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Prager;

PragerU, in partnership with the White House, is bringing America’s founding to life through cinematic storytelling—spotlighting the men and women who risked everything for liberty.

Mike Solana

khanna’s ‘billionaire wealth tax,’ which is not a tax but an asset seizure in which he tallies everything you own, then demands a percentage on top of what you’re taxed — every single year — is already targeting anyone worth $50 million or more. this ends with your 401k.

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Blue States’ Wealth Tax Trap Would Crush American’s Prosperity

More.

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Ro Khanna is already saying the billionaire tax should apply to people with $50 million or more

Soon it will be lowered to $1 million. Then $100,000. Then $10,000.

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Sebastian Caliri:

Mamdani sounds good and is profoundly wrong. America is not exceptional because it believes nothing in particular.

In Democracy in America (which, surely, he has read) De Tocqueville points to the importance of a set of religious mores that constrain possibilities enshrined in the Constitution:
“.. at the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything… [if religion] does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates their use of it.”

There is a reason for America’s prosperity and it resides in freedom mixed with restraint that limits e.g. majoritarianism (the majority can be wrong about something), social engineering, and cruelty.

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Houman David Hammati:

Mr. Mamdani,

If America is truly “an arena of supremacy” that persecutes its people, why did you come here from Uganda instead of staying in India or building your vision where you were born?

America is like our child.

As parents and citizens who chose her, we have a sacred duty to criticize her quietly when she falls short—so we can help her grow stronger and wiser. But we also have a duty to publicly praise her, celebrate her, defend her, and stand with her—especially on her 250th birthday.

You don’t trash your own kid to the whole world on her big day. That’s not love. That’s not leadership. That’s ingratitude.

I was rescued by this country as a small child. She gave my family freedom, opportunity, and a chance to thrive when we had nothing. I owe her everything. And with that gratitude comes the obligation to serve her, protect her, and make her better every single day—not tear her down in public on the day we celebrate everything she has given the world.

Happy 250th Birthday, America.

I will always choose to lift you up.

God bless the United States of America. 🇺🇸

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Brivael Le Pogam:

In France, the State captures and redistributes 57% of everything the nation produces. Fifty-seven percent. Stop and dwell on that figure. For every unit of value created by an engineer, a worker, a founder who risked it all, more than half passes through hands that built nothing. This isn’t a budget line. It’s a permanent mortgage on people’s existence.

And here’s what no one will admit to you: it never happens through revolution. No one votes for decline. We vote for compassion, for security, for justice, for the planet. At every step, we trade a piece of freedom for a promise. And the promises are always beautiful. That’s the trap.

Today’s collectivism no longer waves the red flag; it has understood that it doesn’t sell anymore. It has learned to speak the language of care. ESG, governance, compliance, “responsibility”: these are the new words for a very old idea. The idea that an enlightened elite knows better than you what’s good for you, and that power must therefore be transferred to it, line by line, to decide in your place. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s worse: it’s a consensus. No one is hiding. Everything is done openly, applauded, subsidized.

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Spencer Pratt:

The communist doesn’t think to increase the quality of the grid. The communist demands that you decrease the quality of your life.

They make you ration the things that every other American gets to enjoy. Every single time.

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Elon Musk:

Mamdani has built nothing. He is a taker, never a maker.

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Calvin Coolidge:

“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

———

Thank you. God Bless America, God Bless New York City, and happy Fourth of July.  

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John Adams later called Mayhew’s sermon “the catechism of the Revolution.” It gave many colonists a biblical framework for understanding resistance to tyranny.

Then came prayer. In September 1774, delegates gathered in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress. Before beginning their work, they agreed to open in prayer and invited Jacob Duché, an Anglican pastor, to lead them. The previous evening, a frightening rumor had spread that British forces were shelling Boston. As Washington, Adams, Hancock, Henry, and others gathered in Carpenter’s Hall, Duché read the appointed Scripture reading for the day—Psalm 35: “Plead my cause, O LORD, with those who strive with me; fight against those who fight against me.”

Erick-Woods Erickson

So on this 250th birthday, let me tell you what to do if you fret about this country. Stop being a victim. Reject the voices — foreign-funded, many of them — who want you angry, isolated, and at war with your neighbor. Get off the screen. Go outside. Go to church even if you don’t believe, because you need a community that isn’t a tribe of political partisans. Volunteer at the food pantry. Sit on your front porch and wave at the people walking by. Love your neighbor, whether or not he loves you back — you don’t get a carve-out on that one. Make your community better, and your town gets better, and your state, and then the whole country heals from the bottom up. That’s how it works. Not through revolution. Through you and me.

Mitch Zacks:

As readers celebrate the July 4 holiday with family, we’re reminded that for nearly 250 years, the United States has been an engine of invention, innovation, and growth. Over time, new industries have formed, productivity has improved, living standards have risen, and companies have been created, scaled, merged, disrupted, replaced, and reinvented.

One of the remarkable features of U.S. innovation is that it rarely comes from a single invention or a single company. History shows that progress builds in layers, with one breakthrough creating the infrastructure for the next. The integrated circuit, for instance, started as a practical solution to a physical problem, which was that computers could not keep growing if every connection had to be soldered by hand. By shrinking electronics onto microchips, it helped make possible everything from space exploration to factory automation to smartphones and artificial intelligence.¹

The automobile offers another example. Henry Ford did not invent the car, but the Model T and the moving assembly line changed the economics of transportation. By reducing assembly time from more than 12 hours to roughly 90 minutes, Ford helped turn the automobile from a luxury product into something much closer to a mass-market good.

Throughout history, the U.S. economy has been remarkably good at taking ideas and building systems around them. These systems take the form of factories, supply chains, financing mechanisms, distribution networks, public markets, consumer ecosystems, etc. The result is that inventions become industries, and industries become sources of earnings, employment, productivity, and wealth creation.

But perhaps the most remarkable feature of it all is that everyday investors can ‘own’ a slice of the U.S. economy and all the innovation and growth it creates. I’m referring, of course, to our ability to buy stocks.

What’s more, investors do not need to identify every breakthrough company in advance to participate in American innovation over time. It is not necessary to correctly predict which single stock will dominate the next decade. A diversified equity portfolio, which is accessible for anyone who wants to invest, provides exposure to the evolving American growth engine while reducing the risk that any one company, product, or theme fails to live up to expectations. How great is that?

As we look ahead, artificial intelligence may be the next major chapter in this long American innovation story. There will be disruption, and some jobs and business models will undoubtedly change. But investors should be careful with the idea that every task or industry touched by AI will simply disappear. That has not been the pattern with major technologies before, and though much remains unknown about AI’s ultimate impact on the economy, I doubt the ‘AI jobs apocalypse’ is nigh. Computers did not eliminate work as many believed they would. There are over 250,000 data scientists in the U.S., for instance, a job that did not exist prior to the computer’s invention.

For investors, the long-term thesis for equity ownership can boil down to a single question: whether the U.S. economy still has the capacity to turn innovation into long-term growth. History suggests it does, and I would not bet against this history.

Bottom Line for Investors

American innovation and economic growth have been powerful forces at work since our country’s founding. But 250 years of spectacular growth does not mean the path has always been smooth.

The country has also endured recessions, depressions, wars, inflation shocks, banking crises, political uncertainty, market crashes, speculative bubbles, and countless periods when investors had good reasons to feel uncertain about the future. Many would argue we’re living in one of those periods now, with artificial intelligence raising big questions about jobs, productivity, and the economy.

The investor’s job is not to predict every breakthrough or identify every future market leader in advance. The investor’s job is to stay positioned to participate in the broader system that turns innovation into growth, which in my view, means investing in stocks. The stock market is not a perfect reflection of American innovation, but it has historically been one of the most accessible ways for investors to participate in it. Owning equities means owning a claim on businesses that are adapting, competing, investing, and creating value in an economy built on reinvention.

Matthew Harwood:

By the time of his death, there was little gratitude for Paine’s contributions to the United States outside of workingmen’s associations because of his blistering attacks on revealed religion, particularly Christianity. But as America barrels toward its semiquincentennial, Thomas Paine emerges as the Founding Father Americans can celebrate without regret. Unlike his contemporaries, Paine’s radical liberalism feels strikingly modern—pro-democracy, pro-market, anti-poverty, and antislavery—and worth defending as the forces of reaction mount here at home and abroad. Without the pen of Paine, in fact, there might not be a United States to celebrate today.

In January 1776, Paine’s Common Sense hit the streets of Philadelphia like a cannonball. The 47-page pamphlet was an immediate sensation. Not only did Paine reject reconciliation with Great Britain and call for independence, he attacked hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as millstones around humanity’s neck. What made the text dangerous was that Paine didn’t write it for polite society. With wit and verve, he wrote it for the masses in language any farmer or artisan could understand. But Paine went further. He had the temerity to tell common people that they weren’t mules to be driven into the mud by their so-called betters. Instead, they had the right and ability to rule themselves with dignity, the divine right of kings be damned.

Paine’s democratic beliefs terrified the more elitist and conservative Founding Fathers, most notably his decades-long nemesis, John Adams. While Adams conceded that without Paine “the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain,” he feared Paine’s egalitarian ethos would unleash anarchy into the nascent republic. Paine’s forceful argument for universal male suffrage without a property qualification petrified Adams. (Though he had a friendship with the founding feminist Mary Wollstonecraft during his time in England and revolutionary France, Paine doesn’t seem to have commented on women’s voting rights.)

Glenn Reynolds:

Just last week, Congressman Keith Self introduced a resolution to repeal the Seventeenth. And this time the idea doesn’t seem quite as crazy.

Background: When the Constitution was drafted, and for well over a century afterward, the Senate wasn’t popularly elected. The Constitution provided for the choice of Senators by state legislatures. One did not really campaign for a Senate seat, one lobbied. This was consistent with the Constitutional plan, in which the House of Representatives represented the people, while the Senate represented the states.

The Progressive movement didn’t much like this (a cynic might suggest that they thought it would be easier to demagogue the public than state legislatures made up of cynical politicians.) The 17th was also very much in keeping with the more democracy mood of the era. The franchise had been expanded from a minority of white men with property, to all white men, to all men, and was well on the way (just two amendments later!) to being extended to women. 

Voters were impatient, and there was less appreciation of the careful structural compromises that had been made when the Constitution was drafted. By having a house of Congress that was responsive to the concerns of the states as states, the original design of the Senate served as a counterweight to federal ambition. Once the Senate was just a smaller version of the House with bigger districts, that changed. Public passions mattered more (vitiated only somewhat by the Senate’s longer terms) and Senators now had to campaign.

Tyler Cowen:

Each individual will be seen as something special by the other humans. Public spaces will be emptier, so anyone out in public will attract more notice. If you are waiting in line at the movie theater, you will be more likely to start talking to the person next to you. After all, you already have had the option of talking to the AIs all day long.

It has long been the norm in American small towns that you say hi to the people you pass on the sidewalk, or perhaps start chatting with customers in your store who appear to be outsiders. Those kinds of practices will spread to the large cities of today, which will become like smaller towns due to lower population density.

Many of these humans will invest heavily in their appearances, in their charisma, and in their “vibes.” After all, the AIs will, and already do, perform so many useful informational functions. If you, as a human, wish to draw attention to yourself and be seen as noteworthy, you will have to specialize in the remaining human functions. That may include “touching grass,” giving warm and appropriate hugs, looking good or at least looking interesting, and having some kind of unique identity that either is visible upon meeting or which AI smart glasses will communicate during social interactions. (“This guy has sailed around the world three times and punched a shark on the nose.”)

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Choose life.

Alex Tabarrok summary:

The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.

Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition.

…Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes.

———

Richard Hanania:

-The NHS backlog is six million patients, 10% of the population

-Dental care is so out of reach that 10% of Britons report “do it yourself” dental care like extracting teeth

-Junior doctors went on strike, their starting salaries are $44,000 a year. The average civil servant makes $41K a year

-Keir Starmer faced a scandal for going to a “luxury” hotel, which was $230 a night.

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Will Briggs:

Another resident expressed concern about the level of debt service — money to pay back borrowed funds for infrastructure projects — in the city’s roughly $450 million annual budget. In the current budget, debt service amounted to the second-highest operating expense at $72 million, behind public safety spending at $186 million.

The city is under a third of the maximum allowable debt under state law and maintains a AAA bond rating, the highest possible rating for bonds and a sign the city has capacity to meet its obligations, Schmiedicke said. State and federal contributions have not kept up with local government’s needs, prompting more borrowing to cover local infrastructure costs, he added.

Joel Achenbach: 

In April 1976, three months before the American bicentennial, two guys no one had ever heard of formed a little company called Apple.

They were building what were called “microcomputers.” The traditional tech companies of the time built large mainframe computers. Small computers were of interest to hobbyists. They were a bit like toys. But the two nobodies, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were working out of a house in suburban California, believed they could make microcomputers that nontechnical people would find useful in everyday life.

“We didn’t get the flying cars that ‘The Jetsons’ promised us,” said Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington whose book “The Code” describes the history of Silicon Valley. “But we walk around with supercomputers in our pocket, and these supercomputers were invented by two long-haired, vegetarian college dropouts who didn’t bathe very often and worked out of a garage.”

Chris Rickert:

A former school custodian from Mount Horeb was found guilty late Wednesday of sexually assaulting a child his former girlfriend had cared for at an in-home daycare more than a decade ago.

A jury took a little more than an hour to find James A.A. Myers, 41, guilty of the repeated sexual assault of the same child. The child, who is now 16, had reported to police in 2024 that she remembered being assaulted by Myers several times between Sept. 30, 2012, and Sept. 30, 2015, while at the daycare in a rented house in Mount Horeb where Myers and his then-girlfriend lived.

A book she was reading in school at the time had sparked her memories of the alleged assault, she told police.

Myers was charged in the case on March 7, 2025, when he was still working as a custodian in the Middleton-Cross Plains School District. A spokesperson for the district said on Tuesday that he resigned from that position effective Aug. 6, 2025.

Ashley Belanger: 

The Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The same logic already applied to a cellphone’s tracking, and the high court found “no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History” collected by third parties like Google.

Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone’s location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool.

The decision came in a case where cops used so-called geofence warrants to track down an armed bank robber from a list of all phones logged in the area. Applying a three-part process, cops worked with Google to narrow down the list of suspects and eventually arrested Okello Chatrie, who had opted in to share his location with Google every few minutes. Chatrie was sentenced to 12 years in prison but challenged the geofence warrant as an unconstitutional search.

Tim Harford:

How do we know what works? In an uncertain world, full of untested treatments, disputed policies and untried inventions, it should be a pressing question. For an impoverished young tailor named Franz Reichelt, the answer was: we find out the hard way.

In February 1912, on a cold Sunday morning, Reichelt persuaded journalists, a camera crew and a small crowd to watch him demonstrate his new wearable parachute. The official story was that Reichelt would throw a dummy from the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, more than 50 metres up. Reichelt, however, had tipped off journalists that he would make the jump himself. Otherwise, one suspects, there would have been fewer spectators.

The parachute is, as it happens, something of a running joke in evidence-based policymaking. In the Christmas 2003 edition of the British Medical Journal, obstetrician Gordon CS Smith and public health researcher Jill Pell published a systematic review of “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge”. They noted, with mock sorrow, that “we were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention” and called for “the most radical protagonists of evidence-based medicine” to organise and participate in a rigorous randomised trial of the parachute. 

In case the joke has passed you by, the argument being lampooned is a complaint by advocates of evidence-based policymaking. Many well-established medical practices — along with ideas in policing, criminal justice, education, economics and beyond — have never been seriously tested by the gold standard for evidence: a double-blind, randomised controlled trial (RCT). RCT advocates suggest that this is a scandal. Is it?

The Ceiling Trap:

The most tempting idea in economics

Rents are crushing. A law could just… stop them. What could go wrong?

In every expensive city on Earth, the same conversation repeats. Rents rise faster than paychecks. A family gets a renewal notice with a number that makes their stomach drop. And someone proposes the obvious remedy: make it illegal. Cap the rent. Freeze it. If housing is a human right, why should a landlord be allowed to price a person out of their own neighborhood?

The appeal is real, and so is the problem it responds to. In big, productive cities, a third or more of renter households spend over 30 percent of their income on housing — the standard threshold for being “rent burdened.” Rent control promises relief, and it delivers something voters can feel immediately: my rent stops rising, starting now. 11 “Rent control” is a family of policies. First-generationcontrols (1940s-style) freeze nominal rents outright.Second-generation controls, common today, cap annual increases, often with exemptions for new buildings and rent resets between tenants. The economist Richard Arnott introduced this taxonomy in 1995. The distinction matters — and, as we’ll see, so does everything a ceiling doesn’t change.

Yet among economists, rent control has achieved something remarkable: near-consensus in a field famous for disagreement. In a 1992 survey of American economists, 93 percent agreed that rent ceilings reduce the quantity and quality of housing available. When the IGM panel of elite economists — left, right, and center — was asked in 2012 whether rent control had improved affordable housing in New York and San Francisco over the prior three decades, 2 percent agreed.22 Alston, Kearl & Vaughan, “Is There a Consensus Among Economists in the 1990’s?” American Economic Review(1992); IGM Economic Experts Panel, “Rent Control,” February 2012. The IGM panel includes Nobel laureates from across the political spectrum.

NCES:

In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $37,400 per FTE student, which was more than double the average of OECD countries ($18,400; in constant 2021 U.S. dollars).

This indicator uses information from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to compare countries’ expenditures on education using two measures: expenditures on public and private education institutions per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student and total government and private expenditures on education institutions as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). The OECD is an organization of 38 countries (as of 2021) that collects and publishes an array of data on its member countries. Education expenditures are from public revenue sources (governments) and private revenue sources, and they include current and capital expenditures. Private sources include payments from households for school-based expenses such as tuition, transportation fees, book rentals, and food services, as well as public funding via subsidies to households, private fees for education services, and other private spending that goes through educational institutions. The total government and private expenditures on education institutions as a percentage of GDP measure allows for a comparison of countries’ expenditures relative to their ability to finance education. Purchasing power parity (PPP) indexes are used to convert other currencies into U.S. dollars. Monetary amounts are in constant 2021 dollars based on national GDP deflators and PPP indexes.¹

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Jasper Smith:

In the spring of 2023, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion essay by John D. Sailer, who was then a fellow at the National Association of Scholars. Based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Sailer detailed how a search committee from the Texas Tech University biology department had vetted candidates for a faculty position. One was dinged for advocating a race-neutral approach to teaching; another was praised for reciting a “land acknowledgement” before their job interview. What Sailer found confirmed what he and other critics of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts had long suspected, Sailer wrote: Diversity statements function as ideological litmus tests.

“DEI connotes a set of highly contestable social and political views,” wrote Sailer. “Requiring faculty to catalog their commitment to those views necessarily blackballs anybody who dissents from an orthodoxy that has nothing to do with scientific competence.”

The next day, Texas Tech announced that it would stop using diversity statements in faculty hiring. A short time later the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, sent a letter to the state’s public colleges condemning any hiring practices that consider candidates for reasons other than merit.

For Sailer, the Texas Tech investigation was a turning point in his career. “Moving on to Manhattan Institute was kind of a logical next step,” he said.

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank founded in the late ’70s to improve “great American cities,” has emerged in recent years as a formidable influence on higher education. The think tank has crafted model legislation to remake colleges and universities as race-blind institutions, fueled the campaign to oust Claudine Gay as president of Harvard, and turned City Journal, its quarterly magazine, into a platform for attacking diversity programs, grade inflation, and university presidents’ capitulation to the demands of left-leaning students and faculty. It has found in Trump administration officials and red-state lawmakers a battalion of allies who share the view that higher education has strayed from its truth-focused mission.

In the months leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, met with members of the administration to plan how the government could rein in DEI by threatening federal funding. On his second day in office, Trump signed two executive orders banning DEI-related contracts and spending across the government.

Oyin Adedoyin:

Chris and Carolyn McAuliffe are in their 60s but don’t expect to retire anytime soon. They’re still paying off their student-loan debt, which has ballooned to a half-million dollars.

“I regret going to college,” said Chris, an engineer for a health insurance company.

When they earned their graduate degrees decades ago, the couple owed a combined $114,000 in student loans. With stable careers—Carolyn in nursing—they stayed on top of their monthly payments. Then they bought a house and had two children and money got tight, so they consolidated their loans and opted for a payment plan that lowered their monthly bill.

That extended the life of their loan, and compounding interest charges kept pushing up their balance.

Student loans are increasingly following Americans into their 60s and rewriting what they believed would be their retirement years. More than three million people 62 and older owe federal student loans, up from 1.8 million in 2018, according to Education Department data. Delinquency rates among older borrowers have skyrocketed too, in some cases because they are on fixed incomes or have medical expenses.

Lewina O. Lee , Peter James, Emily Zevon and Laura D. Kubzansky:

Optimism is a psychological attribute characterized as the general expectation that good things will happen, or the belief that the future will be favorable because one can control important outcomes. Previous studies reported that more optimistic individuals are less likely to suffer from chronic diseases and die prematurely. Our results further suggest that optimism is specifically related to 11 to 15% longer life span, on average, and to greater odds of achieving “exceptional longevity,” that is, living to the age of 85 or beyond. These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use). Overall, findings suggest optimism may be an important psychosocial resource for extending life span in older adults.

Alfred Lin:

You have to teach it young. From Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

“If you are allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented, and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge…the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.”

Peter Landers:

Compared with the glacial pace of American universities, the Chinese decision was practically a summary execution. 

On May 12, video blogger Geng Hongwei alleged that Shanghai University scientists faked data in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The university announced a probe the same day. A month later, it said it confirmed misconduct, fired a postdoctoral researcher and ousted the dean of the university’s Institute of Translational Medicine.

A flurry of such cases involving top Chinese researchers and prestigious scientific journals has made Geng a celebrity in China and perhaps the nation’s most powerful person in medical science. With a single five-minute video, the 33-year-old graduate-school dropout can stop an academic star’s career in its tracks.

“The main reason they moved so fast is the sheer scale of the public outcry I can generate,” Geng said in an interview. “The universities simply couldn’t afford to wait.”

Isabel Berwick:

Confidence in the financial returns of a university education has fallen in the UK, as the rapid development of AI threatens to transform the job market.

A British Social Attitudes survey found that a third of people in England consider university education to be a waste of time. The proportion of people expressing this sentiment doubled over the past eight years.

Confidence in higher education’s ability to generate a return on investment reached a record low of 36 per cent, a decline of 10 percentage points from 2018.

Kevin Bass:

This all changed once I started writing about the pandemic. Soon people started talking about me the way I once thought about conservatives. This led to a complete identity collapse as I came to understand that my old worldview was hateful and ignorant, that I hadn’t understood what I had been judging.

I cannot forget the hearing that led to my dismissal from medical school a year after I started writing. During the hearing, people talked about me as if I wasn’t human. My behavior was interpreted in the worst possible light. Complete fabrications were created. Nobody was concerned with the truth, only horrified at my apparent “unprofessional behavior”, which was really a mirror of their unprofessional behavior directed at me. They structured the hearing to make it virtually impossible for me to speak and explain that what was being said was a lie. And nobody seemed to have any problem with this. Why? Because I was bad. If I am bad, then every mistreatment and every violation of the school’s own policies became justified. A person who is bad does not deserve any rights. They only deserve punishment.

But the thing I remember most was the allusions to my social media activity. They said, “Kevin is driven by resentment from his childhood.” I wasn’t. I was on good terms with my parents. They alleged that I needed psychotherapy to deal with this trauma. It was a completely fake story that they had constructed about me, to demean me, to marginalize me, to try to explain the views I had expressed: that something terribly wrong had happened during the pandemic. They couldn’t imagine that I might have legitimate points. So they reduced me to the same kinds of psychological caricatures that I once reduced conservatives to in my own mind.

Joaquin Sapien:

It took less than a day for the detective to give up on the case. A patrol officer had reported a harrowing, violent midnight rape in a Syracuse, New York, park. Hospital records recounted that the victim, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, was “crying uncontrollably.” Her face was bruised, and she had scratches on her neck. Her hymen had been lacerated in two places. Her urine was “grossly bloody,” according to the hospital report, and there was semen inside her.

At 8 on the morning after the assault, after the victim looked fruitlessly through books of mug shots in hopes of identifying her assailant, Syracuse detective George Lorenz interviewed her. She had been awake most of the night for a first police interview, followed by forensic and medical exams: everything from gathering physical evidence of the rape to X-rays of her skull because the attacker had pounded her head on a brick walkway. To alleviate the pain from her injuries, she had been given Demerol, a powerful opioid.

Lorenz, a burly 17-year veteran of the department who had worked as a meat cutter and truck driver before becoming a police officer, seemed annoyed that she had trouble staying awake, according to her subsequent account. “That’s inconsequential, just the facts,” he barked when he thought she was providing extraneous detail.

The detective was dubious that a rape had occurred, according to his preliminary report. “It is this writer’s opinion, after interview of the victim, that this case, as presented by the victim, is not completely factual,” he wrote. After speaking to the male student whom the victim had been visiting before she was attacked, the detective checked the crime scene for anything his colleagues, who had recovered a knife and the victim’s glasses, might have missed.

That was the totality of Lorenz’s investigation. Five hours after receiving the case, in a report marked 13:00 on May 8, 1981, he placed it in the “inactive file pending further info.” The consequences of that decision are still playing out nearly a half-century later.

Sanya Mansoor

Law enforcement’s use of warrants sweeping smartphone location data requires privacy protections, court rules.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information – even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Kagan wrote.

The judges ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v US, against the government, in a case that has been widely viewed as a test of how privacy rights translate into a new digital era.

The use of geofence warrants is widespread, and gives law enforcement agencies the power to compel tech companies to hand over sensitive cell phone data from people at or near crime scenes. The warrants allow police and the FBI to collect this information from individuals within the radius of a virtual “fence” during a particular timeframe. But they are not restricted to requesting data for precise targets.

Nick Danforth:

Following its defeat in World War I, the Ottoman Empire came to an end on Nov. 1, 1922. After six centuries of splendor, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the gates of Vienna, the once-great sultanate stumbled spent into the 20th century and finally collapsed.

But what if it hadn’t?

The fall of the Ottomans was once seen as an inevitable end for “the sick man of Europe,” especially during a historical moment that left empires from the Qing to the Hapsburgs in tatters. But a growing number of works by historians such as Donald Quataert and Hasan Kayaliargue that the Ottomans’ decline was overstated and its collapse was not predestined. In fact, had its leadership stayed out of World War I, or had its German and Austrian allies proved victorious, the empire might well have survived.

Mustafa Aksakal’s The War That Made the Middle Eastoffers the latest and most compelling take on this argument. Aksakal, a historian at Georgetown University, argues that on the eve of the Great War, the Ottoman Empire was not a sick man, doomed to decline by sectarian and national separatist movements. Rather, it was a viable political entity that was destroyed by catastrophic decisions, external invasions, and the profound strain of an existential conflict. As Aksakal writes, “A different future for the empire was also on the table, one that kept alive and extended the empire’s history of a multiethnic and multireligious society.”

What would this hypothetical, post-war Ottoman state have looked like? Perhaps wisely, most historians are hesitant to delve too far into the speculative realm of alternate history. But their scholarship nonetheless provides clues for anyone foolhardy enough to try.

Ares Luna:

One keyboard bug three decades in the making

A few weeks ago, someone reported this to us at Medium:

“I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except Ś. When I press the key for Ś, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens on Medium.”

This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way, and even if we did… out of 32 Polish characters, why would this random one be the only one causing problems?

Turns out, it wasn’t so random. This is a story of how four incidental ingredients spanning decades (if not centuries) came together to cause the most curious of bugs, and how we fixed it.

Kayla Huynh:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty alleges the DPI is “effectively hiding public records behind an illegal” $34,014 fee. In a statement, WILL said the law firm in August 2025 requested from the DPI records of applicants since 2018 who were denied educator licenses for failing to complete an approved program, a DPI-approved educator preparation program that meets specific criteria.

WILL said the DPI acknowledged it had located 1,381 denied applications but charged more than $17,000 to review the files by hand, at $49.26 per hour. The DPI later increased the cost of the records to over $34,000 after WILL attempted to narrow its request, the law firm said.

“An informed electorate is essential to representative government, which is why Wisconsin law strongly favors public access to government records,” said WILL associate counsel Lauren Greuel. “After months of delay, DPI is attempting to price the public out of that access by imposing tens of thousands of dollars in unlawful fees. Government transparency cannot depend on whether citizens can afford to pay for it.”

——-

Corrinne Hess:

After months of no contact, DPI responded, saying the agency had located 1,381 denied applications but said they would have to review the applications by hand, costing $49.26 per hour at a cost of $34,014, said WILL attorney Lauren Greuel.

“An informed electorate is essential to representative government, which is why Wisconsin law strongly favors public access to government records,” Greuel said. “After months of delay, DPI is attempting to price the public out of that access by imposing tens of thousands of dollars in unlawful fees. Government transparency cannot depend on whether citizens can afford to pay for it.”

DPI spokesperson Alison Parkins said in an email to WPR that the agency could not respond in detail due to pending litigation. 

“However, the estimate reflects the time and resources required to produce the requested records, in accordance with Wisconsin’s open records laws,” Parkins said in a statement. “Defending lawsuits from special interest groups such as this requires taxpayer-funded resources that are diverted from our core mission of supporting Wisconsin schools, educators, and students.”

Kathryn Palmer:

Two years after Educational Testing Services lost its contract to administer the SAT, ETS has acquired ACT from a private equity firm. 

“Every student deserves a strong education, a fair shot at college, and a path to a good job,” Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS, said Tuesday in a news release announcing the acquisition of ACT, which administers a standardized college admissions test that rivals the SAT. “Together with ACT, we’re determined to serve students and parents along with educators and states by expanding access to education and job opportunities across America.”

Pat Garrett:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is demanding that the Arrowhead Union High School District remedy unconstitutional religious discrimination after school officials prohibited graduating senior Sarianne Beronja from displaying a Bible verse on her commencement slideshow.

Students were asked by the District to submit personal messages to appear alongside their names during graduation. While the District approved a wide range of personal expressions—including humor, song lyrics, words of gratitude, and even Venmo requests—it rejected Sarianne’s submission solely because it was religious.

A video explaining what happened is available here.

Among other remedies, we are asking the District to rescind any policy, directive, practice, or interpretation that prohibits student religious expression solely because it is religious in nature.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “‘Separation of Church and State’ is not an excuse to erase the viewpoints of students of faith. Arrowhead invited students to express themselves and approved countless secular messages, but when Sarianne shared a Bible verse that reflected her faith, school officials censored it. That’s unconstitutional. We are calling on the school board to immediately correct this violation and ensure no future student is subject to similar discrimination. If the District refuses to do so, our clients are prepared to pursue legal action.”

Nicola Mastrorocco & Edoardo Teso

We investigate how technologies that reduce the costs of monitoring by central authorities have shaped the historical transition from small patrimonial states to large bureaucratic organizations. Our analysis is based on a novel dataset that traces changes in the organizational structure and geographic presence of the U.S. federal government over the nineteenth century. To identify causal effects, we develop a new identification strategy that exploits the expansion of the railroad network as a source of variation in the travel time—and thus monitoring costs—between Washington D.C. and other locations. We present three main findings. First, reductions in travel time to Washington D.C. significantly increased the likelihood of federal government presence in a location. Second, this effect is stronger for occupations and tasks characterized by more severe agency problems. Third, decreases in travel time to Washington D.C. are associated with a decline in patrimonial features of the federal government in the location, in line with enhanced monitoring capacity reducing dependence on personal trust and connections.

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Betsy Hammond:

Two West Linn parents were furious that their children’s elementary schools held onto a once widely used reading curriculum years after it fell out of favor — and wondered why the state allowed it.

As it turns out, the Oregon Department of Education simply took the West Linn-Wilsonville School District at its word that it was in compliance with state curriculum rules. Top administrators asserted the district had gone through all steps required to use materials not on the state-approved list. Pressed by the parents, though, it could provide no records to back up its claim.

Now those parents, Rebecca Puskas and Ashley Bohanan, have filed a legal challenge to the state’s longstanding practice of allowing school districts to assert that they’ve met basic state requirements without providing any proof.

Under the current system, Oregon’s 197 school districts self-certify that they have met minimum requirements for instructional hours, dyslexia screenings, curriculum adoptions and 54 other topics. Puskas, a lawyer, said if their drive to get a judge to reverse the Oregon Department of Education’s decision succeeds, she believes it would prompt a reckoning for that system, known colloquially as Division 22 assurances.

This month, state schools chief Charlene Williams acknowledged many people who interact with the Oregon Department of Education criticize it for accepting districts’ self attestations without requiring evidence.

Hala Gorani:

When I told my (much younger) cousin Asad that I had sent several messages to people I had worked with, suggesting we collaborate, but hadn’t heard back, he didn’t seem surprised.

“That’s totally normal nowadays,” he said casually. “If you don’t get a response,” he explained, “it usually just means it’s not happening.”

“But why not just tell me there’s no budget, or that they’ll get back to me when they have an answer?” I asked him. “Anything but silence?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But I can tell you I’m left hanging all the time when I approach someone who isn’t interested. That’s just the norm.”

It made me wonder whether, as job security has eroded and lifelong relationships with companies have disappeared, it has become easier to ignore people. When there is no expectation of a lasting relationship, and no real personal or emotional consequence, a message, a call, or an email can simply go unanswered.

Is ghosting, I wondered, the new “no?”

Now, I’m no saint in this department. People I don’t know sometimes approach me asking for favours, introductions, or the kind of “quick question” that somehow requires 45 minutes of my life, and I will admit that I have occasionally allowed those messages to drift into the digital wilderness.

Mary Julia Koch:

When William Pallan arrived at the University of Pennsylvania his freshman year, he was set on studying the humanities. He wanted to engage with the great thinkers of the Western canon, from Plato and Aristotle to Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. But as he searched through Penn’s online course catalog and sat in on classes, he felt that the options on offer focused less on the great texts themselves and more on postmodernist interpretations of them. He recalls leaving the first lecture in an English course on Shakespeare midway through when the professor said they’d be approaching the bard’s work through a queer lens.

Glenn Reynolds:

But more importantly, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: We’ve run America with and without a “professional, independent civil service,” and there was more trust in government — and better execution of policy — before the creation of the civil service than after, and particularly before the now-overturned case of Humphrey’s Executor, which protected “independent agencies” from presidential supervision.

But the ramifications of this new decision suggest that the Pendleton Act itself might be at risk, and it should be.

Prior to the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883, government employment operated according to the “spoils system,” which meant that hiring in the executive branch was controlled by the Executive. When a new administration came in, everyone’s job was up for grabs, at least potentially. This “rotation in office” had several advantages, which were widely appreciated at the time, and propounded by presidents from Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln.

Maddie Stone, Amy Westervelt, and Katie Worth:

What they didn’t learn was this: “Wedges” was significantly shaped by the British oil giant BP — one of the single global entities most responsible for causing climate change. 

In 1997, BP abandoned climate change denial. Instead, the company quietly launched a far-reaching effort to intertwine oil company interests and climate science, in part by using its vast resources to shape the research that major universities undertook. 

While its chief executive, John Browne, was rebranding his company as Beyond Petroleum, BP sought out researchers who were already thinking about how to address climate change without replacing fossil fuels. The company found them at Princeton University, where it set about amplifying their work by donating $15 million to start the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The research program was framed around finding solutions to climate change while keeping fossil fuels in play, focusing heavily on carbon capture. 

The “Wedges” paper was the initiative’s first big swing. And it succeeded beyond anything its authors could have imagined. 

CBC Radio:

The core of Humboldt’s thinking on education is ‘Bildung,’ a word that first appeared around the late 13th century, when the Bible was translated from Latin into German. It comes from the idea that a person carries in their soul the image of God, and use it to build those ideals within themselves. 

Bildung’s meaning was static for the next 500 years, but by the late 18th century, German poets and philosophers began to reshape it. Humboldt joined the debate. For him, Bildung was non-secular. He saw it as the ability to see and manifest one’s own, individual potential.

In an essay called Theory of Bildung in 1793, he writes: “What do we demand of a nation?  Of an Age?  Of entire mankind, if it is to occasion respect and admiration? We demand that Bildung, wisdom, and virtue, as powerfully and universally propagated as possible…that it augment its inner worth to such an extent that the concept of humanity, if taken from its example alone, would be of a rich and worthy substance.”

It’s a very powerful concept, says Philipp von Turk, who points to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a seminal influence on Humboldt’s concept of Bildung.

Corri Hess:

Throughout high school, Amanda Watzka and David Heisel would go on long drives across Oconto County.

Heisel would stroke Watzka’s hand and talk about his family’s wealth. He would let her know he could protect her once they were finally together. 

But Watzka and Heisel were not teenage sweethearts — Watzka was a 15-year-old technical education student at Oconto Falls High School, and Heisel was her teacher.

——-

More.

Yaxue Cao:

Patriotism is gauche, “the enlightened people” — to borrow a phrase from George Orwell — would say, implying that patriotism is for simpletons.

Simpleton or not, my love for America is simple, straightforward, and unadulterated. It’s where I call my home, my sweet home.

God bless America.

AFT:

Before 2018, many public-sector employees were forced to pay union fees just to remain employed, even if they disagreed with the union. That changed with a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Today, public-sector employees—including teachers, first responders, and state and local government workers—have the right to decline union membership and stop paying dues.

Paul Vallas:

Her Majesty CTU Pres. Stacy Davis Gates has decreed CPS’ budget “dead on arrival,” although it hasn’t even been presented yet. Let’s be clear: Davis Gates’ warning is don’t make any cuts that impact her members as CPS tries to close a $732 million budget hole. 
 
CTU leaders and Mayor Johnson claim the state is shorting the schools by $2 billion. This means the almost $33,000 per pupil the district currently spends is not enough. They’re demanding $39,000 per pupil to keep current CTU member staffing levels and to pay for salary increases. 
 
Per-pupil funding has grown 44% since 2019, as CPS added 9,000 full-time positions despite losing 12% of its students and received record salary increases. Last year alone, CPS had 1 full time employee for every 7 students and more non-teaching employees (23,074) than teachers. 
 
What has Chicago gained from this? No additional class time, an abandonment of academic standards, an all-out assault on school choice, and the politicization of classrooms.

Camilla Long:

I wasn’t going to write about the horrific findings of the Ockenden report, the many devastating errors at maternity units in Nottingham hospitals. The woman, for example, who went in to have a caesarean, only to discover she’d been given an “inadvertent cystectomy”: they’d cut her bladder out by mistake. Or the dead baby stuffed in a bin as “clinical waste”; or the woman who was told to terminate a healthy pregnancy.

Or the heavily pregnant mother in labour who telephoned the hospital nine times, crying and begging to come in, only to discover, when she was finally allowed in to give birth — having been sent home once — that her baby had died. “I’m sorry, your baby’s dead,” said a staff member. Only minutes earlier, they had been offering “aromatherapy”, fussing over the birthing pool, asking what kind of music she’d like.

The vanity of it.

What happens when a society gets so carried away with itself — with an ideology, an aromatherapeutic way of being — that it abandons all empathy, all reason?

Manuel Pascual:

The renowned economist Roberto Serrano has ‘overwhelming evidence’ that his students cheated. He thinks the time has come for an in-depth debate so the technology does not signal the end of higher education

When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor in a telephone conversation from Providence, Rhode Island. To prevent AI from ending the prestige and utility of teaching, he feels, it is necessary to adopt a different approach: “We need to publicly admit the seriousness of the situation and open up a broad debate about the real extent of the problem.”

Michael Lydick:

Alas, most Americans will never be able to buy one. Current US regulations effectively place these cars behind a 25-year “wait wall,” an import restriction enforced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It prevents foreign-market vehicles from being legally driven here until they are at least 25 years old, unless manufacturers spend heavily to certify them for US safety and emissions standards.

At the same time, satellite imagery revealed enormous European parking lots filled with surplus vehicles from another Chinese EV manufacturer, BYD—a potent visual reminder of the imbalance shaping the modern EV economy.

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), citing “unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of US persons,” in December implemented a ban on unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), including drones, manufactured outside the US. In March, the FCC banned the sale of new foreign-made routers in the US, pointing to cybersecurity threats posed by vulnerable networking gear.

Kelsey Piper:

For decades, kids were getting better at math. The best measure of this — the National Assessment of Educational Progress Long-Term Trend assessment — displays a long climb from 1978 until 2012, when 13-year-old math performance peaked. By 2025, we had wiped out over three decades of gains and were roughly back to where kids were performing in the mid-1990s.

Relative to the literacy crisis — which has spurred endless think pieces, journalism, and legislative responses — declining math performance has received relatively little attention. But they’re part of the same narrative.

You’ve probably heard some version of the simple story about how America messed up reading:

It starts with a movement of educators arguing that the traditional approach was wrong, that instead of emphasizing phonics — which involves boring things like drilling letter sounds and explaining how letter combinations work — schools should embrace a “whole language” approach to learning.

Instead of doing drills, students were encouraged to look at picture books and guess the words from context clues.1 The hope was that this would inculcate not just the skill of reading but the love of reading.

This did not work.

——-

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Brian Dowling:

A US judge ruled Harvard University will have to answer a whistleblower lawsuit claiming it lied to the government to accept hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding for work it never intended to complete. 

Judge Myong J. Young on the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Tuesday rejected Harvard’s request to dismiss the False Claim Act case brought in 2024 by David Zielinski, the former executive director of Harvard’s Clinical and Translational Science Center.

The complaint leveled claims of mismanagement and fraud against Harvard and the science center’s founder, Lee Nadler, who allegedly sought and ..

Danielle DuClos:

Court records are also unclear on when police learned Wallace bought a firearm. Jones’ family alleges that regardless, Madison police could have arrested Wallace in January and taken her firearm away before Jones was shot in March.

“My clients cannot understand why, when the police clearly knew that this individual had attempted to shoot (the January victim) in broad daylight on a Madison street, she was not charged with a crime,” Polich said. “They feel that the public ought to be concerned about this as a public safety issue.”

Beyond the monetary damages, the Jones family is seeking an audit of the Madison Police Department for its efficacy in protecting the public from gun crimes and supervision of the department by a third party.

City officials have 120 days to respond to the claim. If they outright deny the claim or don’t respond, Jones’ family intends to file a lawsuit against the city, Polich said.

Jones enjoyed spending time with her two grandchildren and fishing whenever she could, Mandi Whitford, her daughter, said in a statement. Whitford described her mother as being a hard worker with a huge heart and plans to move to Florida when she retired.

Corri Hess:

Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the bill, saying it interfered with the existing DWD program. 

Ben Gagne-Maynard is National Center for Grow Your Own’s chief program officer. He’s based in Madison and said he’s excited to start working with local education partners to expand teacher apprenticeships.

“As a son of a teacher and a former teacher myself, and as someone now based here in Madison, I care a lot about uplifting and sustaining the teaching profession here in Wisconsin,” Gagne-Maynard said. 

Gagne-Maynard said the teacher apprenticeship model can be a game changer particularly for rural communities since many rural districts often have to get creative about how they hire and retain new teachers. 

“Apprenticeships can create a more structured way for districts to tap into local talent pools, most notably individuals who are often already working in local schools but might face barriers to becoming licensed teachers,” Gagne-Maynard said. 

The Economist:

America’s scores, by contrast, are among the most disappointing. One in seven of its tertiary students scored at or below primary-school level in the literacy tests, up from about one in twenty a decade ago. The share at or below the bottom level for numeracy, meanwhile, was almost one in five.

What is going on? In part, colleges and universities are inheriting problems that have originated in the world’s schools. One cannot overestimate the impact of the pandemic. Countries enforced national school closures lasting 20 weeks on average. Rota systems for in-person learning, and quarantines for “close contacts”, then disrupted lessons more. In the years immediately after that disaster it was as if some students “had not gone to high school”, says Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor at Pepperdine University in California. “It was actually a very scary thing to see.”

Yet colleges and universities that claim to be merely passive observers of this are marking their own homework. In many countries they enjoy broad control of their own admissions policies. They have frequently failed to use these freedoms to hold standards high.
For decades critics have accused college and university officials of lowering entry criteria to capitalise on growing demand. Nowadays the dynamics are a bit different: in some rich countries the number of 18-year-olds is nearing or past its peak. Administrators may find it even harder to resist watering down standards when the alternative is to downsize. Indeed, comparing the OECD’s data on students’ skills with the changing number of students in tertiary systems throws up a correlation that deserves further study: shrinking systems are especially likely to have collected lots of students who score in the lowest levels of those tests.
Falling achievement in schools has mostly been driven by children who already ranked in the bottom half of their classes, not by clever clogs at the top. So the drip of unprepared students into some of America’s best universities demands additional explanation. The irate academics in California, and in many other parts of the country, blame it on the scrapping of entry tests. Before the pandemic more than half of bachelors-granting universities in America required applicants to sit tests of numerical and verbal reasoning—usually the SAT or ACT (these tests help substitute for the standardised exams that exist in many other countries). Now it is as few as 10%.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

By Marian L. Tupy:

When the Berlin Wall fell, a set of propositions seemed settled. Now, it seems those conclusions have been forgotten.

The novelist Tom Wolfe gave us the phrase in a 1987 essay about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, who decided that hygiene, monogamy, and other rules of polite society were bourgeois inventions. They threw them out, moved into communes, and were visited by afflictions that modern medicine had not seen in generations. Doctors at the free clinics started teaching sanitation lessons that Victorian housewives once took for granted. Wolfe called that the Great Relearning: Civilization that discards its hard-won knowledge does not leap ahead to utopia but is dragged back to the starting line.

G Gabrielle Starr:

With the primary election over, California’s field is now nearly set. And as we turn toward the November midterms and consider the future of our democracy more broadly, one truth stands out: education matters, and colleges and universities have a vital role to play in strengthening democratic life.

Just days before California voters received their primary ballots in May, eight gubernatorial candidates took the stage at Pomona College for one of the most consequential debates of this contentious election cycle. With no clear front-runner, a crowded field, and voters still deeply divided, the conversation felt unusually urgent, especially for young people who will live longest with the decisions at stake.

California’s future is theirs.

Anyone who regularly speaks with students knows that the issues dominating the race, such as affordability, higher education, housing, economic mobility, and public trust, are already influencing their choices about where to live, work, and build sustainable futures.

A college campus is the ideal venue for discussions like these, and putting students at the center of the debate was a reminder of something higher education can do far more deliberately.

J.D. Tuccille:

Leading up to our Independence Day party, my wife asked whether she should buy us T-shirts celebrating America’s 250th anniversary or stick with what we already have. We went with our existing garments. When the red, white, and blue string lights are up and the Gadsden flag is flying out front, my son will don his free speech shirt, my wife will wear one with USA printed across it, and my shirt will show an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware and text reading: “Americans. Willing to cross a frozen river to kill you. In your sleep. On Christmas. Not kidding, we’ve done it.”

It will be festive.

Joshua D Rauh:

California’s proposed Billionaire Tax Act would impose a “one-time” 5% tax on the worldwide net worth of individuals with more than $1 billion in assets. Supporters estimate it could raise roughly $100 billion to help address California’s budget pressures, but that projection depends on a static assumption: that billionaires, their assets, and their future income remain in the state. 
The evidence suggests otherwise. Once billionaire departures are taken into account, projected revenue falls to roughly $40 billion, before accounting for the loss of regular income-tax revenue from those who leave. The measure would also remove California’s constitutional limit on taxes on intangible property, making future wealth taxes easier to impose. A tax presented as a fiscal solution could instead weaken investment, reduce employment, and erode the revenue base on which the state depends

William G. Andrekopoulos:

Over the past 15 years, Wisconsin’s educational funding debates have ignored a fundamental problem: the runaway cost of employee healthcare. While Madison politicians consistently feud over state aid formulas and one-time cash injections, school districts face a losing battle against a primary driver of cost that traditional education funding cannot fix.

This healthcare inflation acts as a massive drain on local classrooms. Over the last two decades, hospital service costs in Wisconsin surged by 260%, nearly triple the growth of the state’s median household income.

The data shows that Wisconsin is one of the most expensive states in the country for medical care. According to hospital price tracking from the University of Wisconsin’s Crowe Center April 2026 Report, Wisconsin hospitals charge commercial insurers an average of 321% of Medicare rates for the exact same procedures. That is the highest in the Midwest and fourth-highest nationally. The situation worsens in the consolidated healthcare markets of Milwaukee and Madison, where major hospital systems routinely charge north of 400% of Medicare rates. Ironically, Act 10 gave school boards the total authority to choose insurance plans and cut benefits to save money.

The pressure carries directly into insurance markets. According to national health benefits tracking by the Kaiser Family Foundation Market Dashboard, the average annual premium for an employer-sponsored family plan has breached $25,500—a 70% increase over 15 years. The trajectory is only steepening. For the current cycle, rate filing data from the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance Filing Registry shows major insurers filed for massive, double-digit rate hikes. Average statewide premium increases are hitting 16% to 17%, with individual small-group and commercial marketplace plans spiking over 30%.

Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 system plans an 8.5% property tax increase:

Employee health insurance costs are also expected to grow, as annual premiums are expected to be $94.5 million. This spring, the board approved a 3% increase in the amount of employees’ pay going to health insurance, though the change will not apply to the district’s lowest-paid employees, including special educational assistants and food service employees.

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 healthcare spending! $13,319 per adult $94,500,000/7,095.

Substantial healthcare costs are not a new issues for Madison taxpayers, dating to WPS cost and governance issues. Addressing this should enable higher teacher pay.

Rose Horowitch:

Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust—and how they might restore it.

Three reports—from Yale, from Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, and from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, a higher-education advocacy group—were released this spring. (Cornell is working on a study of its own.) The reports differ in their diagnoses of where higher education went wrong and, by extension, of what should be done now. But their mere existence proves, if nothing else, that America’s universities have finally gotten the message: People don’t like them very much.

Some insiders, granted, seem to view universities as mostly the victims of factors beyond their control. The AAC&U report lists a number of them. People around the world in recent years have turned against all kinds of institutions, not just higher education. The racial-justice movements of the past decade spawned a virulent backlash, and colleges’ “visible commitment to diversity initiatives” made them “an easy political target.” A decline in state funding forced universities to compensate with higher tuition; government regulations around civil rights and financial aid led them to hire more administrators. Through it all, political actors seized on these larger forces to further erode trust in higher education.

Because the report does not identify much in particular that universities did to deserve the public’s contempt, it’s light on concrete ideas for reform. It advises universities to break down bureaucracies that hinder innovation, become more involved in their surrounding communities, and work with peers to defend against government overreach. And it’s teeming with the kind of bureaucratic jargon—for example, it urges universities to “recommit to inclusive excellence” and “tell a clearer and more resonant story that aligns with the lived experiences of individuals from diverse backgrounds”—that has helped make higher education so alienating to so many people.

Abraham Wyner:

A new report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences now makes a similar point from inside the academy. The report is careful. It rejects the crude claim that the humanities are simply corrupt or unserious. But it nevertheless finds, across every field studied, evidence of declining scholarly standards, the drop driven, in part, by the substitution of political criteria for scholarly ones and by a weakening of older ideals of rigour and objectivity.

But the report is mostly diagnostic. What still needs explaining is why those habits became so powerful, and why they proved so professionally useful. My answer is that critical theory did not merely politicise scholarship. It also made scholarship easier to produce.

Harriett Ryan:

That changed in 2024 after a wealthy entrepreneur named Eric Obrokta stepped in. The father of a TFA student with ambitions to play high-level football, Obrokta sank millions into the school.

More than 30 players, including some bound for big college programs, suddenly transferred to TFA before the 2024 season. The offensive line, once anchored by a 160-pound center, came to average about 280 pounds. There were new uniforms and helmets, NFL-style sideline monitors, drones for filming practice and a coach with a $230,000 compensation package.

Alexander Kustov

This knee-jerk evidence-based mindset is not just a pandemic thing, and it shows up wherever we treat one kind of data as the only kind that counts. In 2018, a top medical journal published a randomized controlled trial (RCT) finding that parachutes did nothing to prevent death or injury when people jumped from an aircraft. The catch was that the planes were parked on the ground, and the mean jump altitude was about half a meter. The whole study, of course, was a joke. The authors were not against experiments as such, but they were mocking the common reflex among their colleagues that treats RCTs as the only respectable form of knowledge, even about a claim you could check by looking out the window of a plane.2

I have spent much of my professional life contributing to and asking for better evidence in immigration debates, usually to the quiet exasperation of people on my own side, so I am not about to start sneering at data and acting on “vibes.” Good policymaking does need evidence, cost-benefit analysis, and careful counterfactual thinking. But it also needs humility and better judgment about what kind of evidence a given question can actually require, if any.

There are some policies that are so obviously good that we should not need a perfect study to try them, like legally allowing more housing where demand is high, keeping reliable low-carbon power online when the substitute is fossil fuel, or increasing visas for foreign top talent that everyone says they want. Reasonable people can argue about details and trade-offs. But on questions like these, the case for action does not depend on a perfect RCT, and the burden of proof should not be infinite.

There are also policies so obviously bad that we should not need a study to stop them, like asylum seeker work bans. Seriously, you do not need a randomized trial, or any hard evidence for that matter, to predict what happens when you forbid a willing adult in a legal limbo to work, pay to shelter them instead, and then point to their idleness as proof the system is broken. Most of the hardest calls in policy look more like this than some great mystery requiring a well-designed experiment.

Yvonne Abraham:

The compromise legislation was enacted by the Legislature on June 18. It creates standards for evidence-based reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade. It also requires universal literacy screenings, expands teacher training requirements and creates new measures meant to track district compliance and student progress.

The bill also limits the use of the controversial “three-cueing” method where students identify unfamiliar words using context and picture clues as well as sentence structure. The final bill preserved the Early Literacy Fund but dropped a $25 million transfer to the fund that was in Senate-approved bills. The fund is meant to help districts buy curriculum materials and provide professional development. 

“It did not make it into the bill, but we fully expect that we will do some sort of funding in the future, either a supp or some other vehicle that we have going forward,” Senator Sal DiDomenico, the legislation’s Senate lead, said when unveiling the conference committee’s report.

The education advocacy group MassPotential called the legislation “the first standalone education bill to pass in Massachusetts since before the Pandemic” and said Massachusetts was taking “a true step forward in addressing its literacy disparities and ensuring that every student knows how to read by 3rd grade.”

Healey said her administration is committed to working with districts to provide what they need to carry out the law. The governor also said she is focused on working with educators as well as listening to them.

AGCO:

For 250 years, American farmers from the United States have fed the nation, shaped its landscape and carried forward a way of life passed from one generation to the next. Their stories deserve to be shared and celebrated.

James Howard Kunstler:

Meanwhile, though, the money flows dry up as the old Big Donor Dawgs freak-out at the prospect of having their fortunes confiscated, eaten by this advancing ant-swarm, while Scott Bessent and Todd Blanche work to disassemble the giant, hive-like matrix of NGOs that, for years, laundered US taxpayer dollars through the Democratic Party’s patronage system. In New York City, Philly, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Portland, the NGOs furnished comfortable salaries for young activists churned out remorselessly by Higher Ed, but all that’s starting to look like a bygone Shangri-la, a lost world.

“Many Democratic primary voters, however, are in no mood for defensiveness. As they see it, they’ve been failed by a cautious, compromising establishment, and they’re going to overthrow it.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

Of course, the loss of those cushy jobs and perqs has pitched that young demographic into a yet greater rage, prompting them to wreak vengeance and havoc on the system that took their “entitlements” away. Activists want to do activism, which is not necessarily the same as working for a living. It’s working for an ideal, a cause — to abolish the very society based on working for a living and replace it with a parent-like, hovering, all-powerful government that provides your every need by “seizing the means of production.”

The trouble is, this has been tried before, many times in the previous century, and the track-record is discouraging, exhibit-A being the old Soviet Union, the experiment that failed. Why? Because after seizing the means of production, the state bureaucracy lacks the skills, the spirit, and the creative juice to produce much of anything, and especially to do it well. All it can actually contribute to the process is its intrinsic bureaucratic entropy and, to put it ultra-simply, entropy is just not a force for good in this world.

The Republican Party is laboring through its own parallel, but rather different sort of crack-up, a breach based more on pure enmity to President Trump’s personality than necessarily to ideas or policy. The Right still uniformly subscribes to personal liberty and economic enterprise, but factions on the right have a long-running investment in the Deep State apparatus and its protection against Mr. Trump’s impending prosecution of the so-called “grand conspiracy” (the ongoing seditious coup), as well as his dismantling of the money-flow architecture that keeps Beltway types rolling in dough. Former AG Bill Barr is exhibit-A for that faction, as when he concealed the FBI’s possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop through Trump Impeachment No. 1, when he refused to investigate ballot fraud after the 2020 election, and when he managed to let Jeffrey Epstein off himself in the Manhattan federal lockup.

Progressive Policy Institute:

“The Virginia State Board of Education sent a strong message in a 7-0-1 vote yesterday that children in Virginia can’t wait any longer for the state to get honest about how they’re doing in reading, math, and science.

“In 2025, the Virginia State Board of Education made the forward-looking choice to increase the definition of grade-level learning on its state assessments from the lowest bar in the country to among the highest. This move was not only a recognition that the lowest-in-the-country learning expectations are not good enough for Virginia, but also a vote of confidence in the potential of Virginia students and teachers to meet the higher bar. After much debate between those who wanted the change to happen immediately and those who wanted a long runway, the Virginia State Board chose to compromise: the bar would be phased in over four years, by boosting the definition of ‘proficient’ until reaching the permanent, higher bar in 2029-2030.

“But as almost always happens, there’s an effort afoot working harder to hide behind low expectations than helping students and teachers meet higher ones. On Wednesday, the State Board heard a proposal from the Virginia Department of Education to forgo increasing expectations until the 2028-2029 school year and then move the bar in one fell swoop.

“Thankfully, the Virginia State Board of Education recognized that calls to delay raising standards are just the nice façade people put on their true intentions to kill them entirely whenever the next deadline comes. Let’s be honest why: Some schools and districts that look just fine right now will look less stellar when the system becomes more rigorous. It’s not about student learning; it’s about the perception of a system run by adults.

Nathaniel Cline;

Proposal would implement new cut scores a school year faster than gradual rollout plan

The Virginia Board of Education may delay the full implementation of the state’s plan to raise academic benchmarks for reading and math by two years, rather than gradually increasing them over a four-year period starting this year as scheduled.

The department briefed board members on the proposed delay at their work session on Wednesday at J. Sergeant Reynolds Community College in Henrico County, following a state study’s finding that the new K-12 accountability system, which includes the cut scores, could be refined. 

Virginia will raise cut scores for its Standards of Learning assessments to boost student proficiency, a process that was slated to begin this school year. This initiative, led by former Gov. Glenn Youngkin, followed findings of declining reading and math scores among students in grades 3 through 8, a trend that began during the pandemic. 

But critics are urging a slower rollout, saying a quicker shift could increase teacher burnout, lower graduation rates, and worsen inequitable access to education. Several members of the board said at Wednesday’s meeting that they wanted to keep to the original timeline. 

Melissa Manno:

The “Back to Basics in Math” law, passed as part of the state budget last month, requires school districts to use “evidence-based” methods in elementary school math classrooms. | Fernando Veloso Leão/corelens | Illustration: New York Focus

At New York Focus, our central mission is to help readers better understand how New York really works. If you think this article succeeded, please consider supporting our mission and making more stories like this one possible.

New York is an incongruous state. We’re home to fabulous wealth — if the state were a country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world — but also the highest rate of wealth inequality. We’re among the most diverse – but also the most segregated. We passed the nation’s most ambitious climate law — but haven’t been meeting its deadlines and continue to subsidize industries hastening the climate crisis.

As New York’s only statewide nonprofit news publication, our journalism exists to help you make sense of these contradictions. Our work scrutinizes how power works in the state, unpacks who’s really calling the shots, and reveals how obscure decisions shape ordinary New Yorkers’ lives.

In the last two decades, the number of local news outlets in New York has been nearly slashed in half, allowing elected officials and powerful individuals to increasingly operate in the dark — with the average New Yorker none the wiser.

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21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Bryan Caplan

I’ve finished my visiting professorship at the world-famous, ultra-controversial University of Austin (UATX), where I taught courses in Immigration and Housing, Education and the Family, and Introduction to Political Science. I came to campus every school day, and spent many hours socializing with the students. Here are my main thoughts on the experience.

1. The students at UATX are academically fantastic, a great package of high IQ, sky-high curiosity, and intellectual engagement. The only school I’ve taught at that’s in the same league is the University of Chicago, especially Agnes Callard’s Night Owls program.
2. UATX spurns holistic admissions, automatically admitting students with a 1460+ SAT, 33+ ACT, or 105+ CLT. But by my lights, their students had much better personalities than top schools that officially put high weight on personality! Curiosity and intellectual engagement aside, UATX students were strikingly cheerful, gregarious, agentic, and enthusiastic. Attendance at my on-campus game nights and karaoke parties was high — and since quite a few of my students are based in Northern Virginia, you’ll probably get to meet a few at Capla-Con 2026.
3. As a GMU professor, I’m used to low student attendance. At UATX, attendance is mandatory, enforced with preset grade penalties. Even so, absenteeism was fairly common. But strikingly, students with poor attendance were still highly engaged wherever they chose to show up. Why? UATX students skip classes not because they’re lazy, but because they literally have something better to do. One student was busy running a start-up. Other students were rehearsing for Hamlet. Good for them!
4. While we’re on the subject of Hamlet, the UATX drama club’s performance was profoundly moving. Overall, I preferred Ian McKellen’s (Gandalf/Magneto) live 2022 production, where the famed octogenarian played the title role. But as I told the UATX cast, they were all — McKellen aside — better than their counterparts in my favorite Hamlet production. My epiphany during the play: Contrary to many English teachers, Hamlet is not a tragic hero. He is a full-fledged anti-hero. Remember, after he manslaughters Polonius, Hamlet shows no regret. Instead, he sadistically hides the body from his heirs!

Chris Cargill

For years, opponents of income tax relief have warned that lowering tax rates would reduce state revenues and threaten government services.

Montana’s own tax collection data tells a very different story.

Over the past decade, individual income tax collections increased from $1.06 billion in Fiscal Year 2014 to $2.24 billion in Fiscal Year 2024. That’s an increase of more than 111 percent.

Corporate income tax collections grew even faster, rising from $147.6 million to $312.3 million over the same period—an increase of nearly 112 percent.

In other words, Montana’s two major income tax sources didn’t stagnate after lawmakers began reducing individual income tax rates. They more than doubled.

ACTA:

Recognizing that America’s 250th anniversary is cause for both celebration and a long-overdue call for renewal, 24 historians, political scientists, and education leaders have joined ACTA’s National Commission on American History and Civic Education. The National Commission has a simple, yet essential goal: the restoration of the requirement that every college student complete a semester-long course on the American story. Our schoolteachers, our business leaders, our professionals, and our government leaders must not receive a diploma without this training.

It is an ambitious goal, a multi-year project, which will do much to fulfill the vision of the American Founders. In this Broadside for the Nation, we explain in detail why American higher education must restore this foundational requirement for college graduates to know the American story, what such a course might include, and, crucially, how to make this vision a reality.

Jenny Anderson and Mike Goldstein: 

In a 2023 TED Talk watched by millions of people, the American educator and entrepreneur Sal Khan declared that AI was about to deliver “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” The founder and CEO of Khan Academy was touting the company’s new educational chatbot, Khanmigo, claiming it promised to be an “amazing personal tutor” to “every student on the planet.” By 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was chiming in that AI was on the verge of delivering, for students, “virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need.”

But by this spring, Khan had admitted that the release of Khanmigo was “a non-event” for many kids. Although access exploded, from reaching 40,000 students in 2023 to nearly 1 million this year, actual uptake—whether students use it—has stagnated.

A tool designed to respond to questions and ask follow-ups can’t help a student who doesn’t engage or know what to ask. Khanmigo, like so many other ed-tech tools, has floundered because it hasn’t solved the challenge at the center of education: How do you motivate students to experience the discomfort of learning something new? An AI tutor may be able to deliver math problems that are perfectly calibrated to a student’s level. But it can’t make the student actually do the problems.

Navaneeth Rajan

The University did not directly respond to questions regarding academic integrity investigations or whether the University would monitor or proactively review user histories for policy violations, instead directing instructors to the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning “for guidance on how generative AI tools intersect with academic honesty, course design, and student learning.” The statement advised students to consult the Student Manual’s Academic Honesty & Plagiarism section—which does not mention AI—and ask their instructors further questions.

The spokesperson confirmed that UChicago user information “will not be used to train Anthropic AI models,” a protection which does not apply to Anthropic’s free plans and personal subscriptions. However, personnel should not input sensitive or confidential information to Claude without permission from the appropriate university office.

Anna Bryson:

The Virginia Board of Education on Thursday rejected a surprise proposal from Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s education department to delay tougher passing standards on Standards of Learning exams, arguing Virginia students have already waited long enough for more honest measures of academic achievement.

Gabriele Tweedie:

Incoming students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, are raising concerns about required first-year courses on race and identity politics, including courses titled “You Are on Monacan Land” and “Race, Racism, Colony and Nation.”

Arts and Sciences students at UVA must complete four of these “Engagements” courses during their first year. 

Multiple incoming students spoke with Campus Reform on the condition of anonymity. They questioned both the course offerings and the registration process.

”The engagement courses are ridiculous to me,” one incoming student said. “I think it’s a waste of our time to be required to take them.”

Arpit Gupta:

In 1971, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck offered a famous critique of rent control: “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

Since then, economists have distinguished between different forms of rent regulation. The “first-generation” systems Lindbeck had in mind impose fixed nominal price ceilings: rents remain frozen even if landlords’ operating costs rise, and the rental price carries over when one tenant leaves and another moves in. By contrast, “second-generation” systems limit how much rents may rise during a tenancy, often through formulas that account for inflation or operating costs, while allowing rents to move closer to market levels when an apartment becomes vacant.

Second-generation systems provide tenants with stability and predictable increases, though at some cost to housing efficiency. New York City’s rent-stabilization system, for all its flaws, has generally fallen within this category. Each year, the Rent Guidelines Board—of which I am a public member—sets permissible increases for regulated leases after reviewing changes in landlords’ operating costs and tenants’ incomes. Prior to the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act in 2019, landlords also had greater latitude to raise rents when apartments turned over or after making improvements. Since then, however, those avenues have been sharply restricted, leaving the annual increases approved by the board as the principal means of keeping regulated rents aligned with rising costs.

On Thursday, the Rent Guidelines Board formally adopted Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze, approving a zero-percent increase on both one- and two-year leases for the city’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments. The vote moves us one step closer to the first-generation rent-control model that Lindbeck described, threatening the long-term viability of a large share of the city’s rental housing.

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More.

The Economist:

cademics have always moaned about their students. “Scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before,” complained Egbert of Liège, an 11th-century know-it-all, in an age when not even a tenth of humans could read. Recently there have been lots of new worries about standards in colleges and universities—especially in America, home to many of the world’s best.

But this time, as our International section notes, the laxity is not just in lecturers’ heads.
Maths professors report that they are having to pack freshers off to remedial courses before real learning can start. Some are turning up to university ignorant of things they should have learned early in secondary school. Lecturers in humanities warn that students are struggling to understand texts that a decade ago their counterparts would easily have grasped. Students increasingly ask for reading lists to be cut short.

Tests run by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, suggest that students in colleges and universities are less literate than they were a decade ago. The best are cleverer than ever, but a growing number have basic skills that would embarrass a child half their age. About one in seven students at American colleges and universities scores no better in literacy tests than a typical ten-year-old. For numeracy, it is nearly one in five.

One explanation is the harm to schooling from the pandemic. Another is the fact that, even before covid-19, school marks in America and in many other rich countries were already falling. At the same time, many colleges and universities have been lowering the bar for entry. In America they have largely stopped requiring applicants to sit tests of numerical and verbal reasoning, such as the SAT. Some believe those exercises are unfair to black and Hispanic students. Others are trying to get enough bums on seats as the total number of 18-year-olds in America starts to fall.

Americans are finally recognising that many of their schools teach literacy using methods that other countries long ago binned as pseudoscience. States that reversed course first, such as Mississippi, have been posting big gains.

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###% I have asked a number of tenured University professors about addessing our k-12 disaster. The general response: shrugged shoulders.

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

fire.org:

Hosted by the FIRE Student Network, this conference brings together 100+ college students from across the country to build connections, learn from one another, and gain practical tools to support free speech on campus. Through workshops, small-group discussions, and sessions with FIRE staff and guest speakers, they’ll explore key issues at the intersection of culture, law, and policy, and leave with a clear plan to take action on your campus.

Nobunaga

Tokyo, it is ordinary to see a seven-year-old board a train alone with a yellow safety cap and a perfectly folded permission form in a backpack.

Japan’s school commute culture runs on trust layered over systems.

Many elementary students walk or take public transit without a parent — in surveys across major cities, the vast majority of first graders already go to school on their own or with classmates, not because parents are careless, but because neighborhoods, schools, and communities designed for it over decades.

Station staff know the regular faces.
Drivers watch the platform.
Older students quietly guide younger ones to the right car.

A child in a yellow hat stands on tiptoe to tap his IC card, serious and proud.
A shopkeeper near the school gate watches until the last straggler passes, then nods.

Quinton Klabon summary:

🚨2026 WISCONSIN YOUTH APPRENTICESHIP DATA🚨

9.5% of upperclassmen (+0.9%, 12,203 total)

BEST
Mercer: 53.3%
Luxemburg: 52.7%
Amery: 51.6%
Mellen: 48.8%
Gilmanton: 47.6%
Denmark: 46.3%
Reedsville: 45.3%
Belgium: 43.4%
Pulaski: 39.3%
Boscobel: 38.8%

——

DWD

Roshan Fernandez:

The Chicago Teachers Union is publicly urging financier Michael Sacks, who chaired Chicago’s Democratic National Convention host committee in 2024, to keep his wallet out of the race. 

“We owe Chicago’s voters a school board election that belongs to Chicago’s voters. Not to Wall Street. Not to Silicon Valley,” union President Stacy Davis Gates wrote in a pointed May letter to Sacks that was posted publicly.

Sacks, who hasn’t yet donated this cycle, says he has no intention of staying out. In response, he called the union-backed candidate for school-board president “entirely unqualified.”  

“The idea that some people can engage in politics and others cannot is ridiculous,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Chicago is following a national trend. Local school-board elections, once low-budget affairs, have increasingly become nationalized, with millions of dollars flowing in, said Michael Hartney, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who specializes in education politics.

Chicago’s district faces a $730 million deficit and years of shrinking enrollment. 

The union was the top spender in the first phase of the shift to an elected board in 2024, records show. A CTU spokesperson said they were countering spending from opponents who favored school closures and privatization, among other measures. 

Alexander Russo

My hope, however, is that more education journalists will soon, like Bacon, address the issue of overreliance on education that is detailed in my book. 
 
My hope is that more education journalists will address the issue of overreliance on education.

As I have thought about the implications of my argument, I keep coming back to the physicist Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift.
 
A paradigm is a fundamental way of approaching the world, and, importantly, it is socially constructed. In other words, we have a collective framework for understanding the world, but that framework can change when we are presented with enough new information to destabilize our worldview. In that instance, a paradigm can change, opening the way for something new. 
 
The paradigm we have been living in was constructed in the 1950s by Chicago school economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, who popularized the concept of human capital as the explanation for the increasingly prosperous and more equal economy that emerged after World War II (much more important, in reality, was the power of labor unions and a robust social welfare state). 
 
We’ve been living in that world ever since as politicians, beginning with the Johnson administration, sought to alleviate poverty by focusing on the supposed deficiencies of individual working people. Never mind that most people in the 1960s who were impoverished — especially African Americans, as civil rights activists like Bayard Rustin pointed out — were in that position because they lived in cities where jobs and other social opportunities didn’t exist. 

——-

more.

Minnesota Star Tribune:

The article incorrectly attributed a quote to Matthew Pierce, a records coordinator with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The reporter mistakenly incorporated language from his own email correspondence with Pierce regarding a records request and presented it as a quote. Pierce did not make the statement attributed to him.

In addition, a paraphrased statement attributed to a Department of Natural Resources spokesperson was inaccurate and created the impression that the spokesperson had commented on the incident when she had not.

A preliminary review indicates these errors resulted from breakdowns in the reporting and editing process. No artificial intelligence tools were used in the creation of the story.

——-

more.

Tarini Mehta

The push for the bill comes amid the CSU system’s attempt to position itself as a global leader for the “impactful, responsible and equitable adoption of artificial intelligence” in higher education. Last year, the system announced a “first-of-its-kind public-private initiative” with leading tech companies including Google, Intel, NVIDIA and OpenAI to create an “AI-empowered higher education system.”

In 2025, it entered into a $17 million agreement with OpenAI to provide access to ChatGPT Edu to its 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff for 18 months. Last month, the CSU renewed the controversial contract for three years at an annual price of $13 million. The system also entered into an agreement with OpenAI to pilot the company’s certification courses on AI skills at its campuses.

According to union leaders, the CSU has already attempted to outsource some faculty work to AI agents.

Andrew Maynard

📜 About

The past two plus millennia have had their fair share of technology-driven panics, from warnings about the dangers of writing and printing, to the advent of bicycles, the car, radio, video games and — more recently — generative AI.

Most of these “techlash” responses look irrational with hindsight — knee-jerk social responses that place fear of the unknown, maintaining the status quo, and holding on to identity-defining ideas, ahead of rational thought. And yet, below the surface, there’s often more to them. Rather than being a simplistic rejection of a new technology, they are often responses to something that’s perceived as a threat to something of worth or value — identity, dignity, jobs, security, beliefs, the ability to find meaning in life, and more.

Heather Peske

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. More than ever before, our newly released Teacher Prep Review: Decoding Progress in Reading Preparation tells a tale of two completely different approaches to how teacher preparation programs across the country are giving future teachers the knowledge and skills to implement scientifically based reading instruction. Nationally, roughly half of programs we reviewed (53%) earn an A, up from just 26% in 2023—meaning they teach all five core reading components aligned to the evidence base and avoid discredited practices. This progress proves that teacher prep can transform to align to best practices.

The bad news is about half (47%) of teacher prep programs fall short in giving teachers the skills and knowledge they want and need to be effective teachers of reading. One in five programs still teach debunked reading methods, despite clear scientific evidence that they’re ineffective—or even harmful to students. For example, nearly one in five prep programs (18%) teach candidates to use running records, a debunked assessment tool that encourages students to guess words based on context (rather than sounding them out). 

While states should be leveraging their authority to review and approve programs, teacher prep programs themselves need to make the transition to align to the evidence. In fact, when teacher prep programs include methods of teaching that run counter to the evidence and research, they are selling aspiring teachers a faulty product. When teacher prep faculty lack the knowledge and skills to teach reading aligned to the robust evidence base (especially given readily available professional learning opportunities), or when they refuse on philosophical grounds, they are complicit in misrepresenting what aspiring teachers need to know about reading instruction.   

This misleading approach to reading instruction cheats four groups of consumers: the districts that have to spend money and time to remediate the new teachers; the teachers who receive the students in the next grade and have to make up for lost time; the well-meaning new teachers themselves, many of whom will leave the profession when they are ineffective; and most importantly, the students. Worse, it is the students who are farthest from opportunity who are assigned at higher rates to these brand new, poorly trained teachers. 

——-

Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024: Wisconsin Teacher Preparation Programs

Early Literacy Screener Map.

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

Letter to the Editor:

Neetu Arnold’s proposal (“Whip Grade Inflation Now,” op-ed, June 17) is sensible and would go a long way toward making college grades more meaningful.

It’s very similar to the Contextual Transcript policy the UNC-Chapel Hill faculty council adopted back in 2011. I led that effort, which was unfortunately never implemented. The contextual transcript would have reported each grade along with statistics as to where that grade fell in the class’s distribution. It would have also reported a student’s “Schedule Point Average,” a measure of how the students’ traditional grade point average compares to other students in the same mix of classes.

Steve Nielsen

Horne doesn’t disagree with the new audit. It found 92% of high schools were awarded A or B letter grades, but some “did not appear to meet the established criteria for these grades.”

In fact, one school got an A while only 9.6% of students were proficient in math. Another A-rated school only reported 8.6% of students were proficient in English.

“Parents would say, ‘How did they get an A rating when they have low proficiency?’ So that all has to be reformed,” Horne said.

Growth is weighted heavily, which partially explains that. Horne says they are working to reform the system in the next year or two, potentially creating two separate grades, with one for growth and one for proficiency.

“We need to improve the system so that there’s a limit no matter how much you improve, if the proficiency is low, you shouldn’t be able to get an A but you should be able to get a B,” Horne said.

Corey DeAngelis:

Wall Street Journal:

Readers sometimes say we’re partisan when we point out that Democratic politicians these days take political dictation from teachers unions. Well, we are about to get a market test.

On Tuesday the heads of the nation’s two largest teachers unions delivered their marching orders to the country’s 24 Democratic Governors: Don’t opt into the new federal tax-credit scholarship program, or suffer their political wrath.

“We urge you to protect families and public education in your state by saying no to the Trump private school voucher scheme,” write Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Rebecca Pringle of the National Education Association. 

“Endorsing this voucher program would disregard both the Democratic National Committee platform and the wishes of voters,” they add in their “Open Letter to our Democratic Governors.” That “our” is a nice political touch, suggesting the union bosses know who owns whom in this relationship.

AEI Source:

AEI SOURCE is developed by Tao Tan.

SOURCE (Searchable Open University Records of Charitable Expenditures) is an interactive tool to access a dataset of over 1 million grants from over 57,000 U.S. private foundations to colleges and universities, predominantly American. Each row is a single grant: the funder, the recipient, the year, the dollar amount, the foundation’s own free-text description of why the grant was made, and a thematic tag added by AEI to make the corpus searchable by topic. Filters cover funder, recipient, year, tag, and geography.

Every row also carries a link to the underlying Form 990-PF filing on ProPublica, as well as the foundation’s overall profile. A reader who wants to see the original disclosure for any grant in the browser can click through to ProPublica’s XML viewer and read the raw filing as the IRS received it.

SOURCE was built so that journalists, researchers, donors, university leaders, and the general public can pull the same data and reach their own conclusions. A technical appendix is attached for any reader who wishes to reproduce or extend the dataset. Limitations to this tool are discussed below under “Caveats and limitations.”

DATA SOURCES

The raw material is Form 990-PF, the annual return that private foundations file with the IRS. The IRS releases the 990 corpus in bulk as XML files, and GivingTuesday mirrors and archives the corpus in a public S3 bucket.

We extracted grant-level detail using a Python script. The code reads the XML, isolates the grants-paid schedule, filters to Form 990-PF only (so the corpus is private foundations, not operating charities), and writes the result to a single flat file. We then ran two parallel iterative cleaning passes on that file: one to normalize the recipient names so that the same university does not appear under variant spellings, and one to add a thematic tag to each grant using AI (Claude Haiku 4.5). Code, prompts, and replication instructions for both passes are in the technical appendix.

Holly Korbey

In James Bell’s math class at Chapman High School, sophomores are trying to pinpoint exactly where two lines cross.

The students in this rural Kansas high school already solved for that meeting point in previous lessons, using graphs and other techniques. But this recent lesson shows them how to use a matrix — a box made up of rows and columns representing a system of equations. Matrices are often used in engineering or video game design to calculate the locations of two objects moving through space. 

Traditionally, this kind of complex linear algebra would be taught in the third year of high school math, when many students would take Algebra II. But a decade ago, the Chapman Unified School District, a rural district about 80 miles west of Topeka, Kansas, decided to drop the traditional high school math pathway — Algebra I for a year, followed by a year of geometry and then a year of Algebra II — in favor of what is called “integrated math.”  

Integrated math takes concepts from both algebras and geometry, plus a little from trigonometry — the study of triangles and angles — and blends them over multiple years instead of teaching them separately, a year at a time. That means students can move from lessons in geometry to algebra and back again within the same year. 

Bell, who helped write the math curriculum that Chapman High School uses, said he has seen how practicing both algebra and geometry throughout the year keeps them fresh in students’ minds.

“You’re going to have the opportunity to change course and change direction and see different things,” Bell said. “Students even do a little trig — which is a scary word for kids, but when it’s integrated into every year of math, it doesn’t sound as scary. It doesn’t make it as overwhelming.”

He added: “This is better for students. This is the best of both worlds.”

——-

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Alex Berenson:

Hospital prices have risen almost fourfold since 2000, far more than any other major economic sector. The increase in prices comes after decades of consolidation. Nearly half of medical centers have become part of bigger chains since 2000, largely erasing competition in many cities and metro areas.

—

(Know what hasn’t risen fourfold? A subscription to Unreported Truths! At pennies a day, still the best bargain in journalism.)

—

The White House Council of Economic Advisers released the report last week, but almost no one aside from healthcare trade reporters has noticed or written about it.

Health insurance company executives are so despised they risk being gunned down. But hospitals continue mostly to escape blame for their role in American healthcare’s exorbitant costs. The report suggests that in many cities and states, hospitals are far more important to high prices — and increasingly dominant over private insurers.

After mergers, hospital chains quickly raise prices, research has shown.

Greg Lukianoff:

What worries me is that fear has a way of making old mistakes look like new solutions.

Throughout modern history, whenever a new way of communicating emerges, a familiar argument follows close behind: this technology is too dangerous, too disruptive, too influential to be left free. And the proposed answer is almost always the same — give the government more power.

But governments do not possess some magical ability to eliminate risk, panic, misinformation, extremism, or social conflict. What they can do is acquire new authority over the systems through which people communicate, learn, organize, search, publish, and exchange ideas. And once governments acquire those powers, they rarely surrender them voluntarily. And they alwaysabuse them.

That is why the stakes are so high. We are debating the future of the infrastructure through which billions of people will speak, argue, search, publish, organize, learn, and understand the world. Resisting the ancient impulse to put authorities in charge of what people may say and know helped give us the best things in the modern world: science, liberal democracy, individual rights, pluralism, innovation, and the astonishing expansion of human knowledge. If we forget that lesson now, just as the channels of knowledge are being rebuilt all around us, the consequences could last for generations.

Todd Wallack:

It turns out one explanation is that many online colleges have adopted generous transfer policies, accepting credits from not only other colleges but also an assortment of nontraditional sources.
That includes certifications earned on the job or in the military. Or exams that prove students have already mastered the material, including Advanced Placement and College-Level Examination Program tests.

But it also includes getting credit for taking classes on online learning platforms such as Sophia, Study.com and StraighterLine, which are known as fast and inexpensive places to rack up college credits.

——-

More.

Rebecca Noel

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools board questioned – but passed – a controversial tech contract at its first meeting since Superintendent Crystal Hill was placed on leave.

Instead of the proposed two years, the board only approved a one-year term.

In recent weeks, parents have questioned the use of technology in CMS schools, especially early on in elementary school and particularly a digital program called i-Ready, which CMS has used for the past two years. Students spend approximately 90 minutes a week on the platform, which has digital reading and math assessments and lessons.

District leaders said the tool allows students to receive personalized lessons while allowing teachers to see performance data for each student.

The proposed two-year contract would’ve cost CMS around $9.7 million. For one year, it will cost approximately $4.4 million. The school board initially placed the contract on its consent agenda, which is used for items without opposition, before moving it to the regular agenda ahead of the start of Tuesday’s meeting.

Board members said they received numerous concerns from CMS parents about the platform and the amount of in-school screen time in general.

Darryl Cobb:

At the Charter School Growth Fund, graduation is our favorite time of year. It is when schools shine. We are reminded of what is possible when students, teachers and school leaders have excellence as their north star.

Charters are built on the premise that all kids can learn when a culture of high expectations, great teaching and deep relationships with students and families works together to help each child in the school learn and grow.

This year alone, over 30,000 high school seniors in hundreds of high schools across the country that our fund invests in earned over a billion dollars in college scholarships. And close to 100% of them have been accepted and are going to college.

For individual students, this is an extraordinary outcome.“For my family, this scholarship means that all of their support and sacrifice over the years has truly paid off,” said Laythan Davis, who is graduating from Uncommon Schools in Rochester, New York, this year, and headed to Cornell University on a QuestBridge Scholarship.

But it is surprisingly ordinary in a subset of public schools that have created an approach that works year after year. Our hope is that this becomes ordinary in allcommunities across the country. 

Erin Gretzinger:

Madison schools and other districts still have more work to do, though. Less than half of Madison students didn’t meet grade-level expectations in reading and writing in the 2024-25 school year, slightly fewer than the average statewide, according to state data. About 18.5% of Black students in Madison scored proficient in reading, compared with 20% statewide.

Jackson said her current top priority is placing dozens of early literacy coaches in schools by the start of next school year. She’s also focused on increasing communication between the Department of Public Instruction, schools and families, as well as making sure school districts and teachers have the necessary support and resources to implement the law.

“We expect a lot out of our educators, and we want to be sure that we are rolling this out and supporting this in a way that it doesn’t make it feel like it is overwhelming,” she said. “Our focus is making sure that they’ve got that knowledge, they’ve got those supports, so that we can see and will see changes in student proficiency.”

Jackson will help oversee millions of dollars to be allocated to school districts under Act 20. While lawmakers initially proposed $50 million to fund Act 20, Republican legislators declined to allocate the money amid a legal dispute with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Then two years after the law passed, lawmakers agreed to allocate nearly $41 million in the 2025-27 state budget.

After a final round of reimbursements for schools that purchased new reading curricula and materials ends in June 2027, Jackson said the Department of Public Instruction plans to ask state legislators for permission to use any remaining funds to continue supporting Act 20’s literacy initiatives, which could include coaching, professional development or curriculum.

The department has “no intention to leave any dollars on the table,” she said. “All of those funds will be used to continue to support our schools and continue to do this work.”

The state agency has recently faced sharpcriticism from some literacy advocacy groups on Act 20’s implementation and communication surrounding the law so far. Forward Literacy, a Madison-based group, has raised concerns about some of the state agency’s guidance to districts about personalized reading plans — a cornerstone of the law that requires schools to create individualized improvement plans for K-3 students who score below the 25th percentile on a reading assessment.

Since January last year, Wisconsin school districts have been required to develop that roadmap and share it with parents, who help decide alongside school officials whether a child is meeting grade-level benchmarks. Katie Kasubaski, executive director of Forward Literacy, has called on the Department of Public Instruction to rescind some of the guidance it has issued about when to provide students personalized reading plans.

——-

More.

——-

Colbey Decker:

1/ Wisconsin’s new DPI Director of the Office of Literacy is Kaylee Jackson. Before this, she was Madison’s top curriculum leader. Her record shows decisions filtered through “White Supremacy Culture,” anti-racism ideology, and “systems of oppression.” 🧵

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

David Randall

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) just published Will Flanders’ The FORT Gap: How Inconsistent Teacher Preparation Is Fueling Wisconsin’s Literacy and Educator Crises, a report on how results on Foundations of Reading Test (FORT) show that Wisconsin’s teacher candidates aren’t sufficiently prepared in the Science of Reading, which is the gold-standard in reading instruction. That’s bad news for Wisconsin teachers—and worse for Wisconsin’s students, who won’t have teachers properly prepared to them how to read. Flanders’ report is an excellent summary of the issue for Wisconsin audiences—and for all Americans, since insufficient preparation for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers, especially in the Science of Reading, is a nationwide problem.

It isn’t the only problem for our ELA classrooms. The worst flaw of Common-Core style ELA instruction is that it focuses on skills instruction and neglects literary content—full-lenth, sophisticated, classic works of fiction and nonfiction. Notables such as Doug Lemov, Natalie Wexler, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr. have argued persuasively students need to be taught to read good books as an essential component of learning how to read. As the classical education schools know, the Science of Reading needs to be married to the enduring, challenging content that sparks children to want to read. That same combination inspires our own The Cather Standards: Model PreK-12 State English Language Arts Standards (National Association of Scholars and Freedom in Education); the Cather Standard, by saying what students should learn, implicitly provides a curriculum for ELA teacher preparation.

Implicitly only, alas. The existing standard National Evaluation Series (NES) English Language Arts (301)examination doesn’t entirely ignore good books. One of its five content domains is Analyzing and Interpreting Literature—although even in this domain, only 2 of the 4 competencies really address literature knowledge rather than techniques of how to analyze literature. ELA teachers should be tested centrally for their thorough content knowledge of good books from American literature, Western literature, and World literature.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Nuria Martinez-Keel:

Mississippi also has raised its standards for how it defines a proficient reader. A state law requires Mississippi accountability standards to increasewhenever 75% of students make a proficient score on yearly tests or when 65% of schools or districts make a grade of B or higher on annual A-F evaluations.

“We have increased that level, by the way, four times since I’ve been in office, and (are) about to increase it again,” Reeves told Oklahoma City news reporters. “Because what’s going to happen when you raise the bar, when you raise the level of expectations, what’s happened in Mississippi is exactly what’s going to happen in Oklahoma.”

Oklahoma’s proficiency standards are aligned with expectations used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP tests students in all 50 states every two years and compiles the results in the Nation’s Report Card.

Not only has Mississippi’s overall fourth-grade reading progress impressed the nation, but the state’s scores among Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students have ranked at or near the top of the country, according to NAEP results.

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Dana Goldstein

“Believable typos”

Even before A.I. chatbots, the internet had made cheating easier, in part through the simple mechanism of copy-and-paste plagiarism.

Now, the landscape is more complex. About two-thirds of American students are using A.I. regularly for schoolwork, according to recent surveys. While only a small slice — about 9 percent — admitted to outright cheating in one large study, much A.I. use lies in an ethical gray area.

A recent College Board survey of professors found three-quarters reported their students were using A.I. to write, and over 90 percent of respondents were concerned about plagiarism and dishonesty. Many institutions have seen a sharp increase in student disciplinary cases for academic misconduct, much of it related to the use of A.I.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are the most popular A.I. tools among students.

But just beneath these behemoths is a roiling, fiercely competitive market of legacy ed-tech purveyors and tiny start-ups, all using social media to tell young people that their academic lives could be easier — much easier — if they embrace A.I.

Some start-ups explicitly teach students how to cheat.

Eric:

The vast majority of new education funding for years now has gone to grift: more administrators, fancy new buildings built way over budget under union contracts, and especially Special Education (SPED).

For those unfamiliar, federal law requires schools to integrate special education students into general education classrooms to the “maximum extent appropriate.” For students with milder needs, this can work. For many others, it means assigning a full-time caregiver, politely called a “para-educator,” to handle their needs throughout the school day.

I was largely unaware of the true scale until my wife spent five years working as a para-educator. What she experienced horrified me. The level of care required for many students went far beyond any reasonable definition of “education.” It was intensive, daily caregiving, often one-on-one, funded by taxpayers who have almost no idea this is happening.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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 Lieber:

College tuition will cost no more than 10 percent of parental adjusted gross income. That’s it. Grab the figure from Line 11a of your 1040 form, and divide by 10.

Starting today, those are the instructions for anyone interested in applying to Whitman College, a small liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Wash.

The school is one of a small but growing number of institutions that are finally answering the extremely reasonable question that families have asked in vain for decades: Why can’t you just tell us the price we’ll pay without having to apply and get in first?

“We’re not hiding the cost of college behind secret formulas,” the school now proclaims on its website.

Last month, Brandeis University made a similar move by introducing a tool allowing prospective students and their families to upload tax forms and high school transcripts in exchange for a “you will pay” figure.

What’s in it for you is clear. What’s in it for the schools may surprise you.

Whitman has seen a notable falloff in applications from the upper middle class. Many of those families have high enough incomes to disqualify themselves from much need-based financial aid, but they don’t have enough money to afford the school’s annual list price of close to $90,000.

Lars Andersen:

The prefece to the story is, that I in a kind of roundabout and (I think) humorous way published “my two favorite numbers” by spelling out a 10 diget and a 8 diget number with letters. I didn’t tell what they ment, but they where prime minister Mette Frederiksen’s social security and phone number. I also published a screenshot of me trying to interview Mette Frederiksen on what app, asking her about her wanting to ban encryption (CSA) and introducing mass surveillance via granting the police intelligence services access to all sorts of information (medical journals, social media posts, DNA registers ment for research and so on)

Open Culture:

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