Susan Weinschenk

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IS COMMONLY BELIEVED, BUT NOT TRUE — You read by recognizing the shapes of words and groups of words. Words that are in all capital letters all have the same shape: a rectangle of a certain size. This makes words displayed in all uppercase harder to read than upper and lower case (known as “mixed case”).  Mixed case words are easier to read because they make unique shapes, as demonstrated by the picture below.

OK, NOW THE TRUE STUFF STARTS — When I started this article the topic was supposed to be why all capital letters are harder to read. Like most people with a usability background or a cognitive psychology background, I can describe the research — just what I wrote in the first paragraph above. I decided to look up and cite the actual research rather than just passing on the general knowledge and belief.

The research doesn’t exist, or “It’s complicated” — Something happened when I went to find the research on the shape of words and how that is related to all capital letters being harder to read. There isn’t research showing that exactly. It’s more complicated, and ultimately, more controversial. In July of 2004 Kevin Larson wrote an article that is posted at the Microsoft website that explains in depth all the research on this topic. I’ve picked out several ideas from that article and am presenting them here. A link to Kevin’s article, plus some of his research citations are at the end of this blog for those of you who want more detail.

WMC:

Wisconsin’s health care costs remain the fifth highest in the country, and 88% of survey respondents predict their costs will increase even more this year. Of these, the majority say these increases will necessitate increasing employee contributions.

“Wisconsin’s business community has serious concerns about extreme health care costs,” stated WMC’s Executive Vice President of Government Relations Scott Manley. “These costs are not only a competitive disadvantage, as they dip into employee compensation, investment opportunities, and more, but they also hurt Wisconsin families.”

According to the survey, the cost of health care is tied with the labor shortage/lack of qualified applicants as the top issue facing Wisconsin employers in 2025. When asked what the one thing state government could do to help businesses, 41% of respondents answered, “make health care more affordable.” 

As noted in An Arm & A Leg, WMC Foundation’s latest research report, Wisconsin also has the second highest medical payments for workers compensation.

“There are simple policy solutions to help make health care more affordable,” Manley continued. “The majority of the business leaders we surveyed expressed that they would like to see fee schedules for the Workers Compensation program and legislation to require health care costs and quality to be transparent and accessible.”

Elyse C. Goncalves and Akshaya Ravi:

Harvard Medical School canceled a planned Jan. 21 lecture on wartime healthcare and a subsequent panel with patients from Gaza receiving care in Boston in response to objections that students would hear from Gazans impacted by the war and not also Israelis.

Course instructors and students were notified Tuesday morning that the events — scheduled for that evening — would not be held.

Medical School Dean George Q. Daley ’82 wrote in a Wednesday email sent to first-year students and obtained by The Crimson that his office began receiving complaints from students and faculty within days after the session was first publicized last week.

The guest lecture — by Tufts professor Barry S. Levy, who studies the public health effects of war — was an optional evening session of the Pathways 120: “Essentials of the Profession” course, a requirement for all first-year students at the Medical School and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

Students had organized the moderated discussion with patients and their families as a follow-up to Levy’s lecture, which was not focused specifically on Gaza.

more.

Bruce Schneier:

“ai summary”: AI systems, particularly LLMs, make mistakes differently than humans, posing unique challenges. While human mistakes are often predictable and clustered, AI errors occur randomly and evenly across various topics, requiring new security systems to prevent harm.

Samantha Swenson

Freshmen at Yale University voiced strong support for free speech compared to their older peers in a new poll, giving rise to hopes for the future of the Ivy League campus.

The Yale Undergraduate Student Survey by the Buckley Institute found a “significant turn in favor of free speech, driven largely” by freshmen.

“It is very encouraging that the newest class at Yale is dramatically more supportive of free speech and open discussion than its predecessors,” Lauren Noble, founder and executive director of the Buckley Institute, said in an email to The College Fix.

“The freshman class came to campus in the middle of serious debate, on campus and nationally, about free speech and resoundingly decided that free speech was the right way forward.”

Dan O’Donell:

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has never been the most unpredictable man in the world—in each speech one can expect a few “by gollys” and references to pickleball—but on the first day of this year’s legislative session, he delivered a shocker when asked about State Superintendent Jilly Underly’s decision to change K-12 testing standards.

“I hate to even talk about things that aren’t my purview anymore in the Department of Public Instruction, but I just think there should have been some information and dialogue happening with all sorts of people before that decision,” he said in a news conference earlier this month. “It’s hard to compare year to year if one year you’re doing something completely different.”

In August, Underly’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) announced changes to Wisconsin’s Forward Exam that renamed each level of achievement and made it much easier to attain each level. The standards, which appear on DPI’s school and district annual report cards, were for decades labeled as “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” and “below basic.”

Those were changed to “advanced,” “meeting,” “approaching,” and “developing,” which appear designed to sound better to parents and legislators concerned about student performance. They would naturally react more strongly to a student who is “below basic” than to one who is “developing.”

This change alone would have relatively innocuous, but it was paired with a complete overhaul of the benchmark scores needed to reach each level. For instance, previous scores ranged from 517 to 611 in third grade math. The new standards have a range of 1,370 and 1,740, making comparisons to prior years impossible.

—

more on Jill Underly, here.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Mackinac Center

Teachers can be drunk at school five times before they are fired. They can be high three times before losing their job. And they can MAKE AND SELL DRUGS and keep their job.

James Hope:

Another unique bargaining tactic played out in a school about 100 miles north of Ann Arbor.

Bay City Public Schools currently allows a teacher who sells drugs the opportunity to keep his or her job thanks to a union provision in the district’s collective bargaining agreement.

The contract calls for disciplinary actions for people who are “involved in the unlawful sale, manufacture, or distribution or dispensation of tobacco, alcohol, or illegal drugs.”

The first offense is referred to as “activity.” If a union employee engages in an activity that state law classifies as a misdemeanor, the first offense will result in a three-day suspension and mandatory counseling. The Bay City contract expires in 2025. Michigan Capitol Confidential reported on the issue April 2024.

Quinton Klabon

It is a bit more complicated than that (dispute over when and what to fund after seeming agree), but I am excited at the prospect of moving past the partial veto and get curriculum funding to schools!

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Andrew Handel:

We are in the midst of an educational renaissance in America. At the time of writing, a record 12 states are empowering (or will soon be empowering) every family and every student with education freedom. These states recognize the unique needs of each student and that parents, not government bureaucrats, are best positioned to determine those needs and choose a school that best fits their student.

The ALEC Index of State Education Freedom was created to provide a detailed and comprehensive 50-state analysis of what learning options are available and accessible to families. This publication conducts a deep-dive analysis of each state’s charter school, home school, virtual school, and open enrollment laws to determine how accessible these learning environments are to families. We also analyze the various programs each state has in place that help offset the cost of alternative learning environments, like education scholarship accounts (ESAs), tax-credit scholarships, voucher programs, and more.

With this being the second edition of the publication, we have made several improvements and refinements to the scoring and ranking methodology that better reflect the education freedom environment in each state. You will also notice that the category for education freedom programs has been weighted more heavily in this version, reflecting the critical importance of these programs for families seeking alternate learning environments better suited to their students.

We hope that this publication will serve as a resource for constituents looking to learn more about the programs available in their state to policymakers during the 2025 legislative sessions, who are looking to expand the educational options available to families. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at ahandel@alec.org.

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More.

Abbey Machtig:

In April 2024, staff members filed a complaint with the district about working conditions at the school. The complaint named Principal Candace Terrell and Assistant Principal Annabel Torres, saying regular bullying and poor safety practices led to an exodus of teachers from Southside that has negatively affected students.

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 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?

Cade Metz and Meaghan Tobin

But the performance of the DeepSeek model raises questions about the unintended consequences of the American government’s trade restrictions. The controls have forced researchers in China to get creative with a wide range of tools that are freely available on the internet.

The DeepSeek chatbot answered questions, solved logic problems and wrote its own computer programs as capably as anything already on the market, according to the benchmark tests that American A.I. companies have been using.

And it was created on the cheap, challenging the prevailing idea that only the tech industry’s biggest companies — all of them based in the United States — could afford to make the most advanced A.I. systems. The Chinese engineers said they needed only about $6 million in raw computing power to build their new system. That is about 10 times less than the tech giant Meta spent building its latest A.I. technology.

David Rozado:

This report employs four complementary methodologies to assess political bias in prominent AI systems developed by various organizations. These four approaches are then synthesized into a unified ranking of AIs’ political bias. The four methods used to measure political bias in AIs are: comparing AI-generated text with the language used by Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. Congress; examining the dominant political viewpoints embedded in AI-generated policy recommendations for the U.S.; assessing sentiment in AI-generated text toward politically aligned public figures; and administering political-orientation tests to AIs.

The findings from all the methods outlined above point in a consistent direction. Most user-facing conversational AI systems today display left-leaning political preferences in the textual content that they generate, though the degree of this bias varies across different systems.

The left-leaning bias of AI systems is not inevitable. Studies have shown that relatively low-cost fine-tuning with politically skewed data can ideologically align an LLM toward left-leaning, moderate, or right-leaning political preferences.

Sara Randazzo, Matt Barnum and Julie Jargon:

Class time has become screen time in American schools.

Kindergartners now watch math lessons on YouTube, counting aloud with the videos. Middle-schoolers complete writing drills on Chromebooks while sneaking in play of an online game. High-schoolers mark up Google Docs to finish group projects.

The rapid tech transformation amounts to a grand experiment playing out in American schools. Accelerated by pandemic-era online learning, the move has happened with little debate, conflicting research and high stakes for the nation’s children.

Educators wonder whether the digitization of the classroom has really benefited learning—or if it’s done kids a disservice. Some teachers say online tools help create more engaging lessons and provide personalized instruction. Others say the screen-heavy approach has distracted students and burned out teachers.

“Covid really shifted things toward, ‘Oh, we can do this,’” said Stephanie Galvani, a middle-school English teacher in suburban Boston. “But we didn’t ask: ‘Should we do this?’”

James Taranto:

The deceptive labeling—often self-deceptive, as Mr. Cillizza evidences—is what makes political fact-checking corrupt. Opinion journalism is a respectable craft, provided it is honestly presented as such, as this article is at the top of the page. Political fact-checkers could satisfy this objection by simply marking their work as “opinion.” But that would shatter the pretense of authoritativeness.

It would also invite readers to judge the work by the standards of opinion journalism, by which it is uniformly inferior. I’ve spent my career as a writer and editor of opinion, and I’ve cast a critical eye on political fact-checking since 2008. I have never read a fact-check article that impressed me with its enterprise, originality, passion, boldness, depth, flair or wit—the qualities that make for good opinion writing. “Pinocchios” and “pants on fire” were amusing at first, but the joke wore thin within a few years.

Neil Shah:

Harvard University has laid off its staff in the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, the unit of its $100 million Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative tasked with identifying the direct descendants of those enslaved by Harvard affiliates.

The work will be continued by American Ancestors, which is currently one of HSRP’s external research partners in the work, according to HSRP Director Richard J. Cellini and research fellow Wayne W. Tucker.

Employees were notified Thursday that they had been laid off, effective the same day, per Cellini and Tucker. They were not given any advance notice of the decision and, according to Tucker, rumors of the program’s impending closure only began to circulate Thursday morning.

No additional reasons were given for HSRP’s disbanding, according to Tucker. Since September, HSRP has been a focus of public attention after a Crimson investigation reported that Cellini, the director, had accused Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara N. Bleich, who leads the Legacy of Slavery initiative, of instructing HSRP “not to find too many descendants.”

Russell Warne:

The newly inaugurated second Trump administration has arrived, and among the changes that the president and his allies have proposed is large-scale simplification and elimination of government regulations. President Trump stated in a press conference in December that he wants 10 old regulations eliminated for every new regulation added.

The arguments for deregulation are not new. Regulations function as an indirect tax that slows economic growth: Compliance costs money, and the expense is often passed on to the consumer. Regulations also cost the government (and, therefore, the taxpayer) money to promulgate, revise, and enforce. Deregulation, thus, is a win for everyone because it frees money for economic growth—which increases tax revenue while reducing government spending.

Tyler Cowen Link:

As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms society, understanding factors that influence AI receptivity is increasingly important. The current research investigates which types of consumers have greater AI receptivity. Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI. This lower literacy-greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI’s capability, ethicality, or feared impact on humanity. Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes. In line with this theorizing, the lower literacy-higher receptivity link is mediated by perceptions of AI as magical and is moderated among tasks not assumed to require distinctly human attributes. These findings suggest that companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development towards consumers with lower AI literacy. Additionally, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal, indicating that maintaining an aura of magic around AI could be beneficial for adoption.

Lewin Day:

Down in Florida, Miami-Dade County is famous for three things—sun, sand, and school bus traffic cameras. The city has implemented an automatic camera system on its school bus fleet known as BusPatrol. The cameras film cars that blow past school buses when they’re loading and unloading passengers—and automatically issue fines to offending drivers.

This might sound like a high-tech solution to a nothing problem, but that’s sadly not the case. As covered by NBC Miami, over 11,500 violations were recorded in the first few weeks of the 2024/2025 school year—or roughly 1,600 violations per school day. The sheer volume of incidents prompted Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office to release a video of some of the worst offenders blowing past school buses with lights flashing and stop signs out.

Isaac Shorr:

“That story was killed by the editors, and they gave no explanation for that either,” he said. “So that general experience, you know, obviously the public doesn’t know about those things, but as a reporter having witnessed the way in which the two candidates-”

“We just get called, like, ‘the terrible mainstream media.’ It’s like you don’t understand the process there,” interjected Palmeri.

“Well, you also don’t understand the dumb decisions of cowardly editors that are made above us,” agreed Caputo.

Todd Milewski

McIntosh said in an interview last year that the distribution likely will mirror how back damages are allocated in the settlement. Football players were expected to get around 75% of damages, with men’s and women’s basketball players getting 20% and other athletes getting 5%.

David Lat:

According to Shapiro, these events reflected the “illiberal takeover of legal education”—the subject of his new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. I interviewed Shapiro—about Lawless, whether the intellectual climates at law schools have improved since his near-cancellation at Georgetown, and what can be done to protect and promote free speech and intellectual diversity in higher education—in the latest episode of the Original Jurisdiction podcast.

Fabius Maximus:

Essential reading about an inflection point in US history (2016 – 2024), showing the weaponization of DoJ and the security services (no longer law enforcement agencies).

Alvin Chang:

6:00 am

In this story, we’ll go through 24 hours of a typical weekend day in 2021. We know what people did – and who they did it with – because, since 2003, the American Time Use Survey has asked people to track how they use their time.

By the end of the day, we’ll learn that Martin’s isolation isn’t unique. In fact, loneliness has become a far more common experience in the last few decades – and it was supercharged by the pandemic.

We’ll follow a handful of people, including Martin. Let’s meet everyone else!

Sara Randazzo, Matt Barnum & Julie Jargon:

Students in grades one through 12 now spend an average of 98 minutes on school-issued devices during the school day—more than 20% of the average instructional time—according to data that educational software company Lightspeed Systems analyzed at the request of The Wall Street Journal. 

Andrew Crocker & Matthew Guariglia:

Better late than never: last night a federal district court held that backdoor searches of databases full of Americans’ private communications collected under Section 702 ordinarily require a warrant. The landmark ruling comes in a criminal case, United States v. Hasbajrami, after more than a decade of litigation, and over four years since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that backdoor searches constitute “separate Fourth Amendment events” and directed the district court to determine a warrant was required. Now, that has been officially decreed.

In the intervening years, Congress has reauthorized Section 702 multiple times, each time ignoring overwhelming evidence that the FBI and the intelligence community abuse their access to databases of warrantlessly collected messages and other data. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which Congress assigned with the primary role of judicial oversight of Section 702, has also repeatedly dismissed arguments that the backdoor searches violate the Fourth Amendment, giving the intelligence community endless do-overs despite its repeated transgressions of even lax safeguards on these searches.

This decision sheds light on the government’s liberal use of what is essential a “finders keepers” rule regarding your communication data. As a legal authority, FISA Section 702 allows the intelligence community to collect a massive amount of communications data from overseas in the name of “national security.” But, in cases where one side of that conversation is a person on US soil, that data is still collected and retained in large databases searchable by federal law enforcement. Because the US-side of these communications is already collected and just sitting there, the government has claimed that law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to sift through them. EFF argued for over a decade that this is unconstitutional, and now a federal court agrees with us.

Glenn Greenwald

Criticizing Israeli government policy can now get you punished at Harvard. Today, Harvard adopted an expansive version of the viewpoint-discriminatory IHRA definition of anti-Semitism — one that appears to make belief in Zionism a protected status.

Taleb:

A first general rule: whenever we hear of a constraint on free speech, it is to protect Israel.

The second general rule: whenever we hear of a site or organization officially devoted to free-speech, its true mission is to stifle free speech when it comes to Israel.

Jay Baxter Keith Coleman Lucas Neumann Emily Thai

The team that built X’s Community Notes talks about their design process and the philosophy behind their approach to combatting false information on the platform

Glenn Greenwald:

Despite what a flagrantly deranged conspiracy theory it was (and was exposed as being), it wasn’t harmless. As I always said, its greatest sin wasn’t that it was a journalistic fraud, but a US Security State ploy.

This is what it did — and still does:

Joseph Cox:

A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.

Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The company’s founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment.  

Corrinne Hess:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion has been removed from his position after an internal review found “concerns about financial operations and fiscal judgements,” according to the school. 

LaVar Charleston has led the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement for three years. 

He will leave his role as vice chancellor and return to his backup appointment as clinical professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis in the School of Education. 

Jeff Wagner:

Per public records, the guy who was just bounced as UW-Madison Chief Diversity Officer made over $308,000 a year! That’s not a typo! $308,000! Tony Evers makes $165,000. A Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice makes $185,000. Something is way out of whack. govsalaries.com/charleston-lav…

WILL

An estimated 14% of students in Wisconsin school choice programs have a special needs disability, according to a new analysis conducted by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and School Choice Wisconsin (SCW).

The Quotes: Will Flanders, Research Director at WILL, stated: “The data is clear. Wisconsin’s school choice programs serve thousands of students with disabilities—far more than choice opponents acknowledge. The Department of Public Instruction’s method of counting grossly undercounts these students. This fuels a false narrative about private schools’ commitment to serving children with disabilities.”

Mike Metoff, Director of Research at SCW, added, “This research shows why official state estimates greatly understate the actual number of choice students with disabilities. Our data is consistent with prior scholarly work and dispel misinformation circulated in some media outlets and by opponents of school choice programs.”

Will Flanders:

Given that Superintendent Underly appears to not even understand what DPI’s actions regarding the Forward Exam have resulted in, the results of this records request are vital. If Underly is checked out, who are the “experts” actually setting academic standards?

—Much more on reduced rigor and Jill Underly.

Dairyland Sentinel Files Open Records Request with DPI Over Forward Exam Benchmark Changes

Kayla Huynh:

“There’s not a whole lot of research on it. But when I taught traditionally, it just wasn’t working.  The kids were zoning out during the lesson part, and then I’d have to keep explaining it all over.”

—-

2007 math forum audio video 

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Remedial math

Madison’s most recent Math Task Force

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

John Chesto:

Jones said the UI fund currently has slightly more than $2 billion, and is projected to run out of money by the end of 2027, even with the rate increases.

In a prepared statement on Monday, Healey expressed both frustration and optimism about the situation.

“We were dismayed to uncover early on in our term that the previous administration misspent billions of dollars in federal relief funds and that our state was facing what could have been a more than $3 billion tab to pay it back,” Healey said. “For the past year and a half, we have engaged in extensive negotiations with the U.S. Department of Labor to minimize the impact on Massachusetts residents, businesses and our economy. . . . It is incredibly frustrating that the prior administration allowed this to happen, but we are going to use this as a moment to come together with the business and labor community to make meaningful reforms to the Unemployment Insurance system.”

Miles Klee

Now, under a court order from Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the records of those previously confidential internal dialogues have been unsealed, and appear to confirm Zuckerberg’s decision to greenlight the transfer of pirated, copyrighted LibGen data to improve Llama — despite concerns about a backlash. In an email to Joelle Pineau, vice president of AI research at Meta, Sony Theakanath, director of product management, wrote, “After a prior escalation to MZ [Mark Zuckerberg], GenAI has been approved to use LibGen for Llama 3 […] with a number of agreed upon mitigations.” The note observed that including the LibGen material would help them reach certain performance benchmarks, and alluded to industry rumors that other AI companies, including OpenAI and Mistral AI, are “using the library for their models.” In the same email, Theakanath wrote that under no circumstances would Meta publicly disclose its use of LibGen.

Toni Airaksinen:

A group of educators has published a guide on implementing “Black Feminist Mathematical Pedagogies” in classrooms, arguing that such an approach is necessary because minorities—especially Black girls—face “violence and trauma” in math education.

“When Black female students are repeatedly disciplined for being social, loud, or goofy in the mathematics classroom, they experience mathematical violence,” claim the authors of Designing Mathematics Curricula That Center Students’ Brilliance.

The research team—including Lara Jaisen, Michael Lolkus, doctoral student Marlena Eanes Snowden, and Dr. Leslie Dietiker of Wheelock College—contends that while many believe math is politically neutral, it is actually “steeped in whiteness and heteromasculinity.”

“Whiteness is a global phenomenon, impacting marginalized students and communities… and mathematics curricula are saturated in whiteness.”

The academics assert that “whiteness” is pervasive in math classes and curriculum structures, explicitly stating:

“As a culture, whiteness is toxic in society and in education. More specifically, in society, whiteness presents through norms including—but not limited to—perfectionism, a sense of urgency, individualism, and objectivity.”

WILL:

Since at least 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has made changes that obscure the true performance of schools, making it harder for Wisconsin families to make informed decisions about their children’s education. Today, Senator John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Representative Bob Wittke (R-Caledonia) introduced new legislation (LRB-0976) aimed at restoring transparency and accountability to Wisconsin’s K-12 testing regime.

The bill represents an important step in restoring the ability of parents, policymakers, and taxpayers to assess how well Wisconsin’s schools are doing across the public, charter, and private voucher sectors. Here, we will explain what the bill does, but we first begin with a look at what a mess DPI has made of accountability over the past few years.

Beginning in the 2020-21 school year, DPI has made a number of changes to Wisconsin’s academic accountability standards that have made them far less rigorous.  These changes were all made unilaterally by the Department without any input from the legislature or Governor. The key changes were:

• 2020-21 School Year: DPI lowered the cut points on the state’s report cards, allowing more schools and districts to be rated as three stars or higher (“Meets Expectations” or above) without any improvement in performance.

———

obscuring performance data and hindering informed decision-making

———

Kyle Koenen:

This is just wrong. The standards are no longer aligned with national standards (NAEP). Average school proficiency jumped by 14% in math and 13.2% in ELA, despite most evidence actually pointing to lower student achievement. This was mostly the result of lowered cut points.

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 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?

JD Busch:

A few years back, I did what any reasonable parent would do after their kids came home from Chicago schools quoting Che Guevara and rattling off gender theory jargon that would give Judith Butler a headache: I pulled the plug after realizing the K-12 curriculum was infected with a mind virus embedded in the very standards and teacher education.

If you’re a Chicago parent sick of the status quo, you can pull your kids out and give them a real education — one that’s about justice, not “social justice.” Heck, you can even make it work while staying in the city if you’re brave enough and willing to drive a few miles out of state.

The results? Let’s just say I’m no longer the dad defending his kids against charges of racism for questioning whether BLM was anti-Semitic from the start (yes, this happened at a Chicago private school and Lane Tech).

What I learned yanking my kids out is that the obsession with race, gender, and all manners of victimology and suicidal empathy at these schools has sucked away time for academic excellence and building children of sound moral character.

My now 8th grader, formerly a student at a Chicago private school that worked its way into the “wrong headlines” for going woke, has gone from academic roadkill (pushed along and told he was “doing fine”) to a full-blown scholar-athlete. This is the same kid who, upon leaving his so-called elite private school, tested behind grade level in math and reading and was admitted to his new school on academic probation.

Fast forward to today, and he’s not just catching up — he’s crushing it. Three years on, my son is safely in the top quartile in state assessments, playing high school sports this spring (despite being in middle school), and learning what real accountability looks like.

Quinton Klabon:

Wisconsin students per teacher
2011: 15.1
2020: 14.3
2023: 13.7
2024: 13.7
Non-teaching staff follows that trend.

Pandemic funds supported more staff, so that is normal! 2025 numbers will show if ratios remain low due to more special-needs diagnoses and retaining pandemic staff.

——-

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 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?

Matt Ridley:

The significance of 2014 is that this was when the Obama administration responded to anxiety among some scientists about a series of experiments that made influenza viruses potentially more dangerous to people – by banning federal funding for any such gain-of-function experiments.

Yet from June 2014 money flowed from Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to support experimentswhich led to gain-of-functionin Wuhan in China via an organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance. There, SARS-like viruses ‘gained’ the function in certain experiments of becoming 10,000 times more infectious in humanised mice. (Both the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance have denied any wrongdoing.

more.

Further, attorneys for the defendant argued that the majority of the jury in Washington DC is made of a federal employees. This video is meant to inflame a jury, it has no probative value, and therefore is a violation of federal rule of evidence 401 (which by the way they teach like on the first day of criminal procedure in law school).

District Court Judge Bates declined the motion and allowed the prosecutor to include the video montage.

A Conversation With Stephen Kotkin

Earlier this year, in trying to sketch out a way forward for the United States, you wrote this in Foreign Affairs: “The government and philanthropists should redirect significant higher education funding to community colleges that meet or exceed performance metrics. States should launch an ambitious rollout of vocational schools and training, whether reintroducing them in existing high schools or opening new self-standing ones in partnership with employers at the ground level. Beyond human capital, the United States needs to spark a housing construction boom by drastically reducing environmental regulations and to eliminate subsidies for builders, letting the market work. The country also needs to institute national service for young people, perhaps with an intergenerational component, to rekindle broad civic consciousness and a sense of everyone being in this together.”

How would you rate the Trump administration’s chances of grasping this challenge and taking those kinds of steps?

When radio was introduced on a mass scale, many elites panicked: “This is the end of democracy, the end of civilization, what are we going to do? They can just broadcast anything and everything right into the living rooms of people, unfiltered, we cannot control what they say.” The establishment couldn’t censor it, and over the radio someone could just say anything and could just make stuff up. And Mussolini was great at radio, and Goebbels was amazing at radio. And lo and behold, we got Franklin Roosevelt, who mastered the medium and was a transformative president; whether one approves or disapproves of what he did, it was significant and enduring.

And so we’ve been through this before, with radio. It was very destabilizing, and yet we managed to assimilate it. And then we got the TV version of that story, which was even worse because it was images, not just audio. And again, they could just broadcast anything and everything right into people’s living rooms. They could just say anything they wanted to, and the establishment, the self-assigned filters, couldn’t censor it. And we got Kennedy, as opposed to his opponent, Richard Nixon, who sweated on TV and was mopping his brow while Kennedy shined and beamed.

And now we have social media, which is potentially even more destabilizing for an open society. Everyone’s their own National Enquirer, and everyone is connected. And everyone can broadcast these previously fringe conspiracy theories that are now mainstream. Not because everybody believes them. I don’t know whether more people believe them now than did before. But everybody can see them, hear them, propagate them, forward them.

We always disagree on what the truth is. But now we have a problem with the truth regime. The truth regime is how we determine the truth: evidence, argument, proof. But that truth regime has been destabilized. No one has the truth alone, and we should argue about the truth. But we used to have a consensus on how we got to the truth and how we recognized truth. Not anymore. So how are we going to manage this, to assimilate this new technology and media?

——

more.

The performance of power in the arena and in the Oval Office.

Chris Gtossack

Oftentimes in your “intro to proofs” class or your first “discrete math” class or something similar, you’ll be shown problems of the form “prove that for  is a multiple of  for every ”… But where do these problems come from? And have you ever stopped to think how magical this is? If I gave you some random polynomial in  and asked you if it always output multiples of , the answer would almost always be “no”! So if you really needed to come up with an example of this phenomenon, how would you do it? In this blog post, we give one approach!

I want to give some sort of attribution for this, since I remember reading about this exact topic… like a long time ago. Maybe 6 or 7 years ago? I’m sure that I saved the relevant article¹ in my zotero, but I can’t find it for the life of me! Regardless, I want to emphasize that the whole idea for this topic (using Pólya-Redfield counting to build these divisibility problems) is not mine.

I’ve wanted to write a post on Pólya-Redfield counting for years now, since it was a pet topic of mine as an undergrad, but I think I was always planning too big a scope. This is a very bite-sized problem, and I won’t go into the theory very deeply, so I think it should make for a blog post I can finish in a day².

Let’s get to it!

Jessica Seaman

Superintendent Alex Marrero sent a memo to Denver Public Schools’ principals last week ahead of President Donald Trump’s return to office, offering training about what they and their front-office staff should do if federal immigration officers show up at their schools.

School leaders, he wrote, should deny U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entry into their buildings. Next, staff shoul …

With apologies to Dr. Suess.

Nearing 21 years of the school blog….. (!), events sometimes bring a loud chuckle to my presence.

And, so it was earlier today, when I saw the following:

and remembered Sarah Manski’s aborted 2013 Madison School Board Candidacy.

A few links:

Sarah Manski and the messed up Madison school board election

Commentary on Sarah Manski’s Sudden School Board Candidacy Withdrawal

How else does one explain Sarah Manski’s endorsement from the leader of the State Assembly Democrats, Peter Barca of Kenosha?

Steve Hsu:

This is a must-read interview if you follow AI.

mp.weixin.qq.com/s/r9zZaEgqAa_l…

DeepSeek is one of the top LLMs in the world and its inference costs are a tiny fraction of competitors’ bc of architectural innovation, sparsity of weights, etc. DS v2 caused a huge price war in LLM inference in China.

——-

🎉 DeepSeek-R1 is now live and open source, rivaling OpenAI’s Model o1. Available on web, app, and API. Click for details.

DeepThink from DeepSeek

Glenn Greenwald:

2020 fun with Sen. Chuck Schumer

and:

Everything Democrats and corporate media falsely claimed Trump would do with the pardon power to destroy democracy and the rule of law– pardon all his family members and all his political allies — were things Trump didn’t do.

They were, however, all things that Biden did:

more:

Is this still how Congressman @TedLieu feels?

We’re supposed to have civilian rule in the US, not military rule.

But these generals constantly subverted and sabotaged Trump’s foreign policy because they disagreed with it, while the media justified and cheered it, as here.

Nothing Trump did was more threatening than this:

Batya Ungar-Sargon:

Absolutely insane to hear Amy Klobuchar talk about the rule of law at the exact moment it’s announced that Joe Biden just pardoned the rest of his family.

John Cullen:

Obama launched a bio-war with China in 2014.

He approved Gain of Function after the pause, on a bird flu virus that was already spreading in China.

4 changes by Kawaoka, rendered H7N9 bird flu 200x more deadly.
Then, it was deployed.
Cost? $611,416.00

Hans Mahncke:

The fact that Fauci’s pardon specifically and explicitly addresses his Covid-related offenses, while being backdated to 2014—the year the gain-of-function ban took effect, which Fauci circumvented by outsourcing experiments to China—speaks volumes as to what this is really about.

S.P. Glasby

We investigate the combinatorics of permutations underlying the the daily word game Waffle, and learn why some games are easy to solve while extreme games are very hard. A perfect unscrambling must have precisely 11 orbits, with at least one of length 1, on the 21 squares.

Ross Douthat interviews Marc Andreessen:

“And then… Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution.”

“Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees. Things got really aggressive during that period. And so I go from watching Brian Williams every night and just being lied to 500 nights in a row to, basically, reading the Mueller report, reading the Horowitz I.G. report and being like, ‘Oh, my God, none of this is true.’ And then you try to explain to people, ‘This isn’t true.’ And then they get really mad at you because how can you possibly have any sympathy for a fascist?”

More.

pdf flyer.

Learn more about the Feller School, here.

Mike Dimatteo

He’s a 10-year teacher based in Seattle from what I gather, and teachers love his book Just Tell Them as well as his presentations.

What he speaks on is common sense, or used to be, in education, until it was over-tinkered with by other Ph.Ds rooted in the world of what I’ll call “touchy-feelyism” and “discovery learning” where rather than being the Sage on the Stage, the teacher becomes the Guide on the Side.

Holly Ramer:

Vermont’s child welfare agency relied on baseless allegations about a pregnant woman’s mental health to secretly investigate her and win custody of her daughter before the baby was born, according to a lawsuit that alleges the state routinely targets and tracks pregnant women deemed unsuitable for parenthood.

The ACLU of Vermont and Pregnancy Justice, a national advocacy group, on Wednesday sued the Vermont Department for Children and Families, a counseling center and the hospital where the woman gave birth in February 2022. The lawsuit seeks both an end to what it calls an illegal surveillance program and unspecified monetary damages for the woman, who is identified only by her initials, A.V.

According to the complaint, the director of a homeless shelter where A.V. briefly stayed in January 2022 told the child welfare agency that she appeared to have untreated paranoia, dissociative behaviors and PTSD. The state opened an investigation and later spoke to the woman’s counselor, midwife and a hospital social worker, despite having no jurisdiction over fetuses and all without her knowledge.

Glenn Greenwald:

The only thing more stunning than watching the US Government forcibly close a speech, information and community social media platform that 170 million of its citizens voluntarily chose to use is seeing that it’s Trump, almost alone in DC, fighting to keep it open:

Tom Cotton:

Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from DOJ, but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs. Think about it.

Camilla Turner:

PayPal admits it terminated Molly Kingsley’s account after she spoke out against Covid vaccinations for children and school closures

Rand Paul:

Ignominious! Anthony Fauci will go down in history as the first government scientist to be preemptively pardoned for a crime.

Michael Crichton:

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not
speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can.
— Mark Twain

My topic for today is the prevalence of speculation in media. What does it mean? Why has it become so ubiquitous? Should we do something about it? If so, what? And why? Should we care at all? Isn’t speculation valuable? Isn’t it natural? And so on.

I will join this speculative trend and speculate about why there is so much speculation. In keeping with the trend, I will try to express my views without any factual support, simply providing you with a series of bald assertions.

This is not my natural style, and it’s going to be a challenge for me, but I will do my best. Some of you may see that I have written out my talk, which is already a contradiction of principle. To keep within the spirit of our time, it should really be off
the top of my head.

Before we begin, I’d like to clarify a definition. By the media I mean movies, television, Internet, books, newspapers and magazines. Again, in keeping with the general trend of speculation, let’s not make too many fine distinctions.

Marta Prato:

(i) gross migration is asymmetric, with brain drain (net emigration) from the EU to the United States; (ii) migrants increase their patenting by 33% a year after migration; (iii) migrants continue working with inventors at origin after moving, although less frequently; (iv) migrants’ productivity gains spill over to their collaborators at origin, who increase patenting by 16% a year when a co-inventor emigrates.

Alex Tabarrok:

Notice that migration doesn’t just relocate talent from the EU to the US; it amplifies talent. Preventing “brain drain” would create short-term gains for the EU but retaining talent at lower productivity would stifle long-term innovation and patenting, ultimately slowing growth for both the EU and the world. In short, even the EU gains from sending talent to the US! The effect would be much larger if we can import high-skill immigrants from countries where their skills are even less productive than in the EU. Ideally, other nations could replicate the US institutions that supercharge productivity, creating global economic gains. For now, however, the US seem to be a unique Galt’s Gulch for talent.

Prato concludes with a practical suggestion:

Tyler Cowen:

Here is some video.  And a related note, don’t forget the ERA either.  WSJ article here.

Kayla Huynh:

The department last year surveyed nearly 24,500 seventh through 12th graders in 17 Dane County public school districts, including Madison, Sun Prairie and Middleton-Cross Plains. Students participate every three years in the Dane County Youth Assessment, which measures their mental, physical and behavioral well-being. 

Anxiety and depression rates have risen steadily among student respondents since 2009, according to an analysis of the results. But indicators of mental health challenges dropped last year to 2015 levels, the Department of Human Services reported.

Still, about 60% of high schoolers said they felt lonely “sometimes” or “always.” 

Jimmy Tobias:

As Covid-19 was spreading fear and spurring lockdowns across the United States in early 2020, the scientific journal Nature Medicine published a paper on March 17 titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Written by five renowned academic scientists, it played an important early role in shaping the debate about a fiercely controversial topic: the origin of the virus that has killed millions since it emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Did it spill from animals to humans in nature, on a farm, in a market? Or did it leak from a lab like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading center of coronavirus research in China? Drawing on “comparative analysis of genomic data,” the paper’s authors wrote that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated construct.” Toward the end of the paper, they added, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” in explaining the origin of the virus. Instead, the scientists strongly favored a natural origin, arguing that the virus likely spilled from bats into humans, possibly by way of an intermediate animal host.

The peer-reviewed paper proved to be hugely influential. Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, announced its findings in a post on the agency’s website in late March 2020. When asked during an April 17 press briefing at the White House about concerns that SARS-CoV-2 had come out of a lab in China, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who recently stepped down as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, referenced the paper, describing its conclusions and calling its authors “a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists.” The paper has been accessed online more than 5.7 million times and has been cited by more than 2,000 media outlets. ABC News, for instance, ran an article on March 27 titled “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes Covid-19 ‘Is Not a Laboratory Construct.’” In that article, one of the paper’s authors, Robert Garry, is quoted saying, “There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy theories that went to a pretty high level, so we felt it was important to get a team together to examine evidence of this new coronavirus to determine what we could about the origin.”

Matt Taibbi:

It seems possible the advertised “braintrust” had leeway to make policy choices, up to a point. Klain for instance seems significantly responsible for the too-online-wokester quotient in the Biden presidency, trying to name pestilent Internet creature Neera Tanden to head the OMB. Having been “Ebola Czar” under Obama, he also seems to have been the force behind the push for mandates and the generally hyper-obnoxious tone of White House vaccine policy, appearing to physically arouse Chuck Todd when discussing vaccines during the peak of the pandemic.

On larger questions, it’s not clear Klain figured at all. Responding to criticisms that he let a helpless outpatient sink the 2024 ticket, Klain blamed voters. “There was no cover-up,” he just told The Guardian. “A Democratic congressman ran against him in the primary in 2024, with age as the only issue, and voters overwhelmingly voted for Biden.” This was after the party barred the congressman in question, Dean Phillips, from its numerous closed primaries and spent small fortunes on legal challenges to keep other candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, and the No Labels party from opposing Biden.

These are the key questions. Who fixed the primaries, directed the ballot access suits, crushed third parties, and green-lit myriad Trump prosecutions and other lawfare schemes? Most importantly, who kicked Biden off the ticket and replaced him with Kamala Harris? There’s not a lot of evidence that either Biden or Harris had much to do with those decisions. Jill Biden noted recently that “Joe has an incredible capacity to forgive,” but “that means I end up being the holder of grudges,” a remark seemingly directed toward Pelosi. As the Washington Post just put it, in a story that is about Jill Biden’s memories of last summer yet somehow completely avoids explaining who decided her husband’s career was over during that time:

Salem’s Zito

It had been less than a year since I’d written, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

This was just one more example of that.

Sarah Kuta

That’s where human volunteers come in. By transcribing digital pages, volunteers make it easier for scholars, genealogists and curious history buffs to find and read historical documents.

Getting started is easy: All you need to do is sign up online. The free program is open to anyone with an internet connection.

“There’s no application,” Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives, tells USA Today’s Elizabeth Weise. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”

If you’re not confident in your cursive deciphering skills, the National Archives has other tasks available, too—such as “tagging” documents that other volunteers have already transcribed. Tagging helps improve the searchability of records.

Already, more than 5,000 volunteers have joined the Citizen Archivist program. Many are hard at work on “missions,” or groups of documents that need transcribing and tagging. For example, current missions include Revolutionary War pension files and employee contracts from 1866 to 1870.

Steven Greenhut:

Insurance is the foundation of homeownership and the economy, but California leaders have dilly-dallied in the face of a long-running crisis

The American Spectator might not be at the top of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reading list, but had it been, he would have known that California’s teetering insurance system was just one particularly bad wildfire away from disaster. Sure, he knew that insurers were fleeing the state in the face of its absurd price-control system that doesn’t allow them to price policies to reflect their actual risk, but that knowledge didn’t spur him to make the matter a priority.

In September 2023, I wrote the following on these pages after lawmakers decided to punt on insurance reform rather than take on their anti-corporate allies:

Julia Turner, Kathryn Blanchard, and Rajeev Darolia:

In this report, we explore which public sectors are most commonly represented among individuals who have benefitted, or are on track to benefit, from the PSLF program. Specifically, we present new data detailing which sectors borrowers have most commonly worked in to be eligible for PSLF. We show that the most common sector among those who have received forgiveness through PSLF is education, representing 43% of all employers associated with the program. The majority of these employers in the education sector are K-12 education systems, representing 28% of all employer occurrences in the data. Other common employer subsectors among borrowers who have received PSLF are state and local governments and healthcare organizations. Among the most frequent individual employers are those related to military service including the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the branches of the U.S. military.

Ashley Belanger

Just a few days after more than 700 million new users flooded RedNote—which Time noted is “the most apolitical social platform in China”—rumors began swirling that RedNote may soon start segregating American users and other foreign IPs from the app’s Chinese users.

In the “TikTokCringe” subreddit, a video from a RedNote user with red eyes, presumably swollen from tears, suggested that Americans had possibly ruined the app for Chinese Americans who rely on RedNote to stay current on Chinese news and culture.

“RedNote or Xiaohongshu released an update in the greater China region with the function to separate out foreign IPs, and there are now talks of moving all foreign IPs to a separate server and having a different IP for those who are in the greater China area,” the Reddit poster said. “I know through VPNs and other ways, people are still able to access the app, but essentially this is gonna kill the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with

Becky Jacobs

Edgewood College’s plan to transition to a new name could cost as much as $250,000 and take a few years to fully implement, but changes are expected to start this summer.

“Edgewood University” will better reflect what the private Catholic school has evolved into since its founding in Madison nearly a century ago, said President Andrew Manion.

In 1927, Edgewood College operated as a junior college for women to study liberal arts. The institution then grew to train teachers on a coed campus. In more recent years, the school has essentially operated as a university without being designated as one, Manion said.

Henry Farrell

The Biden administration, in its final days, has laid out an extraordinarily ambitious plan to use its chokepoint on high end semiconductors to control global AI. The best explanation I’ve seen is this Bloomberg scoop by Mackenzie Hawkins and Jenny Leonard, published a few days before the draft plan was published. The draft plan itself is available on the Federal Register (warning – there is a lot of export controls lawyerly jargon).

The idea is to use export controls to restrict the selling and use of to achieve two U.S. policy goals. The first is its desire to keep the most advanced AI out of the grasp of China, for fear that China will use strong AI to undermine U.S. security. The second is its desire to allow some degree of continued access to semiconductors and AI in most countries, to mitigate the anticipated shrieks of protest from big U.S. firms that don’t want to see their export markets disappear.

Hence, this highly complex plan involves controlling access to the advanced semiconductors that are used to train advanced AI models, as well as the model ‘weights’ themselves. The plan continues to very sharply restrict China’s and some other countries’ access to highly advanced semiconductors (what Hawkins and Leonard call Tier 3 countries – the actual terminology is more technical and abstruse). It allows a much more liberal regime of exports without much in the way of controls to a small group of ‘Tier 1’ countries – important allies and other friendlies such as Norway and Ireland. Finally, there is a large intermediary zone of other countries, including some traditional U.S. allies, that will be allowed access to U.S. semiconductors, but under complex restrictions. This loosely extends the regime that the U.S. is trying to make Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates comply with (in which they would agree to detach their data centers from Chinese technologies in exchange for semiconductor access) to the rest of the world. As Hawkins and Leonard describe it:

Thomas Schatz:

The last time a comprehensive review of the federal government was completed, the budget was $848 billion, the national debt was $1.6 trillion, and the debt to GDP ratio was 38 percent.  That was in 1984, when the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, better known as the Grace Commission, sent its final report to President Ronald Reagan. 

The budget is now $7 trillion, the national debt is $35.3 trillion, and the debt to GDP ratio is 121.6 percent.  The need for a new government efficiency commission could not be clearer. 

Shaked Koplewitz writes:

Doesn’t Lynn’s IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect?

That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn’t exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn’t we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)?

And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense – they’d do equally badly at tests, but in their case it’s because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer.

(Or a slightly more complicated version of this – e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don’t come naturally).

David Farenthold:

A nonprofit founded by Stacey Abrams, a Georgia Democrat, admitted on Wednesday that it had violated state law by concealing the fact that it had campaigned for her during her 2018 run for governor.

At the time of that campaign, the group was led by Raphael Warnock, who was later elected to the Senate as a Democrat from Georgia.

At a meeting of the state’s ethics commission, the nonprofit New Georgia Project conceded that it had paid for fliers and door-to-door canvassers telling voters to support Ms. Abrams and other Democrats.

Chris Rickert:

But while some changes were made, a check of all 16 of the school districts that serve Dane County found that 10 had SROs and four were looking at bringing them in for the first time or bringing them back.

The Deerfield School District, enrollment 746, was the only other district besides Madison not interested in having an officer in its schools.

On Monday, in response to inquiries from the Wisconsin State Journal, the Madison School Board released a statement saying the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School has “unsurprisingly … raised questions about what schools are doing to keep students and staff safe” and that “some of those questions are around the need for School Resource Officers.”

“While the Board does not advocate for installing school resource officers, we know that safe and secure schools require various systems and protocols,” the board said. “Our district has these items in place, and they are routinely evaluated to ensure they operate at the highest level. In partnership with our schools, the Office of Safety and local law enforcement, we maintain open communication and conduct safety training and emergency drills together.”

—-

In Milwaukee, police respond to thousands of calls to MPS: ‘Why do we call the police?’

Dan Lennington:

Below is the internal document from UW-Madison showing that their financial aid office employs a “whites only” criteria for the Kipp Scholarship every year. This is illegal: @WILawLiberty & @yaf have filed a complaint.

EXCLUSIVE: Amy Wax has sued the University of Pennsylvania for race discrimination, arguing that Penn punishes speech that offends racial minorities but not speech that offends Jews.

Here is a table from the complaint, which was filed in federal court this morning.🧵 pic.twitter.com/mIdKNDftfs

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 16, 2025

Maggie Macintosh:

The Manitoba Human Rights Commission’s probe into the struggles of students with reading disabilities is moving ahead, despite years of delays participants say have added to their frustration and suffering.

Executive director Karen Sharma told the Free Press that both stakeholder and public consultations have been postponed in recent months due to “other pressing priorities, including an unexpectedly busy litigation agenda.”

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more

Marc Andreessen

TRANSCRIPT: EMERGENCY BRIEFING ON WOKE CATASTROPHE – DAY 15
Location: Underground Bunker, Zhongnanhai Compound
Date: January 30, 2025
Time: 05:00 CST
Present: President Xi Jinping, Dr. Liu Ming (Digital Culture Specialist), Dr. Zhang Wei (Social Movements Analyst)

more.

Pre-Interview Energy Cleansing Ritual 🌸
Burned sage to cleanse Zhongnanhai of its problematic imperial energy while repeating my daily affirmation: “Every surveillance camera is a witness to my truth.” So blessed to be holding space for China’s journey toward radical compliance enforcement!

AJ Bayatpour

We’re doing profiles on all 3 candidates for state superintendent.

We start with Brittany Kinser’s first interview since her campaign launch. Would she accept Republicans raising funds for her?

“Anyone who aligns…I will work with anyone and attend a fundraiser from anyone”

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2 of 3 Madison School Board 2025 April election seats are unopposed ….

If you have coaches and a bad curriculum, what will the coaches be coaching you to do?

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 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?