School Information System – Curated Education Information

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Eric Kaufmann, Leif Rasmussen, and Jonah Davids:

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?

Notes on Higher Education Value

Magen McArdle:

I think the correct formulation is that colleges are in trouble because the wage premium stagnated, but during the lag before people figured that out, colleges increased tuition to the point where expected value declined for marginal students. This led to a proliferation of low value master’s programs, as students vied to differentiate themselves and increase the wage premium, but schools got very good at extracting most of that premium in the form of tuition, and many of those programs were negative NPV. The public now views college as a risk-reward calculation rather than a guarantee of a good job, and that means colleges outside the top elite no longer have anything like the pricing power they enjoyed 15 years ago. The demographic crunch makes that problem even worse. But what makes it existential is that during the boom, many schools assumed cost structures that cannot be sustained in the current climate, but are very difficult to cut because so much of the cost is either in debt/buildings/maintenance/tenured professors—and also because the things that are easiest to cut while maintaining the educational mission are the various amenities that do nothing for education, but attract tuition paying students.

——-

Commentary.

Equity Reduces Excellence

Is diversity truly our strength? Does equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) improve excellence?

Since 2017, the prestigious Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program, which sets the agenda for Canadian academic research, has moved dramatically in the direction of implementing EDI ideology and quotas.

Regrettably, prioritizing EDI results in an “equity-excellence trade-off”: Canadian taxpayers are funding cultural socialist activism among elite professionals at the expense of the disinterested pursuit of truth.

And, Canadian research is paying a high cost for its unfettered embrace of EDI, both through the non-meritorious appointment of less qualified Black, Indigenous, and female chairs, and by diverting millions of dollars to left-wing scholar-activist research.

According to our analysis — the first of its kind — EDI ideology is costing approximately $36 million per year, equivalent to a 12 per cent “tax” on the CRC’s $300 million annual budget.

While previous studies have examined demographic differences and the effects of EDI on organizational and team performance, none has examined its organizational-level consequences in academic research. This study fills that gap by testing EDI’s impact on research output in the CRC holders program from 2016 to 2025. It turns out, diversity is not merely neutral — it can actually lower performance.

To determine the scope of the EDI problem, we measured all award holders listed on the CRC site using the industry standard publication metric, the h-index, which combines both the number of articles a scholar has written or co-written with the number of times those articles have been cited by other researchers.

Edtech in the age of high-intensity distraction

Justin Reich

The learning apps and resources that teachers want kids to use almost always sit inside a browser that’s inside an operating system that’s inside a device.

Educators want those “containers” to be as invisible as possible, and for a time they were. But technology companies want those containers to be impossible to ignore.

And so our devices, browsers, and even now some of our most basic tools have become heat-seeking missiles for our attention, designed by the world’s brightest behavioral scientists to compel our eyeballs to linger on advertisements.

I love teaching with technology, but every year it’s getting harder to get my students to the good stuff.

I love teaching with technology, but every year it’s getting harder to get my students to the good stuff.

It wasn’t always this bad.

In 2003, I taught 9^th grade World History in a pilot classroom with a cart of WiFi-connected laptops, a set of 30 beautiful blue and orange clamshell Apple iBooks.

I wasn’t the very first teacher in the United States to have a one-to-one, internet-connected classroom, but there weren’t too many folks earlier than me.

My school had an intranet service called FirstClass that did just about everything that Google for Education does today: collaborative documents, shared file folders, instant messaging, class syllabi, assignment submissions, and all the good stuff.

How SF’s most powerful mom became a political force

Ezra Wallach;

“We’re accountable to no one but kids and parents,” says Meredith Dodson. | Source: Morgan Ellis/The Standard

Everyone in San Francisco education politics says they’re focused on what’s best for the kids. Not everyone agrees on what that means.

That disagreement came to a head after March 2020, when parents watched schools in big cities like Atlanta, Miami, and Nashville reopen while San Francisco’s stayed shut. They watched the school board in SF debate renaming campuses but not reopening them, and watched as their children disengaged from Zoom lessons. Some believed it was a health hazard to reopen schools; others felt that students could suffer irreparable harm — educational and psychological — from keeping them closed.

Meredith Dodson was part of a group that believed keeping SF schools closed was harming students. She and other parents messaged on Facebook, trading stories about kids who wouldn’t turn on their cameras or could barely get out of bed, who just wanted to return to some semblance of a normal childhood.

Dodson was an unlikely public figure to emerge from the chaos that descended on the San Francisco Unified School District during that period. Raised by a public school teacher in New York, she came to the Bay Area in 2007 for a graduate degree in education policy from UC Berkeley and built a career in public policy and nonprofit consulting focused on early education for low-income families. She describes herself as an “introvert who’s learned how to be an extrovert in an extroverted world.”

She says she once told her husband, back when they were dating, that they’d have to break up if he ever ran for office.

Six years later, Dodson is leaving her post as the salaried executive director of what began as a single-issue coalition called Decreasing the Distance and grew into a political force known as SF Parents.

When The Standard visited the group’s modest office on Page Street, near Hayes Valley, last week, the walls were covered with flyers and maps of the city. Most of the desks were empty. The workers, Dodson explained, were out in the field.

Dodson looked back on six years spent fighting over school closures, recalls, elections, and the direction of the district as relentlessly “nasty, stressful and anxiety-provoking.” “We’re accountable to no one but kids and parents. That’s why it’s tolerable,” she said. “Otherwise there’s no way I would deal with that.”

‘Pajama Paparazzi’: High School Football Sidelines Clogged With Creators

Ellyn Briggs:

Duncanville vs. DeSoto is the kind of high school football game that attracts a crowd.

The two Texas powerhouses—separated by less than 10 miles of Dallas suburb—routinely produce dozens of high-level Division I prospects, making their matchup a marquee event on the state’s fall sports calendar. But in recent years, the sidelines have become almost as jam-packed as the stands.

High-profile games like Duncanville-DeSoto used to draw “probably 10 to 15 members of local and regional media,” says 247Sports national recruiting analyst Mike Roach, who has been covering high school football in the South for a decade. Now, that crew can find themselves along the hash marks with “upwards of 70 or 80 other photographers and videographers.”

Front Office Sports spoke with high school administrators, coaches, and local journalists from around the country who described a similar phenomenon: Sidelines and baselines are increasingly populated with a new class of “private content creators,” often hired by players or their parents via casual, modest-sum agreements.

Social media has made sports-content creation into an accessible job—or at least a decent side hustle. Meanwhile, the proliferation of NIL opportunities throughout the high school ranks has left young athletes and their families with an insatiable appetite for personalized photos and videos. (As one AD in Ohio puts it: “Everyone has a media company now.”)

For schools and state athletic associations, this crush of creators presents a new balancing act and operational headache—accommodating the demand for more coverage while also maintaining safe, orderly playing environments. There is no universal playbook just yet.

“Initiative Overload”

Larry Ferlazzo:

Every teacher knows the burden and the ridiculousness of the annual “new initiatives” that come out of their district central offices.

And every teacher know that most of them go nowhere.

I would strongly recommend that every district superintendent read this Harvard Business Review article, Is Your Company Suffering from Initiative Overload? (they can also listen to it as a podcast).

Just about everything in it can be applied to schools.

Good luck to everybody out there who’s supposed to implement this year’s new initiatives!

——

“application bloat”

The AI “ghosts” contaminating academic publishing

Emanuel Maiberg:

“Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen have appeared as volcano experts, astronauts, thriller protagonists, podcast hosts, and academic co-authors across hundreds of independently produced AI-generated documents, never having lived,” a new preprint research paper from Samsung and the University of Warsaw said.

The paper identified a number of names that co-authored hundreds of AI-generated academic papers, articles, and books. The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields.

The paper, titled “The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing,” utilized a known phenomenon where certain LLMs will keep coming up with the same names in certain contexts. For example, In June, Sam wrote about how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude were likely to use the name Elias Thorne in fiction they generated, and that the character was often a lighthouse keeper. Similarly, users noticed that if they ask ChatGPT to generate a software developer, their name will often be Marcus Chen.

It’s change-or-die time for America’s overpriced, smugly lefty colleges

NY post Editorial

Colleges across the country are facing declining enrollments and gaps in funding. AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File

US colleges face a deadly crisis, with enrollments plummeting and budgets crashing — and they did it to themselves.

The die-back is huge: More than 130 private nonprofit colleges and universities announced closures or mergers these last five years, and (per the Huron Consulting Group) “as many as 442 of the 1,700 private nonprofit degree-granting institutions” — about one in four — “will arrive at the cusp of financial exigency” and face closure over the next decade.

Yes, one piece of the puzzle is demographic: Falling birth rates mean fewer college-age kids.

But another part is the plummeting value of a college degree, as four-year schools arrogantly hiked prices on the false assumption that they’d forever remain the only major path to success.

These schools have pushed tuition up to $100,000-a-year ranges, even as the earnings gap between college and just-high-school grads fell 28% from 2015 to 2025.

Unemployment for recent college grads, 5.7% in June, also now exceeds the overall rate, 4.1% — when it was 5.9% for grads vs. 9.3% for all workers just 15 years ago.

Millions of job postings no longer include a bachelor’s-degree requirement, including at major companies like Apple, IBM and Hilton: These companies don’t think today’s colleges teach what their workers need to know.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Chicago Dug Itself Out of a Financial Hole. Now It’s Sliding Back In

Jeanne Whalen:

In 2022, the city of Chicago hit a milestone it had been targeting for seven years: It lifted a key credit rating out of junk status.

Pandemic-stimulus funds from the federal government and more-disciplined pension-fund contributions helped the city rise out of non-investment-grade status with Moody’s, to a level one notch above junk. Fitch, which had been holding Chicago in low investment-grade territory, also began issuing upgrades. Other agencies lifted the outlook on their investment-grade ratings from stable to positive.

Fast forward to today and Chicago is slipping back in the wrong direction.

This year, the city had to bridge a $1.2 billion deficit to balance the budget, as Illinois law requires. Next year, the city will have to close a roughly $700 million deficit, a mayoral task force estimates.

Structural budget deficits, political disorder and ballooning payments on pensions and debt service have prompted three ratings firms to downgrade Chicago’s credit since January 2025—to levels two or three notches above junk. Moody’s last summer lowered Chicago’s outlook to stable from positive while maintaining its rating one notch above junk.

On the paradox of willpower

Meghan O’Gieblyn

The people who raised me also used to talk about backsliding, the apathy and moral laxness that crept into a believer’s life after the initial propulsion of conversion lost steam. It would be easy to see my return to alcohol and religion that way—an exhausted capitulation after years of effort, a return to default settings. But that’s not how it felt. What I remember most clearly is the intensity of my desire, the profound longing to lose myself in the rituals of Mass or the stupefied oblivion of a blackout, and the utter conviction that these things were right, even as some part of me must have known they were wrong. These were choices I made willingly, even willfully, though on the bleakest days of the winter I confessed, I saw that I no longer understood what those words meant.

When I happened upon the Weil quote about attention and will, I felt the thrill of recognition that I’ve come to see as the signature of truth, the sense that you are learning for the first time something you have always known. I thought I understood what it meant. But after I put the index card on the wall above my desk and looked at it for many days, I saw that I didn’t understand it at all. Or I grasped only the last part, about the ineffectiveness of the will, which was something I’d known for a long time—not through some mystical Platonic knowledge, but the way I’ve come to know most things in life: through repeated failure.

It’s possible, through sheer effort, to summon cheerfulness but not happiness; piety but not faith; seduction but not love; productivity but not genius. I know from experience that it’s impossible to will oneself out of an addiction. And I know that you cannot force yourself into faith, no matter how hard you pray or starve or grit your teeth. I want very much to live a good and virtuous life, without alcohol and drugs, which have made me miserable. And I still long to believe in God, despite the resounding silence that suggests that He does not exist, or is not interested in us, or in me specifically. But my actions suggest that part of me does not actually want these things—or that I want them only provisionally, or part of the time. My will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things, and easily distracted.

Is attention the solution? If so, what must I pay attention to?

Silence Dogood. Richard Saunders. Benevolus. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. All were pen names that allowed Franklin to say things he couldn’t have otherwise said

H.W. Brands

But Franklin’s ingenuity showed most clearly in his invention, or rather recurrent reinvention, of himself. In the course of his life, Franklin devised dozens of authorial personas in print, which allowed him to challenge authority, identify folly and promote human progress with an unsparing vigor he never could have achieved under his own name.

Franklin created his first alter ego when he was in his teens: a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. Mrs. Dogood allowed Franklin to evade an embargo against publication imposed by his jealous elder brother James, a printer to whom Ben was apprenticed. James had a newspaper and sought contributors, but he refused Ben’s submissions as corrosive of the master-apprentice relationship. So Ben disguised his handwriting and surreptitiously slipped letters from Mrs. Dogood under the door of the print shop. Franklin’s account of her life delighted readers while underscoring the difficulties facing widows and women of the day.

Polly Baker was a literal—as opposed to an actual—descendant of Silence Dogood. Polly had the misfortune of falling in love with men who had no intention of marrying her. When she became pregnant, she was brought before the magistrates to be punished for her crime of fornication. In defending herself, she said she had done nothing more than obey the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply. Anyway, she asked, why was no sanction brought against the men who were equally responsible for her illegitimate children and more responsible for the corruption, as the court insisted, of the honest if imperfect woman who stood before it?

Franklin’s most famous alter ego was Richard Saunders, an astronomer and a polymath who annually published Poor Richard’s Almanack. The almanac provided information on holidays, solstices, phases of the moon and the like. What made it special were the squibs of advice and humor that filled otherwise blank spots on the pages. “Fish and visitors stink in three days” recommended itself to guests and hosts alike. “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead” chided the garrulity of blabbers and the naïveté of confiders. (Franklin’s Saunders didn’t invent adages so much as he improved on earlier versions.)

A Message From the Wisconsin DPI Literacy Director

Kaylee Jackson:

September always brings a sense of possibility.

Across Wisconsin, students are returning to classrooms; educators are welcoming new learners, and families are settling into the routines of a new school year. It’s also when so much of the work we talk about throughout the year becomes real: helping every child become a strong, confident reader.

There is a lot happening in literacy across our state this year.

Wisconsin schools are continuing to strengthen reading instruction. Our Act 20 Early Literacy Coaching Program is bringing additional support directly to schools across the state. And at the Department of Public Instruction, we are working to complete Wisconsin’s Statewide Literacy Plan (WSLP), which will serve as a roadmap for how we work together to improve literacy outcomes across Wisconsin.

While these efforts may have different names, they share one goal: ensuring every Wisconsin learner engages in literacy and develops the knowledge, skills, and confidence to thrive in school, work, and life as a reader, writer, communicator, and critical thinker.

That goal belongs to all of us.

Much of the work of learning to read happens in classrooms, but the experiences that shape our students as readers happen everywhere. Families, libraries, community organizations, and schools all play a role. So do the everyday moments when children see the adults around them reading, writing, asking questions, and learning something new.

Our responsibility as a state is to make sure educators and schools have what they need to do this work well and to keep our focus on the students at the center of it.

As we begin this school year, that is what I hope we remember. Our conversations about assessments, policies, programs, and plans ultimately come back to the experiences of Wisconsin students and the opportunities we are creating for them.

We have important work ahead, and I am excited to continue doing it alongside educators, families, and communities across Wisconsin.

Here’s to a year filled with reading, learning, and possibilities.

Warmly,

Kaylee Jackson
Director, Office of Literacy
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

A special message from Kaylee Jackson, the Director of the Office of Literacy, welcoming Wisconsin students back and how excited she is to develop and grow literacy across the state! pic.twitter.com/T9ultnOd7F

— Wisconsin DPI (@WisconsinDPI) September 1, 2026

Quinton Klabon:

The next report comes next month!

1. How is coaching going?

2. Did everybody finish training?

3. Will everybody respond?

Mayors & K-12 (un)achievement

Marilyn Muller:

Rahm Emanuel (@RahmEmanuel) is suddenly preaching phonics, science of reading, and teacher training. How convenient.

He is the same mayor who ran Chicago Public Schools for eight years and never made evidence-based reading, writing, and math instruction the non-negotiable core of how classroom teachers were prepared or supported.

He closed 50 schools—the largest mass closing in U.S. history—overwhelmingly in Black neighborhoods, promising better academics. University of Chicago research found the closings did not deliver meaningful academic gains for the kids who were moved. Graduation rates rose. Proficiency did not keep pace. A later look at students who started elementary school on his watch showed large shares still not reading or doing math at grade level.

The deeper failure was upstream: teachers. Illinois teacher-prep programs have long been weak on the science of reading. NCTQ reviews found many did not adequately cover phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, and the other components that actually teach kids to decode. Chicago itself leaned on balanced-literacy approaches that mixed in practices the research does not support. Rahm lengthened the day and added pre-K. He did not systematically require or rebuild teacher preparation so that every classroom teacher could deliver explicit, evidence-based instruction in reading, writing, and math.

Now he points to Mississippi’s phonics-and-training model as the obvious answer and calls cultural fights a “distraction.” Parents who said the same thing for years—kids need to be taught to read first—were treated as the problem by his party. He does not get to rewrite that record because the polls moved and a 2028 run looks possible.

The argument is not that phonics is wrong. The argument is that Rahm had the power, the schools, and the teachers and did not fix the preparation pipeline when it counted. He does not get a clean slate. In fact… White liberals, like one of the K-12 cartel’s paid grifters in the attached screenshot, do NOT get a free pass either, @MSNOWNews.

Dissident Teacher:

I’m glad someone with Emanuel’s level of influence is paying attention. Still, even if he was secretary of the DOE at the national level, it wouldn’t matter — especially not given his history with unions. He’d have to flip REALLY hard on them to effect necessary structural changes, thereby negating a lifetime of hard-won political capital.

Someone like Emanuel could address this most effectively as governor. He’d then have the power to direct the state-level Department of Education they to take a Louisiana-style approach to literacy in the elementary grades and chop heads until it got done.

Even then, that would only BEGIN the battle to rein the unions in. In a place like Chicago (or NYC, or LA, or SF or Atlanta, etc.), the quid pro quo would be huge; the union would probably want significantly more teachers (read: union members) before they would agree to it. They’d argue class sizes and training days, and implementation metrics, but at the end of the day, the union would be fighting for it’s actual raison d’etre: increasing it’s power as a political machine.

There’s history with Oakland on this. The Board and district leadership all agreed to go back to phonics, but a critical mass of teachers refused after it was implemented; it was too hard, they needed smaller class sizes to do it, etc. The District dropped the initiative pretty quickly and Oakland continues to churn out minority grads who spend 13 years in school for pretty much nothing. In their defense, OUSD has brought phonics back into the classroom now, but tenure protections in blue states like California are so strong that if a teacher quietly refuses to instruct that way, or does the dog and pony show version when the boss is watching, or tries, but is ineffective, there’s almost nothing a principal can do about her performance except offer more training that she can be forced to attend, but cannot be held accountable for implementing.

The result? Parents blame teachers, admin blames teachers, but because teachers can’t be fired, teachers shrug and point fingers right back (fairly, in many cases) and just keep on doing what demonstrably doesn’t work. And the beat goes on…

Even if a strong leader like Emanuel could do the right thing — hold teachers and admin accountable if they failed to improve outcomes for the mass of students — that would leave a huge mark economically that no leader wants to face. K-12 public schools are basically a jobs program/voting bloc. To attract the people who actually could get the job done, you’d likely have to pay a lot more in salaries and benefits and you’d end up firing a lot of people who have no real skill to earn a similar salary in the private sector.

Could it be done? In a right-to-work state like Louisiana, yes. But I watch those too and the political will isn’t there, even when the legislative bodies are red. Again: no politician wants to piss off a voting bloc as big as teachers.

In big blue urban metros the changes that are needed won’t happen unless there’s a full collapse of the existing system.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

——-

Jeanne Allen:

Sorry. This is NOT Education Reform.

@RahmEmanuel is using poll-tested language and if you listen to the actual words, he’s not saying anything novel, bold or transformational.

He’s just saying what the campaign whisperers are telling him –

Let’s go back to basics… (How?)
Teach what a pronoun is not talk about your pronoun… (That doesn’t say stop mistreating our children)
We have to wake up (and??)

Parents? Unions? Freedom? Failure? Nada.

Let’s stop praising people who talk the talk. Please.

——-

I asked currently Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway about our $28K per student system’s long term, disastrous literacy results at a campaign event some years ago. Her response: “Talk to the School Board”.

An Update on One City Schools (Monona, WI)

Kaleem Caire’s FB post (screenshot):

Today, we will welcome back more than 400 children to One City Schools. Nearly 85,000 children will walk through the doors of traditional public, public charter, and private K-12 schools in Dane County, Wisconsin, and another 17,500 will attend child care programs.

That’s more than 100,000 children being taught and cared for by (regulated) early childhood and K-12 educators in our state’s second largest and fastest growing county, and the county with the strongest growth economy as well.

I am proud of my team. Today, One City continues to be the largest employer ever started by an African American in Dane County history (not counting Alliant Energy Corporation, which was created by a merger of three utilities led by CEO Erroll Davis Erroll, Jr., one of the most notable corporate leaders in American history, who passed away at age 81 in April 2026). We currently employ 100 people, and as of this year, have brought in more than $98 million in revenue, with $57 million of this coming from philanthropic donations. All but $1.85 million of these donations have come from Dane County.

We also have the greatest staff and client (children and families) diversity of any medium and large employer in Dane County. Last week, I reported to our Board of Directors that we are starting the 2026-27 school year with a workforce where 58.1% of our employees are staff of color, with 56% residing in Madison and 94% in Dane County. This group will serve a student body projected to be 95% students of color, 65% low-income, and 23% with special education needs.

This is also a team that, according to our last Wisconsin School Report Card published in fall 2025 by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, achieved academic growth among children enrolled in our middle school – One City Preparatory Academy – at or better than 98.7% of ALL middle schools in Wisconsin, and #1 in Dane County.

Likewise, “academic growth” (which is what parents send their children to school for) at One City Elementary School was at or better than 75.8% of ALL elementary schools in Wisconsin.

Among Dane County’s medium and large employers, One City is a market leader in employing women overall and in leadership roles, employing men of color in education, and contracting with minority and women-owned businesses.

Since its founding in 2014, One City has never paid a wage lower than $15 per hour, and all full-time employees are eligible for comprehensive health benefits and our matching 401K program. All employees who would be first-time home buyers are also eligible to participate in the Own It: Building Black Wealth home ownership and wealth building program, which One City helped launch. To date, 32 staff and families of our Scholars have purchased their first home through this program, which provides an 8-week home ownership course, credit repair assistance, and a $19,000 grant toward their down payment, no repayment required. And yes, staff and families who are not Black have purchased homes through this program, too.

Additionally, we provide a 50% tuition discount to staff whose children attend our 5-Star early childhood center, One City Preschool, with a maximum of 14 staff able to participate due to budget limitations and our commitment to maximizing seats available to the broader community. One City Preschool was the first early childhood center outside of Mainland China to be selected by its founder to operate the highly regarded Anji Play program (www.AnjiPlay.com). Several of our staff have been to China to train in their preschools.

BTW, during COVID, we didn’t lay off one employee, and kept several of our contractors (janitorial, landscaping, etc.) fully employed and whole financially. We also raised and gave out more than $135,000 to the families of children enrolled in our schools to help them pay rent, mortgages, phone bills, and utilities, and cover groceries, supplies, and prescription drugs.

When we endured a budget crisis after a major donor’s pledge expired and federal aid for early childhood education was substantially cut, ALL members of our executive team took three months of salary reduction to avoid cutting the pay of any other employee or laying off staff critical to the needs and education of our children. I took four months.

Everyone did it without argument or disagreement, even though it hurt.
This is how much our team loves our children and is dedicated to them, our families, our staff, and the greater Madison community.

And from 2014 to 2021, I was always the third or fourth highest paid employee at One City. Having earned well north of $100K since the year 2000, and with a family of seven to support, it hurt to earn a lot less than that, but I did it to help build One City and provide a fair, competitive wage and benefits to the staff who joined me in building it.

How many CEOs do you know do that?

Yes, a 55-year-old Black man named Kaleem Caire, who was born at the old Methodist Hospital in downtown Madison in 1971, and grew up in a low-income household in South Madison, raised by his aunt, grandparents, and extended family and friends, and who rarely saw his mother and only met his father twice (2004 and 2017), did this, along with dozens of dedicated team members and volunteers, and nearly 3,000 donors. And he did it while being opposed by hundreds of people who were raised in far more privilege than him, and who still take shots at him on social media and through the press.

No, One City Schools is not perfect. What school or employer is?

Moreover, what school has done all that I have mentioned here, with an annual budget leaner than every school district and almost every public school in Dane County, and with far greater public accountability and scrutiny? Think about it: imagine what already strong academic growth would rise to if One City received the same level of public funding as other public schools in Madison and Dane County? Imagine what those superintendents and school board members would feel like if they had to privately raise 30-40% of their operating budgets every year, while being required to serve all children, while enduring a much higher level of public accountability and annual academic, financial, and operational reviews like One City Schools does?

And we’ve accomplished so much more, with millions of children around the world and thousands here in Dane County benefiting from innovations we’ve helped establish and cultivate with partners near and far.

This is what’s possible when a community decides its children are worth the sacrifice.
There is still so much ground to cover. But if this is what we’ve done with less, imagine what we’ll do together with what’s still ahead of us.

I look forward to seeing our 400 Scholars walk through our doors with their parents today for their Ready, Set, Goal conferences, and tomorrow when the learning begins!

Onward.

P.S.

How are One City’s public charter schools funded?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aYTaCWkw5Yfq5lKiroU-srkGw1|1VIoL/view?usp=drivesdk

How are One City’s independent public charter schools held accountable?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YCcTcFovXKYLjgpekSZqsabXs30UoZUc/view?usp=drivesdk [PDF]

and

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18tDchWCz95fHLRfB_CSOvz2mQytsGU1B/view?usp=drivesdk [PDF]

How has One City led and partners on innovations in education?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VRT_WKFXoKswXK_Mv1j¡DI3AVrfZNxWf/view?usp=drivesdk

Despite the criticism, whether legitimate or not, we listen, we learn, we pivot, and we grow. One cannot deny our impact, because it’s real, and in Dane County, it’s unprecedented.

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Notes & Links: Kaleem Caire // One City Schools //

2011: The Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School: On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes).

———

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Which Graduate Degrees Are the Best Investment? (Why I Skipped My MBA)

Nick Maggiulli:

When I was 27 years old I was at a crossroads. I was five years into my career, yet I was stagnating. Though I was making six figures, which was great for my 20s, I knew I couldn’t make much more at my job. Without an advanced degree, my future compensation would be an endless chain of 3% annual “cost of living” adjustments and nothing more. At that moment, I knew I had to make a change.

So I considered getting an MBA. I did research on different programs, the kinds of roles they led to, and what I could reasonably earn after graduation. Unfortunately, that’s where my MBA journey ended.

After looking through the data, I discovered that the post-MBA salary (back in 2017) wasn’t that much higher than what I was already making. So why would I give up two years of income and pay $150,000 just to get a job where I’d earn about the same? While money isn’t the only reason to get an MBA, financially, I couldn’t justify it.

But here’s the real issue I was wrestling with: even if my earnings did increase after getting an MBA, how would I know that this was due to the degree itself and not just my increased age/experience?

This is called a counterfactual, or an alternate version of the world. If I got an MBA, the counterfactual would be how much I would’ve earned without one.

Of course, we can’t actually know the counterfactual. We can’t reverse a decision in the past and see how reality would’ve played out instead.

But there is something we can do. We can compare the earnings of those who got their MBA to those who didn’tget their MBA, but are similar in many other ways. Then we can find the present value of non-MBA lifetime earnings and compare that to the present value of the MBA graduates’ lifetime earnings (after netting out the cost of the program and the years of lost income)

State Bailouts; Will They Come?

Jeffrey Carter

Over the last 110 years, we have chipped away at the Constitution and the founding structure of America. We are a republic, but some of those changes have altered how that republic actually functions.

One important example is the 17th Amendment, which established the direct election of U.S. senators. Under the original Constitution, senators were chosen by state legislatures and were therefore accountable to the states themselves—not directly to the popular vote.

That change fundamentally altered the Senate. In some respects, it turned the Senate into a second House of Representatives, albeit with longer terms and different constitutional powers.

Why does that matter?

Look at the fiscal condition of states such as California and Illinois. The United States itself is carrying roughly $40 trillion in debt. These are not abstract numbers. Eventually, someone has to pay the bill.

During my foray into politics, I learned something else: a surprising number of people involved in government and politics are not particularly good at basic financial math. In fact, Nevada Treasurer candidate Drew Johnson couldn’t even calculate the price of a bond. He said, “Bond prices are just out there. You know what you are going to get.”

And that matters because government finance ultimately comes down to math.

Consider what happens when a state or municipality becomes financially distressed.

There are numerous municipal-bond ETFs, mutual funds, and institutional investors that hold municipal debt. Many investment mandates require them to remain invested in the asset class. As a result, they can continue purchasing small amounts of debt from financially troubled issuers such as Illinois or Chicago.

———-

Rachel Louise Ensign, Paul Overberg:

“Exploring the moral foundations of the Republic on the occasion of America’s 250th anniversary”

heritage:

To understand the Founders, you will read works of moral philosophy that informed — directly or indirectly — their views and their decisions, such as those of Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Locke, and others. The tradition the Founders inherited was a varied one, and the weekly pairings of historical and philosophical sources are designed to let you examine its continuities and divergences, not to presume them.

At the same time, the works of moral philosophy gathered here provide accounts of virtue and the good life that have commanded serious attention for millennia. So, although the course takes the historical questions about the Founding as the starting point, the course necessarily invites you to consider the soundness and ongoing relevance of the principles to which the Founders appealed. Are these principles — or some version of these principles — true?

Over eleven weeks, you will read philosophical sources that shaped the Founders’ understanding of the traditional values of virtue. You will also explore the relationship between virtue and individual liberty, and the extent to which the rule of law rests on a foundation of liberty and virtue and, at the same time, also reinforces those values. The course will end with a discussion of virtue in your own life today, both professionally and personally.

Seattle and D.C. Are Bucking the Trend by Attracting Families With Kids

Most big, expensive cities are losing kids as families struggle to cover the cost of living. The opposite is happening in Seattle and Washington, D.C., two pricey coastal cities diverging from the broader demographic trajectory.

The population of children under 18 in both cities grew 10% between 2015 and 2024, a bigger increase than in many family-friendly Sunbelt locales. Both places had an influx of affluent young professionals in the 2000s and 2010s who stayed once they had kids. Many of those sticking around value diversity and urban experiences more than their own suburban-dwelling parents did.

The cities have vast differences, but possess a few common ingredients that seem to have spurred their growing population of children: high-paying jobs and decent local schools.

In Seattle, tech workers said relocating to the pricier San Francisco area would be a lifestyle downgrade. In D.C., home prices are up markedly in the nearby suburbs, which often come with crushing commutes.

The uptick in kids in these places may be short-lived. Falling birthrates mean both could start to see their child populations decline again soon.

For now, though, there aren’t just more kids in these two cities—the makeup of the child population is dramatically different than it was a decade ago. In both places, the number of children in families with incomes below $100,000 fell while the number from families with higher incomes rose sharply, even after adjusting for inflation.

The two places aren’t perfect. Both are expensive and have above-average rates of certain crimes. Many students in D.C. public schools don’t meet performance standards. Open drug use is common in some areas of Seattle. Still, they offer some lessons on how to keep residents once they have kids and attract new families too.

Kids These Days: What we are really arguing about

Paul Bloom:

My bet is that in the 1940s, adults really missed those great teens in the 1890s, who knew the value of work (only half of them went to school) and weren’t yet coddled by indoor toilets.

None of this means that the worriers are mistaken or that we are in the grip of a moral panic (though I might make this argument in another post). But it does suggest that the popularity of despair can’t be taken as good evidence that this despair is warranted.

But still, things really are rough for kids today. I opened this post with a graph from Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation. Here’s another, looking at American children ages 10-14.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: U.S. Workers Are Paying More for Healthcare, and Next Year Will Be Worse

Anna Wilde Mathews & Peter Loftus:

Surging healthcare costs are walloping U.S. workers, and they will only worsen next year. For 2027, employers may be facing the biggest health-insurance increase in at least two decades.

Americans with workplace coverage are expected to spend an average $5,297 this year on healthcare, $388 more than 2025, according to a new estimate from benefits-consulting firm Aon. The spending represents a combination of payroll deductions for premiums and out-of-pocket charges like deductibles and copays.

The burden is likely to grow significantly next year, when U.S. employers expect their healthcare costs to go up by 11.1%, according to a new survey from WTW, another big benefits consultant—the steepest rise in more than 20 years.

That would represent the fifth year of escalating increases, according to WTW. “Employers are telling us that this is utterly unsustainable,” said Jeff Levin-Scherz, population-health leader at WTW. Expensive cancer treatments and wide adoption of weight-loss drugs are among the factors pushing up spending.

At larger companies, the rapid rise has moved decisions around health benefits from the domain of human-resources executives into the C-suite, said Mike Pasterick, North America health-solutions leader at Aon. “We’re seeing a lot of interest now from the finance organization and even the CEO and the board.”

Hennepin County leads USA in federal spending

Bill Glahn:

A study by the financial website SmartAsset found that Minnesota’s largest county led America in receiving federal taxpayer money. The Center Square reported on the study last week,

Hennepin County in Minnesota has received the most federal spending of any county both in Minnesota and the U.S. overall in the past year and a half.

Details,

For total federal dollars, Hennepin County saw more than $286 billion in federal spending committed to it during the 18-month period examined. That is the most of any county nationally and accounts for about 4.7% of the roughly $6 trillion tracked in the study.

Hennepin County hosts less than 0.4 percent of America’s total population. To receive 4.7 percent off all federal spending represents 12 times the expected result.

Per capita, that comes out to $222,702 in spending per Hennepin County resident.

For those readers who live in the county, do you feel like you’re seeing any of that cash?

The story mentions a big military contract for a company in Plymouth. But nearly all of the money is tied up in a single category. The Center Square quoted the study’s author,

Inside Cal Berkeley Law Review’s Admissions Team, Where ‘Diverse Life Experience’ Matters More Than ‘Editing Abilities’

Aaron Sibarium:

When Maya Parthasarathy, a student editor at the University of California, Berkeley’s law journal, the California Law Review, applied for the journal’s admissions committee in 2025, she knew exactly what her colleagues wanted to hear.

A former deputy at Politico, where she oversaw the hiring of entry-level journalists, Parthasarathy explained how her experience in media would help her promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at the University of California, Berkeley’s flagship law journal, which selects eight editors each year to evaluate candidates for the law review.

We Finally Know What Happened To Kari From MythBusters

“When I first joined [Politico], I realized that the newsroom lacked the diversity necessary to reduce bias and improve our content,” Parthasarathy wrote in her application to the admissions committee. To fix the problem, she said, her team at Politico “did not consider grades,” instead creating a “holistic” review process that included, among other things, an editing test.

“For candidates on the borderline of a passing score on our test, we considered strengths they showed in other parts of their applications, and experiences they would bring to the table,” Parthasarathy said. “At the end of my tenure at Politico, our team had grown from just one person of color — me — to fifty percent hires from underrepresented backgrounds.”

“Most States Will See a Steady Decline in High School Graduates”

Brooke Schultz:

Seven states, however, will see declines of more than 20 percent, and five high population states (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania) are anticipated to account for three-fourths of the total projected decline between 2023 and 2041.

The decline is dependent on two factors, the report states: declining births, which fell sharply starting in 2008 due to the Great Recession and have continued to fall, and the rate of students progressing through school to earn diplomas.

Births have dipped nearly 1 percent each year between 2008 and 2023, with a sharp drop in 2020. Those numbers have since leveled out, but there’s still a consistent decrease, the report shows.

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How large would Gen X, Millennials, and Generation Z have been without abortion?

K-12 Governance, $pending & Outcomes: Remedial Reading

WATCH: “The number one class in college today for freshmen is remedial reading. That’s an indictment of what’s happening in this country and we need as adults to wake up to it.”@RahmEmanuel isn't holding back on the state of American education on @Morning_Joe. pic.twitter.com/7NNfxOr8Co

— Dale Chu (@Dale_Chu) August 31, 2026

Mamdani Clashes With Teachers Union, Citing Fiscal Constraints

James Fanelli:

Mamdani filed a lawsuit last week to stop a law passed by the City Council to provide one-time $10,000 bonuses to low-paid school aides who typically work with students with special needs. The lawsuit marked a surprising rift between the Democratic socialist mayor and the United Federation of Teachers, the influential labor group that represents the aides, as well as teachers in the nation’s largest school system. It was also an about-face for Mamdani, who had the endorsement of the union in last year’s mayoral election and said during his campaign that he supported the bonuses.

The legal fight carries broad implications for a mayor who focused his campaign on affordability and has walked picket lines for workers seeking better wages. It has angered the teachers union and could complicate his relationship with unions representing other city workers who helped sweep him into office.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the 200,000-member teachers union, threatened an “all-out war” if Mamdani tried to stop the legislation in a New York Times interview earlier this summer.

“It’s always surprising when you see a big rift between the teachers unions and Democratic politicians, especially a pretty far-left Democratic politician,” said Michael Petrilli, president of Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education reform think tank. “Conventional wisdom would say that Democratic politicians try not to get sideways with important parts of their constituency and the teachers unions are such an important base.”

What does Syracuse University teach for $100,000 per year?

Philip Greenspun:

“Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills” (WSJ) covers the financial slide at this Rust Belt school pretty well, but doesn’t dig into the product. Let’s pick a few professors at Syracuse and see what a $100,000/year customer might learn from they/them.

Scholar-activist, Professor Kishi Animashaun Ducre:

“The Black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice”, “Katrina as Postscript to Racialized Spaces in Louisiana.”, and “Addressing Environmental and Food Justice toward Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Poisoning and Imprisoning Youth”

Professor PJ DiPietro (she/they, her/them, hers/their):

engages decolonial thinking, hemispheric Latinx studies, and critical theories of race, gender, transgender, and sexuality

“The Coloniality of Gender”; “Trans of Color is an Oxymoron. Humans, nonHuman Animals, and the Bodies Beneath Animals”; “Co-Creating Transdisciplinary Decolonial Curricula”; “Hallucinating Knowing: (Extra)Ordinary Consciousness, more-than-human Perception, and other Decolonizing Remedios within Latina and Xicana Feminist and Queer Theories”

Capitalism

If you want evidence that capitalism is a force for good, just visit a grocery store.

My ode to the humble American supermarket, for @WSJFreeEx pic.twitter.com/BffCflszHE

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) August 31, 2026

NYC socialist leaders caught living large, quietly collecting millions from real estate flips

David Spector

Two NYC Democratic Socialists of America leaders have been caught living the ultimate capitalist dream, with one quietly collecting millions in real estate flips and another nesting in a sleek $500,000 Brooklyn apartment, The Post has learned.

Labor Coordinator Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth sold aluxe Upper West Side triplex in a brownstone building for $2.4 million on Sept. 12, 2022, according to public records.

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DSA: “Daddy’s Savings Account”.

Civics: Massachusetts City May Not Display Statues of Catholic Saints, State’s Highest Court Rules

Jane Coleman

The ACLU-backed plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the statues convey the government’s support for one religion over others, the Court ruled. The city counters that displaying the statues on its new public safety building pays tribute to first responders, without advancing religion.

Civics: “A criminal alien sexually assaulted a victim at UW-Madison this weekend”

Tom Tiffany & Gracie Tuohy

Then the Dane County Sheriff refused an immigration detainer request.

And we know @DavidCCrowley opposes local police working with immigration agents.

Wisconsin cannot afford sanctuary-state policies.

———

Two Fitchburg men were arrested early Saturday morning after University of Wisconsin-Madison police say they sexually assaulted someone on the Goodspeed Family Pier.

UWPD received a call just after 4 a.m. on August 29 about a disturbance on the pier near Alumni Park. Officers responded and learned a sexual assault had occurred. They arrested two suspects and took them into custody.

According to UWPD, the suspects and victim, are not affiliated with UW-Madison. They met at a bar earlier and walked to the pier. The victim was attacked and sexually assaulted as they attempted to leave, according to police.

Yorfred H. Marcano Gutierrez, 31, of Fitchburg, and Arturo R. Santos Albujas, 27, of Fitchburg, were booked into the Dane County Jail. Both face tentative charges of second-degree sexual assault with force, strangulation and suffocation, battery and false imprisonment.

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“Fitchburg men” have ICE detainers that it looks like the Dane Co Sheriff is refusing to honor.

Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids

Russell Shaw

Updated on September 25, 2024, at 5:12 p.m. ET

Sign up for Raising Resilient Children, Russell Shaw’s eight-week guide to parenting with more happiness and less worry.When my son was a toddler, he liked to run in our driveway until he fell. He would then turn to me to see if he was hurt. If my face betrayed worry or if I audibly gasped, he would wail. If I maintained equanimity, he would brush himself off and get back to running. Learning that I could so powerfully influence his mental state was a revelation. Here was this human being who was counting on me to make sense of the world—not just how to tie his shoes or recite the ABCs, but how to feel.

Years later, when he was in middle school, this lesson came back to me. One night while doing homework, my son told me about a classmate who had been unkind to him. My first instinct was to rush to fix it—email the parents, call the school, demand action. (Calling his teachers would have been complicated, given my role as the head of the school.) But instead of reacting, I paused. “That sounds hard. What did you do?”

“I decided not to hang out with him for a while,” my son replied. “I’m going to try playing soccer at lunch instead.”

“That’s a great solution,” I said, and he went back to his homework.

These otherwise ordinary parenting moments crystallized for me an important truth: Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.

Learning vs Doing

Hades:

Learning faster is about getting better at turning information into understanding, and understanding into action. Do this long enough, and something interesting happens. Learning itself becomes easier.

Every skill you build makes another skill easier to understand. Every problem you solve gives you experience for the next one. Every useful idea becomes a foundation for ideas you haven’t discovered yet.

We will need more (not fewer) scientists

Josh Bloom:

Post 5 Analysis

Labor displacement concerns with new technology are neither new nor entirely unfounded. The Luddites, pegged by history as railing against new machinery, were in essence a labor movement¹. Telephone switchboard operators dwindled rapidly following electromechanical switching investments². In a recent essay, Bill Gates called for policy intervention to stem the wholesale move from human labor to machines: “AI will take on work in law, customer service, medicine, software, and manufacturing… There will be some new jobs, but without the right policies, there will be far fewer than exist today.”³

Now, as AI becomes more enmeshed not just in our daily lives but in our scientific work, and looking back on such historical labor displacements, there is a growing unease among scientists, and especially among budding scientists. What will be the role of scientists when increasingly capable AI co-scientists⁴ can participate in precisely the sort of labor we have trained (or are training) to do?

Attitudes towards AI in science were captured in a survey of scientists in 2023 (which feels like many generations ago now)⁵. While most saw AI assisting with faster data processing and computation, many worried about entrenched bias, easier fraud, and superficial understanding — labor displacement concerns weren’t at the fore, but clearly on the horizon. Fast forward to 2026, as AI co-scientists have become demonstrably better, astronomer David Hogg’s white paper “Why do we do astrophysics?” identifies two diametrically opposed future paths: one where AI is kept at bay, and one where it sweeps through our profession and relegates scientists to observers, rather than owners, of the scientific process. And Terence Tao, in a recent ICM lecture capturing the transformative moment for AI in mathematics, argues that the real crisis is not machine capability but values: AI can accelerate proof and verification, and it falls to the community — not the technology companies — to decide what mathematical work is actually for⁶.

No Country for Mediocre Mathematicians

garvy

Lying is a core part of communicating mathematics. We lie to kindergarteners when explaining fractions. We lie to fourth graders when approaching limits. We lie to the NSF whenever they question if our work is important. And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician. It is much easier to claim “I love learning the laws of life,” while literally handwaving, than it is for me to flashback to the twenty or so pivotal moments that lead to me walking out of Gainesville with a PhD in Arithmetic Geometry. Unfortunately, career choice happens to be the prototypical conversation starter, so hundreds of times over the past year I have had to choose between an hour-long walkthrough of my childhood or a small fib, and I am yet to tell anyone of my days at puzzle camp. Lying, however, is a sin, and those small fibs add up to a big wrong. Hence, I make it a point to counteract my lies by always answering the inevitable follow-up question of “what do you plan to do with a math PhD?” honestly, with a shrug.

Other mathematicians answer easily with “math.” I’ve met career mathematicians before. They’re at conferences and universities and on twitter (sometimes). If you find the right corner of our sphere, you can stand inches away from the “smartest people alive” and revel in their brilliance. But strangely enough, every time I interact with any of these geniuses, the feeling I get is never an awe-filled “golly this person’s intellect dwarfs mine,” but instead an unblinking “wow this mfer really loves math.” Passion, talent, and ego intertwine inseparably in the world of academic mathematics, and my personal passion has always been scarce. When I first met with my advisor, Jeremy, he asked me whether or not I planned on pursuing academia, which I responded to in the negative. I figured it required momentum and ego beyond what I had accrued. Jeremy did not disagree, and so we set off to learn at a leisurely pace for four years. At the end of my doctorate, I had accidentally accomplished more than we both expected: solo published in a solid journal, presented at a big conference, and stowed some cash from a couple teaching awards too. Three decades ago this curriculum vitae would have been a golden ticket to almost any post-doc position of my liking, but it is impossible to live today three decades ago, and competition has done naught but accelerate. Jeremy and I were not mistaken to not believe in me.

Miriam Pinski explains why buses can’t solve all our problems.

Works in Progress:

We ask public transport to address problems it was never designed to solve. Bikeshare services are charged with reducing emissions and improving local air quality. Subway stations need to beautify the neighborhood. Buses are made to add union jobs. And every new transit project should reflect community input and empower residents. All of this impedes public transport’s ability to do its main job: transporting the public.

All these goals have merit. But each costs money and adds delay. The Transit Costs Projectdocuments how the Boston Green Line extension, completed a decade later than anticipated, added a three-kilometer bike and pedestrian path after 13 people advocated for it at a community meeting, at a staggering cost of $20 million.

Every extraneous goal trades off against moving as many people as possible and against the welfare of the poor, who use transit the most. While 91.5 percent of American households own at least one car, less than half (45 percent) of transit riders have a vehicle available to them at home.

Buses are a rounding error as a proportion of vehicles on the road, accounting for less than one percent of US transportation emissions. Yet they operate under more rules and regulations than personal cars do. Governments build roads, highways, and parking structures with much more focus on their primary mandate: to improve mobility. But transit agencies answer to a far longer list of requirements.

“The prime minister’s promotion of a Democratic operative from the United States raises questions about judgment, transparency and Canada’s ability to find its own talent”

Brian Lilley:

This week, it was reported that Carney was promoting a woman unknown to most Canadians to the position of chief operating officer in the PMO.

It appears to be a first for Canada to have a COO in the PMO, but it’s who the woman is that is truly interesting.
Maia Johnson is currently listed in the government employee directory as Carney’s “Senior Advisor, United States Stakeholder Strategy.” That sounds like a job for someone at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, not someone working on Wellington St. in Ottawa.

This is where it gets really interesting, though, because Johnson, the woman advising Carney on how to deal with Donald Trump, is an American and a registered Democrat with ties to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

In what world does it make sense for Johnson to be a senior advisor on Canada-U.S. relations, never mind be elevated to the position of chief operating officer of Canada’s PMO?

Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills

Douglas Belkin, Roshan Fernandez:

When he was the director of international student services at Syracuse University, Juan Tavares received a regular Saturday email from the dean of admissions reporting the tally of student applications, acceptances and enrollment deposits.

During the pandemic the numbers began to slide, so Tavares offered the admissions team seven suggestions to improve recruiting, he said. The recommendations centered on the idea that Syracuse was failing to recruit aggressively enough.

“The problem with Syracuse is that the school thinks of itself as like an Ivy, but it’s not,” Tavares said.

Tavares, who no longer works at the school, said his recommendations went nowhere.

In 2025, the weaknesses he had pointed out collided with President Trump’s high profile crackdown on student visas. Syracuse’s international enrollment numbers declined by half for undergraduate and graduate students.

Syracuse also failed to draw enough students overall—prompting it to offer emergency financial-aid packages to lure freshmen.

This school year, which began Aug. 24, enrollment fell short, sending the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall.

Syracuse also added nearly half a billion in debt to build desperately needed new dorms, which brought on a bond market reprimand. And it recently cut programs it said weren’t popular.

A national brand-name institution with a $2.5 billion endowment and a storied 150-year tradition is suddenly beginning to flail.

K-12 Tax & $pending climate: “Always compare prices to hourly wages to understand the true change in living standards”

Gale Pooley:

To examine the data from a different perspective, we calculated the change in the time prices of these 14 items relative to the change in the average hourly wage rate. We then calculated the abundance multiplier—a value indicating how many units you could buy today for the time it took to earn money to buy one unit in 2000. If there were no change, the abundance multiplier would equal one. A value below one indicates decreasing abundance, while a value above one reflects increasing abundance. We also calculated the percentage change in abundance for each item.

Star student rejected by 16 colleges, hired by Google, gets legal win in racial discrimination suit

Joshua Nelson:

A father in Palo Alto, California, is declaring a victory in court after a federal judge allowed a civil rights lawsuit alleging anti-Asian bias in college admissions to move forward.

Nan Zhong and his son, Stanley Zhong, filed federal lawsuits against several elite institutions, including the University of California system, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan and Cornell University. The complaints allege the universities engaged in “racially discriminatory admissions practices that disadvantage highly qualified Asian-American applicants.”

One of their cases will now proceed in part against the University of Washington after a federal judge granted the university defendants’ motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part.

“We got an exciting ruling from the judge,” Nan Zhong told Fox News Digital. “Effectively, the judge ruled in our favor by denying the university’s motion to dismiss. So, this is a major development in the lawsuit. That means the judge found enough factual allegations to support our allegation.”

Civics: New Zealand as Mediocristan

Deep Dish:

The experience got me thinking about New Zealand as a kind of spiritual aspirant to Nassim Taleb’s Mediocristan: a fictional province in which all your outcomes in life are mild and bounded, clustering tightly around the average. As a New Zealander, you are unlikely to be exposed to top-tier, world-beating opportunities, but you also don’t have to think twice about whether you can afford to go to the hospital.

The distribution of life outcomes in Mediocristan looks something like this:

Cross the border into Extremistan, and you enter the realm of wild randomness. Here, the distribution of life outcomes is fat-tailed: a single freakish event can outweigh all of the other data points combined. Trillionaires live next door to paupers. There are midgets the size of your fingernail, and giants as tall as skyscrapers. Every new technology has the potential to wipe the entire country out of existence, or create a paradise beyond the wildest dreams of its inhabitants.

If New Zealand is Mediocristan, then the spiritual counterpart to Extremistan is obviously the United States of America.

In the land of the brave and home of the free, the best thing that can happen to you is very, very good; the worst thing that can happen to you is very, very bad.

Here’s what the distribution of life outcomes looks like under the two regimes:

Obviously Taleb never intended to map this distinction onto actual countries, but let’s run with it for a moment.

New Zealand is mild and predictable because we are unusually good at cropping the left tail of the distribution: not only reducing the frequency of tail-risk events, but the magnitude of their impact.

How do we pull this off?

In a word: geography. New Zealand is a little pimple on the arse-end of the world. It’s possible that you, overseas reader, do not fully comprehend how isolated we are down here in the Pacific, so here is a perspective of the Earth that you have probably never even seen before:

WILL Challenges Another Unconstitutional Race-based Admissions Quota

Pat Garrett:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) called on the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), Governor Tony Evers, and the Wisconsin Higher Educational Aids Board (HEAB) to immediately suspend a state-mandated race-based admissions quota. We warn the governor that the quota is unconstitutional and is nearly identical to a race-based state program the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously struck down earlier this year following a WILL lawsuit.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel Rebecca Furdek stated, “Health care costs are rising, a skills gap in the medical field is on the horizon, and Wisconsin will soon see a shortfall of medical doctors. Yet Wisconsin’s own government imposes barriers on young people entering this crucial field, requiring MCW to enforce a race-based admissions quota in order to receive state funding This quota isn’t just unconstitutional; it’s an abuse of our tax dollars and worsens a looming workforce crisis that will impact us all. We should restore merit and equal treatment to the important field of medicine.”

Background: Wis. Stat. § 39.15(1)(c) requires MCW to “make every effort to ensure that at least 5 percent of the total enrollment” consists of “minority” students as a condition of receiving state funding. MCW also received over $428 million in federal funding in fiscal year 2025, meaning the admissions quota also may implicate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. WILL has filed a number of these complaints over the years, previously securing investigations from the Trump Administration.

In the Land of AI and Bamboo Forks

Virginia Postrel

To this Angeleno, by far the best analogy for Claude’s constitution is the show bible for a TV program. This siteoffers a good description of show bibles, as well as links to examples.3 Creating a show bible forces a prospective showrunner to do more than write a pilot episode. It requires articulating things like the show’s arc and tone and explains why the series should exist.

A show bible serves two purposes. It is first an outward-facing sales document designed to get the show sold. Once the show is in production, the bible becomes the document that different writers use to keep track of the show’s evolution and maintain its continuity.

An AI constitution, like a show bible, is an important coordination tool across time and teams. “A lot of different aspects of the model’s behavior maybe have been spread across a bunch of different teams,” says Carlsmith. “Having a constitution allows a centralized point of design and intention.” Claude’s constitution tries to articulate what Claude is and to create a stable—and positive—character.

I learned why that is such a hard problem. Training an LLM like Claude has two stages. Pre-training is the process of vacuuming up the contents of the internet and any other sources the trainers can get their hands on to create the “foundation model.” Here, the LLM absorbs the patterns and variety represented in the training corpus: a vast sea of Reddit with a tincture George Eliot. That’s the training that allows an LLM to predict what human behavior (e.g., writing, images) in similar circumstances would be like.

The more you tell an LLM about your context and goals in the prompt, so it has a good idea of “similar circumstances,” the more likely you are to be pleased with the result—a helpful tip I need to remember! You aren’t programming a computer with commands that will be taken literally. It needs to know the request’s context.

Post-training is an ongoing stage of active intervention in which developers tweak the model so that its behavior and persona become more desirable and stable. Anthropic wants Claude to act as the “helpful AI assistant” that prioritizes safety, ethics, compliance with Anthropic’s commands, and helpfulness, qualities developed at length in the constitution. It can make small tradeoffs but should keep that order in mind. It shouldn’t be so helpful that it helps you kill your spouse.

Athletic Programs Bleed Money

Josh Moody:

A new government report shows that the vast majority of colleges lose money on athletics even at the highest levels, with students and the academic enterprise subsidizing sports.

Who foots the bill when college athletics can’t pay for themselves?

The answer, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), is a mix of students—who heavily subsidize programs with athletic fees—and the academic enterprise itself. Virtually all programs rely on funding from outside athletics to cover costs, the report noted.

Released Wednesday at the request of Education and Workforce Committee Chairman, Tim Walberg, the GAO report found that college athletic programs are, for the most part, not self-sustaining. Altogether, 330 of 352 Division I programs—or 94 percent—lost money in the 2023–24 academic year.

Civics: Lawfare & the Legacy Media

Kimberley A. Strassel

The Supreme Court last week allowed Donald Trump’s ballroom construction to proceed, eliciting shock from the press corps. The court on Monday allowed the president’s mail-in voting order to continue, eliciting the same shock. This follows the shock after Trump administration wins on immigration enforcement, personnel firings, DEI and transgender orders, and dozens of other issues.

How long is the public meant to treat the press’s pearl-clutching as genuine, rather than part of a campaign to undermine the administration and the credibility of the high court?

The state of legal reporting has reached peak national embarrassment, a master class in fiction that rivals the reporting about Russia “collusion” and Joe Biden’s undiminished capacity. The media’s contribution to lawfare began in the earliest days of the first Trump term and has become only more brazen. The swings and misses are there for all to see, every day. Yet the formula is now so routine that nobody pushes back.

It works like this: The administration takes an action that offends liberal sensibilities. Interest groups rush to litigate, sometimes with prepackaged lawsuits. The press quotes liberal law professors and the litigators themselves as to why the suits are worthy. A liberal judge issues an injunction, which is treated as further proof of a lawsuit’s merit. The stories omit any critical analysis of standing, jurisdiction, merits or precedent. When a higher court corrects the legal overreach, the media, rather than acknowledge it got it wrong, insists the judges are in the tank for Mr. Trump.

Consider that ballroom case. When the National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit last December to halt the project, the press corps pushed the litigation as a slam dunk. The stories all led with a quote from the suit, presenting as fact that “no president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever.” The pieces cataloged the laws the administration had supposedly violated, and the claim that any building required the “express authority of Congress.” Critics hailed the early August ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to halt the project as evidence of the trust’s legal firepower.

Cambridge peddles ‘toxic nonsense’

Amy Gibbons:

Michael Gove has accused Cambridge University of peddling “toxic nonsense” to the next generation of teachers.

The former education secretary warned Cambridge’s Faculty of Education was letting the profession down.

He singled out Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of the university’s teacher-training school, for promoting an educational philosophy that displayed “all the weaknesses of modern academia”.

In a commentary in The Spectator, which he edits, Lord Gove described Prof Cremin’s book, Rewilding Education, as a publication that “doesn’t just display ignorance” but “flaunts and celebrates it”.

“The work actively rejects not just the need for discipline, knowledge and testing in schools but the very idea of our schools themselves,” he said.

Prof Cremin’s book, published in 2025, calls for a stronger focus on children’s emotional development and more nature-based learning, with pupils setting the pace of their own education rather than following standardised lessons and tests.

Civics: Confiscatory Taxation of the Rich Won’t Cover Federal Deficit for a Year

Mark Tapscott:

Politicians on both sides of the partisan spectrum are proposing plans to subject the wealthiest Americans to significantly higher taxes as a response to the federal government’s rapidly increasing annual budget deficits, but such proposals are doomed to fail, according to a new analysis by the Cato Institute.

“Senators Elizabeth Warren (D?’MA) and Bernie Moreno (R?’OH) propose removing the Social Security payroll tax cap, subjecting earnings above $184,500 to the 12.4 percent combined employer-employee payroll tax. Senators Chris Van Hollen (D?’MD) and Cory Booker (D?’NJ) each propose exempting more wages from income taxes at the bottom while raising taxes on higher earners. President Trump has pursued a similar strategy of expanding tax exemptions, while President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both pledged not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000,” Cato Institute Director of Tax Policy Adam Michel explains in an August 12 analysis.

The flaw in all of those approaches, according to Michel, is that “each approach shifts more of the tax burden toward the top. One problem with this approach is that there are not enough high-income Americans to finance the current federal budget deficit, let alone fund additional spending or tax cuts.”

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Taxation stifling the economic base

Scott Johnson:

Statistics also show that the total general government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has increased in almost all member countries of the European Union — a trend not seen in the United States. Today, general government tax revenue accounts, on average, for more than 40% of the European Union’s total GDP. The figure for some countries is lower (22.4% for Ireland), but higher for several others: Denmark (45.8%), France (45.3%), Belgium (45.1%), and Italy (42.6%). The total general government tax revenue (federal, state, and local taxes plus social security) in the United States in 1980 was 25.6% of GDP. Today, it is still 25.6%. On average, populations in European Union countries pay far higher total taxes than Americans do, despite significant US investment in defense. The gap between the European Union and the United States has become immense.

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More.

Civics: 9/11 wasn’t a ‘terrorist attack,’ according to the CBC

Warren Kinsella

The edict is in a memo from the Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News

The definition of that word is widely known and widely accepted.

The Encyclopedia Britannica people define it this way: “Terrorism is the calculated use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create general fear in a population and coerce a government or society to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals.”

By any reasonable and objective standard, that is what happened nearly 25 years ago, on September 11, 2001: Terrorism.

On that terrible day, four airplanes were hijacked by 19 terrorists. They piloted two of those planes into New York City’s World Trade Center, destroying both buildings and murdering 2,753 innocent people. Two dozen of them were Canadians.

A third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. There, 125 people were slain — military and civilian. The 59 people on board the hijacked American Airlines flight were also killed.

A fourth plane, a United Airlines flight, slammed into a field in Pennsylvania after the hostages attempted to seize control from the four terrorists. Thirty-seven passengers and seven crew members were murdered.

Civics: Fare Gates Can Stop Transit Crime

Lucas Pombo:

Last November, 72-time arrestee Lawrence Reed poured gasoline on a CTA Blue Line passenger in Chicago and set her on fire. The incident was so egregious that the Federal Transit Administration got involved, threatening to withhold $50 million in federal funds unless the CTA enhanced systemwide security. The CTA implementedits plan in March, but the benefits have been hard to detect so far.

Congress is poised to repeat the FTA’s ineffective intervention. The Surface Transportation Reauthorization—the government’s five-year approval of road and rail funding—features several similar attempts to improve public safety.

Gender Equality Study “Fundamentally Flawed”

James Nuzzo:

Steven Prohaska writes in this letter to the editor:
“WalletHub’s gender equality study — which contrasts workplace environments, education, health and political empowerment for men and women — is fundamentally flawed.

The authors of the study state, “In certain states and for certain metrics where women showed an advantage over men, we treated the state as having gender equality.”

But when one group is better off than another, that’s not equality.

The study ignores substantial disparities in the other direction. Men are disproportionately represented in dangerous jobs, making up over 90% of workplace fatalities. Women now earn more college degrees than men and usually live longer. Most voters are women.

A study’s methodology cannot accurately be described as measuring “equality” if female advantages are scored as equality instead of inequality. A study purporting to assess gender equality should take a more balanced approach to measuring disparities.”

Milwaukee K-12 Discipline Policy Investigation

Rory Linnane:

Milwaukee Public Schools is under federal investigation based on allegations about how the district considers race in disciplinary practices, the U.S. Department of Education said Aug. 18.

The department’s Office of Civil Rights announced its investigations into MPS and another school district – in Fayetteville, Arkansas – as it shared new guidelines against school discipline policies that aim to reduce racial disparities.

NIH-Funded Study Finds Puberty Blockers Failed to Improve Youth Mental Health

Fred Lucas

A taxpayer-funded study of children and young adults taking puberty blockers and hormone treatments found no improvement in youth mental health.

The Oversight Project, a watchdog group, obtained the final report of “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth” and shared it with the Daily Signal.

The National Institutes of Health first allocated a nine-year grant of up to $10 million for the study through the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. The study was led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who specializes in “gender-affirming care.”

The study included people as young as 8 years old. The sample receiving puberty blockers included participants up to age 16, while the sample receiving hormone treatments included participants up to age 20.

“Over 2 years of medical intervention that started with blockers, mental health remained relatively stable and was on par with the population at large,” the final report says. “These youth showed no worsening of their mental or emotional health and suicidality decreased from baseline to 24 months. Mean scores on mental health measures remain stable in a clinically non-significant range over two years.”

The longstanding argument for advocates of “transing” minors has been that not doing so could cause depression or suicide among youth.

The Great Awokening started in 2014, not 2020

Matthew Yglesias:

As someone who is interested in monoculture events in general and the movie business in particular, I suppose I should have something to say about “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which is a huge hit and stands a decent chance of becoming the top-grossing film of all time in nominal terms.

I saw it and I thought it was … okay. The third-best of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies? The third-best film Zendaya has appeared in so far in 2026? Which is just to say I sort of don’t get it. I don’t know anyone who is super enthusiastic about this movie but also nobody is outraged by it. For a big hit movie to also be sort of mid and unremarkable is I guess the kind of thing I used to expect from America’s old movie culture, when a much larger fraction of the population was in the habit of “going to the movies” pretty regularly. Because “Spider-Man” strikes me as a fantastic “going to the movies” kind of movie. Everyone basically knows who Spider-Man is and the movie will make perfect sense even if you are not up to speed on the latest M.C.U. lore. It has that kind of well-rounded quality where there’s a romantic plot and plenty of action but no hyper-violence and the Punisher is funny rather than alarming so anyone could enjoy it.

But isn’t this sort of “Hey, let’s go to the movies!” vibe exactly what’s gone away in post-pandemic America, with its endless streaming and short-form options? Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I love going to the movies. But that’s why I’m still the guy showing up for stuff like “Crime 101” and “Tuner” — random cool genre movies that would have done at least okay in the 1990s but kind of drop without a trace these days. Not that I’m complaining; I’m glad people are enjoying “Spider-Man.” But I think it’s a little weird.

Siddhartha Roychowdhury: I’m seeing an attempt by the media/Democratic politicians to redefine the Woke 1 era by compressing it from Covid/Floyd in 2020 to 2024. I’m pretty sure that DEI in hiring, dumbing down of curriculum, trans stuff, etc. goes back to around 2014/2015 at least. Are you and others noticing this as well? Should that concern those who don’t want a Woke 2 when Democrats are back in power?

The whole “Woke 1” discourse is a good joke, but it obviously lacks a certain kind of precision.

Every Day Counts

OECD:

Every morning, millions of children are expected to attend school. Yet many face barriers that prevent regular attendance. School attendance problems (SAP) are no longer a marginal issue; they have become a challenge affecting classrooms in nearly every country. This report synthesises evidence from the OECD Policy Survey on School Attendance Problems, literature and international large-scale assessments to give an account of key concepts, terminology and international trends, drivers, and consequences of school absences. It also takes stock of policies and practices for supporting school attendance and distils key messages and policy pointers emerging from the evidence presented in the report.

To support a concise international analysis, this report uses “school attendance problems” as a broad umbrella term and “absence” as a concise term for all forms of non-attendance among students formally enrolled in primary or secondary education. However, international comparisons are challenged by varying terminology.

The language and classification used can shape responses to SAP and experiences of students and families. The terminology can influence how absences are measured, interpreted and addressed. Distinctions, such as authorised and unauthorised absences, often determine whether interventions are supportive, disciplinary or legal. These classifications can also contribute to disadvantages for marginalised students and families.

Despite these challenges, international large-scale assessments (e.g. PISA and TIMSS) provide an indication of patterns. SAP have worsened over time in several education systems since early 2010s. They are more prevalent among certain groups, including disadvantaged and immigrant students. However, results differ by context, time, and between educational levels. Moreover, measures based on student self‑reports and school leaders’ perceptions often produce different pictures, underscoring challenges in measurement and comparison. Nevertheless, post-pandemic attendance remains a concern with many education systems reporting persistently higher absence rates following the pandemic.

Missouri’s 21st Century Public School Personnel Boom

Avery Frank and Cory Koedel;

Since the turn of the century, growth in teaching and administrative staff in Missouri has greatly outpaced growth in student enrollment.
- Growth in FTE teachers: +13 percent
- Growth in FTE administrators: +35 percent
- Growth in student enrollment: –4 percent
Personnel growth has exceeded growth in student enrollment in urban, suburban, and rural areas, and more broadly, in about 85 percent of school districts statewide.
While staffing has increased disproportionately, teacher and administrator salaries have declined in real terms since 2000.
If school districts had maintained their staffing levels from the year 2000 (when they had more students than today), and used the savings to raise teacher salaries, the average teacher salary in Missouri could be $10,000 higher today, which amounts to a 17 percent raise.
- Even a partial unwinding of the Personnel Boom (e.g., back to 2015 conditions) would free up resources to substantially increase teacher salaries.

The number of US high school graduates who chose apprenticeships instead of college is rising. Those programs are mostly focused on blue collar roles.

1130 WISN:

This next item is interesting college aged kids on both sides of the Atlantic deciding to forego college and head right into the trades or into a career apprenticeship immediately after high school. The Wall Street Journal (47:10): has an interesting story about how more of the brilliant kids in Britain are turning down offers to go to places like Oxford and the UK’s top universities. Instead, they’re going into quote white collar apprenticeships. And I admit, I don’t know how some person with only a high school diploma is ever going to become a lawyer without a law degree, but this is the sort of thing that they’re talking about. A lot of these apprenticeships are in finance or other white-collar jobs. One girl the Wall Street Journal interviews was offered a place at Oxford and turned them down to apprentice at a law firm.

The college route would have given her a degree, she said, but also mounds of student debt, no real practical experience, and they say that it’s a dangerous position in a legal industry rushing to adopt AI productivity tools.

Madison schools and Centro Hispano create ‘new model for partnership’

Erin Gretzinger:

In addition to creating Ambriz’s joint role, the agreement expanded Centro’s youth programming into Lincoln and Leopold elementary schools on the south side. While Centro has worked with the district for many years to provide programming to middle and high school students, Menéndez Coller said the elementary school level had been a missing link.

Norma Gallegos Valles, Centro’s director of programs, said the middle and high school programs center around uplifting students’ voices and building their confidence through different hands-on activities, field trips, tutoring and other programming. The expansion furthers the organization’s efforts to focus on key transition grades for students as they move from elementary to middle to high school, she said.

“Those transition periods are where kids really need a little bit more support,” Ambriz added. “Being able to continue that and now expand it even more has been very crucial — and what not only what our kids need, but also what the families are asking for.”

Ambriz said he wants to help address common challenges families face, such as finding stable housing. He is also helping spread word about the district’s boundary and attendance area review to encourage families’ participation in the process.

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2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Greg Lukianoff, Andrea Honeycutt:

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?

The Antitrust Academy

Alex Tabarrok:

The Antitrust Academy is an online platform hosting hundreds of videos comprising a complete course in antitrust law and economics. Teachers include Judge Douglas Ginsburg, Jon Klick, Joshua Wright and others. I am an advisor. A great resource whether you are learning this material for the first time or need to brush up on some legal or economic doctrines.

More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

Aaron Wagner:

“While statistics are not hard to understand, they are even easier to misunderstand,” Ramos said. “Fortunately, concepts in statistics are grounded in intuition and rationality. So, a basic but thoughtful introduction to these concepts can help people understand their own thinking better.”

At the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings in Nashville, Tennessee, a market-research and survey company solicited questions from attendees to include in a nationwide survey given to a representative sample of the U.S. population. Ramos and his co-author, Samuel Anyaso-Samuel, postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, submitted two questions that were used in this survey: “How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?” and “How often would you base decisions on reported statistics if you understood it better?” Ramos and Anyaso-Samuel analyzed the responses to these questions for this study.

Of the 1,000 people surveyed, one-quarter reported that they had no understanding of statistics, while 37% reported limited familiarity. Slightly more than one-quarter said they had learned some statistics in school.

This does not mean that people do not believe statistics matter, Ramos said. Nine out of 10 participants said they would use statistics more if they possessed more understanding.

Louisiana teacher asks Supreme Court to stop Ten Commandments displays in classrooms

Piper Hutchinson:

A Louisiana teacher is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his constitutional challenge to a state law that requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in K-12 and college classrooms.

The posters began going up in classrooms this summer, following the approval of a 2024 law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every K-12, college and university classroom at schools that accept state money. The law was mired in a legal battle until earlier this year, when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it could go into effect.

Chris Dier, Louisianas’s Teacher of the Year for 2020, filed the motion asking for the Supreme Court to intervene. Dier taught at Chalmette High School when he won the honor and is currently on the faculty at Ben Franklin High School in New Orleans.

“I have spent over 16 years teaching my students that the Constitution protects every one of them — every faith, and no faith,” Dier said. “I respect the Ten Commandments and the place religion holds in millions of Americans’ lives, undoubtedly. But the state cannot turn my classroom into a place to deliver its own religious message or make me the messenger who delivers it.”

In a statement through her spokesman, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill declined to address Dier’s petition but said schools should follow the law.

Following Louisiana’s lead, similar measures requiring Ten Commandments displays were adopted in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas, which have been met with various legal challenges.

Volcanoes that made history

Alexandra Witze:

The first telegram arrived in Singapore on a Monday, sent from the city of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). “Terrific detonations from Krakatau (volcanic island),” it reported. Soon afterward: “Stones falling. Village near Anjer washed away.” The wires continued clattering out news of bridges destroyed, boats smashed, lighthouses “disappeared.” By noon on Tuesday, the scope of the natural disaster was clear: “Where once Mount Krakatau stood the sea now plays.”

Within days, the source of the destruction was known worldwide. On the morning of August 27, 1883, a volcanic eruption had obliterated two islands in the strait between Java and Sumatra, and most of a third. More than 36,000 people perished, the majority in devastating tsunamis that raced outward from the colossal explosion.

Thanks to Victorian-era telecommunications, it was the first time in history that people around the globe could begin to document, in near real time, the immediate and long-term effects of a catastrophic volcanic eruption. What they learned over the next few years laid the foundations for the modern science of volcanology. And it was an especially eye-opening lesson in how the biggest eruptions can influence climate, agriculture and even the course of human history.

Global effects

In the months after Krakatau, drifting volcanic particles high in the atmosphere circled the globe, causing violently colored sunsets that contemporary artists captured in paintings, likely including the psychedelic background of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

The Arday Case Is a Test for Academia

Oliver Traldi:

Academia is a place where very awkward people impose strict standards on one another. But these standards are localized, imposed by disciplines and departments. One group’s standards might be opaque to the rest of the university, not to mention the outside world. What passes for good scholarship in one discipline might seem ridiculous in another.

The current crisis of the university can be traced partly to two types of attacks on these already precarious standards. The first has been the introduction of new disciplines that appear to have virtually no standards at all; the second is the relaxation of standards within the disciplines to accommodate new entrants and trendy topics. New interpersonal standards of emotional sensitivity and demographic inclusion have increasingly taken the place of intellectual standards of clever argumentation and strong evidence. But the enforcement of those new metrics turns out to be just as awkward and strict as what preceded them. Paradoxically, the harsh imposition of the new standards often is as insensitive and exclusionary as what came before.

The incompatibility of these two sets of standards accounts for at least some of the media firestorm around the late Jason Arday’s plagiarism and fabrications, and the subsequent focus on Nathan Cofnas, the Ghent University postdoc and whistleblower. Cofnas authored the initial articleoutlining apparently longstanding doubts about Arday’s scholarly and extramural accomplishments. Arday and Cofnas in some respects exemplify the broader shift in academic standards.

A majority (58%) says that it is more important to reduce property taxes than to increase funding for K-12 schools (42%).

Marquette Poll:

Between 50% and 60% have said property taxes are more important in 11 Marquette Law School Poll surveys since June 2023. Prior to that, a majority said that school funding was more important in 16 polls from April 2015 through October 2022.

While voters think reducing property taxes should be a priority, 47% say schools are getting too little funding from the state, 39% say there is enough state funding, and 14% say schools are getting more than is needed.

Opinion is divided on Gov. Tony Evers’ 2024 partial veto which required increases in per-pupil spending limits for the next 400 years. Forty-eight percent say this was necessary to support schools, while 51% say this will mean tax increases for centuries. Partisans are sharply divided on this, with 86% of Republicans saying this will require continuing tax increases and 89% of Democrats saying it was necessary to support schools. Independents are evenly divided, with 46% saying it is necessary and 46% saying it requires ongoing tax increases.

Among registered voters, 53% say they are very or somewhat satisfied with the job their local public schools are doing, while 46% are very or somewhat dissatisfied. Satisfaction declined from a high of 81% in March 2013 to a stable range of 60% to 69% from 2021 to February 2026. Satisfaction has declined from 64% in February this year to 59% in March, to 55% in July, and to 53% in August.

Sixty percent say public schools need to be held more accountable for student performance, while 40% say the schools are doing the best they can with the resources they have.

Opinion is close to evenly divided on the school voucher program that provides state funding for students to attend private or religious schools, as 48% would like to see the voucher program eliminated and 51% want to see it continued. Partisan differences are substantial, but not as large on this issue as on some others, with 68% of Republicans favoring continuing the voucher program and 68% of Democrats wanting the program eliminated. Independents are nearly evenly divided, with 49% favoring continuation and 50% favoring elimination of vouchers.

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53% say they are very or somewhat satisfied with the job their local public schools are doing. Satisfaction hit a high of 81% in March 2013 and was between 60% and 69% from 2021 to February 2026. Satisfaction has declined steadily since then. #mulawpoll

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2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student. More.

New York’s portrait of a graduate is a disaster in the making. Here’s how to minimize the damage.

Brian R. Fitzpatrick:

We’re approaching the end of an era: New York State is scrapping its storied high school Regents exams as a graduation requirement. Initially administered in the 19th century, the Regents were the first standardized state assessments of their kind. And since the early 2000s, students have had to pass five Regents in four subject areas to graduate with the standard “Regents diploma.”

Under the new plan, however, students will take Regents only for federal compliance purposes; passing won’t be required to graduate. Instead, as part of a new framework called the New York State Portrait of a Graduate, a high school diploma will be based upon students’ demonstration of six vaguely appealing “interconnected attributes”: academically prepared, creative innovator, critical thinker, effective communicator, global citizen, and reflective and future focused.

The specifics of the new graduation requirements are still in the works, but so far, official documents indicate that students will “establish their readiness” through “exhibits of evidence,” apparently the state’s hazy umbrella term for tasks including “performances, portfolios, assessments, [and] presentations.” Also, “real-world projects” and “work-based learning” may be involved. Individual teachers will design, administer, and score their students’ “exhibits of evidence” according to a statewide rubric with mastery levels, rather than letter or number grades. I’m really leaning on quotes here because, frankly, most of the guidance is too nebulous to paraphrase.

Though some other states are similarly deemphasizing traditional state testing and developing “portraits” and “visions,” New York is an outlier in its aggressive effort to overhaul its entire assessment system—and to effectively give up on clear academic expectations. As terrible as that is, it’s also more than a little troubling that the Empire State has committed to dismantling the Regents requirements without a clear sense of what will replace them.

Viral video of huge homeless encampment near UC Berkeley prompts alarm

Parker Koppenjan:

Homeless camp has been source of fires, dead rats, and infectious disease Leptospirosis

A viral video taken by a parent recently dropping her son off at UC Berkeley prompted alarm by revealing large camping tents, trash, sleeping bags, garbage, tarps, dirty mattresses, bikes and other debris piled up in heaps and spilling out into the street for several blocks.

“I just dropped my son off at @UCBerkeley housing and as we were approaching we saw this behind his apartments,” parent Lyanne Melendez posted on social media Aug. 19.

The video, which has racked up more than 3.5 million views, depicts a long-standing homeless encampment at Eighth and Harrison streets in the city of Berkeley. While city officials and residents have battled for years to clean it up, the video prompted a new wave of headlines.

What will be left for us to work on?

Arvind NarayananJul 13, 2026

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul last week titled “What will be left for us to work on?” I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available here, annotated with a lightly edited transcript. You can also view them below right here on this page, but the online version has animations, clickable links, and a much nicer experience overall.

Update [August 2026]: ICML has released the video of the talk.

I made three arguments. First, the AI as Normal Technology framework is a correct and useful as a way to think about AI’s impacts, unless and until there is some future discontinuity such as through recursive self-improvement. Second, even though we should take recursive self-improvement seriously, there is no milestone that companies might achieve in the lab that will suddenly put us all out of work. Third and finally, jobs of the future will be radically different, and a lot of adaptation will be needed. I shared my thinking about what this might look like and ended with a vision of human/AI “co-superintelligence”.

Now is a time of great excitement in AI, but it’s also a time of great anxiety in the AI community. I want to address that anxiety head on. How do we prepare for a future where AI will become capable of doing more and more of the work that we do today?

I lead a team at Princeton University trying to advance the science of AI agent evaluation. We try to go beyond the usual claims of “Look, capability is going up on benchmarks!” Those claims tend to be misinterpreted by the broader public as implying that agents are soon about to take all our jobs.

Maybe that will happen. But in our work we try to understand the factors beyond capability that matter for real-world deployment, and bring that understanding into evaluations.

The work that I’m better known for is the essay I co-authored with Sayash Kapoor called AI as Normal Technology. It’s a way to think about the medium-term future of AI and how to adapt to it — and in turn how to adapt it to the needs of society and the economy.

WILL Charts A New Course For WI Charter Schools

Pat Garrett:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released a new report, “Charting A New Course: Improving The Charter School Sector in Wisconsin.” The report is the second in WILL’s Wisconsin Education Comeback: A Roadmap for Student Success series and examines why Wisconsin’s in-state charter school sector has stalled while chartering continues to expand across the country.

Wisconsin was once at the forefront of the charter school movement, being one of the first states to enact a charter school law in 1993. Today, however, the state is falling behind. WILL’s latest report identifies major barriers in funding, authorization, regulation, and governance that make Wisconsin an increasingly difficult place to open and grow innovative public schools.

The Quotes: WILL Research Director Will Flanders stated, “Wisconsin once led the nation in education reform, but charter schools—a vital option for families—have stagnated in recent years. Families want and deserve innovative public-school options, but unnecessary and costly roadblocks prevent charter school expansion. Wisconsin must reverse this trend so our students can access real education options and thrive.”

Key Findings: Since 2015, independent charter enrollment has grown 35%. But over the past three years, enrollment growth has slowed to just 11.6% with Wisconsin ranking 41st out of 45 states in the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ 2022 ranking of state charter laws. To reverse this slowdown and revitalize Wisconsin’s charter school environment, WILL’s report identifies the following key takeaways:

The mental health consequences of social justice fundamentalism

In their 2015 article and 2018 book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg and Jonathan Haidt argue that cognitive distortions (practices like catastrophizing, black and white thinking, overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning) and overprotecting children results in an external locus of control, helplessness and despair, and both the mental health crisis and the rampant culture of illiberalism on campus that we’re seeing today.

Certainly, the two major concerns from the 2015 article have borne out, with academic freedom and free speech on campus being threatened at an unprecedented scalesince 2014 — but especially since 2017 — and mental health of young people tanking to a degree even greater than even Greg and Jon ever predicted. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has reported consistent and rapid increases in the rates of suicide and depression in teens (12-17) and young adults (18-25) since at least 2012. Just last year, nearly 20% of teens (12-17) and a similar number of young adults (18-25) reported experiencing a major depressive episode. This is compared to just 7% in adults older than 25 last year, and just 9% of teens and young adults back in 2012.

Something is clearly happening, but what’s the cause? The recent documentary film “The Coddling of the American Mind,” directed by Ted Balaker, showcases how the adoption of what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism” (a.k.a. “Wokeness” — a term we don’t love) and its associated catastrophizing spirals led three of the film’s protagonists, Kimi, Lucy, and Saeed, into feelings of hopelessness and despair.

However, those are experiences of a select few students. Is there really a significant connection between the illiberal ideologies on college campuses and the mental health decline of college students?

To find out, we used responses collected from FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings to answer two questions:

Are students with poor self-reported mental health also more supportive of illiberal protest?
Are students on the ideological left more prone to self-reported feelings of poor mental health?

The Scoring is Suspect

Susan B. Edelman

Tinkering with the number of points needed to pass New York’s literacy exams may have rendered them useless in gauging how well our kids are learning to read.

Something went wrong.

“It seems increasingly likely that something unexpected happened with the scoring of the reading tests last year,” says Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

His comments on the sharp decline in New York student literacy scores came after I learned that the state education department and its test publisher NWEA, under a five-year $50 million contract, tweaked the scoring of the 2025 tests.

Last year, Kathleen Moore of the Times-Union and I reported evidence that the state had lowered the passing benchmarks for some grades on the exams, raising doubts about claims of eye-popping academic progress.

After the state released this year’s scores, I asked Fred Smith, a researcher and former DOE testing specialist, to scrutinize NWEA’s 2025 technical reports, which provide detailed data on the scoring of its English Language Arts (ELA) exams. He confirmed our news reports.

Scores in several grades rose sharply in 2025.

But this year, all the gains evaporated. In NYC, scores fell an average 6 points in grades 3 to 8. But they plummeted nearly 14 points in third-grade, 6 points in fourth grade, and 13 points in fifth grade.

The state stands by the disturbing data, insisting it shows a real slide in reading proficiency from 2025 to 2026.

Some experts don’t buy it.

“The proficiency rates in NYC and the state as a whole look like they really haven’t budged since 2024,” Pallas told me.

Data Centers and the Open Access Order

Alex Tabarrok

The US discussion over datacenters is depressing. Datacenters do not use a lot of water, they produce very useful outputs, they are not a blight on the landscape. All of this is obvious. But I don’t want to restate the obvious. What bothers me most about the discussion is that people seem to think this is or should be a collective decision. No.

We have a simple set of rules that everyone must follow. You buy land from someone willing to sell it. You contract for electricity. You hire workers who want the job. Your obligations to your local neighbors come from the same laws that govern everyone else. We do not ask what the land, electricity and labor is for. If you follow the rules, that is nobody’s business.

This is the distinction North, Wallis and Weingast make in Violence and Social Orders (paper here) between limited access orders or the natural state and open-access orders. For most of recorded history large-scale economic activity depended on access to political power. In the natural state, “people outside the coalition have only limited access to organizations, privileges, and valuable resources and activities.” The dominant coalition controlled entry into valuable activities and created rents by granting privileges.

An open access order works through general criteria. Organizational formation is “open to everyone who meets a set of minimal and impersonal criteria.” In economic life, the transition entails “the ability to create economic organizations at will, open entry and competition in many markets.”

The key word is impersonal. The same conditions apply regardless of who wants to build or whether public officials admire the proposed use. The state is not necessarily laissez-faire but its role ends once you have complied with the impersonal rules.

NEET: Not in Education, Employment or Training. It’s too late to fix this, but…

Crier in the Wilderness:

I can’t use my degree in a helping profession, which supposedly needed more men, because it went woke. Now, I’m on my fourth career. I have been passed over for multiple positions because I was a man instead of a woman. The people who passed me over admitted to it. I finally gave up and started a business, but artificial intelligence and inflation undercut me. Some of those who helped me to establish my business even told me they were hoping to mentor a woman instead. In addition, even some of my customers wanted to work with a female-owned business.

As a result, I can’t use the money I would otherwise have made to fund the Christian ministry I really had my heart set on.

I’m now a skilled tradesman. I live on my own, with no debt and money in the bank… but I have a non-zero chance of dying at work, and overwhelming overtime, which I can’t get out of. For the privilege, I had to be turned away at the door by multiple other trades, because they refused to work with some college boy.

By the way, women consider blue collar jobs trashy, no matter how well they pay, so there’s a distinct possibility that I continue to work massive overtime for nothing. They turn me down when I ask them out on dates, and then say there are no good men nowadays.

To put this another way, I gave up my twenties to extreme working hours that didn’t help. I’m now doing the same thing to my thirties. It will be decades before all the progressive hiring managers (usually women) retire or die, so there’s no way out.

More choice would help clean up Ontario school mess

Matthew Lau

With a new school year approaching, it’s time to remind everyone that Ontario’s public school system is a gigantic mess. Ontarians may not actually want or need such a reminder but the government and unions are determined to deliver it anyway. Their negotiations for a new contract have stalled before even substantially beginning, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario — which is essentially taxpayer-funded since public-school teachers are forced to pay union dues — is readying a strike mandate and the provincial government is preparing taxpayer-funded advertisements to criticize the unions.

As taxpayer costs mount, the quality of Ontario’s public education, already far too low and sliding for two decadesaccording to test scores, seems bound to deteriorate further. School violence and disorder have escalatedsignificantly in recent years. Many students regularly use artificial intelligence, but more than half of Ontario teachers report receiving no training from their school or board on how to instruct students on AI use.

Notes on legacy media and the 1619 project

John Lucas:

When rocked by the inevitable blow-back against Hannah-Jones and The Times’ false assertion that the desire to preserve slavery was a “primary reason” for the American Revolution, The Times appended a footnote seven months later that failed to acknowledge any error. The Times said only that it was making a “clarification” that its article had been “adjusted” “to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them.”

Nonsense. The Times’ “adjustment” obliterates Hannah-Jones’ original thesis — that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary reason for the Declaration of Independence that we celebrate every July 4. The Times’ “clarification” is that slavery was “among the motivations” of some colonists who fought in the war.

That is not a “clarification.” It is a retraction by another name to avoid having to confess error and undermine their culture war against our founding principles and history. It gutted Hannah-Jones’ central point that the very founding of our present Country was poisoned by slavery. But The Times just slips it, falsely claiming that it is a mere “clarification.”

What a bunch of dishonest hacks.

Confidence without Comprehension

Lars Faye:

One hope is that these models will end up accelerating learning as they are used for code generation. Junior developers can work with the same gravitas and confidence as industry veterans with their “personal AI tutor”. Knowing syntax is increasingly less important, and any knowledge or ambiguity gaps are filled by the AI tool. The deeper mechanics of the code stay abstracted away, since the developer sits higher in the stack.

JetBrains, a major player in developer tools, recently cited a study titled “The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers”, which painstakingly analyzed individual behaviors in live coding sessions, and tested their ability to learn coding with varying degrees of AI assistance. Their main takeaway was stark and counterintuitive:

“Participants thought it was like having a personal tutor. From the data in our study … we observed that they did not, in fact, use GenAI tools like a personal tutor. In fact, it was quite the opposite.”

The participants that leaned into heavier AI assistance:

To fix education, fix the economy first

John Burn-Murdoch:

One of the best illustrations of the importance of economic growth for a society is that when it is weak for long enough, you start to hear complaints about specific things going wrong in specific domains, which ultimately all turn out to be downstream of economic stagnation.

In the UK, this is happening more frequently with education. The standard explanation for Britain’s declining graduate wage premium is that higher education expanded too fast and too far, and too many people now go to university. But similar expansions elsewhere have not produced the same outcome. Instead, the evidence points primarily to problems in the economy, not the education system: weak productivity growth and an unusually low number of genuinely graduate-worthy well-paid professional and managerial jobs.

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In much the same way, the standard explanation for why Britain’s non-graduates feel like distant second-class citizens to their degree-holding counterparts is that they have been failed by an education system that does not provide technical and vocational routes to a successful and respected career. But here, too, economic factors look more likely to be the real culprit.

One useful reference point is Germany, where school pupils specialise early into either academic or more technical routes, and those who choose the latter can be confident they will find relatively high-paying jobs. The country’s education system is a darling of those who believe achieving “parity of esteem” for people who do not go to university is simply a matter of reforms to schooling.

But I’m not sure it’s that simple. The status conferred by a particular qualification is a function of the job and salary it brings, not the piece of paper it’s written on. What really differentiates Germany from the UK, then, is its larger, higher-value and higher-paying manufacturing sector (German factory workers earn 50 per cent more than their British counterparts). Britain can tinker with its vocational routes all it likes, but without good jobs, the deficits in esteem, employment and earnings will remain.

Germany is also as much of a cautionary tale as a model to follow. With China’s booming electric vehicles industry rapidly eating into its automotive exports, I suspect the Germans may have their own moment of misdirected angst over vocational education a decade or so from now as the good blue-collar jobs dwindle.

In this sense, the most durable way for governments to ensure that both university students and their less academic counterparts can move through the education system confident of good financial outcomes for themselves is to have a dynamic economy and robust productivity growth.

A dream of Cambridge

David Runciman:

Oceans of virtual ink have been spilled about the case of Jason Arday because it was the right story at the right time to grab the maximum attention. It happened in high summer, when apart from the interminable heat there wasn’t much else going on. It unfolded in stages, which kept people interested: first the accusations of plagiarism, then the piece-by-piece unravelling of Arday’s life story in the run-up to the publication of his now absurd-seeming memoir.

Above all, though, this was Cambridge. Had Arday been exposed while still a professor at Glasgow University it would have caused a fuss, but nothing on this scale. The contrast between the augustness of the institution and the very contemporary dynamics of Arday’s downfall is what gives the tale its piquancy.

Race, class, snobbery, wokery – somehow they’re all thrown into sharper relief when the setting is that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations, some of them now in tatters.

But what is really going on here is that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through the fantasies people have about Cambridge. That place doesn’t really exist any more. When news outlets want a generic picture of the university to illustrate their tales of collapsing standards, they usually pick King’s College Chapel or the Senate House – suitably imposing edifices to juxtapose with the squalid goings-on being exposed.

civics: on “Rent Control”

Can rent control fix the housing crisis? No. In fact, it could make things a whole lot worse.

Find out more in my latest for @WSJFreeEx pic.twitter.com/bXCbK1y1QM

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) August 24, 2026

Madison Metropolitan School District’s new five-year strategic plan, MMSD: “Excellence Together”

Taxpayer Funded Madison K-12 System:

Performance Objectives

Academic Achievement

MMSD will increase overall student academic achievement
Belonging

MMSD will increase the percentage of students who feel they belong in their school, as measured by the climate survey.

College Credit/Credentials

MMSD will increase the percentage of students who graduate with credits or credentials that provide postsecondary value

PDF Spanish version (I could not immediately find an English PDF version).

More.

There are two huge red flags with Madison’s new school-focus plan. One, it’s a five year plan that leaves thousands of kids behind. And two, the plan doesn’t mention reading until page 15.

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]