Mike Colias:

Mike O’Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor. The sales executive’s note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous—but came with a twist.

Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand violations committed by his co-workers over the years.

During a 2019 sales meeting to discuss a new vehicle launch, a colleague blurted out: “Let’s not reinvent the ocean.”

At another meeting, in 2016, someone started a sentence with: “I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”

For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary.

After one colleague declared: “It’s a huge task, but we’re trying to get our arms and legs around it,” O’Brien quipped: “Adding ‘legs’ into the mix makes it sound kinda kinky.”

John Richards:

Education, Skills and Labour Market
In terms of national scores in reading, mathematics, and science among sampled students at age 15, Canada continues to rank among the top ten countries in the 2022 PISA survey.

At first glance, one might conclude all is well. However, Canada’s national trends have consistently declined since initial benchmarking of the three subjects in the early 2000s. The largest subject decline is in mathematics.

The four large-population provinces – Quebec in particular – have composite mathematics scores well above the OECD average. Five of six small-population provinces score statistically at the OECD average. Newfoundland scores below the OECD average.
Like the proverbial frogs slowly boiling in water, Canadian provinces are at risk of ignoring their problems until too late, as happened in Sweden a decade ago – and is currently taking place in many US states.

The Council of Ministers of Education in Canada (CMEC) could facilitate a coordinated response among provinces to address weaknesses identified in PISA. For example, CMEC could promote superior Quebec mathematics practices. Another example: provinces could pay attention to BC’s superior high-school completion rate in provincial schools.
Press Release

Molly Fischer:

Columbia’s capitulation was in line with a general trend toward circumspection. The memory of Congress grilling university presidents in 2023 seems to be fresh among leaders in higher ed: few want to risk either their jobs or their budgets by saying the wrong thing. A handful of exceptions have stood out; for example, President Christopher Eisgruber, of Princeton, who wrote a piece for The Atlantic about “The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia.” (This week, the Administration suspended dozens of grants to Princeton.) But perhaps none has been as voluble or persistent as Michael Roth, who has been president of Wesleyan since 2007.

Roth is a historian and a Wesleyan alumnus who, as an undergraduate, designed a major in the history of psychological theory. His scholarship has dealt with Freud and memory but also colleges as institutions, in books such as “Safe Enough Spaces” (2019) and “The Student: A Short History” (2023). Recent years have brought an increasingly political thrust to both his writing (for national media and his presidential blog) and to his work as president. In 2023, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, Wesleyan ended legacy admissions.

When Wesleyan students joined the national wave of protests over the war on Gaza, Roth—who describes himself as a supporter of both free speech and Israel’s right to exist—tangled with student protesters as well as with those who wanted him to shut the protests down. Meanwhile, in interviews and essays, he took administrators at other colleges to task for embracing the principles like those found in the “Kalven report”—a 1967 document out of the University of Chicago, which advanced the argument that universities should almost always remain scrupulously neutral. (Such stances were, he told me, “a cover for trying to stay out of trouble.”) As the Trump Administration has ramped up its attacks on the academy, Roth has continued to publish widely, urging fellow-leaders to stand up for their principles. “Release Mahmoud Khalil! Respect freedom of speech!” he concluded in a recent column for Slate, which argued that the Columbia activist’s arrest “should terrify every college president.”

Jenna Telesca Joseph Pisani and Jennifer Calfas:

A federal judge ordered immigration authorities to stop their efforts to detain a Columbia University junior who participated in pro-Palestinian protests until further notice from the court.

Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order, a day after Yunseo Chung sued the Trump administration to prevent her deportation. The judge, appointed by President Bill Clinton, scheduled a hearing for May 20.

The Department of Homeland Security issued an arrest warrant for the 21-year-old student on March 8, according to court records. Chung, a permanent resident, moved to the U.S. at age 7 from South Korea.

Her lawyers say she has broken no laws and the Trump administration is seeking to strip her green card because of her advocacy work.

“Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation—may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express political views disfavored by the current administration,” they wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security said it was seeking Chung’s deportation in line with immigration law. “Yunseo Chung has engaged in concerning conduct, including when she was arrested by NYPD during a pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College,” a spokesperson for the department said. Columbia declined to comment.

Dr. Eric Ostermeier

In 1909, Superintendent Charles Cary was elected to his third of five terms with a 35.6 percent plurality victory, defeating rural school inspector LaFrance Wood of Nielsville by 4.5 points in a four-candidate field.

The subsequent 28 elections for the office had been decided by an average of 31.2 points prior to Tuesday’s race.

The closest election for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Wisconsin history took place for an open seat in November 1857.

In that cycle, Democratic Wisconsin State Historical Society secretary Lyman Draper of Madison eked out a 0.4-point victory against 1853 (Whig) and 1855 (Republican) nominee John McMynn of Racine. Republicans and Democrats each won multiple statewide offices on the ballot that cycle in very close races.

All told, the 2025 election is the 11th most narrowly decided for Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction since statehood. Aside from the 1909 election mentioned above, all other races decided by less than six points took place between 1851 and 1892.

Only four of 39 incumbent Superintendents of Public Instruction were defeated in their quest for another term in Wisconsin:

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More.

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

Brendan W. Sullivan

How do you know whether something is true or not? Surely, you’ve been told that the angles of a triangle add to 180 ◦ , for example, but how do you know for sure? What if you met an alien who had never studied basic geometry? How could you convince him/her/it that this fact is true? In a way, this is what mathematics is all about: devising new statements, deciding somehow whether they are true or false, and explaining these findings to other people (or aliens, as the case may be). Unfortunately, it seems like many people think mathematicians spend their days multiplying large numbers together; in actuality, though, mathematics is a far more creative and writing-based discipline than its widely-perceived role as ever-more-complicated arithmetic. One aim of this book is to convince you of this fact, but that’s merely a bonus. This book’s main goals are to show you what mathematical thinking, problem-solving, and proof-writing are really all about, to show you how to do those things, and to show you how much fun they really are!

Robert McMillan:

A black Volvo rolled slowly down a quiet street while passengers armed with waterguns scanned for their target. Then at two minutes before 5 p.m., high-school senior Gabriel Pardini emerged from a YMCA.

From his middle seat, Graham Iwanchuk raised his Nerf Super Soaker XP35 and fired through an open window. Pardini never stood a chance. He was out of the game.

They were playing Senior Assassin, a citywide game of water-pistol tag that’s become a rite of passage for students across the country—and a major headache for school administrators.

Variations of the game date back to the 1980s, but today it is played with an app called Splashin. Each week the app gives every five-person team a squad to target. Their assignment: take them out with a splash of water. Iwanchuk’s team, the Last Troll, is part of a game that involves 250 other seniors at their school. Every hit is recorded on video and uploaded on the app, where they are widely shared and dissected.

Teenagers sneak into bedrooms, get younger siblings to knock on doors while they hide in the bushes and enlist spies to give up a target’s location. Players can use pretty much anything that gets you wet, from a water balloon to a hose. But water pistols are the weapon of choice.

John Richards and Tingting Zhang

Scores on international tests have been falling. Without better teaching, students will be ill-prepared for a data-driven world.

Canada’s declining K-12 education system is sending out worrying warning signals. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Canadian students ranked in the top 10 among OECD countries. But that doesn’t mean all is well, and the most alarming signs are in mathematics.

Math was the only subject where Canada’s national average dropped below the benchmark score of 500. Even worse, for the first time one of our provinces — Newfoundland and Labrador — scored significantly below the OECD average. Math is fundamental to future economic competitiveness, yet we are failing to equip students with basic numeracy skills.

More.

Jessica Grose:

Florida would join Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Alaska in lowering their testing standards or graduation requirements of late. After the absolutely dismal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores from 2024, which showed that a higher percentage of eighth graders scored “below basic” in reading than at any point in the test’s 30-year history, you would think that states’ education leaders would be putting serious time and effort into helping their students thrive. The NAEP is a congressionally mandated federal exam given to fourth graders and eighth graders every two years and 12th graders about every four years to track educational progress across the country.

All of this is reminding me of something President Trump said in the spring of 2020 about the coronavirus, “‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” If we stop testing America’s students, we’ll have fewer bad headlines about how poorly they’re doing.

Unfortunately, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, agrees with President Trump’s executive order that the Department of Education should go away, but she hasn’t stopped there. As a consequence of the huge job cuts McMahon has enacted so far, she has hobbled the federal government’s ability to gather statistics on student achievement, effective teaching practices and student literacy. The Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers this data, “is now left with fewer than 20 federal employees, down from more than 175 at the start of the second Trump administration,” according to Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.

——

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Glenn Greenwald:

For those interested, here’s the criminal op-ed that Tufts PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk wrote with 3 other students in the university paper that resulted in her being put on the Canary Mission list and then detained off the street by ICE. Criminal op-ed:

More:

A student on a green card at Columbia University in New York who organised protests last summer against Israel’s attacks on Gaza was taken from his house and is still being detained in Louisiana. He has not been accused of breaking any law. Another student on a green card at Columbia managed to preempt attempts to detain her with a lawsuit, but the administration is nonetheless trying to revoke her green card because she attended protests.

A student at Tufts University in Boston who wrote an article last summer for a student newspaper criticising Israel’s attacks on Gaza was taken off the street and is now being detained in Louisiana. The only crime she is accused of is not having a valid visa – because the administration suddenly revoked it before detaining her. 

An Indian student of Georgetown University in Virginia was arrested outside his home for ‘spreading Hamas propaganda’ for social media posts supporting Gaza, but has not been accused of any crime. He is being detained in Louisiana.

Dan Lennington:

Wisconsin’s AG is pilloried for his conduct, wasting taxpayer money and incurring unnecessary overtime expenses. The entire opinion is here: kaulorder.tiiny.site

John Sailer

This piece is particularly fascinating.

Summers calls for an “aggressive reform agenda” to put excellence over identity, truth over social justice. Says it won’t happen via normal processes that “give[s] too much power to faculty members who have political agendas.”

Abdel Abdellaoui, Hilary C. Martin and Peter M. Visscher 

In civilizations, individuals are born into or sorted into different levels of socio-economic status (SES). SES clusters in families and geographically, and is robustly associated with genetic effects. Here we first review the history of scientific research on the relationship between SES and heredity. We then discuss recent findings in genomics research in light of the hypothesis that SES is a dynamic social construct that involves genetically influenced traits that help in achieving or retaining a socio-economic position, and can affect the distribution of genes associated with such traits. Social stratification results in people with differing traits being sorted into strata with different environmental exposures, which can result in evolutionary selection pressures through differences in mortality, reproduction and non-random mating. Genomics research is revealing previously concealed genetic consequences of the way society is organized, yielding insights that should be approached with caution in pursuit of a fair and functional society.

Joe Miller and Hannah Murphy:

A person close to X said Harper’s case “raises a concern that [X] users’ speech might be curtailed if the government is allowed to have access to users’ data without a court-approved search warrant”.

They added: “This issue is not specific to X. It means that the constitution does not prevent the government from snooping through any user’s account on any social media platform or financial platform.”

The timing of the intervention by X — the only individual corporation to have filed a brief in the case to date — is notable given the Trump administration’s use of public material on social media to vet migrants.

The Department of Homeland Security last month proposed broadening the collection of social media account handles from visa applicants and those wishing to apply for residence in the US.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

By Reuters

The investigations were “just the beginning” of the Justice Department’s attempt to eradicate DEI programs, the media release said.

Stanford University said in a statement it began taking steps to comply with the Supreme Court decision immediately after it was issued.

“We continue to be committed to fulfilling our obligations under the law. We do not have details about today’s announcement, but we look forward to learning more about their concerns and responding to the department’s questions,” Stanford spokesperson Dee Mostofi said in an email.

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The University of California said it has adhered to a ban on affirmative action in admissions since California voters approved one in the ballot initiative Proposition 209 in 1996.

Ray Carter

The results of nationwide testing show that students in Oklahoma lag behind students in nearly all of the 50 states when it comes to reading proficiency. Those results represent more than hardship for individual students or a loss of bragging rights for state officials.

According to experts, Oklahoma’s low reading outcomes also translate into a significant, lifelong drain on taxpayer resources and the state economy as students emerge from the K-12 system unprepared for work or college.

A recent report from the Education Consumers Foundation, “The Cost of Failure to Teach Reading: Projections From 3rd Grade Reading Scores,” shows millions of dollars in increased taxpayer expenses are likely to occur in Oklahoma given the many children who do not read proficiently in the state.

“For every student who fails to master reading by grade 3, taxpayers are subjected to what amounts to a hidden annual surtax—one that cumulates with each graduating class,” the report stated. “It is levied in the form of added local, state, and federal tax-funded resources absorbed by the resulting school dropouts and unprepared graduates.”

The reason for the added taxpayer cost is simple: Students who do not learn to read are far more likely to be unemployed or underemployed as adults and therefore rely more on government services.

——-

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Link:

It has to do with Justice Jackson’s comments that when Black newborns are delivered by Black doctors, they’re much more likely to survive, justifying racially discriminatory admissions.

We now know the study contained fraud🧵

I’ll start with their least bad offenses, before moving to the worst of it.

Firstly, the authors were warned not to make causal claims because they lacked the fixed effect I said they needed. They made those claims anyway.

Gavin Baker:

Worth watching, especially for anyone skeptical on DOGE.

@AntonioGracias is one of my closest friends, one of the most exceptional people I know and extremely high integrity.

Grateful to him, Elon and many others for serving 🇺🇸 at DOGE.

Richard Zach:

https://richardzach.org/2025/03/accessible-open-textbooks-in-math-heavy-disciplines/The challengeThe authoring platform of choice in many math-heavy disciplines is LaTeX. It produces typeset documents of excellent quality and handles formulas and mathematical diagrams extremely well. Practically every researcher or instructor in mathematics, physics, and computer science is adept at using it, and it has a wide user base outside these core disciplines as well (e.g., philosophy and economics).

Unfortunately, it only produces PDF output. PDF is not an accessible format: it does not scale well to display on tablets or phones, text does not reflow, it contains no semantic information (e.g., what’s a heading or what’s a list), images, formulas, and diagrams are only visually accessible. This creates difficulties for readers who rely on alternative presentations of material (in other colors, text sizes, fonts, or in non-visual formats, i.e., audio or Braille) or who simply want to access the material on a device not the size of a printed page (e.g., on a smartphone or small e-reader).

Corrinne Hess:

Underly received about $850,000 from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, out of the $1.1 million she’s raised since February. Kinser received almost $1.7 million from the Republican Party of Wisconsin, out of about $2.2 million raised total, according to her committee report and a late filing.

Kinser, who has never been elected to public office, said Tuesday night she is proud of the campaign she ran and she won’t stop working for children.

“We cannot settle for only three out of 10 children reading well enough to go to college or have a career,” Kinser said.

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

Link:

FPF recently collaborated with Wiredto allow the magazine to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. “Public records are disappearing. The National Archive is in disarray,” Stern said. “It’s going to be harder and harder to get documents out of the administration.”

He added that citizens can protect press freedom on paper, but that’s not enough.

“But if there’s not a functional, viable press to use those protections and to carry out that work, then everything you’ve accomplished is academic,” Stern said. “So I think the first thing folks can do to support the press is subscribe to their news outlets and put some money in news outlets’ pockets and in journalists’ pockets so they can continue to exist.”

Alex Shieh:

Around 2 a.m. on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I launched a public database mapping all 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University and sent each one a simple email: What do you do all day?

Ostensibly, it was a journalistic inquiry. The site, which I named Bloat@Brown, was somewhere between FaceMash (Mark Zuckerberg’s college project that scraped student ID photos and let users rank who was hotter) and DOGE. But instead of using Zuckerberg’s ELO-style rankings — a numerical method originally developed for ranking chess players — my site, Bloat@Brown, used retrieval-augmented generation and a custom GPT-4o pipeline to rank administrators by their operational importance.

First, I scraped the internet — job boards, the student newspaper, LinkedIn — to gather whatever I could about each employee. I fed that data into GPT-4o mini to generate a rough utility ranking. The results weren’t definitive — there is only so much information on the public web — but they seemed directionally accurate. (Like obvious DEI jobs triggered a DEI filter, for instance.) 

While my roommate slept, I worked from the common room in my dorm’s basement — the same room that floods whenever it rains and thus has plastic tarps, industrial fans, and wet floor signs permanently set up despite Brown’s tuition and fees rising to $93,064 a year. Brown’s financial woes also mean that the school runs a $46 million annual budget deficit while professors constantly complain they’re underpaid. So, where is our $93,064 a year actually going?

After doing some digging, I discovered that much of the money is being thrown into a pit of bureaucracy. The small army of 3,805 non-faculty administrators is more than double the faculty headcount, and makes for roughly one administrator for every two undergrads. In the US, the cost of college tuition has far outpaced inflation because, for one, administrative staff count has drastically outpaced growth in the student population — a cause for concern since, in the 20th century, universities were affordable and ran fine with a fraction of today’s staffers.

Frederick Hess:

The federal higher-education apparatus that’s so familiar today was far more modest under Reagan or George H.W. Bush. While the federal role expanded significantly during the 1990s, with new lending programs, tax credits, and Clintonite initiatives, the George W. Bush administration focused its education efforts on K-12. (Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ second-term Commission on the Future of Higher Education was laudable but didn’t ultimately amount to much.)

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has inherited a deep roster and an aggressive game plan.The modern era of turbocharged federal involvement in higher education really commenced during the Obama years. The Obama team ran wild: weaponizing Title IX, devising onerous new “gainful employment” regulations for for-profit (and only for-profit) colleges, making Washington the nation’s sole source of college lending, and unilaterally rewriting the terms of the brand-new Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

During Trump’s first term, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos chose not to respond in kind. Instead, she mostly sought to restore the traditional order. A principled Reagan conservative focused on expanding K-12 school choice, DeVos didn’t have much of a playbook or mandate for higher education, other than trying to undo some of the Obama-era excesses.

Emily Kopp:

A researcher who argued that infant mortality is higher for black newborns with white doctors because of racial bias omitted a variable from the paper that “undermines the narrative,” according to the researcher’s internal notes.

The study forms a keystone of the racial concordance field, which hypothesizes patients are better served by medical providers of the same race, and has served as a rationale for affirmative action. It faces new questions just as universities move to defund their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs or face legal action.

The August 2020 study in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluded that the gap in mortality rates between black newborns and white newborns declines by 58% if the black newborns are under the care of black physicians. A possible driver of the phenomenon could include a “spontaneous bias” by white physicians toward the babies, the researchers wrote.

The paper’s most high-profile booster was Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who cited it as evidence for the benefits of affirmative action in her dissent in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that universities that considered the race of college applicants had violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: University Spent Over $200,000 On ‘Diversity’ Course Teaching Physicians That Healthcare Is Racist)

“For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug: it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live,” reads an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges. “Yet due to the enduring and significant underrepresentation of minorities in the health professions, many minority patients will not receive care from a racially diverse team or from providers who were trained in a diverse environment.”

More.

Daniel Leonard:

In some sense, AI tutors prove more useful for students for the exact same reasons that high-quality human tutors have always been effective. “When you have that one-on-one instruction, or small group instruction, the instruction caters to your needs,” Sal Khan—founder of Khan Academy—told us in November. “If a student is finding something easy, then a tutor can move ahead or go deeper. If they’re struggling, a tutor can slow down.”

In another study from last year, an AI-powered tutor helped Harvard undergraduates learn physics more effectively—and in less time. To optimize the bot for learning, the researchers prompted it with a set of constraints—including “Only give away ONE STEP AT A TIME, DO NOT give away the full solution in a single message,” and “You may CONFIRM if their ANSWER is right, but DO NOT tell [students] the answer.”

One hundred and eighty-six physics undergrads were split into two groups: Half received a standard physics lecture, and the other half stayed home to work through the same material under the guidance of the AI tutor. When the researchers compared students’ scores on a pre- and post-lesson assessment of the material, “the learning gains for students… in the AI-tutored group were over double those for students in the active lecture group.” The AI tutor group also worked through the material 10 minutes faster than their peers—and reported higher levels of engagement and motivation. 

more.

Paige Bright, Alan Edelman, Steven G. Johnson

This course, intended for undergraduates familiar with elementary calculus and linear algebra, introduces the extension of differential calculus to functions on more general vector spaces, such as functions that take as input a matrix and return a matrix inverse or factorization, derivatives of ODE solutions, and even stochastic derivatives of random functions. It emphasizes practical computational applications, such as large-scale optimization and machine learning, where derivatives must be re-imagined in order to be propagated through complicated calculations. The class also discusses efficiency concerns leading to “adjoint” or “reverse-mode” differentiation (a.k.a. “backpropagation”), and gives a gentle introduction to modern automatic

Karen Vaites:

Last year, I wrote about a specific, promising development in Wisconsin: the state published the strongest ELA curriculum list in the country.

Unfortunately, the work in Wisconsin prior to that development, and since, underwhelms.

I’m overdue to write about the broader context in Wisconsin, mostly because progress on curriculum improvement has stalled, and I should continue the story. Also, Wisconsin elects a new state superintendent this week, so it’s a good time to revisit the tenure of state superintendent Jill Underly.

From a national lens, Wisconsin offers a cautionary tale for everyone calling to shift power back to states and for the legislated path to literacy gains.

Wisconsin’s Legacy And the Underly Era

Wisconsin is one of the rare states that elects its state superintendent, and this seems to have the unfortunate effect of politicizing the role more than usual. The state’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is described by locals as a “political factory.” Current governor Tony Evers is a former state superintendent, so DPI roles are viewed as a political springboard. Notably, Deputy Superintendent Thomas McCarthy has no education background, he’s a career state politico.

This context helps explain why the state has a lackluster track record on academics. In addition, DPI literacy leaders are known to follow discredited educational philosophies.

Barbara Novak, the Director of Early Literacy, is a historic Balanced Literacy devotee. Novak is the former President of the Wisconsin Reading Association (WSRA), which lobbied against the WI Dyslexia Guidebook and the recent Act 20 literacy legislation. She has been with DPI for more than a decade; during that time, DPI has made few efforts to advance “science of reading” initiatives, in stark contrast to the other states.

A few illustrative stories:

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more.

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

“Hilarius Bookbinder”:

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been a while since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the United States. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the NFL. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

Reading

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wakehere. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

———

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Karen Vaites:

I have made one more update to my State Curriculum Map tracker.

While @WisconsinDPI stopped maintaining the website with 2021 curriculum data by district, parents retained the info, so have been able to publish it openly. Link added.

Note that parents are also the only source of 2024-25 curriculum data by district in WI.

Why is this transparency work falling to parents? A fair question to ask of @underlyforwi.

Prem Thakker:

Samah Sisay of the Center for Constitutional Rights told Zeteo that one’s visa being revoked does not mean that their status would be too. Unlike student visas – which are entry documents that allow someone to enter the country – student statuses are what allow people to stay in the US. To maintain one’s status, a student has to fulfill certain requirements, like being properly enrolled in classes, keeping documents up to date, and following work restrictions.

A student’s visa could expire or be revoked for any number of reasons, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean their status to stay would be taken away, too. Some of these statuses, which are typically overseen by university officers, are now allegedly being unilaterally revoked by ICE instead. While university officers often oversee status in the SEVIS system, Sisay said that DHS can technically revoke status without a university actively disenrolling a student.

Still, the practice is alarming students and university staff across the country. As one official put it, “Someone at ICE pushed a button, and now [students] are ‘illegal’ through a process that absolutely should not be happening.”

Dave Cieslewicz:

Some of my liberal friends have expressed their unhappiness over my endorsement of Brittany Kinser for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. 

So, let me expand on my reasons. 

When I was at the city of Madison and there was a managerial opening I always first thought about how that department was functioning. If things were going good, I’d want to promote from within. If things were rocky, I’ld look to the outside. 

You can’t take an honest look at DPI and conclude that things are in good shape there. Wisconsin is behind average on test scores, behind most states on recovery after COVID, not great on attendance and we have the widest racial achievement gap of any state in the nation. 

So, the first question I need to ask is, why do we want to stick with the status quo?

Well, the status quo has a ready answer: it’s just a question of money. To be exact, the incumbent, Jill Underly, wants to spend the state’s entire $4 billion surplus on public education. But she proposes no changes, no reforms and she would ask for no accountability — no improvements in test scores or anything else. It also just doesn’t add up because if we use all that one-time money in this biennium, what do we do in the next one? 

Moreover, it’s just simply untrue that money is the problem for most districts. In fact, last year Wisconsin communities passed referendums worth more in total than any year in history. Here in Madison we haven’t voted down a school referendum in 20 years and we just passed the largest combined operating and capital referendums in our history — a total of $506 million. Milwaukee also passed its largest referendum ever.

—

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Denis Campbell:

Cashless societies may be a sad fact of modern life for those with a nostalgic attachment to the pound in their pocket, but doctors have discovered one unexpected benefit of the decline of coins.

Far fewer children are having surgery after swallowing small items that could choke or kill them, and the scarcity of loose change is likely to be the reason.

The number of children in England needing an operation to remove a foreign body from their nose, throat or airway fell significantly between 2012 and 2022, NHS figures show.

The fall has been greeted with relief by doctors and surgeons, who for years have been warning of the dangers posed by young children ingesting magnets, tiny batteries and other risky objects.

Microsoft Research:

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices.

We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so.
Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.

IFRG:

New public recordsreleased Thursday by the Institute for Reforming Government’s (IRG) Center for Investigative Oversight reveal how the Department of Public Instruction’s lenient enforcement of Milwaukee Public Schools’ 2024 finance deadlines set up different, more destructive outcomes than DPI’s stricter enforcement in previous years.

Superintendent Underly’s DPI released the records March 5, 2025, 8 months after IRG’s June 17, 2024, request. DPI fulfilled the complete records request only after IRG, represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, threatened legal action.

WHY IT MATTERS

DPI took a gentler approach with MPS than other school districts in years past, despite accurate financial documents being essential to determining state aid for all Wisconsin school districts. DPI has the ability to withhold funding if districts miss deadlines.

——

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

kanji master:

When students begin the journey of learning Japanese, they are met with a fascinating yet complex writing system composed of three scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Take, for example, the sentence “新しいゲームを買いました。” (Atarashii geemu o kaimashita.), which means “I bought a new game.”

Dave Cieslewicz:

It’s the parents of those high-achieving students who are demanding the change and they’re demanding it in response to new state programs granting automatic admissions to the UW for kids who rank in the top 5% of their classes and automatic admissions to UW campuses outside of Madison for those in the top 10%.

The current system doesn’t work because, in addition to there being no weighting of grades, there isn’t even any class rankings. So, how can you tell if any kid is in the top 10%? Even worse, the district has been trying to move away from assigning grades at all with a pilot program at one high school which would replace letter grades with “Advanced,” “Proficient,” “Developing” or “Emerging.” (I note that there are only four of these and so none that equates to an “F.” I assume that if there were one it would be something like “Could Be The Next Einstein.”)

The bottom line here is that merit is finding its way back into the Madison public schools. This whole movement — no weighted grading, no class rankings, downplaying letter grades altogether — is born of the notion that merit is just a construct of the oppressors. And the liberal parents of those high-achieving kids might actually buy that in theory. 

Until it stands in the way of their kid getting into the UW.

——

“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District

“Hilarious Bookbinder”

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

——-

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Simpson Street Free Press

SSFP student reporters and local journalists interview candidates for this year’s school board race. If you missed our forum, now’s your chance to catch up! Stay informed and get to know who’s on the ballot.

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Gokul:

SF on Saturday morning: a large % of Waymos are ferrying solo kids (8-14 yo), presumably to sports or other activities.

A friend told me that 85% of parents at their kids’ SF school use Waymo for kids pickup / drop off: earlier it was ~10% using Uber and Lyft.

Shows how Waymo has grown by expanding the market, serving segments who otherwise were non-consumers of ride sharing.

Nicole Shanahan:

What exactly is a “continuing resolution”? What’s the difference between an “omnibus” and a “minibus”? And why do these always seem to come with the threat of a government shutdown every few months? My conversation with @RepThomasMassie.