School Information System

Kayla Huynh:

• Wisconsin’s audit committee has ordered a review of the Department of Public Instruction’s process for handling educator misconduct.
• The bipartisan audit committee unanimously approved the audit at a meeting Nov. 5.
• The audit follows criticism of State Superintendent Jill Underly over the handling of sexual misconduct and grooming allegations against school staff.

The state Legislature’s bipartisan audit committee on Nov. 5 ordered a review into the Department of Public Instruction’s process for removing, suspending or restricting educator licenses.

The audit comes as State Superintendent Jill Underly has received criticism for her department’s handling of grooming and sexual misconduct allegations against licensed school staff.

The Legislative Audit Bureau will examine the DPI’s oversight of educator misconduct cases, including the quality of its investigations, the steps for revoking or suspending licenses and whether the agency’s policies follow state law. The audit will also review the DPI’s staffing, resources and investigator training.

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Wisconsin Legislature launches audit of DPI licensing processes following sexual misconduct, grooming cases

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

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

John Schindler:

Democrats winning the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, which are blue-to-purple states, hardly constituted any surprise. Less pleasant was the election of Jay Jones as Virginia’s attorney general, notwithstanding that Democrat’s own troubles with the law and his making murderous threats about Republicans and even their children. Jones is a sociopath but Democrats voted for him anyway.

Tuesday’s big news was the election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York City, which is the plain triumph of the radical socialist Left wing of the Democrats, a turning which portends bumptious politics for the whole country for the remainder of this decade. Mamdani’s victory is a remarkable story no matter one’s politics. How a 34-year-old political neophyte whose practical experience for the job is as light as a feather managed to score the mayor’s job in America’s biggest city stands as something for the record books.

As for Mamdani himself, there’s not much to say. The son of privileged immigrants, Muslims from South Asia by way of Uganda, Mamdani possesses all the au courant progressive luxury views of his ilk, the expensively educated (his father is a Marxist Ivy League professor). Mamdani is a proud democratic socialist who is photogenic and ran an innovative social media-driven campaign. He was greatly helped that his opponents were the loathsome Andrew Cuomo, who lingers in New Yorkers’ minds as the grandma-killer during COVID-19, and the fun but hopeless GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa and his cats, who was hampered by the reality that Republicans barely exist in NYC outside Staten Island.

Michael Cuna & Elaine Shen:

Despite dramatically expanded access to selective U.S. colleges, first-generation students persistently trail continuing-generation peers in GPA, internship attainment, and early-career outcomes. We identify a key mechanism: the hidden curriculum unwritten strategies like cold-emailing alumni or strategically engaging faculty essential for success yet unknown and costly to discover without guidance. Leveraging survey and administrative data from 100,000+ undergraduates across 20 public universities, we document stark disparities: first-generation students invest 14-26% less in these high-return hidden actions while over-investing in formal tasks. Stan-dard explanations–income, ability, or preferences–do not fully explain these gaps.

Through a field experiment at UC Berkeley, we isolate causal channels by randomiz-ing information on action availability (awareness) versus returns (beliefs): awareness treatments close the 30% baseline gap almost entirely. Finally, we develop an AI college advisor to expose underlying search frictions in an online experiment; first-generation students allocate just 11% (versus 16%) of queries to hidden topics and follow up about 48% less on hidden curriculum nudges. However, an “active” AI that increases awareness, narrows these search gaps and follow up behaviors. By formalizing the hidden curriculum as dual informational frictions, we demonstrate that overcoming these invisible barriers requires more than equal access.

Ray Jetha:

Not everyone was on board with the idea. Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, the same startup incubator where Lessin was farming for prospects, warned founders on an internal forum not to attend.

“You don’t need finishing school. You need to build something great, make your users happy, and have craftsmanship. We’re just here to make stuff. We’re not here to impress anyone by how fancy our shit is,” Tan wrote on X. 

“The truly wealthy are wealthy in meaningful relationships and the outcome of actually making something people want, not bullshit appearances or impressing people or running power moves or playing zero sum dominance games,” he added. 

Still, the class was free, and so was the wine. A few hundred founders applied for Etiquette Finishing School, and about 50 were accepted. Not everyone showed up.

One founder, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was there to learn to be “less feral.” A meeting with a Japanese conglomerate made him realize he had no idea how to be a “functioning adult in polite society.” 

Ian Mansfield:

However, for the purposes of this article, it’s also the document that introduced the concept of Time Immemorial.

Although often used as a general phrase for “a very long time ago”, it specifically refers to events that occurred before 3rd September 1189.

Anything before that date is time immemorial.

Explicitly why 3rd September 1189 was chosen as the barrier between that which we know and that which we don’t has itself been lost to time.

But a very good theory exists.

That date marks the coronation of King Richard (the Lionheart), the three-tims predecessor of King Edward I, and a good theory exists about why great-grand uncle was the point at which time immemorial began.

At the time, a legal policy allowed defendants to cite oral history passed down from their grandfather in disputes over land ownership. However, for the purposes of this situation, grandad could be dead, but so long as dad was still alive, and would swear that he heard it from his dad, that could stand up in court.

Vance Ginn:

Note from Adam: There is growing momentum to limit or repeal state and local property taxes, which poses an interesting dilemma for libertarians and fiscal conservatives. Advocates see property taxes as relatively efficient, transparent, and minimally distortionary, while critics argue they fuel government growth, undermine secure property rights, and make housing more expensive. The following guest post by Vance Ginn, who writes the Let People Prosper Substack, makes the case for the continued push for property tax repeal. In a follow-up guest post, Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation will make the case for property taxes as an important source of revenue. 

Property ownership is the cornerstone of a free society. It reflects the natural right of individuals to control what they create, earn, or voluntarily exchange with others. From that right flows responsibility, independence, and the ability to build a legacy.

Yet today, homeowners must pay the government every year simply to keep what they already own. Property taxes are not a reasonable price for local services—they are an outdated, overly coercive, and economically destructive way to fund government. They should end.

Across Texas, Florida, Wyoming, Iowa, andMontana, more people are realizing that property taxes—once accepted as a “necessary evil”—are neither necessary nor moral, especially when government spending is not properly restrained. The principle is simple: nothing is free, but ownership should be secure once it’s earned.

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more.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported above average tax & $pending, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

———

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Olivia Herken:

Another bill Evers vetoed would have required school boards to let residents inspect a school district’s textbooks, curriculum and instructional materials. Residents can already request to review learning materials, but the legislationwould have required school districts to respond to such requests within 14 days, as well as publish a list of textbooks on their website. Republicans have unsuccessfully introduced the policy in the last three sessions, with Evers vetoing it once before.

The legislation comes at a time when books and curriculum are under more scrutiny by parents and politicians. Supporters said the bill would improve transparency and rebuild trust between parents and schools, while opponents said it was a means of fearmongering in classrooms.

“My position has not changed, nor have my concerns about the Wisconsin State Legislature’s continued attempts to create burdensome statewide mandates for schools without providing any funding to successfully implement such mandates,” Evers said in his veto memo.

Bojan Tunguz:

Unfortunately the US Academia produces a glut of PhDs, with absolutely no regard for the professional or career prospects of those PhDs. The latest figures put the number of newly minted PhDs in the US at 58,000. Arguably the only jobs where PhD level skills are directly relevant are those in Academia itself, but those jobs have been becoming increasingly hard to get. The latest estimate is that there are only about 10,000 – 12,000 tenure track job openings in the US each year. Some fraction of the surplus is captured by the postdoc market, but not enough to make the whole system sustainable. 

PhD education is primarily subsidized from two sources of funding – grants from the government and the paltry teaching stipends that most PhDs have to resort to. There are ethical problems with both of them. The government funding is, obviously, downstream from taxes. So we are asking the public to pay for (costly) skill acquisition that in most cases have absolutely no practical value. The response to this argument is that the value of (PhD) research is that it expands human knowledge. OK, maybe. But the fact is that 80-98% of all PhD theses are never cited. IMHO, the problem is even worse than that. There is a very powerful publishing-citation cartel in place that operates through you-cite-my-student-I-cite-yours mechanisms. So in other words, it is highly unlikely that the PhD system we have right now in place is even close to being the optimal system for creating new insights and knowledge. 

Another challenge to the skeptical view of the value of PhD is that those programs help create objective, rigorous thinkers, something that is valuable across the board in our society. This is a variation on the “transfer learning” theory of the value of education, which, I am sorry to say, has not been verified through any kind of actual empirical study. A few attempts to validate it have been, at best, inconclusive. And anyone who has sat through a single faculty meeting would find the notion that these people are “objective, rigorous thinkers” laughable.

Michael Tracey:

The Obit:

James D. Watson, who entered the pantheon of science at age 25 when he joined in the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of the most momentous breakthroughs in the history of science, died on Thursday in East Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 97.

His death, in a hospice, was confirmed on Friday by his son Duncan, who said Dr. Watson was transferred to the hospice from a hospital this week after being treated there for an infection.

Dr. Watson’s role in decoding DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, would have been enough to establish him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. But he cemented that fame by leading the ambitious Human Genome Project and writing perhaps the most celebrated memoir in science.

For decades a famous and famously cantankerous American man of science, Dr. Watson lived on the grounds of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which, in another considerable accomplishment, he took over as director in 1968 and transformed from a relatively small establishment on Long Island with a troubled past into one of the world’s major centers of microbiology. He stepped down in 1993 and took a largely honorary position of chancellor.

Sarah Scire:

One thing that stood out? None of the students — even in an elective course about media — confessed any interest in becoming a journalist. A few could name news organizations they trusted but others said the news came to them through social media or what friends shared or what they overheard as their parents were watching television. They had questions for me, too, including several about the pitfalls, challenges, and ethics of being a journalist.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been unprepared, then, to read a new report from News Literacy Project that surveyed American teenagers about their attitudes towards journalists. But “Biased,” “Boring,” and “Bad”: Unpacking perceptions of news media and journalism among U.S. teens still wasn’t a fun read. The online survey asked 756 teenagers (ages 13-18) nationwide about their views and found:

• An overwhelming majority of teens (84%) described news media with negative words — often characterizing media as intentionally deceptive or invoking negative emotional feelings. The top five words submitted by teens were “Fake, “Crazy, “Boring, “Biased,” and “Sad,” according to a very depressing word cloud published in the report.

John Trasviña

Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District’s grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.  

Zach Groshell:

This is borne out of the real-life phenomenon of “packet teaching” – where some hodge podge of random material from TPT replaces focused instruction.

The format of a piece of paper providing a scaffold (ex: a number line so they don’t have to draw a messy one) is still sound.

Sam Clamons:

Biology can be hard to intuit, in part because it operates across vastly different scales, from single atoms all the way up to entire ecosystems. Students of biology therefore often first meet its agents and mechanisms through metaphors: molecules are charged balls connected by sticks! evolution designs organisms to maximize their fitness! mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell! While metaphors give us qualitative handles to grasp, they often oversimplify complex ideas.

This is because most metaphors fail to address specifics — especially regarding numbers. Consider another common bio-metaphor: DNA is the blueprint of the cell. That’s useful for conceptual understanding, but how big is this blueprint? Is it as big as a novel or an encyclopedia? How much space does it take up? It’s possible to look up or calculate the answers to these questions; the human genome is 6.2 billion base pairs, which takes up about 10 cubic microns. But how big is that compared to the total volume of a cell? Is it most of it or just a tiny fraction?

To answer questions like these, you need more quantitative metaphors. Whereas a standard metaphor says that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, a quantitative metaphor says how big a battery a mitochondrion would be, say, if a cell were a toaster. If qualitative metaphors are like containers, then quantitative metaphors are closer to yardsticks.

Patrick Mcilheran:

A family’s huge bet on bettering the lives of thousands of Milwaukee children is moving a step closer to launch as St. Augustine Preparatory School starts taking names for its $104 million north campus in Glendale.

The project takes place in a time of rising parental demand for better options in Milwaukee. Even as the number of school-age children in Wisconsin fell, attendance at independent schools via the state’s parental choice program rose 6.9 percent last year.

This week, St. Marcus Lutheran School, long a mainstayon Milwaukee’s north side, opened a $25 million expansion to accommodate 200 more students.

Further north, it was just two years ago that the philanthropists behind St. Augustine, Gus Ramirez and his family foundation, announced they would buy the campus of suddenly-closed Cardinal Stritch University and convert it into a second location for Aug Prep.

School leaders are now far enough along on construction to start showing it off to prospective students with “hard hat” tours on Saturday morning and a promise to open the doors for good by August of 2026.

Aug Prep, as it brands itself, already runs a decade-old school, kindergarten through 12^th grade, on Milwaukee’s south side, that now fills facilities completed in only 2023.

Suevon Lee:

The admissions policy for Boston’s prestigious exam schools is once again changing, after the school committee approved a proposal Wednesday evening that could result in fewer Black and Hispanic students earning spots.

Under the new policy, a fifth of open seats at the three schools will be offered to top-performing kids citywide, based on grades and test scores. Bonus points for applicants attending high-poverty schools will be eliminated, and extra points for kids without stable housing will be reduced.

The remaining 80% of open seats will be distributed as they are now: Applicants will vie for spots against other kids in their same socioeconomic tier based on grades and test scores.

“Even though I may not like all of the options that we have … we have to move forward,” said Boston Schools Committee Chairwoman Jeri Robinson, who voted in favor of the changes. “Stopping this process now only frustrates actual families for whom this will be a next step.”

The proposal is meant to simplify the policy for more “fair and equitable access to the exam schools,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said at the meeting. She said it can be “sometimes mathematically impossible” for an academically-qualified student to earn a coveted seat because of where they live in Boston.

John Hilliard:

The changes, which will apply to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science, will eliminate bonus points for applicants coming from high-poverty schools, and reduce points for students who are homeless, live in public housing, or are in state custody. A fifth of seats at each school would be open to any qualifying student, regardless of socioeconomic considerations.

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Madison: English 10

“about 4% of Madison students completed a dual enrollment course, compared with almost 26% statewide”

Census.gov

As recently as 2020, there were just three states where older adults outnumbered children: Maine, Vermont, and Florida. By 2024, this number had increased to 11, with Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia joining their ranks.

Choose life.

Corrinne Hess

WIAA executive director Stephanie Hauser said the organization is transparent to its more than 500 members.  

But she said that because WIAA does not receive any taxpayer dollars, it should not have to abide by state open meetings law. 

“It is similar to a church or other private sector entity,” Hauser said. “We are very committed to a clear decision-making process. We publish those on our website.” 

Bill co-author, state Rep. Cindi Duchow, R-Delafield, said even though WIAA isn’t a governmental organization, it has a “de facto monopoly” over Wisconsin student athletes.

Duchow said WIAA decisions on eligibility can cost students college scholarships. 

Xavier Miller:

Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami.

The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue.

The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing. The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price.

Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over.

Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.

Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores.

Liu He:

In the latest episode of transnational repression by the Chinese state, the NYC-based inaugural IndieChina film festival had to delist 2/3 of their films today. The authorities contacted virtually every film director (and in some cases their families), and threatened actions if they do not refrain from presenting films in New York.

We are witnessing a watershed moment in the expansive global ambitions of the Chinese police state, which is venturing far beyond the border of China. Indeed, it is hard to miss a growingly daring gesture from the state security apparatus abroad. In recent months, we’ve already seen a new wave of exit bans against, disappearances of, harassment of families of overseas Chinese students returning to China for vacation, as well as foreign passport-holders being held arbitrarily and indefinitely.

Direct repression against targeted individuals couples with the ongoing operation of global surveillance, overseas police stations, community monitoring via student and townsman associations, and exports of great firewall technology. As domestic dissent gets reduced to exceedingly negligible efforts, the police state turns its attention abroad.

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Vicky Xu:

This actually happened: while my husband cooked chicken (45 min), I ran a research sprint on British academics’ research ties to China to assess the landscape, since we recently moved to the UK and research for work. I identified 29 cases that raise research security questions

Erin Gretzinger:

Madison school district officials who spoke with the Cap Times said the district wants to expand dual enrollment options to increase students’ access to college credit, with a focus on increasing on-site classes. The expansion would offer more alternatives to off-campus programs that pull students out of their schools and AP classes that require students to pass one high-stakes test to earn college credit.

“Students and their families are recognizing that the opportunity to earn college credits while still in high school is really important,” said Meg Filkins, the district’s director of career and technical education. “I think a lot of the work that we are still engaging in is helping students determine what are the courses that will get them the most bang for their buck.”

College credit trade-offs

Among the Madison school district’s class of 2025, about 65% of students left with some kind of college credit — the district’s highest percentage in five years. But how students earned that credit greatly varied.

The district has three main pathways to earn college credit: AP courses, which students take at their high school; dual credit courses, also taken at their school; and state-mandated dual enrollment programs and the district’s early college academies, which largely take place at either Madison College or the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

….

The report noted that while many teachers have higher degrees in education-related fields, not many have higher degrees in other subjects. For example, virtually any math teacher can be eligible to lead an AP Calculus class, but they would need a master’s or Ph.D in math to teach a calculus class for UW-Madison or Madison College.

“That’s often the hurdle for schools to offer dual enrollment,” Cramer said.

Still, the state Legislature has recognized on-site dual enrollment classes as the best avenue to expand college credit options to students.

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Deja vu: Credit for non Madison School District Courses …

The Economist:

The idea of liberating parents is an attractive one. And the idea of all children, regardless of parental income, playing and learning together from just after birth is a pleasant one. Yet there is a problem. The best evidence on the impact of free (or almost free) universal from-birth child care indicates that it can harm children.

How can this be? There is, after all, lots of evidence—in the form of small, randomised controlled trials—in support of similar schemes. The most influential trial began in 1962 when a group of three-year-old children in Ypsilanti, a small city near Detroit, were enrolled in a programme at Perry Elementary School. The organisers found children who lived in poor households and struggled in tests, and then either enrolled them or put them in a control group. For the next two years, those enrolled attended a daily two-and-a-half-hour pre-school programme, where they “planned”, “did” and “reviewed” play activities in groups of five or six. A teacher also visited them at home once a week.

…..

This shift in Quebec, but not in the rest of Canada, is about as good an experiment in how such a policy affects children as it is possible to find. To work out its impact, Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michael Baker of the University of Toronto and Kevin Milligan of the University of British Columbia tapped into a wealth of data on children in Quebec collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth, which gathers details on child care, teacher evaluations, test scores and behaviour reports.

The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.

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more.

Priscilla DeGregory

A Virginia jury has found a former elementary school administrator liable for $10 million in the shooting of a first-grade teacher by a 6-year-old student nearly three years ago.

Former first-grade educator Abigail Zwerner sued Ebony Parker, the former vice principal of Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va., for gross negligence, alleging Parker failed to act on multiple warnings that the 6-year-old boy had a gun and was acting alarmingly the day of the January 2023 shooting.

After over five hours of deliberation on Wednesday and Thursday, the seven-person jury ruled in favor of Zwerner — who had been seeking $40 million in damages.

Ann Althouse summary:

GENERAL SAUER: Dames & Moore… said, this particular provision, where Congress has given these broad verbs, I mean, “regulate” is a capacious verb, admittedly, so are “nullify,” so are “void,” so are, frankly, all the other verbs there in the — the language in IEEPA. The way the Court thought about it is we’re looking at this through the lens of Justice Jackson’s opinion in Youngstown. And the Court held specifically that these verbs placed the President in Youngstown Zone 1. The Court held that — that he’s subject — subject to the widest latitude of judicial interpretation….  

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Why — could you tell me why it is that when Congress intended to permit a president to regulate by imposing tariffs, it’s always used “tariff” and “regulate.”… 

GENERAL SAUER: Respectfully, this Court came to the opposite conclusion, if I may, in Algonquin…. What it held was the phrase “adjust imports,” which includes a verb that’s narrower — 

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: But it was in the context… of activities that had to do with raising and lowering duties. Here, the noun — the verbs that accompany “regulate” have nothing to do with raising revenues in the form of taxes… 

Jeffrey Carter:

In the days of the American Revolution, Civil War, and both World Wars, the wealthy of our country sent their sons into battle. They fought and died for their country. Vietnam changed that. Heck, the signers of the Declaration were all wealthy, and many lost their fortunes because of it. Having skin in the game is a big deal.

During Vietnam, if you were connected, you could figure a way out of going to war if you wanted to. Even President Trump figured a way out. Bone spurs or something. President Clinton dodged the draft, and President Bush was in the Texas Air National Guard. Sure, I know Vietnam became an unpopular war, but the truth is the establishment elite from the WW2 generation didn’t want to see their sons fight in one after what they went through. You can’t blame them for their feelings, but it had adverse consequences. Additionally, there was the draft. You went even if you didn’t want to go if you had a low draft number. That is, unless you had strings to pull.

Today, Da Nang Dick lies about his service but gets to be a Senator. Tim Walz lies about his service, but gets to govern the state of Minnesota. They make a mockery of military service.

Contrast that with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. All served. Their benches and backbenches served. 

This is somewhat changing with our last conflict, which shouldn’t have happened. It’s a volunteer military, and that is a good thing.

Holly Korbey:

What happens when every teacher in the state gets trained in cognitive science and evidence-based teaching practices?

I first met Margaret Lee sometime last year, when she was still the director of organizational development for the Frederick County Public Schools in Frederick County, Maryland, a socioeconomically and racially diverse district of nearly fifty thousand students about an hour west of Baltimore. At the time, I was really digging into the research on teaching and learning. I’d launched this newsletter and focused my other reporting on it as well. But I was looking for something specific: was anybody beyond the grassroots group of insurgent teachers I’d connected with on social media trying to put that research into practice at scale? It was all well and good to talk about cognitive science principles—but I wondered if (and how) big, slow, lumbering school districts might actually move the needle using them?

Lee was the first person to give me a glimpse of what evidence-based teaching and learning might look like at scale. With support from district leadership, over the last decade she’d transformed both early teacher training and ongoing professional learning into something evidence-based, usable and practical; pointed curriculum and instruction in all subject areas toward research on what worked; and homed in on specific research-based moves, like explicit instruction and retrieval practice, shown to work with all students.

Impressed with Frederick County’s slow and steady improvement for all student groups—including the groups who often stubbornly remain farthest behind—I wrote a story about the work, focusing on the part about “scale.”

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Matt Bateman:

One consequence of working for a very data-centric private school is that I routinely hear stories from parents about extremely high end private schools that are academically and behaviorally mediocre or just poor. Basically a 50 thousand dollar/year placebo.

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Kelsey Piper:

in California, too, I’ve heard a weird number of stories of parents assuming that the high price tag and good reputation meant a private school would offer rigorous academic instruction and then it….didn’t.

Mike Clark

The seeds for the improbable Public League title run were planted 16 years ago on a bumpy grass field in Little Village. New Life, a neighborhood nonprofit offering a variety of services, decided to start a 16-inch softball summer league. The goals: to break down barriers, build community and prevent violence by defusing gang conflicts, among other things.

The field at Farragut wasn’t the best. DeMateo, who was the umpire for those early games, recalls “six-inch divots” that created what players called “the Farragut hop.”

But the league, which started small, kept growing. There are now 20 teams playing at two local parks: La Villita and Piotrowski. At the end of the season, the top teams from both sites come together to play for the championship at UIC.

Andrew Kerr:

A prominent U.S. virologist who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic privately informed the U.S. intelligence community in January 2020 that the Chinese lab may be responsible for the outbreak. But in his public remarks to congressional staffers one month later—and after meeting with former White House health adviser Anthony Fauci—the researcher stayed mum about the Wuhan lab and lent credence to the discredited wet market theory.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill virologist Dr. Ralph Baric warned the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during a closed-door presentation with the agency’s Biological Sciences Experts Group on or around Jan. 29, 2020, that the Wuhan lab, which was conducting risky gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses similar to the one that causes COVID-19, may have accidentally released the virus into the human population. Baric’s presentation, which the Washington Free Beacon obtained from a whistleblower, went beyond mere speculation: Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on coronaviruses, Baric experimented with coronaviruses in 2015 with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s top researcher, Shi Zhengli. Later, in early 2024, he testified to House investigators that he had privately warned Shi that her lab lacked sufficient biosafety protections and that he always believed a lab leak origin was possible.

——

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

Colbey Decker:

I testified before the Wisconsin legislature in support of the Constitutional Equality Amendment. As a mom, I shared how my white son with a severe reading disability was waitlisted and deprioritized for specialized education resources in @Greenbayschools—simply because of his race. The district’s “High Priority Strategies” explicitly favors First Nations, Black, and Hispanic students, leaving others invisible. This isn’t equity; it’s discrimination.

David Griffith, Ph.D. Adam Tyner, Ph.D.
Foreword by: Michael J. Petrilli:

Per Figure ES-1, the results suggest that teachers are skeptical of the five “equitable” practices that are the focus of the resulting report, at least one of which (those same results suggest) has now been adopted by no less than half of America’s public schools and nearly three-quarters of the country’s “majority minority” middle schools.

Figure ES-1: Teachers are skeptical of most “equitable” grading practices.

more.

Danielle DuClos:

State legislators called both hearings this week in response to reporting by the Cap Times that uncovered hundreds of sexual misconduct and grooming investigations conducted by the department from 2018 through 2023.

In a joint statement, the audit commitee’s co-chairs — Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Oconto, and Rep. Robert Wittke, R-Caledonia — said Underly and the department “failed at their most basic oversight role.”

“In the coming weeks and months, state auditors will work to get the answers from DPI that the public deserves,” Wimberger and Wittke said.

The Cap Times revealed the department uses a rudimentary internal tracking system — a Google spreadsheet — to document its misconduct investigations and has two investigators to work on 113 cases on average each year.

Joe Chrisman, head of the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, outlined the audit ordered by legislators will likely examine, among other components:

• Trends in the allegations received and investigated by the department
• The duration of the department’s investigations
• Written policies and procedures the department uses for its investigations and whether those were consistently followed
• How the department gathered evidence, assessed information, and documented its investigations and decisions
• Trends in the department’s investigation determinations over time
• Fiscal, staffing and technology resources used by the department for investigations
• How the department’s investigation processes are similar to or different from those used by other Midwestern states

The Department of Public Instruction hasn’t previously conducted audits of its investigation practices or produced annual reports on investigation data, according to spokesperson Chris Bucher.

Other state education departments — such as Arizona, Idaho and Pennsylvania — publish reports on license investigations each year, including data on how many investigations were conducted, the types of conduct investigated and investigation outcomes.

……

Underly also wants educators in private schools to be required to hold a Department of Public Instruction educator license. Current state law limits the Department of Public Instruction’s authority to investigating licensed educators for misconduct.

……

She has declined requests by the Cap Times to discuss the department’s educator misconduct investigations, saying an interview would create a “conflict of interest” since she oversees teacher licenses.

…….

‘We believe in transparency’

———

More:

Since the first installment of Dismissed published:

• State Superintendent Jill Underly increased access to misconduct data
• Legislators held 3 hearings
• Nonpartisan state auditors are auditing DPI’s license misconduct investigations

———

Kimberly Wethal

Lawmakers will audit the state Department of Public Instruction’s process for granting and revoking licenses for educators as the criticism over how the agency investigates cases of teacher misconduct continues.

——-

Accountability and the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI

Mark Treinen:

I’ve been doing journalism a long time and don’t recall a public official ever demanding a “public correction” of an entire story, and then proposing a bunch of fixes to the exact problems highlighted in the @CapTimes story.

———

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Heather L Taylor, PhD, MPH, LDH, Pablo Cuadros, MPH, MaKenzie Gee, MS, Nir Menachemi, PhD, MPH

A total of 132 studies met inclusion criteria, yielding 454 unique outcomes. Lockdowns and school closures were associated with detrimental health effects in the majority of outcomes analyzed, including over 90% of mental health, obesity-related, and health-related social need outcomes (child development/education, employment, access to food, and economic/financial stability). Analyses focused on vulnerable populations, such as racial and ethnic minorities, low-income groups, and individuals with disabilities, were significantly more likely to report detrimental outcomes than the general population.

Conclusion

Given how lockdowns and school closures may affect population well-being, policymakers should carefully weigh both the benefits and harms of these interventions, including how they may affect vulnerable populations. We conclude with policy recommendations to mitigate ongoing harms and inform more evidence-based decision-making.

-——-

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

Corrinne Hess:

Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly announced several changes on Tuesday to strengthen student safety amid criticism of her agency’s handling of accusations of sexual misconduct by educators.

Underly also announced DPI would create a new online database to expand DPI’s existing pubic license look-up tool so the public can see teacher licenses that have been revoked or surrendered.

“Our process is strong and our commitment to transparency is unwavering,” Underly said. “But that does not mean we are standing still.” 

——-

more.

——

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Tao Tan:

In its first nine months, the Trump administration has thoroughly disrupted the American higher education landscape. It has cancelled federal grant funding, pressured university leaders to resign, and circulated a draft compact that ties preferential access to future funding to institutional policy changes. Critics call the administration’s actions overreach or even extortion.Supporters see this as long-overdue accountability.

The controversy has at least exposed a deeper structural truth. The storm now hitting American higher education did not start on January 20, 2025. Its conditions were created almost eight decades ago, when universities began building their budgets around federal aid, federal research, and federal policy. Successive programs, such as the GI Bill, the National Science Foundation, and Title IV aid, all deepened the partnership between the federal government and higher education. 

The Trump administration has simply highlighted the reality that even private universities in America are highly dependent on public support. Today, on average 25% of all university revenue either originates in or is facilitated by the federal government. 

Many faculty earnestly believe in the inviolably private character of their institutions. Even administrators, often more aware of their institutions’ federal entanglements, may not realize how systemic and universal this interdependence has become: In 2025, nearly all universities depend on public money—which depends on public trust and public confidence. 

———

Alex Karp:

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Zohran Mandani:

“The average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is annoyed their education is not that valuable, and that the person who knows how to drill for oil has a more valuable profession”

“I think that annoys the —— out of these people”

Peter Bernegger

My testimony at the Capitol yesterday Nov 5th in Madison in favor of a bill to ban the use of drop boxes in Wisconsin – 6min video link below.

Liberal State Rep Lee Snodgrass begins by falsely claiming there is no voter or election fraud when using drop boxes in elections.

Where I’ll add here to my testimony I have internal documents from the City of Milwaukee election office that they have worked with very corrupt non-profits Souls to the Pols and MICAH to commit election fraud by stuffing drop boxes unlawfully with absentee ballots.
rumble.com/v718rsm-democr…

Mario Buildreps:

Our analysis of about 1,200 ancient pyramids and temples reveals a global pattern of alignment with past geographic poles. This suggests significant crustal deformation, supporting—but differing from—Charles Hapgood’s pole shift hypothesis.

The timing of these shifts precisely matches the temperature rhythm of the last ice ages, with a mere 0.4% probability of coincidence. This forces a re-evaluation of history: these structures were built over hundreds of thousands of years, with some dating to the dawn of Homo sapiens. While many were later modified, their original orientations were preserved.

This revolutionary evidence opens a new scientific field—Archaeorientation—challenging conventional timelines and rewriting deep antiquity.

Brandon Vigliarolo:

If you’re filing an immigration form – or helping someone who is – the Feds may soon want to look in your eyes, swab your cheek, and scan your face. The US Department of Homeland Security wants to greatly expand biometric data collection for immigration applications, covering immigrants and even some US citizens tied to those cases.

DHS, through its component agency US Citizenship and Immigration Services, on Monday proposed a sweeping expansion of the agency’s collection of biometric data. While ostensibly about verifying identities and preventing fraud in immigration benefit applications, the proposed rule goes much further than simply ensuring applicants are who they claim to be.

First off, the rule proposes expanding when DHS can collect biometric data from immigration benefit applicants, as “submission of biometrics is currently only mandatory for certain benefit requests and enforcement actions.” DHS wants to change that, including by requiring practically everyone an immigrant is associated with to submit their biometric data.

“DHS proposes in this rule that any applicant, petitioner, sponsor, supporter, derivative, dependent, beneficiary, or individual filing or associated with a benefit request or other request or collection of information, including U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals and lawful permanent residents, and without regard to age, must submit biometrics unless DHS otherwise exempts the requirement,” the rule proposal said.

DHS also wants to require the collection of biometric data from “any alien apprehended, arrested or encountered by DHS.”

Arthur Kane:

On top of about $810 million in 2024 for individual lawmakers’ office accounts, the House appropriates billions more for other operations of the House, including perks like a childcare center and an office of attending physician so members didn’t have to deal with waiting for a primary care.

David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, a non-partisan, nonprofit that looks out for the use of taxpayer money, said there needs to be a review of all the Congressional spending after The Center Square told him about some of the disbursements detailed in the House office accounts.

“Serving the public should be, you know, public service. [In the past] it was somebody sacrificing something to come to Congress,” Williams told The Center Square. “Now you’re just showered with perks, with benefits, travel, car allowances, now a housing allowance. So it’s turned from public service to really enriching yourself as a member of Congress.”

Sam Fleming, Amy Kazmin and Claire Jones:

The US government’s debt burden is on track to exceed levels in both Italy and Greece for the first time this century, according to IMF forecasts, underscoring the parlous state of America’s public finances.

General government gross debt in the US will rise by more than 20 percentage points from now to reach 143.4 per cent of the country’s GDP by the final year of the decade, IMF forecasts show, exceeding previous records set after the pandemic.

That comes as the IMF estimates that the US budget deficit will hover above 7 per cent of GDP every year until 2030 — the highest of any rich nation tracked by the fund for this year and the rest of the decade.

Italy and Greece have long been highlighted by economists for their fragile public finances. Both countries were at the heart of the euro area sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2012, with Greece requiring a bailout and restructuring overseen by the IMF and EU.

But government debt burdens in both European countries are projected to be on a downward trajectory at the end of the decade as they keep a tight grip on their budget deficits.

By contrast, the US debt-to-GDP ratio will still be rising in 2030, according to the IMF data released this month, with the Congressional Budget Office expecting it to increase for decades thereafter.

Rock Esenberg:

Stunning indictment of higher education, both as to graduates understanding of public policy and the way in which it exacts tens and often hundreds of thousands of dollars from student and fails to provide commensurate value. Universities are important. They need to do better.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Last week a student was beaten in a bathroom at Madison’s West High School. The school district would like you to know that there’s nothing to see here.

Press reports of the incident were sketchy due to the standard lack of information provided by the district. Then a video of the incident, recorded on a cell phone by someone who was present, surfaced on the Internet. In response, West High Principal Dan Kigeya sent an email to parents. 

For the record, I’ve seen the video. It’s very brief, but also violent and disturbing. Still, I wouldn’t call it graphic. It shows one student (I’m assuming everyone in the video is a student, but I don’t know that) violently kicking another student who is on the floor and apparently attempting to cover their head. Other students are in the frame, but it’s not clear what they’re doing. 

While certainly unpleasant, it’s an important piece of information for law enforcement and even for the public. We have a right to know what’s happening in our schools.

Kigeya’s email begins: “I’m writing this afternoon to let you know that we anticipate further media coverage, likely tonight, of last week’s episode of violence in our school. As many of you are aware, one of our students recorded the incident with their cell phone. We do not know whether that footage will be included in any reporting, but recognize the harm that both its existence and further media items about this incident are likely to continue to cause.”

UATX

At UATX, if our graduates don’t become essential to American excellence — and if their work doesn’t inspire others to fund this mission — we’re done.

Every dollar raised, every professor hired, every course taught must produce extraordinary graduates — or we fail. We’ve designed our own constraints: no room for bloated bureaucracies, no frivolous departments, no administrative empire-building. Our survival depends on one thing only: graduating leaders free to pursue American greatness.

The University of Austin rejects the credentialing cartel. We admit purely on test scores, rank every student, and fail those who can’t cut it. The nation’s brightest are coming to Austin — transferring from Carnegie Mellon, turning down UChicago, leaving Columbia — to wrestle with great books, master AI and data science, and start real companies on campus. They’re choosing a university dedicated to excellence instead of collecting hollow credentials elsewhere.

Jeff Yass has shown us what betting on America’s future looks like. Now we invite you to join him.

——-

more.

Nicole Ruiz

In this project, I want to study ambitious modern homemakers and community builders, so I gave Jesse Genet a call. Before I had any conception of this interview series, several people mentioned I should chat with her. Jesse’s past isn’t necessarily what comes to mind as the stereotype of a traditional homemaker. She founded several companies starting at the age of 16, went off to design school against her family’s wishes, and ultimately took one company, Lumi, through the startup accelerator Y-Combinator, and Lumi was acquired later on. While raising 5 children, she was still working at her acquirer’s company full time. Today she’s expecting their 7th, homeschools, manages several small family businesses, and supports her husband’s nascent startup. Today, Jesse sees her large, blended family as another ambitious project — an evolution of the same drive that fueled her companies.
The Identity Shift: Ambitious Parenting and Homemaking
Jesse: I had this identity attribute of “I am an entrepreneur, this is what I do.” Self-identifying what I do as an ambitious, crazy thing. I think that a key shift for me was that having 5, 6, 7 kids is also an ambitious, crazy thing. There was a morphing of the way that I view myself.
I’m not working full-time professionally on anything right now. I always dabble in some side projects, but being pregnant with my fourth, number 7 total, I feel very comfortable with saying I’m not starting a new company tomorrow. Maybe sometime in the future. But it took me a little while to get to that place. So the biggest change has been being comfortable letting go of who I am as this nonstop entrepreneur person, because that was part of my identity for so long.

Chicago Teacher Union:

Maggie Macintosh:

Manitoba’s poor literacy rate has prompted MLAs of all political stripes to unanimously endorse a private member’s bill to increase teacher monitoring and support for struggling readers.

Bill 225 requires elementary schools to systematically screen elementary students for early signs of struggle, immediately act on warning signs and document findings in report cards.

Tyndall Park MLA Cindy Lamoureux first tabled the legislation — now named the Public Schools Amendment Act (Early Reading Screening) — on March 26.

Lamoureux, the lone elected official representing the Manitoba Liberals, drafted it with parents and dyslexia advocates.

On Tuesday, following repeated pleas for the government to collaborate on adjustments, an updated version of it passed third reading.

“Unfortunately, here in Manitoba, literacy rates are very low,” Lamoureux told the house shortly before colleagues in all corners of the legislature supported her bill. “Forty per cent of children are meeting literacy standards right now. That’s exceptionally low — and these numbers are even lower for Indigenous children.”

More:

The Alberta government has unveiled Bill 6, a proposed amendment to the Education Act that the province says aims to strengthen foundational skills in reading, writing, and mathematics for young learners across the province.

If passed, the legislation would make literacy and numeracy screenings mandatory for all students from kindergarten to Grade 3. null

The goal is to identify learning challenges early and provide targeted support to ensure no child falls behind, according to Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides.

“Classrooms today have many different students—some learn fast, some need more time, and some have other challenges,” he said. “If a student is struggling with reading or math, the screener will show it and identify it early.” 

Will Briggs:

The Homebuilders report notes developers have run into several issues with cottage courts, chiefly land and construction costs that can make this type of housing “financially infeasible for a middle market price point.” Communities where cottage courts have been successfully built, however, tend to have a “high upper end” on housing prices. The report also notes another obstacle to the construction of cottage courts has been general unfamiliarity with the type of housing.

Matt Taibbi:

One of my regrets about the Twitter Files is that I think we failed to convey the scale of the ideas being envisaged, like common international databases of speech offenders or the use of “content moderation” to re-shape the public’s understanding not just of news, but history.

and:

This clip by Obama hits at the most dangerous theme in new censorship movements, the idea that “facts” are singular things that can be identified by committees of experts. Experts are frequently wrong, which is why Obama is wrong – we do need to allow “alternative facts.”

David Sacks:

Free speech on social media was narrowly saved by Elon’s acquisition of Twitter followed by Trump’s historic election, but AI provides a second bite at the apple (and a much greater opportunity at that) for the censorship-industrial complex to achieve total information control.

Peter Best is a retired lawyer living in Sudbury, Ontario. 

The worst thing that can happen to a property owner isn’t a flood or a leaky foundation. It’s learning that you don’t own your property — that an Aboriginal band does. This summer’s Cowichan Tribes v. Canada decision presented property owners in Richmond, BC, with exactly that horrible reality, awarding Aboriginal title to numerous properties, private and governmental, situated within a large portion of Richmond’s Fraser River riverfront area, to Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Tribes. For more than 150 years, these properties had been owned privately or by the government. The Cowichan Tribes had never permanently lived there.

But BC Supreme Court Justice Barbara Young ruled that because the lands had never been formally surrendered by the Cowichans to the Crown by treaty (there were no land-surrender treaties for most of BC), the first Crown grants to the first settlers were in effect null and void, and thus all subsequent transfers down the chain of title to the present owners were defective and invalid.

Kim Parker:

In the new survey, majorities across all major demographic groups share the view that the U.S. higher education system is going in the wrong direction. But some groups are more likely than others to say this. For example, adults who have a four-year college degree are somewhat more likely than those without a college degree to express this view (74% vs. 69%).

Harper’s Summary:

A transcript of a series of interviews about why trust in the media has fallen so badly:

Christopher Carroll: Why don’t we begin with the biggest question. A Gallup poll from last year showed that the media was the least trusted civic or political institution in the United States—among other things, Americans trust Congress more than they trust the media. What accounts for this? Why don’t we trust the media?

Taylor Lorenz: Well, I think there’s a lot of culpability on the media side. Corporate media in particular has spent years selling people out and getting things wrong. Look at mainstream coverage of the Iraq War, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the genocide in Palestine. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. These media outlets do not center the lives of poor people, disabled people, immigrants, or the working class. The civil-rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has done an excellent job reporting on how legacy news outlets push pro-police messaging. He looks at coverage of issues like crime surges or shoplifting epidemics—for instance, the widely reported but unsubstantiated claim that shoplifting forced Walgreens to close stores.

I do think that the corporate media—having worked in it myself—has done things to erode trust, whether it’s kowtowing to power or simply failing to represent the truth.

Jemima Kelly:

Does he have a point about some Wikipedia articles having a “liberal” or left-leaning bias that obscures or fails to provide a full and fair version of the truth, though? Yes. Just look up the “COVID-19 Lab leak theory” entry as an example. Despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans in a 2023 study by YouGov and the Economist said they believed the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory and not, as originally thought, a wet market, this is described in the second sentence as a “highly controversial” claim, while it is stated that “many scenarios proposed for a lab leak are characteristic of conspiracy theories” — as if there were not legitimate and non-conspiratorial reasons for believing in it. 

Indeed, last month one of the website’s two co-founders, Larry Sanger, wrote a long essay arguing that some of the standards that the site — which uses thousands of volunteer editors — was founded upon were being “sacrificed in favor of ideology”, and suggested nine ways to fix it. 

But funnily enough, none of Sanger’s suggestions included setting up an AI-powered, low-quality, barely readable Wikipedia rip-off with a peculiar penchant for Musk and his worldview. And yet that’s what we have in the shape of Grokipedia. 

Mark Treinen:

I’ve been doing journalism a long time and don’t recall a public official ever demanding a “public correction” of an entire story, and then proposing a bunch of fixes to the exact problems highlighted in the @CapTimes story.

Jon Styf:

DPI Superintendent Jill Underly appeared in front of the Senate Committee on Education on Tuesday afternoon and for the start of an audit of the department’s license investigation process on Wednesday morning.

Underly called criticism of her department a “partisan sideshow.”

Underly did not attend an Assembly committee on the matter two weeks prior.

“We take every allegation of misconduct seriously and act whenever it occurs,” Underly said.

Underly said that the department lacks subpoena power in investigations and “even limited power” would help that process. 

Underly’s prior response to an investigation of the matter from the Capital Times was demanding a correction on the story without pinpointing any factual errors in the story.

She pushed back against claims regarding the department’s investigations are hidden because the state does not say why a license is revoked in its online database and the state requires a public records request is placed – with no required timeline and subject to potential large fees – before an individual can receive information on an investigation.

“Our work is open and accountable,” Underly claimed. “Nothing is hidden.”

Underly went on to state that she and DPI support the state further defining grooming. A bill was introduced Monday to do that.

Underly previously claimed that “the statutory definition of ‘immoral conduct’ does not currently include grooming or professional boundary violations, limiting our agency’s ability to obtain critical pieces of information.”

———

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Colleston Morgan, Jr.

Good points in the full piece.

IMO, there’s a throughline from the Des Moines debacle to @DrJillUnderly’s @WisconsinDPI teacher misconduct mess: an overreliance on broken licensure systems, substituting bureaucratic credentials as a proxy for educator quality & effectiveness.

The Des Moines superintendent episode wasn’t an immigration story – it was a story about systemic failures in our industry. @rickhess99 and I discuss for @educationweek

Lessons From a ‘Vetted’ Superintendent’s Fall From Grace.

Imagine trying to turn a hearing on the failure of public schools to deal with sexual abuse into an attack on private schools as Senator Larson does here. Their hatred for families having options knows no limit.

Chad Aldeman:

So which schools help students get started on the right path? 

Last year, we set out to find the school districts that were doing the best job of teaching kids how to read. Now, we are expanding that search to individual schools — and have found 2,158 where third-grade reading scores are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates.

We’re going to be highlighting more of those stories in the months to come. But for now, we’re making our data available for anyone who wants to dig in. Armed with the full dataset of 41,883 schools across 10,414 districts in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, built the interactive tool below. Start by selecting the state you want, or click on an individual school to see how it compares with those in the rest of its district. 

———-

Will Flanders:

We have done similar work including a richer array of control variables in our Apples to Apples reports. Private Choice and charter schools tend to rise to the top when all these variables are accounted for.

———

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

We are near all-time highs in percentage of publicly funded students. And people can object to vouchers if they want.

But we have the fewest -number- of publicly funded students since 1995. We can afford it!

More.

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Joel Kotkin:

Perhaps never in recent history have American cities so badly needed strong, pragmatic mayors—and gotten so few. Congressional Republicans, with few urban constituencies, won’t be of much help with mass transitor other city services; big cities will have to “go it alone.” But rather than realigning city budgets and working toward self-sufficiency, many mayors favor far-left policies on policing, rent control, education, and taxation that amount to what the late Fred Siegel described three decades ago as “a suicide of sorts.”

This autumn could well see a neo-socialist, Zohran Mamdani, win the mayor’s office in New York. In Minneapolis, a Mamdani clone, 35-year-old state senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the dominant Democratic Farmer Labor Party (later rescinded, following allegations about voting irregularities at the party’s July convention). Leftists have also scored victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo. And Seattle, which suffered some of the most destructive effects from 2020’s “summer of love,” as its clueless then-mayor called it, appears likely to replace the moderates elected in the 2020 aftermath with a new slate of far-left politicians.

Cities cannot afford such choices. Today, major American metropolises constitute a smaller portion of the nation’s population than at any time in the past half century. Employment has steadily shifted away from cities since the 1950s. The production of great office towers, those temples of urban prominence, has fallen to levels a small fraction of those of the 1990s and may soon dip belowthe rate of spending on new data centers. According to the Financial Times, many global firms are planning to reduce their office footprints by between 10 percent and 20 percent. The industries that traditionally drive high-end employment, like finance and professional services, are also those most often receptive to remote or hybrid work.

John Thornhill & Caiwei Chen:

Today, however, China has the means, motive and opportunity to commit the equivalent of technological murder. When it comes to the mobilisation of the whole-of-society resources needed to develop and deploy AI to maximum effect, it may be just as rash to bet against China. 

The data highlights the trends. In AI publications and patents, China leads. By 2023, China accounted for 22.6 per cent of all citations, compared with 20.9 per cent from Europe and 13 per cent from the US, according to Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025. As of 2023, China also accounted for 69.7 per cent of all AI patents. True, the US maintains a strong lead in the top 100 most cited publications (50 vs 34 in 2023) but its share has been steadily declining. 

The US also outdoes China in top AI research talent — but the gap is narrowing. According to a report from the US Council of Economic Advisers, 59 per cent of the world’s top AI researchers worked in the US in 2019, compared with 11 per cent in China. But by 2022 that ratio was 42 per cent to 28 per cent. 

…..

long-term advantage often comes down to how widely and deeply technologies spread across society. And China is in a good position to win that race (although murder might be pushing it a bit!).

Education is another tell. Major Chinese universities are implementing AI literacy programmes in their curricula, embedding skills proactively before the labour market demands them. The Ministry of Education has also announced plans to integrate AI training for children of all school ages. I’m not sure “engineering state” fully captures China’s relationship with new technologies, but decades of infrastructure building and top-down co-ordination have made the system unusually effective at pushing large-scale adoption, often with far less social resistance than you would see elsewhere. The use at scale, naturally, allows for faster iterative improvements.

Greg Collard:

The House Oversight Committee’s report, “The Biden Autopen Presidency,” can be broken down into two basic parts:

1. Biden’s inner circle — or “politburo,” as the report characterizes it — worked like the two guys in Weekend at Bernie’s, constantly propping up the president to hide his declining cognitive condition from the public.
2. As a result, Biden was often not in charge, thus the need for the administration to use the autopen multiple times.

The report reaches a conclusion that reads like a judicial ruling: Absent evidence that Biden made executive decisions, “the Committee deems those actions taken through use of the autopen as void.” The report continues: 

Barring evidence of executive actions taken during the Biden presidency showing that President Biden indeed took a particular executive action, the Committee deems those actions taken through use of the autopen as void. The validity of the executive actions allegedly approved and signed (largely by autopen) by President Biden must be reviewed to determine whether legal action is necessary to ameliorate consequences of any illegitimate pardons granted, or executive actions implemented, throughout the Biden Autopen Presidency. The Committee finds numerous executive actions—particularly clemency actions—taken during the Biden Administration were illegitimate. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi responded the morning the report was released, saying her team was reviewing Biden’s use of the autopen for pardons.

Tom Church:

2. What would health insurance that actually functions like insurance look like?

Let’s remind ourselves what insurance is supposed to be for: Large, unexpected, costly events. You pay premiums to cover those costs and pay out of pocket for routine, inexpensive, and predictable costs.

Car insurance is the classic example: You pay insurance for when you get into a major accident. You don’t use your insurance to pay for routine and expected costs like gas, oil changes, and tire rotations.

Let’s also remind ourselves how health insurance differs from normal insurance: It covers routine, inexpensive, and predictable costs. In fact, health insurance is mandated to cover those things (see: the Affordable Care Act). Routine doctor visits, laboratory services, preventative wellness visits, and vaccinations are mandated as Essential Health Benefits (EHBs) that all individual and small group health insurance plans must cover. Various preventative measures have no deductible to enrollees.

The unpopular truth is that health insurance in America covers too many things. Health insurance is largely about pre-payment of care. All health care shouldn’t go through health insurance. Premiums and deductibles are high because everything goes through insurance.

Kelsey Piper:

In 2014, too many kids were failing eighth-grade algebra, so San Francisco got rid of it.

This was part of a broader movement called “detracking,” an initiative advocated by the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) and others in the world of math education. This would lead schools to stop offering advanced or remedial classes in favor of placing all students, regardless of ability, in the same classes. Tracking “too often leads to segregation, dead-end pathways, and low quality experiences, and disproportionately has a negative impact on minority and low-socioeconomic students,” the NCSM warned.

So San Francisco took the plunge. No students would take algebra in eighth grade. The hope was that the step would address the city’s glaring inequities regarding which students were high performers in math.

“We decided to detrack both out of the best academic interests of the students and out of a moral imperative,” San Francisco math teacher Kentaro Iwasaki told me. “Tracking mirrors the segregation in our society, maintains the haves and the have-nots. The segregation within our schools — if we walk down a hallway and we see a high-track class, it’s generally white and Asian students, and low-track classes generally Black and brown students.” Iwasaki had taught math at Mission High School in San Francisco prior to the detracking initiative.

Maister:

Beginners coming into our little corner of the programming world have it rough. Normal CPU-centric programming tends to start out with a “Hello World” sample, which can be completed in mere minutes. It takes far longer to simply download the toolchains and set them up. If you’re on a developer friendly OS, this can be completed in seconds as well.

However, in the graphics world, young whippersnappers cut their teeth at rendering the elusive “Hello Triangle” to demonstrate that yes, we can indeed do what our forebears accomplished 40 years ago, except with 20x the effort and 100000x the performance.

There’s no shortage of examples of beginners rendering a simple triangle (or a cube), and with the new APIs having completely displaced the oxygen of older APIs, there is a certain expectation of ridiculous complexity and raw grit required to tickle some pixels on the display. 1000 lines of code, two weeks of grinding, debugging black screens etc, etc. Something is obviously wrong here, and it’s not going to get easier.

Litong Deng:

Hannah Cairo shook the math world when she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a 4o-year-old unsolved math problem, when she was only 17. 

Well ahead of her peers in math, Cairo applied to colleges when she was 14 and was accepted into UC Davis.

Seeking advice on what to do, she consulted UC Berkeley professor Zvezdelina Stankova, founder of the Berkeley Math Circle, or BMC. Cairo had been enrolled in a BMC summer program. Stankova encouraged her to enroll in graduate-level math courses at UC Berkeley rather than enroll as a student at UC Davis. 

“I ended up following (Stankova’s) advice, which, in retrospect, I think was a much better decision,” Cairo said. 

Eventually, Cairo learned about the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, which she would eventually disprove, in a graduate-level math class taught by UC Berkeley assistant professor Ruixiang Zhang.

Cairo is one of many talented mathematicians who have gone through BMC’s programs. Other former BMC students include Oaz Nir, founding partner at Hudson River Trading, a quantitative trading firm with a net trading revenue of nearly $8 billion in 2024, and University of Toronto professor Gabriel Carroll, a four-time top-five scorer in the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, widely considered one of the most prestigious undergraduate math competitions in North America.

However, after 27 years, BMC has shut down its flagship program, BMC-Upper, due to “stringent” new campus background check requirements, according to a statement on BMC’s website. 

Adam Tooze:

Dr. White taught at a number of universities, including Wayne State, the University of Rochester, Wesleyan, Stanford and several campuses of the University of California system. In 1972, while he was a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, his career acquired an unusual footnote: He sued Edward M. Davis, the Los Angeles police chief, over the department’s practice of enrolling undercover officers as U.C.L.A. students so they could monitor the goings-on in classrooms and student organizations. He argued that the practice violated the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and privacy. The California Supreme Court, in 1975, ruled for Dr. White, reversing a lower court decision. “Given the delicate nature of academic freedom, we visualize a substantial probability that this alleged covert police surveillance will chill the exercise of First Amendment rights,” the court said.

Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman

College education is a key determinant of political attitudes in the United States and other countries. This paper highlights an important source of variation among college graduates: studying different academic fields has sizable effects on their political attitudes. Using surveys of about 300,000 students across 500 U.S. colleges, we find several results. First, relative to natural sciences, studying social sciences and humanities makes students more left-leaning, whereas studying economics and business makes them more right-leaning. Second, the rightward effects of economics and business are driven by positions on economic issues, whereas the leftward effects of humanities and social sciences are driven by cultural ones. Third, these effects extend to behavior: humanities and social sciences increase activism, while economics and business increase the emphasis on financial success. Fourth, the effects operate through academic content and teaching rather than socialization or earnings expectations. Finally, the implications are substantial. If all students majored in economics or business, the college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by about one-third. A uniform-major scenario, in which everyone studies the same field, would reduce ideological variance and the gender gap. Together, the results show that academic fields shape students’ attitudes and that field specialization contributes to political fragmentation.

Arne Duncan & Jorge Elorza:

Democrats can regain the educational (and moral) high ground with this federal program.

The latest Nation’s Report Card should be a national wake-up call.

Students at every grade level are slipping. Fourth graders struggle with basic reading. Eighth-grade science scores have declined. Twelfth graders are performing at generational lows in both reading and math. The cracks in our education system are forming early and widening across K-12.

This isn’t a post-2020 dip. The warning signs have been flashing for more than a decade. Since the early 2010s, student achievement has stagnated and then declined, especially for those furthest from opportunity. It’s what education writer Tim Daly calls an “education depression”: a prolonged, structural failure to prepare young people for what lies ahead.

At the same time, the crisis of lost instructional time is deepening. Students don’t need just better schools. They need more time on task: more learning hours, more individualized tutoring, more chances to catch up. During the pandemic, states used federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan Act to expand direct student supports. But those dollars have dried up. Unless states find new ways to sustain them, millions of students will be left even further behind.

One solution already exists: The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special education services and learning technology. For both current governors and gubernatorial candidates, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.

By opting in, a governor unlocks these resources for students in their state. Some Democratic leaders have hesitated, however, worried that the program could be seen as undermining public schools, since private scholarships are also eligible. But that misses the point.

Opting in doesn’t take a single dollar from state education budgets. It simply opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.

That’s why opting in isn’t just defensible, it’s a no-brainer.

Governors won’t control the SGOs directly, but they can shape their impact by promoting transparency and accountability, spotlighting those organizations aligned with their values, and ensuring that the students with the greatest needs are prioritized. The federal program, in essence, can help rebuild the supports that expired with ARPA.

The potential scale is significant. According to a recent analysis by Education Reform Now, even with just 30 percent taxpayer participation, the federal tax credit scholarship program could generate $3.1 billion in California, nearly $986 million in Illinois, and nearly $86 million in Rhode Island each year — funds that could expand tutoring, special services and learning time without reducing state education budgets by a penny.

——-

Robert Pondisco:

I’m not impressed. @arneduncan is now wringing his hands over our “education depression” and lost instructional time? Where was the concern about “student time on task” when he was pushing parents to boycott schools to “fight for stricter gun laws?”
theatlantic.com/education/arch…

Maggie Macintosh:

Human rights investigators have found that parents of struggling readers across Manitoba are being forced to take on “a full-time job” of advocacy so their children can become literate in local public schools.

The Manitoba Human Rights Commission released the long-awaited findings of its probe into literacy 101 education on Thursday — the penultimate day of Dyslexia Awareness Month 2025.

The 70-page document reveals that many schools are not using evidence-based methods to teach reading and lengthy wait times for clinical assessments are affecting overall literacy rates

——-

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Amy Hawkins:

A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped, the Guardian can reveal.

In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.

Murphy’s work focuses on Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim minority in China, being co-opted into forced labour programmes. Her research, and that of colleagues at the HKC, has been cited widely by western governments and the UN, and has helped to shape policies designed to root out goods made by forced labour from international supply chains. The Chinese government rejects accusations of forced labour, and says that Uyghur work programmes are for poverty alleviation.

In February, Murphy was told that her work on China, described previously by the university as “groundbreaking”, had to stop. The website for the Forced Labour Lab, Murphy’s small team of researchers at the HKC, was taken down – although several of the reports remain available in other, less visible parts of the university archive.

In October, the university said it was lifting the ban on Murphy’s work on China and forced labour, and apologised.

——

more.

Appalling. One of Bridget Phillipson’s first acts was to axe the part of our Free Speech Act which would expose foreign funding in our universities.

Zineb Riboua:

I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. I should say that I’m Berber, and I’ve always felt somewhat detached from that way of thinking. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.

Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.

In general, the perennial political challenge lies in identifying one’s true adversary. Each era masks its conflicts, and ours is even more difficult given the trickeries of language. Anglo-American conservatives, trained to debate policies and principles, are unprepared for this kind of politics. They face a movement that treats moral certainty as innocence or the pursuit of “real justice” and disarms opposition by framing power as compassion or the pursuit of “real common good”. Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage. He turns this moral framework into political practice, carrying it beyond culture and identity into economics and foreign affairs.

Algerian Revolution and Mamdani’s Language

Angel Au-Yeung:

“College is broken,” one Palantir post said. “Admissions are based on flawed criteria. Meritocracy and excellence are no longer the pursuits of educational institutions,” it said. The fellowship offered a path for high-school students to work full time at the company.

After deciding to apply, Zanini found out he got the fellowship at around the same time he learned of his admission to Brown University. Brown wouldn’t allow him to defer and he had also landed a full-ride scholarship through the Department of Defense.

“No one said to do the fellowship,” said Zanini, who turned 18 in September. “All of my friends, my teachers, my college counselor, it was a unanimous no.” His parents left the decision to him, and he decided to go with Palantir.

Zanini is one of more than 500 high-school graduates who applied for Palantir’s “Meritocracy Fellowship”—an experiment launched under Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s thesis that existing American universities are no longer reliable or necessary for training good workers.

Some fellows applied because college wasn’t interesting to them. Others applied after getting rejected from target schools.

Palantir is a data-analytics company that has become known lately for its government contracts, including with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Its work with immigration enforcement authorities and in other arenas has drawn criticism, but Karp and other executives have leaned into a pro-America ethos. The company also has many commercial clients.

Li Yuan:

In 1976, Song Ying swam for eight hours from Shenzhen, then a small fishing village, to Hong Kong, joining millions of mainland Chinese who risked their lives to escape hunger, indoctrination and repression under Communist rule.

Today, at 72, she is a New Yorker who voted for President Trump three times and voted early for Andrew M. Cuomo in Tuesday’s mayoral election. She views socialism as a curse she barely survived when she fled China and fears that Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the Democratic mayoral nominee, is a threat to her adopted home.

Ms. Song cannot understand the broad enthusiasm young people have for Mr. Mamdani, who leads the race.

He wants to raise taxes on the rich to fund programs like free child care, buses and city-owned grocery stores, which is vastly differentfrom the Marxist socialism that was practiced by China under Chairman Mao Zedong.

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more.

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Former President Obama called New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Saturday to praise his campaign and offer to be a “sounding board” in the future, sources confirmed to ABC News.

National Post:

Canada has paid billions upon billions to rectify past wrongs — figures that supersede what we spend on the military, and yet are still not enough.

Here’s a partial list: $23 billion to settle the lawsuit for the government not adequately covering the costs of Indigenous children in care; $1.72 billion to cover the cost of farming equipment that was promised to Saskatchewan First Nations 150 years ago but wasn’t provided; $14.9 billion to resolve special claims since 1973; $1.1 billion to settle a lawsuit by patients of federal Indigenous hospitals; $1 billion to an Alberta First Nation to adjust 19th-century treaty payments to modern dollars and $10 billion to another in Ontario, opening the doors to other nations doing the same.

And there are many more on the way. Some Manitoba First Nations are suing Manitoba Hydro for a share of the energy company’s profits, some Ontario First Nations are seeking $95 billion and the power to halt all development in Treaty 9 land without Indigenous consent. It all adds up to complete economic stagnation.

The Liberal government’s attitude of pulling punches and paying claims out the nose — and appointing judges who are open to the idea of more and more compensation — has swelled this into a problem of scales hard to comprehend. Oh, and when anyone points out the sheer cost of all this, they can expect to be accused of perpetuating the “colonial mindset.”

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more.

Michael McNair:

After using export pressure for political leverage, Beijing lifted the export restrictions and flooded the market, driving prices below what any unsubsidized Western producer could sustain. Despite being America’s only player in this critical industry, Molycorp couldn’t compete against state-backed rivals and went bankrupt, ensuring U.S. dependency on China.

The lesson was that China would weaponize critical supply chains when needed, then use subsidies to prevent Western competition from emerging. We spent years warning policymakers, but the response was always the same: “In America, markets decide.” They couldn’t grasp that subsidized competition makes market-based investment impossible

By Madeline Will

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s multi-million-dollar, multi-year effort aimed at making teachers more effective largely fell short of its goal to increase student achievement—including among low-income and minority students, a new study found.

This conclusion to an expensive chapter of teacher-evaluation reform shows the difficulty of making sweeping, lasting changes to teacher performance. The results also demonstrate the challenges of getting schools and teachers to embrace big changes, especially when state and local policies are in flux.

The evaluation of the program, released today, was conducted by the RAND Corporation with the American Institutes for Research and was funded by the Gates Foundation.

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more.

Gabe Kaminsky:

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office that works with prosecutors to pursue drug cartels, war crimes, and money laundering is shifting resources to investigate antifa funding, as federal officials implement directives from President Donald Trump labeling it a “domestic terrorist organization.”

The office, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), has broad legal powers and works closely with Customs and Border Protection, the Justice Department, and intelligence agencies. It is one of many offices launched in the years that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to address national security threats, and it employs more than 7,100 special agents, spread across 220 U.S. cities and 53 countries.

In recent weeks, law enforcement officials at HSI have begun to look into left-wing funding networks, including fundraising platforms that Republicans have said are used by antifa-aligned groups, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials at HSI, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), are also looking into how antifa might recruit activists, the people said.

———-

antifa: grok, claude, openai, gemini, perplexity. Also britannica, grokipedia and wikipedia.

Office of Literacy, Office of the State Superintendent, Barb Novak:

Reporting for Wis. Stat. §§ 115.39(4)(g) Administrators and Educators DPI is required to report (for the 2023 – 24 and 2024 – 25 school years), the number of individuals who completed the mandatory professional development training under 2023 Wisconsin Act 20, section 27 (2), which requires teachers of 5K through grade 3 and principals and reading specialists serving students in 5K through grade 3 to complete professional development training that meets the requirements of 2023 Wisconsin Act 20, section 27(2). Teachers must enroll in the professional development training prior to July 1, 2025. Administrators must complete the training prior to July 1, 2025.

An online survey was sent to the superintendent or equivalent of each district or independent charter school that serves students in 5K through grade 3. Recipients received a unique link and had approximately six weeks to reply. Reminders were sent. Seventy-three percent (314 of 430) of districts and charter schools responded.

2023 Wisconsin Act 20, section 27 (2) also requires professional development training for University of Wisconsin System faculty or academic staff member who teach a course that includes curriculum in reading instruction designed for an individual who intends to apply for a license issued by the DPI to teach a grade from kindergarten to 3, to be a principal, or to be a reading specialist has received the professional. The training must be complete by July 1, 2025

Karen Vaites:

This week, the Massachusetts House passed legislation that would give its department of education – known as DESE – the right to mandate use of state-approved curriculum.

A similar bill failed last year, yet Massachusetts outcomes have continued to slide:

In October, the Boston Globe proclaimed a “Northern Nosedive” in reading scores, and finally, Massachusetts leaders are willing to touch a third rail with curriculum mandates. Most states – and especially blue states – honor local control norms when it comes to curriculum, enabling districts to use whatever they please.

Massachusetts is on to something. Curriculum reform was the cornerstone of literacy work in Louisiana and Tennessee, two of the three states with the biggesr reading gains since 2019.

States are looking to replicate this Southern Surge, and Massachusetts – a longtime bellwether state for education policy – is already a reform pacesetter.

As an advocate for curriculum improvements in US schools, I’m cautiously cheering this bill. It’s necessary to combat the entrenchment of poor programs.

But I’m sounding some alarms, too.

Balanced Literacy Remains Rooted in Massachusetts

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more.

Related: MTEL & “Foundations of Reading”

——-

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Catriona Stewart

We can have the best curriculum in the world – spoiler alert, we don’t – but if pupils are disrupting their learning and that of the well-behaved majority, then everything else is pointless. 

What’s preventing this from being tackled? I think there are broadly three main reasons. 

READ MORE Teaching is supposed to be hard – education expert 

First, there’s systemic and institutional denial that there’s even a problem in the first place. This permeates governmental, local authority and school leadership level, and is present even amongst some teachers – “they behave for me” – for whom poor behaviour and low standards are just normal. 

This is driven by ideology. The system is based on trauma-informed and restorative practices. Not only are these not working, they’re causing immense damage. To challenge those ideological sacred cows is to admit their ineffectiveness and we don’t have brave or visionary leadership prepared to do that, beyond the occasional outlier like [head teacher of Berwickshire High School] Bruce Robertson. 

Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, is part of the problem, as they too are committed to this flawed and damaging approach to behaviour that’s wreaking such havoc in our schools.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

A group of French people gathered around the heart of the Marquette University campus the morning of Oct. 28. They were there to take in something faithful former residents had flocked to more than 600 years ago and an ocean away. 

The group hailed from Chasse-sur-Rhône, the small French city where the Joan of Arc chapel began its life as a place of worship circa 1420. It served the city’s people for hundreds of years before falling into disrepair. The Gothic chapel was eventually reconstructed at Marquette in 1964 and has become a symbol of the campus’ Catholic identity.

The French delegation’s visit was the last stop on a transatlantic tour retracing the chapel’s journey from the 7,000-person city south of Lyon to Milwaukee.

“In a way, it’s a symbolic reconstruction,” said Jennifer Vanderheyden, a Marquette associate professor of French who teaches a course on Joan of Arc and helped lead the delegation on campus. “They want to reconstruct this link (between Chasse-sur-Rhône and Milwaukee).”

……

Marc Rotjman, a former president of Racine’s J.I. Case Co., and his wife, Lillian, bought the chapel in 1962 and later donated it to Marquette. They already had a connection to Marquette: They’d given a $200,000 collection of Old Masters paintings to the university in 1958.

Brandon Warmke:

I’m sorry to say, however, that we have defaulted on our contract with the American public. For starters, universities regularly engage in illegal race- and sex-based hiring. You know it, and I know it. Hiring committees often decide from the outset to hire a woman or racial minority. Deans often refuse to make hires if the candidate does not contribute to “diversity.” Some people deny this ever happens; they say that although affirmative action is crucially important, no one has ever been hired because of his or her race or sex. I’ll let you be the judge of whether that is plausible.

And it isn’t just hiring. Recently, it came to light that the Harvard Law Review rejected 85% of submissions using a racial rubric. Remarkably, the student editors often cited demographic reasons to accept or reject papers. “We have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors,” one editor claimed. Another complained that an article cited only “nine women and one non-binary scholar,” while another criticized a paper for only using the word Black seven times.

I ask you: Is this how the Harvard Law Reviewshould be run? How did it come to be run this way in the first place?

Furthermore, universities regularly discriminate, not just on the basis of race and sex, but also ideology.

We know, for example, that academics discriminate against conservatives. How do we know this? You can just ask faculty, and they’ll tell you. According to a survey conducted by Yoel Inbar, 37% of psychology faculty say they would discriminate against a conservative in a hiring decision, a finding replicated in other studies and confirmed by any conservative in academia.

To nobody’s surprise, this ideological discrimination extends to graduate admissions. For example, in 2020–21, the English department at the University of Chicago announced that it was “accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.” If you just wanted to get a PhD to study Chaucer or Shakespeare, sorry, you were out of luck.

Academics also engage in a kind of implicit discrimination in the way they construct job ads, which are often written to exclude conservatives, libertarians and centrists. Examples are legion, but consider a recent ad from UC Berkeley seeking a tenure track professor who works on “abolition studies, anti-racism and anti-blackness, social inequality, racial socialization, racial capitalism, trans/queer/feminist theory, structural intersectionality, social justice and structural change, and critical disability studies.”

——

more.

Erin McGroarty

For years, the couple chose the high-deductible plans in order to secure a more affordable monthly premium. In recent years it’s cost the two about $300 a month. Without the tax credits, that monthly cost would more than double to around $800. 

The expanded tax credits had saved the family enough that LaCasse-Ford and her husband were able to create a comfortable savings account. If health care costs go up for her husband, those higher monthly premium payments will quickly eat through the family’s savings, she said. 

“All of the unknowns are very stressful,” she said.

How did we get here?

The Affordable Care Act became law in 2010 under President Obama. 

The framework for premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans began in 2014. Since then, the federal government capped how much plan holders pay for their insurance premiums, limiting the cost at a certain percentage of their annual income. The government would pay for the rest by providing a tax credit to make up the difference. 

In 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress and President Joe Biden expanded the premium tax credits to entice more Americans to be insured. The plan worked: The number of people with health insurance ballooned from around 11 million to over 24 million people.

Without the enhanced tax credits, some plan holders will see their insurance costs double or triple. 

Andrew Sullivan:

One of the more maddening aspects of the rise of wokeness in the last decade was how some of the younger advocates for “social justice” responded to criticism. “Read a book,” they’d tell me, and roll their eyes. I was twice their age, had relevant degrees from Oxford and Harvard, but I could obviously only believe what I believed because I had never “read a book.” No discussion was possible until I had “educated” myself — a task they refused to expend any “emotional labor” on. A few exasperated huffs, a slight panic in their angry eyes, and they were gone.

The same almost-Pavlovian response would arise during the BLM madness if you challenged for a millisecond the idea — shared by 44 percent of liberals in 2019 — that cops were gunning down over a thousand unarmed black men a year (the empirical answer was 29 — compared to 44 white men). Was I not aware of the fact of white supremacy, the self-evident systems and structures that Jon Stewart was an instant expert in? Or that sex and race were entirely social constructions? Sheesh. What rock had I been hiding under? 

Support the Dish for less than $1/week

It wasn’t the differing opinion that upset me. One of my queerest character traits is that I love differing opinions. It was the assumption that none of this was opinion at all, but merely established empirical fact — of which I was blissfully unaware, probably because I was a bad-faith bigot, or had never picked up a book. This absolute certainty was also generally correlated with higher levels of education — just as “liberals” and “very liberals” were far more likely to have a college degree than those to their right. Over time, my friends began to wither among the educated classes, especially the newly minted and humorless “queers”, as I gravitated to normies, who had some strong views, were open to some others, and enjoyed a good chat and smoke sesh. 

A new study tells me little I didn’t suspect already about my educational peers and how this strange correlation emerged between higher education and epistemological certainty. But it does prove something empirically important.

Wall Street Journal:

The definition of an elite education has been undergoing revision of late, as top universities from Harvard to Columbia to Northwestern have too often betrayed their commitment to free inquiry on campus. A new ranking system aims to better capture excellence in key tenets of a college education.

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

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

Christopher Rufo

It appears that hackers have taken over the University of Pennsylvania computer systems, calling the college a “dogshit elitist institution full of woke retards” and threatening to release evidence of its discriminatory admissions practices.

Bill Bishop:

This is a recording of my October 31, 2025 discussion with Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li about their excellent and important new book The Highest Exam – How the Gaokao Shapes China.

From a synopsis of the book:

In The Highest Exam, authors Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau present a sweeping, data-rich account of China’s exam-centered education system — a “centralized, hierarchical tournament” culminating in the Gaokao, a grueling three-day college entrance exam. Drawing on decades of empirical research and lived experience, Jia and Li — both leading economists who took the Gaokao and later taught at top universities in Beijing, Hong Kong, and the U.S. — reveal how this state-managed system shapes education, labor markets, political legitimacy, and social values.

Ray Mendez:

We devote this blog to Mr. Ray Mendez, parent of a Madison public school student to Superintendent Joe Gothard and the school board: 

The head-stomping at Madison Westwas not a “fight.” It was a near-fatal attack. Madison Police arrested three teens; two are accused of first-degree reckless injury and battery, and a third faces battery and disorderly-conduct charges. Police said the victim required hospitalization. 

This was predictable. I and others warned you for years that your policies, culture, and cowardice would end in blood. Weapons are confiscated every week. Fights and stabbings barely make the news now. And still you hide behind silence and word games while children bleed. 

With the resources you control, this failure is not negligence. It is criminal. I should not have to spend my own money (over my taxes) and time on attorneys to make schools safe for my child and yours. You waste time on optics instead of action. Each of you own the escalation of violence in schools that will lead to more bloodshed and worse.

——-

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Gina Raimondo

She also added that “a lesson we can learn from China is that they invest in the talent… whereas we don’t have an effective workforce system in this country, we incentivize attendance… we send everyone to college [and] people don’t have skills for jobs. China is incredibly intentional… There is a lot we can learn from China.”

——-

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Senator Rand Paul:

The documents I released today reveal U.S. intelligence officials were in contact with Dr. Ralph Baric — a collaborator of WIV’s Dr. Zhengli Shi – years before the pandemic.

In September 2015, the CIA and ODNI reached out to Baric to discuss a “possible project” on “coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.” Less than two months later, Baric and Shi published “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” research funded through USAID’s PREDICT program and NIH grants, widely acknowledged as gain-of-function.

In 2018, Baric and Shi were again listed as collaborators on EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal to DARPA, which sought to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus, the same feature that later appeared in SARS-CoV-2.

In January 2020, Baric was summoned by ODNI’s Biological Sciences Experts Group to brief officials and later shared slides titled “Origins,” discussing a possible accidental lab release at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a hypothesis that Fauci’s circle publicly dismissed as a conspiracy.

Wall Street Journal:

As epiphanies go, this is welcome. Mr. Gates, in his advocacy, has been a leading promoter of the view that a warming climate is an existential crisis that demands urgent political action. His 2021 book has the nuanced title, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” Without innovation, he wrote, “we cannot keep the earth livable.” The effect on humans “will in all likelihood be catastrophic.”

Now, on the cusp of the latest COP30 climate conclave in Brazil next month, Mr. Gates offers different advice. An essay released on his website promises “three tough truths about climate,” the first of which is that rising temperatures are “a serious problem” but “will not be the end of civilization.”

Wait—this is a hard truth? You mean humanity isn’t doomed? The only people for whom this is a “tough” message are the climate zealots who remain committed to the idea that rising temperatures are a totalizing emergency. They say this to intimidate politicians into giving them billions of dollars in green subsidies, along with other powers to remake the modern economy and society.

Mr. Gates now sounds like Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist” whose writing often runs in these pages. Mr. Lomborg has been arguing for years that while warming temperatures are a reality, the world’s poor in particular face far more urgent challenges. He believes, as these columns have also long argued, that the best way to cope with rising temperatures is through innovation, adaptation, and policies that continue to spread economic growth and prosperity.

Phoebe Weston:

Aurora Nikula, 5, is having a normal day at her nursery. She is making a cake out of sand and mud, adding in make-believe carrots, potatoes and meat. “It’s overcooked,” she says as she splashes water in, then adds another dollop of sand. “More sugar, it tastes better,” she says. A handful of mud goes in, and the dish evolves into a chocolate cake.

Aki Sinkkonen, a principal scientist with the Natural Resources Institute Finland, is watching. He’s also very interested in Aurora’s cake, but for different reasons. “Perfect,” he says, admiring the way she is mixing soil, sand and leaves and then putting it on her face. “She’s really getting her hands in it.”

To a hygiene-conscious kindergarten, this could be a problem, but at Humpula daycare centre in Lahti, north of Helsinki, children are encouraged to get muddy. Across Finland, 43 daycare centres have been awarded a total of €1m (£830,000) to rewild yards and to increase children’s exposure to the microscopic biodiversity – such as bacteria and fungi – that lives in nature.

We already know that access to the outdoors is important for children and their development. But this study goes one step further. It is part of a growing body of research linking two layers of biodiversity. There is the outer layer – the more familiar vision of biodiversity, made up of soil, water, plants, animals and microbial life, that lives in the forest, playground (or any other environment). And then there is the inner layer: the biodiversity that lives within and upon the human body, including the gut, skin and airways.

Max Rivera

To millions of American families who pour their money, their free time and their hopes into travel baseball, Striker Pence is the ultimate success story.

Standing 6’6”, the 16-year-old Pence’s imposing frame and fire-breathing fastball — which has been clocked at about 100 miles per hour — have drawn comparisons to Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson. He’s seen as a potential top pick in a future Major League Baseball draft.

Daniel Buck:

Public school teachers think we only spend ~$7,500 per student

The real number is ~$15,000. Approaching ~$30K in major cities.

How can we have an honest conversation about American schools when even TEACHERS are this misinformed?!

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending practices. This despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Scott Bauer:

Wisconsin became the 36th state to limit cellphones and other electronic devices in school Friday, when its Democratic governor signed a bill requiring districts to prohibit phone use during class time.

The measure passed with bipartisan support, though some Democrats in the Legislature said controlling gun violence should be a higher priority than banning cellphones. 

In signing the bill, Gov. Tony Evers said he believes that decisions like this should be made at the local level, but “my promise to the people of Wisconsin is to always do what’s best for our kids, and that obligation weighs heavily on me in considering this bill.”

Evers said he was “deeply concerned” about the impacts of cellphone and social media use on young people. He said cellphones could be “a major distraction from learning, a source of bullying, and a barrier to our kids’ important work of just being a kid.”

Nik DeCosta-Klipa:

Hitting the books: Often, when Beacon Hill lawmakers pass something unanimously, it indicates there’s little pushback against the legislation. But not this week. On Wednesday, the Massachusetts House passed a sweeping early literacy reform bill by a vote of 155-0, despite opposition from the state’s largest teacher’s union. As the legislation moves to the Senate, here’s what to know about the debate:

• The backdrop: Beacon Hill leaders said the bill is needed to combat “troubling trends” in reading. While a report earlier this yearfound that Massachusetts schoolchildren lead the nation in reading, scores still lag behind pre-pandemic levels. The latest MCAS results show that nearly 60% of students in grades 3 through 8 are not meeting English language arts expectations.
• What’s in the bill: Supporters say about a third of Massachusetts school districts are using outdated reading instruction techniques. The bill would push them to adopt “evidence-based” methods. It’s part of a larger “science of reading” movement that focuses on things like sounding out words (aka phonics), reading comprehension and fluency — as opposed to “three-cueing,” a controversial method many states are moving away from. (NPR has more here on what makes the “science of reading” different.) If passed, the House’s bill would give the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education the power to set K-3 reading curricula based on that framework. It would also require DESE to provide online materials and free training to help teachers adapt to the new methods.
• On the other hand: Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, told WBUR’s Cici Yu that his members have big concerns about limiting the tools they can use “to address the needs of a very diverse student body.” Page said some reading specialists say three-cueing — which uses photos and sentence structure to help students identify words they don’t know — can be helpful for certain kinds of learners. And he argued that the “science of reading” movement has yet to shift outcomes in every state (though some have made progress). The state’s second-largest teachers union, AFT Massachusetts, didn’t take a stance on the bill, according to its president, Jessica Tang. But it did push for several small changes, like a successful amendment to loosen a full ban on three-cueing. Page also applauded that change, but added: “We still have a real issue with having a very strict mandate on what kind of curriculum to use.”
• What’s next: Page and Tang plan to press for further changes to give individual districts more leeway, as the bill moves to the Senate. A spokesperson for Senate President Karen Spilka said their chamber plans to review the bill and that “members are very much engaged in improving literacy outcomes.”

Neetu Arnold:

Here’s why the Massachusetts Teacher Association is against a major reading reform bill:

1) Teachers would lose autonomy over curriculum

2) Oppose 3-cueing ban

3) Skeptical of Science of Reading until it works everywhere

Andrew Jack:

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, 57 per cent of 10-year-olds in these regions could not read and understand a simple story, and this ‘learning poverty’ worsened afterwards to 70 per cent, according to some studies.

The new analysis highlighted that one-third of children are taught to read in a language they do not speak or understand well. It argued improved literacy required either switching basic education into the home language or spending much more time and intensive support to develop their skills.

It also called for a more systemic focus on the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in the spoken language; understanding phonics, or the relationships between letters and sounds; and reading fluency, comprehension and writing.

Primary school enrolment in lower-income countries has risen sharply, notably during the 1990s, according to World Bank data. 

The report did not cover higher-income countries, where literacy rates are much higher.

Todd Truitt

But what about the money? Here’s Aldeman:

According to the NEA, New Jersey spent $24,831 per student in 2023-24 while Louisiana spent $17,541 and Mississippi spent just $12,490. In other words, I think Mississippi and Louisiana have a strong case to be made that their schools are performing considerably better than New Jersey’s are at a much lower cost.  

Mississippi and Louisiana Are Outperforming Virginia

You find similar results for Virginia in the demographic subgroup data: both
Mississippi and Louisiana are outperforming Virginia on NAEP for the least advantaged subgroups and the most advantaged subgroups. Further, Mississippi spends less money per pupil than Virginia (26% less per pupil) while Louisiana spends a comparable amount per pupil as Virginia.

Virginia also has school districts achieving results like in Mississippi and
Louisiana. Wise County Public Schools (WCPS) spent $11,517 per student (37% less than the state average) and had Virginia’s third-best overall standardized test pass rate in the 2023-24 school year. WCPS hadn’t ranked lower than eighth since 2013. WCPS is in a Southwest Virginia county that has a high poverty rate, suffers from a meth epidemic and has a high incarceration rate. Educational leaders there attribute WCPS’ success in part to its focus on setting high expectations at the local level.

more.

David Blaska:

All committed under the un-watchful eye of Superintendent Underly, a MAGA-hating progressive bought by the Democrat(ic) party (to the tune of $1,141,632 — 80% of her total campaign funding), supported by the teachers union, and endorsed by The Capital Times itself. As the news outlet reported:  

The WI Department of Public Instruction investigated more than 200 Wisconsin teachers, aides, substitutes, and administrators from 2018 to 2023 who were accused of sexual misconduct or groomingbehaviors toward students, but the department never reported those incidents to the public. … Not surprisingly, some legislative Republicans are attempting to use the results of the newspaper’s probe to make political points.

Those darn Republicans!

Make political points, will they?! One would hope so! Because her office IS and ought to be po-lit-i-cal. Supt. Underly holds a constitutional office elected by the people on a statewide ballot. Endorsed by her predecessor at the Dept. of Public Instruction, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. The office may be officially non-partisan (Wink, wink!), but it is certainly political. Now watch The Capital Times dance around the consequences of its own reportage:

Some have used the Cap Times’ revelations to call for Underly to resign. But this is about so much more than plain old politics. It’s a matter of the public having confidence that the officials in charge of our schools are working to keep children safe and share with the public how they’re doing so.

———

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

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Sara Randazzo and Heather Gillers

The university is an acute example of the financial woes plaguing higher education. Even before President Trump’s federal funding cuts, many schools were already stretched by years of competitive spending. Their budget struggles are in many cases more than a decade in the making, and it’s not just far-flung state universities or D-list private colleges suffering.

As schools scramble to make cutbacks, they face broader questions about what kind of university they can be in this new era of financial constraint.

“Our president kept saying we’ll get ‘sharper,’” said Gabe Winant, an associate history professor at UChicago. “How does something get sharper? You file away at it.”

In the years leading up to the pandemic, low interest rates fueled borrowing binges across higher education to build snazzy academic buildings and dorms. UChicago and other schools also pushed into private equity and other alternative assets, hoping for big returns but tying up money in long-term investments even as cash grew tight.

Jill LePore & David Leonhardt:

Leonhardt: Do you think that what is often described as woke is a real problem, as opposed to merely a problem that the right has managed — to use another word the left likes — weaponize?

Lepore: No, I think — I am in the belly of that beast. I’ve been teaching at Harvard since 2003, and something really changed on campus around 2014. I often talk with colleagues who are close friends about this: What was it that actually changed it?

Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak, or a thing you can say about something. This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial to the public shaming stuff. I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.

Do I still deeply believe in the mission of higher education and that this is an institution whose value to the world in terms of its research and scholarship and the ambitions of education that it stands on? I think those are crucially important. But I think it just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about.

I think the place I put blame is quite different from the places that the right would put blame. I think the corporatization of higher education has been a real problem, so I have a different understanding of what has gone wrong with higher education. I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.

Leonhardt: Yeah, and it’s hard to win people over when you’re making them feel that way. I want to get back to the Constitution before we close. While I was reading your book, I made a list in the back pages. I hope you don’t mind that I was writing in a copy of your book about the constitutional amendments that I thought we needed today, and I ——

…..

Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another”

——

more.

Nate Honeycutt

When a scholar is targeted for their expression, the story rarely ends when the headlines fade. The formal investigations wrap up and the social media outrage may die down, but for many, the experience marks a permanent shift in how they think, speak, and interact with others in public. Such cases have profound implications for academic freedom and the state of campus free speech in higher education.

According to FIRE’s Sanctioned Scholars report, nearly three-quarters of the scholars we asked said they would not change anything they said or did that led to being targeted. But many also said that, in other ways, they are now altering their speech.

Brian Jabarian:

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly used for written deliverables. This has created demand for distinguishing human-generated text from AI-generated text at scale, e.g., ensuring assignments were completed by students, product reviews written by actual customers, etc. A decision-maker aiming to implement a detector in practice must consider two key statistics: the False Negative Rate (FNR), which corresponds to the proportion of AI-generated text that is falsely classified as human, and the False Positive Rate (FPR), which corresponds to the proportion of human-written text that is falsely classified as AI-generated. We evaluate three leading commercial detectors—Pangram, OriginalityAI, GPTZero—and an open-source one —RoBERTa—on their performance in minimizing these statistics using a large corpus spanning genres, lengths, and models. Commercial detectors outperform open-source, with Pangram achieving near-zero FNR and FPR rates that remain robust across models, threshold rules, ultra-short passages, “stubs” ( 50 words) and ’humanizer’ tools. A decision-maker may weight one type of error (Type I vs. Type II) as more important than the other. To account for such a preference, we introduce a framework where the decision-maker sets a policy cap—a detector-independent metric reflecting tolerance for false positives or negatives. We show that Pangram is the only tool to satisfy a strict cap (FPR 0.005) without sacrificing accuracy. This framework is especially relevant given the uncertainty surrounding how AI may be used at different stages of writing, where certain uses may be encouraged (e.g., grammar correction) but may be difficult to separate from other uses.

Paul Vallas:

For decades, Chicago has turned a blind eye to a silent epidemic that has harmed generation after generation: Lead contamination in drinking water. The science is settled — no level of lead exposure is safe. Lead damages brain development, stunts growth, and causes serious problems with learning, behavior, hearing, and speech. Studies consistently link lead exposure with lower IQ scores, reduced attention spans, and diminished school performance.

A 2024 analysis by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that 68 percent of Chicago children under age six live in households with tap water containing detectable levels of lead. Their findings, based on 38,000 home water tests conducted between 2016 and 2023, underscore how widespread this crisis truly is.

Researchers have also found compelling connections between lead exposure and violent crime. Economist Rick Nevin’s landmark 2007 study revealed strong correlations between childhood lead exposure and later violent offenses across nine Western countries. A 2012 review in *Environment International* confirmed this trend, showing that declines in airborne lead emissions have consistently aligned with reductions in urban violence. Amherst College economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes credited the U.S. phaseout of leaded gasoline during the 1990s with reducing violent crime by more than 50 percent.

While we cannot attribute all social ills to one toxin, it would be equally irresponsible to ignore overwhelming evidence that environmental remediation directly improves public safety and community well-being. Clean air and clean water are not abstract “costs” of government — they are the foundation of public health and opportunity.‍