But they also hoped for a big family, and wanted to get started. Sure, Brittany was making $10 an hour working a retail job at Home Depot. But Michael’s union construction job paid more than triple that, and he’d owned his own home, a modest two-bedroom outside Cincinnati, for more than a decade.
So the two took the plunge, and in 2012, they welcomed their first baby. Brittany was 20; her husband, 34. The birth was difficult. Her son’s umbilical cord was wrapped around his head, and he had to be extracted from her birth canal, fracturing her pelvis. Still, she was smitten. “Your heart grows three sizes,” she recalls. “I couldn’t stop looking at him.”
The Ivys now have five children, ages 3 to 12. They know they aren’t the norm.
More Americans than ever are putting off having children—or not having them at all. The U.S. total fertility rate is around an all-time low, and far below the rate needed to keep the population stable. The average age of women giving birth in the U.S. has risen to nearly 30 years old, up from 27 years old in 2000, according to government data.
Twenty Years Later: Education in New Orleans After Katrina noon webinar 18 August
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the floods that devastated New Orleans and its schools. The recovery effort in the years after the storm reshaped the city’s education system, ushering in reforms and innovations with ripple effects across the country. Join Bellwether for a series of conversations with leaders, policymakers, and experts who were there and helped shape education in New Orleans during the past 20 years. We’ll explore how the city’s schools have changed, the challenges that remain, and what it means for America’s education system more broadly. Join us for the following sessions: Where We Started: Policy Conditions and Constraints in August 2005 (Monday, Aug. 18 at 12:00pm ET) Featuring Former Senator Mary Landrieu, Doug Harris, Jamar McKneely, Alexina Medley, and Andy Rotherham (moderator) How Charters Changed the Game Post-Katrina (Monday, August 25 at 11am ET) Featuring Leslie Jacobs, Dana Peterson, Jim Peyser, and Juliet Squire (moderator) Career Pathway Innovations in New Orleans (Thursday, Aug. 28 at 2:00pm ET) Featuring Aaron Frumin, Claire Jecklin, Cate Swinburn, and Alex Cortez (moderator)
Commentary on Educational Trends and Influences
One could argue that the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century. Willingham has observed that we have learned more about how people learn in the last 25 years than in the previous 2,500 combined. His book Why Don’t Students Like School? examines how that recently acquired understanding can be used to accelerate learning.
Yet, however great his influence has been in the United States, it has been far greater in my own country, England. In fact, while the U.S. is perhaps the world’s largest exporter of educational ideas, it is an “equal opportunity exporter”—pushing out transformative ideas both powerful and catastrophically misinformed. Our efforts in England across a decade to understand the difference between good and bad ideas in education has led to a transformation of our schools from moribund to global leadership at exactly the time the U.S. has continued to struggle.
Many “progressivist” ideas that came to dominate teaching emanated from Teachers College Columbia in New York in the 1920s under such luminaries as William Heard Kilpatrick and John Dewey, based on the ideas of the 18th century Romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He thought that a rigorous academic education stifled the natural creativity and goodness of children; better to have them learn through “self-discovery” or projects than by teacher-led instruction, with less emphasis on the importance of knowledge and more on a set of amorphous skills such as learning how to learn and critical thinking.
These ideas carry different names and have different emphases. But whether it’s “constructivist,” “child-centered,” or “progressivist,” the results wherever they are tried are the same: a weaker education system where children’s life chances, particular those from poorer families, suffer.
Over time in Britain this ideology was increasingly absorbed by our schools, from the 1970s to its peak in the 2000s, and it did enormous damage to our education system. The U.K. plummeted down the OECD rankings of nations’ education standards, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In reading, the U.K. fell from seventh in the year 2000 to 25th by 2009 and in math from 8th to 27th over that period.
Five former Wisconsin women’s basketball players file lawsuit against former coach Marisa Moseley
The allegations of mental abuse that preceded the resignation of former Wisconsin women’s basketball coach Marisa Moseley moved to a new arena on Aug. 15.
Federal court.
Five former players filed a civil lawsuit against Moseley, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and Justin Doherty, who served as the administrator for women’s basketball and retired as UW’s senior associate athletic director for external communications in April. The players claim psychological abuse by Moseley and that Doherty was aware of the issue but took no action to protect the players.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are former Badgers Alexis Duckett, Krystyna Ellew, Mary Ferrito, Tara Stauffacher and Tessa Towers. The lawsuit was filed in District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and seeks compensatory and punitive damages among other penalties.
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Bodhana Becomes Youngest Woman To Beat Grandmaster As Adams Wins 9th British Title
Ten-year-old prodigy WFM Bodhana Sivanandan stunned the nation in the 2025 British Chess Championship in Liverpool on Sunday, becoming the youngest woman ever to beat a grandmaster and the youngest-ever to earn the Woman International Master title. Meanwhile, 53-year-old GM Michael Adams sealed his ninth national title after winning a dramatic three-way playoff.
The 111th British Chess Championship had several notable storylines, which will be covered in this recap.
Third-grade reading: How does your district measure up?
The ability to read by the end of third grade is a critical skill for a child’s success — not only for the remainder of his or her K-12 journey and later educational outcomes but for future career opportunities, earnings potential, and economic mobility.
Statewide, third-grade reading proficiency has been steadily declining for a number of years. Data from the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment reports nearly 54 percent of third graders aren’t meeting grade-level reading benchmarks.
How does your district measure up? Are reading scores where they should be or is there room for improvement? Use the database below to see reading proficiency results from the 2024 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment. According to the Minnesota Department of Education, students who do not take the test are excluded from the assessment results and do not impact a district’s MCA proficiency calculation.
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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?
Books & Schools
That’s it. We can throw away all those outdated paper books. Children will learn directly from an AI which, coincidentally, is sold by the company. We can trust their studies on such matters and be assured that they have no ulterior motive.
But, ah my friends, I have told a slight untruth. I didn’t ask that question. Frederick James Smith asked the question to Thomas Edison in 1913. The question was about the new and exciting world of motion pictures.
“Because, on the whole, they’re run better”
College-admissions experts note that the rise in these schools’ popularity has allowed them to become more selective, boosting their prestige even further among high-school students.
From 2014 to 2024, the last full year for available admissions data, Auburn University’s freshman-class acceptance rate decreased from 85% to 46%; Clemson University’s dropped from 52% to 38%.
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The trend line holds even for the South’s most selective colleges: Rice University’s acceptance rate dipped from 14% to 8%; Emory University’s, from 26% to 15%.
By contrast, elite Northeastern universities have only been able to maintain their enrollments by taking in more foreign students.
Why are young people are flocking to Southern universities?
In a shocking incident, ICE arrested an illegal alien who was involved in a drunk driving car wreck that killed two high school sweethearts in Wisconsin. The tragic event occurred in a sanctuary jurisdiction
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today announced U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a criminal illegal alien responsible for driving while intoxicated and causing the fatal car wreck that killed two American teens in Dane County, Wisconsin.
On August 13, 2025, ICE arrested Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila—a criminal illegal alien from Honduras—who struck a vehicle while driving the wrong direction on a highway, killing 18-year-old Hallie Helgeson at the scene on July 20. Martinez-Avila also gravely injured 19-year-old Brady Heiling who died from his injuries on July 25.
Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila was charged with two counts of felony vehicular homicide and impaired driving by Wisconsin law enforcement. ICE lodged an arrest detainer for this illegal alien’s arrest and removal from the country. Despite this sanctuary jurisdiction giving ICE less than an hour notice to make the arrest, ICE nabbed this criminal alien.
The Million-Dollar Safety Net: How Wealthy Parents Actually Foster Young Entrepreneurship
One respondent shared a particularly striking personal experience. After transferring from a rural Chinese school to an elite private school in Shenzhen, they witnessed a completely different approach to money and opportunity:
“I remember two incidents vividly: A female classmate said she ‘grabbed’ a 20,000 yuan bag, then sold it for over 50,000 yuan half a month later. Another male student used his network to find ways to make money through importing, eventually trading up to get the latest iPhone. Meanwhile, back in my hometown, most parents couldn’t afford an iPhone 4S even after selling oranges for half a year.”
The contrast isn’t just economic — it’s philosophical. These students weren’t just wealthy; they were entrepreneurially native. They instinctively understood concepts like arbitrage, network effects, and opportunity costs that many adults never grasp.
What We Lost When Shop Class Disappeared
At some point in junior high, I had to choose a “shop.” My school in Mexico offered some sensible, safe options such as music, typing, and shorthand. But the ones most boys wanted were the two slightly dangerous ones — Electronics and Electricity or Metalwork.
These were not tucked-away electives; they had pride of place at the far end of the schoolyard, in two corrugated steel warehouses butted against each other like twin workshops in a small industrial park.
I chose Electronics and Electricity.
The proximity of the two classes meant a constant back-and-forth — a lot of joking, teasing, and the occasional informal competition to see who could cause more noise or sparks.
In my shop, we learned how to solder electronics and cables together. We played with full-voltage circuits, wired light fixtures, and installed electrical plugs. We were 13 and 14-year-old boys using tools that could burn us, shock us, and — if we ignored the teacher’s warnings — put us in the hospital. The boys next door were welding in full gear, cutting and filing metal, and doing things that came with a real risk of tetanus. I can’t recall a single accident bad enough to stop a class, though there were burns, scrapes, and the occasional singed eyebrow.
And we loved it.
We gave each other electric shocks for fun. We raced to see who could wire a circuit the fastest or the cleanest. There was no discussion about “toxic masculinity” — just a roomful of boys learning to master tools and danger.
The Public School —>> Prison Pipeline
CPS student gets 5 years for bringing a machine gun to school (but he won’t serve any actual prison time)
“Student” is pretty generous as you will see….
A former Chicago Public Schools student has been sentenced to five years in prison for bringing a loaded machine gun to school, but he is not expected to spend any time in an actual prison.
Marquis Terry, 20, pleaded guilty to possession of a machine gun in exchange for the sentence from Judge Kenneth Wadas. However, after receiving a variety of sentencing credits, Terry is not expected to spend any time in prison.
Didja catch the part where he is….20 years oldand still considered a “student”?
The case began on March 20, 2024, when Terry, then 19, was sent home from a field trip with his classmates at Association House High School, 1116 North Kedzie, in Humboldt Park. A Chicago Police Department arrest report said Terry was sent home from the outing in an Uber for “disruptive behavior” that prosecutors said involved smoking marijuana.
That afternoon, the school’s principal searched Terry’s locker, expecting to find more marijuana. Instead, prosecutors said, the principal opened a backpack and discovered a loaded .45-caliber Glock pistol with an extended ammunition magazine and a “switch” device — an illegal attachment that allows pistols to generate automatic gunfire. Police said the gun had been reported stolen from Henderson, Kentucky.
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
Notes on the National Council of Teachers of English Conference
Another year, another National Council of Teachers of English Conference
Let’s look at their workshops
First up: a critique of “white supremacist curricula.”
It’s like McCarthyism.
Shakespeare? White Supremacist! Phonics? Racist! Reading? How dare you!
‘We cannot have a religious prayer before the Land Acknowledgement’
A Phoenix Union High School District board meeting turned contentious when board member Jeremiah Cota was blocked from reciting the Lord’s Prayer after being told it could not precede the board’s “land acknowledgement.”
The August 7 incident was captured in a video posted to Cota’s X account, showing the board parliamentarian interrupted the prayer, stating, “We cannot have a religious prayer before the land acknowledgement.”
Land acknowledgements are statements recognizing that an event or institution is located on land historically inhabited or claimed by indigenous peoples. In recent years, many government agencies, universities, and school districts have begun including them at the start of public meetings, often framing them as part of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Cota’s X profile states he is a tribal member of the Free People of the San Carlos Apache.
Mitch Daniels Conversation
Tyler Cowen joins Mitch Daniels to explore AI’s promise, economic threats from debt and regulation, and the need for bold, intelligent policy to secure economic growth, innovation, and individual liberty. Cowen discusses his views on immigration, COVID lockdowns and addresses societal fear of confronting rapid technological change.
China beseeches officials to hold fewer meetings and write shorter reports
China has implored officials to hold fewer meetings and slash the length of official reports, ordering a nationwide campaign to tackle the “stubborn and persistent ills” of “formalism and bureaucracy” in the government.
A directive published this week by state media called on officials to “improve document quality”, ensure they “adhere to a ‘short, practical and concise’ writing style” and limit themselves to 5,000 characters.
The statement said departments should reduce the number of official documents they produce annually, and submit a written explanation if the amount increases.
Meetings should also be consolidated and streamlined, the directive said, with speeches not to exceed one hour. The number of people in attendance should be subject to strict controls.
A look at University of Chicago Finances
No peer institution has borrowed so much in relation to its assets; none spends remotely as large a percentage of tuition on servicing debt. Despite gifts and the surge in the stock market, the University’s endowment has actually shrunk under its current president from 2021 to 2024 because it has been liquidating assets to mask the size of its deficits.
But its story also distills forces and trends in American higher education that are corroding ideals, and wasting money, throughout the land.
America’s leading research universities distinguished themselves both in their commitment to an extraordinary ideal, namely, the creation and questioning of new knowledge in every field that touches on human existence, and in their commitment to integrating persons at every stage of learning into this process. One way Chicago and all research universities actualize these ideals is by placing undergraduate students in the classroom with faculty who perform research. Students at these universities learn from people who exist at the cutting edge of what we know.
In a 2009 strategic plan, Robert J. Zimmer, the then-president of the University of Chicago, confessed to the university’s trustees that the faculty-student ratio was lower in 2009 than it had been in 1972. This decline, Zimmer averred, “threaten[ed] our core ethos as a University that places a premium on rigorous inquiry.” And yet, after a brief amelioration, the faculty-student ratio at the University of Chicago has gotten worse nearly every year from 2011 to 2024, for the very simple reason that the University of Chicago placed itself so deeply in debt it could conceive no other way out. (There were plenty of ways out.)
more.
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K-12 Tax & $pending climate: Chicago’s pension crisis is heading for a Detroit-style collapse
“The (Evers) Era locked Wisconsin families into a 400‑year property tax increase,”
School districts have state-imposed limits on how much money they can take in through two sources: State general aid and property taxes. The veto raises those limits by $325 per student, per year, until 2425.
So, an initial question is whether school districts will take advantage of those increases or forgo them.
When we reached out to Americans for Prosperity’s Wisconsin chapter for backup, state director Megan Novak said “history and data point to the reasonable conclusion that Gov. Evers’ veto can and will raise property taxes.”
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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?
“But the report cards will still be inaccurate and less helpful because DPI made a flawed scale…..
2025 SCHOOL REPORT CARD CUT SCORES SENT TO DPI FOR APPROVAL
- 0 districts rated 1 star
- 75% of high-income schools (<30% poverty) rated 4 or 5 stars, said a member
- new benchmarks (versus old)
1 star: 0 (0)
2 star: 49 (48)
3 stars: 60 (58)
4 stars: 71 (70)
5 stars: 84 (83)
For some, one of the most confusing aspects of the report cards is that sometimes those stars don’t align with student proficiency rates in math and reading.
And that isn’t likely to be changed this go-around.
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Wisconsin DPI press release.
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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?
Civics: Higher education discrimination
DOCUMENTS: a UT San Antonio faculty job scoresheet gives 5 points for “Female or URM candidate.”
This is, of course, illegal. But what I’m really curious about is whoever got the “1” in that category.
more.
Civics: A man went to prison for assaulting me. DC Police crime stats show he was never arrested
The extent of crime in D.C. has been debated by the Left and Right since President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he would take federal action to crack down on problems in the District of Columbia.
But if the public wants to have an honest conversation about crime in D.C., the MPD will first have to be honest about how prevalent crime is. Without MPD’s honesty about the crimes that it has chosen to hide from its public-facing stats page, the White House cannot get an accurate picture of how bad the problem actually is and adequately fix it.
For me, the story began long before that attack. I was a Washingtonian for seven years. I was saving up money to buy a condo and planned to spend the next few decades in Washington, the intersection of politics and media. D.C.’s crime problem was something you lived with. You took Ubers and Lyfts, told others if you were walking after dark so they knew when you were home, and knew to be aware of your surroundings, almost to the point of paranoia. (Ladies?)
On a Saturday morning in 2020, I walked out of my apartment on Capitol Hill to mail a package at a post office several blocks from the U.S. Capitol. I put on my black sweatshirt and black sweatpants then headed out the door.
I never made it to the post office.
Just one block from my apartment building’s entrance, I was attacked by a large man well over six feet tall. He charged at me for a reason that I still do not understand. In broad daylight and on well-traveled 2nd Street NE next to Union Station, I fought to get away as he sexually assaulted me. If it had not been for others in the vicinity, including a construction worker named Donny who heard my screaming and ran to my rescue, I don’t know if I would be here today.
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more:
This is the most important story I’ve told. It’s my story. I’ve waited five years to share it, and I’m ready now.
I’m Anna Giaritelli. The DC police are covering up crime. I know because they covered up what happened to me
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The District of Columbia has quietly settled a lawsuit from a sergeant who accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics, court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Police brass repeatedly told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, according to internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts the Free Beacon reviewed.
“I can tell you firsthand here in downtown DC where we work, right here around our bureau, just in the past six months, you know, there were two people shot, one person died…”. more.
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In an Aug. 8 memo to the park commissioners, Tanya Zastrow, executive director of Olbrich Botanical Society — the nonprofit fundraising arm for the gardens — cited an “increase in overnight trespassers, acts of vandalism and most recently theft in the gardens” as the reason for the request.
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Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006
School districts are spending millions of dollars on ineffective master’s degree premiums, creating a dilemma about the value of these degrees
Katherine M. Bowser
Los Angeles USD is facing a $94.5 million budget shortfall this year. Fairfax County, VA: $121 million. Chicago: $734 million. With ESSER funds expired and enrollment declining, districts nationwide face painful decisions that can impact students, such as layoffs and school closures. Identifying and repurposing wasteful spending can help ease these tough choices.
In this District Trendline, we focus on one of education’s most persistent examples of ineffective and inefficient spending—automatic salary increases for teachers who hold a master’s degree (i.e., master’s degree premiums). We find that over 90% of large districts still pay teachers more if they earn one, despite research showing they don’t improve teacher effectiveness—at a cost of millions of dollars wasted.
Ideology and the federal taxpayer funded Truman Scholars
Roughly 80 percent of the 2017 and 2018 Truman Scholars remain in liberal politics within a decade after winning the federally funded scholarship, according to a College Fixanalysis.
The Fix reviewed the current public activities of Truman Scholars from the 2017 and 2018 cohorts and found at least 98 of the 122 winners have a clear connection to liberal politics, such as working for Democratic members of Congress, advocating for progressive causes, or teaching classes with a liberal focus.
In contrast, none are currently involved in conservative politics. The other winners’ ideologies could not be ascertained based on publicly available information.
The Fix similarly found 75 percent of Truman Scholars from the 2015 and 2016 cohorts remain involved in liberal politics a decade later. Only a single winner from those years could be found who today works for conservative causes.
Humanities at the University of Chicago
On June 14, the dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities (AHD) formed and immediately charged five “working groups” with proposing significant reforms on the structure of departments; language instruction; and doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate education. The committees have until August 22 to submit their recommendations to the dean, who will in turn forward them to the provost by August 25. This timetable means that a program of reform intended to change nearly every aspect of academic life will be completed and advanced beyond the division in exactly the interval during which neither departmental nor divisional meetings take place. To achieve this unseemly haste, the process allows neither for consultation with departments nor for comparative and historical study.
Everything about the process, stated rationale, and likely outcomes of this program of reform strikes me as emblematic of the current trajectory of the University of Chicago and, indeed, of higher education as a whole. In what follows, I seek to analyze this development in terms that clarify the stakes, both internally to the University and externally to colleagues in higher education.
I first explore the charges of the committees and the rationale they have been given, both for acting at all and especially for acting quickly. I then analyze the implications of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and other federal actions for the University of Chicago. This analysis leads to the question of the incidence of funding changes at the federal level for the budget of the Division of the Arts and Humanities.
The thrust of this analysis is that the University has undertaken extraordinary quantities of leveraged spending in ways that benefit select units, while others, who have achieved high international ranking with little aid from capital spending, have instead suffered from a withdrawal of operational support in order to finance those endeavors. The present moment of reform brings that long trend to a crisis point. To understand the University’s willingness to dismantle its own excellence, I turn to an earlier moment of panicked reform induced by an earlier stage of this prolonged financial crisis, namely the expansion of the College in 2017. This leads to some final reflections on the maintenance of University ideals in an age of instability.
The Mystery of the L.A. Mansion Filled With Surrogate Children
Katherine Long, Ben Foldy and Sara Randazzo:
In early May, after a baby was hospitalized with possible signs of child abuse, police showed up at a nine-bedroom mansion in this Los Angeles suburb known for lavish homes and residents with roots in China. Inside, they found 15 more children, none older than 3, living under the care of nannies.
The investigative trail led them to six more children at other homes in the Los Angeles area. A Chinese-born man and woman living in the mansion said they were the parents of all 22 children. Birth certificates list them as such. What mystified police was that the children appeared to have been born all over the U.S., and in rapid succession.
Local authorities removed the children from the homes, placed them in foster care, and called in the FBI.
The mansion, it turned out, was listed as the headquarters of Mark Surrogacy, which had arranged many of the children’s births and was managed by Silvia Zhang, the woman living there. Zhang said she was the mother of all the children.
Overregulated charter schools: Fact or fiction?
Earlier this summer, Education Next published a post by EdChoice’s Robert Enlow and Michael Q. McShane, “School Choice Should Take the Road Less Traveled.” It was not my favorite take, to say the least.
The problem wasn’t so much their argument that private-school choice should be regulated differently than charter schooling. While I would quibble (and quarrel) on some specifics, I can appreciate that the rules for private-school choice should be different from those for charter schools. Otherwise we’d “de-privatize” private schools, and what would be the point of that?
No, what really bothered me was their claim—one I’ve seen many others make—that the charter sector once had great potential for innovation, but because of those dastardly authorizers and other red-tape-loving bureaucrats, charters instead became overly cautious, impeding innovation in a way that has hamstrung and limited the entire charter school movement. Here’s how Enlow and McShane put it:
Charter schools have been a school choice success but a limited one, facing increasing challenges through the years with overregulation and limited growth. Hailed initially as a way to dramatically remake education, particularly urban education, charter schools have been stymied in their impact by an authorizing and regulatory framework that has buried potential operators in the very bureaucratic structures charter schools were created to avoid. The sector has empowered a limited set of unelected functionaries to say no for arbitrary and capricious reasons. And, it has curtailed ways in which schools can experiment and try to educate children differently.
School Board Governance…. in Sun Prairie
Following the arrest last month of a former dean of students on child pornography and exploitation charges, the Sun Prairie School Board has deemed district administrators out of compliance with policies requiring them to communicate with the board and the public.
While board members did not directly reference the district’s handling of the allegations and eventual felony charges against Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier, members of the audience cheered their action during Monday’s meeting.
Prior to the votes finding administrators had not followed the policies, a dozen parents or other residents criticized the district for failing to act sooner against Gilkey-Meisegeier and said they were worried about their children’s safety in the district.
Tricia Nowicki, who said she has a daughter at West High School, where he worked, said, “I am extremely concerned for her safety going back in the fall.”
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Madison Metropolitan School District Board, with one of the widest racial achievement gaps in the country, tackling the most important issues as the school year is about to begin. What a joke.
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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?
Free College Prep Program….
The Galin Scholars program is welcoming its third cohort of high school students this fall, continuing its expansion of free college prep in the greater Madison area.
The Madison-based nonprofit now supports 15 students from seven high schools. The first five students graduated from high school this summer and will begin college at Northwestern University, Lake Forest College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall.
The graduates were offered over $1.1 million in merit awards from schools where they applied, according to Galin Scholars.
Established in 2022, Galin Scholars partners with schools and families to support students with strong academic potential. The program focuses on students from low- or middle-income households and who are part of groups underrepresented in college.
Students in the program may receive academic tutoring and counseling, weekly advising, essay support, guidance on college applications and financial aid, college tours, ACT prep and transportation. The program is funded by individual and business donations, education grants and a partnership with Galin Education, a Madison-based college prep company.
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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?
Taxpayer Funded Wisconsin DPI: One school with only 4.1% ELA proficiency was rated “Exceeds Expectations.”
WILL:
The News: WILL submitted recommendations to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) today, urging an overhaul of the state’s school report card standards. WILL’s analysis highlights DPI’s track record of inflating ratings that masks a decades-long stagnation in student achievement.
These efforts come after years of DPI making unilateral changes to the accountability system, a trend that has made it more difficult to accurately compare academic progress over time. Our letter urges DPI to use this as an inflection point for change.
The Quotes: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “Wisconsin is falling behind the rest of the country academically and changing standards only masks this decline. Instead of raising the bar, we are simply putting our heads in the sand. It’s why WILL is encouraging DPI to follow through on its commitment to Wisconsin students and adopt report card standards that give true insight into school performance.”
The Problem: WILL’s analysis exposes significant flaws in the current reporting system where schools and districts appear to perform above average:
- One school with only 4.1% ELA proficiency was rated “Exceeds Expectations.”
- 18 schools statewide received an “Exceeds Expectations” rating despite less than 25% ELA proficiency.
To verify these findings, WILL compared DPI’s ratings to GreatSchools, an independent school rating system widely used by parents when choosing a school. A review of 309 Wisconsin schools across the state’s six largest districts showed that 50% of schools were rated higher by DPI, while only 3% were rated higher by GreatSchools. We believe that this demonstrates DPI’s ratings are overly generous and fail to accurately reflect declining student achievement.
WILL’s Recommendations: To create an honest and rigorous reporting system, WILL recommends that DPI adopt a new approach that is both accurate and transparent.
“The implications for colleges of education are more dire in that they may be failing to prepare candidates in the most essential aspects of the field”
Joshua A. Cuevas, Bryan L. Dawson and Gina Childers:
Abstract
This study assessed the pedagogical knowledge and metacognitive awareness of pedagogy of faculty (N = 107) at a large state university in the United States. The purpose was to ascertain whether faculty could distinguish effective learning practices from ineffective ones, as determined by empirical research in learning science. Faculty responded to items regarding the efficacy of effective practices and others shown by research to be neuromyths or misconceptions. Faculty across all colleges correctly identified most of the effective practices but also endorsed myths/misconceptions, ultimately showing limited pedagogical knowledge. Tenured faculty showed stronger pedagogical knowledge than newer faculty. Faculty were also assessed on their confidence in their knowledge of pedagogical practices. Respondents demonstrated poor metacognitive awareness as there was no relationship between confidence in pedagogical knowledge and actual pedagogical knowledge. Surprisingly, education faculty scored no better in pedagogical knowledge than faculty of any other college and also showed low metacognitive awareness. Results indicate that universities preparing doctoral students for faculty positions should ensure candidates are exposed to accurate information regarding learning science. The implications for colleges of education are more dire in that they may be failing to prepare candidates in the most essential aspects of the field.
Keywords: pedagogy, learning science, cognitive myths,
more.
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When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Killing the Humanities
University leaders in the United States are slashing the humanities left and right. If you take what they say at face value, it’s because of their limited fiscal capacities. But there is growing evidence that this isn’t the case — that it isn’t a lack of capacity so much as a fundamental lack of will on the part of administrators and boards of trustees to support humanistic education and research. How have the priorities of these university leaders wandered so far away from the age-old value of humanistic education and the true purpose of the liberal arts?
Let’s first consider some of the evidence. Back in June, Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa, announced that her institution’s new provost fired her as the dean of the Honors College that she had run for two years. Why? According to the provost, the program Frey established for the college was too expensive. But this was a puzzling suggestion. The university possesses a $1.36-billion endowment, and by all accounts Frey’s new program, which focused on reading core texts in the humanistic tradition, was phenomenally successful. Enrollment in Tulsa’s Honors College grew by over 500%. Retention rates in the college soared, and the program managed to attract multiple major grants and gifts. And although we’re often told that contemporary college students lack the skills, patience, or inclination to read great (or, now, any) works of literature, history, and philosophy, pupils flocked to Frey’s college.
Notes on High Expectations
Joanne Jacobs Summary:
In education, there’s little support for people who say, “That’s not good enough. Do better,” he writes. In a way , the consequences of low standards are life-threatening. But it’s not obvious until years later.
President Trump is reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test, which was discontinued in 2013 in favor of a “more holistic ‘barometer’ of student health,” he writes. In the past, “students who hit certain benchmarks got a certificate.” Not a big deal.
In a New York Times story, For Some, Return of Presidential Fitness Test Revives Painful Memories, a 60-year-old woman calls the test, “survive or fail. It was Darwinist.”
“Now, I don’t think Charles Darwin would think kids having to do pull-ups really captures the adapt-or-die essence of On the Origin of Species, writes Hess. “But this kind of overwrought anxiety has become pervasive, undermining our ability to set clear expectations for kids or confidently stand by them.”
k-12 tax & $pending climate: US Debt: $108,000 per person
NEWS
The U.S. national debt is now officially over $37 trillion.
This is approximately the value of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, India and UK combined. This amounts to $108,000 per person in the U.S.
The debt is currently growing at:
- $3.1M per minute
- $212.9M per hour
- $5.1B per day
Notes on Governance and the taxpayer funded Milwaukee k-12 schools
Partly, for that reason, new Superintendent Brenda Cassellius asked the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS) to evaluate the MPS Office of Human Resources. This is not the first time CGCS has looked at the district’s HR department. But of the 19 recommendations it made in 2019, only one was fully implemented.
At the July 31 school board meeting, CGCS Executive Director Ray Hart outlined its latest findings in a presentation.
It is not enough to simply list the 12 new recommendations here. It is more important to try to understand why reform in the district has been so difficult to accomplish.
MPS has had so many twists and turns in its organizational structure in the last 35 years. Milwaukee’s school voucher program was established in 1990. Advocates for vouchers, such as Susan Mitchell, pushed whole sale dismantling of a centralized system when she wrote in 1994, for the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute to shift control from MPS “by allowing parents to choose schools their children attend and providing them the financial resources to do so.”
Notes on Grant Funded Data Collection at the UW-Madison’s Population Health Institute
While more than 700,000 people use the resource each year, Johnson said, County Health Rankings and Roadmaps will soon lose its primary funder. The New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is set to end its support after 2026.
Mary Ann Lombardo, a foundation spokesperson, said the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps has been a “successful” partnership but the philanthropist is evolving how it works with partners and who it funds.
“Moving forward we are looking to support data programs that better meet the needs of community partners by providing granular and timely data for the economic, social, political and environmental factors that impact communities,” Lombardo said in an email.
Notes on George Mason University Governance
Trustees and boards are supposed to set policy at universities, but too often they settle for football tickets and a child’s admission. That’s one reason it’s good to see the Board of Visitors take its obligations seriously at George Mason University.
We reported last week on the debate at the Northern Virginia school over racial and gender preferences. At a meeting on Friday, part open and part closed to the public, the board voted to eliminate a variety of diversity, equity and inclusion programs that had become fronts for discrimination in admissions and hiring at the school.
This is a rebuke to Gregory Washington, the George Mason president, a vociferous advocate of “diversity” preferences who had long opposed the anti-DEI move. But it was necessary if the school is going to avoid tough sanctions from the federal Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. The DOJ is investigating the school’s policies for possible violations.
Press reports on the meeting have portrayed it as a victory for the president and Mason faculty because Mr. Washington kept his job. The Faculty Senate had rallied in support of the president against the Board of Visitors, whose members are appointed by the Virginia Governor. The current Governor is Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Faking Wokeness to Fit In: A staggering 88% of students admit to pretending to hold more progressive views than they genuinely do
A new study finds that nearly nine in ten students fake more progressive views than they really hold, often to appease professors or stay in their peers’ good graces. The habit doesn’t stop at the classroom door; even close friends and romantic partners are kept in the dark. From lecture halls to late-night conversations, students are learning that conformity pays and candor costs. If universities still see themselves as incubators of independent thought, these numbers should be a wake-up call. Can students truly develop as thinkers when honesty feels unsafe?
Below is an excerpt from an article in The Hill by the study’s authors, Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman. You can read the full piece here.
Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”
We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes…
Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors…
To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex…
Illinois proposes lowering scores students need to be deemed proficient on state tests
Samantha Smylie and Becky Vevea
More students in Illinois would be considered proficient on the state’s annual math and reading tests under a proposal to change cut scores, which the Illinois State Board of Education is set to vote on Wednesday.
Cut scores are the scores that separate students into broad categories of achievement, now defined as below proficient, approaching proficiency, proficient, and above proficiency.
Under the proposed changes, 53% of students would be considered proficient in English language arts, 38% would be proficient in math, and 45% would be in science, according to a presentation shared by state education officials Tuesday. Last year, 41% of students were proficient in English language arts, 28% were proficient in math, and 53% were in science.
But the numbers cannot be compared year-over-year because the cut scores changed.
For example, third grade students currently must score 750 out of 850 on the math section of the Illinois Assessment of Readiness to be considered meeting proficiency standards. But under the proposed changes, they would only need to score 732 to be labeled proficient.
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Taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI recently lowered the bar as well.
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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?
Taxpayer funded Madison School Board Plans to Increase Compensation & Add Healthcare Benefits
A majority of Madison School Board members appeared to be in favor Monday of significantly boosting their pay and making themselves eligible for the district’s employee health care coverage.
Board members cited the amount of work they do and a desire to make the seats more attractive to run for as reasons why increased pay and health coverage were needed. They also pointed to the salaries of board members for other, similar-sized and Wisconsin school districts.
“I think it’s really important to make sure that we make this — with the amount of work that we do — we make sure that this position is as accessible as possible,” board Vice President Maia Pearson said during Monday’s Operations Work Group meeting.
Board members currently make $8,000 a year, with the president of the board making $8,300. According to research by district administration, Milwaukee School Board members make $18,121, Kenosha members make $6,500, Green Bay members make $7,538.40 and Racine members make $3,600. The Madison School District, with about 25,000 students, is the second-largest district in the state.
Milwaukee is the only Wisconsin school district that makes its board members eligible for district health insurance. Making Madison board members eligible for health and dental coverage is estimated to cost the district between $82,000 and $220,000 annually.
Board members last increased their pay, from $4,200, in 2015. There was some consensus Monday during the board’s meeting that $15,000 might be an appropriate new yearly stipend.
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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?
Higher Education Litigation Database
President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape higher education and the federal government have spurred a flurry of lawsuits as higher education associations, students, legal advocacy organizations and colleges push back and seek relief through the courts.
The lawsuits started almost immediately after Trump’s first day, and almost seven months later, advocates continue to file new complaints, challenging various executive orders, guidance documents or decisions to cut grants. Inside Higher Ed is tracking some of the key legal challenges related to higher ed. That includes Harvard University’s efforts to restore more than $2.7 billion in frozen research funding and protect its ability to enroll international students as well as several lawsuits aiming to stop the dismantling of the Education Department. Of the 41 included in our searchable database, judges have ruled against the administration in two-thirds of the cases so far. You can find more analysis of the lawsuits filed so far here.
We’ll update the database regularly, so check back for updates.
Being Direct About Explicit Instruction
As teachers, we should spend a great deal of time refining our instructional methods based on what research tells us about how students learn best. For example, based on research I’ve consumed over the last several months, I’ve shifted intentionally toward using explicit instruction as the core of my teaching practice. But I also believe that simply using a research-based approach isn’t enough. If I want buy-in and understanding from families, I have to communicate what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and how it benefits their children.
While explicit instruction is one of the most evidence-based ways to build knowledge and skills, it often comes with misconceptions that can create confusion or resistance among parents.
Recognizing this, I’ve made it a priority not just to use explicit instruction, but to be transparent and proactive about explaining it, why it matters, how it supports learning, and what it looks like in practice.
Below I explore common misunderstandings I anticipate parents may have, the key ideas I want them to understand about this approach, and my plan to communicate effectively with parents.
What Parents Might Misunderstand
“You are just telling them the answer.”
higher education governance and comity
The leaders of America’s elite universities are required, by the borderline-masochistic, semi-impossible nature of their job, to be skilled in the art of performative comity. So it was a bit of a shock when, at the end of an April panel discussion, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber turned on the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, all but accusing them of carrying water for the Trump administration.
Eisgruber argued that higher education was facing a politically motivated attack, and that the two men were inadvertently making matters worse by agreeing with President Donald Trump, against the evidence, that the sector had grown illiberal and out of touch with mainstream America. The chancellors, taken aback by the public confrontation, countered that the struggles of a handful of Ivy League schools were dragging down the reputation of America’s heavyweight research institutions. Perhaps, they suggested, it was time for the Ivies’ leaders to step back and let new figures—such as themselves—represent the country’s top universities.
Eisgruber’s inability to understand politics not only exposes Princeton and other universities to significant liabilities, but also exacerbates antisemitism on his own campus. I explain how in this @DailySignal piece. dailysignal.com/2025/07/09/pri…
civics: “ai” and the legacy media
AI is no longer a future bet—it’s a newsroom essential. In this exclusive State of the Industry report, Digiday and Arc XP surveyed over 100 media leaders to uncover how publishers and broadcasters are actually using AI today, what’s working, and where challenges remain.
Whether you’re just starting to explore AI or scaling existing tools, this report provides a grounded, data-backed look at how your peers are navigating the AI landscape—and what it means for the future of journalism.
Download the report to learn:
Unyoke the Sciences From the Humanities
Things are going badly for universities. They are in the crosshairs of an erratic and aggressive government willing to threaten anything in its path. While the government may have succeeded at securing promises for needed reforms at Columbia University, it did so by delaying or canceling scientific research funding estimated at between $400 million and $1.2 billion. But even delays that are resolved have their own costs: While a deal will restore this funding, some worthy scientists have lost their jobs and some worthy scientific research projects will not recover. To protect the sciences going forward, radical change to the composition of universities is warranted.
How do academics view the root causes of their own precarious situation? Consider a recent gathering of professors across multiple disciplines for the annual meeting of Heterodox Academy in Brooklyn last month. HxA, as it is known, is a group devoted to fostering the necessary environment and tools for airing of conflicting and unpopular (“heterodox”) views—provided they are expressed civilly. And yet, even among this group, whose members are not prone to marching in lockstep, there was remarkable consensus that the public’s distrust and the government’s ire are directed primarily at faculty in the humanities, because of their often single-minded insistence on identity politics, equity of results over merit, and abandonment of the Western canon
Academic Notes on Whitelash
Hafen and Villescas wrote in their July paper— which was taken down from the journal’s website on Saturday — that as “social work moves in the direction of anti-racist education and practice, social workers of color have urgently called attention to how theme [sic] profession continues to perpetuate white supremacy and harm BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).”
The two scholars wrote that when anti-racist educators attempt to bring attention to how their field advances white supremacy in the classroom, white students attempt to “re-establish the white supremacist status quo” through resistance and the espousal of “color-blind rhetoric.”
This “[r]etaliatory white backlash,” they wrote, is best referred to as “whitelash,” which they describe as intimately entwined with the socio-relational process of white emotionality and the maintenance of racial hierarchies.
Thus, in an attempt to “expose” and “disarm” this white resistance to anti-racist education, the scholarly duo documented their own exploration of the pedagogical strategies they utilized while co-teaching two different undergraduate social work courses in 2023.
Notes on the taxpayer funded Houston School District
School starts on Tuesday, and last week we held our Convocation for teachers and staff. There was music, dancing, celebrating, and, of course, closing remarks. Our teachers and principals are ready for another strong year — the third year of the State intervention. My closing remarks are included below. I wish all of you a great start to your school year.
College Kids Schedule Literally Everything on a Calendar
Some think it’s gone too far, eliminating any spontaneity and reducing life to slots on a grid. Others say that some GCal superusers just want the world to know how busy they are.
Kaitlin Martin, a senior at Georgetown University, estimates that events in GCal cover about 10 to 12 hours of her average day.
“It’s probably from an hour before class to when I’m finishing my last assignment or activity of the day,” she said. Martin uses the app to schedule her classes, her meals, her daily tasks and hangouts with friends. When she makes plans with a friend at Georgetown, one of them sends the other a calendar invite.
Why Do Some People Say There’s No Reading Crisis?
This pushback stems from the longstanding fear that schools will overdo phonics and kill students’ desire to read—in other words, “drill and kill.” Palubiak says that when she substitute-taught in a second-grade classroom and announced that it was time for the required 40 minutes of phonics—which, according to her, the kids didn’t need—she was greeted with boos.
Kids who don’t need instruction in phonics shouldn’t have to sit through 40 minutes of it. One problem, though, is that it can be hard to tell who needs phonics instruction and who doesn’t. It can look like kids are reading, especially with leveled texts that rely heavily on repetition of the same words. Kids can easily guess at the words rather than sounding them out.
——
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?
Iowa Mom Threatened with Lawsuit for Criticizing Curriculum at School Board Meeting
WILL:
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is representing an Iowa parent with respect to a potential defamation lawsuit after she, a newly naturalized citizen from the Dominican Republic, spoke at a public school board meeting about her concerns regarding certain curricula and instructional materials used in her son’s classroom.
What Happened: Our client, Mrs. Elayne Casalins, first addressed her concerns about the curricula and instructional materials with her son’s teacher, the school principal and the superintendent. She went to the school board because no action was taken after she explained her concerns to the teacher, principal, and superintendent. She then spoke at a June 19, 2025, Belmond-Klemme Community School Board meeting to make objections to the instructional materials used in her son’s classroom and the lack of notice she was given as a parent.
She reported to the school board that a teacher made the students watch the PG-13 movie “Till” without any parental notice or consent — even though many students, including her son, were only 12 years old. She further reported that there was a discussion of Black Lives Matter, racism, and police brutality all without parental notification or consent.
Mrs. Casalins’s comments to the school board were intended to address three issues: (1) in her opinion the curricula she objected to violated Iowa state law (Iowa Code § 279.74), (2) she believed that she was denied her statutory right to object to the curricula and instructional materials, and (3) to object to the materials after the fact under School Board Policy 605.3, and to ask that their future use be reconsidered.
Following her comments, Mrs. Casalins received a threatening letter from Boles Witosky Stewart Law PLLC firm demanding that she “cease-and-desist” any public discussion regarding this matter of public concern, namely controversial curricula and instructional materials used at the Belmond-Klemme Community School. The letter was sent on behalf of the teacher employed by the school district.
The global fertility crisis is worse than you think
• 2023 was likely the first year in human history when our fertility rate fell below the replacement rate.
• The world population will start falling c. 2055.
• Never seen before, even compared to wars and pandemics.
• The consequences for the world are momentous.
• Let me describe a few of them.
Postmodern teaching fads are undermining student learning
“In most college classrooms,” wrote Alison King in a seminal 1993 article, “the professor lectures and the students listen and take notes. The professor is the central figure, the ‘sage on the stage,’ the one who has the knowledge and transmits that knowledge to the students. […] In this view of teaching and learning,” King argued, “students are passive learners rather than active ones.” And, she continued, “such a view is outdated and will not be effective for the twenty-first century.”
Instead of the transmittal theory described above, King championed a constructivist theory of learning according to which “knowledge [is] constructed—or reconstructed—by each individual knower through the process of trying to make sense of new information in terms of what that individual already knows”—a process called “active learning.” What students need, according to this view, is not a “sage on the stage” but a “guide on the side.” “Essentially,” King explained, “the professor’s role [as a ‘guide on the side’] is to facilitate students’ interaction with the material and with each other in their knowledge-producing endeavor.”
What students need, according to constructivists, is not a “sage on the stage” but a “guide on the side.”King’s article is a somewhat more modest proposal than contemporary readers familiar with the terminology might expect. But reformation efforts often trigger more revolutionary impulses in others. By 2014, Charles D. Morrison of Wilfred Laurier University was not only referring to “the now-clichéd shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’” but was also declaring that it was only “a good start.” Four years later, Ted Dintersmith even approvingly described a school that “has no teachers, just a few adult ‘guides’ who aren’t expected to be subject-matter experts or allowed to answer questions.” Since then, there has been no shortage of academic papers, magazine and journal articles, and blog posts calling for or celebrating the death of the sage on the stage.
China to restrict Tibetan language in region’s college entrance exam
China plans to exclude Tibetan as a core subject from the national college entrance exam for the majority of students in the autonomous region, a senior official has said, raising concerns over the future of the language.
Gama Cedain, chair of the Tibet Autonomous Region, told a press briefing this week that the change was part of reforms to the national examination and would improve Tibetans’ career prospects.
“Tibet, like other provinces and regions,” would have “unified exam subjects”, he said, such as Chinese and mathematics, and foreign languages including English, Russian, Japanese, French, German and Spanish. But Tibetan will no longer be a core subject in the exam.
“This helps students of all ethnic groups to enjoy fairer access to high-quality education, enhances minority students’ ability to learn and improves their overall scientific and cultural literacy,” he said of the changes.
Taxpayer funded grants and public interest outcomes
Kill shot: seizing Harvard’s patents for inventions developed with federal funds, due to Harvard’s failure to disclose them, failure to commercialize them in America before other countries, and failure to convert them into practical use. From Commerce Secretary Lutnick. Not a good look for former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker — the soon-to-be-former Senior Fellow (board chair) of Harvard Corporation.
Massachusetts’ Teachers Union Seeks a wealth tax increase
“ The passage of Fair Share, which this year is bringing in $3 billion for public education and transportation from less than 1% of taxpayers, demonstrates how a fairer, more equitable tax system can generate billions of dollars for the common good,” Page said. “Massachusetts has more millionaires — and they are wealthier — than before voters passed a constitutional amendment to place a 4 % tax on income above $1 million. Fair Share has made our state a more attractive place to live by investing in the foundations of a prosperous Commonwealth.”
The MTA Board also voted to explore ways to achieve universal access to public, preK education and debt-free access to public higher education for any resident who wants to pursue post-secondary education or career training.
“Our state Constitution guarantees the right to an appropriate public education, which has been interpreted by the courts to mean kindergarten through grade 12, Page said. “That right must be expanded to include preK and public college to be meaningful in the 21st century. If we truly want to get all children the head start they need, we must provide every child with the opportunity to attend a high-quality, public prekindergarten program. And if we are serious about social and economic justice and nurturing a culturally rich and welcoming state of involved citizens, we will provide all residents with the best vehicle for a prosperous future – public education.”
The Board of the MTA also reiterated its commitment to organize and involve all educators across the 400 local associations in the statewide union, and to remain at the forefront of defending public education against the attacks by the authoritarian-leaning administration in Washington.
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Massachusetts is already in the top ten highest tax jurisdictions.
“A federal court certified a class that includes “any child who has been born or will be born in the United States after February 19, 2025.” If unborn children can sue to vindicate their right to citizenship…..”
ORDER
For the reasons stated in the memorandum opinion issued today, it is this 7th day of August,
2025, hereby ORDERED:
1. 2. 3. The plaintiffs’ motion for class certification, ECF 97, is GRANTED.
A class is CERTIFIED under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(2) consisting of:
Any child who has been born or will be born in the United States after February 19, 2025, (1) whose mother was unlawfully present in the United States and whose father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) whose mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary and whose father was not a United
States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
Liza, as next friend to L.B.; Ashley, as next friend to K.K.; Andrea, as next friend to E.T.P.; Niurka, as next friend to L.G.; and Juana, Trinidad Garcia, and Monica, as next friends to their future children, are DESIGNATED as class representatives.
4. Counsel for the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and the Asylum
Seeker Advocacy Project are APPOINTED as class counsel.
Deborah L. Boardman
US District Judge
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more.
Choose life.
The Administrative State and Taxpayer Funded Grants to Harvard
Her hand in deploying these levers of power was evident from the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term. As his ambitions around reshaping higher education expanded, so did her remit. She is credited as an animating force behind a strategy that has intimidated independent institutions and undercut years of medical and scientific research.
The policies Ms. Mailman helped devise — and is now leveraging as she leads the White House’s negotiations with colleges — have sent shock waves through higher education, dividing faculty and alarming some students who see an effort to silence dissent. The aggressive tactics could have far-reaching implications for the future of academic freedom, the admissions practices at the most competitive colleges and the global reputations for some of the crown jewels of the nation’s university system.
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KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.
2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).
civics: US Census over and under counts (and congressional implications)
According to the PES, which states had undercounts?
- Arkansas (-5.04),
- Florida (-3.48),
- Illinois (-1.97),
- Mississippi (-4.11),
- Tennessee (-4.78), and
- Texas (-1.92).
And overcounts?
- Delaware (+5.45),
- Hawaii (+6.79),
- Massachusetts (+2.24),
- Minnesota (+3.84),
- New York (+3.44),
- Ohio (+1.49),
- Rhode Island (+5.05), and
- Utah (+2.59)
Why was there an undercount or overcount in my state?
While the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey can estimate undercounts and overcounts in the census, PES data cannot answer why a particular state may have experienced one.
In a shocking report that has not received the attention it deserves, the U.S. Census Bureau recently admitted that its 2020 Census count of the American population was incorrect in at least 14 states.1 And those mistakes were costly to certain states in terms of congressional representation, number of electors, and money those states are likely to receive from the federal government during the next decade. To put the scope of these mistakes into perspective, contrast the errors in the Census Bureau’s latest recount (the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey, or PES) with the recount from a decade ago (the 2010 Post-Enumeration Survey)—in which there was a net overcount of a mere 0.01 percent (36,000 people), a statistically insignificant error.2
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Implications of over and under counts census results: grok // perplexity
‘Work of the devil’? Authors, dads test limits of travel sports
“Go to a 10 year old softball game and watch the parents,” Lewis said in March at the Project Play Summit. “They care about that more than anything.”
Across campus at the University of California, another author, Richard Reeves, raised within a British youth sports system much more infatuated with playing than the material things you can get from sports, offered this reading of the landscape: “Travel sports is the work of the devil.”
Reeves’ three sons were around middle school age when he and his wife brought them over from the United Kingdom to America, and into the so-called youth sports industrial complex.
“You’ve got these kids being hauled around the country and thinking they gotta do this, parents shouting at the kids and they had scouts there and individual coaches,” he tells USA TODAY Sports. “I was horrified by the culture around it.”
Lewis had two softball-playing daughters and, like so many of us, gave himself to their careers.
“The most pathetic character inside it is the one who’s paying for it all,” Lewis writes in “Playing to Win,” his 2020 audiobook that details life in the complex.
college antitrust and “early decision”
The Early Decision process for college admissions limits price competition for wealthier students and chance of admission for those who need financial aid, not to mention the added stress for students it creates. A new antitrust lawsuit seeks to blow it up. Good riddance.
Grade 4 Reading – Is NAEP’s standard for proficiency set too high?
If you read the full report, you will see even more evidence that NAEP, not most watered-down state standards, relates better to what our students need for solid success. Very simply, if we want students ready for living wage careers or college, we need the sorts of performances the NAEP is scoring Proficient or better.
Grade 4 Reading – Is NAEP’s standard for proficiency set too high?
There’s been a lot of discussion from some teachers and Ed school professors about how the National Assessment for Educational Progress’ (NAEP) standard for reading proficiency is simply set too high. These naysayers claim this creates a false sense of crisis when things actually are pretty much OK. But are the attacks on NAEP valid? Or, do the cautionary tales NAEP is telling us need to be taken very seriously?
I took a look at that question some time back by comparing the message from Kentucky’s NAEP scores to data for the state from two different tests from ACT, Inc. Those ACT tests provided statistics on the proportion of students that had reasonable chances of earning either a “C” (75% chance) or “B” (50% chance) on related college freshman courses. ACT calls these Readiness Benchmark scores and has reported them for a number of years.
Kentucky offered a unique opportunity to conduct this study because the state tested all public school students with the ACT’s Explore test for many years and also has tested all public school students with the ACT College Entrance Test for many years, as well.
So, how did that turn out? You can read this report for the full story: https://tinyurl.com/76uwaee8, but here is one example of what you’ll find. In these figures, the correlation between the percentages of Kentucky public school students scoring NAEP Proficient or Above and the percentages of the same cohorts of students reaching the ACT’s Readiness Benchmark scores are compared.
Reading performance in the US is a serious problem
Whether we use NAEP or state assessments, reading performance in the US is a serious problem, and trying to excuse this away just doesn’t work.
There’s been a lot of discussion from some teachers and Ed school professors about how the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) standard for reading proficiency is simply set too high. Some of that discussion centers on a NAEP process that develops equivalent NAEP scores for each state assessment’s proficiency standard (accessible here: https://tinyurl.com/4hspr6y5).
The results of that study for 2022 Grade 4 NAEP Reading are found in the graphic below. You can see that state standards very widely. Virginia, for example, set a proficiency standard below even the threshold score required to be rated a NAEP “Basic” performance. Massachusetts, at the other end of the scale, actually set a standard slightly above the threshold NAEP uses to declare a student proficient in reading.
About 1/3 of the way up the standards graphic from the least demanding state you will see Kentucky, highlighted with a blue arrow, set a proficiency standard about in the middle of the scoring range NAEP only considers to be only Basic level reading.
Given its easy standards, those who want us to believe there is no crisis in reading would surely want to be able to say that Kentucky is reporting far better results than what the NAEP reported.
What does NAEP say about the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project?
There is a lot of discussion of late about Lucy Caulkins’ Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP)to teach reading. It got me thinking.
Back in 2003, then New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein really pushed TCRWP as THE program to be used to teach reading in the Big Apple.
Rather conveniently, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) started doing what is called its Trial Urban District Assessments (TUDA) around the same time. Basically, the same NAEP used to create state reporting would also be used in some of the nation’s largest school districts. New York City has been in the TUDA for several decades.
TCRWP is on the way out in New York City, but a Chalkbeat study indicated about 48% (maybe more) of the city’s schools were still using TCRWP as of 2019 (https://tinyurl.com/3tesmv48).
With the above information in hand, I decided to look at how the city did on NAEP between 2003 and 2019. The table below has the results (note: years are listed in reverse order with 2019 at the top).
Comparing states by only looking at overall NAEP average scores can provide incomplete analysis of performance
Richard Innes, via a kind email:
One of the more notable problems with much that is written about the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) regarding relative state performances is that far too often, only overall average scores are compared. Whether we are talking college professors, state education agencies, local educators, members of the press, and more, far too often some important parts of the real story are ignored because only overall average scores are compared.
This isn’t a new problem. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has cautioned about overly simplistic analysis that only looks at overall average scores for many years. NCES even included special comments on the topic in the 2009 NAEP Science Report Card (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2009/2011451.pdf).
Below is a partial extract from Page 32 in that report card that highlights some examples of how the picture can be VERY different once more thorough analysis of NAEP is conducted.
The first example used by NCES is Kentucky’s performance in the 2009 Grade 8 NAEP Science Assessment. When you only look at overall average scores, Kentucky scores statistically significantly higher than the national public school average. However, when you only consider scores for White students in each state, Kentucky’s score statistically significantly lower than the national average. Once you learn that in this assessment Kentucky’s NAEP student sample was 85% White, the importance of this additional information becomes far more apparent.
There is no speed limit: “Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me”
In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging classes.
When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those six semesters of requirements.
Then, as Kimo suggested, I bought the course materials for other required classes and taught myself, doing the homework in my own time. Then I went to the department head and took the final exam, getting full credit for those courses.
By doing this in addition to completing my full course load, I graduated college in two and a half years. I got my bachelor’s degree when I was twenty.
Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
civics: “In my opinion, the most probable dystopian outcome of AI is the fusion of corporate and state power, akin to what was revealed in the Twitter Files, where “Trust & Safety” is weaponized for government censorship and control”
At least when you have multiple strong private sector players, that gets harder. By contrast, winner-take-all dynamics are more likely to produce Orwellian outcomes.
— There is likely to be a major role for open source. These models excel at providing 80-90% of the capability at 10-20% of the cost. This tradeoff will be highly attractive to customers who value customization, control, and cost over frontier capabilities. China has gone all-in on open source, so it would be good to see more American companies competing in this area, as OpenAI just did. (Meta also deserves credit.)
— There is likely to be a division of labor between generalized foundation models and specific verticalized applications. Instead of a single superintelligence capturing all the value, we are likely to see numerous agentic applications solving “last mile” problems. This is great news for the startup ecosystem.
— There is also an increasingly clear division of labor between humans and AI. Despite all the wondrous progress, AI models are still at zero in terms of setting their own objective function. Models need context, they must be heavily prompted, the output must be verified, and this process must be repeated iteratively to achieve meaningful business value. This is why Balaji has said that AI is not end-to-end but middle-to-middle. This means that apocalyptic predictions of job loss are as overhyped as AGI itself. Instead, the truism that “you’re not going to lose your job to AI but to someone who uses AI better than you” is holding up well.
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EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum
The plan would mandate that messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, must scan every message, photo and video sent by users starting in October, even if end-to-end encryption is in place, popular French tech blogger Korben wrote on Monday.
Denmark reintroduced the proposal on July 1, the first day of its EU Council presidency. France, once opposed, is now in favor, Korben said, citing Patrick Breyer, a former member of the European Parliament for Germany and the European Pirate Party.
Belgium, Hungary, Sweden, Italy and Spain are also in favor, while Germany remains undecided. However, if Berlin joins the majority, a qualified council vote could push the plan through by mid-October, Korben said.
“idea laundering”
Boaler’s co-faulty member in the Stanford Education dept is credited with the “research” that minority students can only learn from teachers who share their skin color/ identity. Through layers of idea laundering, it is now considered “best practice,” and many many K-12 school districts have developed strategic plans to make the staff “reflect student diversity” Except, his dissertation research is based on a super flawed 1980s TN research project that in no way reflects his conclusions.
“we build these systems through string concatenation, by gluing together trusted instructions and untrusted input”
Anyone who works in security will know why this is a bad idea! It’s the root cause of SQL injection, XSS, command inection and so much more.
I coined the term prompt injection nearly three years ago, in September 2022. It’s important to note that I did not discover the vulnerability. One of my weirder hobbies is helping coin or boost new terminology—I’m a total opportunist for this. I noticed that there was an interesting new class of attack that was being discussed which didn’t have a name yet, and since I have a blog I decided to try my hand at naming it to see if it would stick.
AI seems to know everything—until it’s a topic where you have first-hand knowledge
Jonathan Schedler:
I’m the author of the paper @grok describes here. It’s among the most read and cited articles on psychotherapy outcome—required reading in grad programs around the world
Grok gets literally everything wrong
The paper shows psychodynamic therapy is as or more effective than CBT. Grok says the exact opposite
The title of the paper is literally, “The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy.”
The effect size for psychodynamic therapy for the major study in the paper was .97. Grok says it’s 33. The number .33 does not appear anywhere in the paper.
SEL Needs To Go!
In recent years, there has been a significant focus on the mental health of young people, accompanied by substantial financial investment in Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs designed to support the mental well-being of students. According to a 2017 report, schools are estimated to have spent between $21 billion and $47 billion annually on SEL. That number grewexponentially during and after COVID school closures. While these programs may have been adopted with good intentions, they have not proven to be effective, and research suggests that they may be causing harm. In addition to the lack of evidence supporting the use of SEL, these programs place an added burden on teachers who are overburdened and on school budgets that are already stretched thin.
We believe that there is a better way to improve the mental well-being of students, and the best part is that our solution doesn’t place any additional work on teachers, nor does it burden school budgets. We propose that schools adopt Outdoor Unstructured Recess (OUR) instead of SEL. Giving students daily time outdoors to interact with their peers, engage in physical activity that isn’t organized or directed by an adult, and learn organic conflict resolution would do wonders to boost their mental and physical well-being. The fresh air and pause from instruction time would likely be a welcome respite for teachers as well.
A recent study conducted by Heather Macpherson Parrott and Lynn E. Cohen highlights the benefits of unstructured play that spill over into the classroom. One teacher involved in the study commented that, “For most students, they’re able to focus more during the day because they know a play break is coming, and they can save their socializing and their energy for that time. They look forward to it, and they physically need it.”
Civics: Truthiness and crime statistics
Just one problem: At this very moment, a D.C. police commander has been suspended and is getting investigated for allegedly tweaking crime stats to make them look lower than reality.
And D.C.’s police union says that his suspension is just the tip of the iceberg. The union says its investigation has revealed that cops all over the city are routinely pressured by command staff to downgrade felonies so they don’t appear on the MPD or FBI’s violent crime database statistics.
How much of the “crime drop” is just Democrat machine politicians lying to the public?
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Low standards have devalued non-STEM study
If you major in philosophy, as I did, you will inevitably get jokes about whether they’re hiring at the philosophy factory. The truth, though, is that philosophy majors have above-average earningscompared to the typical college graduate. And that’s not just a function of would-be philosophers going to law school. People whose terminal degree is a bachelor’s in philosophy earn pretty good money.
Most philosophy departments have a line about this, pitching students on the very real value of the skills that philosophy undergraduates practice.
I don’t think those departmental lines are wrong, exactly. Skills like reading texts closely, understanding the logical structure of arguments, and writing persuasively certainly do come in handy in a wide range of settings. That said, I don’t think this explains much about the relative earning power of a philosophy degree. The skills you learn studying history — reading documents, evaluating evidence — are also broadly applicable. What’s interesting isn’t that philosophy-type skills have some utility, it’s that philosophy majors earn more than history majors or English majors or students of other traditional, non-STEM academic topics.
And I think Scotty Hendricks nailed the explanation in a Big Think piece he wrote a couple of years ago: philosophy majors earn more because philosophy majors are smarter, on average, than students of other traditional liberal arts disciplines.
But why are philosophy majors smarter?
A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network
A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks.
Forty years ago, researchers designing shortest-paths algorithms ran up against this “sorting barrier.” Now, a team of researchers has devised a new algorithm that breaks it(opens a new tab). It doesn’t sort, and it runs faster than any algorithm that does.
“The authors were audacious in thinking they could break this barrier,” said Robert Tarjan(opens a new tab), a computer scientist at Princeton University. “It’s an amazing result.”
Seeking an honest and rigorous k-12 reporting system
The Problem: WILL’s analysis exposes significant flaws in the current reporting system where schools and districts appear to perform above average:
- One school with only 4.1% ELA proficiency was rated “Exceeds Expectations.”
- 18 schools statewide received an “Exceeds Expectations” rating despite less than 25% ELA proficiency.
To verify these findings, WILL compared DPI’s ratings to GreatSchools, an independent school rating system widely used by parents when choosing a school. A review of 309 Wisconsin schools across the state’s six largest districts showed that 50% of schools were rated higher by DPI, while only 3% were rated higher by GreatSchools. We believe that this demonstrates DPI’s ratings are overly generous and fail to accurately reflect declining student achievement.
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Dozens of schools “meet” or “exceed” expectations in Wisconsin when 3 out of every 4 students can’t read at grade level. In some schools, it’s 9 out of 10 students.
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Wisconsin’s public school districts got $18,592 of revenue per pupil in the most recent state figures.
It’s an all-time high, even after you account for inflation.
And it’s more than double what they got in 2000.
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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?
k-12 tax & $pending climate: killing the tax base
Citadel’s workforce once numbered 1,100 in downtown Chicago, most of whom were compensated well above the $200,000 threshold Mayor Johnson now wants to tax. In a few short years, Citadel’s Chicago headcount now is at just 250, we understand.
Once company bosses make up their minds that the “privilege of doing business” in a certain place is no longer worth the expense and headache, it doesn’t take long for them to act.
Progressives who lack respect for billionaires like Citadel CEO Ken Griffin may feel they can afford to sniff at the loss of hundreds of his highly paid employees. But the departure of those 850 Citadel workers has meant hundreds of millions in lost spending power, including tax receipts.
Keep chasing folks like that out of town, and that 5% tax soon will need to be raised to something like 7.5% and surely more later.
That’s how once-flourishing cities like Chicago end up circling the drain.
When they are presented with the actual per-pupil spending figures, they are less likely to say that schools are underfunded.
Public, Parents & K-12 Education
KEY FINDINGS
Over 60% of parents feel “hopeful” about the future, and more than half feel “a sense of purpose,” “optimistic,” and “happy.” More than half of non-parents feel “hopeful,” and at least one-fourth feel “frustration,” pessimistic,” or “overwhelmed.”
When it comes to voting in federal and state elections, adults and school parents care mostly about economic issues. School parents place much higher importance on education issues than other adults.
The general public and school parents greatly underestimate per-student spending in public schools. The public and parents are much less likely to say their state’s per-student spending is “too low” when given a publicly reported statistic – by 16 point and 14 points, respectively.
Nearly 2 in 3 parents say their child’s school schedule aligns with their work schedule “always” or “often.” High school parents are the least likely to have aligned schedules with their children. About 3 in 4 parents prefer their child’s school time to start between 8:00 am and 9:00 am. Nearly half of school parents prefer their child’s school time to end between 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm.
Overall support levels for choice-based policies remain high among school parents and the general public:
• Education savings accounts (ESAs) – 76% / 70%
• School vouchers – 69% / 61%
• Charter schools – 72% / 64%
• Open enrollment – 79% / 70%
Three in four school parents believe ESAs should be available to all families regardless of income or special needs. This is over 20-points higher than the percentage of parents who want to determine ESA availability based on financial need.
Large majorities of school parents and non-parents believe ESA funds should be used for educational materials like textbooks, tutoring, online classes, and technology. Sports-related expenses, entertainment tickets, and toys are the expenses least supported by parents and non-parents alike.
Private school parents are much more likely to say that they are “very satisfied” with their child’s schooling experiences than district school parents. Parents are consistently more likely to say they are “very satisfied” with private schools than public district schools. Strong satisfaction has risen among both types since last month.
Methodology
This poll was conducted between August 2-6, 2024 among a sample of 2,252 Adults. The interviews were conducted online and the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of Adults based on gender, educational attainment, age, race, and region. Results based on the full survey have a measure of precision of plus or minus 2.32 percentage points..
According to a 2024 national poll, Americans (including parents) underestimate the amount we spend on education.
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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?
$900 student finder fee…..
You would think it’s shocking that schools would rather pay $900+ per pupil in “finder’s fees” than just listen to parents and improve academic outcomes – but nope, that’s par for the course with US public ed administrators.
Students have been called to the office — and even arrested — for AI surveillance false alarms
Surveillance systems in American schools increasingly monitor everything students write on school accounts and devices. Thousands of school districts across the country use software like Gaggle and Lightspeed Alert to track kids’ online activities, looking for signs they might hurt themselves or others. With the help of artificial intelligence, technology can dip into online conversations and immediately notify both school officials and law enforcement.
Pension Costs Are Draining School Budgets
Student enrollment is falling at public schools across the country, impacting funding streams and threatening financial solvency, as schools continue to be on the hook for considerable fixed costs like loans or debts. Having to pay out teacher pensions (mostly using current revenue to pay retired teachers) is contributing to this growing problem. But even though teacher pension plans are tremendously expensive, they’re still not serving the majority of their members. There are better ways to provide benefits in a more sustainable way.
Nationally, teacher pension costs amount to around $83 billion a year, or about one out of every ten dollars that taxpayers provide for public education. That works out to almost $1,700 per student.
These pension payments are eating up a growing share of the funds that taxpayers think are paying for teaching and learning. This millstone weighs down districts and hampers their ability to be responsive and flexible to falling enrollment levels or other changes in student needs.
States and districts are contributing nearly 20% of each current teacher’s salary toward pension costs. That figure is much, much higher than what a typical private-sector employer pays toward retirement benefits and does not include Social Security contributions.
Academic Neglect
The Chicago Teachers Union’s refusal to close near-empty schools and push for more “sustainable community schools” is hurting student achievement. CTU is about adding members and escaping accountability, not about what’s best for Chicago students.
The Chicago Teachers Union recently marked the 10th anniversary of the celebrated “hunger strike” victory that prevented the closure of the nearly empty Dyett High School.
Lost on the CTU is the harsh reality that despite Dyett boasting an 87% graduation rate and winning a 2A state boys basketball championship, only 2% of its graduates are proficient in reading. None are proficient in math. An alarming 75% of Dyett students were chronically absent – missing more than 10% of the school year.
For far too many Dyett students, education remains a broken promise.
The fight to save Dyett was focused solely on keeping the school open, not on improving its quality. This reflects the CTU’s broader approach to public education: prioritize keeping schools open, expand union membership, increase member benefits and dues, reduce workload and protect jobs.
Student achievement? Not CTU’s priority.
Standardized testing is demonized. As a result, neither schools nor teachers are held accountable for performance.