School Information System

Rachit Nigam:

This class is about the study of programming languages. Before we start, I want to perform two activities with folks here. First, I want us to answer two dumb questions:

1. Why do we design new programming languages?
2. What is a programming language?

While (2) seems to be the more fundamental question, we need to answer (1) to have any hope of even thinking about (2).

So first, why do we design programming languages? Every program that can be written, can be written in C or assembly or Java or any of the dozens of languages we already have. So why do we design new languages?

Common answers to this question will include words like abstraction, performance, convenience, usability etc. The problem with these answers is that apart from the measurable, they are all subjective, aesthetic choices. Convenience is a function of knowledge, familiarity, and community. Usability is similarly ill-defined and hard to measure. And of course, none of these metrics really predict which languages are widely used or popular.

Consider the thought of inventing a whole new natural language just to express a new concept clearly. Explaining the rules of grammar and construction would certainly be simpler than any natural language provides. And yet, we’d have the small, troubling problem that this knowledge would be almost entirely useless; we need to learn a commonly known natural language to communicate with people. And yet, this is something that we can often find ourselves doing with programming languages with the hope that the concepts learned in one language can be transferred into another; a world where being a polyglot is expected, not unusual.

Blake Dodge and Katherine Dee:

Who wrote these dispatches, you may ask? An obscure leftist blogger, tucked away on BlueSky, followed by a handful of Portlandia co-op members? Nope.

Heather Cox Richardson may not be a household name, but she’s one of the most influential voices in American media. From her home in Maine, the Boston College professor has built a following of 2.7 million subscribers — that’s 1 million more people than Jimmy Kimmel’s average audience size, and just shy of the left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker’s 3 million streaming followers — who treat reading her nightly Substack, “Letters from an American,” as an act of patriotism.

To her followers, Richardson is the last responsible adult in the room: calm, authoritative, devoted to the hard facts of history. She presents herself as America’s professor, neither a polemicist nor performer. Yet the history in her telling is never neutral. Each night, she offers a morality tale in which Republicans play the villains; Democrats, the weary defenders of reason.

That pattern was clearest when she told readers last month that Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, was another example of MAGA violence, a symbol of the right’s descent into madness. She still hasn’t corrected the record that Robinson was, in fact, left-leaning, according to his family and basically every piece of credible evidence that exists. But that mistake in particular matters less than what it revealed. Richardson was wrong, but she was doing what she always does: imposing a narrative shape on events that, occasionally, are too messy to have a cleanly delivered moral. In that, she’s emblematic of the new media order: unaccountable, independent, influential, and commanding both an audience larger than most television shows and a devoted fandom. Her appeal rests on what the public has lost faith in — The New York Times telling us all what to think — and what it wants instead: a guide who, more or less, tells us all what to think, but more honorably. A Virgil cutting through the hellscape of modern politics and media.

Sabine Martin:

Universities of Wisconsin faculty in high-demand fields of study could get salary bumps under a new policy that’s part of the recent state budget deal.

Last week, the UW Board of Regents approved a proposal detailing how the UW system will dole out $27 million annually for market pay adjustments to attract and keep faculty in growing fields, fulfilling a legislative reform set in the budget agreement.

Of that, $2 million is earmarked for UW-Madison to use for faculty who work in “areas that advance diversity of thought and the foundation of free markets.”

As of May, 68% of the more than 5,000 faculty across the UW system are paid below their peer American Association of University Professors median salary, according to the Regents.

Kyla Scanlon:

As the supply of young people dries up, towns built around America’s higher education system will learn what happens when the students stop coming

Earlier this year, on a visit back to my alma mater, Western Kentucky University, I spoke to a student majoring in business who told me he might drop out of college to take a factory job near home. Tuition was going up (again) and he wasn’t sure if there was anything waiting for him at the end of this yellow brick road. He was scared.

I certainly didn’t know what to tell him. I wanted to say the degree would pay off, that education is worth the investment. But I graduated in 2019, months before the pandemic. College has changed, and so have jobs. I didn’t have an answer for him because the institutions themselves don’t seem to have an answer either.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. A student leaving college for factory work — the very jobs that disappeared in the First Rust Belt, now somehow seeming more reliable than a degree. It’s the kind of reversal that makes you wonder if the life path forward is actually backward, or if there’s a path at all. The answer, it turns out, is bigger than one student’s choice.

Steve Blank:

Where is Science in the U.S. Done?
America’s unique insight that has allowed it to dominate Science and invention, is that after WWII we gave Research and Development money to universities, rather than only funding government laboratories. No other country did this at scale.

Idrees Kahloon

The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.

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We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4—the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Alice Li:

China’s expansion of its rare earth export controls appeared to mark another escalation in the US-China trade war last week. But the announcements were also significant in another way: unusually, the documents could not be opened using American word processing software.

For the first time, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a slew of documents that could be directly accessed only through WPS Office – China’s answer to Microsoft Office – as Beijing continues its tech self-reliance drive.

Developed by the Beijing-based software company Kingsoft, WPS Office uses a different coding structure to Microsoft Office, meaning WPS text files cannot be opened directly in Word without conversion.

Previously, the ministry primarily released text documents in Microsoft Word format.

The switch in document delivery format came amid escalating trade tensions between China and the US, as Washington continues to wield its technological edge as leverage in its rivalry with Beijing.

Following China’s announcement of the new export controls, US President Donald Trump threatened that America would curb the export of “any and all critical software”.

www

Discover some of the most in-demand careers in the trades. Learn about salary ranges, requirements, and responsibilities of a trade, and how many jobs are available across the country.

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Meanwhile:

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Gregory Barber:

Whether your chip is running a vintage computer game or the latest DeepSeek model, it’ll reward you for speaking its native language.

No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids, by Vladimir Kogan (Cambridge University Press, 328 pp., $29.99)

In February 2021—the same month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a school-reopening plan that effectively extended the Covid closures—teachers’ union bosses Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Becky Pringle of the National Education Association (NEA) were in constant contact with then-CDC director Rochelle Walensky. The lobbying paid off handsomely, according to reporting by the New York Post, with the CDC adopting union advice “nearly verbatim” in at least two cases.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

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By now, even most mainstream liberal commentators have acknowledged that the long-term school closures of the pandemic era were disastrous. Yet the root of that disaster—the tendency to put the political preferences of adults over the well-being of America’s K–12 children—have barely been discussed beyond the pandemic context.

A new book by Ohio State University political scientist Vladimir Kogan, No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids, looks to change this. Kogan draws attention to how schools put culture-war politics and other considerations over the needs of students and parents.

He begins with the problematic notion that “schools are ‘community institutions.’” This is a politically convenient concept that allows schools to get away with poor performance and drift from their core mission, making education about everything but academic performance. “Would residents be OK with drinking contaminated water, laced with dysentery and typhoid, in order to protect the jobs of those who work for public water agencies?” Kogan asks.

———

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Camus:

“They created a portal, managed by the FBI, to directly pressure social media companies.” Internal correspondences show executives at Facebook and Instagram were “appalled,” calling the demands “illegal.” Yet, they complied.

RFK Jr.’s Instagram account, with nearly one million followers, was removed. The reason? He explains, “Not a single post was factually inaccurate. Every statement was sourced from government databases or peer-reviewed science.”

Faced with truth, the administration invented a new category: “malinformation.” RFK Jr. defines it as “information that is factually correct, but it is nevertheless inconvenient to the government.”

He warns, “This is the first step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. There is no time that we look back in history and say that the people who were censoring speech are the good guys. They’re always the bad guys.”

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The Twitter Files.

Neeraja Deshpande

He begins with the problematic notion that “schools are ‘community institutions.’” This is a politically convenient concept that allows schools to get away with poor performance and drift from their core mission, making education about everything but academic performance. “Would residents be OK with drinking contaminated water, laced with dysentery and typhoid, in order to protect the jobs of those who work for public water agencies?” Kogan asks.

Many American educational failures, Kogan argues, are failures of democratic accountability. The voting public is not just parents; academic outcomes aren’t always voters’ highest priority; and most local or school board elections are either uncontested or fail to present meaningful choices to voters. It also doesn’t help that education politics has become so polarized. As Kogan writes, “It is adults who ultimately control public school districts through the ballot box, and what they want is often quite different than what public school students need.”

Schools face a “trilemma,” writes Kogan. They must provide “a quality education for students, democratic accountability to local voters, and good-paying employment opportunities for local residents.” But because children don’t vote, quality education often falls by the wayside.

This is especially true when it comes to decisions to close or consolidate schools—an increasingly common occurrence in a time of declining school-age population. Kogan finds that consolidations and closures by and large don’t affect students’ academic outcomes, but they’re hard to implement because adult concerns make them “unavoidably a political rather than a technocratic process.” The result is often wasteful and inefficient spending.

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Clara Holt:

After forty years in the classroom, my career ended with one small sentence from a six-year-old:

“My dad says people like you don’t matter anymore.”

No sneer. No malice. Just quiet honesty — the kind that cuts deeper because it’s innocent. He blinked, then added, “You don’t even have a TikTok.”

My name is Mrs. Clara Holt, and for four decades, I taught kindergarten in a small Denver suburb. Today, I stacked the last box on my desk and locked the door behind me.

When I started teaching in the early 1980s, it felt like a promise — a shared belief that what we did mattered. We weren’t rich, but we were valued. Parents brought warm cookies to parent nights. Kids gave you handmade cards with hearts that didn’t quite line up. Watching a child sound out their first sentence felt like magic.

But that world slowly slipped away. The job I once knew has been replaced by exhaustion, red tape, and a kind of loneliness I can’t quite describe.

My evenings used to be filled with construction paper, glitter, and glue sticks. Now they’re spent filling out digital reports to protect myself from angry emails or lawsuits. I’ve been yelled at by parents in front of twenty-five children — one filming me with his phone while I tried to calm another child mid-meltdown.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth

October 10, 2025
Dear members of the MIT community,

The U.S. Department of Education recently sent MIT and eight other institutions a proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” along with a letter asking that MIT review the document.

From the messages I’ve received, I know this is on the minds of many of you and that you care deeply about the Institute’s mission, its values and each other. I do too.

After considerable thought and consultation with leaders from across MIT, today I sent the following reply to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Ben Brubaker:

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks.

Matthew Redmond:
In one of his stand-up sets, comedian David Cross rejects all political commentary that tries to answer the question, “What would America’s Founding Fathers think if they were alive today?”

For Cross, it is pointless to speculate about the present-day views of men who could not have imagined cotton candy, let alone the machine that makes it.

“What’s a machine? What’s a machine???” he screams in their collective voice, recoiling from the sorcery of the state fair.

The first time I saw this bit, something odd happened. Having just read the 1776 political pamphlet “Common Sense,” I could hear its author, one of America’s founders, laughing louder than anybody.

That would be Thomas Paine, the man credited with turning the American Revolution from a complicated Colonial fracas into a titanic struggle for the soul of liberty itself.

If Cross is skeptical that anything 250 years old still holds up, Paine, were he alive today, could probably name one thing: skepticism. Ways of thinking and being do not grow out of the ground; we make them ourselves, then hand them down as best we can. Paine would smile to see his favorite heirloom, the skeptical worldview, still intact.

Saying “no” – especially to those in power – is an underrated American pastime, and Paine was its Babe Ruth. If you plan on joining No Kings rallies and have yet to find a slogan for your sign, Paine’s got you covered: “In America, the law is king!” “No King! No Tyranny!” “Monarchy hath poisoned the republic.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Now test scores are falling in New England, rising in Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama, he writes. While leaders of the “Southern Surge” focused relentlessly on improving reading instruction, New England schools were lowering expectations, Huffaker writes. To end the Massachusetts Malaise, leaders must “override the wishes of popular and powerful teachers unions, and, most of all, stop resting on their laurels.”

Karen Vaites and others have written about the Southern Surge in reading scores for months now, but it’s an essay last week by Kelsey Piper, Illiteracy is a policy choice, that seems to have woken everybody up. “If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools,” wrote Piper in The Argument.

No, Mississippi isn’t cooking the books, Piper and Vaites write this week, also in The Argument. With far fewer resources than most states and far needier students, these deep South states are showing impressive progress.

Among other things, the “surge” states test K-3 students’ reading progress frequently to ensure they get timely help. A “reading gate” at the end of third grade — students aren’t promoted if they can’t read adequately — acts as a motivator. “Retention policies work because so much is done between kindergarten and third grade to ensure all kids develop reading skills.”

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jen Schuman:

When the Jefferson County Education Association endorsed Michael Yocum for school board this fall, few voters—perhaps not even the union itself—knew the full story.

According to verified audio recordings obtained by Rocky Mountain Voice (RMV), Yocum privately acknowledged a deferred adjudication involving a sealed juvenile sexual offense. 

Yocum received thousands in funding and endorsements from education-aligned groups. 

Now, with ballots dropping in one of the state’s largest school districts, the public is left to decide whether this is the kind of leadership that belongs at the helm of a district serving more than 75,000 students across 145 schools in Jefferson and Broomfield counties

Brian Blase:

Last year, I coauthored a paper with @kerpen & Casey Mulligan on the 12 broken promises of Obamacare. As the Washington Post has written that the ACA was never affordable, there is a greater recognition of how the law failed in cost control & other areas.

Frederick Hess:

For starters, Oklahoma’s test is less a measure of teaching ability or civic literacy than a quiz of rudimentary political knowledge, coupled with MAGA-aligned talking points on gender, religious liberty, and parents’ rights. The test asks how many senators there are, the names of the “two parts” of Congress, and the first three words of the U.S. Constitution. It also poses questions such as “What is the fundamental biological distinction between males and females?” (Correct answer: chromosomes and reproductive anatomy) and “Why is the distinction between male and female important in areas like sports and privacy?” (Correct answer: “to preserve fairness, safety, and integrity for both sexes”).

A teacher may know basic facts about Congress or biology and still be terribly woke.Checking rudimentary civic knowledge is fine, but this is a really low bar—and not an especially good way to weed out woke indoctrinators. After all, a teacher may know basic facts about Congress or biology and still be terribly woke. And ideological or ignorant teachers also hail from the other 48 states (trust me on this). Assessing all would-be teachers regarding civic knowledge and professional ethics would be a good thing. But this isn’t that. Moreover, targeting California and New York as Walters did reveals the whole thing to be a performative stunt, engineered to capture the attention of MAGA social media.

Well, just the other week, Walters announced he’d be resigning in order to serve as the CEO of a new education advocacy group. That means his successor has the opportunity to take up this initiative and get it right. That will require three things: acknowledging the problem, offering a principled solution, and seizing the opportunity to rethink teacher licensure.

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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?

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN

People in business, especially tech, love progress and innovation. They believe they’re the ones dragging the world forward while everyone else clings to the past. But for decades, they’ve been too narrowly focused on their own projects, on funding a new battery, or coding a new app, or building a better venture capital business. The most successful people become so good at one thing that they forget about the broader conditions that make progress possible in the first place.

But now we, and they, are finding out that the background matters more than anyone thought. Try starting a company that depends on global supply chains when trade wars flare up overnight. Try convincing the best machine learning researchers in the world to join you when immigration policies make it nearly impossible for them to get visas. Try raising a billion-dollar round when investors can’t predict what the government will do next week about taxes, tariffs, or regulations. Suddenly, the things they assumed were fixed, like the rule of law, fairness, and open markets, look less like constants and more like fragile variables.

“How did this happen?” they ask. “We were just building our business.”

What happened is that they confused the game with the rules of the game. The game was building their business. The rules were the scaffolding of ideas – like you can trade freely across borders, hire the best people regardless of where they’re born, expect contracts to be enforced, not determine commercial practices on the whim of a dictator, and get clear regulatory guidance.

Andrew Rotherham summary:

We’re defining success in a way that reflects our community values..not someone else’s”

Dr. Reid unveils the Future Readiness Index, an effort to push back on new state accountability standards w a counter narrative that will allow FCPS to rely on various academic & non-academic metrics (such as degree of belonging & community involvement) to represent that FCPS is doing terrifically, no matter what the state standards say.

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Brooks:

Because of those reform efforts, student achievement test scores in reading, math and most other academic subjects shot upward between the mid-1990s and about 2013. In 1990 48 percent of America’s eighth graders scored below basic competency in math. But by 2013 that was down to just 26 percent. The best part of this progress was that the scores of the most disadvantaged students shot up the most. Among Black students, the share of those scoring below basic in math fell from 78 percent to 48 percent. Among Hispanic students, it fell from 66 percent to 38 percent.

Student outcomes are rarely just about what happens in the schools. The policies of that so-called neoliberal era helped, too. Economic growth was strong; income inequality decreased. Between 1983 and 2010 the child poverty rate fell from 30 percent to about 17 percent.

———

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Preston Cooper

Plus: Tuition cuts thanks to the “big beautiful bill,” and students choose more remunerative majors.

There’s a classic Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin receives an anonymous letter in the mail. In the place of a return address, he notes, “there’s a crude human skull with X’s for eyes and its tongue hanging out!”

He looks up and ventures: “Maybe it’s the IRS.”

Millions of student loan borrowers can expect thematically similar missives from America’s tax collectors starting next year. 2026 will bring the first full tax filing season during which the U.S. Treasury Department can seize defaulted borrowers’ refunds to pay their student loans. This collections tool has been turned off since before the pandemic—but it’s about to come back with a vengeance.

Jasmine Sun:

1) Nobody leaves campus. Caltrained to SF once every 1-2 mos, which was unusual + hard to get ppl to join. Kids are totally disconnected from / uninterested in the real world.

2) Stanford ships incoming freshmen 3 books over the summer and organizes a panel of the authors your first week on campus. Still remember turning to my dormmate to ask what they thought. Reply: “You actually read the books?”

3) Reflexive disrespect for humanities. Was told regularly “Why would you study IR?” and “Everyone smart enough to study CS does.” My freshman dorm was 75% eng. Eng is cool but so is interdisciplinarity.

4) Meanwhile humanities grade-inflate like crazy to retain anyone at all. Profs gave me 0 critical comments on my essays until I did an Oxford tutorial abroad and realized how little I knew. Nobody does readings or psets, ppl believe the focus is networking not learning.

Steve Mcguire:

1. Dartmouth (Feb 5, 2024):

“Several key findings guided our decision: First, standardized test scores are an important predictor of a student’s success in Dartmouth’s curriculum, and this is true regardless of a student’s background or family income.”

“Research shows that standardized test scores can be an important predictor of academic success at a place like Dartmouth and beyond—more so even than just grades or recommendations, for example.”

2. Yale (Feb 22, 2024):

“Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT.”

3. Brown (March 5, 2024):

“Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student’s ability to succeed and thrive in Brown’s demanding academic environment.”

Open Culture:

Teaching child visitors how to write their names using an unfamiliar or antique alphabet is a favorite activity of museum educators, but Dr. Irving Finkel, a cuneiform expert who specializes in ancient Mesopotamian medicine and magic, has grander designs.

His employer, the British Museum, has over 130,000 tablets spanning Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic period to the Neo-Babylonian Empire “just waiting for young scholars to come devote themselves to (the) monkish work” of deciphering them.

WILL

AB 274/SB 277 – Sunset Review:
Wisconsin is the 13th most regulated state in the nation.

These bills establish a 7-year review process for all administrative rules to cut red tape & ensure outdated, duplicative, or unnecessary regulations don’t go unchecked. 3/7

Matt Taibbi;

Aggressively seeking… info that could predicate a case. 

“Obviously, everything is reversed here,” a spokesperson for Grassley’s office said. “You’re supposed to follow a lead to start a case, not start a case in search of a lead.”

The letter was released before former FBI Director James Comey today pleaded not guilty to charges of lying to Congress. Organic support for the hulking ex-FBI chief at the courthouse was faint. A few protesters held signs reading SHOW TRIAL and WEAPONIZATION OF GOVERNMENT, and media focused unironically on whether or not Trump is “using the justice system against his adversaries.” Comey, the once-mighty FBI chief who interfered with two presidential campaigns in 2016 (although he only conducted intrusive surveillance of one), is now going to argue for dismissal on the grounds that his prosecution is “vindictive.” 

Nobody seems to care now, but Trump faced multiple secret investigations at the hands of the FBI under Comey’s watch even before Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to conduct his epic “links and/or coordination” probe. “Crossfire Hurricane,” the first, was absurdly predicated on a conversation between Australian Alexander Downer and Trump aide George Papadopoulos that “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia” (a suggestion of a suggestion!). The newly disclosed effort by Thibault openly grasped for predication.

Margarita Mora:

71 percent of students would report a professor for saying something offensive, according to results

Most college students value free speech — but only up to a certain point, according to the results of a recently released survey from the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University.

Nearly three-quarters of students surveyed reported that they believe free speech matters more than comfort, yet 71 percent would report a professor for saying something offensive, and 57 percent would report a fellow student for the same reason, the results found. 

The annual poll tracks students’ views on free speech, capitalism, national progress, protests, and social media. More than 2,000 students from 472 colleges and universities nationwide were questioned for the 2025 results, released in September. 

Professor John Bitzan, author of the survey, told The College Fix that the assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk is an example of the growing intolerance and violence toward unpopular views on college campuses.

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN

People in business, especially tech, love progress and innovation. They believe they’re the ones dragging the world forward while everyone else clings to the past. But for decades, they’ve been too narrowly focused on their own projects, on funding a new battery, or coding a new app, or building a better venture capital business. The most successful people become so good at one thing that they forget about the broader conditions that make progress possible in the first place.

But now we, and they, are finding out that the background matters more than anyone thought. Try starting a company that depends on global supply chains when trade wars flare up overnight. Try convincing the best machine learning researchers in the world to join you when immigration policies make it nearly impossible for them to get visas. Try raising a billion-dollar round when investors can’t predict what the government will do next week about taxes, tariffs, or regulations. Suddenly, the things they assumed were fixed, like the rule of law, fairness, and open markets, look less like constants and more like fragile variables.

“How did this happen?” they ask. “We were just building our business.”

Erin Gretzinger:

But the district hadn’t analyzed the correlation between safety-related data, such as incidents or school climate surveys, and the recommendations, Assistant Superintendent Cindy Green said.

“It depends on how you define safety, I think, but I think every day our schools work really hard,” Green said. “We have proactive teams in place. We have reactive teams in place. We have critical response teams in place to ensure that students are psychologically safe, physically safe.”

This year, the Madison Metropolitan School District updated its progress on dozens of completed recommendations. These initiatives seek to address a range of concerns, including a more clearly defined complaint procedure for student behavior, increased communication about procedures for school emergencies and a centralized district website on wellness.

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

WILL:

The News: WILL has filed a new lawsuit against Milwaukee County to end an unconstitutional carve out allowing Milwaukee County to withhold millions from Wisconsin’s Common School Fund. This fund, mandated by the Wisconsin Constitution, supports libraries in schools and communities across Wisconsin. Under a provision tucked away in the current state budget, Milwaukee County may take 100% of all traffic fines and forfeitures, while other counties must deposit most of this money into the Common School Fund. Milwaukee County is now the only county that benefits from this carve out in the state budget.

The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “The ‘Cream City Carve Out,’ is a flagrant and unconstitutional money grab by Milwaukee County, okayed by the last state budget. Our constitution requires these funds to go into the Common School Fund, and this budget provision is plainly unlawful. Library funding should be protected to ensure this vital resource continues to serve Wisconsinites for generations to come.”

WILL Client, Christine Stueland, stated, “As a taxpayer and library user, I know that every dollar matters. It’s frustrating to watch politicians in Madison give Milwaukee special treatment while others are shortchanged. If we don’t fight back for fairness and equal treatment for all, it will only get worse.”

Matt Taibbi:

It’s possible it’s coincidence that the IRS opened a case on me on Saturday, Christmas Eve, 2022, the same day as the Twitter Files story about the FBI/CIA, then visited my home exactly as I was testifying in Congress about the same thing. Could be unrelated, absolutely.

CARL HENDRICK

In the early 1980s, Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind(1983) was explicitly written as a rebuttal to the psychometric theory of intelligence. He wanted to challenge the idea that a single numerical score could capture human intellect. For Gardner, intelligence was plural and context-dependent; musical, spatial, interpersonal, and so on. On the surface, this appears to be a far kinder approach to childrens’ abilities than the cold, harsh instrumentalism of the psychometrician. But the problem is not that Gardner’s idea is unkind; it’s that it isn’t true.

Curiously, the most prominent critic of the theory is Gardner himself. Yesterday, I saw a clip of him make a startling admission about his own theory. He claimed that it may not be scientifically true, but that he believes it should remain influential nonetheless.

DAISY CHRISTODOULOU

My mum’s favourite TV show when she was a child was The Flowerpot Men.

As she tells it, she would sit in front of the TV watching the test card, waiting eagerly for the programme to start.

She would sit entranced for 15 minutes, and then it would end, the test card would come back on, and that was it for Bill & Ben until the next day.

That was the media environment of the early 1960s.

A few years ago I suggested to my mum that she might like to try out Duolingo. She has always wanted to learn another language and never got very far. I quite like Duolingo and thought she might too.1

After downloading it and trying it out she rang me up. “This app is AMAZING! I would have LOVED this as a child! But what I don’t understand is – it’s so good and so much fun – why aren’t all the kids on it all the time? Why aren’t they all fluent in ten languages?”

Because the kids today have more options than watching a ropey black-and-white puppet show.

Peter Edmunds:

Schools are not ready for this:

-Open homework in google chrome
-Right click and go to “search with google lens”
-Google lens pops up on the right side and answers the question

Massive implications for homework. This was an Isaac physics “A level challenge 2” question.

——

We asked teachers to try and spot AI-generated student responses to Carousel Learning quizzes.

Sean Salai

Students who entered Arkansas’ school voucher program rocketed by 157% in its second year, a new report shows.

Researchers from the University of Arkansas reported Tuesday that 14,256 students received state tax dollars to spend on private schools and other alternatives to public education during the 2024-25 academic year.

That’s up from 5,548 students who participated in the Education Freedom Accounts program during the 2023-24 term. The report noted that 91% of recipients have reenrolled for the current academic year as the program expands to reach

Bee:

I usually pride myself on being able to understand opposing views, even when I disagree. Plastic bag bans? Flawed but understandable. Central planning? I see the appeal despite the failures.

But the anti–G&T stance baffles me. Even highly egalitarian societies like the Soviet Union went out of their way to nurture talent in science, sports, and chess. They recognized the value of elevating the brightest minds.

Even if you’re a blank slater who believes ability is evenly distributed, and a pure egalitarian who sees any demographic imbalance as injustice, even then, why destroy programs that benefit some children? Ending G&T doesn’t help disadvantaged kids, it just removes an avenue for excellence.

This is one of the few mainstream policies I can’t understand from the other side. It strikes me as deeply wrong and disheartening to see it shaping education policy in one of America’s most important cities.

Kevin Kelly:

It is very probable we will discover that intelligence is likewise not a foundational singular element, but a derivative compound composed of multiple cognitive elements, combined in a complex system unique to each species of mind. The result that we call intelligence emerges from many different cognitive primitives such as long-term memory, spatial awareness, logical deduction, advance planning, pattern perception, and so on. There may be dozens of them, or hundreds. We currently don’t have any idea of what these elements are. We lack a periodic table of cognition.

The cognitive elements will more resemble the heavier elements in being unstable and dynamic. Or a better analogy would be to the elements in a biological cell. The primitives of cognition are flow states that appear in a thought cycle. They are like molecules in a cell which are in constant flux, shifting from one shape to another. Their molecular identity is related to their actions and interactions with other molecules. Thinking is a collective action that happens in time (like temperature in matter) and every mode can only be seen in relation to the other modes before and after it. It is a network phenomenon that makes it difficult to identify its borders. So each element of intelligence is embedded in a thought cycle, and requires the other elements as part of its identity. So each cognitive element is described in context of the other cognitive modes adjacent to it.

Families For New York:

A guest post by Professor Benjamin Solomon on the multiple omissions and inaccuracies in the newly released NY math briefs and why they should be withdrawn

Today I am sharing a guest post by Benjamin, an Associate Professor in School Psychology at the University of Albany, about what is wrong with the recently released New York math briefs and why NYSED should withdraw them. 

Below is a letter that Professor Solomon and others wrote to Commissioner Rosa. 

You can find the original letter with all the footnotes here. 

You can sign their petition to withdraw the Math Briefs here.

You can listen to his podcast with mathematician Dr. Anna Stokke talking about this issue here.

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2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Laura Powell

I’ve been examining public records related to the Des Moines Public Schools superintendent search, which was largely conducted behind closed doors.

This thread explores one aspect: consideration of input from the community on desired traits for the new superintendent. It focuses on the role of a new figure, who works nationally as an education consultant—in shaping the process. 🧵

——-

Federal immigration officials reported that the superintendent had received a deportation order in May 2024 and fled from immigration agents when they approached him on Friday.

Wiley Hodges:

The removal of ICEBlock without evidence of the government either providing a lawful basis for such a demand or following a legal process to effect its removal represents an erosion of this principled stance. Acceding to a government ‘demand’ without demanding that the government follow legal process in order to back up its request (or at least shedding light on how the government did follow such process) raises the question of how easily Apple will accede to other requests. Will Apple lower its general standards for law enforcement requests from those outlined at https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelines-us.pdf? Will Apple give data on the identities of users who downloaded the ICEBlock app to the government? Will Apple block podcasts that advocate points of view opposed to the current US administration? I imagine and hope that these are ridiculous questions, but without a clearer demonstration of Apple’s principled commitment to lawful action and due process, I feel uncertain.

Eugene Volokh:

[1.] There’s a lot going on in the Trump Administration’s proposed “Compact,” and there’s a lot that we might want to ask about it. Some questions would have to do with whether particular demands (such as a tuition freeze or a 15% cap on foreign students or mandatory U.S. civics classes for foreign students) are a good idea. Some might be and some might not be. Some might have to do with the way that the Compact would rebalance power between universities and the federal government.

Some might have to do with whether particular demands (for instance, the requirement that universities require all applicants to take standardized admission tests) should be implemented top-down on a one-size-fits-all basis. The federal government may have the power to impose certain conditions on the recipients of government funds, but that doesn’t mean that it necessarily should do so. This question of when conditions become excessive micromanagement perennially arises when it comes to government contracts and grants.

Some questions have to do with whether the Executive Branch can impose these conditions through just an announcement, whether this would require notice-and-comment regulatory rulemaking, or whether it would require express Congressional authorization. Similar questions have arisen in the past with regard to whether, for instance, Title IX should be understood to mandate university investigation of alleged sexual assault by students; whether it should be understood as mandating a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard in such situations rather than a clear-and-convincing-evidence; and other matters. In particular, the Compact seems to contemplate conditions on universities’ “preferential treatment under the tax code,” which I expect would likely require revisions to the tax code. But there too there have been controversies about where the Executive Branch has power to read provisions into tax exemption requirements that hadn’t been expressly authorized by Congress (see, e.g., Bob Jones Univ. v. U.S. (1983)).

Mia Hughes

In April 2007, millions of Americans tuned in to ABC’s 20/20 as Barbara Walters introduced the world to psychiatry’s most devastating creation: the “transgender child.” In a segment titled “My Secret Self,” Walters profiled three children—including a young Jazz Jennings—being raised as the opposite sex, explaining that they had been diagnosed with “gender identity disorder.”

The episode marks the moment the Western world lost its grip on reality. A brand-new type of human being had been conjured into existence through the collision of psychiatry, endocrinology, and political activism. Yet while the concept defied everything known about childhood development and identity formation, large swathes of society—almost overnight—began believing the unbelievable: that a child could be born in the wrong body.

John Paul Rathbone:

In fact, Boğaziçi’s elegant grounds are a crucible of Turkey’s culture wars, home to battles that encapsulate many of the country’s travails — and that mirror disputes in the US and Hungary, where Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán are also seeking to bring elite universities to heel.

The furore at Boğaziçi erupted in 2021 after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan mandated a loyalist to be its rector, and is set to come to a head again this week.

Although Turkey’s highest court ruled last year that such presidential appointments were unconstitutional, it made the decision on procedural grounds and new government legislation, which re-established the right, was rubber-stamped by parliament in June.

This has cleared the way for Erdoğan to again name a new rector when the current appointee’s term expires on Wednesday.

“We call it the authoritarian tool kit for a reason,” said Lisel Hintz, a Turkey specialist at Johns Hopkins University. “Boğaziçi is a target as it is one of Turkey’s most prestigious public universities . . . The government has long sought to weaken and reconfigure institutions they have viewed as obstacles.”

Karen Vaites & Kelsey Piper:

No. The skeptics are wrong. The Southern Surge is real.

The most important story in K-12 education is that a handful of states — and not the ones most expect — have figured out the tricky business of teaching kids to read. Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama have each bucked national trends by using a common approach and, in so doing, they have revealed the literacy playbook for even cash-strapped states in the Deep South. No excuses, California.

That story was everywhere last week, thanks to Kelsey Piper’s article here at The Argument, “Illiteracy is a policy choice.” In it, she took the media and elected officials to task for underplaying the trend. But the tide is swiftly turning: Last week, The Boston Globedeclared that “New England Schools Are Failing” and that “the ‘Southern Surge’ should be a wake-up call.” The same day, Rahm Emanuel called for an “education reset,” saying these Southern state reforms should become “the meat and potatoes of Democrats’ education agenda.”

But not everyone sees these trends in the data as a path forward for pushing schools to take reading seriously. Freddie deBoer, the left leaning author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, published a fervent critique of Kelsey’s piece on his Substack. He closed with a challenge. “We’ll see if The Argument, a magazine seemingly founded on the premise that liberal good vibes can overcome every inconvenient fact and complication, will engage with this kind of criticism.”

———

more.

———

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Erin Gretzinger:

The school district reached out to external partners to help more families access 4K programming, Gothard said at a Madison Public Schools Foundation event in late September.

“We want to be somewhat agnostic about this,” Gothard said. “This is truly about children and … making sure our youngest learners have the best opportunities for education, kindergarten success and beyond through our 4K community.”

——-

Notes on Madison’s 4K program and achievement….

Chris Rickert:

The Middleton-Cross Plains School District will no longer ask students in a civics class to declare a political party affiliation as part of an assignment, following criticism from the conservative group Moms for Liberty.

In a post on the social media platform X on Thursday, Moms for Liberty claimed a female student in the class “was ordered to write her full name on a square in the high school hallway and publicly declare herself as Republican, Democrat, or Independent.”

A photo accompanying the post shows blue, red and purple sticky notes affixed to a hallway display that is supposed to represent the political spectrum, with students who lean more liberal putting up blue notes at the left and students who lean more conservative posting red notes at the right.

Douglas Hofstader

When you engage in “ambigrammia” (the act or art of producing an ambigram), you are not so much creating something new as discovering something old—or rather, something timeless, something that already (sort of) existed, something that could have been found by someone else, at least in principle. Ambigrammia is thus neither fish nor fowl, in that it floats somewhere between creation and discovery.

Rob Henderson:

Throughout my experiences traveling along the class ladder, I made a discovery:

Luxury beliefs have, to a large extent, replaced luxury goods.  

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

In 1899, the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen published a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Drawing on observations about social class in the late nineteenth century, Veblen’s key idea is that because we can’t be certain about the financial status of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford expensive goods and leisurely activities.

This explains why status symbols are so difficult to obtain and costly to purchase.

In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing like tuxedos, top hats, and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities like golf or beagling.

These goods and leisurely activities could only be purchased or performed by people who did not work as manual laborers and could spend their time and money learning something with no practical utility.

Veblen even goes so far as to say, “The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay.” For Veblen, butlers are status symbols, too.

John Gramlach:

Today, 43% of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society. That’s up from 34% in 2022. And 40% of adults now say it’s a bad thing for sports, up from 33%.

Despite these increasingly critical views of legal sports betting, many Americans continue to say it has neither a bad nor good impact on society and on sports. Fewer than one-in-five see positive impacts.

Despite these increasingly critical views of legal sports betting, many Americans continue to say it has neither a bad nor good impact on society and on sports. Fewer than one-in-five see positive impacts.

Joshua Chaffin:

While the mainstream Democratic Party’s popularity has sunk to a 30-year low, according to one poll, and its leadership appears uncertain of how to oppose Trump, the far left seems vigorous—particularly among the young. A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that 62% of Americans ages 18 to 29 hold a “favorable view” of socialism—something that would have been unimaginable to Cold War generations.

Some are venturing even further left.

On a recent evening, 15 comrades from the Northwest Philadelphia cell of the Revolutionary Communists of America gathered for their weekly meeting in a classroom at Thomas Jefferson University.

Tiffany Hoben:

It’s worth noting that Mississippi made massive improvements in the lowest-performing groups with one of the smallest per-pupil expenditures in the nation.

Daisy Christodoulou:

Let’s imagine a thought experiment where we can take Duolingo back in time to the 1960s – but no other modern technology or entertainment. Just Duolingo. I think then that probably every kid in 1960s Britain would have completed ten languages by the time they were 12. It would have been more entertaining, more addictive and more exciting than any kids’ media product of the 1960s.

But of course, that is not how it works. Modern technology is not restricted to Duolingo, or to learning apps. It is used to create a whole range of entertainment products.

Most of these entertainment products are trying to do just one thing: hold the user’s attention.

Teachers and educational apps are also trying to hold their students’ attention. But they are trying to do another thing too: they want their students to learn.

This basic dynamic is why, in a straight fight with an entertainment product, teachers and education apps will always lose out. The entertainers are optimising for one parameter, and the educators are optimising for two.

However much fun you make learning, someone else will use the same techniques minus the constraint of learning. You are in an arms race where you have one arm tied behind your back. Your rival can use all the techniques you can, plus several more that you can’t.

Olivia George:

D.C. police officers are feeding information to the Justice Department as it probes accusations of manipulated crime data, according to the D.C. Police Union and five other people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an investigation in progress.The voluntary cooperation of about three dozen from the police force, according to three of the people, reflects long-standing frustrations about how violent crime is categorized by supervisors — and surfaces as public safety in D.C. continues to capture the president’s attention.

The comments reflect skepticism and concern over allegations that D.C. police supervisors have manipulated crime data to make districts appear safer. Many commenters express distrust in the accuracy of reported crime statistics, suggesting that crimes are being downgraded or… Show more

Tyler Austin Harper:

A joke, but not entirely. For as long as I can remember, and certainly much longer than that, the University of Chicago has been widely viewed as the destination for humanities students and scholars. Some other elite schools might have the coveted Ivy League branding, or a few more famous faculty members, or a couple more dollars to tack onto the salaries of its professors and graduate students. But perhaps nowhere is the study of literature, philosophy, the arts, and languages more valued, their spirit more authentically preserved, their frontiers more doggedly pursued, than at Chicago. The university has had several household names on its humanities faculty, including the firebrand critic Allan Bloom, the novelist Saul Bellow, and the ethicist Martha Nussbaum, as well as scholars who may be less well known to the general public but whose work has been deeply influential in their fields, including the brilliant literary critic Sianne Ngai and Fred Donner, the pathbreaking and Guggenheim-winning historian of early Islam. In short, Chicago is a place for scholars’ scholars. At least, that’s the reputation. And Chicago’s reputation is no doubt why, when the university announced recently that it was reducing Ph.D. admissions for seven departments—among them art history and English language and literature—and outright freezing admissions to others, including classics, the decision was met, in some quarters, with fury and disbelief. “Chicago!” as one stunned academic friend put it in a text to me.

Hugo Chiasson:

FIRE might have raised our score — but speech on campus still smells like smoke.

This year, Harvard accomplished the enviable feat of rising from last to 13th-to-last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings. The shift might seem like cause for celebration — but the threats to free speech on our campus loom large.

Yes, Harvard moved up from dead last — but flawed rankings can’t hide the chilling wind blowing against free speech. The University’s recent crackdowns and program suspensions, paired with a federal campaign to police campus speech and DEI, are narrowing the bounds of debate.

It is no secret FIRE’s methodology is imperfect. For one, the rankings are biased against large schools with more media attention — one metric used by FIRE is the absolute number of speakers shouted down on campus, for example. The rankings were also based in part on survey data with a relatively small sample size — in Harvard’s case, 411 for a school of about 24,000. Moreover, the rankings exclude so-called “warning” schools that “do not promise free speech rights, marking Harvard’s previous position at the bottom of the list as a bit of a misnomer.

Harvard’s speech climate rests on two pillars: student culture and University policy. For a time, Harvard undertook measures we applauded for their ability to improve Harvard’s speech climate. In light of those positive moves we called on students to cultivate an environment of respectful disagreement.

Dave Huber:

This is just what the Harvard student paper, The Crimson, wants you to do (again): “Trust it.”

Three years ago the paper tried to snow us, saying “while it did favor ‘debate and discourse’ which are ‘central to a vibrant intellectual community’ and the ‘lifeblood of academia,’” it doesn’t mean Harvard needed more conservative faculty.

“We find little reason to believe” more right-leaning professors “would increase productive disagreement in any meaningful way,” the editors wrote. Because hey — “liberal professors can disagree.”

Most recently, Crimson Editorial Editor Henry Haidar says the faculty ideological disparity is “not necessarily a bad thing”; after all, he’s “never had a professor attempt to foist their political views onto” a class. (How very Pauline Kael. But at least she was aware of the social circle she inhabited.)

Preston Cooper:

If there was an era we might call “peak higher education,” it was right after the Great Recession. Unemployment spiked, especially among younger people. Those who couldn’t find work, or who wanted to advance their careers at a time when promotions were scarce, turned to higher education for a leg up. Millions took the opportunity to attend college or go back to complete their degrees rather than take their chances in a weak labor market.

As the economy cratered, Congress obliged the swelling demand for higher education with more funding. Higher student loan limits, heftier Pell Grants, and the new American Opportunity Tax Credit all fueled the college craze. Leaders offered moral encouragement as well. In 2009, President Barack Obama set a goal of making the United States the most-educated nation in the world. And who can forget Michelle Obama’s infamous “you should go to college” rap video?

Wall Street Journal:

The Defense Department is expected to announce shortly that the country’s service academies, including West Point, will soon welcome applicants to submit their scores on the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, a standardized exam alternative to the duopoly of the SAT and ACT. The CLT “will be accepted beginning in February 2026,” the West Point admissions website says.

The CLT was founded in 2015 and pitches itself as a standardized test rooted in the Western tradition. The reading passages draw from names such as Thucydides, Maimonides, Kant, Dickens and Orwell, and text excerpts can run 500 to 750 words. (The College Board, which runs the SAT, says its “passages in the Reading and Writing section range from 25 to 150 words.”) The CLT’s math portion doesn’t permit calculators. One example test gives this question: “If y^z=x and 8z=xy, then what is x+y+z if y is half the value of z?”

The CLT says it is accepted at more than 300 colleges, many of them Christian or private schools, but the company behind the test has also made headway elsewhere. Florida opened all its public universities to applicants with CLT scores in 2023, and Arkansas did the same this year. The classic test’s organizers say in 2024 it was administered 184,000 times.

Whether the CLT continues to spread will depend on its ability to compete, by making college applicants stand out while helping admissions officers decide which prospective students are likely to find academic success on campus. Will West Point and the University of Florida decide the CLT appeals to a different applicant pool or is otherwise useful in separating the brightest and the best?

Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe:

Francis Bacon dreamed of abolishing disease, natural disasters, and chance itself. He also dreamed of abolishing God. Bacon hid this latter dream in New Atlantis (1626), a posthumous novella that may be read as a map for modernity, a book of prophecies, or a grimoire. New Atlantisbegan a secret literary debate, one later taken up by Jonathan Swift, Alan Moore, and Eiichiro Oda. Across four centuries, these writers wondered: Will science summon or suppress the Antichrist?

On the surface, Bacon presented modern ­science as wholly compatible with Christianity. He wrote in Novum Organum that “nature unveils her secrets only under the torture of experimentation,” a slightly more violent articulation of God’s instruction to “have dominion over . . . every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). Bacon quoted scripture with such fluency and erudition that few question his faith today. He presented his plan to unveil nature’s secrets by means of empirical experimentation and inductive reasoning as a continuation of God’s revelation, endowing us with “new mercies” to relieve our estate.

Helen Andrews:

“The feminization of the academy has been a total disaster, okay? Because what it has meant is that the values of the nursery and the kindergarten have now been elevated to the paramount considerations and the old traditional and traditionally mascu- line values of truth-seeking, of argumentation, of reason, evidence and objectivity have been downgraded.”20

My NatCon speech on the Great Feminization is up to 28K views in one week, by the way. I’m pleasantly surprised by the positive reception and grateful to the many writers and anons whose work on feminization I was able to draw on.

Charles Murray:

I don’t watch videos of speeches for the same reason I don’t listen to podcasts: I can read a transcript much faster and few speakers are more engaging than their texts.

I just watched The Great Feminization all the way through. I had been vaguely aware of the ideas behind it, but I will recast much of my understanding of events of the last few decades because @herandrews logic and presentation are so compelling. Brava.

More.

Louise Eccles:

At Caldicot School, near Newport in south Wales, parents of unruly pupils are asked to sit at the back of the classroom to witness their children’s behaviour. If it sounds excruciatingly embarrassing for the teenager, it is intended to be.

Yet the tactics used by the head teacher, Alun Ebenezer — once dubbed the “headmaster from hell” for his tough discipline — appear to be working. 

Since he took over the struggling 1,300-pupil school in June last year and introduced new rules such as weekend detentions, GCSE grades have improved, attendance is up and exclusions are down.

In October 2023, behaviour was so out of control that teachers staged walkouts and a list was handed to management with the names of pupils some staff saidthey refused to teach. As many as 100 truanting pupils were said to wander the corridors during lessons.

Ebenezer, 50, was brought in to turn it round and, in one of his first acts, clamped down on school uniform infringements, excluding children from lessons who refused to comply with the policy. This attracted the ire of parents: one mother complained to local media that her daughter had been kept in a “holding pen” in school over the length of her skirt, before being sent home.

Joel Kotkin:

Yet whatever you think of Trump’s over-the-top move, Portland probably had it coming. No city better epitomises the increasingly radical spirit of the progressive Left. This has devastated its once vibrant downtown; liberal long-time Congressman for the area, Earl Blumenauer, has suggested that parts of it look “like Dresden in World War II”. In 2023, downtown Portland suffered the highest office vacancy rate in the nation.

This year that honour goes to Seattle, which suffers from many of the same pathologies. These cities are increasingly out of sync with the more conservative mood in the country.

James Marriott: 

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. 

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

Sydney Shapiro & Joseph Tomain:

As our book documents, for example, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the states expanded public education to include high school to meet the increasing demand for a more educated citizenry as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And the GI Bill made it possible for returning veterans to earn college degrees or train for vocations, support young families and buy homes, farms or businesses, and it encouraged them to become more engaged citizens, making “U.S. democracy more vibrant in the middle of the twentieth century.”

The other, equally significant lesson is that the democratic and republican principals that propelled Mann’s vision of the common school have colored many Americans’ assumptions about public schooling ever since. Mann’s goal was a “virtuous republican citizenry” – that is, a citizenry educated in “good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being.” 

Mann believed there was nothing more important than “the proper training of the rising generation,” calling it the country’s “highest earthly duty.”

Matt Barnum:

Public school leaders in Arizona recently convened a summit to combat an existential crisis.

Across the state, enrollments at district public schools are falling. Last month, superintendents gathered in Phoenix at the “Traditional Public Schools Messaging Summit” to strategize ways to improve the perception of public education. The goal: woo families and bolster political support.

In an opening brainstorming session, educators shouted out benefits of public schooling. “We welcome all!” said one person. “We represent the community,” added another. There are “comprehensive choices” in public education, chimed in a third.

Arizona is at the leading edge of a reckoning in public education. Nationwide, declining birthrates and rising competition—from alternatives like charter schools, private education and home schooling—have eroded student bodies at the regular neighborhood schools that generations of Americans attended.

The number of U.S. first-graders in public schools in 2023, the most recent year available, was the smallest since the early 1990s (excluding one pandemic-disrupted year), according to federal data. Twenty-one percent of children didn’t attend a traditional public school in 2023, up from 17% in 2019, according to a Brookings Institution report.

Mitchell Schmidt:

The case for it

Advocates for ranked-choice voting say the process could open the door to more viable third-party candidates, while also forcing major-party candidates to moderate their views and court voters from across the political spectrum.

Such a system could also benefit candidates in partisan primaries, which are often decided by a smaller, typically more partisan group of voters who choose which candidate to send to the general election.

After the primary, statewide candidates tend to shift back toward the middle in the November general election to appeal to a broader cross-section of voters.

The case against it

Opponents of ranked-choice voting say adopting such a system would be costly and has the potential to confuse voters. Critics, who have largely been Republicans, also argue the process is too complicated and could be abused by voters who want to game the system.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission does not give opinions on specific legislation, but the agency did note in 2023 that proposed legislation to implement Final Five voting in Wisconsin would “be costly and take significant time to accomplish.”