With apologies to Dr. Suess.

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

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

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

A few links:

Sarah Manski and the messed up Madison school board election

Commentary on Sarah Manski’s Sudden School Board Candidacy Withdrawal

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

Steve Hsu:

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

mp.weixin.qq.com/s/r9zZaEgqAa_l…

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

——-

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

DeepThink from DeepSeek

Glenn Greenwald:

2020 fun with Sen. Chuck Schumer

and:

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

They were, however, all things that Biden did:

more:

Is this still how Congressman @TedLieu feels?

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

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

Nothing Trump did was more threatening than this:

Batya Ungar-Sargon:

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

John Cullen:

Obama launched a bio-war with China in 2014.

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

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

Hans Mahncke:

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

S.P. Glasby

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

Ross Douthat interviews Marc Andreessen:

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

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

More.

pdf flyer.

Learn more about the Feller School, here.

Mike Dimatteo

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

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

Holly Ramer:

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

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

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

Glenn Greenwald:

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

Tom Cotton:

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

Camilla Turner:

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

Rand Paul:

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

Michael Crichton:

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

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

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

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

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

Marta Prato:

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

Alex Tabarrok:

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

Prato concludes with a practical suggestion:

Tyler Cowen:

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

Kayla Huynh:

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

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

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

Jimmy Tobias:

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

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

Matt Taibbi:

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

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

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

Salem’s Zito

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

This was just one more example of that.

Sarah Kuta

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Greenhut:

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

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

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

Julia Turner, Kathryn Blanchard, and Rajeev Darolia:

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

Ashley Belanger

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

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

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

Becky Jacobs

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

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

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

Henry Farrell

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

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

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

Thomas Schatz:

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

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

Shaked Koplewitz writes:

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

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

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

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

David Farenthold:

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

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

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

Chris Rickert:

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

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

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

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

—-

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

Dan Lennington:

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

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

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

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 16, 2025

Maggie Macintosh:

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

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

—-

more

Marc Andreessen

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

more.

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

AJ Bayatpour

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

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

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

——-

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

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

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

MARTÍN E. DE SIMONEFEDERICO TIBERTIWURAOLA MOSUROFEDERICO MANOLIOMARIA BARRONELIOT DIKORU:

“AI helps us to learn, it can serve as a tutor, it can be anything you want it to be, depending on the prompt you write,” says Omorogbe Uyiosa, known as “Uyi” by his friends, a student from the Edo Boys High School, in Benin City, Nigeria. His school was one of the beneficiaries of a pilot that used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to support learning through an after-school program.

A few months ago, we wrote a blog with some of the lessons from the implementation of this innovative program, including a video with voices from beneficiaries, such as Uyi. Back then, we promised that, if you stayed tuned, we would get back with the results of the pilot, which included an impact evaluation. So here we are with three primary findings from the pilot!

1.    The program boosted learning across the board

The results of the randomized evaluation, soon to be published, reveal overwhelmingly positive effects on learning outcomes. After the six-week intervention between June and July 2024, students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills.

Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program significantly outperformed their peers who were not in all areas, including English, which was the main goal of the program. These findings provide strong evidence that generative AI, when implemented thoughtfully with teacher support, can function effectively as a virtual tutor.  

Ilya Shapiro:

Yesterday I laid out my how my personal experience led me to “do the work” and write Lawless. That research uncovered some disturbing differences from when I was in law school in the early 2000s. Back then, critical theory was a spent force. But now “the crits” are back, even stronger, and not just in literature and sociology departments.

Critical legal studies (CLS), which developed in the 1970s, teaches that laws enshrine biases against marginalized groups and thus preserve the status quo. CLS scholars also criticize formalism, which they see as overly focused on analyzing the logic of doctrines, principles, and texts without considering broader social and political implications. From their perspective, the law is simply the codification of the cultural and political preferences of those in power.

In 1973, Derrick Bell, the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School, wrote that racism was a permanent feature of American life that couldn’t be remedied under existing legal structures. After he left Harvard to become dean at the University of Oregon, students began protesting their law school’s lack of diversity. The Harvard Law Review invited Bell to write the prestigious foreword to its 1984 Supreme Court volume, allowing him to dispense with academic rigor and instead present his theories of racial grievance as allegorical narratives. Those establishmentarian career-builders thus helped mainstream the ideas that would become CRT.

Austin Berg

S&P cites 2025 budget, little willingness to cut spending and uncertainty about the ability to raise taxes.

And:

A downgrade isn’t only a reputational hit; it could also increase the city’s cost to borrow money for long-term projects like Johnson’s $1.25 billion housing and development bond, which is slated to go to market early this year.

The city’s chief financial officer, Jill Jaworski, disagreed with the downgrade and said in a release that the rating does not “accurately reflect the strength of the City’s credit,” or its ability to meet steep debt and pension obligations.

——

—-Madison’s latest Standard & Poors debt ratings.

Lindsay Ellis

Landing a professional job in the U.S. has become so tough that even Harvard Business School says its M.B.A.s can’t solely rely on the university’s name to open doors anymore.

Twenty-three percent of job-seeking Harvard M.B.A.s who graduated last spring were still looking for work three months after leaving campus. That share is up from 20% the prior year, during a cooling white-collar labor market; the figure was 10% in 2022, according to the school. 

more.

Steve Hsu:

Superfocus.ai makes an AI that saves PE funds hundreds of hours of human professional work via automated document analysis. A lot of those hours are MBA/JD hours…

Julie Sedivy:

But that leads to a curious puzzle: Complex sentences are not ubiquitous among the world’s languages. Many languages have little use for them. They prefer to string together simple clauses. They may even lack certain words such as relative pronouns that and which or connectors like if, despite, and although—these words make it possible to link clauses together into larger sentences. Allegedly, the Pirahã language along the Maici River of Brazil lacks recursion altogether. According to linguist Dan Everett, Pirahã speakers avoid linguistic nesting of all kinds, even in structures such as John’s brother’s house. (Instead, they would say something like: Brother’s house. John has a brother. It is the same one.)

This can’t be pinned on biological evolution. All evidence suggests that humans around the world are born with more or less the same brains. Abundant childhood exposure to a language with layered sentences practically guarantees their mastery. Even adult Pirahã speakers, who have remained unusually isolated from European languages, pick up the trick of complex syntax, provided that they spend enough time interacting with speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, a language that offers an adequate diet of embedded structures.

Sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation.

Corrinne Hess:

Act 20 was a bipartisan bill, proposed by Republicans who worked with DPI on the details. 

When it was approved, the Legislature created a separate, nearly $50 million appropriations bill for implementation. 

Then disagreements began over how that money would be used, and who would decide how to use it.

Wisconsin allows its governors to use partial vetoes on appropriations bills. Evers’ use of that power in February 2024 prompted a lawsuit in April from Legislative Republicans asking the $50 million be withheld from DPI. 

Evers and DPI then filed a counterclaim saying without the money, implementing the new law in time for the 2024-25 school year will be impossible.

In July, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 6-1 the GOP overstepped its constitutional authority by blocking Evers’ actions related to the Department of Natural Resources. But the court did not rule on the $50 million for DPI. 

Attorney General Josh Kaul has asked the high court to bypass the Appellate Court and rule on the matter. 

Joint Finance Committee co-chairs Sen.Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, and Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, said legislative Republicans have consistently supported efforts to increase literacy in Wisconsin. 

“This is why we allocated $50 million to create the Office of Literacy and passed Act 100 to lay the framework for DPI to implement this important initiative,” the two said in a statement. 

Evers’ partial veto in February 2024, known as Act 100,  struck language allocating  money for school boards and charter school compliance in the early literacy program.

——-

More.

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

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Brittany Kinser:

“Only three out of ten students in Wisconsin are college and career ready – 32% is too little! Our kids deserve so much better. We must restore high standards and focus on reading, writing, and math to ensure every child can get a meaningful job, attend college, or master a trade,” stated Kinser.

Brittany’s campaign platform includes the following key priorities:

• Restore high standards for Wisconsin kids
• Refocus on teaching reading, writing, and math
• Partner with parents to champion their child’s education
• Ensure funding reaches the classroom and rewards good teachers
• Drive transparency, predictability and innovation at DPI

“I am excited to share more details about my campaign so voters can appreciate the clear contrast between me and the other candidates. Our grassroots effort to demand the best education possible for Wisconsin children is growing daily,” stated Kinser.

Jill Barshay:

A prominent professor of special education is about to ignite a fierce debate over a tenet of his field, that students with disabilities should be educated as much as possible alongside their peers in general education classrooms, a strategy known as inclusion. 

In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, Douglas Fuchs of Vanderbilt University and the American Institutes for Research, along with two other researchers, argues that the academic benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms are not settled science despite the fact that numerous studies have found that children with disabilities learn more that way. Fuchs said the paper is slated to be published this spring in the Journal of Learning Disabilities and he expects it to be made public online sooner. 

“We’re not saying that the evidence indicates full inclusion cannot work,” said Fuchs. “We’re saying that the evidence in terms of where to place these children is extremely weak, is fundamentally flawed, and no conclusions can be drawn from the evidence.”

Fuchs also notes that there is a growing body of high-quality research on how to teach children with disabilities or those at risk of being diagnosed with a disability. These studies are randomized controlled trials of interventions that require hours of intense, specialized instruction. For many, if not most, students with disabilities, Fuchs argues, a separate setting, such as a separate classroom or even a separate school, might be the best way to get the instruction they need. 

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Madison’s one size fits all English 10, among many others.

More. And.

 Seth Barrett Tillman:

[T]here are numerous other methods that Trump will likely deploy on day one of his new administration to immunize himself and punish those who attempt to hold him accountable. The two most important of these would be to appoint an attorney general who could be counted on to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith in an attempt to end the federal prosecutions. Without a special counsel protecting the criminal trials, Trump could then demand that the attorney general withdraw the federal government from the D.C. and the Florida indictments. Second, Trump may attempt to pardon himself for any federal crimes or commute any sentences he has received up to that point. Although it seems likely that both of these acts would constitute criminal obstruction of justice by the President, the Trump v. United Statesruling could give Trump cover to do just that; according to the majority opinion, appointing and removing Justice Department officials is among his core constitutional powers to which absolute immunity attaches, and the same would be said for any exercise of the pardon power, given that it is an enumerated power under Article II. 

It is not overly dramatic to say that should these events occur, it would signal the end of the rule of law with respect to the presidency . . . .

Kayla Huynh:

Mary Erickson fondly remembers attending La Follette High School in the 1960s. 

Over the years, she held onto her high school memorabilia: The pins she received as a cheerleader rooting on the Lancers, the hand-written essays her teachers graded with A’s, the photos she captured for the yearbook and the prom dresses her mom sewed for her sister. 

Hoping to preserve those memories, Erickson donated a box of her decades-old items to the high school’s archives and history museum before it officially opened in 2002. She said she now regrets that decision after learning last year contents of the museum were thrown away.

The museum included “over 50 years worth of treasures,” Erickson said. 

Forrest Brazeal:

It’s pretty disorienting to me that smart people, secular people, particularly people in tech, view homeschooling as a high-status option now.

I was homeschooled for 13 years, from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade—you can tell that about me because I have essentially the same skill stack as Rapunzel from Tangled—and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block.

“Homeschooled”, according to Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls, historically meant one of two things, and I was both of them:

• An academic freak who wins spelling bees.1 I was a two-time National Spelling Bee finalist in 2005-06. ESPN’s John Marvel once said he liked my odds for two reasons: 1) I was homeschooled and 2) I had a name he couldn’t pronounce.
• A religious freak who believes in young-earth creationism. The earth is thankfully old enough to have forgotten the full-length country-western musical I wrote in high school called “Creation vs Evolution: The West of the Story”.

Jill Barshay:

In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, Douglas Fuchs of Vanderbilt University and the American Institutes for Research, along with two other researchers, argues that the academic benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms are not settled science despite the fact that numerous studies have found that children with disabilities learn more that way. Fuchs said the paper is slated to be published this spring in the Journal of Learning Disabilities and he expects it to be made public online sooner. 

“We’re not saying that the evidence indicates full inclusion cannot work,” said Fuchs. “We’re saying that the evidence in terms of where to place these children is extremely weak, is fundamentally flawed, and no conclusions can be drawn from the evidence.”

Fuchs also notes that there is a growing body of high-quality research on how to teach children with disabilities or those at risk of being diagnosed with a disability. These studies are randomized controlled trials of interventions that require hours of intense, specialized instruction. For many, if not most, students with disabilities, Fuchs argues, a separate setting, such as a separate classroom or even a separate school, might be the best way to get the instruction they need. 

“Some number of kids with disabilities can and should be in general classrooms,” Fuchs said. “It’s manifestly obvious that they’re doing reasonably well. They should stay there. But for a majority, they need intensive instruction, and we know how to provide intensive instruction. The evidence is, I dare say, overwhelming.”

Mark Dent:

But while the criticism of high fructose corn syrup is mainly about nutrition, its emergence and staying power have hinged on government subsidies, tariffs, and political favors connected to corporate largesse. Sugar is an economic issue, too — one that experts say benefits a few powerful entities while the rest of the country bears the cost

Riva-Melissa Tez

California’s education and public safety records are also abysmal. Despite devoting 50 percent of the state’s general fund to education, with the main share going to K-12, only 50 percent of students meet or exceed reading standards, consistently lagging behind the national average. Meanwhile, crime is spiraling out of control, with violent offenses surging 15.4 percent since 2019, homicides up 15.5 percent, and assaults 27.4 percent higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for 2025-2026 is $322 billion, surpassing even initial estimates. Many Californians missed our governor’s stealthy tax hike last year, increasing California’s top marginal income tax rate from 13.3 to 14.4 percent. This move, aimed at funding an expansion of paid family leave, is a thinly veiled attempt to plug the holes in California’s crumbling fiscal ship. 

These are the long-standing trends, and any observer can’t be too surprised at the consequences of this wildfire. If a natural disaster had been handled competently, it would have been an outlier for the Californian government. 

It’s time for Californians to shake off their complacency and demand a reckoning from those who are supposed to govern. For too long, we’ve tolerated a system that squanders our hard-earned wealth and is now destroying our property. The Romans built aqueducts stretching hundreds of miles in less time than it takes to permit an outbuilding in California — and their aqueducts actually held water. We deserve better — better stewardship of our finances and better management of our resources.

Paul Graham:

The word “prig” isn’t very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google’s isn’t bad:

A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.

This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it’s an instance of a much older one.

There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.

So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.

The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.

Alec MacGillis:

In both Ohio and Wisconsin, opponents, led by teachers’ unions, were challenging the programs on the grounds that they violated the separation of church and state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld vouchers; a federal appeals court in Ohio ruled against them.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up a First Amendment challenge to vouchers, based on one of the Ohio cases, in February 2002. Robert Chanin, a lawyer for the National Education Association, told the court, “Under the Cleveland voucher program, millions of dollars in unrestricted public funds are transferred each year from the state treasury into the general coffers of sectarian private schools, and the money is used by those schools to provide an educational program in which the sectarian and the secular are interwoven.” Chanin noted that ­virtually all the students in the voucher program were attending religious schools, rather than secular private schools.

But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the likely swing vote in the case, interrupted to pick up on a point made by a state attorney who’d defended the vouchers. In evaluating Cleveland’s choice program, shouldn’t the court consider not only private schools but also other options available to students, such as public magnet schools and charter schools?

The question caught Chanin off guard. The issue was the constitutionality of private school vouchers, yet O’Connor was evoking public school options. The state pressed its advantage, with its lawyer stressing the limited scope of the pilot: “It didn’t take too much money away from the public schools, but gave enough for a limited program that is targeted to the most needy, to the poorest of the poor.”

Peter Savodnik:

But Chua’s Yale Law mentees aren’t just Republicans. They come from both sides of the political aisle and include the progressive reporter Ronan Farrowand Democratic congresswoman-elect Maggie Goodlander, who’s married to Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Chua has also taught the Mozilla Foundation’s executive director, Nabiha Syed, and Usha Chilukuri, who became Usha Vance, and sat in the front of the class while her future husband sat in the back. Chua’s classes were always oversubscribed, several sources told me. There was always a line of students waiting to speak with her at her office, on the third floor of the Sterling Law Building, which was built in 1931 and is meant to look like it was built in 1131.

“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student told The Free Press. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”

“It’s across the board—left wing, right wing,” Chua said of the students she’s advised. “I get a lot of immigrants.” She said she is also close with federal judges and Supreme Court justices of all political stripes. That includes the conservative Brett Kavanaugh, who Chua helped 10 of her students—eight of whom were women—land clerkships with. As well as Sonia Sotomayor, who has been dubbed the Court’s “most liberal” justice and attended the Washington, D.C., book party for Chua’s first novel, The Golden Gate.

“She has become the most important adviser and mentor of students at the Yale Law School in the entire time that I’ve been on the faculty, which is going on half a century,” said Kronman, a lifelong Democrat.

The “Ethical Skeptic”:

I share an equal frustration with the lack of genuine curiosity and rigorous investigative effort applied to interpreting the artifacts uncovered at Göbekli Tepe and other archaeological sites. For instance, why was I the first to recognize that the serpent image carved into the wall of Enclosure AA, or Hypogeum Pit, at Karahan Tepe represents Sheshanāgá, the cosmic shining serpent of ancient lore—an image tied to the Milky Way’s luminous center?² How could such a connection escape notice? Surely, this should not have been that hard to figure out. I am not even directly involved in the field, yet I was able to discern the meaning of the image within minutes of seeing it for the first time.

The builders of Göbekli Tepe made their message in the Pillars unmistakably clear, guiding us like children through precisely what they were observing and documenting. Yet, they likely underestimated just how obtuse the children of men would become.

This raises an uncomfortable question: if an outsider can make such connections so readily, what does it say about the level of curiosity and rigor being applied by those entrusted with unearthing and interpreting humanity’s ancient story? My concern goes beyond mere intellectual lethargy or bureaucratic stagnation. I sense that fear governs much of the work and conclusions produced within the discipline of archaeology. Fear of being labeled heretical, fear of diverging from the consensus, fear of professional censure and reductive categorization, and perhaps most troubling, fear of unseen powers whose agency and influence remain deliberately obscured.

An Alternative Interpretation of Pillar 43, Its ‘Handbags,’ ‘V’-Scoring, and Iconic ‘H’ Symbols

Michael Alcazar

Yet as dark as Gotham could be in those gritty days memorialised in film classics like Taxi Driver, there was always a ray of light: namely, a healthy respect for the police. Any disturbance would stop as soon as an officer stepped into the train, for example. Many of these cops were Vietnam veterans, and you could see the command and experience in their eyes. I remember noticing one officer’s medal above his NYPD shield: “sharpshooter”, it read.

It’s the crucial element missing today, as disorder grips the Big Apple once more. Law-breakers don’t respect law enforcement — and for good reason: they know that, thanks to misguided criminal-justice “reform”, they can re-offend over and over with utter impunity.

WILL:

Join the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and 50CAN as we share the results of a new survey of parents on the state of educational opportunity in Wisconsin. Among the key findings are parent perspectives on education and the lack of information parents have access to regarding their local school system, the true costs of state spending on education, academic achievement and more. We will also look at how the Badger State compares nationally. The survey is organized into five categories of learning that families tell us are crucial for them and their children: 1) school quality and opportunity, 2) tutoring, summer and mental health, 3) out of school activities, 4) information and engagement, and 5) college and career readiness. A total of 403 parents and guardians of school-aged children across our state were surveyed between July 8 and August 22, 2024 as part of a nationwide research effort that reached more than 20,000 respondents

Matt:

Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.

It’s hard to describe it in words.

So, I use pictures.

Read below for the illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Stephen Wolfram:

For more than a century people had wondered how simple the axioms of logic (Boolean algebra) could be. On January 29, 2000, I found the answer—and made the surprising discovery that they could be about twice as simple as anyone knew. (I also showed that what I found was the simplest possible.) 

It was an interesting result—that gave new intuition about just how simple the foundations of things can be, and for example helped inspire my efforts to find a simple underlying theory of physics. 

But how did I get the result? Well, I used automated theorem proving (specifically, what’s now FindEquationalProof in Wolfram Language). Automated theorem proving is something that’s been around since at least the 1950s, and its core methods haven’t changed in a long time. But in the rare cases it’s been used in mathematics it’s typically been to confirm things that were already believed to be true. And in fact, to my knowledge, my Boolean algebra axiom is actually the only truly unexpected result that’s ever been found for the first time using automated theorem proving.

A friend asked me if these statements from John Koskinen’s 8 January, 2025 Madison Rotary Club talk are true. Education topics begin about 48 minutes in.

Complete talk:

John Koskinen is Chief Economist at the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

More on suburban enrollment growth

xlsx data

Kari Gensler Santistevan:

This report is prepared pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 118.51(15)(c), as amended in 2011 Wisconsin Act 114, which requires the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to: Annually submit a report to the governor and to the appropriate standing committees of the legislature under Wis. Stat. § 13.172(3).

The report under this paragraph shall include all of the following information:
• The number of pupils who applied to attend public school in a nonresident school district under the full-time open enrollment program;

• The number of applications received under the regular and alternative application procedures, and for the applications received under the alternative application procedure, the number of applications received under each of the criteria listed under the alternative application procedure;

• The number of applications denied and the bases for the denials;

• The number of pupils attending public school in a nonresident school district under the open enrollment program. The department shall specify, separately, the number of pupils attending public school in a nonresident school district whose applications were accepted under the regular application procedure and the alternative application procedure, and for the applications submitted under the alternative application procedures, the number of pupils attending under each of the criteria listed under the alternative application procedure.

The report covers school year 2023-24.

The report was prepared by Kari Gensler Santistevan, School Administration Consultant, with assistance from Bill Evans, IS Systems Development Services Specialist; Jennifer Demrow, School Administration Consultant; and Michael Bormett, Assistant Director, Parental Education Options Team. Data for the report was gathered and compiled through the Open Enrollment Application Log (OPAL), an online application and tracking system in use since the 2008-09 school year.

Much more on Open Enrollment, here.

Noah Carl:

Science, nominally the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, is at it again. In November, it published an editorial by Agustin Fuentes titled ‘Scientists as political advocates’. The gist is that scientists and scientific institutions need to be even more political than they already are.

Back in 2023, Fuentes wrote an editorial that claimed “being woke is just doing good 21st-century science”. And in 2021, he wrote one that described Charles Darwin as “an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices”. Indeed, the prolific Fuentes has penned no less than eight editorials for Science over the last four years – suggesting that the editors like what he’s selling.  

Returning to ‘Scientists as political advocates’, Fuentes begins by warning readers that science is “under attack”. Does he mean that it’s under attack from woke ideologues trying to bend science into a tool for promoting ‘diversity’? Or that it’s under attack from public health officials trying to shut down discussion over the harms of pandemic policies? Of course not. He means that it’s under attack from his political opponents.

Elizabeth Weiss:

I spoke of censorship in anthropology and archaeology — no longer are photos of skeletal remains allowed in many journals; museum exhibits are being shuttered; and professors are being prevented from showing students teaching materials.

Lukasz Olenjik:

Device fingerprinting involves collecting information about user devices, such as smartphones or computers, to create a unique identifier, often to track people or their activities as they browse around the web. This data may include IP addresses, browser user-agent strings, screen resolution, or even details like battery discharge rate. Fingerprinting is particularly concerning because it can be passive—requiring no user interaction. Data is collected without the user’s knowledge and linked to their device. Upon subsequent browsing, systems can recognize the same visitor, enabling ad tracking or uncovering private information, such as browsing habits.

This form of identification is neither transparent nor user-friendly. Users are often unaware it is happening, and when done without their consent, awareness, or other legal grounds, it breaches laws. Unlike cookies or other mechanisms, such identifiers cannot be easily “cleared,” making them especially invasive. Nevertheless, websites, advertising technologies, and others have continued to use them. Remarkably, large technology companies like Apple and Google once vowed not to engage in such practices. This commitment marked a major achievement for privacy, driven by advancements in privacy research and engineering. Large platforms even began competing to enhance user privacy, benefiting users’ welfare and reducing the risk of data misuse or leaks. This issue cannot simply be reduced to “Google does this, and the ICO critiques it.”