School Information System

Jeanne Abrams:

Abigail Adams has been celebrated in popular culture as a strong, brilliant woman who was an indispensable political adviser to her husband, John Adams, and a savvy steward of the family homestead.

But there was another side to Abigail Adams that hasn’t drawn nearly as much attention: She was also an astute, successful businesswoman and investor.

Her skills certainly didn’t go unnoticed in her time. Thomas Jefferson, for one, saw her as exceptional in her grasp of business matters. He described her as one of the “most attentive and honourable economists” in a letter to James Madison, and he praised her financial acumen and her direction of the couple’s financial affairs while John Adams was stationed in Europe on behalf of the fledgling American government.

Building a business

Indeed, Jefferson could have used her help with his own finances. Although he was a member of Virginia’s aristocratic planter class, he notoriously died in significant debt. He overspent on home remodeling and luxuries, including exquisite furnishings, artworks and hundreds of bottles of fine wine he brought back from his stint in Paris as the American minister to France.

David Blaska

Your irascible host is a proud graduate of Sun Prairie Sr. High School, Class of 19xx … well, never mind. The farm village of our youth had a working blacksmith (he was village president) and a harness maker on Main Street. In the years since, the city has grown more populous than Manitowoc, requiring two brand new high schools in striking new buildings. The newest, SP West, opened in 2022 and serves 1,300 students 9-12.

Since our school days in detention hall, a bad case of diversity, equity, and inclusion has infected Sun Prairie’s public schools no less than Madison’s. The troubles afflicting them are a direct result of educators’ obsession with race.

The city is in a justifiable uproar over the criminal charges brought against the dean of students at SP West of sexual exploitation of a child (two counts) and 13 counts of possession of child pornography — all felonies. Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier allegedly bought booze for under-age girls in exchange for nude photos, secretly took 200 photos of girls, and engaged in sex acts on school grounds. The dean of students!

He’s the third district employee to be charged with sexual misconduct involving students since December 2022! 

Not even a teacher’s license!

Nothing that we have seen dispels the notion that Gilkey-Meisegeier was a DEI hire. A long and distinguished academic career? The man didn’t even have a teachers license! The WI Dept of Instruction was quoted to saythat Gilkey-Meisegeier had applied for a teaching license but failed to complete the necessary steps to be granted one! Plus, he was only 28 years old when he took the job in the 2023-24 school year! The school district said it waived away several previous arrests for drunk driving on the grounds that it is illegal to deny employment for an offense unrelated to his job duties. Was he the only applicant?!

New Gingrich:

I could never understand why the education bureaucracies and teachers’ unions could tolerate terrible outcomes for millions of children (most of them poor and minority) and do nothing to fix the system. Then I read “Failure Factory.” Now, I see the corruption clearly. Papst has done the entire country an enormous service by exposing this astonishing record of failure.

Baltimore City Schools spent $1.7 billion in 2024 (up from $1.3 billion in 2017). That year, only 10 percent of the students scored proficient in math. In 2017, 11 percent of students met mathematics proficiency requirements. Further, student enrollment dropped from 82,354 in 2017 to 75,811 in 2024. So, taxpayers paid $400 million a year more for 6,543 fewer students – and math scores got worse.

Local reformers have no hope of getting real change, because the unions who make a living off the school system wield the power. Virtually every administrator (730 administrative staff) and most of the teachers (4,930) form an army for defending the indefensible. They care about their paychecks, not educational achievement.

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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?

Thomas Savidge

As debt service continues to devour an already unsustainable budget, do not expect student learning outcomes to improve. 

On August 28, 2025, Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the fourth-largest school district in the US,passed a $10.2 billion budget and is facing a $743 million deficit. Prior to the budget passage, the big three credit rating agencies each rated CPS General Obligation (GO) Bonds “non-investment grade speculative,” also known by the more pejorative title “junk bonds.” CPS bonds receiveda Ba1 rating from Moody’s and a BB+ rating from both S&P Global and Fitch Ratings.

The name “junk” refers to the risk that investors face that CPS will not make interest payments or repay the principal when the bond fully matures. To offset this risk, junk bonds offer high interest rates to attract investors. This is especially significant because GO bonds are backed by “the full faith and credit” of CPS, meaning the district promises to use all existing revenue to pay back the debt and, if necessary, raise new taxes to pay the debt. 

Unfortunately, these ratings are justified. Research from the Illinois Policy Institute found that CPS suffers from chronic budget deficits as well as billions of dollars in debt and unfunded pension liabilities despite record-high operating revenue. The problem is persistent overspending. As my colleague Corey DeAngelis wrote, CPS officials and staff “put their own desires before the needs of children.” 

The situation at CPS, however, will not be contained within Chicago. The budget stress could put additional stress on the state of Illinois, which is already teetering on the edge of the fiscal cliff. 

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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?

The Leading Edge

In effect, some institutions have created “neighborhoods” on university campuses separated by wealth. This practice resembles the segregated socio-economic layout of many American cities, where the wealthy cluster in one area of town and those of lesser financial means live “on the other side of the tracks.”

Does luxury housing and the price gaps in residence hall housing shape student experience and academic performance? I assembled a research team funded by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International (ACUHO-I) to tackle this question. What we discovered after two years of data collection should concern administrators and students alike. Universities became so focused on attracting students through admissions that they overlooked how housing policies would affect those same students once enrolled.

Liam Beran:

Several UW Law School employees, including the director of the school’s public defender training clinic, have been laid off in response to mandatory university-wide budget cuts.

“None of us wanted to make layoffs or reduce hours but, given that the vast majority of our [general] revenue goes towards salary, there was unfortunately no way of avoiding that,” UW Law Dean Dan Tokaji wrote in an Aug. 7 email to all staff and faculty. “We have notified those who will be most directly affected by those cuts, and do not anticipate that further cuts of this nature will be necessary in the coming academic year.”

Greg Bump, UW-Madison assistant director of media relations, says in an email that he does “not have” the exact number of layoffs but suggested that Isthmus file a public records request for the number.

Tokaji wrote that the actions were necessitated by an order in June from UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin directing the university’s schools and colleges to cut 5% of their budgets for the coming fiscal year. Mnookin cited federal “uncertainty and risks” in directing the cuts. University officials have instructed division heads that layoffs are meant to be a “last resort.”

The law school is also cutting funds for supplies and other expenses, including travel, catering and library acquisitions, according to Tokaji’s email.

Corrinne Hess:

There were parents who took part, there was a WIAA official who took part, no one stepped up to help the kids,” Byrd said. 

After the incident, Waterford Union High School District conducted an investigation. According to district findings, volunteers were intentionally mispronouncing students’ names, middle school students were referring to Rufus King students as “gangsters,” and a WIAA meet official used racially insensitive language directed at a King athlete.

Byrd said her daughter was “shaken and upset.”

“It’s one of those things you see on TV but doesn’t seem real,” Byrd said. “But it was real that day.” 

The school released a statement, saying officials were “committed to holding students accountable.” 

The Waterford incident wasn’t an isolated event. 

Farid Zaid:

Yet nowhere does the principle reshape outcomes more quietly – and more consequentially – than in academia, where it is not just results but the architecture of ambition itself that bends to its logic.

Universities present themselves as arenas of merit, where brilliance rises naturally toward recognition. Yet in reality, the world of journal publishing, citation counts, and institutional prestige resembles a reputation marketplaceskewed by legacy and access. Influence compounds along familiar lines, while those outside established networks find themselves locked out of visibility, relevance, and reward. Innovation, it seems – unless safely packaged – is a dangerous wager. And so, countless ideas, like that buried talent, are hidden away before they are ever given a chance to grow. 

Metrics were meant to illuminate excellence.But instead of casting light, they have thickened the shadows – entrenching privilege, narrowing inquiry, and rewarding only those already standing in the spotlight.

The idea that scholarly excellence could be measured with precision is a relatively recent invention. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF), introduced in the mid-twentieth century, marked the beginning of this shift – offering first libraries and then academic publishers, universities, and funding agencies a seemingly neutral way to quantify influence and impose order on the ambiguity of peer judgment. Over time, additional metrics such as citation counts, universityand journal rankings, and the h-index amplified this logic, promising to identify scholarly value with algorithmic efficiency. It was a technocratic vision of academic meritocracy: detached, rational, transparent, and fair.

James J. Heckman and Sadegh Eshaghnia

What drives social mobility? The answer matters to policymakers and families alike. A wave of highly publicized research has led public policy and public discussions astray. It claims that the neighborhood a child lives in is the key factor that shapes his life. While this idea has been around for decades, it has recently gained more traction. Mainstream media have promoted the idea in article after article, arguing that ZIP Code is destiny and a major source of inequality in the U.S. 

If the causal relationship between neighborhoods and child outcomes is strong, policymakers can implement a simple and effective solution: relocate struggling families to residential areas with better conditions. But this has been tried. In the 1990s the Department of Housing and Urban Development moved families out of high-poverty neighborhoods in the so-called Moving to Opportunity experiment. Moving to a better neighborhood had some benefits, but it didn’t improve employment outcomes for adults or educational outcomes for youths.

Ma Junjie:

…. (with suicides after exam setbacks becoming grimly familiar), and entrepreneurs spoke endlessly about their “success stories” while quietly burying the unseemly details of how their first fortunes were made. In a country obsessed with upward mobility, failure was unforgivable.

I was born in Hebei, one of the provinces once derisively referred to as part of China’s “Mountains-and-Rivers Four” – regions known for scarce educational resources and overwhelming populations. For generations, students there have endured the brutal gauntlet of the gaokao, the college entrance exam often described as “thousands of troops crossing a single-plank bridge.” More than a decade ago, I was one of the few who managed to cross it. The exam changed my life: I left the countryside, entered the city, studied abroad, and eventually became an urban resident. For years, my story was retold in my hometown as a model of success, a reminder to parents that education could still offer an escape from China’s entrenched urban-rural divide and the cruel “scissors gap” of opportunity.

Yet on my most recent trips back, I was struck by conversations that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago. Parents no longer speak obsessively about their children’s test scores. Instead, they share a grim realism: even in the cities, prospects are bleak. The coveted positions in state-owned monopolies are all captured by the children of officials and state-owned enterprise (SOE) executives. Private firms are synonymous with endless overtime and burnout. Low-end work – delivering food, driving ride-hailing cars, cleaning homes, or working as security guards – barely sustains a living and is seen as no more dignified than staying in the village, marrying early, and caring for aging parents. 

Former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:

Well, okay, so not the whole board. Just one and a half of the seven members. Those members are Nicki Vander Meulen and Martha Siravo. The issue is weighted grading. The state of Wisconsin has set up a system that guarantees admission to the highly sought after Madison campus to high school students who rank in the top 5% of their class. Those in the top 10% are automatically admitted to other schools in the system.

That has made class ranking more important than ever, so the question now arises how fair those rankings are. If a student leans on easier courses and pulls a 4.0, she can rank above another student who takes the most rigorous courses and earns a 3.9. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Well, that’s what Vander Meulen thinks. Siravo says she’s not sure, but she’s justifiably unhappy that the administration of Superintendent Joe Gothard made that decision without consulting the board and has been slow to answer her questions about the policy.

The official administration answer is: “Our decision to keep what’s currently in place reflects our belief in the importance of a system that supports equity, maintains transparency and reflects our community’s values,”

“fears of too many parents who worry that Madison’s public schools are not rigorous enough.”

Joye Walker:

I am OK with test retakes (one per test) if a student scored below 75% on a test, and the maximum possible retake score is 75%. It encourages students to do their best the first time rather than try to play the system (which is what they do), and it allows for some recovery for the good student who bombs one test.

I am very OK with zeros, particularly on homework that is not attempted. In my experience, completing homework is a very valuable part of learning math. Each day, I cruised the room and looked at everyone’s homework. Sometimes I was spot checking but mostly, I was looking for problems that students had with it. In precalculus honors, for example, there were usually three or four problems that gave many students problems, and I always addressed all questions. Occasionally, I assigned a problem that only a handful of students would/could do, and that was OK. It challenged the top students and I always made it clear that such problems wouldn’t be on any test.

I am also OK with zeros for tests or quizzes that were never taken.

One policy I didn’t see listed was the one about deadlines. The last year that I taught, we couldn’t impose deadlines on anything, so that, for example, a student could turn in a large stack of homework on the last day of the trimester and we were expected to accept it without penalty. I am very opposed to this because the idea of homework is that it facilitated learning as we moved toward a test. It was counted as zero points once we took the test over that chapter.

“fears of too many parents who worry that Madison’s public schools are not rigorous enough”

Chris Rickert:

…. of any district middle or high school, data from the police department show.

Police responded to the school at 30 Ash St. 185 times between Sept. 3, 2024, and June 11, or about once every 1.5 days. That would include calls about issues outside the school that might not have anything to do with the school’s students or staff.

Police responded to four battery calls, for example, and two for traffic-related hit-and-runs.

The vast plurality of the calls, 65, are for “stratified policing” — a police department term indicating that police are meeting at the school about ongoing public safety issues and not for particular incidents.

Police spokesperson Anthony Vogel said that officers generate the call type to show they are “providing a police presence” in an area.

Five years after the Madison School Board voted to remove school resource officers from the four main high schools, West had by far the most such police presence call types of any of the four schools. There were only 20 at Memorial last year, four at La Follette and four at East.

The police department’s records custodian redacted the reasons for three calls to West, saying “the information contains highly personal details related to a sensitive investigation and disclosing it would likely harm important public interests without providing any significant benefit to the public.”

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Gangs and School Violence Forum

Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006. More.

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

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. 

By Ashanty Rosario

During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.

These incidents were jarring—not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become. Many homework assignments are due by 11:59 p.m., to be submitted online via Google Classroom. We used to share memes about pounding away at the keyboard at 11:57, anxiously rushing to complete our work on time. These moments were not fun, exactly, but they did draw students together in a shared academic experience. Many of us were propelled by a kind of frantic productivity as we approached midnight, putting the finishing touches on our ideas and work. Now the deadline has been sapped of all meaning. AI has softened the consequences of procrastination and led many students to avoid doing any work at all. As a result, these programs have destroyed much of what tied us together as students. There is little intensity anymore. Relatively few students seem to feel that the work is urgent or that they need to sharpen their own mind. We are struggling to receive the lessons of discipline that used to come from having to complete complicated work on a tight deadline, because chatbots promise to complete our tasks in seconds.

Corrinne Hess:

She wants to move to a pre-k-6 and 7-12 “junior high” model. 

The junior high students would be located in MPS high schools, Cassellius said. 

“With some modernization, those facilities could really be wonderful school environments for our students to be able to do career programming,” Cassellius said. “I think it would give a more well-rounded education to our students.” 

Any changes to grade configurations would need approval from the Milwaukee Board of School Directors. 

Gov. Tony Evers’ instructional audit released in June confirmed that having too many different grade spans makes improvement and accountability efforts difficult, said MPS School Board President Missy Zombor.

Sabine Martin:

Morgan’s most popular service is birthday trunk reveals.

“I work with the families to curate very specifically to their student what they would like them to have, taking into account allergies, favorite items from home, just very, very specific to their Badger traditions, cultures, maybe things they’ve always done growing up, and then rolling that into an experience for the student,” Morgan said.

Michelle Lowry:

We examine the determinants of business school faculty pay, using detailed data on compensation, research, teaching, and administrative service. We estimate that a top-tier journal publication is worth $116,000, with significant variation across disciplines. Second-tier publications are worth one-third as much, and other publications have no impact. Further analysis of salaries and cross-discipline publication records suggests that researchers are compensated based on the journals they publish in rather than the departments they belong to. Conference presentations and teaching evaluations have significant but smaller effects than top-tier publications. Faculty administrators earn a premium, with department chairs receiving 11-35% and deans 58-94%. Post-Covid-19, real faculty pay has fallen more than in comparable fields and the sensitivity of pay to research performance has weakened.

:

That number underlies the crisis. With France’s budget deficit hitting 5.8 per cent of GDP, François Bayrou, the fourth prime minister since 2024, wants to cut €44bn from the ever-expanding budget. Since parliament won’t let him, he’ll probably lose a vote of confidence on Monday. Then on Wednesday, protests and strikes aim to “block” an already blocked country. Why can’t France spend less? And where might this end?

Contrary to popular belief, France’s state wasn’t always massive. At liberation in 1944, many people lived on farms without even rudimentary public services, such as electricity or running water. Pensions used to be ungenerous. In 1970, the effective average age of retirement was 68, exactly the age at which the average French man (in an era when most workers were men) died. In 1995, six governments of developed countries were higher spenders than France.

Then, when the euro arrived in 2002, French politicians calculated that with the European Central Bank printing their money, they could spend with impunity. The prodigality peaked in pensions: French retirement now averages 25 years, about the longest in human history. But spending is also relatively high on health, infrastructure in cities (though not in France’s vast countryside), and — oddly for an obsessively over-centralised country — on local civil servants. Meanwhile, France’s private sector has borrowed merrily too.

French politics is personalised around the figure of the president. After the former Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron got the job in 2017, the word “neoliberal” pervaded French discourse. France is now routinely described as a “neoliberal wasteland”, its state supposedly slashed by Thatcherites. In the new post-truth era, other absurd beliefs went mainstream, such as the notion that France was uniquely cursed (as witness world-leading French pessimism in opinion polls) or that it was heading for racial civil war.

….

Because France overspends domestically, it can’t afford to help Europe resist Vladimir Putin. Its defence budget is still only 2 per cent of GDP. I recently visited a weapons factory that makes surveillance drones. I imagined it was producing thousands, but was told, “The French military has 14.”

NIL = “Name Image Licensing”

University of Wisconsin Madison Public Records // Athletic Department.

The Economist:

A blunter explanation is that people just cannot be bothered. Professor Bate got everyone in a bate with his comments about students not reading: saying such things, he admits, might seem “old fogeyish”. Speak to professors, however and they all lament their students’ waning attention spans. When Professor Rose began teaching, he taught “Bleak House”. He would not attempt it today, he says, partly because of “constant pressure” from university deans to “assign less and less and less reading” and partly because “students simply won’t read it”. In multiple surveys young people describe reading as “boring” and “a chore”.

It is possible to say: who cares? English professors may well lament a fall in literacy, but that may be simple self-interest: less a concern about a declining custom than a declining number of customers. Yet literacy affects more than university reading lists. For one thing, increasing literary sophistication seems to lead to increasing political sophistication. At its simplest, Athenians in the fifth century BC could begin to practise “ostracism”—voting to banish people by writing their name on ostraka, scraps of pots—because, as William Harris, an academic, points out, they had achieved “a certain amount of literacy”.

By contrast, decreasing literary sophistication may lead to decreasing political sophistication. Our analysis of Britain’s parliamentary speeches found that they have shrunk by a third in a decade. We also analysed almost 250 years of inaugural presidential addresses using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. George Washington’s scored 28.7, denoting postgraduate level, while Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, the reading level of a high-schooler.

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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?

Richard Belcher:

Even with some improvements, I don’t see a single Dekalb grade in which more than 35% of students are proficient in math or literacy. So 2/3 are not proficient. Damn!

Mr Star:

In the past few years, however, this kind of parochial reputation has fallen to the wayside as a far darker, more ominous picture of the United Kingdom has taken shape. ‘The Yookay’ (coined, I believe, by Mythoyookay) has come to describe, in all its bizarre and misshapen glory, the haunting aesthetics replacement migration has introduced to the quintessential and quaint England that many had in their heads. Meanwhile, the work of men like Adam Wren to uncover and catalogue the insanity of the grooming gang situation and the seemingly still ongoing cover-up surrounding it, has darkened the reputation of the entire nation to all who learn about it. ‘Adventure travel’ Youtubers like Bald and Bankrupt have gone as far as to film themselves ‘exploring’ the impoverished slums of Northern England – revealing scenes that seem reminiscent of ‘“a collapsing civilization” as one Youtube commenter put it.

Ann Althouse Summary:

Lineham recently talked to Joe Rogan for 3 hours, embedded below. I’ve listened to it in full. Lineham is very intense on the subject of censorship and transgender issues and women’s rights. It’s hard to notice from America, but he is a substantial pop culture figure in the UK and Ireland, and it’s painful to see him persecuted. 

Wall Street Journal:

The legal question is whether these 22 board members have in fact been rejected. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares told the schools in a June letter that the power to refuse confirmation of Mr. Youngkin’s appointees “rests with the General Assembly as a whole,” and it “requires more than action by a single committee of one house.” If so, they could keep serving until the next legislative session. A Fairfax County judge ruled against that view in July, which is what’s being appealed.

This legal limbo is a particular problem for GMU, which faces a deadline to resolve allegations that it violated the Civil Rights Act. In late August the Education Department offered the school 10 days to accept its terms, which included a public apology from President Gregory Washington. So far he has declined.

“An apology will amount to an admission that the university did something unlawful,” his attorney wrote to GMU’s board. The government’s claim that the school discriminated in hiring and promotion “borders on the absurd,” the letter said, arguing that “no job applicant has been discriminated against by GMU,” and the Education Department is misconstruing Mr. Washington’s remarks on diversity.

At risk is millions in federal research funding for GMU, which doesn’t have a huge endowment like Harvard or other private schools that have tangled with the White House. In recent years a $1.5 million grant supported GMU research on “underwater explosions and their effects on civil engineering infrastructure,” and $3.2 million funded a project with an Army institute to study hemorrhagic diseases.

Perhaps one way out of this mess would be to fire Mr. Washington, though can the board do that if it lacks a quorum? In a Friday statement, the board said it hopes to negotiate with the Education Department. If that fails and Mr. Washington won’t bend, then Democrats may have locked George Mason into legal liability and thrown away the keys.

WILL:

The News: WILL has filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) on behalf of Kally Bishop, a highly skilled special education teacher at Thoreau Elementary, a part of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). Kally was “surplussed” or involuntarily transferred over less qualified teachers based on the District’s race-laden scoring system. WILL’s complaint with the EEOC is the first step to taking legal action against the school district.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, stated, “MMSD’s hyper focus on race is both wrong and illegal. The unfortunate and entirely predictable result is the District losing one of its best teachers at the expense of its most vulnerable students. We hope that this case exposes how the District’s rubric is being applied.”

WILL Client, Kally Bishop, stated, “I loved my job at Thoreau Elementary and was heartbroken to be forced out after so many years there. No teacher or student should ever be discriminated against based on their race.”

Our Client: Kally was a Cross-Categorical Teacher at Thoreau Elementary, a position that focuses on students with disabilities. Kally specifically worked with non-verbal students who struggle with basic communication skills. During her career, Kally has worked hard to develop techniques to help these students succeed and reach their highest potential. She loved her job at Thoreau and gained the trust and respect of both parents and her peers.

MMSD’s Scoring System Raises Serious Questions: In 2021, MMSD adopted a new scoring system for determining how educators are surplussed. Seniority was replaced by a weighted “rubric” of four scores, but the highest, by far, is so-called “culturally responsive practices.” This criterion is heavily race-based, openly encouraging teachers to prioritize “students of color” over other students to receive the highest score. When this new system was adopted, the superintendent and the school board told the public that it was intended and designed to protect “teachers of color.” And the circumstances surrounding Kally’s transfer are highly suspicious and suggest that this scoring system was applied, in practice, as a proxy for race discrimination.

Wisconsin State Journal:

new state law requires the Universities of Wisconsin System to admit any high school student who finishes in the top 5% of their class to its flagship campus, UW-Madison. Students who finish in the top 10% of their class get direct admission to most other UW System schools. It’s a great program to encourage more bright students to attend one of Wisconsin’s fine universities.

2 Madison School Board members criticize administration on weighted grading

• Chris Rickert | Wisconsin State Journal

But the program has caused some problems in the Madison School District. Madison wasn’t used to ranking high school students by GPA and has had to adopt some new policies. One controversial choice was to not weight a student’s GPA based on course difficulty. That means a student who coasts through easy courses can have a higher GPA than students who challenge themselves with honors and AP classes.

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?

Greg Toppo:

A quarter-century ago, David Saylor shepherded the epic Harry Potter fantasy series onto U.S. bookshelves. As creative director of children’s publisher Scholastic, he helped design and execute the American editions of the first three novels in the late 1990s. 

But when the manuscript for J.K. Rowling’s fourth book landed on his desk, Saylor sat up straight: It was huge. Bigger, more complex and narratively intricate than virtually any storybook ever aimed at children.

“I had to really think,” he said in a recent interview. “‘How are we going to typeset this book? How are we going to print a million copies? How are we going to get enough paper?’”

——

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?

Pablo Rodríguez Sánchez

Enters technology

For several decades now, it is possible to solve these problems using symbolic computation software packages, available for computers and even for some pocket calculators. Since the explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines, access to such tools is easier than ever. So, if you want to know the derivative of some function, you can just ask your favourite AI engine via your smartphone, and you’ll (most likely) get the correct answer.

All of this raises a valid question: why bother learning all those tedious methods

Jordana Hunter and Nick Parkinson

Adults use maths every day, whether it’s to compare grocery prices, pay bills or interpret statistics in the news.

Adults with weak maths skills are more likely to struggle with employment, have poor mental healthand suffer homelessness.

When students feel anxious about maths, it can impede their performance.

While a little stress is actually helpful — it means we care and helps us focus — too much stress jams up our working memory, which we need to solve maths problems.

Students with high anxiety might make careless errors, misinterpret questions or sit staring vacantly at a maths problem, too overwhelmed to start.

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More.

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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!)

Michael Bahareen:

Perhaps even more troubling than court battles is the growing normalcy of political persecution. Democrats surely believe their efforts to pursue impeachment and, later, legal action against Trump were sound and morally right. But in an era whose political ethos seems to be defined by “their side did it first,” Republicans inevitably saw these and other actionsas little more than retribution against a president whose politics Democrats did not like. They have thus become very supportive of Trump’s second-term efforts to go after people whom they don’t like.

Gerrymandering is just the latest front in this war. And while it’s true that Republicans fired the first shot with their 2010 project REDMAP and did so again by pursuing mid-decade redistricting, Democrats’ hands certainly aren’t clean here, either. But what is most worrisome is that this latest escalation is undoubtedly setting a new precedent for future redistricting. The parties will now see it as imperative to not only draw as favorable maps as possible in states that they control but to do it whenever they feel like it. Failing to do so, the thinking will go, could consign them to minority status in the House for years. An easy fix would be a federal ban on political gerrymandering, which House Democrats proposed in 2019 but did not see through.

Notes and links on gerrymandering.

Jeff Fong:

Despite the fact that getting rid of property taxes is Not a Good Idea, that doesn’t mean that existing property tax regimes are necessarily optimal. Property taxes, after all, punish development because they factor in the value of the house or whatever other structure happens to be built on top.6 Instead of abolishing property taxes, shifting to land value taxation (LVT) would constitute an actual improvement.

In brief, an LVT works like a property tax, but only applies to the value of a parcel’s land (i.e. it doesn’t tax the value of any buildings or infrastructure on top). So, if you own a $350,000 property where the land component is worth $50,000 (and the building is valued at $300,000) an LVT would only tax you based on the $50,000 value of your land. 

Eric S Raymond:

Public service announcement: there is an extremely easy way to tell when you can trust the experts and “follow the science”, versus when you can’t.

The corruption of science has a purpose, and the purpose is to provide rationalizations for the assertion of political power.

Anytime you hear scientists and experts saying something that operates as a rationale for politicians to Do Something, the way to bet is that you’re being scammed.

Conversely, politically neutral science is almost never corrupted by anything worse than petty careerism. Because the incentives aren’t there.

Some of us learned this 40 years ago from contemplating the “scientific” literature on firearms policy. Took the lies and gaslighting around COVID to make the general public aware.

The biggest political earthquake is yet to come, around the utter neo-Lysenkoist travesty that “climate science” has become.

Chris Rickert:

Madison last week announced that it would not shift to weighted grading for the purposes of the Wisconsin Guarantee, and it has posted its policy for what to do when there are ties among the top 5% and 10% of students.

Essentially, every student with a GPA that places them in the top 5% or 10% of their class will have that designation noted on their transcripts, even if that means that more than 5% or 10% of the total class is designated as such.

The district gives the example of a class of 574 students. Five percent of 574 is about 28, but if more than that number of students have GPAs that put them in the top 5% — because their GPAs are the same — then all those of those students will be considered in the top 5%.

“If more than the top 28 are tied by GPA, all of these students will have the ‘top 5%’ of class notation on their transcript,” the district policy says. “For example, if 41 students are tied for the top 5% by GPA, all 41 students will receive the top 5% notation.”

The same expansive approach would also apply to those deemed in the top 10%.

In a statement from its communications office, the district points to the letter of the law for why it believes this approach is legal.

The district “identifies its students in the top 5% and top 10% based on students’ GPAs as the sole criterion,” it said, adding that it’s not ranking students who fall outside of the top 10%.

The communications director for Republican state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, the law’s main author, said the law does not “contemplate” Madison’s approach to calculating the top 5% and 10% of students.

———

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?

CJ Womack:

The CTA contribution, filed Aug. 23, went directly to “The Election Rigging Response Act, Governor Newsom’s Ballot Measure Committee,” which backs Prop 50. 

[RELATED: California State University system is expanding ChatGPT to all students and faculty in the name of equity]

The measure originated from a three-bill package in July, where Democrats used a “gut-and-amend” tactic on A.B. 604 and S.B. 280, along with A.C.A. 8, to grant the legislature temporary control of redistricting for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 election cycles. The state’s independent Citizens Redistricting Commission would resume authority in 2031.

“If this redistricting scheme goes through, voters will have no reason to trust politicians,” Assemblyman Carl DeMaio told Campus Reform. “Politicians will choose their voters; voters will not choose their politicians.”

California State Superintendent of Education candidate Sonja Shaw also criticized the union’s support. “The California Teachers Association is behind every attack on our kids, pushing confusion in classrooms, protecting only those who fit their narrative, and selling out teachers to back Newsom’s gerrymander,” Shaw wrote on X.

CTA’s Issues PAC is one of the state’s largestpolitical spenders, previously funding school funding measures and union protections. The union has not released a formal statement on its Prop 50 contribution.

——-

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

David Barry:

This is all a nonsense. I suspect that Cowen saw how well o3 performed in his field of economics, and wrongly generalised to assuming that it is reliable in other areas.

But perhaps you are not convinced by my evidence. o3’s final answer cited an editorial from Volume V of Lasker’s Chess Magazine, and my various links have been to digitised archives of other publications. Might OpenAI have got themselves an illicit digital copy of the Magazine that I was unable to locate, so that o3 could give correct information from it without being able to cite it?

No. Moravian Chess still exists, and you can buy Volume V (among others) for 29 euros plus postage. Here is my copy:

By E. Thomas Finan

Universities should see the White House’s campaign as a wake-up call rather than the root of their troubles—a warning that they have to rebuild trust among not just prospective students, parents, and donors, but also voters and elected officials across party lines. America’s higher education has always depended to some degree on the patronage of its elected leaders, an arrangement that has often been a civic boon, encouraging schools to respond to public needs and serve the common good. Today, universities have to prove that they can uphold their end of the deal.

Sydney Review of Books:

Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.

I often return to an essay by Lydia Davis about an unusual experiment in translation. Better known for her work on French writers like Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot, Davis had in this case tried to translate a literary text, not from French but rather from English into English. The text in question was Laurence Sterne’s unfinished 1768 novel, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick. Even a glance at its first page suggests why the book might require translation. Here is how it begins:  

Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz:

‘You’re really smart. What the hell is wrong with you?” Yale English Prof. Lawrence Rainey asked one of us (Mr. Katz) over a beer-stained table at a local pizzeria after grading his first college paper in 1987.

The grade in question was a C-plus, the same grade that Ms. Gold received on her first college paper, at Princeton in 2013. We had each arrived at college thinking we were hot stuff: straight-A students from private schools in New York. We were quickly knocked down a peg.

This formative moment would be nearly unimaginable today. At Yale, some 80% of undergraduate course grades are A or A-minus. Harvard’s statistics are about the same. Princeton held out for a while, but since it abandoned its policy of capping the percentage of A-range grades in 2014, grade-point averages have soared. Grade inflation isn’t limited to the Ivy League: GPAs have been rising nationwide for decades. Skyrocketing tuition has turned students into paying customers who expect to be praised, not challenged.

This fall, as professors sit down to grade their students’ first papers, we urge: Challenge your students. Don’t worry about being liked. Worry about being respected.

Students will respect you if you respect them by being honest about the quality of their work and taking the time to help them do better. Often you and they are both fully aware that they haven’t really tried. Make them want to try. You never know the difference your feedback could make. Our C-plus papers were both about Homer, and we went on to become classicists. Would this have happened if our professors had let us coast on unearned confidence?

Alexandra Citrin-Safadi:

Now, people who have been talking about summering like it is the 1990s will call this an invented problem. Just let them run around the park! Stop over-programming the children! Let them live! And spiritually, I fully agree. Except I’d prefer to avoid a visit from Child Protective Services for letting my soon-to-be kindergartner roam the New York City streets unattended.

Navi Kabra:

Today, the opposition gets a chance. Here’s an article that could be seen as a rebuttal¹ to the Alpha School review, which essentially argues that all these exciting new experimental schools are bound to fail because they fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of schools. 

I think this article has some significant flaws, rambles a bit in the middle, and seems a little contradictory in a few places, but it does make a bunch of good points. So here are some interesting excerpts.

The primary point the review makes is this:

In the same way that democracy is the worst form of government ever invented except for all the others, conventional school is the worst form of motivating students to learn except for all the others.

On to the main points of the argument. First, schools aren’t primarily for learning:

What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?

So what are schools for, then?

School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.

While we all complain about how bad schools are, we can pretty much all agree that school does make some difference:

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More on the Alpha School.

——

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?

Dan Lerman:

At the private school where I once taught, the idea was that spelling got in the way of creativity. So I watched as kids wrote ‘macien’ for ‘machine’ at age 14. Tuition was $60,000 a yea

But schools have decided that facts are no longer worth teaching.

In many classrooms today, the very idea of committing information to memory has become unfashionable. As I tour schools for my daughter, we are often assured that facts will surely not be the focus of her education. “We don’t do rote memorization,” teachers proudly declare with a condescending wink. As if memorization were an outdated relic of a less enlightened era.

But without facts, what are students actually learning?

At the progressive Brooklyn private school where I once taught, spelling wasn’t corrected until middle school. Focusing on spelling, we were told, got in the way of creativity.

I then watched smart, curious kids write macienfor machine at age 14, then wilt when people involuntarily gasped at their failed spelling attempts. Their writing was often expressive and insightful . . . and incoherent. They probably weren’t even aware of the $60,000 per annum price tag, or they might have raged against that macien.

——-

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 Simon:

When the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) takes center stage as the anchor sponsor of this fall’s Committee to Protect Journalists Annual Dinner, one name should remain unspoken: Jimmy Lai. Mentioning Lai in a New York City ballroom would ring hollow, given the WSJ’s news division has conspicuously ignored his trial—the most significant human rights case in Asia and a critical test of basic freedoms in Hong Kong, a city that still claims to be a global financial hub.

Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media owner, writer, and champion of liberty—and my boss—is being prosecuted under the city’s draconian National Security Law. His media companies have been shuttered; his home for the past 1,707 days, a Hong Kong prison cell. Lai’s case has drawn intense global scrutiny, with over 30 major outlets—AP, AFP, Bloomberg, CNN, The New York Times, and nearly every UK news organization—covering it in the two days since the trial’s conclusion. Yet, the WSJ’s news pages remain silent. 

The WSJ’s editorial board, however, has steadfastly supported Lai, a personal friend to several members and a figure whose busts of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman adorned his media group’s lobby. Their advocacy is organic, rooted in a shared passion for free markets and free people. 

The WSJ’s news division, however, tells a different story. Apple Daily, Lai’s tabloid, and the WSJ were always distinct—our scrappy, in-your-face style clashed with their polished restraint. Still, the tension felt personal. In the mid-2000s, I invited the WSJ’s then-Asia Chief Editor for a day on Lai’s boat with journalists from other outlets. The rebuff was sharp, accompanied by criticism of Apple Daily and Next Magazine’s journalistic standards and our supposed failure to “understand China.”

Corrinne Hess:

“I can’t just come in with big plans. I need to make those big plans with the community,” Cassellius said. “I’ve said all along that this is going to be community-led and community-driven, and these listening sessions are a way to be able to demonstrate that to the community.”

Laundry list of issues leads to distrust of the school district

Cassellius arrived in Milwaukee after the school district faced one of its most tumultuous years in recent memory.

First, there was a battle to convince taxpayers to boost district funding through a hefty property tax increase. By a margin of just 1,720 votes, voters approved a $252 million referendum in April 2024.

But just one month later, financial mismanagement by former Superintendent Keith P. Posley and several members of his team was revealed.

Veronica Dagher:

Kelly Palmer, Chicago | Child’s age: 2

I opened a 529 college savings account when my son was born and shared the contribution link with friends and family. (The plan will typically generate a direct link to your child’s gifting page so others can contribute but won’t give them the ability to access your account details such as the account balance). It took the pressure off us having to save during our child’s first year and shielded our house from an onslaught of toys and clothes our baby would grow out of quickly. We continue to share the link before our son’s birthday each year. For his coming birthday, he would be thrilled to open yet another firetruck toy, but someday he will realize a contribution to his 529 was a more valuable gift.

Joe Wrote:

Putting aside the undemocratic and elitist nature of this philosophy, it creates a self-sustaining, destructive cycle. Not only are donors’ interests different than working-class interests, but it also turns the relationship between the Democratic Party and its supporters into one of lecturer and lectee. That would be bad enough on its own, but when you add in that many of these lectures are naked attempts to sell unpopular, grotesque policies that benefit the elite and sacrifice basic morality, we can see why the Democratic brand is underwater, even with its most loyal supporters.

Two recent episodes show the poisonous nature of the Democrats’ top-down thinking.

Earlier this week, two competing Palestine resolutions were introduced to the resolution panel at the Democratic National Committee’s annual summer meeting. The first, put forth by 26-year-old progressive Allison Minnerly, called for an arms embargo on Israel and immediate recognition of a Palestinian state. Both these positions reflect the will of not only Democratic voters, but also Americans. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 75% of Democratic voters, 66% of Independents, and 60% of Americans oppose sending military aid to Israel. It also found that half of all American voters think Israel is committing genocide (77% of Democrats and 51% of Independents).1 By all available evidence, Minnerly’s resolution matches the will of Democratic voters, the sentiment of most Americans, and, most important of all, reality. Even the Israel-based observers B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights have called Israel’s actions a genocide, joining the global consensus.2Recognizing reality is often good politics, as is being proven by Zohran Mamdani’s healthy lead over pro-Israel centrists, and the growing number of former AIPAC donees who are now refusing the group’s money in the 2026 midterms.3

Nate:

Read the terms of service. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t pick defaults.

Yesterday, Anthropic quietly flipped a switch. If you’re a Claude user, your conversations are now training data unless you actively say no. Not when you give feedback. Not when you explicitly consent. By default, from day one.

Here’s what changed: Previously, Claude didn’t train on consumer chat data without your explicit thumbs up or down. Clean, simple, respectful. Now? Everything you type becomes model training fodder unless you navigate to settings and opt out. And if you don’t opt out, they keep your data for up to five years.

I’m not here to pile on Anthropic. The reaction across Reddit and tech forums has been predictably negative – privacy advocates are disappointed, users feel blindsided, and everyone’s comparing this to the same moves OpenAI and others have made. What I want to talk about is something more fundamental: this is exactly why you can’t get comfortable with defaults in AI.

Think about it. You pay for Claude Max, you develop workflows, you integrate it into your thinking process. You are human and you like stability and you naturally assume the deal you signed up for is the deal you’ll keep. But the ground shifts. Yesterday’s privacy-first approach becomes today’s opt-out system. Tomorrow? Who knows what changes.

Ethan Savka:

Deprioritizing objective measures of merit in service of racial goals is extremely foolish,” Kingsbury told The College Fix in an interview.

To determine his findings, published Aug. 6 in City Journal, Kingsbury submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to all 93 U.S. public medical schools, seeking admissions data on race, undergraduate grades, Medical College Admission Test scores, and acceptance rates for students admitted in 2024. 

Once the responses came in from 23 of the institutions, the data revealed statistically improbable patterns. 

“Twenty-three medical schools have answered my request, including flagship institutions in states like Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri, New Mexico, and Colorado. The data they provided make it clear that schools are at least skirting the Supreme Court’s decision, if not violating it outright,” Kingsbury wrote.

“…It’s reasonable to ask whether the 23 medical schools that responded to my request are indicative of all 93 public medical schools in America. The answer is likely yes.” 

The disparities were especially stark at Eastern Virginia Medical School and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, where black applicants were about 10 times more likely to be accepted than white or Asian applicants with similar grades and test scores.

Eric S Raymond:

Undoubtedly, the funniest thing about the current political scene is hearing people scream about fascism descending on the US in one breath, then advocating censorship and disarmament of civilians in the next. Do they even listen to themselves?

Elsa Johnson:

After that I started screenshotting our conversations. I was beginning to suspect that Charles might be working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and he could be trying to recruit me as a spy. 

I know it sounds paranoid, but I had heard of other Stanford students receiving communications like this out of the blue — especially those studying science, tech, engineering or mathematics. 

Generally, it’s the same playbook: a person claiming to be a Chinese student “slips into your DMs”, or direct messages. They start out friendly with inquiries about your home life and ask whether or not you have mutual friends. Sometimes they point out shared interests and invite you to hang out.

Then the hard sell begins, with offers of an all-expenses-paid trip to China. They might flatter you with compliments and claim you can make money in the country as a social media star. If the conversation progresses, they may ask about your research, academic achievements over the years or the software you might use in class.

And this is exactly what happened with Charles. He shared videos of another woman he claimed was a Stanford student. “She was on a TV show in China and is famous now!” he wrote.

Chiz Kidd:

Motivation

Machine learning (ML) is a powerful field driven by mathematics. Whether you’re building models, optimizing algorithms, or simply trying to understand how ML works under the hood, mastering the core equations is essential. This blog post is designed to be your go-to resource, covering the most critical and “mind-breaking” ML equations—enough to grasp most of the core math behind ML. Each section includes theoretical insights, the equations themselves, and practical implementations in Python, so you can see the math in action.

This guide is for anyone with a basic background in math and programming who wants to deepen their understanding of ML and is inspired by this tweet from @goyal__pramod. Let’s dive into the equations that power this fascinating field!

Ashlea Ebeling:

Once you filter parenting decisions through the lens of taxes, you will find plenty of discounts on the enormous cost of parenting. Sure, there are the basics to think about, such as the child tax credit that every parent should take, if eligible. That just went up, by the way, to $2,200 per child. But there’s more. Daycare. Summer camp. Private school. College. Braces. Therapy. Sneakers.

Many parents don’t take up the challenge. To maximize your tax benefits, you have to study, and you have to do it before tax season in most cases. That is especially important now because of changes that help parents in the big new tax law.

Are you ready?

Samuel Jay Keyser

Made at the high point of Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock, Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” was a poke in the eye of abstract expressionism. Not only was it blatantly mimetic, but it was being blatantly mimetic with a mundane commercial product found in every supermarket and corner grocery store in America. When people think of repetition in painting, they probably think first of these iconic soup cans.

But not all repetition is as in-your-face or as disruptive as “Campbell’s Soup Cans.” One painting from the Impressionist period is particularly pertinent. I am thinking of “Paris Street; Rainy Day” by Gustave Caillebotte. Currently housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, it was originally exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1877. It is probably Caillebotte’s best-known work. I consider it a masterpiece and regret that I have never seen the real thing. Even so, it never ceases to bowl me over. Discussions of it typically focus on the incredible verisimilitude of the painting, the sense that it is photographic in its vivid capture of an ordinary moment. Thus, art critic Sebastian Smee observes in an article in The Washington Postdated January 20, 2021:

Keith Harris:

The University of Minnesota doesn’t exactly have money to throw around these days. Funding from the U.S. government is no longer reliable, tuition is skyrocketing, programs are disappearing, and to make up for an additional $150 million they’ll be paying student athletes this year, the U is charging every student a $200 surcharge.

So when a little bird (with tenure) happened to point out to us that the Board of Regents is shelling out $15 million over five years to a local marking firm called Rise and Shine, we got to wondering what our public university was getting for the money.

And here, via a survey sent out to students last week, are at least some of the new branding taglines under consideration:

Jeffrey Selingo:

The analysis found that elite colleges are slightly more likely to send alumni to a Fortune 50 company, but not by much. In terms of sheer numbers, very few Fortune 50 employees attended highly selective colleges, because those schools’ enrollment numbers are tiny compared with higher education as a whole. Your future coworkers in any company are roughly four times as likely to have graduated from a college with an acceptance rate above 40% than from a more selective school, according to the Lightcast research. And as those coworkers move through their careers, many will end up in the executive suite.

Last year, Nature published a study with the headline, “The most successful and influential Americans come from a surprisingly narrow range of ‘elite’ educational backgrounds.” The study focused on just 34 elite colleges attended by some Fortune 500 CEOs. But an appendix revealed that 378 other colleges also had alumni running Fortune 500 companies. Duke and Brown each had three graduates on the list, but so did Ball State, Louisiana State, San Diego State and many other schools.

The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that life is made up of two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game has a fixed endpoint, with winners and losers. That’s college admissions. An infinite game goes on and on and has no definite winners. That’s the career that comes after college. In trying to master the finite game of getting into an elite college, we too often lose sight of the infinite game of life.

Take Colleen McAllister, who turned down an offer of admission from Cornell University to attend Ithaca College, drawn by its communications school and a generous financial aid package. When I met her at an alumni event, she told me that she spent a semester at Ithaca’s Los Angeles program, where she interned for a production company. After graduation, she eventually found herself up for a job at Illumination, the animation studio. “I had, at that point, done so many different internships and entry-level jobs,” she told me. “I was happy to take out the trash, happy to do the coffee run. I was willing to read everything that crossed the desk.”

Brian Jabarian:

AI-generated text is everywhere: hard for orgs to assess human performance. Can we detect it while min false accusations? Yes! With

@alexolegimas we audit detectors, show incredible accuracy ~0 (!!) false pos & neg; and we offer a policy framework for evaluating trade-offs.

James Kierstead with Michael JohnstonForeword by Prof Douglas Elliffe

Grade inflation in the United States:

From 1940 to 2012, the percentage of grades that were A’s went from 15% to 45%.

C’s went from 35% to less than 15%.

GradeInflation.com
Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities

More from Steve McGuire.

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?

Ravi Gupta:

The fine print is striking. When Katrina hit in 2005, roughly 60 percent of New Orleans schools were labeled “failing” by the state. Today, that number is zero. High school graduation rates have soared from 54 percent to 78 percent. College enrollment has jumped by 28 percentage points. Students across all demographics—Black, White, low-income, students with disabilities—have posted dramatic gains that would be the envy of almost any school system in the country.

Harris’s team anticipated and tested the obvious objection: that the student population must have changed after such a massive displacement like Katrina. Perhaps the student body became more affluent? Less needy? They worked with the U.S. Census to track who actually returned, and their finding deflates the skeptics’ favorite excuse: “The demographics of the district changed for families that had school-aged children… almost not at all.” Even more compelling, when they tracked individual students who attended school both before and after Katrina, those same children were learning at faster rates in the new system.

Yet if you scan the national education discourse today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any major elected leaders talking about New Orleans. This represents a dramatic shift. A decade ago, President Barack Obama himself celebrated the city’s progress, telling a New Orleans audience in 2009 that “a lot of your public schools opened themselves up to new ideas and innovative reforms,” and that “we’re actually seeing an improvement in overall achievement that is making the city a model for reform nationwide.”

But that early attention has given way to virtual silence. This silence isn’t accidental—it’s the result of a success story so politically inconvenient that it threatens the foundational beliefs of both sides of America’s education debate.

———

Ben Binday:

NEW: Hundreds of unseen docs indicate Josh Shapiro gained an unprecedented level of influence at Penn, sought to ban its main pro-Palestinian group, and had a “partnership” with a significant pro-Israel group on campus.

Anna Stokke:

Powerful comments from @ToddTruitt76508 to Maryland State BOE. Why does Carrie Wright get it for reading, but NOT math?
“staff cited NCTM’s 2023 fluency position paper…that cites an opinion article of the Lucy Calkins of math, Jo Boaler who has proudly proclaimed she never learned her times tables”
youtube.com/live/qhPADx_75…

———

More:

Alex Tabarrok:

Trump has put tariffs on the economics agenda in a way that hasn’t been true for decades. As a new semester of principles of economics begins, here are some resources for teaching tariffs.

Comparative Advantage (video)

The Microeconomics of Tariffs and Protectionism (video)

Why Do Domestic Prices Rise with Tariffs? (post)

Trade Diversion (Why Tariffs on More Countries Can Be Better)(post)

Secretary @ Columbia via Steve McGuire:

Columbia University asked its community members about priorities for its next president.

Academic freedom was the second most popular response.

DEI didn’t make the top 5.

——-

Jason Locasale:

Scott Kupor:

Given that, does “a billion here, a billion there” still amount to “real money?” The answer is unequivocally “yes,” and President Trump’s administration is committed to demonstrating that.

The federal budget in less than one page

To understand why, we first need to understand the federal budget in a bit more detail. There are three big areas of the $7 trillion in federal spending:

Mandatory spending – these are programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Some people collectively refer to these as “entitlements” – commitments the federal government has made to cover health and retirement benefits for older Americans and less fortunate Americans. Today, we spend approximately $4 trillion in this bucket.
Interest payments on the debt – we have to “service” our $36 trillion debt, or pay people interest for the privilege of lending us that money. Today, the U.S. spends approximately $1 trillion in this bucket.
Discretionary spending – this is the catch-all bucket for everything else. It includes lots of stuff, but a few of the big items are: (i) the roughly 2.4 million non-military federal employees (e.g., IRS, Commerce, Interior, and a whole hosts of other federal agencies); (ii) Defense-related personnel and other spending; and (iii) Veterans Affairs. Today, we spend approximately $2 trillion in this bucket.
Luckily (or not, depending on your view of taxes), the federal government also collects some money each year, the vast majority of which comes in the form of tax payments that you and I pay. The government collects about $5 trillion today, leaving us $2 trillion in the hole.

Lots of people may debate the size of the debt, how much is too much and what are the longer-term implications. But one thing is clear: a growing debt means you must pay interest payments each year to satisfy your lenders. That’s “dead money,” meaning we’re paying lots of interest without getting anything of value in return.

Kejal Vyas:

Kidnappers released his family after nearly a month in exchange for a $1,000 ransom, Mexican state prosecutor records show. The family has lived since then at a shelter in this border city, where Atencio has worked construction and food delivery jobs to support them.

Their fate and well-being are part of a mounting political challenge for Latin American leaders including Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum. She has sought to earn goodwill with the U.S. on matters including trade by fighting drug cartels more aggressively than her predecessors and helping curb illegal migration to the U.S. Now, with Mexico’s economic ties with its largest trading partner as uncertain as ever, the ramifications of Trump’s immigration policies are giving her new domestic problems to solve.

“This whole problem is like a monster growing before us, and there’s little we can do about it,” said Román Domínguez, an evangelical pastor who runs a shelter for a few dozen migrants in Ciudad Juárez, near the pedestrian bridge to El Paso, Texas.

Steven Pinker:

As @rosehorowitch notes, the average GPA at Harvard is 3.8/4. Harvard administrators, laughably, call this “grade compression” (not “inflation”), & one said, with a straight face, that perhaps our students are performing better & better. I knew this was codswallop, so went to the objective, multiple-choice final exam scores over the 20+ years I’ve taught at Harvard. With the help of Dr Nicole Noll (preceptor) I found that performance sank by 10 percentage points (quoted in the article).

——-

Steve McGuire:

One common response to reports of grade inflation at Harvard is that the students are elite so of course they get A’s. But Harvard’s own data show this was not always the case, and Professor Pinker provides evidence below that performance has in fact declined over time.

Paul Alivisatos:

Now: Taking these questions in reverse order, first, with regard to administrative efficiency, we are reducing the number of administrative leadership positions, both centrally and in divisions and schools. This involves reducing the number of university senior leadership roles, including fewer officers and asking leaders to take on additional portfolios. We are reducing some staff positions in select administrative areas. We are also strongly encouraging streamlining of some elaborate divisional and academic structures that are burdensome to faculty time. Importantly, these changes to the divisions will have the effect of returning resources and faculty time to where they are best used: toward teaching and scholarship. 

Second, new capital projects are critical for our future, but we have to be able to afford them. We need to create new spaces for the most demanding new areas of inquiry, while preserving and renewing our many beautiful historic buildings. We cannot do this by continuing to support large projects primarily with financing. We have established new guidelines requiring that we secure philanthropic or other external support prior to embarking on any new projects. Accordingly, we have substantially scaled down plans for the New Engineering and Science Building; we will build the essential underground specialized space for quantum information science and technology and a more limited above ground footprint than originally planned, but will still include essential teaching labs. Concurrently, much needed renewal of the historic buildings spanning the Central Quads is one the highest priorities for our present philanthropic fundraising efforts.

Third, we are acting to better serve students at all levels.

Susan Goldsmith:

The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense.

When these depressing statistics were published in a high school newspaper in mid-1997, black parents were troubled by the news and upset that the newspaper had exposed the problem in such a public way. Seeking guidance, one parent called a prominent authority on minority academic achievement.

UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor John Ogbu had spent decades studying how the members of different ethnic groups perform academically. He’d studied student coping strategies at inner-city schools in Washington, DC. He’d looked at African Americans and Latinos in Oakland and Stockton and examined how they compare to racial and ethnic minorities in India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and Britain. His research often focused on why some groups are more successful than others.

Braden Cartwright:

At a time when Stanford is firing employees to save money, newly released IRS documents show the university paid 18 employees $1 million or more in the previous fiscal year.

Stanford announced in July that it was laying off 363 employees this fall as part of a $140 million budget cut caused by reduced federal research funding and a higher endowment tax.

Stanford Management Company CEO Robert Wallace, who handles the university’s investments, was the highest-paid employee last year with a salary of $6.3 million, IRS forms show.

Katherine Bindley:

Base salaries for nonmanagerial workers in AI with zero to three years experience grew by around 12% from 2024 to 2025, the largest gain of any experience group, according to a new report by the AI staffing firm Burtch Works, which analyzed the compensation of thousands of AI and data-science candidates. The report also found that people with AI experience are being promoted to management roles roughly twice as fast as their counterparts in other technology fields. They’re jumping the ladder as a result of their skills and impact instead of their years on the job.

“There is a significant salary difference between a machine-learning engineer job and a software-engineer job,” says Anil K. Gupta, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and co-lead of its AI job tracker.

Databricks, the data-analytics software company whose value has skyrocketed during the AI boom, plans to triple the number of people it hires right out of school this year, in part because of their familiarity with AI.

Hannah Erin Lang:

Leza and Anthony Dieli are saving about $1,000 a month for their 7-year-old daughter, Zoey. This money isn’t for college tuition or summer camp or medical expenses. It is to support her once she is an otherwise independent adult.

There is a novel strain of financial advice that suggests supporting grown children isn’t a reason to be ashamed. It is probably necessary, and sometimes even desirable. The Dielis decided to start saving early. Leza graduated college during the 2007-09 recession, worked a string of unhappy jobs and racked up credit-card debt. She doesn’t want that for Zoey.

“I want her to feel like she has options,” Leza said.

Whether they plan for it or not, plenty of parents are likely to find themselves in the same boat. About 60% of parents with children ages 18 to 34 said they had helped their kids financially in the previous year, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey. Parents are finding that the rising expenses that trail them from their child’s birth through college are now extending well into adulthood.

They commonly chipped in for housing, debt payments and everyday expenses such as groceries, according to a Bankrate survey last year. A third of younger millennial home buyers got help with the down payment from friends or family, according to an April report from the National Association of Realtors.

Ivana Greco

Even if schools aren’t doing their part. 

Every week, my four kids and I go to our local public library and check out dozens of books. We’re certainly not alone: The library is usually packed with kids, parents, babysitters, and grandparents. Our public library is a vital community resource, and it is more than doing its part to get kids reading books. Unfortunately, it’s fighting an uphill battle: The statistics are pretty grim. In 1984, 70 percent of 13-year olds said they read for fun at least once or twice a week. By 2023, that number had dropped to 36 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—and college professors are increasingly befuddled by students who arrive on campus unable to tackle lengthy and complex reading assignments.  

Doubtless a complex interaction of causes is at fault in these trends: The impact of short video on attention spans and the long-term impact of learning loss due to the COVID pandemic remain topics of debate. Some schools have failed to adequately teach students the fundamentals of phonics, leaving them struggling with the basics of reading. For older students, reliance on AI may decrease their motivation to do the reading formerly needed to get a passing grade. Educators and social scientists will be struggling for years (if not decades) to pick apart this tangled web of issues. 

Babylon Bee:

Trump’s plan was praised by national security experts, who cited it as a brilliant maneuver to reduce China’s influence on global affairs in the long term by shrewdly allowing their students to be made substantially less intelligent at educational institutions in the U.S.

Steve McGuire:

25 years ago, Harvey “C-“ Mansfield decided he would “distribute two sets of grades to his students: an initial grade he thinks they deserve, and then a second grade—the one that will go on their transcript—which will be ‘based on Harvard’s system of inflated grades.’”

——-

2001 (!):

Students who take Government 1061, “Modern Political Thought,” this semester, won’t get just one grade from Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. ’53, they will get two.

In lecture Thursday morning, Mansfield announced he will distribute two sets of grades to his students: an initial grade he thinks they deserve, and then a second grade–the one that will go on their transcript–which will be “based on Harvard’s system of inflated grades.”

Mansfield is one of Harvard’s most ardent opponents of grade inflation. He has voiced concern about grade elevation at Faculty meetings and even with University President Neil L. Rudenstine.

“[But] the administration has done nothing about this glaring flaw in education,” Mansfield said in an interview Friday.

More.

“Without the threat of poor grades, students have largely stopped trying in their courses.”

and:

Not a single student can read at grade level in 30 Illinois schools.

Rose Horowitch

In the era of grade inflation, students at top colleges are more stressed than ever.

During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting.

They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.

Last year, the university set out to study the state of academics at Harvard. The Classroom Social Compact Committee released its report in January. Students’ grades are up, but they’re doing less academic work. They skip class at a rate that surprises even the most hardened professors. Many care more about extracurriculars than coursework. “A majority of students and faculty we heard from agree that Harvard College students do not prioritize their academic experience,” the committee wrote.

———

More.

———

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?

Bethany Mandel:

If you read the NYT newsletter in the morning hoping to understand the news, good luck knowing anything notable about what happened in Minneapolis yesterday.

Scott Johnson:

If Minnesota is a state trans refuge, Minneapolis must be the capital. In the wake of the mass shooting yesterday at Annunciation Church by trans madperson Robin Westman, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey instructed us: “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity.” He means to shut down those of us who have do not concur in the wisdom of the party’s program.

Frey also disparaged “thoughts and prayers” for the two children and others injured in Westman’s murder spree. He apparently wants to tout gun control. “Gun violence” is the question and “gun control” is the answer. Amen.

Westman’s reported video/manifestos include anti-Semitic and anti-Christian phrases and symbols as well as calls to kill President Donald Trump and destroy the state of Israel. He wrote of murdering “filthy Zionist Jews,” that “six million wasn’t enough,” and “free Palestine,” the New York Post reported yesterday. “If I will carry out a racially motivated attack, it would be most likely against filthy Zionist jews,” Westman reportedly wrote in a journal that the paper said was “full of antisemitic slurs.”

It sounds like a slightly expanded edition of the whole party package. Miranda Devine gets inside Minnesota’s political culture in her New York Post column “Deadly Minnesota school shooting reflects tragic cost of a disordered society — including Dem leaders who lost the plot.”

The lineup of public officials at the press briefing after the shooting yesterday is a joke: Walz, Frey, O’Hara, Minneapolis public safety commissioner Toddrick Barnette, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. They make for an unintentionally satirical portrait of political clowns. It is the visual counterpart to Devine’s column.

We have followed the exodus of sworn officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, the demoralization of the department under Chief Brian O’Hara, the lawlessly lax law enforcement of Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, the promotion of Minneapolis and Minnesota as “sanctuary” jurisdictions for illegal immigration, and so on. Minneapolis is down some 350 officers of the more than 900 that populated the ranks at the time of the death of Saint George Floyd. Five years later, Minneapolis’s police department more than 150 officers short of the legal minimum.

——

The Star Tribune.

——

Media coverage of the latest tragedy hits another new low.

It’s the most glaring example I can remember of a news organization apologizing for its own reporting. 

——

Free Beacon:

The transgender perpetrator of Wednesday’s attack on a Catholic church and school in Minneapolis, Robin Westman, was born Robert but changed his name at 17 years old because he identified as a female, court records show. Here’s how mainstream media reports described him.

Elizabeth:

There is joy and happiness after desistance, after the state attempts to destroy your family. It’s not always easy to find, but it’s there.
You don’t have to go along with any of it. Step up and start parenting again. It’s not your job to be their friend.

——

David Bernstein:

Listened to @NPR for the first time in months. Lengthy reporting on the shooting today, completely avoided saying anything about the shooter and the shooter’s ideology, except for admonishing Sen. Klobuhar for referring to the shoot as a “he” when “their gender identity is not known at this time.” NPR has totally become a parody of itself.

Wall Street Journal:

The details are still emerging about the person who shot up a church full of Catholic school children in Minneapolis on Wednesday at a celebratory Mass for the first week of the new school year. But the signs so far point to a case of a young person, as in many other such tragedies, beset by a murderous madness.

Law enforcement identified the suspect as 23-year-old Robin Westman of suburban Minneapolis. News reports say the transgender woman who had changed her name from Robert had attended the same Annunciation Catholic School that the children attended, and that Westman’s mother had been an employee there.

Diana Nerozzi:

The Minnesota shooter wrote in his manifesto:

“I am sick of my hair, I want to chop it off. I only keep it because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself.”

Karol Markowicz:

But there’s no discussion allowed about what to do when a child declares themselves transgender. No one may point out that gender dysphoria is often a symptom of a much larger mental health problem.

The American Medical Association, a professional group of physicians that has become a wholly political entity in the last few years, only suggests one path, that of “gender-affirming care” — and urges that “forgoing gender-affirming care can have tragic health consequences, both mental and physical.”

———

Ann Althouse summary.

Dean Ball:

The plaintiffs (Raine’s parents) are suing for damages in tort (both products liability and negligence) as well as under California’s Unfair Competition Law for injunctive relief, which means a request for a court to require (“enjoin”) a defendant to either do something or stop doing something. In this case, the plaintiffs are requesting injunctive relief that amounts to public policy:

…an injunction requiring Defendants to: (a) immediately implement mandatory age verification for ChatGPT users; (b) require parental consent and provide parental controls for all minor users; (c) implement automatic conversation-termination when self-harm or suicide methods are discussed; (d) create mandatory reporting to parents when minor users express suicidal ideation; (e) establish hard-coded refusals for self-harm and suicide method inquiries that cannot be circumvented; (f) display clear, prominent warnings about psychological dependency risks; (g) cease marketing ChatGPT to minors without appropriate safety disclosures; and (h) submit to quarterly compliance audits by an independent monitor.

The complaint, of course, is one side of the story, crafted by attorneys to be as persuasive as possible. For example, the complaint includes few references to, and no quotes of, any efforts by the model to encourage Raine to seek mental healthcare, talk to a human, or take other preventive steps (and I’m sure GPT-4o did this many times). In addition, the complaint makes clear that Raine routinely jailbroke the model, telling it he was asking questions about suicide for purposes of fiction he was hoping to write. 

We have not yet heard OpenAI defend itself, and we have not had a trial, where new facts and context might well come to light.

Quinton Klabon:

Read Wyatt’s piece! But people misdiagnose how school spending grew.

Whether Walker or Evers, pre-Act 10 or post-, we spend LESS per student member on administration and operations!

Sadly, we spend WAY less on instruction too.

Cost increases are facilities and support staff.🧵

I will point out Wisconsin is 1 of 7 states with no direct state facilities funding. Ohio even funds private school renovations and expansions.

Jason Zweig:

Why does the smart money keep flunking Investing 101?

During the 2008-09 global financial crisis, many of the world’s biggest investors found themselves in dire need of cash because they had sunk too much money into assets that couldn’t be publicly traded.

Now they’ve made the same mistake all over again.

Over the past couple of decades, no group of investors has piled into what are called alternative assets more eagerly than the endowment funds of major colleges and universities. In their rush to emulate the stellar success of Yale University’s endowment head David Swensen, who died in 2021, educational institutions pulled tens of billions of dollars out of stocks and bonds and poured it into hedge funds, private equity, venture capital and other investments that don’t trade publicly.

The result looks nothing like the portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds that has long been a guidepost for many investors. On average, in fiscal 2024, educational endowments with more than $5 billion in assets held only 2% in cash, 6% in bonds, 8% in U.S. stocks and 16% in international stocks, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. That left two-thirds of their total holdings in private funds and other non-traditional assets that can’t readily be turned into cash.

Matt Barnum:

After months of targeting universities over antisemitism allegations, the Trump administration is turning to a new focus: whether schools are using proxies for race in admissions to diversify student bodies.

This emphasis is emerging in recent edicts from federal agencies and in the White House’s scrutiny of specific universities.

In late July, Attorney General Pam Bondi warned in a memo against using “unlawful proxies” for race—such as geography or applicant essays on overcoming hardships—in admissions. Soon after, the U.S. Education Department announced it would require universities to report new data on applicants, broken down by race, to “ensure race-based preferences are not used.”

Universities have been prohibited from using racial preferences in admissions since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023. The Trump administration suggests schools may be flouting the ban, though universities say they comply.

For conservatives and the administration, the current push represents a common-sense strategy to enforce and extend the Supreme Court’s ruling. Others say this approach distorts the court decision and could depress Black student enrollment, which has already fallen at some top colleges.

Oyin Adedoyin:

Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, Notre Dame and the University of California, Berkeley, were among the schools that wanted her. Few offered her need-based financial aid. Her parents had been saving, but not enough to cover full tuition for both her and, eventually, her little sister, nevermind the law school Ana Sofia also wants to attend. The cost of one year of undergrad these days can approach $100,000.

“It’s like you’re paying the salary of a recent graduate just to start going to college,” said Gabriel Gómez, Ana Sofia’s father.

Parents spend 18 years trying to decide what’s worth it for their children in a world of rising costs. For those who send their kids to college, the decision over where to go is in its own category. There is the wide-eyed optimism of launching a child into the world. There is also the potential to drain savings and rack up student loan debt. Many parents are reluctant to weigh in too much on the choice of schools, wanting to avoid tipping the scales.

Gabriel, a director at a manufacturing company, tried not to put too much pressure on Ana Sofia to pick a college based on price. What if she chose a cheaper school and ended up unhappy? But the Irvine, Calif., resident couldn’t stop himself from comparing the costs to the much lower ones in Mexico, where he and his wife, Marcela Garza, grew up and went to school.

Eugene Volokh:

From the University of Oregon School of Law’s dean Friday …

In February 2025, a civil rights complaint was filed against the Oregon Law Review (OLR) student organization, based on events that occurred in the 2024 spring semester. In August 2025, the university’s Office of Investigations and Civil Rights Compliance completed its investigation and issued a report. …

In April 2024, while selecting articles for the 2024-25 Volume 103, the OLR chose not to offer publication to an author who indicated they were faculty at Tel Aviv University. No law school administrators or faculty were involved in this decision. …

In early August, the university completed its investigation, finding the law school administrator not responsible for any policy violation. The university did, however, find the OLR responsible for violating University of Oregon policy and the Student Conduct Code. The investigation found that OLR engaged in conduct that, on its face, was discrimination based on perceived national origin. …

Gail Cornwall: 

within the next two years, a majority of U.S. kids will be subject to some sort of phone-use restriction [in schools].

…Part of the reason that I feel so strongly about getting phones out of classrooms is that I know what school was like for teachers without them. In 2005, when I was 25 years old, I showed up at a Maryland high school eager to thrill three classes of freshmen with my impassioned dissection of Romeo and Juliet. Instead, I learned how quickly a kid’s eraser-tapping could distract the whole room, and how easily one student’s bare calves could steal another teen’s attention. Reclaiming their focus took everything I had: silliness, flexibility, and a strong dose of humility.

Today, I doubt Mercutio and I would stand a chance. Even with the rising number of restrictions, smartphones are virtually unavoidable in many schools. Consider my 16-year-old’s experience: Her debate team communicates using the Discord app. Flyers about activities require scanning a QR code. Her teachers frequently ask that she submit photos of completed assignments, which her laptop camera can’t capture clearly. In some classes, students are expected to complete learning games on their smartphone.

Wendy Wang:

A kiss-cam moment at a recent Coldplay concert went viral: a tech company CEO was caught on camera embracing a woman who was not his wife, an HR executive at the same company. The story spread like wild fire, and that public display of infidelity stirred up many conversations on men, women, and cheating—raising questions that are worth exploring with data. How common is cheating today? Are men with higher status jobs more likely to cheat? How does work status relate to cheating?

To better understand cheating among adults in the workplace, I looked at the data from the General Social Survey (GSS) for men and women ages 25 to 54, the prime age range with the highest rate of labor force participation. I combined the data in each decade to be able to look beyond fluctuations in a single year and focus on the overall trend.

——-

more.

Jon Hartley and Dylan Rem:

On June 27th, many graduate students on campus received an ominous email titled “Termination Request” sent by Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU) leadership, including Liam Sherman, the Vice-President for Membership, and Orisa Coombs (who signed off on her emails as “UE Local 1043 President”), the president of the SGWU. The emails demanded that university administrators terminat the students immediately for simply failing to pay dues to the Union, as mandated by the recent collective bargaining agreement signed between the University and the student union in 2024. 

Some graduate students on campus have objected to joining the student union, which is affiliated with and sends money to the United Electrical Workers (UE), a nationwide union that funds progressive activism. The Union is now attempting to employ aggressive methods of extracting payments from graduate students to the tune of several hundred dollars.

Benji Edwards:

A hobbyist developer building AI language models that speak Victorian-era English “just for fun” got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn’t know had actually happened until he Googled them.

“I was interested to see if a protest had actually occurred in 1834 London and it really did happen,” wrote Reddit user Hayk Grigorian, who is a computer science student at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.

For the past month, Grigorian has been developing what he calls TimeCapsuleLLM, a small AI language model (like a pint-sized distant cousin to ChatGPT) which has been trained entirely on texts from 1800–1875 London. Grigorian wants to capture an authentic Victorian voice in the AI model’s outputs. As a result, the AI model ends up spitting out text that’s heavy with biblical references and period-appropriate rhetorical excess.

Grigorian’s project joins a growing field of researchers exploring what some call “Historical Large Language Models” (HLLMs) if they feature a larger base model than the small one Grigorian is using. Similar projects include MonadGPT, which was trained on 11,000 texts from 1400 to 1700 CE that can discuss topics using 17th-century knowledge frameworks, and XunziALLM, which generates classical Chinese poetry following ancient formal rules. These models offer researchers a chance to interact with the linguistic patterns of past eras.

According to Grigorian, TimeCapsuleLLM’s most intriguing recent output emerged from a simple test. When he prompted it with “It was the year of our Lord 1834,” the AI model—which is trained to continue text from wherever a user leaves off—generated the following:

Kerry Kavanaugh:

25 Investigates was there in early August when hundreds of teachers spent four days in Mansfield in literacy instruction training.

“Today we’ve got 300 teachers representing 84 districts across the state learning the basis of evidence-based early literacy instruction,” said Patrick Tutwiler, Massachusetts Secretary of Education.

The trainings, that fully funded by the state, were dubbed ‘Literacy Launch Institute’ and are just part of Massachusetts’ efforts to improve literacy skills for students statewide.

As reported by 25 Investigates first in February a national report revealed that 60% of Massachusetts 4th graders were reading below grade level, with even higher percentages among Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students.

The trainings targeted educators in grades Kindergarten through 3rd. Tutwiler says it’s crucial to target those students in the youngest grades.

Jean Twenge, Jenet Erickson, Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox:

Clearly, many single women today perceive getting married or becoming a mother to be transitions of loss. But is this perception true?  

New data paint a different picture. In the 2022 General Social Survey (GSS), the nation’s leading social barometer, married mothers are happier than single childless women as well as married childless women and unmarried mothers.¹⁰ Other surveys have found similar results.¹¹

To better clarify how marriage and motherhood are linked to women’s happiness, we fielded the Women’s Well-Being Survey (WWS) of 3,000 U.S. women, ages 25 to 55, conducted by YouGov in early March 2025 (for details, see About the Data and Methodology). We wanted to know: Why are married mothers the happiest group of women? 

Happiness

Consistent with previous surveys, our new survey finds that married mothers are happier than unmarried women or women without children. Nearly twice as many married mothers say they are “very happy” as unmarried women without children.  

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Michael Walsh:

When did reporters become “journalists”? When I started out at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 1972, nobody called himself a “journalist.” We were reporters, and proud of it. “Journalist” had a snooty air to it and seemed to be reserved for the newspaper trade’s bigdomes who wrote editorials. The rest of us wrote news stories.

I started out, as reporters did in those days, on general assignment, writing the weather story and tallying the numbers of dogs killed each year on Monroe County highways. Later I did time on the night rewrite desk, working from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. — working hours I still pretty much keep. Nobody had a degree in “journalism.” You learned your trade by watching and imitating the old guys (there were very few women in newsrooms in those days), some still sharp and on their game, and others wrecked old hulks adrift in the Sargasso Sea of the office, the city desk.

But they could still teach, and my earliest stories fell under the ken of one John B. Kenney, a gruff oldtimer who showed me the ropes. He advised me to add my middle initial, “A.” to my byline, correctly observing there were a lot of Irish-American kids with my first (very common) and last (fourth commonest name in Ireland) names and thus help avoid confusion. It was good advice but I didn’t take it, and to this day Amazon has real trouble with disambiguating me from a dozen other Michael Walshes, some of whom are priests, authors of books on religion, or Hitler apologists, but none of whom is me.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Her resignation is effective immediately, according to a news release sent out shortly before 9 p.m. Monday. 

The news release said Kamoku emailed the board, saying, “I have enjoyed my 2.5 years of service, but the time has come for me to prioritize my children and my job.”

Kamoku was elected in spring 2023. Her position on the board is up for election in April, but the District says her resignation “opens up a Board seat for a new Board appointment” and information on how to apply would be released in the future.

Teddy Ganea:

UChicago’s financial position is clear: Unlike near-peer institutions, its endowment is not large enough to sustain its spending and debt. The university carries nearly $6bn in debt while running annual budget deficits exceeding $200m, all on an endowment three times smaller than Stanford’s. 

To compensate, the university has focused on expanding lucrative certification programs, increasing donations, raising tuitions, and cutting costs, though many faculty and students viscerally disagree with the administration on which costs to cut.

Yet these debates neglect the most important factor: the UChicago endowment’s weak returns, driven by poor investment decisions.