School Information System

Derek Muller:

Back in March 2025, I wrote about the LSAT’s predictive value in law school admissions. I argued that while it remains useful, it is less valuable today than it was twenty years ago (even though many admissions practices still treat it as equally predictive).

And in June 2025, I wrote about what we know, and what we don’t, about accommodations in law school exams.

I wanted to dig into one of the empirical literature’s central claims—how time-related accommodations affect the LSAT’s predictive value—and what that might reveal (or obscure) about legal education.

Data from LSAC shows that time accommodated test-takers receive higher scores than non-accommodated test-takers, around four to five points. Most accommodations for test-takers translate into LSAT scores that predict law school success as accurately as for non-accommodated test-takers. For instance, a visually-impaired person receiving large-print materials will receive a score that fairly accurately predicts law school success. There is an exception, however, for time accommodations, and LSAT scores tend to overpredict law school success when there are time accommodations. Requests for additional time have increased dramatically over the years, from around 6000 granted requests in 2018-2019 to around 15,000 granted requests in 2022-2023.

Imagine two entering students, similarly situated in all material respects (e.g., GPA, etc.), and with identical LSAT scores. One received a 165 with a time accommodation; the other received a 165 without one. The time-accommodated score would probably be a 160 or 161 without the time accommodation.

LSAC data suggests that the time accommodated score overpredicts law school GPA. That is, despite receiving what appears to be a 165, it functions as something lower.

Jeonghyun Kim and Cory Koedel:

Grades at American universities have been rising for decades, a trend that accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But what happened after that? Using new data collected through the 2023-24 school year, we can see how grades continue to evolve. The Covid spike in grades corrected in the two years immediately after the pandemic, but the drop in grades was short-lived — the decades-long upward trajectory resumed thereafter.

We looked at average grades in all freshman-level undergraduate courses from 2011-12 to 2023-24 at eight large public universities: Kent State University, Missouri State University, Northern Arizona University, Texas A&M University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Missouri at Columbia, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (These institutions post their grade distributions online.) While all of these are large universities, they range from not selective to highly selective, meaning grading in this sample likely reflects university grading more broadly.

Below we graph overall grade trends as well as separate trends in the following fields: business and economics, social sciences and humanities, and math-intensive STEM, which excludes biology.

The overall trend shows steady increases through the 2010s, culminating in a sharp spike in 2020. The average freshman-level course grade rose from just above 3.0 in 2012 (a B) to 3.3 by 2020 (a B+). After corrections in 2021 and 2022, the trend turned upward again in 2023, resuming its pre-pandemic trajectory.

The same pattern — a pandemic spike, followed by a post-pandemic correction and then the resumption of grade inflation — is apparent across fields, with the exception of business and economics, which reverted to its 2016-19 flatter trend. (Still, grades rose rapidly in business and economics in the early 2010s.)

More:

Ada Palmer:

Employment is in chaos. Tariffs are battering global supply chains. The tech companies behind large language models (LLMs) say their products will soon automate away huge swaths of jobs, replacing occupations that have existed for decades (like programming) or millennia (writing, child care) with unprecedented new jobs overseeing automated work — jobs whose skill needs no one can predict. If the generative AI geese do lay these golden eggs for investors, we may face unemployment on a scale to rival the industrial revolution. If they don’t, some already fear a tech-stock crash to rival 1929. Either way, the promises of LLMs are already 

Becky Ferreira:

Of all the classic blunders, the most famous is getting involved in a land war in Asia (source: The Princess Bride). Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops learned this lesson the hard way during their disastrous retreat from Moscow at the wintry tail of 1812, which claimed the lives of 300,000 soldiers—more than half of the French army—largely from exposure and disease.

While the epic death toll has been notorious for centuries, the exact pathogens responsible for the losses have remained a matter of debate. Contemporaneous reports from the field suggested that typhus and trench fever commonly afflicted the army. But when scientists sequenced DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers, they did not find the bacteria that causes those diseases.

Instead, the results revealed the presence of “previously unsuspected pathogens” that suggest paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever were major killers during the mad rush from Moscow, according to a new study.

Mailee Smith:

The Chicago Teachers Union’s annual reporting with the U.S. Department of Labor shows it has been paying accountants to conduct its audits.

But it hasn’t released those “annual” audits in over five years.

CTU is required by its own internal rules to provide an audit of its finances every year. But it hasn’t done so since Sept. 9, 2020.

The union reported to the U.S. Department of Labor that it did have an outside auditor conduct an audit in 2025 and that the cost totaled nearly $80,000.

Robert Thornett:

For over 75 years, geography departments have been nearly nonexistent at so-called elite colleges in the United States. Most Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford and the University of Chicago, once had geography departments. Now, the only one with a geography department is Dartmouth. Having taught college geography for over eight years, I can attest that most American college students never take a geography course. They graduate without ever having to demonstrate that they know anything about the physical or cultural landscapes of other countries, let alone their own.

American geographic education took a massive step backward in the wake of World War II, when Harvard shut down its geography department in 1948 and most other U.S. colleges with geography departments followed suit. But while geography went out of style among the elites, since the 1980s it has made a major resurgence, especially in the land-grant universities, where greater emphases on energy, agriculture, and natural-resource management provide a demand for geographic knowledge.

New York Focus:

Governor Hochul vetoed a measure to speed up New York’s public records process, which is among the slowest in the nation. We asked our reporters about their most protracted records requests.

When Kathy Hochul took over as governor in 2021, she promised a more transparent, more responsive state government. In her first major speech as chief executive, she vowed to usher in a “new era of transparency,” including by facilitating an “expedited process” to more promptly fulfill public records requests under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

It was a niche topic for a debut speech, but important for government accountability: FOIL, which allows members of the public to request unpublished records from state and local government agencies, is one the main ways that journalists, advocates, and other watchdogs ensure that New York officials don’t evade public scrutiny. Each state has a version of the law, but New York is among the slowest to fulfill requests.

Four years later, Hochul has pursued some transparency initiatives, — but still hasn’t come through on her promise to expedite New York’s notoriously slow FOIL system. This year, the state legislature tried to pick up the slack, passing a bill that would tighten the deadlines that agencies must meet in responding to FOIL requests — but this month, Hochul vetoed it.

Joanne Jacob’s summary:

We know what schools need to do to improve learning, writes Mike Schmoker, the author of Results Now 2.0. He lists three practices proven to be effective:

• The faithful implementation of a clear, sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum
• Daily engagement in liberal amounts of purposeful reading, discussion, and writing across the curriculum
• The routine (though not exclusive) use of explicit, step by step instruction — where each lesson has a clear goal and the teacher frequently “checks for understanding” — and re-teaches when students struggle

Schools that do these things get excellent results, Schmoker writes. Yet many teachers have been told in training and professional development sessions that knowledge is unimportant and explicit instruction is outmoded.

“Actual teaching has been overtaken by staggering amounts of group activity, worksheets and screen time,” he writes. The culture of teacher training is dominated by “whims, fads, opportunism, and ideology.”

WILL:

Additional Background: The initial lawsuit involved a defamation claim for run-of-the-mill social media posts on X and Facebook. The posts in question criticized a school district for having a “social justice coordinator,” and described people who hold such positions as “woke,” “white savior[s]” with a “god complex,” “woke lunatics,” and “bullies.” Statements like these are pervasive on social media; indeed, they were more restrained than a lot of online speech. Nevertheless, the Plaintiff, who previously held the position, chose to respond with a defamation lawsuit, and the trial court allowed the claims to go to trial. 

WILL stepped in to file an early appeal to avoid a costly and non-sensical defamation trial for First Amendment protected speech. We argued, and the Court agreed, that for statements to be actionable for defamation, they must be “provably false.” See Milkovich v. Lorain J. Co., 497 U.S. 1, 20 (1990). That is, a comment must directly state or clearly imply an objective, binary truth claim that listeners would reasonably understand to be either true or false. As courts have recognized, firm adherence to this principle is critical to protecting free speech.  

 Courts have regularly held that nebulous concepts like “woke” and “bully” that are routinely and indiscriminately thrown about in public discourse are not actionable precisely because their meaning depends on one’s opinion and viewpoint. As the court noted in this case, “Johnson’s statements cannot be proven true or false.”

Will Oremus and Faiz Siddiqui:

Elon Musk on Monday launched an early version of Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia written by AI, only for the site to stop working soon after.

The project, which the billionaire has touted as a less biased alternative to the venerable online resource Wikipedia, was visible to the public for about an hour before it began blocking visitors. Musk and his social media company, X, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

When it first went live Monday afternoon, the site resembled Wikipedia in style and format, with articles on topics such as ChatGPT, Diane Keaton and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But it appeared significantly smaller, more opaque in its workings — and more right-leaning in how it framed some articles.

Grokipedia’s entry on gender, for instance, began with the sentence: “Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex….” Wikipedia’s starts with: “Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.”

Musk’s own Grokipedia entry differed strikingly from the Wikipedia page on the same subject. It described some of his pursuits in breathless terms, saying his pushes for artificial intelligence “emphasize AI safety through truth-oriented development rather than heavy regulation” and that certain releases “releases reflect xAI’s rapid iteration, with Musk highlighting Grok’s design for maximal truth-seeking and reduced censorship,” citing xAI’s own website to make that point.

Anna Stokke:

This is a mistake, but may take time to work out. 🔥Despite that, it’s still outperforming every episode in terms of daily downloads! In the meantime, please follow Chalk & Talk on YouTube 👉

Anna Stokke:

This is a mistake, but may take time to work out. 🔥Despite that, it’s still outperforming every episode in terms of daily downloads! In the meantime, please follow Chalk & Talk on YouTube 👉

Chad Aldeman:

My favorite paper on this comes from Dan Goldhaber, Malcolm Wolff, and Tim Daly, who looked at how accurate early measures of achievement are in predicting longer-term academic outcomes. In a 2021 paper, they used data from North Carolina, Massachusetts and Washington State and found, “consistent and very strong relationships between 3rd grade test scores and high school tests, advanced course-taking, and graduation.”

The signals are strong enough by 3rd grade that educators and policymakers should act on them. Goldhaber’s team concluded that, “early student struggles on state tests are a credible warning signal for schools and systems that make the case for additional academic support in the near term, as opposed to assuming that additional years of instruction are likely to change a student’s trajectory. Educators and families should take 3rd grade test results seriously and respond accordingly; while they may not be determinative, they provide a strong indication of the path a student is on.”

Unfortunately, math gaps start to show up almost immediately in state testing data. To help visualize this issue, I created the interactive tool below. Users can click on a state to see its average math proficiency rates in grades 3-8. In states that make the data available, users can also sort by specific student groups. The data come via AssessmentHQ.org, which pulls directly from state websites.

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Anna Stokke:

In the flavour of @ChadAldeman: if your child is behind in math DO. NOT. WAIT. ⚠️Even parents who have strong math backgrounds have told me they trusted the school to do its job, only to find their kid struggling in middle school b/c there was no urgency to teach math well.
Math is cumulative. It’s relentlessly hierarchical. When students get behind it snowballs. ⛄
What to look for?

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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!)

Math Forum 2007

Samuel A. Church and Cam N. Srivastava:

More Harvard College students than ever are passing their classes with flying colors, but the College’s evaluation system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading,” according to a report released by the Office of Undergraduate Education on Monday.

The 25- page report, which was sent to faculty and Harvard College students on Monday, found that more than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are A’s, compared to only a quarter of grades two decades ago. It concluded that Harvard’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

In the 25-page report, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh argued that the rising share of A grades necessitates reforms to “restore the integrity of our grading and return the academic culture of the College to what it was in the recent past.”

A faculty committee is exploring whether instructors should be able to award a limited number of A+ grades to undergraduates to crack down on grade inflation, according to the report. The highest grade undergraduates can currently receive is an A. The committee is also considering a proposal to include the median grade for every course on a student’s transcript.

Concern over high grades at Harvard is not new. Two years ago, Claybaugh presented a report to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences calling attention to skyrocketing undergraduate marks. A faculty committee concluded in January that undergraduates frequently prioritize other commitments over their classes.

more.

Authors (in alphabetical order by last name): Horacio Alvarez-Marinelli, Izzy Boggild-Jones,Michael Crawford, Margaret “Peggy” Dubeck, Dhir Jhingran, Christopher Lack, NompumeleloMohohlwane, Maria Eugenia Oviedo, Benjamin Piper, Jaime Saavedra and Hanada Taha:

One of the primary causes of this literacy crisis is the failure to use instructional methods proven by research. Many education systems continue to use outdated approaches that research has shown to be ineffective or lack clear guidance on how to teach reading effectively. Other factors that contribute to poor reading outcomes include insufficient books, inadequate teacher training and ongoing professional development, high absenteeism, limited class time, instruction in unfamiliar languages, and teaching that doesn’t match children’s learning levels—all compounded by a broader failure to adopt science-based reading practices.

Fortunately, scientific research now provides clear guidance on how children learn to read and how to teach them effectively. Reading is one of the most extensively studied areas of human learning, with over a century of research. While early research focused primarily on English-speaking, high-income countries, the research base has expanded significantly. This report synthesizes the growing
research from LMICs, reviewing more than 120 studies on effective reading instruction conducted across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and covering more than 173 different languages. This expanded evidence confirms that certain fundamental principles of effective reading instruction are universal, though specific aspects of instruction can be adapted to different languages and cultural contexts.

This research shows that reading with comprehension is a complex process that relies on multiple, interconnected skills. These skills can be grouped into two broad domains: decoding and language comprehension. Decoding is the ability to recognize written symbols (e.g., letters) and convert them into the sounds they represent to recognize words. Language comprehension involves understanding what those words, sentences, and texts actually mean. Both decoding and language comprehension skills are essential and work together when children read: without decoding skills, children cannot recognize words; without language comprehension, they cannot grasp their meaning (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). Effective reading instruction must develop both skill areas simultaneously. These foundations start in the early years, at home or in formal early childhood education, and become the focus of the primary grades.

more.

Jill Barshay::

“American children are being prevented from doing better in reading by a longstanding commitment to a pedagogical theory that insists students are best taught with books they can already read,” Shanahan writes in his book. “Reading is so often taught in small groups — not so teachers can guide efforts to negotiate difficult books, but to ensure the books are easy enough that not much guidance is needed.”

Comprehension, he says, doesn’t grow that way.

The trouble with leveled reading

Grouping students by ability and assigning easier or harder books — a practice known as leveled reading — remains deeply embedded in U.S. schools. A 2018 Thomas B. Fordham Institute survey found that 62 percent of upper elementary teachers and more than half of middle school teachers teach at students’ reading level rather than at grade level.  

That may sound sensible, but Shanahan says it’s not helping anyone and is even leading teachers to dispense with reading altogether. “In social studies and science, and these days, even in English classes,” he said in an interview, “teachers either don’t assign any readings or they read the texts to the students.” Struggling readers aren’t being given the chance — or the tools — to tackle complex material on their own.

Katya Shwenk:

The five-year contract with government technology middleman Carahsoft Technology, made public in September, provides Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) licenses for a product called Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring platform used by the Israeli military and the Pentagon.

An informational pamphlet marked confidential but publicly available online advertises that Zignal Labs “leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning” to analyze over eight billion social media posts per day, providing “curated detection feeds” for its clients. The information, the company says, allows law enforcement to “detect and respond to threats with greater clarity and speed.”

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has in the past procured Zignal licenses for the US Secret Service, signing its first contract for the software in 2019. The company also has contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation.

Matt Bruenig:

country with a huge amount of poverty and inequality owing to the fact that a large share of unemployed, elderly, and disabled people receive little to no income. Then that country creates unemployment, disability, and old-age benefit schemes funded by taxes on labor. As a result of these new schemes, poverty and inequality plummet. Was this inequality reduction achieved by welfare state redistribution or by pretax predistribution? Based on normal understandings, clearly the former. Yet Blanchet, Mogstad and, by endorsement, Lazardi use odd accounting specifications to say it’s the latter.

Regarding (b), this is just factually false. In the United States at least, state and federal income taxes are assessed net of employer-side payroll taxes but not net of employee-side payroll taxes. Blanchet’s decision is also clearly not a quirk of payroll tax administration. As I noted in my piece, in Denmark, which has no payroll tax, Blanchet actually takes some of Denmark’s income tax and declares it to be a social insurance contribution as part of his accounting exercise.

Not counting employer-side payroll taxes as redistribution is also obviously indefensible. In Sweden, those taxes are 31.42 percent of gross pay, which is effectively a 23.9 percent flat tax, on all labor income with no cap. In the United States, the same taxes are 7.65 percent of gross pay, which is effectively a 7.1 percent tax, on all labor income up to $176,100 of income. For labor income beyond $176,100, the tax falls to 1.45 percent of gross pay, which is effectively 1.43 percent. Baking these taxes into your pretax/market/predistribution baseline, as Blanchet does, makes it so that the inequality reduction achieved by Sweden’s much more aggressive tax approach is not counted as redistribution at all.

Put differently, if the United States tripled the employer-side payroll tax while eliminating the cap so the higher tax applied to all income, Blanchet’s specification would score the resulting inequality reduction as “predistribution.”

Kat Rosenfield:

Despite what you may have heard on the website formerly known as Twitter, I do not like the thesis currently known as The Great Feminization. I did not hold hands with the thesis underneath the bleachers after school, I will not be attending prom with the thesis, please don’t put it in the newspaper, etc, etc. (You can put it in the newspaper that I got mad at the person who put that in the newspaper; more on that later.)

What do I think about the Great Feminization thesis, I don’t know. Or, to put it another way: lots of thoughts, some only halfway coherent, and many in active contradiction to each other. I keep tripping right off the bat over the word feminization, which on one hand clearly describes something real but on the other hand seems to get people’s backs up in a way that makes a productive discussion impossible, which is a problem. If you can’t have a conversation about your theory without thirty minutes of preemptive throat clearing about how the term you’ve coined to describe feminized cultural norms does not amount to an attack on women as a category, perhaps it would be easier to just choose a different word. (I say this, but then there’s a part of me that immediately wants to retort that no, it would not be easier— and furthermore, that it’s hard to imagine a more feminized endeavor than quibbling over the language used to describe an idea to the point where the idea itself never gets discussed at all.)

Anyway: Where I probably disagree most with Andrews, or at least am not persuaded, is on the notion that feminization is the downstream effect of having more females in any given environment. It seems clear that the phenomenon known as feminization can happen independent of the presence of women (which is why, again, if we need a name for this thing we should maybe call it something else). It’s correlation rather than causation: not to be all “men be dancing like this”, but some traits and skills are more commonly associated with women than men, and these do happen to be the traits and skills that correlate with success in the attention and information economies of the current moment.

Stanford Report:

The Faculty Senate’s power to condemn or rebuke has been under considerable debate for the last couple of years following a 2020 censure of a Hoover Institution fellow.

The Faculty Senate decided that it does not have the power to condemn or rebuke individuals, while clarifying that it retains the right to a no-confidence vote on senior leadership during its Thursday meeting.

The vote followed years of debate and review stemming from the senate’s 2020 censure of Scott Atlas, a Hoover Institution fellow who advised President Trump on COVID-19 policy. That censure raised broader questions about academic freedom, due process, and the senate’s role in formal condemnation or rebuke.

As senators revisited the issue, many agreed that the body needed to clarify its authority.

In voting to approve the motion, some senators emphasized the importance of institutional neutrality, warned against chilling debate, or noted that existing mechanisms already allow for faculty discipline and individual expression.

“I view our values of academic freedom and diversity of thought as being paramount to how we come together as a university, and when we disagree with one another, which we should do frequently and vigorously, then we respond by arguing with one another and by educating our students, our peers, and potentially the public,” said Sarah Heilshorn, the Rickey/Nielsen Professor in the School of Engineering and professor, by courtesy, of bioengineering and of chemical engineering.

Corrinne Hess:

….. a bill will be introduced soon that will include math screeners to provide testing and individualized plans to help struggling students catch up. 

“This bill is not going to be the full solution to the problem, but I think it’s going to be a very good first step in addressing a very serious problem,” Kitchens said. 

Act 20 was a bipartisan effort, but implementation wasn’t easy and a fight over funding made its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. 

Recognizing this, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm that has become more involved in education issues over the last several years, has decided to take on math reform itself. 

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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!)

Math Forum 2007

Corey A. DeAngelis

Failure gets rewarded when it comes to government unions. Look no further than Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). She was just unanimouslyelected to lead the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT).

Her promotion comes despite a track record of presiding over educational disasters in Chicago, where student outcomes are abysmal and public trust in the union has cratered. Failing upwards exposes the rotten core of teachers unions. They focus on power, politics, and protecting adults at all costs, with no regard for kids.

Start with the facts on the ground in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Despite spending roughly $30,000 per student annually, not a single child was proficient in math in 55 schools. Zero kids met basic standards in over 50 schools – failure factories churning out ill-equipped students while taxpayers foot the bill.

According to the Nation’s Report Card, only nine percent of black eighth graders in Chicago areproficient in math. Children are getting shortchanged by a system that prioritizes union demands over actual education.

When confronted with these dismal results during a radio interview, Davis Gates deflected by callingstandardized testing “junk science rooted in white supremacy” and claiming it was “born out of eugenics.”

Under Davis Gates’s leadership, public opinion of the CTU has tanked. A poll by Echelon Insights, conducted for the Illinois Policy Institute, showed the union’s net favorability dropping 11 points – from +2 to -9 – in just eight months of her tenure. The rapid nosedive reflects Chicagoans’ growing frustration with strikes, school closures, and political overreach.

Yet instead of accountability, Davis Gates gets a statewide promotion, now representing over 100,000 educators across Illinois. Parents in conservative areas won’t even be able to escape her influence, as she’ll be calling the shots for the entire state’s union apparatus.

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

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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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?

Kareem Weaver

A former prisoner, but now a free man, advocate, author, and Emmy nominated actor is known as The Prison Coach for his ongoing work with incarcerated men.

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

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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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?

Anna Krylov:

Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.

Three representative examples illustrate this decline:

1. Institutionalized social engineering
The Springer Nature Diversity Commitment (Skipper & Inchcoombe, 2019), which you quoted in your invitation letter, openly pledges to “take action to improve diversity and inclusion in the conferences we organise, and in our commissioned content, the peer review population and editorial boards.” Editors are “asked to intentionally and proactively reach out to women researchers” and authors are instructed to suggest reviewers “with diversity in mind.” In other words, editorial choices and peer review are to be guided not solely by competence but by demographic attributes. I cannot stop but wondering — was I asked to review the manuscript because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs?

2. Ideological subversion of literature citations 
Nature Reviews Psychology (Unsigned, 2025) now encourages authors to practice “citation justice” — that is, to social-engineer their manuscript’s bibliography to promote members of favored identity groups, even if their works lack the requisite merit or relevance. “Citation justice” is particularly harmful because it undermines the rigor and reliability of published research. When references are chosen not for their scientific relevance or quality but to promote the work of preferred identity groups, the integrity of science itself is compromised (Shaw, 2025; Coyne, 2025).

3. Institutionalized censorship 
Nature Human Behavior has published a censorship manifesto (Unsigned, 2022) — now widely criticized (see, for example, Rauch, 2022; Winegard, 2022; Krylov & Tanzman, 2023) — in which they openly declare their intent to censor legitimate research findings that they deem potentially “harmful” to certain groups. Not only is it arrogant for editors to presume they have the expertise to make such judgments, the practice is antithetical to the production of knowledge.

Any of these policies, taken alone, would undermine the epistemic standards of scientific publishing as a pillar of the truth-seeking enterprise. Together they represent a profound corruption of purpose. The purpose of science is the pursuit of truth, not the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

CWB Chicago

The state’s juvenile system operates in near secrecy, with a mandate of focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment. Moyer’s firsthand accounts reveal a system so lenient at times that it seems to embolden violent offenders rather than reform them.

“In cases where a kid acts in shocking, violent ways, causing great harm to victims, it can feel like this system designed to handle them so tenderly is simply inviting them to continue on the same violent path,” he writes.

Natalie Proulx:

New national testing data, reported in September, shows that the reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades. A third of the 12th graders who were tested did not have basic reading skills.

What is your reaction to that news? Does it surprise you? Do you have thoughts, based on your own experience in school, about what might have contributed to this decline? How concerning is it to you?

In “Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low,” Dana Goldstein explains that the loss is probably related to school closings during the coronavirus pandemic and increases in screen time:

The reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades, according to new federal testing data, a worrying sign for teenagers as they face an uncertain job market and information landscape challenged by A.I.

In math, 12th graders had the lowest performance since 2005.

The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, long regarded as the nation’s most reliable, gold-standard exam, showed that about a third of the 12th graders who were tested last year did not have basic reading skills.

It was a sign that, among other skills, they may not be able to determine the purpose of a political speech. In math, nearly half of the test takers scored below the basic level, meaning they may not have mastered skills like using percentages to solve real-world problems.

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Nadya Williams:

In 2008, the academic job market crashed and never recovered. I know this for a very particular reason: that year I received my Ph.D. in classics from Princeton University, but most of the jobs had evaporated in the recession. Every year since, the number of jobs in the field has only grown smaller, paired most years by the announcements of closures of classics departments—and those in other humanities fields—in universities across the U.S. and the U.K. 

For most people, this news is an unfortunate development, but not one to which they devote much thought. And yet, for some, this has been a life-defining tragedy. Years ago, an English professor I knew wondered, in self-reflective distress: Without academic jobs, what would happen to those who cannot imagine anything but a life spent living entirely in their heads? Enough others are pondering this question to continue filling up Ph.D. programs in the humanities each year, even as chances of employment in traditional academia now are lower than winning the lottery. 

The author R.F. Kuang has clearly been thinking about this question, as she pursues a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. In case you’re wondering, there are even fewer jobs in her field than in classics. But Kuang has also done something unusual with her remarkable academic training: She has written “dark academia” fantasy novels, reflecting on the academia we know, but setting the stories in a world where magic is real, readily present, and incredibly alluring and dangerous all at once. The effect is something akin to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but set in British universities. 

In Kuang’s previous novel, the bestseller Babel, the protagonists are brilliant magic and linguistics students at Oxford, trying to survive and thrive against all odds while also trying to reform an international system they find systemically unjust. Spoiler alert: They fail, but Kuang doesn’t. The novel is superb in its plot twists, character development, and the casually simple use of minutiae of different disciplines that Kuang herself has managed to master along her academic journey. Her characters are convincing academic geniuses—those people who are all book sense, but no common sense.

Jason England;

Microsoft Teams is about to deal a heavy blow to those who like to work from home for peace and quiet. In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker’s location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you’re actually there or not.

From a boss’ perspective, this would eliminate any of that confusion as to where your team actually is. But for those people who have found their own sanctuary of peaceful productivity by working from home, consider this a warning that Teams is about to tattle on you.

How does it tattle?

Anomify:

Summary

As more and more of us use Large Language Models (LLMs) for daily tasks, their potential biases become increasingly important. We investigated whether today’s leading models, such as those from OpenAI, Google, and others, exhibit ideological leanings.

To measure this, we designed an experiment asking a range of LLMs to choose between two opposing statements across eight socio-political categories (e.g., Progressive vs. Conservative, Market vs. State). Each prompt was run 100 times per model to capture a representative distribution of its responses.

Our results reveal that LLMs are not ideologically uniform. Different models displayed distinct “personalities”, with some favouring progressive, libertarian, or regulatory stances, for example, while others frequently refused to answer.

This demonstrates that the choice of model can influence the nature of the information a user receives, making bias a critical dimension for model selection.

Oyin Adedoyin:

A career-coaching side gig gave Lauren Braley enough additional income to pay off the remaining chunk of her student debt last year.

Braley finished physical-therapy graduate school in 2017 with roughly $125,000 in debt.

But she didn’t feel the loans’ full toll until she and her husband had a child and took on the costs of daycare and homeownership. Braley owed $800 a month on her loans and sometimes opted to pay as much as $2,000, more than her mortgage.

After interest rates started falling in 2020, she refinanced her federal student loans, reducing the interest rate from around 6% to just under 3%. She refinanced two more times as rates grew more attractive, saving herself $55,000 in interest in the process, she said.

Eventually, Braley made a career switch and received messages on LinkedIn from physical therapists looking to make a similar move. She began to charge for her career-coaching services.

Samara Kalk Derby

In a social media post Saturday, a Madison woman alleges staff members at an East Side middle school physically and sexually assaulted her son at one of the employees’ homes.

The Economist:

Finally, liberalism is flawed. It has been capacious enough both to advance universal human rights and to accommodate slavery and the denial of women’s right to vote. The technological progress valued by liberals has given humanity horrible weapons of war and the power to annihilate itself. Yet liberalism also inducted an era of co-operation among democracies after the second world war, including the relatively free movement of goods, capital and people across borders.

There is no one starting point in the history of liberalism. But England, in 1688, at the beginning of the (bloodless but) Glorious Revolution, is as good a place and time as any. The flight of James II gave Parliament the opportunity to set a new relationship with the monarchy in offering the throne to William III and Mary II: constraining the king’s power and enshrining political rights in an English Bill of Rights. It was not the beginning of modern constitutional democracy. That would come a century later, in America (spoiler alert). But it was a forerunner of it.

Jukka Savolainen

I examined this question in a recent article in the journal Theory and Society. Focusing on sociology — my own academic discipline — I asked whether its well-documented political monoculture impacts the scientific quality of sociological research. To find out, I compared sociology to three other major social sciences: economics, political science, and psychology. All four lean left, but sociology is in a league of its own: For every Republican in the field, there are 44 registered Democrats. Nearly one in five sociology professors identifies as far left — more than quadruple the rate in economics and more than double the rate in political science or psychology.

Benjamin Solomon:

The refrain has been broadcast widely: New York math achievement, as measured on a respected national test, is in the dumps. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 37% of New York 4^th graders scored proficient relative to 39% overall for the nation.1 The situation was worse for 8^th graders, with only 26% of students scoring at or above the proficiency cut-off, again below average for the nation.¹ All other Northeastern states performed better. The highest performing state, Massachusetts, outperformed New York by 17 and 13 standard points, respectively, for the two grades sampled.¹ Results were even more disappointing for students historically ranking below the 50^th percentile for the test: those above recovered pandemic losses, while those below yielded worse scores than they did pre-pandemic. That is, disproportionality between the haves and have-nots continued to grow between 2022 and 2024. On the average, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky outperformed New York in 4^th grade math, even before adjustments based on differences in student’s socioeconomic status.

A frustrating backdrop for these findings is that New York outspends all other states on education, with per pupil expenditures exceeding $36k annually.2Importantly, averages don’t tell the full story; some New York districts are financially stressed, as funding is uneven and comes from multiple sources.3 The cost of living in New York is high, and school funding supports more than math and literacy instruction, although these are obvious priorities. Nevertheless, the data suggests that funding isn’t the crux of the problem. An alternative explanation is that math instruction, on the average, is poor across the state, driven by New York State Department of Education (NYSED) state standards which do not align with empirical research.4 These invalid state standards drive the selection of poor curriculums and teaching methods, frustrating teachers and fueling a downward spiral.

———

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!)

Chick Pezeshki:

For example, lately, at the behest of one of my collaborators (shout-out to Ryan!) as I mentioned a couple of posts back, I’ve been listening to Daniel Siegel’s audiobook, The Neurobiology of We. Siegel’s work as a psychiatrist is mostly centered around healing trauma.  In order to do that, he preaches his version of the concept of integration. Using a soft version of the left-brain and right brain understanding of the brain, he differentiates this into discussing how the left neocortex and right neocortex  — the big, thinking cap that wraps itself around our limbic/emotional system– operates.

Siegel assigns the primary function of the left-brain neocortex to storing and processing explicitknowledge — in his words, the fragments of events and such that the brain receives from the various sensory organs (sight, sound, etc.) and body parts that receive the stimuli from given events, as well as trauma.  He then assigns the primary function of the right-brain neocortex to a holistic, experiential interpretation and integration of those pieces of information on the left.  The integrator is the hippocampus — part of the limbic system that sits between the two and serves important roles in short term memory, and has recently been shown to have interesting effects in spatial and temporal regulation.  

Jennifer Pahlka

…. and too often it’s an active impediment to that work getting done. Whether you like it or not, disruption is here. The job now is to shape that disruption in the public interest.

That’s why we’re launching the Recoding America Fund. It’s a pooled philanthropic effort that will raise and deploy at least $120 million over the course of the next six years. We’ll build off the work of so many over the past decades who’ve seen this problem from a variety of angles: the Congressional modernization field, good government groups, the civic tech community, think tanks who see the futility of their policy recommendations when they land in a system that can’t faithfully execute them, private sector leaders and contractors who have had to grapple with unnecessary government bloat, and others. But while this work will leverage the powerful insights so many have gained from grappling with a system in disrepair, it is also discontinuous with the past in three ways. First, the frame is no longer transparency or accountability or modernization, but rather state capacity – simply, the ability of our government to achieve its policy goals. Second, we seek to build a diverse but coherent field around that frame, one in which advocates can achieve more collectively than each could alone, while maintaining their own perspective and tending to their own politics. And lastly, we are collectively committed to leveraging this moment of disruption to achieve what’s needed for the future of our country, not what’s comfortable or convenient.

Josie Fischels

Marching bands from across the state are currently competing against one another with high-energy spectacles, complete with props, costumes, sets and intricate sound systems.

It’s a cool autumn night in October, and the ice-cold metal stands at Valley Stadium in West Des Moines are full. The stadium lights sizzle and illuminate the field, and an announcer’s voice can be heard booming all the way from the parking lot, where visitors tote blankets from their cars.

But the crowd, whose boisterous whooping can only be quelled by a team of volunteers holding “quiet please” signs, isn’t there for a football game. Instead, they’ve settled into the bleachers to catch the final hours of an all-day high school marching band competition.

ValleyFest, hosted annually by Valley High School, has invited top bands from across Iowa and neighboring states to participate in its competition and fundraiser for 46 years.

Guardian:

In a letter to school families obtained by WBAL TV 11 News, the school wrote: “We understand how upsetting this was for the individual that was searched as well as the other students who witnessed the incident. Our counselors will provide direct support to the students who were involved in this incident and are also available to speak with any student who may need support.”

Baltimore county police told the outlet: “Officers assigned to Precinct 11-Essex responded to Kenwood High School following a report of a suspicious person with a weapon. Once on scene, the person was searched and it was determined the subject was not in possession of any weapons.”

Lamont Davis, Allen’s grandfather, told the television station: “Nobody wants this to happen to their child. No one wants this to happen.”

 This article was amended on 24 October 2025. An earlier version displayed a picture of a Baltimore city police vehicle, although Baltimore county does not include the city of Baltimore.

Alan Greenblatt:

My decision was a long time coming. Earlier this year, the chief content officer for our parent company, e.Republic, stated in a meeting that we should not run articles that could draw the attention of the Trump White House and have them try to shut us down.

At the time, her position struck me as wrong in a couple of ways. Chiefly, there was the obvious betrayal of journalistic ethics. Secondly, however, Governing is such a small (although I’d like to say prestigious) publication that the idea anyone in the current White House was reading it, let alone preparing to hammer it, struck me as dubious.

Governing was started nearly 40 years ago by editors from Congressional Quarterly who thought state policy should get more news coverage. Even after it was bought in 2009 by e.Republic, Governing remained one of the few outlets to pay continuous attention to governments outside of Washington. It often receives compliments such as being called “the Rolling Stone of state of the state addresses.” It’s a wonky publication, and it’s not huge, but it has a sterling reputation for covering a crucial niche.

Fatima Hussein:

In the midst of a federal government shutdown, the U.S. government’s gross national debt surpassed $38 trillion Wednesday, a record number that highlights the accelerating accumulation of debt on America’s balance sheet. 

It’s also the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars in debt outside of the COVID-19 pandemic — the U.S. hit $37 trillion in gross national debt in August this year. 

The $38 trillion update is found in the latest Treasury Department report, which logs the nation’s daily finances.

Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model, who served in President George W. Bush’s Treasury Department, told The Associated Press that a growing debt load over time leads ultimately to higher inflation, eroding Americans’ purchasing power. 

The Government Accountability Office outlines some of the impacts of rising government debt on Americans — including higher borrowing costs for things like mortgages and cars, lower wages from businesses having less money available to invest, and more expensive goods and services.

Andy Kessler:

“I think universities have become detached from society and from reality as well,” Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice says in a podcast interview. “People take for granted some of the innovations that have come out of universities.” True. Colleges also take for granted why we do research at universities in the first place. Change is needed.

The Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence” contains a dog’s breakfast of demands—some reasonable, others likely free-speech violations. One commands that universities with endowments of more than $2 million per undergraduate “will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs,” although schools can still make rich kids pay. The deadline is Monday. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown and others have already said no to the whole thing.

The university model has other problems. Progress comes via surprises. But tenure, which was intended to protect academic freedom in the humanities but now often hinders it, has become standard including in hard sciences—which limits fresh, young talent and thereby constrains surprising new progress-pushing ideas.

Plus, the grant process has politicized science and can suppress new ideas and future surprises. Successful researchers are the ones great at applying for grants rather than at battling the status quo. It’s similar inside companies. Early Google AI researchers had to hide machine-learning servers because they were forbidden by the search folks.

Natasha Korecki:

Shifting in her chair as she sits at a long conference room table inside the Chicago Teachers Union offices, Stacy Davis Gates lets it sink in.

The Chicago Teachers Union president, having just spoken at length about the struggles of Black residents in Chicago neighborhoods, justice as a foundational classroom principle and the triumph of helping a former teacher get elected mayor, finally stops.

“Look at me. Like, both my grandmothers: sharecroppers. Literally, Sunflower County Mississippi. Eudora, Arkansas — and I get to lead the largest union in the Illinois AFL-CIO. They have over 100,000 members,” the 48-year-old Davis Gates told NBC News.

She continued, her voice shaking and eyes welling with tears: “I am a manifestation of that sacrifice, and I work so very hard to make good on it because I knew what it took.”

“They never sugarcoated or hid their struggle from me,” she said. “I honor them with my work and my practice. It is intense because I got to make up — I’ve got to make good on the investment they made on my future.”

——-

More.

Anna Hansen:

…..

Stephanie Saul:

The percent of Black and Hispanic students in Harvard’s first-year class dropped this fall while that of Asian American students increased, according to figures released on Thursday. It was more evidence that a 2023 Supreme Court ban on affirmative action is having a significant effect on racial diversity at the nation’s elite schools.

Harvard College said that 11.5 percent of its first-year students identify as Black this fall, down from 14 percent last year and 18 percent in 2023, before the Supreme Court ban took effect. While the decline is not as sharp as some experts had predicted, it reverses a trend toward increased racial diversity that had begun in the 1960s.

The numbers, released by Harvard College, showed an even sharper drop this year for Hispanic students — to 11 percent of this year’s first-year class from 16 percent last year. The percentage of Hispanic students had seen an increase last year from 2023, however.

Harvard did not release figures for white students.

The racial breakdown of students at Harvard and other schools has been closely watched because of the role these schools play in providing access to power and influence in American society. In recent months, the Trump administration has also sought to force universities to report expanded admissions data that could be used to prove whether they are giving preferential treatment to applicants based on race.

Harold Meyerson:

Crucially, the tax won’t crimp the fortunes of any billionaire who moves into the state next year or any later year, as it only applies to the billionaires living in the state this year. Therefore, the objections lodged against both the Mamdani and the Zucman taxes—the horrific specter of billionaire flight—can’t be levied against the California proposal. That’s not to say the proposal won’t be attacked as socialistic, of course. But by directing the funds the measure would yield to the 15 million Californians on Medi-Cal (the state’s version of Medicaid) at a time when their access to health care is on the brink of being either reduced or eliminated due to the cutbacks imposed by Trump and congressional Republicans, who redirected those funds to massive tax cuts for the rich, the measure’s sponsors can be reasonably confident that state voters will enact it. (They have until June to collect the required number of valid signatures—roughly 874,000—to place it on the November 2026 ballot.)

The spillover effects of its presence on the midterm-election ballot should be considerable. Democratic candidates, I suspect, will endorse it enthusiastically; conservative billionaires seeking public office, which could well include gubernatorial hopeful Rick Caruso, may find themselves compelled to support it. Democrats in states and cities that are also home to the very rich may well opt to enact similar proposals, whether through legislation or at the ballot box.

As Saez noted, the carefully devised limitations on the California initiative—confining its applicability to just 200 taxpayers and its time frame to a one-and-done one-year assessment—mean that it doesn’t address the metastatic growth of economic inequality as such. It certainly does nothing to restore the highest-bracket income tax rate of 91 percent reached during the presidency of socialist (well, Republican) Dwight Eisenhower, during whose 1950s tenure the wealth and income of ordinary Americans saw record increases. Nonetheless, it opens the door to further efforts to rein in the current redistribution of income and wealth to the very, sometimes obscenely, rich—efforts that are essential to preserving democracy.

Douglas Belkin:

“Legacy applicants have done nothing meritorious to earn this advantage,” wrote Edward Blum, education analyst Richard Kahlenberg and economist Peter Arcidiacono, a political independent, to the Education Department recently, urging officials to track legacy in admissions and analyze the impact. Blum, a conservative, spearheaded the lawsuit against Harvard College that helped lead the Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action in 2023, while the other two men testified against the practice.

Their efforts add to an accelerating bipartisan push to ban legacy preferences in admissions as America focuses more on who gets into college and why. The scrutiny on a hereditary leg up has intensified since the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, which ended most race-based admission preferences and prompted new questions about other nonmerit-based special treatment.

Emma Jacobs:

One winter afternoon, I joined a gathering wrapped in woolly hats and gloves, abuzz as we watched a local youth football match. Speculation was not about the players (if only), but a dad: Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta watching his son in the neighbouring game. The model of restraint, far from his reputation for intensity.

What a contrast to the “concerning behaviours” that have reportedly triggered a ban on parents from future sports fixtures for under-11s in the south-west London borough of Merton. These disruptions included preventing runners from crossing the finishing line in races and hurling abuse at children and officials, some of whom were secondary school pupils.

Such behaviour is hardly a surprise to anyone who has been on the sidelines of a junior sports match. I once saw two dads escorted from an under-fives kick-about because their fight was scaring the children.

Earlier this year, a video circulated of parents in Kent brawling at an under-10s football match. In Yorkshire, a group of parents watching junior rugby lined up behind a teenager about to take a kick, to jeer and boo. This week in the US a father was arrested for pulling a gun at an American football game.

Ira Stoll:

Alas, the Doft Lecture featured only the left-leaning Goldberg, not the more conservative Douthat, so for “vitality” the audience had to settle for Penslar, a liberal, pushing Goldberg with questions. He appeared to be doing his best, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the event from turning into a kind of anti-Trump rally and group therapy session—an strange look for a university that intermittently claims to be recommitting itself to serious scholarship and research and to viewpoint diversity rather than to politicized groupthink.

Where this was headed was clear almost from the start. “I grew up in Buffalo. I got out as soon as I could,” Goldberg said. That condescending comment was greeted by the Harvard audience with appreciative laughter. Compare it with the more gracious way another prominent journalist, Tim Russert, described the same hometown: “I was surrounded by beauty and history and the sense of possibility that a great city instills in its residents. Buffalo captured my imagination and remains a part of me to this day.”

Goldberg described her youth in Buffalo as an activist forming human chains to defend abortion clinics from Operation Rescue protesters who had been invited in, she said, by the city’s Catholic mayor. 

“My parents forced me against my will to go to temple, which I absolutely hated,” Goldberg said by way of explaining her Jewish background

Sami West

Covid-era school closures caused the U.S. significant economic and educational loss while being less effective than other transmission interventions, according to new research.

The University of Washington and Oxford University study found that closing schools created $2 trillion in future economic losses — a conservative estimate — while reducing Covid spread by just 8%.

Mask mandates, on the other hand, lessened transmission by nearly 20% and cost relatively little, researchers concluded.

“Hindsight is 20/20, right?” said Adrian Raftery, a professor emeritus of statistics and sociology at UW and a co-author of the study. “This study’s an opportunity to look back and see what worked, what didn’t work, and what we could’ve done better.”

The research examined 11 different non-pharmaceutical interventions — including mask mandates, public testing, contact tracing, social distancing, and workplace closures. Those interventions combined saved almost 900,000 lives and reduced the death rate by about 70%, Raftery said.

———-

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

Danielle DuClos:

The Cap Times found the Department of Public Instruction has investigated more than 200 educators from 2018 to 2023 following allegations of sexual misconduct or grooming. The reporting also revealed the department relies on a rudimentary system to track its investigations, obscuring the scale of misconduct for policymakers and the public. 

Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly, who leads the Department of Public Instruction, was absent during Thursday’s hearing, drawing bipartisan criticism from the committee’s members.

“I’m disappointed that Dr. Underly is not here today,” said Rep. Mike Bare, D-Verona. “She should be here.”

Three department officials answered questions from lawmakers for more than two hours, highlighting the agency’s antiquated online licensing system and asking that a definition of grooming be added to the state law governing the Department of Public Instruction’s authority to revoke an educator’s license.

“Would we prefer more clarity? Would we prefer more authority? Absolutely,” said Rich Judge, assistant state superintendent for the DPI’s Division of Government and Public Affairs. 

The Joint Legislative Audit Committee has also scheduled a public hearing Nov. 5 for a proposed audit of the Department of Public Instruction’s license investigations in response to the Cap Times’ reporting.

——-

200 Wisconsin teacher sexual misconduct, grooming cases shielded from public.

Kristin Brey:

Superintendent Jill Underly should have attended hearing on misconduct concerns Protecting kids is not a partisan issue. Transparency and accountability are not political weapons; they are tools to rebuild trust

Kali Hanson:

Property taxes are climbing faster in Dane County and Madison than the rest of Wisconsin, according to a new Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis of state tax data.

The countywide tax levy grew 5.7% to about $1.9 billion last year, with Madison’s portion of the total increasing 5.1% to $894 million.

Tax levies increased by 4.2% statewide last year, continuing a pattern in recent years of growing by a smaller rate than in Dane County and Madison.

A tax levy is how much has been approved to be collected, but actual collections owed can be lower due to tax credits. Property taxes are approved by a variety of government bodies within counties and cities, including school districts, county government, municipal government, technical colleges and special tax districts.

Within Madison, property taxes for the city contributed the sharpest increase last year, growing by 11% to $318 million. Taxes for the Madison Metropolitan School District grew the second most after the city, by 2.1% to $402 million.

Parts of the school district also overlap with the municipal boundaries of Fitchburg, Shorewood Hills, Maple Bluff and a few more communities in the county.

——-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Mark Treinen:

A major point of @danielle_duclos’ reporting on Wisconsin educator misconduct is that it’s really hard to get public records on these cases. On @WORTnews, transparency experts Bill Lueders and Tom Kamenick break down the issues, and solutions:

Todd Truitt:

Superintendent from Virginia’s largest school division says increasing the # of questions to be proficient on our standardized tests (from the lowest in the nation) will demotivate students. Nonsensical, self-serving statements like these undermine public schools.

———

Marc Porter Magee:

“Amber Northern, a Virginia Board of Education member, said at the board’s September meeting that the state expects too little of students and that setting higher passing scores will incentivize them to do better on the exams”

———

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Jim Nobles:

As we know from investigations and prosecutions, particularly by federal officials, a significant number of people in these organizations were not serving. They were stealing not just from taxpayers but also from families in their own communities. As a result, families — particularly Somali families — did not receive the food, child care or other state-funded services that they needed and that taxpayers had paid for. Added to this betrayal, people in these community organizations were using the stolen money to buy expensive homes, automobiles and other personal items for themselves.

Despite the federal, and some county, investigations and prosecutions, the state’s negligence allowed people in these sham organizations to continue to use their simple theft scheme repeatedly in child care programs, food programs, housing programs and others. This egregious lack of oversight by state officials has also deepened public mistrust in government.

While executive officials were obviously negligent, less obvious is the fact that some key legislators tried to minimize the fraud problem and shield the Department of Human Services and the Walz administration from criticism.

For example, when the Office of the Legislative Auditor issued a report on child care fraud, the then-chair of the House Human Services committee dismissed the report and the problem, saying, “there’s always going to be fraud,” and she refused to allow OLA to present its report to the committee. In addition, the chief House supporter of publicly funded child care subsidies criticized the OLA report for referencing prosecutions that had proven fraud in the child care program. The references were unnecessary and harmful, he said.

More.

Kat Rosenfield

gonna go out on a limb and say that 99% of the journalists snarkily-quote tweeting this clip haven’t actually watched it, because what Luckey is saying is not only uncontroversial but basically identical to Toni Morrison’s comments on the same topic circa 1989

BBC:

New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.

The intensive international study of unprecedented scope and scale was launched at the EBU News Assembly, in Naples. Involving 22 public service media (PSM) organizations in 18 countries working in 14 languages, it identified multiple systemic issues across four leading AI tools.

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more.

Sun Yu:

Leading US universities are bracing for deep spending cuts to offset an upcoming increase in the endowment excise tax despite posting double-digit investment returns this year.

More than a dozen institutions have adopted austerity measures — from hiring pauses to suspended capital projects — as they face a sharp increase in taxes on endowment income from next July.

While their endowments all reported higher returns in the 12 months to June, compared with the previous year, the gains are unlikely to offset the impact of the tax increase, said university officials.

The shortfall has fuelled budget cuts that threaten to weaken one of the country’s greatest strengths — its higher education system — at a time when it is already under attack from the Trump administration.

“I think it is economically suicidal,” said Owen Zidar, an economics professor at Princeton University, “higher education is one of the key engines of prosperity in America and stifling it is really quite counter-productive.”

Wall Street Journal:

The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal looked at 100 colleges, assessing them on qualities that many students and families are concerned about, including free speech, the school’s approach to politics on campus, and students’ professional success after graduation. Schools that have demonstrated ideological pluralism among the faculty received higher marks. Same for a vibrant and inclusive campus social life. Student tolerance for controversial speakers was another plus.

The rankings also look closely at the strength of the general curriculum and whether the university is providing excellence or coasting on a fancy reputation.

What do students think of their teachers? Do liberal arts schools present students with a core curriculum that expects them to master foundational subjects like economics, a foreign language, composition and natural sciences? Does the university require a U.S. history or government course to graduate? Schools received negative marks for a DEI focus that “elevates activism over academic inquiry.”

Marie DuPont:

As the New Jersey governor’s race heats up, one man who hoped to be on the November ballot instead faces legal scrutiny over campaign spending. Sean Spiller, who until last month was president of the New Jersey Education Association, finished fifth in June’s Democratic primary despite outside spending on his campaign exceeding that of all the other candidates combined. As a longtime member of Mr. Spiller’s union, I wondered who was supporting him with that kind of money. Turns out it was teachers like me.

I’m not a political activist. I have nearly two decades of experience in the classroom. And I have consistently paid about $1,500 in annual union dues in the belief that my union would use the money to bargain for better wages, fair working conditions and classroom improvements. Instead, the union passed a portion of the dues paid by me and 200,000 other teachers—more than $40 million—to a series of political organizations that backed Mr. Spiller’s failed campaign.

Mr. Spiller finished fifth out of six candidates in the Democratic primary with just 89,472 votes, or 10.6% of the total. That means the union spent about $450 a vote. Many teachers pointed out that we were never even surveyed to see if we supported his cause.

Win or lose, the union’s handling of members’ money was wasteful and irresponsible. I argue, in a lawsuit filed Sept. 30 in New Jersey Superior Court, that it was also an illegal breach of contract and a violation of the union’s fiduciary duty to its members.

Kendall Staton

Schools across Virginia expect to see a dramatic increase in students failing end-of-year exams as the state prepares to implement higher benchmarks for standardized tests. But some state leaders, including Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), say the changes could give a more accurate picture of student performance.
The Virginia Board of Education voted unanimously last month to raise the score students need to get to be deemed proficient on the annual state math and reading exams, called the Standards of Learning. For example, an eighth-grader would now need to score a 449 out of 600 points — an increase of 49 points — to be rated proficient on the reading exam.

The goal, officials say, is to align state exam standards with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test used to measure career readiness and student achievement. The board will meet this week to decide how and when to implement the new scores.

The changes are the latest in an effort to overhaul the public education system in Virginia pushed by Youngkin, who campaigned on expanding charter schools and has supported funding for private-school vouchers. He has long talked about closing what he calls an “honesty gap” — a disparity between pass rates on Virginia’s state exam vs. national tests. Education experts have criticized that characterization, saying it relies on a misinterpretation of NAEP data.

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more

Tom Tiffany:

Wisconsin’s DPI poured time and resources into a 35-page DEI Plan but couldn’t find time to fully investigate 200+ teacher sexual misconduct cases.

Our kids deserve better than woke leadership and coverups. Yet all we hear from Tony Evers and Jill Underly are crickets. 🦗

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more.

———

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Milwaukee Education

City Forward Collective’s latest polling data confirms what many of us have sensed in community conversations across Milwaukee: voters are hungry for bold leadership focused on outcomes for all Milwaukee’s students, and are responding well to the candor and honesty that new MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius has brought to her role.

As we have consistently done throughout the past few years (July 2024, February 2025), we regularly take the pulse of Milwaukee voters to understand what they want and expect from our education system.

This fall’s survey of 535 Milwaukee residents delivered some clear messages:

1. Milwaukee’s publicly-funded school sectors continue to receive similar levels of support – though we found a notable uptick in net favorable perceptions of public charter schools.
2. In a political environment where telling uncomfortable truths usually gets punished, Superintendent Cassellius’ candor about MPS’s deep challenges is resonating.
3. The School Board still has work to do to repair broken trust—and faces broad public support for state intervention if it doesn’t resolve MPS’s fiscal challenges.
4. And when it comes to more tax increases? Voters have once again made their position clear: in the midst of an affordability crisis, they want bold action on rightsizing, not another referendum.

Senator John Jagler

Here is the response from @DrJillUnderly to the letter and questions @SenRomaineQuinn and I asked about the @CapTimes investigation into teacher sexual misconduct investigations. I appreciate the reply. But her answers only leave me with few more questions 🧵

—-

Dan Shafer:

It is absolutely ridiculous that Dr. Jill Underly is off at her college receiving a “distinguished alumni award” instead of answering questions in Assembly committee today. The @CapTimes reporting raises serious questions that demand answers from the head of DPI. Unacceptable.

Kristin Brey:

Where is the urgency from any @WisDems on this issue? I’ve seen a singular post about it from @saraforwi and that’s it.

Anna Wilde Mathews, Ruth Simon, Stephanie Stamm and Elizaveta Galkina:

“If healthcare costs go up faster than the economy in general, that means there’s less money left over to go to wages,” said Gary Claxton, a senior vice president at KFF.

J.H. Berra Paving Co., in St. Louis, is struggling with this trade-off. The company is facing a 15% health-insurance rate increase this year, on top of last year’s increase, said John O’Connor, a risk manager for the company. That extra cost is likely to put a lid on wage increases for the company’s workers, O’Connor said.

The KFF survey, which includes more than 1,860 employers and was completed earlier this year, offers a detailed snapshot of workplace insurance. Nearly half the U.S. population gets health coverage through a job.

Kate Morton

And here’s an enrollment breakdown that includes branch campuses, with a double-digit decrease for UW-Platteville Baraboo Sauk County, which is set to close next year.

Laura Powell:

Most of us who end up doing what I do probably don’t set out to become citizen journalists.

We’re just curious people who care about what’s true, and, when we stumble upon information that has been overlooked, we feel compelled to get the word out.

At least that’s how I ended up spending two weeks covering the story of Ian Roberts, the disgraced former Des Moines superintendent who turned out to have lied about pretty much everything.

When headlines first appeared about a school district superintendent being arrested as an illegal alien, the universal reaction was disbelief. Sensational headlines often mislead, but this time the stories offered no hint of a reasonable explanation.

The mystery of how Roberts rose so high intrigued me. I’m allergic to dishonesty, so once I realized I had a liar in my sights, I kept digging.

more.

CBS

A decade after a landmark study proved that feeding peanut products to young babies could prevent development of life-threatening allergies, new research finds the change has made a big difference in the real world. 

About 60,000 children have avoided developing peanut allergies after guidance first issued in 2015 upended medical practice by recommending introducing the allergen to infants starting as early as 4 months. 

“That’s a remarkable thing, right?” said Dr. David Hill, an allergist and researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and author of a study published Monday in the medical journal Pediatrics. Hill and colleagues analyzed electronic health records from dozens of pediatric practices to track diagnoses of food allergies in young children before, during and after the guidelines were issued. 

“I can actually come to you today and say there are less kids with food allergy today than there would have been if we hadn’t implemented this public health effort,” he added.

Danielle DuClos

This time with a focus on school districts wanting thousands of dollars to provide staff investigation records

No statewide tracking of sexual misconduct and grooming by teachers exists in Wisconsin, including at the state Department of Public Instruction, which oversees educator licenses. 

A federal study estimates one in 10 students across the country experiences these behaviors during their K-12 schooling, and a Cap Times investigation uncovered over 200 Wisconsin teacher license investigations into alleged educator sexual misconduct and grooming from 2018 to 2023. 

….

The Madison Metropolitan School District was also the only district out of the 20 the Cap Times sought records from that refused to provide the name of the employee responding to the request, opting for an anonymous email address instead.  

“We choose to limit the means by which people are able to contact them to only the email address,” said Ian Folger, district spokesperson.  

Billie-Jo Grant, the CEO of McGrath Training Solutions, which provides instruction on educator misconduct prevention, said maintaining proper documentation is crucial because sexual misconduct thrives in secrecy.  

“That’s really important to have the investigation and document that this person violated these policies,” she said. 

School districts should be tracking who they have investigated for sexual harassment or violence toward students from a prevention standpoint, Patel said.  

——-

more.

——-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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:

But those numbers only go so far. A 2019 studyconducted for the school district found that while the school district’s residential population grew by 100,000 people from the 1980s to the 2010s, the district’s enrollment remained largely stagnant.

——-

Where Have All The Students Gone? 1995-2024

——-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus, Crimson Staff Writers

The reductions — detailed by five faculty members and in emails obtained by The Crimson — stipulate smaller Ph.D. admissions quotas across dozens of departments. Departments were allowed to choose how they would allocate their limited slots across the next two years.

The official deadline for departments to inform the FAS how they want to allocate their admissions spots is Friday, according to an FAS spokesperson. Final allocations could change over the next week, but some departments are already preparing for drastic decreases in their Ph.D. student numbers.

Departments that would only have one new Ph.D. seat after accounting for the percentage reductions will not be allowed to admit any students, according to a faculty member with knowledge of the matter, who added that there might be some narrow exceptions.

more.

Roshan Fernandez:

On a typical weeknight, students at High Point University might sit down to filet mignon at “1924 PRIME,” the on-campus steakhouse. This isn’t a mere perk. Servers are told to coach the young diners on body language, professional attire, which fork to use and when to salt their food.

It is one of the striking amenities at High Point, which prides itself on preparing students for the rigors of a career—and has also become a favorite of affluent families. “Half of Wall Street sends their kids to this school,” President Nido Qubein says in an interview.

Universities nationwide are battling to pad their balance sheets by attracting families who will pay full sticker price, particularly as the Trump administration slashes funding. High Point is something of a blueprint. Its model—catering to a wealthier student body—has fueled its enrollment growth, campus expansion and financial stability.

Dozens of carefully manicured gardens adorn the lush grounds. Students are almost always within earshot of a fountain; Qubein says the water has an energizing effect. Classical music plays around campus, and there are six outdoor heated swimming pools, each accompanied by a hot tub.

Matt Taibbi:

A year later, the Privacy Office of the Department of Homeland Security is releasing a review of that episode, the broader issue of using disaster relief work to collect political intelligence on voters, and the potentially withholding of benefits from some with the wrong beliefs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new administration found more than just one “isolated incident,” describing violations of the Privacy Act of 1974, which with a few exceptions bars collection of information about First Amendment-protected speech, like political signage. Most tellingly, though, DHS investigators found — in a near-exact parallel to trends in pro-censorship programs — that a lot of the political controversy surrounding FEMA aid grew out of the vague way in which the agency’s Disaster Survivor Assistance Field Operations Guide was written.

The Field Operations Guide instructed FEMA workers to “Remove yourself from the situation if you feel threatened” when dealing with “hostile” individuals, the only problem being, as the new report notes: “The Disaster Survivor Assistance Field Operations Guide does not define the term ‘hostile.’”

“The way the guide was written, FEMA employees had leeway to skip outreach to a house if its signs made them feel uncomfortable,” one Washington-based First Amendment lawyer put it last week. “So it’s basically the same concept of a harm or distress standard we’re seeing in Europe with speech issues, where the emotional response of the observer is what matters legally, as opposed to a concrete rule.”

Link:

Grounded in the conviction that education is about shaping whole lives, the Center for Catholic Studies at St. Mary’s University, in partnership with YouGov, has released the results of the second year of its Holistic Impact Report (HIR). This national study examines how Catholic colleges form students for purpose, community and integrity in a time when higher education often struggles to define its deeper aims.

Marco Giancotti:

The field of psychology had a big crisis in the 2010s, when many widely accepted results turned out to be much less solid than previously thought. It’s called the replication crisis, because labs around the world tried and failed to replicate, in new experiments, previous results published by their original “discoverers”. In other words, many reported psychological effects were either non-existent—artifacts of the experimenter’s flawed setup—or so much weaker than originally claimed that they lost most of their intellectual sparkle.

(The crisis spanned other fields as well, but I mostly care about psychology here, especially the cognitive kind.)

This is very old news, and I’ve been vaguely aware of several of the biggest disgraced results for years, but I keep on forgetting which are (still probably) real and which aren’t. This is not good. Most results in the field do actually replicate and are robust [maybe], so it would be a pity to lose confidence in the whole field just because of a few bad apples.

Andrej Karpathy

Here is some advice I would give to younger students if they wish to do well in their undergraduate courses.

Having been tested for many years of my life (with pretty good results), here are some rules of thumb that I feel helped me:

GENERAL

All-nighters are not worth it.
Sleep does wonders. Optimal sleep time for me is around 7.5 hours, with an absolute minimum of around 4hrs.
It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning. I feel like the brain “commits” a lot of shaky short-term memories to stable long-term memories during the night. I try to start studying for any big tests well in advance (several days), even if for short periods of time, to maximize the number of nights that my brain gets for the material.

Attend tutorials or review sessions.
Even if they are bad. The fact that they get you to think about the material is what counts. If its too boring, you can always work on something else. Remember that you can also try to attend a different tutorial with a different TA.

Keegan Kyle:

Underly stood by the department’s practice of allowing educators under investigation for misconduct to voluntarily surrender their licenses to avoid further investigation. She said voluntary license surrenders often spare victims from “retraumatization through lengthy investigations.”

She also called these license surrenders a “binding, legal agreement to a permanent, lifetime ban on their ability to teach in Wisconsin,” contradicting her own department’s records. At least eight educators since 2018 have been allowed to surrender their licenses and maintain their ability to reapply after a defined time period — typically one to three years.

The Cap Times obtained internal case notes for the eight educators under state open records laws, as part of a yearlong investigation into how the Department of Public Instruction and others respond to allegations of teacher sexual misconduct and grooming behaviors toward students. The Cap Times’ reporting on educator misconduct in Wisconsin is continuing as part of an investigative series called “Dismissed.”

———-

My Letter to Attorney General Josh Kaul on a recent Wisconsin DPI open records request (Act 20 at risk data)

—–

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Adding to the curious tale for data submitted to DPI 7.15.2025:
e-mail received 21 October, 2025:

Jim,
Public records laws do not require agencies to create records that do not currently already exist. The data you requested is not currently available in a record that is responsive to your request. Districts are required to submit the data to DPI by July 15. DPI is required to submit a report to the legislature by November 30th (presumably to allow DPI adequate time to organize the data and compile a report). Staff is currently working to compile the report that is due to the legislature, but the data is still being compiled and organized. Since the requested information will be available to you at some point in just over a month (at the latest), I did not consider my original response to be a formal denial of your request. But if you would like additional justification for our delay in providing you the record you requested here you are. DPI’s obligation is limited to producing records that already exist; “the public records law does not require an authority to provide requested information if no record exists, or to simply answer questions about a topic of interest to the requester.” The Journal Times v. City of Racine Bd. of Police and Fire Comm’rs, 2015 WI 56, ¶ 55. Further, “[t]he open records law does not require the custodian to collect or compile statistics or create a record for the benefit of a requester.” George v. Rec. Custodian, 169 Wis.2d 573, 579 (Ct. App. 1991). An authority is also not required to extract information from existing records and compile that information in a new format to respond to a request. Wis. Stat. § 19.35(1)(L).

Pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 19.35(4)(b), DPI’s decision to deny your request as described above is subject to review by mandamus under Wis. Stat. § 19.37(1), or upon application to the attorney general or to your local district attorney.

Please either check our website or follow up with me directly on or around November 30.

Best,

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Stephanie Arnott (she/her/hers)
Paralegal – Advanced | Office of Legal Services
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
201 W Washington Ave | Madison, WI | 53703
(608) 224-6176

My Letter to Attorney General Josh Kaul on a recent Wisconsin DPI open records request (Act 20 at risk data)

—–

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Quinton Klabon summary:

LAB said DPI is very harsh to choice schools!

DPI threatened to defund private schools whose finances were 1 week late and defunded after 1 month.

DPI…perhaps did not threaten districts? And it took DPI 5.5 months to defund MPS?

1 month versus half a year is a big disparity!

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———

Corrinne Hess:

Audit finds nearly a quarter of Wisconsin schools missed financial deadlines. The Legislative Audit Bureau made 22 recommendations to DPI to improve procedures

Legislative Audit Bureau.

We found that fiscal year (FY) 2022-23 audited financial statements and related audit findings for 325 of 421 school districts (77.2 percent) were submitted by the December 15 deadline established by DPI, but were submitted an average of 67.7 calendar days late for 96 school districts (22.8 percent). Neither statutes nor DPI’s policies specified a deadline by which DPI was required to complete its review of the financial information submitted to it. We found DPI took an average of 87.4 calendar days to complete its review of the audited financial statements and related audit findings for the 325 school districts, including an average of

74.7 calendar days during which DPI did not begin its review. The FY 2022-23 audited financial statements and related audit findings for Milwaukee Public Schools, which were due on December 15, 2023, were submitted on December 20, 2024, and were the latest among all 421 school districts.

We found that FY 2022-23 audited financial statements and related audit findings for 23 of 28 independent charter schools (82.1 percent) were submitted by the December 15 deadline established by DPI, but were submitted an average of 56.4 calendar days late for 5 schools (17.9 percent). DPI took an average of 82.0 calendar days to complete its review of the audited financial statements and related audit findings for 21 independent charter schools whose statements were submitted on time and for which relevant documentation was available, including an average of 56.0 calendar days during which DPI did not begin its review. We found that DPI did not have any written policies for reviewing audited financial information for independent charter schools.

——-

more.

——-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Wall Street Journal:

Students and parents don’t get to vote in union elections, alas. But union teachers do and they care most about money and dodging accountability for student failure. Ms. Davis Gates has delivered on both counts. In 2024 she told a Chicago radio station that academic testing “at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy” and “you can’t test black children with an instrument that was born to prove their inferiority.”

Yes, grading is racist, so stop using tests to judge students—and heaven forbid don’t hold teachers accountable. By the way, Ms. Davis Gates sends her own son to a private school.

Ms. Davis Gates recently memorialized black activist Assata Shakur, who killed a New Jersey police officer in 1973 as “a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.” But after her election to run the state union, she said her goal is “to show people how to practice democracy, how to work across out differences, how to create solidarity based on our collective needs.” By solidarity she means more money for union dues.

Ms. Davis Gates led the CTU to drain its coffers to help elect Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson so she’d have a friend in City Hall. The teachers got their raises, but Chicago voters noticed. By 2023 an M3 Strategies poll found that only 29% of Chicago residents had a positive opinion of the teachers union and only 18% had a favorable opinion of Ms. Davis Gates.

Hannah Schmid

Virginia raises bar for students while Illinois hides strugglesLow student proficiency is being hidden in Illinois. Virginia raised its expectations for students.

While other states are attacking their portion of the national epidemic of poor reading and math proficiency, Illinois is burying the problem.

Illinois approved a plan this summer to lower the scores needed to be considered proficient in reading and math on state assessments. Virginia went in the opposite direction. Its board of education just voted to raise cut scores in reading and math.

Illinois is more concerned with inflating proficiency rates than improving students’ actual performance in core subjects. Instead of addressing low proficiency, the Illinois State Board of Education is minimizing the problem by changing the definition of a struggling student.

———-

———-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Hilary Lane

• The New Illiterates by Samuel L. Blumenfeld
  A book that details not only the ways in which these horrendous teaching methods have failed children, but also the arrogance and indifference of the instigators. “When one begins to think of the incalculable damage done to the young minds of America through defective teaching techniques, one can scarcely contain one’s anger. Flesch was accused of writing in anger by his critics, as if anger were an inappropriate reaction to gross pedagogical malpractice which has had a ruinous effect on the literacy of millions of children. […] If it bothers you to see children suffering and failing needlessly because of defective teaching methods obstinately adhered to against all criticism, you will become angry.”and“We have the most inarticulate generation of college students in our history, and this may well account for their mass outbreaks of violence. They have no more intelligent way to express themselves.” (Blumenfeld is quoting Karl Shapiro)Aside from that, this book also features a lengthy section on practical methods to use to teach your children how to read (as young as preschool!)
  (p.s. the above link for this book is an affiliate link for bookshop.com. If you have children and want to teach them yourself, I do highly recommend this book.)

Jan H. van de Beek, Hans Roodenburg, Joop Hartog and Gerrit W. Kreffer

In a way, this report can be seen as an update and extension of the CPB report Immigration and the Dutch Economy from 20031 . That CPB report, among other things, calculated the costs and benefits for the treasury of non-Western immigration at the time. Since that report, the government has no longer calculated these tax costs and benefits of immigration in a general sense. This is striking because in the Netherlands just about everything that is relevant to policy is regularly monitored in all kinds of ways. And given its considerable size in the last decades, immigration to the Netherlands can certainly be considered policy-relevant.

The fact that the CPB report from 2003 has not received a full update is not least due to normative limitations. In this context, the late minister Eberhard van der Laan said in the NOS-journaal news program of 4 September 2009 that the cabinet is not interested in putting people along the yardstick of euros. The then director of the CPB, Laura van Geest, stated in an interview: 2 “I don’t think you should talk about refugees and start calculating something.” And Klaas Dijkhoff stated in 2016 as State Secretary for Security and Justice in response to parliamentary questions 3 that the government does not evaluate citizens, but policy. Country of origin is personal data that, “in accordance with the principles of the rule of law, is not relevant to most policy areas,” says Dijkhoff.

There are three underlying – often implicit – arguments that play a role in this: ‘one should not calculate the value of a human life’, ‘one should not blame the victim’ and ‘one should not play into the hands of the extreme right’. 4 None of these three arguments makes sense upon closer consideration.

Let’s begin with the argument that one should not ‘calculate the value of a human life’. It is sometimes noted that it would not be ethically acceptable to calculate the costs and benefits of immigrants. Humanitarian reasons and human solidarity would oppose this. This argument is already very easy to refute for immigrant workers because their arrival is often defended on the basis of economic selfinterest. But it doesn’t really make sense for family immigrants and refugees either. Few residents would welcome immigrants at any cost, for example, for whom it does not matter whether immigration reduces their income by a small percentage or cuts their income by a quarter.

Derek Thompson:

A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television.

…When podcasts got started, they were radio for the Internet. This really appealed to me when I started my show. I never watch the news on television, and I love listening to podcasts while I make coffee and go on walks, and I’d prefer to make the sort of media that I consume. Plus, as a host, I thought I wanted to have conversations focused on the substance of the words rather than on ancillary concerns about production value and lighting.

But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts. Does it really make sense to insist on an audio-only podcast in 2025? I do not think so. Reality is screaming loudly in my ear, and its message is clear: Podcasts are turning into television.

My work on “the end of thinking” follows the decline of literacy and numeracy scores in the U.S. and the handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. Neither of these trends is exclusively caused by the logic of television colonizing all media. But both trends are significantly exacerbated by it.

Big Pictures Originals:

For decades, the United States stood as a global symbol of free speech. But what if that legacy is being quietly rewritten?

GOD COMPLEX is a Big Picture Original documentary that launches a deep investigation to answer this question.

Through expert testimony and firsthand accounts, the film raises unsettling questions about the future of truth and invites you to see what few have dared to expose.

Bret Devereaux:

We’ve talked about the patterns of marriage, of birth, of death, of subsistence in farming and spinning and weaving, the innumerable maintenance tasks that keep the household running and the pressures that elite extraction – omnipresent for our peasants – exert on the system.

This week I want to try to put it all together, taking our models and transmuting them into a sense of what life in these communities was like, with its hardships and its joys. In particular, this is an effort to take our models – which exist mostly as numbers – and turn them into something approaching a narrative, a digital-to-analog conversion that I hope can capture a bit more of the nature of life for these people. That narrative is going to follow one of the dominant ways early agrarian societies thought about time: not as a linear progression, but as a sequence of cycles, from the smallest to the largest.

Chad Aldeman:

But I want to double back on Sherrill’s casual slams on Mississippi and Louisiana. Do they have some of the “worst schools” in the nation, as Sherrill claimed? And by implication, is New Jersey doing better than these states? The answer to both of those questions is no. 

Sherrill’s confusion may stem from the fact that New Jersey does have pretty high student achievement scores, but this could be largely because New Jersey is a relatively wealthy state that spends a lot of money on its schools. Does that mean its schools are good? What value are the schools adding? 

For example, here are the raw, unadjusted 4th grade math scores for these three states: 

New Jersey: 240 

Mississippi: 239 

Louisiana: 235 

New Jersey gets the slight nod here. It may not be as much of an advantage as old historical prejudices would lead you to believe, but it is still beating these Southern states. Go New Jersey! 

But wait. Let’s start to break those down a bit. What are the 4th grade math scores for non-poor kids? 

Mississippi: 256 

Louisiana: 254

New Jersey: 254

Huh. That’s weird. New Jersey’s non-poor students are slightly underperforming those in Mississippi and Louisiana. What about low-income kids?

———-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Becky Jacobs:

Nearly 2,500 people applied to attend the law school this fall, Scheller said. That’s a 36% increase over last year and the school’s highest amount in 15 years.

UW-Madison tends to receive about 1,600 to 1,800 applications in a typical year, Scheller said.

Law schools across the country reported an 18% increase in applicants during the 2025 admissions cycle. Preliminary numbers suggest this rise may continue, according to the Law School Admission Council, a Pennsylvania organization that tracks enrollment data.

Laura Meckler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel

The administration is looking to shed workers and transfer some operations to other departments as it seeks to close the Education Department

The prolonged government shutdown is helping the Trump administration advance its goal of closing the Education Department — a longtime conservative aim that congressional Republicans have failed to act on.

Jessika Harkay

One four young adults across the U.S. is functionally illiterate – yet more than half earned high school diplomas, according to recently released data.

The number of 16-to-24 year olds reading at the lowest literacy levels increased from 16% in 2017 to 25% in 2023, according to data released in December from the National Center for Education Statistics in partnership with the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies. 

In 2023, a total of about five million young adults, equivalent to the population of Alabama, could understand the basic meaning of short texts but could not analyze long reading materials, according to further analysis by the American Institute of Research.

The nine percentage point increase is in line with an unprecedented decline in the literacy rate among all adults in the same six-year period. 

But even more troubling is the AIR researchers’ finding that while the percentage of young adults with high school diplomas increased from 50% to 55% between 2017 and 2023, that group also saw the largest decrease in scores on tests measuring literacy skills compared to older adults with diplomas. 

———-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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?

Barbara Oakley:

Washington has an urgent math problem. Nearly one in three students cannot demonstrate basic grade-level skills, and among low-income students it’s almost one in two. In a state that prides itself on leading the nation in technology jobs, that’s not just an education issue — it’s an economic emergency.

This problem isn’t unique to Washington. Across the Western world, classrooms have embraced teaching philosophies that emphasize “conceptual understanding” over getting the right answer. Ask educators and many will insist they never do this, but in practice, students are often rewarded for being able to explain in words how they got their answer, even when it isn’t correct. 

Part of the reason is that teachers are rarely taught how the brain learns. Neuroscience shows we rely on two main systems: the declarative system, which lets us explain or describe something, and the basal ganglia system, which builds automatic skill through practice and pattern recognition. A student can sound confident explaining a process while still lacking the practice and memorization that allows them to consistently provide the correct answer.

Tomoe Kanaya, Jonathan Wai and Brenda Miranda:

A majority of the research on students receiving special education services in the United States have focused on school-aged outcomes. Comparatively less is known about how these students fare in adulthood. By utilizing a one-to-one propensity score matching technique, individuals who received special education services were compared with those who did not on multiple adulthood outcomes that span educational attainment, economic self-sufficiency, social engagement, and health. Results suggest that Hispanic students in our sample who participate in special education fared better compared to their non-Hispanic counterparts on some outcomes. Moreover, propensity (the likelihood of receiving services) predicted several more outcomes. These results point to the potential importance of the contextual factors that surround special education services and suggest the need to provide context-specific services at the local level. The findings also highlight the use of propensity score analyses to reduce concerns of selection bias in special educational research.

James Shore:

I’m actually showing them to make a point about your biases. In the modern era, we expect images to be true to life. We have cameras that give us nearly perfect representations of the world. But realism isn’t what medieval monks were always trying to accomplish. Religion and metaphor were a central part of their lives, to a degree that I think we in the modern world have trouble understanding.

The elephants on the left aren’t really elephants. They’re a way of presenting a moral lesson about your place in the world. The image serves that story. It’s not there to teach you about elephants. It’s there to teach you about God.

So if your first reaction to these elephants was to laugh at those ignorant medieval monks… then perhaps you’ve fallen prey to your biases. The elephant doesn’t look like an elephant because the metaphor was more important than the reality.

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

[beat]

The past informs the present, but the present informs the past. We can’t help but to interpret it through the lens of our own experience, and those biases distort the reality of what it was actually like to live there.

This idea fascinates me, because it’s not only true of the past; it’s true of everything. Our biases and experiences influence so much of how we interpret the world.

From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …

Sophie McBain

Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.

Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device – one prototype looks like a pair of glasses – that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?

Tara Weiss:

There are the parents who want to know what the “magic number” is to donate to guarantee admission. The moms who ask whether a friend-of-a-friend should put in a good word. The dads who call shortly before decisions are released asking, What will it take to get the deal done? The parents whose behavior was so crass that Los Angeles school consultant Sandy Eiges added a clause in her contract stating that the use of profanity could terminate their working relationship.

All this is to get eighth graders into high school.

“I don’t mince words,” said Eiges, owner and founder of L.A. School Scout, which guides families through K-12 school admissions. “That’s part of what they’re paying me for—to get them through this successfully.” Eiges wouldn’t disclose her fee but said that consultants in L.A. typically charge between $5,000 and $10,000 for their services. That is on top of annual school tuition that can range from $25,000 to $50,000, she said.

Getting into high school has become a brutal competition for many families. Across the country, school choice for public and private institutions has surged amid expanded access to vouchers, educational savings accounts and Covid-era learning loss. There are a large number of high school options there to fill that gap, but the systems and admissions are difficult to navigate–not to mention competitive. Freaked-out parents are paying up.

New York City is widely considered the most competitive and confusing market. This week, middle schoolers received random lottery numbers that determine their priority in public school admissions. The system includes four different types of schools: the lottery schools, charter schools, specialized schools that require a test, and then arts schools that require an audition. Private schools are a whole other story.

Holly Korbey:

EdReports doesn’t rate materials on whether they have a successful track record in helping students learn, but rather how well they align with Common Core State Standards. And even after they amended their process to try to correct for some of these challenges, experts say EdReports hasn’t gone back and re-reviewed materials using the new criteria—so materials green-lit before remain so today.

“Relying on EdReports blindly is not reliable,” said education journalist Natalie Wexler, who wrote her own widely-read critique examining how EdReports reviews could be misleading to consumers last year.

That would be big news to practically every state leader looking for something good their schools can use. And when I asked a small group of researchers and experts whether a better review platform exists? Also, no. Maybe. With caveats.

I think it goes without saying that curriculum choice, what students actually learn all day at school, is important; research has confirmed it. Using learning materials that are well-designed, organized, and sequential, year upon year, add up to more than the sum of their parts, according to cognitive science, because a store of knowledge in long-term memory is so crucial to the kind of thinking and analyzing we want students to be able to do.

But U.S. schools have just recently jumped back on the bandwagon of believing that using a curriculum—any curriculum—is good in the first place.

Eugene Volokh

Tovar v. American Automatic Fire Suppression Inc., decided Oct. 3 by San Diego County Superior Court Judge Carolyn M. Caietti, declined to impose sanctions on defendant’s lawyers, because the plaintiff hadn’t complied with certain procedural rules, but added:

Notwithstanding the denial on procedural grounds, the Court is deeply troubled by the conduct of Defense counsel. Defendants admitted to submitting authority that was miscited, non-existent or inapposite…. “Simply stated, no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations—whether provided by generative AI or any other source—that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified.” … [A] party’s citation to fabricated legal authorities violate[] “a basic duty counsel owed to his client and the court” ….

One of Defendants’ most recent motions contain both citations to cases that do not appear to exist and factual misrepresentations. On July 23, 2025, Defendants filed a motion to compel an independent medical examination of Plaintiff. There is a citation to a case that does not exist and a citation that does not stand for the premise asserted.

In addition, Attorney Woods’ supporting declaration contained [non-AI-related] misrepresentations to the Court. [Details omitted. -EV]

Defendants also cite to a Notice of Errata filed in relation to the IME motion as having cured any false citations or misrepresentations. While the Notice of Errata removed citations to two of the cases cited, it more so “corrected” other citations to repealed statutes. It also minimized the citations to “clerical errors” that did not alter the substance of the legal argument presented. A stark contrast to the position taken by Defendants now.

Henry Oliver:

Literary culture is dominated by pessimists. They claim that the English novel is in a slump, the media is dying at the hand of tech oligarchs, and that culture is in a repetitive doom-loop. Every film is a sequel. Students don’t read anymore. A generation of graduates are illiterate. Marshall McLuhan was right.

There is a lot of truth in this perspective. Survey data shows there really has been a decline in reading this century. Studying literature at university is in steep decline. No-one doubts that there is a preponderance of screen time instead of book time. It is heartbreaking to see children still in their buggies addicted to tablets.

Somedays, I feel the pull of the pessimistic argument. What was the last English book that was as good as Piranesi or An Inheritance of Loss? Why do we not have a new Sally Rooney, or a Percival Everett every year?

But I think the overall picture is more complicated. Literature is doing just fine in quality terms, but we are at a tipping point. We have a chance to change all this, and pessimism won’t help.

Let’s start with fiction. The last few years have seen some splendid British novels: Piranesi, Hamnet, Klara and the Sun, Shuggie Bain, and the Wolf Hall books. This year I have especially enjoyed Flesh by David Szalay. And Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a very funny new novel. International fiction is thriving: South America, Ireland, Korea, Japan and France have all produced great novels recently. This year, Helen deWitt, a true genius, is publishing a new novel. In 2022, Tyler Cowen listed seventeen major novels of modern times and concluded that we are not living through an especially bad time for literature. There is also children’s writing. Sam Leith wrote in 2022 “we’re going through a bit of a golden age for children’s fiction.” He named Katherine Rundell, Piers Torday, SF Said, Jeff Kinney, Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve and Michelle Paver. There are also writers like Alex Bell, Frances Hardinge, and Julia Donaldson.

Samuel Axion:

“Almost every reasonable AI company that’s out there is saying, listen, if it’s a fair playing field, then we’re happy to pay for content,” Prince said. “The problem is that all of them are terrified of Google because if Google gets content for free but they all have to pay for it, they are always going to be at an inherent disadvantage.”

This is happening because Google is using its dominant position in search to ensure that web publishers allow their content to be used in ways that they might not otherwise want it to.

The changing norms of the web

Since 2023, Google has offered a way for website administrators to opt their content out of use for training Google’s large language models, such as Gemini.

Douglas Belkin & Natalie Andrews:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first university to reject a sweeping proposal from the Trump administration offering colleges funding advantages in exchange for far-reaching campus reforms.

In a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon Friday, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said the proposal—called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”—would restrict freedom of expression and MIT’s independence. The proposal is inconsistent with the school’s belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone, she said.

“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence,” Kornbluth wrote. “The people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”

The compact, sent out to nine colleges last week the White House perceived as “good actors,” proposed a wide-ranging set of terms the administration says are intended to elevate university standards and performance.

The compact demands that schools ban the use of race or sex in hiring and admissions; freeze tuition for five years; cap international undergrad enrollment at 15%; require that applicants take the SAT or a similar test; and quell grade inflation.

Much of the document focuses on the campus political climate. Critics said the language was imprecise, including a mandate to get rid of departments that belittle conservative ideas.

Wall Street Journal:

The school’s policy of prioritizing American students is especially valuable because of how much elite math and science is taught and researched there. MIT notes that in the “free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences.”

“The document also includes principles with which we disagree,” Ms. Kornbluth writes, “including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution.” On free speech, MIT says it believes “we must hear facts and opinions we don’t like and engage respectfully.” It already has its own Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.

Will the school be punished for not signing on? That’s a serious question since the Administration has shown it can be vindictive.