1,416 results
Governor Evers: TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE:I am vetoing Senate Bill 454 in its entirety. The bill would mandate school boards and independent charter schools to assess the early literacy skill of pupils in four-year-old kindergarten to second grade using repeated screening assessments throughout the year and to create a personal reading plan […]
By Kadjata Bah, Josepha DaCosta and Moises Hernandez The Kohlenberg paper looks closely at school-to-prison pipelines and uses the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause to emphasize her case. She points out the Constitution “authorizes and mandates Congress to guarantee a meaningful floor of adequate functional literacy instruction nationwide.” During the past few years, federal courts have […]
AB446 Legislative links and lobbying information. (League of Women voters is against!) Speakers, in order: 0.08: Rep. Dave Considine (D-Baraboo) voted No. 4:50: Rep. Robert Wittke (R-Racine) voted Yes. 6:30: Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay) voted No. 11:40 Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) voted yes. 14:14 Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt (R-Fond du lac) voted yes. 30.08: […]
mp3 audio Transcript (Machine Generated). Representative LaKeshia Myers. Related: Assembly bill AB446 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. My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading […]
mp3 audio Related: Assembly bill AB446
October 21, 2021 11:00a.m. CST. Watch via Wisconsin Eye. Wisconsin AB 446; SIS links. The list of lobbying organizations (many taxpayer supported!) opposed to Roadmap to Reading Success is remarkable: Association of Wisconsin School Administrators League of Women Voters Wisconsin (!) Pearson NA (!) Southeastern Wisconsin Schools Alliance WIRSA Wisconsin Association of School Boards Wisconsin […]
Transcript (machine generated) mp3 audio Notes and links on AB446. Kelly Butler Barksdale Reading Institute bio. 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. My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans […]
Kymyona Burk bio. Wisconsin AB446 notes and links.
Machine generated transcript. September 14, 2021 Assembly Education Committee Hearing audio. October 7, 2021 Senate Education Committee Hearing audio. Much more on our long term, disastrous reading results and Wisconsin AB446, here.
“1993: Wisconsin Students #3 in the Nation in Reading 2019: #27 If Mississippi can do it, we can do it”. 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. My Question to Wisconsin Governor […]
Peachy Keenan: If the illiterate Dark Ages are indeed coming, at least we will have our stacks of hardcovers to comfort us. A recent essay in The Atlantic tells us what most of us have already surmised: reading is dead, and it’s not coming back. In “The Age of Reading Is Over,” we learn that not only […]
Nell Gluckman: In February, several University of Wisconsin regents were so frustrated with the system’s president during a presentation on artificial intelligence that they started texting one another. “Pulling teeth to get him to get proactive with strategy and now this is what we get,” one texted to another. The exchange, which surfaced in public […]
William Flanders This study examines the association between participation in Wisconsin’s private school choice programs and English Language Arts achievement using longitudinal administrative data from 96,241 students tested in 2018–2019 and 2022–2023. Propensity score matching compares voucher participants with similar public-school students, with exposure measured by years of participation. Sustained participation is positively associated with […]
Mary Harrington The age of post-literacy is upon us. The dismayed warnings from teachers and professors have been growing in volume for some years; now, The Atlanticreports in its latest cover story that one Harvard student needed a set text translated from “Old English” in order to read it. The book in question? A Clockwork Orange. The digital revolution, […]
Vivek Sen: PALANTIR CTO: “FOR $10 BILLION, ELON MUSK PUT 300 ROCKETS IN ORBIT.” “FOR $11 BILLION, THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA HAS BUILT 1,600 FEET OF ELEVATED RAIL… WITH NO RAIL.” ——— 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 […]
Josh Centers: The British cybernetician Stafford Beer (1926-2002) gave us the right lens for all of this. He compressed a lifetime of studying organizations into one blunt dictum: The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it intends, not what its mission statement declares. Beer wrote that there is no point in claiming […]
Chad Aldeman: If a district has low reading scores and uses instructional practices that are inconsistent with what has been well documented about how children learn to read, the case is clear for switching to an evidence-based science of reading approach. But Lexington’s young readers are not struggling. They have relatively strong test scores. So, perhaps not surprisingly, […]
Carl Hendrick: In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren VanderBurgh gave a lecture warning about the dangers of autopilot. He titled it “children of the magenta line,” after the magenta coloured course line the flight computer draws across a cockpit display. He noticed that pilots were so used to following that line, to managing the automation rather […]
NY Times Editorial Commentary: In 1970, only 7 percent of college freshmen nationwide had a high-school grade average of A or higher; today, the share is roughly 40 percent. ———— 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 […]
Alex Tabarrok summary: The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their […]
NCES: In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $37,400 per FTE student, which […]
Nicola Mastrorocco & Edoardo Teso We investigate how technologies that reduce the costs of monitoring by central authorities have shaped the historical transition from small patrimonial states to large bureaucratic organizations. Our analysis is based on a novel dataset that traces changes in the organizational structure and geographic presence of the U.S. federal government over […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Pat Garrett The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has launched “The Wisconsin Education Comeback: A Roadmap for Student Success” a series of reports to reform education in Wisconsin. The roadmap will aim to provide a comprehensive set of K-12 education reforms for the next Governor and legislature to tackle. The first report […]
Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson and Clifford Asness: The cost-disease sectors generally—healthcare, higher education, anything where Baumol’s curse (upward salary pressure in fields without productivity gains) meets a regulatory cartel. These will not be fixed by any single intervention because the political coalition that benefits from the status quo is too large and too local. Housing in San […]
Dan O’Donnell: The study, titled “The FORT Gap: How Inconsistent Teacher Preparation Is Fueling Wisconsin’s Literacy and Educator Crises,” is the opening installment of a broader WILL initiative called “The Wisconsin Education Comeback: A Roadmap for Student Success.” The series is intended to hand the state’s next governor and legislature a ready-made agenda of K-12 […]
Andy Rotherham: Bottom Up Accountability Some context: 1 – We saw again last week that we have a student achievement problem. Not just gaps — but overall issues as well. Achievement was declining post-ESSA, post-no phones, whatever your preferred monocause, but it went off a cliff in 2020. 2 – We have a holy war about public […]
Skeptoid: California was one of the first states to go all-in on whole language, which they did in 1987, although it had already spread through much of the state. The result was fast and alarming. In the 1992 and 1994 NAEP reports, California’s reading scores for 4th and 8th graders had collapsed to among the […]
Quinton Klabon If you are a left-leaning policy -expert-, please, get in touch with Wisconsin’s state Legislature. Come prepared to explain why schools score well in Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey. We are trying to copy Minnesota. 😭😭😭 ——— This film was shown in most High Schools around the US for most of the 1960s. […]
Deborah Prinze: On Thursday, Wisconsin Congressional Reps. Gwen Moore and Mark Pocan helped introduce the “Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act,” which aims to eliminate the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), which was included in President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” To many families, this new legislation is yet another attempt by Democrats to halt […]
Erin Gretzinger: The Madison school district would raise the property tax levy by 8.5% next year under its preliminary $609 million operating budget, which would include salary increases for veteran teachers, paid parental leave, more school safety staff and an expansion of community recreation facilities near West Towne Mall. Property taxes for the average Madison home, […]
Teagan King: Following the statewide trend, Madison added 86.2 full-time equivalent paraprofessional positions, a 25% increase. It also added 236.4 full-time equivalent teachers, a 12.1% increase. Other licensed non-classroom employees only grew by 0.9%. The Madison School District’s student enrollment increased by 0.9%, or 223 students, over the past 16 years. It added 327 full-time […]
WILL: Wisconsin public schools average $18,592 per student. High school choice gets $13,371. K-8 choice gets just $10,877. If extra spending isn’t driving student success, what is? Hear @RickEsenberg break down the real state of education in our latest episode. 🎧 ——— 2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax […]
Beanie “If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake…We’re on the wrong road. And if that […]
Paleoneoloberal Throwing more money at public schools, even doubling teacher salaries, has virtually no effect on student outcomes. ——- Clearly adding more admin staff hasn’t improved the numbers, so maybe go back to the 1960s ratio ——- 2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be […]
Corri Hess: Wisconsin’s congressional Democrats are calling for the federal scholarship tax credit to be repealed. During a press conference in Washington D.C. on Thursday, U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore and U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan joined their colleagues to introduce the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act. The bill would repeal the Educational Choice for […]
Erin Gretzinger: Starting next school year, Madison elementary students will take a weekly survey about their feelings on a new online platform, following the School Board’s approval despite initial concerns. When district administrators first proposed the platform, called Sown to Grow, to the School Board this year, several members expressed doubts about using an online […]
Quinton Klabon: On main NAEP, Wisconsin’s 8th grade girls math’ scores FELL 8 POINTS from 2019 to 2024, 1 point above boys to 3 below. That is a reverse Mississippi miracle, debatably 1 grade level. Their national RANK ROSE from 4th to 1st. It is bad! (February 2026 results out January 2027) ——— 2026-2027 Madison […]
Erin Gretzinger: Nine Madison parents from Parent Check on Tech who spoke with the Cap Times expressed concerns about the prevalence of screen time in classrooms, as well as the millions of dollars the school district spends annually on hardware and subscriptions for digital tools. They’re distressed about students using Chromebooks for non-educational purposes like […]
Tristan Bove Early childhood is a crucial time for education. It’s when children develop the cognitive and emotional ability to grow into successful adults, and instill foundational skills to keep learning later in life. Schools are supposed to be a place for kids to grow and learn, but in the U.S., they’re quickly becoming an […]
WMC: A majority of Wisconsin employers say the state’s business climate is headed in the wrong direction, with their responses underscoring growing concerns about taxes and the state’s workforce, according to the latest Wisconsin Employer Survey. Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC) – the combined manufacturers’ association and state chamber of commerce – conducts the survey twice […]
Brooks: Milwaukee received $772 million in ESSER funding and just passed a $252 million referendum (which Mandela Barnes publicly supported). When the largest district in the state can’t fix its air conditioning, the issue isn’t a lack of funding. The issue is the priorities of the adults in charge. ——— 2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues […]
Arthur Jones IIJun 8, 2026 Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., is introducing a proposal on Monday that aims to improve reading outcomes for America’s youth and combat illiteracy nationwide. The Reading Excellence and Achievement for Development — or “READ” — Act focuses on evidence-based reading instruction, implementation and intervention through a growing practice called the “science […]
Corri Hess: Members of the Milwaukee Reading Coalition say the Department of Public Instruction promised to help fund an initiative to train teachers in early literacy, but has reneged and the project is now in jeopardy. Fewer than 10 percent of children in kindergarten through third grade attending both private and public schools in Milwaukee are meeting […]
Teagan King This is unsustainable at a time where our benefits just went up $14 million, we are being asked more and more to fairly compensate our employees, so our costs are not going to (decrease). …… I just want this community to know that there’s greatness happening all over the place. Equal to that […]
“Legal Process” Vanderbilt report decrying State of Scholarship calls out Ed schools and social work research for serious problems: “There is reason to believe that the problems we have identified in the core disciplines are significantly more serious in some of these allied areas” ——- Early Literacy Screener Map. More. Act 20. 3,887 Madison 4 year old to […]
Teagan King: The district’s overall revenues and expenses would be roughly even, at about $706 million each. That represents a 5.6% increase in revenues from the current school year, largely boosted by higher property tax revenue generated from the referendums voters approved in 2024, and a 4.1% increase in spending. The district is planning a […]
Tyler Jagt: The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse. Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade […]
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty In Episode 10 of the “If You Can Keep It” Podcast, we shift our focus to America’s classrooms to examine the current state of education in Wisconsin and beyond. We dive into why the traditional “assembly line” model of public schooling may be out of date, how the birth […]
Jackson Walker: According to Forward Literacy, however, some 150 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools appear to be failing in the execution of early literacy remediation plans, which lay out exactly how parents will be notified and what steps will be taken to help students. While schools are supposed to alert parents when new testing […]
Kaylah Huynh: The Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education think tank, ranked Wisconsin 36th among 50 states and the District of Columbia for teacher union strength, falling 18 spots from its previous 2012 study. The rankings factored in union resources and membership, involvement in politics, the state’s labor and bargaining policies, policy wins and losses, and the […]
Courtney Gustafson Wisconsin public schools now employ 1 adult for every 7 students, breaking the all-time record from 2025. Wisconsin public schools employ 113,171 staff in 2026. Unfortunately, Wisconsin educates just 791,794 public-school students, the fewest since 1991. Educating fewer students with more staff is a major cause of school referenda. This information comes from […]
Ariel Kalil, Derek Rury Many, if not most, of them are wrong. Actual proficiency rates among eighth graders are 30 percent in reading and 28 percent in math, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or N.A.E.P. The gap between grades and test scores is particularly pronounced in schools serving higher proportions of low-income […]
PBS: As the school year comes to a close, a new analysis shines a harsh spotlight on what’s being called a “learning recession” among American students. It’s a problem that started long before the pandemic, according to the latest National Education Scorecard — an annual deep dive into data about kids in grades K-12. The […]
Erin Gretzinger: Under Madison’s approach, a student who receives an A in a standard class earns the same 4.0 grade points as a student who gets an A in an AP class. District officials also decided not to implement a tiebreaker for students with identical GPAs, meaning all students with GPAs in the top 10% and 5% […]
Quinton Klabon Summary: As someone who did a handful of home visits to get kids to school when their parents did not, I respect Fond Du Lac! Adjusted for poverty, I have them as the best big district on the Forward. ACT could use work, but their Act 20 decisions make me think they will […]
Jackson Walker: Parents don’t want ‘to just sit and read through state statutes’ A three-year-old Wisconsin law requiring schools to inform parents when their students are struggling with reading is going unenforced in far too many districts, leading many learners to fall behind state-mandated reading benchmarks, according to literacy advocates. In some places parents are […]
David Blaska: courtesy of us taxpayers. Blaska is back in kvetch mode today. Madison public schools will do it every time. The district is giving away more free stuff to its employees: 12 weeks — 60 days worth — of taxpayer paid parental leave for every teacher, custodian, lunch lady, and bureaucrat. Price tag: $1.2 million/year. […]
Quinton Klabon: Early Literacy Curriculum Council interviewed a candidate for state Literacy Director guiding part of Act 20. The candidate is Kaylee Jackson. DPI said “is our person” and this is ongoing consultation to keep going. ELCC said they get input beforehand. —— Early Literacy Screener Map. More. Act 20. 3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade […]
Erin Gretzinger: The district “had identified early on, for the thousands of people who now live there, that there would be a school in that area. Here we are, 25 years later, with nothing there,” Gothard said at a November School Board meeting. “Part of our impetus for doing this work is to avoid ever […]
JMann: The “Mississippi Miracle” – the transformation of one of the country’s worst school systems into one of the best – was more of a marathon than a sprint, insiders say. Three people involved in education in Mississippi discussed how the state changed its policies and practices over time to dramatically improve results. “The story […]
Blaise Mesa: Wisconsin students have struggled to recover since the pandemic, leaving the state ranked toward the bottom for academic growth in math and reading, a new report says. The state ranks 33rd out of 38 states in math and 30th out of 35 states in reading, according to the Education Scorecard. The report, released annually, […]
Claire Cain Miller, Francesca Paris, Sarah Mervosh: The drops in U.S. scores go beyond the pandemic and cut across income, geographic and racial divides, new data shows. Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score […]
Natalie Eilbert: The period of academic prosperity, as Kahloon notes in his October article, was 2000 to 2007. That window corresponds with then-President George W. Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind law, which set higher standards for education and used test scores as the measuring stick for academic progress. It also captures the last generation […]
Dave Cieslewicz: Conservative Republican Sen. Steve Nass, points out correctly that this is still more dollars going into public schools with no requirement for better results. But Madison senator and gubernatorial candidate Kelda Roys also blasted the deal as irresponsible and she has been endorsed by the state’s largest teachers union. She wouldn’t have made […]
Erin Gretzinger But between the years where scores jumped, the state Department of Public Instruction adjusted testing benchmarks and lowered the threshold to score proficient. The number of students reading and writing proficiently statewide went from 39% to 51%. The department cautions the public against comparing test scores before and after the change because the results “cannot be […]
Jenny Peek: The gravity of Madison’s literacy crisis didn’t come into focus for Patterson until she became a literacy teacher leader with the Madison Metropolitan School District; before that she had been teaching fourth and fifth grade for 15 years. “You kind of know as a teacher but once you have an admin-type view you […]
Michael Ford In communities across the United States, citizens are paying a hidden tax. No, it is not some new fee or utility hike. It is the cost of local government dysfunction. Here in Wisconsin, historically known as a good-government state, news headlines contain stories of local city councils and school boards plagued by infighting, […]
Matt Barnum: Cecilia Lopez Alvarado was scrolling through Reddit one evening in her dorm room when she came across a thread about students at the University of California San Diego who struggled with basic math. A report had warned of an alarming decline in students’ math skills at UCSD, a highly selective university. It drew international headlines […]
Erin Gretzinger The Madison school district unveiled its proposal for a new cell phone policy at a School Board meeting Monday, recommending an all-day ban for students in grades K-8 while allowing more leniency for high school students to use their phones during passing time and lunch periods. At the meeting, some School Board members expressed trepidations […]
Tyler Cowen Summary: Often what is on the phone is in fact more interesting and sometimes more instructive as well, even if the students do worse in terms of the standards set by the school. Have online worlds become the last free places for children? Eli Stark-Elster: Major public intellectuals and politicians have responded by […]
Karen Vaites, Curriculum Insight Project: An important “Science of Reading Progress Report” just dropped from Fordham. It’s full of lessons on the state of reading instruction. I’ll start with the ones that people aren’t (yet) talking about. Curriculum advocates encourage the use of curricula which are “educative,” meaning they incorporate professional learning for teachers, and/or model good […]
Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.Michael J. Petrilli Formal reading instruction in the United States predates our nation’s founding. Published in the 1680s, The New England Primer—the nation’s first major schoolbook—included spelling and sounding-out exercises that modern science of reading advocates would readily identify as early phonics instruction. But it was the late nineteenth-century psychologist Edmund Huey who […]
Anna Stokke: People often ask me how I became involved in math education, and why I so often call out poor practice and insist on evidence. As with many of us, it’s personal. We sent our daughter to school expecting she’d be taught math. After all, that’s what schools do: they teach kids how to […]
Patrick Mcilheran: That Jill Underly was elected—and in an election structured to guarantee union control of the outcome—poses a big problem for oversight by the people’s legitimate representatives. Where was DPI Supt when she skipped a public hearing on April 15 on her department’s standards-setting conference in the Dells? This is the level of transparency […]
Asra Nomani, Preston Mizell, Michael DorganMay 1, 2026 Teachers plan May Day walkouts nationwide, igniting debate ‘Outnumbered’ discusses teachers planning May Day walkouts nationwide, sparking a debate about the impact on students. The panel debates the political motivations behind protests against President Donald Trump’s policies, and the implications for declining student academic performance in cities […]
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. Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability The taxpayer funded Madison […]
Erin Gretzinger: In Caire and his team’s view, One City and other charter schools are more accountable than traditional public schools given the specific academic goals and other stipulations in their charter contracts. Wittke, the Republican lawmaker, said One City’s lobbying wasn’t a factor in his support for funding demonstration charter schools. “I don’t care […]
Dave Cieslewicz: Shortly after those taxpayers voted to pony up a record $607 million in school spending increases, the district blew $100,000 on a new marketing campaign including a new MMSD logo — to add insult to injury that money was paid to an outstate consulting firm. Then the school board voted themselves a massive […]
Bloomberg: Most students in the US aren’t proficient in reading or math — but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their report cards. Four out of 5 parents say their children are getting B’s or higher. Test scores, meanwhile, have hit multiyear lows. According to one study, 60% of grades don’t match standardized assessments. […]
Erin Gretzinger: “I don’t know when, where or what age — but there is interest in the city, in this region, right now that we have to think is going to produce more children with the kind of growth that’s being projected,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said in an interview this year. The new projections from MGT, a […]
Will Flanders: In Madison, less than 40% of students can read proficiently using the most recent legitimate data. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the union would shut down schools for a day for politics given their history of supporting COVID shutdowns—doing immeasurable harm to a generation SCOOP: The Madison Metropolitan School District (@MMSDschools) in Wisconsin […]
David Blaska: We wanted Ray Mendez to run for school board this year but he has more sense than that. No entity in local government more needs a disrupter than the Metropolitan Madison Board of Education. We introduced the gentleman to Werkes readers in November 2025. Mr. Mendez picks up on a platform this on-line scribbler […]
Neetu Arnold In recent months, leaders in several cities and states have touted their schools’ sky-high graduation rates. Such figures usually justify celebration—but not when state exams and standardized test scores show weak results. Praising high graduation rates could mislead families about what their kids really know, setting them up for unpleasant surprises later in […]
Molly Beck: Guv race news: WEAC, the state’s largest teachers union, endorses Democratic state Sen. Kelda Roys for governor. —— A bit of history: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators ——— Fast Lane Literacy 1998! Money and school performance. A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.” 3888 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students […]
WILL: The Wisconsin Constitution grants the Legislature the authority to determine education policy and to effectuate school funding and charges the Superintendent of Public Instruction with the task of supervising public instruction, not the judicial branch. Moreover, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s Choice Programs 30 years ago. The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, […]
Karen Vaites: A recent study “compared trends before and after dyslexia laws were enacted across 47 states, ” and the findings were grim: “First, more than half of the states with these new laws showed no significant shift in identifying learning disabilities related to reading. Some states identified more students, some fewer, but there was no consistent […]