Martin Enserink

“Editors no longer have confidence in the reliability of the findings and conclusions reported in this article,” the journal said in a retraction note published yesterday.

“The concerns relate to lack of transparency and misstatement of the hypotheses and predictions the reported metastudy was designed to test; lack of preregistration for measures and analyses supporting the titular claim (against statements asserting preregistration in the published article); selection of outcome measures and analyses with knowledge of the data; and incomplete reporting of data and analyses,” the note says.

Graham Piro:

For the first time since the October 7 terror attacks in Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, a tenured faculty member in the United States has been fired for pro-Palestinian advocacy. The firing of tenured anthropology professor Maura Finkelstein by Muhlenberg College, a private, Lutheran school in Allentown, Pennsylvania, marks the third serious attack on tenured faculty this week.

Finkelstein, unenviably, joins both Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who was dealt a major sanction for her in-class and extramural speech, and Joe Gow, fired today from his tenured faculty role at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse for making vegan-themed pornography with his wife in his spare time.

Abbey Machtig:

More referendum money would pay for an estimated $15 million increase in health care costs, and for new teaching and mental health staff.

An additional pay increase for district employees also is tied to the operating referendum. The district and Madison Teachers Inc. already agreed to a 2.06% wage increase, in addition to raises awarded for years of experience and level of education. If the referendum passes, staff would get the full 4.12% increase allowed under state law.

Money from the operating referendum also would be used to invest in 4K programming, bolster multilingual education and enrich career exploration opportunities in middle schools, according to the district’s website. The district has not provided information about the cost of each of these items, or exactly what kind of programs would be expanded or added.

The School Board also may decide to use a chunk of referendum revenue to address student service employees’ salary compression — the term for when newly hired employees with less experience earn close to, or more than, employees in the same job with more experience. The compression is the result of changes made in 2018 to the schedule that dictates salary increases based on years of experience and level of education. Student services employees include social workers, psychologists, occupational and physical therapists, school counselors and speech and language clinicians.

It will cost about $1.8 million to even out the salaries, according to district estimates. The School Board also could opt to fix the compression in the 2025-26 budget.

…..

The district has not committed to reducing expenses before asking taxpayers for more money, unlike, for example, the McFarland School District. McFarland schools made $1.2 million in cuts and the district now is asking voters to approve a $5.25 million operating referendum.

If the operating referendum fails, the Madison School District plans to significantly draw down its reserves, by about $46.7 million, to cover expenses.

That plan would be a short-term fix and comes with added financial risk. Pulling from reserves can hurt the district’s financial rating and increase its need to take out short-term loans.

The school district’s current reserves fund balance sat at just over $114.6 million on July 1, according to information provided to the School Board on Sept. 16. Board policy requires the district to maintain a fund balance that is equal to 10% to 15% of its general operating budget, which currently sits at about $496.6 million.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Gregg Easterbrook

As it becomes fashionable to denounce the Constitution because it inconveniences many in power, I commend this book by historian Sean Wilentz, which shows that, for all its flaws, the U.S. Constitution is the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment

Alan Blinder:

But after Mr. Sewer signed up, he said that Caltech was almost nowhere to be found. Mr. Sewer said his primary instructor, who sometimes vanished during class sessions, lived in Mississippi, not Southern California. A course facilitator, he said, was in India. Neither had any meaningful ties to Caltech, which Mr. Sewer had known as an academic powerhouse and a backdrop of the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”

The university, he learned, had largely outsourced the program to a company called Simplilearn.

“It was just a bunch of bogus,” Mr. Sewer scoffed in an interview. “They just wanted our money.”

Caltech, a private university in Pasadena, Calif., is a highly selective school, but some of its online programs make it merely part of the crowd. Colleges across the country are routinely offering online, nondegree-granting programs that they tout as avenues to offer more educational opportunities to broader audiences. But the programs are largely unregulated and may not feature university faculty members or their curriculums.

Matt Taibbi:

This is every amateur speaker’s dream, to follow Russell Brand. Thanks a lot, God!

I was once taught you should always open an important speech by making reference to a shared experience.

So what do all of us at “Rescue the Republic” have in common? Nothing!

In a pre-Trump universe chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell, Bret Weinstein and I would organically get together for any reason, much less an event like this.

True, everyone speaking has been censored. The issues were all different, but everyone disagreed with “authoritative voices” about something.

Saying no is very American. From “Don’t Tread on Me!” to “Nuts” to “You Cannot Be Serious!” defiance is in our DNA.

Rachel Wolfe:

In Spanish, parents call it encaminado: making sure your children are on the path to an independent adulthood.

Out of Dan and Joana Moreno’s four grown children, only their daughter is encaminada. She recently graduated from business school and got engaged. The Morenos’ three adult sons are still sleeping in their Miami childhood bedrooms. The younger two dropped out of college, and the oldest never went. All three are single. Their only work experience is with the family business.

“Something has gone amiss here,” says their father, Dan, who owns the repair chain Flamingo Appliance Service. “We love them, we love having them around, but that’s not how you build a life.”

The life trajectories of America’s sons and daughters are diverging.

Presented with a more-equal playing field, young women are seizing the opportunities in front of them, while young men are floundering. The phenomenon has developed over the past decade, but was supercharged by the pandemic, which derailed careers, schooling and isolated friends and families. The result has big implications for the economy.

Melissa Korn:

The university, based in Nashville, has signed a 99-year lease for a 2.2-acre property in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The campus currently includes 13 buildings with 150,000 square feet of space.

Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said the property is valued at more than $100 million. The school is still assessing the investment needed for renovations.

Vanderbilt has set its sights elsewhere, too. The university recently pitched a $520 million project in West Palm Beach, Fla. It has an agreement with the city there but is still in discussions with county officials. Programs there would focus on data science, fintech and engineering, the school has said.

Vanderbilt is in a fortunate class of colleges, attracting plenty of students, faculty and research dollars. Last year, it admitted just over 6% of first-year applicants. But it competes fiercely against other top-tier schools for accepted students—about 57% of admitted students enrolled.

Laine Higgins and Jared Diamond:

Quarterback Matthew Sluka announced Tuesday that he was quitting the UNLV program in order to preserve his NCAA eligibility and switch to a different school for next season. The reason, he says, was that he was promised money he never received.

Marcus Cromartie, Sluka’s agent, told ESPN that an assistant coach verbally offered $100,000 if Sluka transferred from Holy Cross to UNLV. The deal never materialized, prompting Sluka to walk away while he could still take advantage of rules letting players retain a year of eligibility if they play four or fewer games in a season.

Cromartie didn’t respond to several requests for comment from The Wall Street Journal.

Tyler Cowen:

Not just on the basis of what you publish, but on what you contribute to the major AI models.  So if you go to a major archive and, in some manner, turn it into AI-readable form, that should count for a good deal.  It is no worse than publishing a significant article, though of course depending on the quality of the archive.  As it stands today, you basically would get no credit for that.  You would instead be expected to turn the archive into articles or a book, even if that meant unearthing far less data for the AIs.  Turning data into books takes a long time — is that always what humans should be doing?

Articles still count under this standard, as jstor seems to be in the literary “diet” of the major AI models.  Wikipedia contributions should count for tenure, and any “hard for the AI to access data set” should count for all the more.  Soon it won’t much matter whether humans read your data contribution, as long as the AIs do.

Christopher Martell:

This is not a post about what standardized tests do. The reality is that educational assessment is a complicated process. High-quality standardized tests can be helpful in assessing what students know, but they do not always measure what they intend to measure. More importantly, they are also only one of many assessments that teachers and schools use to get a fuller picture of what students understand and are able to do (see here for an argument on why standardized tests are problematic and evidence that students already take too many of them). 

Rather, this is a post about what standardized tests can’t do. Standardized tests were never designed (and should never be used) to determine if a student should receive a high school diploma. As an educational researcher, I know a little about this. I remember my quantitative research methods professors as a doctoral student always telling us that “a test only measures what a test measures.” So, you should never try to use that test to measure something it was not designed to do. The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) was designed to measure one thing: basic comprehension in literacy, mathematics, and science. Students may be not only proficient, but advanced in other academic areas, such as history/social studies, world languages, art, music, theater, consumer and family sciences, computer science, vocational fields, or business, but if they do not reach an arbitrary MCAS score in only three subject area tests, they will not receive a diploma in Massachusetts.

The MCAS does not measure workforce or higher education readiness. The MCAS does not measure a student’s ability to think critically or problem solve. The MCAS does not improve student’s individual economic opportunity (but a student’s economic opportunity can predict their MCAS score). The opponents of Question 2 will tell you an MCAS graduation requirement is necessary for all of these things to occur; they are being intentionally disingenuous (in fact many boldly claim that this ballot question will get rid of MCAS altogether, which it does not). Moreover, researchers have long known that social class may influence up to 84% of a student’s MCAS score. In many ways, the MCAS tells us more about how much wealth a student’s family or community has than it measures the quality of that student’s schools or their individual learning.  

Bezos Washington Post

To have children or not to have them? That is the question more and more Americans are asking themselves. Only 26 percent say having children is extremely or very important for a fulfilling life, according to a Pew Research Center survey, whereas 71 percent say the same about “having a job or career they enjoy.” The U.S. fertility ratehas plummeted to 1.6 lifetime births per woman, well below the “replacement rate” of around 2.1, at which point a population remains stable between generations.

Choose life.

Terry Tao:

Traditionally, mathematics research projects are conducted by a small number (typically one to five) of expert mathematicians, each of which are familiar enough with all aspects of the project that they can verify each other’s contributions. It has been challenging to organize mathematical projects at larger scales, and particularly those that involve contributions from the general public, due to the need to verify all of the contributions; a single error in one component of a mathematical argument could invalidate the entire project. Furthermore, the sophistication of a typical math project is such that it would not be realistic to expect a member of the public, with say an undergraduate level of mathematics education, to contribute in a meaningful way to many such projects.

For related reasons, it is also challenging to incorporate assistance from modern AI tools into a research project, as these tools can “hallucinate” plausible-looking, but nonsensical arguments, which therefore need additional verification before they could be added into the project.

Proof assistant languages, such as Lean, provide a potential way to overcome these obstacles, and allow for large-scale collaborations involving professional mathematicians, the broader public, and/or AI tools to all contribute to a complex project, provided that it can be broken up in a modular fashion into smaller pieces that can be attacked without necessarily understanding all aspects of the project as a whole. Projects to formalize an existing mathematical result (such as the formalization of the recent proof of the PFR conjecture of Marton, discussed in this previous blog post) are currently the main examples of such large-scale collaborations that are enabled via proof assistants. At present, these formalizations are mostly crowdsourced by human contributors (which include both professional mathematicians and interested members of the general public), but there are also some nascent efforts to incorporate more automated tools (either “good old-fashioned” automated theorem provers, or more modern AI-based tools) to assist with the (still quite tedious) task of formalization.

Lesley Muldoon:

Four and a half years after the start of the pandemic, it’s time to raise the bar and stop making excuses for sagging achievement. Newly released data show that student growth in 2023-24 lagged behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in nearly every grade. That data follows the big declines in reading and math scores on the most recent Nation’s Report Card and the release of a study showing that high-needs districts have been recovering from the pandemic more slowly than their wealthier counterparts, worsening long-standing achievement gaps.

The pandemic also led to an explosion in chronic absenteeism, and we’ve seen only modest improvements. A recent study by USC researchers found a lack of concern about the issue among parents. School leaders also aren’t as worried as you’d expect, with only 15 percent saying they were “extremely concerned” about student absences in a survey released by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Gregg Easterbrook:

New Justice Ketanji Jackson has said from the SC bench that government should control what opinions the public is allowed to hear and see. the elitist urge to censor dissent is scary.

Christopher Snowbeck

Most carriers in the state’s individual and small markets are raising rates by roughly 9% to 15%.

The rate jumps, revealed in state data Friday, are bigger than during each of the past two years. They will be offset for many in the individual market by larger tax credits from the federal government (taxpayers) if they buy coverage through……

Crazy multidimensional cost and tax growth continues along with ever higher co-pays and deductibles.

Ann Althouse Summary:

JUST IN: New ICE report reveals the Biden-Harris administration has let in 425,000 illegal immigrants who are convicted criminals. That is enough people to fill Michigan’s football stadium 4 times. The report says the following illegals are “roaming the country”: – 13,099 M*rderers – 15,811 R*pists – 425,431 Convicted Criminals “Essentially what that is, is it means migrants who were encountered by DHS but are no longer in federal custody.” “It’s illegal immigrants who are caught and released at the border, released with the court date years away.”

In March, I requested data from the Biden-Harris administration on how many illegal immigrants with a criminal history have been released in our communities.

I just received an answer this week: Over 662,000.

Remember this as VP Harris tries to tout the adminstrations’ “success” during her dog and pony show at the border today.

More.

Lawfare and elections, continued.

Michael Shellenberger:

No matter your politics, these new numbers are shocking. Of the 7 million migrants that ICE released while their cases are being processed, 663,000 have criminal histories, 13,000 were convicted of homicide, 16,000 of sexual assault, and 1,845 face homicide charges.

Alex Karp on the lack of trust in Government.

Elon Musk:

The only thing holding California back from extreme socialism and suffocating government policies is that people can leave California and still remain in America. Once the whole country is controlled by one party, there will be no escape.

Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.

“The 1st Amendment stands as a major roadblock for us right now” (!)

I’m glad Kerry is putting this out there because clearly, their agenda is to rip up the Constitution of the United States of America. Imagine a world where the “elites” shut down and remove your voice. Americans should be prepared to fight to the death to preserve our republic.

 Jim Piwowarczyk & Jessica McBride

A fuller timeline in the case of Alejandro Coronel-Zarate raises serious questions about Madison and Minneapolis police and the Hennepin County Jail. Since the alleged Venezuelan gang member crossed the border in 2023, he’s accused of leaving trail of abused females in his wake. Why did it take until now for ICE to detain him? 

A Minnesota jail took alleged Tren de Aragua Venezuelan gang member Alejandro Coronel-Zarate into custody for almost three days but freed him into the community even though Madison police had already established probable cause that the noncitizen choked, beat, and threatened to burn and kill a terrified Madison woman, new records obtained by Wisconsin Right Now show.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department – which has a “sanctuary” policy of not cooperating with ICE and is located in a sanctuary county – released Coronel-Zarate, 26, of Venezuela, on Nov. 20, 2023, even though court records show that Madison police had already obtained the key evidence that was eventually used to issue felony suffocation charges in Wisconsin on December 1. There’s no evidence they told ICE. By the time Madison filed charges, Coronel-Zarate was in the wind, and a warrant was issued when he did not show up for court.

The key questions:

Why didn’t Madison police go get him when the Minnesota Jail decided to release him? Did they tell ICE that he was accused of a violent crime?

Why didn’t Minneapolis and Hennepin County authorities tell ICE that he was sitting in jail so a detainer could be placed on him?

Nellie Bowles:

The message to the media is very simple: You have to be a huge Kamala fan, you must learn all the lyrics, you must debase yourself as a journalist, and then you’ll get to hear some “answers” to some “questions” and you’ll get one signed pair of Kamala the Cop handcuffs (I would do literally anything for a set, Kamala, I will debase myself more than anyone, please). Kamala, call on me! I know that when you worked at McDonald’s you did fries! Not McFlurries, fries! 

It might sound crass, but as Kamala rises in the polls and journalists tear off their blazers to reveal Kamala Harris chest tattoos, I’ve never been more bullish on The Free Press. My message to mainstream media: Keep on keeping on. I love you guys. And if you’re a CNN anchor thinking about posting a Kamala appreciation TikTok dance to get your own Kamala sit-down “interview,” I love that for you. I’m not here to stop you. I’m here to teach you the dance, and profit from your weakness, which is why, Free Press board, I deserve a raise. 

Michael Hardy and Forrest Wilder:

The anticipation was building. For four months, Houston Public Media had been working on a widely anticipated podcast about the state’s takeover of the Houston Independent School District and its controversial installation of Mike Miles as superintendent. Called The Takeover, the four-part series would be hosted by Dominic Walsh, an award-winning public-education reporter who had spent the past year covering Miles’s ambitious overhaul of the state’s largest school district. He’d broken stories and won awards for his coverage of the intervention. Now he would bring it all together for a national audience. “We’re super-excited,” wrote the podcast editor in an internal email obtained by Texas Monthly. “I don’t think a lot of people understand the significance of what’s happening” in Houston, wrote another employee. “Can’t wait for May 3!” 

In addition to heavily promoting the podcast on its radio station, News 88.7, HPM spent what management identified as a “not insignificant” portion of its annual marketing budget advertising the show to potential listeners. Every major streaming platform planned to offer the podcast; excerpts would run on public radio stations across Texas. But when the release date of May 3 rolled around, the podcast was nowhere to be found. 

Fans of the station were puzzled and frustrated. “Why is the podcast not available?” one longtime listener wrote to HPM in an email. “Where is Dominic Anthony Walsh? What has Houston Public Media done with him???” Several expressed concern that the station had bowed to political pressure. “The immediate suspicion without further explanation is external meddling from someone, somewhere with enough reason and power to stop the podcast,” wrote another listener.

Wall Street Journal:

“But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally, charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States,” the former first lady added.

There’s a novel legal concept. Because Russians can’t be punished in the U.S., she wants Americans to be arrested for their political speech if they happen to utter arguments also uttered by Russians.

Mrs. Clinton seems to be referring to the Americans recently cited by Attorney General Merrick Garland as dupes of Russian attempts to influence the U.S. election. Those folks may be naifs, or even fellow travelers, but they do have First Amendment rights.

Note that Mrs. Clinton is worried about speech she thinks helps Donald Trump. But would her speech standard also apply to the 51 former U.S. intelligence officials who claimed in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”? They were spreading disinformation because the laptop and its contents were real and had belonged to Hunter.

Wall Street Journal:

Chicago can’t afford anything close to that. Rather than disappoint his union buddies, Mayor Johnson wants the school district to take out a $300 million loan to cover higher teacher salaries and pension costs next year. CPS has a junk credit rating, so Mr. Johnson’s loan would end up costing the school district around $700 million.

More.

“Martinez has argued that such demands could bankrupt the (Chicago k-12) system”

The Economist:

The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (gss), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In gss’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left.

More.

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the most darkly hilarious things I’ve seen in politics is how Democrats and media liberals constantly run around warning that if Trump wins, he’ll weaponize the justice system by prosecuting his political enemies, and they do it with zero sense of irony or self-awareness:

Chris Rickert:

The chair of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board tried to prevent police from arresting a family member, demanding of an officer, “Do you know who I am?” and telling him she would call two of his superiors to complain, according to a complaint filed this summer by the vice president of the city’s police union.

Oversight Board Chair Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores showed up at the scene of an Oct. 20 disturbance involving the family member, identified in court records as her 26-year-old daughter, “and attempted to use her position to influence and change the outcome of the police investigation to her own desired resolution,” according to the complaint, which was sworn to by Madison Professional Police Officers’ Association Vice President Emily Samson on July 26 and submitted to the city’s Ethics Board.

Aaron Miller:

I get nostalgic reminiscing on my little league baseball days. I think about long summer days, team bus rides, early close friends, and… private equity.

Wait, private equity?

That’s right. In 2024, we’re seeing a boom of private equity investment into youth sports.

For the longest time, American youth sports programs were largely run as nonprofits and mom & pop businesses. But recently, investors spotted a massive market.

In the US, 30 million kids participate in youth sports and 34 million parents pay – making up a $28 billion total addressable market.

$28 billion: that’s larger than major entertainment sectors, like the box office ($10 billion), recorded music ($11 billion), and online sports betting ($14 billion).

Andrew Bahl:

“There’s no common sense to this at all,” said Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. “This is, in its worst iteration, a nefarious action to minimize our rights. And I think that pig with lipstick is just still a pig.”

When Wisconsin allowed non-citizens to vote

Throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, non-citizens were allowed to vote in local, state and even federal elections in many states across the country.

That includes Wisconsin, where foreign citizens could vote in elections for all levels of government, provided they pledged their intent to become U.S. citizens. That policy lasted until 1908.

“As the United States economy expanded with industrialization and so forth, one of the ways that folks tried to lure immigrants to come westward, aside from access to land, was voting rights,” said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University who researches immigration and voting.

Research from Hayduk and his colleagues shows that 13.5% of the Wisconsin voters in 1900 were foreign citizens.

Those laws fell out of favor in the 20th century. Federal law was eventually changed to bar foreign citizens from voting in elections for president and U.S. Congress, while some states passed laws prohibiting them from participating in gubernatorial and legislative elections.

Noah Hirschl, Christine R. Schwartz and Elia Boschetti

Recent social and economic trends in the United States, including increasing economic inequality, women’s growing educational advantage, and the rise of online dating, have ambiguous implications for patterns of educational homogamy. In this research note, we examine changes in educational assortative mating in the United States over the last eight decades (1940 to 2020) using the U.S. decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, extending and expanding earlier work by Schwartz and Mare. We find that the rise in educational homogamy noted by Schwartz and Mare has not continued. Increases in educational homogamy stalled around 1990 and began reversing in the 2000s. We find a growing tendency for marriages to cross educational boundaries, but a college degree remains the strongest dividing line to intermarriage. A key trend explaining this new pattern is women’s increasing tendency to marry men with less education than themselves. If not for this trend, homogamy would have continued increasing until the early 2010s. We also show substantial heterogeneity by race, ethnicity, and nativity and among same- versus different-sex couples.

Commentary.

Stanley Kurtz

Lozenski is no outlier. On the contrary, he has been the leading voice advocating the addition of a radical version of “ethnic studies” to Minnesota’s social-studies standards (citizenship and government, economics, geography, history, and now ethnic studies). Lozenski is also the key organizer and thought leader for the radical leftist advocacy groups that Governor Walz has effectively put in charge of rewriting Minnesota’s social-studies standards. While Lozenski’s call for the overthrow of the United States is the clearest expression of his radical stance to date, it’s hardly surprising. For years, conservative voices in Minnesota have sounded the alarm over the extremism of Lozenski and his allies. Maybe now, Walz will have to answer for putting Lozenski and his friends in charge of education in the state.

Yet Walz is apparently doing everything possible to avoid accountability. According to an earlier promise by the Minnesota Department of Education’s interim communications director, Anna Arkin, the ethnic-studies implementation framework was supposed to have been released in time for a public comment period from August 9 through August 22. Yet no framework has yet been published.

The most recent public meeting of the committee that is crafting the implementation framework came and went this past Tuesday, September 24. Once again, no framework was produced. (For more, see this important account by Catrin Wigfall.) Increasingly, it appears that, contrary to earlier promises, there will be no public release or public comment period before the October 31 statutory deadline to submit a finalized ethnic-studies implementation framework. There is good reason to believe that the implementation framework is being withheld from the public to prevent it from becoming an issue in the presidential election.

Wall Street Journal:

CBO examined a sample of federal student loans that entered repayment between July 2009 and June 2013 to measure the extent borrowers were making progress on repaying their debt before the three-and-a-half years of pandemic forbearance. Short conclusion: They weren’t.

During the first six years after borrowers were supposed to begin making payments, CBO estimates that loans were in repayment status for only 45% of the time—about 32 months. Borrowers weren’t making payments for most of that time because they were either in default, forbearance or deferment.

It gets worse. CBO says “borrowers made payments greater than $10 in only 38 percent of the months” in which a payment was due. That means that even most borrowers who were making payments were doing so inconsistently and often in token amounts.

One reason is that the Democrats’ 2010 income-based repayment plans capped payments at 10% of discretionary income—i.e., income exceeding 150% of the poverty line—and canceled debt after 10 to 20 years. As a result, many borrowers had negligible required payments. But then their loan balances ballooned as they accrued interest.

Quinton Klabon:

But we spent a lot, even before it, and Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and Saint Paul show spending may not lead to results.

Becky Jacobs:

This fall, UW-Madison reported enrolling 8,516 first-year students — the second-largest freshman class in the institution’s history — and 1,375 new transfer students. The university received a record number of first-year applicants and saw its highest total enrollment, with 52,126 students.

——

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math (2014!)

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”

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

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 

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

Rachel Alexander Cambre

Responding to parental demand for more options and input regarding their children’s education, lawmakers have created or expanded education choice programs in more than a dozen states over the past few years, restoring education freedom for rising numbers of American parents. But parents are not simply seeking education freedom: They are, in increasing numbers, seeking an education for freedom for their children—a classical liberal arts education that aims to form adults capable of understanding, exercising, and protecting their American rights and responsibilities. This report constitutes an inquiry into that model of education by surveying the growing number of classical liberal arts schools committed to it.

Alec Johnson:

The DPI doesn’t seem worried. After raising the alarm in May with a letter to MPS saying it was “incredibly late” in submitting required financial reports, the DPI is now urging patience. Bucher said the department is working with the district on a daily basis and “stands with MPS every step of the way.”

Quinton Klabon:

Based on their flowchart, I think these are the MPS SCHOOLS THEY MAY RECOMMEND CLOSING: Douglas, Assata, Auer, Banner, Brown, Clarke, Groppi, Hampton, Hi-Mount, Holmes, Hopkins-Lloyd, Jackson, Keefe, King Mid, Lincoln Mid, Roosevelt, Sherman, Siefert, Starms Discovery, Westside.

Aaron Sibarium

NEW: Penn tried to buy Amy Wax’s silence by offering her a deal: it would water down the sanctions against her—and take a pay cut off the table—provided she kept quiet about the case and stopped accusing the university of censoring her.

As you might guess, Wax refused.🧵

America First Legal:

/10 Only “government issued or law enforcement email address[es]” were allowed to use this system.

Paul Bedard:

A federal judge scheduled a trial date for a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Jan. 6 protester Ashli Babbitt, who died after being shot by U.S. Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd.

The watchdog group Judicial Watch, which is helping in the lawsuit filed by Babbitt’s husband, Aaron, revealed that Judge Ana C. Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia scheduled a trial date of July 20, 2026, for the $30 million wrongful death suit.

Following a Friday hearing on the case, Judicial Watch also said Reyes is considering a request to move the case to California, where Ashli Babbitt’s family lives.

Wall Street Journal:

More bad news for California, Illinois and New York. A recent analysis finds that their most upwardly mobile millennials are fleeing for lower-tax states. Call it a high-tax state brain drain. The flight of the young and newly affluent promises to compound the states’ budget and economic problems.

Using IRS data, the fintech company SmartAsset ranked states based on net migration of young households (ages 26 to 35) in 2022 that earned at least $200,000 a year. The biggest losers: California (-3,226), Illinois (-1,323), Massachusetts (-1,102), New York (-345) and Pennsylvania (-320).

Michigan, Louisiana, Delaware, Minnesota and Missouri round the top 10 losers. Delaware (6.4%) and Illinois (4%) lost the largest share of their young, higher-earning households.

The biggest gainers were Florida (1,786) and Texas (1,660), which have no income tax. They attracted more than twice as many such households as any other state. “Half of states attracting the most young and rich households don’t charge state income tax,” the study notes. The other big gainers without an income tax are Tennessee (347) and Nevada (162).

Will Flanders:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government shelled out $189.5 billion to school districts across the country via Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding. Wisconsin was no exception. Across three rounds of ESSER funding, the state and school districts received more than $2.4 billion dollars. Despite federal requirements that ESSER money be used to supplement rather than replace existing spending, many school districts are clamoring to keep programs in place that were largely funded with ESSER money. Indeed, DPI has said that they will “be advocating to increase funding for schools to make up for the loss in ESSER funds.” The end of ESSER funds is also being blamed for a record number of school districts going to referendum this Fall.

But a critical question remains: Is there evidence that ESSER funding achieved its intended goal of addressing learning loss? With the deadline for spending ESSER dollars approaching at the end of September, now is an opportune time to assess whether the funding effectively mitigated and reversed the educational setbacks caused by the pandemic. Combining data from the state report card with data on district funding allocations from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, we find that only one area of spending bears a strong relationship to learning loss improvement.

More.

Scott Bauer:

Up to 2,000 voters in Wisconsin’s heavily Democratic capital of Madison were sent duplicate absentee ballots, but a city spokesperson said Tuesday that none had been returned, all affected voters were being contacted and there were multiple safeguards in place to ensure only one ballot is counted.

“This was a mistake,” city spokesperson Dylan Brogan said. “The clerk’s office moved to rectify it as quickly as possible.”

The error in a Democratic stronghold in the battleground state led to a demand for more information from U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican backer of former President Donald Trump whose northern Wisconsin district does not include Madison.

“Voters deserve clear answers regarding the full scope of this blunder, how the city plans to restore public confidence in its ability to accurately administer the election, and assurances that those responsible are held accountable,” Tiffany wrote.

Liam Beran

The problem? Barcodes — also known as certificates — are not printed on ballots themselves. They’re printed on ballot envelopes, and poll workers are required to scan the barcodes prior to even opening the envelope. A ballot won’t be accepted if it’s not in a completed envelope, said Rachel Rodriguez, Dane County Clerk’s Office elections management specialist, meaning that there would be no way for the voter to submit the ballots separately. 

Andrew Bahl:

A press release from the clerk’s office said the mistake happened due to a “data processing error.” Dylan Brogan, communications manager for the city of Madison, said the issue occurred when workers effectively merged two of the same data files into one document, doubling up the names and addresses there.

“1% of voters in the bluest county in a swing state got duplicate ballots”

Maribeth Witzel-Behl, City of Madison Clerk

Letter to duplicate ballot recipients.

Commentary.

Kayla Huynh

Among the changes are lower scoring standards for each performance level and different labels categorizing students. In an interview with CBS 58, state Superintendent Jill Underly said students “appeared to be doing worse than they really were” under the previous system. 

Madison Metropolitan School District leaders this month offered the School Board a sneak peak at the district’s Forward Exam resultsusing the new bars for success. Less than half of third through eighth graders and 14% of Black students were considered proficient in literacy, according to the results.

School Board President Nichelle Nichols said she had a “visceral reaction” seeing the results. The scores show less than 20% of tested students with disabilities and about a quarter of English learners scored proficient in literacy. 

Students fared worse on math portions of the test, with 45% of third through fifth graders and 41% of sixth through eighth graders scoring proficient in math. Among Black students, 8% of sixth through eighth graders and 12% of third through fifth graders scored proficient.

“These percentages look pretty much the same” as previous years despite state Department of Public Instruction officials lowering scoring standards and warning against comparisons, Nichols said in the board meeting.

Marc Andreessen:

If you want to fix a broken system, you have to pull money OUT, not put more money IN.
If you put more money IN, the system interprets it as a reward and uses the money to become even more broken.
We get this for businesses. We forget it for nonprofits and governments. 🤔

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Masterman:

The recommendations in the report were developed by the HSA Board and also were informed by conversations with administration in an effort to gain consensus around some of the main recommendations. One primary recommendation (see page 48) is to end the randomized admissions process and restore human judgment to admissions, preferably with a designated admissions officer and/or committee following best practices to improve diversity, and student choice and fit. The current randomized admissions process failed in its objectives regarding diversity at Masterman (see page 11-15) and failed our children, those leaving Masterman and those newly accepted,  in placing many of them in schools that are not the right fit for them. It should be ended. The District should return admission decisions to the schools and hire a dedicated, full-time Admissions Officer to systematically court the most able students of every demographic from across the city.

We have done our best to represent the array of views in our community about topics that are nuanced and complex. We welcome all comments and suggestions on the report and the process.

More.

Peachy Keenan:

What if the best way to change her mind was not by focusing on votes, elections, candidates, the legality of a 6- or 8-week ban, or technicalities like viability? What if instead of “abortions are bad,” the argument was: “Babies are awesome!” Imagine connecting the clinical concept of “embryo” and “fetus” to “a little human being who will look like you and have the same hair color as you.” 

A friend sent me a link to a disturbing study that involved grafting the harvested scalps of late-term aborted babies onto rats. These “scientists” are literally implanting pieces of human baby scalp onto living rats and regrowing the dead child’s own hair on the rat. Presumably this is some kind of test for curing baldness for men who think they’d look sexier wearing a dead baby’s scalp. (The study also involves fetal thyroid tissues and liver cells, which must be why fully-formed aborted newborns fetch such high prices for livers and thyroids on the market.)

The web page for the study includes nightmarish photos of a baby’s light brown hair growing on a rat’s body. Imagine seeing these images and wondering, “Is that my baby?” Imagine a billboard campaign of these images with the tagline “Is this your baby?” Maybe, just maybe, that message could help connect an inchoate positive pregnancy test to the finished product: an adorable newborn.

Maybe it’s worth a try. Maybe it’s time for babies to get a rebrand. 

Choose life.

Linda Jacobson:

Changing standards and proficiency targets is a routine process for states that some say offers a more accurate reflection of what students know. But given the cataclysmic effects of COVID on student learning, experts say now is not the time to tweak how we measure performance. 

“Many parents are already underestimating the degree to which their children are lagging behind,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard researcher who has been tracking students’ recovery from COVID learning loss. “Lowering the proficiency cuts now will mislead them further.”  

Even Jill Underly, Wisconsins’s education chief, confessed to some bewilderment about the process last year.

“The crummy thing is, I am an educator and I don’t understand it — so how are parents supposed to understand this too?” she wrote in a June 2023 email. “For example, what does Proficient mean vs. Advanced? That they are at grade level vs. the next grade level? I just hate this stuff so much.”

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Robert Schmad:

We leverage a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to private school vouchers across markets as well as students to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. To do this, we estimate several choice models on data only from control markets before turning to the treatment data for model validation. This exercise reveals that a model where school choice is constrained by ability-to-pay achieves better out-of-sample fit but still underpredicts experimental take-up of the voucher offer. We then present evidence from treatment markets that: a) the voucher offer also induced search; and b) private schools used program surplus to incentivize enrollment. Further, we show that a unified model incorporating these features can explain both the control and treatment data patterns. Estimates from that model imply that a targeted voucher program would have a marginal value of public funds (MVPF) of at least 3.

Www summary:

The article discusses the controversial education reforms implemented by Denver Public Schools over a decade ago. The study found that these reforms positively impacted students’ academic outcomes, increasing their likelihood of graduating. However, the improvements were not consistent across all student groups, with students of color experiencing mixed results in their math and literacy test scores and graduation chances.

Katherine Bindley and Joseph Pisani:

Postings for software development jobs are down more than 30% since February 2020, according to Indeed.com. Industry layoffs have continued this year with tech companies shedding around 137,000 jobs since January, according to Layoffs.fyi. Many tech workers, too young to have endured the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, now face for the first time what it’s like to hustle to find work.

Company strategies are also shifting. Instead of growth at all costs and investment in moonshot projects, tech firms have become laser focused on revenue-generating products and services. They have pulled back on entry-level hires, cut recruiting teams and jettisoned projects and jobs in areas that weren’t huge moneymakers, including virtual reality and devices.

At the same time, they started putting enormous resources into AI. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 offered a glimpse into generative AI’s ability to create humanlike content and potentially transform industries. It ignited a frenzy of investment and a race to build the most advanced AI systems. Workers with expertise in the field are among the few strong categories.

A number of professors:

No one should prize the free exchange of ideas more than academics, whose entire purpose is to develop, challenge, and improve ideas. Endorsing state control of pub- lic discourse through the censorship of political opponents should be anathema to any defender of democracy. We are thus dismayed by the public letter “Against Big Tech’s Attack on Digital Sovereignties,” signed by many notable academics, including Daron Acemoglu and Thomas Piketty.

Although the letter mentions “Big Techs” in general, it singles out Elon Musk’s X as an “instance in a wider effort to restrict” Brazil’s (and other nations’) “digital developmental agenda”. We attempt to understand what this means, but first it is worth reviewing the facts.

Brazil’s law establishes that any judicial order to remove content from a social platform must specify what content is to be removed (Law 12.965, Art. 19, §1). The law also affirms the constitutional protection of free speech (Art. 5, IV, IX, and Art. 220
§2). Nevertheless, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension of the accounts of influencers, journalists and even members of Congress, all of whom were critics of the current president. X complied with these orders until April 2024, when Elon Musk stated this would violate laws in Brazil. Moraes’s threats of fines and the jailing of X’s legal representative lead X to close its office in Brazil. Moraes ordered the suspension of X for all Brazilians along with the seizure of Starlink’s assets to cover the fines he imposed. Note that Starlink is a separate company, with no connection to X besides the fact that Elon Musk is a shareholder in both. A report by the U.S. Congress found that “Moraes ordered the censorship of a Brazilian citizen for criticizing Moraes for censoring Brazilians” (p. 5).

However, instead of siding with X, the law, and Brazilians’ freedom of expression, the academics’ letter condemns Elon Musk for providing the only digital platform in Brazil that refused to censor speech deemed undesirable by some public officials. It seems the signatories believe that governments should be able to decide what their citizens can and cannot hear, and use all their might to silence criticism — essentially endorsing
authoritarianism.

More.

WILL:

WILL’s new report Back to the Past: The Fiscal Threat of Reversing Act 10 for Local Governments,estimates the fiscal impact for local and county governments to be at least $480 million annually.

The Quotes: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “Ending Act 10 would bring about $480 million in new costs for local governments statewide.  Localities would be forced to do one of two things, cut crucial services or dramatically increase funding by raising property taxes. Either way, Wisconsinites would be at a loss.”

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann stated, “Local governments have been granted greater flexibility from Act 10, which has resulted in more efficient delivery of services, pay increases for hard-working public servants, and lower property taxes for residents. I cannot imagine going back.”

About Act 10: In 2011, Wisconsin became a leader in public sector union reform with the passage of the Budget Repair Bill—better known nationally as “Act 10.” The law signed by Governor Scott Walker strongly limited the power of public sector unions to extract more and more money from state taxpayers. Today, likely based on the liberal composition of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a lawsuit was recently filed that seeks to reverse the landmark legislation.

Report’s Key Findings: The impact of overturning Act 10 on Wisconsin would be quite dramatic. In education, the law allowed school districts to move away from a ‘steps and ladders’ pay system to systems where teachers can be rewarded for their impact on academics. Terminating Act 10 would likely restore the old system where quality played no role in teacher pay.

More.

Much more on Wisconsin Act 10, here.

The Milwaukee pension scandal lead to the rise of Scott Walker and ultimately Act 10.

And:

Chicago public schools: “already the nation’s largest junk-bond issuer”

Dave Cieslewicz:

And, again, on that score school districts like Madison, which obsess over race, have made zero progress in closing the racial achievement gap. Why do liberals cling so tightly to a system that delivers no results? 

A color blind society was once, not so long ago, the liberal position on the matter. But somewhere over the past decade or two we lost our way. It became fashionable, especially in academia, to employ discrimination as a means of correcting past discrimination. That was a classic example of destroying the village in order to save it.

Because the enemy is discrimination itself. And the answer isn’t to rig the system, but to do a much better job of preparing all students to compete successfully within it.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Richard Phelps:

A less publicized goal of the recentering synchronized the verbal and math score distributions. Over time, the SAT’s math and verbal scales had developed quite different shapes, and College Board worried that that lack of symmetry threatened the SAT’s face validity among its vast non-technical customer base. Despite these explanations, however, critics accused College Board of score inflation and watering down the content of the SAT.

Now, College Board is “recalibrating” some Advanced Placement (AP) exam scales and eliciting similar reactions from critics. College Board invokes a desire to make score distributions similar across AP exams, just as they crafted similar distributions for the verbal and math SAT subtests in 1995-96.

In all, three changes currently transpire. Standards for all AP exams are being set by a new “evidence-based standard setting” (EBSS) method. Score distributions across all AP exams will have similar shapes. And score distributions for a minority of AP exams have been or soon will be adjusted—all upwards thus far.

Does the recalibration really matter for AP exam users—students, schools, teachers, and colleges? To counteract AP exam score inflation, all a college need do is raise the threshold at which it awards course credit. That’s not hard.

Not hard for independent, private colleges, that is. Indeed, some of them no longer award course credit for exam scores of three, four, or five. Public colleges, however, may not be so flexible. According to College Board,

Cap Times:

It is a victory, indeed, and we celebrate it with a great guardian of the Constitution, the rule of law and justice: Lester Pines.

Much more on Lester Pines, here.

Peter Arcidiacono, Karthik Muralidharan & John D. Singleton:

We leverage a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to private school vouchers across markets as well as students to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. To do this, we estimate several choice models on data only from control markets before turning to the treatment data for model validation. This exercise reveals that a model where school choice is constrained by ability-to-pay achieves better out-of-sample fit but still underpredicts experimental take-up of the voucher offer. We then present evidence from treatment markets that: a) the voucher offer also induced search; and b) private schools used program surplus to incentivize enrollment. Further, we show that a unified model incorporating these features can explain both the control and treatment data patterns. Estimates from that model imply that a targeted voucher program would have a marginal value of public funds (MVPF) of at least 3.

Commentary…

Sometimes, though, the public’s views aren’t all that clear.

That’s been the case in staunch Donald Trump territory with the movement to force religion, the Bible and the Ten Commandments into the public education system.

One would guess that in ultra-conservative states that gave Trump 20-to-30-point margins in the last election, requiring school kids to take Bible lessons would be a slam dunk. But Ryan Walters — Oklahoma’s Republican school chief who decreed a few weeks ago that all public schools in his state must incorporate Bible teachings in school curricula — is probably surprised.

His edict, after all, has spawned similar moves in other conservative states. Louisiana, for instance, is requiring its schools to display the Ten Commandments, and others are poised to follow suit.

By Jake Kanter

Deadline understands that London’s historic Evening Standard newspaper has been making plans to revive its former writer using artificial intelligence.

Two sources said AI Sewell has been assigned to review The National Gallery’s new Vincent van Gogh exhibition, titled Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers.

One person said the plans were discussed at the highest level of the Standard and in consultation with Lord Lebedev, the newspaper’s proprietor. Dylan Jones, editor-in-chief of the Standard, did not respond to requests for comment.

Abbey Machtig:

Plus, the combined tax impact of the city’s operational referendum and the two measures from the School District means will likely have to increase monthly rent for tenants living in his rental property. 

“This will mean about $1,500 a year, best-case scenario, which means rent for everybody will go up at least 150 bucks a month,” Freihoefer said.

If the operating referendum is approved by voters, owners of an average Madison home would see a $1,049 increase in their tax bills by 2028. If both the operating and facilities referendums are successful, taxes would increase by $1,376 by 2028.

Former district employee Sherry Barnsley wants more details: She said it’s still unclear what exactly the school district is asking for and worries voters won’t fully understand the questions on the ballot.

She said the $100 million operating referendum — which ramps up over four years but then authorizes the school district to levy taxes above the state caps in perpetuity — is particularly fuzzy. 

The $507 million facilities referendum would pay for updates to 10 schools: Five new buildings, some of which house more than one school, would be built, and two others would be renovated.

——-

In its informational materials about the referendums, the district emphasizes how much more the average homeowner would pay in taxes per month, despite the fact that property taxes are billed annually.

Marc Andreessen:

If you want to fix a broken system, you have to pull money OUT, not put more money IN.
If you put more money IN, the system interprets it as a reward and uses the money to become even more broken.
We get this for businesses. We forget it for nonprofits and governments. 🤔

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Robert Redfield:

Parents reported around 41 percent of children under 18 had “current or lifelong health conditions” when asked about 25 health conditions.

For instance, obesity in American children has increased dramatically since John F. Kennedy’s presidency, from around 4 percent in the 1960s to almost 20 percent in 2024. The causes of childhood obesity are complex, but a primary origin is clearly the modern American diet of highly processed foods.

But our food problem goes well beyond obesity: Pesticides are proven risk factors for neurodevelopmental outcomes in kids, causing maladies like ADHD. If the next president prioritizes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify which exposures are contributing to the spike in chronic disease in children, we will finally find out and end what is slowly destroying our children.

More.

Lily Altavena

Twice in the same week in May 2023, Oakland County Sheriff’s deputies restrained and put 10-year-old Caleb Killingsworth in the back of a patrol car.

The second time, Caleb, an autistic child who weighed less than 90 pounds and stood less than 5 feet tall, according to his mother, was restrained on the ground and then handcuffed. The fifth grader came away with scrapes on his face.

Both times school staff called law enforcement after Caleb walked away from the Pine Tree Center, a specialized school in Lake Orion with a program for “emotionally impaired” students, a state designation that applies to roughly 10,000 Michigan students with behavioral disabilities.

US DoD:

“Our tight partnership with INL and the Department of Energy Idaho Operations Office is leading the way forward not just for manufacturing advanced reactors, but also for regulating them in an efficient and safe manner.”

The prototype reactor facility is designed to be transported within four 20-foot shipping containers, and tested at INL. The Project Pele team will construct a concrete shield structure at the test site next year in order to be ready for reactor placement in 2026.

Upon arriving at INL, the reactor will be transported by truck to the test site and positioned within the concrete shield structure. Piping and electrical wiring will tie the reactor to INL’s specialized electric microgrid. Once the reactor’s final safety review is completed, the Pele project team will then proceed with the initial Test and Evaluation plan. If successful, transportable nuclear power could meet the increasing demand for a resilient, carbon-free energy source capable of delivering reliable 24/7 power to mission-critical DoD operations in remote and austere environments.

Paris Schultz:

Davis Gates also claimed that Martinez wants to close or consolidate schools, though CPS sources countered that he has no such plans, saying the school board requested a contingency list of potential closures.

Last spring, Martinez joined CTU members in Springfield to advocate for an additional $1 billion in state funding. However, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and state lawmakers said those funds were not available.

Davis Gates pointed to Minnesota Governor-turned-Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz as a model for Gov. Pritzker to follow.

“He figured a lot of stuff out with this. He made sure that there was a social worker that was funded from the state. He figured out how to meet the needs of special education students, so these things can be done,” said Davis Gates. 

Austin Berg:

MUST WATCH: Maybe the best opening line in public comment history. Former Chicago Public Schools Board Member Dwayne Truss goes off on the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Brandon Johnson for their fight to oust CPS CEO Pedro Martinez and issue a $300M payday loan to fund the union’s contract demands.

Reminder that these are the actual new revenue ideas from the Chicago Teachers Union. The CTU claims Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez should be fired for not doing enough to lobby Springfield for more money.

Chicago public schools: “already the nation’s largest junk-bond issuer”

The Chicago Teachers Union and its state and national affiliates spent nearly $6.5 million on Chicago political candidates between Feb. 28, 2022, and May 4, 2023.

This year’s Democratic National Convention takes place in America’s first city to fall under the control of a teachers union.

Stacy Davis Gates is a powerful union leader of public school teachers and sends her kids to private school. These are facts.

More.

——

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators (2010)

Nicki Neily

They smear and demonize parents who want their children to learn age appropriate material rather than graphic sexual content.

As a society, we don’t put Playboy in kindergartens; this isn’t considered a “book ban,” but merely common sense.

Abbey Machtig:

Omega School serves mostly Madison youth and young adults looking to earn a high school diploma, while Literacy Network offers a wide variety of tutoring opportunities to adults, especially in English language instruction.

Megan Brenan:

Americans’ rating of the Secret Service’s job performance has deteriorated sharply to a new low in Gallup’s 10-year trend. The latest poll was completed almost entirely before the Sept. 15 apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the second in nine weeks. About one in three U.S. adults now rate the Secret Service’s performance as “excellent” (8%) or “good” (24%), while 25% say it is “only fair” and 36% “poor.”

The Sept. 3-15 poll was conducted as various government entities continue to investigate the Secret Service’s reported lapses in the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Amid these highly publicized investigations, the percentage of Americans rating the Secret Service as excellent or good plunged 23 percentage points, while the share of those rating it as poor rose by the same margin.

The current findings are in marked contrast with four of the five previous readings over the past decade. The Secret Service — the federal law enforcement agency charged with keeping political leaders safe — has typically enjoyed broadly positive ratings from the public, with majorities offering an excellent or good assessment of its performance.

Since 2014, an average of 53% of Americans have rated the Secret Service positively. Yet, this year is not the first time the agency has failed to receive a majority-level excellent or good rating. The initial 43% positive rating in 2014 followed several security lapses, including one in which an intruder jumped a fence and entered the White House.

Daniel Schmidt:

First, you must discover what you’re passionate about and only focus on that. For me, it was public speaking and writing. You cannot be a “jack-of-all-trades.” These colleges want young people who are excellent at just one or two things. They want Math Olympiad winners, international debate champions, chess prodigies, etc. If you spread yourself thin, admission officers cannot picture where you will be 20 years from now. Remember: all that these universities ultimately care about is producing future leaders in their respective industries.

Fortunately, you do not need to be on the extreme level of “Math Olympiad winner.” I was president of two clubs (Model UN and Debate) and ran a blog and that was it. But you must orient your application around just one or two passions and excel in related extracurriculars to demonstrate your competence. That is crucial.

Dave Cieslewicz:

• And here’s the real kicker. Teaching staff is actually down. Madison has lost 75 tenured faculty positions since 1992, despite growing by thousands of students and adding nearly 8,000 academic staff. But that’s actually not so bad compared to most UW system schools. They have between 25% and 30% fewer faculty positions than they did 30 years ago. 

So you want to find a culprit for fast-growing tuition? Look to three things: declining taxpayer support, bloated staff and building binges. The last issue was not addressed in the Fiscal Bureau report, but it’s a real problem.

Marilyn Muller:

The more that is spent, the more illiterate students get, because the money doesn’t go to the students, it goes to the hundreds in management and administration that then treat the students as sources of revenue.

The more illiterate students are, the more money the system gets, so their incentive is to increase, not decrease, illiteracy!

More.

Liyan Qi:

Ricki Mudd was born in 1993 in China during the one-child policy era. She remembers her early childhood only in fragments, but has been told she had spent some of it hidden in a bag.

At age 5, she was adopted from a Chinese orphanage, one of the more than 150,000 children China sent overseas. Most were girls. In the West, they were one of the most visible consequences of the one-child policy, which ended in 2016. This month, Beijing put an end to foreign adoptions.

China is grappling with a demographic crisis, with dropping birthrates and a rapidly aging population. The policies to control the population have given way to new ones in the opposite direction. But a legacy of the one-child policy is a dearth of women of childbearing age.

Because of a government decree that led to forced abortions and sterilizations, millions of girls were never born or were hidden from authorities. In the process, China’s gender ratio became increasingly skewed, with 117 boys born for every 100 girls in 2004, compared with 106 in 1980, United Nations data showed.

Full Speech by Prime Minister of Italy, @GiorgiaMeloni, after receiving The Atlantic Council’s Global Citizen Award in New York City. pic.twitter.com/aDpSr3IeI8

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) September 24, 2024

Leslie Eastman:

Early last year, The Independent Review published an intriguing article: Hyperpoliticization of Higher Ed Trends in Faculty Political Ideology, 1969–Present.

The authors, Phillip W. Magness (senior research faculty and director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research) and David Waugh (managing editor at the American Institute for Economic Research), assessed complex data obtained from surveys that evaluated the political views of higher education faculty [e.g., Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Faculty Survey (1969–1984), UCLA-Higher Education Research Institute Faculty Survey (1989–2016)]. The information confirms trends that Legal Insurrection has long noted: Since 2001, 2001 higher education faculty positions have taken a hard, and “professors on the political left are now approaching a supermajority.”

While their findings are interesting, a question they pose about the future consequences of this development is prescient.

Patrick Conway:

As thousands of students settle into the fall semester at colleges and universities around Boston, another group is preparing for an important milestone at a medium-security prison in Shirley. On Sept. 23 the first cohort of students from the Boston College Prison Education Program will don their caps and gowns and be greeted by a brass band playing the familiar refrains of “Pomp and Circumstance” before crossing the stage to receive their bachelor of arts degrees.

The ceremony marks a significant achievement, not only for students but also for Boston College. Our initial graduating class is small: Three students will be earning their diplomas. But the ceremony will start an annual tradition. Soon, our program will see groups of 10 to 15 students graduate.

Having worked within the criminal justice system for nearly two decades, and within college-in-prison programs for the past 10 years, I believe initiatives like ours do more than provide access to high-quality education — they also provide a pathway for reimagining more effective, meaningful, and humane responses to crime and incarceration.

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

Dan Lennington

NEW: WILL secures historic victory against $37B Biden-Harris’s infrastructure program. This was the granddaddy of all affirmative action programs-dictating how nearly all roads, bridges, & highways are built. No more DEI highways! Details to follow from @WILawLiberty

More:

“The noble aspirations of our founding documents represent the most successful experiment in representative democracy the world has even known. But by no means has our American experiment been perfect. No one could argue, for example, that our Nation has always treated men and women of all backgrounds in this country equally.

Josh Koehn:

Two San Francisco supervisors will miss key meetings this week to attend a taxpayer-funded junket in Japan to learn how an institute in the country teaches math. 

The details of that word salad of a sentence might seem a bit mystifying for those who realize:

• San Francisco supervisors have no role in deciding how math is taught in the city’s public schools.
• The mayor just announced last month that the city could be facing a half-billion dollar deficit, and trips to Japan wouldn’t seem to rate on the priority scale.
• Algebra hasn’t even been taught to San Francisco’s eighth graders in almost a decade.
• Cherry blossom season doesn’t start until the end of March.

Adding a bit more complexity to the situation, the absences of Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Myrna Melgar from this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting could create hiccups in getting measures on the March 2024 ballot, especially if the return leg of their 5,180-mile trip runs long. Recent history shows it wouldn’t be the first time a supervisor was overly optimistic about returning home in time for an important meeting.

In a phone call last week, Melgar defended the trip, which will include training at Tokyo Gakugei University, by noting that the city gives millions every year to fund the San Francisco Unified School District. After Proposition G passed with 64% of the vote last year, the city will be contributing tens of millions more in the years to come.

Dave Cieslewicz:

This week there’s more. It turns out that the district is running a $3 million deficit in its food service program, which is double the $1.5 million gap it had last year. And the district’s response? They’ve got a plan to get back to even — by 2033. 

Really? This is an organization that plans to take a decade to solve a $3 million problem? And can anybody realistically expect to solve a problem over ten years? You really think you can make accurate estimates over a period that long? 

Even worse is the quote from school board President Nichelle Nichols, who said, “Those are dollars we don’t get to dream with.”

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Susan Snyder

Wax — who has called into question the academic ability of Black students, invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to her classroom, and said the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration — will be suspended for one year at half pay with benefits intact. She also will face a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn.

But she will not be fired or lose her tenure.

“These findings are now final…,” Penn said in a statement, noting the five-member hearing board’s determination that Wax “violated the university’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”

Penn intends to publish the announcement of the decision in Tuesday’s Penn Almanac.

Vanessa Fuhrmans, Katherine Bindley and Chip Cutter:

It’s hard to overstate how much remote and hybrid work have reshaped the postpandemic labor market. It has enabled moves to lower-cost areas, let working parents better coordinate child care and brought millions of people into the workforce—including those with disabilities. And it made it easier for mothers of young children to stay on the job, helping drive a sharp increase in the number of women working.

Tech-industry workers especially took advantage of the ability to work remotely, flocking from high-cost coast cities to cheaper locales such as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Boise, Idaho. High in demand, many commanded the same pay they made in San Francisco and Seattle. “Work from anywhere” became a favorite recruiting tactic, with some workers being told they’d never need to come back to the office.

Remote work also fueled a digital commerce boom that let online retail giants like Amazon reap record profits, and hire hundreds of thousands of people, many in far-flung places. Over 2020 and 2021, Amazon’s head count roughly doubled to more than 1.6 million employees. Then the company laid off 27,000 workers starting in late 2022.

Anand Sanwal:

In the grand theater of American higher education, few performances are as anticipated—or as controversial—as the annual unveiling of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. 

Like a high-stakes beauty pageant for academia, these rankings have become a cultural touchstone, influencing the decisions of countless students, parents, and even the very institutions they aim to evaluate. 

But beneath the glossy veneer of numerical precision lies a system rife with flaws, manipulations and unintended consequences.

I’ll propose a better way below but first, why are the US News Best Colleges rankings so useless?

Graham Hillard:

Are the men and women who staff America’s colleges rugged individualists determined to swat away the overweening hand of the state? Or are they simply greedy? An ongoing dispute over attendance-related recordkeeping and compliance has brought the question newly to the fore.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed last month, the conflict began when the federal Department of Education released proposed guidance intended to “clarify, update, and consolidate certain provisions that apply to distance education.” Nestled among the new rules was a requirement that universities take and report student attendance in virtual classes, lest (to borrow IHE’s paraphrase) “students drop out of online courses while the institution continues to collect federal Title IV financial aid funds.”

The federal government wishes not to pay colleges to educate students who no longer exist.In describing its proposal, the education department noted that “institutions can often easily determine when students stop attending a distance education course.” Because “institutional systems are already monitoring when students submit assignments,” noting that an enrollee has failed to do so in a timely manner is typically as simple as consulting one’s learning-management software (e.g., Blackboard).

As standard practice dictates, the feds conceded that “the proposed regulatory change would add a burden for institutions.” Nevertheless, this hardship was expected to be minimal:

Kevin McAllister:

Prestigious private colleges and universities occupy the upper tier of the list, with Stanford University placing No. 2 and Princeton University, which topped the overall rankings, coming in at No. 3. In total, private universities claimed 36 of the top 50 spots on the salary list.

Beyond MIT, other colleges with robust STEM programs also finished strong: Georgia Tech landed fourth, the California Institute of Technology sixth and Harvey Mudd College seventh. The Missouri University of Science and Technology, the Milwaukee School of Engineering and Michigan Technological University also landed in the top 15.

Dan Lennington:

Enrollment figures from @UWMadison show racially discriminatory admission policy WAS hurting Asian, white, & int’l students. First, consider UW’s targets: black admission rate ballooned to over 63%, exceeding overall admit rate.

Will Flanders:

Admitting students to college based on merit shouldn’t be controversial. New data from UW Madison make it clear that wasn’t happening prior to SCOTUS decision last year. In some universities, Asian students have benefitted. Here, Asian & white students benefit.

Matt Shaver:

Fascinating new data on the severity of chronic absenteeism in MN schools from MDE.

Interesting that while the number of chronically absent students doubled from 18/19 to 21/22 the slices of absenteeism have been pretty stable.

How does this compare to other states?

Bill Whitaker:

problem as this is, it’s also not a whodunit. We know who’s responsible. It’s the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel that are based in Mexico. They dominate and control the entire global fentanyl supply chain, starting in China, going to Mexico, coming into the United States.

Milgram told us this crisis began 10 years ago… when the cartels started to wrestle control of the supply chain from China and began making fentanyl in clandestine labs in Mexico.

Bill Whitaker: So these two drug cartels from our neighbor, from Mexico, are responsible for almost 70,000 American deaths a year?

Anne Milgram: Yes.

Chicago Tribune:

Johnson has demanded that CPS — already the nation’s largest junk-bond issuer, paying more than $800 million annually just to service its mountain of ongoing debt — add another $300 million in high-cost debt to cover teacher raises and to make a $175 million pension payment whose responsibility has ping-ponged in recent years between the city government and CPS. A new schools boss hired specifically to strike a deal with a militant and unreasonable union presumably would need to add far more than $300 million to the maxed-out CPS credit card in order to buy labor peace.

The strategy pursued by the unholy alliance of Johnson and CTU is becoming clearer by the day. Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders, all Democrats and supporters of organized labor, have refused the Johnson-CTU demands for hundreds of millions more in state funds to finance CTU’s membership growth. They’ve done so despite CTU president Stacy Davis Gates’ racially charged attacks on them when she didn’t get what she wanted from Springfield.

So now Johnson and Davis Gates’ seeming gambit is to deliberately sink CPS into insolvency so that the state has “no choice” but to bail out Chicago’s schools, nearly 40% of which are enrolled with half or fewer of the students they were designed to serve. That’s unconscionable, and is why this school board has a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers to continue to display the courage it’s shown so far. A new CEO piling more debt on CPS only will make the inevitable job of right-sizing this district all the more painful.

More.

Chicago Public Schools is in dire financial straits, yet Chicago Teachers Union blocks closing of near-empty, failing schools. – Wirepoints

More than two years ago, we sounded the alarm on this issue by highlighting CPS’ 20 most empty schools. Like Douglass High School, capacity 912, with just 35 students enrolled. Or Austin High School, capacity 1,776, with just 172 students enrolled. The kicker? Not a single kid in either of those schools could read at grade level based on 2023 testing.

The problem is far bigger than those 20 schools. CPS has more than 163 schools – about one-third of the district’s traditional schools – that are less than half full. 

Below we lay out the 100 most empty traditional schools in Chicago. This is not Martinez’s list – that has not been released – but these schools certainly do deserve closure/consolidation.

Will Flanders & Shannon Whitworth:

In a recent op-ed published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona articulated a series of criticisms about school choice in Wisconsin, opting instead to defend a failed status quo of one-size-fits-all education. His arguments lean heavily on national talking points commonly used by opponents of school choice, revealing a significant misunderstanding of the realities of Wisconsin’s education landscape, including both school choice options and public education.

Recent polling shows that 68% of Wisconsin voters support school choice, including 47% of Democrats and 69% of independents. Furthermore, the liberal-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a legal challenge to the program, and Gov. Tony Evers agreed to direct more funds towards the program in the last state budget.

Here’s a closer look at the misconceptions in the Secretary’s column and why they warrant reconsideration. His first claim is that Wisconsin schools are underfunded. However, data from the Department of Education —under Cardona’s own administration—paints a different picture. Wisconsin’s spending on education is among the highest in its history. The reality is that we are spending more on education per student in Wisconsin today than we were in 2000—and have more than doubled education spending over the past fifty years after adjusting for inflation, and ranks among the top half of states in spending.

More:

Please stop using 2010 as the magic year that all education spending must be compared to. 2010 is the highest level of spending in WI history. Advocates for more spending point you there for a reason. We are spending more today than at almost any other point.

And.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Frank Newport and Joy Wilke:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the U.S. general fertility rate reached an all-time low in 2011, at 63.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The fertility rate has dropped 11% from 1990, when there were 70.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44.

The finding from Gallup’s Aug. 22-31 survey suggests that the changes in the U.S. birthrate in the last few decades apparently are not related to a change in Americans’ underlying attitudes toward children. It may be that fewer women are having children or that women, on average, are having fewer children, but the data show that the general interest in having children has remained constant — and high.

Younger Americans Want Children; Those With Kids Would Repeat Decision

More than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 40 have children, and another 40% do not currently, but hope to have children someday. Only six percent of Americans aged 18 to 40 do not have, and do not want to have, children.

Choose life.

Barry Sautman

What drew you to ethnic minority issues in China?

I’d been to Xinjiang perhaps three or four times many years ago. I was concentrating on a particular subject, which was preferential policies. At that time I was studying them broadly, going to different minority areas including Tibet, Xinjiang, Guizhou, Sichuan, Inner Mongolia. That was in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s.

From that I got interested in ethnic minority policies more generally because there was a debate in China about them.

Some said preferential policies and ethnic policies were not broad enough and they weren’t directed sufficiently to closing the socioeconomic gaps that existed between Han people and minority people.

The other side was people who said that basically ethnic regional autonomy had created a vested interest on the part of minority officials particularly.

Www

Near the end of the period, shortly before the bell rang, the door opened and Granny sauntered in with her usual Granny Holloway attitude. “How did they do?,” she asked. “Marvelous,” said Mrs. Abels. “They were completely in my hands.”
Granny then faced us and said “And that, my students, is how a dictator takes over a nation. Not with guns or tanks or laws or mandates. They do it using false promises and gifts”
I can’t remember a lesson all through 12 years of public school that made such an impression on me and has stayed with me.

Jay Greene:

Foreign students can make important contributions to every college campus but there are downsides as well. My alma mater the University of Pennsylvania is now 25% international and over 35% if you include the optional practical training programs. Should we reserve more spots for American citizens for our best universities and our medical school residency programs. Does turning American universities into global educational centers undermine its critical function to inculcate American values in our future American elite. 

Austin Berg:

NEW: Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates is calling attention to Chicago Public Schools borrowing during Pedro Martinez’s tenure as CFO.

But Jill Jaworski, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hand-picked CFO, served as a financial advisor on $7.6B in CPS borrowing across 19 deals from 2011-2019. You can find the full list of deals in the table below.

So why is Gates calling attention to borrowing under Martinez, but not Jaworski?

Because she’s trying to draw attention away from her reckless demand for the schools to issue a $300M payday loan to pay for the union’s contract demands. It would cost $700M+ over the life of the deal.

The misdirection isn’t working.

Vibhuti Agarwal:

Earlier this year, hundreds of students were bused in for an overnight stay at the Nature Valley Resort, a mid-budget hotel just outside India’s capital.

There wasn’t much partying or communing with nature. Instead, the students pored over an exam paper that they had each paid about $15,000 to $20,000 to have an advance peek at.

Now, many of the people who planned and hosted that cheating holiday have been arrested. Police have filed a 900-page indictment against at least half a dozen suspects—including a police officer with advance access to the exam paper—for gaming an exam to recruit thousands of officers.

India is facing an epidemic of cheating in college-entrance and job-recruitment exams, as the sheer number of people competing for a tiny pool of opportunities creates a lucrative opportunity for people to help students gain an advantage, often at an enormous cost to their families.

John Kass:

The mayor of Chicago would rather protect the violent over his citizens. He’d rather embrace repeat gang offenders than the people who need his protection.  As the corrupt corporate media becomes anxious and defensive about Johnson’s self-destructive reasoning, like the clownish leftist fools mocked by Matt Walsh in “Am I a Racist?” a great city is dying.

Now Johnson’s approval rating is an abysmal 27 percent makes him the most unpopular mayor of a Democrat Convention city in decades.

He has lost allies in the Chicago City Council by not paying attention to what is important: The people of his city. They want to be safe as possible. But he wants to get rid of the ShotSpotter technology that helps police make quick arrests. Johnson apparently doesn’t like that and his political inexperience and buffoonery allowed the City Council to organize against him.

And obviously the schools don’t educate the children. They can’t even read or do math at grade level, a national disgrace, but now more panic attack news for the mayor: News reports that the schoolteachers were told to give passing grades to illegal migrant children who are squeezing the native born out of classrooms.

Violent crime on the increase—not decreasing as the liars of corporate media keep prattling on about. Crime is up 40 percent over 2019 levels. And we already know that Chicago is the murder capital of America.

Some of you may have noticed something about this column written by a longtime Chicago newspaper man. I’ve put in links to Wirepoints.org and the Illinois Policy Institute, but not the Chicago Sun Times or my old paper the Tribune. Why not? The Trib went woke and broke and neither paper covers crime as they used to.

Tyler Cowen Summary:

Taylor would owe 25% tax on this gain or between 50-100M which would be greater than her additional earnings of 20M.

Property taxes where assessed values are aggressively increased is a close to home, small version of the crazy unrealized capital gains tax scheme.

Thea Lim:

But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.” 

Not-job, or whatever name you prefer—“quitting time,” “off duty,” “downtime”—is where we restore ourselves from a mere jelly, precisely by using our internal meter to determine the criteria for success or failure. Find the best route home—not the one that optimizes cost per minute but the one that offers time enough to hear an album from start to finish. Plant a window garden, and if the plants are half dead, try again. My brother-in-law found a toy loom in his neighbour’s garbage, and nightly he weaves tiny technicolour rugs. We do these activities for the sake of doing them, and their value can’t be arrived at through an outside, top-down measure. It would be nonsensical to treat them as comparable and rank them from one to five. We can assess them only by privately and carefully attending to what they contain and, on our own, concluding their merit. 

And so artmaking—the cultural industries—occupies the middle of an uneasy Venn diagram. First, the value of an artwork is internal—how well does it fulfill the vision that inspired it? Second, a piece of art is its own end. Third, a piece of art is, by definition, rare, one of a kind, nonfungible.

www

All too often whole school approaches to literacy are bolt-ons or blanket strategies. These are implemented with the best of intentions, but lack the nuance needed to meet subject, phase or student needs. Often these are linked to an approach that expects the English department to teach literacy. 

In my talk at ResearchEd, and here, I’m going to talk about why effective literacy isn’t just delivered by English teachers. And posing the question- how can we ‘do literacy’ better?

Effective literacy considers three domains; reading, writing and spoken language. These three domains have common sets of knowledge and skills, which overlap, interact and support one another (Breadmore et al., 2019). The three domains of literacy benefit from lots of instruction, lots of practice and lots offeedback. 

It’s unlikely that the instruction, practice and feedback can be provided in English lessons, literacy lessons, or interventions alone. One solution to this, is to equip all of our teachers to contribute to pupils’ literacy development through consistently high quality literacy instruction. 

Danny Westneat:

That’s a start but would mean more cuts elsewhere. Nobody is talking about this, but buried in a budget presentation recently was the fact that each 1% of salary reduction across the district produces $7 million in savings. So to avoid closing any schools (which was estimated to save about $25 million to $30 million), the school workforce, including administrators, could take a 4% salary cut.

If you were a teacher or principal, would you take 4% less to save your own school?

I don’t put this idea out there lightly — I’m the son of two teachers — or without bitter experience. In the last big recession, after the Seattle P-I shut down, my own union was asked to freeze our pensions. We agreed to the unthinkable, on the thought that it was preferable to have at least one daily newspaper left standing in Seattle. And for us to have jobs at all.

That schools labor contract didn’t pencil from the day it was signed. Going back on it a bit to forestall a spiraling crisis in Seattle public education ought to at least be on the table. Plus it’s easier to reverse, if the state ponies up more money, than emptying 20 schools.

MJ Koch:

But in February, she was fired. Unable to find another teaching job, she is suing the school, its trustees, and its two top officials, Head of School Felicia Wilks and Director of Teaching and Learning Eric Zahler. In the lawsuit, filed earlier this month in New York State Supreme Court, Protopappas and her attorney, Sean Dweck, claim she was the victim of “employment discrimination based upon age, race/national origin” and “retaliation after lodging complaints about the discriminatory practices at the school.” What’s more, they argue, after a student took issue with the way Protopappas, 62, conducted a class, Spence deprived her of the due process that would have allowed her to defend herself.

“I never thought that I would pay such a high price for practicing and teaching the skill of free and responsible expression and independence of mind at a school that I picked for its open-mindedness twenty-five years ago,” Protopappas told me. “I have done nothing but serve this school.”

Protopappas’s firing stems from a May 2023 incident that took place in her Advanced French class, which was being taken by eight Spence seniors. Out of the blue, according to the complaint, one student asked, “Why did France ban the hijab?”

Anna Stokke:

And I think this will be of interest to listeners no matter where you live. For example, they adopted structured literacy programs shortly after learning about the outcomes of the Right to Read reports from other regions. This initiative recently earned them a national award from Dyslexia Canada. Now, as listeners know, I love discussing math and Evergreen has also taken steps to address low math scores, so stay tuned to hear all about that.

 

Scott and I also touch on broader pedagogical narratives, the role of schools in  society, and the importance of setting high expectations for students. We wrap up by discussing the significant progress Evergreen has made in early literacy instruction. A key takeaway from this episode is that strong leadership and a commitment to addressing weaknesses can significantly impact student learning.

Walter Kirn:

The “science of”

That’s disinformation deluxe right there

Shai Goldman:

An unexpected realization dawned on me toward the end of my first semester at Columbia University. For months, I had been noticing certain oddities in seminar discussions, especially in my core literature class. Sporadically, a fellow student would make a stray, weird comment—confusing one central character with another, or misunderstanding key moments in the plot. They might mistake Hector for Agamemnon, or casually forget that Dulcinea del Toboso was of less noble lineage than Don Quixote claimed. These comments would be followed by awkward pauses, before the discussion resumed as normal.

In some classes, professors started having us read key passages of the text together, either aloud or during quiet in-class reading time. I joined them, at first imagining that a second read was a deeper read. Asked to analyze together, I might notice that my group partner had no understanding of Descartes’ ontological argument. I tried to ignore it, so as not to seem unkind.

As our final exam neared, my classmates’ study habits came into sharp relief: They seemed to be learning the material from scratch, scrambling to flip through entire swaths of the Western literary canon in a single week. It was then that I understood that, for the past few months, I had been participating in a show class, in which I was one of the only students who actually bothered to read any of the books. Apparently, the opportunity to explore the supposedly foundational texts of Western civilization didn’t matter as deeply to my peers as I had expected.

Ronald Dworkin:

The changing work environment in which many doctors practice medicine leads to such moments of uncertainty—and all but guarantees that they will occur more frequently. As more doctors work for large companies, they have bosses they must answer to. Rules for how to practice medicine have multiplied exponentially, and their bureaucratic enforcement makes doctors afraid to violate them. With science forming the bulk of their medical and post-graduate education, doctors also feel bewildered when faced with questions that touch on the moral, the political, and the philosophical.  

Wyatt Eicholz:

According to the Tax Policy Center, the average for all states for combined state and local direct general government expenditures was $11,087 per capita in 2021.ⁱⁱⁱ Wisconsin spent $10,340, less than the U.S. average and, again, less than the average of $10,527 for the Great Lakes states.

Looking again at combined state and local expenditures, the average of all states without income taxes is $11,123 compared to Wisconsin at $10,340. In this comparison, only Alaska and Wyoming spend more, an average of $17,947. In this comparison, South Dakota joins New Hampshire, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Nevada as states that spend less, an average of $9,173.

Sylvia Snowden:

Since 2022, nearly 50,000 migrants have been bused to Chicago from the Texas border. While not all of these new arrivals have opted to stay in Chicago, many who have chosen to make the city their new home have been resettled in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Now, WGN News can exclusively report that several Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teachers who work in these communities say they were told by school administrators to give migrant students passing grades last school year.