School Information System

John Stossel:

“My child can’t read!”

That’s become a common complaint from parents.

Why? It might be because kids are distracted by social media and video games.

But I think it’s also because reading instruction became lazy and political.

“Progressives” at teachers’ colleges pushed a reading technique called “Balanced Literacy.” 

Instead of memorizing sounds and letters, teachers push what they call “cueing,” guessing words based on their context, or pictures.

Balanced Literacy downplays “structured phonics,” the older technique where kids memorize letters’ sounds and learn to sound out words.

Balanced Literacy does sound more fun than boring phonics drills. Progressives said it would make kids wantto read.

It mostly didn’t. Yet it was largely accepted until about two years ago, when podcaster Emily Hanford released a series called “Sold a Story.” It resonated with parents who were upset that their children couldn’t read.

“It didn’t seem like they were really teaching them to read,” one complained. “It seemed like they were teaching them to sound like they could read.”

A teacher contacted the podcast to say: “I trained other people in balanced literacy using that cueing system. I’m mad. I’m saddened for the kids that I’ve taught.”

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Chad Aldeman:

Besides, thanks largely to the state’s investments in free community college for everyone and tuition- and fee-free public four-year college for students from low-income families, the number of students attending public colleges and universities has jumped by about 24,000 since 2022. That’s a gain of 16 percent in three years, reversing years of declines and far outpacing national rates.

Unfortunately, these high-level attainment measures are hiding some pernicious trends. First, there’s the stark fact that about 26,000 Massachusetts high school sophomores only “partially” met state expectations in math as measured by MCAS tests, and another 11,000 fell into the lowest “not meeting” expectations performance category. Similar numbers of students were behind in English and science.

Second, public college enrollment gains don’t look as good once you realize that they seem largely driven by adults going to college rather than students coming directly from high school. As evidence, the matriculation rate for recent high school graduates entering state colleges and universities is down from about 50 percent in 2015 to 44 percent in 2024.

Third, Massachusetts’ community college enrollment surge means more students entering a system with some of the lowest graduation rates in the country. According to the latest data, barely more than one in three students who enter a Massachusetts community college leaves with any sort of degree or certificate within six years. That places Massachusetts fifth-worst in the country in terms of community college completion rates. Black and Hispanic students have even worserates.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Wendy:

Anyone wondering why the special education population is growing so fast in Texas and across the U.S.? Many people have figured out that being labeled as “sped” is actually very beneficial.

A student reaches 4th grade and still cannot read fluently. The school has two choices:

1. Admit the student has fallen through academic cracks due to poor instruction, or
2. Classify the student with a Specific Learning Disability in Reading and move forward with an IEP.

Guess which route is taken almost every time?

The “SLD in reading comprehension” label becomes a justification as to why the student can’t read at grade level. I’m not dismissing legitimate learning disabilities. Those do exist. However, I have personally witnessed these disabilities vanish when gaps in learning are filled in.

Academic gaps have grown so rapidly since COVID that Texas was forced to remove its 8.5% cap on SPED enrollment. Why? Because it’s easier to label them as “special education” students than to admit we have an instructional problem.

Brian Fraley:

DPI has yet to provide all the public documents I requested 14 months ago.

I enlisted the help of the Institute for Reforming Government. It shouldn’t take threats of legal action to get government agencies to release public data, but here we are.

Eventually, DPI did release SOME of the information we requested a year ago, and that led to our reporting of the $368,885 waterpark workshop.

We are still awaiting more public documents, including the contract DPI signed with Data Recognition Corporation, the vendor who facilitated the standards-reset process.

Now, IRG is calling for state lawmakers to establish a “Special Committee on Oversight of the Department of Public Instruction” because the reliance on waterpark workshops (Yes, there have been more than the one that was convened to reset the standards) raise troubling questions of how taxpayer dollars are being spent by the Department.

There are many layers to this scandal.

Dairyland Sentinel, and the public, deserve access to all public records, including the Department’s contract with Data Recognition Corporation.

Taxpayers deserve a full accounting.

Wisconsin citizens deserve the truth.

———

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

More.

DPI standards.

Billy Binion:

Whenever Paul Ehrlich comes up, this letter comes to mind.

I don’t like celebrating anyone’s death. But Ehrlich’s legacy should be remembered for what it is: apocalyptic environmental predictions that helped legitimize coercive sterilization and ruin countless lives. Horrific.

More. And.

When talking about Ehrlich today, spare a moment to note that he set the template that the modern environmentalist movement still uses: apocalyptic forecasts that don’t bear out, but which lead countless people to make disastrously bad personal & public-policy decisions.

Video.

This explains a lot.

Jeffrey T. Denning, Rachel Nesbit, Nolan Pope, Merrill Warnick:

Average grades continue to rise in the United States, raising the question of how grade inflation impacts students. We provide comprehensive evidence on how teacher grading practices affect students’ long-run success. Using administrative high school data from Los Angeles and from Maryland that is linked to postsecondary and earnings records, we develop and validate two teacher-level measures of grade inflation: one measuring average grade inflation and another measuring a teacher’s propensity to give a passing grade. These measures of grade inflation are distinct from teacher value-added, with grade inflating teachers having moderately lower cognitive value-added and slightly higher noncognitive value-added. These two measures also differentially impact students’ long-term outcomes. Being assigned a higher average grade inflating teacher reduces a student’s future test scores, the likelihood of graduating from high school, college enrollment, and ultimately earnings. In contrast, passing grade inflation reduces the likelihood of being held back and increases high school graduation, with limited long-run effects. The cumulative impact is economically significant: a teacher with one standard deviation higher average grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of their students by $213,872 per year.

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

Matt Brown:

The data you’ll see referenced here, and in all future newsletters in this series, comes from the Total Operational Expenses line item from that report. That number includes all the money a school spends on coaching salaries, administrative salaries, scholarships, travel, software, recruiting, and all sorts of other operational expenses. It does not include athlete revenue share payments. The numbers we are talking about here are not the “salary cap” for each team.

I’d love to publish that information! But almost every school refuses to share it, even at an anonymized level. So this is the next best thing I can get.

This data also comes from FY25, or July 1 2024-June 30 2025. That means this data is not from this basketball season. It is from last basketball season, when Florida won the national title.

Corrinne Hess:

From 2002 through 2023, student enrollment declined 7.3 percent in Wisconsin, from 875,592 students to 811,661. That was compared to a 1.3 percent decline nationally during the same period, according to the Policy Forum. 

Reasons for the decline are multi-faceted, said Mike Johnson, superintendent of the Eau Claire Area School District. 

“I think the factors include lower birth rates and more choices for students,” Johnson said. 

In the last two years, two independent charter schools opened in the Eau Claire area. Johnson said that has resulted in 60 elementary school students leaving the district. 

DPI released its public school enrollment numbers last week. The state is expected to release enrollment numbers for private and charter schools in the coming weeks. 

This year, the Eau Claire school district has 10,533 students, down almost 9 percent from 2019 when there were 12,523 students enrolled. Those declines have budget implications, as state aid to schools is calculated based on enrollment. 

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Abortion.

Wall Street Journal

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is supposed to be the great moderate hope for Democrats in 2028, but on Friday he revealed himself as a captive of the left’s most destructive interest group. He vetoed a bill to opt his state into the federal tax-credit scholarship program, taking dictation from the teachers union. 

“The answer is not diverting students and dollars from public education, but providing sufficient resources to fix public education,” the Governor wrote in his veto message. That was the last day before the bill would have quietly become law without his signature, after nearly two weeks on his desk.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Robert Stacy Mcain:

Crystal Mangum walked out of a North Carolina prison last month, 15 years after she fatally stabbed her boyfriend, Reginald Daye. Five years before her murder conviction, however, Mangum made national headlines when she accused members of Duke University’s lacrosse team of raping her. The accusation was false, but the furor surrounding that 2006 case provoked a firestorm that had a radicalizing effect on many students at Duke, including President Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller. Twenty years later, we live in a world shaped to a remarkable degree by a lie told by a stripper.

David Evans, a 23-year-old economics major from Bethesda, Maryland, was one of four captains of the Duke lacrosse team. Because of the team’s competition schedule, the players had been forced to skip spring break and stay on campus. So the team captains came up with the idea of having a party and inviting strippers to entertain the players. As events would prove, this was a very bad idea, and college boys everywhere ought to be taught this lesson. Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, but when the team captains called up an escort service to send over a couple of strippers to their off-campus house, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

March 13, 2006, was a Monday night, and one might suppose that the Allure Escort Service in Durham, North Carolina, would have had many adult entertainers available for the occasion. For some reason that was never adequately explained, however, while the lacrosse team captains had reportedly requested white strippers, the two performers sent to 610 North Buchanan Boulevard were a 31-year-old mixed-race woman, Kim Roberts (half-black, half-Korean), and Ms. Mangum, a black woman who was then 27. This contributed a racial aspect to the subsequent controversy that had a magnetic effect in attracting national media attention.

Here it must be pointed out that, although Duke University sits amid the thriving urban Research Triangle region of North Carolina, it is nevertheless still in the South, and there is nothing that the national media loves so much as to cover a “racial incident” in the South. As I wrote in 2020:

Henry Mance:

The number of boarding pupils in Britain fell 4 per cent last year, faster than the decline in private schools as a whole, according to the annual survey by the Independent Schools Council. Since Covid, boarders have fallen from 14 per cent of private school pupils to less than 12 per cent.

The boarding experience has loomed large in English culture, from the 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days to the 1968 film If…. and the recent TV sequel to John le Carré’s The Night Manager. It will not be universally mourned. Charles Spencer, brother of Princess Diana, described his prep school, Maidwell Hall, in Northamptonshire, as “without love”. In a recent memoir, he detailed the abuse he suffered there in the 1970s. Maidwell closed last year.

But Rendcomb prided itself on being different. Its founder Noel Wills wanted boarding schools to be places where children from different classes could meet in “absolute equality”. He founded Rendcomb “in the belief that the true aristocracy among men is in reality simply an aristocracy of brains and character”. The school drew heavily from Gloucestershire farming families and council funding. Richer, fee-paying students were almost looked down upon.

Washington Post:

If politicians won’t fix bloated pensions amid credit downgrades, the bond market will force their hand.

It takes a long time to kill a city, and the bigger the city, the longer it takes. But Chicago’s “public servants” have done a fine job speeding up the process.

The Windy City was forced this week to put off a planned sale of $292 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, part of an $800 million debt-service package. Authorities blamed volatility caused by the Iran war, but other bonds were priced without incident.

Scott Jensen:

What Minneapolis homeowners need to realize is this: decreasing valuation of taxable commercial properties combined with increased spending creates a budget gap that must be bridged by increasing taxes “somewhere.” That “somewhere” is YOU.

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And:

Nikita Stange:

That number is staggering, but not unusual. Chronic absenteeism — missing 10% or more of the school year — is a defining challenge in public education. While often attributed to illness or disengagement, transportation is the hidden driver. What this mother lacks is not motivation, but a safe, reliable way to get her kids to school. Yet, absenteeism is sometimes treated as educational neglect, triggering child welfare involvement and lasting consequences. 

When we overlook transportation, we miss a simple truth: Showing up is half the battle. No curriculum matters if students can’t get through the doors. 

Across Cleveland, bus systems are stretched thin, routes are cut, and schedules are unreliable. This strain will worsen; the Cleveland school district’s recent announcement of a massive consolidation plan to close 23 buildings will inevitably place even greater demands on its already fragile transportation network. Families without cars are left to cobble together solutions — walking miles in unsafe conditions or waiting in the dark at isolated stops. The toll shows up in attendance data. 

Two hundred missed days are not just numbers; they are lost reading groups, math lessons, forgotten field trips, and gaps that compound every week away from school. Chronically absent students are less likely to read proficiently by third grade or graduate. For children already facing poverty or disability, the consequences are sharper.

www

Journey through classic short stories fille with adventure, horror, tragedyand fantasy.

Jennifer Kabbany:

A bill introduced Thursday by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik seeks to reform the federally funded Truman Scholarship Foundation, whose leaders have doled out the prestigious scholarships overwhelmingly to left-wing students for the last decade.

Each year, the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation provides $30,000 to about 50 students for graduate school in exchange for pledging three years of work in public service.

The “Truman Scholarship Clean House Act” comes after annual research conducted by The College Fix found that of the 653 winners from 2015 to 2025, only 29 conservative recipients were identified compared to 397 liberals, based on their public bios, LinkedIn profiles, and social media accounts. 

The Fix’s research also showed how the program is a left-wing talent pipeline, as it spawns Democratic and progressive careers over Republican and conservative ones by a margin of 35 to 1.

Amine Raji:

The paper demonstrated 90% success against knowledge bases containing millions of documents, using gradient-optimized payloads. What I tested is a vocabulary-engineering approach — no optimization against the embedding model — against a 5-document corpus. The corpus is obviously smaller than what the paper evaluated, so the success rate isn’t directly comparable. The value of a small local lab is reproducibility and clarity of mechanism, not scale. In a real production knowledge base with hundreds of documents on the same topic, the attacker needs more poisoned documents to reliably dominate the top-k — but the attack remains viable. The PoisonedRAG authors showed that even at millions-of-documents scale, five crafted documents are sufficient when using their optimization approach.

Steven Walters:

“Between the 1999-2000 and 2022-2023 school years, statewide fourth grade reading proficiency dropped from 78% to 44.8% (a 43% decline…) and statewide eighth grade math proficiency dropped from 42% to 30.5% (a 27% decline..).”

If the governor and Legislature don’t respond to a ruling that the current system is unconstitutional, the suit asks that the Court “establish a schedule that will enable the Court…to adopt and implement a new school finance system that meets all relevant state constitutional guarantees.”

In a statement, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos dismissed the suit as “another meritless attempt by liberal activists to defund the state’s highly successful school-voucher program and interfere with the Legislature’s authority to fund public schools…. The courts will soundly reject it.”

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Erin Gretzinger:

As Mosner Feltham and Vander Meulen underscored their track records and ongoing endeavors to improve the Madison Metropolitan School District, Molle and Colussi-Lynde spotlighted their ideas and what differentiates them from their opponents.

The candidates share many overarching priorities, such as advocating for changes to the state funding formula for public schools and addressing salary compression for veteran teachers. They outlined contrasting visions on issues like cell phone bans, board governance approaches and how to close student achievement gaps.

More.

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Robert Pondiscio:

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, it became common in education circles to hear his political ascendance described as a “Sputnik moment” for civics—a rude awakening that would force American schools to reckon with their failure to prepare students for democratic self-government. Like the Soviet satellite’s 1957 launch that jolted the nation into taking math and science education seriously, Trump’s improbable victory was going to galvanize demand for civics and history to ensure that students graduated with an understanding of our political system, where the levers of power are, and how to pull them. Ten years later, we’re still waiting.

James Traub’s The Cradle of Citizenship is an attempt to describe what such a revival in civic education would really take. Through no fault of his earnest efforts, however, the book’s value lies less in pointing the way forward than in illuminating the institutional, cultural, and political forces that make a civics and history renaissance in our schools almost impossible to imagine.

Traub sets out to understand why civic education, so frequently invoked as the remedy for democratic decay, remains thin in practice. A skilled reporter, he travels widely from a heavily Hispanic high school in West Chicago, Illinois, to a classical charter school in Texas—he even takes a seat in a New York City theater alongside students attending Hamilton. Along the way, he observes classrooms animated by discussion and concern but strikingly light on historical knowledge and understanding. Teachers, dedicated and well-intentioned and not the hardcore ideologues we often fear or imagine, navigate vague standards, weak preparation, and intense public, parental, and political scrutiny.

All told, Traub’s classroom reporting points to a civic malaise rooted not in ideological capture or student apathy, but in an education system that has grown cautious and diffuse—eager to promote engagement and dialogue, yet reluctant to teach history and civics with the clarity, authority, and coherence that democratic citizenship requires. His stated aim is to reverse all this and describe “how schools can help save our democracy.” There is one problem, however, that his diligent book elides almost entirely: America’s public schools don’t seem to want the job.

Karpathy via Josh Kale:

Analyzing how susceptible every occupation in the US economy is to AI and automation, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH).

Patrick McIlheran:

Drawn by mission, kept by coaching

Part of an ongoing Badger Institute series about teacher loss in Wisconsin schools and what policy makers and administrators can do about it.

Facing an increasingly difficult market for hiring teaching talent, leaders of Wisconsin independent schools are developing useful strategies even as they look to the state for some fundamental policy and financial reforms.

“I think a teacher’s job is to be a lifelong learner themselves,” said one of those leaders, Kimberly Desotell, president of the GRACE Catholic schools system in Green Bay. “You can’t do the same thing you did today in teaching tomorrow. … We always have to be improving.”

One key response: Retain the talent a school has through deliberate and sustained coaching to help educators grow better at the work they chose. Others: changes in the timing of student teaching, alteration of certification requirements, and closing the funding gap with traditional public schools.

Joe:

Has anyone studied this phenomenon of “felony-flation”?

Where every new law against the stupidest stuff now ruins your life with a felony conviction?

Alex MacGillis on John Burns:

“In our time, it has become common for young reporters to give as their moral code, indeed as their reason for choosing the profession, that they aim to create a better world,” Mr. Burns wrote. “It is a handsome thing, but one that can foster a missionary complex — a hubris, even – that can favor a blindness to inconvenient facts to the advantage of others.”

Ryan Moulton:

When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours. Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra in Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math?

His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids’ happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready. If they hadn’t touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears. I started asking around to the other kids’ parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.

I write software for a living. I have hoped for educational software to revolutionize learning my whole life, and am extremely optimistic about its possibilities. We’ve given our kids lots of educational apps whenever we could find ones that seemed worthwhile. They’ve had tablets from a young age. They love Khan Academy and have gotten a lot out of it. I was happy the kids got chromebooks in school, started learning Scratch, and were using them regularly. I am not objecting to the concept of (or primacy of) educational software. I think it has the potential to do an immense amount of good.

I have no disagreement with i-Ready’s goals. The problem is that the software simply doesn’t work.

——

What if I told you that a @usedgov website was practically marketing iReady Math based on a flawed study conducted during the pandemic?

Daisy Christodoulo

A couple of years ago, a grocery delivery company came up with a catchy slogan. Their service, they said, was about the “democratisation of laziness.”

It is a memorable phrase, and also slightly unsettling. It’s true that it is easier to be lazy if you are wealthy and privileged, but it’s also true that we don’t think of laziness as an absolute good to be maximised. Rather than giving everyone the chance to be lazy, maybe we should think about finding ways to make everyone less lazy?

Of course, laziness has its upsides as well as downsides, so maybe democratising it is not so bad. I’ve written about this dilemma in a piece on the stupidogenic society.

But there are some things that are more unambiguously bad where we should definitely try to remove elite privileges rather than spread those privileges to everyone. Cheating is one of them. Wealthy students have always been able to pay top dollar to have bespoke essays written for them. But until recently, this kind of unidentifiable cheating was only available to the very wealthy. Large Language Models have changed all that. They have democratised cheating, and made it available for the masses.

Thanks for reading No More Marking! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Aaron Garth Smith:

A large body of research shows that effective teachers are the most important school-related factor in determining student success, making teacher compensation a key policy lever. “We need to pay all teachers more—and effective teachers even more,” said Heather Peske of the National Council on Teacher Quality in a recent SCHOOLED debate on teacher pay.

Peske has a point. The nationwide average teacher salary fell by over 6 percent between 2002 and 2022, going from $75,152 to $70,548 in 2023 dollars, according to new Reason Foundation research. In total, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries fell in 40 of 50 states, as shown in Table 1.

It’s also a fact that teacher salaries are tied to educational attainment and years of experience, meaning that high-performing teachers—and those in shortage areas like math, science, and special education—aren’t paid more for their results or expertise.

To put the right incentives in place, bold teacher pay reforms are needed. But to maximize the long-term impact of these policies, it’s important to address the root causes of stagnant salaries. Examining data both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic reveals structural problems in K–12 finance that keep dollars out of teacher paychecks.

Hugo Timms:

Schools in northern England have been advised against allowing art, music or dancing that Muslims deem ‘idolatrous’.

We regularly hear the refrain that schools need to get back to ‘old-fashioned’ methods of teaching. But how far back should they go? And, while we’re at it, to which society? Labour councils in the north of England have attempted to clear up this confusion for us. Seventh-century Arabia, at the dawn of Islam, is their answer. 

In a document titled ‘Sharing the Journey’, multiple Labour-run councils have told schools that drawing pictures of humans could be ‘idolatrous’ to ‘some Muslim’ pupils. Music lessons could also conflict with the religious injunctions of Islam, on the grounds that ‘music is traditionally limited to the human voice and non-tunable percussion instruments as in the days of the prophet, when they were only used in marriage ceremonies and on the battlefield’. Dancing and physical activities also need to be carefully policed so as to ensure there is no ‘physical contact between male and females’, nor ‘performing in a manner that might encourage immodesty or sexual feelings’. 

This is, to put it mildly, disturbing. These councils – they include Leeds, Oldham, Tameside and Kirklees – are effectively advising schools to look to the Taliban for educational inspiration. They are also denying pupils the joys of drawing, music and dancing. Any adult who isn’t chronically maladjusted knows that these expressions of creativity and affection are vital to a human’s development – indeed, they are among the most important aspects of any child’s education.

PJ Randhawa, Leigh Lesniak, Alfonso Gutierrez, Ronald Zachara and Raul Quinones

According to the school district, her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.”   

Sánchez is adamant she and her daughter have been steadily living in their home since moving in. As for the location of her car—she says she loaned it to a family member in Chicago last summer. Now it’s back in her driveway.

Pamela Hobart:

Last week was National SEL Week (plus International SEL day). Schools across the country celebrated with themed dress days, mindfulness minutes, and feelings check-ins. I didn’t celebrate because, for gifted kids, the SEL movement has become part of the problem.

My various online associates have been valiantly arguing against SEL for a variety of reasons – for instance,

SEL programs are massively expensive and unproven to improve either academic and SEL outcomes

!

But specifically the gifted ed community has its own big SEL issue: generic SEL measures are no substitute for actually challenging bright kids. (Neither are the esoteric ones!) Unproven educational bells and whistles should come last in the collective effort to help top students reach their potential – not first.

Gifted Education Harbors SEL On Steroids

Gifted ed circles have developed their own cottage industry around social-emotional concerns: overexcitabilities, asynchronous development, perfectionism, existential depression, twice-exceptionalities, multipotentiality, masking, gifted burnout…

www

Last Thursday, Governor Greg Gianforte signed SB 212, the Montana Right to Compute Act (MRTCA), marking the state as the first in the nation to secure comprehensive rights for citizens to own and utilize computational and artificial intelligence tools. This legislation positions Montana at the forefront of safeguarding digital privacy and technology accessibility.

The newly signed law not only ensures the fundamental rights to own, access, and use computational resources but also incorporates several critical safeguards:

• Strict limits on governmental regulation wherein any restrictions must be demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to a compelling public safety or health interest.
• Mandatory safety protocols for AI-controlled critical infrastructure, including a shutdown mechanism and compulsory annual risk management reviews.

The initiative, propelled by advocacy from State Senator Daniel Zolnikov and organizations like the Frontier Institute, contrasts with recent restrictive legislation efforts in states like California and Virginia. Zolnikov, a noted advocate for privacy, has been instrumental in pushing for tech-friendly policies that ensure individual liberties in an evolving digital landscape.

“As governments around the world and in our own country try to crack down on individual freedom and gain state control over modern technologies,” Zolnikov said. “Montana is doing the opposite by protecting freedom and restraining the government.”

Tunku Varadarajan:

Every American kid “ought to understand how glorious the Bill of Rights is, and particularly the First Amendment. And we know that kids don’t know any of this.” When he first ran for Senate in 2014, a poll found that “something like 40% of American college students thought the First Amendment was dangerous, because you might use your freedom of speech to say something that hurt someone else’s feelings.” That is “the whole freaking point of America—that you can say something that hurts someone else’s feelings because words are not violence and violence is not words.” 

The 250th anniversary “is a big opportunity, but it’s obvious that our schooling structures are failing on a massive scale. Right now, the bureaucratic lethargy is to maintain the school structures that we have as a works program for the adults who work in the schools, not to serve the students through these schools.” Our civic collapse is “a subset of a larger coming-of-age collapse. But our educational institutions are in freefall.” 

Does that mean Mr. Sasse is pessimistic about America? He says he isn’t, but his optimism is guarded: “Our constitutional structure is still the greatest inheritance that anybody’s ever received.” As a nation, we are still able “to exercise our freedom to choose and pursue the good, and to seek virtue.” He wants the nation to reflect on the things that he’s asked his own son to understand: “self-restraint and self-discipline and self-control.” That’s a father’s bequest to his son, and a public servant’s to his country.

——

More.

Jeff Larson

Read our methodology.

Every year, thousands of high school students get ready for the SAT by using The Princeton Review’s test preparation services.

But few, if any, realize that the prices for The Princeton Review’s online SAT tutoring packages vary substantially depending on where customers live. If they type some ZIP codes into the company’s website, they are offered The Princeton Review’s Premier course for as little as $6,600. For other ZIP codes, the same course costs as much as $8,400. 

One unexpected effect of the company’s geographic approach to pricing is that Asians are almost twice as likely to be offered a higher price than non-Asians, an analysis by ProPublica shows.

Mackenzie Krumme

Wisconsin’s economic growth lags behind the rest of the nation. That’s a top line takeaway from a new report by Forward Analytics, a nonpartisan research organization within the Wisconsin Counties Association that advises policymakers on issues affecting the state. 

The researchers used six indicators to evaluate the health of Wisconsin’s economy, looking at the period from 2017 to 2024. In almost every measure of growth Wisconsin fell behind much of the country including areas like labor force participation, real gross domestic product, population and household income. 

Kevin Dospoy is the director of Forward Analytics. He spoke with WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” about the report.

Fischer King:

Because this is behind a pay wall, I’ll tell you what happened. Texas has a decades old law on the books that allowed illegal aliens to pay in-state tuition at Texas state universities. The Trump DOJ filed a lawsuit to invalidate the law – Attorney General Paxton immediately “settled,” and the law was invalidated without the need to go through the messy process in the Texas legislature. It is indeed similar to how the Obama DOJ would sue blue cities for “racial discrimination,” and the city would immediately “settle.” This allowed City Councils all over the country – Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, others – to hobble their own police departments with the force of the federal government in ways they couldn’t do on their own.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Now, to be sure, I will happily vote for both of them because any change to this dismal board has to be a step in the right direction. Incumbents Blair Mosner Feltham and Nicki Vander Meulen have been part of a board that is leading the district to new depths each year. 

Year after year, test scores continue to lag the state and nation, truancy rates remain high, fiscal management would be criminally negligent but for the fact that there is no fiscal management at all and the racial achievement gap hasn’t budged despite the fact that it is the main thing the district has focussed on for a couple of decades. 

You’d think that a community that claims to value public education as much as this one does, would care. But we don’t. We hold no one to account for this performance. Incumbents get reelected or run unopposed and unjustified spending referendums get approved overwhelmingly. Nobody even bothers to take a hard look at the numbers. 

Despite the fact the incumbents have opponents this time, this April will bring no change. Both Mosner Feltham and Vander Meulen will be reelected hands down. I’ll vote for their challengers just to send yet another weak, unheard message of protest.

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Colin Wright Summary:

“Why did you identify this as one of the craziest grants?”

“Because it references feminist and queer insights into prison abolition and LGBTQ studies.”

“Any other reasons?”

“No.”

Legendarily based. 😆

——-

Lulu Cheng Meservey:

Here we see the clash of two opposing worldviews about legitimacy

The founder view: progress comes from defiant upstarts willing to disrupt old institutions

The lawyer view: authority comes only from credentials and tenure. “Do you have any history of scholarly review?”

——-

US Debt Clock.

theeffortfuleducator

If there’s a way for students to take a shortcut when learning, they’ll usually take it. I’m not so sure they understand how that shortcut negatively impacts learning long-term. Here’s a short video where I explain how I talk with my students about this, including some useful analogies, to help them to see that the mental effort is worth it in the long run.

Chris Rickert:

A former Madison School District teacher brought up on state child porn and exploitation charges is now facing federal charges as well.

David C. Fawcett, 58, of Madison, exchanged sexually explicit messages and images with a 15-year-old Texas girl last summer, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dane County Circuit Court on Feb. 6.

On Feb. 18, a federal grand jury indicted him on two counts of producing child pornography.

Paul Kirschner:
Editor’s Note: The central premise of The Next 30 Years is that improving educational outcomes for children depends less on new policies and programs and more on getting classroom practice right. That means taking seriously what cognitive science tells us about how people learn—and resisting the comforting myths that dominate education discourse.

Few people have done more to challenge those myths than Paul Kirschner, whose Substack is a must-read for anyone interested in evidence-based teaching. Along with Carl Hendrick and Jim Heal, he is also the co-author of the excellent book Instructional Illusions, which examines many of the misconceptions about teaching and learning that stubbornly persist in schools. 

Today’s essay, which first ran on his Substack, is a good example of why Kirschner’s work is so valuable: it takes a close look at familiar but misleading ideas about learning and shows how easily intuition can lead us astray. He takes widely repeated ideas about learning—if students are engaged, they’re learning (right?); students learn best when they discover things for themselves (don’t they?), among others—and asks the simple but often neglected question: Is it actually true? – RP

Instruction is a bit like watching a magician or illusionist: what you see feels clear and convincing, but the surface appearance doesn’t fully explain what’s really going on. In a magic show, the audience naturally focuses on the visible action and misses the hidden mechanisms that produce the effect. Something similar can happen in education.

I’ve just published a book with Carl Hendrick and Jim Heal called Instructional Illusions. It’s not a book about edu-myths in the usual sense. We’re not simply taking a bat to tired old nonsense such as learning styles and calling it a day. The problem is more interesting than that, and also more dangerous. Many of the things we address in the book aren’t absurd. They’re plausible. They contain a grain of truth. That’s precisely why they’re so persistent.

Tessa West:

The workplace can be a tricky place to navigate. Almost everything we do at work—identifying the experts, managing tough feedback from a boss, figuring out how to work in teams made up of different personalities—comes down to our ability to manage relationships. And to do so, we need savvy social skills.

Most employees acquire those skills over time—by learning from their nonwork relationships, watching how colleagues behave in the office, and by seeing what happens when they stumble in their own workplace interactions.

But the newest workplace generation—Gen Z—is unlike anything we’ve seen. Through a combination of having fewer real-world relationship experiences, spending their education years in remote environments, and learning to communicate largely through asynchronous methods, these 20-somethings have missed opportunities to develop the skills needed to navigate the complex world of work.

The result is that many are woefully unprepared for surviving—let alone thriving—in their jobs.

We already can see what this means for both employees and the organizations that hire them. For one thing young employees are struggling to fit into these organizations. There is a lot of turnover, because new hires who don’t acclimate don’t last long.

WILL:

School districts face significant legal risk if they continue policies or practices that undermine parental rights. As the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Mirabelli, parents have standing to bring constitutional claims when schools conceal information related to their children’s gender identity from them. Litigation in this area may expose districts and individual employees to substantial liability.

——

More:

Mike Masnick:

Well, the siren is going off once again. This time, Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell:

There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunnedthat it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.

Bipartisan Policy Center

Calls for federal alignment, clear career pathways, removal of barriers to keep U.S. competitive

WASHINGTON, DC—The Bipartisan Policy Center today released a comprehensive blueprint for tackling one of America’s most important domestic challenges: preparing America’s workforce for the jobs of today—and into the future. In a newly released report, “A Nation at Risk to a Nation at Work,” BPC’s Commission on the American Workforce offers bold strategies for building a national talent strategy, keeping learners and workers centered, and upgrading benefits and supports for working families.

“America does not lack talent—it lacks strategy,” saidMargaret Spellings, president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center. “This Commission has built a practical roadmap for how government, business, education, and states can align for the first time around a talent strategy, breaking down silos, creating clear career pathways, and removing the barriers that stop families from advancing. We know our economy can’t grow, our country can’t prosper, unless we come together and invest in our most important asset: our people. That’s why we are calling for urgent action to meet the needs of our citizens and give every American a fair shot at economic opportunity.”

Launched in February 2025, the Commission on the American Workforce brought together a wide range of leaders and experts–Democrats and Republicans, governors, CEOs, education leaders, and workforce experts–to offer a new vision to advance the skills, knowledge, and experiences of the American workforce, supported by a reimagined federal role in partnership with state governments and private sector industry leaders.

———

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Laura Powell:

In recent years, public school districts across California have drifted far from their core academic mission. While student achievement has stagnated or declined, districts have rapidly expanded administrative bureaucracies and non-teaching staff focused on programs only tangentially related to classroom instruction. This shift harms educational outcomes and erodes trust between schools, families, and taxpayers.

One of the most significant trends in education over the past few decades has been the growth of non-teaching personnel. In California and nationwide, administrators, counselors, and other support staff have grown far faster than classroom teachers. This expansion stems from schools taking on roles in addressing students’ perceived needs related to mental health and social identity. Programs emphasizing “social-emotional learning” (SEL), “school climate,” and inclusion have created new staff positions that barely existed a generation ago.

Steve Gordon:

Blue state high earner taxes aren’t organic, bottom-up events. They’re being forced on states controlled by unions like the WEA thru their compliant Dem puppets.

Delaney outlines all the other progressive funding dreams that have NOTHING to do with teachers here.
Same radicals that want boys in girls’ sports and to continue keeping secrets from parents.

——

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

Mike Solana:

Inspired, I guess, by the cascading disaster that is California’s recently proposed “billionaire tax” — a first of its kind private asset seizure, the threat of which alone triggered the largest wealth flight in state history— Senator Bernie Sanders just introduced a nationalasset seizure, which he’ll soon be floating in D.C. alongside Silicon Valley’s own bumbling sideshow Congressman “Traitor Ro” Khanna. As is ever their dishonest case, the stated purpose of the policy is to fund a variety of feel-good social welfare gifts. But, with an itty bitty wittle annual 5% seizure of every billionaire in the country’s property, the policy is designed to eradicate the concept of private property in general (an argument I detailed in November), and the concept of the wealthy businessman in particular. Such ideas, once safely quarantined on the very fringe left, are now supported by the entire leftist wing of the Democratic Party, and not because men like Bernie are stupid, or insane. But because technologists and entrepreneurs tend to be idealists who believe in the concept of liberty, while Democrats have a theory of power.

The targeting of billionaires has nothing to do with helping the poor. Billionaires are targeted because they constitute power, have signaled a drift from political orthodoxy into political diversity over the last few years, and now represent one of the only potential checks on institutional, predominantly left-wing power in the country — whether they are blind to this power or not. Fortunately for those among you tired of my conspiracy theories (which have only ever been correct), I won’t need my whiteboard to connect these dots, as the left has recently grown more confident in its political prospects, which has led to some recent sloppy honesty.

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Last month, in Munich, when pressed on her future presidency, socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez giggled, and proposed a national asset seizure in the vein of California’s, which, her interviewer cheerfully added, would be impossible for Americans to evade; just a couple weeks ago, Senator Gallego explained — did not threaten, but calmly explained — the Democratic Party’s intention of dismantling tech companies that merged while Trump was president, to my eye obviously signaling crosshairs over Elon Musk; and a few days after that, Senator Chris Murphy explained his party intends to abuse antitrust law to reverse recent inroads by moderates in media, targeting Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. in particular, as Bluesky Nation melted down over the looming threat of Bari Weiss, their Joseph Goebbels, influencing CNN.

——

Valerie Jarrett, eternal Obama whisperer, “earned” $740K as CEO in 2024. That’s right—$740,000 to run a nonprofit that’s basically a retirement spa for the old crew.

Dr. Roger McFillin:

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights filed Freedom of Information Act requests across 32 states to obtain data on psychiatric drug prescribing to children enrolled in Medicaid. They shared that data with me for review. What it contains should prompt serious national conversation.

Medicaid is a federal and state program funded by American taxpayers, designed as a safety net for the country’s most economically vulnerable citizens. In 32 states alone, that safety net spent $1.78 billion prescribing psychiatric “medications” to nearly three million children in a single year. 270,000 of those children were under the age of five.

These are not benign interventions. They are drugs with serious, documented risks prescribed to developing brains during the most sensitive years of human life. Stimulants carry the same DEA addiction classification as OxyContin and fentanyl. Antidepressants carry a black box warning for suicidal behavior in children and adolescents and are associated with permanent neurological and sexual damage that may persist long after the drug is stopped. “Anti-anxiety” drugs including benzodiazepines carry warnings for life-threatening dependence in adults taking them for more than two weeks.

We are giving them to toddlers.

Paul Sagar:

If you listen to the prophets of artificial intelligence, a wonderful future begins to take shape: a post-scarcity society where nobody needs to work, all diseases are cured, and human life is changed beyond recognition. Well, unless the machines are “misaligned”, and just wipe us out. At the other extreme, skeptics tell us that AI is just another normal technology: one that will have various important effects, for sure, but that in the grand scheme of things is going to matter less than indoor plumbing or antibiotics. Oh, and that it’s also a giant financial bubble.

I’m neither an economist nor a computer scientist, and I don’t possess a crystal ball — so like most people, I struggle to know what to make of it all (even if my suspicions tend toward the latter). But I do teach political philosophy in a British university, so I have had to wrestle with the impact of large language models (LLMs) in one small domain: higher education. And here, my conclusion is simple. The threat they pose is existential.

However, the reasons for this are not straightforward. As often, reality is complicated. Still, we can make headway by bracketing out the question of what AI means for university research — which will differ dramatically across fields — and instead focus on teaching. Specifically, students who use LLMs to complete their coursework assignments. Ask anybody lecturing in a university today and they will tell you the same: the impact has been dramatic.

Maria Popova

“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf’s melodious voice unspools in the only surviving recording of her speech — a 1937 love letter to language. “In each word, all words,” the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot writes a generation later as he considers the dual power of language to conceal and to reveal. But because language is our primary sieve of perception, our mightiest means of describing what we apprehend and thus comprehending it, words also belong to that which they describe — or, rather, they are the conduit of belonging between us and the world we perceive. As the bryologist and Native American storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer observed in her poetic meditation on moss, “finding the words is another step in learning to see.” Losing the words, then, is ceasing to see — a peculiar and pervasive form of blindness that dulls the shimmer of the world, a disability particularly dangerous to the young imagination just learning to apprehend the world through language.

Mary McCue Bell

Former interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin is accused of misconduct by ethics investigators in the District due to a letter he sent to Georgetown Law that raised questions about its diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

After a whistleblower claimed the law school was employing diversity, inclusion and equity policies, Mr. Martin sent a letter to university officials last year inquiring about such initiatives and eventually barred his federal prosecutors’ office from employing its students.

Hamilton Fox of the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel alleged that Mr. Martin’s conduct as interim U.S. attorney violated the First and Fifth amendments of the Constitution by demanding that the law school change its instructions, according to the Friday filing made in the D.C. Court of Appeals’ Board on Professional Responsibility.

“The DC bar’s attempt to target and punish those serving President Trump while refusing to investigate or act against actual ethical violations that were committed by Biden and Obama administration attorneys is a clear indication of this partisan organization’s agenda,” the department said in a statement.

——

Somewhat related.

David Oks:

The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.

But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?

The answer, I think, is complementarity.

In my last piece, on why I don’t think imminent mass job loss from AI is likely, I talked a lot about complementarity. The core point I made was that labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage: the relevant question for labor impacts is not whether AI can do the tasks that humans can do, but rather whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone. And I suggested that given the vast number of frictions and bottlenecks that exist in any human domain—domains that are, after all, defined around human labor in all its warts and eccentricities, with workflows designed around humans in mind—we should expect to see a serious gap between the incredible power of the technology and its impacts on economic life.

Laura Bryant Hanford and Erin Friday:

Even when courts determine no child abuse has occurred, children are being removed from homes through networks of runaway shelters and nonprofits. Nonfamilial adults are hiding children who are confused about their sex, and child-welfare departments extend investigations until the child turns 18, rendering the cases moot.

Many states permit or require that foster placements and residential facilities affirm a child’s “gender identity” and consent to medical interventions. That sends a message that the foster-care system offers an exit from parental authority.

The mantra offered to parents is no longer “would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” It is “would you rather lose custody of your child, or ‘transition’ her?” Sage Blair’s story is far from unique, and its ending is a relatively happy one.

Patrick McIlheran

Some parents were intensely involved. She recalled one mother who took a direct approach after learning of her daughter’s truancy. “She wore a shirt to school: ‘I’m Susan’s mom,’ with her picture on it.

And she followed her from class to class because she was skipping class. … And she said to her, ‘If you ever skip again, I’m coming again. And I will sit here every single time.’” “Do you think she ever skipped again? No, she did not.”

David Blaska:

The UniParty rules this roost because its too few challengers are afraid to pin the tail on the donkey. Too polite to rip the bark off progressive incumbents who pose as friend of the taxpayer and tribune of public safety — but only at election time. Once elected, the ruling classdefunds the sheriff’s department, refuses police body cameras, and jacks up property taxes 11.2% on average! 

We are not managing or advising Sean Burke’s campaign for Dane County Board in the 12th supervisory district (east of the county airport) in the April 7 election. Mr. Burke is no Republican. But we like his style! Burke is taking some very hard wood to the entrenched incumbent.

——-

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

Chris Arnade: 

An epidemic of mental illness and/or addiction plays out in the US in public, with our streets, buses, parking lots, McDonald’s, parks, and Starbucks as ad hoc institutions for the broken, addicted, and tortured.

That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the US it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.

You can learn more about the US by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder.

Corrinne Hess:

A federal complaint filed Wednesday alleges Oconto Falls School District officials overlooked sexual abuse of students for 20 years. 

The 60-page complaint, filed in the U.S. Eastern District, alleges a pattern of abuse that includes grooming and sexual conduct by multiple staff members involving more than a dozen minor students at Oconto Falls High School between 2005 and 2025. 

The complaint was filed by three women, now adults, who graduated from Oconto Falls High School and said they were sexually abused by school staff when they were teenagers.

Ananth Seshadri

Executive Summary:

On March 5, 2026, the Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents Education Committee unanimously approved a policy allowing UW institutions to offer 90-credit bachelor’s degree programs—completing a bachelor’s degree in three years instead of the traditional four. This report examines the economic case for this policy. Key findings include:

• A bachelor’s degree is both an investment good and a consumption good. Economists estimate the annual consumption value of college—amenities, leisure, the campus experience—at $11,600 to $15,100. Students who view college primarily as an investment should have the option to graduate in three years without paying for consumption they do not value.
• Three-year degrees can save Wisconsin families $18,000 to $29,000 in direct costs (one year of tuition, room, and board) plus an additional year of post-graduation earnings. These savings will reduce pressure on General Purpose Revenue (GPR) and state need-based aid while moving graduates into the workforce—and onto the tax rolls—sooner.
• Enrollment at UW institutions outside of UW-Madison fell 22% between 2012 and 2023, while the Wisconsin Technical College System rebounded to 293,904 students by 2024–25. Three-year applied bachelor’s degrees can help UW comprehensive universities compete more effectively for students and funding.
• A growing wave of states—including Indiana, Utah, Maine, Massachusetts, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island—have adopted or are piloting three-year degree programs. Over 70 institutions have joined the College-in-3 Exchange, and every U.S. accreditor now permits sub-120-credit degrees.
• Many Wisconsin students already arrive with substantial credits: 78,703 high school students participated in dual enrollment in 2023–24, and 25.2% of the Class of 2024 scored 3+ on an AP exam. At UW-Madison, average time-to-degree has fallen to 3.78 years.

Institute for reforming government

The tool allows taxpayers to review:

• Additional spending requested by the referendum
• Growth in district staff from 2020 to 2025
• Total temporary federal ESSER III dollars that were allocated to ongoing expenses

The tool uses publicly available state and NCES data.

Taxpayers now have clear, consolidated information in one place, helping inform them about local school referenda.

WHY IT MATTERS

According to IRG’s latest analysis, 

• Since 2020, Wisconsin public school enrollment has declined by 49,078 students.
• During that same period, districts added 2,366 staff positions.
• Because fewer students are in classrooms, taxpayers are funding 8,878 additional adult employees statewide compared to 2020.
• Nearly $614 million in temporary federal COVID relief funds were allocated to ongoing costs over two years. With those Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER III) funds now expired, some districts are asking voters to approve additional funding to sustain those temporary spending levels.

——-

30 October 2025 Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students.

Quinton Klabon

So says the Ed Law Center, a respectable left-leaning group sponsored by teachers unions, who analyzed our fiscal capacity.

Even they think Wisconsin is normal!

and:

🔵Since 2020, Wisconsin public school enrollment has declined by 49,078 students.
🔵During that same period, districts added 2,366 staff positions.
🔵Because fewer students are in classrooms, taxpayers are funding 8,878 additional adult employees statewide compared to 2020.
🔵Nearly $614 million in temporary federal COVID relief funds were allocated to ongoing costs over two years. With those Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER III) funds now expired, some districts are asking voters to approve additional funding to sustain those temporary spending levels.

——-

30 October 2025 Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students.

Rob Henderson:

In the 1960s, even well-off families lived in ways that would now seem modest. Think of the world depicted in “Mad Men.” Don Draper is a high-earning advertising executive. Yet his living arrangement wouldn’t strike anyone today as lavish. In the pilot episode, his children Sally and Bobby share a bedroom. The family owns one car. No one claims a good childhood requires constant activity, a private room for every child or elite educational planning starting in kindergarten.

Today the expectations are different. Many parents feel pressure to provide their children with a full schedule of extracurriculars, travel sports, private tutoring and tuition for an expensive college. Add to that list a smartphone and travel experiences.

Antinatalism increasingly looks like a luxury belief—an idea that confers status on the people who hold it while imposing costs on those further down the socioeconomic ladder. If childbearing is a status competition, the logical move for those at the top is to succeed at it while persuading others to opt out.

Austin Berg

Chicago Board of Education President Sean Harden called a special meeting over the Christmas holiday. He had one objective: Quietly pass a $25 million property tax hike.

One might understand why Harden wanted to keep it under wraps.

Weeks earlier, Chicago homeowners saw the largest residential property tax hike in at least 30 years. And the man who appointed Harden to his post, Mayor Brandon Johnson, just spent months talking about how he was refusing to hike property taxes as part of the city budget.

Best not to mix messages.

But Harden’s plan hit a snag. Fox 32 Chicago political reporter Paris Schutz published news of the meetingbefore the school board posted a public notice of its own.

Becky Jacobs:

UW-Madison experienced a roughly 17% decline in federal research funding over the past year, she said. About 145 grants were terminated or faced stop-work orders, and as a result the university lost at least $27 million. Forty-three grants were later restored through legal challenges. 

University researchers also received about 16% fewer awards in calendar year 2025, despite submitting nearly the same number of federal grant proposals as the year prior, said Vice Chancellor Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, who oversees UW-Madison’s $1.93 billion research operation. 

Alicia Nieves

For the activists organizing the protests, the point was not simply to help a small group of migrants enter the country. The intended goal was to highlight what they considered a broken immigration system that separated families and to pressure the Obama administration and Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. 

But this third action had begun to raise concern inside the administration. Word of the earlier crossings appeared to be circulating among migrant communities and criminal smuggling networks along the border. Cartels that controlled the crossing routes seemed to recognize that the tactic could open a new market for families with children who had previously been deterred by the more perilous desert crossing their male relatives had attempted years before. 

Dissident Teacher:

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something public schools no longer provide, if they ever did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in state-run schools in California.

On graduation day, 2014, I had a spectacular breakdown at work. Two of my colleagues watched as I ugly-cried at my desk from the end of minimum day until I put on my gown to walk the seniors down to their seats on the football field. There they would wait to shake the superintendent’s hand as he defrauded the entire audience by handing their beloved young men and women diplomas signifying those kids could read, write, speak, and calculate. 

Like so many teachers, I didn’t blame the school system at the time; I chalked it up to social, economic, psychological, and other factors the school couldn’t address in our very poor, mainly immigrant-populated district. 

But when I moved to a school that served some of the wealthiest families in our metro area, it was the same damned story. 

Many kids were functionally illiterate and innumerate. The writing of 9th-12th graders in English was often incoherent, full of fragment sentences and errors in English grammar, usage, and mechanics. Students couldn’t seem to organize their thoughts meaningfully and employed little vocabulary beyond the 6th grade level. Only the most proficient and frequent readers produced work that didn’t require major revision. Students didn’t know enough about Western civ to turn out an intelligent paper on any piece of literature, whether novel, short story, or poem. They hadn’t read enough in any genre to have a working model of how to produce good, clear writing. 

Math didn’t look much better. Every AP Econ class I taught at that school audibly gasped when told calculators weren’t allowed on Econ tests, which at most require knowledge of basic arithmetic. (Many kids struggled to finish timed tests because of this rule.) One of the hardest-working seniors in my class last year, a 17-year-old from a wealthy, supportive family, needed help multiplying two-digit integers; he wasn’t sure what to do with carried numbers.

Matthew G. Burgess:

Academics in the United States face threats to their intellectual and expressive freedoms from both sides of the political spectrum. These threats are comparable to or greater than the threats of the McCarthy era, by some measures. However, far more academics self-censor than are censored by others. Although self-censorship may sometimes be rational from a careerist perspective, here I argue that academic self-censorship is often irrational. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that academic reward systems favor intellectual risk-taking in the long run, on average. In contrast, academics often avoid rational expressive risks due to fears of adverse non-careerist consequences and short-term incentives for risk avoidance. Personality traits correlated with risk aversion may be overrepresented among those who self-select into academia. Academics’ large-scale self-censorship behaviors create a free-rider problem and underappreciated risks to academia’s value proposition, its public trust, and, by extension, its funding and student enrollment. Self-censorship also makes free expression appear more transgressive, which may magnify both its real and perceived risks. Despite ongoing censorship threats, U.S. academia remains one of the expressively freest professions in the history of the world. Yet our freedoms are only useful – to ourselves and society – if we have the courage to use them.

—

More.

Rocío Hernández

The governor also touted legislation he’s supported on funding for raises for school districts and charter schools, early literacy and open enrollment. 

Expanding school choice has been a pillar of Gov. Joe Lombardo’s agenda since he was elected in 2022. But actually doing so has proved a tall order in the Democrat-controlled Legislature. 

During The Nevada Independent’s IndyTalks event on Thursday, Lombardo said though he’s taken small steps to provide more schooling options for students, he considered it a disappointment he hasn’t been able to do more, such as his failed attempts to expand the state’s Opportunity Scholarship program to help low-income families access private school education. 

He said the majority of school choice advocates are expecting “bigger, bolder and better.” 

“So I have to keep fighting away,” Lombardo said. 

The governor recently decided to opt into a federal school choice tax credit program, but public school advocates worry it won’t allow for state oversight. 

Stephen G. Adubato

Out of my 12ish friends who got their PhDs in the humanities in the last 10 years, only 2 of them got tenure-track teaching jobs at a university. This is one of the many reasons I opted out of academia. On top of realizing I’m not smart or diligent enough to pursue doctoral work—also that academic writing is boring and no one reads it…and that people actually read and enjoy stuff in journalistic/popular outlets [like this Substack!]—I saw how stressed, depressed, and mentally unstable my friends were while completing their doctoral work. Their inability to get a job in academia only made everything worse. Not to mention the fact that they accrued debt while studying—thanks to the dismal stipends they received—their lack of stable employment post-doc only dug them deeper into the hole.

As I declared alongside Jonah Howell, Kay Craig, and K.C. Johnson, academia is dead…at least if you’re in the humanities. Schools are losing money. Funding for doctoral programs is running low, thus acceptance rates are getting slimmer. It also doesn’t help that we just hit an enrollment cliff, reducing the amount of students applying for undergrad programs—thus sucking even more money out of schools. Furthermore, universities are becoming more corporate and bureaucratic, which is only serving to suffocate academic integrity and campus culture [which I covered in the NYTimes, Compact, and here on Substack].

If you do manage to get into a PhD program—which will require a great amount of effort [and connections] given how competitive the process has become—you probably won’t get a lot of funding. And then when you finally finish, the chances are that you will not find a tenure-track teaching position any time soon.

Goldy Brown III:

Most Wisconsin parents don’t spend much time thinking about how the state superintendent of public instruction is chosen. They’re focused on whether their child can read confidently by third grade, whether math finally clicks or whether their local school can attract and keep strong teachers. But the way Wisconsin selects its top education official quietly shapes all of those outcomes – and it deserves closer attention.

As more responsibility for education shifts back to the states, how Wisconsin governs its schools matters more than ever. Federal retrenchment, expanded state flexibility and recent court decisions limiting federal agency authority have left governors and legislatures with greater power – and greater responsibility – for results. That shift makes governance structures more important, not less. Wisconsin’s continued practice of electing its superintendent of public instruction now works against accountability and clarity at precisely the wrong time.

The position dates back to 1848, when Wisconsin’s founders were wary of concentrating power in a single executive. That caution made sense in a young, rural state with a modest system of common schools. It makes far less sense today. The modern Department of Public Instruction oversees billions of dollars, administers complex federal programs, and manages responsibilities comparable to other major state agencies. This is not a symbolic or representative role. It is an executive job that demands management skill, policy coherence, and operational experience.

State fills top role with off-cycle election

Yet Wisconsin fills the role through a low-turnout, off-cycle statewide election. In practice, these races are shaped by the groups most consistently engaged in education policy and most capable of organizing around an otherwise low-profile contest. Education associations and other stakeholders routinely provide endorsements, funding and visibility that matter far more than broad public participation – patterns reflected in campaign finance records maintained by the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. Many voters, meanwhile, struggle to name the candidates, much less evaluate their administrative experience.

Danielle DuClos and Erin Gretzinger:

After Dane County prosecutors said a brutal physical assault last fall at West High School left a student hospitalized, the Cap Times analyzed the school district’s published assault data back to the 2016-17 school year.

That analysis found 1,476 assaults were reported during the 2023-24 school year, an eight-year high. Another 1,194 assaults were reported last school year, the most recent year of data available.

Since the 2018-19 school year, the published data has consistently shown over 1,100 assaults in Madison public schools, excluding the two years interrupted by COVID-19 school closures. 

The recent levels are dramatically higher than prior years. Just 72 assaults were reported in 2016-17 and 58 in 2017-18. The next year, the total jumped by more than 1,800%.

When the Cap Times shared its findings with Madison school district officials, they said the data seemed to exaggerate reality. District officials said they were unaware of the totals published by the state Department of Public Instruction until contacted by the Cap Times.

The school district’s preliminary review of the data suggests the “inconsistencies might span several years,” Fiedler said.

——-

Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006

Frederick Hess

After all, it was 26 years ago this spring that the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development issued its National Reading Panel report, which made the case for the science of reading and emphasized the need for explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and systematic phonics instruction.

Those recommendations were the foundation of the Bush administration’s Reading First initiative, which sought to ensure that K–3 reading materials and instruction were science-based. Launched with high hopes, the $6 billion effort was soon undone by operational headaches. It flopped so badly and was memory-holed so efficiently that many who’ve embraced today’s “science of reading” charge aren’t even aware that they’re retracing the footsteps of their Bush-era predecessors.

What went wrong with Reading First? Pretty much everything. The machinery to evaluate instructional materials was rickety. Reading First deputized reading labs at three universities to vet materials, a structure ill-equipped to fend off vendor-supplied junk science. When officials at the U.S. Department of Education sought to deal with the result, they stumbled into allegations of misconduct and favoritism. Oh, and vendors proved adept at repackaging the same old materials and trainings as suddenly consistent with the new requirements.

The result was an ambitious push to overhaul reading instruction that ultimately delivered underwhelmingresults. With much of the nation gearing up to take the science of reading for another spin, it’s worth asking how states can increase the odds that the result will be more Mississippi than meh.

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Vince Bielski:

Half a century after the book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” sounded an alarm about the rise of illiteracy in the U.S., it has only gotten worse: A quarter of all young adults, many of them high school graduates, are now functionally illiterate. Unable to read more than basic, short sentences, their prospects in today’s information economy are bleak. 

This crisis gave rise to a movement that embraced the science of reading and produced a surprising success story in the Deep South, a region dogged by the highest rates of childhood illiteracy in the nation. State leaders and education reformers in Mississippi and Louisiana led a remarkable improvement in elementary reading scores that now rank among the highest in the nation. 

The turnaround was a long slog, requiring a heavy hand from the state to win buy-in for a wholesale transformation of curricula, teaching methods, accountability, and more. Former state education chief Carey Wright called it the “Mississippi Marathon.” One of the biggest questions in public education now is whether the southern surge can spread nationwide, turning millions of struggling students into proficient readers with a brighter future. 

But such a top-down approach is running into resistance, particularly in blue states like New York and Illinois, where strong teachers’ unions have fought to preserve local control over schools. And nowhere is the political battle over who runs the classroom more pronounced than in Massachusetts, which has long boasted the nation’s best public schools. 

Nicole Barbaro Simovski:

Many states including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, and Utah now require instructors to make their course syllabi publicly available. The reasons are clear, advocates argue: The public has a right to knowwhat is being taught in public university classrooms, and students should have clarity on the course content and objectives before spending their tuition dollars to enroll. 

These are defensible arguments for more transparency, but there also appear to be underlying political motivations to the sudden surge of policy proposals by state legislatures and institutions. People and organizations on the right and center-right are eager to assess syllabi for left-wing bias and lack of viewpoint diversity. Professors and others also appear worried by the potential for online harassment of faculty that can ensue when their syllabi are openly shared.

But even if the political motivations behind these proposals and the potential risks to faculty as a result of them are real, it doesn’t follow that the core concept of course transparency is inherently bad. Classrooms are not sacred spaces. Just as we’ve come to expect transparency in scientific and other kinds of research, the knowledge work that occurs in classrooms should also be transparent, not just for the sake of the students or the public, but for the good of the profession and discipline. We academics need to leave behind the limits of “self-evident” instructional privacy and make our courses radically transparent, not via political pressure and legislation, but through internally led reform of our teaching practices.

U.S. universities are in the midst of a crisis of confidence. Public trust in higher education has dramatically declined in the past decade, especially among those who are politically in the center and right-of-center. The value of a college degree is in question as prices soar and many recent graduates struggle to find work. Partly as a result, the very notion of academic freedom that allows academics to teach how they want and to inquire freely is being threatened. 

A Legal Place:

Since 2013, MA increased per pupil spending over 70%. You’d think that would produce extraordinary, positive academic outcomes in a state bursting with experts from Harvard.

Here’s how one expert applies her expertise – building an “Army of Goodness” with school counselors:

Erika Sanzi:

All it takes is framing a school walkout as a political protest, and many school administrators will do the rest. They’ll natter on about student voice, First Amendment rights, and civic engagement while retreating from disciplinary consequences.

Maya Lora:

Starting next school year, Baltimore students in kindergarten through second grade have screen time limits of 15 to 20 minutes per day in class — a first for Central Maryland school districts. They’ll also have to share laptops and tablets, rather than getting assigned their own. Santelises said City Schools wants its youngest learners to have more in-person, hands-on experiences without distractions.

Across the country, most students are using computers and tablets in school by kindergarten, and far more of them are doing so on their personal devices than before the pandemic. At least five states are considering scaling back on technology in the classroom, from in-class screen time limits in Virginia to a complete ban on digital devices through fifth grade in Tennessee.

Bindu Bansinath:

— a 34-year-old Rhode Island mother of a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old

When my husband and I were dating, his deal-breaker was having kids. I didn’t feel the same way, but I didn’t see life without children as an option. It always felt like the next stage of life for us. I remember telling my husband, “I’m worried; I love our life now and I’m not sure what it’s going to look like with a child.” He told me, “It’s going to be better.” I was the executive of a nonprofit, which was a stressful but fulfilling job. I was worried about my career, but I thought, There are working moms everywhere. People do this. Then I had my first baby.

Her first year of life, she was colicky and cried all the time — you couldn’t put her down.

Wall Street Journal:

The trend went beyond Texas. During the 2024 primary season, AFC’s political affiliates spent nearly $10 million across 15 states. We defeated 67% of incumbents who stood against parents on this crucial issue.

Texas, where the teachers unions assumed their monopoly would last forever, is rolling out a wildly popular new school choice program, with 150,000 student applications already in the door and two more weeks left in the open enrollment window. The program will have the largest-ever day-one launch for a school choice program in history. The primaries confirmed that voters are fully behind that move.

The rural myth is dead. The lesson for every statehouse in America is now impossible to ignore: School choice wins. Oppose it, and voters will show you the door.

Jeremy Wayne Tate:

One of the unexpected things you learn when you run a large high-stakes online exam is that the data starts revealing things the test was never designed to measure.

As CLT has grown, especially with more public school participation, one of the clearest insights has been around cheating.

The sad truth is that public school students are not just slightly more likely to cheat. They are dramatically more likely to attempt cheating than students from classical schools, religious schools, or homeschool backgrounds.

This shouldn’t be surprising.

Most public schools operate with no clear moral or philosophical framework for why cheating is inherently wrong. If education is just about the score, cheating simply becomes part of the game.

——-

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

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

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”

Becky Jacobs:

If the Legislature’s intent is to protect sensitive NIL agreements involving student-athletes, the language should be narrowly tailored to accomplish that goal,” Bennett said.

Lynch said the bill wouldn’t provide an unlimited exemption. The university has released records that don’t involve student privacy or competitive interests, including the athletics department budget and information reported to the NCAA. This legislation wouldn’t change that, she said.

The bill would support UW-Madison’s continued denial of certain records, such as NIL contracts between the university and student-athletes, and UW-Madison’s NIL contract template, she said.

“I acknowledge (the exemption) may look like it’s broad, but I also can’t predict the future,” Lynch said.

The university needs flexibility to respond to potential NIL changes, she said.

WILL:

Wisconsin continues to lead the nation in the racial achievement gap between white and African American students. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in fourth grade reading, Wisconsin’s 45-point gap is the largest in the country—13 points greater than the next grouping of states such as Louisiana, Michigan, and South Carolina. State-level data from the Forward Exam mirrors these national results, revealing persistent and deep differences in academic proficiency. While many policymakers attribute these gaps to explicit racism, historic discrimination, and systemic inequities, this analysis investigates the extent to which other factors—specifically poverty and disability status—help to explain the relationship between race and academic performance.

More.

What’s been the result of DEI, CRT, SEL, restorative justice, abandoning discipline, ignoring truancy, lowering standards, binging on taxes and debt, hiring more and more administrators & non-teaching staff, and constantly obsessing about race?

——-

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Dave Cieslewicz:

But the message is clear: once again in 2027, just as this year and in the previous cycles, there will be no meaningful choice. By that time there will be five partisan liberals on the court and Brunette will run promising to be the sixth. By August of 2027 there will be only one conservative, Brian Hagedon, among the seven justices.

Of course, Republicans will nominate someone to run against Brunette, but it won’t matter. Liberal Democrats now own these seats. Two things happened. First, liberals became super-charged about these court races when they figured out that they weren’t going to take back the legislature any time soon, but they could legislate through the court. Then even the supercharger went into overdrive after Roe was overturned. The second thing that happened is that the demographics switched. It’s voters with more years of education who show up to vote in spring elections. Those used to be Republicans, but now they’re Democrats. The Republicans are now the blue collar party while the Democrats are the college-educated.

Alexander Kustov:

My two posts on AI in academia got over a million views and a thousand angry responses. I got a few things wrong. I stand by the rest. But most people reacted to the headline, not the arguments.

So here are all 20 theses laid out. Tell me which ones you actually disagree with 🧵

WILL:

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “This is a welcome decision by the Trump Administration to enforce Title IX and protect girls’ privacy. For too long, school districts in Wisconsin have allowed policies that force young girls to share private spaces with biological males. The Department of Education should continue to press for full enforcement of Title IX across the state. We have already filed a Title IX complaint against Westosha Central High School and are hopeful the federal investigation into the Sun Prairie Area School District will bring accountability.”

WILL’s Fight for Student Privacy: WILL has filed Title IX complaints against Westosha Central High School and the Sun Prairie Area School District (an investigation opened in 2023 is still pending) following concerns from parents that biological boys were using the girls’ private locker rooms and bathrooms.

Jackie Mader

A few months before her daughter started kindergarten, Claire Benoist saw a Facebook post that stunned her. Another family with an incoming kindergartner was wondering if it was true that children in the Croton-Harmon School District, 45 miles north of New York City, receive an iPad when they start school. 

Other parents confirmed this: Kindergartners are often on their own iPads during school, playing games and watching television shows and YouTube videos. “It had never occurred to me that screens would be used in such a way,” Benoist said. 

A few weeks before school started, Benoist told school administrators in the 1,500-student district that she couldn’t believe schools would give devices to kids as young as 4 and 5. Benoist and her husband had followed pediatric guidelines recommending no screen time before age 2. After that, they only allowed occasional episodes of kids’ shows like “Bluey” or “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”

School administrators assured Benoist that iPad time would be limited to 15 minutes a day, she said. But once school started, Benoist’s daughter suddenly knew jingles from diaper and car commercials, which Benoist and her husband determined were playing before YouTube videos at school. 

“It feels like too much,” said Benoist, whose daughter has watched videos during snack time, transition time and dismissal.   

Aakash Gupta:

The numbers explain why. CS degrees doubled from 52,000 to 113,000 per year over the last decade. Universities kept expanding enrollment because the demand signal from 2021 said “hire everyone.” Then three things happened simultaneously: tech companies overhired, corrected with 250K+ layoffs across 2024-2025, and started replacing junior engineering tasks with AI tooling. The entry-level funnel collapsed while the supply pipeline was locked in at peak capacity.

CS unemployment for recent grads hit 6.1% in 2025. That’s nearly double philosophy majors at 3.2%. The “learn to code” era produced a generation of graduates competing for jobs that are either gone or now require 3+ years of LLM integration experience they couldn’t possibly have.

The split is geographic and institutional. If you’re at a top-15 program in a tech corridor with two internships on your resume, the market looks tight but navigable. If you’re at a mid-tier state school with no internship pipeline, you’re watching the career fair fill up with insurance companies while your $140K in loans accrues interest.

That faculty meeting fight about “pivoting to AI collaboration skills” is the right debate happening two years too late. The schools that retooled their curriculum in 2023 will survive. The ones still teaching data structures as the core value proposition while job postings demand LLM orchestration are training students for a market that no longer exists.

Anish Koka MD (Cardiology):

As a young boy, I grew up reading of the triumph of good over evil in my favorite Indian comic book: Amar Chitra Katha. The tales of the virtuous vassals imbued by a godly spirit vanquishing the forces of darkness is powerful and appealing in large measure because we believe we inhabit a world where the good guys won. But unlike the comic books, the bad guys in the real world don’t have horns, and don’t look like J.R.R Tolkien’s trolls – they wear suits and have fancy degrees and appear quite respectable. Would it be really obvious if the bad guys won? History is after all replete with examples of revolutionaries who believe themselves to be virtuous, blindly following a degenerate elite into an amoral abyss.

With this in mind, a lawsuit from the world of American medicine, filed by Dr. Norman Wang against his employer and others is particularly enlightening.

This particular affair began when Dr. Wang published a paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association titled “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019 “.  The purpose of this white paper was to “provide an overview of policies that have been created to impact the racial and ethnic composition of the cardiology workforce, to consider the evolution of racial and ethnic preferences in legal and medical spheres, to critically assess current paradigms, and to consider potential solutions to anticipated challenges.”

At the time of the publication in March 2020, Norman Wang was a cardiologist, a member of the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and director of the fellowship program in clinical cardiac electrophysiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). His publications to this point had largely consisted of esoteric matters in the field of his expertise : electrophysiology. This publication, was of an entirely different nature. The article asserted that the medical profession had not been successful in its overarching goal of increasing the percentages of underrepresented races and ethnicities in the medical profession, and particularly in cardiology. The article also noted that programs to achieve these diversity goals applied different standards to applications by members of underrepresented races and ethnicities and thus raised questions about the legality of doing so because of how race was being used as a factor in hiring, recruitment, promotion and admissions.

John Hinderaker

If you think America’s public schools are terrible, you are right. If you think they lean to the left in their instruction, you are also right. But the truth is much worse. Guided in large part by radically left-wing teachers’ unions, our schools are in some cases openly rejecting the teaching of “content”–the word used in my state, Minnesota–in favor of requiring activism.

Check out this American Experiment video on Liberated Ethnic Studies:

Kevin Roberts

The clearest example yet of what the Deep State looks like: unelected bureaucrats refusing access to an executive branch agency for representatives sent by the newly elected president—the one in whom our Constitution says the executive power is vested.
 
There needs to be accountability for these actions, or we will continue having a shadow fourth branch of government wholly unaccountable to the will of the American people.

——

The growth of the administrative class in every regulated industry has been breathtaking.

Becky Jacobs

Wisconsin’s 13 public universities can now develop three-year bachelor’s degree programs — but it could be a while before any appear at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I know there are some other UW institutions that are exploring that as a possibility. We have not had discussions here at Madison about that,” Allison La Tarte, UW-Madison’s vice provost and chief data and analytics officer, said at a recent campus meeting.

Interim Provost John Zumbrunnen added, “I do not see (UW-Madison) any time soon turning towards the widespread presence of reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees.”

The UW system’s Board of Regents revised its policyThursday, allowing campuses to explore reduced-credit programs. Students could earn a bachelor’s degree with at least 90 credits rather than 120.

Natalya Murakhver

When 80% of parents wanted in-person learning and got virtual school instead, venture capitalist Paul Martino discovered his job description had changed: he was now doing the superintendent’s job for him.

In August 2020, Paul Martino wasn’t looking for a fight. He was looking for answers.

The Central Bucks School District — Pennsylvania’s largest public school district — had just announced a switch to virtual learning, despite a survey showing over 80% of district parents preferred in-person education. Martino, whose kids were 9 and 11, felt something snap.

“It happened out of pure anger.”

That anger became action. Martino, a venture capitalist by trade, launched a grassroots movement that would ultimately lead to the superintendent’s resignation and school board member replacements. More importantly, it sparked a template that parents across the country would follow to reclaim their voice in their children’s education.

“We ended up putting the school board on notice that we were paying attention,” Martino recalls. Soon, his phone was ringing with calls from around the country asking the same question: How did you do that?

Sally Sharif:

just gave a closed-book, pen-and-paper midterm exam in my 300-level course at UBC with 100 students. All exams were graded by an experienced graduate-level TA according to a rubric.

My class averages at UBC are usually 80-85.

Context:

• This was the first midterm, covering ONLY 4 weeks of material.
• Students had a list of possible questions in advance: no surprise questions.
• Questions included (a) 3 concept definitions, (b) 3 paragraph-long questions, and (c) a 1.5-page essay.
• I have taught this class multiple times. Nothing in my teaching style changed this semester.
• We read entire paragraphs of text in class, so students don’t have to do something on their own that wasn’t covered during the lecture.
• Students take a 10-question multiple-choice quiz at the end of every class (30% of the final grade).
• Attendance is 95-99% every class. Attention during lectures and participation in pair-work activities are very high → anticipating the end-of-class quiz.

* But unfortunately, I suspect many students are not reading the material on the syllabus. They are asking LLMs to summarize it instead.*

Andrew Petersen:

Allen and her son are at the vanguard of a fast-growing business catering to health-conscious parents. Companies are offering products they said can alleviate gastrointestinal issues common in infants, and help optimize young children’s gut microbiomes.

Some scientists said that infancy can be a critical period to shape the microbiome, and potentially prevent disease and improve health later on. But microbiome researchers and pediatricians said that many of the products’ marketing is outpacing the science.

Selling baby-biotics

Tiny Health and Alba Health sell gut health tests for babies for $249 and $349, respectively. Parents send in stool samples and the companies return detailed analyses of the types and prevalence of various microbes found. The companies also offer recommendations, like giving certain supplements or bringing babies to a petting zoo, which they said can improve children’s microbiomes.

Infant formula and baby food producers are incorporating more prebiotics, which fuel beneficial gut bacteria. They also are adding probiotics, the beneficial bacteria itself.

Daniel Libit:

A college sports bill burrowing through the Wisconsinstate legislature could shield all financial records  involving the University of Wisconsin’s athletics department and those of other public institutions in the state.

Such is the warning from transparency advocates over Assembly Bill 1034, which passed the lower chamber last month by a 95-1 vote. A companion measure, Senate Bill 1075, is now pending in the Wisconsin state Senate, where last week it received a public hearing before the committee on government operations, labor and economic development.

The legislation is designed to align state law with the House v. NCAA settlement by establishing the right of the University of Wisconsin System to pay college athletes for their NIL. The bill would also increase state funding to cover debt service for maintenance of certain athletic facilities at UW, UW-Milwaukee and UW-Green Bay. Lastly, it would make explicit that athletes who sign revenue-sharing deals with private institutions like Marquette would not be rendered employees of those schools as a result.

The bill has been strongly endorsed by UW, which has argued that it is necessary to help ensure its athletic programs remain competitive amidst the “volatility in college athletics.”

“Chemical Canary”:

At our regional cooperative school district budget meetings, a group has been repeatedly requesting secret ballots on amendments as a delay tactic. The counting process runs out the clock and forces voters with time commitments to leave before the vote. I started looking into whether secret ballots are even legally required here, and I don’t think they are.

RSA 40:4-a is the only NH statute giving voters the right to demand a secret ballot, but it only applies to town meetings. It does not extend to school district meetings. RSA 197, which actually governs school district meetings, contains zero voting procedure rules. RSA 195, covering cooperative school districts specifically, is equally silent. RSA 197:19 gives the school district moderator town-moderator-equivalent powers, but that is the moderator’s authority, not a voter right to demand secret ballots.

My conclusion is that secret ballots at these meetings are moderator discretion and local custom, not a statutory requirement. If correct, the meeting body could vote to change the procedure themselves.

Am I missing a statute that creates this right specifically for school district deliberative sessions?

Not a lawyer. This is really the first time I have tried to read statutes.

Bruce Baker:

Here’s a quick summary of a thread I recently posted on both BlueSky and X. 

Storytime – for those who want to push some “southern” miracle in public schooling – using Mississippi as their exemplar, and implying “red state” strategies are the policy solution:

First – Mississippi doesn’t catch Massachusetts or New Jersey. NOT EVEN CLOSE

But states like Arizona and Florida fall to and even blow Mississippi in some cases on 8th grade NAEP performance (a better indicator of the cumulative effects of a system on student learning than 4th grade assessments). 

Notable in these graphs are the continued large declines in Arizona and Florida while others are stabilizing or rebounding from 2022 to 2024 (AZ stabilizes in math, but not FL).

Andrea Medina, Ashlyn Wright

Outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in suburban Broadview on Sunday, Sarah Afzal spoke on behalf of her 28-year-old sister, Sundas Naqvi, who goes by Sunny.

Elected officials, family members and Sunny’s attorney stood alongside her, sharing their accounts of what they say happened after Sunny returned to Chicago.

Afzal says Sunny, a U.S. citizen born in Evanston, was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport while returning from Turkey on Thursday.

“Detained with no cause. All she was told was that there was curious travel history,” said Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison.

Afzal says Sunny was held at the lower level of Terminal 3 at O’Hare for nearly 30 hours along with five of her colleagues. Two of them are also U.S. citizens and three are green card holders.

The group had originally been headed to India for a work trip with a layover in Turkey, but the trip was canceled after visa issues came up while they were there. They split up and traveled to different countries in the region, with Sunny going to Bulgaria and Austria. The group later reunited in Turkey and flew back to Chicago on Thursday morning.

Alex Tahk

Executive Summary

This survey of tenure-track and tenured faculty at UW–Madison examines the ideological composition of the faculty, attitudes toward hiring, perceptions of campus climate, and experiences with expressing controversial opinions.

Ideological Composition

UW–Madison faculty are substantially more liberal than both the general American public and Americans with doctoral degrees. Seven in ten faculty identify as some form of liberal, while fewer than one in ten identify as conservative. This imbalance is present across all academic fields, though it varies in degree, with the Humanities showing the highest concentration of liberal faculty. Economics-related fields stand out as having more ideological diversity than other social sciences, though they still lean liberal overall. Junior faculty are more liberal than senior faculty, raising the possibility that the imbalance may increase over time. Notably, faculty of color are not more liberal than white faculty—and Asian faculty are significantly more likely to identify as conservative—indicating that efforts to advance racial diversity and viewpoint diversity need not be in tension.

Hiring

Using a randomized survey experiment, the study finds that significant minorities of faculty would be less likely to hire a candidate who expressed a conservative view on topics such as immigration, abortion, affirmative action, or transgender sports participation. Because respondents were randomly assigned to evaluate either a liberal or conservative statement, these differences cannot be attributed to a general aversion to candidates expressing political opinions. The asymmetry specifically reflects less favorable treatment of conservative viewpoints, with differences ranging from 11 to 38 percentage points depending on the topic.

Consequences for Expression

While liberal faculty are more likely to express controversial views, conservative faculty who do express views report experiencing institutional consequences—such as warnings from administrators—at substantially higher rates than liberal faculty who express views.