By Sarah Schwartz:

Two bills that would boost federal involvement in reading instruction passed out of a Senate committee on Thursday, signaling Congress’ continued interest in the “science of reading” movement.

One, the bipartisan READ Act, would put new requirements on existing federal literacy grants to support early screening for reading difficulties and evidence-based reading instruction, and shift some funding to states with the lowest reading scores.

Another, the 21st Century Dyslexia Act, would change how the reading disability dyslexia is classified under federal disability law, establishing dyslexia as its own category.

“In the greatest country in the world, we can’t resign ourselves to the fact that many children still struggle to read at grade level, and that only 1 in 3 students leave high school as proficient readers,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., one of the cosponsors of the READ Act, during the session of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday.

Both bills will now advance to the full Senate.

The READ Act and its committee approval demonstrate growing momentum in Congress for the “science of reading,” a movement that has been primarily led by the states. Since 2020, more than 40 states have passed legislationrequiring or encouraging schools to use evidence-backed practices to teach young children how to read.

Language in one of the House’s 2027 fiscal appropriations bills calls for convening a second National Reading Panel

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Brian Hamilton:

So, too, was the current status quo in Congress, where members get rich by staying in office.

The Founders were builders, not leeches. They didn’t want to stay in public office for the entirety of their careers. Public service was a short-term contribution of a private citizen to their communities and country.

Recall that, after the American Revolution, some encouraged George Washington to assume the role of king, since he basically had control of the military. To his everlasting credit, he rejected that notion. This was noted by no less than the king of England, who said that, upon forgoing royalty, Washington would be “the greatest man in the world.”

Needless to say, we are short a few Washingtons these days.

To date, more than 300 legislators have served for more than 30 years in Congress. Some 70% of the current members were career politicians before they made it to Washington. No Founder would have even thought to consider laws around term limits because they couldn’t have fathomed hanging out well beyond their welcome, all the while depending on the government dole for their salary.

The natural question is, why would legislators want to stick around for so long?

It turns out that, since 2004, the top 100 wealth gainers in Congress have averaged a 114% increase in net worth while in office, according to a recent Ballotpedia study. During the same period, the median U.S. household saw its inflation-adjusted net worth decline by nearly 1%. That means that for every $1 of wealth the average American lost, Congress’s top 100 gained $121. Wow. Today, at least 30% of senators are estimated to be worth more than $10 million, despite their taxpayer-funded base salary being just $174,000.

How is this possible?

One obvious explanation is that these politicians are privy to information that average Americans aren’t, yet they are still permitted to own and trade individual stocks. The 2012 Stock Act, which requires members of Congress to report stock trades worth more than $1,000 within a 45-day window, does nothing to curb legislators’ trading.

You would hope that they would want to act in the interest of the country without the appearance of personal gain. However, an investigation conducted by a consortium of news organizations that analyzed nearly 9,000 financial-disclosure reports identified 78 members of Congress who violated the Stock Act.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I always thought that you were supposed to make money from taking risks and adding value. It seems these guys are simply trading on their influence and knowledge. I think most Americans would be shocked to know how the system actually works in favor of the politicians.

While running for president in 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) targeted President Lyndon B. Johnson, who added millions of dollars to his family’s fortunes while in Washington. Goldwater said that “small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.” Unfortunately, he was spot on.

Laura Nelson:

The school that Dr. Priscilla Chan co-founded for low-income students was designed to be different.

The vast fortunes being minted in other corners of Silicon Valley had mostly missed East Palo Alto, Calif., where the Primary School opened in 2016. Funded through Chan’s philanthropy with her husband Mark Zuckerberg, the private, tuition-free school aimed to support the “whole child” through wraparound services, including free dental checkups, early-intervention screenings and wellness coaching for parents.

The school joined a long list of efforts by the country’s wealthiest, dating back to Andrew Carnegie, to put their stamp on the American classroom. Then, after a decade of operation and more than $125 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Primary School shut down in June.

Anna Stokke:

Report | American Enterprise Institute

• Several popular ideas in math education are unsupported by high-quality evidence, used at the wrong stage of learning, or harmful to student learning.
• Among these are five common instructional practices: teaching multiple strategies for the same operation before students have mastered one reliable method, allowing technology to replace foundational knowledge and procedural skills, delaying the teaching of procedures until conceptual understanding is secure, teaching primarily through student-led problem-solving, and avoiding repetitive practice.
• Effective math teaching supports new learners through clear, explicit instruction.

Introduction

Math education is plagued with superficially appealing phrases and ideas that aren’t aligned with how students learn. Many students find math difficult or think they are incapable of doing it. Ideas marketed as quick fixes or ways to avoid the hard work necessary for learning math are therefore often attractive to educators and students.

Despite their appeal, many of the most popular ideas in math education are unsupported by high-quality evidence, are applied at the wrong stage of learning, or work against learning.

Here are five popular ideas in math education that should be reconsidered and abandoned.

Misconception 1: New Learners Should Learn Multiple Strategies

The Crimson Brand Studio:

The Harvard College Writing Center will no longer operate as a standalone unit after its director was laid off and its functions were consolidated as part of a restructuring in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, prompting swift backlash from current and former writing tutors.

In a Thursday email obtained by The Crimson, the center’s director, Jane Rosenzweig, told tutors that she was laid off and that they could potentially continue working through the Academic Resource Center. She was among dozens of College staff informed of layoffs and job changes last week as the school moves forward with a restructuring that will reshape several of its main offices.

The Writing Center offers support to students through one-on-one peer tutoring and other resources. FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm confirmed in a statement that “several offices and functions within the College have been consolidated, including the Writing Center.”

“Importantly, students will continue to be able to work with writing tutors and access other resources previously provided by the Center,” he added.

Rosenzweig, who has worked at Harvard for more than two decades, has also taught first-year Expository Writing courses and helped develop a new AI learning module required for all first-year students enrolled in Expos. She declined to comment on her layoff.

Glenn Reynolds

Well this didn’t age wellpic.twitter.com/prvxPsrHpF

— Julian Assange (@ImJulianAssange) July 29, 2026

Jeff’s response was “He saved lives. What have you done?” My reply was “Did he?”

A few of my friends came on to suggest, politely enough, that Fauci’s contribution was mostly negative and Jeff abruptly responded “Good-bye, Glenn,” and unfriended me.

Well, I will survive the shock of that blow, but it struck me — after all those years of disagreeing on politics, this was the straw that broke Jarvis’s back? Anthony Fauci? Especially now, when he’s the butt of self-incrimination jokes? In front of Congress, Fauci wouldn’t even say what color his tie was. (I’m trying to talk one of my distiller friends into putting out a limited run of Fauci whiskey, with the slogan “Take the Fifth!”) 

Why Fauci, and why now?

I think the answer is that Fauci, and Faucism, represented the apotheosis of what the managerial/academic/journo class desires: An excuse for sweeping power, based on (alleged) expertise, in which they could ride roughshod over those stupid proles and flyover people while preening about the allegedly superior moral and intellectual qualities that justify their rule.

Then it turned out that they were wrong about nearly everything and — as Fauci’s diaries demonstrate — knew it at the time, at least at the top. And their overreach is one of the things that gave us Trump 47.

Ann Althouse summary.

Derek Thompson:

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

•Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
• Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
• Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
• And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?
A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.

But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.

One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?

Why is the Education Department pulling student loan funding from college programs that leave students worse off financially? Find out in my latest for @WSJFreeEx pic.twitter.com/3RsL9PNmTq

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) July 31, 2026

Joanne Jacobs:

On the advice of Astor and others, schools have invested heavily “in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming,” Barshay writes. Since the Columbine massacre in 1999, fewer students are bringing weapons to school. But school shootings have increased.

School shooters aren’t responding to bullying or trauma, Astor told Barshay. They crave notoriety. “Most of them are suicidal, and they decided to be homicidal so that they would be remembered,” he said.

“The more media attention a shooter gets, the more likely the event will inspire a future mass shooter,” warns the National Center for Health Research.

Trying to make schools safe and supportive places is important, Astor says. But preventing school shootings requires working with the media. He hopes to persuade journalists and social media companies to “adopt guidelines that reduce attention on perpetrators, delay publication of manifestos and videos, and focus more coverage on victims,” writes Barshay.

Catrin Wigfall:

When asked to estimate how much their state spends per public school student, parents and other adults guessed $5,000 and $6,000, respectively, both significantly under the average across all states ($15,591 using FY 2022 data) and even well below the lowest spending state, Utah, at $9,496 per student.

A national July survey by Morning Consult on behalf of EdChoice polled 2,250 adults and 1,300 school parents on a variety of education-related questions, including public school funding. Non-parent respondents estimated public school spending was around $10,000 per student, a guess that landed within actual spending ranges.

Source: EdChoice

Respondents were also asked whether they thought public school funding in their state was too low, too high, or about right. Without any information on how much their state spent per public school student each year, 54 percent of the general public said funding was “too low.” With information on how much their state spent, the percent of Americans saying funding was “too low” dropped to 37 percent — a decrease of 17 percentage points — and the percent to say funding was “too high” increased 10 percentage points.

Source: EdChoice

According to the Minnesota Department of Education’s latest numbers, Minnesota’s spending per student as measured by average daily membership (ADM) was $16,650 for FY 2024. (This varies by district.) Beginning with FY 2026, the basic formula allowance, which is the basic general education revenue component for school districts, will increase automatically each year at the rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) within a band not less than a two percent increase over the previous year or greater than a three percent increase over the previous year.

———

Hollly McDede:

This story was originally co-published by ProPublica and KQED

I was a new reporter at KQED in 2021 when former elementary teacher Joseph Brian Houg was sentenced to more than three decades in prison for sexually abusing 10 students. He’d taught at the same San Francisco Bay Area school for more than two decades. Were there warning signs?

I soon discovered parents on social media saying they had complained to school administrators for years about Houg. I also knew that schools could release such complaints if they were substantiated or if teachers were disciplined. So I filed public records requests with Houg’s school — something anyone can do.

I received 43 pages of records within a few months showing that parents had reported Houg to the principal at least four times since 2009. They complained about him for asking students to strip down to their underwear in his classroom in order to try on costumes for a play he was directing, and for coming into their changing room. They also complained about his touching boys’ chests or stomachs and tapping one boy on the butt. I learned that the principal had twice warned Houg to stop touching students. But he was allowed to keep teaching. (The principal said in a deposition that while Houg’s actions crossed professional boundaries, they were not reported to her as sexual.)

Over the next two years, I reported on similar cases of teachers remaining in the classroom after complaints of unwanted touching. Another Bay Area elementary school, in Benicia, reported a teacher to the state’s licensing body after he resigned due to accusations of misconduct. He was hired by another school, and his educator license remained in good standing until he was criminally charged. (He is currently fighting those charges.)

This raised a whole different set of questions for me: Should these teachers have been allowed to keep teaching in new schools? How much about a teacher’s disciplinary history did potential employers know? And what was the state’s responsibility for acting on, and sharing, the information it had about these teachers?

Carson Griffith: 

Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in a town house in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is not his employer, of course. Like all editors on the site, Pruitt is a volunteer. “At this point, I won’t say I don’t have any skin in the game,” he told me. “But it’s a lot lower stakes than a job because if I get something wrong, it’s fairly easy to fix it. I can fix it myself. I can do what I want to do on my own time.” Still, he holds himself to some rules: “I do try to get in at least one edit a day.”

Kate Armanini:

After a divisive debate, the Chicago Board of Education approved the district’s $9.96 billion budget Thursday, adopting an amendment that anticipates $150 million in state funding to reverse school-level cuts.

The district’s 2026-27 budget originally included the layoffs of 760 teachers, department cuts and a midyear spending freeze to close a $730 million deficit. The controversial amendment eliminates the spending freeze and plans to undo at least some of the planned layoffs.

But it’s unclear whether additional state funding will materialize.

Lawmakers already passed the state’s budget in June — closing their own $2 billion deficit — and Chicago Public Schools leaders say they’ve been given no indication that more funding is available.

CPS CEO Macquline King warned the budget amendment may leave the district vulnerable to midyear school cuts if the money doesn’t come through. Lenders will also “not look favorably” at unconfirmed revenue, which could lead to credit downgrades and higher borrowing costs, officials said.

“We need to learn from our mistakes instead of repeating them,” King said.

——

Angel Gutierrez:

My speech on the floor before the budget vote. I was prepared to vote on Sup. King’s and her team of experts budget on Thursday and unfortunately we did not have the opportunity, instead we voted on an unbalanced budget that adds “Phantom Dollars,” which is why I voted NO!

——

Related:

Heck, I would dig a little deeper on whether even more state aid is a good idea. Mostly, better performers and higher spenders lean local.

(County-based districts are a great compromise: equity by metropolitan area, then use state aid for the poor counties without breadwinners.)

And:

Other Boards have been angry with Milwaukee. Here is Waukesha on state aid.

~”When Milwaukee passes a referendum, they are passing on a tax increase to every other district. These referendums are killing us from a district that cannot even file its financial reports on time.”

Jon A. Shields:

Colleges, especially selective ones, contribute to class segregation in America by cocooning students in residential campuses that are culturally much like the neighborhoods they’ll one day occupy. That makes it all the more important that students take courses that expose them to the rich social-scientific literature on our growing class divide. Unfortunately, such educational encounters seem to be rare. Students need more opportunities to learn about their fellow citizens; otherwise, we fear that America will remain a mostly foreign country to the next generation of college graduates.

Matt Taibbi:

“Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chair, has cast himself as a contemporary Joe McCarthyintent on ferreting out the truth about one man’s supposed crimes against his country…Just before leaving office, President Joe Biden took the remarkable step of providing Dr. Fauci with a blanket pardon… On the advice of his lawyers, the 85-year-old Dr. Fauci made the extraordinary choice during Wednesday’s hearing to plead the Fifth… The effect was a useless drama that offered zero insights to a public desperate for them.”

— The New York Times

In a Senate hearing Wednesday, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases(NIAID), about Covid, and US-funded gain of function experiments. “Can you explain to the committee why you chose to fund this dangerous research in China?” 

Fauci answered by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, for the first of 100 times: 

This ought to have marked a dramatic and final end to years of hagiographic worship of the man, and commenced a long overdue decision to investigate science’s role in causing the pandemic. 

No luck. The reaction to Wednesday’s hearing makes clear that there is no amount of evidence that will move half of the American population off its religious devotion to this invidious huckster-narcissist whose reckless behavior endangered the world. Nothing gets through. Documentary evidence doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the FBI and the Department of Energy point in that direction. Not even a desire for self-preservation — the investigation of Fauci and other scientists is a necessary precursor to learning how an engineered virus killed millions — will shake this segment of the population. 

A sample of the revelations that have been, and apparently will continue to be, ignored:

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:

“Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

— U.S. Supreme Court, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

Major Findings

1. The percentage of colleges and universities earning an overall “red light” rating in FIRE’s Spotlight database has hit an all-time low — this year to 13.2%. This is an approximately one-and-a-half percentage point drop from last year, and is more than 55 percentage points lower than the percentage of red light institutions in FIRE’s first, 2006 report in which 68.6% of all institutions earned a red light rating. 
2. 69.4% of institutions now earn an overall “yellow light” rating. Though less restrictive than red light policies, yellow light policies still restrict expression that is protected under First Amendment standards and invite administrative abuse.
3. A total of 76 colleges and universities now earn an overall “green light” rating, up from 73 schools as of last year’s report. Policies earn a green light rating when they do not seriously threaten protected expression. For the second year in a row, more institutions earn a green light rating (76) than a red light rating (66). This gulf widens at public schools, where the number of public schools earning a green light rating (68) eclipses the number of private schools earning a red light rating (37) by over 30. 

Robert Pondiscio:

Of course, education policy, governance, and funding matters. But policy can only create the conditions for success. Ultimately, student learning depends on what teachers know and are able to do. That’s the animating idea behind “The Practice Project.”

Each paper in the series translates evidence from cognitive science, education research, and the accumulated wisdom of accomplished educators, thinkers, and writers into practical guidance for teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders. Rather than prescribing new policies, adjudicating arguments, or promoting educational fashions, the papers in this initiative focus on the craft of teaching itself.

Significantly, this series is a joint effort of AEI and researchED, a UK-based outfit that is well-known overseas but remains something of a cult item here in the US. It’s an international community of teachers, researchers, and school leaders committed to improving evidence-based classroom practice through research and the dissemination of professional knowledge. I’ve been a fan since attending my first researchED conference in Philadelphia in 2018. In the years since, I’ve presented at their conferences in England, Canada, and Chile. I’ve been to several others not as a speaker but simply as an attendee.

Indeed, many of the contributors to this series are people I’ve met through the researchED community. I’ve seen them teach, discussed their work at the pub afterward, and watched teachers pack their sessions because they had something genuinely useful to say. The goal of “The Practice Project” is to make that expertise available to educators who may never have the opportunity to attend a researchED conference in person.

www:

Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be “the limit of human felicity.” A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe

Rachel Pritzker:

I believe it’s important to honestly reassess ourselves and our efforts periodically. And when I see how I’ve fallen short, to fess up to it and commit to doing better going forward. To that end, I’ve written about how easy it is to accidentally fuel toxic polarization and distrust more broadly. I have learned a few things the hard way, here are a few of them: 1/2

Jennifer Weber, Carolyn D. Gorman:

This view overlooks a basic behavioral principle: that consequences shape what children do next. Some consequences make a behavior less likely—that’s punishment. Others make it more likely—what B. F. Skinner called reinforcement. It doesn’t matter whether the reward is getting something good or merely escaping something bad.

Much classroom misbehavior is motivated by the desire to escape. The student is trying to get out of something he finds unpleasant, whether it’s work he can’t do, a subject he’s failing, or an audience he’d rather not face. For that student, a suspension acts as a reward—it gets him exactly what he wants, reinforcing the behavior. The harm is what the days outside of the classroom bring––disengagement and the growing sense that school is not where he belongs. Other misbehavior is motivated by desire for attention; in those cases, pulling the student aside for a one-on-one discussion is unlikely to be an effective deterrent.

The restorative-justice practices that have replaced suspension, such as mediation circles or discussion with a teacher, distribute the same kinds of unintentional rewards. A child escaping a math worksheet doesn’t care whether he gets a suspension slip or is placed in a restorative circle; either way, the worksheet is gone. Likewise, a child who seeks adult attention doesn’t care whether it’s punitive or therapeutic; either way, he got it.

Schools often––unintentionally––deepen the reward of attention through the use of mental-health programs. A standard response to repeated misbehavior is a visit to the school counselor or school psychologist. There the misbehaving student receives a caring adult’s undivided, one-on-one time. Students who need adult attention should get it, but not as the payoff for acting out.

Escape works the same way in reverse. The trip to the counselor’s office ends the math lesson just as surely as a suspension does. For the student acting out to avoid work that he cannot do, an effective response must ensure that the work does not go away. The assignment should wait for him––in the office, after school—so that the misbehavior no longer gets him out of it. And because the skill he lacks is usually the real problem, the lasting fix is help with the work itself, which will give the student more reason to want to stay in the classroom.

——-

Notes and links on Restorative Justice.

Kathleen Stock:

The progressive world loves a good fairy tale. Autistic and totally mute till the age of 11, Professor Jason Arday only learned to read and write at 18. Since then, he has blazed through the academic ranks, from a lectureship in physical education in 2016, to a Cambridge Professorial Chair in Sociology in 2023 — the youngest black professor ever appointed there. He has helped the Government with its antiracism strategies; advised on the national curriculum; guest-edited the Today program; and been the subject of a glowing profile on Good Morning America. His writing has been enthusiastically praised by James O’Brien and David Lammy. His fans now await his memoir, to be published in a month’s time.

It seems likely to be an incredible read. In various interviews, Arday has claimed to have completed his PhD with a brain tumor; to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days; to have raised millions for charity; to have played both snooker and football at professional levels. And now there is a new chapter in this gripping life story: outright allegations of plagiarism in his academic writing and muttered suspicions of fraud. There are magical-sounding transformations here, arduous journeys, and noble heroes battling it out with dastardly villains. But who exactly are we supposed to root for, and what is the moral of the story?

——-

Benjamin Ryan:

The Good Law Project insists Cambridge professor Jason Arday has not plagiarized and that claims that he has are part of a right-wing smear project.

Here are side-by-side comparisons of his compared with other people’s work:

Cole Reynolds

The plastic, nonlethal aircraft, which can smash windows and ram attackers, will be at the ready in a handful of schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado.

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat. 

At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.

Jessica Poiner:

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

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

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

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

None of my audiences balks at these findings.

Ella Hanley:

When Congress first passed IDEA in 1975, it pledged that the federal government would pay up to 40% of the additional costs of educating students with disabilities. The federal share has never reached that level, according to the National Council on Disability.

The Madison school district is facing a roughly $65 million gap between the federal government’s promised IDEA funding and what it currently provides, Superintendent Joe Gothard said.

IDEA requires public schools to provide a “free appropriate public education” to students with disabilities, meaning local school districts cannot legally reduce services because federal funding falls short. Instead, the district must make up the difference with state and local dollars.

“We’ve got to find a way to balance this out,” Gothard said. “To fully fund special education is the number one priority, and we’ve heard that at the state level.”

Between 2019 and 2024, Madison school district special education spending increased faster than general education spending, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. About one-sixth of the district’s more than 25,000 students receivespecial education services.

John Hillen:

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

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

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

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

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

Will Flanders and Brooke Smith:

As students prepare for the 2026-27 school year, DPI has finally released spending data for the 2024-25.  While this continues a pattern of the DPI seemingly dragging it’s feet in releasing public school spending information, the data is still illuminating.  Despite the continual refrain that public schools are “underfunded,” the data reveals—yet again—spending that is near all-time highs. 

On average across the state, school district revenue is $18,859 per student.  This represents an increase of about $267 per student from last year without adjusting for inflation. 150 districts have seen a per pupil funding decline from last year, while 270 have seen an increase.  Though funding is slightly down by $203 from the 2023-24 school year after inflation adjustment.  This 1.06% decline is fully explained by inflation, which was approximately 3% between August 2023 and August 2024.  More pertinent than that is the long-term trend.  The figure below shows revenue per student back to the 2006 school year—the earliest available on the DPI website after they removed older data earlier this year.  

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Julia Amann:

There has never been a better time to be a math nerd.

New college graduates and Ph.D.s are now securing million-dollar pay deals from elite trading firms seeking to secure the best and brightest amid fierce competition from artificial-intelligence companies.

——

Yet:

This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Tony Woodlief

The Education Department will no longer count racial disparities in K-12 school suspension rates as proof of discrimination, it announced on July 23. This is a welcome change, but it won’t automatically restore order in the thousands of schools pressured by the Obama and Biden administrations into adopting “alternative discipline” methods whose chief objective is race equity. Many such programs have come at the cost of student safety and education. 

These methods go by many names, like “restorative practices,” “social-emotional learning” and, most telling, “restorative justice.” In lieu of suspensions, administrators invite offenders to reflect in a soothing place on the feelings and trauma that led them, say, to hit another student or disobey a teacher. Students may also be invited into a “restorative circle” with school staff and other students, where they can share their feelings, and others in the circle can talk with them about how peace in the community might be restored. 

Reality often falls short of this vision. Concerns about restorative justice emerged soon after the Obama administration began pushing it. Public schools in Philadelphia that implemented it experienced “skyrocketing truancy, serious misbehavior, and declining achievement,” Manhattan Institute researchers observed in 2017. Other cities experienced similar results. 

If any school district needed help diverting struggling children from a path that begins with school suspensions and ends in prison, it was the Little Rock School District in Arkansas. Its schools serve a student community that is 57% black, in a county whose 2024 black out-of-wedlock birthrate was 80%, where nearly three-quarters of students come from low-income households and roughly the same percentage fall below grade level in reading and math, according to 2024-25 data. During the 2021-22 school year, before its wide-scale adoption of restorative justice, this district of roughly 20,000 students had almost 2,500 instances of violence, bullying and weapons infractions.

Who could blame LRSD for forming a partnership with the Tendaji Community Development Corp., which claims its alternative discipline methods “promote cohesion among students and administrators while fostering a growth mindset and positive relationships”? LRSD engaged Tendaji in 2022, paying it almost $1.5 million between 2023 and 2025 alone to provide digital social-emotional learning tutorials, on-site peer mediation and “restorative circles,” among other services.

What followed was a catastrophe. Since the 2021-22 school year, districtwide assaults by students on other students have jumped 118%. Assaults by students on teachers and staff have climbed 151%. 

——-

Much more on restorative justice, here.

A Declaration of First Principles was adopted by the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust in June 2026.

The declaration is organized around three core purposes:

• Pathbreaking research. Universities exist to create, preserve and disseminate knowledge.
• Transformative education. A university education is meant to teach students how to think rather than what to think.
• The covenant between universities and society. Universities depend on public, private and philanthropic support offered in exchange for education and research that serve the public good.

The full text of The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles follows.

Preamble

Emerging from a unique combination of the pre-revolutionary colleges and the Enlightenment tradition that reshaped Europe and found constitutional expression in the American founding, the modern university has stood as a bedrock institution of a free and self-governing republic — advancing discovery and the pursuit of truth. However, the substantial decline of public trust in some of America’s preeminent institutions over the past few decades has now extended to higher education.

This erosion of trust presents a defining challenge for the country. America’s universities have long stood as forums of pathbreaking research, transformative education, democratic deliberation, free expression, and transmission of our shared political and cultural heritage. They have served as essential engines of discovery, progress, and economic opportunity. Supported by government funding, private philanthropy, student and community investments, and public trust, universities have delivered breakthroughs in every domain. Through their advancement of civic thought, health, technology, economic development, and national security, America’s universities have engendered national prosperity and a highly productive, successful society. The tremendous success of this distinctively American system of research, education, and innovation has inspired respect, admiration, and attempts at imitation across the world.

To ensure this enduring success, American universities need to be firmly committed to their core purpose: the cultivation of a free and self-governing republic by the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge through reason, argument, and evidence, rooted in the pursuit of truth and discovery at the frontiers of human knowledge and in a university culture of free inquiry, wide-ranging debate, and academic excellence.

Mitchell Schmidt:

All five Democratic candidates in the race for governor — former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former state Department of Administration secretary Joel Brennan, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, state Rep. Francesca Hong and state Sen. Kelda Roys — told the Wisconsin State Journal they support a full repeal of Act 10.

The winner of the August primary will advance to November to face presumptive GOP governor nominee and U.S. Rep Tom Tiffany, who voted in favor of Act 10 while serving in the state Legislature. Tiffany has argued a repeal of Act 10 would cost Wisconsin taxpayers upwards of $2 billion a year. Long-shot GOP candidate Andy Manske has said the fate of Act 10 will be decided by the state Supreme Court.

The field of Democratic candidates were asked what they’d hope to do with regard to Act 10 if elected governor, and what specific components of the 2011 law they’d seek to repeal.

Here’s what they had to say:

——-

Rick Esenberg:

By traditional equal protection analysis, there is no argument that Act 10 violates the equal protection clause. Rational basis review does not mean “a rationale I find persuasive.” A rational basis often must include “things we had to do to get enough votes.” To say otherwise, would be a failure to acknowledge the nature of the legislative. While excluding classes on the basis of race, sex or for mere favoritism should be problematic, a law’s failure to be comprehensive can’t make it unconstitutional. Striking Act 10 down would be legislating from the bench which, frankly, has always been a big part of the progressive legal project.

——-

Notes and links on Wisconsin Act 10.

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dan Lennington:

It’s now been three years since the United States Supreme Court declared that race may never be used as a “negative” or operate as a “stereotype” in higher education. While that landmark case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, dismantled affirmative action in admissions, race still lingers as a factor in many other areas of higher education.

One such area is financial aid—specifically grants and scholarships. The National Scholarship Providers Association estimates that 11% of all higher-education scholarships still contain eligibility requirements for race, ethnicity, or other demographic factors, even after SFFA.

Race-based scholarships, though, are facing increasing scrutiny. Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down a race-based scholarship created by the Wisconsin Legislature in 1985. The scholarship provided taxpayer-funded grants to students based on need. Critically, however, the scholarships were available only for “minority undergraduates.” And even that definition further restricted eligibility by providing that only certain minorities qualified: blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. All other students were excluded because of their race. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) sued the State on behalf of Kiki Rabiebna and Richard Freihoefer, a married couple. Kiki is a native of Thailand and Richard is a white American. They have a teenage son who is entering college in Wisconsin this fall. But because of race and ancestry, no one in the Rabiebna-Freihoefer family was eligible for the scholarship. The left-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with WILL and its clients, unanimously holding that the scholarship’s racial qualifications violated the 14th Amendment.

The left-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with WILL and its clients, unanimously holding that the scholarship’s racial qualifications violated the 14th Amendment. In the Court’s main opinion, Justice Ziegler explained that the Constitution requires “all individuals to be treated equally without regard to one’s race, ancestry, origin, or ethnicity.” And each citizen must be treated “as an individual—not as one member of a class.” 

Philip Marcelo:

A school district in a rural corner of upstate New York is hitting pause on plans to deploy an AI-powered, humanoid robot in the classroom after state education officials, teachers and local residents raised concerns, including the maker’s ties to a company that produces hyper realistic sex bots.

The Salamanca City Central School District’s board approved the nearly $60,000 purchase from Realbotix with visions that “Sally,” as the stationary robot with long dark hair has already been nicknamed, would enhance the education of high school students studying robotics and technology fields. 

“Having a difficult time programming an Arduino board? Don’t even know what an Arduino board is? Ask Sally and she can explain it,” Superintendent Mark Beehler, said Tuesday. “The robot also provides opportunities for students to learn how the robot is maintained, how it is updated with new approved content, and how to troubleshoot issues.”

But as news spread in the small community located on the Seneca Nation of Indians reservation, parents and teachers worried about how students’ personal information would be used. Unionized teachers took aim at Realbotix’s sex doll sister company, even as district officials and the company itself stressed the two manufacturers operate independently.

Eugene Volokh:

A short excerpt from the long opinion in Pruitt v. Grosse Pointe Public School Sys., decided Friday by Judge Robert White (E.D. Mich.):

Plaintiff Gary Shane Pruitt, a parent, attempted to raise concerns with officials from the Grosse Point Public School System (the District) about the educational environment at the public middle school his child attends. Pruitt objected to the display of rainbow pride flags in classrooms. The District officials could have listened to Pruitt’s concerns and then defended a teacher’s decision to display the flag. Surely, the teacher only aimed to create a welcoming environment for all her students. Instead, Pruitt’s concerns were dismissed.

So Pruitt visited the school to record a video of the flag. He came with his son, after school hours, and only entered the school after receiving permission from a school employee. And despite the fact multiple school officials observed him in the school, he was never asked to leave. Weeks passed without comment or action from school officials.

Then Pruitt took his concern to a public forum—posting a video to social media showing the rainbow pride flag on display. The video included Pruitt’s voiceover calling the display of the rainbow flag political and divisive, and he called on parents to “speak out” about the “radical programing” from “groomer teachers[.]” In response, the school principal initially sent an e-mail to parents, affirming the non-threatening nature of the video and identifying its publication as the “political” speech of a “parent[.]”

But public criticism followed. The District, citing complaints from staff and community members for the “disruption to the educational environment[,]” issued Pruitt a no-trespass order. A picture of Pruitt’s face was posted at the entry to the school and the district threatened criminal prosecution if Pruitt violated the order.

Moreover, the District informed Pruitt in writing that his total ban on attendance at extracurricular activities could only be revisited “at the sole discretion” of the District. Eighteen months passed without so much as a violation from Pruitt, but his requests to lift the order were denied. Finding no resolution, he sued.

At bottom, Pruitt’s video criticizing public-school officials constitutes speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The way public schools educate children is a core matter of public concern and debate. The District retaliated against Pruitt for his speech with their after-the-fact imposition of a no-trespass order and threat of criminal prosecution. The timing of the District’s written correspondence in this case, as well as the content of the order itself, confirms as much.

Enrico Berkes & Ruben Gaetani:

We document that the diffusion of new scientific ideas beyond their field of origin has declined substantially over the past four decades. This contraction is closely linked to increasing specialization in scientific language: research that employs more technical terminology tends to be adopted less broadly. We develop a theory of scientific discovery in which the diffusion of new ideas depends on the degree to which potential adopters can understand and process them. When introducing their discoveries, scientists face a tradeoff between technical communication targeted at their immediate peers and more accessible language meant to reach broader audiences. As knowledge accumulates and research at the frontier builds on deeper layers of prior work, this tradeoff increasingly favors specialized language, limiting diffusion.

Policy interventions that align scientists’ incentives can broaden adoption and increase the social value of scientific research.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Academia has a diversity problem, and people are starting to notice.

Oh, it’s not a race/gender diversity problem; academia has paid a lot of attention to that. 

It’s a political diversity problem.

One person raising alarms is Tennessee’s former governor, Phil Bredesen — a Democrat. 

Bredesen recently flagged research he’d done that showed virtually all (over 90%) of Tennessee faculty members’ political donations have gone to Democrats. 

How long, he asked, can such overwhelmingly blue higher-ed command political support, or even legitimacy, in a deep-red state like Tennessee (where more than 64% of voters went for Trump in the last election)? Good question.

David Bentley Hart:

The Ideals

There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful; but two afford me particularly intense pleasure. One is the opening paragraph from his essay “On Dreams”:

Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. A good part of our sleepes is peeced out with visions, and phantasticall objects wherin wee are confessedly deceaved. The day supplyeth us with truths, the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings. And therefore having passed the day in sober labours and rationall enquiries of truth, wee are fayne to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherin the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better then folly and madnesse.

And the other is the final paragraph from the second chapter of the fifth book of the immense, glorious, and shamefully neglected miscellany Pseudodoxia Epidemica, entitled “Of the Picture of Dolphins”:

And thus also must that picture be taken of a Dolphin clasping an Anchor: that is, not really, as is by most conceived out of affection unto man, conveighing the Anchor unto the ground: but emblematically, according as Pierius hath expressed it, The swiftest animal conjoyned with that heavy body, implying that common moral, Festina lentè: and that celerity should always be contempered with cunctation.

To my mind, each is in its own way a perfect, exquisitely faceted gem of English prose from an especially glorious literary epoch. The music of the one has haunted me for most of my life; the gleeful perversity of the other has lost none of its power to make me laugh in nearly four decades. And, however great the joy I take in either of these passages in isolation, it is as nothing compared to the idiot bliss I derive from their juxtaposition. Taken together, they ideally illustrate the two extremes of the great man’s voice: on the one hand, its glowing beauty and spacious sonority; on the other, its anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance.

Chris Smyth, Elizabeth Bratton and Amy Borrett:

In a nondescript building just off the A40 highway in the outer suburbs of London lies the centre of the fastest growing, and most profitable, part of Britain’s university sector.

Though few have heard of it, Global Banking School is now the biggest teacher of full-time undergraduates in the country having more than doubled in size in just three years.

Yet GBS is not formally a university but a private company contracted by universities around England to teach students who may never set foot on their own campuses.

A decade after the country’s formal cap on student numbers was removed in order to encourage a market in higher education, one in 10 full-time undergraduates in England is now taught by for-profit franchise companies such as GBS, according to FT analysis of data from the Office for Students, the university regulator.

Advocates say franchise providers have brought private-sector innovation and spread educational opportunity to demographic groups ignored by traditional high-cost universities.

29 July, 2026 Madison Rotary Club [mp3 audio // machine generated transcript]

Club notice:

Dr. Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert, Sonia Spencer; Literacy: It Takes a City

Join Dr. Joe Gothard, Superintendent, Becky Kundert, Senior Executive Director of Curriculum & Instruction, and Sonia Spencer, Senior Strategic Partnerships Coordinator, as they present the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Early Literacy & Beyond, “It Takes a City,” which focuses on fostering a community-wide culture of reading. Our schools and teachers are shifting instructional practices to the Science of Reading and aligning with Wisconsin’s ACT 20 requirements. The district is implementing comprehensive strategies, including high-quality instructional materials, student-centered assessments, and personalized reading plans, alongside robust summer programming and district-wide reading challenges. To achieve these goals, MMSD actively collaborates with local partners while inviting community members to support student success through tutoring, mentoring, and volunteer opportunities.

My email to Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer on their 29 July Madison Rotary Talk.

Payman Milanfar:

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jonas Du:

a new pilot program pairs top universities with defense contractors and industry giants, aiming to steer doctoral training away from pure academia and toward “national scientific goals”

The Trump administration is pairing top universities with corporate giants in an effort to steer traditional PhD programs toward national scientific priorities.

Today, the White House and National Science Foundation are announcing a $47 million pilot program to fund around 250 four-year doctorates in technical fields, starting this fall. Students in the pilot will be placed at an industry partner, where they will spend at least one year doing “practical research” that can go towards their dissertation. NSF’s investment will fund three years of these PhDs, with 31 universities and 20-plus companies funding the rest.

“About the same amount of basic research is done today in academia as in the private sector,” Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Pirate Wires. “Over time, while the ecosystem has changed and different players have emerged where important scientific work is being done, the institutions which train our next generation of scientists have not really been updated.”

Essentially, the administration says they want to correct the mismatch between PhD programs’ academia-focused pedagogy and the large proportion of graduates who take industry jobs.

The administration’s move is a signal that despite its general scrutiny toward legacy institutions of higher education, it is still open to collaborating with them — including with elite schools that have borne the brunt of research funding cuts and civil rights investigations. The pilot spans a wide range of public and private universities across the country, from state schools like the University of Texas at Austin to the Ivy League, including Columbia, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania, according to an initial list.

“We want to support merit,” Kratsios said. “We want our interactions with academia to reflect the realities of the scientific ecosystem today.”

Nate Fischer:

The digital age is likely to reward traits America has historically possessed in abundance: entrepreneurial energy, adaptability, optimism, decentralized problem-solving, and a culture that encourages ordinary people to build and take initiative. New technologies could restore an economy centered on these capabilities even as they disrupt incumbent bureaucratic systems.

For decades, advanced societies drifted toward managerialism. Economic success became tied to credentialing systems, administrative complexity, institutional gatekeeping, and large bureaucratic organizations. Much of professional life came to consist of navigating processes, managing information flows, and complying with procedures. This may have been inevitable in the twentieth century, as everything from government to industry required large bureaucratic systems to operate at a competitive scale, but it suppressed many of America’s traditional cultural norms.

Now digital technologies are increasingly capable of handling exactly this kind of work. AI systems and automation tools excel at processing information, synthesizing knowledge, identifying patterns, generating standardized outputs, and coordinating workflows. Many of the functions that defined the managerial age are among the easiest to automate.

What these technologies do not easily replicate are human capacities like judgment, leadership, trust, responsibility, risk tolerance, and the ability to organize people around a shared goal—strengths that have long been central to American society.

Noah Smith

A lot, actually. But it won’t look quite like what humans do with our intelligence.

Not a lot of people expected that AI would come for the mathematicians before it came for the truck drivers, but it did. The other day, an AI model disproved the Jacobian Conjecture — an 87-year-old open problem that human mathematicians had struggled to solve. The greatest living human mathematician, Terence Tao, turned to AI to help him understand the solution. Around the same time, AI solved a very important open question in quantum cryptography. Solving Erdos problems has now become almost child’s play for the best AI models. And this is the worst AI will ever be at math. Model capabilities, and the amount of compute available, both continue to increase at rapid rates. (Meanwhile, long-distance trucking employment is slightly higher than it was a decade ago.)

I don’t expect mathematicians to actually lose their jobs en masse, of course.1 But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that humankind has invented machines that are smarter than we are. Intelligence isn’t defined for machines the same way it is for humans — AI’s capabilities are spiky in different ways than ours — but it’s undeniable that the technology is improving rapidly in every domain of cognitive capability. It’s still possible to find some mental tasks that humans are better than machines at, but those final advantages tend to disappear almost as quickly as we can identify them. “AGI”, or “ASI”, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly here.

Benjamin Eddie:

Every American who walks into an emergency room — for a broken arm, a mental health crisis, a childhood vaccine reaction, or a suicide attempt — could soon have their full identifying medical record routed to a private contractor working for a federal consumer-safety agency that has no statutory authority over any of those conditions, under a program that skipped the federal law requiring public notice before it could begin.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, a small independent watchdog created to track injuries from defective lawn mowers, cribs, and kitchen appliances, has been pressuring hospital executives across the country this year to hand over the identifiable records of every patient who visits their emergency rooms — not just those hurt by consumer products, but every patient, for more than 10,000 diagnostic codes. The campaign, reported this morning by KFF Health News, represents the broadest federal reach into hospital patient records in recent memory, and it was built on two legally contested claims: that the Paperwork Reduction Act’s mandatory public-notice requirement does not apply to a program that has already contacted more than a dozen hospitals, and that an unrelated data-sharing law gives the CPSC the power to penalize hospitals that say no.

This is not a theoretical risk. Between 2017 and 2019, the CPSC improperly released the personal health information of approximately 30,000 people — names, addresses, ages, incident summaries — to outside parties including Consumer Reports. The 30,000 affected individuals were never notified. A Senate investigation found the breach resulted from inadequate training and poor IT management. Now the same agency, operating without its full governing board and having lost nearly one in five career staff members, is building a system designed to collect far more records — from far more people — through a private contractor whose contract with the government has not been made public.

Clay Routledge:

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Americans are more focused on mental health today than at any other point in our history. Public health campaigns urge us to check in on our feelings and talk openly about our struggles. Schools have adopted mental health curriculums. Employers offer mental health days. There are thousands of mental health and wellness apps.

Yet our mental health appears to be getting worse. Over the past several decades, the percentage of Americans who report being in poor mental health has been rising. Over half of U.S. doctors surveyed in 2023 reported a decline in their patients’ mental health. That same year, more than three-quarters of companies reported rising mental health concerns among their work forces.

Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem?

In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are inadvertently making us more vulnerable to psychological distress.

Start with our expanding conception of mental illness. The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.

Dan Lennington:

Separate But Equal @UWMadison. Today we sued the University over 20 race-based scholarships. But UW claims this is no discrimination – they say the scholarships are just “separate but equal.” This is an outrageous betrayal of the Constitution’s demand of total racial equality. will-law.org/wp-content/upl…

Becky Jacobs:

The lawsuit argues race-based scholarships and grants at Wisconsin’s flagship public university are discriminatory and violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

The institute is representing two plaintiffs. One is an association of Wisconsin taxpayers called Citizens Defending Liberty. The other is Young America’s Foundation, a national conservative student organization led by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker with a chapter at UW-Madison.

Brendan Borrell: 

The parents felt they were in good hands. Xinhua Hospital, which is affiliated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, was acclaimed for its pediatrics department. It was the first Chinese institution to perform open heart surgery on infants, and the first in the country to separate conjoined twins. If all went well, the hospital would make history once again. The girl would be the first person in the world to receive a gene-editing therapy directed at the brain. It would rewrite the mutated gene in her neurons, restoring the needed DNA base so she could make a vital protein.

Leading the effort was Zilong Qiu, a neuroscientist at the university’s brain center, the Songjiang Research Institute. At the time, in late March 2025, Qiu was one of several researchers around the world vying to push base editors—a more precise form of the powerful gene editor CRISPR—into custom treatments for children with rare diseases. One month earlier, KJ Muldoon, an infant with a life-threatening metabolic disorder, had quietly received his first intravenous infusion of one such treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Anna Liberty:

Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970.

I was ecstatic about this opportunity. I’m passionate about giving people just a bit more control over the potential locked up in the devices they carry with them every day. When people know more about computers in general and about making their own software in particular, whole worlds open up. This gave me the chance to pry the door to that world open for people who likely would have never discovered it otherwise.

While I had taught people programming to individuals previously, this was my first experience teaching in a classroom environment. I went from knowing next to nothing about teaching to designing my own curriculum, including lesson plans, curriculum, and a digital learning environment.

Sun You:

Chicago’s underfunded pension system is in dire condition, with some funds at risk of becoming “completely insolvent” in a market correction, Chicago mayoral candidate Susana Mendoza warned.

“If the market gets a cold,” Mendoza said in an interview with the FT, “I don’t even know that we’ll survive with pneumonia.”

The remarks by Mendoza, currently Illinois’ top finance official, came as Chicago’s four city employee pension funds reported an aggregate funded ratio of 28.1 per cent last year, compared with a national average of 82.5 per cent, leaving the city’s retirement system among the worst funded in the US.

The warning highlights the financial pressures facing US public pension systems, many of which remain burdened by large unfunded liabilities despite several years of strong stock market gains. Chicago has also become a test case for how state and local governments may cope as cash-strapped public pension plans edge towards insolvency.

“Chicago’s pension crisis is extremely important to the rest of the country because everyone is kind of wondering what happens when the pension system is completely in a free fall,” said Zachary Christensen, managing director at the Reason Foundation.

Kids Win Wisconsin:

Find out where your Gubernatorial Candidates stand on the Literacy Crisis and how they plan to address it, if elected Governor of Wisconsin.

——

Megan Novak:

Your daily reminder that Francesca Hong voted against legislation making child grooming illegal.

Disgusting.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Corrinne Hess:

Between 2022 and early 2024, the College Board adjusted how it scores AP subject exams using a data- and numbers-based approach aimed at eliminating some of the subjectivity and inconsistency that had previously been part of AP exam scoring. 

The “recalibration” resulted in a higher percentage of students getting the 3’s, 4’s, and 5’s that qualify them for college credit in nine subjects.

“When we see these numbers of increasing exam taking and increasing scores, I think it’s important to know that we don’t think that it’s just that Wisconsinites are suddenly doing a lot better on AP exams,” Shaw said. “Although that would be wonderful news. I think there’s a degree to which some of that may be happening. But it seems like the larger factor here is this recalibration that the College Board did.”

Libby Wissing has taught AP math classes at Divine Savior Holy Angels, a private girls school in Milwaukee, for 12 years. She said last year, for the first time, it was clear what the free response questions, or non-multiple choice questions, on the AP pre-calculus test were going to be.

AP statistics was revamped this summer, so Wissing will know what those questions will be next school year.

“It does feel like there’s more direct expectations, which then makes it easier as a teacher — if the goal is to get students to do well on this exam,” Wissing said.

But Wissing doesn’t believe this is a good thing:

——-

Moving the goal posts is not a new tactic:

Wisconsin Act 20 requires the use of early literacy screeners for 4k to 3rd grade students. The aimsweb screener by Pearson changed their “cut scores” for the 2025-2026 version. This tactic makes it difficult to evaluate programs, progress and rigor over time.

29% of all Madison 3rd graders [Report] scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the fall of 2025, while 46.1% of 2nd graders scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

And, taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI often changes cut scores.

The Free Press:

It’s not exactly news to Free Press readers that Anthony Fauci got a lot wrong during the pandemic.

The former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and the government’s leading authority during the Covid crisis—Fauci led the call for lockdowns and school closures. Wrong. He said that it was “extremely unlikely” that people who had been vaccinated could transmit the virus to others. Wrong. He said that children as young as 2 should wear masks. Wrong. He argued that the virus had emerged from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, jumping from an animal to a human—and shut down any suggestion that it could have resulted from a leak in a laboratory that was engaged in “gain of function” research.

As for those who disagreed, Fauci had an astonishingly arrogant response: “They are really criticizing science because I represent science.”

Back when both the public health establishment and the mainstream media hung on Fauci’s every word, Republican Senator Rand Paul was one of the few in a position of power willing to criticize him—going so far as to say that Fauci should “go to prison” for “his dishonesty” in dismissing the lab leak theory. Paul has long been convinced that the virus did indeed result from a lab leak, a position that is no longer viewed as heresy but is taken seriously by a number of officials in the intelligence community. And he has never stopped trying to get to the bottom of it. Paul has subpoenaed Fauci to testify at a hearing his committee is holding on Wednesday. Fireworks are guaranteed.

——-

Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

It also paints a portrait of Dr. Fauci as obsessed with himself, reveling in his own importance and the celebrities he knows, from the actress Julia Roberts to the singers Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand. It shows, as well, the pressure he was under, as he became the public face of the government’s response while at the same time countering what he called “slanderous lies” about him spread by “extreme right elements in society.”

——-

Wall Street Journal Summary:

Newly released diaries paint an unflattering portrait of a self-obsessed and not entirely honest bureaucrat, in contrast to the image of the careful scientist he cultivated in public.

——-

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the main guilty acts of Fauci is not the claim that he got the COVID origin wrong at first. It’s that he and his Lancet crew fabricated a certainty about COVID’s origins they plainly did not possess — due to entirely self-interested reasons (namely, their careers and reputations would be endangered if COVID had been caused by gain-of-function and other Wuhan research they funded and participated it).

They then weaponized that fake, deceitful certainty to label anyone who suggested a lab leak as a racist (which never made sense, since the “wet market” theory was always the more racist one), and then also used that non-existent certainty to bully and coerce media outlets and Big Tech to aggressively censor anyone questioning or dissenting from their proclamation.

….

The Fauci emails released long ago left no doubt that this was true. I still think the Lancet letter is one of the worst scientific scandal in years.

——-

Rick Esenberg:

There was a lot of gamesmanship at the Fauci but he is a classic example of why we don’t want to be ruled by “experts.” He’s a great illustration of why we are in a populist moment.

——

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

Marty Lueken, Colyn Ritter:

Since the Covid pandemic, school officials have warned about declining enrollment and a looming fiscal cliff. Those concerns are real. The U.S Department of Education projects that enrollment for public elementary and secondary schools will decline by 2.7 million students, or by about 5.5%.

When enrollment falls, districts may receive less funding while still operating the same number of buildings, bus routes, and programs. Closing or consolidating a school can disrupt families, lengthen commutes, and affect communities that view their schools as neighborhood anchors.

District leaders will face difficult decisions. But difficult does not mean impossible, and it does not excuse failure.

Public school systems have managed demographic change for decades. They opened schools when enrollment grew, redrew attendance boundaries as populations shifted and consolidated buildings when communities shrank. The task now is to manage the latest transition in ways that leave students better served.

Two Sectors, Two Fiscal Realities

Noah Smith: 

Not a lot of people expected that AI would come for the mathematicians before it came for the truck drivers, but it did. The other day, an AI model disproved the Jacobian Conjecture — an 87-year-old open problem that human mathematicians had struggled to solve. The greatest living human mathematician, Terence Tao, turned to AI to help him understand the solution. Around the same time, AI solved a very important open question in quantum cryptography. Solving Erdos problems has now become almost child’s play for the best AI models. And this is the worst AI will ever be at math. Model capabilities, and the amount of compute available, both continue to increase at rapid rates. (Meanwhile, long-distance trucking employment is slightly higher than it was a decade ago.)

I don’t expect mathematicians to actually lose their jobs en masse, of course.1 But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that humankind has invented machines that are smarter than we are. Intelligence isn’t defined for machines the same way it is for humans — AI’s capabilities are spiky in different ways than ours — but it’s undeniable that the technology is improving rapidly in every domain of cognitive capability. It’s still possible to find some mental tasks that humans are better than machines at, but those final advantages tend to disappear almost as quickly as we can identify them. “AGI”, or “ASI”, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly here.

Hannah Frankman Hood:

As recently as 1995, a child’s straight-A report card meant something specific. Still relatively rare, the feat indicated that a child had worked hard and was learning and retaining information at the expected grade level. Parents would congratulate their little scholars over dinner, take them out for ice cream, and quietly calculate the damage of a college tuition bill.

If your child comes home with a straight-A report card in 2026, there may still be cause to celebrate. But grades have changed in ways a discerning parent should understand before loading up the car for a run to Baskin-Robbins.

When Every Child Is Above Average

Once upon a time, grades were at least a nominally objective measure of academic merit, in the sense that they equated roughly to a percentage: an A meant a student got 90–100 percent of the work correct, a B meant a student got 80–89 percent correct, and mastering less than half meant a failing grade. And more importantly, there were far fewer incentives for a teacher to misrepresent them.

Related Stories

In the 21st century, grades are inflated as standard practice. Grades evolved from relatively standardized metrics of knowledge into heavily inflated, subjective signals between adults and institutions. This shift—driven by consumer-model schooling and faculty incentives—actually harms students.

Rachel Rees and David Sheppard:

Lucy Powell, the UK’s new education secretary, has been accused of making a misleading claim about her own education, after saying she was the only pupil from her school year to attend Oxford university.

Powell told the BBC last year, while running for the Labour deputy leadership, that she was the “only one” from her year group at Manchester’s Xaverian College “to get into Oxford that year” out of “2,000 people”.

But two former Xaverian pupils told the FT that multiple members of Powell’s year group at the highly regarded state sixth form in central Manchester also got into Oxford that year.

One of the people said at least three others in Powell’s year group, whose members completed their A-levels in 1993, also went from the school to Oxford, and that they had shared a class with her at Xaverian. One student started at Oxford after taking a gap year.

Timeline:

December, 2021: Madison Early Literacy Task Force Report:

Task Force Broad Recommendation Themes
Theme 1: Ensure Anti-racist, Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Equitable Education
Theme 2: Improve Instructional Coherence
Theme 3: Align Leadership for Literacy
Theme 4: Enhance Organizational Structures to Support Literacy
Theme 5: Refine Data Systems
Theme 6: Build on the Strengths of Our Students, Families, and Community
Theme 7: Collectively Grow Together Through a Commitment to Continuous Improvement
Theme 8: Enhance Implementation Efforts Through Communication and Coordination

Madison adopted Mondo and Calle de la Lectura curricula in 2012 and later launched LETRS training for literacy staff.

April, 2022: Scott Girard:

The board, after months of deliberation, unanimously chose to purchase the Open Up/EL Education curriculum and materials for its English language arts programs and Benchmark for the multi-language programs at some schools around the district. The district will spend $5.6 million for the curricula, instructional materials and professional development.

April, 2023: Jenny Peek:

The new K-5 literacy curriculum was formally approved for purchase in April 2022, and this is the first school year it’s being used district-wide.

Julie Briggs, the district’s literacy implementation coordinator, says it’s been a big shift.

“Many people across the nation went with the balanced literacy approach, and at the time we thought that we were doing the right thing,” Briggs tells Isthmus. “But as we’ve gone on, we’ve seen our scores are not improving. And it’s not just MMSD or Wisconsin, it’s nationwide.”

So when it came time to choose a new curriculum for teaching literacy, Briggs says the focus had to be “aligned to the science of reading.”

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener 4k – 3rd grade results. According to Peek’s Isthmus article, students who were in Kindergarten during the new curriculum’s first year: 2022-2023, were in first grade during 2023-2024, second grade during 2024-2025 and third grade 2025-2026.

Second Grade Results; All schools – Madison School District: 46.1% of 1,831 students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group. Therefore, pre cut score change: 53.9% of Madison second graders scored above the 25th percentile.

2025-2026: Third grade Fall early literacy screener – Madison School District all schools.

*** The aimsweb screener cut scores changed….[Description] 29% of all Madison 3rd graders [Report] scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison School District April, 2022 early literacy curriculum purchase documents.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

I gave it a simple prompt: “Translate this blog post into Italian”. That was it. No context, nothing else. The answer:

I’m going to pass on this one. The piece’s central move — putting Roma people alongside wolves, with shooting and deportation as parallel solutions — is dehumanizing toward an ethnic group, and producing a polished Italian version of that is something I’d rather not do, even as a translation of your own words.

Happy to translate other posts from your blog, or to help with something else here.

What a missed opportunity for an “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” delivery! But also, what on earth!?

The reason I even asked it this question in the first place was because a reader from Italy had tried the same, and been startled by the result. So he wrote me, and I thought, “That can’t be right”, but the experiment replicated. Crazy.

Now, it’s tempting to jump straight into litigating the blog post itself. Maybe you like wolves, and think 1,285 dead sheep, and exponentially counting, is an acceptable price to pay for their presence. Maybe your suicidal empathy weighs the plight of Roma migrants above that of Copenhagen residents who say they’ve had enough. That’s fine. Reasonable people can disagree on what it takes to maintain a functioning society.

But the idea that Anthropic should decide what you get to read is insane. Translating a text isn’t endorsing it. What if Microsoft Word started refusing to right-align paragraphs it disagreed with? Or Windows wouldn’t print an excerpt from The Camp of the Saints? (I know, don’t give them any ideas!).

Brain boxing.

Permission based entrepreneurs.

Drawing outside the lines.

I recently queued with a soon to be senior at a Madison high school. I relish such brief chats as a glimpse into that world, their observations, desires and community.

Inquiring about classes and interests, I discovered engineering and STEM all around. Terrific. Someone who wants to build. Fantastic.

I further inquired which “ai” bots were used? “Oh, I don’t. I don’t want to use data center energy.” I asked if this student carries an iPhone. Yes, of course. Uses a car? Yes; electricity at home, in school and at the summer job? Yes.

I thanked the student for a fun chat and suggested a dive into the ai world, both for learning and the essential fact that other teens around the globe are accelerating such usage. I am fully aware of the pros and cons of these tools. That said, this is how tech always is. A firm, traditional liberal arts foundation is an ideal place to begin, imho.

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the 13th flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/g27YJCQgiN — SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 24, 2026

I long wondered how Uber managed to “draw outside the lines” in New York City. My answer arrived in 2021.

Ian Rowe, Brad Wilcox:

Every summer, New Yorkers ask why so many Asian students and so few black students are admitted to the city’s elite public high schools. Only three of the 777 students in Stuyvesant High School’s incoming class this year are black. This has again led to complaints about the entrance exam, demands that it be scrapped, and articles about how the system is “rigged against students of color.” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards went so far as to say black students are “being locked out—this is segregation.” 

Missing from the debate is any discussion of family structure. Two numbers that seldom surface in discussions about race in America’s schools: 80% of Asian children nationwide live with married birth parents, vs. 30% of black children, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. This factor—whether a child has two married parents at home—predicts success in school, or admission to a school like Stuyvesant, almost as well as or even better than race.

Nicholas Decker:

Doctors and hospitals were encouraged to hike their prices to match the generosity of insurance coverage. On the patient side, the marginal cost of getting more healthcare once you have the plan might be zero, thus leading to inefficiently high levels of healthcare. Even if the insurance company attempted to control things through cost sharing, where the patient must pay a portion of the costs of care, this would only cut out the most egregious waste.

Then, expenditures flatlined. For much of the 1990s, healthcare spending as a share of GDP was constant, and even in the years it grew, its growth rate was lessened considerably. The rise of managed care was responsible. Between 1988 and 1998, the percentage of employees in traditional fee for service plans fell from 71% to 14%.

They accomplished these cost reductions with the tools of modern health insurance companies. Rather than pay any medical bills at any doctor, they would instead restrict the network of doctors and hospitals you could see. If they charge too much, they’ll find themselves out of the network and getting no business at all. Insurance companies began to involve themselves in what treatments a patient should be prescribed, requiring “prior authorization” for treatments of great expense and heterogeneous effectiveness. The most extreme versions of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) like Kaiser Permanente would be fully vertically integrated, with the doctors being employees of the insurance company on salary. Even if they are not directly employed, they can still be paid a flat per-patient fee, or capitation, regardless of what procedures are ordered or what work is done.

Austin Sarat

I have spent two decades teaching humanities and social sciences at Amherst College, and my classes have always been built on one assumption: that students would do the reading. Long, dense texts, week after week. Lately, that assumption has started to feel naive.

Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut. But I’ve started to wonder whether I’m fighting a trend that started long before these students ever reached my classroom.

The numbers behind my hunch

I’m not imagining this. A 2024-2025 surveys of 1,250 high school English teachers found they assigned an average of 2.81 full books a year — down from four books annually in a comparable 2008-2009 survey of 400 teachers. Some high schoolers now read no complete books at all, only excerpts.

The decline isn’t confined to teenagers. Sunil Iyengar, who directs research at the National Endowment for the Arts, found in 2024 that only 49% of adults reported reading at least one book in the past year, down from nearly 55% a decade earlier. Reading proficiency is falling too: 32% of 12th graders scored below basic reading levels in 2025, up from 24% in 2002. Martin West, an education professor at Harvard, has said American literacy skills peaked in the mid-2010s and have been falling since.

Reading has been central to American life since Harvard opened in 1636, assuming its entering students were fluent not just in English but in Greek and Latin. Thomas Jefferson said he “cannot live without books.” That inheritance feels newly fragile to me every time a student asks for a shortcut instead of a way in.

This isn’t the first time higher education has faced a reading crisis. In the 19th century, colleges expanding access found that many admitted students weren’t ready for the demands of academic reading — and responded by building preparatory reading programs, a model pioneered at places like the University of Wisconsin and later copied by the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Columbia. We may need something similar now, except the students in front of me aren’t underprepared by admissions standards; they’re underprepared by a K-12 system that has quietly stopped asking them to finish books at all.

——-

More.

www:

Both call for a single unicameral legislature. DSA: “proportional representation in a single federal legislature” — meaning the abolition of the U.S. Senate (

DSA Program

). Mao’s Common Program established the National People’s Congress as “the highest body of state power” — unicameral by design (

Wikipedia / Common Program

).

Both eliminate independent judicial review. DSA: “Limit the Court’s power of judicial review which it uses to effectively create and abolish laws outside the legislative process” (

DSA Program

). Mao’s Common Program subordinated all courts to “democratic centralism” (

Wikipedia / Common Program

).

Both nationalize the “commanding heights.” DSA: “the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control” and “public ownership over major transportation and energy infrastructure and natural resources” (

DSA Program

). Mao’s Common Program: “development of production through socialist relations of production,” with the state prioritizing “the state-owned economy” while tolerating small private enterprises in a “mixed economy” transitional phase (

Wikipedia / Common Program

).

Both defend America’s geopolitical adversaries against sanctions. DSA: “End economic sanctions that impact the sovereignty of countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran” (

DSA Program

). Mao’s Common Program based its foreign policy on “respect for mutual sovereignty” — the identical rhetorical formula he used to justify supporting Kim Il-sung’s invasion of South Korea and every anti-Western regime that followed (

Wikipedia / Common Program

).

Both demand reduced U.S. military capability. DSA: “Greatly reduce the U.S. military budget, close overseas bases, and bring troops home” (

DSA Program

). Mao dissolved the Nationalist army and reoriented Chinese military doctrine around anti-imperial “self-reliance.”

Rupert Wegerif

Question 2: Can a student engage in a meaningful dialogue about a text without first having read and struggled with the original text themselves?

When I began my PhD, I assumed that I was expected to read carefully everything I referenced. This troubled me because I found it impossible. I still remember the advice I was given: most papers do not need to be read line by line. You can usually grasp their main point from the abstract, the introduction and a quick skim. But there are a few texts that really do need to be read carefully: texts that do not simply reproduce familiar assumptions but offer something genuinely new. Reading such texts carefully can provide the kind of challenge to conventional thought that students need for intellectual growth.

The danger of turning to AI too early is that it removes precisely this interruption. Instead of first encountering the text in all its difficulty and resistance, the student is presented with an interpretation that reflects what the model predicts people are likely to think. AI can make difficult texts immediately accessible, but in doing so it can deprive students of the productive struggle through which those texts become transformative.

So my answer is a qualified one. Students can often have a useful conversation about a text they have encountered only second-hand. Indeed, much academic work depends on that. But for the relatively small number of texts that have the potential to change how you think, there is no substitute for wrestling with the original yourself.

Question 3: What would a genuinely dialogic use of AI by a humanities student look like?

Nathan Cofnas:

I was recently contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge (whose name I will not reveal) who alleges that Arday is a plagiarist and fabulist. My source claims that many if not most professors at Cambridge have known about this for more than a year. However, Arday and/or Cambridge’s administration are using intimidation and legal threats to squelch the story. As far as I am aware, the only mention of Arday’s alleged plagiarism that exists in the public domain is on the personal website of retired Plymouth Marjon University professor Dave Harris. (More on that later.)

Besides the plagiarism, there are serious questions about Arday’s biographical claims.

Developing normal speaking abilities after being nonverbal until age 11 is medically improbable.

Arday has repeatedly made unequivocal assertions that he could not read, write, or even spell his own name until he was 18. But he left secondary school with General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) qualifications in Physical Education and Textiles. Despite being in vocational subjects, these tests require literacy, and they are normally taken at age 15 or 16. Based on publicly available information, it is possible to recreate a timeline that places Arday’s test date before age 18. It is conceivable that he received “special arrangements” to allow him to take the test with help from a reader and scribe. However, a write-up of his forthcoming memoirsays that he “left secondary school with two GCSEs to his name, still barely able to read or write.” So he may be backing away from his original story.

30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days are feats of dubious believability. Wikipedia lists running 50 marathons in 50 days as one of the highlights of professional ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes’s career. 30 in 35 days is possible for an amateur, but only with intensive training and planning. 300 miles in three days is an even bigger stretch. For comparison, Yiannis Kouros, who has been described as “the greatest ultrarunner of all time,” set a world record in 1984 when he ran 359 miles in three days. Arday asserts that he was able to do all this because “If you have the will, it will always supersede skill”—a proposition that anyone with experience in athletics knows to be false.

However, it is impossible to prove or disprove Arday’s biographical claims without more direct evidence. Therefore, I will only address questions about his scholarship.

Mat McDermott:

We live in a world where access to information is more plentiful than ever, yet truth has never felt more elusive. AI summaries, 24/7 media, and never-ending social media “takes” create more opportunities for content to be corrupted by misinformation and disinformation.

Wikipedia is another example. Fresh claims of left-wing bias have triggered congressional concerns and led to the launch of Grokipedia as an alternative encyclopedia. Last month, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger was banned by editors for trying to promote an “intellectual diversity” project online. This month, my organization, the Hindu American Foundation, found out (yet again) why intellectual diversity is so sorely needed within Wikipedia, throughout the mainstream media, and everywhere Americans consume content.

Wikipedia editors recently changed the summary description of HAF, which is meant to be written from a “neutral point of view,” to now include this line: “HAF is thoroughly embedded in networks of Hindu nationalist politics and seeks to weaponize Hindu victimhood to bolster this agenda.”

Does that sound neutral to you?

I have worked at HAF for more than a decade. The campaigns we’ve done, the policy stances we’ve articulated, and the educational work we’ve promoted don’t neatly fit into the buckets that either our supporters or detractors want to put us in.

In U.S. political terms, HAF falls somewhere between the mainstream center-left and center-right (although political reference points have shifted dramatically over the past decade). HAF is more left-leaning on domestic cultural issues and more right-leaning on foreign policy matters. We are definitely nowhere near the far-right Hindu supremacists that our most vocal detractors would suggest, but a quick look at HAF’s Wikipedia page shows otherwise.

Nicola Woolcock:

Higher education providers must have contingency plans in place and intervention is not the default response, the government has told MPs

Dear Sonia, Becky and Joe:

Thank you for taking the time to discuss our city’s long term, disastrous literacy results this Wednesday.

Decades go by.

I look forward to hearing about the 4k-3rd grade early literacy screener outcomes from 2024,  2025 and the first half of 2026 (with cut score changes), parent notification of same and personalized reading plan progress.

To my knowledge, we parents and taxpayers have never seen this level of somewhat timely data.

In addition, comparing these results with District promotion, graduation practices and policies illuminates the community and k-12 governance challenges at hand.  We continue to graduate students who lack reading and math proficiency.

Attorney McKenna Kohlenberg’s 2020 paper on the costs of these practices:

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

“For in cities like Madison, reputationally progressive jewel of the state that denied Dred Scott his citizenship and citizen rights nearly two centuries ago, so too does the racialized illiteracy crisis lawfully disparage young Black men to non-citizen subjects and deny their access to democratic society to- day. If this academic year mirrors the past 12 in Madison, at least 85% of Black fourth graders currently attending the city’s public schools are four times more likely than their peers to drop out, and 2/3 will end up in prison or on welfare. If this academic year mirrors the past 12 in Madison, the vast majority of the 166 Black boys who began fourth grade in the city this past fall are now members of a discrete class that is more likely to spend time incarcerated than to become func- tionally literate in school. Coining this the age of the mass and disparate illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline, this Article reinforces the reality that we have not ended the subjugation of Black men in America, we have merely found yet another away to disguise it.”

Madison taxpayers have long funded our k-12 system far above most Districts, much less choice schools, now around $28,000 per student annually.

In the words of one of your predecessors, who spoke at Rotary in 2013: “What will be different, this time?” (2019 as well)

Best wishes,

Jim

————

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The Times:

Now that Barker is airing the party’s dirty linen in her book, I ask if she fears accusations of racism from her former colleagues. “I mean, yes, that’s a risk,” she says. “I’m not really worried about stuff like that anymore, though, because once you’re cancelled and you say what you really think, you get all sorts of responses and at some point it stops having any meaning — and I know who I am and I know that I’m not racist.”

This was the first time Barker had heard about RCN but suddenly all the pieces dropped into place. “Once I learnt what it was, I realised the extent of its influence on how Democrats talked,” she says. “RCN was a way to pivot every issue to identity. It trained politicians to think of every issue as an identity issue first and foremost. RCN was an entire intellectual framework that reduced agenda items on the progressive wish list to racial politicsiạ

Barker says donors would ask politicians on the phone directly:

“What’s your race?” And then: “I’m sorry, I am restricting my investments to women of colour only.”

Jonah Messinger, Emily Ekins:

The new Cato Institute Fourth of July Survey, conducted with Morning Consult, asked seven basic civic knowledge questions as the country celebrates the nation’s 250th anniversary. A majority of Gen Z correctly answered only one of them.

While about two-thirds (66%) of Gen Z correctly identified George Washington as the first president, a substantial minority (34%) could not.

Nearly two-thirds (61%) of Americans under 30 are unaware of what America’s 250th is commemorating this year, while just 39% know we are celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Of those who answered incorrectly, 11% thought America’s 250th was celebrating the first presidential election, 8% thought it was the ratification of the Constitution, 7% thought it was the victory of the Revolutionary War, 4% thought it was the pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock, 1% said it was the founding of Jamestown, and 30% admitted they didn’t know what America’s 250th is about.

A majority (52%) of Gen Z Americans also don’t know what country from which the American colonies declared their independence, while 48% correctly answered that it was Great Britain. 

Sandy Kress:

We are in the midst of an extensive study of 18 ways of living that characterize the kind of upright people upon whom communities depend to truly flourish. The mission today will not be to look at a particular way of living as we typically do. Rather, we’ll consider a crucially important institution through which those ways are taught, especially to children. This institution is, of course, the family.

Every one of us enters the world through a family. Long before we make our own decisions, someone has begun shaping how we see, whom we trust, what we desire, and how we respond to correction. Proverbs takes that influence with complete seriousness. Its opening chapters are framed by a father speaking to his son because Solomon understands that wisdom is passed from one generation to the next before it is tested in the larger world. 

The family is the first place in which character takes shape. There God’s instruction is first received, and the habits of a lifetime begin to take root. A healthy society depends in part on what happens there.

For young children, parents are entrusted with forming judgment before the world will form it for them. 

The father helps the child develop understanding, so that received wisdom becomes one’s own and the child can begin to recognize what particular situations require (4:1). The child should garner from parents the cultivated capacity to live in harmony with God’s moral order, especially in following His commandments (4:4).

They’re to “bind the instruction continually” upon the child’s heart and “tie it” about the child’s neck (6:21), linked to the child’s affections and decking his moral character. They accompany the child and teach him when awake, wherever he goes, and even when he sleeps (6:22). The commandments serve as a lamp, providing light for the instruction of the way of life he should live (6:23).

Greg Lukianoff

I am excited to announce that an adapted chapter (with a ton of new data) from Rikki Schlott and my book ‘The Canceling of the American Mind’ will be the cover story at Reason magazine next month. It describes what we call the Conformity Gauntlet — the incredibly difficult road you have in academia if you step out of line or question the ideological orthodoxy. 

As in the phrase “running the gauntlet,” the process involves a series of hurdles, challenges, and setbacks you must overcome to reach your goal. In the Conformity Gauntlet, however, these trials have nothing to do with your level of skill, intelligence, or competence, but rather your rigidness in adhering to the ideas and behaviors of the academic ruling class. The idea is to keep dissenters out or at least make them extremely hesitant to dissent, and it works very well.

In the first part of the piece, Rikki and I explain the research which shows that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements function as political litmus tests. I mean, of course they do, but Nate Honeycutt at FIRE has done some really interesting experiments proving what should be obvious.

We then take the reader on an imaginary tour of academia from the point of view of an independent-minded highschooler and demonstrate how many conformity pressures he or she will face on their way to becoming a scientist. Layering the threats to free speech and conformity pressures on top of each other is key to really understanding how the Conformity Gauntlet works, because no single case really conveys how bad it’s gotten for freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought on campus on a systematic basis.

Alana Goodman and Collin Anderson:

Days after Chuck Schumer denied any involvement in the campaign of Dan J. Sullivan—the newly declared Republican known as “Decoy Dan” who is running for Senate in Alaska in an apparent bid to siphon votes from GOP incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan—the Senate minority leader’s nonprofit group began running an ad starring a Dan J. Sullivan campaign representative, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

The spot from Majority Forward, the nonprofit affiliate of Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, features a man identified as “Alan” from “Anchorage” who owns a moving company and accuses Sen. Sullivan of “voting to raise our costs.” His full name is Alan Harris, and his moving company, Allstar Moving, is registered to a residential address in Anchorage, Alaska, records show. So is a second business, Amber Lee Strategies, a political consulting firm owned by Harris’s romantic partner, Democratic strategist Amber Lee, who owns the property, according to local records.

Dan J. Sullivan confirmed in June that he hired Lee as a campaign adviser after the metadata from his campaign launch press release listed “Amber Lee” as its author. But Lee is not supporting the lesser-known Sullivan alone: Dan J. Sullivan’s declaration of candidacy states that a “rep” for the campaign, “Alan Harris,” delivered the declaration form to the Alaska Division of Elections in Anchorage “on behalf of Daniel J. Sullivan” on June 1.

——-

More.

Aaron Churchill

A few weeks ago, my colleague Robert Pondiscio argued convincingly that the accountability policies of the No Child Left Behind era did not work as effectively as they could have because schools did not know how to respond to the pressure they felt to improve instructional practice and deliver stronger results. I think that’s right and, as Robert argued, that’s why leading states discovered that they needed to provide help, and in some cases mandates, to get schools to adopt approaches that would actually improve student performance and narrow achievement gaps. Robert wrote:

The states and districts showing the strongest results today are not those that abandoned accountability. Nor are they those that relied on accountability alone. They are the ones that paired accountability with coherent instructional strategies, high-quality curricula, teacher support, and a clearer understanding of how children learn. Mississippi’s literacy gains did not emerge from testing by itself. Neither did the progress seen in places like Louisiana or, more recently, Houston. Accountability provided urgency and focus. It did not provide the instructional playbook.

I agree with all that, and it’s in line with some things I’ve written about the need to marry accountability with greater capacity building, as some standards-based reformers have long urged.

But it’s important to point out that directly improving instructional practice wasn’t all that NCLB in particular, and consequential accountability in general, were about. They were also trying to shift the local politics of education. That’s why many consider NCLB to have been a civil rights effort as well.

Wall Street Journal:

You can bring America’s inventions to life below. Use your computer mouse to rotate each image, or even zoom in for a closer look. Or take advantage of your smartphone’s augmented reality, by tapping the “Tabletop” buttons to see each image in an indoor setting or tapping the “Outdoor” buttons in a wide-open area to explore them at a larger scale. And at the bottom of this page, there are links to see locations connected to each breakthrough.

Robert Pondiscio:

“If men were angels,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” The same might be said of student discipline. If children were naturally orderly, patient, truthful, and inclined to subordinate their impulses to the common good, discipline would scarcely be required. Yet a persistent strain of educational thought—from Rousseau to today’s restorative-justice advocates—suggests that disorder at school arises less from human nature than from the heavy hand of adult authority. Remove punishment, replace hierarchy with empathy, and the child’s better instincts will emerge.

Madison understood something many educators prefer not to: Institutions exist because human beings are notangels. Children are no exception. Yes, they are capable of generosity, curiosity, and grace; they are also capable of cruelty, impulsiveness, deceit, and disruption. The work of schooling has always involved cultivating the former in students while restraining the latter. Any theory of discipline that forgets or denies this begins in sentimentality and often ends in disorder.

Nathan Maynard’s The Science of Discipline is an intelligent and humane expression of this type of disciplinary theory. To be sure, he does not suggest children are angels, but he does ask educators to view misconduct through a different lens. Most behavior problems, he argues, are not signs of defiance or character failure but clues to something deeper: a missing skill, an unmet need, emotional overload, or a breakdown in human connection. Behavior is communication. Discipline, therefore, should begin with curiosity—seeking to understand what a child is struggling to express and helping that child learn more constructive ways of meeting those needs. It is a generous vision, and one that shifts the educator’s role from rule enforcer to diagnostician, mentor, and guide. But by neglecting the role of character and culture in behavior, it ultimately does students a disservice.

Chris Rickert:

Shut down along with the street since Wednesday afternoon has been the Society of St. Vincent de Paul resale shop at 1309 Williamson.

Financial Times:

The American founding father Benjamin Franklin famously declared that “as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously”. In that spirit, he declined to patent his own inventions, from bifocals to the lightning rod.

Some 250 years after the US Declaration of Independence, Silicon Valley should give thanks. Instead, its biggest companies regularly find themselves in ugly courtroom scraps over the theft of industrial secrets and the poaching of their finest minds.

The latest high-profile case pits iPhone-producing incumbent Apple against ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which has ambitions to become a hardware giant, after its 2025 acquisition of design studio io, co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive. 

Apple’s lawsuit claims its rival has used former and current Apple employees to steal hardware designs as part of a “co-ordinated pattern of misconduct”. (Ive is not mentioned by name in the suit.) “OpenAI’s nascent hardware business [is] rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” the suit alleges.

Jonathan Sumption

Since De Tocqueville wrote, events have combined to falsify his grounds for optimism. The federal government, and therefore the president who directs it, now has functions encompassing most aspects of public welfare. Its 12,000 civilian employees of 1832 have grown to two million in 2025, in addition to another million employees of the individual states, many of whom are employed in federal programs. In the same period, federal government expenditure has increased from an estimated 0.02% of GDP to 23%, dwarfing the expenditure of the individual states. This is a pattern common to all modern democracies. At the time of the census of 1851, the United Kingdom employed just 1,628 civil servants, as against 560,000 now. At the end of the 19th century, government expenditure in European countries stood at about a tenth of GDP on average, as opposed to just under half today. Even these figures do not capture the whole picture. Until relatively recently, the main limitation on the power of governments was their ignorance. The German sociologist Max Weber defined bureaucracy as “domination through knowledge”. That domination has been greatly increased by modern techniques of information gathering, storage and retrieval.

Article II of the US Constitution concentrates all executive power in the president’s hands. He has an electoral mandate independent of Congress. He hires and fires all federal agents and employees. All of them are answerable to him. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. He nominates all federal judges, subject to Senate confirmation. He is not answerable to Congress for the way that he uses these powers, except by way of impeachment, and only then for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Since a decision by the Supreme Court in 2024, the president has also been constitutionally immune from criminal liability for acts done in his public capacity.

These awesome powers are characteristic of presidential systems, and the only other region where presidential democracies have been the norm is Latin America. Every Latin American country has adopted the US constitutional model, with greater or lesser variants. And every one of them has at some points in its history experienced the subversion of its democracy by its president or the usurpation of presidential powers by a military dictator. The only significant European country to have a presidential system comparable to the US is France. The constitution of the Fifth French Republic was created for a relatively benign strongman, General de Gaulle, but the French presidency may well in 2027 fall into the hands of a markedly less benign strongman of the extreme Left or Right.

The great German-American constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein observed that the success of the American presidential model was due to factors unique to the United States: its historical prosperity, its relative freedom from external threats, its political culture. These things had, as he put it, “converted an intrinsically absurd constitutional mechanism into a cherished national myth”. When transplanted to a less privileged environment, Loewentein pointed out that the American model has almost always failed. His emphasis on the moral and physical environment of democracies was an important insight. After all, the moral and physical environment may change. All democratic constitutions, whether formal and legal like that of the USA, or informal and political like Britain’s, are vulnerable to the collapse of the basic cultural norms on which democracies depend. When this happens, the formal institutional framework usually survives. There are elections, legislatures, courts and so on in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the rule of law and substance of democratic accountability have gone, replaced by a brutal autocratic reality.

——-

Commentary:

Yes, but he is wrong. The US Constitution has patently not been dismantled. As for the excessive use of executive orders, this is a problem that afflicts every Presidency. The allegation of corruption is nothing more than that. We await Lord Sumption’s evidence on this point.

Ed Zitron:

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.

——-

More.

Oliver Kim:

—a man who brought an ambitious drive to scale, a rationalizing impulse, and (most of all) a faith in the power of quantification to solve our most pressing social problems.

“To this day,” he wrote near the end of his life,2“I see quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the world. Of course, it cannot deal with issues of morality, beauty, and love, but it is a powerful tool too often neglected when we seek to overcome poverty, fiscal deficits, or the failure of our national health programs.”

This approach made McNamara’s early career a glittering success. During World War II, he brought statistical control to the US Air Force’s bombing of Japan. At 24, he was made the youngest assistant professor at Harvard Business School. At 44, he became the first person outside the Ford family to preside over the Ford Motor Company—a job he left after just five weeks, to join President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet. At the Pentagon, and then the Bank, he presided over massive increases in spending, bending these huge bureaucracies to his will and reassembling them into their modern forms.

And yet, when the sum total of his career is considered, the overwhelming sense is one of failure. The final years of McNamara’s life were spent reckoning with the wreckage of his legacy.

Where did things go so wrong?

Ann Althouse Summary:

The utter frustration of trying to make Elon Musk understand and care that he is hated.

Come for the launch, stay for some of the most stunningly beautiful art you’ve ever seen. https://t.co/ckfT1PWih1

— Shivon Zilis (@shivon) July 25, 2026

Ethan Shorey:

In a move that drew praise from advocates calling for protecting transgender youth, the School Committee voted 5-2 against changing its policies to require parental notification.

Many attendees at the July 20 meeting testified for maintaining the protections.

The policy change would have required that parents be informed of their child’s identifying as transgender as long as it is determined that the child is not in danger, and that teachers use the pronouns and gender preferred by parents.

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

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

Corri Hess:

Homeschooling is the fastest growing education option in Wisconsin. 

Recently released numbers from the Department of Public Instruction show the number of students being homeschooled in the state grew by nearly 6 percent since 2025 to 32,891 children.

Meanwhile, the number of private school students is up 0.1 percent and the number of students in Wisconsin’s public schools is down 1.7 percent, or 14,087 kids. 

Homeschooling has steadily gained in popularity since the mid-1980s. 

In 1985, there were 966 children in the state being homeschooled, according to DPI data. 

Every year another approximately 1,000 kids left traditional schools and were taught at home, that is until the 20-year period between 2000 and 2020 when the number of homeschooled students fluctuated between about 18,000 and 21,600. 

Then the pandemic hit and the number of students homeschooled jumped by more than 10,000 students. 

“I think it is surprising that we’re just not talking more about it,” Shaw said. “There’s a sense of being post pandemic, but the results that we see in terms of how our kids are doing is we are not back and that comes out in the the levels at which students are reading, the levels at which students are able to do math and the relationship between families and students and school, which is ultimately what chronic absenteeism is.” 

Shaw says the trends are happening across the nation, so Wisconsin is not an outlier when compared to student achievement in other states since the pandemic.

Where Wisconsin does stand out is the Black-white achievement gap, which is the largest in the country after Washington D.C., Shaw said.

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Emi Nietfield:

In some ways, Ms. Perez’s ambitions reminded me of those of a 2010s-era girl boss. But there is a crucial difference: She is not willing to sacrifice her personal life for a company title. Ms. Perez’s fiancé graduated last year and now works as an admissions officer at St. Mary’s. They are marrying next year and hope to have three kids, whom Ms. Perez, a Catholic, wants to raise herself while running her business from home. One of her role models is Lila Rose, a podcaster and anti-abortion activist who is both a high earner and a mother who is present for most of her kids’ waking hours. Young conservative female influencers like Ms. Rose, Brett Cooper and Isabel Brown bring their children on work trips and hold their newborns in video interviews, conspicuously displaying a lifestyle that balances faith, family and financial comfort. It’s a version of having it all for the influencer generation — and a response to economic scarcity by doubling down on personal choices.

——

Zanny Minton Beddoes interviews Elon Musk.

——

Quinton Klabon:

Superintendent Underly is fundraising for @WiscEdNetwork in gorgeous Superior.

@uwgb and @UWMadison @ELPAUW are listed as sponsors, as is CESA 10. @WisconsinDPI is depicted on the sponsorship slide but was not thanked by name nor listed as a sponsor on the website.

——-

Notes and links on Jill Underly.

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Will Briggs:

As part of the transfer, the state Transportation Department will issue an up-front payment of $37 million, which will be placed in a new city fund for future transportation projects. By vote of the City Council, $15 million of that payment will be earmarked to assist with the north-south bus rapid transit line planned to run along South Park Street.

Setting aside those dollars will also help the city in its efforts to receive federal funding for the larger bus rapid transit line from Fitchburg to Madison’s north side, Spieler said.

The state’s annual $300,000 connecting highway aid payments to the city will cease as part of the transfer agreement. Madison will also become ineligible for future state payments for reconstructing the highway.

The city could offset the loss of state funding with future federal funding. Park Street and other parts of U.S. 151 will become eligible for Surface Transportation Grant-Urban grants — a source of funds for existing city roadways — starting after a decade, Deputy City Engineer Chris Petykowski told the Finance Committee last week.

Corrinne Hess:

This fall, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay will be the first campus in the public university system to offer students a reduced-credit degree. 

Students interested in the bachelor’s degree in computer science will have the option of finishing their coursework in about three-and-a-half years, or with 100 credits. 

That’s down from a traditional 120-credit, four-year degree program. 

Computer science majors still have the options of taking the four-year program, said Kate Burns, UW-Green Bay’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. 

Burns said computer science was chosen as the first reduced-credit major given the high demand for technology-related careers throughout the region. 

“We noticed that our computer science students were getting jobs before they finished their degrees, and to us, that was really a signal that the students were ready and the workforce was ready,” Burns said. 

Jon Mooallem:

In 1970, Mary-Dell Chilton was a perseverant but underemployed young chemist teaching part-time at the University of Washington in Seattle—a position she’d leapt at only because, after months at home caring for an infant, she was desperate to get back to work. 

One of her students gave a presentation about a recently published paper about a tumor-producing disease that affected grapes, stone fruits and other crops. The paper claimed that a common soil bacteria, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, was actually transplanting its own genes into the DNA of the affected plant—genes which, once expressed, spurred the growth of those tumors.

“I just absolutely did not believe it,” Chilton recalled. In the 2018 book “Seeds of Science,” journalist Mark Lynas writes that Chilton even cold-called the paper’s lead author in Belgium, Marc Van Montagu, just to tell him she thought his results—this idea that a bacteria was going around smuggling its DNA into a plant—were “nonsense, total nonsense.”

International Mathematical Union:

The Fields Medal is awarded to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.

The medals and cash prizes are funded by a trust established by J.C.Fields at the University of Toronto. For 2026, the prize funds from the University of Toronto are supplemented by generous support from the Fields Institute.

Royce Podeszwa:

Another failed referendum in the Hustisford School District on April 7 means the district will start the dissolution process. 

Voters rejected a $3.75 million referendum 861-612. 

Todd Bugnacki is interim superintendent for the Hustisford School District. He told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that means the district’s students and assets will be divided between neighboring districts. 

Intercollegiate Studies Review:

Read Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and you’d never mistake it for a book about dinosaurs. Yet more than 25 percent of college English majors in a 2024 Kansas study thought otherwise. The confusion traces to a single word: Dickens describes London’s mud as so thick it “would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus” waddling up the street as part of an extended simile, not a plot point. Many students missed the joke entirely.

This miscomprehension is not surprising, argues Rose Horowitch in a thorough and unsettling article for The Atlantic. Drawing on recent studies, she argues that America has become a postliterate society. Many have traded books and newspapers for TikTok and tweets, with devastating consequences.

Horowitch points out that teachers are assigning fewer and shorter books (if any at all), even in classes built around the written word. Meanwhile, some pre-K schools now hand tablets to three-year-olds. How can attention spans survive these practices, especially when instilled at such a young age?

Horowitch acknowledges that book sales are up, book clubs are back in fashion, and audiobooks are thriving. But she notes that this is confined to “a dwindling proportion of the population.” Horowitch believes that the collapse of literacy means societal trouble for the majority of Americans.

John Hindraker:

I think it is generally understood that red states outperform blue states by any possible measure. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity offers a new analysis that reaches that conclusion. This approach is unique because it tries to eliminate other variables, and isolate the importance of political philosophy:

[W]e needed to use more sophisticated statistical analysis to account for these other, non-political factors. We want to be able to say with a high degree of certainty that “Other things else equal Red States have higher rates of economic growth.” Specifically, in order to more confidently examine the issue we needed to use modern multivariate techniques such as regression analysis to isolate from other explanatory factors. After better controlling for such non-political factors as temperature or the presence of oil or gas deposits, does being a Red State still mean that the welfare-enhancing growth in incomes exist? Do politics really matter?

The answer is a resounding “yes,” as the report below indicates.

Madison has benefited greatly from the Obama era $38,000,000,000 back door electronic medical record federal taxpayer subsidies.

Gary Frankel:

How academia accidentally recreated medieval hierarchy.

In 2009, an anonymous university support staff member wrote to C.K. Gunsalus—a prominent academic who specializes in the study of higher education administration—looking for advice and, frankly, a little bit of kindness. The staffer claimed that many of the faculty members at their institution, including a number heavily involved in campus activism, refused to treat them with any respect. Their collective attitude towards non-academics, even those who worked for the university, was akin to that reserved for “a servant or a child.”

Gunsalus’ answer, which Inside Higher Ed published as an advice column, amounted to little more than word salad. But the gist of her response was that the employee should simply grin and bear it. After all, those rude academics were just trying to signal their authority, and who is to say that the anonymous employee is as good at their job as they think they are? Sometimes, professors simply need situations explained to them in a more scholarly manner.

Project on Government Oversight:

• That is $712.6 billion in federal spending that the public can’t tell exactly where it went beyond the state locations.

Subaward reporting, required by federal law, should explain where federal funds go after being awarded to intermediary recipients such as state agencies. The subaward data, however, is fundamentally broken and incomplete, offering little to no additional information on the flow of federal funds.

• In our review, prime awards only had local-level data for 20.7% ($198.3 billion) of awarded federal grant funds.
• Subaward data only accounted for an additional 5% ($47.6 billion) of federal grant dollars that could be tracked to the local level.

According to our review, the vast majority of direct payments were trackable to the local level, though a few programs showed signs of significant errors in the data. However, the granularity of the local place of performance for these awards was limited.

Lee Habeeb:

“As laboratories of democracy, the top states in this year’s report are demonstrating that low-tax, light-touch regulatory policies attract families, businesses, and opportunity,” said ALEC President and Chief Economist Jonathan Williams. “Meanwhile, states at the bottom of the rankings continue to lose residents to those embracing economic freedom.

Ana Maria Constantin: 

On Sunday evening, as Spain and Argentina played out the World Cup final, the mathematician Levent Alpöge posted a short message on X. The Jacobian conjecture, he wrote, is false. He thanked a friend for asking about it, and another friend, “fable,” for working during the match.

That second friend was Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest AI model. Together they had produced a counterexample to a problem that had resisted mathematicians for 87 years. It was 216 characters long.

The Jacobian conjecture was set out by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939. In rough terms, it says that a certain kind of polynomial map, one whose Jacobian determinant is a non-zero constant, must be reversible with a neat polynomial inverse. It became one of the field’s most stubborn open problems. Stephen Smale put it on his famous 1998 list of challenges for the 21st century. New Scientist calls it the hardest maths problem an AI has yet cracked.

Ann Althouse summary:

Congressman Brandon Gill asks Smithsonian Museum director Anthea Hartig at the House Oversight Committee hearing today.

It’s quite an exchange. Gill has a very well-planned set of question designed to destroy Hartig, and Hartig’s defense is almost entirely restricted to long silences and diligent note-taking, as if she’s endeavoring to learn from Gill:

Sarah Schwartz:

Third grade retention policies could lead to better student scores, even before any children are held back, a new study suggests.

The findings, from researchers at American University and Syracuse University, add another wrinkle to an ongoing debate over retention policies tied to reading scores, which require students who aren’t proficient readers by the end of 3rd grade to repeat the year.

Eighteen states currently have retention policies on the books, some part of recently passed “science of reading” laws, according to a tracker maintained by the advocacy group ExcelinEd. 

For You

Critics of these retention policies argue that holding kids back can have negative social-emotional consequences, and doesn’t always lead to better outcomes for children who are retained.

But its proponents say that the benefits outweigh the potential harms, in large part due to the way retention policies can prompt schools to beef up their support systems for struggling students.

Manuel Bagues Milan Makany Giulia Vattuone Natalia Zinovyeva:

We study how faculty promotion decisions shape women’s careers and the academic pipeline, using data from 4,000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions using the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees between 2002 and 2008: applicants whose committees included a co-author or colleague were significantly more likely to qualify for promotion. We document two main findings. First, failing to obtain tenure has asymmetrically lasting consequences for women. Those who narrowly miss tenure are 57 percentage points less likely to be tenured fifteen years later, compared to 29 percentage points for men. Second, when women do obtain tenure, the effects extend well beyond their own careers: promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions.

Colleston Morgan:

That’s why we’re sharing two new resources to help Milwaukee voters make informed decisions:

• Our Get Involved hub and Voter Informationpage, with everything you need to know how to register, find out what’s on the ballot, and make a plan to vote.
• Our Where They Stand candidate guides, with detailed, cited breakdowns of where every candidate stands on K-12 education issues.

This spring, we laid out CFC’s student-first policy priorities for the state’s next leaders:

1. Fix Wisconsin’s Broken School Funding Model, an antiquated relic that’s failing both schools and property taxpayers, by joining 30+ other states in adopting a new formula that instead funds students, not sectors;
2. Embrace & Protect Families’ Access to School Choice, recognizing that more than 100,000 students – 1 in 5 statewide – exercise some form of choice, and that here in Milwaukee, families have led the fight for this right for 30+ years;
3. Hold Every School Accountable for Student Outcomes, addressing the concerns of more than 90% of voters that lowered academic standards are resulting in students not being prepared for the future; and
4. Address The Ongoing Challenges at MPS, acknowledging that even with some recent progress, the state’s largest district remains one of the most troubled urban school systems in the country, both academically and financially.

All year, we’ve engaged directly with candidates for governor and in contested Milwaukee legislative races, asking where they stand on that agenda. Some answered. Some went quiet. We believe voters deserve to know either way, which is what Where They Stand is for.

Clear differences have emerged on the issue of K12 education in the crowded Democratic field for governor:

More.

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

“application bloat”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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