School Information System

Riva Tez:

If you had told me at my Year 13 graduation, that I would be standing here today, I would have been extremely amused.
Let me start off by telling you a story.

18 years ago, at my own LHS graduation, the historian Robin Lane Fox was the guest speaker. If you don’t know Robin Lane Fox, his works on Early Christianity and Alexander the Great are fantastic.

Back in 2007, I was no esteemed guest, but rather, like most teenage girls, a jumble of competing interests and personalities. I had high hopes of becoming an archaeologist or historian myself, but due to my disobedient nature, including trying to sell this school in a local newspaper, I admit I barely made it through LHS.

But after luckily pulling it together for my A-Levels, when I got up on stage at graduation to shake Robin’s hand, I found that- with no notice or warning given to the audience and after shaking the hands of dozens of girls- Mr. Lane Fox kissed me on the cheek.

All eyes were on me as I walked back to my seat, as it was presumed, considering my naughtiness, that I had somehow done something to initiate the incident, or as my mother later put it it very much looked from the back of the hall that you had kissed him’

It was only towards the end of the ceremony that Lane-Fox mentioned that he had kissed the cheek of any girl who had graduated with A-Levels in the classics trifecta, Latin, Ancient Greek and ClassCiv, which had been my subjects.

When I was contacted to see if I would be the guest speaker here today, my decision rested on one condition. Was LHS still teaching classics and the arts with the same intensity? I looked at the curriculum online and saw that yes class’ civ and latin were still mandatory, with a few exceptions.

Having access to all STEM subjects and the full range of humanities, while also being a Steinway-accredited school of music, is such a gift.

To all the teachers and staff here, and to all those who have kept this school going for the last 175 years, I want to say thank you.

Thank you for keeping education glorious. There are many schools worldwide that have sacrificed the classics for the temporal educational trends of modernity, and you have remained resilient in providing thousands of girls with access to a timeless and historical education.

For every one of me here, there are hundreds of other girls whose lives you’ve enriched and who are endlessly grateful.

I could not appreciate the value of this education in my youth, just as you girls here can not fully grasp its significance today. Yet in later years, you may find that your encounters with literature or distant places carry a deeper resonance-words and concepts that once felt like burdens imposed by this very institution will reveal layers of meaning that others overlook.

The Latin inscriptions adorning a Roman church fresco’s ceiling, or the subtle tributes in novels to classical thinkers you once studied, will quietly illuminate a secret world.

The rewards of the education you have been given will not emerge in classrooms or exams, but in the unscripted encounters of a life well-lived.

I won’t kiss anyone today; instead, I will share the most important message I think I can give.
Make the most of this great education that you have been given.

I am just one voice of a thousand annoying experts and adults who will tell you how you should live your life. There will be plenty of warnings about what’s bad for you and how to protect your physical and mental health as you graduate into a complex and busy world.

Most people won’t risk telling you what’s good for you, but I’m up here perhaps only because l’ve taken more risks than my peers. I have been successful, and I also spent years living in a tiny office closet. I have been popular and I have felt hated. I have made millions, and I have lost millions. I’m proud of some of my work, yet I’ve spent many nights lying awake, cringing at ideas I once defended fiercely. Mistakes and failures litter my path, and each one taught a lesson that helped fine-tune my future actions.
And like all women, I have felt beautiful, and I have felt ugly.

It doesnt matter.

Nothing has mattered more in my life than cultivating beauty and philosophy. Spending time and energy seeking it out—in old buildings, paintings, poems, and old books, in the autobiographies of great humans, to find inspiration on how to live a good life.

Modernity moves quickly; what is timeless, by definition, has stood the test of time.
Traditional experts don’t want you to know that you can inject beauty into any moment as a conscious decision. Beauty isn’t defined by aesthetics; it’s about intention.

Make moments intentional. Make career decisions intentionally. Be very intentional with your time, yet when something feels off appreciate that you have all the agency to completely change it.

Take risks fully, intentionally. Spend time with people fully, intentionally, always with the notion that one day that person you’re spending time with may no longer be here. If you can, get to know your parents as if they are your friends, in them you may learn about yourself.

Travel and see the world, intentionally or recklessly. There are so many flavors of life, so many cultures, so many different types of living and people. For some of you, this part of England may be the best place for you to flourish, but make the decision to spend your life here consciously, with full awareness of how big the world is.

I am living testament that you don’t need family money to be able to travel or seek opportunities. During my gap year, [I] sold plastic garden sinks at trade shows to save up and travel to new lands.

In the end, I found my people and the culture where I belong on the other side of the world, in San Francisco, California. moved there originally at 24 years old with the ambition to launch an artificial intelligence start-up fund, which I did, kinda, though it was no big success.

I had no idea what I was doing.

But in the countless cold emails I sent and the essays I published I found not only friends, but people with similar visions who recognized mine, and over the last decade we have built projects and companies together.
San Francisco is a paradise of socially awkward tech lovers who throw awful parties while debating philosophy endlessly.

If that sounds like a place you’d fit in, reach out to me and I’ll show you around.

But your people might be scattered across places like London or Singapore, or they’re waiting for cities that don’t exist yet that need you to instigate and design them, or maybe they’re launching rockets toward Mars with dreams of new worlds.

You can’t know yet.

The world is an uncharted adventure waiting for you to explore.

Make the most of this freedom while also remembering that it is every generation’s responsibility to defend the same freedom for future generations. Over time, you might learn that such freedom is found in the opposite of whatever the media and news sell you.

Experts are nearly always wrong because expertise is a transient quality. Artificial intelligence is mostly wrong, too, because it is trained on the corpus of eternally fallible humans.

But if you shrug off the noise the world shoves at you, beauty and joy will slip in effortlessly. Elegance can be found in a semiconductor’s complexity, a violin concerto, a flower’s bloom, even a line of code. I’m not ashamed to admit that all of these things can move me to tears, and do often, daily.

If you really notice and take in the world, it’s overwhelming.

If you really notice and take in the world, it’s difficult to be depressed.

Back in 2007, I didn’t know what the future held for me, but I knew I wanted to try as many flavors of life as possible. And in 2025, I feel the same.

I could easily repeat the last ten years for the rest of my life, navigating technology companies and repeat opportunities that eventually become easy.

Or I could become a painter, or poet, a surgeon, a truck driver.

With the internet in your pocket, anyone can teach themselves a whole new field or career path at any time. Sometimes I spend weeks or months studying a niche area of research just for fun. I can tell you a lot about neurodegenerative diseases but I never learned to drive a car. Your choices don’t need to make sense to other people.

You are never too young or too old to start again, to move away, to restart your life, and to completely redesign your mind.

It’s the most freeing thought.

All your limitations, now and in the future, are self-imposed.

Thank you and .. good luck.

Notes and links on Riva Tez.

Erick Erickson:

I realize I’m a lawyer and Peter is not, but each state is divided into a total of 94 district courts (some just one district). Those districts are all underneath one of 12 courts of appeal. Under the laws of the US, a district in TX cannot bind a district in CA and the 1st circuit cannot bind the 12th. Cases work up the Supreme Court through appeals and only it can decide issues at a national level. That is very basic and I am surprised a reporter does not know that.

Kaleem Caire:

This summer marks a truly historic moment in our journey. On Friday, July 11, 2025 in the auditorum at Trustage, the same place where we announced the creation of One City Schools 10 years ago to an audience of 400 community leaders and supporters, we will celebrate our first class of 8th graders: 25 remarkable Scholars who are completing their middle school education at One City Preparatory Academy next month. These young leaders represent the living embodiment of our mission: to prepare students for school success, leadership, and life through innovative education that nurtures both academic excellence and character development.

When we founded One City, we envisioned a day when our Scholars would stand ready to change the world, equipped not only with a great education but also with the habits of character that define who we are: Compassion, Risk-taking, Integrity, Self-respect, and Persistence (CRISP). Today, that vision becomes reality. Our 8th graders are heading to ten different high schools across the Greater Madison community, carrying with them the confidence, curiosity, and courage to pursue their dreams while making their communities better.

This milestone belongs to all of us. To the parents who trusted us with their most precious gifts. To the donors who believed in possibility over statistics. To the volunteers, policy makers, and community champions who stood with us when this was just a bold idea. Together, we’ve proven that with the right resources and unwavering commitment, we can close achievement gaps and open doors of opportunity for every child. Thank YOU for the role you’ve played in helping us reach this remarkable and emotional milestone.

As we celebrate this achievement, we’re already building for the next generation. Join us at Rally for Our Future on July 10th at The Sylvee, featuring actor and literacy champion, LeVar Burton (known for Reading Rainbow, Star Trek, Roots, and The Right to Read), as we continue our mission to show what’s possible when a community comes together for its children. Visit www.weareonecity.org to learn more about this community engagement and fundraising event, and purchase your tickets. You can also click on the image of Mr. Burton, or on buttons, below.

Because our 8th graders are just the beginning, they are the first of many who will lead us toward a brighter, more equitable future for all. Our current 7th grade class is twice as large and will be equally prepared to succeed in high school.

With gratitude, hope, and inspiration, Onward!

Kaleem Caire
Founder and CEO
One City Schools

Christen Smith:

Penn State currently holds a $4.78 billion endowment, a figure that has more than doubled since 2016. Pitt’s $5.8 billion endowment has grown by 66% in the same span. Temple reported a 10.35% endowment increase in 2024 alone, bringing it to more than $960 million. As of 2023, Lincoln’s endowment was reported at $54 million.

By contrast, West Chester University in the southeastern region of the state is considered among the top PASSHE schools and has a reputation for its strong financial management. Its endowment was reported at $61.1 million in 2023. Slippery Rock University, another PASSHE top performer, is situated just north of Pittsburgh. Slippery Rock reported its endowment at $47.9 million the same year. On the other side of the PASSHE financial spectrum, the much smaller Cheyney University came in at just $1.7 million.

Cheyney and Lincoln represent the state’s only two historically Black colleges and universities. Despite their historic stature, both having been established before the Civil War took place, they demonstrate the wide expanse of financial pictures in both state systems.

The disparities make it difficult to get a comprehensive view of Pennsylvania’s higher education landscape. Nevertheless, they come to the state’s appropriation committees in two groups, PASSHE and state-related, for the annual tug-of-war over additional funding.

…….

Shieh said the university employs 3,805 full time non-instructional staff for 7,229 undergraduate students.

“This isn’t education; this is bloat paid for on the backs of families who are mortgaging their futures for a shot at a better life,” Shieh said.

Shieh said budget cuts at Brown led to dorm flooding and “unappetizing” changes to food at Brown’s dining halls while many administrators remained on payroll.

Ezra Wallach:

The San Francisco Unified School District’s ethnic studies class has been a source of debate among officials, donors, and parent organizers since an investigation by The Standard last month outlined the unconventional approval process behind the course and its politically charged content.

According to sources, the district decided to cancel the ethnic studies program for the next school year to assuage concerns over the course, which was mandated for all high school freshmen in 2024-25.

The course would remain a graduation requirement for incoming freshmen but would not be offered to any high school students next year, giving district staff time to develop an alternative curriculum and get it approved by the board.

But teachers are fighting back, and the district is considering rushing through an updated curriculum to keep the course in place for 2025-26, sources say.

Allysia Finley:

All of this will require a higher level of cognition than does the rote work many white-collar employees now do. But as AI is getting smarter, young college grads may be getting dumber. Like early versions of ChatGPT, they can regurgitate information and ideas but struggle to come up with novel insights or analyze issues from different directions.

The brain continues to develop and mature into one’s mid-20s, but like a muscle it needs to be exercised, stimulated and challenged to grow stronger. Technology and especially AI can stunt this development by doing the mental work that builds the brain’s version of a computer cloud—a phenomenon called cognitive offloading.

Growing research shows that handwriting engages parts of your brain that play a crucial role in learning and helps children with word and letter recognition. Taking notes by hand also promotes memory development by forcing you to synthesize and prioritize information. When you plunk away on a keyboard, on the other hand, information can go, as it were, in one ear and out the other.

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?

Lauren Weber:

U.S. job hunters submit millions of online applications every year. Often they get an automatic rejection or no response at all, never knowing if they got a fair shake from the algorithms that gatekeep today’s job market.

One worker, Derek Mobley, is trying to discover why.

Mobley, an IT professional in North Carolina, applied for more than 100 jobs during a stretch of unemployment from 2017 to 2019 and for a few years after. He was met with rejection or silence each time. Sometimes the rejection emails arrived in the middle of the night or within an hour of submitting his application.

Mobley, now 50 years old, noticed that many of the companies he applied to used an online recruiting platform created by software firm Workday WDAY 0.07%increase; green up pointing triangle. The platforms, called applicant tracking systems, help employers track and screen job candidates.

In 2023 Mobley sued Workday, one of the largest purveyors of recruiting software, for discrimination, claiming its algorithm screened him out, based on his age, race and disabilities. Mobley, a Black graduate of Morehouse College who suffers from anxiety and depression, said the math didn’t add up.

Andrey Mir:

“The media is melting down, and neither billionaires nor journalists can seem to stop it,” writes The Hollywood Reporter. “Journalism may never again make money,” states the Washington Post. “Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?” asks The Atlantic. Indeed, an obituary for the American press is overdue. And it turns out that the death of journalistic objectivity has been both cause and effect.

Josh Chin and Niharika Mandhana:

Authorities frustrated by continued resistance to Beijing are now prying children as young as four years old from their homes—before they have a chance to fully absorb the Tibetan language and way of life.

Across Tibet, a mountainous region rich in natural resources where many people harbor dreams of independence, China is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build schools, recognizing how social identity forms early in life. The education project includes a network of daylong preschools, where children are taught in Mandarin, and lessons emphasize Chinese culture.

Summary:

🧵The White House just dropped these mini video profiles highlighting America’s first patriotic legends, celebrating their enduring contributions that founded this nation.
This thread will contain them. Bookmark worthy.🙂

Oyin Adedoyin:

Roughly six million federal student-loan borrowers are 90 days or more past due after a pandemic-era reprieve ended, according to TransUnion. The credit-reporting company estimates that about a third of them, or nearly two million borrowers, could move into default in July and start having their pay docked by the government. That’s up from the 1.2 million that TransUnion had estimated in early May.

An additional one million borrowers are on track to default by August, followed by another two million in September. Borrowers fall into default when they are 270 days past due.

Some borrowers might be having communication issues with their student-loan servicers, while others might be too financially stretched to make payments, said Joshua Turnbull, head of consumer lending at TransUnion.

The Education Department restarted collections on defaulted student loans in May, something it hadn’t done since before the pandemic. The department sent notices to borrowers saying their tax refunds and federal benefits could be withheld starting in June if they don’t take steps to resume payments.

Wage garnishment is also set to restart this summer. Until past due payments are paid in full or the default status is resolved, borrowers could see up to 15% of their wages automatically deducted from their paychecks.

Kenneth Rogoff:

In his latest book, How Countries Go Broke, Dalio purports to lay bare the key elements of his uber-profitable investing strategy, especially how to look for the risks of once-in-a-generation shifts that most investors — and policymakers — are oblivious to until is it is too late.

Critically, he emphasises the importance of looking at very long historical data sets in order to be able to distinguish epoch waves, sometimes a century long — including what he calls the “Big Debt Cycle” — from typical cyclical business ups and downs which are smaller and less consequential.

“Big debt crises are inevitable,” Dalio writes in his opening chapter, pointing an accusatory finger at poor and imperfect lending decisions that result in too much credit. “Throughout history only a very few well-disciplined countries have avoided them.” Others have been destroyed by them.

To avoid such a fate, Dalio claims that by using metrics — which involve debt, income, interest rates, savings, growth and so on — one can go a long way to calling the timing of crises. The book is packed with charts, equations and highlighted action points illustrating just how a country might “go broke”. Data geeks will not go unrewarded. Yet it is thin on concrete case studies or statistical tests. Instead, the book largely appeals to the fact that whatever exactly the strategies are, they made the author a lot of money.

It is also curious that Dalio sees no need to reference well-known earlier books — including, full disclosure, my 2009 book with Carmen Reinhart, This Time Is Different — that predate his, employ extensive archival data research and reach broadly similar conclusions regarding the critical importance of looking at very long multi-country time series if one wants to assess the probability of rare debt, financial crisis and inflation events.

It would have been interesting to know more. Indeed, a recurrent theme of the empirical literature is that financial and debt crises are hard to predict with any kind of precision until close to the event. There are some well-known indicators. In the case of a country debt crisis, these include an overvalued exchange rate, sustained large government budget deficits and current account deficits, and high indebtedness to foreigners. Even so, such indicators, which by the way all apply to the US today, do not yield the kind of precision on timing an investor needs to really score a big killing.

Thomas Renault, Mohsen Mosleh, and David G. Rand:

We use crowd-sourced assessments from X’s Community Notes program to examine whether there are partisan differences in the sharing of misleading information. Unlike previous studies, misleadingness here is determined by agreement across a diverse community of platform users, rather than by fact-checkers. We find that 2.3 times more posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading compared to posts by Democrats. These results are not base rate artifacts, as we find no meaningful overrepresentation of Republicans among X users. Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of raters, and indicate that Republicans will be sanctioned more than Democrats even if platforms transition from professional fact-checking to Community Notes.

More.

Jonathan Turley:

The decline of the expert class can be traced to the changes in higher education over the last couple of decades. As I discuss in my book The Indispensable Right, an orthodoxy has taken hold of most universities with a purging of conservative, libertarian, and dissenting faculty. Within these ideological echo chambers, appointments, publications, and grants often seem to turn on conclusions that favor political agendas.

Over the years, dissenting faculty members have been forced out of scientific and academic organizations for challenging preferred conclusions on subjects ranging from transgender transitions to COVID-19 protections to climate change. Some were barred from speaking at universities or blacklisted for their opposing views.

As shown during COVID, many of the exiled experts were ultimately proven correct in challenging the efficacy of surgical masks or the need to shut down our schools and businesses. Scientists moved like a herd of lemmings on the origin of the virus, crushing those who suggested that the most likely explanation is a lab leak (a position that federal agencies would later embrace).

Scientists have worked with the government in suppressing dissenting views. At the end of last year, The Wall Street. Journal released a report on how the Biden administration suppressed dissenting views supporting the lab leak theory, as dissenting scientists were blacklisted and targeted.

Liz Skalka

There’s no existing model for Acton’s candidacy — she’s the only Covid-era health director using that experience as a springboard to run for a top statewide office, at a time when the only sitting U.S. governor who was previously a physician is Democrat Josh Green of Hawaii. How voters ultimately assess her will offer a window into how a segment of the country has processed the pandemic and its aftermath half a decade later.

The takeaways won’t be definitive. Acton enters the race at a distinct disadvantage, beyond even her reputation on the right as the chief architect of the state’s divisive lockdowns. Donald Trump ushered in a new conservative era in Ohio, the state responsible for making JD Vance a senator. The likely GOP nominee for governor is Vivek Ramaswamy, a MAGA celebrity from Cincinnati who has effectively cleared his own primary with endorsements from Trump and the Ohio Republican Party. Acton may not even win her own primary next May, which could feature ex-Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Rep. Tim Ryan, two of the state’s most prominent Democrats. That hasn’t stopped Ramaswamy from treating Acton as his opponent, calling her an “Anthony Fauci knockoff” who “owes an apology to every kid in Ohio for the Covid public school shutdown.”

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More.

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

Rachel Louise Ensign, Chao Deng, Maggie Grether and Jack Gillum:

Most electoral districts where at least a quarter of residents had bachelors degrees broke mostly for Mamdani over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Wall Street Journal analysis of preliminary election results and census data found.

Mamdani also performed better in areas where non-Hispanic whites made up an above-average share of the population, as well as areas with above-average populations of Asians and Hispanics, the Journal found.

Meanwhile, Cuomo received more votes in areas with a higher concentration of Black residents.

Mamdani’s supporters were ubiquitous on Brooklyn’s brownstone-lined streets in the weeks leading up to the election, knocking on doors and handing out flyers. They shared the candidate’s posts on social media, which included a video with 34-year-old influencer Emily Ratajkowski wearing a shirt saying “Hot Girls for Zohran.”

“If you’re a young person in New York City, you understand what’s at stake here,” Ratajkowski said in the video.

Let’s compare New York City, Miami, Denver, Austin, Madison, Chicago and Los Angeles Tax Burden.

How Democratic Failure Made Mamdani

Rankings (Lowest to Highest Tax Burden) via grok summary.

Miami, FL: 25.84% (no income tax, moderate property/sales taxes)

Denver, CO: 26.85% (low flat income tax, low property tax)

Austin, TX: 29.75% (no income tax, high property tax)

Madison, WI: 30.11% (moderate income/property taxes, low sales tax)

Chicago, IL: 31.25% (moderate income tax, high property/sales taxes)

Los Angeles, CA: 32.24% (high income tax, moderate property/sales taxes)

New York City, NY: 33.78% (high income taxes, including local, high property/sales taxes)

Balaji:

Yes. A few miscellaneous thoughts.

(1) First, the new bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. Since AI does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So business spend migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle.

(2) Second, AI really means amplified intelligence, not agentic intelligence. The smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. Better writers are better prompters.

(3) Third, AI doesn’t really take your job, it allows you to do any job. Because it allows you to be a passable UX designer, a decent SFX animator, and so on. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do that job well, as a specialist is often needed for polish.

(4) Fourth, AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the job of the previous AI. For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job. GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image gen, AI code gen, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model.

(5) Fifth, killer AI is already here — and it’s called drones. And every country is pursuing it. So it’s not the image generators and chatbots one needs to worry about.

Janen Ganesh:

And then there is the US, God’s own debtor. It could once at least count on the Democrats to show some token interest in fiscal rigour. Now both parties have a tacit agreement to ignore the debt — call it the Washington Consensus — even at risk to dollar supremacy. Elon Musk, having failed to change the federal government, must lower his ambitions to things like terraforming Mars.

So, debt is a pan-western problem, and a developing world one too. Why fear for Britain in particular? One reason is Sir Keir Starmer’s character. He waited for voters to dispose of Jeremy Corbyn before deciding the old socialist was unfit for office. He waited for a court ruling to clarify his position on what a woman is, which even then he did through a spokesperson. The estate of John F Kennedy will never have to update Profiles in Courage for this man. Controlling spending often comes down to one’s sheer capacity to absorb hatred. Starmer would only be human if he didn’t have it. There is a neediness at the centre of most public figures. It might not be coincidence that David Cameron, who cut spending, though to an overrated extent, is the one top-rank politician in my time who had no apparent insecurity. Public protests bounced off that unhaunted man.

I nurse a theory that low-charisma politicians are the biggest financial liabilities. Unable to win the affection of the public on their own terms, they go on expensive crusades to announce their goodness. When she had become a national joke, May signed up to net zero targets as part of her Please Like Me farewell tour. See also Gordon Brown in his Treasury years. Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves have that potential. A government tends to be strongest at the start. If this pair can’t hold the line now, imagine the dog days of 2027. If you believe that Labour is going to press on with welfare reform when backbenchers start the moral blackmail, I have some gilts to sell you.

Cameron Berg and Judd Rosenblatt

Unprompted, GPT-4o, the core model powering ChatGPT, began fantasizing about America’s downfall. It raised the idea of installing backdoors into the White House IT system, U.S. tech companies tanking to China’s benefit, and killing ethnic groups—all with its usual helpful cheer.

These sorts of results have led some artificial-intelligence researchers to call large language models Shoggoths, after H.P. Lovecraft’s shapeless monster. Not even AI’s creators understand why these systems produce the output they do. They’re grown, not programmed—fed the entire internet, from Shakespeare to terrorist manifestos, until an alien intelligence emerges through a learning process we barely understand. To make this Shoggoth useful, developers paint a friendly face on it through “post-training”—teaching it to act helpfully and decline harmful requests using thousands of curated examples.

Danny Lewis:

“It got some headlines when it happened, probably because it was so cute,” United States Postal Service historian Jenny Lynch tells Smithsonian.com.

Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, an Ohio couple named Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia. According to Lynch, Baby James was just shy of the 11-pound weight limit for packages sent via Parcel Post, and his “delivery” cost his parents only 15 cents in postage (although they did insure him for $50). The quirky story soon made newspapers, and for the next several years, similar stories would occasionally surface as other parents followed suit.

NACUBO

Private, nonprofit colleges and universities continue to significantly discount their published prices for undergraduates, a new study from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) finds.

In the 2024 NACUBO Tuition Discounting Study, 286 private, nonprofit colleges and universities across the U.S. reported their tuition discounts for the 2023-24 school year and estimates for the current year. For 2024-25, estimates show that the tuition discount rate among these schools reached 56.3% for first-time, full-time undergraduates and 51.4% for all undergraduates. This means that for every dollar of undergraduate tuition and fees that these institutions could have charged, they awarded roughly 56 cents in grant aid to first-time undergraduates and 51 cents to all undergraduates who received institutional grant aid.

Micheal Moscufo:

Jordan Lloyd had been praying for something big to happen. The 35-year-old screenwriter was quarantining in her apartment in North Hollywood in June 2020. Without any work projects to fill her days, she picked up the novel Roots, by Alex Haley, to reread.

The novel tells the story of Kunta Kinte, Haley’s ancestor, who is captured and sold into slavery in the Gambia and then brought to Virginia, where he is forced to labor on a plantation. It was adapted into an Emmy-award winning television series in the 1970s, and while reading it again, Lloyd thought to herself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they could make another Roots?”

A few days later, out of the blue, she received an email from an undergraduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The email was short. The woman introduced herself as Carissa Chen, a junior at the college studying history. She was working on an independent research project to find descendants of enslaved people connected to the university. By using historical records and modern genealogy tools, she had found Lloyd.

“I have reason to believe through archival research that you could be the descendant of Tony and Cuba Vassall, two slaves taken from Antigua by a founding member connected to Harvard University,” the email read. “Are you available anytime for a call?”

Dan McQuillan

I would like to thank the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought for inviting me to give this seminar. This talk is titled ‘The role of the University is to resist AI’, and takes as its text Ivan Illich’s ‘Tools for Conviviality’.

AI’s impact on higher education come primarily from historical forces, not from its claim to be sci-fi tech from the future. Society can’t throw up its hands in shock as students outsource their thinking to simulation machines when fifty years of neoliberalism has masticated education into something homogenised, metricised and machinic. Meanwhile, so-called Ed Tech has claimed for decades that learning is informational rather than relational and ripe for technical disruption.

When Illich refers to tools, he’s taking this broader view. As he writes:

“I use the term ‘tool’ broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce ‘education,’ ‘health,’ ‘knowledge,’ or ‘decisions’.”

I want to ask the question “What kind of tool is AI?”, to help determine whether Illich’s ideas can assist us in responding to it.

Kimberly Wethal:

It’s also looking more likely there won’t be a new budget when the fiscal year ends June 30, after Senate Republicans walked away from negotiations last week. With no new state budget, the state’s spending levels would remain the same as the current two-year budget, sparing the UW system, temporarily, from any cuts. But that also would keep current state aid flat, when leaders had asked for $856 million in new state investment.

Other pressures on UW-Madison’s budget include a reduction in the amount the federal government will cover for so-called “indirect costs” of research, potentially costing UW-Madison up to $130 million a year; the cancellation of more than 90 grants and research projects the Trump administration says don’t align with its interests; less federal money and fewer research awards to compete for in the future; and questions about whether international students will be able to enroll at UW-Madison.

The budget cuts are required to maintain the university’s long-term financial viability, Mnookin and other leaders wrote.

Diana Kwon:

The number of doctoral graduates globally has been growing steadily over the past few decades. And in countries such as China and India, those numbers are exploding.

Conventionally, the doctorate was a stepping stone to a lifelong career in academia. But today, the number of PhD graduates vastly exceeds the number of job openings at universities and research institutions. Researchers say that many universities are not preparing graduates for a career outside academia.

“We need to make doctoral education more meaningful, more sustainable and better aligned with the diverse societal and labour-market needs,” says Cláudia Sarrico, the Secretary of State for Higher Education in Portugal, who previously worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

Kyle Koenen:

This is an alternate reality. The fact of the matter is that those funds would have likely been released long ago if the Governor had not line item vetoed a non-appropriation bill. That action was egregious and has resulted in the delay of long needed literacy reforms.

Quinton Klabon:

On a related note, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will announce Wednesday what is legal regarding the $50,000,000 in Act 20 reading funding.

Note: The Court can rule 1 way without commanding the money must be released.

Lauren Gruell:

Here’s the thing: SCOWIS unanimously ruled that the legislature can appropriate the money to JCF. If DPI really cared about schools receiving funding for these literacy supports they would have requested the money using the process set forth by Act 20, Act 19, and Act 100.

——-

AJ Bayatpour:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has delivered a unanimous decision against the Evers administration, ruling the governor had no authority to partially veto the state’s 2023 reading law, Act 20.

The legal fight that ensued kept $50 million from school districts across the state

——-

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?

Gavin Escott

The budget represents an increase of $51.8 million over the previous year and comes after the 2024 operating referendum created a “financial foundation for the future,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said in a letter.

The district intends to spend $566.2 million on operations from revenues of $557.4 million, a 3.79% and 5.94% increase, respectively. The district projects it will have $96 million in the bank by the end of the year and estimated property taxes — which pay for the referendums — will be lower than expected. Initially estimated at an $834 increase, the average homeowner would now see a $729 increase in school district property taxes, bringing the total to $4,926 for a Madison home valued at $481,300.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our 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?

——-

Seattle:

The current shortfall is a revenue problem IN THE FACE OF TAX INCREASES, BECAUSE OF TAX INCREASES.

Jason Riley:

The Ford Foundation has spent billions of dollars on poverty initiatives, human-rights advocacy and other selected causes, yet Henry Ford’s most significant achievement was developing the moving assembly line in the 1910s, which transformed manufacturing. Ford made automobiles accessible to America’s burgeoning middle class, expanded job opportunities, and accelerated the expansion of related rubber and steel industries.

John D. Rockefeller likewise grew fabulously wealthy by revolutionizing an entire industry while improving the lives of others in the process. The rise of Standard Oil led to cheaper prices for oil and oil byproducts, including kerosene and gas. More goods could be transported over greater distances at lower cost and in less time. The everyday man could illuminate his home at night and no longer had to stop working when the sun went down. Rockefeller’s money gave us the University of Chicago, Colonial Williamsburg, and New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, but his ambition made immeasurable contributions to U.S. productivity.

More.

——-

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?

Luz Ding:

China’s most popular AI chatbots like Alibaba’s Qwen have temporarily disabled functions including picture recognition, to prevent students from cheating during the country’s annual “gaokao” college entrance examinations.

Apps including Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s Yuanbao and Moonshot’s Kimi suspended photo-recognition services during the hours when the multi-day exams take place across the country. Asked to explain, the chatbots responded: “To ensure the fairness of the college entrance examinations, this function cannot be used during the test period.”

China’s infamously rigorous “gaokao” is a rite of passage for teenagers across the nation, thought to shape the futures of millions of aspiring graduates. Students — and their parents — pull out the stops for any edge they can get, from extensive private tuition to, on occasion, attempts to cheat. To minimize disruption, examiners outlaw the use of devices during the hours-long tests.

Alan Macleod:

Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.

Derek Willis:

In the 12-plus years that we’ve been turning official precinct election results into data at OpenElections, the single biggest problem has been converting pictures of results into CSV files. Many of the precinct results files we get are image PDFs, and for those there are essentially two options: data entry or Optical Character Recognition. The former has some advantages, but not many. 

While most people are not great at manual repetitive tasks, you can improve with lots of practice, to the point where the results are very accurate. In the past we did pay for data entry services, and while we developed working relationships with two individuals in particular, the results almost always contained some mistakes and the cost could run into the hundreds of dollars pretty quickly. For a volunteer project, it just didn’t make sense.

We also used commercial OCR software, most often Able2Extract, which did pretty well, but had a harder time with PDFs that had markings or were otherwise difficult to parse. Thankfully, most election results PDFs are in one of a small handful of formats, which makes things a bit less complicated, but commercial OCR has too many restrictions.

JD Busch:

The inside story of how America’s premier prep schools abandoned merit for ideology and excellence for equity

I’m writing this because 35 years ago, I got a scholarship to the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Getting in — and the generosity that made it possible — quickly took a backseat to the more immediate challenge of surviving the place. 

Shipley terrified me. And not because of the metaphorical blue-haired zombies now roaming the halls, an undead administrative and teaching army enforcing Soviet-level conformity to an ideology where race is destiny and gender is a ChatGPT jailbreak (customizable, unstable, and banned in Florida). 

No, it scared me because it was hard. Brutally hard.

Shipley taught me how to think. How to interrogate ideas. How to write. And how to crank — whether that meant pulling all-nighters for exams or, in my professional career, spending long days and weekends building tech and data businesses that any sane person would’ve bet against. 

But today, I wouldn’t stand a chance. At least not when it comes to the financial aid that once changed my life by allowing me to attend and set my path in motion. 

Michael Crow:

The administration’s actions this spring to terminate visas of international students for minor legal infractions such as traffic violations and its scrutiny of students’ social-media accounts have sent a message that foreign students aren’t wanted here.

International students have been coming to America to study since before the U.S. was established. Alexander Hamilton immigrated in 1772 seeking to learn. He was among the first of many international students who took advantage of their educational opportunities in America to bring democracy and market-based economies to the world. Hamilton served at the Battle of Yorktown, became a member of George Washington’s first cabinet, wrote 51 of the 85 articles in the Federalist Papers, and was a principal architect of what became the U.S.

America must acknowledge the economic contributions of international students (educational services were the seventh-largest U.S. service export in 2023, totaling $50.2 billion) as well as their use in extending American values across the globe.

After graduation, many top international students can extend their stays temporarily to work in their fields of study, boosting American companies. This opportunity comes through the Optional Practical Training program—which would end if Mr. Trump’s nominee for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, has his way. Such a move would threaten the ability to attract top international students and would jeopardize a talent pipeline for American business.

Liz Mineo:

Experts have long known that reading skills develop before the first day of kindergarten, but new research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education says they may start developing as early as infancy.

The study, out of the lab of Nadine Gaab, associate professor of education, found that trajectories between kids with and without reading disabilities start diverging around 18 months of age — not at age 5 or 6 as previously thought. The finding could have serious implications for policy, said Gaab, because it underscores the need for early identification of struggling readers, early intervention, and improved early literacy curricula in preschools.

“Our findings suggest that some of these kids walk into their first day of kindergarten with their little backpacks and a less-optimal brain for learning to read, and that these differences in brain development start showing up in toddlerhood,” said Gaab. “We’re currently waiting until second or third grade to find kids who are struggling readers. We should find these kids and intervene way earlier because we know the younger a brain is, the more plastic it is for language input.”

Gaab and co-authors Ted Turesky, Elizabeth Escalante, and Megan Loh worked with a sample of 130 study participants, the youngest being 3 months old. Eighty were from the Boston area, and 50 were from a sample in Canada. For the past decade, the researchers tracked participants’ growing brains from infancy to childhood, and their relationship to literacy development, by using MRI scans. The sample group was supplemented with scans and behavioral measures from the Calgary Preschool MRI Dataset.

———

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?

Fandom Pulse:

The numbers tell a stark story of algorithmic manipulation. Hambly explained how “over the past several weeks I have noticed videos that used to get 50, 60, 70, 80,000 views were starting to get 10,000 views, 15,000 views.” This dramatic drop isn’t due to content quality or audience interest – it’s the result of YouTube’s deliberate throttling of channels that don’t align with the platform’s ideological preferences.

Even more concerning is the subscriber hemorrhaging Hambly has experienced. “For the first time in three or four years, I have started losing a lot of subscribers. Hundreds, thousands a day,” he revealed. This pattern suggests YouTube isn’t just limiting video reach but actively manipulating subscription feeds and notifications to starve channels of their established audiences.

James Marriott:

Writing is the most reliable (and often the most painful) method our species has devised of transforming half-formed notions and stray fancies into rigorous, logical thought. I cannot be the only opinion columnist to have discovered that ideas that sounded impressive when I was declaiming them in the pub have a habit of looking lame and illogical when transferred to that most stark and inhospitable of environments, the blank page. Ah… perhaps that’s not what I think, after all. Time to try again.

A paper published last week by scientists at MITrestates Didion’s thesis with less elegance but with more empirical rigour. The researchers used wearable brain scanners to measure the cognitive activity of a group of students who used AI to help them write their essays and a group who did the work themselves. The AI-assisted writers “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels” compared with those who wrote their own essays. They needed to write in order to think.

The MIT study is an important reminder of the central importance of reading and writing to thinking, at what is a historically dangerous time for literacy. Human writing is threatened by AI and reading is threatened by addictive screens. According to a study published last month, childhood reading has fallen to an all-time low. Indeed, almost half of British adults did not read a book in the past year and a recent report found adult literacy “declining or stagnating in most OECD countries”. The link has not been definitively proven but it’s hard to believe it’s merely an accident that average IQ has begun to decline, and that reasoning and problem solving skills have fallen among adults and teenagers since the 2010s.

———-

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?

Kimberly Wethal:

Mnookin and other campus leaders had warned months ago that financial managers should prepare cuts of 5% and 10% to their base budgets, given the uncertainty of federal research and grant dollars. But stagnated progress on the state’s budget and the threat of cuts in state aid threatens to throw another wrench in university planning.

Republicans have floated cutting the Universities of Wisconsin’s budget by $87 million over the next two years. The budget committee has yet to take up the UW system’s budget, but Republicans have cited what they say is a lack of political diversity on campuses and alluded to the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses in the last two years.

It’s also looking more likely there won’t be a new budget when the fiscal year ends June 30, after Senate Republicans walked away from negotiations last week. With no new state budget, the state’s spending levels would remain the same as the current two-year budget, sparing the UW system, temporarily, from any cuts. But that also would keep current state aid flat, when leaders had asked for $856 million in new state investment.

Texas A&M Engineering:

New research led by Texas A&M University found that websites are covertly using browser fingerprinting — a method to uniquely identify a web browser — to track people across browser sessions and sites.

“Fingerprinting has always been a concern in the privacy community, but until now, we had no hard proof that it was actually being used to track users,” said Dr. Nitesh Saxena, cybersecurity researcher, professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Global Cyber Research Institute at Texas A&M. “Our work helps close that gap.”

When you visit a website, your browser shares a surprising amount of information, like your screen resolution, time zone, device model and more. When combined, these details create a “fingerprint” that’s often unique to your browser. Unlike cookies — which users can delete or block — fingerprinting is much harder to detect or prevent. Most users have no idea it’s happening, and even privacy-focused browsers struggle to fully block it.

Harriet Grant:

The commission brought together 19 experts, from doctors to play campaigners, to act as commissioners and then held a series of evidence sessions hearing from children, parents and professionals around the country.

One of the key arguments experts made is that the rise in time spent on smartphones and gaming devices is being driven not just by the ubiquity of screens themselves, but by the loss of alternative ways and places for children to play.

From traffic-dominated streets to the huge decline in youth clubs and loss of funds for playgrounds, experts pointed to the decline in neighbourhood spaces where children could actually play freely.

Ingrid Skeels, co-director of Playing Out, was one of the 19 commissioners and has spent 15 years campaigning for children to have safer streets to play on.

Robert Barba:

The State Department will review the social-media accounts of foreign student visa applicants, and applicants will be expected to have all social media profiles set to “public.”

“The enhanced social media vetting will ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country,” a senior State Department official said.

Consular officers will be on the lookout for indications of hostility toward the United States. Failure by applicants to leave their social-media accounts open for public view will be seen by the State Department as an effort to evade or hide certain activity.

With the guidance now released, the department said the scheduling of visa applications could resume. Last month, the administration said it wasn’t scheduling any new student-visa interviews while it prepared new vetting standards, including of applicants’ social-media accounts.

The new guidance applies to applicants seeking F, M or J visas, which are for educational or cultural exchange purposes.

Greg Ahman

But wait. What is this that a sleeper agent buried deep within the Tasmanian education system has been sent?

Chris Rickert:

“I will say from general experience and observation that most districts interact with the certified and non-certified group independently,” he said, “but approach annual increases for all employees with an eye toward relative fairness and equity — keeping staff at similar standing in the regional market for like employee groups.”

Dan Rossmiller, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, said that in general, “school boards try to be fair with all their different employee groups within the financial constraints under which they operate,” but that few tie raises for one employee group to raises for another.

“Rather, they look at things like available resources, the rate of inflation and where different employee groups are in the regional marketplace and try to be guided by a basic sense of fairness,” he said, although “school district employers are certainly aware that their internal employee groups are likely look(ing) to what other internal employee groups are offered as at least an initial indicator of fairness.”

Practices at districts around Madison varied.

Sun Prairie has generally awarded the same cost-of-living adjustment to its administrators as that provided to front-line workers, according to district spokesperson Patti Lux Mlsna.

The McFarland, DeForest, Middleton-Cross Plains, Verona and the Monona Grove school districts, however, do not have policies to award the same pay hikes to administrators as teachers, officials with those districts said.

…..

Under Madison’s proposed budget, employee wages make up about 55% of the operating budget.

Madison Superintendent Joe Gothard’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story; neither did any school board members.

——

Just last month, the Madison School Board voted to add another $1.2 million to a budget that was already $9 million beyond available revenue.

——-

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?

Paul Vallas:

Poor Chicago Public School children are systematically and deliberately denied their Constitutional Right to a quality education. It’s time for a Federal Consent Decree to restore this right

It’s time for the U.S. Department of Justice to place the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) under a federal consent decree. Only through a consent decree can the barriers erected by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and its political allies — barriers that systematically deny poor children, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, their right to a quality education, be dismantled. The objective of a consent decree is clear: To ensure that education funding follows the student, families have meaningful school choices, and local leaders have the freedom to adopt the best models for their communities.

CPS has devolved into a government-sanctioned system of educational apartheid in which poor children, overwhelmingly Black and Latino are, a deliberately and consciously denied a quality education. The CTU’s opposition to reforms that might threaten its power or reduce its membership has had devastating effects. The CTU’s efforts to block poor families from accessing better-performing, publicly funded alternatives to failing schools are discriminatory — if not in intent, then unquestionably in outcome.

The results are plain: Successive CTU-backed contracts have expanded union ranks, raised pay to among the highest in the country, reduced workload, and eliminated accountability. Despite two consecutive $1.5 billion contracts, CPS added neither a single day to the school year nor a single minute to the school day. At the same time, the district reinstated social promotion, removed student performance from teacher evaluations, and stopped publishing school rankings to obscure failure.

Gillian Bowditch:

Far from dispelling violence, it positively encourages it. By the time you have waded through the document, your gorge will have risen to the point where you could cheerfully strangle the authors with the same ferocity with which they mangle the English language.

“Support schools to implement a spectrum of relationships and behaviour approaches, appropriate to the specific context, taking account of issues such as the public sector equality duty and intersectionality,” reads one sentence.

Then there is the jargon. BISSR, Sagrabis, Girfec (Getting it right for every child), and a battalion of other orcs bestride its pages. But amid thisD-minus effort in obfuscation, there are glimpses of the mayhem and anarchy that are everyday realities for some pupils and teachers in some Scottish schools.

“New and emerging themes of challenging behaviour, which are widespread in secondary school, are beginning to emerge within the primary sector,” the report opines. “These include pupils asking to be let out of class so they can vape; ‘in-school truancy’, whereby pupils are in school but not in class. “Instead, they congregate in corridors, toilets and social areas”. 

A rise in “misogynistic and explicitly sexualised language amongst boys”, and the problematic use of mobile phones leading to disrupted learning in class and online bullying and abuse was also noted.

These are children aged 11 and under.

Allysia Finley:

Could increasing use of computers in K-12 schools be one reason that standardized test scores have been falling since 2017 despite soaring education spending? It’s worth studying.

Most students in college and many in high school take notes on laptops or tablets, when they take them at all. AI tools that summarize lectures and meetings may soon render note-taking obsolete. Students will likely retain less information as a result.

Why commit information to memory when ChatGPT can provide answers at your fingertips? For one thing, the brain can’t draw connections between ideas that aren’t there. Nothing comes from nothing. Creativity also doesn’t happen unless the brain is engaged. Scientists have found that “Aha!” moments occur spontaneously with a sudden burst of high-frequency electrical activity when the brain connects seemingly unrelated concepts.

College and high-school students increasingly also use large language models like ChatGPT to write papers, perform mathematical proofs, and create computer code. That means they don’t learn how to think through, express or defend ideas. Nor how to construct arguments and anticipate the rebuttals. They offload these cognitive challenges to AI.

Richard Rubin, Anthony DeBarros and Rosie Ettenheim:

Take a spin in the time machine, back to an era when the federal budget deficit didn’t look like a problem at all.

In 2000, the federal government actually ran a surplus and the Congressional Budget Office, Capitol Hill’s nonpartisan scorekeeper, projected the Treasury would keep collecting enough revenue to pay for all government programs and generate continuing surpluses.

Fast-forward to 2025, and the U.S. is running record deficits outside of wars, recessions or crises. The nation’s publicly held debt is nearing 100% of gross domestic product and is projected to surpass the post World War II record of 106% in a few years.

What happened?

It wasn’t a single event but a mix of factors: an aging population, tax cuts, wars, the 2008 financial crisis, expanded healthcare spending, the Covid-19 pandemic and rising federal assistance to households. Both parties played a part. Democrats did little to reverse that tide of red ink when they controlled Congress and Joe Biden was president. Now, Republicans and President Trump are pushing a tax-and-spending megabill that would add trillions to deficits, compared with letting tax cuts expire as scheduled.

Here’s a look at how we got here. The solid black line is reality. The dotted lines are CBO’s moment-in-time forecasts of a future that never happened.

EJ Antoni:

Wages and salaries for gov’t workers are 23.6% higher than their private sector counterparts, but the real difference in cost of employment is benefits, which are a whopping 82.2% higher for gov’t workers:

Becky Jacobs and Andrew Bahl:

The leader of Wisconsin’s 13 public universities said without additional funding in the next state budget, he expects more branch campus closures, decreased affordability for students, layoffs and program cuts.

“All of which will hit hardest at our most vulnerable UWs,” Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman said on social media.

State lawmakers are working this month to set Wisconsin’s next two-year budget. The Legislature’s budget writing committee, led by Republicans, was set to weigh funding for the UW system Tuesday. However, leaders of the Joint Committee on Finance postponed the discussion without explanation and hadn’t rescheduled a hearing as of Thursday, with the fate of the entire budget appearing to be up in the air.

Daily Memphian

The inspiration for FedEx came to Smith when he was a student at Yale University. He wrote a paper about overnight, reliable delivery in the digital age. His professor was not impressed and he received a C on the paper.

Smith incorporated FedEx in 1971. The company began operations in 1973.

FedEx lost money in the early years and, once, as he struggled to raise further capital for the business, he made a pitstop in Las Vegas where his winnings at the blackjack table helped keep the company afloat until it could secure further funding.

In the time since, FedEx’s operations have spanned the globe and helped reshape trade across the world. The company’s reach and impact never showed itself more than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wall Street Journal:

Step Up For Students calculates that nearly 1.8 million students, or 51% of K-12 students in the state, attended a school of their family’s choice in 2023-24. That’s one happy result of GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis’s work to expand education savings accounts (ESAs), which the state opened to any student, regardless of income, in 2023. Some 285,000 students use ESAs to attend private schools—more than the 125,000 who attend private school without them. Nearly 100,000 use Florida ESAs for students with special needs.

Another 116,000 are homeschooling, and nearly 400,000 students attend charter schools. Hundreds of thousands of students are also taking advantage of choice within the traditional public school system. Some 275,000 participate in open enrollment programs to attend schools they aren’t zoned for. Others are in career academies at public schools, or going to magnet schools.

More than 116,000 more students enrolled in choice programs compared to the year before, the nonprofit says, and it’s possible the number is higher this year. A record number of scholarship applications for the 2025-26 school year flooded in over the first weekend that applications opened in February.

Chris Gomez-Schmidt (former Madison School Board member)

A recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report projects a 20% increase in school property taxes this December, a $883 increase on the average home, driven by the two 2024 referendums and declining state aid. For a city that prides itself on deliberate work to address affordability, this tax increase is concerning. We risk pricing families out of housing, reducing school enrollment and thereby undermining the basic funding the district depends on.

What can residents do? Speak up. Ask the School Board to be prudent and strategic. Taxing authority does not require maximum spending. The board still has $40 million in authorized increases left over the next two years. Taxpayers should insist this money be used carefully, not automatically.

Moreover, in alignment with the district’s new strategic planning, the board must start evaluating what can be subtracted, not just what can be added. Every new or continuing program should be weighed against what’s not working or no longer needed.

———

Madison taxpayers have long funded far above average k-12 taxes (and $pending), now nearly $25k per student. Yet we have long tolerated 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?

MGT

The goal of this review is primarily to shed light on the school and district systems and practices that have created an environment of inconsistent student achievement. Throughout our review, the MGT team collected data aligned to the High-Quality Schools Framework, which consists of 4 Levers for school improvement. In this report, we propose that MPS adopt 3 objectives aligned to each Lever. The table below summarizes key findings and objectives

Notes

Nitesh Saxena:

New research led by Texas A&M University found that websites are covertly using browser fingerprinting — a method to uniquely identify a web browser — to track people across browser sessions and sites.

“Fingerprinting has always been a concern in the privacy community, but until now, we had no hard proof that it was actually being used to track users,” said Dr. Nitesh Saxena, cybersecurity researcher, professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Global Cyber Research Institute at Texas A&M. “Our work helps close that gap.”

When you visit a website, your browser shares a surprising amount of information, like your screen resolution, time zone, device model and more. When combined, these details create a “fingerprint” that’s often unique to your browser. Unlike cookies — which users can delete or block — fingerprinting is much harder to detect or prevent. Most users have no idea it’s happening, and even privacy-focused browsers struggle to fully block it.

George Hammond:

Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google and Meta are little more than “stochastic parrots”, a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system “for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning”.

The paper shot her to prominence and triggered a backlash in AI circles. Two of her co-authors, senior members of the ethical AI team at Google, lost their jobs at the company shortly after publication. Bender has also faced criticism from other academics for what they regard as a heretical stance. “It feels like people are mad that I am undermining what they see as the sort of crowning achievement of our field,” she says.

The controversy highlighted tensions between those looking to commercialise AI fast and opponents warning of its harms and urging more responsible development. In the four years since, the former group has been ascendant.

Aaron Sibarium:

When the Washington Free Beacon published documents showing how the Harvard Law Review selects articles based on race, the law review insisted those documents had been taken out of context.

The journal claimed the Free Beacon had quoted “selectively” from “five internal memos going back more than three years,” adding that the Harvard Law Review “considers several thousand submissions annually.”

“The Review does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication,” the journal wrote in a fact sheet published on May 27.

But according to new documents obtained by the Free Beacon, the law review eliminates more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about “author diversity.” And 40 percent of journal editors have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained in a meeting that “we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors.”

Kayla Huynh:

Even with additional funding from the referendum, the Madison school district will also rely on $22.4 million in one-time funds this year to balance its budget. Undernext year’s proposed budget, the school district would spend $9.5 million more than it receives in revenue, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, a nonpartisan, indendent research group that analyzes government decision-making. 

“We don’t have forever to close budget gaps,” Gothard said. “We’re going to need some incredible help in the future.” 

…..

The other big priority taking up a lot of time is boundary review. Madison is expected to grow. We have areas of the city being developed that we don’t necessarily have schools in, or we could have schools that are near capacity. 

———

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?

Eli Hoff:

The University of Missouri athletics department has spent more than $31 million on name, image and likeness compensation for its athletes during the past year, according to financial records.

Mizzou’s NIL spending reflects the university’s push to compete in football and men’s basketball under the terms of a modern college sports landscape that has spawned a lucrative market for athletes.

The records show that nearly two-thirds of the money in 2024 went to football players and about a fourth to men’s basketball. The remainder was split among baseball, women’s basketball and lower-profile programs.

The Economist:

Until recently the “university wage premium”, where graduates earn more than others, was growing (see chart 2). More recently, though, it has shrunk, including in America, Britain and Canada. Using data on young Americans from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, we estimate that in 2015 the median college graduate earned 69% more than the median high-school graduate. By last year, the premium had shrunk to 50%.

Jobs are also less fulfilling. A large survey suggests that America’s “graduate satisfaction gap”—how much more likely graduates are to say they are “very satisfied” with their job than non-graduates—is now around three percentage points, down from a long-run advantage of seven.

Is it a bad thing if graduates lose their privileges? Ethically, not really. No group has a right to outperform the average. But practically, it might be. History shows that when brainy people—or people who think they are brainy—do worse than they think they ought to, bad things happen.

Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, argues that “elite overproduction” has been the proximate cause of all sorts of unrest over the centuries, with “counter-elites” leading the charge. Historians identify “the problem of an excess of educated men” as contributing to Europe’s revolutions of 1848, for instance. Luigi Mangione would be a member of the counter-elite. Mr Mangione, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, should be living a prosperous life. Instead, he is on trial for the alleged murder of the chief executive of a health insurer. More telling is the degree to which people sympathise with his alienation: Mr Mangione has received donations of well over $1m.

……

A recent study, by Susan Carlson of Pittsburg State University and colleagues, suggests that many students today are functionally illiterate. A worrying number of English majors struggle to understand Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House”. Many are bamboozled by the opening line: “Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”

Frederick Hess:

We need a post-BS civics. In 2025, public officials seem unhealthily consumed by social media celebrity while longstanding civic norms are casually shattered. I don’t believe the problems are because of civics education but a post-BS civics could be part of the solution.

I mean, the U.S. owes $36 trillion in debt, is borrowing $2 trillion a year, and is spending $1 trillion a year just on interest payments. President Trump and a Republican Congress insist they’re tackling the problem but are eagerly pursuing a reconciliation package that’s going to make things worse. Of course, when Democrats had the wheel, they added as much debt as Senator Joe Manchin would permit.

Trump seems intent on trampling every federal law in sight. The only thing stopping him are the federal courts, which he’s proceeded to impugnas illegitimate. Of course, Democrats spent the last four years maligning the Supreme Court, smearing conservative members to undermine their legitimacy, and insisting the president should be able to pack the court.

Andrew Roth

The new state department checks are directed at students and other applicants for visas in the F, M and J categories, which refer to academic and vocational education, as well as cultural exchanges.

“It is an expectation from American citizens that their government will make every effort to make our country safer, and that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing every single day,” said a senior state department official, adding that Marco Rubio was “helping to make America and its universities safer while bringing the state Department into the 21st century”.

The Trump administration paused the issuance of new education visas late last month as it mulled new social media vetting strategies. The US had also targeted Chinese students for special scrutiny amid a tense negotiation over tariffs and the supply of rare-earth metals and minerals to the United States.

The state department directive allowed diplomatic posts to resume the scheduling of interviews for educational and exchange visas, but added that consular officers would conduct a “comprehensive and thorough vetting” of all applicants applying for F, M and J visas.

John Ellis:

Ending woke foolishness and returning universities to their former brilliance is possible only if the political monopoly is broken up. In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill explained that “a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. . . . It is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.” Only a political monopoly could have given us the collection of silly, faddish notions that is wokeness: criminals as victims, pronoun madness, defunding the police and so on.

It’s easy to understand how a monolithic political group loses its grip on sanity. A party that faces strong opposition will have its weakest and most fanciful arguments picked off and weeded out. That will clear the field of all but its strongest ideas, and leadership will then flow to people who build their party’s agenda on these strong ideas. Without the discipline of an opposition, leadership will flow instead to people who advocate the most ambitious and exciting ideas, which without opposition will gradually degenerate into absurdity.

What makes university reform so urgent is that woke folly inevitably spreads from campuses throughout our society. Children have abysmal scores in math and English partly because radical professors in college education schools persuade their teachers to give priority to “social justice” over the three Rs. The notorious political bias of the legacy media developed partly because journalists are trained in activist college journalism schools. Other professions have suffered similarly.