School Information System

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

“The most effective way to destroy an organization is to make it more bureaucratic”

alephic:

In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, was aware of this. What they didn’t know was that their blueprint for sabotaging Nazi operations would become the operating manual for modern corporations.

This re-publication comes from a deeply uncomfortable recognition. Open to Section 11 and you’ll find instructions that could have been lifted from yesterday’s management consultant: “Refer all matters to committees.” “Haggle over precise wordings of communications.” “Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.” The saboteurs’ playbook has become our best practices.

We puzzle over our economic stagnation, wondering why the technological revolution hasn’t made our organizations faster. Since the 1970s, productivity growth has limped along at roughly half its post-war pace, except for a brief internet-fueled surge in the 1990s. The answer stares at us from these pages.

China’s population over 65 outnumbers children for first time since 1949: survey

Emma Ma & Mandy Zuo:

For the first time in records dating back to 1949, China is now home to more people aged 65 and above than children, the latest official data showed, underscoring the country’s deepening demographic pressure.

By November last year, 15.87 per cent of China’s roughly 1.4 billion-strong population was aged at least 65, compared with 15.25 per cent aged between 0 to 14, according to the results of a nationwide sample survey released late last week.

That meant China’s traditional family-based model of elderly care was under immense pressure, said independent demographer He Yafu, while the burden on social security pension payments was growing heavier.

The data was extrapolated from a November “mini-census” – a sample survey of 1 per cent of the nationwide population held between the once-a-decade national censuses – that covered over 20 million people, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

“In pension provision, the population aged 65 and over – the main users of pensions and elderly care services – has now overtaken the child population, adding further strain to social security pension payments,” He said.

“At the family level, the rising number of elderly people and the trend towards smaller households are placing immense pressure on the traditional family caregiving model.”

How English pupils are being silenced in lessons

Anonymous:

Last week, I was teaching the scene in Macbeth when our hero sees an illusionary dagger. It was a lower ability group in Y9. The scene was homing in on the quotation ‘Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/ That summons thee to heaven or to hell’ and the question my Academy booklet, which all teachers are required to work from, wanted me to ask was ‘Why might Shakespeare have used rhyming couplets?’

The booklet said the reason was to bring the scene ‘closure’ and so the students copied this down from my visualiser, then repeated it verbatim and in unison, shared the exact wording in their pairs and even wrote it again on a whiteboard. The belt and braces of obedience had been completed. I was compliant with the Trust-wide policy. Time for me to move to the next page of the booklet.

Although this was a satisfactory interpretation, it didn’t seem sufficient. The class hadn’t given it any thought of their own and, as an experienced teacher, I could tell the students didn’t fully understand what they were being asked to write down. So I decided to deviate from the booklet.

I turned the visualiser off, moved to stand with the students in the middle of the room, where I would have naturally stood before being required to teach in a formulaic way, asked them ‘why else do you think Shakespeare used a rhyme here?’ and prompted them to write down their own ideas. They looked terrified.

City parenting has become a financial flex

The Economist:

Not ago Wicker Park, a neighbourhood on the north-west side of Chicago, was among America’s hippest neighbourhoods. On summer weekends young people with weird haircuts mobbed nightclubs. Vintage stores did a roaring trade in faded T-shirts from the 1980s. A few Puerto Rican restaurants, remnants of a poorer neighbourhood, sat uneasily alongside the new cafés serving cronuts and unlimited mimosas.

“Nearly nine in 10 parents in the United States believe that their child is performing at or above grade level in reading and math”

Ariel Kalil, Derek Rury

Many, if not most, of them are wrong.

Actual proficiency rates among eighth graders are 30 percent in reading and 28 percent in math, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or N.A.E.P. The gap between grades and test scores is particularly pronounced in schools serving higher proportions of low-income students, according to a 2023 study.

This problem has gotten worse over the past 15 years or so as grade inflation has increased. Between 2010 and 2022, average high school grade-point averages rose significantly — especially in math, to 3.32 from 3.02.

Meanwhile, standardized testing — one of the few independent checks on schools — is being undermined. Under federal law, states must administer annual standardized tests in math and reading in grades three through eight. But several states have recently loweredthe score a child needs to be deemed “proficient,” producing big gains on paper without any change in the classroom.

Wisconsin redesigned its assessment, and English proficiency in the state increased to 48 percent from 39 percent. Illinois and Kansas have followed suit. In more than half of the states, proficiency rates on state reading tests now exceed the rates on national tests by 15 percentage points or more, and in some states the gap is much larger.

The federal government is making the problem only worse. In 2025, the Trump administration gutted the Education Department, which is behind the national test. Although some reports indicate that the agency has begun to rebuild, certain assessments have already been scaled back.

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Quinton Klabon:

most staff per student in -Wisconsin history-, 1 adult per 7.0 kids

staff down -747 since 2025, but did not keep up with student drop
teachers soon to be <50% of school workforce
major cause of referenda and low teacher pay

———

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

By Allison Pohle and Roshan Fernandez

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?

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics”

UC Student Success:

“The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”

———

Via Neetu Arnold.

Exposing Critical Vulnerabilities in CBSE’s On-Screen Marking Portal: From Authentication Bypass to Full Account Takeover

ni5arga:

I first posted a rough write-up of these vulnerabilities to r/CBSE using a throwaway reddit account, but I figured a proper write-up on my own blog would be a better home for it. The tweet (X post) where this is being discussed can be found here.

These vulnerabilities were initially discovered on 25 February 2026 and were promptly reported to CERT-In.

What is CBSE and On-Screen Marking?

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is one of the largest national education boards in India. It operates under the Government of India and runs major examinations like the Class 10 and Class 12 board exams for millions of students every year.

CBSE is affiliated with over 28,000 schools in India and several hundred more abroad, which makes it one of the most influential educational bodies in the country. Every year, millions of answer sheets are evaluated by thousands of teachers and examiners as part of the board exam process.

To streamline all of that, CBSE has started moving to a digital On-Screen Marking (OSM) system for the Class 12 board exams (circular). Instead of checking physical answer sheets, examiners log into an online portal where scanned copies of answer scripts are assigned to them for evaluation.

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More.

AI-slop, GrantaGate and bad writing

Tuhin Chakrabarty:

The last two days have been a bit crazy, thanks to a certain short story published in Granta magazinethat has now been awarded a prize by the Commonwealth Foundation. Nabeel Qureshi was the first on my feed to highlight that it was AI-generated. As I write, his tweet has 1.5M views which is roughly 1.4M more than anything I have ever written. For us fortunate, or if I may say unfortunate, professors whose inboxes are inundated by AI-written emails, it is not exactly detective work to recognize that this short story was completely AI-generated.

Pangram’s AI detection confirmed this. For those who don’t know me, I should admit I am a bit of an AI-detection maximalist, so obviously I got into arguments on X with people who were quick to dismiss the detection results and insist detectors don’t work.

How the SPLC’s Woke Ideology Infected 169 School Districts

Tyler O’Neil:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has spread its woke activist agenda in education to at least 169 school districts in 42 states, according to a new report, and the impact of teachers unions helps explain this expansive influence.

Learning for Justice, the SPLC’s education arm, promotes “social justice” activism, pushes racially divisive messaging, and advocates transgender ideology. The program, launched as “Teaching Tolerance” in the 1990s, dropped the emphasis on “tolerance” amid the Great Awokening in February 2021. Around that same time, the program removed its own impact statement from the website, which had previously bragged that “more than 500,000 educators” read its magazine, screened its films, visited its website, and used its curricula.

The parental rights group Defending Education exposedLearning for Justice’s broad influence in an exhaustive report Tuesday.

“Unbeknownst to parents, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been poisoning pupils’ minds around the country for years with its toxic curriculum,” Nicole Neily, the group’s president, told The Daily Signal. “SPLC lesson plans on issues such as queer theory, white privilege, and anti-racism have supplanted traditional coursework in history, social studies, and other core classes—teaching children to view themselves and others through the lens of identity politics, and that America is forever stained by its original sin.”

How did the SPLC spread its tentacles this far? America’s two largest teachers unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—help explain it, as does the American School Counselor Association.

“By promoting and integrating Learning for Justice content and standards into mental health programming and curricula, the teachers unions and ASCA are giving the far-left organization credibility,” Rhyen Staley, director of research at Defending Education, told The Daily Signal. “This is deeply troubling for a variety of reasons, especially since the SPLC has put parents on its ‘hate map’ for simply raising concerns with their local school districts.”

Exposing the group disparities = discrimination fallacy

Zach Goldberg:

“We have a hard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large … When you truly believe that racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.”-Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning

The idea that persistent outcome disparities between racial groups necessarily reflect or result from discrimination rests on a narrow, misleading, and politically motivated portrayal of the empirical reality. In what follows, I introduce and briefly discuss a number of data points that call this narrative into question.

Disparities between groups are the norm, not the exception—even among ‘whites’.

Binary white vs. black comparisons merely obscure disparities that obtain between virtually all ethnic/ancestry groups while promoting the illusion that white-black disparities are somehow exceptional. Indeed, large disparities in socioeconomic outcomes are observed even between US-born whites of different European ancestry. For example, Figure 1 below graphs the age and sex-adjusted median personal income among US-born respondents (so as to exclude the distortive influence of first-generation immigrants) by self-reported ancestry. Overall, nearly half (47.8%) of all European ancestry groups reported below-average median incomes in the 2015-2019 period, which is almost identical to the share (48.4%) among their non-European counterparts. Among the lowest US-born ‘white’ earners are those of Spanish, Dutch, Acadian, French, and British/English ancestry.

Home-schooling is taking off

The Economist:

A couple of months after two children attacked Enna Pink’s son with sticks at kindergarten, he began pleading with her to stay at home. “I didn’t want to force him to go,” says Ms Pink. She and her husband, who both worked at a startup, thought home-schooling would be a better fit for their son, who is “hyper-sensitive”. But it is illegal in Germany, where they lived. So they moved to Costa Rica, where home-schooling is illegal for locals but there is little oversight for digital nomads.

Now her children, seven and four, do not follow lesson plans; instead they learn by playing outside, joining other children in local activities and travelling around the world. She thinks all this fosters curiosity and confidence. “We feel that what our society needs in the future is not what the school system can offer,” she says.

Chart: The Economist

Home-schooling has long been associated with oddball parents, awkward children and shaky pedagogy. But it is growing swiftly. Numbers were rising before the pandemic; they have since surged in countries like Britain, Australia and Canada (see chart 1). In America 3.2m children, or 6% of the school-age population, were home-schooled in 2024—more than double the number in 2019.

As home-schooling has grown, the families who take it up have changed as well. Take America, where home-schooling, once a fad on the counter-cultural left in the 1970s, was by the 1980s driven by conservatives who decried schools as “Satanic hothouses”. It is still associated with white evangelical Christians.

They face cuts to entry-level jobs. They’re also highly sought after for their AI skills.

Now Kanjorski sees AI as a potential edge when she starts as a financial analyst at an insurer in Burlington this summer, a spot she feels lucky to have after applying to around 40 jobs. “I would like to be the person who can help other people understand it better or figure out how it fits into their day-to-day,” she said.

Here comes the Class of AI, the most AI-native group of graduates to enter the workforce—a cohort employers are already trying to figure out what to do with. They started college just a few months before ChatGPT splashed into the world. They’re leaving as AI rapidly shakes up the entry-level jobs that were once thought of as solid career launchpads.

What the University Is Now For

Amarda Shehu

In 1869, Charles Eliot asked what the American college was for, and answered by dismantling the curriculum that had defined it for two centuries. In 1936, Robert Hutchins asked the same question against the pressure of the Depression, and refused to let the university be reduced to a job-training apparatus for an economy in collapse. In 1963, Clark Kerr asked it again of the postwar multiversity, and named the contradictions the institution had been carrying without naming. As much as we want to think this moment is unique, we stand at a similar inflection. The question is the same. The pressures are different. The hedging that has carried the American university through the last half century is no longer available, and the institution will have to answer, in language its students and their families can recognize as honest, what it is now for.

The pressure this time arrives in the form of a technology that has begun to absorb the credentialed performance the university has been selling. Large language models can pass the bar examination, write the brief, draft the memo, generate the code, summarize the literature, and produce the analysis that an entry-level professional was hired to produce. Companies have been laying off in the tens of thousands and citing AI as the reason, and a year later many of them are quietly rehiring, often offshore and at lower wages. Forrester’s 2026 Future of Work report finds that 55 percent of employers regret those layoffs and projects that roughly half will be reversed. The on-ramps into professional careers are narrowing at the same time that tuition continues to rise. The Burning Glass Institute reports that the value of a bachelor’s degree has dropped to a thirty-year low, with unemployment among recent graduates approaching levels seen among non-graduates, as employers automate the entry-level tasks that once gave junior staff the experience the labor market is now demanding upfront. The families paying that tuition are being asked to take on more debt for a credential whose market value the technology is in the process of revising in real time. The institution is being asked to absorb this revaluation at a moment when the federal research enterprise that has underwritten the modern American university is itself contracting, when state appropriations have been declining in real terms for two decades, and when the discretionary resources required to undertake any serious redesign are scarcer than they have been at any point in the postwar period. The institution has so far responded to all of this with a vocabulary of adaptation. AI literacy across the curriculum. Faculty workshops on integrating the tools. A few new degree programs. The vocabulary is not wrong. It is incommensurate with the size of what is happening.

The Yass Prize

Wall Street Journal:

The Yass Prize, founded by Susquehanna co-founder Jeff Yass and his wife Janine, announced Wednesday that it will fund scholarships for 500 Philadelphia children to attend private school. The need is pressing because the city plans to close 17 district schools in 2027 thanks to declining enrollment. The 4,000 or so students whose schools are closing are eligible for the scholarships, worth $8,000 a year through high school graduation. Scholarships are awarded first-come, first served.

Students can take the scholarships to some 16 private schools near Philadelphia that the Yass Prize organization has recognized as innovative and promising. That includes Liguori Academy, a high school that offers building trades training, and St. Francis de Sales, a Catholic elementary school.

A new school can be life-changing. Only a third of Philadelphia students were proficient in English, and a quarter in math, on state tests last year. That’s the horrifying return on school district spending of about $32,000 per student, according to the Commonwealth Foundation. District-staffing surged while enrollment dropped 12% from 2016 to 2025.

Parents have few other options to escape, though many try. That’s the takeaway from a new Commonwealth Foundation report on the state’s two modest programs that offer tax credits to businesses and individuals who donate to scholarship organizations. More than 100,000 mostly lower-income children used the tax-credit scholarships in 2023-24, the most recent year with data available. But funding caps leave tens of thousands of students on waiting lists, says the report.

Civics: Will Massachusetts Sour on Religious Freedom?

Michael McConnell & John Witte, Jr.:

The 1780 Massachusetts Declaration of Rights has religious-freedom protections older than the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Once tolerant of a localized establishment of town-based churches, it was amended in 1833 to bar establishment and instead to protect “all religious sects and denominations” from laws that deny equal protection or subordinate one religion to another.

It has never been interpreted to bar all religious symbols from public property. A statue of Moses is prominently displayed at the Worcester state courthouse, there has long been a statue of David at the State House, and Boston’s flag and seal proclaim in Latin “God be with us as he was with our fathers.” None of this has ever been challenged, let alone held unlawful.

But after the city of Quincy commissioned a highly regarded artist to sculpt two statues for the city’s police and fire building, a Superior Court judge ruled last year that they violated the state constitution and sent the statues to a warehouse, out of public view. The statues depict St. Florian and Archangel Michael, and thus purportedly endorse Catholicism, the judge claimed.

Notes on declining k-12 academic performance

PBS:

As the school year comes to a close, a new analysis shines a harsh spotlight on what’s being called a “learning recession” among American students. It’s a problem that started long before the pandemic, according to the latest National Education Scorecard — an annual deep dive into data about kids in grades K-12.

The findings of this report are sobering. Children had a steady decline in math and reading scores beginning all the way back to 2013, which happens to be when smartphones and social media really took off.

Compared to a decade ago, math scores today are down in 70% of school districts. Reading scores are down in 83%.

Scores have climbed a bit since 2022, but nowhere close to making up all the lost ground. In fact, 8th grade reading scores are now at their lowest level since 1990.

@wmbrangham recently spoke with Thomas Kane, one of the authors of the scorecard and a professor at Harvard University.

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Commentary

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

The New Rules of Sorority Rush, According to a Top Consultant

Sarah Spellings:

Trisha Addicks knows the pain of being rejected from a sorority. As a freshman at the University of Georgia in 1986, she went through her first rush, a competitive process of talking to strangers with the hope of becoming lifelong sisters by the end of the week. She showed up unprepared and didn’t get any bids.

“It was devastating to me,” Addicks, 58, said. She never forgot the feeling—not when she made it into Chi Omega the next year and not all these decades later.

That feeling has fueled her to build a successful business in a surprising niche: getting women into their dream sororities. She founded her consulting firm, It’s All Greek to Me, in 2017 after spending over 20 years performing similar services pro-bono for her friends’ kids.

Then and now, Addicks helps young sorority hopefuls fine-tune their networking skills, clean up their social media, learn how to chat with strangers and perfect their style. Occasionally, they’ll do a trial rush in heels in the Georgia heat.

Cancer may take my life. Here’s what a hymn made me see.

Megan Basham:

What finally brought my odds-fevered mind some peace was a hymn that reminded me what I believe — that someone is in control of the wheel, and the ball, and the number of pockets, and the length of the spin. And statistics and probabilities hold no sway over Him. A friend dealing with his own cancer shared a performance of the 17th-century German hymn, “What God Ordains is Always Good.” For some reason, I didn’t stop to look up his survival rates, I just clicked play. This is what I heard:
“What God Ordains is always good;/ His will is just and holy./ As He directs my life for me,/ I follow meek and lowly.”

Young people in particular have powered a rise in the number of Americans with credit scores over 780

Oyin Adedoyin:

The ranks of super prime credit-score holders have grown by 15 million over the last half-dozen years, thanks in part to young people.

Americans with top-tier scores above 780 have been a boost to banks, which are increasingly courting high-end customers with offers of credit cards and other loans. Banks touted their focus on customers with strong credit while reporting first-quarter earnings growth in recent weeks.

“With our portfolio heavily weighted to prime, delinquencies and credit losses declined and are well in line with expectations,” said Jane Fraser, Citigroup’s chair and chief executive, on an earnings call.

Approximately 85% of the bank’s balances are extended to consumers with a FICO score of 660 or higher.

Lots of consumers entered the super prime category during the pandemic when they received stimulus payments or cut back on spending, according to TransUnion, a credit-reporting firm. The growth continued as worker incomes have risen, and stocks and home values surged.

“the Madison Metropolitan School District decided in the fall to stick with unweighted GPAs”

Erin Gretzinger:

Under Madison’s approach, a student who receives an A in a standard class earns the same 4.0 grade points as a student who gets an A in an AP class.

District officials also decided not to implement a tiebreaker for students with identical GPAs, meaning all students with GPAs in the top 10% and 5% were identified as qualifying for automatic admission, even if the total number of students then exceeded the 10% and 5% ratios.

But this week, the district announced it had to change course and developed a new ranking criteria to break ties if students have the same GPA.

Under the proposal, the district would first consider a student’s composite ACT score and then weigh the number of successfully completed college-level courses, including AP and dual-enrollment courses. Then, if needed, the district would rely on attendance rates.

The proposal reflects “indicators linked to college success and persistence,” according to a memo to the School Board written by Mary Jankovich, the district’s executive director of college, career and community readiness, and Langston Evans, a director of college and career readiness.

……

He declined to provide numbers showing how many more Madison students than the 10% and 5% ratios were awarded eligibility in previous years, directing the Cap Times to submit a formal records request for that information.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

From Sympathy To Empathy

Quinton Klabon Summary:

As someone who did a handful of home visits to get kids to school when their parents did not, I respect Fond Du Lac!

Adjusted for poverty, I have them as the best big district on the Forward. ACT could use work, but their Act 20 decisions make me think they will grow even more!

———

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Wisconsin students who struggle with reading are let down by unenforced literacy reforms, say advocates

Jackson Walker:

Parents don’t want ‘to just sit and read through state statutes’

A three-year-old Wisconsin law requiring schools to inform parents when their students are struggling with reading is going unenforced in far too many districts, leading many learners to fall behind state-mandated reading benchmarks, according to literacy advocates.

In some places parents are not being properly notified of either their children’s struggles or remediation plans or both. In other places, remediation appears to not be meeting the standards specified in the law. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, meanwhile, is not providing clear guidance, let alone oversight.

“I think that no one is really checking up on (the schools), no one is really monitoring the implementation (of the law),” said the head of Forward Literacy, Katie Kasubaski.

One mother of children with special needs described guidance materials from the DPI as being “clear as mud.”

The Legislature in 2023 passed Act 20, a reading reform law that requires districts to adopt “science of reading” methods — essentially, teaching children to sound out words in preference to the discredited “three-cuing”method that included guessing at words by looking at nearby pictures and using context clues.

Under the law, students undergo screening tests three times per year. Students who fall into the lowest-scoring quarter are supposed to receive a personalized reading plan and their parents are supposed to be notified.

———-

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Sunny Yu, Dyllan Han, Dan Jurafsky

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?

Hannah Natanson’s advice to journalists.

By Hannah Natanson

Look, I know it’s a tough time to be starting a career in journalism. Trust in the news media is historically low. I could list some statistics, but I’m sure you know them already. Jobs are few, and getting fewer. I recently read—in my own newspaper—a quote from an expert declaring the media industry “low hire and some fire.” The rise of artificial intelligence is alarming many newsrooms across the country. I’m hopeful we will find responsible ways to harness this revolutionary tool, but we might not. You’re also graduating at a moment when people in power are taking unprecedented steps to intimidate or silence the free press. (I don’t think I need to specify an example here.) I could keep going with this depressing list. But I don’t want to.

Actually, I want to convince you that you’ve made—or are about to make, after I finish my ultra-inspiring remarks—the best decision of your lives. Because journalism is not only the foundation of our democracy. It’s the most fulfilling work you’ll ever do. And the most fun you will ever have. Let me tell you why. Growing up, I always heard my father say he never worked a day in his life. I was confused, because he definitely left home for his office each morning. He tried to explain: When he was in his lab, conducting scientific research, it didn’t feel like work. Imagine, he said, if you woke up every day just desperate to get started on your homework. That didn’t help. I didn’t get it.

My sophomore year in college, I joined the student newspaper, mostly because I thought it would make me stand out from the other medical-school applicants. I was premed at the time, convinced my future lay in scientific research, like the kind my father did. That fall, the college’s dining workers went on strike, and the newspaper put out a call for volunteers. Intrigued, I raised my hand. Soon, I was traipsing across campus for hours every day, missing classes and meals, shadowing weary workers as they shuffled through picket lines. Along with talented fellow student journalists, I began cultivating sources at the uppermost levels of the workers’ union.

Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence

Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences, like reinforcing delusions, little is known about the extent of sycophancy or how it affects people who use AI. Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. First, across 11 state-of-the-art AI models, we find that models are highly sycophantic: they affirm users’ actions 50% more than humans do, and they do so even in cases where user queries mention manipulation, deception, or other relational harms. Second, in two preregistered experiments (N = 1604), including a live-interaction study where participants discuss a real interpersonal conflict from their life, we find that interaction with sycophantic AI models significantly reduced participants’ willingness to take actions to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing their conviction of being in the right. However, participants rated sycophantic responses as higher quality, trusted the sycophantic AI model more, and were more willing to use it again. This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward prosocial behavior. These preferences create perverse incentives both for people to increasingly rely on sycophantic AI models and for AI model training to favor sycophancy. Our findings highlight the necessity of explicitly addressing this incentive structure to mitigate the widespread risks of AI sycophancy.

Ryan Hart:

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Why Colleges Are Slashing MBA Prices

Wall Street Journal:

The University of California, Irvine, this month said it will reduce tuition for its MBA program by $30,000 to $99,000. “The Merage Flex MBA’s new tuition falls below the federal loan cap of $100,000, removing a critical financial barrier for working professionals across Southern California and beyond,” the university said. It boasted that its “MBA is priced within reach of government loan limits—making a world-class degree not just aspirational, but truly attainable.”

You have to love how the university spins virtue out of necessity. The GOP tax bill last year capped the aggregate federal debt that graduate students can take out at $100,000, and $200,000 for professional degrees like law and medicine. Previously, grad students could borrow an unlimited amount.

As a result, many grads took out mortgage-sized debts to pursue pricy degrees, many of which don’t pay off in future income. The Education Department this month said New York University offers a “master’s degree in film and video studies where students who take on federal loans leave with $168,000 in debt on average but earn just $47,000.”

Struggling borrowers would then enroll in the Obama and Biden loan forgiveness plan in which the feds wrote off one-third of debt. Graduate programs became cash cows for universities, which raised prices to take advantage of the open spigot of federal loans.

AI is accelerating grade inflation

Lindsay Ellis:

AI is making “A” grades easier to come by, a new study shows—and making them less useful to employers trying to size up college graduates.

The share of A’s in college classes heavy on writing and coding—in other words, work more prone to artificial-intelligence use—has grown more significantly than in other classes since ChatGPT’s debut, according to a paper from the University of California, Berkeley, released Wednesday. Professors teaching AI-exposed classes gave out about 30% more A’s and fewer A-minus and B-plus grades.

The results suggest that students have relied on generative AI to do better in their studies, not that these classes of students are learning more, says Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education and the paper’s author.

While grade inflation has been an issue on college campuses for years, AI tools have made it even harder to assess the quality of students’ work. To zero in on AI’s effect on grades, Chirikov pulled data on more than half a million grades from 2018 to 2025 at a large public university in Texas that publishes course syllabi and grade distributions.

Socialism Case Study

Handre:

Robert Owen’s New Harmony experiment stands as perhaps the most instructive lesson in economic history about why socialism fails every single time someone tries it. This wasn’t some theoretical debate in a university classroom. Owen put his money where his mouth was, purchasing the thriving town of Harmonie, Indiana in 1825 for $150,000 and transforming it into his vision of a perfect socialist society.

The setup looked promising. Owen brought genuine intellectual firepower to Indiana. Scientists, educators, and progressive thinkers flocked to this “Community of Equality” where private property would disappear, money would become obsolete, and collective labor would serve the common good. Owen had already made his fortune in the textile industry, so he understood production and management. He wasn’t some armchair theorist.

Within months, the cracks appeared. The hardest workers started questioning why they should break their backs when lazy neighbors received identical compensation. Why stay late to finish critical tasks when someone else could sleep in and still eat the same meals? Owen had eliminated the price system that communicates information about individual contribution and social need. Incentives collapsed immediately.

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: See How the Global Government Debt Binge Is Rippling Through Markets

Sam Goldfarb and Peter Santilli:

Recent strains in the global bond market are demonstrating a key problem confronting G-7 leaders at their meeting in Paris this week: how to manage a growing pile of government debt, accelerated by war and the pandemic.

Tumbling bond prices have pushed yields on government debt higher, lifting borrowing costs for governments, businesses and consumers alike. The main driver has been the war-fueled surge in energy prices, which has lifted inflation and spurred talk of possible interest-rate increases by central banks. But concerns about the fiscal outlook in Japan and the U.K. have also added to the bond-market selloff in recent days.

In the U.S., federal debt held by the public just climbed above 100% of the country’s gross domestic product for the first time since the aftermath of World War II. Yet the country still has advantages that have blunted the impact of that milestone.

Here is a look at the current complex relationship between government finances and the bond market:

Madison Schools: Taxpayer-Funded Parental Leave Debate

David Blaska:

courtesy of us taxpayers.

Blaska is back in kvetch mode today. Madison public schools will do it every time. The district is giving away more free stuff to its employees: 12 weeks — 60 days worth — of taxpayer paid parental leave for every teacher, custodian, lunch lady, and bureaucrat. Price tag: $1.2 million/year.

No other school district in Wisconsin offers this generous bennie — not Milwaukee, Kenosha, Green Bay, or Racine. Do you get 60 days of paid parental leave at your job? University of Wisconsin employees get half that. Parental leave for state government employees is unpaid. Same for City of Madison workers.

Just the same, generous paid leave felt “long overdue” to school board president Savion Castro, research fellow at UW-Madison School of Education and project assistant at its Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives. (Yeah, Madison’s school board is incestuous.)

———

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Mary Spicuzza & John Diedrich:

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?

“The Illusion of Thinking”

“How to ai”

It argues that AI models, no matter how brilliant they may seem, do not understand what they are doing.

They do not solve problems. They do not reason. They merely generate text word by word, trying to sound coherent.

Apple tested the most advanced reasoning models in the world on controlled puzzle environments. They tore open the internal “thinking” traces.

What they found shatters the narrative that we are getting closer to AGI.

Current models don’t scale with complexity. They have a hard mathematical cliff. And they do not degrade gracefully. They collapse.

But here is the most unsettling part.

When a problem gets too complex, the AI doesn’t use its remaining compute to try harder.

——

The Paper.

My son’s math homework is essentially just Pokémon

Will Oremus:

»

One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.

“That’s not your math homework!” I told him. But it was. His fifth-grade-math teacher had told her students to spend time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. As my son indignantly showed me, Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions in between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your “Aquadile” or “Bonasaur”—barely veiled rip-offs of Pokémon characters—gets a health boost that will help it fend off your opponent’s next salvo.

Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) These platforms—which also include Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot—can seem like a win-win. Students’ eyes light up at math-and-vocabulary-review sessions that once induced groans. Teachers, meanwhile, can use the games to track which questions kids get right and wrong, helping them triage trouble spots.

China Is Throwing Christians in Jail, but This Pastor Refuses to Back Down

Brian Spegele:

Pastor Ezra Jin was just finishing dinner with his elderly mother-in-law in the Chinese city of Beihai last October when more than a dozen police appeared at the door.

They stormed the apartment, confiscated his phones and computer, and hauled him off to jail.

Since then, he’s been confined to a dank cell at Beihai’s No. 2 Detention Center, cut off from his flock and his family, 8,000 miles away in the U.S. His sin: leading a church that Xi Jinping couldn’t bring to heel.

For years, Jin built a thriving Protestant congregation in the heart of Beijing, known as Zion Church, that operated outside the government’s system of tightly controlled official churches. Authorities once tolerated Jin and others like him, back when China’s economy was thriving and the country was gradually opening up to the world.

Then Xi took power and began tightening the screws. Officials interrogated churchgoers, threatened they could lose their jobs and pressured landlords who rented space to churches. Authorities demanded surveillance cameras be installed at Zion. Some of Jin’s assets were frozen, and he was barred from leaving China.

How to Reform the Universities

By Abigail Anthony:

American universities were once destinations for intellectual enrichment but have devolved into activist factories. Yet those with endowments surpassing the GDPs of small countries will survive the negative press, students will continue enrolling to obtain a snazzy résumé line, and academics will still publish nonsensical ideas that are eventually embraced by mainstream outlets. Since the universities seem destined to endure, how do we fix them?

Recourse to the law is one approach. Nonprofits like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression fight against free-speech violations, while firms such as the Alliance Defending Freedom have sued schools over interpretations of Title IX that enabled males to participate in women’s sports. The Department of Justice is dragging universities to court, particularly for violating antidiscrimination laws.

But coercing an institution to abandon its firm commitments to the progressive agenda will require more than a judge’s order. The Supreme Court ruled unambiguously in 2023 that affirmative action is illegal, yet the demographic composition of incoming classes at colleges across the country has not drastically changed since, which suggests that admissions offices still racially discriminate. More troubling, legal pressure risks further entrenching illiberalism on campus rather than eradicating it. Instead of paring back bias trainings and restrictions on speech, it could merely extend them in ways the militant activist left generally opposes — applying them, for example, to combat antisemitism.

The Great Zombification

Owen Yingling:

During the exam, students were pulling out phones and taking photographs of the test to submit to LLMs before copying down machine-written responses into their blue books.

I was disturbed but not surprised when I began to see intrusions into the humanities. Typically, each fraternity deals with one or two plagiarism cases a year in the mandatory humanities courses, but after sophomore year and the release of GPT 5, the cases (allegedly) went down and the grades went up.

Parallel growth marked the next stage. I was asleep in my Cairo hotel bed, studying abroad, when Sidechat, UChicago’s anonymous social media platform, made a tremendous discovery: The Maroon, our school newspaper, had published two articles completely written by AI. This had gone unnoticed for a few months before the only UChicago student with free time on his hands decided to see what sort of groundbreaking coverage of Chicago-area sports The Maroon might have and was certainly dejected to realize that instead of being furnished insider scoops on the Bulls’ roster moves, he was stuck reading sentences like: “Chicago’s perfect start isn’t a fluke; it’s the product of cohesion,” and “And through it all, there’s Giddey — the calm in the chaos, dictating the tempo and keeping the team grounded in the momentum.”

It should have been clear then that AI use was not simply a matter of academic misconduct. It could not be dealt with solely through reforming the baffling university disciplinary system, which is consistently content to grab twenty or so kids a year and suspend them for a year or two for cheating on an assignment or exam.

Teens Helped Bring Malls Back to Life. Now They’re Getting Banned.

Kate King:

At the Bronx mall, the owner temporarily banned younger shoppers who weren’t with someone 21 or older. These chaperone policies—sometimes called youth-escort or parental-guidance policies—started decades ago and have increased alongside the rise in mall disruptions over the years.

In some cases, mall takeovers have devolved into physical fights, robberies and gunfire. Landlords view banning unaccompanied minors as the most direct way to address the problem. Chaperone policies are also used to respond to gang violence, food-court brawls and shoplifting.

Owners say the bans have reduced violence and disorderly gatherings—to the relief of most shoppers—without having a noticeable impact on sales.

But some teens feel betrayed by these moves. Houston resident Zane Miller, who frequented the Willowbrook Mall in Houston as a teenager and now serves as president of the nonprofit organization National Youth Rights Association, said it was unfair to penalize all teenagers for the poor behavior of a few.

The Light at the End of the Weld

Anna-Sofia Lesiv:

When Rex ran the laser welder on the nose cone, the weld it produced was actually smaller than what a TIG welder would have laid down at roughly half the size. And yet it was significantly stronger, with a tenth of the distortion, and done five to six times faster. The intuition most people have is that a bigger weld means a stronger joint. The laser broke that assumption completely. Because it deposited energy so precisely and quickly, it fused the metal more completely, with less heat spreading into the surrounding structure to weaken and warp it. So you literally got more with less.

SpaceX put the laser into production immediately, and within a month, had over a hundred handheld laser welding machines running throughout the Starship facility. What started as Rex’s pet project became a production standard in thirty days.

Youth Mental Health and School Smartphone Bans: Early Evidence

Henry Saffer:

To provide causal evidence of the effects of these bans, I rely on synthetic difference-in-difference models and the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) from 2016 to 2024. Currently, there are data for only one state with two post-ban periods and two states with one post-ban period, which makes the results preliminary evidence only. The outcome variables are screentime and measures of psychological wellbeing. Overall, these early results provide no clear evidence that the school ban policy reduced screentime or improved psychological wellbeing.

———

More.

Sleep Deprivation

Amanda Ruggeri:

In ancient times, parents probably didn’t suffer as much from feeling sleep deprived, leading some scientists to reconsider guidelines for today’s new parents to get some shut-eye.

How exhausting is it to be a parent? When one brave soul posed this to a Reddit parenting forum, more than 400 answers flooded in. “Extremely. It’s extremely exhausting and it is literally CONSTANT,” wrote one respondent, the sentiment echoed by hundreds of others.

There are many reasons why parents feel so bone-crushingly tired today – and not all of them have to do with sleep. For instance, many families raise their children without community support, while parents often have to juggle work with child-rearing.

At the same time, many caregivers’ sleep certainly changes after having children, whether that’s due to an infant’s middle-of-the-night feeds or a preschooler’s penchant for a 05:00 start.

Given that we’ve been parenting for as long as humans have existed, it may seem natural to assume parents have been sleep-deprived for millennia, too. But the evidence that we have indicates this likely isn’t true. So what did our ancestors do differently – and is there anything we could learn from them?

Behind the curtain, Evers administration diverts taxpayer money to fund environmental bureaucracies

Mark Lisheron:

“This looks like an attempt to skirt the normal budget process by moving positions around instead of being transparent about staffing levels,” Born said. “The reality is, this agency (DOA) already has a large number of positions and, before shifting more we need a clear justification and accountability to taxpayers.”

When the Badger Institute first contacted Rosenberg directly, she said she believed she could provide answers to some of our questions. She then failed to respond to follow-up calls trying to get those answers in the weeks after the Badger Institute obtained the LFB analysis.

The DOA did not respond to emails asking about the office and Rosenberg.

The DOA defended its decisions to an analyst for the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau investigating the behind-the-scenes funding of state offices. Officials took the route they did “due to constraints on expenditure authority” during the regular and public budget process, according to a memo from the LFB analyst shared with the Finance Committee.

——-

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

Civics: “Just 111 contributors – or 17% – were from Wisconsin, records show”

It’s likely most of the donors gave to the legal defense fund Dugan created to help her pay the high-powered team she hired to fight federal charges that she helped an undocumented immigrant escape arrest, but the state records did not say what the money was for.

The list of donors, which Dugan filed in February with the state Ethics Commission, does not include the dollar amounts or the dates that the donations were made, as neither is required to be disclosed, a spokesman with the commission said.

If You Love Reading, Skip Grad School

Eric Jager:

You told me if I loved literature, I shouldn’t go to grad school,” wrote a former student. The biochemistry-turned-English major, who went on to medical school and is now a thoracic oncologist, was thanking me for a conversation we had over fifteen years ago, which I had entirely forgotten. “I’m grateful,” she added, “that literature can remain a personal love rather than an obligation.”

When I received this note recently, I was relieved to find out that a talented student had been spared five to ten years in academic servitude, with job prospects ranging from infinitesimal to none. I was also reminded of a simple truth too often ignored in all the soul-searching about the fate of the humanities in a time of budget cuts, declining enrollments, and AI. There’s no easy solution to the crisis, but there is something we can do about it. Instead of perpetuating our narrow interests, faculty should focus on inspiring students to read and write, regardless of what they end up doing for work.

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

William Deresiewicz

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

Parents Are Fuming About Other Peoples’ Kids Getting Extra Time on the SAT

Tara Weiss:

Adarsh Vijay Mudgil thought his children had every advantage for college admissions: a top high school in Long Island that offers plenty of AP courses, test-prep tutors and a private adviser to guide them on applications.

Then his daughter told him at least 60 peers received extra time to finish the ACT during their junior year at Jericho High School.

Mudgil said he doubts they all had legitimate reasons for the special accommodation. More likely, they had parents who found a loophole.

“It’s cheating,” said Mudgil, 50, whose daughter is now at the University of Virginia. “It puts our kids at a disadvantage.”

Test time has emerged as a fierce battleground among parents of high-schoolers. Students with diagnosed disabilities or medical issues for years have been given longer to finish college-entrance exams. But the ranks of the extra timers have surged, with a concentration in wealthy areas. And many parents are crying foul.

They’re training their anger on families who are going to extremes for an edge, from spending $10,000 for a diagnosis from a neuropsychologist to finding a gastroenterologist to support requests for unlimited bathroom breaks.

Boy’s brain tumor tied to gene therapy

Jocelyn Kaiser

A gene therapy given to a 13-month-old boy has, years later, led to a tumor in his brain after the virus carrying the gene inserted part of it directly into his DNA, researchers reported today at a meeting and in a paper. The mass was safely removed, but his case appears to be the first time a gene therapy delivered directly into the body has been linked to cancer.

Researchers involved with the case and others stress that the rare case does not mean the adeno-associated virus (AAV) the boy received, which has been given to thousands of people as part of gene therapies, should not be used. “We have to be really cautious in extrapolating this” to other AAV trials, says Lindsey George, who co-led the trial and presented the work at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy.

The boy was born with Hurler syndrome, also known as MPS I, a condition in which certain sugars build up in the brain and damage it. It stems from a mutation in the gene encoding an enzyme called IDUA, which cells need to break down the sugars.

St. John Elementary School Teacher accused of having sex with student

Garrett Cabeza:

A first-grade teacher at St. John Elementary School in Whitman County has admitted to having sex with a 16-year-old student attending the neighboring high school, according to court documents.

Mackenzie Naught, 25, was arrested Sunday at her St. John home on suspicion of first-degree sexual misconduct of a minor, a felony, for the alleged crime that happened a week prior.

“At this time, St. John School District is aware of allegations involving a district employee that are currently being reviewed by law enforcement,” St. John School District Superintendent Tina Strong wrote in a statement. “The employee has been placed on leave and will not be on campus during this process. The District is cooperating fully with the appropriate authorities and will also be conducting its own investigation into the allegations.”

Naught’s husband reported late Saturday night that his wife admitted to him that she had sex with the teen and the husband had screenshots to prove it, court records show. The husband told deputies he knew the teen for years and is friends with his family.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Duplex boom is attracting middle-income earners to Wichita

Rebecca Picciotto:

Wichita is that rare American city betting its future on the middle class.

While Sunbelt boomtowns from Miami to Austin, Texas, expand their tax bases by courting wealthy finance executives and tech workers, Wichita businesses and politicians are reaching out to middle-income earners in fields such as healthcare services, energy and manufacturing.

On the housing front, rows of affordable duplexes are sprouting up for young families, retirees and empty-nesters next to single-family homes and farmland.

Wichita is marketing itself as a rare mecca of affordability for the new middle class in an era of perpetually rising costs, especially the soaring cost of housing. The median household income there is around $66,000, while the average monthly rent for all apartments is $950. That is about 45% cheaper than the national average of $1,750, according to figures from RentCafe.

“City leaders and business leaders have tried to capitalize on that inexpensive housing to try to lure new people to come here,” says Chase Billingham, a sociologist at Wichita State University and author of a book about Wichita’s economic development. “That idea of your dollar going further in this region.”

New York Governor Hochul Opts In to Choice Scholarships

Wall Street Journal:

Starting next year, the program will provide a federal income tax credit up to $1,700 per person for donations to scholarship-granting organizations. The money can be spent on tuition and school fees as well as textbooks, special needs, tutoring, test prep and after-school programs that benefit private- or public-school students.

There’s no good reason for a state not to join since it amounts to free money from the feds and has no impact on state budgets. Students from households earning up to 300% of the regional median income can qualify.

Twenty-nine states so far have opted in, according to Ballotpedia, and most are GOP-leaning states. (Virginia opted in under former Gov. Glenn Youngkin.) Many of those states have already enacted or expanded their school-choice programs. But the federal scholarships are a way for Democratic states dominated by teachers unions to get in on the action and help students languishing in union-run schools.

In Illinois, March primary voters in 30 counties supported a nonbinding ballot question in favor of the state opting into the program. Sixty-four percent said Gov. JB Pritzker should opt in, though he hasn’t so far as he eyes a presidential run and wants union support.

The New York State United Teachers issued a statement Friday that “public dollars belong in public schools. Vouchers—by any name—take money away from neighborhood schools.” The opposite is true. If New York doesn’t opt in, New York donors can still take advantage of the tax credit—but only for donations to outfits in states that have opted in. In other words, New York money would leave the state.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Taxes on Second Homes Are Springing Up Across America

Nichols Miller:

State and local governments across the U.S. are seizing on a juicy new target for plugging budget holes and easing housing shortages: second homeowners.

New York City is planning to tax pieds-à-terre worth $5 million or more. Rhode Island’s “Taylor Swift tax” will hit homes valued at over $1 million that are uninhabited for at least 183 days of the year. Nicknamed after the pop star who owns a waterfront mansion in Westerly, R.I., the measure is set to take effect in July.

Meanwhile, courts are weighing proposals in Montana and San Francisco for extra levies on vacant homes.

These taxes are generating furious debate. Supporters say they would help improve housing affordability by encouraging owners of second homes to turn them into long-term rentals rather than let them sit vacant.

“Homes should be for people to live in, not to sit empty, especially during a crisis,” said Sean Elo-Rivera, a city council member in San Diego, where residents will vote on whether to tax second homes.

Elo-Rivera introduced the city’s proposal, subject to a June ballot measure, to place a levy of $8,000 on vacant properties next year. The tax would rise to $10,000 in 2028.

Wisconsin DPI Literacy Administrative Update

Quinton Klabon:

Early Literacy Curriculum Council interviewed a candidate for state Literacy Director guiding part of Act 20.

The candidate is Kaylee Jackson.

DPI said “is our person” and this is ongoing consultation to keep going. ELCC said they get input beforehand.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]