School Information System

Sovann AP Linden & Mateo H. Petel

Widely seen as “Stanford’s technical MBA” and located in the school of engineering, the program has a quasi-monopoly on entrepreneurship courses. At its center is a founder-first curriculum that treats entrepreneurship not as an extracurricular, but as a core intellectual pursuit. Courses such as Lean LaunchPad, Technology Venture Formation (known on campus as MS&E 273), and Hacking for Defense allow students to earn academic credit for building real companies. 

Many of these classes either require or strongly recommend having an MS&E teammate — effectively making the program a gatekeeper to Stanford’s most startup-relevant coursework.

“What you’re seeing is engineers signing up to these MS&E classes, switching to MS&E as a co-term, or just getting to know the MS&E folks personally” said an alum. The real secret is that you don’t need to work on a startup on top of your studies, rather MS&E makes it easy to get credit for working on a startup project, with professors often connected, or acting as angel investors.

Applications for these classes are competitive, and a team several graduate students, including MS&E, co-founded Stanford Founders, a student organization, to help with team formation. Stanford Founders has now grown to the largest on-campus graduate founders association, hosting its own Demo Day and attracting numerous investors.

Ian Miller

Sure, you can mandate masks, but what does are the effects for those who are forced to wear them? What does it cost in terms of lost social cohesion, normalizing anti-social behavior? What are the trade-offs that result from closing schools, from forcing businesses to shut down, or locking down society?

Are there harms to physical, emotional, or verbal development?

These are important questions that were completely ignored by those in power during the pandemic, because they were inconvenient to the architects of the covidiocy.

But new research is out confirming yet again that the collective absurdity of Covid policies caused immense damage and permanent harm to a generation of children. For nothing.

———-

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

Via Anna Stokke:

Granted I’m 68, a grandfather, and old school, but my view of the current public school performance is that it sucks.

We somehow have come to accept that poor performance is OK as long as you feel happy. What a crappy way to go through life.

It’s painful to watch a high school student working at your local store unable to make change when the cash register doesn’t do it for them!

This started 30 years ago when the Prairie provinces agreed on a math curriculum that focused on problem solving without ensuring you have basic arithmetic skills to solve the problem. I recall a meeting at Salisbury-Morse Place School introducing the program to parents of Grade 1 students and I was vocal about the road this would lead to: students unable to solve the problem because they can’t do the math. Students will either score 90 and above or fail miserably, but that’s OK as long as they are happy.

It’s taken 30 years, but I told you so.

The standard must start with the university requirement and work back from there.

High school final exams – yes, you have to get stressed and study – must be written by the university to establish entrance requirements.

The time for coddling has long past, and yes parents, you need to help your kids with their homework and take responsibility for your child’s success.

Bill Allan

Winnipeg

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Billy Binion:

That shouldn’t happen in America, but taking on the entrenched federal civil forfeiture system is challenging,” said Bob Belden, an attorney at I.J. (which represented Martin), in a statement via email. “Unfortunately, there is not a clear path to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. We know that several Justices are alarmed at how civil forfeiture works in America and hope that the right case will work its way to the Court.”

Ann Althouse summary:

Matt/Slim was one of the organizers of the event. He couldn’t get people to show up, and neither could Colbert. Numbers are numbers. The First Amendment protects your right to speak but it won’t assemble an audience for you.

Ellen Gamerman

Parenting that’s light on discipline has dominated the culture in recent decades. But critics blame the approach for some of Gen Z ’s problems in adulthood. They cite surveys that show young adults struggling with workplace relationships (was it because their parents never told them “no”?) and suffering from depression and anxiety (was it because their parents refereed all their problems?).

For parents who have spent years trying to meet their children’s emotional needs without slipping into overt permissiveness, FAFO can sound blessedly simple.

Dillon, 35, knows the approach can be off-putting. “Maybe your kids wouldn’t like that, but, not to be rude, my kid is tougher than yours,” said the mother of two outside Richmond, Va. 

Daniel Buck:

Scrolling through UW-Madison’s course catalog for teachers

“Understand how racism is endemic to the U.S. public school system… Consider how policies system white dominance…”

———-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Greg Ashman:

Which is all very well, but what does it have to do with education faculties? 

Imagine you were to walk into your favourite education faculty and state that you see educating an individual as providing them with valuable knowledge much like making deposits of money at a bank. How do you think those around you would react? What if you wrote this in an essay and submitted it for assessment? I suspect you would be met with widespread disapproval.

What if you claimed that education was the process of posing problems for students to grapple with, set in familiar contexts? I suspect you would be met with approval.

Both ideas come from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed—which itself did not emerge from a vacuum and drew on older ideas—but I suspect the above would play out regardless of whether you, or anyone listening to you, had read this book or were familiar with the ideas. Instead, what perpetuates these attitudes is a cycle of approval and disapproval. We are highly attuned to the sentiments of those around us and that is part of our biologically primary ability to fit in and learn the rules of our society. Just as an electromagnetic wave needs nothing more than the waxing and waning of electric and magnetic fields to propagate through space, ideas need nothing more than the waxing and waning of approval and disapproval to propagate through time.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Chris Rickert:

Enrollment growth in Madison schools has not kept pace with population growth in Madison and its suburbs, or with enrollment growth in surrounding districts. Why is that?

There are competing interests. There’s choice, there’s the perception, there’s many reasons why families choose to send their children to our schools. I want us to improve that. I want us to be the district that people want to send their children to.

A year ago, I asked our team this question: What is the enrollment strategy for the Madison Metropolitan School District? And I was not satisfied with what I heard and the efforts underway, so we began about a year ago creating some enrollment strategies for MMSD. Part of that is understanding what the rates of our enrollment are, what the historical trends are, and with a lot of folks talking about the growth in Madison and the vicinity, it’s a really important time for us to ensure that our district is looked at as a reason why people want to come to Madison and enroll in our schools.

What do you mean by “perception”?

I know during COVID, we were one of the districts that was closed. There were other districts that were open. I know that at times we get the perception that our schools aren’t safe, that they’re unruly. Many times there are narratives that can perhaps happen in one school and it becomes a blanket perception about all of our schools. These are things in a larger district — especially in a growing city like ours — that we just have to work together as a large community, one that does really value its public schools.

Are you surveying families who live in the Madison district but decide not to go to district schools?

———-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Becky Jacobs:

Each Friday, students unload thousands of pounds of food and quickly stock shelves at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s pantry, just in time for shoppers to arrive.

The Open Seat Food Pantry serves an average of 1,500 visitors a month. Last fall, the number of visits nearly doubled from the previous year.

“We’ve seen a huge, huge, huge increase in demand” for food help on campus in recent years, said Chloe Shomo, an incoming UW-Madison senior who works at the pantry.

Madison College also has seen an increased need for food assistance, and to accommodate that growth the school recently relocated its pantry to an upgraded space, with an e-pantry and more ways to access healthier food, said Denise Holin, a student health educator and pantry coordinator.

From last summer to this spring, the Cupboard Student Food Pantry helped nearly 1,600 students and distributed over 20,000 pounds of food and supplies at Madison College’s Truax and Goodman South campuses, Holin said.

Becky Jacobs:

Four months ago, while facing a host of financial challenges from the federal government, Wisconsin’s flagship public university asked all schools, colleges and divisions to outline plans for slashing their budgets.

Today, those plans remain unclear in the community. University of Wisconsin-Madison administrators have declined to discuss how their cuts could affect employees and students, and have withheld records that could shed more light on what’s at risk.

Campus leaders have publicly disclosed only the overall scale of cuts, announcing in June that schools and colleges need to shrink their budgets by 5% and administrative units face a 7% cut. They’ve called the step needed “to help protect our long-term financial viability” and said layoffs should be considered “a last resort.”

University leaders expect “many of the necessary reductions can be borne by trimming non-personnel expenses, leaving some vacancies unfilled, and, in some instances, moving existing expenses to alternative funding sources,” according to a statement at the time.

Matt Taibbi:

In private, executives all year have called this what it is (“A massacre,” an ABC exec told CNN’s Oliver Darcy, comparing the lay-off merry-go-round to Squid Game). In public however pundits are continuing to play out a hollow charade, acting as if these collapses are a confounding Scooby Doomystery, or explained by an evil political conspiracy surrounding an upcoming Paramount merger. Poor Willie Geist — I have a soft spot for the guy despite his longstanding role as the Ed McMahon of Morning Joe — went on Today to do a feature about how, yes, The Colbert Report is losing assloads of money, but the political “context” is “impossible to ignore”:

Many factors are converging to cause these changes, from the overall decline of big-budget TV variety shows (TV in general, really) to changes in the political weather, but those outraged responses reveal the biggest: an epidemic sense of entitlement. It’s true that media companies were once happy to support news shows that lost money, as a way to fulfill their federal mandate to broadcast content in the “public interest.” But the Communications Act of 1934 wasn’t written to ensure revenue from sports and sitcoms endlessly bailed out the dimwit producers of error-factory news programming. People like Colbert and Hayes think they have a license to get the biggest stories wrong forever, lose money forever, get paid tens of millions to do both those things, and proudlydisplay all these qualities to audiences without consequence. Try that on television for ten straight years, and life really will come at you fast.

datarepublican:

The graph below shows the 501(c)(3) grant network for the Barack Obama Foundation. But it could be almost any major nonprofit. They all look like this.

——

more:

The claim is largely true, based on investigative reports from outlets like the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, and independent journalists such as Sue Pascoe of Circling the News. These sources detail how $100 million raised through the FireAid benefit concert—organized by celebrities and linked to the Annenberg Foundation—for victims of the 2024 Los Angeles wildfires was distributed. Funds came from ticket sales, sponsorships, and donations, with promises of aiding recovery.

AFT Press Center:

I have never looked forward to our TEACH conference as much as I have this year. That’s because of you—the educators in this room and the educators of this nation. It’s been a tough year; I don’t know if it has ever been more challenging. Yet you make a difference in your students’ lives, no matter what. You build your students’ confidence to think independently and with creativity. You help each student realize their unique potential. You create community—in our classrooms, our schools, our neighborhoods. You are our nation’s future-makers.

And you do all this as you deal with everything from budget cuts to culture wars—with class sizes that are too high and salaries that are too low, amid so much divisiveness. You have done this while officials, whose job it is to support teaching and learning, make your jobs harder.

Even our ability to make our classrooms welcoming spaces has gotten harder. I think about the teacher in Idaho who was ordered to remove a sign she had in her classroom for years: “Everyone is welcome here.” She was told by her administration, this year, that this was a political opinion, not a sacrosanct responsibility. Can you imagine that reassuring children that they are in a safe, welcoming space is now an act of insubordination?

William Briggs:

The same sort of thing is true for DIEing at universities. Year or so back, I suggested we ought to allow the left to have its way at universities. Let them DIE to their hearts’ content. Fire all non-perverted white and Asian tmen, hire only Victims. Indoctrinate students with gusto. Bend all subjects toward Victim theory. (My suggestion then was we be allowed to have the same freedoms, which of course the left would never permit.)

We should encourage universities to DIE. Cheer them on!

The reason is simple. The faster they DIE, the faster they die. After they keel over from their gruesome manic suicide, leaving behind only smoking wrecks and the corpses of those who were considered ideologically impure (i.e. everybody), we march in and revivify campuses and refit them for their true purpose.

They have gone some way down this path, and making inexorable progress. Yet students still willingly matriculate into them. Why?

Universities largely survive still because of the misperception by employers that people with “degrees” are more valuable than those without, which forces the young into the camps. While it’s true “degrees” yet have value for a few purposes, this is obviously increasingly false for most. Some employers are catching on and softening the “degree” requirement, which is well.

Joanne Lipman:

I recently asked Google to show me pictures of a grandmother. It shot back pages of kindly old women with clouds of gray hair and orthopaedic shoes. None looked like Sharline Andersen, 60, an energetic events director in Fresno, Calif., who raised four daughters while working and is now a grandmother of 12, including half a dozen step-grandkids. “I don’t see retirement as anything close to my future,” she says. “I feel like I have a lot of energy left and a lot left to give.”

Antonio Gracias:

While I disagree with the statements of the AFT, I also want to thank them. I appreciate their efforts to safeguard the pensions of teachers and other public servants across America. As a nation, we are united in service to our country, as well as in gratitude to the many who sacrifice and serve for the benefit of all of us, including our teachers. We know that by understanding each other, we are best positioned to achieve our common goals. Like the AFT, I am committed to fairness, democracy, economic opportunity, and high-quality education, healthcare, and public services for our students. Should the AFT ever want to have a conversation with me, I promise to approach the discussion with an open heart and mind. My request is that the AFT also do the same and promise to open their hearts and minds to me. Perhaps, if we listen to each other with compassion and our mutual love of America, we can understand each other better. I also believe that understanding each other is the first critical step to finding solutions to the important problems that face our country today.

I hope this is a moment where our compassion can be stronger than our anger.

Finally, I am deeply grateful for the support we received from teams across the government. Their dedication and patriotism will always inspire us. It was a great privilege to serve alongside them as we worked to strengthen our nation for all Americans. As I have under both Republican and Democratic administrations, serving my country when called upon will always be an honor.

———

More on Gracias.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wyatt Eicholz

By the numbers

Wisconsin’s district-run public schools had $18,592 of revenue per pupil, an all-time high and more than twice what it was in the school year ending in 2000, according to the most recent figures from the Department of Public Instruction.

The figure’s peak status holds even after adjusting for inflation.

In 2023-2024, school districts in Wisconsin took in $15.3 billion in revenue and educated 827,397 students as counted by the DPI for school finance purposes. Dividing one by the other gives a per-pupil revenue figure.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Amanda Castro:

The “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” developed by engineers brought into government under Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, is programmed to scan about 200,000 existing federal rules and flag those that are either outdated or not legally required.

According to a PowerPoint presentation dated July 1 that was obtained by the newspaper, the tool estimates that approximately 100,000 of those rules could be eliminated, primarily through automation with minimal human input. The projection claims this could save trillions in compliance costs and spark increased external investment.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), AI has already reviewed over 1,000 regulatory sections in under two weeks. Similarly, it was responsible for “100% of deregulations” at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), according to the PowerPoint presentation. The Post, however, reported it was not able to confirm the use of AI at the agency independently.

When asked about the use of AI for deregulation, White House spokesman Harrison Fields emphasized to the newspaper that “all options are being explored” to meet the president’s deregulation goals. He clarified that no single plan has been finalized, and the effort is still in early, creative stages with ongoing consultation within the White House.

DOGE plans to complete agency-specific deregulation lists by September 1 and finish nationwide rollout by January 20, 2026—labeled in internal documents as “Relaunch America.” Agencies are currently receiving training on how to integrate the AI tool into their regulatory review process. The presentation claims the tool could save 93 percent of the labor typically required to gut federal rules, reducing what would usually take 3.6 million work hours to just 36.

Steven Calabresi:

I do not think it was necessary to do that. I think Interim U.S. Attorneys, whose 120-day appointments have expired without the Senate ever voting on their nominations, can be reappointed to an indefinite number of 120-day terms as Interim U.S. Attorneys by the Attorney General under 28 U.S.C. § 546 until and unless the Senate votes down their nominations and so long as they have been nominated for the office in question.

The 120-day term limit does not bar reappointment if done by district court judges. Given that cross-branch appointment of inferior officers is unconstitutional, as I will explain below, there is no reason why 28 U.S.C. § 546 ought to be read as precluding the reappointment of nominated U.S. Attorneys whom Senators do not have the votes to defeat but whose confirmations they are able to delay.

Attorney General Robert Jackson in his famous speech on the role of the federal prosecutor pointed out that from 1789 to the present-day U.S. Attorneys have always required Senate confirmation because of their “immense power” and because they need to win “an expression of confidence in [their] character by both the legislative and the executive branches of the government.” Jackson’s point is certainly true. But a Senate minority that lacks the votes to reject a nominee cannot be rewarded if, after 120 days, they have used Senate procedure to prevent a vote from taking place.

This issue is coming up all over the country right now because Senate Democrats refuse to allow floor votes on President Trump’s nominees to be U.S. Attorney. The matter is thus of great practical importance in the District of New Jersey and in other Districts as well.

Kevin Bass:

If you want to understand why the universities have become stupid, you have to understand that the universities have literally become stupid.

The average undergraduate IQ has fallen by nearly 20 points in 80 years–massive.

This drop has happened at every level of education

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Watch out for more property tax hikes. Chicago governments are bleeding and officials won’t reform spending, so it’s hard to see how they avoid going after both homeowners and businesses.

Start with the city. Chicago’s Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski says a property tax increase is “likely” needed to cover the city’s $1 billion budget hole. (Mayor Johnson later downplayed the need for a hike even though he proposed a $300 million hike last year.)

Then there’s Chicago Public Schools’ own $734 million deficit and the likely need for a property tax hike there, too. Pile on top of that the tax hikes needed to bail outthe $771 million shortfall at the Regional Transit Authority. 

Oh, and property taxes will go up even further if Gov. Pritzker signs the police and fire pension booster billthat’s sitting on his desk right now. It calls for nearly $7 billion more in taxpayer contributions to the public safety pension plans through 2055.

Musa al-Gharbi

How a new “woke” elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status—without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged

More.

Liam Knox and Michael Smith:

Rufo says the Education Department is considering a proposal that would ensure all US universities that receive federal funding — the vast majority — adopt many of the same conditions that Columbia University agreed to in a deal this week. He sees the plan, which he first outlined with the Manhattan Institute this month, as a way to swiftly broaden President Donald Trump’s higher-education agenda.

Lucy Foulkes & Jack L. Andrews

In the past decade, there have been extensive efforts in the Western world to raise public awareness about mental health problems, with the goal of reducing or preventing these symptoms across the population. Despite these efforts, reported rates of mental health problems have increased in these countries over the same period. In this paper, we present the hypothesis that, paradoxically, awareness efforts are contributing to this reported increase in mental health problems. We term this the prevalence inflation hypothesis. First, we argue that mental health awareness efforts are leading to more accurate reporting of previously under-recognised symptoms, a beneficial outcome. Second, and more problematically, we propose that awareness efforts are leading some individuals to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems. We propose that this then leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms, because labelling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual’s self-concept and behaviour in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling. For example, interpreting low levels of anxiety as symptomatic of an anxiety disorder might lead to behavioural avoidance, which can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms. We propose that the increase in reported symptoms then drives further awareness efforts: the two processes influence each other in a cyclical, intensifying manner. We end by suggesting ways to test this hypothesis and argue that future awareness efforts need to mitigate the issues we present.

Richard Reeves:

There’s much here I agree with her on. But I also think she’s framing the argument for representation in teaching far too narrowly, and in the process making it harder to address. I’ll address each of her points in turn, challenge some outlandish claims about Scandinavia, and finish with a plea not to falsely equate a positive movement for more men in our schools with a negative blame campaign against women teachers.

1. Girls have long been ahead of boys

Grose correctly writes that the gender gap in favor of girls in K-12 education is not a recent development, writing:

[T]he research that really surprised me was a meta analysis from 2014 by Daniel and Susan D. Voyer that showed that girls have been outperforming boys in school since 1914. This suggests that female academic achievement is hard to correlate with the post-1972 impact of Title IX or other downstream consequences of second-wave feminism. And going back further, I find it hard to believe that a teaching force trained before women had access to their own credit cards was somehow favoring girls, when the society around them wasn’t even sold on higher education for women.

But this is not breaking news to scholars in the field. If I may be permitted quote myself on this point, in Of Boys and Men I wrote:

Richard Rubin and Kara Dapena

Most of the tax cuts, measured in dollars, go to the highest-income households. But relative to their share of the existing tax burden, more goes to middle-income households. The middle 20% of taxpayers pay 10% of taxes and get 13% of the tax cut. The top 20% pay 67% of taxes and get 60% of the tax cut.

Basically, the overall tax pie is getting smaller. High-income people who received tax cuts will pay a bigger piece of that smaller pie and still come out ahead. Democrats will often describe a tax cut as a distribution program and judge its effects by looking at how much of the overall money goes to each income group. Because rich people pay the most taxes, their tax cuts are also, in dollars, typically the largest from an across-the-board tax cut. 

This math drives Democrats’ “tax cuts for billionaires” arguments. Republicans chose to keep all the 2017 tax cuts, including those for the highest-income households, because they viewed the 2017 law as an economic success and also wanted to keep lower rates for businesses that pay taxes through individual tax returns.

But there are other ways to look at the same data. One is to look at the tax cut as a share of people’s previous tax bills. Lower-income people typically don’t pay much federal tax to start with and by this metric therefore will see some significant reductions.

Let’s look at another metric, often preferred by economists. It compares a group’s tax cut to its after-tax income, giving a sense of how financially significant a tax cut is to a particular household. This shows that the biggest winners aren’t the bottom 20% or top 1%, but the group just below the top 1%.

Households with the same income pay different taxes depending on where they live, their deductions and how they get their money. The new law, in some cases, exacerbates those differences. Many people at the bottom of the income scale pay payroll but not income taxes, and so they won’t see much change. 

Natalie Andrews, Douglas Belkin and Sara Randazzo:

The White House is seeking fines from several universities it says failed to stop antisemitism on campus, including hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard University, in exchange for allowing the schools to access federal funding, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The deal that the Trump administration struck with Columbia University on Wednesday is now a blueprint for negotiations with other universities, a White House official said. Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government over three years to settle allegations it violated antidiscrimination law and to restore its federal grants.

The administration is in talks with several universities, including Cornell, Duke, Northwestern and Brown, the person familiar with the talks said, though it sees striking a deal with Harvard, America’s oldest university, as a key target.

The White House hopes to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard, in a deal that would make Columbia’s $200 million payment look like peanuts, the person said.

John Burn-Murdoch:

One of the most striking but under-discussed insights from this year’s World Happiness Report was that the marked worsening in young adult mental health over the past decade is primarily, if not exclusively, an Anglosphere phenomenon.

The share of young adults regularly experiencing stress and anger has risen sharply over the past 15 years in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. But it has been largely stable elsewhere in the west, according to detailed data from the Gallup World Poll used in the report.

Laura Silver, Scott Keeter, Stephanie Kramer, Jordan Lippert, Sofia Hernandez Ramones, Alan Cooperman, Chris Baronavski, Bill Webster, Reem Nadeem and Janakee Chavda:

Americans trust each other less than they did a few decades ago. The share of adults who said “most people can be trusted” declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, according to the General Social Survey.

In a 2023-24 Pew Research Center poll, an identical 34% said most people can be trusted.

Who says most people can be trusted?

Social trust seems to be rooted partly in personal experience. People learn to trust others based on how they themselves have been treated. But scarring events that reduce trust – like losing a jobor experiencing discrimination – may happen to people in some groups more often than others, leading to differences in trust across society.

Amory Gethin

This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor

Harriet Shawcross and Dipanjan Sinha:

Thirty million Indians want a job on the railways, but a fiendish general-knowledge test stands in their way

During the most recent recruitment drive there were around 90,000 positions on offer and roughly 30m people went for them

Late last year, he found out from a friend that the exam had been announced. He checked the Ministry of Railways website and sure enough, there was the date: November 27th 2024. In a few weeks, the moment he’d spent his adult life preparing for would be here.

Since India started liberalising its economy in the 1990s, its GDP per head has increased eightfold. The country now has the world’s fastest-growing large economy.
Yet many Indian graduates struggle to find work. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) nearly a third of them are jobless. Walk-in interviews draw massive crowds. At the start of this year a video went viral showing thousands of engineers queuing to apply for open positions at a firm in the western city of Pune (local media reported that only 100 were available).

John Arnold:

Nearly everyone has given up on urban K-12 reform. Politicians no longer talk about it. There’s but one city, Houston, attempting wholesale reform and early results are incredibly promising. Cities from across the US are starting to pay attention.

In 2023, after years of falling outcomes, Texas took over HISD, dissolved the elected school board, and appointed a new superintendent. Freed from short-term electoral pressures, the district was able to make difficult but necessary reforms, particularly with personnel.

Houstonians knew the district was failing and wanted change, but not this change. The community was outraged by the state takeover and even more so with many of the changes. The conflict was palpable: state vs city, Republican vs Democrat, white vs black/brown.

The first year was incredibly tense around the city. There were protests. People pulled their kids out of the district for other options. The press was scathing. Everyone was waiting for the takeover to fail. But it didn’t.

After the first year, the number of A and B rated schools rose from 93 to 170. The number of D and F rated schools fell from 121 to 41. Local criticism quickly became more muted. With substantial gains in year 2, criticism has quieted further.

School reform is hard. Many efforts have failed or fizzled out. The head will eventually leave, and local governance will return. The big question is whether the gains will endure.

Meanwhile, politicians in most other places have given up, settling for poor outcomes rather than making tough, unpopular decisions to improve them. That’s certainly not the right answer. Houston might be a blueprint for cities and states with the will for change.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Brooke Muckerman:

• The company is also providing STEM workshops, donating equipment, and supporting job fairs.
• The Musk Foundation donated $350,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Memphis, allowing two high school club sites to reopen.

xAI, which has set roots in Memphis to build up its supercomputer campuses, has helped Memphis-Shelby County Schools with HVAC upgrades and other facilities needs, a representative from xAI said July 25.

The representative said the company has visited John P Freeman Optional School, Fairly High School and Westwood High School, inspected HVAC and plumbing systems, athletic fields and gyms and put together a “large list” of items and defects with principals and administration.

The schools are all located near the first data center facility xAI established in Memphis. MSCS has struggled with the aging infrastructure in many of its school buildings and is staring down at least $1 billion in deferred maintenance.

They completed some work in April and May, the representative said, like getting fans back and operational and opening up some ductwork.

——-

Memphis spends about $1,900,000,000 for students 106,000 students or $17,924 each.

Madison taxpayers spend more than $25,000 per student, this despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Amory Gethin

This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor.

Sabine Martin

UW-Eau Claire faculty leader has been suspended for the next school year without pay after he flipped a table in April that the university’s College Republicans chapter set up on campus for Election Day. 

José Felipe Alvergue, who served as UW-Eau Claire’s English Department chair, won’t return to campus to teach for the academic year and faces disciplinary actions through a settlement with the university.

His suspension is over the April 1 incident at an event the university’s College Republicans student chapter held to support conservative candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court Brad Schimel and Republican-backed state superintendent of public instruction candidate Brittany Kinser. 

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

We have a big problem in Chicago. The city’s public safety pension funds have an obligation to pay $68 billion in pension benefits to police and firemen over the next 30 years. To meet those future obligations, the funds need $26 billion in investments right now. 

But the funds have just $6 billion in assets today. Absent a bailout, the pension funds will never have enough money to meet their obligations. 

And yet – unbelievably – Illinois lawmakers have passed a new bill to make things worse. They’ve increased  the obligations of those pension funds by sweetening the benefits of police and firefighters hired after 2010 – so-called Tier 2 workers. If Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs the bill, that $68 billion obligation will jump by several billion, to something over $70 billion. 

But assets on hand? Still $6 billion. Meaning the funds will be even more broke.

Mark Edmundson:

“What’s your idea of Paradise?”

I posed this question to the 12 students in my class on John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost.” Lots of sparkling answers came. It was a wonderful group. At the end, a young woman named Jessica turned to me and asked, “What about you, sir?” Jessica had a predilection for calling me “sir”—various valences of irony applied, usually soft. “What’s your idea of paradise?”

My answer was out before I had time to think much about it.

“This,” I said, “sitting here with you, talking about Milton.”

I think that one of the best freedoms in the world is the freedom to sit in a quiet room and try to get at the wisdom in great writing with a group of students. Milton can help you think about almost any consequential human subject. How shall we govern ourselves? Milton endorses humane hierarchy in which those on top take particular care of those below, who respond, if all is well, with gratitude. The environment? Milton reflects on that too—paradise is a garden, after all. Tend your garden with care. Look out for the animals and don’t eat them! Adam and Eve are vegetarians.

I am never tired of Milton and neither, it seems, are my students. And I sometimes give quiet thanks for the freedom to teach “Paradise Lost” as I like.

Joe Leahy:

While the number of births rose by about 520,000 last year to 9.3mn, following a record low in 2023, they were still outpaced by deaths and have declined by nearly half since the peak of 17.9mn in 2017. 

Zhuang Yanfang, an educator and owner of three kindergartens in Jinhua, a city in China’s prosperous coastal Zhejiang province, decided to turn one of her facilities, which at its peak had boasted 270 children, into a 42-bed nursing home in 2023. 

“With the birth rate dropping, enrolments had declined,” said Zhuang. She estimated that “90 per cent of private kindergartens have closed” in the rapidly ageing community. 

Despite expanding her two remaining kindergarteners to provide day care for infants starting from 10 months old, she was not optimistic. The facilities had only about 150 children combined, down from more than 1,000 a few years ago.

Some see opportunities for reforming China’s education system in response to the demographic cliff. HKUST’s Gietel-Basten said that Beijing could reallocate resources saved by the declining student numbers to improve the overall quality of the education system, from providing better day-care facilities for infants to investing in its universities.

Even Zhuang, the kindergarten operator, has found that the transition to running nursing homes has its own challenges.

Madison taxpayers, meanwhile support additional bricks and mortar spending despite stagnant enrollment:

“Over that period, (Madison) the district has lost a net total of 13,005 students.”

Anna Stokke:

This one deserves a tweet all of its own. Responses to university profs’ concerns about grade inflation:

“The Manitoba Association for Progressive Assessment was established at the start of the year to connect teachers interested in forms of “ungrading,” such as “outcomes-based assessment,” which involves doing away with high-stakes tests and regularly evaluating students against specific and clearly-defined learning goals.”

Public service announcement: If your kid is slated to attend the high school run by the leader of this esteemed “progressive assessment” association, I would get them out now.

Yum-Tong Siu:

This course was taught by Professor Yum-Tong Siu. We met twice a week,

on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:30 to 4:00. At the first lecture there were

over 30 people, but at the end of the add-drop period, the class consisted of

11 students. There was an in-class midterm exam and a short take-home final.

The course assistants were Calvin Deng and Vikram Sundar.

Michael McCann:

For the most part, however, the order is aspirational and refrains from enunciating policy positions. Notably absent are specific declarations that the NCAA and its members ought to be exempt from antitrust scrutiny or that college athletes aren’t employees. 

The absence of many specifics is important for several reasons. For starters, agencies that would be directed by Trump are already capable of issuing regulations and other administrative actions to exert control over college sports. 

To that point, in the last week of Joe Biden’s presidency, federal agencies entered the college sports legal debate without an accompanying executive order. The Department of Education issued a fact sheet expressing that colleges paying athletes for their NIL counts as athletic financial assistance under Title IX. A month later, Trump’s Department of Education rescinded that fact sheet.

Biden’s Department of Justice also filed a statement of interest in the House litigation. The statement expressed that a revenue share cap of $20.5 million, while better than not sharing any revenue, is still an antitrust problem, because it’s a cap that hasn’t been collectively bargained. The DOJ under Trump didn’t pursue the issue as U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken weighed the granting of final approval to the settlement.

Larry Summers:

Based on what I have read and heard so far, the agreement reached between the Federal government and @Columbia is an excellent template for agreements with other institutions including @Harvard.

First, academic freedom is preserved as the University maintains academic autonomy.

Second, ongoing reform with respect to anti Semitism, maintenance of order, promoting merit-based admissions and hiring, and strengthening the commitment to intellectual excellence is reinforced and a framework for further reform is established.

Third, normality is restored with a return to normal funding patterns, availability of visas for foreign students and removal of legal overhangs.

I, like anyone, could quibble with aspects of the program and much will depend on what both Columbia and the government do in the future. But this may be the best day higher education has had in the last year.

Jovan Tropkovic:

For centuries, the liberal arts have been a cornerstone of academic life at Western universities.

A liberal-arts education offers an interdisciplinary foundation in the humanities, natural and social sciences, and mathematics, rather than focusing on a single field of study. It is designed to cultivate reason, moral character, and civic understanding. The goal is to shape students into critical thinkers with problem-solving skills applicable across a broad range of careers.

Historically, higher education was grounded in the study of the Great Books—the foundational texts of Western civilization. The works of Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, and others grapple with enduring questions of truth, justice, beauty, and the human condition.

Ray A. Smith, Haley Zimmerman and Jason French:

Memo to job-hunting college grads: It pays to take your search to cities just beyond America’s biggest metro areas.

In one of the toughest markets for entry-level jobs in years, several second-tier cities—including Raleigh, N.C.—rise above the pack for their strong hiring, decent salaries and affordability. Instead of Atlanta or Chicago, consider Birmingham, Ala., or Milwaukee. Or think Baltimore, in lieu of Washington, D.C.

Those alternative cities, along with Austin, Texas, rank as the top five most promising locations to find work for recent college graduates, according to a new study by payroll-services provider ADP.

Researchers crunched public cost-of-living data and ADP payroll data for more than five million U.S. workers in their 20s to rank 55 metro areas on three metrics: affordability, wages and hiring activity. They then weighed hiring rates for jobs that typically require a degree against affordability-adjusted wages in each city to devise a single, overall ranking.

What sets the top-ranking cities apart? Raleigh, Baltimore and Austin—all of which scored in last year’s top five, too—tend to have a higher-than-usual concentration of technology, health and financial firms, says Ben Hanowell, ADP Research’s director of people analytics.

David Blaska:

But also, families are voting with their feet — sending a net 13,005 students out of Madison’s public schoolssince 2005 through the state’s Open Enrollment program. They took with them about $90 million in state funding. Write off another $20.5 million from low-income parents using vouchers for eligible private schools. 

Remember that next time Madison Metro School District (MMSD) asks for your checkbook. When Democrats whine about vouchers “taking money away from public schools!” they’re talking about conscientious parents fleeing a school system that pays more attention to equity than education. State money follows the student!(Corollary: government serves the individual, not the other way around!)

To Rickert’s Wisconsin State Journal account of enrollment, the Werkes compared academics and spending in central Dane County’s eight school districts. Our faceless bureaucrats used as their source numbers from the WI Institute of Law & Liberty — much more reliable than the DEI-jiggered numbers at the WI Dept of Public Instruction. 

Madison’s public schools lag its 7 neighbors in almost every category. Almost 15% of MMSD students never graduate; nearly a third of students are chronically absent; district math and reading scores are among the state’s worst. As of the 2022 school year (before DPI cooked the books), fewer than half (41.4%) of Madison students were at grade level in reading & writing (although that is up from 38.0% in 2015). Math scored 36.3% — down from 2015.

——

Where have all the students gone? Commentary.

——

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Marc Ethier:

Stanford Graduate School of Business, long considered among the most elite MBA programs in the world, is facing a storm of internal criticism from students who say the academic experience has fallen far short of expectations. In a series of interviews with Poets&Quants, current MBA students voiced concerns about outdated course content, a disengaged faculty culture, and a broken curriculum structure that they say leaves them unprepared for post-MBA careers — and worse, dilutes the reputation and long-term value of a Stanford degree by producing scores of grads unprepared for the modern world of work.

“We’re coming to the best business school on Earth, and the professors can’t teach,” says a rising second-year MBA student and elected member of the school’s Student Association. “We’re not learning anything. The brand is strong, but there’s nothing here to help you build discernible skills.”

The student and their peers have been sounding the alarm to administrators, they say, but they’ve been met with resistance, delays, or indifference. At the core of their frustration is a belief that the school’s curriculum has not adapted to the realities of a rapidly evolving business world. While some faculty members have been receptive and collaborative when students raise concerns, they say, others see teaching as a secondary priority, and administrators have been slow or reluctant to act. In speaking candidly to Poets&Quants, the students asked for anonymity to avoid repercussions in their student experience and employment prospects.

Meanwhile, a senior member of the GSB’s leadership team tells P&Q that they “hear the students’ concerns,” and new Dean Sarah Soule, who began her tenure in June, adds that “This is an extremely important set of issues, which I take very seriously.”

Charles Murray:

How to destroy the nation’s finest high schools for educating the intellectually gifted: Keep exactly the same teachers and curriculum, but ease the admissions requirements.
Immediately, classroom discussion degrades to accommodate students who misunderstand what the teachers and the smart kids say. The following year, the curriculum is diluted and grading softened to avoid massive failures. Within a few years, the best teachers have given up what made them the best or left. It always happens.

Veronica Brooks

“What is government, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

James Madison asks this question in one of the most iconic Federalist Papers—a series of newspaper articles explicating the Constitution that was presented to the judgment of the American people in the fall of 1787.

While they purport to explain the Constitution’s arrangement of the three branches of government, The Federalist Papers are more than a dry anatomy of political institutions.

In our new course, “The Federalist,” R.J. Pestritto treats the work as a book—a textual unity by a single author, “Publius”—and a book that is as much a work of political philosophy as it is of the narrower science of government.

As a work of political philosophy, The Federalist Papers articulate the complex account of human nature that animates the U.S. Constitution.

One of the major problems the new constitution was meant to address was the problem of conflict between the 13 states and the need for a stronger federal government to preserve the union.

Pestritto observes that many Anti-Federalist positions advocating against a strong federal government were influenced by French Enlightenment accounts of the perfectibility of human nature; as civilization progresses over time, human habits continually improve and are less prone to conflict, rendering strong government less necessary.

Publius summarizes their view in Federalist 6:

George Leef:

We hear over and over that the eight universities comprising the Ivy League are elite institutions. They train our future leaders and do so much to advance knowledge. That’s what they want everyone to believe so we’ll keep going to great expense to send our sons and daughters to them.

But is there really anything so wonderful about the education students receive in the Ivy League? The new book Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation will cause readers to be skeptical about that.

Louise Perry:

“I do not think this is a coincidence. About 30 years ago, P.D. James’s prescient novel ‘The Children of Men’ imagined that a birthrate crisis would induce governments to facilitate the suicides of the elderly in a ritual known as ‘the Quietus.’… The population pyramid is increasingly inverted…. This poses an existential threat to welfare systems, which rely on young workers to fund entitlements and health care for older adults. Those who hope that liberal immigration policies will solve this problem forget that immigrants themselves get old, and their birthrates tend to converge with those of the greater population over time. If birthrates do not recover — and at present, they show no real signs of doing so — eventually we will be forced to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history up until recently: Older people will be cared for privately, typically by their children and grandchildren, and those without families will have to rely on charities, such as they are. In the meantime, we are in a period of transition. Welfare states limp on, but in conditions of increasing stress….”

——

Choose life.

John Burn-Murdoch:

The marked rise in unemployment among recent college graduates has been one of the most-talked-about economic trends of the past year. Joblessness among highly educated youngsters everywhere from the US to the UK and beyond has climbed above the overall unemployment rate for the first time on record, raising questions about everything from the value of a college education to the role played by AI.

But the headline trend masks important nuances beneath the surface, which, once unpicked, shed light on the extent to which these sweeping narratives are true.

Digging into detailed monthly US employment data, the first thing that jumps out is that the rise in graduate joblessness is concentrated almost entirely among young American men.

ai.gov

America is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI). Winning this race will usher in a new era of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people. Recognizing this, President Trump directed the creation of an AI Action Plan in the early days of his second term in office. Based on the three pillars of accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, and leading in international diplomacy and security, this Action Plan is America’s roadmap to win the race.

America must have the most powerful AI systems in the world, but we must also lead the world in creative and transformative application of those systems. Ultimately, it is the uses of technology that create economic growth, new jobs, and scientific advancements. America must invent and embrace productivity enhancing AI uses that the world wants to emulate.  Achieving this requires the Federal government to create the conditions where private sector-led innovation can flourish.

• Removing Red Tape and Onerous Regulation
• Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values
• Encourage Open-Source and Open-Weight AI
• Enable AI Adoption
• Empower American Workers in the Age of AI
• Support Next-Generation Manufacturing
• Invest in AI-Enabled Science
• Build World-Class Scientific Datasets
• Advance the Science of AI 9
• Invest in AI Interpretability, Control, and Robustness Breakthroughs
• Build an AI Evaluations Ecosystem
• Accelerate AI Adoption in Government
• Drive Adoption of AI within the Department of Defense
• Protect Commercial and Government AI Innovations
• Combat Synthetic Media in the Legal System

Gavin Escott:

But faculty representatives worry such a system gives an advantage to universities with greater access to external funding — typically, major research universities — at the expense of the rest of the system.

“The new teaching load requirement has the potential to exacerbate inequalities in educational opportunities within the UW System, preserving more hands-on learning and career building opportunities for students at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee while making it harder for faculty and students to collaborate on research at the regional comprehensive universities,” UW-Oshkosh English professor Douglas Haynes said.

“Furthermore, if the only way permitted to gain teaching release time for research work is to procure external funding, this would disproportionately impact faculty, staff and students in the arts and humanities.”

UW-Green Bay professor and chair of Democracy and Justice Studies Jon Shelton echoed that concern and questioned what the requirement would do to the regional universities’ ability to conduct research.

“It’s quite possible that this is going to prevent Green Bay from internally being able to fund course reassignments for research,” Shelton said, adding that faculty were particularly frustrated the deal was reached without their input.

“This just shouldn’t have been negotiated behind closed doors without actually determining what the impact of this would look like for people doing the work.”

Matt Lamb:

Tayah Lackie sued St. Cloud State University, Students United, and Minnesota State University officials for her required student fees.

The money went to Students United, which advocates for taxpayer-funded bailouts of student loan borrowers, something Lackie (pictured) opposes. She first filed her lawsuit in May of last year, as previously reported by The College Fix.

On July 10, a federal judge in Minnesota dismissed her claims against the other defendants but allowed the case against the student advocacy group to continue. The next step is discovery.

“Although Students United is a private organization on paper, the court found that it qualifies as a state actor in this case because it has a special right to student fees in state law and works jointly with the government to collect those fees,” the Liberty Justice Center explained in a celebratory news release. It is representing Lackie along with the Upper Midwest Law Center.

Ross Dellenger:

As part of the agreement, the College Sports Commission is expected to treat collectives or any “school-associated entity” in a similar fashion as other businesses when determining the legitimacy of third-party NIL deals submitted to the CSC’s NIL Go clearinghouse.

This is a change from the CSC’s previously publicized approach.

According to a memo sent to schools two weeks ago, the CSC — created and administered by the power conferences — explained that it has denied dozens of athlete deals from collectives because it is holding collectives to a higher threshold, announcing that businesses whose sole existence is to pay athletes (i.e. collectives) cannot meet the definition of a “valid business purpose.”

Isabel Garcia:

“In many ways, I think this is an opportunity for a reset,” Schiller said. “I think the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was a very bureaucratic organization that was, still is today, doling out that money, will go away. Let’s reset. Let’s come up with a new governance structure.”

Opponents argued the cuts will largely affect local news stations and rural Americans. 

CPB president Patricia Harrison said that “many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down.”

Jonathan Leaf:

The total has been growing an astonishing rate. According to the department’s Office of the Historian, there were 6,850 career officers in 1980 – roughly the same number as when my friend enlisted. Today, however, there are 15,600 – 127% more than there were 45 years ago. But the number of countries in the world has changed little.

Sebastian Raschka:

So, in this article, rather than writing about benchmark performance or training algorithms, I will focus on the architectural developments that define today’s flagship open models.

(As you may remember, I wrote about multimodal LLMs not too long ago; in this article, I will focus on the text capabilities of recent models and leave the discussion of multimodal capabilities for another time.)

Rebecca Watson:

But I knew, even then, that my degree would have served me better — or really, I would have served my degree better — if I had been older. So, although it seems surprising to me, maybe it was inevitable that at the beginning of this year, I suddenly wanted to return to education. I was on the cusp of turning 30 — much to the relief of my colleagues, who would refer to my twenty-something state with visible nausea — and while I don’t take age markers too seriously, the neatness of the beginning of a decade tends to make you wonder how the next 10 years might play out.

My unconscious mind had evidently been working on the question without me realising, because it came to me as a fully realised certainty: I want to become a psychotherapist. I had to work backwards from there (how?), but even as I determined what it entailed (five years of training; no clue how I’m going to pay), the conviction remained.

If you had told my undergraduate self that in a decade I would be attempting to balance a social life and a career as a journalist and novelist with a part-time degree, she would be looking for the punchline. But instead, I am remarkably energised. I don’t know how I’m going to make it work, but I know that I want to.

Rich Kremer:

The Forum analysis suggests another critical factor is enrollment declines. Nationally, enrollment has fallen by 1.3 percent between 2002 and 2023, the report shows. In Wisconsin, it’s dropped by 7.3 percent in that time. The report said that could actually make the state’s per-pupil spending level look better than if enrollment had held steady over the past two decades. 

There are factors the Policy Forum report suggests could alter Wisconsin’s school spending trajectory, like Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ 2023 partial state budget veto, which extended a $325 per-pupil revenue limit increase through the year 2425. The current state budget, signed into law July 3, also increases state funding to schools for special education by more than $500 million over the next two years. And, voters across Wisconsin approved a record number of school district referendums in 2024, which authorizes districts to raise local property taxes above state revenue limits.

“Together, these decisions could provide districts with additional resources that, in future years, could mean that Wisconsin regains some ground or holds steady in comparison with the U.S. average,” the Policy Forum report said.

However, Sommerhauser said, school referendums and new authority for schools to raise property taxes to bring in new money also adds to housing costs and could “reach a point where there’s some fatigue around that among voters.” 

———

The Report:

Wisconsin ranked 26th among the 50 states in the per pupil amount it spent on public schools in 2023. This was down from 25th in 2020, the latest data available at the time of the Forum’s most recent analysis of this issue.

———-

Wisconsin’s public school districts got $18,592 of revenue per pupil in the most recent state figures.

It’s an all-time high, even after you account for inflation.

And it’s more than double what they got in 2000.

—— Wyatt Eichholz

———-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Deedy:

— 50% from China
— 75% have PhDs, 70% Researchers
— 40% from OpenAI, 20% DeepMind, 15% Scale
— 20% L8+ level
— 75% 1st gen immigrants

Each of these people are likely getting paid $10-$100M/yr.

Wisconsin DPI:

The Private School Choice Programs (Choice) include the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the Racine Parental Choice Program (RPCP) and the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program or statewide program (WPCP). These programs allow eligible students to attend a participating private school in grades four-year-old kindergarten (K4) to 12.

Each year, parents must complete the Online Parent Application. An email address is required.

Open application periods vary by Choice program. Parents may apply to one or more schools for their student(s) during the available open application period(s).

Parents or guardians with questions should contact the school(s) to which they are applying. School contact information is available here under Find Participating Schools and Open Application Periods.

——-

Quinton Klabon:

Daniel Buck:

Birth rate dropped again to 1.6 births per woman across a lifetime

NCES projects total school enrollment to drop by 4 million in just 6 years

When I tell you that mass school closures and layoffs are coming.

I’m telling you. School closures and layoffs are coming.

——-

Interestingly, Madison taxpayers recently funded new buildings amidst stagnant enrollment.

And:

Madison’s population is growing rapidly, but its schools are not keeping pace.

Chris Rickert:

In Christman’s case, the reasons were “affordability and convenience.”

Eliza’s “day care, 4K program and future after-school care are significantly less expensive in McFarland,” she said. “Since she was already attending day care there, it made the most logistical and financial sense for our family to continue with McFarland moving forward.”

Eliza has never attended Madison schools, so the decision to opt for McFarland “wasn’t based on dissatisfaction with Madison,” Christman said, “but rather on the practical benefits McFarland offered in terms of child care cost and ease of transition.”

In Morris’ case, it was dissatisfaction with Madison — both the schools and the high property taxes.

She recalled one incident in which there was a disruptive student in her now-12-year-old’s class and, instead of simply removing the student from the classroom, her child and the rest of the students in the classroom were removed so that the disruptive student’s needs could be addressed.

She also was not a fan of some of the district’s COVID-19 protocols, such as requiring students to wear masks while outside. She thought that the academics at Memorial High School could have been more rigorous, although she acknowledged that she doesn’t have a basis of comparison yet as her two youngest children haven’t entered high school in Verona.

She emphasized that her criticisms were not of teachers, but of some of the policies they were forced to work under.

“And just the amount of money that the community has been putting into these schools, and not sure where the money’s going,” she said. “It’s a combination of those things.”

——-

Where have all the students gone? Commentary.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ron French, Mike Wilkinson & Isabel Lohman:

• In 10 years, Michigan boosted K-12 education spending more than 41 states
• The result: More staffers and worse test scores. ‘We invest more per pupil than most states and achieve bottom 10 results’
• There’s plenty of blame, and one consensus: Michigan needs a wake-up call to fix crisis

Frustrated by declining academic performance in state schools, education leaders in 2015 announced an audacious goal: make Michigan a top 10 education state by 2025.

“If 10 years from now we’re not a top 10 performing state, then shame on all of us,” said then-State Superintendent Brian Whiston. 

Wall Street Journal:

In 1973 Ed Feulner and his friend Paul Weyrichco-founded the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that nurtured and spread many of the policies that informed the Reagan Administration. Its “Mandate for Leadership” policy compendium in 1980 became a guide for the Reaganauts out to change Washington. 

Under Feulner, the think tank also became known for short, fast policy summaries delivered to Members of Congress and staff in anticipation of votes. Turnover on Capitol Hill is rapid, and Heritage’s missives were influential guides to policies developed on the right over many years.

Like many Reagan-era conservatives, Feulner believed in a coalition built on the three-legged stool of free markets and a smaller government, strong national defense, and traditional views on social policy. He welcomed all factions of what was once called the “conservative movement,” from libertarians to Russell Kirk traditionalists to neocons. 

For many years, the Journal worked with Heritage on the annual Index of Economic Freedom. The volume ranked countries around the world on various measures of economic liberty. Feulner was notable for believing in a strong U.S. presence in the world, and he was especially close to leaders in Taiwan and South Korea. As recently as the mid-2000s we can recall a delegation of Heritage scholars making the case to us that U.S. defense spending should be 5% of gross domestic product. Today it’s closer to 3%, and heading lower under President Trump.

Born outside Chicago in a German-American Catholic family, Feulner attended Regis College in Denver where he discovered conservative ideas. Barry Goldwater was an early political influence. “You have to choose between liberty and equality,” Feulner told John Miller of National Review. “I picked liberty.” Each year he published an essay by thinkers who defined conservative principles.

Sergio Martinez:

In the mid-20th century, schools in communist countries were tools of the state. History lessons became hagiographies of the Soviet Union. Math examples were drawn from military production. Even literature bowed to Marxist dogma. But what did all this ideological schooling do to the people who lived through it?

Two new studies—one from Finland, the otherfrom Poland—suggest the answer: indoctrination works. Not by making people less intelligent, but by shaping their values, ambitions, and sense of agency. Decades later, it still haunts their lives.

A Tale of Two Experiments

In 1973, 221 fifth-grade students in Pirkkala, Finland, became part of a quiet experiment. Their curriculum was rewritten to reflect Marxist-Leninist ideology. Capitalism was depicted as oppression, the Soviet Union as a moral compass, and the free market as a source of inequality.

Researchers compared them to a control group of students who received standard education. They tracked these individuals over decades, analyzing data on taxable income, months worked, job choices, educational attainment, and cognitive ability.

The study found that the students exposed to the special curriculum earned roughly 10% less as adults. This wasn’t due to differences in education or intelligence, but because they made different career choices: public-sector jobs, artistic paths, and professions that aligned with values they had been taught early on—solidarity over self-interest, ideology over income.

A similar pattern emerges from Poland, where a 1954 nationwide reform quietly removed political indoctrination from school curricula. Researchers Costa-Font, García-Hombrados, and Nicińska studied what happened next. Their natural experiment exploited school enrollment cut-off dates to compare students just slightly more or less exposed to the old Stalinist education. This included removing content explicitly praising the importance of obedience to the Soviet regime and adherence to Marxist-Leninist values, along with Stalin-themed recitation competitions.

Students who experienced one fewer year of Marxist-Leninist schooling were more likely to complete high school and college. Decades later, they were also more likely to be employed. When you stop rewarding obedience and start rewarding merit, students begin to believe that their choices matter. Ambition wakes up.

Daniel Soufi:

There’s one conclusion that comes up repeatedly throughout this report: the perception that everything is of lower quality is more pronounced among older people. The reasons are varied. One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance.

Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The Disordered Consumer) (2019), recalls that years ago, the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity. “Now we don’t even consider it,” he notes over the phone. “My grandmother, when she went to buy clothes, looked at the type of fabric they were made of. Now, no one knows what their pants are made of. Why would they? In a year, we’ll stop wearing them because they’ll no longer be fashionable.”

Cristina Criddle and Andrew Jack:

More than a quarter of prompts by college-age users in the US put into ChatGPT, the world’s most popular large language model (LLM), are for educational purposes, according to internal research from OpenAI, the product’s maker.

Chatbots can be a helpful research tool. But some students are using the technology to do their work for them, educators say. Plagiarism is one of the top concerns raised in a survey of members of the Digital Education Council, a global network of universities. Other issues were ethical concerns, the devaluation of degrees and the complexity of integrating AI into existing data and tech systems.

Some students are also becoming more crafty, using complementary software such as word spinners — which change the order, or nature, of words — to help them evade plagiarism or AI detectors.

Steven Sinofsky:

Now imagine when even the author hasn’t read what was written… yikes. How does AI writing and reading impact this reality?

I used to write long memos—significant ones—maybe once a year. I’d send them to thousands. That scale alone signals, “someone else will read it.” I hoped direct reports and close colleagues would read them. I could count on 2 or 3 people to definitely read them.

Bill would read. Steve would read—but only if we discussed it in person, because that’s how he worked.

I knew this, so I always made a slide version. I’d use it in dozens of team meetings. But even then, for months after sending a memo, I’d be referring members of the team back to what was in it. Could I have done better, of course. I did the best I could at the time. I figured once a year people could read 20-30 pages for their job.

People want context. They want the big ideas. But getting an organization—of any size—to actually read is almost impossible.

The only reliable thing people read? Org memos. And even then, if one (as I often did) didn’t include an org chart picture—rather than just words—people would skim or skip and wait for (hopefully) a tree graph in the email.

And these were from the “big boss,” sending out “big strategy.” So if you think folks in big orgs are reading 40-page PRDs, budget plans, new product proposals, or deal docs deeply and regularly… you’re probably kidding yourself. I know how the Amazon process has evolved from friends there. It too is breaking down which is a bummer as I am a huge fan of that.

Now enter AI. What happens when it’s doing the writing—and not even the author has deep knowledge of what was written?

That’s like a compiled or multiple author memo no one ever actually read end-to-end.

And if people are asking AI to summarize—but the summary is lossy or invents data—what then?

I say all this as part of the “TV” and later “MTV” generation. Back then, we were told that fast-paced, cut-cut-cut media made us incapable of absorbing anything. Meh…ok boomer, I know you can’t follow the plot of “24” but that’s your problem not mine.

So maybe this is just old man yelling at cloud. But for me? My entire career has been defined by the reality that people in business don’t really read.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ann Althouse summary:

“Sales [at the city-owned grocery store] were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet.”

“Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020…. At a community meeting last year, Pierson played videos of security incidents so graphic he gave a warning in advance — a naked woman parading through the store throwing bags of chips to the ground, another person urinating in the vestibule and a couple fornicating on the lawn of the library in broad daylight…. [P]olice Maj. Chris Young said that even an ‘overwhelming presence’ of officers in recent months didn’t significantly decrease incidents…. Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure… and so people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released… and head back to the same location, Young said. ‘We typically have the same group of offenders every week that are recognizable by face and by name, just loitering and hanging out,’ he said. ‘A small percentage of people are ruining it for the rest of the community that deserves to go to their grocery store and their library.'”

Katie Roiphe:

My teenager, on the other hand, is very Zen at the airport. He raises his eyebrows at my excessive worrying. I can suddenly see myself through his eyes, needlessly anxious, absurdly concerned with trivial and fabricated timelines, expending unnecessary energy on pointless things.

His way of moving through the airport seems preferable, wearing headphones, gliding indifferently, even if there is the slightest chance that, left to his own devices, he would miss a flight.

My son has perfected that look of pure contempt that may be familiar to parents of teens. The recipient of this look, which I think may exclusively be me, has no real choice but to wither obligingly into nothingness. This look often comes because I have said something mean about someone or gossiped in an unkind but maybe funny way.

I do think that my son will probably become more tolerant, more forgiving of my character flaws, when he is older, but maybe I could borrow a little of that excessive moral clarity and disapproval teenagers are known for.

Cliopatria

Jack Malvern, in the London Times (March 11, 2004):
JOHN may no longer be the name of choice for today’s new parents, who seem to prefer Jack or Alfie, but 800 years ago baby boys were unlikely to be called anything else.

Fresh research into naming patterns in the Middle Ages shows that 35 per cent of men in 1377 were called John. The dominance of a handful of names was so strong that more than half of men and boys were named John or William. A further quarter was divided between Thomas, Richard and Robert.

The supremacy of John persisted for centuries. He was knocked from the top spot by William only in the 19th century. The pattern emerged when George Redmonds, a historian from Huddersfield , combed through lists of men, women and children registered to pay the poll tax, the national tax that was so rigorously enforced that it caused the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.

Conor Durkin:

An overview of 2024

As a recap of our starting point: as of the end of 2023 (e.g. last year’s numbers), the combined four pension systems (Police, Fire, Labor, and Municipal Workers) stood at 23.0% funded, with $11.12 billion in assets against $48.32 billion in liabilities (a net unfunded liability of $37.2 billion). My expectation last year was that the net unfunded liability would actually climb in the near-term, even as our funded rates climb, given the latest actuarial reports for the four funds.3

Here’s what actually happened, from the city’s 2024Annual Comprehensive Financial Report:

One thing I think worth highlighting here is just how explicitly we’re paying for the mistakes of earlier administrations (mostly Daley) not fully funding pensions. We can put a dollar number on this. The four pension funds’ annual reports break out the ‘normal cost,’ which is the amount that our liability increased from active employees accruing another year of benefits. You can think of this as what the city would have to contribute if we had no unfunded liability. For the coming year, our total normal cost across the four funds is around $438 million. Because we’re tremendously underfunded, the city instead is statutorily required to pay roughly $2.6 billion into the funds. That extra $2.2 billion is the cost we’re incurring for the underfunding of the past.

Geoffrey Steadman:

College Vergil 2nd ed. (2025) has just been published in paperback and hardcover and is available in pdf on this website. College Pliny and Vergil (2023) is available in paperback, hardcover and as a pdf on this website. Both books are offered as a separate series for the 2025-26 AP Latin syllabus.

Mass Daily News

Thanks to a controversial, taxpayer-funded police training program rolling out statewide in 2025, police officers across Massachusetts are being trained to view concerned parents as potential extremists. The training is developed and delivered by the Municipal Police Training Committee (MPTC), the state agency responsible for setting standards and providing training for municipal, MBTA, environmental, UMass, campus police officers, and deputy sheriffs performing police duties.

The curriculum relies heavily on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) controversial “hate map,” widely criticized for broad and politicized designations.

Enter Moms for Liberty, a grassroots parental advocacy group that’s now officially “extremist” enough to merit police suspicion. Known for protesting school policies such as teaching first graders that boys can be girls, Moms for Liberty has rallied against what it views as overreach in education on topics like gender ideology and race curriculum. Despite no evidence of criminal activity, just voicing concerns about these issues is enough to get flagged.

Political commentator Mike Urban, known for cutting through the noise with sharp insight, recently dropped a bombshell video exposing the full scope of this training. In “What Massachusetts Police are Being Taught Will SHOCK You,” Urban reveals how Massachusetts Democrats are quietly funding a program that surveils citizens for their political views — all under the banner of “hate crime” prevention.

John Sailer:

Earlier this year, Deborah Loewenberg Ball, a former University of Michigan dean, described how administrators can and should be “more forceful” in executing on diversity hiring goals.

What she describes is basically a clever and very effective assertion of power:

—Most importantly, she says, search committees just won’t move forward until they “bring back a pool that looks decent.”

—”You had to be very strictly rule-bound and create a bunch of very strict rules about what it would take to carry out a search. Who can be on the committee, what the charge looks like, what the description looks like, how you search.”

Glenn Greenwald

Yes, Claire Danes tried to explain on Colbert’s show — after he asked her about all the CIA/intel people she talks to for her role in “Homeland” – that CIA became aligned and “allied” with the corporate media in 2016 against Trump — and Colbert talked over her and cut her off:

Arnold Kling:

I am trying to come up with exam questions that can test how well someone has absorbed key concepts from The Social Code. The exam will be in the form of a conversation with the AI professor. The feedback that the user will receive will be qualitative. It will be based on how correctly they employ the concepts and avoid basic misunderstanding.

I could be wrong, but I think that the goals for this type of seminar are less measurable than those for, say, a course in algebra or anatomy. I am trying to offer students models of the world, and those models are themselves imperfect. 

When we teach economics, we often say that our goal is for students to be able to “think like an economist.” We might test for that by giving out problems involving supply and demand diagrams, but students can pass those and still not apply economic thinking to real-world policy questions.

One way to approach coming up with the exam for the seminar is to ask: what do I hope that a student who has sat through the seminar does not believe? 

The top misconceptions I hope to have steered someone away from are:

The Economist:

The biggest benefits seem to come to those who master their second languages fully. That in turn is usually because they speak the two as natives, or at least have spoken them on a near-daily basis for a long time. A bit of university French does not, unfortunately, convey the same advantages as deep knowledge and long experience. Switching languages frequently in the course of a day (or conversation) may be particularly important. Studies of interpreters and translators have provided some of the strongest evidence for a bilingual advantage. For example, they are faster at repeatedly jumping back and forth between simple addition and subtraction problems than monolinguals, suggesting generally better cognitive control.
But elsewhere is “a forest of confounding variables”, says Mark Antoniou of Western Sydney University. Bilinguals are not like monolinguals in lots of ways. The child of diplomats, raised in a foreign language abroad, may have cognitive and educational advantages that have nothing to do with bilingualism. At the other end of the socioeconomic ladder, though, studies have found striking evidence that in poorer parts of the world multilingual people show the strongest advantages from speaking several languages. Where schooling is scant, researchers surmise that bilingualism exercises children’s brains in a way that their schooling may not.

Douglas Belkin, Juliet Chung, Emily Glazer and Natalie Andrews:

A 2024 survey by Harvard found that only one-third of the college’s graduating class felt comfortable discussing controversial topics, and a 2023 survey by the student newspaper found that just 3% of faculty at Harvard College identified as politically conservative.

Harvard President Alan Garber helped promote an “intellectual vitality” program to reinvigorate debate on campus and ensure students engage in discussions free of self-censorship.

Garber faces a delicate challenge in squaring off against President Trump: Any changes the university makes that could be perceived as bowing to the president would face blowback by large groups of faculty, alumni and students, but Trump has many levers to pull to inflict damage on the school.

Naveen Nvn:

Around 2018-19ish, I was pushed into a centrist stance because I was appalled by wokeness, especially on campuses. I was in graduate school in the US at that time. Although I didn’t experience wokeness advocacy in the classroom except two or three incidents, I saw signs of wokeness on campus a lot. But even then, I was quite libertarian on how universities ought to handle campus politics.

I picked up God and Man at Yale around this time because wokeness was my primary concern.

I’ve always known that conservatives love that book. I assumed it would be a defense of free inquiry and against universities having a preferred ideology.

However, to my surprise, in the book, he argued explicitly that Yale was neglecting its true mission and it should uphold its “foundational values,” as he put it. I assumed he would be promoting a libertarian outlook on campus politics, but he was arguing the opposite.

He said Yale and other elite universities should incorporate free markets and traditional perspectives directly into the curriculum because they are betraying a contract that the current alumni and the administration have with the founders of the universities. It was a pretty shocking advocacy of conservatism being imposed on the students, and I didn’t like that at all.

But later on, around 2020-ish, I became a conservative (thanks to you; more on that in the link below). But even as late as early 2023, I still held a libertarian view on academic freedom and campus politics.

(You may be interested in a comment I left on your ‘Why Young People Are Socialist’ post yesterday, in which I shared how I was once a liberal, then turned centrist, and how I finally turned conservative. You are a major influence.)

Stacey Vanek Smith:

People have been worrying about U.S. debt basically ever since there even was a U.S. “The accumulation of debts is a most fearful evil,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787. At the time, U.S. debt was around $40 million. Today, it’s closer to $40 trillion. At the same time, the U.S. economy is bigger and more powerful than Jefferson could have ever imagined, and things are looking pretty good: unemployment is near record lows, inflation is under control… so what’s the problem?

“Part of the problem is it’s been this kind of ‘boy who cries wolf’ type thing, and people just get tired of it,” says Kent Smetters, an economist at Wharton, who has been crying wolf about the debt for years. He started to wonder: What exactly happens if the U.S. just doesn’t deal with its debt? He got a few economists and mathematicians together to build a computer model of the economy to play out scenarios. 

They made a model of the entire U.S. economy, which required a lot of computing power. “This math problem was a big one,” Smetters said. “And the model computations are about 20,000 times bigger than our standard model.”