Channel 12:

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

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

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

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

Carl Wilkinson:

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

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

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

Washington Free Beacon:

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

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

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

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

Jonah Kaplan, Michael Kaplan

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

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

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

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

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

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

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

——-

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

——-

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Sean Thomas:

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

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

Chris Rickert:

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

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

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

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

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

Noah Carl:

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Bender & Patrick McIlheran:

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

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Andrew Tie:

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

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

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

Joseph Epstein:

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

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

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

David Uberti, Juanje Gómez and Kara Dapena:

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

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

Methodology

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

Anya Kamenetz:

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

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

US Department of of Justice:

Yesterday, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division filed a lawsuit against Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) over MPS’ collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with a teachers’ union which preferences teachers who are members of an “underrepresented population” in employment decisions and prioritizes “Black Men Teach Fellows” for certain employment benefits, terms, and conditions.

“Discrimination is unacceptable in all forms, especially when it comes to hiring decisions,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “Our public education system in Minnesota and across the country must be a bastion of merit and equal opportunity — not DEI.”

“Employers may not provide more favorable terms and conditions of employment based on an employee’s race and sex,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Department of Justice will vigorously pursue employers who deny their employees equal opportunities and benefits by classifying and limiting them based on their race, color, national origin, or sex.”

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, notes that MPS seeks to increase their “BIPOC staffing . . . to at least 40% by 2026,” and that by 2026–2027, at least “54.3 %” of new teacher hires “identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).” MPS’ CBA classifies teachers for involuntary reassignment, layoff, and reinstatement depending on whether the teacher is a member of an “underrepresented population.” The United States’ complaint further alleges that MPS awards members of a third-party group organization called “Black Men Teach Fellows” multiple benefits, terms, and conditions of employment not available to female or non-black teachers, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended.

The complaint asks the court to declare that MPS discriminates against teachers based on their race, color, national origin, and sex, in violation of Title VII, and to enter a permanent injunction against MPS stopping them from implementing similar discriminatory provisions in a future CBA.

This case stems from an investigation launched by the Employment Litigation Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

You can view the complaint here.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Now, students are taught to “trust their feelings” and to value “lived experience.” Classic literature and thought is denigrated as being about “dead, white men.” For more on this, I suggest “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

And so now there’s been a reckoning. This is good. The fact that this reckoning is coming from one of the great idiots ever to occupy the White House is unfortunate, but it doesn’t make the needed corrections any less positive. 

And the changes aren’t just coming from hard-right populists. A couple years ago Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania eliminated the college degree requirements for 92% — or about 65,000 — of state jobs. The truth is that for the vast majority of jobs in our society a four-year degree simply isn’t necessary. And even most advanced professional jobs don’t really need it. Lawyers used to be able to read law without going to college. Lincoln did that and some say he was a pretty good lawyer. 

The value of a college education has not been undermined by Donald Trump. instead, it’s been eroded by the snobbish elites who turned college into a hard-left indoctrination factory, eliminated standards of rigorous instruction and replaced reason with intuition — provided that those feelings led one to the correct hard-left ideology.

link:

At Yale, 92% of grades in women’s studies classes are either A or A-. Only 55% in mathematics are.

You couldn’t ask for a better metaphor for what ails elite American academia and culture.

——-

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

Mike Nichols:

City of Madison politicians have thus far spent over $9 million buying and financing improvements on a 24,000-square foot portion of a new multi-use development right next to the Pick ‘n Save that never closed — and that apparently has no plans to close anytime soon.

Kurt Welton, one of the owners of the building that Pick ’n Save leases, said he just signed a renewal. He declined to discuss further details of the new lease, citing confidentiality requirements, but did question why the city is involved with the nearby development in the first place.

“I don’t understand where the city is coming from on this,” he said. “Within a mile, there are four or five grocery stores. It is not a desert.”

“Why does the city think it needs to spend $10 million to bring groceries there when they already have groceries? This is the way communists think.”

Pick ’n Save stores in Wisconsin are run by Roundy’s, which is a subsidiary of Kroger. A Kroger spokesperson did not return a call for comment, but in 2024 a Roundy’s corporate affairs manager told a local Madison publication, Isthmus, that the company was planning to “continue to provide access to fresh foods at affordable prices” at the South Park Street location.

Meanwhile, Madison city officials — having already doled out millions — now own a nearby space at 815 Cedar St. that, it appears, was not built to easily house a grocery store.

The space, for instance, reportedly had insufficient electrical power and the building had a roof that won’t accommodate necessary equipment. A large bank of windows and the floor plan are also less than ideal.

The building “wasn’t built for a grocer, even though it was supposed to be,” said Kristi Maurer, the grocer who will open Maurer’s Urban Grocery in the city-owned space.

“A lot of the journey has been dealing with the building and the reality of the building,” she said.

Jessie Opoien:

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, a former public school educator, used his powerful partial veto authorityto extend that provision for 400 years – meaning school districts may raise revenue by that amount each year until 2425.

That funding increase can be filled in by state lawmakers, or by local property taxes. School districts are also not required to increase their levy by the full allowed amount, but most have in response to a variety of financial pressures.

This year, it’s entirely up to property taxes to fund those increases, as the bipartisan 2025-27 state budget did not include an increase to general school aid. The compromise between Evers and Republican lawmakers instead boosted the state’s reimbursement to school districts for special education costs.

In addition to those state budget decisions, voters passed the most school funding referendums in state history in fall 2024, and again approved the majority of school referendums on the ballot in spring 2025. Growth and enrollment in private school voucher programs also contributed to the increase, along with a per-pupil aid bump in the most recent state budget.

——-

“Madison school district’s property tax increase accounts for 17% of the rise in total tax levies for K-12 schools statewide”

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

———

more.

———

Shadow Robin Vos:

The damage control on Evers 400 year veto is crazy.

Here are the facts:

-Evers extended revenue limits for 400 years or $325/pupil/year
-Districts can then increasing spending up to that limit WITHOUT a referendum
-Defacto indexing of property taxes into perpetuity without voter approval (unless exceeding limits)
-Without the 400 year veto, future increases would be accountable to voters via referendum.

My assumption is he did this to be in the union’s good graces after signing the largest increase in choice spending since its inception.

Bottom line is that he gloated and thought he was so cool (pic for context) for giving the authority to raise taxes for 400 years.

Maybe rethink that line item veto and bragging about it if you don’t want property tax hikes on democrats.

———

Patrick McIlheran:

Sixty-nine percent of Madison school district voters said, “Tax me harder, daddy!”

One hundred percent of them are suffering the consequences.

madison.com/news/local/gov… via

———

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Tyler Cowen

Oral culture, in contrast, tends to be more fluid, harder to evaluate and verify, more prone to rumor, and it has fewer gatekeepers. Those features have their advantages, as a good stand-up comedian will get louder laughs than a witty author. Or an explanation from YouTube, with moving visuals, may stick in our minds more than a turgid passage from a textbook. We also just love talking, and listening, as those modes of communication reach back into human history much further than reading and writing do. Speech is part of how we bond with each other. Still, if any gross generalization can be made, it is that oral culture makes objectivity and analytic thought harder to establish and maintain.

Given this background, both the good and the bad news is that the dominance of print culture has been in decline for a long time. Radio and cinema both became major communications media in the 1920s, and television spread in the 1950s. Those major technological advances have commanded the regular attention of billions, and still do so. Earlier in the 20th century, it suddenly became a question whether you take your ideas from a book or from the radio. And this was not always a welcome development, as Hitler’s radio speeches persuaded more Germans than did his poorly constructed, unreadable Mein Kampf.

The fact that books, newspapers, and reading still are so important reflects just how powerful print has been. How many other institutions can be in relative decline for over a hundred years, and still have such a hold over our hearts and minds?

Corrinne Hess

When Brad Cortright opened his property tax bill this month, he saw the same thing most Wisconsin homeowners are experiencing: A big jump. 

Cortright’s taxes on his Wauwatosa home are up $2,400. 

“It’s not quite 50 percent, but it’s a lot,” Cortright said. “I think what happened to us was we didn’t get increased as much as we should have the previous cycle, and it caught up with us this cycle.” 

WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” newsletter keeps you connected to the state you love without feeling overwhelmed. No paywall. No agenda. No corporate filter.

A report released Tuesday from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found gross K-12 school property taxes rose an average of 7.8 percent in December, the largest increase in three decades. 

That’s because of local referenda and increases to per-pupil revenue limits in the last two years, according to the report. 

County property taxes are set to rise 3.1 percent, an increase more in line with recent years. 

As a result, tax levies for all local governments are expected to see their largest increase since at least 2018.

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“Madison school district’s property tax increase accounts for 17% of the rise in total tax levies for K-12 schools statewide”

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

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more.

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Shadow Robin Vos:

The damage control on Evers 400 year veto is crazy.

Here are the facts:

-Evers extended revenue limits for 400 years or $325/pupil/year
-Districts can then increasing spending up to that limit WITHOUT a referendum
-Defacto indexing of property taxes into perpetuity without voter approval (unless exceeding limits)
-Without the 400 year veto, future increases would be accountable to voters via referendum.

My assumption is he did this to be in the union’s good graces after signing the largest increase in choice spending since its inception.

Bottom line is that he gloated and thought he was so cool (pic for context) for giving the authority to raise taxes for 400 years.

Maybe rethink that line item veto and bragging about it if you don’t want property tax hikes on democrats.

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Patrick McIlheran:

Sixty-nine percent of Madison school district voters said, “Tax me harder, daddy!”

One hundred percent of them are suffering the consequences.

madison.com/news/local/gov… via

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Let’s break down Gov. Evers’ 400-year tax hike and why Wisconsinites deserve more accountability for what we’re funding👇

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Saloni Dattani: 

Until a few years ago, I thought data visualization wasn’t very interesting. At best, it was a nice bonus in my work. I preferred writing because I found it gave me the space to get across the details and clarifications that people would often miss on a flashy chart.

Anyway, most data visualizations I had come across were not very good. A lot of graphs were (and still are) confusing, misleading, or overly simplistic. I’ve seen quite a lot – three dimensional bar charts, double-axis charts with completely different scales for the same metric, unitless charts, pizza slice charts with sizes that corresponded to nothing in the data. Even now I come across charts that are ugly in such novel ways that I wonder how much imagination it must have taken to create them.

Chris Rickert:

Most public-school districts in Dane County already have policies to restrict cellphone use in class, but Madison is somewhat unusual among them in having policies specific to individual schools.

In general, Madison middle schoolers’ cellphones must be “off and away” or “out of sight” during school hours. High schoolers have more leeway; most are allowed to use their phones during non-instructional time.

School district data and other research have repeatedly shown a tendency, nationwide, to discipline Black students and students receiving special education services at rates higher than their classmates.

To avoid such disparities in the enforcement of the cellphone ban, the district says the UW team will look at existing data on discipline related to cellphone use in schools to “establish a historical equity baseline, enabling the team to set measurable goals to reduce or eliminate racial disparities in disciplinary actions under the new policy.”

Washington Post:

Chicago has long-term structural problems with its finances, thanks in large part to wildly underfunded pensions. The country’s third-largest city has a history of using short-term gimmicks to paper over its problems, such as a notorious 2008 deal that sold off 75 years of future parking meter revenue for $1.15 billion, which was quickly spent. That deal is still hurting finances today, which should have taught local politicians that there is no substitute for serious fiscal reform. Alas, apparently not.

The city’s net operating budget increased almost 40 percent between 2019 and 2025, “subsidized in large part by temporary federal pandemic funding that kept the City financially afloat,” according to Grant McClintock of the Civic Federation. “The pandemic is over, but many of the programs and personnel positions established during that time remain, and without the benefit of the federal funding that previously supported them.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) proposes to offset a $1.15 billion shortfall by taxing the businesses that anchor Chicago’s economy, borrowing and more gimmicks.

The mayor proposes to increase the tax on the lease of “personal property” like computers, vehicles and software from 11 percent to 14 percent, and to bring back the city’s “head tax,” which would result in large employers paying $33 per worker, per month.
By making it more expensive to do business or hire workers in the city, these measures threaten Chicago’s future economic growth and tax collections. These moves are especially reckless given that the Chicago Fed’s 12-month hiring outlook is the weakest it’s been since the pandemic. Gov. JB Pritzker (D) says the head tax would penalize employment.

www:

Automatically translated preprints from the Chinese arXiv (ChinaXiv).

Erin Gretzinger:

In letters sent to residents with their tax bills this year, the city of Madison reported eight area school districts, including the Madison Metropolitan School District as the largest one, accounted for more than half of residents’ tax bill this year. Schools have historically accounted for 42% to 46% of the average tax bill, so the jump to over 50% wasn’t surprising given the referendum approvals, Soldner said.

“Madison is always going to get less from the state, because in the eyes of the state and school funding, we are considered wealthy because Dane County and city of Madison property values are so high compared to the rest of the state,” Soldner said. “But the state really just hasn’t kept up in any shape or form in terms of state dollars to support Madison schools.”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Alec Johnson:

After last month’s decision to close three elementary schools, the Waukesha School District on Dec. 10 shared the next steps in closing those buildings and moving students and staff to the district’s remaining schools.

Waukesha Schools Superintendent James Sebert said open house and enrollment dates have been set and that the district is figuring out boundary maps and transportation eligibility.

The open houses are an opportunity for students and families to learn more about a particular school or program. The enrollment dates are for all district families to express preferences on what district school their children attend, something the district does every year. Generally, the district holds these events in December, but backed it up to January this school year due to the school closure vote, Sebert told a reporter.

The School Board voted in November to close Bethesda and Hawthorne elementary schools, as well as the former Whittier elementary school building, which currently houses the district’s STEM elementary program.

Jessie Opoien Laura Schulte

The president has said letting states create a “patchwork” of AI regulations would impede U.S. efforts to lead the world in AI development.

The executive order says it would not preempt “otherwise lawful” AI laws relating to child safety protections, but does not include additional details.

In Wisconsin, recently enacted state laws governing AI include a requirement for campaign ads to include a disclaimer if they use artificial intelligence, an expansion of the definition of child pornography to include AI-generated content and a ban on distributing sexually explicit “deepfakes” without consent.

Evers said he is proud Wisconsin has led the way “to address dangerous and harmful effects caused by emerging technologies like AI” in a bipartisan fashion.

“Mr. President, it is breathtaking for you to threaten to punish and withhold federal funding from states like Wisconsin for taking decisive, bipartisan action to pass common-sense policies that protect Wisconsinites from being potentially being sexually exploited using AI-generated materials or being deceived by political ads made using AI,” Evers wrote.

“Put simply, doing so could reopen the door for bad actors in Wisconsin to resume reprehensible behavior we have worked to criminalize while leaving fewer options for local law enforcement to be able to hold those bad actors accountable. This is an untenable and unacceptable result,” Evers wrote.

Kristen Smith:

A parent of a 10th grade student came into school to talk to me the other day. He was helping his son with a Physics assignment, and he said that as they were working through an equation together, he realized that his son didn’t have his multiplication facts mastered. He wanted to come talk to me because I’m his son’s 10th grade math teacher. He wasn’t frustrated with me, but he wanted my advice on what to do about it, and above all, he was just genuinely dumbfounded that no teacher in his son’s educational history had ever brought to his attention that he didn’t know his multiplication table facts. 

I wanted to tell this parent that this was the least surprising news I had heard all day and that many of my 10th grade students did not know their multiplication facts. Every year I have a few students who feel the need to tell me this at the start of the school year, and I always reassure them that by 10th grade they will get to use a calculator for most assignments. This masks my true feelings about the situation, which is that it is a huge disservice to our students to allow them to go through elementary and middle school without mastery of these facts. 

When I taught 6th grade, I spent the first four months of the school year practicing facts with my students at the start of class each day (we called it the Skill Builder) and then tutoring students who needed more support with mastering the facts. I knew this was important because without fluency with multiplication facts, students would get completely overwhelmed when I taught decimal division later in the year. Their working memory would be overloaded as they tried to hold on to the steps of the procedure while also trying to recall all of their facts. The automaticity with facts also unlocked the ability to reason about whether an answer made sense or compare quantities with fractions. For my high school students, the ones who don’t have fluency with their multiplication facts struggle more to make sense of proportional reasoning problems like triangle similarity problems. They are more likely to fail to catch computation errors in their work. As hard as they may work to gain algebraic fluency with solving equations and substituting into functions, they are always held back by their lack of foundational numeracy.

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

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Dissident Teacher:

“How frugal is the chariot that bears the human soul.” – Emily Dickinson

Benjamin Franklin did not invent the lending library — he invented the free market version of it: a member-supported circulating library. For an upfront sign-up fee and small monthly payments, tradesmen, merchants, farmers, et al could borrow anything within. The Founding Fathers all recognized the necessity of education, though they argued the extent to which the state should run such a system — yet another thing they were right to be concerned about. Still, Franklin’s system meant that access to great ideas was no longer reserved for the rich. 

And here we are, 250 years later, many of us with the space and the disposable income necessary to build the kind of library that would’ve made any of those great men envious — thanks to independent used booksellers in our towns and nationally on eBay and companies like Amazon.

My purpose here is to make it easier for you to find and purchase the books I recommend. I’ve separated the libraries into three age groupings and all the lists are searchable by genre, so if you have a sense of who your reader is, selecting a fitting title will be easier. 

You can navigate each list with the pagination button on the top right corner of the table or search by genre, author, and title. Give some attention to lexile level. Lexile levels below 800 are best for young readers. Mid-range readers are comfortable anywhere from 700-1100, and experienced readers will thrive at 1000+. Don’t be afraid to pick up a book with a high lexile score — just know you may end up reading it to your child instead of with him. 

While I am an Amazon affiliate and I’d love it if you bought these books using my links, eBay is a great place to buy them used at low prices. Sometimes the only way to get a particular title is from a used bookseller. Many can also be found on Kindle, and the out-of-print titles are often under $3 in the Kindle bookstore. Physical books are much better for young readers though.

Jacob Savage:

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career. I was thirty-one, I’d been in Los Angeles for five years writing scripts. There had been minor successes, a couple of small projects optioned, and I’d recently started writing with my best friend. We were writing constantly, making each other better, building momentum. 

Success felt close. Back then it always did.

We’d written a pilot script that a veteran showrunner had agreed, in a very theoretical, very Hollywood sort of way, to “come on” to. That project had fizzled, so we were surprised when an executive emailed us out of the blue to meet. The showrunner explained he’d submitted us for an upcoming writer’s room he was going to run—the exec had loved our pilot and wanted to hire us.

This was it, the moment our careers were supposed to take off. We’d put in our time—I’d been tutoring SATs and reselling tickets to make ends meet while I wrote—and five years seemed par for the course, based on the slightly older guys we knew who’d made it.

But of course, by 2016, we were already too late. 

The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had initially thought I might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the end it wasn’t possible.”

We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he explained apologetically, and the higher-level writers were all white men. They couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another season, they’d be able to bring us on.

They never did. 

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023. 

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Peachy Keanan:

One of the unspoken reasons for the decline in marriage and births: young men of marriage age had their careers derailed in favor of diversity hires.

DEI is economic genocide.

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Vittorio:

fifth-order: institutional trust gone. once you know positions are filled by demographics rather than competence, every credential becomes suspect (if not a priori worthless). is your doctor qualified or a diversity hire? your pilot? your engineer? you can’t prove any individual is incompetent, but you can’t trust any individual is competent either. medicine skepticism, academic failure, media skepticism, none of this emerged organically. it was manufactured by the DEI hire you can’t be sure is qualified to treat you.

Michael T. Nietzel

Purdue University will begin requiring that all of its undergraduate students demonstrate basic competency in artificial intelligence starting with freshmen who enter the university in 2026.

The new “AI working competency” graduation requirement was approved by the university’s Board of Trustees at its meeting on December 12. It’s part of a broader AI@Purdue strategy that spans five areas: Learning with AI, Learning about AI, Research AI, Using AI and Partnering in AI.

“The reach and pace of AI’s impact to society, including many dimensions of higher education, means that we at Purdue must lean in and lean forward and do so across different functions at the university,” said Purdue President Mung Chiang in a news release. “AI@Purdue strategic actions are part of the Purdue Computes strategic initiative, and will continue to be refreshed to advance the missions and impact of our university.”

Samantha Calderon:

A new senior executive director of schools and learning at the Madison Metropolitan School District has been hired, according to officials.

Dr. Keona S. Jones brings nearly three decades of experience as an administrator and educator

Jones was most recently the assistant state superintendent for the Division for Student and School Success at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She was first appointed in 2019 and reappointed two years later.

Her previous titles include assistant principal, early childhood education director, special education teacher, consultant, and executive director. Jones was also an adjunct lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted even named Jones as administrator of the year for her commitment to student success.

“Dr. Jones brings a deep understanding of instructional excellence, student and staff supports, and the systems that help schools and students thrive,” said Dr. Carlettra Stanford, assistant superintendent of schools and learning. “Her experience positions her well to advance our strategic priorities and strengthen the structures that support our school communities. We are excited to welcome her to MMSD.”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ben Unglesbee:

The new method for evaluating programs within the Universities of Wisconsin’s 13 institutions could substantially increase how many programs go on the chopping block each year.

The current rubric, which flags programs that confer fewer than 25 degrees over five years, has identified from 41 to 54 programs for review in recent years, according to a task force on program elimination that presented the committee’s findings.

“While the current metric has been useful in determining an academic program’s performance based on the conference of degrees, it represents a lagging indicator,” the task force said. “In addition, by focusing on graduated students rather than enrolled, the current metric does not fully represent the instructional workload associated with providing curriculum for a program.”

While the group honed in on a numerical measure of a program’s health, members also highlighted that metrics don’t capture its whole value.

Along with quantitative rubrics, “the value of a program is also reflected in its qualitative contributions,” the task force said. “Both measures should be included in a thorough and fair monitoring process that looks at the totality of contribution of an academic program.”

Educated & Free:

“You can get away with copying everything. But you’re gonna experience einstellung which means that you’ll think you know what you’re doing because you’re smart enough to reverse engineer the answer but you’ll really have no clue how to do the actual work. And my in-class, on paper handwritten test WILL out you. I have tests weighted at 80%; they effectively ARE your grade. There are no retakes. There are no test corrections. There is no extra credit. There is only the test. Allocate your time accordingly.”

Heike Larson:

Starting today, high school students can apply to Progress in Medicine, a new program by the Roots of Progress Institute.

What: In this summer program, high school students will explore careers in in medicine, biotech, health policy, and longevity. We will inspire them with stories of historical progress and future opportunities in medicine, help them think about a wider range of careers, and raise their aspirations about how they can contribute to progress in medicine. The program centers on this central question:

People today live longer, healthier, and less painful lives than ever before. Why? Who made those changes possible? Can we keep this going? And could you play a part?

Help spread the word about this program, especially to smart, ambitious teens:

Becky Jacobs:

Starting next fall, full-time faculty and instructional academic staff at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee will need to teach at least one course per semester and a minimum of 12 credit hours each school year. Employees at the other 11 state universities face higher requirements.

All credits for general education courses must also be transferable and satisfy general education requirements across the universities by September.

Sen. Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, said she likes that students will have better predictability in how credits transfer.

“But I do think this is a slippery slope of monkeying around in the university system, and we don’t really have any business there,” said Hesselbein, Democrats’ leader in the Senate.

…..

“My hope is that as we move forward we can also do this with other opportunities to have credit transfers,” Vos said. “Right now, it’s only those (general education) requirements. But if you take accounting at Whitewater, I don’t know why it shouldn’t be accounting at Stout.”

Scott Calvert:

Teacher Andrea Gonzales sipped tea from an apple-adorned mug a student gave her, and mixed granola into a bowl of yogurt. It was 5:35 a.m. on a recent school day. Except for the kitchen, the home she and her fiancé share with four housemates was dark. In the distance, a rooster crowed.

Gonzales wouldn’t greet her first-graders until 7:55, but she stepped out under an inky sky and left in her Toyota Prius at 6 o’clock sharp. The drive to her public school on the Monterey Peninsula often takes an hour or more in traffic. It is a slog she has dealt with for years, while searching in vain for reasonably priced housing near work.

“We have talked as a family about honestly not even just leaving the district but leaving the state, just because it’s so expensive,” said Gonzales, 30 years old.

edunomics:

We’re regularly adding more, so check back. OR use our template below to make your own.

OR use our template to enter student enrollment and staffing data for your state or district, starting with the 2014-15 school year. We encourage the use of state or district published and audited data. Alternatively, data can be found on NCES Common Core of Data.

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more.

 Hollis Robbins

The dirtiest secret in higher education is that there is no good data on the quality of teaching and teachers on college campuses. There is no way for anyone to know how good or bad teaching is, beyond anecdotes. Ask around. As someone who has been in this business for 30 years, I will tell you: things are not great and getting worse. I estimate that except for very elite private institutions (Princeton, Wesleyan, and the like), well over half of university instruction across the U.S. is fair to poor. Perhaps 25% is good and 5% is excellent.

How can I make such a claim? I’ll get to that and I’d love to be wrong. But I challenge anyone to push back with real data. There isn’t any beyond what I outline below.

I also challenge anyone to show me any college or university marketing materials that guarantee the quality of classes students will take. You won’t find much. It’s impossible to guarantee quality because there is no operational definition of quality teaching. You may find guarantees of a “quality education” defined by small classes and award-winning professors with Ivy League PhDs, but you will not find an institution that guarantees that some percentage of the courses a student will take will be high quality.

The dirty secret isn’t that there are bad teachers. Of course there are, just as there are bad doctors, bad lawyers, bad plumbers, bad customer service reps, bad cops. The problem is that there’s an entire ecosystem and infrastructure that decided that quality at the micro level, at the level of the individual instructor and individual course, isn’t as important as claims of “social impact” at the macro level, for the institution and the sector as a whole. And so, the inscrutability of teaching quality persists.

Who is to blame for the lack of attention to quality teaching, the lack of data, and the absence of any good definition of quality teaching? Three groups. First, colleges and universities who have no incentive to define or measure teaching quality and have not funded serious controlled studies. Supporting quality is expensive. Second, faculty, who want even less attention paid to teaching quality than their institutions do. In fact, if there is one topic on which faculty and institutions are in complete agreement it is avoiding the topic of teaching quality altogether. (Both prefer to focus on “belonging” and “satisfaction,” the drivers of grade inflation.)

George Wiebe

Most of the jump is the result of two Madison School District referendums passed last year, which increased school taxes by nearly $780, or about 18%, on the average Madison home, according to the city’s breakdown of the tax bill.

Voters also approved a $22 million city referendum last year, although that increase was reflected on homeowners’ 2024 property tax bills.

The Madison School District makes up just over half of Madison homeowners’ property tax bills. That’s a point Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway sought to stress in a letter that accompanied the eye-popping tax bills this week.

“It’s the responsibility of the City of Madison to send out this tax bill on behalf of Dane County, Madison College (MATC), and your school district,” the mayor wrote. “However, the City’s share is only 34 percent of your total property tax bill.”

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Lindsay Clark 

Protests force disclosure of costs totaling $16,000 per student over 7 year rollout replacing 80 legacy systems

The total cost of a Workday implementation project at Washington University in St. Louis is set to hit almost $266 million, it was revealed after the project was the subject of protests from students.

In late October, students demonstrated outside the Faculty Senate demanding the University’s leadership reveal more details about its finances, including its spending on Workday, amid concerns about job losses at the institution.

In an email to Student Life, the institution’s independent student newspaper, David Gray, executive vice chancellor for finance and chief financial officer (CFO), said the total cost of the project was set to reach upwards of $265 million over at least seven years, roughly $16,000 per student.

The student newspaper said the Workday project was broken down into $81 million for financial and human resources services (HCM), $98.9 million for the student application called Sunrise, and $56.5 million for planning, data integration, and financial aid. Meanwhile $23.8 million in the 2026 financial year is for support and $5.7 million for annual licensing.

Kayla Huynh :

Nearly 37% of Wisconsin students in 4-year-old kindergarten through third grade scored below the 25th percentile on early literacy assessments last school year, according to the state Department of Instruction.

For Milwaukee Public Schools, over half of 4K through third graders – or nearly 12,500 students – tested below the 25th percentile, results from the exams show.

The assessments, required under the state’s 2023 literacy law Act 20, evaluate students on reading skills and identify children at risk of reading difficulty.

Data from the first year of the literacy screeners, released Dec. 1, show about 97,400 Wisconsin students in 4K through third grade scored in the bottom quarter of students in reading. Under the state’s literacy law, students scoring below the 25th percentile must receive additional support in reading, including a personalized learning plan.

The law also requires the DPI to report results of the screeners to the Legislature annually. State Superintendent Jill Underly said the first year of data will serve as a baseline for student performance.

‘These data are critical in helping schools guide instruction and intervention – not to define a student’s potential,’ Underly said in a statement. ‘With time and a sustained investment in strengthened classroom instruction and, as needed, additional reading support, we can move steadily toward our goal of making sure every Wisconsin child excels at reading by the end of third grade.’

About 39% of 5-year-old kindergarten through third grade students – or over 86,200 students – received interventions under a personalized learning plan last school year, the DPI reported.

More:

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

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

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

Chester E Finn, Jr.

The College Board high command is defensive about the value and predictive power of the SAT and AP exams (Letters, Dec. 9). But on the whole the company is right: The tests are better predictors of college performance than anything anyone else is using, especially in California, where diplomas seem to be handed out by the bushel with little or no attention to student learning.

External measures akin to audits, like the SAT and APs, tend to be more reliable and accurate than grades and statewide tests, for which the standards and cut scores keep fluctuating. The College Board’s products aren’t getting “easier” as such. But the company keeps introducing more variants, including subjects widely thought to be easier. It’s removed some elements—such as SAT essays—that many find more revealing than multiple-choice questions. And it does occasionally recalibrate its scoring in various ways. It isn’t pure. It’s simply the best available, and in my view pretty darn good.

Josh Barro:

And that, of course, gets at a major reason why so many students are suddenly “disabled” — it gives them a leg up, academically, in a supposedly elite, achievement-measuring environment.1

A college education is supposed to both build human capital and send a signal about human capital to employers. The explosion of accommodations is one of several forces that are simultaneously undermining elite colleges’ value on both of those dimensions:

• Admissions standards at many schools have gotten less rigorous. This is because many universities have made standardized testing optional for applicants; in some cases, colleges will not even consider standardized test scores that students voluntarily report. The University of California Board of Regents voted in 2020 to phase out using test scores in admissions decisions, and the result is an exploding fraction of students at UC San Diego who can’t do basic math. This undermines the signal value of the degree: having gained admission to a UC is not the signal of academic aptitude that it once was. It also undermines actual human capital creation, because top schools are enrolling an unknown (but increasing) number of students who won’t be able to learn advanced material.
• Once students are in college, the grades they receive have greatly inflated — a majority of grades at Harvard College are now straight A’s. This reduces the signal value of a high GPA: if everyone gets the same A’s, you can’t tell from a transcript which students actually performed the best. It also reduces the fundamental value of a college education, because it gives students the option to work less hard and learn less while still getting good grades — an option many are surely taking.

David Margulies

Recent state math tests (CAASPP) show many Monterey County districts reporting low percentages of K-12 students proficient in math: Only 22 percent in Salinas, 19 percent in King City, 17 percent in North Monterey County (NMCUSD). Essential foundational skills aren’t being taught and practiced to mastery.

One such skill is math fact fluency, specifically memorizing single-digit addition facts, like 3+4=7, and memorizing single digit multiplication facts, like 6×8=48 (“the times tables”).

California’s Math Content Standards, the content students are expected to learn, define fluency as “fast and accurate,” explicitly requiring students to “know from memory” these math facts by the end of third grade.

Warner Todd Huston

It must be getting claustrophobic over at the CTU Center

The feds seem to have caught onto the financial mess the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has created for itself and are demanding the union’s audit records going back to 2019, if they even exist, that is.

The CTU has been stonewalling since the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee sent its letter on November 20th, but last week the union finally claimed that they would comply with the committee’s requests, though they have pushed the date off from December 8th to the 22nd.

Already the CTU has been holding information back from its members and violating its own rulesmandating that its audits be released to members annually. And for a while it looked like the union was going to do the same to the feds.

The notice taken by the congressional committee comes after a group of teachers filed a lawsuitearly in October to force the CTU to release the audits it has withheld from its members.

The CTU attempted to have the lawsuit thrown out, but a judge denied the request.

The House committee noted how alarmed it is over the CTU’s refusal to obey its own rules and worried the union is acting to “betray the trust of the very people they are meant to serve.”

Phoebe Arslanagic-Little

This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.

South Korea is often held up as an example of the failure of public policy to reverse low fertility rates. This is seriously misleading. Contrary to popular myth, South Korean pro-parent subsidies have not been very large, and relative to their modest size, they have been fairly successful.

The story of South Korean fertility rates is thus doubly significant. On the one hand, it illustrates just how potent anti-parenting factors can become, creating a profoundly hostile environment in which to raise children and discouraging a whole society from doing so. On the other, it may offer a scintilla of hope that focused and generous policy can address these problems, shaping a way back from the brink of catastrophe.

———

Choose life.

Timur Kuran:

University professors are granted tenure essentially for the freedom to carry their research wherever it leads. But the share of tenured and tenure-track faculty has been falling. According to AAUP (see below), it fell from 53.1% in 1987 to 31.8% in 2023 (below). There are reasons to expect the decline to continue:
(1) Financial difficulties incentivize universities to hire part-time adjuncts, who are much cheaper and easily terminated,
(2) In recent years, most tenured faculty have failed to push back against woke censorship, thus failing to fulfill their end of the implicit bargain: speaking honestly even when its inconvenient to do so. Even worse, tenured faculty have participated in censorship and cancellation campaigns inimical to core university functions.
(3) Partly because of (2), the university has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and legislators are less willing than in the past to subsidize universities and the professoriate.
(4) As fertility declines and population falls, universities will prefer short-term contracts to indefinitely lasting tenure contracts that commit them to decades of employment.
I haven’t even mentioned AI. That’s for another day.

———

Dana Goldstein:

“We do one book after state testing, and we did ‘The Great Gatsby.’ … A lot of kids had not read a novel in class before.”

— Laura Henry, 10th-grade English teacher near Houston

“My son in 9th grade listened to the audio of ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ For ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they watched the balcony scene instead of reading.” 

— Rebekah Jacobs, Rockville, Md.

“We typically spend a ridiculous amount of time reading each book, such that in my freshman year, we read only one, ‘Macbeth.’”

— Liv Niklasson, age 16, Los Alamos, N.M.

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.

Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times.

Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.

Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video, the forms that are dominating in the era of mobile, streaming media.

We wanted to find out how students and teachers feel about the shift, and what role schools can play. So The Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.

More than 2,000 people responded

———

Karen Vaites:

I’m glad to see the supply side aspect of the issue get its due:

“Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.

Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.

Students typically access the content online, often using school-issued laptops.

These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.”

———-

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

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

An NBC News poll recently found that only one-third of Americans believe a four-year college degree is worth the cost. A new study by the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank helps explain why: Many young college graduates out of work are having a harder time than high-school grads finding jobs, and artificial intelligence isn’t to blame.

The share of Americans who believe a college degree pays off has fallen by 20 percentage points since 2013. Today, 63% say that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off,” according to the NBC poll. Only 46% of those with college degrees believe they are worth the cost, a 17-point decline.

You don’t need an economics degree to notice that young college grads are struggling. According to the Cleveland Fed study, the unemployment gap between high-school and college grads between the ages of 22 and 27 has tightened to a mere 2.5-percentage points, compared with about five percentage points in previous decades.

By Jonah Kaplan, Michael Kaplan

Luxury cars, private villas and overseas wire transfers: CBS News obtained dozens of files and photos that reveal how Minnesota fraudsters blew through hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars as part of one of the biggestCOVID-era fraud schemes.

The files document a spending spree in which defendants, many of Somali descent, took taxpayer money meant to feed hungry children and used it to buy cars, property and jewelry. Videos show them popping champagne at an opulent Maldives resort. In a text message, one defendant boasts: “You are gonna be the richest 25 year old InshaAllah [God willing].”

The documents feature exhibits from a recent federal trial, many of which are being made public by CBS News for the first time. The exhibits include:

• A confirmation email for a stay in an overwater villa with a private pool at Radisson Blu Resort Maldives
• Lakefront property in Minnesota
• Receipts showing wire transfers to China and East Africa
• First class tickets to Istanbul and Amsterdam
• A 2021 Porsche Macan
• Stacks of cash, texted between defendants

Joanna Slater:

A growing number of educators are finding that oral exams allow them to test their students’ learning without the benefit of AI platforms such as ChatGPT

When students in Catherine Hartmann’s honors seminar at the University of Wyoming took their final exams this month, they encountered a testing method as old as the ancient philosophers whose ideas they were studying.

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Commentary.

Eric Turkheimer, Daniel T. Willingham

QUESTION: What does an IQ score actually mean? On the one hand, I’ve heard people say that these scores are meaningless—a high IQ simply shows that the child is good at taking intelligence tests. On the other hand, I know that some districts use IQ test scores as gatekeepers for their gifted and talented programs. What is the science behind IQ scores?

ANSWER: An IQ score is a summary of how successfully a child can answer the types of questions that are frequently posed in school, especially questions that require thinking abstractly with words, numbers, or space. This summary number is not meaningless because it predicts students’ success in school and in many jobs.

But IQ is frequently misunderstood by educators, families, and the general public. Instead of being recognized as a summary of correctly answered questions, it’s believed to be a measure of an internal essence within the child that many call their learning potential. But there is little evidence that such an essence exists at all, let alone that IQ tests measure it.

A better way to think about an IQ score is as a snapshot of achievement now, rather than future potential. This conceptualization offers a better lens for how we might enable all children to answer more questions correctly—that is, to raise their IQs.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis:

I have complicated feelings about being freelance in 2025. (Nervous doesn’t cover it.) But I am genuinely excited to be out reporting again, after spending the last four years almost exclusively editing long magazine stories. My intention is for that to include much more regular posting on this Substack — which for now I’m calling, appropriately, Personal News — until I figure out what this newsletter should be. Ideas in the comments, please.

For now, partially prompted by a recent seminar I gave to some students at Johns Hopkins, here are a few things that more than a decade of editing magazine stories has taught me about writing.

Rachel Bachman and Laine Higgins:

For almost all of its 129-year existence, the Big Ten has positioned itself as a moral custodian of college football.

This was a conference of hulking stadiums and buttoned-up traditions that was older than the NCAA itself. It bragged about the academic prestige of its schools and reminded its athletes that they were students first, sneering at all those other schools that had the audacity to win at all costs.

The Big Ten was so wedded to its own way of doing things that Ohio State undergraduates still hear about the time that a bunch of professors kept the Buckeyes out of the Rose Bowl to punish a coach for paying his players.

But in recent decades, Big Ten leaders have appeared less concerned with maintaining its particular heritage and more interested in squeezing every last dollar out of the business of college sports.

What was once a hallowed collection of 10 Midwestern universities has nearly doubled in size, to 18 schools, including those in the New York and Los Angeles TV markets. The Big Ten now generates more than $1 billion a year from its media rights.