college is a great place to make friends, date, and possibly meet a spouse. Those features are ever more important as America suffers a crisis of loneliness. Furthermore, if you think that artificial intelligence may displace a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, marrying well will become more important. The title of the new essay by Clara Collier says it all: “After Work, We’ll Have Each Other.” You are also going to live longer, so think hard about who you wish to spend that time with.
The data show that college-educated people are more likely to marry, and to stay married. More generally, college-educated folks have superior social indicators of all kinds, including resistance to alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction. (Charles Murray wrote a whole book on this theme, called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.)
If you have a bachelor’s degree and are over 25 years of age, your chance of being married is 64 percent. If you have only a high school degree, your odds of being married are an even 50 percent.
For divorce, the results are more dramatic yet. The chance of a woman remaining married for at least 20 years is 78 percent if she went to college, but 41 percent if she is only a high school graduate. For men, the gradient is less sharp though still significant—namely, 65 percent versus 47 percent.
People who finished college also have more extensive networks of friends. For instance they are twice as likely to have six or more close friends, and less than half as likely to have no close friends at all.
Claims about the value and benefits of diversityFootnote 1have proliferated in recent decades, becoming a contemporary secular credo that animates the spirit of almost all elite institutions of the English-speaking world. Consider, for example, President Bill Clinton’s proclamation, in his State of the Union Address, that “we must never, ever believe that our diversity is a weakness—it is our greatest strength” (Clinton, 1997). Nowadays, such contentions about the value and benefits of diversity—what we refer to as the “Diversity Hypothesis”—are commonplace, even axiomatic.
However, in contemplating the meaning and effects of diversity, it is important to note that ‘diversity’ is not a single fixed concept but something that can be understood in two distinct ways. For instance, as argued by Mogilski et al. (2025), diversity can refer to diversity in demographic makeup and identity, with an emphasis on including underrepresented groups within positions of power, or it can refer to diversity of perspective.
In the context of workplaces and fields of inquiry, the contexts most relevant to the present review, the Diversity Hypothesis is arguably manifest most prominently in the cognitive or informational Diversity Hypothesis (Mello & Rentsch, 2015) that posits that teams whose members vary in terms of their perspectives, thinking styles, knowledge, skills, values, and beliefs (i.e., diversity of perspective or viewpoint) are more likely to generate unique ideas and find more creative solutions to complex problems than homogenous teams. Consistent with this, popular science writers such as Scott E. Page (2007, 2019) contend that groups of people with diverse perspectives, heuristics and interpretations systematically outperform groups composed of the “best” individual performers, with additional claims that this viewpoint diversity ultimately stems from identity diversity (e.g., demographic differences, such as gender and race).
The big story: Florida is one of 24 states, including Washington D.C., that currently funds K-12 tutoring directly, according to a new review published today by Stanford University.
The university’s third annual National Student Support Accelerator looks throughout the nation to analyze how states support high-impact tutoring and the policies and funding they have in place for it.
High-impact tutoring is an immersive form of tutoring based on relationship building and individualized instruction known to improve education outcomes and even school attendance, according to lead author of the brief Kathy Bendheim.
“Our mission is to accelerate access to high-impact tutoring to students in need,” Bendheim said.
Of the 18 states that ran competitive tutoring grant programs last school year, Florida was one of the 17 that kept them going this year.
The Florida Legislature established the Florida Tutoring Advantage program in 2024 and which is administered by the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning. In last school year alone, the review detailed the state funded $22 million toward the program, including $2 million for AI-enhanced learning support.
Seventy-three percent of districts throughout the state participated in the program last school year that served more than 46,000 students. This year, the state appropriation sits at $14 million.
Despite unprecedented access to information in the digital age, young citizens face growing challenges related to news consumption and misinformation. This large-scale randomized controlled trial examines the impact of two complementary interventions designed to foster media literacy and the consumption of high-quality news among high-school students, implemented in France over the 2024-25 academic year. The study involves 243 high schools (for a total number of 9,628 students), randomly assigned to a control group or to receive one or both of the following interventions: (i) a one-year free digital subscription to the leading national newspaper, and (ii) media education modules implemented by teachers. Exploiting unique data on students’ actual online news consumption, we document a very large uptake of the free subscription, which translates into persistent and large increases in news consumption (+0.49 to 0.60 sd) and demand for future news, including an 8pp increase in paid subscriptions nearly a year after the intervention. We also observe a 0.20 to 0.31 sd increase in news knowledge for students enrolled in deprived schools, reducing baseline information inequality by 45-70%. Finally, we show that both free news access and media education improve media literacy skills (+0.08 to 0.26 sd), with larger effects among students taught by teachers with prior experience in media education.
After roughly six years, IPS changed its grading policy to make it possible for students to receive a zero. However, students have multiple opportunities before that happens.
Indianapolis Public School students can receive a zero on assignments again, but only if they make zero effort to complete them.
The IPS school board updated the district’s grading policy to remove the district’s no-zero grading policy for students in first through 12th grade in aunanimous vote on Thursday.
The change comes about six years after the no-zero policy was implemented and is largely due to teacher feedback, said Lela Simmons, IPS chief learning officer, during the school board’s agenda review session on Tuesday.
Now, students can receive a zero on an assignment if they make no attempt to complete it after getting multiple opportunities and support from the teacher. How that works is up to the teachers and will depend on the student and their grade level, Simmons said.
If students make a good faith effort, they will earn at least 50%, Simmons said. Anything 59% or lower is an F, while other letter grades are about 10 points each. For example, anything 90% or higher is an A and grades between 80% and 89% are a B. Earning at least 50% on an assignment makes it more likely students will pass the class.
She said the aim is to continue to give students opportunities to do better and try again.
The no-zero policy was approved in July 2020 and meant that the lowest score students could receive was 50%.
“The intention of that shift was because it is incredibly hard for students to come back from zeros in their grades,” Simmons said.
She said the change was also in response to the COVID-19 pandemic which led to students learning virtually and missing assignments for related reasons such as quarantine.
Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found.
The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI.
404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program.
A calculus class may not be the first place you’d think to find oral exams. But Robin Pemantle is a longtime fan. A math professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Pemantle believes that having conversations with students about math is a uniquely valuable way to assess what they have learned and how they think.
A regulation that raises gasoline prices makes people angry but when regulation prevents an industry from ever existing, most people never learn what they lost.
Consider nuclear power. Overnight construction costs for early U.S. demonstration reactors fell 81 percent between 1954 and 1968. For reactors begun between 1967 and 1972, costs rose 187 percent. The 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision and then the reaction to Three Mile Island in 1979 accelerated the cost increases and slowed construction even more. Note the order. The turn was underway years before the accident that everyone blames for it.
What might have happened had the earlier learning and deployment trends continued? Peter Lang’s 2017 paper in Energiesestimates that nuclear power would have cost about one-tenth as much by 2015. The additional generation could have avoided as many as 9.5 million premature deaths.
The number is staggering even if quartered. Millions of deaths. Yet, the graveyard was both invisible and silent.
(Furthermore, climate change would not be a problem today had nuclear power not been handicapped.)
The nuclear story you probably know but Niko McCarty has an excellent new Works in Progress piece on an invisible graveyard of technology that I knew almost nothing about.
In the 1980s, officials decided to regulate engineered microbes under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a law written for industrial chemicals. Microbes swap genes all the time, but EPA treats them as “new” whenever DNA is introduced from another genus. As a result, even a marker gene used simply to identify successfully edited cells can trigger review if it remains in the organism. McCarty reports that researchers filed more than 240 applications between 1987 and 2018: “Only a few were ever approved for widespread use.”
What have we lost? We can’t know for sure but among the plausible losses McCarty discusses are engineered bacteria that detect buried explosives, microbes that extract rare-earth metals and improved plastic-digesting enzymes. Similarly, Chernia et al.write:
That essay, arguing for the existential necessity of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, was widely criticized on both left and right. Yet the arguments it made and the images it galvanized were also widely credited with helping propel Donald Trump into the White House. Ten years later, those arguments are still worth looking at.
The central argument of Anton’s essay was evident from the title. Like those passengers on Flight 93 who realized what was going on with their plane on September 11, 2001, and decided to storm the cockpit to stop their plane from being used as a weapon against the nation, Americans had a duty to stop Clinton from winning the 2016 presidential election.
AI has made groundbreaking progress in pure math in the past few months:
May 20, 2026: Erdos’s planar unit-distance conjecture was disproved (open 80 years)[1].
August 1, 2026: The first explicit non-sofic group was constructed (open 27 years)[2].
August 23, 2026: The six-sphere was shown to admit a complex structure (open 78 years; unverified)[3].
This AI advancement raises the following questions: (a) How much can AI speed up the process from ideation to peer-reviewed publication? (b) What is the role of a mathematician when AI can solve conjectures faster?
We are assembling the top math talent worldwide to answer these questions. On October 30th, a hundred teams will be given frontier models to solve open conjectures and build new mathematical theories. Then, they will defend their results before leading mathematicians, who will assess their understanding of the results.
This summer marks the worst period for US statistical integrity since President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last August. Two different and seemingly uncoordinated events at the Census Bureau raised alarms about inappropriate political encroachment on the scientific and technical authority of the agency.
I take some comfort that journalists and independent experts spoke up quickly and loudly. I still trust the economic indicators we get from the expert staff at Census and other US government statistical agencies, like inflation data and the jobs report. But I am scrutinizing any technical changes more closely and am quicker to look for political influence.
These two events—the publication of a brief on the official Census platform about noncitizen voting that fell far short of Census standards and a political decision about privacy-protection methods—are new harms. The main impact is likely to be on demographic data for voting and redistricting, and on local demographic and economic data. The headline-worthy macroeconomic data that policymakers, financial markets, and the media follow closely were spared this time around. But damage to any part of the statistical system reverberates throughout the system. These events demonstrate that the Census Bureau and other agencies are increasingly vulnerable to political interference that would harm their credibility and the ability of businesses and policymakers to make the data-driven decisions that affect Americans’ daily lives.
More than 85,000 students from 895 school districts have confirmed they’ll use a state-funded scholarship toward private school or home-school expenses in the coming year, according to a report this month by Texas Comptroller Don Huffines. Some 68,000, or 80%, are in households making 200% or less of the federal poverty level. That’s $66,000 for a family of four.
Another 17,300 students are in households between 200% and 500% of the poverty threshold, meaning no more than $165,000 for a family of four. More than 20,000 students, or about 25%, also have a disability. This outcome is by design: The law gives priority to children with disabilities and lower incomes, and a $1 billion funding cap means the program won’t reach other tiers of applicants.
The figures are incomplete, since only about 70% of the students offered funding had finalized their participation by the report’s Aug. 1 deadline. Depending on how many families with lower incomes decide not to take a scholarship after all, more funds may flow to higher tiers. After the report’s release, Mr. Huffines said the state had offered money to another 15,000 students between 200% and 500% of poverty.
Still, the report is a helpful look at where the taxpayer’s money is going. Scholarship amounts are modest: $2,000 for home-schoolers or up to $10,474 to attend a private school, which is 85% of the usual per-pupil funding. Children with disabilities can qualify for more.
The most comprehensive guide to free speech on campus — anywhere
The University of Chicago ranks 1 out of 261 schools in the 2027 College Free Speech Rankings with a score of 81 and a B- speech climate grade.
UChicago ranks first nationally on “Administrative Support,” showing strong trust in officials to defend speech. It lands in the top 25 for “Political Tolerance,” indicating comparatively greater student willingness to host controversial speakers, and “Openness,” meaning fewer contentious topics feel off-limits. The data shows no bottom 50 weaknesses.
The University of Chicago authored the original Chicago Statement and the Kalven Report on institutional neutrality. The school earns a “green light” Spotlight rating. UChicago should respond clearly and forcefully to defend free speech whenever censorship occurs or is demanded. Doing so will demonstrate the university’s commitment to free speech and build community trust that the administration will defend expressive rights.
In April, Memorial University—the only university in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador—posted five job openings for prestigious Canada Research Chair (CRC) professorships. In all five cases, it was specified explicitly that able-bodied white men need not apply. Rather, the jobs were reserved for members of “equity groups, including women; 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Indigenous peoples; racialised persons; and persons with disabilities.”
Following the uproar, Memorial administrators refused to apologise or back down. Instead, they explained that universities across Canada were all doing the same thing (even if they weren’t so blatant about it)—since any school seeking to get Canada Research Chair funding from the federal government must demonstrate that they are tearing down “systemic barriers in academic hiring.”
Memorial University isn’t wrong. As a group of researchers led by University of Buckingham professor Eric Kaufmann details in a new report published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canada’s $300-million-per-year Canada Research Chairs program restricts disbursements to universities that hit aggressive affirmative-action targets set by government officials.
A new report finds a lot of critical theory and not much of the basics.
Children learn a great deal about race and gender in schools these days, but not nearly enough about reading and math. A big reason is the colleges that teach the teachers, and a new report forthcoming Wednesday brings more insight into how they promote politics instead of the basics of instruction.
The evidence comes from Daniel Buck of the American Enterprise Institute, who examined syllabi for programs at eight public graduate schools of education across five states. For each school he analyzed one master’s or certification program that “aligned most closely with an elementary teaching degree,” he writes, not programs that are “overtly political.”
———
2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.
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!)
The academic-dishonesty crisis is well documented. When the Harvard Crimson surveyed undergraduates this spring, nearly 40 percent copped to using AI “in ways their instructor may view as inappropriate or against class policy.” Now, schools are scrambling to catch up. Princeton and Oberlin — institutions that have long prided themselves on faith in undergraduates’ morality — are ending the tradition of unsupervised exams. The University of Chicago’s social-sciences division is banning all technology from classrooms in required courses.
But as some faculty move to restrict devices, many administrators are betting on something else: better tech. When California State University system schools upgraded their contracts with Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection giant, campuses paid an additional fee for a tool that scans essays for AI. Columbia University’s Teachers College recommends educators use Draftback, a Chrome extension that lets professors replay a Google doc’s entire revision history. Other institutions have GPTZero, a program that promises to find AI-powered plagiarism with “99 percent accuracy.”
Despite all this, as the fourth academic year of AI college begins, students keep finding innovative ways to skirt the rules. Just a year before Jared’s friend pitted an LLM against WebAssign, agentic coding tools couldn’t yet reverse-engineer the weaknesses in professors’ grading platforms, much less build bespoke software to exploit them. But in the spring of 2025, a new class of AI tools became available to the public. Unlike mere chatbots, newer models can plan multistep tasks, call on external tools like web search and code execution, and carry out complex assignments — from building slide decks to writing and running code — with minimal human supervision.
Share
The Economist
VERY THREE years the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, releases the results of international school tests sat by 15-year-olds all across the world. There were reasons to hope that the latest data, published on September 8th, would bring positive news. Marks in mathematics, reading and science had collapsed in the previous round of testing, which was carried out just after the pandemic. Policymakers dared hope that, with the calamity well in the past, grades might start to rebound.
That is not what happened. On the contrary, in rich countries—the primary focus of the tests—scores have fallen further (see chart 1). In literacy, the decline is actually speeding up. These data suggest that there are long-running factors pushing down achievement in schools, and that without swift correction, pupils’ abilities could yet plumb further depths. Anyone who cares about the young of today—and the economies of tomorrow—ought to be alarmed.
The OECD’s project, known as PISA, takes a measure of young people’s aptitudes as they approach the end of their compulsory school days. The number of school systems taking part has expanded over the years: the latest tests were sat in all 38 OECD member-countries and in 53 other places (many of them developing economies). The results are used to create an international league table of sorts.
This year, as in almost every round since 2000, Asian school systems rule the roost. Children in China—taking part for the first time since 2018—have wiped the floor with almost everyone else (though scores there are skewed because the tests are sat in only four rich provinces). In science and maths they score 100 points above the average for OECD countries (as a broad rule of thumb, 20 points is considered to be about as much as an average pupil gains in a full year of learning). Kids in Singapore, Macau, Taiwan and Japan follow behind.
Estonia still looks the best school system in the West. Turkey is rising very fast. And there is heartening news for Britain, whose youngsters now rank inside the world’s top ten in all three disciplines. Compared with three years ago, Britain has pushed up its science results and held reading and mathematics broadly steady. That counts as a good result when many others are heading down.
32% of Americans satisfied with the quality of U.S. K-12 education
K-12 schools rated worst on teaching critical thinking skills
Record-low 66% of K-12 parents satisfied with child’s education
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ satisfaction with the quality of K-12 education in the U.S. has slipped to 32%, a new low in Gallup’s 27-year trend and down 11 percentage points over the past two years. At the same time, dissatisfaction has risen to a record high of 67%.
Satisfaction has averaged 44% since 1999. After peaking at 53% in 2004, it has only been above 50% once, at 51% in 2019.
Overall, 8% of U.S. adults are completely satisfied and 24% somewhat satisfied with the quality of K-12 education, while 36% are somewhat dissatisfied and 31% completely dissatisfied. These findings are from an Aug. 3-24 Walton Family Foundation/Gallup telephone poll.
Currently, 35% of Democrats, 32% of independents and 25% of Republicans are completely or somewhat satisfied with K-12 education. Democrats’ and independents’ satisfaction levels are record lows by three points and one point, respectively. Republicans’ satisfaction was lower only in 2023, during the Biden administration.
Although Democrats have often expressed higher satisfaction than Republicans with K-12 education dating back to 1999, Democrats are largely driving the recent drops in satisfaction. Since 2024, satisfaction among Democrats has fallen by 19 points, including by seven points over the past year, while independents’ satisfaction is down 10 points and Republicans’ is down six points.
When Los Angeles parent Lila Byock’s son started middle school, his grades suddenly collapsed.
It didn’t make sense. “He’d always been a bright, curious, engaged kid who did really well in school,” Byock said. She and her husband were confused and concerned.
Teachers assured the family that their son understood the material and the problem wasn’t academics. “They said, ‘He just can’t stay on task on his iPad,’” she continued.
That answer surprised Byock. Like many parents, she assumed that after pandemic remote learning ended, classrooms had largely returned to face-to-face instruction. Instead, she learned her son was spending much of his school day on a district-issued device.
“He was scrolling YouTube Shorts during math class. He was playing Fortnite battles with classmates during class,” Byock said. Other students watched streaming shows during lunch on school-issued iPads, and one student even showed pornography on a school device, according to Byock.
After talking with her son, Byock realized he wasn’t trying to break rules, but rather, he felt trapped by distractions he couldn’t seem to resist. “It was eroding his self-esteem,” she said. “He told us, ‘I want to stop, and I don’t think I can.’”
When Byock asked school administrators how devices were being used and what safeguards existed, the school’s answers didn’t satisfy her.
America has few large cities and they usually have a bad rap. They’re known for being crime-ridden, inhospitable places dotted by ‘bad neighborhoods’ and poor architecture, with hostile design elements, poorly-maintained streets, and unenticing public art. The prototypical example of this is Detroit, Michigan, which was once a booming industrial powerhouse containing nearly two million people, museums and gorgeous art deco homes, towers, and squares, and America’s highest household incomes. Now, it would be all too polite to call it a ‘hellhole’, and it’s not alone.
America’s cities are, by and large, bad.1 The easiest way to see this is to understand the primary reason why they’re so bad: crime. The big benefit of cities for countries is that they’re economic engines of progress due to agglomeration effects: benefits and cost-savings that appear because companies, services, and workers are geographically collocated in them. But agglomeration effects are negatively related to crime. Look:
But is this causal? Does crime reduce the extent of agglomeration economies? To a major extent, yes, and we know it thanks to a suite of different disasters—bombings, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.—, to random events that displaced populations—the Mariel Boatlift, Japanese internment, close elections that appointed discriminatory mayors, etc.—, to the historical period known as the Great Migration—the mass movement of African Americans from the southeastern U.S. to the rest of the country’s urban areas. My replication package deals with all of these, and they produce convergent results, but for this article, I’ll just talk about the clearest example.
The Great Migration started just before World War I and ended just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The era was marked by African Americans leaving the South for two main reasons: to escape Jim Crow laws and to seek economic opportunity in the factories of the North.
Right in its student handbook, Whitman College specifically promises every student freedom of expression and association. So, when members of the Whitman Republican Club sought recognition to become a college-affiliated student organization, they had every reason to expect approval through the same review process as any other group.
Instead, the student senate unanimously rejected their application. 25-0.
Was it something they had done? Was it something they forgot? No, the record points somewhere else: It was what they believed.
Immediately before the vote, members of the Associated Students of Whitman College’s Senate grilled the club’s representatives about their political views rather than limiting their questions to the club’s organization, constitution, or eligibility. Instead of using viewpoint-neutral criteria, senators asked probing, ideological questions like, “On the 2024 republican party platform subsection 18, what is your club’s take? Will you call the republican party out for things like this?” and “President Trump has made life hard for all international students. When you don’t get affiliated, what is your plan?”
At the end of the discussion, one senator made their objection remarkably explicit: “You can name yourselves whatever you want, but the language of your constitution is in direct contrast to our own constitution. I would suggest that you scrub the title and make a debate club.”
“Impedance” is a measure of how a system resists the inflow of energy. Often, a system can be changed to accept energy more efficiently, by adding an element called an “impedance matcher.” Most people have never heard of an impedance matcher, but once you know about them, you begin to see them everywhere: in the shape of a trumpet, the anti-reflective coating on a lens, and the foam spikes on the inside of a recording booth.
A familiar example of an impedance matcher is the transmission of an automobile, which couples the energy from the engine into the wheels by converting the relatively fast rotation of the engine into the slower, stronger rotation required to propel the car. The transformer on an electric pole solves an analogous problem, converting the high-voltage electricity on the transmission lines to the high-current electricity required to power your home. Lots of machines, from jet engines to radios, depend on impedance matchers to move energy from one part of the system to another.
Some of the most interesting impedance matching occurs when energy comes in the form of a wave. You have probably noticed in a swimming pool that waves from a splash reflect off the sides of the wall. Because there is an impedance mismatch between the water and the wall, the wave energy is unable to couple into the wall, and so it reflects back. If you watch a vertical seawall, you will notice that the reflected wave adds to the height of the original wave, creating a splash that is almost twice the height of the wave. This does not happen when a wave rolls up a gently sloped beach, because the slope acts as an impedance matcher, allowing the wave’s energy to flow into the sand. The foam spikes on the inside of an anechoic recording booth serve much the same function. The sound waves are much larger than the spikes, so they make the foam gradually denser as it gets closer to the wall. This couples the sound energy into the absorbing wall without reflection, so there is no echo.
Several years ago, the Kashanis found themselves in an all-too-familiar spot for many young families. They wanted to find an alternative to the local public school for their two young children, but they couldn’t afford a private school in the city or a house in a good suburban school district. The Kashanis felt stuck.
A relative suggested they move to South Florida and enroll their children in the Jewish day school Mrs. Kashani’s nieces and nephews attended.
Florida’s K-12 scholarship programs allow parents to direct their children’s education funds to the school of their choice. Thanks to such policies, private-school and home-school families in Florida don’t have to pay twice for education—in the form of tuition for their kids and taxes for others’ kids—the way New York families do.
Moreover, Florida’s school choice policies mean that families enjoy wider residential options, because they don’t have to limit their home search to areas with good schools. “As educational opportunities keep expanding, I believe we’ll continue to see buyer demand spread across more neighborhoods,” Florida realtor Michael Buttacavoli observes, “not because the best schools are becoming less desirable, but because families simply have more options than they did a decade ago.”
The Kashanis settled in a middle-class neighborhood in Broward County near the private school their children now attend using state-funded scholarships. Spared the added expenses for housing and schooling that many young families face elsewhere, the Kashanis then did something that would have seemed impossible back in New York: They had a third child.
In the hierarchy of group chats, ranked from most benign to active minefield, the mom chat is in its own atmosphere, the Victor Wembanyama of thorny text chains. You think your family group chat, the one that includes both your prickly parents and defensive in-laws, is tricky to navigate? Welcome to the mom chat, a group of 10, 20, 40 near-strangers with varying parenting philosophies, backgrounds, priorities—and spelling capabilities—discussing their most precious gift, their child.
The wider world had the pleasure of meeting the mother of all mom chats last week, after a creator named AshleighJamz posted a viral sequence of texts in which a woman named Michelle asked her Kindergarten class chat if they could agree on “some basic rules” about lunchboxes: Please, nobody send Oreos to school. Ever.
The series, now known as Oreo-gate, may well be a marketing ploy. The texts are set to songs created by the AI music app Suno. A Suno spokesperson said that the company has a paid partnership with AshleighJamz, but that creators have editorial control over what they post. Oreo says it wasn’t behind the viral chat but is “thrilled” about it. AshleighJamz didn’t return a request for comment.
Hundreds of colleges are sending students letters of admission—without even requiring an application.
Schools are increasingly agreeing to admit students based on a handful of criteria, like high school transcripts. Known as “direct admissions,” this expedited process is free and omits required essays, questions about extracurriculars and mandated standardized tests.
In turn, the colleges—which are seeking ways to attract more students amid broader financial headwinds—gain exposure to prospects who may never have heard of them otherwise. They then woo the young people into enrolling.
Proponents call the approach a solution for both sides.
“Instead of a student applying to the institution, the institution applies to them,” said Angel Perez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “It’s a way for students not to have to jump through hoops in order to get into college.”
Direct admission has ballooned in popularity, particularly among less-selective private schools vying for a shrinking pool of college-goers. On the Common App, the number of participating institutions has more than tripled since 2023-24, representing about a fifth of the app’s partners, said Chief Executive Jenny Rickard. More than a dozen states now have direct-admissions initiatives.
Predictably, the comment section was disabled at the bottom of the editorial, continuing a trend of censorship on issues the Times knows will spark subscriber blowback. The paper almost always tries to justify the suppression by saying it’s a “sensitive” subject, but that is not the true reason.
What I think the Times’ bosses really want is to preserve what’s been described as the “illusion of consensus.” In short: They want to squash any evidence that their readers disagree with them.
Had the comment section been open, it almost certainly would have been filled with a chorus of subscribers voicing their opposition to the “no” endorsement. They would have pointed out that the Times has never shown any consideration to the biological females affected by trans athletes in their sports, and that the separation is simply a matter of fairness.
But this would make it known that the paper’s readers do not jibe with the agenda the Times is pushing. And the brass, well…the brass can’t have that.
This subscriber censorship is hardly limited to the trans-in-sports debate. Earlier this summer — when the World Cup rocketed patriotism to what felt like a 10-year high — a Times reporter found a handful of Trump detractors to suggest the country had mixed feelings about whether it wanted the U.S. men’s soccer team to succeed. The story was universally blasted on social media, as critics decried a tone-deaf attempt to pooh-pooh said patriotism. But it seemed the Times anticipated such a reaction. No comments allowed.
California is paying tens of millions of dollars for illegal immigrants to attend college — infuriating Golden State natives struggling to pay their tuition.
California provides illegal migrant students with state-funded grants and other financial aid, while thousands can also benefit from in-state tuition rates, waivers for community college fees and subsidized loans.
The vault lies inside a grassy hill, next to the rolling Texas prairie.
In the windowless room, climate controls ensure the humidity remains constant, while a suppression system stands ready to snuff out fires. A bulletproof steel door guards the contents.
One recent August afternoon, a burly security guard pried it open, and David Barton, a sprightly 72-year-old conservative political activist, strolled inside to his prized collection: tens of thousands of founding-era American documents and artifacts he values at millions of dollars.
Barton darted among glass cases and rattled off the highlights of his trove: a Revolutionary War-era shot flask, a 1795 handwritten prayer proclamation from Samuel Adams, and what he says is a lock of George Washington’s hair.
As students in the Madison school district start the new school year, administrators will continue to limit students’ access to artificial intelligence features on school-issued devices, including Chromebooks.
AI applications like Chat GPT and Google’s Gemini tool are blocked or disabled on students’ computers this year, district spokesperson Edell Fiedler said in a statement. Fiedler said there are no changes in the district’s approach to AI access and use for students this school year.
At an event with reporters in August, Superintendent Joe Gothard previously said the district is actively working to address the implications of AI in classrooms.
“I think right now, we’re in the beginning stages of understanding AI and its impact on the work that we do and how we need to best work with our students, our staff and our families,” Gothard said.
School districts across the country are grappling with how to implement AI in classrooms, sparking debates about what appropriate usage looks like for students of different ages and what platforms to spend money on. The nation’s two largest school districts, in New York and Los Angeles, moved in recent weeks to largely restrict student-facing AI applications.
Some school districts were forced to make quick decisions at the start of the school year after Google Classroom, a popular online tool in schools, automatically enabled the use of its Gemini chatbot for students of all ages in August, according to Education Week. The chatbot previously had been restricted to students 18 years or older.
———
2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.
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!)
One of us (Mr. Fryer) released a study in 2016—later published in the Journal of Political Economy—finding that police aren’t more likely to shoot black Americans than white Americans, after accounting for the relevant context. Colleagues who read the draft warned him not to publish: “You’ll ruin your career.” The paper was denounced on social media within minutes of release, and Mr. Fryer needed armed protection for more than a month. Privately, scholars who read the study called it rigorous, honest work. Publicly, many of the same scholars said nothing. No single study settles a question this large—but silence isn’t how science advances.
That silence is the problem—a cultural and an economic one. When the professional cost of publishing an unwelcome finding exceeds the cost of suppressing it, rational scholars suppress it. The result is that social-science literature reflects what researchers are permitted to say rather than what they actually discover. The scope of the problem is difficult to measure, because its most important effects are invisible—though the data we have suggest it is getting worse. In a 2024 survey of more than 6,000 professors by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 35% said they had toned down their written work for fear of controversy—roughly four times the share of social scientists who admitted the same at the height of McCarthyism.
Some astonishing statistics I came upon when looking more into the catastrophe that is the Seattle Public Schools. The white-black achievement gap got much worse than this after the equity plan, note. The 3.5-year gap is from before the failed, counterproductive plan.
More than 760 000 students took the PISA science, mathematics and reading test in 2025 across 91 countries and economies, representing around 33 million 15-year-olds across the world. The highest performers in PISA 2025 across these three domains were the Chinese jurisdictions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and Singapore. Additionally, Estonia, Japan, Korea, Macao (China), Chinese Taipei and the United Kingdom were among the top 10 performing education systems. The overall performance of OECD countries declined, with the lowest average levels of performance ever observed in science, reading and mathematics. However, there have been some improvements; for example, among OECD countries, Costa Rica, the Slovak Republic, Türkiye and the United Kingdom have seen increases in science scores since 2022. Overall reading scores saw particularly steep declines in the past three years, including in skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources and thinking critically about what we read. The instances of “hasty reading” – in which students read quickly but inaccurately – nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.
By every measure, American students are being outperformed by students in Singapore and parts of China who had top scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, taken by 15-year-olds around the world.
The good news from the latest PISA results, released Tuesday, is that the U.S. has gained relative standing in recent decades. Today, U.S. students score well above average in science and reading. Math scores, long America’s weakest subject, are now on par with other developed countries.
The bad news is how this happened. The U.S. has steadily moved up largely because other countries’ scores have deteriorated faster than ours over the last decade. A bevy of data pointsshow American students are learning less than they used to. Even U.S. PISA scores in math and reading are at or near their lowest level.
The PISA 2025 results are out today. Some quick insights.
The major story is very significant global decline. The last PISA study was in 2022, and saw big declines in reading and maths scores from 2018. Obviously the pandemic played a part.
But this 2025 round has seen further falls even from the 2022 lows!
Things haven’t gone back to normal post-pandemic – they’ve got worse.
Every generation thinks the generation below is less smart – but this time they might be right!
…….
I also think that we shouldn’t overlook the impact of educational fads. Over the last twenty years or so, a lot of influential global organisations have encouraged fads like 21st century skills, discovery learning, etc., and a lot of countries have adopted them.
But these are evidence-free fads that are not going to improve education.
———
Canadian students’ reading and math scores decline in OECD’s global assessment
Canadian high-school students are outperforming many of their international peers in science, math and reading, but their overall scores in these subjects are also declining, according to a new international ranking by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Results for the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment, released Tuesday, show Canada in the top 10 among 91 countries and economies that were evaluated.
The OECD conducts the assessment, which measures the performance of 15-year-olds in science, math and reading, every three years. Science was the main focus of this latest round of assessments. Math and reading were also tested, but there were fewer questions asked.
In 2025, about 24,600 students from across the 10 provinces participated in the assessment.
The results showed that Canada’s scores in science, math and reading have all been declining, a trend also seen in other countries.
In science, Canada’s mean performance dropped five points compared to 2022. Its math score dropped 12 points, while reading saw a drop of 17 points.
Most other countries saw similar, if not worse, declines.
2/2 This is important. More Canadian students are struggling and fewer Canadian students are excelling. This started before COVID and it continues.
———
The percentage of American 15 year olds who scored at the top level of PISA held relatively steady while the percentage scoring at the lowest level increased.
Finally, comparative data further bolsters the claim that Gibb and co.’s reforms positively affected the quality of English schools. Between 2010 and 2024, the constituent nations of the United Kingdom ran something of a natural experiment in education policy. While England embraced phonics, a knowledge-rich curriculum, explicit teacher-led instruction, and greater school autonomy, Scotland and Wales eschewed the evidence on early literacy instruction, doubled down on national curricula focused on the acquisition of amorphous “generalizable” skills, and promoted self-directed “discovery” learning as state of the art. During this period, the international metrics show that England forged ahead, while its fellow home nations stagnated (see Figure 2).
This is because those outcomes are the most reliable measure of the quality of school systems, and thus one of the most powerful predictors for the long-run success of economies. Researchers at Stanford University estimate that if all 15-year-old Americans achieved at least the PISA baseline Level 2, this could add over $40trn—one and a quarter times America’s nominal GDP—to the country’s economy over their working lives.
Yet in 2025, 22% of American 15-year-olds failed to reach this benchmark in science (up from 19% in 2018), 35% in mathematics (up from 27%) and 26% in reading (up from 19%). These students struggle to interpret simple data, identify evidence in a graph or understand simple texts.
The picture is similar in many countries. Indeed, the world is no longer sharply divided between rich and well-educated nations and poor and badly educated ones: national wealth accounts for just half of the variation in countries’ performance, according to PISA.
In the same vein, good policies and wise spending choices are far stronger predictors for learning outcomes than just how much countries spend per student. Luxembourg spends $288,521 per student from the beginning of primary school up to the age of 15, by far the most, but it still posts lower science scores than Ireland, France or Italy—all of which invest less than half that amount per student.
Students in the Chinese jurisdictions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang topped the PISA science test, with all more than 100 points above the OECD average, where 20 points typically equals a school year’s progress. Even if they represent just a small part of China, they make the largest contribution (27%) to the global talent pool of PISA’s top performers. These students can tackle challenging scientific concepts, evaluate claims and identify flaws in scientific arguments, making them prime candidates for tomorrow’s top jobs. The education systems next on the list—Singapore, Macao, Chinese Taipei and Japan—are all from East Asia, too.
The greatest cause for concern emerges not from a single snapshot of PISA, but from the direction of travel. At a moment when artificial intelligence is transforming how humans work, learn and live, one would expect education systems to be raising the bar. Instead, in many places, outcomes have declined.
Reading, the gateway to all learning, has declined sharply. Between 2018 and 2025 performance fell in three-quarters of the countries. Across the OECD it was down by 25 points—more than a year of learning. Much of this decline happened between 2022 and 2025. The biggest surprise is who fell furthest behind. It was not the most disadvantaged students, but those from wealthy families, which points to a much broader challenge than inequality alone.
Few countries would allow millions of children to receive a new vaccine without first demanding rigorous clinical trials. Yet in education we introduce new technologies into millions of classrooms with remarkably little evidence about their impact, turning students into unwitting crash dummies for tools we do not yet fully understand.
———
2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.
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!)
(NB. If you would like a similar analysis conducted for your state or university, feel free to contact me to discuss consulting fees.)
At The Nuzzo Letter, I previously published two data briefs on the female:male ratio in undergraduate admissions at universities in the United States (U.S.). The first data brieffocused on four major technical universities in the U.S.: California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The second data brief focused on eight Ivy League universities and six Ivy League “adjacent” universities.
The current data brief builds on these two data briefs by focusing on all universities in one state’s higher education system: North Carolina. One reason why I chose North Carolina is because the Martin Center for Academic Renewal is based in North Carolina, and the Martin Center published a policy brief earlier this year titled: “Where are all the men? A look at male vs. female postsecondary enrollment in North Carolina.” I also chose North Carolina for personal reasons. I lived in North Carolina for two years while completing my Master’s degree at Appalachian State University between 2006 and 2008.
The North Carolina universities included in the current analysis are:
Michigan continues to pour record amounts of taxpayer money into public education, but the latest statewide testing results show English Language Arts proficiency moving in the opposite direction.
New 2026 M-STEP results released by the Michigan Department of Education on September 4, 2026 show proficiency declining from the previous year in every ELA grade tested by M-STEP, grades 3 through 7.
The numbers are particularly troubling when viewed over several years.
Third-grade ELA proficiency has now fallen for three consecutive years, dropping from 40.89% in 2023 to 39.64% in 2024, 38.87% in 2025 and just 38.17% in 2026.
Fourth grade has followed essentially the same path, falling from 44.35% in 2023 to 43.25% in 2024, 42.43% in 2025 and 41.28% in 2026.
At the same time, Michigan has repeatedly increased education spending under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, including record per-pupil funding and hundreds of millions of dollars directed toward literacy, tutoring, teacher training, early childhood education and other programs.
For the 2025-26 school year, students entered classrooms under what Whitmer’s office called her seventh consecutive record education budget.
That bipartisan budget increased the state’s foundation allowance by $442 to a record $10,050 per student. Whitmer’s administration said the budget would help Michigan children “learn, grow, and thrive” and highlighted increased literacy support among its major investments.
But less effort in the short term inevitably carries a cost long term: if English stops being a main subject, it won’t disappear, it’ll just become more and more “expensive”, just like piano.
Right now, if you’re a normal family that doesn’t have money for tutoring classes, your kid can still rely on school education and hard work to slowly raise their grades, get through the Gaokao, pass CET 4 and 6 in college, and even if they’re not totally fluent, they’ve at least grasped the basics.
If they don’t work in a profession that uses English, they can leave it by the wayside (just like how most work doesn’t have much to do with physics or chemistry or biology either, should we stop teaching those too with this logic?). If they want to travel overseas or keep studying, then at least school education formed a steady foundation for them.
Importantly: language takes time. If schools don’t teach it and families don’t support it, then how hard it is for an adult to start from zero?
Of course, we do need reforms in English education.
But the problem should be “how do we teach this” and not “should we teach it at all?”
What we really should be cancelling is pointless English involution, not the opportunity for normal kids to interact with English at all.
The same week that Claude finished formalizing the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in Lean, a paper landed in my inbox titled, The Spherical Hadwiger Theorem. The Spherical Hadwiger Conjecture1, which has been open since about 1974, describes a niche-but-important piece of integral-geometric machinery. I’m not going to get into the details of the conjecture here; if you are interested you can see a discussion in my previous post where the theorem (then still a conjecture2) greatly simplifies the proof of a little lemma of mine from grad school.
But to the point: this new preprint by Wang & Wu of Hunan University apparently proves the conjecture using AI assistance. The final section contains the disclaimer:
During the preparation of this manuscript, OpenAI Codex was used to assist with developing proof details, identifying gaps and points requiring clarification, organizing and typesetting the manuscript, and editing the English. The authors reviewed and verified all AI-assisted mathematical content and suggested changes, made all final mathematical and editorial decisions, and take full responsibility for the manuscript.
This disclaimer leaves open the possibility that Codex did a substantial portion of the work that, until very recently, required a research-level mathematician: developing proof details3, finding and fixing gaps, and apparently writing the paper. Moreover, the work is very polished and readable (if you are a research mathematician in this field)
The political backlash started on the left, and Bernie Sanders now wants a nationwide halt to new data centers. But Democrats in Senate races across the country are signing up for some version of a slowdown. In Ohio Sherrod Brown is making the issue the center of his comeback bid against appointed GOP Sen. Jon Husted.
Even politicians who have supported data centers are turning. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker once courted data centers but now has turned them a cold shoulder. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has a huge lead in his re-election campaign, this month issued an executive order restricting their development.
Republicans are also getting in on the act. GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany is running ads in Wisconsin in his campaign for Governor calling his opponent “Data Center David Crowley.” “Our lakes run dry, family farms paved over,” says the fear-mongering spot.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in August paused new construction pending the completion of a statewide audit, citing concerns about data center power and water use. He blamed AI firms: “They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”
It’s true the AI industry has hurt its own cause by fueling speculative anxiety about mass unemployment. AI developers have also failed to explain how data centers benefit local communities. But the larger failure has been the lack of political leadership in explaining the technological and economic transition now underway and how to address it.
Why home-school your children? The question should be flipped. Why not continue the schooling you started with your children at birth? Is there compelling evidence for sending one’s child to institutional school rather than continuing parent-directed, home-based education?
For most of history, home-based education was normal. Parents and other adults took on the tasks of teaching children language, morals, practical skills, religion, reading, trades and habits needed for adult life. Mass institutional schooling is comparatively recent. Yet today we treat it as the default and ask home-school parents to defend their choice.
Why not reverse the burden of proof? Our May systematic review covers four decades of home-school research. Fifteen of 24 studies of academic achievement—62%—reported positive outcomes for home-school students compared with institutionally schooled students. Sixteen of 25 studies—64%—on social and emotional development found positive outcomes for the home educated. Thirteen of 24 studies—54%—examining later adult outcomes found positive results. Most of the other studies found no differences.
These studies don’t prove home schooling causes every advantage. It is difficult to control for all variables. But the evidence doesn’t support the presumption that children need institutional schooling for sound academic or social development.
Other evidence should also raise questions. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress found about 7 in 10 eighth-grade public-school students scored below NAEP Proficient in mathematics and reading. Nearly 1 in 5 American 15-year-olds report being bullied at least several times a month, and 13% don’t feel safe in hallways, cafeterias, restrooms or other places at school. Research shows that 11.7% of Americans report experiencing at least one form of school-employee sexual misconduct during K-12.
When foreign governments pour billions into American universities, the question is no longer who funds higher education, but who owns it. Western scholars routinely preach their independence, yet eagerly pocket vast sums from oppressive regimes—autocrats who execute dissidents, subjugate women, crush free speech, and actively work to undermine the West. And their strategy is working.
The word “subversion” conjures images of secret agents and covert operations. But it can just as easily take the form of a signed contract and billions flowing into a prestigious institution. Qatar has perfected this method..
U.S. Department of Education data show that Doha has directed more than $6.6 billion to higher education in the United States. No other government comes close: Qatar is now the largest source of foreign funding for U.S. universities. Money of that scale creates enormous leverage— and something resembling an Omertà: a code of silence difficult to break. Texas A&M shows what happens when that silence is challenged.
New Zealand case ‘the tip of the iceberg’, and banning the technology will not solve the assessment problem, expert warns
The University of Auckland has become the latest institution to discipline a student for taking AI glasses into a test after organisers had “explicitly” warned that smart devices were prohibited.
The phenomenon has moved beyond East Asia, described by CNN as “ground zero” for AI-facilitated cheating. The broadcaster reported that a Taiwanese applicant to a top medical school had been discovered wearing smart glasses in the entrance exam, after an inspection revealed that the glasses’ frame was emitting heat.
In South Korea, people being tested on their English language skills were caught using smart glasses on separate occasions in May. Two years earlier, a Japanese teenager was referred to prosecutors for allegedly using camera-equipped glasses to photograph university entrance exam questions and share them with outsiders, according to Kyodo News.
Thomas Corbin, a research fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, said such reports were the tip of the iceberg. “Most of the cases that we are seeing are just happenstance,” Corbin told Times Higher Education.
When Gavin Holt was called before a Boston municipal court in October over a party that some of his housemates had thrown, he thought the incident would be a mere blip in the first semester of his junior year.
The Boston College biology student said he wasn’t even present at the party that resulted in noise complaints and disorderly house charges against him and a dozen others. Nonetheless, three months and thousands of dollars in legal fees later, Holt acknowledged the event for what it turned into: “An extra weight on my shoulders that I was carrying throughout the semester.”
Holt received a sentence of 20 hours of community service and was required to write letters of apology to the school and neighborhood.
In this buttoned-up northeastern city with some 160,000 college students and notoriously strict laws when it comes to alcohol, imbibing underage has long been a point of friction. But lately those tensions have been brought to a boil as a result of a postpandemic partying revival, increasingly sophisticated fake IDs and stricter enforcement. According to the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission, a state agency that supervises businesses that serve alcohol, the number of fake IDs confiscated in the state last year hit its highest level in at least two decades.
The top-line narrative of Seattle Public Schools’ past decade is the story of a comprehensive, even radical, internal cultural and pedagogic shift. The reset is broadly characterized as a turn away from a reformist culture built around instituting multiple layers of accountability (for students, teachers, and schools) that was intended to maximize academic achievement, to one fixated on warmer, less prescriptive, therapeutically tinged pedagogical approaches designed to foster a sense of identitarian belonging.
In keeping with the national Democratic Party’s embrace of education reform in the early Obama years, SPS from 2007–11, under the direction of then-Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, became intensively focused on boosting student achievement and school and teacher performance. And those efforts bore fruit: according to the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), produced by Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, Seattle students’ average test scores were 0.7 grade levels above the national average in 2009. By 2013 they had risen to 1.43 grade levels above average, finally peaking at 1.68 above average in 2018.
The rapid academic gains may have been real, but not everyone was pleased with the way they were being achieved. By the early 2010s, many progressive Seattle teachers and activists had joined forces with racial and social justice organizations to push back against what they saw as culturally inappropriate testing and academic accountability regimes that were unfair to children of color. In 2013, this opposition went nationalwhen some local teachers launched a defiant boycott of standardized tests, winning support from leaders of national teachers unions and other prominent progressive education advocates like Noam Chomsky, Diane Ravitch, and Jonathan Kozol.
Already in 2012 the district had adopted a new foundational policy for “Ensuring Educational and Racial Equity” that among its other elements mandated district schools offer a “welcoming culture and inclusive environment” for students. By the time Congress replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its accountability mechanisms in 2015, SPS was well on its way to unwinding what had come to be widely perceived as a cruelly indifferent, unfeeling, and counterproductive fixation on measurable outcomes. In its place, SPS moved to implement policies centered on making students who had previously been deemed underperformers, particularly black and brown students and those of lower socio-economic status, feel affirmed in Seattle schools. As the 2012 equity policy explained it, “A student whose history and heritage are appreciated and celebrated will learn better and be more successful than if that student is forced to overcome a cultural barrier.”
Georgetown is getting 150,000 pages of printed and digital files — documentation from a lifetime of scouring the Middle East. And then there are some special items.
Bergen holds a super-rare paper copy of a fatwa issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman (known as the “blind sheikh”), whom he’s called the “spiritual guide” of the September 11 attacks. Abdel-Rahman issued the theological order while incarcerated in the United States and had it relayed by his lawyer. It was then distributed to attendees at what Bergen called “the one and only al-Qaeda press conference” in Afghanistan in 1998.
“Kill them in the sea, on land, and in the air,” it read. Bergen did not attend the press conference, but obtained the card with an Arabic message from an attendee afterward. He said the fatwa gave religious permission to al-Qaeda’s members to kill Americans and set the stage for the 2001 attacks.
But in just a few years, every single major platform had created strict, but incredibly vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation/censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators and an entire new field of machine learning created from nothing. The Internet went from a space for people without institutional backing to get their views out to one with regular purges and demonetizations of heterodox figures and those associated with them, encouraged by those very same non-tech organizations that formerly championed Internet freedom. This was justified as a response to (massively overblown and mostly fictitious) Russian influence campaigns4, and as fighting nebulous “hate,” the definition of which could be shifted at will to cover whatever views or ideas the organizers classifying it wanted it too and to exclude those they didn’t, and “misinformation.”
The closure of the Internet occurred in two distinct phases: 2015-2019 (associated with the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the so-called alt-right) and 2020-2022 (associated with the lockdowns and the 2020 election). Almost all of the technical and organizational infrastructure and conceptual justifications were built out in the first phase, which successfully decapitated and destroyed the previously-independent, but by definition fringe, online ecosystem of ideas. In the second phase, the same weapons that previously targeted heterodox online discourse were turned against opposition to the COVID measures du joure and mainstream conservatives. The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed.
These purges are usually framed as a direct response to particular events or atrocities. For example Amazon ostensibly removed all Confederate flag merchandise from their web store in response to Dylan Roof’s 2015 massacre of black churchgoers. This is a mistake. Atrocities without a propaganda campaign from the press and political pressure from an opaque network of governments and quasi-government NGOs lead to no changes. There were no mass purges after Audrey Hale’s 2023 murder of elementary schoolers in Nashville motivated by anti-white hatred or the 2016 murder of five Dallas police officers by an ex-marine motivated by the BLM movement. On the other hand, press campaigns not centered around an atrocity, such as the mass deplatformings of YouTube personalities, lead to the same types of purges as the atrocity-based ones. It is not the atrocity that causes the changes, but the media and behind-the-scenes pressure campaign.
We soon confirmed that system leaders had been talking extensively. But many crucial messages that we knew existed were nowhere to be found. In one instance, we obtained a thread of texts among a few of the regents that referenced other messages between Abbott and Jay Graham, the vice chair of the board, about Harrison’s post. But our probe for those records yielded nothing. University staff told us that they could “only produce records that exist as of the date of the request.” It seemed that everyone involved had deleted their copies of the conversation.
Eventually, a top official with the Texas A&M system provided us with clarity; they said the regents, wary of public-information requests, were accustomed to using a work-around: “Read it and delete it.” Though destroying public records before the mandatory retention period expires can be a crime under state law, enforcement is rare, leaving officials free to routinely violate the foundation of the once robust Texas Public Information Act.
A generation ago, our lawmakers, journalists, and engaged citizens considered transparency and openness to be bedrock principles of our state’s government. Laws enacted in the seventies secured the public’s right to know how state officials wield their authority. For decades these laws had served as a point of state pride: Texas boasted of offering some of the most transparency-friendly rules in the United States. The TPIA spells out its foundational philosophy in the preamble: “The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”
These transparency laws led to revelations of some of the worst cases of malfeasance in the state. They also prompted the creation of regulations that have benefited taxpayers. After the Austin American-Statesman used over one hundred records requests to uncover more than 450 unreported child sex abuse incidents across Texas day care facilities, legislators passed a slate of new laws regulating the industry. And after the Houston Chronicle filed three hundred public-information requests and found that the Texas Education Agency had pushed districts not to identify students with disabilities, denying children services they were legally entitled to receive, the U.S. Department of Education took federal action, and the Legislature tightened its policies.
But over the past two decades, governmental bodies, with the help of the courts, have degraded Texas’s public-transparency apparatus piece by piece, nearly hollowing it out. Since January, I’ve filed more than a hundred records requests across nearly thirty state agencies—and in the process have seen how Texas’s open-government principles stand today. I was repeatedly denied, priced out, or strung along and often given records that were wholly redacted. In an era when trust in government and institutions has plummeted, the state is shutting out its own citizens.
Below are three thoughts in response, and two things you can do about it.
This lawsuit is an obvious attempt to silence valid criticism and dissent. I stand behind my reporting 100%. In the footnotes, you can find each piece published in The Last Ward that is mentioned in the lawsuit.2
My team and I will continue reporting on the inner-workings and consequences of the union’s political machine. Chicagoans, including rank-and-file teachers frustrated by CTU’s leadership, deserve nothing less.3
My sincere thanks to every journalist, friend, colleague, reader — and especially, every Chicago teacher — who has reached out personally with words of support.
Here are two actions you can take to support me and our team.
First, you can make a tax-deductible donation to the Illinois Policy Institute, which will help cover costs associated with this lawsuit and the Chicago Policy Center’s work to make Chicago home to the most effective, accountable, and trustworthy big-city government in the nation.
Thanks to the generous support of individual donors, every dollar raised up to $250,000 will be matched 1:1, doubling your impact.
And second, if you live in Chicago, please take a moment to request your mail ballot for the November school board election here.
This is the first time in city history that residents will decide on a fully elected school board. And the last time until 2042 that all 21 seats — every district seat plus the citywide presidency — are on the same ballot.
As we now know, she was never feeding 5,000 children per day. In a rare instance of trying to stop the fraud while it was still raging, in the spring of 2021, the MN Dept. of Education briefly cut off payments to Feeding Our Future. Mekfira ran to the media crying racism.
Cambridge University professor Jason Arday, celebrated in the press for his unbelievable life story, resigned amid plagiarism accusations and was found dead days later. The real scandal is not academic integrity, but rather institutional failure. They were so desperate to relieve their white guilt that they never bothered to question his story. Instead of treating a black man as a person, they used him as a symbol to prove they weren’t racist.
Perceptions of government corruption are now higher in the U.S. than at any point in the past two decades and outpace most other countries, including advanced economies. While perceptions of corruption in business are also elevated, government corruption is seen as significantly more widespread.
In a country where many are polarized across a wide range of issues, this is one case where bipartisanship reflects shared alarm as much as shared consensus. In fact, it is the near convergence of U.S. partisans on the issue — with Democrats’ concern about government corruption now only marginally higher than Republicans’ — that has lifted the U.S. figure to its record high.
I am a high school English teacher. Year after year, I notice one thing almost all of my students have in common: a desire to find the easiest path to their goals.
This instinct is familiar to most of us. We all want the perfect detour to avoid morning traffic, a food service to plan our meals, a machine to clean our houses. Innovation has made many of these dreams into realities, and we should all be very grateful for that.
But school is different. For students learning to process information, find their voices, and demonstrate their understanding of the world, the ability to cut corners is catastrophic. Shortcuts are incompatible with learning.
That’s why, in 2023, I banned artificial intelligence in all of my classes.
At 11, he’s competitive, and he loves the game. But if his mother, Elizabeth, had it her way, he would still be on one of the town’s low-cost teams, where he started at age 6, rather than the $5,000-a-year club program that now dominates their schedule. She looks back on those earlier years fondly: carpooling to games with other families from their suburban public school, cheering on the neighborhood kids from the sidelines. That version of youth soccer resembled her own days on the field in the ’90s, when it was the norm for children — even the most athletically inclined — to play on community-based teams through eighth grade. She had wanted that for her son too. Saturday mornings at the park with friends. Orange slices from the cooler during halftime. Parents clapping for everyone, win or lose, because really, what’s the difference?
Rumaysah Khan was offered a place to study at the University of Oxford. She turned it down and went to work as an apprentice at a law firm instead.
The college route would have given her a prestigious degree, but also mounds of student debt and little to no practical experience—a dangerous position in a legal industry rushing to adopt AI productivity tools.
“I knew from an early age I wanted to do law and that this route would fast track me into the career,” said London-based Khan.
College grads on both sides of the Atlantic are facing a challenging start to their careers, with job candidates finding themselves competing with AI for entry-level positions. For a large cohort of British high-school graduates, college no longer feels like a good deal.
Now, a growing number of white-collar apprenticeship programs are offering high-school leavers another route into industries such as consulting, finance and law—fields typically reserved for college graduates.
Mr. Bundi estimates he wrote more than 2,500 essays over the next 12 years, sometimes three a day. He balanced completing his public health degree with helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish theirs. Some students gave him their school login information so he could keep up with their assignments.
Mr. Bundi didn’t know it then, but he was in the boom era of internet gig work. Newly wired to the global internet and hungry for jobs, well-educated youths from places like Kenya, the Philippines and India found opportunities in the crevices of the digital economy. They could make money online doing unglamorous tasks that others further up the economic ladder did not want to do.
Then A.I arrived, and the good times ended.
In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. At colleges worldwide, students made a simple calculation that has become more pronounced today: Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?
A year ago, San Francisco dad Matte Scheinker was mired in the process of figuring out which high schools would be best for his eighth-grade child and how to apply for the public and private options.
He was overwhelmed. Frustrated. Stuck in a cycle of searching each school’s web pages for information, a tedious and time-consuming effort.
“It’s just hard to figure things out,” he said, adding that he initially couldn’t name half the high school options. “It’s not a fun process.”
When it was finally over, his child accepted and enrolled for ninth grade, Scheinker decided he would make it easier for those heading into the stressful high school search.
The results, the SF School Atlas, officially launched Monday with one-stop shopping for the district and charter high schools as well as private schools in the city and surrounding areas.
There are more than 60 schools listed, with detailed information about tuition, location, history, student-teacher ratios, deadlines, “signature” programs, Advanced Placement courses and more. (The Chronicle publishes a list of private schools in the Bay Area with tuition and other basic information.)
The Atlas doesn’t rank or recommend one type of school over another, Scheinker said.
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
The first time Davis Bates visited Hampshire College, he was technically trespassing.
With only a backpack and a sleeping bag, the high school senior had hitchhiked from his hometown of Sudbury, Massachusetts, to Amherst to see if the private liberal arts school might, as his guidance counselor suggested, be a good fit. Bates arrived well after dark to the rural campus. With no place to stay, he found his way into an unlocked lecture hall and decided to sleep there until he could explore on his own the next day. In the middle of the night, he awoke to the bright light of a security guard’s flashlight shining over him. The guard laughed and left Bates to go back to sleep. “That’s when I decided to come to Hampshire College,” he told me, a fellow alum, when I met him in May.
We were back on campus for the college’s annual commencement ceremony—its last. Earlier this year Hampshire succumbed to declining enrollment and other financial pressures and announced it would be closing its doors after fifty-six years. Though some students close to finishing their degrees would be able to do so during a limited “teach-out” in the fall, the grand pedagogical experiment that began in western Massachusetts more than half a century ago was coming to an end. “We live in a system that is not as kind to an idea of Hampshire as the system was when Hampshire started,” Bates told me. With its passing, he added, “It’s just really, really sad to not have this incubation space for people who create and for people who don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Hampshire was always unique in the landscape of higher education. Students were the architects of their own education. With faculty approval, you could do art, write a book, spend several months brokering corporate tax credits, or study spermatogenesis in cockroaches. There were no grades, only narrative evaluations. In the words of its founders, the college saw itself as “a vehicle for the realization of self in society.” As Archibald MacLeish, a poet and playwright, said at an event marking the school’s opening in 1970, these men saw higher education as a means of healing “troubles in the culture itself, in the civilization, in the state of civilization.” To them, these were not problems that could be healed through government intervention or, for that matter, even revolution.
ew policy reform commissions draw up a list of recommendations only to implore lawmakers to ignore them. Yet that is where Minnesota’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Special Education finds itself. Facing a multi-billion-dollar budget shortfall, state lawmakers asked the commission to identify $250m in savings on special education, where spending is expected to swell by nearly $1bn between 2022 and 2027. In August the commission released provisional recommendations and unanimously urged the legislature not to enact any of them, warning of harm to pupils.
Minnesota’s paralysis reflects a national dilemma: educating disabled children is a popular policy, but the sums required under current laws are eye-watering. Across the country, school districts are pulling money from general-education funds to pay for services for pupils with special needs. Even as school enrolment declines, the number of students in special education across the country is rising. Between 2014 and 2023 it grew by 1.4m, from 11.6% of all pupils to 14.7%. In several states—including Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wyoming—that figure is higher still at roughly one in five. As costs rise, states are confronting fraught questions about who should pay, how well programmes work and what must be pared back to cover the bill.
Fifty years ago, it was estimated that over half of the country’s disabled children received an insufficient education. To remedy this, in 1975 Congress passed what eventually became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), one of several laws that together guarantee disabled children a “free appropriate public education”. Each eligible child receives an Individualised Education Programme (IEP) specifying the services a school district must provide. These range from occasional speech therapy to a classroom aide or placement in a specialised school, which can cost districts hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
It’s a no-brainer that any teenager should aim for university because a degree carries substantial economic value. Degrees are also very useful for employers because they signal that a young person has advanced skills that are in high demand.
Both of those statements have been taken as gospel for decades, but their legitimacy is increasingly in question. A closer read of economic history suggests they should always have been seen as more contingent than fixed. As US economists Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz and David Autor showed in their work on “the race between education and technology”, there is nothing inevitable about more education being met with more demand for those skills — it all depends on how the supply of particular skills interacts with the technological paradigm of the day.
The 1800s transition from artisans to larger and more complex businesses created demand for educated workers and delivered them a healthy wage premium, which the expansion of high school education in the early 20th century then eroded. The information revolution then exploded the scale and complexity of work, fuelling a long boom in knowledge-work jobs that buttressed the college wage premium over the past 40 years even as the numbers obtaining a degree expanded.
New Orleans students are leading the nation in reading and math growth as they improve their test scores faster than their peers in Louisiana and across the country, according to a recent nationwide analysis.
Students in Orleans Parish were in the 99th percentile in reading growth and in the 98th percentile for math growth among nearly all districts nationwide from 2022 to 2025, according to the study, which looked at changes in student test scores during that period. Called the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, the study was first released in May and updated with new data this month.
New Orleans students learned nearly 34% more per school year than the national average during that period, according to the analysis, which based that estimate on how much students’ test scores improved from one grade level to the next. Their “learning rate” was well above Louisiana’s statewide rate and higher than in comparable school districts, the study found.
The technology brings our universities’ already dangerously distorted ends to their logical fulfillment.
Artificial intelligence did not wreck our colleges and universities. Leadership in higher education did. AI simply revealed the perverse incentives underpinning America’s system. Where the three actors of academia—administrators, faculty, and students—should strive in harmony toward Truth, our universities abandoned that pursuit long ago and reoriented themselves toward a new end: the appearance of learning.
American colleges depend on tuition, and administrators must keep the money flowing in. Student-derived revenue provides roughly 75% of operating budgets for the median private college, and roughly 50% for the median public college. Approximately 13 million students each year pay their tuition with federal dollarsreceived through Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which governs student financial aid programs. Although students can only use this funding at accredited schools, the accreditation process is flawed, as many state and private accreditation organizations overemphasize outcome metrics like retention and graduation rates.
But maximizing for these metrics has unintended consequences. Most significantly, it incentivizes university administrations to churn out as many graduates as possible rather than focusing on rigor, which weakens academic standards. With these incentives in place, every student expelled for cheating constitutes lost revenue and a hit to the university’s rankings, not to mention the administrative cost, potential lawsuits, and public scandal that every institution wants to avoid.
We provide evidence that CEOs with a business degree reduce wages and the labor share in the US and Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter. Using an IV strategy based on the composition of the board of directors at the time of new appointments, these appear as causal effects. Exploiting exogenous export shocks, we establish that a key mechanism for these wage effects is changes in rent-sharing practices and provide evidence suggesting that these effects are driven by business managers prioritizing shareholder value.
One of the biggest achievements in the 2025 tax bill was limiting the amount of federal loans that students could borrow to a total of $100,000 ($20,500 a year) for most graduate degrees and $200,000 ($50,000 a year) for professional ones. Many master’s and doctoral programs cost north of $100,000 and some even more than $200,000.
Graduate programs have become cash cows for universities, and the caps could impel them to reduce prices and spending. Heaven forefend. The caps are forcing some universities to reduce their bloated workforces. Hence, the union lawsuit, which seeks to expand what counts as a professional degree so universities can rake in more federal student-loan dollars.
Congress codified a regulation defining a professional degree as signifying “completion of the academic requirements for beginning practice in a given profession” for which a “professional licensure is also generally required.” Degrees in pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, veterinary and chiropractic medicine, law, optometry, osteopathy, podiatry and theology are expressly covered.
The AFL-CIO, American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (Afscme), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Nurses United argue that the Education Department should let more graduate degrees qualify as professional, such as social work, education, library science and public health.
Black and Hispanic applicants faced better odds of being admitted to the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in the 2025 admission cycle than did White or Asian applicants with the same MCAT score and GPA, according to the university’s own data.
Among applicants with the same admission test scores and grade point averages, a Hispanic or Black applicant had nearly 4 times the odds of admission of an Asian applicant.
The data provide evidence that some racial and ethnic groups may be favored in the admissions process, and follow earlier results branded as “brazen” by anti-discrimination activists.
On their own, however, the data do not establish discrimination. Because the school uses a holistic approach in admissions, the disparities could result from other factors, such as life experiences, essays, and letters of recommendation. Furthermore, the dataset does not identify admissions pathways or pipeline programs, such as dual degrees or the Wisconsin Academy for Rural Medicine. These have materially different criteria for admission.
“Our admission process reviews every aspect of an application with the strength of academic preparation key to determining an applicant’s likelihood of success,” university spokesman John Lucas told The Madison Federalist. “Students are admitted on the basis of their likelihood to succeed throughout the rigorous course of study in UWSMPH programs.”
He said that “admission standards fully comply with the law” and “no student is admitted on the basis of their race/ethnicity/identity.” He did not answer whether the admissions process changed in any way between the 2025 and 2026 admissions cycles.
Dear Reader: This is a piece is about a powerful but little-known organization in Texas, the Texas Association of School Boards. It’s a story of how even in a state where conservatives have been governing strongly for years, shadowy left-wing groups amass huge sums of public money and use it against us. Whether you’re a Texan or not, it’s a case worth studying: there are networks like TASB in every state, and we need to fight them everywhere. – Joe
Most Texans have never heard of the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB). TASB is an NGO which purports to represent Texas school districts and the boards that govern them. It takes taxpayer dollars from nearly every school district in the state through membership dues. It offers questionable “services” to members and benefits financially from relationships with major vendors. And its crown jewel is a massive and unaccountable risk pool for its member districts that operates outside the usual frameworks that govern insurance.
TASB’s revenues have grown steadily for years, surpassing $100 million for the first time in 2025. And it has used those funds to become a powerful political operation, lobbying in favor of left-wing social issues and higher property tax, and fighting against education reforms. It does all this with very little transparency owing to its “private” status. That may be changing soon, thanks to more and more Texas leaders waking up to the fact that we’ve allowed unaccountable organizations to metastasize in our state.
Aristotle explained in Politics millennia ago, “…often a great change of institutions takes place unnoticed when people overlook a small alteration…” In the derelict corners of bureaucracy, cancers and corruptions take root that eventually threaten our culture, our children, and the fabric of our society. The left has run that play in Washington and in the universities, and they have run it just as well in states that conservatives naively assume are “safe” because of the way they vote.
For years, many conservatives in Texas have worried about the left winning elections, and what that would mean for our governance. Unfortunately, the left learned long ago that winning elections in a complex country is just one way to rule; another option is to capture the institutions that operate beneath elections — like boards and associations with large, hidden pools of public money.
——-
Propublica: Wisconsin Association Of School District Administrators Inc 2025 Revenues: $1,580,000.
‘Government-created information blockade’ blocks families, U.S. News from access
The Success Academy charter school network is suing the New York education commissioner, Betty Rosa, accusing her of blocking the release of AP test score results as part of what the lawsuit calls “a government-created information blockade.”
The suit says Rosa, at the behest of the teachers’ union, blocked the College Board from releasing AP test data to U.S. News & World Report for use in its high school rankings. That effectively impeded Success’s ability to communicate—a violation of First Amendment free expression rights, the suit says.
“Fewer than 25 percent of high school students nationally pass at least one AP examination by the time they graduate. By contrast, 95 percent of Success Academy’s 2026 graduating class passed three or more AP examinations, 79 percent passed five or more, and 60 percent passed seven or more,” the lawsuit says. “Those results are among the most objective and compelling evidence of the rigor of Success Academy’s high-school program and of its students’ readiness for college.”
I’m not the only parent who feels increasingly anxious about their children’s media diet. For teenage boys in particular, entertainment often comes in the form of YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: ‘I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos’ or ‘I cemented a microwave to my head’. In comparison to this, the mindless television I watched in the 1990s seems as narratively complex as Dostoevsky.
Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening.
Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book,The New Dark Ages, published this week.
I wouldn’t call the book ‘urgent’ because I usually take that to mean ‘worthy scolding by an ideological ally’; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us.
James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have been to Alfred the Great.
——
2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.
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!)
The example that Lucas had most in mind was monetary policy’s effects on employment and real output. What we now call “the great inflation” of the 1960s and 1970s was front of mind in 1976. Today it is viewed as a colossal, persistent policy error. Students learn that the cause of the great inflation was that when our government increased its spending (both to fight the Vietnam War, and to achieve the ambitious domestic agenda of the Great Society objectives) the Federal Reserve accommodated the rising deficits by expanding its purchases of government debt, which produced accelerating inflation.
The Federal Reserve at the time (self-servingly) claimed that it had not caused the inflation. And Fed Chair Arthur Burns (who led the Fed from February 1970 through January 1978) even argued that monetary policy was powerless to end the inflation – a view that led him to advocate price controls to President Richard Nixon. Policy makers also continued to argue that rising unemployment could be addressed with further monetary expansion, and that this could be done without raising the level of inflation.
That thinking was based on the “Phillips Curve” – an empirical regularity documented from past behavior – which suggested that one could forecast the amount of added employment and real GDP they could achieve by expanding the money supply by a given amount.
That mechanical view of the effects of monetary policy ignored that people form expectations by observing government and central bank policies and rely upon those expectations when entering into labor bargains and purchase decisions. Once people learn that higher monetary growth led to higher inflation, the policy implications of the Phillips Curve must change because expansionary monetary policy must become less effective in raising employment and output; people see inflation coming and bid up their own prices accordingly, which offsets the expansionary effect of the policy.
Summary: Contemporary culture often mistakes despair for wisdom, teaching young people to view democracy, technology, climate, and the future itself through an apocalyptic lens. Although serious risks demand honesty, exaggerated pessimism can cultivate helplessness and discourage constructive action. Young people therefore need proportionate realism that acknowledges danger while affirming human agency and the possibility of progress.
Adults tell them that democracy is dying, capitalism is exploitation, technology is dehumanizing, climate change is collapse, Russia is at the door, and the next generation will be poorer, angrier, and less free. To question this doom script is to risk being accused of naivety, complacency, or moral failure. Then the same adults wonder why the young seem anxious about the future.
This is not seriousness. It is a culture teaching helplessness and calling it maturity.
None of that means young people should be fed cheerful propaganda. The world plainly has serious problems. Wars happen. Institutions fail. Technologies can be misused. Climate change is real. Families struggle. Many young people face housing costs, mental-health pressures, and a political arena that often feels both hysterical and strangely small.
Then again, hard problems do not become easier because we learn to describe them in the darkest possible language. A culture that turns every difficulty into apocalypse and every risk into proof of collapse should not be surprised when the young start to believe the future is something to fear rather than shape.
The strange part is that the lesson of darkness is being taught to the generation with more tools at its fingertips than any before it. A teenager with an internet connection can now reach lectures, books, markets, networks, design tools, translation systems, coding assistance, and increasingly powerful AI. Young people can learn, build, publish, trade, code, design, organize, and create in ways that would have sounded absurdly utopian a few decades ago.
Peter Berkowitz is one of those rare public intellectuals who doesn’t mind being on the “wrong” side of hot controversies—which is to say, he’s willing to clash with the “progressive” juggernaut. A former professor at Harvard and George Mason Law School, Berkowitz is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America, is a collection of his essays on higher education written between 2014 and 2025. They give the reader a comprehensive view of the problems that beset our colleges and universities.
He writes, “The nation’s elite institutions of higher education have gone well beyond leaving many students ignorant of the nation’s founding principles and sustaining political institutions. For some time now, numerous classes, academic writings, and even fields of study have disposed students to despise those principles and institutions.” And no, “despise” is not too strong a word. As the book repeatedly shows, college courses are often taught with the objective of turning students into zealots for a thorough transformation of America. Many never hear anything good about our constitutional system, property rights, or free enterprise—only criticisms.A truly liberal education, he states, “fosters virtues of freedom and equips students to prosper in and maintain a free society.”
The technical college system is seeking $54.2 million to create a grant program for high school students taking college-level courses.
During the 2024-25 school year, students from more than 600 high schools earned nearly 330,000 college credits at the technical colleges.
The request seeks a change in state law to allow technical colleges to distribute the grants. The money would support staffing to expand access and student outreach, stipends for dual enrollment instructors, coverage of tuition and fees that school districts pay, and equipment.
A new full-time position to support dual enrollment programs is also included in the request.
The proposal comes amid the administration’s long-running battle with a number of prominent universities, including its repeated threats to pull Harvard University’s tax exemption. It is part of a broader initiative by the administration to scrutinize the nonprofit sector, including whether individual groups deserve their exemption from taxes.
“Schools rebranding race-based preferences as equitable, inclusive, or diversity-enhancing does not change their discriminatory nature,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
The proposed rules will establish a “clear standard, and the institutions that continue to use discriminatory practices will no longer receive the benefits of federal tax-exempt status.”
The American Association of University Professors, which has battled the administration in court over a number of its decisions, ripped the proposal. AAUP faculty chapters, including those at Columbia, Harvard and UCLA, have been key to challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to force colleges into deals that align with the president’s higher education policies.
“Weaponizing the IRS to attack colleges and universities that uphold and expand civil rights is outrageous,” Todd Wolfson, the group’s president, said in a statement. “This is blatantly racist political coercion intended to deny minority students reparative opportunities to further their education.”
The largest number of Americans born in a single year arrived on campus in the autumn of 2025, and now a falloff is looming. College enrollments are forecast to drop 13% by 2041, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. In some parts of the country—especially the Midwest and the Northeast—the declines have already begun.
You would think a shrinking pool of students would automatically make it easier to get into college. But that won’t necessarily be true everywhere, especially at the most competitive schools, higher-education analysts say.
It is impossible to precisely predict colleges’ admission rates in the future as those numbers depend on a lot of things, including the reputations of campus culture, sports team wins and even the weather. But the demographic cliff is hitting just as another phenomenon is coming into play: a flight-to-quality, where the most sought-after schools are attracting an ever-growing number of applicants, while less-attractive schools draw fewer.
Part of the reason is rising skepticism about the value of a college degree. More families reason that if they are going to spend tens of thousands of dollars, the diploma better pay off with a good job—otherwise why bother?
This story was originally co-published by ProPublica and KQED
California lawmakers unanimously passed legislation last week to ensure that school administrators are informed about past accusations of misconduct against teachers as part of their hiring process.
The legislation follows a KQED-ProPublica investigation revealing how delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, allowed educators to get new jobs after school districts reported them to the state teacher licensing agency for sexual harassment or other misconduct. Our reporting found that at least 14 educators were hired by new schools after their former employers determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other sexual misconduct.
The bill, authored by Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, is an attempt to make sure that doesn’t happen again, adding teeth to background check mandates in place since 2025. Under that law, applicants for jobs at public schools are supposed to list every teaching position they have ever held. The requirement expanded to private school teaching applicants this year. Top school administrators are required to check with applicants’ previous employers to see if they had ever been reported to the state for credible or substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct.
But the existing law relies on schools and teachers to follow the mandates without clear penalties for those who fail to do so. Muratsuchi’s bill specifies that the state’s teacher licensing agency may discipline teachers and administrators; that can include issuing public reprimands, or suspending or revoking their credentials if they don’t comply.
Michigan reading scores are down across grades 3-7
State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko says scores need to improve
Michigan is implementing several literacy changes, but many are in the early stages of implementation
Michigan third grade reading scores continued to slide in the state’s most recent standardized tests this year, even as schools begin to implement reading reforms. Just 38.2% of third grade students in Michigan are proficient in English Language Arts, down from 38.9% the previous year, according to results released Friday from the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, commonly known as the M-STEP. Students took the tests in spring 2026.
It’s the lowest third graders have scored in the 12-year history of the exam. The news comes after leaders have tried for a decade to improve reading scores with literacy coaches, optional teacher training and a short-lived law to retain struggling third graders.
Meanwhile, fourth through seventh grade reading scores are also down from the previous year. Just 44% of students grades 3-8 are proficient in reading, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of M-STEP and PSAT 8/9 tests.
“We need to improve the results of all these assessments for our students moving forward,” said State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko. “Michigan proficiency rates are not where we want them to be. We must increase proficiency rates in all subjects and areas, and in all grades. And we must do this over time, showing steady improvement in all areas.”
——-
2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.
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!)
Black and Hispanic applicants faced better odds of being admitted to the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in the 2025 admission cycle than did White or Asian applicants with the same MCAT score and GPA, according to the university’s own data.
Among applicants with the same admission test scores and grade point averages, a Hispanic or Black applicant had nearly 4 times the odds of admission of an Asian applicant.
The data provide evidence that some racial and ethnic groups may be favored in the admissions process, and follow earlier results branded as “brazen” by anti-discrimination activists.
On their own, however, the data do not establish discrimination. Because the school uses a holistic approach in admissions, the disparities could result from other factors, such as life experiences, essays, and letters of recommendation. Furthermore, the dataset does not identify admissions pathways or pipeline programs, such as dual degrees or the Wisconsin Academy for Rural Medicine. These have materially different criteria for admission.
“Our admission process reviews every aspect of an application with the strength of academic preparation key to determining an applicant’s likelihood of success,” university spokesman John Lucas told The Madison Federalist. “Students are admitted on the basis of their likelihood to succeed throughout the rigorous course of study in UWSMPH programs.”
He said that “admission standards fully comply with the law” and “no student is admitted on the basis of their race/ethnicity/identity.” He did not answer whether the admissions process changed in any way between the 2025 and 2026 admissions cycles.
When students struggle to make sense of text, there’s a good chance that dysfluency (the inability to read with sufficient accuracy, automaticity, and prosody) is a contributing factor—quite possibly the dominant one.
Fluent readers recognize words “at the speed of sight” and read with proper expression and intonation.
The path to stronger reading in middle and high school starts with refocusing on fluency by prioritizing shared, oral reading in class.
Introduction
The importance of fluent reading is routinely underestimated, especially as it applies to middle and high school students.
Far from a mere primary-grade issue, fluency is a prerequisite to reading comprehension at every level. Dysfluency is a hidden crisis in American schools, and the decline in recreational reading among children has compounded the problem.
In this report, I discuss why fluency is a prerequisite to reading comprehension, what we know about dysfluency in later grades, and what teachers can do to develop and improve students’ reading fluency.
What Is Reading Fluency?
Reading fluency is, in the words of Mark Seidenberg, the ability to read “at the speed of sight,” to recognize words and grasp their meaning almost as soon as your eyes land on the page, with little or no conscious effort.1 When a reader is not at this level, we call it “dysfluency.” The lack of conscious effort is important. Readers who can recognize words and phrases without thinking about them can allocate their working memories to higher-order tasks, like interpreting a text’s meaning or perceiving subtleties of word choice.
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!)
The Texas State Teachers Association on Thursday criticized the budget request, saying taxpayers need more information on who has signed up to receive voucher funding before raising the program’s price tag.
Recent state data shows that 70% of families who joined or have pending invites to the program already attended a private school or home-school.
“Many school districts have been forced to close campuses or eliminate programs to tackle budget deficits,” the association said in a statement. “We can’t afford to keep draining increasing amounts of tax dollars from these public schools to support religious and other private schools.”
Officials from the comptroller’s office noted Thursday that the funding request was based on the number of current participants and those on the waitlist, as required by state law. Legislators will tackle Texas’ two-year budget when the next lawmaking session begins in January.
Participating families with a child in private school currently qualify for about $10,500 annually. Home-schoolers receive up to $2,000 per year.
Children with disabilities qualify for up to $30,000, an amount based on what it would cost to educate that student in a public school. However, fewer than 30 students have received the full amount.
Nearly 110,000 students have received funding so far, while more than 106,000 families remain on the waitlist, according to the budget request.
For the last decade, academic scores in Wisconsin have been in steady decline. Seeing as our state’s civic, economic and cultural health depends on a well-educated population and the majority of students attend public schools, it is imperative that policymakers reverse this trend. This report recommends three broad avenues for lawmakers to consider, along with several concrete actions within each.
Key recommendations:
Raising expectations is arguably the avenue upon which all else depends. Policymakers can do so by strengthening math instruction, including universal screening tests, revising state standards, actively combatting grade inflation, and raising academic cut scores.
Teachers are central to education occurring within schools: Without a strong teaching workforce, curriculum remains untaught and policies go unimplemented. Creating and supporting a strong teacher corps requires strong behavior codes, competitive merit-based pay, and rigorous practical training.
At the end of a quality education, a student ought to be prepared for a professional career. To strengthen career pipelines, policymakers can implement credential transparency, bolster career and technical education, and expand gifted and talented education across the state.
———
2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.
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!)
$7.7 BILLION — that’s how much compensation grew at America’s homeless NGOs from 2013 to 2024, while homelessness rose to a record 771,480.
Advocates argue that ending homelessness requires more federal funding, citing rising rents and a workforce they characterize as “woefully underpaid.”1The National Alliance to End Homelessness’s 2023 report “New Estimates Suggest that $4.8 Billion Is Needed to Bring Homeless Services Salaries into the Modern Era” advocated for an additional $9.6 billion in federal appropriations supporting the Continuum of Care Program, including $4.8 billion specifically to raise homeless service worker salaries.2
An examination of a balanced panel of 1,458 nonprofit Continuum of Care (CoC) providers shows that program budgets for compensation have increased significantly. Reported financials in both 2013 and 2024 show total compensation grew 117.8 percent and total revenue grew 123.9 percent, dramatically outpacing the 34.7 percent cumulative inflation rate and the 30.7 percent growth in the national Point-in-Time (PIT) homelessness count.3
Growth in the homelessness sector was not concentrated in a few outliers: 84 percent of providers grew compensation faster than inflation, 54 percent more than doubled it, and 29 percent more than tripled it.4 Provider compensation also grew roughly 2.7 times faster than the broader nonprofit sector benchmark on an annualized basis.5 The problem is not how money flows into the CoC system, as the National Alliance to End Homelessness’s report suggests. The problem is that the system pays for inputs (beds, salaries, services delivered) rather than for outcomes (people exiting homelessness for unsubsidized housing, employment, and treatment success). Compensation tracks revenue at a stable 36–39 percent of total income across the period, meaning the entire industry has grown together while measured outcomes have not moved.6
——-
2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.
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!)
Across cultures and time, four major institutions have formed young men: family, religion, work and war. By demanding effort and sacrifice, each of these molded boys into men. Parents raised sons to be husbands and fathers. Scriptures demanded grappling with human nature, sin and salvation. Work looked at needs, and forged character and grit. War—or more broadly, the obligation to protect your community—harnessed strength as service.
Today, war and work have faded. Thankfully, violence has been pushed to the periphery of most societies to a degree ancient and medieval people never conceived possible. The world is still dangerous and humanity still capable of unspeakable evil, but most neighborhoods bear little resemblance to lawless frontiers of old. Our continental nation is blessed with good neighbors and big oceans, and most violence is constrained through ordered liberty.
This isn’t cheap: The men and women who defend us pay a steep price. There’s always the risk of imagining peace is the natural, autopilot order of things, rather than a stunning achievement that requires ongoing vigilance. But it’s a blessing that less than 1% of the population serves in America’s all-volunteer military.
Imagine you discover a magical ring that bestows invisibility on its wearer. What do you do next? Many an introductory ethics course has started with the Ring of Gyges from Plato’s Republic: the tale of a shepherd who found such a ring, then “seduced the king’s wife, and … set upon the king, and slew him and possessed his kingdom”. As freshmen discuss the old thought experiment this month, some will harbor smaller, more doable ambitions: to fake their first essay convincingly, and perhaps every piece of work thereafter.
To obtain the prize that helped him lose his scruples, Plato’s shepherd had to descend into a chasm, enter a hollow bronze horse through a small door, then remove the ring from the finger of a corpse. Students today just have to ask Claude. AI agents can create a literature review from scratch; fabricate data sets; write computer code or solve equations. They can even check exam answers in real time. Lecturers are apparently powerless to detect the malfeasance. Those students who find the inner strength to avoid such shortcuts are watching peers sail ahead of them in the rankings, effort-free.
This makes cheating a particular problem in aggressively competitive elite universities. Writing in The Atlantic, behavioral scientist John Paul Rollert reports that a third of Harvard students now admit to using AI illicitly. But it is also a growing problem in the academy as a whole. An estimated 22% of UK-based students used it to cheat in 2023/24, and the numbers have surely increased since then. Rollert worries that we are creating a generation with “a knack for cutting corners, a disdain for community rules, and an assumption that a spirit of integrity… is the reserve of suckers and wimps”. Though there is some truth in this, it all sounds a bit too Patrick Bateman for the average situation. Most young cheats are just following the crowd, and aren’t gaining a knack for anything at all.
The classic trickster archetype has always been glamorously countercultural. Plato’s shepherd seems ingenious and daring, despite his murderous desires. But AI doesn’t even give us that small consolation. It spawns impressive-looking symbols and sentences at the click of a mouse, and the user can’t take any credit. He doesn’t even need to understand what he is passing off as his own.
How should universities prepare students to start startups? Y Combinator is in the perfect position to answer this question, because we get them next. We’re like grad school. And because YC has had 20 years to refine its model of what a promising founder looks like, you probably won’t find a better target.
What do the YC partners look for? It’s surprisingly simple. They want people who are good at building things and have a habit of doing it.
The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance. [1]
So the way to prepare undergraduates to become successful founders is not to give them some new curriculum focused on “entrepreneurship”. It’s to do what universities already do best — to teach them computer science and mechanical engineering and molecular biology. [2]
Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career. Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product. Customers don’t care what the founders studied in college. So founders are free to study whatever they want, as long as they get good at building things.
But building should be understood in a very broad sense. It doesn’t mean all would-be founders have to study some form of engineering. Almost any kind of expertise that could be described as building or creating could be useful. It was useful to Steve Jobs to have studied calligraphy, for example; it was one of the reasons Apple dominated desktop publishing. So while math and science and engineering and design tend to be good bets, I would not want to draw a sharp line around them, because I can imagine other forms of building that could be useful. And of course you don’t have to major in something to be good at it. Mark Zuckerberg was good at programming, but he was a psychology major, not a CS major.
Professor hopes victory will ‘help reverse a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia’
A University of Washington professor who was disciplined for adding a parody “land acknowledgement” to his syllabus won a $600,000 settlement Thursday in a lawsuit against his employer.
The settlement comes four years after Professor Stuart Reges first filed his free speech case against the public university, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
In a statement Thursday, the computer science professor expressed hope that his legal victory “will remind public universities that they are obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of their students, faculty, and staff.”
“More importantly, I hope that my protest can help reverse a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia and help to convince them that instead of ‘protecting’ students from controversial ideas, they should be helping them to learn how to cope with disagreement,” Reges stated.
Reges and the University of Washington reached the final settlement after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in December that administrators were “liable under the First Amendment for retaliation and viewpoint discrimination.”
For a week, the federal government and the state of Pennsylvania have been embroiled in a fight over whether a measles outbreak killed two state residents, leading to countlessarticlesasking, among other questions, if a mother’s measles can cause a fatal lacerated spleen in an infant (the answer: unlikely).
Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is insisting on reviewing the two cases before it agrees the deaths were measles-related, provoking a new round of questions about whether the CDC should be second-guessing the state’s report (the answer: yes).
Yet nobody has asked the most crucial question of all:Why did the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, hold a press conference to announce these deaths?
To put it another way: Why is every measles death now national news? Using a press conference to alert a population of a measles outbreak makes sense. Residents should know if they’ve been exposed, especially if they’re unvaccinated.
Announcing individual measles deaths is pure political and public health (to the extent those ideas can even be separated) theater.
The PhD thesis of a student in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education—in which Dr. Arday held a professorial chair, in the sociology of education, until he resigned hours after the investigation announcement—has been put under what British and Canadian academics have told us is a remarkably long embargo, shielding it from public view until 2031.
Crucially, among the panelists who reviewed the thesis was Dr. Arday himself.
The thesis, which we have obtained and which we review below, raises important questions about whether the Faculty of Education, including Dr. Arday’s own contributions, let down the basic standards of higher education.
The lengthy embargo raises further questions about what Cambridge, which is among the most elite universities in the world, and the paper’s author might have to hide where her scholarship is concerned.
Written by Damilola Folayan, the thesis is entitled Of, but not in: A poetic exploration of how Black women students respond to the coloniality of Oxbridge—referring to the portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge. It garnered her a coveted Cambridge PhD in 2025. Following what’s known as an autoethnographic style, it is in essence an epic poetry-slam interpretation of the plight of Dr. Folayan and three other black women at Oxbridge and their experiences navigating, with considerable ambivalence, these historically, and still overwhelmingly, white elite institutions.
Twenty years later, Mike Judge’s prescient comedy is getting harder to laugh at.
the movie, Luke Wilson gives a sweet and genuine performance as a literal average Joe frozen by the Army in an experiment. Through a series of mishaps, he and Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute escaping jail by agreeing to be a guinea pig in the same test to keep people in suspended animation, are left forgotten in their pods longer than planned.
In the intervening five hundred years, the American populace gets objectively dumber through genetic drift, as intelligent professionals delay starting families and people who are, well, idiots go on to have babies by the dozen. Civilization devolves into chaos as commercial profits overtake the public interest, and the public’s interest is occupied by the pursuit of money, sex, and base entertainment. Corporations corrupt everything from health care to government—just ask Joe’s clueless internist, Dr. Lexus, or President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
When Joe and Rita awake, they are the smartest people on the planet. Unfortunately, that planet is dying. It’s dusty, it’s crumbling, and all of the crops are failing because a corporation has marketed its electrolyte beverage as the perfect irrigation fluid. “Brawndo,” crows every other flyer on America’s grimy streets, “It’s got what plants crave!”
Key data points about international student admission and enrollment in 2026 at UW-Madison from Zumbrunnen’s declaration include:
Undergraduate applications declined 10.9% year over year, from 14,433 to 12,857.
Graduate applications declined 27%. Graduate enrollment is down 20%.
Third-party groups that sponsor international students in the U.S. fell too, from 27 groups to 14 groups.
Some countries in the Middle East saw major drops in sponsored applications, such as Saudi Arabia (134 to 7) and the United Arab Emirates (85 to 5). Malaysia went from 65 sponsored applications to zero.
It takes 5.8 years on average to complete a doctoral degree. All doctoral programs are designed to last more than four years.
The university expects to have to file more than 2,000 requests each year for students to stay longer, leading to a cost of $600,000 in administrative labor and fees.
Zumbrunnen said graduate students in particular make “critical contributions” to classroom instruction and research. The school has about 3,300 graduate international students and about 550 international researchers. International students make up about 40% of all teaching assistant, research assistant and graduate fellow roles.
The Department of Justice just weighed in on fair use and AI training in the USA. Here are some highlights ↓
“Training does not reveal anything to the public at all. It simply creates a copy of a protected work in order to teach an LLM to recognize relationships between data.”
The learning apps and resources that teachers want kids to use almost always sit inside a browser that’s inside an operating system that’s inside a device.
Educators want those “containers” to be as invisible as possible, and for a time they were. But technology companies want those containers to be impossible to ignore.
And so our devices, browsers, and even now some of our most basic tools have become heat-seeking missiles for our attention, designed by the world’s brightest behavioral scientists to compel our eyeballs to linger on advertisements.
I love teaching with technology, but every year it’s getting harder to get my students to the good stuff.
I love teaching with technology, but every year it’s getting harder to get my students to the good stuff.
It wasn’t always this bad.
In 2003, I taught 9th grade World History in a pilot classroom with a cart of WiFi-connected laptops, a set of 30 beautiful blue and orange clamshell Apple iBooks.
I wasn’t the very first teacher in the United States to have a one-to-one, internet-connected classroom, but there weren’t too many folks earlier than me.
My school had an intranet service called FirstClass that did just about everything that Google for Education does today: collaborative documents, shared file folders, instant messaging, class syllabi, assignment submissions, and all the good stuff.
Nearly half of Americans (47%) want labor unions in the U.S. to have more influence than they do today, a record high in the past quarter century and roughly double the 23% who want unions to have less influence. Another 26% want unions’ influence to remain the same.
The share wanting greater union influence is up four percentage points from 2023 after rising almost continuously from a record-low 25% in 2009. Over the same period, the percentage wanting unions to have less influence has fallen from 42% to a record-low 23%.
The Seattle Education Association, representing some 6,000 teachers and other staff, voted 91% to strike if they don’t reach an agreement with the district before school starts. The union is demanding higher pay—1% to 3% raises for teachers, and 3% to 5% for so-called classified staff such as paraprofessionals, on top of cost-of-living increases, reports the Seattle Times.
Not that teachers are underpaid. According to union data reported by the Times, full-time Seattle Public Schools teachers make on average $117,000, while classified staff earn $67,858. The union is also demanding smaller class sizes and more staff for special education.
All of this is as the district is trying to close an $87 million budget shortfall. It has had to pillage its reserve funds in recent years, and on Wednesday the school board adopted a budget that cuts administrative staff and some school employees. That’s a needed corrective, but district finances are still in trouble, and the union demands won’t help.
Washington law doesn’t give public employees a right to strike. State courts have deemed such strikes illegal, and courts have sometimes enjoined public union strikes. But there are no penalties set by law, and unions have found they can get away with it.
That includes Seattle teachers, who delayed school for five days with a strike in 2022. They scored hefty pay raises in their three-year bargaining agreement—7% for the first year of the contract, followed by 4%, then 3%. Last year other Washington school district unions went on strike, including custodians and other staff in Evergreen Public Schools. After more than two weeks on the picket line, the union received raises of as much as 13.5% over three years, and avoided legal trouble.
When your first brush with adulthood involves endless consumption and no cost, it gives you the wrong idea of how the world works.
What’s behind the craze for socialism among young people? The New York Times, focusing on the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York membership surge, offers the conventional view: that it is fueled predominantly by “frustration with the economy” and the desire for a social safety net. The same report notes that the DSA member base has become younger and more white-collar, with its greatest appeal to college-educated urban dwellers.
Why college students? The usual assumption is that professors are indoctrinating students, but that’s too simple. The campus itself is a powerful factor.
When students arrive in college, they encounter a vague sense of freedom. What they often do not realize is how controlled their campus experience is. Universities operate as a closed economy: centrally administered, collectively resourced, carefully controlled by administrators who hope their plans aid retention efforts.
Over the past several decades, the college campus has morphed into a comprehensive residential and lifestyle provider. Beginning in the 1990s, when colleges started competing more aggressively for larger enrollment numbers, investing in student life became a way to recruit students. Expanded student unions, more-comfortable residence halls, larger recreation centers, campus programming offices and improved dining choices became the norm.
Hundreds of colleges are sending students letters of admission—without even requiring an application.
Schools are increasingly agreeing to admit students based on a handful of criteria, like high school transcripts. Known as “direct admissions,” this expedited process is free and omits required essays, questions about extracurriculars and mandated standardized tests.
In turn, the colleges—which are seeking ways to attract more students amid broader financial headwinds—gain exposure to prospects who may never have heard of them otherwise. They then woo the young people into enrolling.
Proponents call the approach a solution for both sides.
“Instead of a student applying to the institution, the institution applies to them,” said Angel Perez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “It’s a way for students not to have to jump through hoops in order to get into college.”
Of course districts should be accountable for spending, but the real question is whether accountability can be separated from equity. Districts cannot budget their way out of chronic disinvestment.
Connecticut’s real challenge is not getting districts to spend smarter. It’s making certain that students are funded fairly regardless of where they live.
I feel this group of hardworking dedicated individuals were set up to fail as an election year ploy. I am sure after seeing the results of the last meeting that the commission will make some good recommendations. My fear is that as soon as the election is over those recommendations will sit on a shelf gathering dust for the next 13 years.
More than 88,000 tax filers, similar to the population of Dodge County, left Wisconsin in 2022. Over the last ten years, more than 900,000 filers have left the state, most of them moving to states with a flat or no income tax, taking more than $37 billion in income with them.
That lost income means lost tax revenue, too. Wisconsin missed out on more than $400 million in state and local tax revenue in 2023 alone, and more than $3.5 billion over the past decade.
WHY IT MATTERS: This isn’t wealthy families leaving. Most people who moved to lower-tax states were middle class. The average tax filer who left Wisconsin for a flat or no-income-tax state in 2023 earned about $78,500 — showing that everyday families are leaving for better opportunities and to keep more of what they earn.
THE QUOTE:
“Wisconsin families and job creators are voting with their feet. Wisconsin can’t out-tax its neighbors and expect people to stay,” said Maryjane Behm, IRG Deputy Director of Policy & Reform. “It’s clear Wisconsin is losing residents to states that let the taxpayers keep more of their own money.”
WHAT’S NEXT: The incoming legislature and new governor will debate the state’s next two-year budget after the November elections, with a $3 billion surpluson the table. Now is the time for comprehensive income tax reform, including eliminating the income tax, regardless of whether Wisconsinites choose a divided government again this fall.
Last week, in a Bronx courtroom that drew almost no cameras, Judge Audrey Stone found Dimone Fleming not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect for stabbing her sons, Daishawn Fleming, 3, and Octavius Canada, 11 months old, to death. The prosecution stipulated to postpartum psychosis. Fleming will not go to prison. She remains in custody for a psychiatric evaluation and returns to court this month. Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Wichman explained afterward that “prosecuting mothers does not and cannot prevent these crimes from happening, but public discourse might.” The New York Times recorded the outcome in a single clause: she will avoid prison.
This morning in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a jury of nine women and three men is back for a fifth day on the case of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, on January 24, 2023. She does not deny the acts. She denies responsibility for them. The Commonwealth says she sent her husband out of the house and carried out a plan. On Tuesday, the jurors told Judge William Sullivan they were unable to reach a unanimous decision, and he sent them back to keep working. Outside the courthouse, supporters in pink have treated her as the injured party, and a fundraiser for her family has drawn hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Eighteen days before the Fleming ruling, Governor Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, stripping the Massachusetts 24-week abortion limit and leaving late pregnancy to a physician’s “professional judgment.” So the same commonwealth that will not mark a line at a viable unborn child is now asking twelve jurors whether three deadborn children amount to a crime or a medical episode. The jurors’ hesitation is not a failure of nerve. It is what happens when a culture has spent a generation teaching that a child’s claim on life yields when the child depends on a mother who no longer accepts the cost.
When Carl Hendrick took his first ride in a Waymo, the self-driving taxi service, he thought it felt a lot like the future of education.
Hendrick is a senior learning scientist at Alpha School, a buzzy private-school company where he trains artificial intelligence models to teach students—a process, he says, that is not unlike training a self-driving car.
For such a car, “it was just thousands and thousands of miles, training itself on data, and not just on a linear path. The challenge is in all the different eventualities, like the cyclist who’s wobbling in the road, the kid running out,” he says. “I think, in five or 10 years, a similar thing will happen in education where we train AI models on learning and all of kids’ misconceptions and problems.”
For Alpha School, the equivalents to the swerving bikes and unexpected pedestrians are more like misconceptions, learning differences or preteen classroom struggles. And the “cars” the company is testing have 10-year-olds in the backseat.
In theory, life at Alpha School looks like this: students spend two hours each morning—or more, if they don’t meet their benchmarks—working with an AI tutor that adapts to each student’s needs, assesses their progress and gives live feedback. Hendrick and the company’s other learning scientists work with software developers to train the models using the latest research and curriculum tools. In the afternoon, students work on “life skills” by attending workshops on topics that include coding, entrepreneurship and public speaking. Tuition at most campuses ranges from $40,000 to $75,000 per year.
And now Alpha is expanding. This fall the company plans to grow to roughly 50 campuses across the U.S., including 27 newly announced locations.
