Carl Campanile:

New York is spending more on education than any state in the nation despite shrinking schools and 12% fewer students than 15 years ago, an eye-opening new report found.

Empire State enrollment could see another double-digit decrease by 2031 as population growth stagnates and birth rates plummet — which would mean New York is shedding students faster than anywhere in the US except California and New Mexico, according to the report by budget watchdog the Citizens Budget Commission. 

The reckoning will force policymakers to consider controversial decisions: closing or merging schools and reducing staff or continuing to prop up facilities with a dearth of students, the report said.

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Value Proposition Tracker

New York State and its localities also collect more from taxpayers than any other state and spend the third most per capita in the country. While this delivers the nation’s highest average per-student spending, it produces middling performance. The State’s broad and deep social safety net has been critical to supporting economic opportunity, but outcomes have not always kept pace with spending.

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2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“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?

Shannon Whitwort:

“It’s not all of them, but it’s always them,” is something I hear constantly. This means that every time you hear about some sort of antisocial behavior, the perpetrator is almost always a black person acting like a fool.

My kids aren’t doing that, and I cannot imagine under what circumstances they would, given they know the consequences my wife and I would impose as parents. I talk to my children, especially my son, about being situationally aware and leaving a scene well before anything bad develops. 

Similarly, I teach at Milwaukee Lutheran Middle & High School, where 97 percent of the student body is inner-city, economically disadvantaged black kids. The entire staff, from the principal, the teachers and the counselors to the people in the lunch kitchen are constantly talking to our students about following a more Christ-like life, making better choices. We teach them that grown, mature people don’t fly off the handle at the slightest provocation or resort to violence or other foolishness.

Our school is not immune from these problems, but I personally believe that constant messaging does make a difference with most of our students. I spent over 22 years as a litigator, with a number of those years being a prosecutor or in criminal defense. I believe this experience in the criminal justice system provides me with insight into how people are motivated to make the decisions that wind them up in the system.

Scott Niederjohn, Ph.D

Interestingly, I first met Mark in the offices of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), the predecessor to the Badger Institute. At the time, I was an economics doctoral student, and Mark was a professor of education at UW-Milwaukee. That chance meeting changed both of our lives, but especially mine. Over the years, we went on to publish three books, more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, countless op-eds, a few economics curricular materials, and six Badger Institute reports (and Mark co-authored another five studies for the Institute as well). More importantly, I found a mentor and one of my closest friends.

Mark was an absolute giant in the field of economic education. He authored or co-authored much of the core curriculum developed by the Council for Economic Education that K-12 teachers continue to use today. His curriculum vitae was among the most impressive you will ever see, with more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

Mark was also a unicorn — the rare professor in a major school of education who championed free markets and school choice. He advocated for phonics-based reading instruction, a reduced role for Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction in teacher licensing, market-oriented economic education for all Wisconsin students, and expanded educational choice.

Alison Somin:

A Washington Post essay highlights an important concept but falls short.

‘Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan famously wrote in his dissent in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. It would take decades to dismantle the Jim Crow system of racial segregation challenged in that case. Through those years, Harlan’s vision of colorblindness shone as a moral North Star to the civil rights movement.

Yet recently, the Washington Post published a storytitled, “How ‘colorblind Constitution’ went from conservative notion to legal pillar.” Its subheadline reads: “The once-obscure concept has been cited in recent landmark Supreme Court cases, but some …

Adele Uphaus:

The Spotsylvania School Board on Monday voted against implementing pre-hire drug testing of employees, but also voted against postponing discussion of the topic indefinitely.

A motion to develop a policy for implementing drug testing of new hires and rehires who work directly with students in any capacity failed by a vote of 4-to-3, as did a substitute motion to consider implementing testing only of new hires and rehires who work with elementary and special education students.

Board members Larry DiBella (Berkeley), Rich Lieberman (Lee Hill), and Lorita Daniels (Salem) supported both motions, while Belen Rodas (Chancellor), Carol Medawar (Courtland), and Jennifer Craig-Ford (Battlefield), joined board chair Megan Jackson (Livingston) in voting against them.

“I do struggle with this,” Jackson said. “As a parent, I was shocked to learn that we don’t do this. But from a school board member lens, it doesn’t seem like the best idea…  I think the sentiment is good, but I think we have also learned that your knee-jerk reactions are not always in the best interest of the school division.”

Adam Goldstein & Greg Lukianoff:

Canada is steadily transforming free expression from a right into a privilege — one that regulators, tribunals, and government officials can withdraw whenever they decide another interest matters more

Maybe. But two things happened at once here, and both are bad.

First, the categorical safe harbor is gone — so whether a sermon or a quoted verse is protected now depends on context, audience, and how a prosecutor reads the room. Second, in the horse-trading that got the bill through Parliament, the government also dropped the longstanding requirement that the Attorney General personally sign off before a hate-speech charge can proceed. In the absence of these two barriers, clergy and ordinary believers now get to wonder, in advance, whether saying the quiet part of their faith out loud will be read as hatred by someone with the power to charge them.

American law has a name for what happens when people must guess what they are allowed to say and, because of the uncertainty, end up not saying anything at all: a chilling effect. We have little doubt Canadians will feel that chill, even in wildfire season.

There’s more. Close behind the Combatting Hate Bill, a new Ottawa bylaw taking effect August 1 will mandate a 50-meter “bubble zone” (that’s about 164 freedom feet) around schools, hospitals, places of worship, daycares, and care homes. Inside the bubble, protest is simply banned. Not “protest that blocks the door,” or “protest that disrupts planned events,” but any protest at all. A councillor actually proposed narrowing the mandate to only prohibit conduct that actually obstructs access, and the motion lost. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Canada’s analogue to the ACLU, warned that two people standing on a sidewalk reading a pamphlet about peace would now be in violation of this bill. This is an intentionally broad blanket ban on expression that was once protected in Canada.

Ed Zagorski:

The Watertown Unified School District has some work to do, according to student and parent surveys reviewed last week by School Perceptions Senior Research Director Derek Gottlieb and the WUSD Policy Committee.

Out of 2,061 surveys sent to students, 1,393 responded, representing a 68% return rate.

Students’ overall satisfaction with District schools was 5.91 (on a scale of 0-10), down from 6.06 last year.

Gottlieb said 2,935 parent surveys were sent out and 409 parents responded, resulting in a 14% response rate.

WUSD parents were surveyed on a scale of 0-10 regarding their likelihood to recommend schools to friends and family members. Eleven percent of parents responded extremely unlikely, while another 11% responded extremely likely. Twenty-two percent were neutral, bringing the overall score to 5.61. This is a 16.3% decrease from last year’s score of 6.74.

Regarding the school district’s educational excellence, the parent rating was 3.07 in 2026 (on a scale of 1-5), down 8.1% from 3.34 last year.

On another question, “The school board is doing what it takes to make our district successful,” parents scored 2.08 in 2026. This score is a 24.9% decrease from last year’s 2.72.

———

315 Watertown 4k-3rd graders scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Susan Svrluga, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel:

Those critics want the elite university to follow Harvard in fighting federal ultimatums. Yale has been accused of racial discrimination in medical school admissions.

University President Maurie McInnis publicly acknowledged last week that the school was in talks with the Justice Department, which concluded that Yale’s medical school discriminated based on race, favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian ones. Critics say the department cherry-picked data and used flawed legal arguments, but the investigation expanded to Yale’s law school and undergraduate campus.

Austin Berg:

Just 27 students are enrolled at Frederick Douglass Academy, which was built to serve more than 1,000 kids.

Frederick Douglass learned to read in secret.

He understood from a young age that literacy was, in his words, “the pathway from slavery to freedom.”

But at Frederick Douglass Academy High School in Chicago, the school is so under-enrolled that Illinois cannot publicly report how many of its students read proficiently. There simply aren’t enough tested students to publish the results without risking their anonymity.1

Douglass Academy has 47 classrooms built to serve 1,008 kids. But only 27 students are enrolled there. 

At 3% utilization, it is the emptiest big-city school in the country, according to Chicago Policy Center research.2

Meanwhile, CPS personnel records show Douglass currently employs 28 full-time staff members.3

In a district that once served nearly 600,000 studentsand now serves 312,000, and where one-third of school buildings sit at least half empty, Douglass illustrates the consequences of poor facilities planning: fewer opportunities for students and higher costs for taxpayers.

If a student in Illinois misses more than 10% of school days in a year, they are considered chronically absent. At Douglass, 100% of seniors are chronically absent.

And while the state couldn’t report test scores for the most recent school year, not a single 11th-grade student at Douglass could read or perform math at grade level in the 2023-2024 school year.

This isn’t due to underfunding. In the 2023-24 school year, Douglass spent $93,000 per student.

The real issue is simple: Research has long shown that very small high schools struggle to provide the breadth of academic courses and extracurricular opportunities available at larger schools.

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More.

Sean Stevens:

Both sides do it, but not in the same way.

“Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature,” said the late Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Philip Kerby. “Sex is a weak second.”

The data say Kerby was right.

FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database has now documented 2,057 attempts to prevent or punish campus expression since 1998, and one fact immediately stands out: censorship campaigns are remarkably bipartisan.

Of the total, 985 attempts came from the right of the expression while 952 came from the left. The rest came from both, from actors whose ideology could not be identified, or they involved non-ideological disputes.

But while censorship efforts from the left and the right occur with similar frequency, they take fundamentally different forms.

Efforts from the left typically originate on campus and are usually led by students, while efforts from the right typically originate off campus and are usually led by activist groups, public officials, or wealthy donors. Efforts from the left tend to use op-eds, social media, and online petitions to get their message across while efforts from the right threaten budgets, launch investigations, and demand resignations.

Another major difference is that efforts from the left tend to be more successful — about 50% succeed, compared to only about 40% from the right.

——

Greg Lukianoff

Some usual suspects who like to pretend things aren’t that bad on campus saw the data—showing that roughly 70% of students think professors should be reported for saying “offensive” things—and immediately countered with, “Oh, they’re only saying that about when professors sexually harass them!”

No, they aren’t. The students mean forbidden opinions even if they are, in fact, correct.

I featured the NDSU data a while back but thanks to Stu for sharing it more broadly.

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More:

There are so many corners of higher education that have zero interest in helping themselves regain credibility.

Mark Cuban:

But wait. North Carolina seems to know it’s not the perfect deal.
On July 10, 2026, the plan’s board voted to hand the job back to Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC. The new contract starts January 1, 2028 and runs through December 31, 2031, with two optional one-year extensions. Until then, Aetna keeps running the plan through the end of 2027.
What we know: Blue Cross won both jobs this time — medical administrator and pharmacy benefit manager, replacing CVS Caremark. The state expects roughly $12 billion in costs over three years and claims about $1 billion in savings. The state also toughened the process: it canceled the first bidding round in April 2026 because no bid met its minimum requirements, and on the pharmacy side Blue Cross was the only bidder that met them all. Separately, new “preferred provider” deals with UNC Health and Novant Health start in 2027, steering members toward those systems with lower out-of-pocket costs.
What we don’t know yet — because the actual contract documents haven’t been made public: whether the new deal fixed the pennies-on-the-dollar problem, what Blue Cross actually promised on discounts and cost growth, what happens if it breaks those promises, and what the pharmacy pricing terms look like. We also don’t know what it means for one company to now hold the medical contract, the drug contract, and the network design all at once — less conflicted than the CVS arrangement, but a lot of eggs in one basket. Last time, the state posted every contract document publicly about seven weeks after the award. If it does that again, taxpayers will be able to check the fine print for themselves by early fall.

———

and

All you need to know is that after all the legal changes and scrutiny thrown at PBMs and insurance companies, NOT A SINGLE ONE has said they will result in lower costs for employers or patients.

———

Healthcare cost are putting an extreme pressure on school districts’ finances ($94,500,000 in Madison!)

More.

Handre:

The unreadability is the point. Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped design the thing, admitted in 2013 that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and credited “the stupidity of the American voter” for its passage. You couldn’t debate what you couldn’t read, and Congress couldn’t be held accountable for text it delegated to unelected agencies to write after the vote. This is legislation as fog machine. Complexity becomes a moat.

Ask yourself who swims in that moat comfortably. Not you. Not your doctor. UnitedHealth and Aetna employ floors of compliance lawyers who parse those 20,000 pages for a living, and every page raises the cost of entry for any upstart insurer who thinks he can serve customers better. No central planner can possess the dispersed knowledge to price medical care for 330 million people. The regulators know this too, at some level. Their answer wasn’t humility. Their answer was paperwork: an estimated 165 million hours of it annually, a tax paid in human lifetimes.

Stuart Loren

Chicago’s pension funds just had the kind of year that’s supposed to fix things. Returns came in between 11% and 14%. Contributions hit records, including $272 million in supplemental payments. And yet, according to the city’s annual financial report, our pension debt grew — up $500 million from what the city reported last year, to $36.4 billion. If a banner year cannot reduce that shortfall, it’s fair to ask whether this system is sustainable.

That said, there was some improvement. The funded ratio rose from 25.4% to 28.1%, driven by asset growth of 14%, while liabilities grew just 3%. The catch is scale: The funds hold only $14 billion of assets against $51 billion of liabilities.

At that size, more than $3 billion went just toward servicing existing obligations, consuming nearly every dollar the city and its employees paid in. Real progress belongs to the funding schedule: For example, the police fund is now on pace to hit its statutory funding target. But that schedule only works by growing the taxpayer’s bill every year for decades.

As a result, pensions are crowding out spending on essential services. In 2025, the city paid $2.9 billion into its four funds — 23.5% of its entire operating budget. Over $900 million came from the $6 billion corporate fund — the discretionary pot at the center of recent spending fights. Property taxes tell the same story: Over 80% of the city’s portion of the levy goes toward pensions. 

Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe:

Ironically, an honest discussion of our apocalyptic moment would have resonated most powerfully with young people. They understand and fear the existential dangers of climate change, artificial intelligence, demographic collapse, and nuclear weapons. Benedict could have taught the young the particularities of the biblical apocalypse, including the totalitarian peace and safety that precede it. Such a discussion would have revealed reasons for hope, as we seek the bravery to “be not troubled” (Matt. 24:6). One cannot imagine a more qualified person than Benedict to lead such a conversation. Now we must make do without him.

It is not my place to tell the Church what time it is. Benedict already did that, as this essay, which I wrote with my friend Sam Wolfe, attempts to show. My humble hope is that others might succeed where Benedict failed, in answering the question: Facing the hour of darkness, how can we recover faith in the future?

Eschatology enraptured the young Joseph Ratzinger. Sometimes autobiography disguises itself as biography; this is a rule to remember when reading Ratzinger’s 1957 The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (his Habilitationsschrift, which qualified him for a professorial appointment in the German university system). He wrote that “Bonaventure’s theology of history presents a struggle to arrive at a proper understanding of eschatology. . . . [T]he theology of history does not represent an isolated area of Bonaventure’s thought. On the contrary, it is related to the basic philosophical and theological decisions which provided the basis for his participation in the bitter controversies of the 1260’s and 1270’s.” Ratzinger excavated these “controversies” because he thought that “it would not be difficult to work out applications to the present,” even seven centuries later. “Precisely at the present moment,” he added, “­theology has every reason for remaining in ­contact with its own history.” He chose not to identify those applications and those reasons, because “the task of the historian is to present his findings and nothing but his findings. . . . At times this limitation has disturbed me.”

Whatever its limitations, Ratzinger’s exposition of Bonaventure established his genius. It translates Bonaventure’s medieval density for the modern mind. As he proceeds, Ratzinger seems to be on the point of adjudicating questions the Church has ­neglected for centuries, questions reaching to Christianity’s mysterious core. At this core lies the problem to which Ratzinger devoted the final ­section of his treatise: How and when will the world end?

J.D. Tuccille:

Give the world’s control freaks credit where it’s due: No matter how creepy their proposals are, there’s always another nanny someplace eager to double down with an even more intrusive scheme. So, as Americans debate the wisdom of drunk-driver kill switch mandates for cars, their counterparts in Europe now require that new vehicles include in-car cameras that constantly monitor drivers. The result is an escalating race in government-dictated automobile surveillance that we’ll all have to pay for, even if we plan to bypass or sabotage it once we’re off the lot.

Helen Pluckrose:

Writing before Herbert’s arrest, Kevin Lister, a maths teacher who lost his job for refusing to honour a trans-identified student’s pronouns, responded in the way a liberal should. He defended the free speech of a trans activist whose movement had championed the very principles that contributed to his dismissal and had done so in a highly authoritarian way. I greatly admire Mr. Lister for that consistency. It would have been easy for someone with his experiences to become authoritarian in turn—or simply remain silent and enjoy the schadenfreude—but he did neither. Lister wrote:

This has got nothing to do with Aberdeen University, I don’t even know why they are investigating it.



He should not be sacked for his vile and ignorant posts because to do so continues the terrible attacks on free speech that are happening in the UK.



Instead he should be free to demonstrate his ignorant and self centred behaviours. The only things Aberdeen University should be interested in is that he is not allowed into women’s spaces and he is not allowed to compel anyone’s speech such that they must use his language.



Equally, staff and students at Aberdeen University should be entitled to express their views on what they want to see happen to him without fear of reprisal.



This is at the core of my coming case at the Upper Tribunal against the DBS.



I have been kept on the Children’s Barred List for posting concerns on social media about the sexualisation of the class room, buying babies on line, and the social transitioning of children.

Tracy Jan and Holly McDede:

The Trump administration has launched a national crackdown on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers, following a KQED-ProPublica investigation into California’s teacher disciplinary system.

In guidance issued last week, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon cited the news outlets’ reporting in May that California’s teacher licensing agency has not revoked the professional credentials of at least 67 educators who school districts determined had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools.

McMahon threatened to withhold federal funding from public schools that fail to protect children from teacher sexual misconduct. She called on states and school districts to scrutinize their laws and regulations to prevent educators who have engaged in sexual misconduct involving students from obtaining new positions elsewhere. Citing previous reports by the Government Accountability Office and other studies, McMahon said the Department of Education has observed a “troubling and recurring pattern” of credible reports of sexual abuse and harassment by school employees going uninvestigated. 

“Unfortunately, many administrators and State educational regulators have apparently preferred to sweep these incidents under the rug and have ‘pass[ed] the trash’ to another school,” McMahon wrote in an open letter to state schools chiefs on Friday, referring to teachers who go on to work in different schools after findings of sexual misconduct.

McMahon said the Department of Education intends to increase its monitoring of school systems to ensure that they comply with federal law. The Trump administration will also examine states’ laws and regulations to determine their effectiveness in protecting students, she said. 

Daniel Cody

A Florida student accumulated a monumental 11.99 GPAthrough an atypical high school routine, prompting local schools to change how they weigh courses.

The high marks by Vaibhav Bhaskar, who is on his way to Duke University to study finance and economics, earned him a new state record, beating out the Sunshine State’s previous top 11.84 grade point average, according to the Palm Beach Post. 

To keep track of his ambitious milestones, Bhaskar relied on a physical reminder of his objectives. 

“I have a whiteboard in my room, and I listed five goals on it for my high school career back when I was a sophomore,” Bhaskar told The Post, noting that his top aims were to “become valedictorian” and “break the state GPA record.” 

Soulmate Keynes:

Most weeks since my eldest child was born three and a half years ago, I have filled in the parenting spreadsheet. At the time of writing, it has over 1,000 rows, with a “P” to mark every morning, afternoon and evening of parenting that my husband and I have done. It also includes a chart illustrating which of us is in credit (me) and by how much (as of today, 7.5 days and 24 bedtimes).

Let’s just say that it wasn’t my husband’s idea. “It’s at a time in our lives when we don’t exactly need more admin,” he told me on Sunday evening, during a formal interview conducted in our living room. Still, he has no plans to stop logging his hours. The spreadsheet monitors how close we are to fulfilling our shared objective: dividing childcare as evenly as we can.

I have struggled to find data describing how unusual we are. Not for having the spreadsheet — I know that’s weird. But for wanting to share the job of parenting evenly between us. Traditional attitudes towards child-rearing have softened over time, but surveys of Britons still suggest that our arrangement, of both parents working full time while our children are young, is frowned upon by many.

Dave Shiflett:

By some measures America’s 250th birthday puts a worthy notch in the historic timeline. A quarter-millennium is respectable, but we’re young compared with the oldest republic (San Marino, founded in 301) and a blink of the eye for Egypt, which unified into a single state more than 5,000 years ago. Closer to home, modern Canada is 159 years old, while Mexico counts 205 years since its independence from Spain.

Mom, more widely known as Peggy, recently attended a family gathering that included an 8-month-old great-grandson named Charlie and Charlie’s other living great-grandmother, Jody. Both grandmas reminded me how young America is and how much it has changed, mostly for the better.

Using mom’s life span as a yardstick puts things in perspective. Go back 98 years from her birth in 1928, and you’re at 1830, a mere 54 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed and 31 years before the start of the Civil War, during which mom’s grandfather would serve in Robert E. Lee’s signal corps. Go back one more life span and it’s 1732, the year George Washington was born.

Her life, like America’s, has been rich in challenges. Her father deserted the family early on, leaving her mother to raise two daughters at a time when women were at a significant disadvantage in the job market. They never owned a car and for a time had to cook meals on a hot plate. “We were poor,” mom is fond of saying, “but we didn’t know we were poor.” She and her sister later went to college on scholarships and lived out their own American Dreams. Her sister, who went to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had a daughter who became a plastic surgeon and a son who became a doctor. Mom’s kids did well too, save for the son who became a hack writer.

Michael B. Horn:

For years I’ve hoped that school districts could take a page from other industries and “disrupt” themselves to optimize learning for each and every child.

I’ve changed my mind.

It’s not because districts can’t innovate. They can, and many do.

But a proper application of disruptive innovation theory shows that the vast majority of existing school districts will not drive the disruptive innovation needed to transform the education sector in the United States—not because they lack visionary leaders, but because districts themselves are the incumbent business model.

For those who haven’t followed all my past work on this topic, a bit of grounding.

Kerry McDonald

For Layla Coyne, choosing to attend a microcollege was a natural extension of her unconventional K-12 schooling experience. As a middle schooler, she left a traditional public school to attend Rock Tree Sky, a self-directed learning community in Southern California that offers part-time programming for local homeschoolers and charter school students. For high school, she continued at Rock Tree Sky while enrolling at Summit School, a public independent study program offered through the Ojai Unified School District. She also took dual enrollment courses through a community college and spent nearly a year studying in Paraguay. 

After graduation, Coyne continued taking community college courses while pondering her next steps. It was then that she discovered Thoreau College, a microcollege in rural Wisconsin, that offers summer and semester-long programs blending homesteading and agricultural skills with academic inquiry. After attending the month-long summer program, she knew she wanted to return for the full semester experience. “I just loved every part of it,” said Coyne, who was one of five students in the fall 2024 semester cohort. 

Thoreau College is one of several microcolleges that have opened in recent years, offering intentionally small, immersive programming and expanding the landscape of higher education possibilities. As the higher education sector struggles with declining public confidence, enrollment challenges and institutional closures, microcolleges emerge as a creative, collaborative model for post-secondary education.

At the microcollege, Coyne and her peers learned skills such as sheep-shearing, foraging and fire-making, while also reading and discussing the works of Wendell Berry, Henry David Thoreau, Robin Wall Kimmerer and other nature-focused authors. “I think the intention of having a small community-based school is something that is very much desired at this moment when a lot of the world is getting more and more isolated,” she said. 

Average tuition for Thoreau College’s semester-long program is about $8,500, with additional fees if students wish to obtain college credit through a new partnership between Thoreau and Prescott College, a private, experiential college in Arizona.

By Becky Jacobs

About a month ago, a major chilled water line ruptured near the Charter Street Healing and Cooling Plant. The pipe was part of a system that provides air conditioning for much of campus, including academic buildings, research facilities and hospitals.

“The damaged section of pipe has been removed, and work is underway to install a permanent replacement,” Deej Lundgren, the UW system’s associate vice president for capital planning and budget, told the Board of Regents during a virtual meeting Thursday.

UW-Madison continues to calculate the total cost of the repairs and determine what caused the break. The university may seek additional funding from the UW system in the future, Lundgren said. The pipe was 4 feet in diameter and buried 20 feet underground, which made it “very challenging to get at,” he said.

“In partnership with the state of Wisconsin, it was determined that the current Engineering Drive utility project could be used to support the repair efforts,” Lundgren said.

Anna Gross, Daniel Thomas and Rachel Rees: 

A top US lawmaker has urged the UK culture secretary to detail her plans to make big social media companies give greater prominence to trusted news sites, as American authorities push back against perceived attacks on free speech in Europe.

In a letter to Lisa Nandy, Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, warned that the proposals risked creating “a tiered information system” and called for a formal briefing by July 28, when a new culture secretary is likely to be in post under presumptive prime minister Andy Burnham.

Last month, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced plans to give established broadcasters and media companies greater prominence on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, amid concerns about online misinformation.

Under the proposals, first reported by the FT, content from news channels including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 would have to be awarded more promotion by social media platforms’ algorithms and special rules may be implemented at times of increased social unrest.

Russell T. Warne:

Abstract

Between October 1, 1966 and December 31, 1971, a total of 341,127 men joined the military under lowered physical (9%) or mental test standards (91%). Called Project 100,000, this initiative was controversial from its first announcement and has been the subject of commentary for more than 50 years. In various discussions, Project 100,000 has been portrayed as a cynical method of meeting military needs without drafting middle-class youth, a dangerous experiment that harmed vulnerable people, and a successful employment program. This literature review explores the context and empirical research on Project 100,000. The conclusion is that Project 100,000 met some of its creators’ goals and fell short of others. Though it ended over half a century ago, Project 100,000 still provides valuable historical, theoretical, scientific, and societal lessons for both civilian and military leaders

Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.

One interesting thread I’ve seen in many of the current screen/free play debates is the notion that growing up in the 70s/80s was a kind of youth utopia and children should be “free” (i.e., forced, possibly by government regulation) to return to those halcyon days. This is curious as, growing up during those years myself, I remember them very well. Neither parents nor children viewed those years as utopia. And government statistics generally found that youth who grew up during this period had some of the worst behavioral outcomes on record. So why are people so nostalgic?

NPR Corrections:

claimed to have uncovered $110,000 in fraud. In fact, it was $110 million in fraud.

Sudha G. Tilak

Long before photography became the visual language of empire, one Englishwoman was sketching the people she encountered across India with unusual curiosity and precision.

Emily Eden, a gifted artist and writer, belonged to one of Britain’s most influential political families. She travelled across northern India in the 1830s while accompanying her brother, George Eden, first Earl of Auckland, the governor-general of India.

Alongside princes, generals and courtiers, she drew servants, attendants, travellers, fakirs, Afghan and Sikh nobles, Akali warriors, hill communities and even the animals that accompanied imperial journeys. Her remarkably broad gaze set her apart from many contemporaries.

More than two dozen of her sketches were published in 1844 as Portraits of the Princes and People of India. They now form the heart of Princes & People, an exhibition at DAG in Delhi curated by art historian Mary Ann Prior, bringing together the complete published series of hand-coloured lithographs made from Eden’s original sketches.

Wall Street Journal:

The press is attacking the report as an attempt to censor independent museum curation, but that’s not how we read it. The 162-page “Saving America’s Story,” produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council, lays out in persuasive detail how the museum offers a largely critical view of American history that “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated.”

Instead, the museum offers the message, captured in one exhibit, that when they founded the U.S., “early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.”

The report isn’t a cheerleading document seeking to hide America’s warts. What it seeks is a history of the U.S. that doesn’t resemble the 1619 Project in its partisan bias.

The report’s examples show the degree to which progressives have captured the history museum. In one exhibit, the Pledge of Allegiance was described as a tool to “instill American nationalism through flag ceremonies.” Nationalism? That’s a needlessly pejorative edge. How about patriotism?

John MCWhorter

Good God. Rouse genuinely thinks Fighting the Power is the essence of serious thinking, has never been questioned about it even this far into her career, and is incapable of even understanding what Lee’s questions are getting at. She’s not deflecting. She really has no idea how ridiculous she sounds.

I became an academic out of being curious about things. Gradually realizing since the 1990s that this kind of person is ordinary in the humanities and social sciences, is routinely given awards and high administrative positions, and is beyond the reach of rational discussion has been one of the most disappointing experiences of my life.

John McWhorter:

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It has become a summer rite to bemoan how few Black students are admitted to Stuyvesant and other highly competitive public high schools in New York City. And the numbers are unpleasant. This year only three of 777students admitted to Stuyvesant are Black. Last year it was eight out of 781.

Since about one in five public school students in New York City is Black, many see the paucity of Black students at what are called specialized high schools as evidence that their admission standards must be unfair. “There needs to be a real, independent investigation into the admissions process,” the Queens borough president, Donovan Richards Jr., said after the latest results were released. Many have demanded the elimination of the Specialized High School Admissions Test — the sole measure of whether a student will be admitted (except at the LaGuardia performing arts school, which uses an audition process).

Is the problem the test, or what happens before the test?

Black students often attend poorly performing schools, but so do the sons and daughters of Asian immigrants, even if undocumented, who are admitted at far higher rates than even white students.

In New York City, growing up poor or working class has never barred a child from educational excellence. Poverty rates for Black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers are not that different. But Asian students of modest means are getting into the selective high schools in healthy numbers.

Jennifer Smith Richards, Megan O’Matz, Mollie Simon and Jennifer Berry Hawes:

A decade ago, the state of Florida stripped a teacher of her license for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy. Last year, she opened a private school there with ease. 

Her name and photo were on her new school’s website and details of her case were easy to find with an online search.

The state also knew that a transplanted Midwesterner had been fired from her Cincinnati charter school, following felony charges related to misuse of public funds, and had been banned from teaching or running schools in Ohio. Yet Florida did not stop her from starting a private school and collecting public money.

ProPublica analyzed data from 13 states of varying sizes that do publish private school directories and offer public funding to these types of schools, and found that at least 1,500 more are listed today than were five years ago — bringing the total to more than 9,600. The numbers provide a rare look into the growth catalyzed by friendly legislatures and government money, while public school districts are losing students and closing schools. 

When public money is available, most private schools take advantage of that funding. In several states, all or nearly all students at some private schools pay tuition with public dollars. For instance, public funds subsidized 99% of all private school students in Iowa this past school year, the third year the program was available. 

An average of 100 new private schools have launched in Florida each of the last five school years. West Virginia, a state with fewer school-age students than are enrolled in Chicago Public Schools, has gained about 40 new private schools. 

And in the three years since Arkansas began allowing students to get about $7,000 annually toward tuition, about 120 new private schools opened. ProPublica detailed the consequences of the rapid growth and meager oversight in Arkansasin a previous story, spotlighting a school where students were subjected to menial labor and violence. The owner there was convicted of permitting child abuse, a felony. The state has said student safety is its top priority, but the school remains eligible to receive state money after a temporary stop.

———

Sun Prairie, Madison and Wisconsin teacher sexual abuse cases.

Tia Clinton, Benjamin K. Master, Lydia R. Rainey, AK Keskin:

Key Takeaways

• Budget shortfalls have become the top challenge U.S. public school district leaders are facing in 2026, with 54 percent of survey respondents ranking it in their top three concerns—up from 33 percent in 2025.
• Declining enrollment is also increasingly a concern among survey respondents, especially for leaders in rural districts.
• Interviewed leaders pointed to the loss of federal COVID-19 relief funds, rising costs, and state and local revenues that have not kept pace as the primary drivers of budget shortfalls.
• Leaders indicated that budget cuts have worsened other challenges in their districts, such as ensuring adequate staffing and improving reading and math achievement.
• To increase enrollment, school districts are competing for students: About 40 percent of survey respondents said that their districts are considering marketing campaigns, 33 percent are considering expanding pre-kindergarten (pre-K) services, and a similar share are considering offering new extracurriculars (e.g., sports, out-of-school programs). 
• In the face of continued enrollment decline, many public school districts will need support both to plan for long-term downsizing and to identify and invest in the services that can help them better attract and retain families.

Public school districts nationwide are navigating compounding challenges that are forcing hard decisions and placing growing pressure on leaders to adapt. In our spring 2026 American School District Panel (ASDP) survey data, we observe major shifts in the top challenges district leaders are facing, compared with 2025 survey results. Specifically, budget shortfalls and declining enrollment have risen to the top of district leaders’ concerns, even as other long-standing challenges remain pressing issues.

In this report, we examine how these challenges are affecting districts nationwide, drawing on survey findings from a nationally representative sample of public school district leaders and follow-on interviews with 38 district leaders across the United States to learn more about how they are responding to these challenges. This work is intended to provide national, state, and local policymakers—as well as the general public—timely information regarding the condition of public school systems nationwide and help inform decisions related to school funding, instructional improvement, and community engagement.

Lewis Andrews:

The financial outlook for many of America’s blue cities and states has become increasingly grim. According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the cumulative debt of local governments has grown by $1.3 trillion, or almost 50 percent, over the past decade; states and cities run by Democrats over most of that period account for two thirds of the surge.

Even more troubling is the sharp split between the way that Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning jurisdictions are attempting to manage their budgets: the former by cutting spending and lowering taxes to attract new residents, the latter by raising taxes to cover their ever-growing deficits. Not only has this led to a widely observed migration of high earners from blue states to red ones, but according to a recent Brookings study, it has also led foreign investors to confine their financing of new US factories and office buildings to GOP-controlled areas.

Some blue governments may be closer to default than is generally supposed. Chicago is now floating bonds, not for capital improvements, but for legal settlements, worker compensation, and other operational expenses. As a February 2026 editorial in the hometown Tribuneput it, Mayor Brandon Johnson is “leaving his successors with a financial ash heap.” Meanwhile, according to a report from the respected Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, San Francisco is facing “a fiscal crisis unlike any in its history.” As for the state of California, Alpha Strategies Investment Consultants president Jay Rogers recently warned the owners of its municipal bonds against imagining they hold a safe investment. 

Dale Chu

The question of whether, when, and how public funding may flow to religious schools has been contested for more than 150 years, animated by the tension between the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which bars the state from sponsoring religion, and its Free Exercise Clause, which restricts the burdens that can be placed on religion.

Over the past 25 years, the Supreme Court has resolved that tension in stages: first holding that the Constitution does not forbid public dollars from reaching religious schools through parents’ free choices (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 2002); then that states cannot deny religious schools a benefit freely available to their secular counterparts (Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, 2017; Espinoza v. Montana, 2020); and, finally, that states cannot evade that rule by drawing a line between a school’s religious status and its religious use of funds by saying, in effect, “we will fund a religious school, but not if it does religious things with the money” (Carson v. Makin, 2022).

Now the Court has agreed to hear yet another case in this realm, St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, which raises a different and perhaps more vexing question: What happens when the free exercise of religion collides with a state’s anti-discrimination laws? How the Court answers could determine whether states may attach conditions to public benefits that religious institutions cannot, in conscience, accept.

St. Mary centers on a conflict over Colorado’s universal preschool program, which promises every family in the state a free year of early education at the provider of their choice. To participate, a preschool must sign an agreement pledging not to base its enrollment decisions on a list of characteristics that includes sexual orientation and gender identity. Two parish preschools in the Archdiocese of Denver—St. Mary’s in Littleton and St. Bernadette’s in Lakewood—say that signing such a pledge would require them to adopt policies that contradict Church teaching on marriage and the human person. The case was joined by Dan and Lisa Sheley, parents whose children attend St. Mary’s, who argue they are shut out of the universal program their own taxes help fund.

Danielle Kaeding:

Wisconsin law requires institutions to honor donor restrictions on spending those funds, as well as manage and invest them in good faith.

Norgaard argues the college didn’t do that. He said he never gave the college written consent to change restrictions on spending his endowed funds. Despite repeated written requests, he said Northland has never provided a full accounting of how funds were spent.   

“We threw everything into these two scholarships in terms of keeping (Bjorn’s) memory alive, and so it’s like a gut punch,” Norgaard said. “You feel like his legacy is somehow diminished. Money was set up, and now it’s gone.”

In a statement, Ted Bristol, chair of Northland’s board, said the college petitioned the court to distribute its remaining endowment funds in a “reasonable, fair and thoughtful manner that most closely aligns with donor intent.”

“Our petition outlines the process and reasons which led to the board’s difficult decision to close Northland College, despite our best efforts,” Bristol wrote. “We have tried to balance the interests of everyone involved affected by Northland’s closure.”

About one year before the college closed, Northland’s financial statements show the value of its endowment assets was close to $5 million — roughly $25 million less than the original restricted funds that were required to be maintained in perpetuity by donors.

Matthew Haag:

A disproportionately small number of Black and Hispanic students received admission offers to New York City’s elite public high schools for the upcoming academic year, continuing a pattern of racial and ethnic gaps that has existed for years despite promises by elected officials to address the divide.

About 62 percent of the students in the city’s public schools are Black or Hispanic. But at its eight most prestigious high schools, about 10 percent of the students in the incoming freshman class are expected to be Black or Hispanic, roughly the same as last year. About 80 percent of the seats went to Asian and white students.

At Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, often considered the most selective of the city’s specialized high schools, three of the 777 offers were made to Black students, and 21 were for Hispanic students, together representing a nearly one-third decline from the previous freshman class. One Black student was admitted to Staten Island Technical High School.

——-

Alex Berenson:

“About 19 percent of all public school students are Asian, but they received 57 percent of the offers for the specialized schools for the fall.”

In other words, white kids make up 19 percent of the NYC schools – and 23 percent of the students at the best schools. They’re barely overrepresented.

This is not about racism, it’s the opposite, it’s about Asian kids outcompeting everyone else on a one-shot exam that requires intelligence, preparation, and, ideally, parental support. The Times ITSELF admits the truth, calling the test:

“a grueling assessment of students’ mastery of math and English that rewards multistep problem-solving skills and time management.”

Dale Chu

Good evidence shows that we’re stuck in a “learning recession.” We also need to consider the likelihood of a connected recession in something indispensable to student learning, namely effective teaching.

I often invite audiences to identify the same missing word in three eerily similar quotes by reputable educators over two decades. Each laments the gradual disappearance of something central to effective schooling. By the second quote, most of the audience correctly guesses that the missing word is indeed teaching.

The most recent example comes from author and consultant Michael Sonbert, whose observations in thousands of classrooms demonstrate that, however hard they work, “teachers aren’t teaching.” That is, they rarely provide explicit, sustained, whole-class lessons.

Instead, they’re more prone than ever to facilitate—to have individuals or groups complete assignments on screens or worksheets, often at their own (sometimes dawdling) pace. Sonbert dubs this shift the “biggest trend in teaching today.” It is tacitly confirmed by the photos that dominate education publications, which illustrate the pervasiveness of group activities involving crayons and colored markers.

None of my audiences balks at these findings.

Alarmed by this trend, a superintendent and assistant superintendent in Connecticut did some digging and reported their findings in an article titled “What’s Missing in Teacher Prep.” They made two discoveries. First, that their teachers had graduated from 17 different pre-service programs. Second, that none of them had received any “practical experience” in the most vital elements of instruction—like “checking for understanding.”

Similarly, in a Fordham Institute piece in 2020 called “Training teachers to fail,” two Minnesota teachers decry the preparation they received from two well-known ed schools. “Oddly enough,” they write, “we were not trained in how to actually teach” (their emphasis). They were warned, moreover, not to be seen “at the front of the room” during observations. Good thing, as they received “minimal to nonexistent training in effective whole-group instruction.”

Susan Svrluga:

Roberto Serrano was shocked when he saw the results of the midterm exam in his advanced mathematical economics class at Brown University last semester: The average score was 96, when in the past, it had ranged from the 60s to the 80s. Nearly half of the students this year got a perfect score of 100.

Stephanie M. Lee:

A month ago, 10 high-profile scholars released a document — titled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” — that lit up a million scholarly group chats. The chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, vocal critics of the purported politicization of higher education, charged the group with evaluating a number of disciplines for signs of political skew. The conclusion: All the fields showed “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)

Paul Boghossian

The idea that there is something amiss in the humanities and the social sciences, and that the problem has something to do with the politicisation of research in these areas, is hardly new. American historian Richard Hofstadter traced American scepticism about the role of university professors in public life to evangelical Protestant suspicion of the “learned clergy” during the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In more recent history, the idea reached a high-water mark during the McCarthy era, and another in the 1980s with the publication of best sellers such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987) and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990).

Our report does not attempt to trace the roots of the present-day critique of the academy to these antecedents. Nor does it attempt to engage in detail with contemporary critics of the humanistic academy and its defenders, a sprawling discussion that has taken place mainly online and in the press. Much of that discussion is focused on undergraduate teaching and its social consequences, a topic we address only in passing.

Claire Suddath

When I heard Vanderbilt University was opening a campus in New York, my first thought was, Well, I hope KA moved its cannon.

For decades, the Vanderbilt chapter of the Kappa Alpha fraternity had a Civil War–style cannon that it displayed sometimes on its lawn, sometimes in its basement, but usually pointed toward the North. Now that the 153-year-old Tennessee university was expanding northward, I wondered if the frat repositioned it. If not, the school would be pointing the cannon at itself.

A Vanderbilt fraternity could get away with a little the-South-will-rise-again humor back when nobody was paying much attention to it. But things are different now. Over the last few years, Vandy, as it’s affectionately known, has become one of the most desired and admired schools in the country. At a time when only 42 percent of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education, and as other schools face a spate of crises — an increasingly antagonistic White House, the existential threat of AI, administrative uncertainty about how to handle student protests — the university has emerged as a bit of an apolitical fantasy land. It accepted just 2.9 percent of regular-decision applicants, and although its overall acceptance rate won’t be available until late August, a university official told me it’s expected to be about 4.8

Paul Bloom:

I really like professors. I’m a professor, my wife is a professor, and most of my friends are professors. I heard about a retirement community in Arizona that’s specifically for professors, and if I ever end up in a retirement community, that’s where I’d like to go.

It’s not just that professors are my people; I think there are objectively good things about us. We tend to be pretty smart. We are sometimes socially inept, but in a sweet way. We are genuinely excited about ideas — professors spend a lot of time thinking about questions such as the origin of the universe, the nature of truth, the evolution of species, and whether Shakespeare discovered the unconscious. We are often generous. For instance, many professors spend a lot of time mentoring students in ways that aren’t requirements of the job and don’t lead to any tangible rewards. And we are a peaceable lot. If you’re sitting at a bar, minding your own business, and some drunk takes a swing at you, the drunk is unlikely to be a professor.

But I don’t think we are very brave. We don’t tend to be troublemakers. I’m not denying that many of us say and write things that upset the public. Professors make bold and shocking claims — there is no immaterial soul; there are many genders; Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet; empathy makes the world worse; and so on. Philosophers are particularly provocative in this regard. I’ve heard them argue that babies don’t feel pain, that dogs and chairs don’t exist (because the only things that really exist are elementary particles), that atoms are conscious, and that life is terrible and we’d all be better off dead. Bold stuff!

But this boldness has its limits. It doesn’t typically extend to interactions with our colleagues. We want them to like us, and so we work to avoid their disapproval. We don’t want to make trouble.

David Cohen:

In an academic world where scholars regret seeing their cherished theories vanish into the knacker’s yard, Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is unusual in wishing people would retire one of his best-known coinages.

Baron-Cohen, one of Britain’s best-known autism experts, says he now regrets the language of his ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism. He now thinks it may have caused as much bother as good in influencing how people talk about the condition.

This is not because of the underlying science, but because the specific words themselves have proved ‘open to misunderstanding’. The phrase he came up with is now ‘too broad to be useful’, he tells The Spectator.

The soft-spoken clinical psychologist’s change of heart arrives just as the research centre he founded in 1997 is being handed a record-setting new dollop of money.

Cambridge University this week announced a £26 million gift from a US philanthropist to establish the K. Lisa Yang Centre for Autism Research, along with a dedicated autism hub at a children’s hospital in Cambridge. Baron-Cohen will help oversee both ventures. Much of the new money is earmarked for looking at why autistic people have generally poorer health and shorter lives.

Baron-Cohen first set out his famous theory in his 2003 book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, drawing largely on journal work he had published the previous year. In it, he postulated that the capacity for empathy is the critical dividing line between men and women, and between those who are autistic and those who are not.

Wall Street Journal:

That America emerged from the revolution as a free republic at all is something of a miracle. Most revolutions end in blood and tyranny, not liberty. As historian Gordon Wood has documented, the U.S. revolution was “radical” in its ideas about liberty and the rights of man. Its ideas emerged from the British Enlightenment—David Hume, Adam Smith, John Locke—that so influenced Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

“All men are created equal” was about as radical an idea as you could express in 1776. Yes, that equality was imperfectly realized at the time. But the seed was planted, and then nurtured in the soil of the Declaration’s call for liberty and self-government. And as Wood explains in his great book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” these ideas would spread and unleash the republican spirit of free men and women who built America.

The two Presidents after the Founders who best understood the Declaration were arguably Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge. Lincoln invoked the universal principles of the Declaration to make the case that ending slavery was essential for America to be true to its founding. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, came eventually to agree with Lincoln.

As for Coolidge, his oration in 1926 on the 150th anniversary deserves to be remembered more than it is:

Lesson Hollow

Anthropic just gave every verified K-12 teacher in America free access to a premium version of Claude that’s mapped to “academic standards in all 50 states.” When Claude for Teachers helps with a lesson, it does not invent academic standards. It reaches into a specific, public dataset and pulls from it. The dataset is called the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph, a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative project that Claude for Teachers connects to rather than one Anthropic built. It is open under a Creative Commons license, and I analyzed the entire thing, all 222,865 standard items spanning the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the national frameworks they share.

I read it against one question, the only one that matters to a parent. Is this teaching a fact or a skill, or is it teaching a contested claim as though it were settled? What I found was three completely different kinds of bad in here, and the difference between them is not severity. It is reach. To see it, you first have to understand where these standards come from.

Where the 222,865 come from

Start with the shape of the pile, because nobody explains it and it changes everything.

At the bottom are a small number of national frameworks that almost every state builds on. Common Core supplies the math and the English. The Next Generation Science Standards, NGSS, supplies the science. A framework called C3, short for College, Career, and Civic Life, supplies the skeleton for social studies. These are the source documents, and they are compact: the Common Core math list is about 800 statements, its English list about 2,400, NGSS about 1,300, and C3 about 450.

On top of that national base sit 208 separate state frameworks, one per subject per state. And here is the part that matters. In math, science, and English, the states mostly copy the national base. When I count how many states share the exact same standard text, the most-adopted lines in the whole dataset are pure skills lifted straight from the national frameworks: “Reason abstractly and quantitatively” appears in 39 states, “Science and Engineering Practices” in 40, a trigonometry standard about sine and cosine in 41. That shared national skeleton is where the country actually agrees.

Social studies is the exception, and it is the crucial one. C3 is only a skeleton of skills, not content. It never says what history to teach. So in social studies every state writes its own standards from scratch, which is why 94% of all unique standard texts in the entire dataset turn out to be one-state originals that no other state adopted. Social studies is where a state gets to say what it wants, in its own words, accountable to no shared national text.

When you find something ugly in this data, the very next question is how many states adopted it. If the answer is one, you are looking at a local capture. If the answer is thirty, you are looking at something the national frameworks handed to everyone.

So let us sort the bad by reach.

Johanna Kurtz:

The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.

This type of failure is well understood as a threat in economics. The old joke is that when a man marries his cleaner, the GDP of both households collapses even while the actual labor being done remains the same and everyone is better off. In our case, we’re seeing the opposite: a thousand small divorces and social fragmentations which boost the appearance of GDP but leave everyone poorer in reality.

Occasionally, researchers succeed in capturing and modelling these hidden transitions, and we get a glimpse into the deep faultlines under society — direct evidence that official measures miss what households actually feel. In 2024, for example, a compelling study by Lawrence Summers and colleagues

showed

that the gap between depressed consumer sentiment and cheerful official statistics closes once borrowing costs (excluded from the modern CPI but important for family finances) are counted as part of the cost of living. The consumers were right.

What actually got cheaper over the past fifty years? Electronics, entertainment, fast fashion, processed food, toys, screens of every kind. And what got more expensive, usually by many multiples? Housing, education, childcare, healthcare, insurance.

Absurdly, both of these movements register in the statistics as progress: one shows up as asset appreciation and the other as consumer surplus. But the lived reality for families feels like a pincer.

Robert Sampson’s research on Chicago found that the collective efficacy which keeps neighborhoods safe — mutual trust plus the willingness of residents

to intervene for the common good

— is strongest where residents own their homes and stay put. Ownership is both a private good and the raw material of the social capital whose destruction started this spiral. A generation locked out of ownership is locked out of both.

Marriage follows the same pattern. Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch.

Anish Acharya

Oliver Sacks had an idea late in his life that I keep coming back to. He observed that most people treat being present as the goal, as if the whole point of living were to sit inside the current second. He thought that was a little sad. The people he found most alive were soaked in the past and future at once: remembering, planning and dreaming. That’s what making does to you. It stretches you across all three tenses, because you’re building toward something you can already see, out of everything you’ve ever loved. Consuming, by contrast, parks you in the now.

Take social media. At the start it was a little miraculous: people taking the time to share what was happening and what they were thinking with each other. Then it became a contest. A call for attention. And once the algorithms took over, the thing that broke through was whatever was loudest, so people optimized for loud, and lately we’ve started calling the machine-made version of it slop.

But the feed was slop before any machine got involved. Slop is just what you get when everyone consumes and nobody creates, and the cure is people making things again, which AI is unusually good at enabling. That’s about the most anti-slop thing I can imagine. A companion you talk to and shape and argue with will do more for you than a celebrity you watch from across the internet, because one of them is a thing you make and the other is a thing that happens to you. It’s the difference between putting on an autogenerated Spotify playlist and making somebody a mixtape. A mixtape is you, smuggled into another person’s afternoon.

And this isn’t reserved for creatives. A master electrician

in Kentucky

with no computer science degree used AI to build a load-calculation tool that sells for $12.99 and replaces a $500 service call. A plumber

canceled a $40,000 consulting contract

after a single afternoon with OpenClaw got him further than the consultants had scoped in weeks. For most of computing history, if you couldn’t code, you were a consumer of other people’s ideas. That’s over. The cost of trying things has collapsed, and the people picking this up first are not the ones anyone predicted. Software is about to be everywhere the way YouTube made video everywhere, and most of it will be built by people who’d never have called themselves builders.

Auditor Allison Ball:

• JCPS lacks a current and cohesive plan that outlines district priorities and goals (finding 1.7).
• A fear of retaliation exists in the JCPS culture (finding 1.8).
• The board operates with too little focus on student outcomes (finding 2.2).
• Former Superintendent Polio had control over the internal audit process, including reviewing and filtering information (findings 3.1, 3.2, 3.6).
• Since 2016, the Board has approved the maximum allowed property tax increase annually (p. 133-139).
• Despite receiving $500 million of COVID funds through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER), in FY22, JCPS somehow began running a budget deficit (p. 142-144).
• Every working budget from FY22-26 shows expenses exceeding revenues (finding 4.18).
• In 2025, approximately 222 teaching positions were vacant. In a survey, nearly half of school-based staff agreed that vacant positions in their school made their jobs harder. School administrators and HR personnel noted delays in the hiring process, which led to hardship in finding qualified candidates for positions (findings 5.1, 5.4).  
• Despite a 62% inflation-adjusted increase in per-student revenue from 2002 to 2022, average teacher salaries only increased by 12% (finding 5.9).
• In comparison to peer-districts (ratio of 1:180 to 200), JCPS assigns more school administrators per student (1:137.5). Further, compensation for principals and assistant principals exceeds national averages (finding 5.10).
• JCPS does not have a deferred maintenance plan. In October 2025, JCPS operations leadership estimated that a budget of $2.5 billion was required to solve the district’s deferred maintenance repairs (finding 6.4).
• JCPS claims that it has $1.3 billion in unmet facility needs (p. 215).
• 26% of schools were found to be under-enrolled, meaning they were below optimal capacity (finding 6.6).
• For 2022-23 and 2024-25, 33,358 out of 42,712 behavior incidents on a bus were committed by repeat offenders (finding 7.5).
• 1/5 of all JCPS students feel unsafe at school (finding 8.10). 
• 25% of teachers observed by the exam team during school visits did not demonstrate high expectations for students (finding 9.5).
• During school visits, the exam team observed frequent Chromebook usage for instructional purposes, which does not support high-quality instruction or student engagement (finding 9.7).
• JCPS has experienced a sharper and more sustained decline in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) proficiency rates since the COVID-19 pandemic than many of its peer districts (finding 10.1).
• Kentucky Summative Assessment (KSA) results indicate that significant achievement gaps remain across multiple student subgroups within JCPS. Notably, for 3rd grade reading for the 2024-25 school year, African American students’ proficient or distinguished rate is 14 percentage points below the JCPS average, compared to 27 percentage points below the state average (finding 10.2). 
• According to the 2024-25 Kentucky Accountability System, approximately two-thirds of all JCPS schools receive an overall rating of “red” or “orange” — the two lowest of five performance levels (finding 10.3).
• JCPS is at risk of losing additional federal funding if they do not adhere to federal policy related to Diversity, Equity, & Poverty (DEP) (finding 11.1).
•  JCPS has 40 DEP employees (p. 340).

More.

Susan Miller:

Based on the most recent Survey of School District Finances from the US Census, in FY 2023, 4,522 (32%) out of the country’s 14,088 school districts ran a deficit, defined as total expenses in excess of total revenues. In aggregate, these deficits totaled $1.6 billion. And that was before the last round of ESSER funding rolled off. With falling enrollment in many district-managed schools, financial distress is poised to get much worse in the years ahead.

The great challenge facing a growing number of school districts is how they will respond to this accelerating crisis.

The situation they face is made worse by recent research findings by Marguerite Roza, the leader of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab: “Most school board trustees do not actively engage in public deliberations about budgets, and most budget items are approved with little public discussion or consideration of alternatives.”

Thus far, most districts have treated increasing financial distress at the department level, separately addressing problems of enrollment declines, falling school facility utilization, and/or growing operating costs. Yet in many districts, financial distress has worsened.

The critical issue is that these are just symptoms of the actual problem: How to keep a complex system in balance to maintain a district’s financial health in the face of accelerating and uncertain change.

Before discussing how best to solve this problem, let’s review its three major symptoms: falling enrollment, declining facility utilization levels, and increasing operating costs.

Aaron M. Renn

Americans didn’t use to have to wonder about which thinkers to turn to. We had institutions that selected, vetted, appointed, and elevated people we relied on as authoritative voices. They had processes around them, like editorial review and fact checking at publications, to ensure they did not go off the rails. The professions had an ethical code that meant something. While this system was not without its faults, and not without errors, Americans felt confident relying on network TV anchors, writers at newspapers, college professors, pastors, doctors. It was an era of high institutional trust.

That world is gone today. The institutions that sustained it have lost public trust, not entirely without warrant. Not only are official voices not trusted, but being in a position of authority today often makes the skeptical trust you even less.

People today feel left to their own devices in picking the voices they should listen to. Influencers and outsider voices are now often the authorities of choice, whether that be on personal health, relationships, or media. Even when those people are part of a major legacy institution, it’s as individuals that people trust them.

In short, trust has been devolved. People no longer have a default in trust institutions; they trust and follow individuals they’ve personally selected. People don’t believe something just because it was published in their local newspaper. They believe it because they trust the individual who said it. Because there’s no longer an institutional layer of vetting and review, the choices people make on whom to trust have a big impact on how our society functions. 

This environment makes those public intellectuals who apply to themselves individually the same standards of truth, rigor, public spiritedness, etc. that we used to rely on the institutions to supply a critical resource. That’s because the individual with a following is now a structural element in our society. So it’s not just that these public intellectuals are people individual Americans or leaders can trust, but they are supplying important support columns that disappeared with the decline of institutions in America. They are particularly needed as America passes through a period of transition in which the new and renewed institutional structures we need to build are not yet in place.

I’ve noticed that I keep turning again and again to certain public intellectuals that I find particularly compelling and fit this bill: Ross Douthat, Richard Reeves, Tanner Greer, Ryan Burge, Julius Krein, and others. Or someone I don’t know as well will write an op-ed or essay that resonates with me in the same way as those people’s work. 

I’ve often wondered if there’s a set of characteristics these people share. I’ve concluded that the answer is Yes. There is a common disposition or ethos that I sense. A common set of attributes.

Ann Althouse Summary:

“Like many terrible things, we can blame therapyspeak on America’s stupidest decade: the 1970s.”

“Back then, it was called psychobabble…. The concept survived the hedonistic ’80s, the grimy ’90s, and the low-rise aughts only to reemerge in the social media age with a new name and a more sinister purpose…. Isn’t it odd… that the most selfish people you know always seem to be the ones who are armchair diagnosing their friends and family with personality disorders? I’m reminded of the minor scandal that erupted a few years ago when an A-list actor allegedly wrote private messages to his then girlfriend telling her that if she needed to post photos of herself in a bathing suit, he was not the right partner for her. Elsewhere he wrote, ‘I’d love to know before the premiere so I’m not put in the position of publicly flaunting our love if my boundaries are going to be continued to be disrespected. That would be hurtful and triggering for me.’ The girlfriend was a professional surfer….”

Quinn Slobodian

The turn to empire is notable first for displacing a previously preferred language of mind control. After Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about Silicon Valley’s complicity in mass surveillance triggered the first phase of the so-called techlash, critics gravitated to language of behaviorism and anxieties about brainwashing from the mid-twentieth century. Our internet-connected phones and laptops had put us in Skinner boxes; we were the pigeons pecking at the pellets according to a pattern—at the mercy of “attention merchants” in “the shallows.” “The technology that connects us also controls us,” read the tagline for the influential Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Shoshana Zuboff—who had taken classes with B.F. Skinner himself as a youngster at Harvard—warned in her 2019 bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that Silicon Valley now had “the instruments and methods that can impose Skinner’s technology of behavior across the varied domains of everyday life right down to our depths.” 

The shift from psychology to political geography is a good one. It centers questions of power and authority alongside issues of land and energy. The reliance of citizens, states, and pension funds on the financial fates of a small number of US tech companies is a startling development of the recent past. It is sensible to search for a term proportionate to our astonishment—empire talk is a rhetoric of shock. 

Tyler Tone:

The most important decisions about our lives can turn on factors ranging from unfair to downright absurd. In medieval England, a criminal facing the gallows could save their neck by reciting Psalm 51 from memory — a literacy test meant to identify clergy that became a famous loophole for accused commoners. In France, employers have long sorted job candidates by handwriting analysis, a method researchers later found predicts job performance no better than chance. In Israel, a famous study of parole boards found that favorable rulings peaked right after the judges had lunch and gradually slid toward the bottom as dinner approached. This became known as the “hungry judge effect.”Subscribe

Society has historically tackled such problems by firing bad decision-makers, passing generally applicable laws governing business practices, or — in the case of England’s “neck verse” — simply repealing the rule. Other times, we might just accept that any qualitative decision carries some inherent arbitrariness — what legal scholar Cass Sunstein and Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman called “noise“ in human judgment. Attempting to ensure good decisions by regulating the tools a decision-maker consults — as opposed to the acts and outcomes themselves — is a relatively recent societal initiative. And today, it’s coinciding with algorithms and AI bringing the same unfairness and absurdity to decision-making in digital form. 

Instead of memorizing Psalm 51 or perfecting a handwriting sample, people try to game algorithms. As testing of AI video-interview screening tools offered by a Munich startup revealed, a job candidate’s score would rise when she added a bookshelf to her background and fall when the lighting dimmed. A Guardian investigation similarly found resume-screening tools quietly treating a first name like “Thomas” or a keyword like “church” as a predictor of success on the job.

The Sorting Machine:

What did SFFA reveal about “merit” in college admissions?

A domestic student at a given academic percentile has a far smaller chance of landing a seat at an elite university, and of paying for it, than an identical student fifty years ago.Admissions are fundamentally zero-sum, so where did these seats go?

Lin Huang:

Most people only know Jaime Escalante from Stand and Deliver. Few know there was a Chinese immigrant teacher who did something just as extraordinary:

For 20 years in the Arizona desert, he took the state’s poorest Indigenous, Latino, and Black middle schoolers —many with broken English and shattered foundations —and turned them into statewide champions. His name is Michael Xu. The “Sage from the East.” A man who survived China’s Cultural Revolution, hard labor in the jungle, lifelong dyslexia, and insomnia…. yet became a legendary math teacher. This thread is the first time his full story is being told. And it reveals something much bigger than one teacher’s success.

Aurelia Sutiono:

The University of California, Riverside’s Undocumented Student Programs offers up to $9,000 annually through its Butterfly Project Fellowship to “DREAMers, students from mixed-status families, and undocu allies,” while a comparable graduate research grant for U.S. citizen graduate students provides up to $4,000 per year.

According to fellowship materials reviewed by Campus Reform, the Butterfly Project Fellowship provides up to $9,000 annually to illegal alien graduate students, with awards “disbursed through the Financial Aid Office.” 

At public universities such as UCR, the financial aid office administers taxpayer-supported financial aid programs, meaning public resources are being used to subsidize a university that is providing substantially larger awards to illegal immigrant graduate students than to comparable U.S. citizen graduate students.

Josh Ulick
and Dave Cole:

In 1976, when America’s last big birthday rolled around, the country wasn’t in an obvious mood to celebrate. The Vietnam War and Watergate were fresh in people’s memories. Cities like New York were caught in urban doom loops, and stagflation weighed down the economy.

The bicentennial celebrations offered a break from this national malaise.

For children of the 1970s, it was mostly a chance to celebrate. Kids decorated their bikes with stars and stripes, marched in local parades and painted local fire hydrants red, white and blue–faded examples of which could be seen well into the ’80s. The bicentennial quarter, minted for the occasion, still occasionally turns up in pocket change.

Looking back at photos from the era, with their feathered hair and cutoff jeans, is more than an exercise in nostalgia. If the spirit of 1976 reminds us of anything, it’s that even in uncertain times, the country can throw a good party.

Peachy Keenan:

If the illiterate Dark Ages are indeed coming, at least we will have our stacks of hardcovers to comfort us.

A recent essay in The Atlantic tells us what most of us have already surmised: reading is dead, and it’s not coming back. In “The Age of Reading Is Over,” we learn that not only are fewer people reading long-form prose for pleasure, but soon they will permanently lose the ability to do so. The scroll, the digital cave, has trapped young brains and is atrophying their attention spans early so that they will not be able to get through a novel later on.

“Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to ‘translate’ the book into easier language.)”

Mass literacy is devolving into mass illiteracy, fast. This catastrophe is being helped along by an “elite” culture that has dismissed classic Western literature—the “canon,” as we used to call it—as hopelessly out of date, the work of dead white patriarchs, no longer “relevant” to “today’s modern audiences.”

But how would today’s modern book readers know, since they can’t and won’t ever encounter any of these works in print? It’s one thing to find Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn or Gatsby irrelevant. It’s quite another if you can’t comprehend prose unless it is delivered via a toddler board book or an erotic romantasy novel.

Meanwhile, woke activists in California are trying to get “Black English” (formerly known as Ebonics) taught in preschools to improve literacy skills. They also want to classify it as a separate language so black kids can be deemed “bilingual.” Teaching them how to “speak Black” is “part of a movement to challenge harmful language hierarchies and affirm Black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in Black history, culture, and community.” I would think children raised in black households would already know how to “speak Black.” “We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,” the director of the Children’s Equity Project, Xigrid Soto-Boykin, said. I am old enough to remember when this was a hilarious scene in the classic 1980s comedy Airplane, when passenger Barbara Billingsley offered to translate for two men who could not understand English. “Excuse me, stewardess, I speak Jive.”

It remains to be determined if the Black English activists will allow white children to learn and speak Black English along with their classmates. Or are some languages only reserved for certain races?

But if Harvard students and preschoolers and everyone in between are not reading anymore, what’s left?

——-

“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“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?

Nell Gluckman:

In February, several University of Wisconsin regents were so frustrated with the system’s president during a presentation on artificial intelligence that they started texting one another.

“Pulling teeth to get him to get proactive with strategy and now this is what we get,” one texted to another. The exchange, which surfaced in public records obtained this month by The Chronicle, was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Soon after, President Jay Rothman would be out of a job. At first, it was not clear why. But text messages and emails between the regents and Rothman show the extent that disagreement over what to do about AI played a role in his abrupt firing. The conflict speaks to the increasing uncertainty the technology is bringing to all levels of higher education.

“Jay telling us to question [AI’s] output and then asking AI to rank the UWs and then presenting it to us is comical,” Noah Fritz, a regent, who is a student, wrote to Jack Salzwedel, another regent, during the February board meeting. “I just leaned over and said that to Angela,” Salzwedel responded, referring to another board member. (Salzwedel resigned earlier this month due to family medical challenges.)

Ashok Rai, also a regent, listed a series of unanswered questions in a separate text to Fritz, including, “annual system spend on AI” and “what type of protections do we have, and what type of policies do we need, to make sure we are [not] feeding current platforms with proprietary information.”

“There is no regents guidelines or guardrails on AI,” Timothy Nixon, a regent, told lawmakers. “President Rothman has blocked those.”

“I was of the belief that a systemwide policy would not be helpful since each university was on top of the evolving situation,” Rothman wrote to the lawmakers. Still, in response to the regents’ feedback, he said he prepared a resolution on AI that he planned to bring to the March board meeting, but Bogost told his office not to. Instead, he wrote in the letter, “We were directed to submit guidelines for discussion at that meeting, which we did.”

Records obtained by The Chronicle show that Rothman sent a landscape analysis of AI, in the form of a set of slides to board members ahead of the February board meeting. At least part of the analysis, he said in an email to them, was generated by AI. The slides show ways other systems around the country are using AI to do their day-to-day work. Video recording of the February board meeting show that representatives from around the system gave presentations on how they were teaching about AI, using it in research, or in other ways.

——-

I’ve raised the question of our long-term disastrous literacy issues with various academics.

The response has mostly been head in the sand, with one prominent AI professor stating that “I’m not going to answer that question because as I want to keep this discussion positive”

———-

“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“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?

Kristian Niemietz:

Four years ago, a colleague asked me whether I could chair a debate with some guy called ‘Gary Stevenson’, who was, apparently, an anti-inequality campaigner and a YouTube commentator of some description. I had never heard of Stevenson, but accepted. The debate went all right, even though it was mostly a case of talking past each other (which, given that I was the moderator, was probably my fault). It was otherwise not especially memorable. Britain does not exactly have a shortage of left-wing media figures and activists. In the first half of the 2010s, there was the campaign for a ‘Robin Hood Tax’, the anti-tax-avoidance campaign ‘UK Uncut’, the ‘People’s Assembly’ with its endless anti-austerity marches, the Occupy movement, and, later, the political cult around Russell Brand. From 2015, all of these movements coalesced around Corbynism, and while Jeremy Corbyn himself stepped down as Labour leader in 2020, the movement lingered.

Stevenson was slightly different because of his unusual backstory as a former City trader, and because of his singular focus on wealth inequality as opposed to, for example, income inequality, nationalisation, or price controls. Nonetheless, I saw him as just another minor character in Britain’s vast left-wing ecosystem.

Today, four years on, Gary Stevenson is everywhere. He is a best-selling author, his YouTube channel ‘Gary’s Economics’ has more than 1.6 million subscribers, he is all over the media, and Channel 4 have just released an entire documentary about him. Four years ago, the wealth tax, Stevenson’s flagship policy, was a niche idea that only a bunch of tax nerds were interested in. Today, it is the policy idea of the hour, with three-quarters of the public expressing support for it. Stevenson even sells T-shirts with pro-wealth-tax slogans.

John Morley

This paper explores a ubiquitous problem in organization that I call “generational conflict.” Generational conflict is a difference of interest between the people of the present and the people of the future. I focus primarily on conflict among the equity holders of business firms, but I show that the problem also appears in trusts, nonprofits, families, cities, states, and nations. Generational conflict takes many forms. Among other things, it discourages investment in the future, sows disagreement over the pricing of entry and exit, complicates transitions between cooperative and investor ownership, and drives spiraling cycles of withdrawal. Many investor-owned corporations solve these problems by issuing “permanent” equity interests that last as long as the firms that issue them. But other firms, such as law firms, customer coops , and investment funds, issue shorter “impermanent” equity interests that force these firms to find other solutions. Firms with impermanent equity mitigate generational conflict by reducing the mismatches in duration between generations of equity holders and the decisions they make and by disciplining firm governance to reduce the odds of opportunistic behavior across generations. I survey the range of generational conflicts and solutions and offer a theory to explain the balance between them. I argue that the solutions to generational conflict represent some of the most transformative social technologies of modernity. Without them, it would be difficult to imagine skyscrapers, vaccines, airplanes, computers, or much of the other technological and physical capital that characterizes the modern world.

Alex Tabarrok:

Within the United States, professions are regulated in some states but not others—Louisiana, for instance, requires florists to be licensed. (Do license-holding Louisiana florists produce better, safer arrangements? I don’t think so.) Given this variation even within a single country, we’d expect considerable variation across countries too. Multiple independent surveys—not just HK—confirm that Denmark, Sweden, and even France have less occupational licensing than the United States. Since these countries have high state capacity, we can rule out the hypothesis that licensing exists for safety or quality. The implication is clear: occupational licensing is often about rent-seeking, not quality assurance.

Kevin Kelly:

Just to be clear, no human action is doing the mapping. The system itself, the LLM, is mapping each bit of the world, all things, all attributes, all art, all words, all ideas. And astoundingly it creates this map, this latent space, not piecemeal, but all at once simultaneously. (To do so requires an immense, energy-hungry, massive cluster of chips, all connected together with miles of wires — the famous data center now in short supply.)

While training, the LLM is fed millions of books, billions of web pages, and billions of pages of text from social media. It reads every word on each of them, and once this entire library of material is loaded into its mind, it massively calculates all the interconnecting vectors, all the relative directions pointing to each other. The scale of this vast synchronized parallel calculation is staggering. It then throws away the books, the text, the images, and only keeps this tangled web of directions and vectors. These billions of directions are called its parameters. As we build larger and larger models, mapping more and more material, the parameters increase. The latest models on the frontier of AI contain trillions of parameters, meaning there are trillions of directions, or trillions of attributes that it uses to map every idea or thing it has seen.

Gabriel Sison:

“Join the waitlist” and “Launching in 2026,” the MyGender Dolls website tells visitors. 

“Grounded in gender-affirming clinical practices,” the dolls will be a “therapeutic” resource for clinicians and educators who work with children ages 4-10, it states.

The new website only includes a few details about the dolls, a years-long project by faculty at the university’s Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health. Some of the links on the site are not working yet, but there is a “waitlist” form that people can fill out “to be kept up to date about the MyGender Dolls.”

The College Fix contacted the email address listed on the website and the project organizers via email on July 2 and 5, asking for information about the product and launch date. No one responded.

Previously, the university had a webpage dedicated to the project, but it was removed at some point after The College Fix first reported on it in December 2024.

According to the page, MyGender Dolls mimic classic paper dolls, featuring drawings of children of different ages, shapes, and skin colors to represent “all” kids. Children will be able to choose different internal and external genitals, clothes, and other accessories to help them “visualize their anatomy and genders,” the page stated.

——-

The State of Reading.

Sierra Dawn McClain:

The family’s roots in the region trace to the 1730s, when Richard Brown from Pennsylvania moved to a Quaker settlement in Loudoun County. Ms. Brown keeps yellowed documents from the farm’s early days, including the 1741 deed to the property from Lord Thomas Fairfax, who owned millions of acres in Virginia.

During the Revolutionary War, Loudoun County supplied the Continental Army with grain and livestock. “Loudoun was called the breadbasket of the Revolution,” said Denise Mo, executive director of the Loudoun Heritage Farm Museum.

During the Civil War, Oakland Green was wedged between opposing armies. To prevent Confederate cavalry commander Col. John Mosby and his rangers from using the county’s farms for food and shelter, the Union Army burned more than 200 barns in the winter of 1864. The Browns’ barn was spared.

The post-Civil War expansion of railroads opened new markets, enabling Virginia farms to ship perishable milk to the District of Columbia. By the 1890s, lines such as the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad carried fresh milk to the district daily. Oakland Green adapted, operating a dairy in the late 1800s.

Frederick Turner:

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!”¹So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Prof. von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.

Emma Camp:

What can a vintage refrigerator tell us about capitalism? Quite a lot, actually!

Find out more in my latest for @WSJFreeEx pic.twitter.com/ni6sCilt5u

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) July 13, 2026

Ann Althouse summary:

“… they have no idea what they’ll do with their diploma once they graduate, they have no particular interest in the program they’re in…. My own son was … pretty lost, after struggling in studies to be a software developer (constantly at home, alone, in front of a computer), then working in customer support for an insurance company (constantly at home, alone, in front of a computer). It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work, but he procrastinated, felt many tasks were pointless, and just wasn’t happy. But his dad and I both have PhDs and his sister is an MD, and it seemed he felt he ‘should’ be in university. Then he found out about an opportunity to train as a baker. 8 months of classes and practice in a very good gov’t run program (free), then a month as a trainee at a bakery. He lucked into a popular local artisanal place, very well known for their baguettes, croissants and sourdough. They hired him as soon as he was finished, and he’s SO HAPPY there! He’s interacting with others all day, he’s always on the move and always learning, and can see the results of his work immediately (and eat it too!)….”

Tyler Cowen:

Government-run systems often (not always) do a perfectly fine job setting a broken arm or administering a long-standing, well-known medication. They do much less well when it comes to developing, financing, and delivering a new immunological approach to fighting cancer, personalized to your individual genome at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In our rapidly arriving biomedical future, innovation capacity will matter above all else. And though they may not see it today, the people with the most life ahead of them will reap nearly all of the benefits of a dynamic system, or suffer the consequences of a paralytic one.

Thirty years ago, it was often debated whether the Canadian or British healthcare systems were better than what we have in the U.S. After all, they offered a kind of guaranteed access to health services. The details could differ, but often the healthcare had no upfront price or only a low user fee. In America, in contrast, healthcare was more expensive, there were many millions of uninsured people, and dealing with sometimes rapacious insurers and hospitals could involve significant emotional trauma.

But over time the British and Canadian systems look worse and worse. The queues and rationing have increased, as giving healthcare away for free makes it hard to satisfy demands in a timely manner. In Canada, for instance, the median wait time has risen from 9.3 weeks in the early 1990s to 28.6 weeks today. In the British National Health Service, only 65.3 percent of patients start treatment within 18 weeks.

This entire dynamic will be intensified as the pace of medical innovation picks up.

Ammar A. Merhbi

Walk into recently renovated progressive schools, and the physical design is unmistakable. Traditional rows are absent, replaced by writable glass, varied seating arrangements, and expansive floor plans. The foundational assumption driving these changes is that open, fluid environments automatically produce collaborative, self-directed learners.

However, an extensive review by Sowmya Sathish and Siu-Kit Lau (2026) examines 118 peer-reviewed studies to clarify how space actually impacts learning. Their findings demonstrate that physical space alone does not change student outcomes; it provides a framework that must be actively managed.

Below is an analysis of what their research reveals about modern classroom design, followed by an external evaluation of these architectural trends through the Science of Learning lens.

Sathish and Lau (2026) establish that international educational priorities heavily emphasize competencies like collaboration, problem-solving, and self-regulation.

To evaluate how physical space supports these targets, the researchers built a conceptual model intersecting three theoretical lenses: Socio-Material Theory, Constructivist Learning Theory, and Cognitive Flexibility Theory. (Note: The study focuses on Cognitive Flexibility Theory, how learners adaptively restructure knowledge for complex tasks, rather than Cognitive Load Theory).

Daniel OK-Carr

Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia recently defended her company’s flagship i-Ready platform to Fordham readers. The program, used by millions of students, has come under fire from teachers, parents, and students as part of an ed-tech backlash sweeping the nation.

To set the record straight, Sia stated that Curriculum Associates “welcome honest scrutiny of our research.” She then pointed to a large correlational study out of Georgia State University that evaluated i-Ready use in one large southeastern metro district during the post-pandemic recovery as proof their approach “works.”’

The study behind the claim

She’s right to build her case from it. This appears to be the only independent, peer-reviewed study directly evaluating i-Ready Personalized Instruction outcomes in the program’s 15-year history. So let’s take her up on the offer and scrutinize it. When you read the fine print, a very different picture emerges than the one she’s selling to us.

Start with the number she would like us to focus on. To show her product lifts the achievement of traditionally underserved students, Sia quotes the study directly, and the quote sounds impressive: students who were “Black, male, FRLM-eligible, or with intellectual disabilities experience(d)…up to 14 weeks of instructional growth.”

William Flanders

This study examines the association between participation in Wisconsin’s private school choice programs and English Language Arts achievement using longitudinal administrative data from 96,241 students tested in 2018–2019 and 2022–2023. Propensity score matching compares voucher participants with similar public-school students, with exposure measured by years of participation. Sustained participation is positively associated with achievement growth. Statewide program participants gained approximately 0.14 standard deviations overall and 0.35 standard deviations after four or more years. Similar patterns appear in Racine. Findings suggest evaluations of school choice should emphasize long-term participation rather than short-term outcomes alone.

——-

“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“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?

Jill Barshay:

“Teachers, just like students or coders, might be using AI as a crutch,” said Alp Sungu, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Instead of doing the actual work, they’re using AI to delegate the task, and that lowers the quality of their teaching.”

A draft of the study, “Generative AI Can Harm Teaching,” was released online in June and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It echoes Sungu’s widely discussed 2024 research on how students’ use of AI is harming learning. 

“Students use AI as an answer machine, not as a tool for learning, and therefore it harms learning,” said Sungu. “Here, I think teachers are potentially using AI as a material generating machine for homework, lecture notes, lesson plans, syllabus. Instead of improving their own output, they’re using AI as a replacement with very minimal interaction, and therefore the quality of output is not good enough.”

Sungu’s experiment, conducted with fellow University of Pennsylvania researchers, including educational psychologist Angela Duckworth, followed 193 teachers and more than 2,800 middle and high school students in a private school chain in Turkey during the spring of 2025. 

Teachers were randomly assigned either to receive access to a ChatGPT-based teaching assistant customized to Turkey’s national curriculum or to continue teaching as usual. Over 10 weeks, teachers primarily used the tool to generate lecture notes, assignments and exams.

Students whose teachers had access to the AI tool rated their classes as less enjoyable, less interesting and less important than students in the control group. The decline in intrinsic motivation was modest, but larger among students of those teachers who had already been heavier AI users before the experiment began.

Carlo Rovelli

A fierce debate is raging around the slippery notion of consciousness. It retraces a trotted pattern of cultural resistance: We humans are often scared by anything that may disturb our image of ourselves. 

Famously, Darwin’s realization that we have common ancestors with all living organisms on our planet met ferocious resistance. Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. The cultural history of modernity is dotted by similar ideological rearguard battles, wherein old worldviews fight in retreat against novel knowledge to save some concept held dear. Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls.

During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul. The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter. Angels were souls without a body and so were people after their material death. The soul, taken to be immortal and created by God, was understood as the repository of memories, emotions and our subjectivity. It could speak and fall in love. It was the agent of our agency; the subject of our freedom; the entity that bore responsibility, culpability, virtue and value; and deserved to be judged, saved or damned.

The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves and by the long, slow effort to update them with our new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries. 

Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist. 

Tiffany Camhi

This month, the U.S. Department of Education began rolling out a new accountability test that most colleges and universities will soon have to pass.

The test itself is simple: If an undergraduate program’s graduates don’t earn more than workers who never went to college, that program could be cut off from federal student loans. The same goes for any graduate program whose graduates earn less than someone with only a bachelor’s degree.

“If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers,” said Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent in a recent statement.

Sponsor Message

But this new test, known as “do no harm,” raises some thorny questions about the purpose of college. Like: Is it just about making more money?

Some advocates for postsecondary arts education think not.

“Earnings is only a small piece of that puzzle,” said Lee Ann Scotto Adams, executive director of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), a nonprofit that studies the careers of arts graduates.

Nils Gilman:

When University of California President Clark Kerr delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1963, published shortly thereafter as The Uses of the University, he was doing something unusual for an academic administrator: he was offering a sophisticated social theory, and doing so with wit. In these lectures, Kerr coined the term “multiversity” to describe what the postwar American research university had become. In Kerr’s account, the modern university was no longer to be understood as a community of scholars united by a shared ideal of learning, but rather as a sprawling institutional conglomerate serving at once as a research engine, a job-training facility, a credentialing mechanism, a coming-of-age experience, and an incubator of the national technical elite. The University of California, which Kerr had just finished steering through a near-decade of explosive growth, was his exemplar.

Kerr was a droll man. He once observed that the three great problems facing any university president were “parking for the faculty, athletics for the alumni, and sex for the students.” He described the university faculty (and I can confirm from personal experience that this remains accurate) as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” And when Ronald Reagan made good on his 1966 gubernatorial campaign promise to fire him for being too lenient with the Free Speech Movement protesters, Kerr offered one of the great farewell lines in American academic history: “I leave the University of California as I arrived: fired with enthusiasm!”

Despite the jokes, Kerr was a serious man. The argument underneath The Uses of the University was that the multiversity, precisely because of its sprawl and apparent incoherence, was the institutional master key of mid-century American civilization. It was the nexus at which basic scientific knowledge was produced, technical and professional talent was credentialed, democratic citizenship was cultivated, and the national project of technological supremacy was advanced. The multiversity didn’t need to be coherent in order to be functionally useful as a platform for what Kerr called“administering the present.” He wrote with the high modernist confidence of someone who believed that hierarchical technocratic institutions, if competently managed, could keep these various volatile elements in balance.

Kerr’s dismissal by Reagan in 1967 was, in a sense, the first indicator and warning of the crisis of the high modernist technocratic model that he championed and sought to institutionalize through the multiversity.

Edgar and Co.

When a society produces more highly educated, ambitious people than it has elite positions to hold, a frustrated class of credentialed aspirants emerges who have the training to critique the existing order and the motive to overthrow it. 

Revolutions are rarely led by the poorest. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was a lawyer born in an affluent family, part of Russia’s elite, and a graduate with a first-class degree. The French Revolution is predominantly associated with the poorest peasants and urban workers, the sans-culottes, rising up against the snobbish and out-of-touch elitists. Yet the core leaders of the uprising were intellectual professionals belonging to the Bourgeoisie, a term Karl Marx later used in The Communist Manifesto to describe the wealthy, privileged social class. In fact, out of the 600 delegates elected to represent the commoners (the Third Estate) in 1789, roughly half were lawyers or legal officials; even the infamous leader of the Reign of Terror, Maximilien Robespierre, was a university-educated lawyer who won a prestigious scholarship to the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. (Estates General of 1789, 2024)

Yes, they were not part of the hereditary aristocracy; however, their origins can be traced to families of merchants, doctors, local officials, and landowners. This provided them with the “Bourgeoisie Advantage”, as they possessed the disposable income required to spend months in Paris debating politics without needing to perform manual labour.

Therefore, it is rather ironic that Robespierre achieved his peak political influence by executing King Louis XVI for high treason in 1793, when just 23 years before that, he delivered a welcome address in Latin to the very man he condemned to death, whilst wearing powdered wigs, silk stockings, tailored waistcoats, and silver-buckled shoes, the immaculate style of the upper classes. Hence, we can conclude that Robespierre was undoubtedly financially and socially much closer to the aristocrats he executed than to the peasants he claimed to represent.

// My System Information on the Internet

How websites track you across the internet — without cookies, without your knowledge, and without any way to clear it.

Browser fingerprinting is a tracking technique that collects unique technical details about your browser and device to create a digital “fingerprint.” Unlike cookies, it works silently in the background, cannot be cleared by deleting your history, and continues tracking you even in incognito mode.

IP_ADDRESS64.64.116.170● VISIBLE

How Browser Fingerprinting Works

When you visit a website, your browser automatically shares certain parameters so the page displays correctly. Tracking scripts gather dozens of these signals — operating system, browser version, screen resolution, timezone, installed fonts, GPU details — and combine them into a unique identifier.

While millions of people might share one trait (like using Windows), the exact combination of all your settings is mathematically unique to you. The result is converted into a single hash — a tracking ID that follows you across sites.

Wall Street Journal:

Sooner or later the Supreme Court will no doubt want to settle, in substantive fashion, the many questions that are now being raised about how governments may regulate internet use by minors, consistent with the First Amendment. States won’t always get the balance right, and perhaps some of the laws they pass will prove easy to evade, which critics say has been the experience in Australia under its new age law for social media.

How will it go in Texas and Ohio? Who knows. Yet many frustrated and alarmed American parents are probably gratified that at least their leaders are finally trying something.

John Hillen:

The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.

SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.

These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.

Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.

Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.

McKie, Anna

Last November, Lauren Jager, a chemistry undergraduate student at Idaho State University in Pocatello, was applying to PhD programmes when she noticed that some application portals warned students about using generative artificial-intelligence tools for their personal statements. They informed students that they would use detectors to sniff out applications that contained AI-generated text. The portals weren’t specific about which detectors they were using. But they were clear on one thing: “They said that if they felt that the personal statement had been written with AI, then they would disregard your entire application,” Jager says.

She didn’t think much of it — she hadn’t used AI at all — but a friend said they’d run their own statements through an AI detector on the Internet, just for safety. Jager decided to do the same with a few detectors she’d found online. 

“They all came back at almost 100% AI,” she says. “I started freaking out.”

Frank Bruni:

I know I’m old because I remember when a B+ was a respectable grade.

Now it’s more like an indictment. I’m a masochist if I hand down too many of those.

The students getting them may fill out negative course evaluations, which could mean empty seats in my future classes and professional grief. Some students will show up in my office to argue for a more generous appraisal, forcing uncomfortable conversations. That’s not because they’re snowflakes or brats but because they’re smart, motivated, self-protective denizens of a higher-education system in which so many professors dole out so many A’s that even an A- is a setback, and a grade-point average of 3.8 instead of a 3.9 can mean rejection from law and medical schools.

They’re just trying to keep their most deeply felt ambitions alive, and a B+ is a dagger in hope’s heart. Do I really want to wield it? And be the assassin of their dreams?

This month marks my five-year anniversary on the faculty at Duke University. I arrived as more and more Americans began to look askance at higher education, which was often cast in caricature. It’s untrue, for example, that professors tiptoe across a minefield of microaggressions, at the mercy of humorless students itching to cancel them for insufficient wokeness. The overwhelming majority of the young people I teach are just earnestly trying to figure out the world and their places in it. They’re more curious than censorious.

But grade inflation is as bad as they say, and it drains students’ transcripts of meaning, deprives professors of agency and turns schools into approval factories. We should be ashamed, and we should fix it.

Brian Fraley:

In January 2025, Dairyland Sentinel requested records from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction related to its June 2024 Forward Exam standard-setting workshop at Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells.

We expected records. 

Instead, we found a much bigger story. It took more than a year, and it still isn’t over. Along the way, the records revealed spending, contracts, and internal practices that had never been publicly examined.

It inspired us to dig deeper and take a broader look at government transparency in Wisconsin. Over the next four months, Dairyland Sentinel reviewed press accounts, court opinions, appellate decisions, lawsuits, settlements, agency correspondence, public records and documented disputes involving Wisconsin state government dating back to late 2021.

The deeper we dug, the more familiar the stories became. None of these cases is new. What is new is seeing them together.

Different agency. Different requester. Different issue. Yet, the same roadblocks kept showing up.

Some requests sat for months, others for more than a year.

Wall Street Journal:

Yet Justin and Rose Taylor allege in a federal lawsuit that Sunnyvale School District, near San Jose, is denying them the same ability to opt out. The Taylors, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, have religious objections to material that their two elementary-age children might encounter.

According to the complaint filed last month, a county “teaching guide” says health and science lessons should “explicitly teach about gender identity and sexual orientation.” A sample fourth-grade history lesson on “Two Spirit and Non-Traditional Families” says students will explore how these identities “disrupt traditional definitions of the family.” Even math teachers are encouraged to “use problems that relate to marriage equality, gender-neutral bathrooms, and LGBTQ+ rights.”

The guide also links to a list of books, including some at issue in Mahmoud, such as “Born Ready” about a “boy named Penelope.” Yet the First Amendment guarantees “free exercise” of religion, and the High Court said this was violated when the Maryland district withheld opt outs for “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks. Last year the Taylors asked to excuse their children from instruction using “‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks or similar materials.”

In their telling, Sunnyvale at first suggested it could accommodate them, before refusing. According to the complaint, officials wrote that the Mahmoud ruling “addressed a specific set of facts in another state” and “does not override California’s statutory requirements governing instructional content.” Well, state law doesn’t override the Constitution.

Neutrality Project:

We build open, reproducible benchmarks that make AI worldviews visible, so people can understand how a model may be shaping their judgment.

Gavin Flanders:

Over a year after UC Berkeley Haas School of Business professor Przemyslaw Jeziorski was murdered in Athens, Greece, his family is engaged in a legal battle against alleged squatters occupying his Berkeley home.

On July 4, 2025, Jeziorski was shot and killed by the boyfriend of his ex-wife, Konstantina “Nadia” Michelidaki, in the midst of a divorce and custody battle. Michelidaki was later found dead in her Athens prison cell, having died by suspected suicide.

Squatters have now allegedly taken over Jeziorski’s home on Marin Avenue, which he and Michelidaki used to rent out as an Airbnb.

“The problem with the law in California as to squatters is that there’s no legal mechanism to remove squatters from the house in a situation where they claim they have a lease,” said attorney Erin Stratte, who represents the Jeziorski family, in an email. “Even when it’s clear that the claims the squatters are making are legally impossible.”

Under California law, landlords using self-eviction through lockouts or utility shutoffs against alleged squatters are illegal, and instead, property owners must provide proper notice, usually a three-day notice to quit, before filing an unlawful detainer lawsuit.

Daniel Muijs:

Motivation has long been a ‘hot topic’ in education, seen by some (see recent claims that ‘motivation is 90% of learning’) as one, if not the key aim of teachers, and by others as merely the outcome of attainment and mastery. 

But what does research actually say? Firstly, there is a lot of it! Motivation has been and remains a very popular research topic. Secondly, what it actually means can be quite confusing. When I looked at some of the more recent meta-analyses and longitudinal studies on this, it was clear that motivation refers to a lot of different-but-related things in different studies, which is unfortunately very common in educational research. 

Greg Lukianoff

International free speech stories of the week

• [UK] Andy Burnham’s team confirms his stance on social media ban for under 16s(Birmingham Live) by James Rodger

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall previously told the BBC that an update on VPN restrictions would be coming in July. A spokeswoman for Mr Burnham told The Mirror: “Andy is committed to keeping kids safe online, and has been vocal in his support of age restrictions for kids using social media.

“He knows this ban is a critical first step to keeping kids safe online and preventing further tragedies for families. The task now is to build on the consensus across political parties to make sure it’s enforced in full, and delivered with the urgency this issue demands.”

Kathleen Castillo-Clark:

At the close of our first year of the Texas Early Literacy (TEL) Network, faculty from Angelo State University, Texas Southern University, Sul Ross State University, and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley came together to share the work they’ve been doing to strengthen how future teachers are prepared to teach reading. Across the convening, faculty highlighted refinements to coursework, shifts in their own practice and new ways of building practice-based opportunities that give candidates authentic opportunities to analyze student data and make evidenced based instructional decisions. One of the most powerful moments came from a teacher-candidate.

Taylor Sublett, a teacher-candidate at Angelo State University, stood in front of the room and described what this work looks like from the other side of the lectern—from inside the classes faculty have been refining all year.

Reflecting on her experience in Associate Professor Leah Carruth’s “Reading Development in Elementary School” course, Sublett described an early field experience working with first-graders at a local charter school, assessing their reading levels, selecting texts, and planning lessons targeting phonemic awareness. She had encountered terms like segmenting, blending, encoding…..

Alison Wolf:

London was once awash with apprentices. They poured into the city from across the country: at Elizabeth I’s death, they made up over 10 per cent of the entire city population. Fifty years and a civil war later, London had doubled in size, and historians estimate that a quarter of its population had at some point served an apprenticeship.

Apprentices lived as well as trained with their apprenticeship masters. They often made trouble and quite often rioted. They also became skilled journeymen and often employers in their turn, either in London or back in the provinces. The whole system feels surprisingly like the modern university sector, in which young people move en masse across the country, seeking degrees as the passport to good jobs, and with the pull of London as strong as ever.

Or rather, the two did feel similar, until very recently. Because in today’s uncertain economy, degrees are losing their glitter. The average “graduate premium” — the amount that a degree adds to your earnings — is falling, and among young graduates, pessimism about the future is rising. But what alternative is there to university?

Lily Ottinger

Pilot schools in China are already using AI to grade children’s artwork, monitor their facial expressions during lectures, and screen them for psychological problems — and the Ministry of Education (MOE) wants schools across the country to follow suit.1

Integrating AI into the education system has rapidly become a top priority of the Chinese central government, which is betting that AI tools can eliminate China’s vast educational inequities and make the next generation of workers more productive. The State Council highlighted education as a key area of focus in the “AI+” plan, it received a shout-out in the 15th Five-Year Plan, and in May 2025, the Ministry of Education (MOE) released a white paper on AI for education.2 This MOE document proclaims that 2025 marks the dawn of an era (“智慧教育元年”), the beginning of a system-wide effort to “intelligentize” 智能化 education using AI tools. The MOE’s goal: universalize basic AI access in primary and secondary schools by 2030. Industry received that signal and responded rapidly, with Alibaba Cloud releasing its own AI+education white paper the following month.3 But the gap between Beijing’s (and Hangzhou’s) techno-optimism and rural China’s reality is enormous.

This report explores why the Party wants to integrate AI into education, what applications the MOE is most optimistic about, and where the barriers to successful rollout lie. We’ll limit our analysis to K-12 education today, but university AI initiatives will be the focus of our next report in this series!

AP News

Kids in Lower Merion school district in Pennsylvania get iPads starting in kindergarten, switch to Chromebooks in second grade and get their own MacBooks in eighth grade. Hundreds of parents signed a petition asking to preserve their ability to opt their children out of using digital devices during the school day. The school district has pushed back, saying it’s not feasible to let hundreds of students opt out of technology that is essential to the curriculum.

Scott Johnson:

If you mean that Omar and Elmi only lived together for a year or two after they were married, why don’t you say so? You know that she only got around to dissolving the marriage last year as she was preparing for bigger things.

You only describe describe Elmi as “a British citizen.” Where and when did they meet? Was he a British citizen at the time she married him?

Am I wrong in thinking that if Omar were an up and coming heroine of the conservative movement you might take a closer look at the question of who Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is and why Omar has treated the issue of her marriage to him as a public relations crisis about which she refuses to talk to the media (other than her extremely misleading comments to the City Pages reporter in 2016)?

I don’t understand your treatment of her marriage to husband number 1 either. As you know, she says that she married him “culturally” in 2002. You note that she has three children with him. You don’t note that she has lived with him since 2002 or that she has held him out at all times as her husband, although you do note that she got around to marrying him legally this year — again, as she was preparing for bigger things. You only describe him as “her current husband.”

——

More.

The Snow Report:

I am not the first to write about the fact that education has a fraught and not very pretty history when it comes to generating, critiquing, and applying rigorous evidence in order to maximise student academic and wellbeing outcomes. Examples of this commentary can be found here, here and here. Way back in 1996, David Hargreaves observed in a Teacher Training Agency Annual Lecture in London, that 

“Teaching is not at present a research-based profession. I have no doubt that if it were, teaching would be more effective and more satisfying”.

In 2000, Dr Louisa Moats commented that 

“Unfortunately, lack of rigor and respect for evidence in reading education are reinforced by the passivity of education leaders who feel that any idea that can muster a vigorous advocate is legitimate and deserves to be aired”. 

Dr Moats was discussing reading instruction, but her words are no less applicable to other curriculum areas, most notably mathematics instruction.

Roshan Fernandez

Washington University in St. Louis is eliminating an optional essay to reduce applicants’ stress. 

A select group of colleges is making it easier to apply—but probably harder to get in. 

Top schools including Tulane University, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are reducing the number of essays applicants have to submit. Colleges say that they are trying to ease students’ stress, and that artificial intelligence has made it harder to tell whether students are actually doing the writing.

Robert Maranto:

Don’t regulate private schools — deregulate public schools.

The backlash to how traditional public schools handled Covid turned the first half of the 2020s into the half-decade of school choice, but now, the public education empire is striking back.

In this year’s midterm elections, in states including Arizona, Iowa, and my own Arkansas, school-choice opponents are arguing that to (indirectly, via parent choice) get taxpayer funds, “accountability” requires saddling private schools with public-school regulations. This may sound good at first blush, but it has it exactly backward: Instead of crushing private schools with more red tape, we should empower public schools with less.

School-choice skeptics claim more regulations mean more …

Drew Holden:

Falling trust in elections isn’t a new problem. Until the mid-1800s, individual states set their own election timelines and were required only to schedule their votes within a 34-day window set by Congress. The loose rules created chaos, chief amongst them concerns around voter fraud, which eventually came to a head in the 1840s. As members of the House of Representatives argued in 1844, reform was needed “to guard against frauds in the elections of President and Vice President.” Sound familiar?

There were also concerns about early voting and how those returns could undermine turnout and even shift voters’ decisions in states with later elections. The advent of the electric telegraph also meant that earlier voters would be deprived of new information about events and candidates in an increasingly connected country.

To allay these concerns, Congress in 1845 passed what has come to be known as the Presidential Election Day Act to “establish a uniform time for holding elections for members of the House of Representatives, and for electors of President and Vice President, in all the States of the Union.”

The spirit of that law governed U.S. elections thereafter. “For nearly two centuries, Americans understood elections to be events conducted on a single, defined Election Day,” Trey Trainor, a former commissioner of the Federal Elections Commission, explained to me. “While absentee voting existed in limited circumstances, widespread post-Election Day ballot collection and counting was not the norm. That expectation gave voters confidence that everyone was participating under the same rules and within the same timeframe.”

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James Hankins:

Apart from the trust issue, Americans shouldn’t be voting before election debates have even taken place and before election season is over. Small-d democratic deliberation (a contradiction in terms for pre-American republics) requires open, lengthy, and public debate that engages the full attention of the electorate. The ratification debates over the Constitution should be the standard. Early voting in September cuts short that process and encourages people to vote their prejudices rather than making considered judgements.

Mary Harrington

The age of post-literacy is upon us. The dismayed warnings from teachers and professors have been growing in volume for some years; now, The Atlanticreports in its latest cover story that one Harvard student needed a set text translated from “Old English” in order to read it. The book in question? A Clockwork Orange.

The digital revolution, author Rose Horowitch argues, completes a trajectory predicted from the mid-20th century by writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman: the end of mass literacy, and with it much of the normative culture we take for granted. Horowitch musters literacy scholars, critics, and doom-sayers to warn that this transformation will change the way we think — that it will usher in a less rational, more demagogic political culture. Her argument goes that this is, in effect, a new burning of the Library of Alexandria.

All this is right. But beyond a gesture at Trumpian rhetoric, Horowitch balks at thinking through in any detail the political implications of the new digital post-literacy. In fact, this is its central feature, and its implications are less revolutionary than astonishingly reactionary, in ways that make even the most staunch conservative look like a squashy Leftist.

The end of mass literacy means the degradation of every large-scale transformation that formed the modern world, from secularism to industrial technology, nation-states and democracy. A post-literate polity is less rationalistic, meaning it’s also more willing to believe in curses, demons and Satanic pedophile rings. No wonder, perhaps, that from “WitchTok” to hipster Catholicism to apocalyptic AI, a supernova of religious and crypto-religious phenomena has left bewildered commentators wondering what happened to “New Atheism” and the world of science and reason it promised.

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“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“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?

Brian Blase:

There is vitally important info missing from mainstream media stories on ACA premium increases.

1) Subsidized enrollees don’t pay the increases
2) Nearly 90% of enrollees are subsidized

This figure shows that taxpayers have borne almost all the premium increases over time.