The Economist:

America’s scores, by contrast, are among the most disappointing. One in seven of its tertiary students scored at or below primary-school level in the literacy tests, up from about one in twenty a decade ago. The share at or below the bottom level for numeracy, meanwhile, was almost one in five.

What is going on? In part, colleges and universities are inheriting problems that have originated in the world’s schools. One cannot overestimate the impact of the pandemic. Countries enforced national school closures lasting 20 weeks on average. Rota systems for in-person learning, and quarantines for “close contacts”, then disrupted lessons more. In the years immediately after that disaster it was as if some students “had not gone to high school”, says Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor at Pepperdine University in California. “It was actually a very scary thing to see.”

Yet colleges and universities that claim to be merely passive observers of this are marking their own homework. In many countries they enjoy broad control of their own admissions policies. They have frequently failed to use these freedoms to hold standards high.
For decades critics have accused college and university officials of lowering entry criteria to capitalise on growing demand. Nowadays the dynamics are a bit different: in some rich countries the number of 18-year-olds is nearing or past its peak. Administrators may find it even harder to resist watering down standards when the alternative is to downsize. Indeed, comparing the OECD’s data on students’ skills with the changing number of students in tertiary systems throws up a correlation that deserves further study: shrinking systems are especially likely to have collected lots of students who score in the lowest levels of those tests.
Falling achievement in schools has mostly been driven by children who already ranked in the bottom half of their classes, not by clever clogs at the top. So the drip of unprepared students into some of America’s best universities demands additional explanation. The irate academics in California, and in many other parts of the country, blame it on the scrapping of entry tests. Before the pandemic more than half of bachelors-granting universities in America required applicants to sit tests of numerical and verbal reasoning—usually the SAT or ACT (these tests help substitute for the standardised exams that exist in many other countries). Now it is as few as 10%.

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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.

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?

By Marian L. Tupy:

When the Berlin Wall fell, a set of propositions seemed settled. Now, it seems those conclusions have been forgotten.

The novelist Tom Wolfe gave us the phrase in a 1987 essay about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, who decided that hygiene, monogamy, and other rules of polite society were bourgeois inventions. They threw them out, moved into communes, and were visited by afflictions that modern medicine had not seen in generations. Doctors at the free clinics started teaching sanitation lessons that Victorian housewives once took for granted. Wolfe called that the Great Relearning: Civilization that discards its hard-won knowledge does not leap ahead to utopia but is dragged back to the starting line.

G Gabrielle Starr:

With the primary election over, California’s field is now nearly set. And as we turn toward the November midterms and consider the future of our democracy more broadly, one truth stands out: education matters, and colleges and universities have a vital role to play in strengthening democratic life.

Just days before California voters received their primary ballots in May, eight gubernatorial candidates took the stage at Pomona College for one of the most consequential debates of this contentious election cycle. With no clear front-runner, a crowded field, and voters still deeply divided, the conversation felt unusually urgent, especially for young people who will live longest with the decisions at stake.

California’s future is theirs.

Anyone who regularly speaks with students knows that the issues dominating the race, such as affordability, higher education, housing, economic mobility, and public trust, are already influencing their choices about where to live, work, and build sustainable futures.

A college campus is the ideal venue for discussions like these, and putting students at the center of the debate was a reminder of something higher education can do far more deliberately.

J.D. Tuccille:

Leading up to our Independence Day party, my wife asked whether she should buy us T-shirts celebrating America’s 250th anniversary or stick with what we already have. We went with our existing garments. When the red, white, and blue string lights are up and the Gadsden flag is flying out front, my son will don his free speech shirt, my wife will wear one with USA printed across it, and my shirt will show an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware and text reading: “Americans. Willing to cross a frozen river to kill you. In your sleep. On Christmas. Not kidding, we’ve done it.”

It will be festive.

Joshua D Rauh:

California’s proposed Billionaire Tax Act would impose a “one-time” 5% tax on the worldwide net worth of individuals with more than $1 billion in assets. Supporters estimate it could raise roughly $100 billion to help address California’s budget pressures, but that projection depends on a static assumption: that billionaires, their assets, and their future income remain in the state. 
The evidence suggests otherwise. Once billionaire departures are taken into account, projected revenue falls to roughly $40 billion, before accounting for the loss of regular income-tax revenue from those who leave. The measure would also remove California’s constitutional limit on taxes on intangible property, making future wealth taxes easier to impose. A tax presented as a fiscal solution could instead weaken investment, reduce employment, and erode the revenue base on which the state depends

William G. Andrekopoulos:

Over the past 15 years, Wisconsin’s educational funding debates have ignored a fundamental problem: the runaway cost of employee healthcare. While Madison politicians consistently feud over state aid formulas and one-time cash injections, school districts face a losing battle against a primary driver of cost that traditional education funding cannot fix.

This healthcare inflation acts as a massive drain on local classrooms. Over the last two decades, hospital service costs in Wisconsin surged by 260%, nearly triple the growth of the state’s median household income.

The data shows that Wisconsin is one of the most expensive states in the country for medical care. According to hospital price tracking from the University of Wisconsin’s Crowe Center April 2026 Report, Wisconsin hospitals charge commercial insurers an average of 321% of Medicare rates for the exact same procedures. That is the highest in the Midwest and fourth-highest nationally. The situation worsens in the consolidated healthcare markets of Milwaukee and Madison, where major hospital systems routinely charge north of 400% of Medicare rates. Ironically, Act 10 gave school boards the total authority to choose insurance plans and cut benefits to save money.

The pressure carries directly into insurance markets. According to national health benefits tracking by the Kaiser Family Foundation Market Dashboard, the average annual premium for an employer-sponsored family plan has breached $25,500—a 70% increase over 15 years. The trajectory is only steepening. For the current cycle, rate filing data from the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance Filing Registry shows major insurers filed for massive, double-digit rate hikes. Average statewide premium increases are hitting 16% to 17%, with individual small-group and commercial marketplace plans spiking over 30%.

Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 system plans an 8.5% property tax increase:

Employee health insurance costs are also expected to grow, as annual premiums are expected to be $94.5 million. This spring, the board approved a 3% increase in the amount of employees’ pay going to health insurance, though the change will not apply to the district’s lowest-paid employees, including special educational assistants and food service employees.

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 healthcare spending! $13,319 per adult $94,500,000/7,095.

Substantial healthcare costs are not a new issues for Madison taxpayers, dating to WPS cost and governance issues. Addressing this should enable higher teacher pay.

Rose Horowitch:

Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust—and how they might restore it.

Three reports—from Yale, from Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, and from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, a higher-education advocacy group—were released this spring. (Cornell is working on a study of its own.) The reports differ in their diagnoses of where higher education went wrong and, by extension, of what should be done now. But their mere existence proves, if nothing else, that America’s universities have finally gotten the message: People don’t like them very much.

Some insiders, granted, seem to view universities as mostly the victims of factors beyond their control. The AAC&U report lists a number of them. People around the world in recent years have turned against all kinds of institutions, not just higher education. The racial-justice movements of the past decade spawned a virulent backlash, and colleges’ “visible commitment to diversity initiatives” made them “an easy political target.” A decline in state funding forced universities to compensate with higher tuition; government regulations around civil rights and financial aid led them to hire more administrators. Through it all, political actors seized on these larger forces to further erode trust in higher education.

Because the report does not identify much in particular that universities did to deserve the public’s contempt, it’s light on concrete ideas for reform. It advises universities to break down bureaucracies that hinder innovation, become more involved in their surrounding communities, and work with peers to defend against government overreach. And it’s teeming with the kind of bureaucratic jargon—for example, it urges universities to “recommit to inclusive excellence” and “tell a clearer and more resonant story that aligns with the lived experiences of individuals from diverse backgrounds”—that has helped make higher education so alienating to so many people.

Abraham Wyner:

A new report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences now makes a similar point from inside the academy. The report is careful. It rejects the crude claim that the humanities are simply corrupt or unserious. But it nevertheless finds, across every field studied, evidence of declining scholarly standards, the drop driven, in part, by the substitution of political criteria for scholarly ones and by a weakening of older ideals of rigour and objectivity.

But the report is mostly diagnostic. What still needs explaining is why those habits became so powerful, and why they proved so professionally useful. My answer is that critical theory did not merely politicise scholarship. It also made scholarship easier to produce.

Harriett Ryan:

That changed in 2024 after a wealthy entrepreneur named Eric Obrokta stepped in. The father of a TFA student with ambitions to play high-level football, Obrokta sank millions into the school.

More than 30 players, including some bound for big college programs, suddenly transferred to TFA before the 2024 season. The offensive line, once anchored by a 160-pound center, came to average about 280 pounds. There were new uniforms and helmets, NFL-style sideline monitors, drones for filming practice and a coach with a $230,000 compensation package.

Alexander Kustov

This knee-jerk evidence-based mindset is not just a pandemic thing, and it shows up wherever we treat one kind of data as the only kind that counts. In 2018, a top medical journal published a randomized controlled trial (RCT) finding that parachutes did nothing to prevent death or injury when people jumped from an aircraft. The catch was that the planes were parked on the ground, and the mean jump altitude was about half a meter. The whole study, of course, was a joke. The authors were not against experiments as such, but they were mocking the common reflex among their colleagues that treats RCTs as the only respectable form of knowledge, even about a claim you could check by looking out the window of a plane.2

I have spent much of my professional life contributing to and asking for better evidence in immigration debates, usually to the quiet exasperation of people on my own side, so I am not about to start sneering at data and acting on “vibes.” Good policymaking does need evidence, cost-benefit analysis, and careful counterfactual thinking. But it also needs humility and better judgment about what kind of evidence a given question can actually require, if any.

There are some policies that are so obviously good that we should not need a perfect study to try them, like legally allowing more housing where demand is high, keeping reliable low-carbon power online when the substitute is fossil fuel, or increasing visas for foreign top talent that everyone says they want. Reasonable people can argue about details and trade-offs. But on questions like these, the case for action does not depend on a perfect RCT, and the burden of proof should not be infinite.

There are also policies so obviously bad that we should not need a study to stop them, like asylum seeker work bans. Seriously, you do not need a randomized trial, or any hard evidence for that matter, to predict what happens when you forbid a willing adult in a legal limbo to work, pay to shelter them instead, and then point to their idleness as proof the system is broken. Most of the hardest calls in policy look more like this than some great mystery requiring a well-designed experiment.

Yvonne Abraham:

The compromise legislation was enacted by the Legislature on June 18. It creates standards for evidence-based reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade. It also requires universal literacy screenings, expands teacher training requirements and creates new measures meant to track district compliance and student progress.

The bill also limits the use of the controversial “three-cueing” method where students identify unfamiliar words using context and picture clues as well as sentence structure. The final bill preserved the Early Literacy Fund but dropped a $25 million transfer to the fund that was in Senate-approved bills. The fund is meant to help districts buy curriculum materials and provide professional development. 

“It did not make it into the bill, but we fully expect that we will do some sort of funding in the future, either a supp or some other vehicle that we have going forward,” Senator Sal DiDomenico, the legislation’s Senate lead, said when unveiling the conference committee’s report.

The education advocacy group MassPotential called the legislation “the first standalone education bill to pass in Massachusetts since before the Pandemic” and said Massachusetts was taking “a true step forward in addressing its literacy disparities and ensuring that every student knows how to read by 3rd grade.”

Healey said her administration is committed to working with districts to provide what they need to carry out the law. The governor also said she is focused on working with educators as well as listening to them.

AGCO:

For 250 years, American farmers from the United States have fed the nation, shaped its landscape and carried forward a way of life passed from one generation to the next. Their stories deserve to be shared and celebrated.

James Howard Kunstler:

Meanwhile, though, the money flows dry up as the old Big Donor Dawgs freak-out at the prospect of having their fortunes confiscated, eaten by this advancing ant-swarm, while Scott Bessent and Todd Blanche work to disassemble the giant, hive-like matrix of NGOs that, for years, laundered US taxpayer dollars through the Democratic Party’s patronage system. In New York City, Philly, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Portland, the NGOs furnished comfortable salaries for young activists churned out remorselessly by Higher Ed, but all that’s starting to look like a bygone Shangri-la, a lost world.

“Many Democratic primary voters, however, are in no mood for defensiveness. As they see it, they’ve been failed by a cautious, compromising establishment, and they’re going to overthrow it.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

Of course, the loss of those cushy jobs and perqs has pitched that young demographic into a yet greater rage, prompting them to wreak vengeance and havoc on the system that took their “entitlements” away. Activists want to do activism, which is not necessarily the same as working for a living. It’s working for an ideal, a cause — to abolish the very society based on working for a living and replace it with a parent-like, hovering, all-powerful government that provides your every need by “seizing the means of production.”

The trouble is, this has been tried before, many times in the previous century, and the track-record is discouraging, exhibit-A being the old Soviet Union, the experiment that failed. Why? Because after seizing the means of production, the state bureaucracy lacks the skills, the spirit, and the creative juice to produce much of anything, and especially to do it well. All it can actually contribute to the process is its intrinsic bureaucratic entropy and, to put it ultra-simply, entropy is just not a force for good in this world.

The Republican Party is laboring through its own parallel, but rather different sort of crack-up, a breach based more on pure enmity to President Trump’s personality than necessarily to ideas or policy. The Right still uniformly subscribes to personal liberty and economic enterprise, but factions on the right have a long-running investment in the Deep State apparatus and its protection against Mr. Trump’s impending prosecution of the so-called “grand conspiracy” (the ongoing seditious coup), as well as his dismantling of the money-flow architecture that keeps Beltway types rolling in dough. Former AG Bill Barr is exhibit-A for that faction, as when he concealed the FBI’s possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop through Trump Impeachment No. 1, when he refused to investigate ballot fraud after the 2020 election, and when he managed to let Jeffrey Epstein off himself in the Manhattan federal lockup.

Progressive Policy Institute:

“The Virginia State Board of Education sent a strong message in a 7-0-1 vote yesterday that children in Virginia can’t wait any longer for the state to get honest about how they’re doing in reading, math, and science.

“In 2025, the Virginia State Board of Education made the forward-looking choice to increase the definition of grade-level learning on its state assessments from the lowest bar in the country to among the highest. This move was not only a recognition that the lowest-in-the-country learning expectations are not good enough for Virginia, but also a vote of confidence in the potential of Virginia students and teachers to meet the higher bar. After much debate between those who wanted the change to happen immediately and those who wanted a long runway, the Virginia State Board chose to compromise: the bar would be phased in over four years, by boosting the definition of ‘proficient’ until reaching the permanent, higher bar in 2029-2030.

“But as almost always happens, there’s an effort afoot working harder to hide behind low expectations than helping students and teachers meet higher ones. On Wednesday, the State Board heard a proposal from the Virginia Department of Education to forgo increasing expectations until the 2028-2029 school year and then move the bar in one fell swoop.

“Thankfully, the Virginia State Board of Education recognized that calls to delay raising standards are just the nice façade people put on their true intentions to kill them entirely whenever the next deadline comes. Let’s be honest why: Some schools and districts that look just fine right now will look less stellar when the system becomes more rigorous. It’s not about student learning; it’s about the perception of a system run by adults.

Nathaniel Cline;

Proposal would implement new cut scores a school year faster than gradual rollout plan

The Virginia Board of Education may delay the full implementation of the state’s plan to raise academic benchmarks for reading and math by two years, rather than gradually increasing them over a four-year period starting this year as scheduled.

The department briefed board members on the proposed delay at their work session on Wednesday at J. Sergeant Reynolds Community College in Henrico County, following a state study’s finding that the new K-12 accountability system, which includes the cut scores, could be refined. 

Virginia will raise cut scores for its Standards of Learning assessments to boost student proficiency, a process that was slated to begin this school year. This initiative, led by former Gov. Glenn Youngkin, followed findings of declining reading and math scores among students in grades 3 through 8, a trend that began during the pandemic. 

But critics are urging a slower rollout, saying a quicker shift could increase teacher burnout, lower graduation rates, and worsen inequitable access to education. Several members of the board said at Wednesday’s meeting that they wanted to keep to the original timeline. 

Melissa Manno:

The “Back to Basics in Math” law, passed as part of the state budget last month, requires school districts to use “evidence-based” methods in elementary school math classrooms. | Fernando Veloso Leão/corelens | Illustration: New York Focus

At New York Focus, our central mission is to help readers better understand how New York really works. If you think this article succeeded, please consider supporting our mission and making more stories like this one possible.

New York is an incongruous state. We’re home to fabulous wealth — if the state were a country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world — but also the highest rate of wealth inequality. We’re among the most diverse – but also the most segregated. We passed the nation’s most ambitious climate law — but haven’t been meeting its deadlines and continue to subsidize industries hastening the climate crisis.

As New York’s only statewide nonprofit news publication, our journalism exists to help you make sense of these contradictions. Our work scrutinizes how power works in the state, unpacks who’s really calling the shots, and reveals how obscure decisions shape ordinary New Yorkers’ lives.

In the last two decades, the number of local news outlets in New York has been nearly slashed in half, allowing elected officials and powerful individuals to increasingly operate in the dark — with the average New Yorker none the wiser.

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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

Bryan Caplan

I’ve finished my visiting professorship at the world-famous, ultra-controversial University of Austin (UATX), where I taught courses in Immigration and Housing, Education and the Family, and Introduction to Political Science. I came to campus every school day, and spent many hours socializing with the students. Here are my main thoughts on the experience.

1. The students at UATX are academically fantastic, a great package of high IQ, sky-high curiosity, and intellectual engagement. The only school I’ve taught at that’s in the same league is the University of Chicago, especially Agnes Callard’s Night Owls program.
2. UATX spurns holistic admissions, automatically admitting students with a 1460+ SAT, 33+ ACT, or 105+ CLT. But by my lights, their students had much better personalities than top schools that officially put high weight on personality! Curiosity and intellectual engagement aside, UATX students were strikingly cheerful, gregarious, agentic, and enthusiastic. Attendance at my on-campus game nights and karaoke parties was high — and since quite a few of my students are based in Northern Virginia, you’ll probably get to meet a few at Capla-Con 2026.
3. As a GMU professor, I’m used to low student attendance. At UATX, attendance is mandatory, enforced with preset grade penalties. Even so, absenteeism was fairly common. But strikingly, students with poor attendance were still highly engaged wherever they chose to show up. Why? UATX students skip classes not because they’re lazy, but because they literally have something better to do. One student was busy running a start-up. Other students were rehearsing for Hamlet. Good for them!
4. While we’re on the subject of Hamlet, the UATX drama club’s performance was profoundly moving. Overall, I preferred Ian McKellen’s (Gandalf/Magneto) live 2022 production, where the famed octogenarian played the title role. But as I told the UATX cast, they were all — McKellen aside — better than their counterparts in my favorite Hamlet production. My epiphany during the play: Contrary to many English teachers, Hamlet is not a tragic hero. He is a full-fledged anti-hero. Remember, after he manslaughters Polonius, Hamlet shows no regret. Instead, he sadistically hides the body from his heirs!

Chris Cargill

For years, opponents of income tax relief have warned that lowering tax rates would reduce state revenues and threaten government services.

Montana’s own tax collection data tells a very different story.

Over the past decade, individual income tax collections increased from $1.06 billion in Fiscal Year 2014 to $2.24 billion in Fiscal Year 2024. That’s an increase of more than 111 percent.

Corporate income tax collections grew even faster, rising from $147.6 million to $312.3 million over the same period—an increase of nearly 112 percent.

In other words, Montana’s two major income tax sources didn’t stagnate after lawmakers began reducing individual income tax rates. They more than doubled.

ACTA:

Recognizing that America’s 250th anniversary is cause for both celebration and a long-overdue call for renewal, 24 historians, political scientists, and education leaders have joined ACTA’s National Commission on American History and Civic Education. The National Commission has a simple, yet essential goal: the restoration of the requirement that every college student complete a semester-long course on the American story. Our schoolteachers, our business leaders, our professionals, and our government leaders must not receive a diploma without this training.

It is an ambitious goal, a multi-year project, which will do much to fulfill the vision of the American Founders. In this Broadside for the Nation, we explain in detail why American higher education must restore this foundational requirement for college graduates to know the American story, what such a course might include, and, crucially, how to make this vision a reality.

Jenny Anderson and Mike Goldstein: 

In a 2023 TED Talk watched by millions of people, the American educator and entrepreneur Sal Khan declared that AI was about to deliver “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” The founder and CEO of Khan Academy was touting the company’s new educational chatbot, Khanmigo, claiming it promised to be an “amazing personal tutor” to “every student on the planet.” By 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was chiming in that AI was on the verge of delivering, for students, “virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need.”

But by this spring, Khan had admitted that the release of Khanmigo was “a non-event” for many kids. Although access exploded, from reaching 40,000 students in 2023 to nearly 1 million this year, actual uptake—whether students use it—has stagnated.

A tool designed to respond to questions and ask follow-ups can’t help a student who doesn’t engage or know what to ask. Khanmigo, like so many other ed-tech tools, has floundered because it hasn’t solved the challenge at the center of education: How do you motivate students to experience the discomfort of learning something new? An AI tutor may be able to deliver math problems that are perfectly calibrated to a student’s level. But it can’t make the student actually do the problems.

Navaneeth Rajan

The University did not directly respond to questions regarding academic integrity investigations or whether the University would monitor or proactively review user histories for policy violations, instead directing instructors to the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning “for guidance on how generative AI tools intersect with academic honesty, course design, and student learning.” The statement advised students to consult the Student Manual’s Academic Honesty & Plagiarism section—which does not mention AI—and ask their instructors further questions.

The spokesperson confirmed that UChicago user information “will not be used to train Anthropic AI models,” a protection which does not apply to Anthropic’s free plans and personal subscriptions. However, personnel should not input sensitive or confidential information to Claude without permission from the appropriate university office.

Anna Bryson:

The Virginia Board of Education on Thursday rejected a surprise proposal from Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s education department to delay tougher passing standards on Standards of Learning exams, arguing Virginia students have already waited long enough for more honest measures of academic achievement.

Gabriele Tweedie:

Incoming students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, are raising concerns about required first-year courses on race and identity politics, including courses titled “You Are on Monacan Land” and “Race, Racism, Colony and Nation.”

Arts and Sciences students at UVA must complete four of these “Engagements” courses during their first year. 

Multiple incoming students spoke with Campus Reform on the condition of anonymity. They questioned both the course offerings and the registration process.

”The engagement courses are ridiculous to me,” one incoming student said. “I think it’s a waste of our time to be required to take them.”

Arpit Gupta:

In 1971, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck offered a famous critique of rent control: “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

Since then, economists have distinguished between different forms of rent regulation. The “first-generation” systems Lindbeck had in mind impose fixed nominal price ceilings: rents remain frozen even if landlords’ operating costs rise, and the rental price carries over when one tenant leaves and another moves in. By contrast, “second-generation” systems limit how much rents may rise during a tenancy, often through formulas that account for inflation or operating costs, while allowing rents to move closer to market levels when an apartment becomes vacant.

Second-generation systems provide tenants with stability and predictable increases, though at some cost to housing efficiency. New York City’s rent-stabilization system, for all its flaws, has generally fallen within this category. Each year, the Rent Guidelines Board—of which I am a public member—sets permissible increases for regulated leases after reviewing changes in landlords’ operating costs and tenants’ incomes. Prior to the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act in 2019, landlords also had greater latitude to raise rents when apartments turned over or after making improvements. Since then, however, those avenues have been sharply restricted, leaving the annual increases approved by the board as the principal means of keeping regulated rents aligned with rising costs.

On Thursday, the Rent Guidelines Board formally adopted Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze, approving a zero-percent increase on both one- and two-year leases for the city’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments. The vote moves us one step closer to the first-generation rent-control model that Lindbeck described, threatening the long-term viability of a large share of the city’s rental housing.

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More.

The Economist:

cademics have always moaned about their students. “Scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before,” complained Egbert of Liège, an 11th-century know-it-all, in an age when not even a tenth of humans could read. Recently there have been lots of new worries about standards in colleges and universities—especially in America, home to many of the world’s best.

But this time, as our International section notes, the laxity is not just in lecturers’ heads.
Maths professors report that they are having to pack freshers off to remedial courses before real learning can start. Some are turning up to university ignorant of things they should have learned early in secondary school. Lecturers in humanities warn that students are struggling to understand texts that a decade ago their counterparts would easily have grasped. Students increasingly ask for reading lists to be cut short.

Tests run by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, suggest that students in colleges and universities are less literate than they were a decade ago. The best are cleverer than ever, but a growing number have basic skills that would embarrass a child half their age. About one in seven students at American colleges and universities scores no better in literacy tests than a typical ten-year-old. For numeracy, it is nearly one in five.

One explanation is the harm to schooling from the pandemic. Another is the fact that, even before covid-19, school marks in America and in many other rich countries were already falling. At the same time, many colleges and universities have been lowering the bar for entry. In America they have largely stopped requiring applicants to sit tests of numerical and verbal reasoning, such as the SAT. Some believe those exercises are unfair to black and Hispanic students. Others are trying to get enough bums on seats as the total number of 18-year-olds in America starts to fall.

Americans are finally recognising that many of their schools teach literacy using methods that other countries long ago binned as pseudoscience. States that reversed course first, such as Mississippi, have been posting big gains.

——-

###% I have asked a number of tenured University professors about addessing our k-12 disaster. The general response: shrugged shoulders.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

fire.org:

Hosted by the FIRE Student Network, this conference brings together 100+ college students from across the country to build connections, learn from one another, and gain practical tools to support free speech on campus. Through workshops, small-group discussions, and sessions with FIRE staff and guest speakers, they’ll explore key issues at the intersection of culture, law, and policy, and leave with a clear plan to take action on your campus.

Nobunaga

Tokyo, it is ordinary to see a seven-year-old board a train alone with a yellow safety cap and a perfectly folded permission form in a backpack.

Japan’s school commute culture runs on trust layered over systems.

Many elementary students walk or take public transit without a parent — in surveys across major cities, the vast majority of first graders already go to school on their own or with classmates, not because parents are careless, but because neighborhoods, schools, and communities designed for it over decades.

Station staff know the regular faces.
Drivers watch the platform.
Older students quietly guide younger ones to the right car.

A child in a yellow hat stands on tiptoe to tap his IC card, serious and proud.
A shopkeeper near the school gate watches until the last straggler passes, then nods.

Quinton Klabon summary:

🚨2026 WISCONSIN YOUTH APPRENTICESHIP DATA🚨

9.5% of upperclassmen (+0.9%, 12,203 total)

BEST
Mercer: 53.3%
Luxemburg: 52.7%
Amery: 51.6%
Mellen: 48.8%
Gilmanton: 47.6%
Denmark: 46.3%
Reedsville: 45.3%
Belgium: 43.4%
Pulaski: 39.3%
Boscobel: 38.8%

——

DWD

Roshan Fernandez:

The Chicago Teachers Union is publicly urging financier Michael Sacks, who chaired Chicago’s Democratic National Convention host committee in 2024, to keep his wallet out of the race. 

“We owe Chicago’s voters a school board election that belongs to Chicago’s voters. Not to Wall Street. Not to Silicon Valley,” union President Stacy Davis Gates wrote in a pointed May letter to Sacks that was posted publicly.

Sacks, who hasn’t yet donated this cycle, says he has no intention of staying out. In response, he called the union-backed candidate for school-board president “entirely unqualified.”  

“The idea that some people can engage in politics and others cannot is ridiculous,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Chicago is following a national trend. Local school-board elections, once low-budget affairs, have increasingly become nationalized, with millions of dollars flowing in, said Michael Hartney, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who specializes in education politics.

Chicago’s district faces a $730 million deficit and years of shrinking enrollment. 

The union was the top spender in the first phase of the shift to an elected board in 2024, records show. A CTU spokesperson said they were countering spending from opponents who favored school closures and privatization, among other measures. 

Alexander Russo

My hope, however, is that more education journalists will soon, like Bacon, address the issue of overreliance on education that is detailed in my book. 
 
My hope is that more education journalists will address the issue of overreliance on education.

As I have thought about the implications of my argument, I keep coming back to the physicist Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift.
 
A paradigm is a fundamental way of approaching the world, and, importantly, it is socially constructed. In other words, we have a collective framework for understanding the world, but that framework can change when we are presented with enough new information to destabilize our worldview. In that instance, a paradigm can change, opening the way for something new. 
 
The paradigm we have been living in was constructed in the 1950s by Chicago school economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, who popularized the concept of human capital as the explanation for the increasingly prosperous and more equal economy that emerged after World War II (much more important, in reality, was the power of labor unions and a robust social welfare state). 
 
We’ve been living in that world ever since as politicians, beginning with the Johnson administration, sought to alleviate poverty by focusing on the supposed deficiencies of individual working people. Never mind that most people in the 1960s who were impoverished — especially African Americans, as civil rights activists like Bayard Rustin pointed out — were in that position because they lived in cities where jobs and other social opportunities didn’t exist. 

——-

more.

Minnesota Star Tribune:

The article incorrectly attributed a quote to Matthew Pierce, a records coordinator with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The reporter mistakenly incorporated language from his own email correspondence with Pierce regarding a records request and presented it as a quote. Pierce did not make the statement attributed to him.

In addition, a paraphrased statement attributed to a Department of Natural Resources spokesperson was inaccurate and created the impression that the spokesperson had commented on the incident when she had not.

A preliminary review indicates these errors resulted from breakdowns in the reporting and editing process. No artificial intelligence tools were used in the creation of the story.

——-

more.

Tarini Mehta

The push for the bill comes amid the CSU system’s attempt to position itself as a global leader for the “impactful, responsible and equitable adoption of artificial intelligence” in higher education. Last year, the system announced a “first-of-its-kind public-private initiative” with leading tech companies including Google, Intel, NVIDIA and OpenAI to create an “AI-empowered higher education system.”

In 2025, it entered into a $17 million agreement with OpenAI to provide access to ChatGPT Edu to its 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff for 18 months. Last month, the CSU renewed the controversial contract for three years at an annual price of $13 million. The system also entered into an agreement with OpenAI to pilot the company’s certification courses on AI skills at its campuses.

According to union leaders, the CSU has already attempted to outsource some faculty work to AI agents.

Andrew Maynard

📜 About

The past two plus millennia have had their fair share of technology-driven panics, from warnings about the dangers of writing and printing, to the advent of bicycles, the car, radio, video games and — more recently — generative AI.

Most of these “techlash” responses look irrational with hindsight — knee-jerk social responses that place fear of the unknown, maintaining the status quo, and holding on to identity-defining ideas, ahead of rational thought. And yet, below the surface, there’s often more to them. Rather than being a simplistic rejection of a new technology, they are often responses to something that’s perceived as a threat to something of worth or value — identity, dignity, jobs, security, beliefs, the ability to find meaning in life, and more.

Heather Peske

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. More than ever before, our newly released Teacher Prep Review: Decoding Progress in Reading Preparation tells a tale of two completely different approaches to how teacher preparation programs across the country are giving future teachers the knowledge and skills to implement scientifically based reading instruction. Nationally, roughly half of programs we reviewed (53%) earn an A, up from just 26% in 2023—meaning they teach all five core reading components aligned to the evidence base and avoid discredited practices. This progress proves that teacher prep can transform to align to best practices.

The bad news is about half (47%) of teacher prep programs fall short in giving teachers the skills and knowledge they want and need to be effective teachers of reading. One in five programs still teach debunked reading methods, despite clear scientific evidence that they’re ineffective—or even harmful to students. For example, nearly one in five prep programs (18%) teach candidates to use running records, a debunked assessment tool that encourages students to guess words based on context (rather than sounding them out). 

While states should be leveraging their authority to review and approve programs, teacher prep programs themselves need to make the transition to align to the evidence. In fact, when teacher prep programs include methods of teaching that run counter to the evidence and research, they are selling aspiring teachers a faulty product. When teacher prep faculty lack the knowledge and skills to teach reading aligned to the robust evidence base (especially given readily available professional learning opportunities), or when they refuse on philosophical grounds, they are complicit in misrepresenting what aspiring teachers need to know about reading instruction.   

This misleading approach to reading instruction cheats four groups of consumers: the districts that have to spend money and time to remediate the new teachers; the teachers who receive the students in the next grade and have to make up for lost time; the well-meaning new teachers themselves, many of whom will leave the profession when they are ineffective; and most importantly, the students. Worse, it is the students who are farthest from opportunity who are assigned at higher rates to these brand new, poorly trained teachers. 

——-

Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024: Wisconsin Teacher Preparation Programs

Early Literacy Screener Map.

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

Letter to the Editor:

Neetu Arnold’s proposal (“Whip Grade Inflation Now,” op-ed, June 17) is sensible and would go a long way toward making college grades more meaningful.

It’s very similar to the Contextual Transcript policy the UNC-Chapel Hill faculty council adopted back in 2011. I led that effort, which was unfortunately never implemented. The contextual transcript would have reported each grade along with statistics as to where that grade fell in the class’s distribution. It would have also reported a student’s “Schedule Point Average,” a measure of how the students’ traditional grade point average compares to other students in the same mix of classes.

Steve Nielsen

Horne doesn’t disagree with the new audit. It found 92% of high schools were awarded A or B letter grades, but some “did not appear to meet the established criteria for these grades.”

In fact, one school got an A while only 9.6% of students were proficient in math. Another A-rated school only reported 8.6% of students were proficient in English.

“Parents would say, ‘How did they get an A rating when they have low proficiency?’ So that all has to be reformed,” Horne said.

Growth is weighted heavily, which partially explains that. Horne says they are working to reform the system in the next year or two, potentially creating two separate grades, with one for growth and one for proficiency.

“We need to improve the system so that there’s a limit no matter how much you improve, if the proficiency is low, you shouldn’t be able to get an A but you should be able to get a B,” Horne said.

Corey DeAngelis:

Wall Street Journal:

Readers sometimes say we’re partisan when we point out that Democratic politicians these days take political dictation from teachers unions. Well, we are about to get a market test.

On Tuesday the heads of the nation’s two largest teachers unions delivered their marching orders to the country’s 24 Democratic Governors: Don’t opt into the new federal tax-credit scholarship program, or suffer their political wrath.

“We urge you to protect families and public education in your state by saying no to the Trump private school voucher scheme,” write Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Rebecca Pringle of the National Education Association. 

“Endorsing this voucher program would disregard both the Democratic National Committee platform and the wishes of voters,” they add in their “Open Letter to our Democratic Governors.” That “our” is a nice political touch, suggesting the union bosses know who owns whom in this relationship.

AEI Source:

AEI SOURCE is developed by Tao Tan.

SOURCE (Searchable Open University Records of Charitable Expenditures) is an interactive tool to access a dataset of over 1 million grants from over 57,000 U.S. private foundations to colleges and universities, predominantly American. Each row is a single grant: the funder, the recipient, the year, the dollar amount, the foundation’s own free-text description of why the grant was made, and a thematic tag added by AEI to make the corpus searchable by topic. Filters cover funder, recipient, year, tag, and geography.

Every row also carries a link to the underlying Form 990-PF filing on ProPublica, as well as the foundation’s overall profile. A reader who wants to see the original disclosure for any grant in the browser can click through to ProPublica’s XML viewer and read the raw filing as the IRS received it.

SOURCE was built so that journalists, researchers, donors, university leaders, and the general public can pull the same data and reach their own conclusions. A technical appendix is attached for any reader who wishes to reproduce or extend the dataset. Limitations to this tool are discussed below under “Caveats and limitations.”

DATA SOURCES

The raw material is Form 990-PF, the annual return that private foundations file with the IRS. The IRS releases the 990 corpus in bulk as XML files, and GivingTuesday mirrors and archives the corpus in a public S3 bucket.

We extracted grant-level detail using a Python script. The code reads the XML, isolates the grants-paid schedule, filters to Form 990-PF only (so the corpus is private foundations, not operating charities), and writes the result to a single flat file. We then ran two parallel iterative cleaning passes on that file: one to normalize the recipient names so that the same university does not appear under variant spellings, and one to add a thematic tag to each grant using AI (Claude Haiku 4.5). Code, prompts, and replication instructions for both passes are in the technical appendix.

Holly Korbey

In James Bell’s math class at Chapman High School, sophomores are trying to pinpoint exactly where two lines cross.

The students in this rural Kansas high school already solved for that meeting point in previous lessons, using graphs and other techniques. But this recent lesson shows them how to use a matrix — a box made up of rows and columns representing a system of equations. Matrices are often used in engineering or video game design to calculate the locations of two objects moving through space. 

Traditionally, this kind of complex linear algebra would be taught in the third year of high school math, when many students would take Algebra II. But a decade ago, the Chapman Unified School District, a rural district about 80 miles west of Topeka, Kansas, decided to drop the traditional high school math pathway — Algebra I for a year, followed by a year of geometry and then a year of Algebra II — in favor of what is called “integrated math.”  

Integrated math takes concepts from both algebras and geometry, plus a little from trigonometry — the study of triangles and angles — and blends them over multiple years instead of teaching them separately, a year at a time. That means students can move from lessons in geometry to algebra and back again within the same year. 

Bell, who helped write the math curriculum that Chapman High School uses, said he has seen how practicing both algebra and geometry throughout the year keeps them fresh in students’ minds.

“You’re going to have the opportunity to change course and change direction and see different things,” Bell said. “Students even do a little trig — which is a scary word for kids, but when it’s integrated into every year of math, it doesn’t sound as scary. It doesn’t make it as overwhelming.”

He added: “This is better for students. This is the best of both worlds.”

——-

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

Alex Berenson:

Hospital prices have risen almost fourfold since 2000, far more than any other major economic sector. The increase in prices comes after decades of consolidation. Nearly half of medical centers have become part of bigger chains since 2000, largely erasing competition in many cities and metro areas.

—

(Know what hasn’t risen fourfold? A subscription to Unreported Truths! At pennies a day, still the best bargain in journalism.)

—

The White House Council of Economic Advisers released the report last week, but almost no one aside from healthcare trade reporters has noticed or written about it.

Health insurance company executives are so despised they risk being gunned down. But hospitals continue mostly to escape blame for their role in American healthcare’s exorbitant costs. The report suggests that in many cities and states, hospitals are far more important to high prices — and increasingly dominant over private insurers.

After mergers, hospital chains quickly raise prices, research has shown.

Greg Lukianoff:

What worries me is that fear has a way of making old mistakes look like new solutions.

Throughout modern history, whenever a new way of communicating emerges, a familiar argument follows close behind: this technology is too dangerous, too disruptive, too influential to be left free. And the proposed answer is almost always the same — give the government more power.

But governments do not possess some magical ability to eliminate risk, panic, misinformation, extremism, or social conflict. What they can do is acquire new authority over the systems through which people communicate, learn, organize, search, publish, and exchange ideas. And once governments acquire those powers, they rarely surrender them voluntarily. And they alwaysabuse them.

That is why the stakes are so high. We are debating the future of the infrastructure through which billions of people will speak, argue, search, publish, organize, learn, and understand the world. Resisting the ancient impulse to put authorities in charge of what people may say and know helped give us the best things in the modern world: science, liberal democracy, individual rights, pluralism, innovation, and the astonishing expansion of human knowledge. If we forget that lesson now, just as the channels of knowledge are being rebuilt all around us, the consequences could last for generations.

Todd Wallack:

It turns out one explanation is that many online colleges have adopted generous transfer policies, accepting credits from not only other colleges but also an assortment of nontraditional sources.
That includes certifications earned on the job or in the military. Or exams that prove students have already mastered the material, including Advanced Placement and College-Level Examination Program tests.

But it also includes getting credit for taking classes on online learning platforms such as Sophia, Study.com and StraighterLine, which are known as fast and inexpensive places to rack up college credits.

——-

More.

Rebecca Noel

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools board questioned – but passed – a controversial tech contract at its first meeting since Superintendent Crystal Hill was placed on leave.

Instead of the proposed two years, the board only approved a one-year term.

In recent weeks, parents have questioned the use of technology in CMS schools, especially early on in elementary school and particularly a digital program called i-Ready, which CMS has used for the past two years. Students spend approximately 90 minutes a week on the platform, which has digital reading and math assessments and lessons.

District leaders said the tool allows students to receive personalized lessons while allowing teachers to see performance data for each student.

The proposed two-year contract would’ve cost CMS around $9.7 million. For one year, it will cost approximately $4.4 million. The school board initially placed the contract on its consent agenda, which is used for items without opposition, before moving it to the regular agenda ahead of the start of Tuesday’s meeting.

Board members said they received numerous concerns from CMS parents about the platform and the amount of in-school screen time in general.

Darryl Cobb:

At the Charter School Growth Fund, graduation is our favorite time of year. It is when schools shine. We are reminded of what is possible when students, teachers and school leaders have excellence as their north star.

Charters are built on the premise that all kids can learn when a culture of high expectations, great teaching and deep relationships with students and families works together to help each child in the school learn and grow.

This year alone, over 30,000 high school seniors in hundreds of high schools across the country that our fund invests in earned over a billion dollars in college scholarships. And close to 100% of them have been accepted and are going to college.

For individual students, this is an extraordinary outcome.“For my family, this scholarship means that all of their support and sacrifice over the years has truly paid off,” said Laythan Davis, who is graduating from Uncommon Schools in Rochester, New York, this year, and headed to Cornell University on a QuestBridge Scholarship.

But it is surprisingly ordinary in a subset of public schools that have created an approach that works year after year. Our hope is that this becomes ordinary in allcommunities across the country. 

Erin Gretzinger:

Madison schools and other districts still have more work to do, though. Less than half of Madison students didn’t meet grade-level expectations in reading and writing in the 2024-25 school year, slightly fewer than the average statewide, according to state data. About 18.5% of Black students in Madison scored proficient in reading, compared with 20% statewide.

Jackson said her current top priority is placing dozens of early literacy coaches in schools by the start of next school year. She’s also focused on increasing communication between the Department of Public Instruction, schools and families, as well as making sure school districts and teachers have the necessary support and resources to implement the law.

“We expect a lot out of our educators, and we want to be sure that we are rolling this out and supporting this in a way that it doesn’t make it feel like it is overwhelming,” she said. “Our focus is making sure that they’ve got that knowledge, they’ve got those supports, so that we can see and will see changes in student proficiency.”

Jackson will help oversee millions of dollars to be allocated to school districts under Act 20. While lawmakers initially proposed $50 million to fund Act 20, Republican legislators declined to allocate the money amid a legal dispute with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Then two years after the law passed, lawmakers agreed to allocate nearly $41 million in the 2025-27 state budget.

After a final round of reimbursements for schools that purchased new reading curricula and materials ends in June 2027, Jackson said the Department of Public Instruction plans to ask state legislators for permission to use any remaining funds to continue supporting Act 20’s literacy initiatives, which could include coaching, professional development or curriculum.

The department has “no intention to leave any dollars on the table,” she said. “All of those funds will be used to continue to support our schools and continue to do this work.”

The state agency has recently faced sharpcriticism from some literacy advocacy groups on Act 20’s implementation and communication surrounding the law so far. Forward Literacy, a Madison-based group, has raised concerns about some of the state agency’s guidance to districts about personalized reading plans — a cornerstone of the law that requires schools to create individualized improvement plans for K-3 students who score below the 25th percentile on a reading assessment.

Since January last year, Wisconsin school districts have been required to develop that roadmap and share it with parents, who help decide alongside school officials whether a child is meeting grade-level benchmarks. Katie Kasubaski, executive director of Forward Literacy, has called on the Department of Public Instruction to rescind some of the guidance it has issued about when to provide students personalized reading plans.

——-

More.

——-

Colbey Decker:

1/ Wisconsin’s new DPI Director of the Office of Literacy is Kaylee Jackson. Before this, she was Madison’s top curriculum leader. Her record shows decisions filtered through “White Supremacy Culture,” anti-racism ideology, and “systems of oppression.” 🧵

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Randall

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) just published Will Flanders’ The FORT Gap: How Inconsistent Teacher Preparation Is Fueling Wisconsin’s Literacy and Educator Crises, a report on how results on Foundations of Reading Test (FORT) show that Wisconsin’s teacher candidates aren’t sufficiently prepared in the Science of Reading, which is the gold-standard in reading instruction. That’s bad news for Wisconsin teachers—and worse for Wisconsin’s students, who won’t have teachers properly prepared to them how to read. Flanders’ report is an excellent summary of the issue for Wisconsin audiences—and for all Americans, since insufficient preparation for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers, especially in the Science of Reading, is a nationwide problem.

It isn’t the only problem for our ELA classrooms. The worst flaw of Common-Core style ELA instruction is that it focuses on skills instruction and neglects literary content—full-lenth, sophisticated, classic works of fiction and nonfiction. Notables such as Doug Lemov, Natalie Wexler, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr. have argued persuasively students need to be taught to read good books as an essential component of learning how to read. As the classical education schools know, the Science of Reading needs to be married to the enduring, challenging content that sparks children to want to read. That same combination inspires our own The Cather Standards: Model PreK-12 State English Language Arts Standards (National Association of Scholars and Freedom in Education); the Cather Standard, by saying what students should learn, implicitly provides a curriculum for ELA teacher preparation.

Implicitly only, alas. The existing standard National Evaluation Series (NES) English Language Arts (301)examination doesn’t entirely ignore good books. One of its five content domains is Analyzing and Interpreting Literature—although even in this domain, only 2 of the 4 competencies really address literature knowledge rather than techniques of how to analyze literature. ELA teachers should be tested centrally for their thorough content knowledge of good books from American literature, Western literature, and World literature.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Nuria Martinez-Keel:

Mississippi also has raised its standards for how it defines a proficient reader. A state law requires Mississippi accountability standards to increasewhenever 75% of students make a proficient score on yearly tests or when 65% of schools or districts make a grade of B or higher on annual A-F evaluations.

“We have increased that level, by the way, four times since I’ve been in office, and (are) about to increase it again,” Reeves told Oklahoma City news reporters. “Because what’s going to happen when you raise the bar, when you raise the level of expectations, what’s happened in Mississippi is exactly what’s going to happen in Oklahoma.”

Oklahoma’s proficiency standards are aligned with expectations used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP tests students in all 50 states every two years and compiles the results in the Nation’s Report Card.

Not only has Mississippi’s overall fourth-grade reading progress impressed the nation, but the state’s scores among Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students have ranked at or near the top of the country, according to NAEP results.

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dana Goldstein

“Believable typos”

Even before A.I. chatbots, the internet had made cheating easier, in part through the simple mechanism of copy-and-paste plagiarism.

Now, the landscape is more complex. About two-thirds of American students are using A.I. regularly for schoolwork, according to recent surveys. While only a small slice — about 9 percent — admitted to outright cheating in one large study, much A.I. use lies in an ethical gray area.

A recent College Board survey of professors found three-quarters reported their students were using A.I. to write, and over 90 percent of respondents were concerned about plagiarism and dishonesty. Many institutions have seen a sharp increase in student disciplinary cases for academic misconduct, much of it related to the use of A.I.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are the most popular A.I. tools among students.

But just beneath these behemoths is a roiling, fiercely competitive market of legacy ed-tech purveyors and tiny start-ups, all using social media to tell young people that their academic lives could be easier — much easier — if they embrace A.I.

Some start-ups explicitly teach students how to cheat.

Eric:

The vast majority of new education funding for years now has gone to grift: more administrators, fancy new buildings built way over budget under union contracts, and especially Special Education (SPED).

For those unfamiliar, federal law requires schools to integrate special education students into general education classrooms to the “maximum extent appropriate.” For students with milder needs, this can work. For many others, it means assigning a full-time caregiver, politely called a “para-educator,” to handle their needs throughout the school day.

I was largely unaware of the true scale until my wife spent five years working as a para-educator. What she experienced horrified me. The level of care required for many students went far beyond any reasonable definition of “education.” It was intensive, daily caregiving, often one-on-one, funded by taxpayers who have almost no idea this is happening.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ron Lieber:

College tuition will cost no more than 10 percent of parental adjusted gross income. That’s it. Grab the figure from Line 11a of your 1040 form, and divide by 10.

Starting today, those are the instructions for anyone interested in applying to Whitman College, a small liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Wash.

The school is one of a small but growing number of institutions that are finally answering the extremely reasonable question that families have asked in vain for decades: Why can’t you just tell us the price we’ll pay without having to apply and get in first?

“We’re not hiding the cost of college behind secret formulas,” the school now proclaims on its website.

Last month, Brandeis University made a similar move by introducing a tool allowing prospective students and their families to upload tax forms and high school transcripts in exchange for a “you will pay” figure.

What’s in it for you is clear. What’s in it for the schools may surprise you.

Whitman has seen a notable falloff in applications from the upper middle class. Many of those families have high enough incomes to disqualify themselves from much need-based financial aid, but they don’t have enough money to afford the school’s annual list price of close to $90,000.

Lars Andersen:

The prefece to the story is, that I in a kind of roundabout and (I think) humorous way published “my two favorite numbers” by spelling out a 10 diget and a 8 diget number with letters. I didn’t tell what they ment, but they where prime minister Mette Frederiksen’s social security and phone number. I also published a screenshot of me trying to interview Mette Frederiksen on what app, asking her about her wanting to ban encryption (CSA) and introducing mass surveillance via granting the police intelligence services access to all sorts of information (medical journals, social media posts, DNA registers ment for research and so on)

Open Culture:

Take online cours­es from the world’s top uni­ver­si­ties for free. Below, you will find 1,700 free online cours­es from uni­ver­si­ties like Yale, MIT, Har­vard, Oxford and more.

Note: This page includes a lot of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs). If you want to enroll in a free ver­sion of a MOOC, please select the “Full Course, No Cer­tifi­cate” (edX) or “Audit” (Cours­era) option. If you take the course for a certificate/credential, you’ll be charged a fee, and we will receive a com­mis­sion from our affil­i­ate partners–Coursera, Future­Learn and edX.

Teagan King:

The Madison School Board on Monday approved $613 million in spending for the 2026-27 school year, including an average 5.3% raise for district teachers.

The $39 million increase over this school year will be largely funded by an 8.5% increase in revenue from property taxes, most of which was authorized by voters in a pair of referendums two years ago.

“There are always going to be challenges,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said Monday. “This is not the time for us to think about a non-investment or a flat investment in the Madison Metropolitan School District.”

Salaries and wages make up 81% of the district’s 2026-27 operating budget, which includes a 2.63% base wage increase for the district’s teachers, $4.7 million for increases along the district’s established salary schedules, and $3.8 million in salary adjustments to better compensate veteran teachers.

For the owner of an average Madison home, now valued at $500,300, that will mean about a 6.39% increase in the school portion of their property taxes to $5,193.17, a $311.82 increase.

Property taxes will account for 72% of the district’s total operating budget for 2026-27, the most in 10 years, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum report. Next year’s property tax levy increase will follow a 20.4% increase for the 2025-26 school year, which the report indicates was the largest in more than 30 years.

Salaries and wages make up 81% of the district’s 2026-27 operating budget, which includes a 2.63% base wage increase for the district’s teachers, $4.7 million for increases along the district’s established salary schedules, and $3.8 million in salary adjustments to better compensate veteran teachers.

Employee health insurance costs are also expected to grow, as annual premiums are expected to be $94.5 million. This spring, the board approved a 3% increase in the amount of employees’ pay going to health insurance, though the change will not apply to the district’s lowest-paid employees, including special educational assistants and food service employees.

Next year’s budget also includes roughly $1.2 million for the district’s new 60-day paid parental leave policy, which the board approved in May.

About 140 employees are expected to use the leave, and about 80% of them are expected to need substitutes. The estimate is based on the number of parental leaves during the 2024-25 school year.

Expenditures for the district’s special education fund are also projected to be $120.6 million, about twice as much as its revenues and roughly $7.5 million more than in 2025-26. Food service funding will also face higher expenditures than revenues, at $15.5 million in budgeted expenditures and $11.7 million in revenue.

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Teagan King:

Madison’s kindergarten through 12th grade students will face new restrictions on phone use next school year, after the Madison School Board approved a districtwide cellphone policy Monday.

The district’s new policy includes a bell-to-bell cellphone ban for kindergarten through eighth-grade classes, prohibiting any access to devices during the school day, including free times such as lunch and recess.

High schoolers will face off-and-away restrictions that prohibit phone use during instructional time, including classes, assemblies, labs and field trips, but would be allowed to use devices during lunch. Phone use will also be prohibited during passing periods under final adjustments made at Monday’s meeting.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

by Qianruo Shen

Abstract: This paper examines the cognitive and curricular problems of Common Core elementary mathematics. Through analysis of Big Ideas Math and related instructional practices, it argues that, visual representations are employed excessively and without sufficient transition to symbolic reasoning and mathematical abstraction. At the same time, standard algorithms and procedural memory are de-emphasized, while multiple strategies are treated as goals in themselves rather than as means to efficient problem solving.The paper further argues that the opposition between understanding and memorization reflects a serious cognitive misconception. In practice, the proliferation of visual models and solution methods tends to keep instruction at the level of surface features rather than guiding students toward deeper conceptual structure. As a result, the curriculum becomes diffuse and overloaded, increasing students’ burden and extending learning time. Difficulties in fractions among American students reflect these deeper structural and cognitive problems.The study concludes that elementary mathematics should remain grounded in practicality, clarity, and coherent procedural structure so that most students can achieve solid mastery.

Teagan King:

The district had 25,029 students enrolled for the 2025-26 school year, a 126-student drop from the previous year. It expect 379 fewer this fall.

Overall 4K-12 enrollment in Madison schools is also projected to decrease about 3% over the next five years and 7% over the next 10 years, according to MGT’s forecast.

The district has already seen a slow decline over the past five years from an enrollment at 25,497 during the 2021-22 school year. Enrollment will continue to decline through the next several school years, according to MGT’s report.

The MGT forecast includes 24,649.6 students for the 2026-27 school year, 24,477.7 students during the 2027-28 school year and 24,369.8 students during 2028-29.

Enrollment in Madison schools could decline more than another 1,000 students by 2035, with enrollment projected at 23,069.8 that year.

However, district leaders expect longer-term growth.

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Teagan King:

A new boundary review was needed due to increasing housing developments expected to bring in new students, some already overcrowded schools and a desire to have more students attend schools closer to home instead of being driven across town, which could also ease transportation concerns, Green said.

Will any schools close?

Madison is not considering closing or consolidating any schools, though some school configurations could change. The district is seeking suggestions on shifting grade configurations, like making some schools 4K through eighth grade, changing paired elementary schools that provide kindergarten through second grade at one site and third through fifth grade at another or turning some sites into magnet schools.

“It’s too early to say that we’re actively considering that, but that could change depending on what we hear at our engagement sessions and see in our survey responses,” Folger said. “We’re not closing ourselves off to any possibilities.”

————

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Chuqin Jiang:

Every June, millions of Chinese high schoolers take a make-or-break university entrance exam that many regard as the world’s hardest.

The pressure is enormous. Students spend years studying everything from math to the sciences and philosophy for the “Gaokao.” A single score serves as a potential arbiter of a student’s future, determining not just whether they can attend college but also where they’ll go and what they’ll study.

Each year, the exam is a national event. To ensure students arrive at testing sites on time, police enforce rolling traffic closures. Construction projects are halted within a specific radius of test sites so students aren’t distracted.

All students must take Chinese language, math and foreign-language exams, plus three subjects determined by their chosen path of study. The content of the questions also varies by region. Here are some of the questions that appeared this year:

Joshua Rauh, Gregory Kearney

Every few years, somewhere in America, voters are asked to dig deeper into their pockets to pay more for their public schools. A new sales tax here, or an extension of a property tax or parcel tax increase there. The typical pitch? This is a necessary investment in our kids, otherwise they won’t have enough music or science or laptops. The promise follows a familiar pattern: we need more money for education so we can have more resources for classrooms and better educational outcomes. 

The problem is that the money is often not going where people think, as we show in a new school district pension atlas covering 12,800 districts around the U.S. These numbers have largely been invisible until now, and the fiscal picture is not reassuring.

In 2023, pension contributions nationally absorbed over 10 cents of every dollar of associated education spending — the portion of school district budgets tied to employees who teach, support, and operate America’s schools — up from 8.5 cents in 2015. These contributions amounted as of the latest year of data to $77 billion annually that could go to pay directly for teachers and textbooks.

While associated education expenditures increased by $59 billion in real terms between 2015-2023, pension contributions absorbed approximately one-third of that increase.

———

U.S. School Pension Atlas

District-level pension contributions and their impact on education budgets, 2015–2023

———

Joshua Rauh:

Around 1/3rd of the real increase in annual $ for U.S. public schools since 2015 is getting consumed by pension contributions. In states like NJ and IL, it’s over 100%. We got the numbers for 12,800 school districts – read about it and check out your district in our new tool. ⬇️

Glenn Reynolds:

And the toxic waste it emits isn’t chemical but intellectual sludge, in the form of racial bigotry, antisemitism and crude Marxism.

“It’s amazing,” constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro said a few days ago in testimony to a committee of the US Commission for Civil Rights: “The heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country.”

This isn’t the workplace bias and schoolyard name-calling that once marked antisemitism in this country — it’s now reached the performance stage. 

Like the recent incident in which antisemitic Cornell student Austin Franco rejected a job offer from a Jewish-owned startup with the hateful message “Not interested in working for a Jew” — then raised more than $20,000 from equally antisemitic goons on a crowdfunding site.

Franco attends the same campus where antisemitic students this semester trapped the university’s president in his car, holding him hostage after he hosted a civil debate over Israel.

Violence, threats and taunts have hit Jewish students on campuses across the country, from Columbia and Yale on the East Coast to UCLA on the West. 

Why have universities been so limp-wristed in addressing this unvarnished hatred? 

One reason is money:  Arab sheikdom Qatar has pumped tens of billions of dollars into US universities in recent years — and in the academy, money talks.

But another reason is that our universities have been the Petri dish in which this nasty ideology is cultured.

Law schools and humanities departments have embraced Critical Race Theory, which views everything through the lens of oppressor versus oppressed. 

——-

Sam Haselby:

The US left relocated from labor to elite private education. So instead of supporting, say, increased minimum wage or universal healthcare, it embraced unpopular utopian things that would never threaten oligarchy but which titillate Princeton and NYU students.

Washington Post:

While states cut back spending after the 2008 financial crisis hammered their budgets, those subsidies resumed their long-term upward trend by 2019. Last year, they averaged $12,081 per student, up from $7,677 in 1980, adjusted for inflation.

There is considerable variation between states: 26 consistently increased funding, 19 held roughly steady and five cut spending. But, on the whole, government is spending more on higher ed.

Why does the conventional wisdom suggest the opposite? Gillen finds that advocates often cherry-pick comparison years. For example, they’ll start with an abnormally high year for funding (2001) and end with the post-financial crisis nadir of 2012.
Comparisons also tend to use a bespoke inflation measure, called the Higher Education Cost Adjustment (HECA), rather than the standard measure. This does not adjust for changes in the general price level but for assumed increases of input costs, such as professor salaries. That’s a helpful way to examine cost pressures on colleges, but it leaves out broader inflationary context.

Alan J. Borsuk

There have been times when I was optimistic that – at last! – Milwaukee leaders were coming together to take on the city’s reading crisis in a meaningful and energized way. Last September was one of those times, when key figures across Milwaukee’s often-fractious education scene appeared together at a meeting of the Greater Milwaukee Committee to say that they were committed to action.

Now is not one of those times. Two reasons stand out:

One is that there is just too little happening to implement the Wisconsin reading reform law passed almost three years ago, and even what is happening seems to inch ahead. Compared to other states, some of which have serious progress to show for their commitment, Wisconsin seems to be slow-walking its way through reading improvement.  

The other is the dispute between the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the Milwaukee Reading Coalition, a still-new group of dozens of civic and educational leaders. The dispute focuses on whether and how to use public money for training a large number of teachers in Milwaukee schools about effective approaches to getting children in early grades on track for reading success. The dispute is a prime factor in why the reading coalition work is pretty much at a standstill.  

An entire school year has passed since that Greater Milwaukee Committee session. There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work on launching what was envisioned at that point. But it has not brought agreement or significant progress. Public money, controlled by the state Department of Public Instruction, hasn’t been made available. A good amount of private philanthropic money has been raised, but to make this a true citywide reading campaign, open to all schools and teachers, the private money isn’t enough.

Reading Coalition leaders – including Mayor Cavalier Johnson, Greater Milwaukee Foundation CEO Greg Wesley; influential philanthropic leader JoAnne Anton of Herb Kohl Philanthropies, and long-time education leader Howard Fuller – have gone public with their frustration with dealing with the DPI and Jill Underly, the elected state superintendent of public instruction. Exchanges of letters in recent weeks between the two sides have underscored how much things are at a standstill.

I’m not going to focus here on the specifics of the dispute, except to say the reading coalition leaders clearly have been willing to try different routes, including seeking fresh state legislation, to make this effort go forward, and the DPI has not gone along with them. The civic leaders say that they were led on for months by DPI leaders to think that things could be worked out before progress stopped entirely. At this point, it seems almost certain that nothing will change until after the fall elections, when there will be a new governor and when it is likely there will be changes in the balance of power in the legislature.

———

more.

———

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

David Blaska:

Fully state-funded requires assuming $6.1 Billion in school property tax levies across Wisconsin’s 432 school districts — an 11 percent increase in state spending right there! Of course, Governor Hong would tax Wisconsin’s few billionaires — who have all that cash stuffed in mattresses instead of invested in the economy. (She’d also let Madison impose its own income tax. So there’s your tax relief.)

Presumably local school boards would remain free to set their own budgets. Which will be FULLY FUNDED! With the Big Sugar Daddy picking up the tab, the likes of Maia Pearson and Savion Castro will get free money for more social tinkering. Springtime for teachers unions! Winter for Poland and France. No more of those pesky referenda! 

Already, this school board intends to shower employees with three months (60 workdays) worth of parental leave — twice as much as University of Wisconsin. (State workers have to use sick leave.) Plus $8.5 million in pay raises, which includes up to $5,000/year for long-tenured teachers. And no revenue restraintsbecause schools will be FULLY FUNDED!

——-

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

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

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ben Southwood:

Only one country succeeded in modernizing its property rights in this period: England. The Glorious Revolution resolved the conflict between landowners and the Crown by handing the country to the landowners. One might expect this to have produced an oligarchy that jealously guarded its privileges. But the landowners, precisely because they were empowered, did something their continental counterparts could not. They dismantled the fossilized property arrangements that had blocked development elsewhere, and in doing so, set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

Alex Baumhardt:

Oregon schools have among the highest absenteeism rates in the country, state data shows, and it’s a problem that has persisted since students returned to school following the COVID pandemic nearly five years ago.

Roughly one-third of Oregon students in 2024 were considered chronically absent, meaning they missed 17 or more school days during the school year in a state with one of the shortest school years in the country. About one-fifth of students nationwide were chronically absent in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Repeal and replace

Among the recommendations state education officials offered are to repeal 11 state statutes relating to compulsory school attendance and to replace them with statutes that “would include compulsory attendance requirements and exemptions,” and also outline the responsibilities of guardians and school districts when it comes to student attendance. The report described some state attendance laws as “outdated” and “duplicitive,” and said some homeschooling regulations are wrapped into attendance laws.

Patti Waldmeir: 

We are entering the age of the everyday exoskeleton: light, wearable robotic devices that can change what it means to grow old.

Last week I strapped on a pair of bionic trainers to help me walk, and a robotic hip belt to make climbing easier. Not that I need assistance with either function now — but one day, I probably will. I applaud the idea of wearable robots that can help stave off immobility, as well as the social isolation and physical and mental decline it often brings.

Full exoskeletons have been around for decades, designed for military, workplace or medical rehabilitation uses. But now lighter and more affordable (if not cheap) joint-specific wearable exoskeletons are entering the market, aimed not at those who cannot walk, but those who struggle to go as far or as comfortably as they’d like.

John Harnes:

Prior to the reunion, they discovered that the Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW) was on strike, and the issue upon which many alums focused before arriving in Cambridge was whether our class should cross the picket line. Fortunately, the issue never presented itself. One suspects that the union shared the university’s opinion of our relevance and deemed our geriatric gathering unworthy of protest. Certainly, no pickets greeted our arrival at any activity I attended. The only protest I saw was at the registration of incoming reunions the day we were leaving, which I passed on the way to breakfast. There was no picket line, just a sad- looking graduate student holding up a sign. As he ignored my wife and me, we ignored him.

However, that does not mean that I ignored the strike entirely. One of its more striking elements (no pun intended) was that the graduate students were represented by the United Auto Workers. While this may, at first, seem an odd coupling, the UAW has been involved in student politics for some time. In fact, as recounted by Amity Shlaes in her book, Great Society, the UAW was heavily involved in the formative years of that radical student organization, Students for a Democratic Society.

Walter Reuther

——-

Somewhat Related: Act 10. And: Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer.

John Mac Ghlionn:

Lee C. Bollinger has spent his career inside the American university, not as a casual observer, but as one of its stewards and defenders. He led the University of Michigan through one of the most consequential affirmative action battles in modern legal history, then took the helm at Columbia University for nearly two decades—long enough to test whether his beliefs were genuine or merely convenient. Bollinger’s, it turns out, are the real deal.

He taught constitutional law. He thought seriously, and for a very long time, about how a free society protects the free exchange of ideas. And he came through it, not bitter, but battle-tested.

His new book, University: A Reckoning, arrives at a difficult moment. American universities are both praised as engines of discovery and condemned as temples of self-satisfied detachment. They are celebrated for producing Nobel laureates and blamed for producing graduates who can’t hold a civil conversation with someone who sees the world differently. They carry enormous prestige and, increasingly, enormous suspicion.

Public trust has eroded on both sides of the political divide, though for very different reasons. On the right, universities are seen as ideological monasteries—places where adherence to one set of views is enforced through social pressure dressed up as intellectual consensus. On the left, they are blamed for serving wealth and privilege rather than challenging it. Both critiques contain enough truth to sting. Into this atmosphere of palpable frustration, Bollinger steps forward, not to apologize or deflect, but to defend.

The question worth asking from the very first page is how honestly he manages it in this book. The answer, reached gradually, is this: honestly enough to make the book worth reading, but not honestly enough to fully satisfy the reader.

amuse:

California has handed us the cleanest test imaginable, and it did so almost by accident. In 1996 the state created the California High-Speed Rail Authority and charged it with linking the state by fast train. Six years later, in 2002, a man named Elon Musk founded a small rocket company called SpaceX. Hold those two dates in mind, because the six-year gap matters. The public agency had a head start. It was older, it was backed by the full faith and taxing power of the largest state economy in the country, and it was promised a river of money that would eventually swell beyond anything the rocket company ever raised. By every measure that bureaucrats use to predict success, the train should have been running long before the rocket reached orbit.

Now look at what each one did with its years. SpaceX raised roughly $12 billion in private capital across its entire history, money that investors handed over voluntarily, knowing they would lose all of it if the company failed. With that sum it built the first orbital-class rocket that could land itself and fly again, landing a booster in December 2015 and reflying a used one in 2017. It carried NASA astronauts to the International Space Station beginning in 2020. It flew a launch cadence that reached 138 orbital flights in a single year. It drove the cost of reaching orbit down by something like 65% to 70%, delivering payload at roughly $3,000 per kilogram against the Space Shuttle era’s $54,500. In June 2026 it went public, raised about $75 billion in one of the largest offerings in history, and saw its market value climb to roughly $2.5 trillion, the sixth most valuable public company on earth. That is what $12 billion of privately allocated capital produced.

Set against this the record of the train. Voters were sold Proposition 1A in 2008 on a specific promise, an 800-mile system carrying passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in two hours and forty minutes, for a total cost of $33 billion, with service beginning in 2020. The 2020 deadline passed with nothing to ride. The price estimate climbed past $77 billion, then $80 billion, then $128 billion, and the Authority’s own 2026 business plan now contemplates a figure as high as $231 billion for the full build. The scope, meanwhile, collapsed in the opposite direction, shrinking from a statewide network to a single 171-mile segment between Merced and Bakersfield, with interim service now hoped for somewhere between 2030 and 2033. After roughly three decades and more than $13 billion spent, the number of miles of high-speed track carrying paying passengers stands at zero. The US Senate Commerce Committee put the matter in a headline that needs no commentary, observing that after 25 years and billions in federal subsidies, not a single train is operating in California.

The Snow Report:

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

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

In 2000, Dr Louisa Moats commented that 

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

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

Of course, there’s a bias from me right there in my opening paragraph – the idea that education exists to maximise student outcomes, academically and psychosocially. So yes, let’s be clear that that is, for me, a strong ethical and civic responsibility for those who work in education, across the university, policy, research, and classroom practice levels. And yes, I am of the view that transmission of knowledge as well teaching students how to apply said knowledge, is core business for schools. For some, that immediately casts me as “neoliberal” in my political views. I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a member of any political party but if my position that accountability matters as much in education as it does in other professional fields makes me neoliberal, I’ll take that over being what I’ve termed previously, paleoprogressive.

Tyler Cowen Summary:

I am a mathematician…and some of your recent comments on MR about the role of AI in Econ research as well as the (disappearing?) role of academic papers inspired this response. (It is partially but not exclusively about academia, so I hope it is ok that I’m sending it to your GMU address. Also, I’m hoping it doesn’t get flagged as spam because of the ai in the title…)

In no particular order:

-In the course of a math career, one accumulates lots of computational guesses, now one can test those with minimal effort.

-One also accumulates lots of incomplete and half formed drafts, proofs of special cases, etc, etc. Running those past claude and chatgpt can (does!) pay off. A lot of math is cleverly applying linear algebra and while I’m very good at linear algebra, I’m not as good at it as the AI’s are.

-The lower hanging fruit here are slightly off the beaten track, but not esoteric subjects. If you have a good overview of such, you can pretty quickly prod ai’s into making progress on them. (Before, you needed to have a school of grad students for that). Basic techniques (graph theory, algebra, calculus..) that ai’s are already good at can push these forward already. Making progress on truly hot topics is harder.

Paul Glynn: 

Trust in the news has fallen to an all-time low globally – the lowest since annual reports by the Reuters Institute began more than a decade ago (2015).

The research published on Tuesday suggests that public trust worldwide is at 37%, three points down on this time last year. In the UK, it has fallen by five points to 30% – 20 points lower than 10 years ago.

More than half of respondents said they now get their news from third-party platforms like social media and video networks, although a similar number still use news websites and TV news as well. Traditional sources are still more popular in the UK.

“Our data points to a mix of anxiety, disengagement and cynicism from audiences, many of whom don’t like the way publishers are covering long-running news stories such as immigration, inflation and international conflict,” the institute said.

Alexandra Hardle

It’s almost time for Arizona voters to decide who will square off in the race to be Arizona’s top education official.

Republican Tom Horne is the current superintendent of public instruction. The race has grown heated since Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee announced she would be running against Horne in the Republican primary. Empowerment Scholarship Account programs and diversity, equity and inclusion policies have been key issues in the contest.

On the Democratic side, Teresa “Terry” Ruiz and Brett Newby will face off on July’s ballot, running more subdued campaigns than their Republican opponents.

The superintendent of public instruction is elected as the head of the Arizona Department of Education, limited to two consecutive terms. 

The superintendent is responsible for distributing state and federal education funds to counties and public school districts every year. The superintendent also works with the State Board of Education to create standards for public schools. The superintendent can also request the auditor general to investigate public school money accounts.  

Michael Guamarin

This guy collected every local law in America and put them in a single database.

2.2 million laws.

This might seem to you like some nerds side project, and while it is technically, it is also much more important than you think.

Historically, whenever anything is made transparent to the voting bloc it undergoes radical change.

Every. Single. Time.

Nils Gilman:

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

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

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

Ross Douthat:

“… so I got into Yale Law School. And I wanted the best jobs, and I wanted to make the most money. But the thing I realized is that this kind of striving had made me pretty hollow. It had made me less interesting than some of the Christians that I know who seemed to have things figured out much better than the ‘elites’ that I had surrounded myself with. And I just started searching for something that answered the more important questions, like: How do you be a good father? How do you be a good husband? So one way that I would put this is, and this goes back to the personal relationship thing, is, yes, I do think religion serves a socially useful role. I think the evidence is quite clear that people and families that are raised with some sort of institutionalized faith are happier and healthier and more well-adjusted. But I also think: Isn’t that evidence that there’s something about Christianity that’s particularly true? That if these people who believe these things and practice the faith in these ways — I come back to this phrase, I think it’s from the Book of Matthew: ‘By your fruits you shall know them.'”

———

More.

Alex Olshonsky:

Why did I lose a night of sleep over this? Why did I scroll LinkedIn like a banshee on blow? What the hell is wrong with me?

And then the doozy: Wait. Director? That’s a totally different job. I’m already a stress case. They’re gonna realize I’m out of my depth. How could they not?

The spiraling thoughts follow you, and by the time you’re on the train home, you’re cursing your promotion.

And on and on it goes…

Sam McVeety and Amir Hormati: 

As foundation models continue to improve, the lack of relevant context often limits what they can do, especially as they are used to build agentic systems. While these models can help you write code, summarize documents, or analyze a dataset, they still need the right information to produce accurate and actionable results. 

That’s why today, we’re introducing the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), an open specification that formalizes the LLM-wiki pattern into a portable, interoperable format. This is a vendor-neutral, agent- and human-friendly standard for representing the metadata, context, and curated knowledge that modern AI systems need.

As published, OKF v0.1 represents knowledge as a directory of Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, with a small set of agreed-upon conventions that let wikis written by different producers be consumed by different agents without translation.

Eugene Volokh:

The decision, in yesterday’s Rabiebna v. Higher Ed. Aids Bd., was written by Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler, and joined by Justices Rebecca Grassl Bradley, Brian Hagedorn, and Janet Protasiewicz. The program provided state funds to students who were black; American Indian; Hispanic, meaning “a person of any race whose ancestors originated in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central America or South America or whose culture or origin is Spanish”; or (to oversimplify slightly) of Laotian, Vietnamese, or Cambodian extraction. The opinions are long, but the majority basically applied Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll. (2023).

Justices Jill Karofsky, Susan Crawford, and Rebecca Frank Dallet concurred in the judgment, but expressed their disagreement with SFFA.

Luke Berg, Rick Esenberg, Dan Lennington, and Nathalie Burmeister (Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, Inc.) represent plaintiffs.

Corrinne Hess:

About 36 percent of Wisconsin’s youngest students score below the 25th percentile for reading. 

Statewide standardized tests show that fewer than 40 percent of students are considered proficient, and adult literacy rates indicate that over half of Wisconsin adults read below a sixth-grade level.

Jackson said the states that are seeing improved reading scores are seeing the improvement after six or seven years.

‘So what’s going to be necessary is understanding that this is going to be a journey for us,” Jackson said. “And we need the continued support of our schools. We need the continued support of our Legislature and we need continued support from DPI.” 

Jackson started her role in May. 

Before that, she was offered a job with the Milwaukee Reading Coalition, but the group was unable to move forward with the position due to lack of state funding. 

——-

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Rick Esenberg

Grants to minorities were not held unconstitutional. Grants based on race were. Odd that most of the piece was given over to Jill Karofsky’s disagreement with what everyone (including her) agrees is controlling law. She’s wrong. Badly wrong.

Susie Dent:

Have you ever wondered whether dictionary writers sometimes make words up? It’s a fun thought: a lexicographer slipping in their own invention when no one is looking, or changing a definition to something hilarious. The reality of course is that dictionaries are the product of many hands; not only that, but they also draw on hard evidence of language in the wild. It would take a lot of for a made-up word to even make it to a first draft. But what, say, if everyone was in on it? What if a fake entry was deliberately smuggled into a dictionary and every editor turned a blind eye? That would be quite the linguistic thriller.

The reality is that fake additions are a thing, and they go by the name of ‘mountweazels’. Were you to consult the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, you would find an entry for one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel: a photographer, born in Bangs, Ohio, best known for her pictures of rural American mailboxes. Tragically, the entry relates, Virginia was killed at the age of 31 by an explosion whilst on an assignment for Combustibles magazine.

John Hinderaker

It’s bad enough that our public schools are terrible. It’s worse that their curricula, in some states, are actively anti-American. In Minnesota, where I live, our legislature has mandated a change from teaching factual content to instilling left-wing activism. This is done in the guise of “Ethnic Studies” instruction. 

My organization campaigned hard against the legislative Ethnic Studies mandate and has since campaigned to repeal it. Nevertheless, it is going into effect this year. How bad is it? We have released a series of videos exposing what “Ethnic Studies” really means. This is the third in the series; there are two more to come. Prepare to be shocked:

Teagan King;

Lindbergh and Elvehjem were first suggested for renaming in proposals submitted in spring 2023 and fall 2022, respectively. In the past six years, the district has already renamed three elementary schools — now known as Carey, Henderson and Anana — as well as Gillespie Middle School and Memorial High School.

Elvehjem was suggested for renaming due to its namesake’s mixed legacy. Conrad Elvehjem was a UW-Madison professor, biochemistry department chair and university president. He pioneered niacin supplementation, but also, in 1931, he publicly supported a document that prohibited Black people from living in his neighborhood in Madison.

Madison resident Betsy Abramson suggested Lindbergh for renaming due to the namesake’s ties to Nazism and antisemitic statements. Abramson is chairing the renaming committee.

Charles Lindbergh, who attended UW-Madison but did not graduate from the university, was an American pilot known for completing the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight in 1927. He drew controversy starting in the late 1930s over disparaging comments about Jewish people and race, and he expressed admiration for German society around World War II. Lindbergh also accepted a medal from the Nazi government during a visit to Germany in the 1930s.

In April, the Madison School Board also launched a renaming process for Chavez Elementary School, and its renaming committee will start meetings in July. The district decided to rename the school after sexual assault allegations against the school’s namesake, labor rights activist Cesar Chavez, were revealed in March.

The district plans to have a list of top name choices for all three schools finalized for the Madison School Board to vote on at its August meeting, Tubbs said.

——-

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

More. Act 20.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

William Deresiewicz:

It’s no coincidence, it seems to me, that the decline of liberal democracy, as a fact and value, has succeeded the decline of liberal education as a fact and value. If we are ever to revive the first, an essential step will be to resurrect the second. The two “liberals,” after all, are the same. They refer to political liberty, as understood by ancient Athens, republican Rome, the American founders: not libertarian freedom from individual constraint but collective self-government by civic equals. Its opposite is tyranny, arbitrary rule by a single will, a dispensation we’re becoming more familiar with than we had ever thought we’d be.

John Hinderaker

Mass deportations may be coming to Europe. The European Parliament has voted (418-218) to pass the new “Return Regulation.” It will facilitate deportation of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, and includes various enforcement measures. Watch the MEPs chant “Send them back!” Some, like this Member of the European Parliament, think it will lead to mass deportations:

Done deal: Mass deportations from Europe will soon become reality✈️ pic.twitter.com/rQ66WpZL3P

— Charlie Weimers MEP 🇸🇪 (@weimers) June 17, 2026

European voters are finally being heard. That is how it seems, anyway. Activists like Eva Vlaardingerbroek are getting traction. Will the Save Europe Act pass? I assume not, but stranger things have happened. (I see that YouTube restricts this video, you can’t have young people knowing there is a controversy about immigration):

John Sailer:

In April 2024, as anti-Israel protests overtook the nation’s campuses, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s then-interim chancellor Lee Roberts made headlines with a viral gesture. After a group of protesters removed the American flag and replaced it with the Palestinian flag at the campus’s quad, Roberts walked to the flagpole with campus police officers to raise the Stars and Stripes. The moment blew up on social media, portraying Roberts as a bold leader, likely cementing his permanent appointment later that year.

UNC Chapel Hill had already led the way on several key reforms. Its Board of Trustees adopted an institutional neutrality policy. It also created the School of Civic Life and Leadership, aimed at cultivating civil discourse and other habits of good citizenship in students. Roberts was widely expected to pick up the torch.

Neetu Arnold:

Grade inflation is a tough problem to solve. Harvard recently announced a cap on A’s in any given class, but it doesn’t address lower grades, including A-minuses, and such measures tend to provoke faculty resistance. Dartmouth has reported median grades since 1994, and it still experienced grade inflation. There’s a way to address the grading system directly while preserving faculty autonomy: by adding an “inflation-adjusted GPA” on student transcripts. 

A student’s transcript would show two overall grade-point averages. Next to the traditional GPA will appear a second number that adjusts course grades based on the median grade in each class. A student who earns an A in a course where the median grade is also an A would receive less of a boost than one who earns an A in a tougher course. If a student filled his schedule with easy-A classes, his transcript might show a traditional GPA of 4.0 and an adjusted GPA of 2.7. This large difference communicates that the student’s traditional GPA overstates his academic performance.

Luke Burgis:

“In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville after touring Jacksonian America. The French writer had seen that Americans seemed particularly good at forming civic associations that incorporate both freedom and responsibility; in doing so, those associations formed citizens who were capable of governing themselves and flourishing in every domain of human life, without being consumed with the kind of political zero-sum games that threaten not only life and happiness, but progress, too.

Nearly two centuries later, do we Americans retain the talent for association? The signs aren’t promising. We belong to fewer congregations, clubs, unions, and lodges than our grandparents did. We report fewer close friends, and a rising share of us claim none at all. Time spent alone has reached record highs, and the Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public-health emergency. The genius for association that Tocqueville admired has not been abolished, so much as left to atrophy.

The breakdown in association results in what I call the problem of “the one and the 99” — the direct and unnatural relationship between a human person and a large group. It is a perennial problem, but current conditions have accentuated it dramatically because our technologies are built to connect the one directly to the millions, dissolving everything in between. The platforms that promised to bring us together did so by hollowing out the associations that once stood between the person and the mass. A man scrolling alone is plugged into a crowd of strangers — exposed to their moods, their fears, their judgments — with no friend group or congregation to mediate the encounter. We have never been connected to so many while accompanied by so few. 

Its political manifestation is the self set against the state, with no intermediary institutions or forms of association between them — except a few good group chats, if you’re lucky.

Eric:

This is pretty crazy: The 5-2 Democrat Court finds Larry Krasner is so quick to falsely concede error in murder cases (to try to free convicted murderers) that it has tasked the Pennsylvania Attorney General with checking to make sure he’s not lying. I’ve never seen this.

…..

This is a split decision, but shows that the presumption of regulatory for Soros-funded radical leftwing DA Krasner is gone. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has had enough. It needs someone to “enhance the reliability” of proceedings. Yikes!

……

In a forceful and scolding opinion, the state’s high court said Krasner’s office “violated its duty of candor” and ruled the state attorney general’s office must now review cases it seeks to overturn.

Corinne Cowan

A majority of law professors feel that they cannot express their opinions on controversial topics for fear of backlash from students, other faculty, or administrators, according to a new report released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

The report, based on surveys with 1,959 law school faculty members, shows an academic environment in which law school faculty endorse First Amendment principles, but struggle to practice them. FIRE is a free speech advocacy group known for its legal work, College Free Speech Rankings, and university faculty polling — but this new report represents the group’s first foray into law …