Frederick Hess:

In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, we see a coherent series of actions that point in the same direction. The problem with most school reform efforts is not the sheer number of changes but the cultural discordance—the whiplash, fad-chasing, and stopping-and-starting. So, when a literacy agenda involves a number of moving parts, it’s not a problem so long as they’re working in concert. It would be a mistake to imagine the lesson of Spinning Wheels is that inertia is good for schools. Rather, it’s that chaos is bad for them.

Brumley and I also got into “Let Teachers Teach,” a comprehensive agenda for school leaders and legislators that the Louisiana Department of Education released last year. I love this initiative. Devised in concert with a few dozen respected Louisiana teachers, the recommendations aim to make teaching more manageable. They call for limiting students’ cell phone use, placing ungovernable students at alternative sites, abolishing antiquated lesson-planning requirements, reducing the burdens of mandated teacher trainings, ensuring adequate time for preparation, and so forth. It’s overdue and the kind of thing that I’ve been (mostly fruitlessly) urging “reformers” to do for decades, both for the practical benefits and as a way to show respect for those doing the work.

It’s tough to capture just how dramatically “Let Teachers Teach” contrasts with the ethos that’s fueled so much reform during the past few decades. Heck, I can still recall pretty clearly the time (15 years ago) when the push for value-added teacher evaluation yielded half-baked algorithms and crappy placeholder measures for the 70 percent of teachers who didn’t teach reading or math in grades 4 through 8. I’ve seen plenty of advocates roll their eyes at teachers who dare to voice sensible concerns about student misconduct or raging student absenteeism, especially when those teachers are crosswise with the dictates of “restorative justice.” It’s laughable but sadly true that a reform focused on making it easier for professional educators to do their damn job qualifies as novel.

———-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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”

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 Halmos, Paul R. (Paul Richard),

A collection of math problems for all skill levels, from high school to professional, organized into 14 categories like matrices, probability, space, and puzzles, with hints and solutions.

Anna Stokke:

It is often desirable to explain why standard methods work using pictures and blocks but these concrete materials should not be used as actual strategies for working through arithmetic problems – our ancestors moved beyond such primitive techniques centuries ago.

These convoluted strategies take up so much time that children are still working on basic arithmetic at the end of their primary school years when they should be moving on to more advanced topics such as fraction arithmetic and algebra, like their counterparts in high-performing jurisdictions like Singapore. Some Canadian children are left hopelessly confused by the multiple, convoluted strategies and do not master basic arithmetic at all.

This leaves them with shattered confidence and unprepared for learning further mathematics.

Further to this, inquiry-based or discovery-based learning has swept North American schools over the last several years. As if multiple strategies weren’t confusing enough, teachers are encouraged to use open-ended problems that have several possible solutions as a primary instructional tool for teaching novice learners. For example,

“The answer to my question is 62. What might my question be?” or

“Create a sentence that uses the numbers 22 and 73 and the words share and almost.”

————

2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Derek Thompson:

The official baby boom—the period between the 1930s and 1960s when birth rates soared in the West—is so famous that its fame obscures its strangeness. Imagine being a journalist or demographer in 1925. For the previous 100 years, going back to the early 1800s, the fertility rate in the U.S. and practically every other rich country had steadily declined toward the replacement rate of 2.1.1 Nothing in the history of western family life or economics could have predicted what happened next. 

In the 1930s and 1940s, fertility in the U.S. surged suddenly by more than 70 percent. It happened in cities and in rural areas; among working women and non-working women; among college graduates and couples who didn’t finish high school; among white and nonwhite couples; in the U.S., Europe, and beyond. In Birth Quake, the Barnard economist Diane J. Macunovich called the baby boom “a totally unexpected, earth-shattering, and ground-breaking event experienced not just in the United States, but in virtually the entire Western industrialized world.”

New Statesman

English literature no longer makes the top ten of A-level subject choices. English departments at universities are regularly closing. Studies show dramatic drops in literacy and reading, particularly amongst teenagers. 

Today we’re asking: is English literature dying?
The New Statesman’s deputy editor Will Lloyd is joined by the New Statesman’s new culture editor Tanjil Rashid and columnist and critic James Marriott.

Ramsay Hodgson:

Mark Lehain, executive headteacher at Wootton Academy Trust, described the figures are “sad but not surprising”.

The former government adviser said: “The good news is that we know better than ever how to systematically support students to be their best, have clear expectations which we explicitly teach…that are calmly and consistently upheld.

“Things are tough right now, but I’m optimistic that we will do even better as a sector over time.”

The recently published data also shows that suspensions and exclusions reached record highs in England’s state schools in 2023-24. Since 2020-21, schools have been able to record multiple reasons for a single suspension or permanent exclusion.

The number of suspensions neared 1 million for the first time (954,952) in 2023-24, up 21 per cent on the previous year (786,961), while permanent exclusions crossed the 10,000 threshold for the first time (10,885), up 16.1 per cent on 2022-23.

Jesse Signal:

For example, we’ve already been through several iterations of the “diversity statement” controversy. In the University of California system and elsewhere, these required statements for applicants to faculty positions have obviously served as political litmus tests. This was a practice that was only recently discontinued, and it almost definitionally shut out a lot of conservatives — or honest ones, at least — from even being considered for UC faculty positions!

In other areas the bias works a little bit differently. To take a subject I’ve written and reported on a lot, for a while social psychology was obsessed with implicit (unconscious) bias and the IAT, a test that can supposedly detect it. Many careers were made and many research dollars won by folks who bought into the basic premises underpinning this area of research: Implicit bias is an important driver of policy outcomes, and it can be measured.

I’d consider both of these claims to still be unproven, but either way: They are obviously left-coded. If you have conservative or even moderate/nuanced views on racial discrepancies, you’re unlikely to buy into a theory requiring you to have liberal views on racial discrepancies. And if you won’t buy into that theory, that’ll make it harder to get hired into a social psychology faculty position, because at any given moment there are only a finite number of dominant ideas and only a small number of available job slots. Candidate A, who does graduate work on implicit bias and catches the eyes of one of the doyennes of the field, is going to have a much easier time than Candidate B, who works in a more obscure and/or less politically favored area.

Biggest human imaging study scans 100,000th person

Jim Reed

Scientists say they can study our bodies as we age in greater detail than ever before, thanks to more than a billion scans of UK volunteers.

The world’s biggest human imaging project says it has now hit its target of scanning the brains, hearts and other organs of 100,000 people – the culmination of an ambitious 11-year study.

“Researchers are already starting to use the imaging data, along with other data we have, to identify disease early and then target treatment at an earlier stage,” says Prof Naomi Allen, chief scientist at UK Biobank.

The data is made available at low cost to teams around the world to find new ways of preventing common health conditions from heart disease to cancer.

Naomi Best:

This Obama speechwriter’s elitism shines through despite his eventual realization that he can tolerate his @joerogan listening brother-in-law.

He concludes they can agree to disagree, (truly groundbreaking), but he clings to a pecking order based on credentials. This is the elitist MO: valuing opinions AND worth by letters after a name.

Paul Melman:

Representative republics are a perfect example. The most effective administrators and policymakers tend to be intellectually curious, well-versed in law and economics, good at taking feedback, at least somewhat good at thinking creatively, and morally upstanding. In principle, good looks, oratory eloquence, a charming personality, well-connectedness, and personal wealth are not particularly useful to creating and executing government policy. But the primary selection criterion for public office is the ability to win elections. Thus, that is the target, not being a good policymaker. And being charming is far more useful than being studious when it comes to attaining public authority. 

Hereditary monarchy is of course quite prone to this problem as well. You cannot make the selection criteria opaque, because that would cause constant succession crises. So, it has to be something transparent, such as a hierarchical list of heirs which determines who has legitimacy as a new ruler and who doesn’t. Even if the rules of succession are immutable, they can still be gamed, by assassination for example. Therefore, factors such as getting away with poisoning your elder siblings or sending your nephews to battle on suicide missions become crucial in determining who gets authority.

Lauren McGaughy:

But Bill Aleshire, a Texas-based attorney specializing in public records law, was appalled that the governor is claiming that months of emails between his office and one of the world’s richest people are all private.

“Right now, it appears they’ve charged you $244 for records they have no intention of giving you,” Aleshire said. “That is shocking.”

Aleshire said it’s not unusual for government agencies to tap the common-law privacy exception in an attempt to withhold records from the public. But he’s used to it being cited in cases that involve children, medical data or other highly personal information — not for emails between an elected official and a businessman.

“You’re boxing in the dark,” Aleshire said. “You can’t even see what the target is or what’s behind their claim.”

Ann Althouse summary:

How does he know he made every decision? We’re not liars if we simply doubt that he had the mental capacity to know what was going on. What sort of decision-making was it? Am I a liar if I presume he did nothing more than rubber-stamp whatever was recommended by the staff? In that light, the autopen is irrelevant. It was “a whole lot of people” who were given clemency, and that’s a reason to spare him the effort of wielding the pen, but it’s also a reason to wonder if he knew much or anything about what he was doing.

At least we can say that he takes ownership now of the decisions that were made. And yet the reasons to take ownership after the fact are completely different from the reasons to make the decision in the first place.

——

“Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons…Rather than ask Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version thru the autopen, which they saw as…routine”

datarepublican:

Billions of dollars are spent on government grants, charities, and other organizations every year. Have you ever wondered where the money is awarded or where it ends up?

We’re connecting the dots between government grants, charities, and drawing connections to expose where the money flows.

We’ve found some interesting connections, and we’ve made the data available for you to explore.

See what you can find, and if you find something interesting, please let me know on X!

– DataRepublican

———

First run of the new NGO tool from @twinforces and I was not disappointed by how it works. I was however in absolute shock what I found. (a thread)

We have long suspected of kickbacks, but this was eye opening to see kickback grants and money handlers.

This is the cash from just ONE ngo Save The Children, and shows 1) how many people touch the money along the way, and 2) a view of the kickback grants.

Brent Williams:

———-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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”

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?

Christopher Rufo

To that end, we have assembled a group of academics, intellectuals, and civic leaders who, today, are proud to unveil the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, which recapitulates the crisis of the universities and calls on Trump to advance six principles for reform: truth over ideology, institutional neutrality, color-blind equality, free speech, civil discourse, and administrative transparency.

Although some academics will balk at any kind of intervention, the reality is that American taxpayers subsidize the universities to the tune of more than $150 billion per year. In exchange, those institutions have a responsibility to follow the law and to uphold basic academic standards, beginning with the most important of all: an orientation toward truth.

These principles are good for universities, conducive to the public good, and consistent with existing law. The intention is to set a baseline of minimum standards that will rein in the worst instincts of the universities, empower administrators who want to prioritize academic excellence, and ensure that taxpayer funding is devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, rather than ideological crusades.

These principles are also broadly popular. As part of this initiative, the Manhattan Institute, where I am a senior fellow, conducted a public opinion survey on each of the reform principles and found that they all enjoy the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans.

The American people have been enormously generous to our universities. It is time for the universities to honor their end of the bargain.

Voters have grown distrustful of the universities and see these reforms, which they support by margins ranging from 3:1 to 9:1, as common sense. For example, 66 percent say that universities must provide a real forum for free speech, and 67 percent agree that schools should expel students who try to squash civil discussion by disrupting events, occupying buildings, and calling for violence. Voters overwhelmingly support students’ right to protest, but have little tolerance for activism that seeks to intimidate others.

Ron DeSantis:

For the third straight year CNBC has ranked Florida the #1 economy in the nation among all 50 states.

Florida has:
—lowest number of state workers per capita
—lowest debt per capita
—second-lowest spending per capita
—no income tax
—#1 public higher education system
—lowest in-state tuition
—universal school choice
—law-and-order policies
—#1 for new business formations

Joe Lonsdale

Top universities TRIPLED their administrators, nearly all radicals; Yale even has more of them than it has students now. If they deeply cared about research, they could go to DC and show that they’ve cut their administrative staff in half, got rid of all the political ones, and show what else to change at DoEd so they can cut 1000 more.

Elon Musk:

There is a vast mountain of left-wing bullshit on the Internet and then a much smaller mountain of right-wing bullshit. The right doesn’t write very much!

Unfortunately, there is not much in the middle.

We obviously see this with people in general, where there is a bimodal distribution of opinions that break along political party lines. People tend to think that their political side is all good and the other side is all bad.

Getting @Grok to be sensible and neutral politically when there is so much nonsense out there is a serious challenge, and one that most humans fail to pass.

Dalvin Brown and Oyin Adedoyin:

The federal government is retreating from its central role in financing higher education.

President Trump’s big tax-and-spending law includes new restrictions on how much students can borrow and how they repay. The provisions begin to reverse the government’s near takeover of the $1.7 trillion student lending market over the past six decades.

As a result, families are reassessing the costs and risks of college. Many are likely to turn to private lenders, which typically charge higher interest rates and require creditworthy cosigners. Those lenders recently accounted for some 8% of outstanding loans, according to data from Enterval Analytics.

In particular, as many as half of graduate-student borrowers may take private loans to cover funding gaps, according to Jordan Matsudaira, director of the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research Center at American University, and former chief economist at the Education Department.

Republican lawmakers say they want to reduce taxpayer risk from the ballooning federal student-loan portfolio while forcing colleges to curb their prices.

Stephen Wolfram:

Wolfram Research, led by Founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram, is one of the world’s most respected computer, web and cloud software companies—as well as a powerhouse of scientific and technical innovation. As a pioneer in computation and computational knowledge, we have pursued a long-term vision to develop the science, technology and tools to make computation an ever-more-potent force in today’s and tomorrow’s world.

Wolfram Language, the only full-scale computational language, offers high-level representation for all computational ideas for people and AIs. With Wolfram, you can connect LLMs and other AI systems to powerful, accurate and current computation and knowledge.

WHEN AND WHERE IS THE WOLFRAM SUMMER RESEARCH PROGRAM HELD?

The program takes place at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. All students must arrive on campus on June 25, 2025, between 1pm and 5pm, and students must leave from campus on July 12, 2025, between 8am and 12pm.

The pre-program workshop will be held virtually June 7–8, 2025.

HOW MUCH DOES THE PROGRAM COST, AND WHAT IS THE CANCELLATION POLICY?

The cost of the program is $4500, including a $500 non-refundable deposit that is due on April 15 for Early Decision candidates and May 1 for Regular Decision candidates. The cost of the program includes access to Wolfram technologies for a full year and full room and board for the duration of the main program. The full registration fee is due May 1.

The pre-program workshop has no associated tuition fee.

Bill DeBaun:

NCAN estimates the class of 2025’s FAFSA completion rate was 53.9%, compared to about 47% for the class of 2024 by about June 30 last year. That 53.9% is not only close to the class of 2023’s (the last cycle to open October 1) but also to the pre-pandemic classes of 2017-2019.* The class of 2025 also recorded the highest number of FAFSA completions by about June 30 that NCAN has on record by about 60,000 students.

The findings will come as a relief to practitioners and policymakers across the country, following an extremely difficult 2024-25 FAFSA cycle which saw FAFSAs decline sharply last year. These findings also reflect a smoother experience for students and families and are also a likely signal of continued strong demand for higher education nationally. 

Increasing FAFSA completions and expanding access to financial aid was, of course, the intention of FAFSA simplification. After a difficult 2024-25 cycle, the FAFSA process appears back on-track. Many students and families are reporting a smoother FAFSA completion experience. It’s a tremendous achievement that has been accomplished by a concerted effort from the field, including and especially NCAN members. Our collective nationwide goal for the class of 2026 should be to achieve an all-time high in FAFSA completion and then to push even further from there.

Beth Wallis:

The assessment will test educators’ knowledge on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism and the “fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.”

“As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safe guarded [sic] from radical leftist ideology that California and New York have fostered,” Walters said in an email to StateImpact. “Teacher’s [sic] who move from these states will not be receiving a teaching certificate unless they pass our new assessment.”

Though the assessment is still in development, Walters says it will be implemented before the start of the school year. That’s despite most schools already having staff hired for next year, and school starting next month.

In a news release, Walters said Oklahoma is “raising a generation of patriots, not activists.”

The announcement comes days after another mandate given to schools the month before fall classes begin. On Monday, Walters announced districts must find funds within their own budgets to provide school meals for all students. Since the announcement, lawmakers have questioned whether Walters has the authority to make that decision.

Alex Tabarrok Summary

I’m less interested in blame than in the useful reminder that not all politics is American politics. Vaccination rates have dipped worldwide and not in response to U.S. politics or RFK Jr. In fact, despite RFK Jr. the U.S. is doing better than some of its North American and European peers. Outbreaks here may be triggered by cross-border exposure, not failures in U.S. public health alone. Not all politics is American—and not all American outcomes are made in America.

Matt Bury:

Despite decades of educational research, evidence-based practices remain marginalised in teacher training, curriculum design, & classroom implementation. Instead, unproven fads continue to dominate. This article argues that education’s failure to mature into a profession grounded in empirical research (unlike medicine, accounting, or engineering) is the root cause. We examine ideological resistance, weak research standards, & structural failures in English Language Teaching (ELT) as a case study. Finally, we propose a pathway toward a more evidence-informed educational profession.

open courseware:

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry,

Matthew Barnett:

However, these proposed fixes fail to address a deeper and more fundamental issue: adding such patches to the LVT fundamentally undermines its ability to function as a substantial source of tax revenue.

Even in its simplest “naive” form, the LVT has a narrow tax base. The reality is that the vast majority of global wealth is created through human labor and innovation, not through the inherent value of natural or undeveloped land. If this sounds counterintuitive to you, perhaps imagine being transported to Earth millions of years ago, before humans evolved. Being the only human on Earth, you’d “own” all the natural resources on the planet, but you’d be unable to access almost any of the value tied up in those resources, because unlocking that value requires human labor and tools that haven’t been invented yet.

Sabine Martin

As of the beginning of Wednesday, the division had approximately 100 full-time employees, John Lucas, UW-Madison spokesperson, said. Lucas said UW-Madison sent the employees who were laid off a notice Wednesday.

The restructuring of the diversity division is one of several recommendations a working group consisting of administrators identified over the past year, Mnookin said. She said she charged the working group with completing a review of how UW-Madison is supporting its undergraduate students.

The changes to the diversity division come after the UW Board of Regents in 2023 reached an agreement with Republican lawmakers to freeze hiring for diversity, equity and inclusion positions for three years and restructure related roles in exchange for receiving millions of dollars in state aid.

Sabine Martin:

Tuition for most undergraduate students at the Universities of Wisconsin will increase this fall.

The UW Board of Regents at a meeting Thursday approved raising in-state undergraduate tuition at the UW system’s 13 public universities by at least 4%. All universities also opted into an additional 1% tuition increase except UW-Green Bay.

The tuition change is the third consecutive increase students will see after a 10-year-long freeze that ended in 2023. The Regents voted for a 3.75% tuition increase last year for the 2024-25 school year and a 5% raise the year prior.

Beckie Supiano:

By all appearances, students in the honors program at the University of Iowa should make a seamless adjustment to their college courses. These students, who applied and were selected by the program in a holistic process, have long been on the academic fast track. Many came in with college credits, often from Advanced Placement.

Related: Dual Enrollment across Wisconsin (very little in the taxpayer funded Madison K-12 system…)

Cristina Rendon

A basketball camp by Warriors guard Gary Payton II is providing skills for children who love the game, while also serving a bigger purpose.

The GPII Foundation is hosting its third annual basketball summer camp at Oakland Hills Campus, formerly known as Holy Names University. On Tuesday morning, roughly 130 children gathered for the clinic to work on skills and rotations, and support children with dyslexia.

“Summer morning at 9 o’clock, you got to have a love for the game to be here,” Payton said. “I’m glad that they have that passion in them for basketball, just like I do.”

The camp is made possible by the GPII Foundation. It was established in 2021 and raises dyslexia awareness and offers support. The non-profit is run by his mother, Monique Payton, and his sister, Raquel Payton-Childs.

Deborah Fallows:

It’s more than just talk. Many of the older students told us about the college level courses they had taken at WCPA as part of the school’s Pathways program, and how they appreciated the different style of teaching and demands of coursework. Professors from nearby Bakersfield College teach Pathway classes at WCPA; 100% of students take some of their courses, and 50% earn enough credits for an Associates degree by the time they graduate. This is a huge jumpstart in time and money toward a BA, which means a lot to large numbers of students and their families.

One by one, the older students walked-and-talked with us as we toured the campus. Here are some of the highlights we saw and heard about:

Soldiers of Change: The school sponsors a shark-tank like program for projects addressing social change. The students organize themselves into small groups, survey the other students for ideas, collect topics, and make their pitches. Judges listen, award winners, and approve budgets. A recent winner used food (always a hit). Their project was to present new cuisines as intros to new cultures, in the school cafeteria. One boy raved about Indian food, and his first-ever bites.

It’s more than just talk. Many of the older students told us about the college level courses they had taken at WCPA as part of the school’s Pathways program, and how they appreciated the different style of teaching and demands of coursework. Professors from nearby Bakersfield College teach Pathway classes at WCPA; 100% of students take some of their courses, and 50% earn enough credits for an Associates degree by the time they graduate. This is a huge jumpstart in time and money toward a BA, which means a lot to large numbers of students and their families.

One by one, the older students walked-and-talked with us as we toured the campus. Here are some of the highlights we saw and heard about:

Soldiers of Change: The school sponsors a shark-tank like program for projects addressing social change. The students organize themselves into small groups, survey the other students for ideas, collect topics, and make their pitches. Judges listen, award winners, and approve budgets. A recent winner used food (always a hit). Their project was to present new cuisines as intros to new cultures, in the school cafeteria. One boy raved about Indian food, and his first-ever bites.

…….

Learning Farm and Harvest Hall: At the school’s on-site garden, called the Learning Farm, students learn to grow and harvest crops. The results show up frequently in the school cafeteria, to the delight of the young farmers. One of our guides reported an overheard conversation,  “Hey, those are my tomatoes you’re eating. I’ve been growing those and now they’re on your flatbread! Check out my tomatoes!”

Beginning in 7^th grade, in the classrooms and kitchen, students learn how to build and cook meals, and even take home ideas to their families. On any given day, high schoolers may be prepping the food, serving the meals, doing the checkout. Besides imparting these practical, lifelong skills, there is a higher purpose for the emphasis on nutritious food. Here in the Central Valley, which provides about 25 % of America’s food supply, WCPA is developing and nurturing a sophisticated sense of the ecosystem of agriculture, nutrition, and business. But also, here in Kern County, home to both Lost Hills and Delano, the rate of obesity is 49% and of diabetes, nearly 9%. So, WCPAs are starting early to build good foundations and break bad cycles. The adults emphasized to us that they’re “stamping” the kids with an understanding and experience in managing every aspect of this place-based asset of the food culture that surrounds them. “That’s a piece that we see as vital.”

———

more.

———

Notes and links on dual enrollment.

Madison High Schools & University of Wisconsin-Madison Enrollment: A Recent History

Geiger summary:

Jamie Dimon on Democrats today:

“I have a lot of friends who are Democrats today, and they’re idiots. I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works. Almost every single policy they rolled out has failed.”

——-

More and more people are realizing that the old Dem/Rep parties are both dead…

Moving forward it’s:
Nationalism vs. Communism
Stephen Miller vs. Zohran Mamdani

——

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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”

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?

Anna Hansen:

Children under 16 years old no longer will be allowed at Goodman pool without a parent or adult guardian under new rules implemented by the city.

The previous age of children who require an adult chaperone was 10, but Madison Parks officials voted Wednesday night to raise that to 15 years old. The new rule takes effect Thursday, July 17.

The change was in response to a recent fight involving a large group of kids at the South Side facility, the city’s only public swimming pool.

————

Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin:

Chris Rickert:

The Madison School District said Thursday that it is working with the man it hired to be the new principal at Lori Mann Carey Elementary School to make sure he gets the state educator’s license he needs to take the job.

The district on Tuesday announced the appointment of longtime educator and activist Percy Brown Jr. as the new principal at the South Side school, but it wasn’t clear from the Department of Public Instruction’s online licensing database that he has the license that under state law he needs to be a principal at a public school in Wisconsin.

The database shows a Percy L. Brown has had teacher and administrator licenses in the past, but none of them were current. Instead, it shows that teacher and administrator licenses applied for in June 2019 and June 2020, respectively, were currently invalid because background checks had not been completed.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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”

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?

Open Letter:

Current GenAI technologies represent unacceptable legal, ethical and environmental harms, including exploitative labour, piracy of countless creators’ and artists’ work, harmful biases, mass production of misinformation, and reversal of the global emissions reduction trajectory.

GenAI is a threat to student learning and wellbeing. There is insufficient evidence for student use of GenAI to support genuine learning gains, though there is a massive marketing push to position these products as essential to students’ future livelihoods. Young people using anthropomorphised chatbots are vulnerable to psychological and emotional addiction. GenAI “relationships” continue to trigger mental health crises, human relationship breakdowns, and in the worst cases, attempted and completed suicides.

Further, GenAI adoption in industry is overwhelmingly aimed at automating and replacing human effort, often with the expectation that future “AGI” will render human intellectual and creative labor obsolete. This is a narrative we will not participate in.

Tyler Cowen:

Why are so many young people today turning to socialism?

By socialism I mean an economic system where the government nationalizes the means of production—if not in all industries, at least in some critical ones. But as we shall see, many of those attracted to socialism these days may be more attached to negative vibes about the status quo than any particular economic system.

This is most evident in the recent New York City electoral results of Zohran Mamdani, who did very well in the Democratic primary for mayor and is polling well ahead of sitting mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo. Among other things, Mamdani has called forgovernment-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free buses.

Alex Tabarrok:

America’s response to rising scientific competition from China—symbolized by DeepSeek’s R1 matching OpenAI’s o1—has been very different. The DeepSeek Moment has been met not with resolve and competition but with anxiety and retreat.

Trump has proposed slashing the NIH budget by nearly 40% and NSF by 56%. The universities have been attacked, creating chaos for scientific funding. International collaboration is being strangled by red tape. Foreign scientists are leaving or staying away. Tariffs have hit highs not seen since the Great Depression and the US has moved away from the international order.

Some of this is new and some of it is an acceleration of already existing trends. In Launching the Innovation Renaissance, for example, I said that by the Federal budget numbers, America is a warfare-welfare state not an innovation state. However, to be fair, there are some bright spots. Market‑driven research might partially offset public cuts. Big‑tech R&D now exceeds $200 billion annually—more than the entire federal government spending on R&D. Not everything we did post-Sputnik was wise nor is everything we are doing today foolish.

Nevertheless, the contrast is stark: Sputnik spurred investment and ambition. America doubled down. DeepSeek has sparked defensiveness and retreat. We appear to be folding. 

Question of the hour. Why has America responded so differently to similar challenges? Can understanding that pivot help to reverse it? Show your work.

His Hsu:

But for English departments, and for college writing in general, the arrival of A.I. has been more vexed. Why bother teaching writing now? The future of the midterm essay may be a quaint worry compared with larger questions about the ramifications of artificial intelligence, such as its effect on the environment, or the automation of jobs. And yet has there ever been a time in human history when writing was so important to the average person? E-mails, texts, social-media posts, angry missives in comments sections, customer-service chats—let alone one’s actual work. The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing.” It’s possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.

Benjamin Rothove:

The University of Wisconsin–Madison announced that its DEI office will “sunset as a freestanding division” in an email to its students and employees on Wednesday. Unfortunately, DEI is dead in name only.

While UW–Madison’s Division of Diversity, Equity, and Educational Achievement (DDEEA) is no longer independent, most of its operations are merely being shifted to other places. Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said its responsibilities and personnel would be divided between the Division for Teaching and Learning, the human-resources department, and the data collection office.

According to the Daily Cardinal, one of UW–Madison’s student newspapers, fewer than ten of the approximately 100 DDEEA employees …

Jovan Tripkovic

Eliminating these degree programs and rebranding them as minors does little to address the broader ideological imbalance on campus. Other programs—Political Science and Anthropology, to name two—also reflect a clear ideological bias.

Just as important are underlying structural problems in the university’s broader curriculum. The University of Wyoming offers dozens of Ph.D. programs, including in fields such as entomology, anthropology, and English. Many of these programs are not nationally competitive, offering modest stipends and limited job placement for graduates. They are largely a legacy of the university’s push to achieve R1 research status. It wouldn’t be surprising if many of them are soon labeled low-producing.

Without deeper, structural reforms, headlines about canceled degree programs will likely become more common.

Patrick McDonald:

The Graduate School of Education’s DEI shutdown is part of a broader trend at Harvard. Campus Reform has reported that the university has taken steps away from DEI during the Trump administration.

Earlier this year, for instance, Harvard Medical School renamed its DEI office to the Office for Culture and Community Engagement amid growing federal pressure. 

Harvard has faced significant consequences over its support for DEI, including a freeze in $2 billion of federal funding.

“Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” departments within the Trump administration stated in their April letter announcing the funding pause. “But we appreciate your expression of commitment to repairing those failures and welcome your collaboration in restoring the University to its promise.”

Jay Greene:

Just this week, Barnard University settled a lawsuit stemming from widespread problems with antisemitism on campus. In that settlement, it reaffirmed that it would not use its endowment for political purposes, including sanctioning Israel. And last week, the University of Pennsylvania reached an agreement with the Trump administration to cease having men compete in women’s sports or to be in women’s locker rooms.

There are even reports that both Harvard and Columbia are close to reaching agreements with the Trump administration to remediate their civil rights violations and to unfreeze federal funds.

Soon, Princeton will find itself standing alone in its pursuit of an increasingly politicized university. If it continues to lose public subsidy and doesn’t eventually reverse course, it may find itself reduced to nothing more than a finishing school for wealthy young radicals. Under Eisgruber, it already looks a lot like that.

Alana Goodman:

Philadelphia’s public school system has become an “absolute cesspool” of anti-Semitism and anti-American hatred, according to local parents, who say Gov. Josh Shapiro (D.) has “completely ignored” their pleas for help.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Philadelphia school officials have publicly defended terrorism, called for the release of convicted cop killers, claimed Israel is an “apartheid theocracy,” and denounced the United States as a “criminal Amerikan empire.” The Philadelphia school district settled a federal discrimination case with the Department of Education last year after students allegedly taunted their Jewish classmates with Nazi salutes, swastika graffiti on doors, and threats to “kill the Jews.”

Frustrated parents told the Washington Free Beaconthat they have tried to raise these issues with the governor but that his staff has done nothing in response and eventually stopped taking meetings with them.

One mother of two Philadelphia public school students told the Free Beacon that she and other concerned parents met with Shapiro staffers several times during 2023 and 2024, including with Carrie Rowe, the current head of Pennsylvania’s Department of Education.

“We have met with people in his office, seven or eight of them on a few occasions, and nothing has happened,” the mother said. “[The governor’s office] heard firsthand the horrors that are going on, and what we’ve been dealing with, and nothing has happened to address or fix it.”

The Wisconsin Policy Forums’ recent brief look at Dual Enrollment (taking courses at a 2 or 4 year higher education institution while still enrolled in a high school) prompted me to update University of Wisconsin-Madison enrollment data by high school. The effort also reminded me of Janet Mertz’s tireless effort years ago on behalf of local high school students whose dual enrollment opportunities were largely aborted.

Most of the data for these charts is available at the UW-Madison Registrar’s web presence. The earlier years I somehow captured in an old spreadsheet.

UW-Madison enrollment has grown substantially in recent years, now around 50,000 students. The reasons for that are best left to another post, or better yet, others with a deeper understanding of higher ed finance & staffing choices.

Madison area high schools:

Theo Scheer:

A 4/4 load is already common for many faculty members at teaching-focused institutions, such as regional public colleges. So is a 2/2 load at research institutions.

But Michael DeCesare, a senior program officer at the national American Association of University Professors, said state-mandated minimum course loads are at odds with AAUP standards, which recommend that faculty “participate fully in the determination of workload policy.”

Teaching requirements are best decided by individual colleges and departments, as they are in the UW system currently, since expectations vary widely among different types of staff, said Christa Olson, an English professor and chair of the English department at UW-Madison.

The budget’s “one-size-fits-all approach” applies equally to professors who focus on teaching as it does to employees in its extension program, who primarily do community outreach, Olson said.

……

While those mandates were not adopted, university officials tried to push back by improving transparency about how much faculty members work. Now the UW system publishes a database of thousands of instructors that details how many credit hours they teach, broken up by group and individual instruction.

Other state legislatures have previously discussed increasing faculty workloads, but the proposals haven’t come to fruition.

Wisconsin Policy Forum

The number of Wisconsin high school students who participate in dual enrollment programs continued its decade-long growth in the 2023-24 academic year, hitting a new record. A combined 78,703 students participated in the dual enrollment programs offered by the University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin Technical College systems, through which they could earn credit at higher education institutions as well as their high schools. This represents more than a quarter (26.6%) of the state’s secondary students across public, private, and home schools, and it is a 3.4% increase over the previous year (see Figure 1).

The Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) offers the largest dual enrollment program in the state, enrolling more than four times as many students as the one operated through the University of Wisconsin System (UW). From 2022-23 to 2023-24 (referred to in this brief as 2023 and 2024), however, the UW program grew at a faster rate – by 12.0% to 15,588 students – than the WTCS program, which increased by 1.5% to 63,115 students. Both systems offer an array of programs to meet the various needs of high school students, which sometimes results in similar, parallel programs in each system. In this analysis, individuals who took classes in both systems are counted twice but are unduplicated if they participated in multiple programs within one system.

In our previous report on dual enrollment, we examined participation in the programs using data provided by the state’s two public college systems. Since then, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has added postsecondary preparation programs to its annual report cards for high schools. These programs, which include dual enrollment and Advanced Placement (AP), equip students for higher education or the workforce. With this new information, we are now able to examine participation levels by high school in dual enrollment and other postsecondary opportunities.

…….

The 472 public high schools that reported providing dual enrollment opportunities in 2023 enrolled 259,286 students, and 68,151 of them (26.3%) took advantage of those opportunities.

Participation rates varied across these schools, however. Students from urban schools had the lowest rate of dual enrollment participation at 19.7%, while those in suburbs, towns, and rural communities had participation rates of 28.3%, 30.1%, and 27.6%, respectively — all higher than the state average.

Students from schools with high rates of poverty were less likely to participate in dual enrollment programs. Only 4.3% of students from schools in which more than 75% of the students identified as economically disadvantaged took a dual enrollment course. On the other extreme, schools where less than 25% of students are from economically disadvantaged families reported a dual enrollment rate of 30.5%.

———

Related: A long running issue in the taxpayer funded Madison School District: Credit not for non MMSD Courses

Jared Barton and Cortney Rodet:

The authors measure economic literacy among a representative sample of U.S. residents, explore demographic correlates with the measure, and examine how respondents’ policy views correlate with it. They then analyze policy view differences among Republicans and Democrats and among economists and non-economists. They find significant differences in economic literacy by sex, race/ethnicity, and education, but little evidence that respondents’ policy views relate to their level of economic literacy. Examining heterogeneity by political party, they find that estimated fully economically literate policy views (i.e., predicted views as if respondents scored perfectly on the authors’ economic literacy assessment) for Democrats and Republicans are farther apart than respondents’ original views. Greater economic literacy among general survey respondents also does not result in thinking like an economist on policy.

——-

more.

“in the sight of the unwise”

Sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Patronage is thus inevitable, and it does come with costs. At its worst, patrons unthinkingly select their friends and relations, or their political allies, selected for loyalty and allegiance, demonstrated in some very different domain to that of the role in question. But it can also come with benefits. Confronted with our five promising lieutenants, the decision-maker at the Admiralty might recall that one of them is that nephew of his who, as a lad, never backed down from scraps and often won fights against much bigger boys. This sort of private but very useful information can be easily factored into decisions in a world where patronage is allowed to operate in a fairly unfettered manner. And indeed evidence suggests that naval officers with powerful friends at the Admiralty performed substantially better in battle, indicating that the patrons – especially in wartime – were judiciously using their power to select on important but low-visibility criteria.

Patronage can be viewed, therefore, as a mechanism to both improve average outcomes, but also increase the variance: on the whole things are better, and you get more top performers, but you also get more disasters. Clearly a mechanism will be needed to remove the underperformers. The Royal Navy, for instance, court-martialled every single post-captain who lost a ship. Most were of course exonerated, but for those who were judged not to have fought well enough, the penalties were severe: a permanent ban from naval command in many cases, death in a few. 

Admiral John Bnyg was one of the unlucky ones. Judged to have not fought aggressively enough in the Battle of Minorca (1756) he was convicted to death under the Articles of War, although it was widely expected that George II would commute the sentence. The King declined and Byng was duly executed. Byng had lost no ships and was in many ways a victim of blunders at the Admiralty he was not responsible for. Nonetheless, the Articles of War constituted a strict incentive structure, applying to all ranks equally, that aimed to cajole naval officers to fight to the death rather than withdraw from battle (something that was and is much easier to do at sea than on land).

Anna Stokke:

I’ve been reviewing Canadian math curricula (standards) this week. Here’s a BC grade 5 outcome titled “multiplication & division facts to 100.” As if this all weren’t bad enough, we have “memorization of facts is not intended at this level.” Grade 5! Wish I could unsee this.

——

2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Chris Rickert:

Gothard used a press conference Wednesday to call on state and federal legislators to provide a bigger chunk of the money local districts need to educate students — or local property taxpayers will be left shouldering even more of the cost of public education. 

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results.

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”

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?

Natasha Singer:

But some researchers have warned that generative A.I. tools are so new in schools that there is little evidence of concrete educational benefit — and significant concern about risk.

Chatbots can produce plausible-sounding misinformation, which could mislead students. A recent study by law school professors found that three popular A.I. tools made “significant” errors summarizing a law casebook and posed an “unacceptable risk of harm” to learning.

Outsourcing tasks like research and writing to A.I. chatbots may also hinder critical thinking, a recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found.

“I do think that there is a risk,” said Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, noting that he frequently cited the critical thinking study to employees. He added that more rigorous academic research on the effects of generative A.I. was needed. “The lesson of social media is don’t dismiss problems or concerns.”

Soubhik Barari, Ph.D., Eric Newsom, M.S.Ed., Ji Eun Park, Ph.D. and Susan M Paddock, Ph.D.

Higher education has long been viewed as a stepping-stone for individuals to achieve professional and personal goals. To demystify the options within the higher education landscape, prospective students and their families often turn to college rankings. This is especially true in an era of increasingly expensive college costs (Franke, 2017). Several major college rankings providers have recently revised their methodology to better reflect these cost concerns, along with making other updates. While this effort may be laudable, any proposal for substantive changes in rankings raises the question of the underlying qualities encapsulated by the rankings and whether the ascribed methodology can accurately capture those qualities.

Given these potential issues, we conducted a methodological review of five prominent college rankings systems: U.S. News & World Report (USNWR), Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Forbes’ Top College list (Forbes), The Times Higher Education World University Ranking (THE), and the QS World University Ranking (QS).

Our overarching approach is to assess the construct validity of college rankings. Construct validity is a crucial property in the development of numerical scales, such as rankings, that aim to quantitatively describe otherwise abstract qualities of social entities such as ‘market value’ or ‘educational quality.’ Our assessment includes a review of conceptual, data, and methodological factors within this framework that are central to developing a methodologically sound ranking of colleges, drawing examples from our five illustrative ranking systems. Here, we summarize five key issues spanning the conceptual, data, and methodological aspects of construct validity along with an initial recommendation to address each (expanded further in Section 5)

Sabine Martin:

In-state undergraduate students at the Universities of Wisconsin would pay hundreds more in tuition in the 2025-26 academic year under a proposal President Jay Rothman announced Tuesday.

The plan to raise tuition by up to 5% for in-state undergraduate students would be the third consecutive increase since 2023 after the end of a 10-year freeze.

Tuition would increase by 4% in the UW system under the proposal, plus an optional 1% that all universities except UW-Green Bay plan to adopt.

At UW-Madison, tuition and fees for 2025-26 would be $12,166.

——-

If approved, this would be the third year in a row the UW system will increase tuition after a 10-year freeze.

Emily Sturge:

The law will cap how much graduate students and parents can borrow starting July 2026. 

Graduate students will be capped at $20,500 per year, with a lifetime maximum of $100,000. This falls below the total cost of a master’s degree, which typically ranges from $44,640 to $71,140, according to the Education Data Initiative.

Professional students in law and medical programs may borrow up to $50,000 per year, capped at $200,000 total. Earning a law degree in the U.S. costs an average of $206,000, while medical school students face a higher total average of approximately $230,000, according to Education Data Initiative.

Parents who borrow for their children’s education are limited to $20,000 per year with a $65,000 lifetime maximum using the Parent PLUS loan program.

Policy experts predict that these changes will shift borrowers toward private lenders.

“We’re going to see huge growth of the private student-loan market as a result of this bill,” said Bryce McKibben, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University, in an interview with MarketWatch. 

Ann Althouse summary:

This gets my tag “MSM reports what’s in social media.”

Here‘s the viral video the article is about. It’s exactly the video you’d expect from a 24-year-old barre instructor and fitness influencer who studied political science and communications. It’s what I’d have said at age 24.

By the way, I just watched a movie made by a 24-year-old woman, and I got the feeling it was exactly the kind of story I thought up when I was that age. Not saying I could have made the movie that topped the Sight & Sound “Greatest Films of All Time,” just saying I remember these young-woman thoughts. 

Lauren Greuel and Cory Brewer:

It’s not every day that the liberal-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously sides with the Republican-run Legislature. But that’s what happened recently in a dispute over how $50 million of early literacy funds are distributed to Wisconsin schools.

In its ruling, the court rejected false narratives pushed by the governor and his allies at the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) that these funds were somehow wrongfully withheld by the Legislature. They weren’t, the court agreed, and now kids will get access to badly needed funds for literacy.

In 2023, the Legislature passed a bipartisan package of bills aimed at addressing the state’s literacy crisis. With only 1 in 3 students scoring at proficiency in reading in 2022, lawmakers agreed something had to chang

———

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”

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?

Constance Grady:

Every month or so, for the past few years, a new dire story has warned of how American children, from elementary school to college age, can nolonger read. And every time I read one of these stories, I find myself conflicted.

On the one hand, I am aware that every generation complains that the kids who come next are doing everything wrong and have gotten stupider and less respectful. I fear falling into this trap myself, becoming an old man yelling at cloud. 

On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though?

I don’t think I’m alone in this confusion. Similar responses emerge almost every time a new piece arrives with tales of elite college students who can’t get through Pride and Prejudice or another report reveals just how far reading scores have plunged among America’s schoolchildren. “Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively,” Slate reported bleakly in 2024. Within days, a teacher’s blog offered a rebuttal, arguing that there has never been an era where adults were impressed by kids’ reading habits: “Find a news article published since the 1940s that shows that students not only read proficiently but eagerly and a lot. I’ll wait.”

————

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”

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?

Jim Hewitt & Nidhi Sachdeva:

We think he is. Education, as it currently stands, is clearly not a science-based profession. When teachers face a tough classroom problem, they rarely turn to research for answers. More often, they rely on instincts, experience, or strategies picked up from colleagues. That’s not to say these things don’t have value—they absolutely do. But it’s striking how seldom research is consulted.

Research also plays a surprisingly small role in inservice training. More often than not, professional development promotes ideas that are familiar, popular, or easy to present, but not necessarily ones that are science-based. Teachers who participate in these training sessions might assume that the instructional materials have been rigorously vetted. In reality, that’s unlikely. Countless hours of professional development have been spent — and are still spent — on edu-fads like learning styles and multiple intelligences, in spite of decades of research that have failed to show any benefits for student learning.

Experienced teachers have told us stories of their schools committing to a new educational initiative one year, only to see it quietly abandoned the following year. This can cause teachers to become skeptical or even cynical about new initiatives. When the latest “big idea” is rolled out with great fanfare but disappears without clear results, teachers begin to see these efforts as trends rather than meaningful improvements. Over time, this pattern erodes trust in leadership and reduces teacher engagement with future professional development. Instead of asking, “How can I apply this to improve student learning?”, teachers may start to wonder, “How long until this one fades away too?” 

Blue Falcon HD:

Here, the reject field contains exact phrases which will result in a guardrail violation. The removefield contains phrases that will be removed from the output, while the replace field contains phrases that will be replaced with other phrases. The regexReject, regexRemove, and regexReplace fields contain regular expressions that will be used to match and filter content in a similar manner.

Ava Menkes:

One City Schools, the independent charter school on Madison’s south side, plans to hold a community rally Thursday at The Sylvee to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

Over the last decade, One City has raised $50 million to help serve underprivileged students in the area through innovative and unique ways, according to founder and CEO Kaleem Caire.

Caire said One City’s student demographics are distinct from other public schools in Madison. About 92% of its students are people of color, 70% come from poverty and 20% have special needs.

One City is also the only expeditionary learning (EL) school in Dane County and one of five in Wisconsin. An EL school is known for having strong foundations in literary and character development, Caire said.

“The academic results that our kids have generated recently have been phenomenal,” Caire said. “No school in Dane County has seen the marked increase in achievement among Black and Latino students that we’ve seen at One City.”

———

Notes and links on One City Schools.

A majority of taxpayer funded Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school.

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”

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?

Robert Colvile:

A prime minister may now need not just a bulging folder of pre-cooked policies, but something tantamount to an invasion plan to transform the state

Indeed, when you talk to people on the Labour side, what is surprising is not just how scathing they are about their own party’s performance — even accounting for the less-than-ideal situation inherited from the Tories — but how gloomy they are about turning things round. Even before the welfare shambles, I’d been told more than once that Labour’s early mistakes had already been fatal, whether that be slashing the winter fuel allowance, the lack of a convincing pre-election narrative (or pre-election honesty about tax rises) or Sue Gray’s complete failure, as Starmer’s chief of staff, to plan for power.

As a result, a new consensus has taken hold in Westminster: that, to paraphrase the military, proper planning prevents pathetic performance. The secret to successful government, everyone now agrees, is to do mountains of work in opposition, in precisely the way that Starmer’s team didn’t. Just look at Trump 2 v Trump 1. Or Keith Joseph and the other revolutionaries that surrounded Margaret Thatcher, whose “hard work and good thinking” before 1979 was cited admiringly last week by Nigel Farage. Or Gordon Brown as chancellor, delivering Bank of England independence on day one. Or David Cameron and his education and welfare reforms.

For those of us who run think tanks — in my case, the one where Thatcher and Joseph did that very thinking — this is obviously welcome news. Coming up with ideas outside government is the literal definition of what we do.

——

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”

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?

Corey DeAngelis summary:

The nation’s largest teachers union adopted a business item “to defend against Trump’s embrace of fascism by using the term facism [sic] in NEA materials correctly characterize Donald Trump’s program and actions.”

Alex Tabbarok:

The employer contribution strikes me as important. Suppose that in addition to the initial $1000 government payment that on average $1000 is added per year for 18 years (by a combination of parent and parent employer contributions). Note that this is below the maximum allowed annual contribution of $5000. At a historically reasonable 7% rate of return these accounts will be worth ~36k at age 18, $58k at age 25 and $875k at age 65 subject to uncertainty of course as indicated below.

Colin Gorrie:

Our fictional monk Godwin lived in the wake of the single most significant event in the history of the English language: the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Before the Conquest, English — albeit an old form of English — was the language of power and government in England. After the Conquest, French took its place for centuries.

It was but a temporary replacement: English eventually re-established itself in the halls of power, thanks to the gradual loss of English territory in France and the birth of a new English identity during the Renaissance. But the period of French dominance left its mark on all aspects of the language, from vocabulary to pronunciation. And, as Godwin found to his chagrin, it had a revolutionary impact on English spelling.

In fact, this early French influence over English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks (é, à, ç, etc.), or, as linguists call them, diacritics, today.

Let’s keep calling them diacritics, since accent can mean so many things, from different regional ways of speaking to where in a word you place the emphasis.

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein:

Young people typically start out on the political left but become more conservative as they get older. Baby boomers who once marched against the Vietnam war got jobs, got married and had children. Now their grandchildren see them as tethered to Fox News.

Today’s young Americans are following the first part of that pattern. Ask a group of them to choose between capitalism and socialism and they will split right down the middle. Their support was crucial in nominating Zohran Mamdani, who says he wants to capture “the means of production,” as the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York.

But will the young people outgrow their radicalism? There is reason to doubt. Record numbers of Generation Z are pursuing higher education, with 53% of those 18 to 24 having completed at least some college. That’s a troubling sign given how left-wing ideology has come to dominate higher ed.

College is where many young people learn that socialism means free stuff. They are indoctrinated to blame capitalism for racism, inequality and climate change. Unlike the older generations, they grew up after the end of the Cold War and have no memory of the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union, Maoist China and other socialist regimes. Maybe they’ll see socialism in action in New York.

John Sailer:

Peña is a self-professed radical who boasts of how she wants to dismantle the university from within & lays out an overtly ideological research agenda.

Colleges have always had radical faculty. What’s notable is Peña’s history of lavish funding and awards, including:

—the Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship

—Future of Minority Studies Fellowship

—research support from the Ford Foundation

—research support from the Mellon Foundation

—the 2022 Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship

—a 2017 MIT Disobedience Award

List goes on. It’s no accident that we have so many faculty so out of line with the country. Huge and very intentionally craft career incentives brought us here.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

David Friedberg’s recent All-In podcast argument sounds convincing: student debt creates desperate graduates, financial stress drives political radicalism, and young Americans embrace socialism because capitalism failed them economically. The analysis captures real and understandable pain but overlooks the underlying mechanisms.

Zohran Mamdani reportedly owes at least $200,000 from his college years. He studied African Studies and graduated without a job, but now he’s winning elections as a socialist candidate in New York City. Friedberg connects the financial dots, but the ideological picture remains invisible.

Lauren Lumpkin:

The consequences have been serious. Parents said principals are retracting previous assurances that they could enroll their children late, and there has been little flexibility with children with special circumstances. At least two families have been reported to the city’s child welfare agency for truancy because they did not send their 5-year-olds to kindergarten on time.

And the children whose families sought to give them more time to develop may be further behind. Students who spent an extra year in preschool or day care missed kindergarten, a year that focuses on playtime and socialization but has increased in academic rigor.

The number of students who started kindergarten late during the 2024-2025 school year was not immediately available Thursday, but district officials said they are aware of about 10 families who are trying to do so this fall.

—-

I think the answer to her question why is: It’s part of the struggle against (what is perceived as) white privilege: “It is difficult to determine exactly how common it is to delay a child’s enrollment in school. Some national data suggest it’s rare — somewhere between 3.5 percent and 5.5 percent of eligible children do it. Most of those students are boys born in the summer months. Academic redshirting is also more common among White children at schools that serve large numbers of wealthy families, who can afford an extra year of preschool or day care, according to an article published by the American Educational Research Association.” –Ann Althouse.

Rebecca Treiman, Jacqueline Hulslander, Erik G. Willcutt, Bruce F. Pennington & Richard K. Olson:

The goal of the present study was to test theories about the extent to which individual differences in word reading align with those in spelling and the extent to which other cognitive and linguistic skills play different roles in word reading and spelling. Using data from 1,116 children ranging from 8 to 17 years, we modeled word reading and spelling as latent traits with two measures of each skill to reduce measurement error. The models also included five skills that have been theorized to relate differentially to reading and spelling: phonemic awareness, working memory, rapid automatized naming, arithmetic, and vocabulary. The latent-trait correlation for reading and spelling was very high, 0.96, although significantly less than perfect. Vocabulary correlated more strongly with reading (0.64) than spelling (0.56), but the correlations of the other skills with reading and spelling did not differ significantly. Breaking down the sample by age, we found a significantly higher latent-trait correlation between reading and spelling in the younger half (r= .98) than in the older half (r= .94). This difference may reflect the fact that the words on reading and spelling tests are more different from one another at older ages. Our results suggest that word reading and spelling are one and the same, almost, but that spoken vocabulary knowledge is more closely related to reading than to spelling.

——-

more.

Niall Ferguson:

ChatGPT and its like have swept through academia, changing how students work, write and think. The bots are here to stay, so we need to reimagine learning

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more.

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To make it pedagogical, LLM is an autocomplete function that randomizes based on the statistical frequency:

• Probability matching: if in the frequency space, the autocomplete is at 85% “take an umbrella” and 1/10^6 “have squid ink”, it will do 85% of the time “take an umbrella”.
• “Temperature” setting: you can pick up to 100% the highest probability: “take an umbrella”.

L. K. Soiferman

I have been reading with interest the articles on our education system in Manitoba, starting with Grant Park removes advanced-placement-test due to student stress (April 29); Getting beyond just grading and tests (Think Tank, May 6); Grading by percentage is failing our students (Think Tank, May 7); and The importance of quality of assessment for students (Think Tank, May 12).

They all made me think, which is the sign of a good article. I learned that from my educators: to think for myself.

One of the articles stressed that percentages should be removed from schools due to student stress.

They advocate that no tests, no grades, and just anecdotal comments will better serve students’ needs. If this is what is happening in public schools today, I despair.

This rhetoric does not teach young people anything about striving for goals, or about having faith in their own ability to learn.

This type of thinking explains so much about the students I see in my first-year university classes. Students who can’t take constructive criticism, who bristle at instruction, and who don’t bother reading the grading rubrics before completing assignments.

They hand in anything that they have written at the last minute and expect an A because they submitted the assignment.

They come to see me at the end of the term telling me that they now have all of their late assignments ready and are wondering how to submit them.

When I explain that they can’t, they become defensive and wonder why, if it was acceptable in high school, I won’t accept them now.

They consistently miss classes and instruction and then want special treatment because they are stressed.

As a former colleague of mine at the University of Winnipeg told his students, if they aren’t stressed at university, then they aren’t trying. Life is stressful and it starts at school. Students have to know how to deal with stress when they are on their own.

It’s part of life to deal with situations that do not always go as planned.

Wall Street Journal:

States are starting to remove more unruly students from schools, and the Trump Administration is getting out of the way.

The Texas Legislature in May passed a bill that makes it easier for teachers to remove misbehaving students from classrooms and extends the allowable time for in-school suspensions. Some 3,300 Texas district employees were targets of student assault in 2023-24, according to the Texas Tribune. Removing students for any “unruly, disruptive, or abusive” behavior, as the legislation allows, could help prevent such escalation.

Arkansas lawmakers in April passed a law that ensures students removed for violent behavior aren’t returned to the same classroom. The Legislature also stripped from state law a requirement that districts use “positive behavioral support”—which focuses on “conflict resolution” and “coping skills”—to address student misbehavior. 

Washington state’s superintendent finalized rules, effective this month, that loosen restrictions on removing, suspending, or expelling students. Other stateshave taken similar action in recent years, including Louisiana and Nevada, where the state teachers union supported legislation making it easier to remove students.

Run Ma:

But because families have very different views on what a “good” afternoon program looks like, Alpha is now launching a series of microschools. The academic portion stays the same, but the afternoon programming varies depending on the focus. There’s one centered on sports, another on esports and gaming. But the one that stood out to me — and to the parent writing the review — is the GT School, their gifted and talented microschool. His three kids are all enrolled in GT. In that track, the afternoons lean heavily into more academic and competitive pursuits like chess and debate. But what’s different is that everything is tied to real-world validation. For example, if students do a storytelling assignment, the goal isn’t just to write the story, it’s to submit it to The Moth and get it accepted. Chess isn’t just about learning strategy; it’s about earning a national rating. Debate is expected to lead to actual competition results. The point isn’t just to complete a task. The point is to complete it and get external recognition. What really stood out, though, and what the parent-reviewer said is the true engine behind Alpha, is the school’s internal virtual currency: Alpha Bucks. Students earn Alpha Bucks for completing tasks, reaching goals, and going above and beyond. They can then spend them on real things: physical products, school events, even internal auctions. It’s an economic system that shapes motivation and behavior.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews George Church:

Mirror life, if it can be weaponized, that would take it to a whole other level of concern. The concern was that if we got it to a certain point, then it would be easy to weaponize it. Again, there’s practical considerations that maybe that most people who consider weaponizing mirror life would probably be satisfied with weaponizing viruses that already exist, that are already pathogens. And they wouldn’t want to destroy themselves and their family and their legacy and everything like that. But all it takes is one, one group probably, or one person.

But your question is, is it inevitable? I don’t know. It might be. It’s quite possible it’s already here. In other words, we already have mirror life in our solar system or maybe even on our planet. It just hasn’t been weaponized.

What we were saying in the Science paper is that this seems like the sort of thing that could wipe out all competing life if were properly weaponized. But there are probably a few things like that. What we really need to do is reduce the motivation to do that, maybe increase our preparedness for a variety of existential threats. Some of which will be natural, some of which will be one disgruntled person who has essentially too much power.

Over the history of humanity, the amount of things that a single person can do has grown very significantly. It used to be, when you had your bare hands, there was kind of a limit to what one person could do. A large number of people could team up and get a mammoth or something like that. Today, one person with the right connections or right access to technology could blow up a city. That’s a huge increase in capability. I think we want to start dialing that back a little bit somehow.

Miranda Devine

A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.” 

Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment.

The “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] on Russian Election Interference” was conducted by career professionals at the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and was commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe in May. 

Andrew Deck:

A new policy at Law360, the legal news service owned by LexisNexis, requires that every story pass through an AI-powered “bias” detection tool before publication.

The Law360 Union, which represents over 200 editorial staffers across the 350-person newsroom, has denounced the mandate since it went into effect in mid-May. On June 17, unit chair Hailey Konnath sent a petition to management calling for the tool to be made “completely voluntary.”

“As journalists, we should be trusted to select our own tools of the trade to do our information-gathering, reporting and editing — not pressured to use unproven technology against our will,” reads the petition, which was signed by over 90% of the union.