School Information System

Richard Phelps:

They number among President Trump’s most dedicated supporters. For decades, they have fought the good fight—on their own time and on their own dime—against politicians and pundits enriched by billions of dollars from the federal government and some of the world’s wealthiest foundations. They endured steady streams of abuse and ridicule from some pundits, journalists, and politicians. Other pundits, who may or may not be sympathetic, declare that they won the battle against the overwhelming odds. But they know that they did not.

They supported Donald Trump because he seemed to agree with them, articulating their frustrations, clamorously and unequivocally. “Common Core is a disaster,” he said, “Common Core means Washington tells you what to study.” He has been proven right on both counts.

Those supporters are soccer moms who observe Common Core’s effects up close with their own children. They are local activists who recognized Common Core right away for what it was: the latest in a long string of progressive education white elephants. They had seen it all before, for example, in the calamitous “New Standards” projects in California, Kentucky, and Maryland around the turn of the century. Those states eventually mustered the good sense to cut bait and release those dysfunctional programs, only to have the same program designed by the same people imposed upon them from above a decade later.

Common Core’s primary selling point in the late 2000s and early 2010s was to standardize learning standards across states so that state performance could be compared on a common metric—apples to apples, as it were. The biannual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) already compared state student achievement. But, advocates argued, NAEP was not based on a common curriculum across states, offering laggard states an excuse that NAEP made apples-to-oranges comparisons.

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much more on Common Core.

Richard P. Phelps and Cathryn MacArthur

Abstract: The authors read a systematic sample of “working papers” downloaded from the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) from the past quarter century—the years 2000 to 2024. They looked for “dismissive literature reviews” in the introductory and concluding sections of the papers. A dismissive review is one declaring an absence of previous research, or previous research worth referencing, for example: “there is no previous research on,” “this is the first study of,” and “surprisingly, few studies have broached this topic.” Typically, dismissive reviews are raw declarations, made without mention or evidence of having conducted a literature search.

All working papers retrieved for the topic “education” are classified into three groups (lacking a true education focus, containing no dismissive reviews, containing one or more).

The authors provide summary descriptive statistics for various quantities by category and a 1000+ line list of all the working papers retrieved and the dismissive reviews we found, which are highlighted within verbatim text. Dismissive reviews’ character and variety are discussed along with their implications for public policy.

KEYWORDS: Citation manipulation, research integrity, literature review, dismissive review, research literature, false novelty claims, firstness claims, citation cartels

Chad Aldeman:

Take New York, for example. In its latest “Making the Grade” report, the Education Law Center adjusted school spending figures relative to their regional labor market costs. It gave New York’s school funding system an A for the total amount of money it sent to public schools, a B for the distribution of those funds among schools and an A for the amount of money it spent relative to the state’s overall gross domestic product per capita.

Overall, New York came out as one of the top-rated school funding systems, if not the highest-rated.

And yet, New York students perform slightly below national averages. While its schools spent $33,970 per student, $15,509 more per pupil than the rest of the country, in Fiscal Year 2022 its students trailedoverall student performance in fourth-grade math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the “Nation’s Report Card.”

But it’s not just New York. The relationship between school spending and student outcomes is weaker than you might imagine. To make the fairest comparison possible, I used the Education Law Center’s spending figures, which are adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and the demographically adjusted NAEP scores from the Urban Institute.

The graph below shows the results for 2022, the latest year for which comparable spending figures are available. As you can see, New York is an extreme outlier: It spent more than any other state, and its results were in the bottom half. Other high-spending states like Vermont, New Jersey and Connecticut also got pretty poor results given their investments.

Which states do well on this metric? Texas, Florida and Mississippi all stand out for getting strong student outcomes despite not spending that much.

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More.

Enjoyiana Nururdin:

In the termination letter, Vakunta castigated Bishop for being “derelict” in his responsibility as a city leader, saying Bishop failed to participate in the general management of the civil rights agency or make changes following a series of disciplinary actions. She called his actions, conduct and behavior “an utter rupture of the bonds of trust.” 

The discipline started three years ago with a letter in March 2022, then with a verbal warning in October 2022 and a one-day suspension in December the same year, according to the termination letter. Bishop was also suspended for three days in August two years ago, then for five days in June last year. Bishop received his final warning Nov. 7 last year, a week before the Mayor’s Office received a joint complaint about Davis. Bishop was suspended for 10 days.

Claire Jones and Sam Fleming:

While the Trump administration enthusiastically embraces disruptive digital assets and deregulation, it is at the same time undertaking an unprecedented assault on the foundations of America’s traditional policymaking order. 

Under the banner of boosting growth, the president has been threatening to fire Powell and other top Fed officials in a bid to curb the central banking independence that has underpinned America’s economic foundations for over half a century. 

For the past few decades, the meetings in Jackson Hole against the backdrop of Wyoming’s rugged mountains have come to embody the power and prestige of central bankers, with their debates on monetary policy transmission, quantitative easing and inflation dynamics. 

But the economists listening to Powell at the Jackson Lake Lodge, which has been battling an influx of bats in recent weeks, are aware that the ascendancy of the technocrats is in danger of being thrown dramatically into reverse. 

“When I speak to economists, they’re dispirited,” says Glenn Hubbard, a chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers under George W Bush, citing the broad discontent among many Americans with experts. “They know economic policy lost a very important thread with the public.”

Hubbard, now a professor at Columbia University, adds: “My fear is that if they don’t pick up that thread, the populist frenzy is only going to get worse.”

Wall Street Journal:

When students needn’t even bother to blame Fido for their missing homework, something’s gone wrong with the schools. Yet 52% of K-12 public teachers in a new survey say their school or district has adopted at least one “equitable” grading policy, such as no zeros for missed assignments, no penalties for turning in late work, or unlimited retakes on tests.

The good news is that teachers hate it: 81% said a no-zeros policy is “harmful to academic engagement,” including 80% of “teachers of color,” the Fordham report says. Some of the quotations from surveyed teachers are unsparing: “Being given a 50 percent for doing nothing seems to enable laziness.” “Ridiculous.” “Insulting to the students who work.” “Most teachers can’t stand the gifty fifty.”

A majority of teachers, 56%, said a policy of no late penalties is harmful, compared with 23% who liked that. On letting students retake tests, the teachers were divided, with 41% supporting it, and 37% against. But in general, 71% agreed “grading policies should set high expectations for everyone.” Only 29% approved of reforms “to be fairer” to disadvantaged students.

“Equity grading is not leveling the playing field,” one teacher said. “It is simply lowering standards so that school districts look like they are meeting kids where they are, when in fact they are hiding their failures behind ‘equitable’ policies.” Another worried A grades “are passed out like Halloween candy. Whether a student learned anything is nearly irrelevant.”

Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman and David J. Deming:

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges.

The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

More:

One immediate conclusion is that standardized test scores help lower-income groups get into the best schools, compared to the alternatives.

Berry Arnold:

With consequences ranging from teacher attrition to declining student learning, schools have failed to enforce fundamental behavioral standards.

With consequences ranging from teacher attrition to declining student learning, schools have failed to enforce fundamental behavioral standards.

Since at least 2022, the education world has been preoccupied with the “teacher exodus”: a troubling trend of teachers quitting at record rates. Though attrition has eased somewhat since its pandemic peak, it remains stubbornly high. Deteriorating classroom conditions are a big reason. Teachers cite chronic student misbehavior as the top source of stress and burnout, ranking it above workload and even pay.

Longtime educator Ben Foley is one of many who found the situation unbearable. After more than two decades teaching middle school in California, he resigned midyear, worn down by classrooms that had descended into chaos. He described the daily environment as “anarchic,” with students routinely ignoring basic instructions, roaming the room, throwing things, and roughhousing. Foley likened the experience to “death by a thousand cuts,” explaining that “for every request I make, several kids flat-out defy it.”

Alex Tabarrok: 

The excellent Don Boudreaux on comparative advantage, one of the deepest and most important ideas in economics.

As a new semester begins this is a good reminder that MRU has great videos for learning and teaching economics, all entirely free and open. (Of course, these videos pair delightfully with Modern Principles of Economics).

Emine Saner: 

Using AI would feel like cheating, but Tom [who works in IT in the UK government] worries refusing to do so now puts him at a disadvantage. “I almost feel like I have no choice but to use it at this point. I might have to put morals aside.”

Others, despite their misgivings, limit how they use it, and only for specific tasks. Steve Royle, professor of cell biology at the University of Warwick, uses ChatGPT for the “grunt work” of writing computer code to analyse data. “But that’s really the limit. I don’t want it to generate code from scratch. When you let it do that, you spend way more time debugging it afterwards. My view is, it’s a waste of time if you let it try and do too much for you.” Accurate or not, he also worries that if he becomes too reliant on AI, his coding skills will atrophy. “The AI enthusiasts say, ‘Don’t worry, eventually nobody will need to know anything.’ I don’t subscribe to that.”

Part of his job is to write research papers and grant proposals. “I absolutely will not use it for generating any text,” says Royle. “For me, in the process of writing, you formulate your ideas, and by rewriting and editing, it really crystallises what you want to say. Having a machine do that is not what it’s about.”

Te Ping Chen:

Child care in America is broken.

Working parents with young children are stretched thin; a year of daycare can easily cost more than a year of tuition at an in-state college. At the same time, child-care workers are severely underpaid, often earning barely enough to get by and with no real path to ever make much more.

It is a problem with broad repercussions for the entire economy. Parents who can’t afford quality care, or can’t find it, can’t work. Young adults who are scared off by the cost of care might be less likely to have that second child, or even to have children in the first place.

So, is there even a solution? We asked leading thinkers to weigh in.

Adam Rittenberg:

Northwestern statement on the settlement with former coach Pat Fitzgerald, notes that the evidence established no player reported hazing to Fitzgerald, nor did he condone or direct any hazing.

Austin Berg:

WATCH: Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates tells attendees at the Netroots Nation conference, “you have to create the crisis by which the boss…the government can no longer ignore you.”

Gates and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson are now pressuring Chicago Public Schools board members to approve around $200 million in junk bonds at the Aug. 28 budget vote.

The schools’ chief budget officer says this borrowing would trigger a “downward spiral” of more credit downgrades, higher borrowing costs, and cuts to the classroom.

But the CTU and the mayor see creating this crisis as leverage to demand more money from Springfield.

It’s like setting your house on fire and hoping the insurance pays out.

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Chicago’s pension crisis is heading for a Detroit-style collapse

Jon A. Shields and Yuval Avnur:

Like Ms. Alexander, Said attracted admirers and critics. One of his most influential intellectual competitors was Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), author of a 1993 essay and a 1996 book both titled in part “The Clash of Civilizations.” Huntington didn’t deny the existence of anti-Arab prejudice, but he thought the differences between the West and the Arab and Islamic worlds were deep and profound.

“The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” he wrote. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Said called Huntington’s book “belligerent” in an essay (published shortly after the 9/11 attacks) titled “The Clash of Ignorance.”

Huntington wasn’t Said’s only prominent critic. Historian Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) wrote a sharp critique in his 1993 book, “Islam and the West.” “Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies” (2004), by Ian Buruma and Ivishai Margalit, also challenges Said’s thesis, arguing that Western intellectuals have a long tradition of painting the West in disfigured, grotesque ways.

Julie Nelson:

Strong statement from Acting US Atty Joe Thompson on not just the Feeding our Future fraud but the brazen attempt to bribe one of the jurors.

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Somewhat related:

“The environmental movement provided a point of fracture for the Democratic coalition.” Of the contemporaneous secessionist movement in Michigan’s Northern Peninsula, Burd writes: “Arguing that environmental legislation hindered economic possibilities and threatened notions of political autonomy, politicians and residents throughout the region disputed much of the new environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, driving a wedge through traditional Democratic strongholds throughout the Great Lakes region.” In Minnesota, the split came in 1978.

Tom Sherrington

Thoughts on GCSE Grades. 🧵 In general we’re not at peace with the realities of grading. You can’t have comparative standards AND have everyone succeed above a certain level. The bell curve is not imposed.. there’s no conspiracy. It’s an outcome of cohort performance.

Mike Damiano

who’s going to save my mom, Niccum thought.

What the Jacobs family didn’t know — couldn’t have known — was that they were now involved in what would becomeone of the worst medical research scandals of this century. Prominent scientists would see their careers derailed. Duke,an emerging biomedical powerhouse, would be disgraced. Patients would die of their cancers not knowing their finalmonths of treatment had been compromised by scientific fraud.

The scandal would also prove a crucial test for a leader quickly rising through the ranks of academia. The dean overseeing clinical research at Duke Medical School at the time was Sally Kornbluth. Today, she is the president of theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. She is helming one of the top research institutions in the world during a periodof unprecedented upheaval in science, at a time when President Trump and his allies have precipitated — andcelebrated — the ouster of at least five leaders of elite universities, four of them women.

Chris Rickert:

high-level city of Madison administrator with multiple past disciplinary actions against him was allowed to retire from his position after his most recent violations of city policy, records released Thursday show.

Byron Bishop, who previously served as the Department of Civil Rights’ equal opportunities division manager, was formally disciplined six times going back to March 2022, according to an Aug. 6 memo to him from Deputy Mayor Linda Vakunta with the subject line “termination of employment.”

A city employee since 2016, Bishop’s last day was Aug. 6. Under the terms of his departure, he will be paid the remainder of his $134,158.96 annual salary through the end of this year, city spokesperson Dylan Brogan said

Luke Glawacki:

Our university librarian just reached out to faculty members asking us to sign a “citation justice” pledge. Text from the pledge and my reply.

Alana Pipe:

Every working parent knows that it is staggeringly expensive to put a child through daycare—but it depends a lot on where you live.

The median cost of sending one child to daycare for five years is about $44,000 across the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Labor Department data. In 26 counties, the median cost for five years of daycare is more than $100,000.

U.S. median: $43,945
What’s the cost of five years of daycare today?
Search the map below to see how the median cost to send one child to daycare until kindergarten compares across the country.

Eyal Press

In 2005, a “working definition” of antisemitism was posted on the website of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, a research institute founded by the European Union. It described antisemitism, somewhat vaguely, as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” Even less precise were the eleven examples of antisemitism that followed, many of which focussed on Israel. Among them was “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

In the two decades since it was introduced, this definition has not been endorsed by most leading scholars of antisemitism, in part because critics believe that it blurs the line between hostility toward Jews and criticism of Israel. It has been a different story in the political arena, where the reception of the definition has been nothing short of astonishing. In 2016, a slightly altered version of the definition was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization. To date, more than forty governments have adopted it as well, notwithstanding the definition’s lack of precision. In his forthcoming book, “On Antisemitism,” the historian Mark Mazower argues that, to some of the definition’s promoters, its vagueness has been a virtue rather than a drawback. The definition emerged at a time when campaigning against antisemitism was becoming a growing priority—and a highly effective fund-raising tool—for organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. What increasingly concerned these groups was not classical antisemitism, which, by the end of the Cold War, appeared to be declining, but the “new antisemitism,” which manifested in what they saw as the demonization of Israel.

Chris Rickert:

The Madison School District on Friday said it will maintain its current unweighted grading system for high schoolers.

The decision means that for the purposes of ranking students for a new state guaranteed college admission program, there is currently no way to distinguish students who take more challenging courses from those who take less-challenging courses.

“Our decision to keep what’s currently in place reflects our belief in the importance of a system that supports equity, maintains transparency and reflects our community’s values,” Mary Jankovich, the district’s executive director of college, career and community readiness, said in a Friday evening news release.

Under the new program, known as the Wisconsin Guarantee, students who rank in the top 5% of their class are guaranteed admission to the Universities of Wisconsin’s flagship UW-Madison campus, while students who rank in the top 10% are guaranteed admission to the system’s 12 other four-year schools.

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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?

Brian Potter:

Altogether, the US receives about 5 trillion gallons of precipitation a day. Most of that (63%) gets returned to the atmosphere via evapotranspiration. Much of the rest ultimately flows into the Gulf of Mexico (11%), Pacific Ocean (6%), and Atlantic Ocean (2%). About 10% gets stored in surface bodies of water (lakes, reservoirs) or underground aquifers, and 6% flows back into Canada. The remaining 2% is consumed by people in various ways.

Robert Pondisco:

If you spend time in American classrooms today, especially in schools shaped by the dominant ideas of social and emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP), you might get the impression that the world is a broken and dangerous place — and that wise and loving adults equip children to navigate it successfully by making them aware of just how bad things are.

We think we’re helping them. But what if we’re not?

That question lies at the heart of a compelling and underappreciated body of research led by Jeremy Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Clifton studies “primal world beliefs,” or “primals” — deep, often unconscious assumptions about the nature of the world. Is it safe or dangerous? Enticing or dull? Alive or mechanistic? His work suggests that these beliefs shape everything: our sense of well-being, our resilience, our openness to experience, even our mental health outcomes.

Clifton’s research has not made its way into teacher-training programs, education-policy debates, or district SEL initiatives. The only mention I’ve found of it in a publication aimed at teachers is a 2022 Education Week interview in which Clifton offered a quiet warning: “Don’t assume teaching young people that the world is bad will help them. Do know that how you see the world matters.” This quiet warning, if heeded, could spark a revolutionary change in American education. It could also guide those seeking to respond more productively to the mental health crisis afflicting America’s children.

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more.

Adam Wren & Dasha Burns:

The blue blacklist: In a new memo, the center-left think tank Third Way is circulating a list of 45 words and phrases they want Democrats to avoid using, alleging the terms put “a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities.” It’s a set of words that Third Way suggests “people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats.”

They span six categories — from “therapy speak” to “explaining away crime” — and put in sharp relief a party that authors say makes Democrats “sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.” In the document, titled “Was It Something I Said?” Third Way argues that to “please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant,” according to the memo.

Among the blacklisted terms: privilege … violence (as in “environmental violence”) … dialoguing … triggering … othering … microaggression … holding space … body shaming … subverting norms … systems of oppression … cultural appropriation … Overton window … existential threat to [the climate, democracy, economy] … radical transparency … stakeholders … the unhoused … food insecurity … housing insecurity … person who immigrated … birthing person … cisgender … deadnaming … heteronormative … patriarchy … LGBTQIA+ … BIPOC … allyship … incarcerated people … involuntary confinement.

“We are doing our best to get Democrats to talk like normal people and stop talking like they’re leading a seminar at Antioch,” says Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president of public affairs. “We think language is one of the central problems we face with normie voters, signaling that we are out of touch with how they live, think and talk. In recent weeks, this has become a bit of a thing, with comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman highlighting how insane Dems can sometimes sound. Also, elected officials like [Delaware Rep.] Sarah McBride and [Kentucky Gov.] Andy Beshear are begging their colleagues to just be normal again.”

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More.

Sabine Martin:

With a 7% budget cut, UW-Madison Libraries is closing the Astronomy, Mathematics and Physics Library at 4 p.m. Friday. The campus Social Work Library will shutter also at the end of the coming school year, and others will have reduced hours.

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As ever, figuring out how much taxpayer funded organizations spend, where and budget growth is an adventure.

2014-2015 Budget $pending: $2,855,100,000

2020-2021 Budget $pending: $3,358,000,000 (+17%)

Curiously…. current year top line numbers are. nowhere easily found!

Dave Zweifel:

Madison lost two men in recent weeks who, in each of their own ways, were nothing less than outstanding educators.

Marvin Meissen was one of the Madison School District’s innovators, an acclaimed champion of the teaching of science, one of those unsung heroes who do so much to inspire our young people, including members of his own family, on the importance of education.

Marvin developed the science program at La Follette High School when it opened in 1963, and his success there propelled him to the science coordinator post for all of Madison’s public schools. His work turned hundreds of Madison students on to successful careers in the sciences.

Later in his Madison schools’ career, Marvin served as assistant principal at West High and then principal at Velma Hamilton Middle School before his retirement in 1994.

He passed on his love for education to his five children, all of whom became teachers. Two of his sons, Phillip and Michael, earned their doctorates in education. Michael went on to become principal of La Follette High, where his father had pioneered the science curriculum. A granddaughter, Kristina Meissen, has also earned her doctorate, all from the UW-Madison.

Ann Althouse Summary:

 “Eric Adams Advisor Winnie Greco Handed a CITY Reporter Cash Stuffed in a Bag of Potato Chips/THE CITY reported the incident to law enforcement and was promptly contacted by the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office”? That came out on the evening of August 20th. (Here‘s my blog post about it from midday yesterday.)

Was everyone tolerating this practice until the City reporter openly objected to it? Why was the City reporter’s envelope delivered inside a potato chip back if it was not understood to be wrong? The NYT writes, “No established American news organization permits its reporters to accept cash payments for covering events” and “The Times’s ethical guidelines explicitly prohibit receipt of such gifts.” And the NYT reporters seem to have witnessed the open delivery of red envelopes, without snack-food camouflage. Perhaps The City was viewed as in the gray zone between “established American news organization” and news organizations that had already been initiated into a system of paying for news coverage.

The NYT doesn’t explain its waiting to publish. Perhaps it was working on a more detailed story explaining pervasive corruption and it just got scooped. 

Jay Greene:

Even more thoroughly documented are the civil rights violations via racial discrimination. Considering it righteous to treat some racial groups preferentially in admissions and hiring, university administrators and faculty frequently wrote emails and reports about racial goals and about the different procedures used for different races of applicant. These illegal practices continued even after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admission—a fact that’s easily proven via these documents and statistical evidence.

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more.

Cleo Krejci & Nadia Scharf

Early in Trump’s second term, the U.S. Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to state education departments nationwide outlining the federal government’s stance against DEI. It said schools have “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism,'” creating DEI programs in response.

Trump officials argue those DEI programs — such as scholarships or hiring plans intending to boost racial diversity — are illegal and discriminatory against White and Asian people, in particular.

In February, the federal government directed states to sign an agreement on DEI, or risk losing federal funding. States were asked to certify that they won’t break antidiscrimination laws through the use of DEI programs.

Education officials in at least 25 states, including Wisconsin, refused.

Some Wisconsin districts took steps to comply anyway. They include the Green Bay School District, which removed mentions of diversityfrom job descriptions and policies, and several Fox Valley distircts.

Several lawsuits — including one Wisconsin joined as a plaintiff — have challenged the administration’s attempts to end DEI programs.

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Via Rick Esenberg.

Lila Shroff: 

Gone already are the days when using AI to write an essay meant copying and pasting its response verbatim. To evade plagiarism detectors, kids now stitch together output from multiple AI models, or ask chatbots to introduce typos to make the writing appear more human. The original ChatGPT allowed only text prompts. Now students can upload images (“Please do these physics problems for me”) and entire documents (“How should I improve my essay based on this rubric?”). 

Not all of it is cheating. Kids are using AI for exam prep, generating personalized study guides and practice tests, and to get feedback before submitting assignments. Still, if you are a parent of a high schooler who thinks your child isn’t using a chatbot for homework assistance—be it sanctioned or illicit—think again.

The AI takeover of the classroom is just getting started. Plenty of educators are using AI in their own job, even if they may not love that chatbots give students new ways to cheat. On top of the time they spend on actual instruction, teachers are stuck with a lot of administrative work: They design assignments to align with curricular standards, grade worksheets against preset rubrics, and fill out paperwork to support students with extra needs. 

Nearly a third of K–12 teachers say they used the technology at least weekly last school year. Sally Hubbard, a sixth-grade math-and-science teacher in Sacramento, California, told me that AI saves her an average of five to 10 hours each week by helping her create assignments and supplement curricula. “If I spend all of that time creating, grading, researching,” she said, “then I don’t have as much energy to show up in person and make connections with kids.”

Kevin Hartnett: 

It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long.

Yet a paper posted on February 10 left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo, just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.

“We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that,” said Itamar Oliveira of the University of Birmingham, who has spent the past two years trying to prove that the conjecture was true. In her paper, Cairo showed that it’s false. The result defies mathematicians’ usual intuitions about what functions can and cannot do.

So does Cairo herself, who found her way to a proof after years of homeschooling in isolation and an unorthodox path through the math world.

Joe Pinsker:

What happens to your spending when you have a child? We recently spoke with new parents from across the country to hear how it went for them.

Spoiler: None of them said having a baby was cheaper than they expected.

Americans would have to spend $20,745 to buy a basket of goods and services commonly used in a baby’s first year, versus $15,775 for a similar basket in 2022, according to BabyCenter, a parenting website.

Three families gave us a peek at their credit-card charges, Amazon orders and overall monthly spending. Take a look:

Georg Mack:

You may have left the education system. But did the education system leave you? 

One strange realisation as you get older: A lot of the behaviours you were punished for in school are rewarded in adulthood, and a lot of the behaviours you were rewarded for in school are punished in adulthood. 

A large part of adulthood isn’t learning anything new; it’s just unlearning lessons from school, debugging the code the education system has written in your head—line by line, habit by habit, assumption by assumption. 

Here’s a list of behaviours punished in school — but rewarded in adulthood: 

1. Questioning the highest status person in the room – At school, it’s easy to see your teachers as gods that can’t be questioned. That’s the default assumption the school whispers to you: teachers are the highest-status people in the room. One of the biggest red pill moments comes in your early 20s. A person you know who is lost and confused says to you: “I’m unsure what to do with my life, so I’m going to become a teacher. It’s got great holidays!” You then do the mental maths: “What % of the teachers I put on pedestals at school were just lost people figuring things out?!”. And the same is true now: “What % of people I’m putting on pedestals now are just grown-up children figuring things out?”

Katja Hoyer

The first shock came on New Year’s Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne. “A throng of about a thousand young men was forming,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle explained. “Most of them were from the North African-Arabic region.” In scenes Merkel would later describe as “abominable”, the report continued, “packs of men were hunting down women, cornering many of them. There were sexual assaults, rapes.”

The police response was somewhere between clueless and callous. One young woman told the German media later how she was trapped in the crowds and then suddenly “someone had his hands between my legs”. When she tried to report this at a police station where “there were lots of girls, all crying uncontrollably”, she was told to go elsewhere. A public police statement said the celebrations in Cologne had been “relaxed”.

In the end, it was probably this staggering denial that riled people the most. In her memoirs, Merkel dedicates just one paragraph to the incident in Cologne. There is no compassion for the victims, just a cool assessment that the delayed response “gave rise to the impression that the authorities were trying to cover something up”. Merkel’s main concern, then as now, was political. As the leader of a nominally centre-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she faced plenty of internal pressure for her generous refugee policy. But the public mood also tipped. The “Welcoming Culture” that dominated the news dissipated quickly. Asked in one representative poll in January 2016, 73% of respondents felt dealing with “asylum” and “refugees” was the most urgent government priority.

Matt Burgess:

United States Custom and Border Protection officials have sweeping powers to search anyone’s phone when they are entering the country—including US citizens. Newly released figures show that over the past three months, CBP officials have been searching more phones and other devices than ever before.

John Horgan:

My friend Jim is helping me see science’s current troubles from an historical perspective. And that’s making me, the end-of-science guy, even gloomier about science’s prospects.

James E. McClellan III is professor emeritus of the history of science at Stevens Institute of Technology, where I teach. Together with the late historian Harold Dorn, Jim wrote Science and Technology in World History, which traces human knowledge-seeking and invention from the Stone Age to the digital age. It’s deeply researched and yet fun to read, quite the accomplishment.

Jim has been re-researching and re-writing his book for a new edition, and I’m reading his updated chapters as the finishes them. One theme jumps out at me: Power, not truth, has always been the primary aim of human knowledge-seekers. Almost all ancient societies accumulated knowledge for practical reasons: because it helps us heal, feed and house ourselves, plan ahead, travel and communicate, kill our enemies and so on.

The exception is the Hellenistic empire, which resulted from the conquests of Alexander the Great (tutored by Aristotle) and lasted for three centuries. Greek rulers built the library of Alexandria and other centers of learning, where scholars could indulge their curiosity just for fun. Within reason.

The Romans, who displaced the Greeks, cared a lot about medicine and engineering, but they didn’t invest much in research for its own sake. Either did ancient civilizations that emerged in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India and the Americas. For most cultures, religion served as the source of ultimate truth.

Not until the 19th century, long after Newton had done his thing and when the industrial revolution was under way, did Europe and the U.S. begin recognizing the economic, medical and military potential of research untethered to specific practical goals. And only after World War II did governments invest heavily in “basic” research, hoping for more spinoffs as nifty as The Bomb.

Rachel Bachman:

He had his players read a book.

The volume he selected was “Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great.” It isn’t exactly “Anna Karenina.” At a modest 118 pages, it’s the kind of self-improvement manual that an enterprising salesman could finish on a flight from Dallas to Cincinnati.

But its messages, told through parables delivered by a Japanese master to a young American pupil, are clear. Excellence is a slog that requires consistent, tiring work. Setbacks are part of the process. Humbly committing to improvement is its own reward.

“Everybody focuses on that final result and what it looked like and all those things,” Day said recently. “We needed to get back to the beginning of the process—and focusing on the process and not necessarily focusing on the result.”

Chippewa Herald:

Chippewa Falls Middle School teacher Alisha Neinfeldt has been named the 2025 Wisconsin History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

The award honors a top K-12 educator in each state for their work teaching American history and has been awarded since 2004.

“History teachers play an essential role in helping students understand the past, build critical thinking skills, and develop a deeper appreciation for the people and events that shaped our nation,” James G. Basker, president and CEO of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, said in a press release. “We are proud to recognize educators who go above and beyond to make history engaging, meaningful, and relevant in their classrooms.”

Cara Lombardo:

Billionaire Bill Ackman has a new fascination: a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed-teach children in two hours.

Alpha School is launching a New York City location in September, and the investor and social-media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution, according to people familiar with the matter.

On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha’s co-founder, its principal and others on a panel discussion at his Hamptons home. The panel on K-12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of the Milken Institute’s Hamptons Dialogues.

Alpha School, which calls its teachers “guides,” says it uses AI-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools despite the condensed days.

The schedule allows students to do hands-on activities in the afternoon, which the school says help them build life skills. These include 5-mile bike rides “without stopping” for kindergartners, and exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans.

Skyler Stamps

The start of another school year is within the next week for many school districts across the state. However, many still have unfilled full-time classroom teacher positions. 

According to Teach Iowa, there are still over 500 classroom teacher positions that are unfilled across the entire state. Out of those, 30 are world language teachers. 

Joe Carter, superintendent at the Algona Community School District, said that applications for for all positions have greatly declined over the past decade.

Clive Cookson:

Reading for pleasure in the US has declined by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years according to analysis of the daily lives of Americans, supporting several smaller studies that suggest fewer people are using their leisure time to read.

Analysing data from the US government’s American Time Use Survey, researchers at the University of Florida and University College London found that of the 236,000 Americans surveyed the proportion who read for pleasure on an average day fell from 28 per cent in 2003 to 16 per cent in 2023.

“This is not just a small dip — it’s a sustained decline of about 3 per cent per year,” said Jill Sonke at the University of Florida. “It’s significant and deeply concerning.” The results will be published in the journal iScience.

The study included any kind of reading done for enjoyment or purposes other than work or school, including ebooks on screen or listening to audio books, as well as traditional books, newspapers and magazines in print. Although electronic media have added many new ways to read, the researchers expressed confidence in their methodology.

Daniel Willingham:

US Reading decline is dramatic over the last 20 years, but no decline among teens…because they never read much in the first place, a point I’ve been harping on for years, as people often focus on social media & teens re: ⬇️in reading.

Will Flanders Summary:

The title of this thread on the Wisconsin Reddit is both funny and sad because WI should only WISH to be Mississippi when it comes to NAEP scores.

Dan Lennington:

Tony Evers has been in charge of Wisconsin education policy since 2009 (& effectively since 2001). Republicans have been completely unable to educate voters about the generational failure he caused. He’ll ride off into the sunset without facing any electoral consequences

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The funny thing about Catholic schools is that they spend about half as much per pupil as their public schools counterparts. It’s often a very no frills education: older buildings, less technology, fewer sports fields, etc.

But it works.

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They’ll blame school funding, but Wisconsin is 21st in per pupil funding while Mississippi is 44th.

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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?

Lee Fang:

These foundations are eliminating middle school algebra and promoting “numberless math,” which is leaving students paying the price.

Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment.

What Liz Simons has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science, but his daughter’s foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Heising-Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K-12 mathematics education according to social justice principles.

The revamp the advocates seek is profound. They reject well-established practices of math instruction while infusing lessons with racial and gender themes. The goal is to motivate disadvantaged students while dispensing with the traditional features of math, like numerical computation, that they struggle with on standardized tests – considered an oppressive feature of white supremacist culture.

In many quarters, including corporations and universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are in retreat due to pressure from the Trump administration and the courts. Not so in public education, with curricula that are locally controlled and largely insulated from the dictates of Washington. That allows progressive foundations and like-minded charitable trusts to continue to pour millions of dollars into reshaping math education for black and Latino kids, including a $800,000 grant this year from the Heising-Simons Foundation, even though there exists no credible research showing that the social justice approach improves their performance.

“Politicians, and legislatures, even school boards,” are often too “hamstrung” to get things done, Bob Hughes, the director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation, said at an online symposium on the need for racial equity policies in America’s classrooms. Philanthropy, he added, faces fewer barriers in making rapid changes.

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More.

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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!)

Becky Jacobs:

3. Financial aid overhaul 

As part of Trump’s domestic policy agenda this year, Congress passed and Trump signed into law an overhaul of federal student financial aid.  

For UW-Madison, the most significant changes involve the elimination of Grad PLUS Loans and limits to Parent PLUS Loans, effective next year. These federal programs paid for education expenses not covered by other financial aid, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Hundreds of UW-Madison students borrowed money through these loans in recent years, according to the university. 

In May, leaders of Wisconsin’s public, private, technical and independent colleges and universities raised alarm over proposed changes to Pell Grants, which generally support low-income students. Those changes never materialized in the final bill, though. 

Federal lawmakers also defunded SNAP-Ed, a grant program that teaches people how to live and eat healthily. UW-Madison’s Division of Extension received over $8 million each year to run FoodWIse and provide local nutrition education to Wisconsin communities. 

In late July, the division sent layoff notices to 92 employees across the state, including four educators and one administrator in Dane County.  

Locally, FoodWIse taught children and adults how to make healthy food choices at schools, senior centers and local community centers. FoodWIse also collaborated with food pantries, recreation and school programs. 

Alex Tabarrok 

In my posts The Sputnik vs. DeepSeek Moment and The Answers, I contrasted America’s reaction to Sputnik—expanded funding for education in math, science, and foreign languages; creation of agencies like ARPA; higher federal R&D spending; recruitment of foreign talent; and reduced tariff barriers—with the more recent U.S. response to China’s rise as an economic and scientific power, which has been almost the reverse.

One can also compare America’s choices today with China’s own strategy, where the roles also seem reversed. A striking example is China’s new K visa for science and technology.

Seppo Linnainmaa:

Efficient backpropagation (BP) is central to the ongoing  Neural Network (NN) ReNNaissance and “Deep Learning.” Who invented it? 

BP’s modern version (also called the reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Finnish master student Seppo Linnainmaa [BP1] [R7]. In 2020, we celebrated BP’s half-century anniversary! A precursor of BP was published by Henry J. Kelley in 1960 [BPA]—in 2020, we celebrated its 60-year anniversary.

In the 2020s, it was still easy to find misleading accounts of BP’s history [HIN][T22][DLP][NOB]. I had a look at the original papers from the 1960s and 70s, and talked to BP pioneers. Here is a summary based on my award-winning 2014 survey [DL1] which includes most of the references mentioned below.

The minimisation of errors through gradient descent (Cauchy 1847 [GD’], Hadamard, 1908 [GD”]) in the parameter space of complex, nonlinear, differentiable, multi-stage, NN-related systems has been discussed at least since the early 1960s, e.g., Kelley (1960) [BPA]; Bryson (1961) [BPB]; Pontryagin et al. (1961); Dreyfus (1962) [BPC]; Wilkinson (1965); Tsypkin (1966) [GDa-b]; Amari (1967-68) [GD2,GD2a]; Bryson and Ho (1969); initially within the framework of Euler-LaGrange equations in the Calculus of Variations, e.g., Euler (1744). 

Steepest descent in the weight space of such systems can be performed (Kelley, 1960 [BPA]; Bryson, 1961 [BPB]) by iterating the chain rule (Leibniz, 1676 [LEI07-10][DLH]; L’Hopital, 1696) in Dynamic Programming style (DP, e.g., Bellman, 1957 [BEL53]). A simplified derivation (Dreyfus, 1962 [BPC]) of this backpropagation method uses only the Leibniz chain rule  [LEI07].

The systems of the 1960s were already efficient in the DP sense. However, they backpropagated derivative information through standard Jacobian matrix calculations from one “layer” to the previous one, without explicitly addressing either direct links across several layers or potential additional efficiency gains due to network sparsity. 

Andrea Petersen:

When Dariya Quenneville’s infant daughter was ready for solid food, she skipped the mushed up avocado and banana. On the menu instead? Raw egg yolk and puréed chicken liver.

“She would just teethe on that and soothe herself,” said Quenneville, 31.

Schizandra is what her mom calls a “carnivore baby.” Most of her diet is meat, along with other animal-sourced foods like eggs and butter. “She’s an easy baby,” said Quenneville of her daughter, now almost 2. “I believe that the food in the diet is a very, very big piece of that.”

With the carnivore diet rising in popularity among adults, babies and toddlers are getting in on it, too. Moms swap tips—think directions for whipped bone marrow—on Facebook forums with names like Carnivore Motherhood.

Some parents say they’re inspired by social-media stars: A handful of doctors who are raising their own carnivore babies have YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands and even millions of subscribers. Rising interest in protein and concerns about ultraprocessed foods are causing some people to look at carnivore-style diets. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a carnivore champion, has loudly expressed his affinity for beef tallow.

Cremieux:

How many of the people who would’ve been in your generational cohort aren’t here because they were aborted?

Between the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationdecision in 2022, women had access to abortion because of the Supreme Court’s decision to establish a woman’s constitutional right to it based on the right to privacy. During that time, Americans underwent tens of millions of abortions. Given that America only experienced tens of millions of births in that same timeframe, the answer to my question is likely a nontrivial portion: a potentially sizable part of the generations that have been born since 1973 may have been aborted.

Using data from the Guttmacher Institute—a nongovernmental organization sprung out of Planned Parenthood in 1968 with the aim to expand reproductive rights globally—we can see that aborted generation members have been a very sizable percentage of every generational cohort since the Roe v. Wade decision.1

If we naïvely tally up America’s abortions, we can see that potentially over a quarter of Gen X and Millennials were aborted, nearly as many Gen Z met that fate, and almost a fifth of Gen Alpha were treated the same way.

These figures help to contextualize the human toll of abortion—these are, at minimum, millions of lost lives. But these numbers are off when it comes to describing the number of people who would be in these generations were it not for abortion. If we want to understand how large generations would be without abortion, we have to account for the effect of abortions on completed fertility.

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More:

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choose life.

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Nathalie Auger, Jessica Healy-Profitós, Aimina Ayoub, Antoine Lewin and Nancy Low:

The relationship between induced abortion and long-term mental health is not clear. We assessed whether having an induced abortion was associated with an increase in the long-term risk of mental health hospitalization.

Enjoyiana Nururdin:

If approved by city leaders, most agencies would receive increases of 1% to 8% from previous spending levels. One exception would be a 30% budget increase requested by the City Clerk’s Office.

The office is restructuring this year after the resignation of longtime City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl. City Attorney Michael Haas, who is serving as interim clerk, is asking for a $791,000 budget increase to help with next year’s expected workloads.

Moving forward, Madison plans to hold City Council elections at least once every year after adopting staggered terms for alders. More funding is also needed for voter engagement in historically underrepresented wards and for responding to requests for city records, Haas said.

The clerk’s office’s annual budget would grow to $3.4 million.

Larger city agencies, such as the police and fire departments, are seeking smaller increases as a ratio of previous funding levels. But these requests would draw more in total from the city’s general fund, which pays for many day-to-day expenses like salaries and services.

Both the Police Department and Fire Department are requesting 2% increases in funding next year. The police budget would grow by $1.9 million to nearly $100 million. The fire budget would increase by $1.5 million to $77 million.

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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?

Zusha Elision:

The fascination with what some call “genetic optimization” reflects deeper Silicon Valley beliefs about merit and success. “I think they have a perception that they are smart and they are accomplished, and they deserve to be where they are because they have ‘good genes,’” said Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “Now they have a tool where they think that they can do the same thing in their kids as well, right?”

David Griffith, Ph.D. Adam Tyner, Ph.D.
Foreword by: Michael J. Petrilli:

Grading policies have long been debated in American schools, but only recently have “equitable” reforms taken center stage.

Policies like “no zeros,” eliminating late penalties, and allowing unlimited retakes aim to make grading fairer for disadvantaged students. But critics argue that these changes inflate grades, erode accountability, and ultimately harm student learning—and many teachers agree.

In the first nationally representative survey to examine this issue, America’s K–12 teachers finally got a chance to weigh in. The verdict: Most teachers report feeling pressured to give higher grades, and say these policies reduce academic engagement, even in schools without formal mandates.

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more.

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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?

Jon Brodkin:

A federal appeals court rejected T-Mobile’s attempt to overturn $92 million in fines for selling customer location information to third-party firms.

The Federal Communications Commission last year fined T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, saying the carriers illegally shared access to customers’ location information without consent and did not take reasonable measures to protect that sensitive data against unauthorized disclosure. The fines relate to sharing of real-time location data that was revealed in 2018, but it took years for the FCC to finalize the penalties.

Daniel Buck:

Countless times, the Department of Education tried just that: Sending schools piles of money.

Ya know what happened every time?

No academic improvements.

Here are four examples🧵

Thom:

Nowhere on this first page of search results is the producer of the product, who might actually have the best answer to your question(s). Of course, if all you wanted to do is buy some Porta, well, your results were sold to the highest bidders. 

This is no longer useful search, and it’s getting worse. Even DuckDuckGo has a similar problem with the search term I just suggested, though they at least claim that they protect your private information. In April, the US District Court held that Google violated antitrust law, specifically because the Google search methodology has been abused. What will happen from that decision is still unknown, but I don’t think it makes a lot of difference.

Follow the money. Always follow the money. The reason why Google wants you to use an Android device, the Chrome browser, and their Search engine is simple: that gives them full control over you, and they can track and promote to their heart’s content. But you might have noticed that third thing in the stack of things I got from a Google search: an AI response. And this leads me to my original bold-faced assertion, above: in the coming year or two, search as we know it will disappear and be replaced by AI interaction. 

Joanne Jacobs:

Law enforcement agencies reported nearly 1.3 million criminal incidents on school property from 2020 to 2024, according to a new FBI report. That includes 540,000 assaults and 45,000 sex offenses. “Kids shouldn’t be trapped in dangerous schools,” writes Corey DeAngelis, a school choice advocate.

Bullying is the number one reason parents use choice programs to leave public schools, write researchers Misty Gallo, Colyn Ritter and Patrick J. Wolf. Low middle-school test scores rank second. “When public schools are not equipped to limit exposure to bullying behavior and when the academics of the middle school years are insufficient, parents flee the public schools if and when private school choice programs provide the financial means to do so.”

Mickey Muldoon:

I think that the answer is “AI Alignment” has an implicit technical bent to it. If you go on the AI Alignment Forum, for example, you’ll find more math than Confucius or Foucault.

On the other hand, nobody would view “pharmaceutical alignment” (if it were formulated as “[steering] pharmaceutical systems toward a person’s or group’s intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles”) as primarily a problem for math or science.

While there always are things that pharmaceutical developers can do inside the lab to at least try to promote ethical principles – for example, perhaps, to minimize preventable hazards, even when not forced to – we also accept that ethical work is done in large part outside of the lab; in purchasing decisions, in the way that pharmaceutical marketplaces operate, in the vast mess of the medical-industrial-government complex. It’s a problem so diffuse that it hardly makes sense to gather it all into one coherent encyclopedia entry.

The process by which the rest of the world influences the direction of an industry, by way of purchasing, analyzing, regulating, discussing, etc., is Selection. This comes from the terminology of evolution – in this framing, dinosaurs didn’t just decide to start growing wings and flying; Nature selected birds to fill the new ecological niches of the Jurassic period.

Sherman Criner

Broad historical instruction has given way to boutique narratives.

Imagine, for a moment, the year is 2500. Human civilization is gone, lost to disaster, time, or neglect. One day, an alien research team lands in what was once North Carolina and begins to study the ruins of a place once known as Duke University. Buried beneath centuries of sediment, they find a course directory from the Department of History, dated 2025. What would these visitors conclude about American history? Would they know about the Revolutionary War and its heroes, Washington crossing the Delaware, the debates at Valley Forge, the intellectual courage of the Founding Fathers? Would they learn about the immigrants who built the railroads, the entrepreneurs who transformed an agricultural society, or the soldiers who fought fascism across two oceans?

At Duke, far too few American History professors specialize in non-identitarian fields.
Almost certainly not. They would come away knowing far less about the broad sweep of American history—its political transformations, economic changes, diplomatic turning points, and cultural achievements—than about a narrow range of faculty preoccupations, many of them rooted in identity politics or highly specialized subfields. The result would be a picture of the past that is partial, fragmented, and skewed toward present-day concerns, leaving much of the nation’s history unexplored. But why do I, a Duke history major now in my fourth year, say this?

More striking still, over 51 percent of the department’s American History offerings are explicitly devoted to themes of racial- and social-justice movements.

Oliver Roeder:

The sculpture’s letters contain encrypted messages. Though they appear as one giant grid, “Kryptos” consists in fact of four sections, each themed and encoded differently, now known as K1, K2, K3 and K4. The first three sections were decoded by professionals and enthusiasts decades ago and their solutions are public knowledge.

PNAS:

Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. 

Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud.

Clayton Wickham:

More than a third of Texas students attend rural schools, and despite their communities’ support, many of those schools have been on the brink of financial ruin for years. Not far down the road from Marathon, Alpine Independent School District and Marfa ISD are both running deficits of around $1 million, despite having some of the lowest teacher salaries in the state. Nearby Valentine ISD operates out of an unrenovated 1910 schoolhouse and has recruited six teachers from the Philippines to keep its doors open. The Marathon school is also feeling the pinch. We sometimes teach two classes at once; we rely on online coursework to meet curriculum requirements; two of our fluorescent lights emit a sinister drone the district can’t afford to address; and our track has completely peeled away in places, revealing the layer of concrete underneath.

In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott held public-education funding hostage because a coalition of Texas Democrats and rural Republicans refused to pass his universal voucher program. But this spring the levee finally broke, and lawmakers passed two landmark education bills. One, House Bill 2, offers rural schools a long-awaited lifeline, investing $8.5 billion in public education over the next two years. The second, Senate Bill 2, earmarks billions to fund private school tuition through education savings accounts (ESAs), taxpayer-funded accounts parents can use for private school or homeschooling. Some fear it may mark the beginning of the end for public education in rural Texas.

Wall Street Journal:

Could a state try to join the scholarship program only for some uses, such as tutoring at public schools? That would defeat Congress’s intent, and maybe prompt a legal challenge. Or perhaps the Treasury Department can write the program’s implementing rules to make clear that the parameters of the scholarships are set by Congress. That would mean Democratic governors can’t take some and reject others, as if this were a school lunch menu.

In North Carolina, it might not matter, given the GOP’s margin in the Legislature. “Either you support school choice, or you don’t,” said state Sen. Phil Berger, that chamber’s GOP leader. “I look forward to holding Gov. Stein accountable and overriding his veto to ensure North Carolina can participate in President Trump’s signature school choice initiative.”

Given the program’s 2027 launch date, other Democratic governors are going to get the same question, and some might be thinking of 2028. A spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said last month his administration is reviewing the law and “awaiting additional federal guidance.”

Yet the choice is clear: Giving students access to the scholarship funds can help families at no cost to the state. But it might upset the teachers unions.

Konrad Putzier and Rachel Louise Ensign:

For generations, Americans have chased opportunity by moving from city to city, state to state. U.S. companies were often quicker to hire—and to fire—than employers in other parts of the world. But that defining mobility has stalled, leaving many people in homes that are too small, in jobs they don’t love or in their parents’ basements looking for work.

Others are slapped with “golden handcuffs.” Those who bought homes when mortgage rates were low or have stable white-collar jobs are clinging to them rather than taking big leaps.

This immobility has economic consequences for everyone. The frozen housing market means growing families can’t upgrade, empty-nesters can’t downsize and first-time buyers are all but locked out. When people can’t move for a job offer, or to a city with better job opportunities, they often earn less. When companies can’t hire people who currently live in, say, a different state, corporate productivity and profits can suffer.

Young graduates who don’t land good jobs soon after college often never really recover from those years of diminished earnings, widening the gap between the economy’s winners and losers.

Wall Street Journal:

The Wyoming Education Association doesn’t want families getting those dollars. In a lawsuit filed in June, the union argued that because the state constitution requires the Legislature to maintain a “complete and uniform” public school system, lawmakers cannot fund “private education that is not uniform.” A state judge granted an injunction on the ESA program last month.

Wyoming’s Attorney General and parents are appealing at the state Supreme Court, and the law is in their favor. Wyoming’s constitution also directs the Legislature to “suitably encourage means and agencies calculated to advance the sciences and liberal arts.” The ESA program is a way of doing so. It’s not creating a new system of schools.

It also isn’t killing the existing school system. The $30 million ESA program has its own general-fund appropriation, which doesn’t divert dollars directly from public schools—whose per-pupil funding approaches $20,000. District funding is tied to enrollment, so public schools could lose money if students leave, but that’s happening even without the scholarships.

Eric Berger:

As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the Moon “before” 2030.

Then, last Friday, the space agency and its state-operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, successfully conducted a 30-second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket’s center core with its seven YF-100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mengzhou spacecraft in June. A version of this spacecraft is planned for lunar missions.

On track for 2030

Thus, China’s space program is making demonstrable progress in all three of the major elements of its lunar program: the large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft, which will carry humans to lunar orbit, plus the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the Moon before the end of this decade.

Te-Ping Chen:

But they also hoped for a big family, and wanted to get started. Sure, Brittany was making $10 an hour working a retail job at Home Depot. But Michael’s union construction job paid more than triple that, and he’d owned his own home, a modest two-bedroom outside Cincinnati, for more than a decade.

So the two took the plunge, and in 2012, they welcomed their first baby. Brittany was 20; her husband, 34. The birth was difficult. Her son’s umbilical cord was wrapped around his head, and he had to be extracted from her birth canal, fracturing her pelvis. Still, she was smitten. “Your heart grows three sizes,” she recalls. “I couldn’t stop looking at him.”

The Ivys now have five children, ages 3 to 12. They know they aren’t the norm.

More Americans than ever are putting off having children—or not having them at all. The U.S. total fertility rate is around an all-time low, and far below the rate needed to keep the population stable. The average age of women giving birth in the U.S. has risen to nearly 30 years old, up from 27 years old in 2000, according to government data.

Bellwether:

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the floods that devastated New Orleans and its schools. The recovery effort in the years after the storm reshaped the city’s education system, ushering in reforms and innovations with ripple effects across the country. Join Bellwether for a series of conversations with leaders, policymakers, and experts who were there and helped shape education in New Orleans during the past 20 years. We’ll explore how the city’s schools have changed, the challenges that remain, and what it means for America’s education system more broadly. Join us for the following sessions: Where We Started: Policy Conditions and Constraints in August 2005 (Monday, Aug. 18 at 12:00pm ET) Featuring Former Senator Mary Landrieu, Doug Harris, Jamar McKneely, Alexina Medley, and Andy Rotherham (moderator) How Charters Changed the Game Post-Katrina (Monday, August 25 at 11am ET) Featuring Leslie Jacobs, Dana Peterson, Jim Peyser, and Juliet Squire (moderator) Career Pathway Innovations in New Orleans (Thursday, Aug. 28 at 2:00pm ET) Featuring Aaron Frumin, Claire Jecklin, Cate Swinburn, and Alex Cortez (moderator)

Nick Gibb:

One could argue that the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century. Willingham has observed that we have learned more about how people learn in the last 25 years than in the previous 2,500 combined. His book Why Don’t Students Like School? examines how that recently acquired understanding can be used to accelerate learning.

Yet, however great his influence has been in the United States, it has been far greater in my own country, England. In fact, while the U.S. is perhaps the world’s largest exporter of educational ideas, it is an “equal opportunity exporter”—pushing out transformative ideas both powerful and catastrophically misinformed. Our efforts in England across a decade to understand the difference between good and bad ideas in education has led to a transformation of our schools from moribund to global leadership at exactly the time the U.S. has continued to struggle.

Many “progressivist” ideas that came to dominate teaching emanated from Teachers College Columbia in New York in the 1920s under such luminaries as William Heard Kilpatrick and John Dewey, based on the ideas of the 18th century Romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He thought that a rigorous academic education stifled the natural creativity and goodness of children; better to have them learn through “self-discovery” or projects than by teacher-led instruction, with less emphasis on the importance of knowledge and more on a set of amorphous skills such as learning how to learn and critical thinking.

These ideas carry different names and have different emphases. But whether it’s “constructivist,” “child-centered,” or “progressivist,” the results wherever they are tried are the same: a weaker education system where children’s life chances, particular those from poorer families, suffer.

Over time in Britain this ideology was increasingly absorbed by our schools, from the 1970s to its peak in the 2000s, and it did enormous damage to our education system. The U.K. plummeted down the OECD rankings of nations’ education standards, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In reading, the U.K. fell from seventh in the year 2000 to 25th by 2009 and in math from 8th to 27th over that period.

Mark Stewart

The allegations of mental abuse that preceded the resignation of former Wisconsin women’s basketball coach Marisa Moseley moved to a new arena on Aug. 15.

Federal court.

Five former players filed a civil lawsuit against Moseley, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and Justin Doherty, who served as the administrator for women’s basketball and retired as UW’s senior associate athletic director for external communications in April. The players claim psychological abuse by Moseley and that Doherty was aware of the issue but took no action to protect the players.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are former Badgers Alexis Duckett, Krystyna Ellew, Mary Ferrito, Tara Stauffacher and Tessa Towers. The lawsuit was filed in District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and seeks compensatory and punitive damages among other penalties.

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Complaint.

TarjeiJS

Ten-year-old prodigy WFM Bodhana Sivanandan stunned the nation in the 2025 British Chess Championship in Liverpool on Sunday, becoming the youngest woman ever to beat a grandmaster and the youngest-ever to earn the Woman International Master title. Meanwhile, 53-year-old GM Michael Adams sealed his ninth national title after winning a dramatic three-way playoff.

The 111th British Chess Championship had several notable storylines, which will be covered in this recap.

Carrion Wigfall:

The ability to read by the end of third grade is a critical skill for a child’s success — not only for the remainder of his or her K-12 journey and later educational outcomes but for future career opportunities, earnings potential, and economic mobility.

Statewide, third-grade reading proficiency has been steadily declining for a number of years. Data from the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment reports nearly 54 percent of third graders aren’t meeting grade-level reading benchmarks. 

How does your district measure up? Are reading scores where they should be or is there room for improvement? Use the database below to see reading proficiency results from the 2024 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment. According to the Minnesota Department of Education, students who do not take the test are excluded from the assessment results and do not impact a district’s MCA proficiency calculation. 

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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?

Terence Eden:

That’s it. We can throw away all those outdated paper books. Children will learn directly from an AI which, coincidentally, is sold by the company. We can trust their studies on such matters and be assured that they have no ulterior motive.

But, ah my friends, I have told a slight untruth. I didn’t ask that question. Frederick James Smith asked the question to Thomas Edison in 1913. The question was about the new and exciting world of motion pictures.

Zachary Marschall

College-admissions experts note that the rise in these schools’ popularity has allowed them to become more selective, boosting their prestige even further among high-school students.

From 2014 to 2024, the last full year for available admissions data, Auburn University’s freshman-class acceptance rate decreased from 85% to 46%; Clemson University’s dropped from 52% to 38%.

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The trend line holds even for the South’s most selective colleges: Rice University’s acceptance rate dipped from 14% to 8%; Emory University’s, from 26% to 15%. 

By contrast, elite Northeastern universities have only been able to maintain their enrollments by taking in more foreign students.

Why are young people are flocking to Southern universities? 

DHS.gov:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today announced U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a criminal illegal alien responsible for driving while intoxicated and causing the fatal car wreck that killed two American teens in Dane County, Wisconsin.  

On August 13, 2025, ICE arrested Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila—a criminal illegal alien from Honduras—who struck a vehicle while driving the wrong direction on a highway, killing 18-year-old Hallie Helgeson at the scene on July 20. Martinez-Avila also gravely injured 19-year-old Brady Heiling who died from his injuries on July 25.

Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila was charged with two counts of felony vehicular homicide and impaired driving by Wisconsin law enforcement. ICE lodged an arrest detainer for this illegal alien’s arrest and removal from the country. Despite this sanctuary jurisdiction giving ICE less than an hour notice to make the arrest, ICE nabbed this criminal alien.

Magic Sketch:

One respondent shared a particularly striking personal experience. After transferring from a rural Chinese school to an elite private school in Shenzhen, they witnessed a completely different approach to money and opportunity:

“I remember two incidents vividly: A female classmate said she ‘grabbed’ a 20,000 yuan bag, then sold it for over 50,000 yuan half a month later. Another male student used his network to find ways to make money through importing, eventually trading up to get the latest iPhone. Meanwhile, back in my hometown, most parents couldn’t afford an iPhone 4S even after selling oranges for half a year.”

The contrast isn’t just economic — it’s philosophical. These students weren’t just wealthy; they were entrepreneurially native. They instinctively understood concepts like arbitrage, network effects, and opportunity costs that many adults never grasp.

Hector Herrera:

At some point in junior high, I had to choose a “shop.” My school in Mexico offered some sensible, safe options such as music, typing, and shorthand. But the ones most boys wanted were the two slightly dangerous ones — Electronics and Electricity or Metalwork. 

These were not tucked-away electives; they had pride of place at the far end of the schoolyard, in two corrugated steel warehouses butted against each other like twin workshops in a small industrial park.

I chose Electronics and Electricity.

The proximity of the two classes meant a constant back-and-forth — a lot of joking, teasing, and the occasional informal competition to see who could cause more noise or sparks.

In my shop, we learned how to solder electronics and cables together. We played with full-voltage circuits, wired light fixtures, and installed electrical plugs. We were 13 and 14-year-old boys using tools that could burn us, shock us, and — if we ignored the teacher’s warnings — put us in the hospital. The boys next door were welding in full gear, cutting and filing metal, and doing things that came with a real risk of tetanus. I can’t recall a single accident bad enough to stop a class, though there were burns, scrapes, and the occasional singed eyebrow.

And we loved it.

We gave each other electric shocks for fun. We raced to see who could wire a circuit the fastest or the cleanest. There was no discussion about “toxic masculinity” — just a roomful of boys learning to master tools and danger.

Arthur Sido:

CPS student gets 5 years for bringing a machine gun to school (but he won’t serve any actual prison time)

“Student” is pretty generous as you will see….

A former Chicago Public Schools student has been sentenced to five years in prison for bringing a loaded machine gun to school, but he is not expected to spend any time in an actual prison.

Marquis Terry, 20, pleaded guilty to possession of a machine gun in exchange for the sentence from Judge Kenneth Wadas. However, after receiving a variety of sentencing credits, Terry is not expected to spend any time in prison.

Didja catch the part where he is….20 years oldand still considered a “student”?

The case began on March 20, 2024, when Terry, then 19, was sent home from a field trip with his classmates at Association House High School, 1116 North Kedzie, in Humboldt Park. A Chicago Police Department arrest report said Terry was sent home from the outing in an Uber for “disruptive behavior” that prosecutors said involved smoking marijuana.

That afternoon, the school’s principal searched Terry’s locker, expecting to find more marijuana. Instead, prosecutors said, the principal opened a backpack and discovered a loaded .45-caliber Glock pistol with an extended ammunition magazine and a “switch” device — an illegal attachment that allows pistols to generate automatic gunfire. Police said the gun had been reported stolen from Henderson, Kentucky.

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

Daniel Buck:

Another year, another National Council of Teachers of English Conference

Let’s look at their workshops

First up: a critique of “white supremacist curricula.”

It’s like McCarthyism.

Shakespeare? White Supremacist! Phonics? Racist! Reading? How dare you!

Campus Reform:

A Phoenix Union High School District board meeting turned contentious when board member Jeremiah Cota was blocked from reciting the Lord’s Prayer after being told it could not precede the board’s “land acknowledgement.”

The August 7 incident was captured in a video posted to Cota’s X account, showing the board parliamentarian interrupted the prayer, stating, “We cannot have a religious prayer before the land acknowledgement.” 

Land acknowledgements are statements recognizing that an event or institution is located on land historically inhabited or claimed by indigenous peoples. In recent years, many government agencies, universities, and school districts have begun including them at the start of public meetings, often framing them as part of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Cota’s X profile states he is a tribal member of the Free People of the San Carlos Apache.

Podcast:

Tyler Cowen joins Mitch Daniels to explore AI’s promise, economic threats from debt and regulation, and the need for bold, intelligent policy to secure economic growth, innovation, and individual liberty. Cowen discusses his views on immigration, COVID lockdowns and addresses societal fear of confronting rapid technological change.

Edward White:

China has implored officials to hold fewer meetings and slash the length of official reports, ordering a nationwide campaign to tackle the “stubborn and persistent ills” of “formalism and bureaucracy” in the government.

A directive published this week by state media called on officials to “improve document quality”, ensure they “adhere to a ‘short, practical and concise’ writing style” and limit themselves to 5,000 characters.

The statement said departments should reduce the number of official documents they produce annually, and submit a written explanation if the amount increases.

Meetings should also be consolidated and streamlined, the directive said, with speeches not to exceed one hour. The number of people in attendance should be subject to strict controls.

Clifford Ando:

No peer institution has borrowed so much in relation to its assets; none spends remotely as large a percentage of tuition on servicing debt. Despite gifts and the surge in the stock market, the University’s endowment has actually shrunk under its current president from 2021 to 2024 because it has been liquidating assets to mask the size of its deficits.

But its story also distills forces and trends in American higher education that are corroding ideals, and wasting money, throughout the land.

America’s leading research universities distinguished themselves both in their commitment to an extraordinary ideal, namely, the creation and questioning of new knowledge in every field that touches on human existence, and in their commitment to integrating persons at every stage of learning into this process. One way Chicago and all research universities actualize these ideals is by placing undergraduate students in the classroom with faculty who perform research. Students at these universities learn from people who exist at the cutting edge of what we know.

In a 2009 strategic plan, Robert J. Zimmer, the then-president of the University of Chicago, confessed to the university’s trustees that the faculty-student ratio was lower in 2009 than it had been in 1972. This decline, Zimmer averred, “threaten[ed] our core ethos as a University that places a premium on rigorous inquiry.” And yet, after a brief amelioration, the faculty-student ratio at the University of Chicago has gotten worse nearly every year from 2011 to 2024, for the very simple reason that the University of Chicago placed itself so deeply in debt it could conceive no other way out. (There were plenty of ways out.)

more.

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K-12 Tax & $pending climate: Chicago’s pension crisis is heading for a Detroit-style collapse

Hope Karnopp:

School districts have state-imposed limits on how much money they can take in through two sources: State general aid and property taxes. The veto raises those limits by $325 per student, per year, until 2425. 

So, an initial question is whether school districts will take advantage of those increases or forgo them.

When we reached out to Americans for Prosperity’s Wisconsin chapter for backup, state director Megan Novak said “history and data point to the reasonable conclusion that Gov. Evers’ veto can and will raise property taxes.”

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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?

Quinton Klabon:

2025 SCHOOL REPORT CARD CUT SCORES SENT TO DPI FOR APPROVAL

• 0 districts rated 1 star
• 75% of high-income schools (<30% poverty) rated 4 or 5 stars, said a member
• new benchmarks (versus old)
  1 star: 0 (0)
  2 star: 49 (48)
  3 stars: 60 (58)
  4 stars: 71 (70)
  5 stars: 84 (83)

Corrine Hess

For some, one of the most confusing aspects of the report cards is that sometimes those stars don’t align with student proficiency rates in math and reading. 

And that isn’t likely to be changed this go-around. 

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Wisconsin DPI press release.

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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?

John Sailer:

DOCUMENTS: a UT San Antonio faculty job scoresheet gives 5 points for “Female or URM candidate.”

This is, of course, illegal. But what I’m really curious about is whoever got the “1” in that category.

more.

Anna Giaritelli

The extent of crime in D.C. has been debated by the Left and Right since President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he would take federal action to crack down on problems in the District of Columbia. 

But if the public wants to have an honest conversation about crime in D.C., the MPD will first have to be honest about how prevalent crime is. Without MPD’s honesty about the crimes that it has chosen to hide from its public-facing stats page, the White House cannot get an accurate picture of how bad the problem actually is and adequately fix it.

For me, the story began long before that attack. I was a Washingtonian for seven years. I was saving up money to buy a condo and planned to spend the next few decades in Washington, the intersection of politics and media. D.C.’s crime problem was something you lived with. You took Ubers and Lyfts, told others if you were walking after dark so they knew when you were home, and knew to be aware of your surroundings, almost to the point of paranoia. (Ladies?)

On a Saturday morning in 2020, I walked out of my apartment on Capitol Hill to mail a package at a post office several blocks from the U.S. Capitol. I put on my black sweatshirt and black sweatpants then headed out the door.

I never made it to the post office.

Just one block from my apartment building’s entrance, I was attacked by a large man well over six feet tall. He charged at me for a reason that I still do not understand. In broad daylight and on well-traveled 2nd Street NE next to Union Station, I fought to get away as he sexually assaulted me. If it had not been for others in the vicinity, including a construction worker named Donny who heard my screaming and ran to my rescue, I don’t know if I would be here today.

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more:

This is the most important story I’ve told. It’s my story. I’ve waited five years to share it, and I’m ready now.

I’m Anna Giaritelli. The DC police are covering up crime. I know because they covered up what happened to me

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Alana Goodman:

The District of Columbia has quietly settled a lawsuit from a sergeant who accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics, court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Police brass repeatedly told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, according to internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts the Free Beacon reviewed.

Kyra Phillips:

“I can tell you firsthand here in downtown DC where we work, right here around our bureau, just in the past six months, you know, there were two people shot, one person died…”. more.

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Olbrich:

In an Aug. 8 memo to the park commissioners, Tanya Zastrow, executive director of Olbrich Botanical Society — the nonprofit fundraising arm for the gardens — cited an “increase in overnight trespassers, acts of vandalism and most recently theft in the gardens” as the reason for the request.

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Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006

Katherine M. Bowser

Los Angeles USD is facing a $94.5 million budget shortfall this year. Fairfax County, VA: $121 million. Chicago: $734 million. With ESSER funds expired and enrollment declining, districts nationwide face painful decisions that can impact students, such as layoffs and school closures. Identifying and repurposing wasteful spending can help ease these tough choices.

In this District Trendline, we focus on one of education’s most persistent examples of ineffective and inefficient spending—automatic salary increases for teachers who hold a master’s degree (i.e., master’s degree premiums). We find that over 90% of large districts still pay teachers more if they earn one, despite research showing they don’t improve teacher effectiveness—at a cost of millions of dollars wasted. 

Benjamin Rothove:

Roughly 80 percent of the 2017 and 2018 Truman Scholars remain in liberal politics within a decade after winning the federally funded scholarship, according to a College Fixanalysis.

The Fix reviewed the current public activities of Truman Scholars from the 2017 and 2018 cohorts and found at least 98 of the 122 winners have a clear connection to liberal politics, such as working for Democratic members of Congress, advocating for progressive causes, or teaching classes with a liberal focus.

In contrast, none are currently involved in conservative politics. The other winners’ ideologies could not be ascertained based on publicly available information.

The Fix similarly found 75 percent of Truman Scholars from the 2015 and 2016 cohorts remain involved in liberal politics a decade later. Only a single winner from those years could be found who today works for conservative causes.

Clifford Ando:

On June 14, the dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities (AHD) formed and immediately charged five “working groups” with proposing significant reforms on the structure of departments; language instruction; and doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate education. The committees have until August 22 to submit their recommendations to the dean, who will in turn forward them to the provost by August 25. This timetable means that a program of reform intended to change nearly every aspect of academic life will be completed and advanced beyond the division in exactly the interval during which neither departmental nor divisional meetings take place. To achieve this unseemly haste, the process allows neither for consultation with departments nor for comparative and historical study.

Everything about the process, stated rationale, and likely outcomes of this program of reform strikes me as emblematic of the current trajectory of the University of Chicago and, indeed, of higher education as a whole. In what follows, I seek to analyze this development in terms that clarify the stakes, both internally to the University and externally to colleagues in higher education.

I first explore the charges of the committees and the rationale they have been given, both for acting at all and especially for acting quickly. I then analyze the implications of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and other federal actions for the University of Chicago. This analysis leads to the question of the incidence of funding changes at the federal level for the budget of the Division of the Arts and Humanities.

The thrust of this analysis is that the University has undertaken extraordinary quantities of leveraged spending in ways that benefit select units, while others, who have achieved high international ranking with little aid from capital spending, have instead suffered from a withdrawal of operational support in order to finance those endeavors. The present moment of reform brings that long trend to a crisis point. To understand the University’s willingness to dismantle its own excellence, I turn to an earlier moment of panicked reform induced by an earlier stage of this prolonged financial crisis, namely the expansion of the College in 2017. This leads to some final reflections on the maintenance of University ideals in an age of instability.

Katherine Long, Ben Foldy and Sara Randazzo:

In early May, after a baby was hospitalized with possible signs of child abuse, police showed up at a nine-bedroom mansion in this Los Angeles suburb known for lavish homes and residents with roots in China. Inside, they found 15 more children, none older than 3, living under the care of nannies.

The investigative trail led them to six more children at other homes in the Los Angeles area. A Chinese-born man and woman living in the mansion said they were the parents of all 22 children. Birth certificates list them as such. What mystified police was that the children appeared to have been born all over the U.S., and in rapid succession.

Local authorities removed the children from the homes, placed them in foster care, and called in the FBI.

The mansion, it turned out, was listed as the headquarters of Mark Surrogacy, which had arranged many of the children’s births and was managed by Silvia Zhang, the woman living there. Zhang said she was the mother of all the children.

Michael J. Petrilli

Earlier this summer, Education Next published a post by EdChoice’s Robert Enlow and Michael Q. McShane, “School Choice Should Take the Road Less Traveled.” It was not my favorite take, to say the least.

The problem wasn’t so much their argument that private-school choice should be regulated differently than charter schooling. While I would quibble (and quarrel) on some specifics, I can appreciate that the rules for private-school choice should be different from those for charter schools. Otherwise we’d “de-privatize” private schools, and what would be the point of that?

No, what really bothered me was their claim—one I’ve seen many others make—that the charter sector once had great potential for innovation, but because of those dastardly authorizers and other red-tape-loving bureaucrats, charters instead became overly cautious, impeding innovation in a way that has hamstrung and limited the entire charter school movement. Here’s how Enlow and McShane put it:

Charter schools have been a school choice success but a limited one, facing increasing challenges through the years with overregulation and limited growth. Hailed initially as a way to dramatically remake education, particularly urban education, charter schools have been stymied in their impact by an authorizing and regulatory framework that has buried potential operators in the very bureaucratic structures charter schools were created to avoid. The sector has empowered a limited set of unelected functionaries to say no for arbitrary and capricious reasons. And, it has curtailed ways in which schools can experiment and try to educate children differently.

Sun Prairie:

Following the arrest last month of a former dean of students on child pornography and exploitation charges, the Sun Prairie School Board has deemed district administrators out of compliance with policies requiring them to communicate with the board and the public.

While board members did not directly reference the district’s handling of the allegations and eventual felony charges against Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier, members of the audience cheered their action during Monday’s meeting.

Prior to the votes finding administrators had not followed the policies, a dozen parents or other residents criticized the district for failing to act sooner against Gilkey-Meisegeier and said they were worried about their children’s safety in the district.

Tricia Nowicki, who said she has a daughter at West High School, where he worked, said, “I am extremely concerned for her safety going back in the fall.”

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Megan Novak:

Madison Metropolitan School District Board, with one of the widest racial achievement gaps in the country, tackling the most important issues as the school year is about to begin. What a joke.

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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?

Ella Hanley:

The Galin Scholars program is welcoming its third cohort of high school students this fall, continuing its expansion of free college prep in the greater Madison area.

The Madison-based nonprofit now supports 15 students from seven high schools. The first five students graduated from high school this summer and will begin college at Northwestern University, Lake Forest College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall.

The graduates were offered over $1.1 million in merit awards from schools where they applied, according to Galin Scholars.

Established in 2022, Galin Scholars partners with schools and families to support students with strong academic potential. The program focuses on students from low- or middle-income households and who are part of groups underrepresented in college.

Students in the program may receive academic tutoring and counseling, weekly advising, essay support, guidance on college applications and financial aid, college tours, ACT prep and transportation. The program is funded by individual and business donations, education grants and a partnership with Galin Education, a Madison-based college prep company.

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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?

WILL:

The News: WILL submitted recommendations to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) today, urging an overhaul of the state’s school report card standards. WILL’s analysis highlights DPI’s track record of inflating ratings that masks a decades-long stagnation in student achievement.

These efforts come after years of DPI making unilateral changes to the accountability system, a trend that has made it more difficult to accurately compare academic progress over time.  Our letter urges DPI to use this as an inflection point for change.

The Quotes: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “Wisconsin is falling behind the rest of the country academically and changing standards only masks this decline. Instead of raising the bar, we are simply putting our heads in the sand. It’s why WILL is encouraging DPI to follow through on its commitment to Wisconsin students and adopt report card standards that give true insight into school performance.”

The Problem: WILL’s analysis exposes significant flaws in the current reporting system where schools and districts appear to perform above average:

• One school with only 4.1% ELA proficiency was rated “Exceeds Expectations.”
• 18 schools statewide received an “Exceeds Expectations” rating despite less than 25% ELA proficiency.

To verify these findings, WILL compared DPI’s ratings to GreatSchools, an independent school rating system widely used by parents when choosing a school. A review of 309 Wisconsin schools across the state’s six largest districts showed that 50% of schools were rated higher by DPI, while only 3% were rated higher by GreatSchools. We believe that this demonstrates DPI’s ratings are overly generous and fail to accurately reflect declining student achievement.

WILL’s Recommendations: To create an honest and rigorous reporting system, WILL recommends that DPI adopt a new approach that is both accurate and transparent.

Joshua A. Cuevas, Bryan L. Dawson and Gina Childers:

Abstract

This study assessed the pedagogical knowledge and metacognitive awareness of pedagogy of faculty (N = 107) at a large state university in the United States. The purpose was to ascertain whether faculty could distinguish effective learning practices from ineffective ones, as determined by empirical research in learning science. Faculty responded to items regarding the efficacy of effective practices and others shown by research to be neuromyths or misconceptions. Faculty across all colleges correctly identified most of the effective practices but also endorsed myths/misconceptions, ultimately showing limited pedagogical knowledge. Tenured faculty showed stronger pedagogical knowledge than newer faculty. Faculty were also assessed on their confidence in their knowledge of pedagogical practices. Respondents demonstrated poor metacognitive awareness as there was no relationship between confidence in pedagogical knowledge and actual pedagogical knowledge. Surprisingly, education faculty scored no better in pedagogical knowledge than faculty of any other college and also showed low metacognitive awareness. Results indicate that universities preparing doctoral students for faculty positions should ensure candidates are exposed to accurate information regarding learning science. The implications for colleges of education are more dire in that they may be failing to prepare candidates in the most essential aspects of the field.

Keywords: pedagogy, learning science, cognitive myths,

more.

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

Eric Adler:

University leaders in the United States are slashing the humanities left and right. If you take what they say at face value, it’s because of their limited fiscal capacities. But there is growing evidence that this isn’t the case — that it isn’t a lack of capacity so much as a fundamental lack of will on the part of administrators and boards of trustees to support humanistic education and research. How have the priorities of these university leaders wandered so far away from the age-old value of humanistic education and the true purpose of the liberal arts?

Let’s first consider some of the evidence. Back in June, Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa, announced that her institution’s new provost fired her as the dean of the Honors College that she had run for two years. Why? According to the provost, the program Frey established for the college was too expensive. But this was a puzzling suggestion. The university possesses a $1.36-billion endowment, and by all accounts Frey’s new program, which focused on reading core texts in the humanistic tradition, was phenomenally successful. Enrollment in Tulsa’s Honors College grew by over 500%. Retention rates in the college soared, and the program managed to attract multiple major grants and gifts. And although we’re often told that contemporary college students lack the skills, patience, or inclination to read great (or, now, any) works of literature, history, and philosophy, pupils flocked to Frey’s college.

Joanne Jacobs Summary:

In education, there’s little support for people who say, “That’s not good enough. Do better,” he writes. In a way , the consequences of low standards are life-threatening. But it’s not obvious until years later.

President Trump is reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test, which was discontinued in 2013 in favor of a “more holistic ‘barometer’ of student health,” he writes. In the past, “students who hit certain benchmarks got a certificate.” Not a big deal.

In a New York Times story, For Some, Return of Presidential Fitness Test Revives Painful Memories, a 60-year-old woman calls the test, “survive or fail. It was Darwinist.”

“Now, I don’t think Charles Darwin would think kids having to do pull-ups really captures the adapt-or-die essence of On the Origin of Species, writes Hess. “But this kind of overwrought anxiety has become pervasive, undermining our ability to set clear expectations for kids or confidently stand by them.”

Massimo

NEWS

The U.S. national debt is now officially over $37 trillion.

This is approximately the value of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, India and UK combined. This amounts to $108,000 per person in the U.S.

The debt is currently growing at:

• $3.1M per minute
• $212.9M per hour
• $5.1B per day

Terry Falk:

Partly, for that reason, new Superintendent Brenda Cassellius asked the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS) to evaluate the MPS Office of Human Resources. This is not the first time CGCS has looked at the district’s HR department. But of the 19 recommendations it made in 2019, only one was fully implemented.

At the July 31 school board meeting, CGCS Executive Director Ray Hart outlined its latest findings in a presentation.

It is not enough to simply list the 12 new recommendations here. It is more important to try to understand why reform in the district has been so difficult to accomplish.

MPS has had so many twists and turns in its organizational structure in the last 35 years. Milwaukee’s school voucher program was established in 1990. Advocates for vouchers, such as Susan Mitchell, pushed whole sale dismantling of a centralized system when she wrote in 1994, for the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute to shift control from MPS “by allowing parents to choose schools their children attend and providing them the  financial resources to do so.”

Becky Jacobs:

While more than 700,000 people use the resource each year, Johnson said, County Health Rankings and Roadmaps will soon lose its primary funder. The New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is set to end its support after 2026.

Mary Ann Lombardo, a foundation spokesperson, said the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps has been a “successful” partnership but the philanthropist is evolving how it works with partners and who it funds.

“Moving forward we are looking to support data programs that better meet the needs of community partners by providing granular and timely data for the economic, social, political and environmental factors that impact communities,” Lombardo said in an email.