School Information System

Phoebe Arslanagic-Little

This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.

South Korea is often held up as an example of the failure of public policy to reverse low fertility rates. This is seriously misleading. Contrary to popular myth, South Korean pro-parent subsidies have not been very large, and relative to their modest size, they have been fairly successful.

The story of South Korean fertility rates is thus doubly significant. On the one hand, it illustrates just how potent anti-parenting factors can become, creating a profoundly hostile environment in which to raise children and discouraging a whole society from doing so. On the other, it may offer a scintilla of hope that focused and generous policy can address these problems, shaping a way back from the brink of catastrophe.

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Choose life.

Timur Kuran:

University professors are granted tenure essentially for the freedom to carry their research wherever it leads. But the share of tenured and tenure-track faculty has been falling. According to AAUP (see below), it fell from 53.1% in 1987 to 31.8% in 2023 (below). There are reasons to expect the decline to continue:
(1) Financial difficulties incentivize universities to hire part-time adjuncts, who are much cheaper and easily terminated,
(2) In recent years, most tenured faculty have failed to push back against woke censorship, thus failing to fulfill their end of the implicit bargain: speaking honestly even when its inconvenient to do so. Even worse, tenured faculty have participated in censorship and cancellation campaigns inimical to core university functions.
(3) Partly because of (2), the university has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and legislators are less willing than in the past to subsidize universities and the professoriate.
(4) As fertility declines and population falls, universities will prefer short-term contracts to indefinitely lasting tenure contracts that commit them to decades of employment.
I haven’t even mentioned AI. That’s for another day.

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Dana Goldstein:

“We do one book after state testing, and we did ‘The Great Gatsby.’ … A lot of kids had not read a novel in class before.”

— Laura Henry, 10th-grade English teacher near Houston

“My son in 9th grade listened to the audio of ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ For ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they watched the balcony scene instead of reading.” 

— Rebekah Jacobs, Rockville, Md.

“We typically spend a ridiculous amount of time reading each book, such that in my freshman year, we read only one, ‘Macbeth.’”

— Liv Niklasson, age 16, Los Alamos, N.M.

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.

Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times.

Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.

Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video, the forms that are dominating in the era of mobile, streaming media.

We wanted to find out how students and teachers feel about the shift, and what role schools can play. So The Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.

More than 2,000 people responded

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

An NBC News poll recently found that only one-third of Americans believe a four-year college degree is worth the cost. A new study by the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank helps explain why: Many young college graduates out of work are having a harder time than high-school grads finding jobs, and artificial intelligence isn’t to blame.

The share of Americans who believe a college degree pays off has fallen by 20 percentage points since 2013. Today, 63% say that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off,” according to the NBC poll. Only 46% of those with college degrees believe they are worth the cost, a 17-point decline.

You don’t need an economics degree to notice that young college grads are struggling. According to the Cleveland Fed study, the unemployment gap between high-school and college grads between the ages of 22 and 27 has tightened to a mere 2.5-percentage points, compared with about five percentage points in previous decades.

By Jonah Kaplan, Michael Kaplan

Luxury cars, private villas and overseas wire transfers: CBS News obtained dozens of files and photos that reveal how Minnesota fraudsters blew through hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars as part of one of the biggestCOVID-era fraud schemes.

The files document a spending spree in which defendants, many of Somali descent, took taxpayer money meant to feed hungry children and used it to buy cars, property and jewelry. Videos show them popping champagne at an opulent Maldives resort. In a text message, one defendant boasts: “You are gonna be the richest 25 year old InshaAllah [God willing].”

The documents feature exhibits from a recent federal trial, many of which are being made public by CBS News for the first time. The exhibits include:

• A confirmation email for a stay in an overwater villa with a private pool at Radisson Blu Resort Maldives
• Lakefront property in Minnesota
• Receipts showing wire transfers to China and East Africa
• First class tickets to Istanbul and Amsterdam
• A 2021 Porsche Macan
• Stacks of cash, texted between defendants

Joanna Slater:

A growing number of educators are finding that oral exams allow them to test their students’ learning without the benefit of AI platforms such as ChatGPT

When students in Catherine Hartmann’s honors seminar at the University of Wyoming took their final exams this month, they encountered a testing method as old as the ancient philosophers whose ideas they were studying.

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Commentary.

Eric Turkheimer, Daniel T. Willingham

QUESTION: What does an IQ score actually mean? On the one hand, I’ve heard people say that these scores are meaningless—a high IQ simply shows that the child is good at taking intelligence tests. On the other hand, I know that some districts use IQ test scores as gatekeepers for their gifted and talented programs. What is the science behind IQ scores?

ANSWER: An IQ score is a summary of how successfully a child can answer the types of questions that are frequently posed in school, especially questions that require thinking abstractly with words, numbers, or space. This summary number is not meaningless because it predicts students’ success in school and in many jobs.

But IQ is frequently misunderstood by educators, families, and the general public. Instead of being recognized as a summary of correctly answered questions, it’s believed to be a measure of an internal essence within the child that many call their learning potential. But there is little evidence that such an essence exists at all, let alone that IQ tests measure it.

A better way to think about an IQ score is as a snapshot of achievement now, rather than future potential. This conceptualization offers a better lens for how we might enable all children to answer more questions correctly—that is, to raise their IQs.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis:

I have complicated feelings about being freelance in 2025. (Nervous doesn’t cover it.) But I am genuinely excited to be out reporting again, after spending the last four years almost exclusively editing long magazine stories. My intention is for that to include much more regular posting on this Substack — which for now I’m calling, appropriately, Personal News — until I figure out what this newsletter should be. Ideas in the comments, please.

For now, partially prompted by a recent seminar I gave to some students at Johns Hopkins, here are a few things that more than a decade of editing magazine stories has taught me about writing.

Rachel Bachman and Laine Higgins:

For almost all of its 129-year existence, the Big Ten has positioned itself as a moral custodian of college football.

This was a conference of hulking stadiums and buttoned-up traditions that was older than the NCAA itself. It bragged about the academic prestige of its schools and reminded its athletes that they were students first, sneering at all those other schools that had the audacity to win at all costs.

The Big Ten was so wedded to its own way of doing things that Ohio State undergraduates still hear about the time that a bunch of professors kept the Buckeyes out of the Rose Bowl to punish a coach for paying his players.

But in recent decades, Big Ten leaders have appeared less concerned with maintaining its particular heritage and more interested in squeezing every last dollar out of the business of college sports.

What was once a hallowed collection of 10 Midwestern universities has nearly doubled in size, to 18 schools, including those in the New York and Los Angeles TV markets. The Big Ten now generates more than $1 billion a year from its media rights.

Caleb Watney:

The National Science Foundation announces Friday that it is launching one of the most significant experiments in science funding in decades. A new initiative called Tech Labs will invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in large-scale long-term funding to teams of scientists working outside traditional university structures, a major departure from how the agency has funded research over the past 75 years.

The timing couldn’t be better. The way our science agencies fund research in the U.S. no longer matches the way many breakthroughs actually happen.

For most of the postwar era, federally funded science has been built around a simple model. Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 essay, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” sketched a vision of government-backed research led by university-based scientists pursuing their own ideas. The system that emerged—small, project-based federal grants mostly to individual scientists—worked brilliantly for decades. It gave researchers autonomy, kept politics at arm’s length, and helped make American science the envy of the world.

50can:

A 50-STATE SURVEY OF 20,000 PARENTS

A new 50-state study from 50CAN and Edge Research, offering an unprecedented, state-by-state examination of the current education landscape and what is important to parents.

The 200-page report is available for download in full and by question or state.

Beanie:

Parents, don’t judge your children’s educational progress/ability by their grades. Ask them questions about things they should know (no Googling allowed). Have them read aloud to you (regardless of their age). Don’t assume that ‘A’ is anything other than a participation trophy that the teacher was pressured to give thanks to grade inflation.

Matthew Ygelsias:

There is no proliferation of students in wheelchairs. The issue is the proliferation of students making disability claims largely based on mental health, largely in order to get extra time on tests. And taking tests is very much part of the core mission of undergraduate education. 

Time pressure is either not an important part of the assessment, in which case nobody should be subjected to it, or else it is an important part of the assessment, in which case everybody should be subjected to it. 

Maya Sen from the Kennedy School, who I generally think has good takes, reacted to this story by saying that abuse of accommodations is “far from a pressing national policy problem.” And I can see where she’s coming from there. But I think it’s just one manifestation of something that really is a pressing national policy problem, which is that the stakeholders in the American higher-education system can’t really articulate what it is they’re trying to do. So as various controversies pop up — about disability accommodations or viewpoint discrimination or admissions — there’s not a coherent response because there are no guiding principles to refer back to. 

And that’s pretty important. These institutions play major roles in American society. They are nodes in our entire scientific-research enterprise and a major export industry. Employers rely on them to perform both screening and social capital functions. They are informal-but-significant authorities and sources of expertise and producers of knowledge.

Julie Quinlan Brame

Last month, the MPS Board voted to end the Carmen Northwest Charter Schoolcontract in 2027. That decision dismayed me deeply, because it appeared driven more by ideology about charter schools than by the needs of students, families, staff — and even MPS itself.

I come from a family of teachers. In fact, my mom was one of her school’s teachers’ union representatives for many years. I attended public schools from kindergarten through college. I care profoundly about public education.

My husband is a second-career high school teacher who began teaching in MPS on the city’s North Side. His experience so disillusioned him that he nearly left teaching altogether. But Sister Mary Diez, a mentor of his at Alverno College, urged him to try one more year — this time at Carmen. So, he joined the first cohort of teachers to open Carmen Northwest in 2013.

xAI

Today, xAI is thrilled to announce a groundbreaking partnership with the Government of El Salvador to launch the world’s first nationwide AI-powered education program. Over the next two years, we’ll deploy Grok across more than 5,000 public schools, delivering personalized learning to over one million students and empowering thousands of teachers as collaborative partners in education.

This initiative will create adaptive, curriculum-aligned tutoring that adjusts to each student’s pace, preferences, and mastery level—ensuring every child, from urban centers to rural communities, receives world-class education tailored to their needs. By co-developing this system with El Salvador, we’ll generate new methodologies, datasets, and frameworks to guide responsible AI use in classrooms globally, with a focus on local contexts, safety, and human-centered impact.

At xAI, our mission is to advance scientific discovery and deepen our collective understanding of the universe. This partnership embodies that purpose by harnessing Grok’s frontier capabilities to accelerate learning at scale, bridging educational gaps, and fostering innovation that benefits humanity. It’s a step toward making advanced AI accessible to all, reimagining how nations build knowledge for generations to come.

Sam Hasselby:

As the NYT reported, the Obama Presidential Center is a “center” not a library, Obama privatized the archive and does not allow the National Archives and Records Admin to run it. nytimes.com/2019/02/20/art…

Nate Gartrell:

A UC Berkeley professor smelled a rat — over the years there had been $46,855 in damage from computers that failed, and nearly all of it seemed to affect one particular Ph.D. candidate at the college’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department.

The professor wondered if the student’s luck was really that bad, or if something else was afoot. So he installed a hidden camera — disguised in a department laptop, and pointed it at the student’s computer. According to police, the sly move captured another Ph.D. candidate, 26-year-old Jiarui Zou, damaging his fellow student’s computer with some implement that caused sparks to fly out of the laptop.

Now, Zou has been charged with three felony counts of vandalism, related to the destruction of three computers on Nov. 9-10. The charges allege the damage amounted to more than $400 each time, though the professor who reported the vandalism, and the affected student, told police they suspect Zou of the additional incidents that had been going on for years, court records show.

Zou was arrested on Nov. 12 at UC Berkeley’s Cory Hall and declined to talk to police, according to court records. He is due for his first court appearance on Dec. 15 and is no longer in custody, records show.

Betsy McKay and Caroline Kimeu:

One of the greatest public-health achievements of recent decades has been driving down child mortality around the world. Now, that long-running decline is reversing.

The number of deaths of children under 5 years old is projected to rise this year for the first time in decades, the Gates Foundation, the philanthropy chaired by billionaire Bill Gates that is a major funder of global health and development causes, said in a report Thursday.

About 243,000 more children under 5 years have died or will die this year than in 2024, according to the projections, which were made by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which measures global-health indicators and is funded in part by the Gates Foundation.

Danielle DuClos:

After the Cap Times revealed the state Department of Public Instruction had investigated more than 200 educators from 2018 through 2023 following allegations of sexual misconduct or grooming, public officials proposed new legislation, pledged greater transparency and ordered a wide-ranging audit.

Yet, Wisconsin’s laws and the Department of Public Instruction’s policies to prevent educator misconduct continue to fall short of efforts by other states and what advocates say are best practices.

Clear state laws on employee screenings, staff and student training, and disclosing misconduct to future employers are all key to stopping sexual abuse of children, said Jetta Bernier, executive director of the national advocacy group Enough Abuse.

“Not every school leader or school department or education leader is aware of the extent and scope of the problem. … You need to institutionalize policies. Otherwise, you’re running in place,” Bernier said.

Compared to other states, including its Midwestern neighbors, Wisconsin lacks laws mandating more transparency on educator misconduct, such as banning confidentiality agreements between school districts and former employees.

Here are seven ways Wisconsin’s laws and policies could change to mirror practices in other states or more closely follow advocate recommendations to strengthen educator sexual misconduct prevention:

Dan D. Goldhaber and Dominic J. Brewer

The authors provide evidence that teachers can have an impact on student outcomes, and they show that student achievement in math and science can be improved by requiring teacher training in those subject areas.

MOST public school systems reward teachers who obtain advanced degrees with a considerable increase in their base pay. Salary schedules
typically provide a pay premium averaging 11% for a master’s degree, 14% for an education specialist’s degree, and 17% for a doctorate over what a teacher would carn with a bachelor’s degree only Some school systems even require their teachers to obtain an advanced degree after a specified number of years of teaching in the district. The emphasis on teachers’ having or obtaining advanced degrees raises…..

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More.

Erika Edwards:

The measles outbreak in South Carolina is “accelerating” with no end in sight following Thanksgiving and other large gatherings, state health officials said Wednesday.

As of Wednesday, 111 measles cases had been reportedin what’s known as upstate South Carolina — an area in the northwest of the state that includes Greenville and Spartanburg.

“We are faced with ongoing transmission that we anticipate will go on for many more weeks,” Dr. Linda Bell, state epidemiologist for the South Carolina Department of Public Health, said during a news briefing Wednesday.

Twenty-seven of those cases have been reported since Friday. “That is a significant increase in our cases in a short period of time,” Bell said. She attributed the spike in part to holiday travel and get-togethers, as well as low vaccination rates.

According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.

Jordan Jantz

Imagine teaching a room full of students, wading through the tedious details of algebra, when a student starts throwing his pencils at his classmates. However, even as the teacher, you cannot do anything to confront or stop this disruption. 

Worse, imagine the disruption is more dangerous than hurling pencils, such as a student assaulting a classmate or attempting to attack you.

Now imagine being a student in the classroom, trying to focus through this incident. Or consider being the parent of the disruptive student, left uninformed about your child’s behavior.

This is the reality of many American public school classrooms.

But one bill in Wisconsin aims to reform classrooms in the state. Assembly Bill 614—the Teachers’ Bill of Rights—would protect teachers’ authority to maintain an orderly classroom and teach discipline.

Foundation for Freedom Online:

X became the first American platform to be fined under the EU’s Digital Services Act, receiving a €120 million penalty after allegedly refusing to open up its data to “disinformation researchers.”

Disinformation researchers are critical to online censorship – they are the ones who compile databases of disfavored speech and the advertisers that fund it.

Without access to online platforms’ data, the international censorship machine is blind.

The EU’s Digital Services Act and its provisions mandating data access for researchers emerged with the full support and cooperation of the US government under the previous administration.

23 US-funded “counter-disinformation” organizations are involved in the EU’s censorship regime, representing $15,444,695 in US taxpayer funding.

Many of these organizations will receive access to X’s data if EU bureaucrats successfully pressure the platform.

Documents reviewed by FFO also expose the central role of the US Trade Representative and the US International Trade Administration at the Department of Commerce.

Both collaborated with the EU under the previous administration, through the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, which developed a shared list of policy priorities that were later enshrined in the Digital Services Act.

These include the DSA’s provisions on data access for researchers that are now being used to target X.

Sophie Carson:

The former school building on the St. Rita Catholic Church campus in West Allis, which celebrated its last Mass in late November, has been sold to a private Christian school for $3.5 million.

The buyer, the Milwaukee-based Academy of Excellence, accepts tax-funded tuition vouchers through Wisconsin’s school choice programs, which allow students from lower-income families to attend private schools for free. Academy of Excellence is by far the state’s largest recipient of taxpayer dollars through choice programs, taking in $50.2 million for the current school year, state records show.

The Dec. 3 sale of the St. Rita school building, at 6021 W. Lincoln Ave., was made public through online deed records. It’s a five-story building with about 60,000 square feet of space. That includes a basement chapel and two upper floors previously used as a convent for the Catholic sisters who worked at St. Rita.

William Galston:

Beneath the ebb and flow of daily events, a long-term trend is reshaping the U.S. economy and society. Americans lately have been focused on artificial intelligence, but demography is likely to prove equally important.

To maintain a stable population, women need to give birth to 2.1 children on average during their lifetimes. This figure is the “replacement rate.” As recently as 2007, fertility was close to this rate. Since then it has fallen sharply, reaching a record low of 1.6 in 2024.

Over time, this will mean less demand for child care and fewer pupils in prekindergarten through elementary school. Within a generation, it will entail a diminishing number of working-age adults to finance healthcare and retirement for an expanding elderly population. Today’s young adults will likely see the U.S. population shrink over their lifetimes—unless birthrates rise or Americans are willing to accept large inflows of immigrants, principally from African and Muslim countries that have surpluses of working-age adults.

This might seem too far away to worry about. But in many parts of the U.S., the future is now. In areas with older, mainly white inhabitants, deaths exceed births and populations are shrinking.

Calli McMurray: 

Scientific publisher Springer Nature has begun to retract dozens of papers that relied on a dataset fraught with ethical and reliability concerns, The Transmitter has learned. Five papers have been retracted since 16 November, and 33 more retractions are planned, says Tim Kersjes, Springer Nature’s head of research integrity, resolutions.

The papers attempted to train neural networks to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children in a dataset containing photos of children’s faces. Retired engineer Gerald Piosenka created the dataset in 2019 by downloading photos of children from “websites devoted to the subject of autism,” according to a description of the dataset’s methods, and uploaded it to Kaggle, a site owned by Google that hosts public datasets for machine-learning practitioners.

Alysia Finley:

Diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years. One reason, which Minnesota’s welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details, is Medicaid fraud and abuse.

Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a single child. Yet states rarely verify that kids who are diagnosed actually meet the medical criteria for the disorder or that they get appropriate treatment from qualified specialists.

The result: Children covered by Medicaid or the government-run Children’s Health Insurance Program are 2.5 times as likely as those with private coverage to be diagnosed with autism. Many lower-income kids are labeled autistic merely because they have behavioral or developmental problems.

In 2014 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began requiring state Medicaid programs to cover autism therapy such as applied behavior analysis or ABA, a technique that uses positive reinforcement to improve social and communication skills. ObamaCare plans are also required to cover such therapy as an “essential benefit.”

Previously, the responsibility for providing such treatment fell mainly on public schools. Many lacked the expertise and were happy to shift the costs to federal taxpayers, which cover between 50% and 75% of Medicaid bills for most beneficiaries.

Anand:

McCabe’s research confirms this: once cheating becomes normalized and the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.

This is the classic prisoner’s dilemma.

• If everyone plays fair, all benefit. 
• But if others cheat and you don’t, you fall behind. 
• So even the “good” students feel forced to cheat just to stay even.

This, however, isn’t a moral collapse. 

It’s a design failure.

The real revelation? 

AI exposed that a lot of school work isn’t worth the effort. 

Maria Montessori said it a century ago: 

“The work must be something the child feels is worth doing.”

Schools forgot and flipped that. 

Andrew Gelman:

Recently we discussed a debate about how much of the improvement in test scores of students in Mississippi can be attributed to a policy of holding back more students–in particular, having kids repeat third grade will be expected to improve average for fourth graders. Education researchers Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky, and Daniel Robinson expressed skepticism about claimed dramatic benefits from the Mississippi plan, but then there were good arguments on the other side. One thing is that a lot of the discussion was about what happened right after the new plan was implemented in the mid-2010s, but there have been longer-term trends in Mississippi and other states. Changes in averages are always hard to interpret because of possible changes in compositional effects, including decisions of the age at which children start first grade, classification of students as disabled, and who’s taking the test in any given year. Also, all these comparisons are observational: as Wainer puts it, there’s no control group. On the other other hand, decisions need to be made in the absence of ironclad evidence. So I was left in a state of uncertainty.

A couple days later we learned that Wainer et al. had garbled some statistics, entirely misreporting Mississippi’s fourth and eighth grade math scores. Wainer et al. were making a general point about testing and selection, something they’d seen in various forms many times in their careers, but they were evidently not close to the data from Mississippi, even to the aggregate data that are easily available. As I discussed, I should’ve earlier been more suspicious of their claims about the math scores, given that in my earlier post I’d noticed a discrepancy between those and others’ claims. After all this, I remain unsure what to think about Mississippi. It’s an observational comparison, there’s selection, there’s variation between states in how much they teach to the test, and at the individual level there are the spillover effects on the kids who are not held back . . . all sorts of things. On the other hand there are these long-term trends. Selection has to be explaining some of what is happening in Mississippi–if you hold kids back and give them the test later or manage to exclude them from the tested population entirely, the average scores of the remaining students should rise–but it’s hard to say how much, and at some point you have to go with the data in front of you. As is often the case, we’re not just arguing about causal effects; we’re also trying to pin down what exactly is happening.

In the meantime, I received an email from another education researcher, Doug Harris, who writes:

Wainer et al. also got it wrong on the other cities like New Orleans. To quote them: “We have seen several previous K–12 education ‘miracles’ that turned out to be hoaxes. Five of them were in Houston, Atlanta, the District of Columbia, El Paso, and New Orleans . . . The New Orleans miracle was caused by a natural disaster. Hurricane Katrina tragically relocated about a third of the students who came from the poorest areas. Removing thousands of low scorers immediately raised the average test scores of the students who remained.”

Several people pointed this out to me [Harris], especially because I have been studying the New Orleans school reforms for more than 10 years. My center, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, has published more than 50 articles about it. Our Advisory Board includes both supporters and critics of the reforms.

When I first came to New Orleans the sharp upward trend in outcomes gave me and others good reason to think this fit the first rule. The school reforms were sparked by Hurricane Katrina, which changed the city in many ways. Many families never returned, at least not to their original homes and neighborhoods. The whole city was hit hard, but low-income neighborhoods were hit a bit harder. Given the correlation between demographics and education outcomes, it was reasonable to be concerned that changes in the population, not the school reforms, drove the change in outcomes. Recognizing the problem, I spent years trying to disentangle this.

Vladimir Kogan:

DeBoer’s message is clear: “Put more simply and sadly, nothing in education works.”

Academic achievement, deBoer believes, is largely genetically determined. Even when education interventions are effective in the short term, many of the benefits fade out over time or simply shift the entire distribution—increasing performance across the board, without closing the gap between top and bottom performers. Students’ relative positions in that distribution remain “remarkably static over time, even in the face of massive spending and intense intervention, and . . . this persistence fatally undermines modern assumptions about schooling, its purpose, and its potential.”

DeBoer is a skilled writer who combines an entertaining style, cheeky barbs, and apparent substantive expertise. It is easy to see how he has built such an impressive following and why many of his arguments may seem persuasive to a lay reader. And deBoer is right to criticize education reformers for exaggerating the likely impacts of even their most effective policy proposals. As the Fordham Institute’s President Michael Petrilli acknowledged recently, “we have overpromised and underdelivered.”

But dig into the details, and it becomes clear that deBoer’s most fatalistic critiques of reform efforts are either greatly exaggerated or simply incorrect and the evidence he marshals to support his claims either cherry-picked or just made up.

To understand why progress in closing achievement gaps is possible, it is important to examine each major element of deBoer’s argument and see where he goes wrong.

Preston Byrne:

A client got their first letter from Australian eSafety. This was our reply. The US government was copied

Open Culture:

The his­to­ry of sci­ence, like most every his­to­ry we learn, comes to us as a pro­ces­sion of great, almost exclu­sive­ly white, men, unbro­ken but for the occa­sion­al token woman—well-deserving of her hon­ors but seem­ing­ly anom­alous nonethe­less. “If you believe the his­to­ry books,” notes the Time­line series The Matil­da Effect, “sci­ence is a guy thing. Dis­cov­er­ies are made by men, which spur fur­ther inno­va­tion by men, fol­lowed by acclaim and prizes for men. But too often, there is an unsung woman genius who deserves just as much cred­it” and who has been over­shad­owed by male col­leagues who grabbed the glo­ry.

In 1993, Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Mar­garet Rossiter dubbed the denial of recog­ni­tion to women sci­en­tists “the Matil­da effect,” for suf­frag­ist and abo­li­tion­ist Matil­da Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay “Woman as an Inven­tor” protest­ed the com­mon asser­tion that “woman… pos­sess­es no inven­tive or mechan­i­cal genius.” Such asser­tions, Gage pro­ceed­ed to demon­strate, “are care­less­ly or igno­rant­ly made… although woman’s sci­en­tif­ic edu­ca­tion has been gross­ly neglect­ed, yet some of the most impor­tant inven­tions of the world are due to her.”

Kevin L. Cope, Jens Frankenreiter, Scott Hirst, Eric A. Posner, Daniel Schwarcz and Dane Thorley:

In the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant technical advances, such that legal-advocacy organizations are increasingly adopting them as complements to — or substitutes for — lawyers and other human experts. Several studies have examined LLMs’ performance in taking law school exams, finding mixed results. Yet there have been no published studies systematically analyzing LLMs’ competence at one of law professors’ chief responsibilities: grading law school exams. This paper presents results of an analysis of how LLMs perform in evaluating student responses to legal analysis questions of the kind typically administered in law school exams. The underlying data come from exams in four subjects administered at top-30 U.S. law schools. Unlike some projects in computer or data science, our goal is not to design a new LLM that minimizes error or maximizes agreement with human graders. Rather, we seek to determine whether existing models — which can be straightforwardly applied by most professors and students — are already suitable for the task of law exam evaluation. We find that, when provided with a detailed rubric, the LLM grades correlate with the human grader at Pearson correlation coefficients of up to 0.93. Our findings suggest that, even if they do not fully replace humans in the near future, LLMs could soon be put to valuable tasks by law school professors, such as reviewing and validating professor grading, providing substantive feedback on ungraded midterms, and providing students feedback on self-administered practice exams.

Harriet Ryan:

Phillip Bell III was in tears when he phoned his grandparents’ farm outside Sacramento.

“Come and help me please,” his grandmother, Lorna Barnes, recalled the then-16-year-old sobbing in March 2023.

Two months earlier, his mother had whisked Bell, a nationally ranked wide receiver, off to a new school in Los Angeles, where they were living in a mansion previously occupied by the rapper Soulja Boy and leased with the help of a sportscaster whose son played quarterback.

It was just the first stop on Bell’s odyssey through the youth sports black market. Paying students to play sports is against state interscholastic rules. But in the nation’s football hotbeds, a secret economy in athletically gifted teens has thrived for years—and the recent arrival in most states of legal Name, Image and Likeness compensation for high-school athletes has only made it hotter.

Bell’s mother, who abused drugs, shopped him from school to school, demanding up to $72,000 a year, according to court filings, public records and interviews with relatives and others who knew the family. He also joined a club team that paid thousands of dollars a weekend.

Dave Cieslewicz:

I thought it was a crazy system, and still do. It was fundamentally undemocratic because so much influence was in the hands of staff and citizen committee members who never had to answer to anyone at an election. But it reflected the character of our city. Madison is a city of bureaucrats and professors, so it makes sense that its citizens would favor a system that placed inordinate power in the hands of city staff and “experts.” 

Quinton Klabon:

Districts paid for hundreds of millions of permanent salaries with temporary funds in the pandemic aftermath.

Wisconsin had 49,078 FEWER students from 2020 to 2025 but 561 FEWER teachers and 2,702 MORE other staff.

How do I know?

I tracked every dollar districts budgeted for DPI approval from the last round of federal pandemic relief, ESSER III.

That is 17,830 line items and 1,492,737,119 dollars!

Find your own district here.

Add this to Act 10, which did NOT cause a staff shortage.

From 2011 to 2020, Wisconsin had 16,591 FEWER students but 2,176 MORE teachers and 8,632 MORE other staff.

Some urban/rural/special are short, but we are not in general.

———

Empty Schools, Empty Wallets: How ESSER Pandemic Aid Led to More School Referenda:

The report draws on 17,830 school district allocations analyzed by IRG to find out how schools allocated the last round of federal COVID dollars. IRG tracked how districts planned to spend every last dollar: teachers, construction, and more.

Wisconsin districts added significant staff while losing more than 47,000 studentsand now face a difficult decision as fiscal cliffs loom: referenda or layoffs.

WHAT WE FOUND: 

• Districts went on hiring sprees they now cannot afford.
  • ESSER III dollars were intended as 1-time emergency relief, but districts allocated 41% of funds to permanent salaries, propping up staffing levels to all-time highs even as enrollment plummeted. 
• Districts did not allocate funding fast enough.
  • Despite needing to allocate funds in a brief 2-year window, districts had allocated only 34% of funding 6 months in and just 79% after 17 months, slowing transparency and, perhaps, recovery. 
• Districts given more money could be less efficient with funding.
  • Some districts with moderate poverty received $3,000 to $5,000 more per student than some districts with high poverty. Wild variations in funding meant some schools benefited far more than others.
• Districts sometimes made poor allocation decisions. 
  • Milwaukee—recipient of 34% of all ESSER III funds—allocated  $193 million to construction projects, including athletics facilities and renovations at schools likely to close. At the same time, it failed to invest in essentials like classroom air conditioning, financial system updates, or lead remediation, leading to crises for students
• Districts recovered poorly from the pandemic.
  • Despite unprecedented resources, Wisconsin saw disappointing recovery in academic performance. According to Harvard University, Wisconsin ranked 30th in reading recovery and 16th in math.

———

Madison has long spent far more than most K-12 systems, now more than $26,000 per student. This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Meanwhile, Chicago schools at low capacity utilization.

Jason Ma:

While faster growth is the most appealing option, it’s not coming to the rescue because of the shrinking labor force, he said. AI will boost productivity, but not as much as would be needed to rein in U.S. debt.

Frankel also said the previous era of low rates was a historic anomaly that’s not coming back, and default isn’t plausible given already-growing doubts about Treasury bonds as a safe asset, especially after President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff shocker.

Relying on inflation to shrink the real value of U.S. debt would be just as bad as a default, and financial repression would require the federal government to essentially force banks to buy bonds with artificially low yields, he explained.

“There is one possibility left: severe fiscal austerity,” Frankel added.

How severe? A sustainable U.S. debt trajectory would entail elimination of nearly all defense spending or almost all nondefense discretionary outlays, he estimated.

Jonathan Chait:

Every once in a while, a state or city discovers a new and better way to educate poor children. Inevitably, a group of skeptics arises to insist that this new way doesn’t work, that even attempting to shrink the gap between rich and poor students is a fool’s errand.

Strangely enough, these skeptics tend, with increasing frequency, to reside on the political left.

The most recent subject of this recurring dynamic is Mississippi. Once synonymous with terrible education, the state incorporated a set of educational reforms including teacher training, testing, retention (i.e., whether kids move forward or are held back), and a mostly phonics-based reading instruction, unlike the ineffective but popular “whole language” model that prevailed at the time. In a mere 10 years, the state’s fourth-grade reading scores rose from 49th place, in 2013, to the top 20, in 2023. Adjusted for race and income, Mississippi now does a far better job of teaching literacy than do many northern states seen as leaders in public education. In 2023, Maryland promptly hired Carey Wright, Mississippi’s superintendent of education, to oversee the state’s public schools.

Education reform has long split Democrats between, generally speaking, a moderate wing (led by, for instance, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and their progressive critics. Moderates have called for better incentives for attracting and keeping quality teachers (such as merit-based pay), better systems for tracking student progress, and better alternatives—such as public charter schools—to failing schools. Their critics from the left are skeptical of reforms designed to lift performance. And though these critics support public schools as community centers and providers of child care and secure middle-class jobs, they tend to dismiss any plan to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students, at least as long as poverty and inequality exist in the broader society.

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Retraction Watch

A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a professor emeritus when he died in 1997.

A 2019 investigation launched by the UK institution found 26 papers coauthored by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, a social scientist in Germany, were based on questionable data and contained findings that were “incompatible with modern clinical science and the understanding of disease processes.”

For example, the two researchers’ data showed people with a “cancer-prone” personality were more than 120 times as likely to die from the disease as were those with a “healthy” personality, Anthony Pelosi, a longtime Eysenck critic, pointed out in an article preceding the university probe.

Aaron Wesolowski:

I’m the parent of an Alice Deal Middle School student who loves to read. We have books scattered on every surface in the house and we regularly have to do late-night patrols to check that the reading lights stay out after bedtime. 

Our child isn’t the only middle schooler in D.C. with this love of books. And DC Public Schools is making concentrated efforts to improve kids’ reading levels. That’s why many parents like myself were shocked by a recent change to the English Language Arts curriculum at Deal Middle School. 

The new curriculum removes all full-length novels from the 8th grade curriculum. Previously, Deal 8th graders read challenging and thoughtful novels like To Kill a Mockingbird and A Raisin in the Sun. The rationale for this change is that the old curriculum was cobbled together through trial and error by Deal’s English teachers and the new curriculum, which focuses on short passages, will better prepare the students for high school.

That may be so, but reading full novels has real and important benefits for middle school-age children and in life. Reading longer narratives helps students track character growth, story development, and complex structures. Reading fiction can train students to inhabit characters’ perspectives, fostering empathy. And perhaps most important for children growing up right now, with so much talk of technology shortening attention spans, reading full-length books can build concentration and mental stamina. 

Emma Kamp:

The students at America’s elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country. And yet, shocking percentages of them are claiming academic accommodations designed for students with learning disabilities. 

In an article published this week in The Atlantic, education reporter Rose Horowitch lays out some shocking numbers. At Brown and Harvard, 20 percent of undergraduate students are disabled. At Amherst College, that’s 34 percent. At Stanford University, it’s a galling 38 percent. Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. 

Obviously, something is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus. A student with real cognitive struggles is much more likely to end up in community college, or not in higher education at all, right?

Wai Wah Chin:

Membership training for the National Education Association (NEA), America’s largest teachers’ union, makes the organization’s priorities unmistakably clear.

Defending Education, a watchdog group, recently obtained pre-attendance and participant materials for the NEA’s training session, “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice,” which begins today. The documents, considered alongside other union programming, reveal the NEA’s fixation on identity politics.

The pre-attendance materials put the training’s absurdity on full display. On the document’s second page, the NEA lists a series of principles that it expects attendees to accept. Among them are “Listening for Understanding,” “Being Gracious,” “Staying Engaged,” and “Saying ‘I’—tell your truth.” Is this program for adults or kindergartners?

Then, on the seven pages that follow, the NEA recounts “key terms” about “sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.” The list begins with “agender” and ends with “Two-Spirit”—an identity that non-Natives are instructed not to use. (Of course, males may identify and insist on being treated as females.) All of this is before one gets to the 56-page participant handout, which features pronoun-use instructions and oppression flowcharts.

These materials would be comical if they weren’t being used for a meeting of the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

Armin Rosen:

In the meeting with Ellison were Salim Said, co-owner of the Safari Restaurant in south Minneapolis, and Ikram Mohamed, a consultant for Feeding Our Future. Both eventually faced federal indictments for their alleged role in the scam. (Said has been convicted on 21 counts of fraud, while Ikram is awaiting trial.) Ellison assured his guests that the money would continue flowing through FOF. It was the state government, which Ellison in theory represented, that would soon be on the defensive, the attorney general told them. “[Governor Tim] Walz agrees with me that this piddly, stupid stuff running small people out of business is terrible,” said Ellison. “Let’s go fight these people,” he declared, “these people” being rightfully cautious state officials. Ellison suggested that Salim “send the names of all these people who are hanging on by a thread” — the Somali businesses and nonprofits that existed at the public’s expense, many of them through fraud — so that he could personally needle senior bureaucrats into restoring their funding. 

Ellison might not have extended such generosity out of pure nobility of spirit. Nine days after the meeting, Ellison’s reelection campaign received four donations at the legal maximum of $2,500, one of which came from Ikram’s brother, who also became a Feeding Our Future defendant. Salim Said made a $2,500 donation to the campaign of Jeremiah Ellison, Keith Ellison’s son, then a Minneapolis city councilman. In total, Glahn found that Ellison received $15,000 from FOF-linked donors. At the time, the state remained happily oblivious to the Feeding Our Future scam, which only broke open when FBI agents executed scores of simultaneous search warrants in January of 2022.

Ellison’s job is to be the top legal advocate for the government and the people of Minnesota. On the recording, “he’s sitting with people who were suing his clients, the state agencies, and talking about how he’s going to fight his own client,” Republican state representative Walter Hudson, a member of the House of Representatives’ Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, explained when I met him at the Capitol in Saint Paul. Ellison, he said, “was downplaying very clear evidence of massive amounts of fraud in order to gain political patronage from the Somali community, at minimum. Now, from there, you can speculate all sorts of things.” 

Natalie Wexler:

Comparing education systems internationally is a tricky business because contexts vary widely. But England and the U.S., along with some other countries, have long shared a similar problem: Education orthodoxy conflicts with what cognitive science tells us about teaching and learning.

Orthodoxy vs. Science

In both countries, prospective teachers have been told they should serve primarily as facilitators, allowing children to direct their own education as much as possible through inquiry, discovery, and free choice. It’s considered more important for students to acquire skills—for example, in reading comprehension or critical thinking more generally—than to acquire any particular knowledge. Some argue that requiring students to retain factual information is not only unnecessary but harmful.

Cognitive science, on the other hand, indicates that when learners are new to a topic, what works best is explicit instruction that incorporates lots of teacher-directed interaction with students. And studies showthat learners need to acquire knowledge through a content-rich curriculum in order to apply “thinking” skills. The more information you have about a topic stored in long-term memory, the better able you are to understand a text on that topic or to think about it critically.

Susan Pickard:

The keynote speaker, a well-known American anthropologist in his 50s, wearing a tight T-shirt that showed off his tattooed arms, stood on stage in front of a packed ballroom at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association, the most elite social-science gathering of its kind in the United States. “To quote the taxi driver who drove me from the airport,” he said, pausing for one theatrical beat, “ ‘fuck ICE!’ ”

The audience — from grey-haired professors at the top of their game to undergraduates, there to present a poster  — whooped, cheered, and clapped enthusiastically.

We were five minutes in, and I, an ethnographer with a doctorate in anthropology and 30 years’ experience, already felt not-at-home. The speaker, Jason De León, an academic star who has won every major award the academy can bestow, began his talk by recounting how he’d “remained silent” during an event he attended at which colleagues offered public condolences for the recently murdered Charlie Kirk. He’d been disturbed by the sympathy, he said, because “Charlie Kirk was a peddler of hate speech.” However, his silence had “inhibited” him, and his speech for that prior event was mediocre, he told us, because he had not been “true to himself.” 

Andy Kessler:

A June study from MIT Media Lab suggests that using ChatGPT to write essays results in “cognitive debt,” a fancy way to say that artificial intelligence makes you dumb. Critics of AI and social media regularly throw around terms like “continuous partial attention.” Or “brain rot.” In a Substack article on our “stupidogenic society” (more on that later), one commenter states, “Our society has become so smart we truly are stupid.” Ouch. But are we?

We’ve heard all this before. The Atlantic asked in 2008, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—which I found from a Google search. My parents called television the “idiot box,” a term coined in the mid-1950s. Calculators, cars and probably candles and the abacus were considered a menace to society.

Still, the antitechnology backlash grows. We know that intelligence scores from 1932 to 1978 increased about three points every decade, the Flynn Effect. Each generation gets smarter. That’s too short for evolution, so scientists credit better nutrition or reduced exposure to lead. But IQ score growth slowed in teenagers starting in the 1990s and again in the 2000s. Hmmm, must be PCs and that darn internet.

In 2023 Northwestern researcher Elizabeth Dworak discovered a “reverse Flynn effect,” with youth scores dropping from 2006 to 2018 in three out of four “cognitive domains.” Facebook was released to the general public in 2006. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. It’s obviously their fault, right? Well, IQ scores are notoriously fickle.

Rachel Wolfe:

“People are making really rational choices about how difficult it is to be a parent and how the stakes seem higher and higher,” said Karen Guzzo, a family demographer at the Carolina Population Center.

Efforts in other countries to subsidize child-rearing and boost fertility have largely fallen flat. In Japan and Hungary, for example, policies like expanded paid family leave and monthly per-child allowances led to only modest increases in the birthrate.

But those types of policies are very different from what the Trump administration is laying out.

“If I have a baby today, I need money today, I don’t need money when my kid turns 18,” said Guzzo.

Terry Schilling, who runs conservative political ads as head of the American Principles Project, says that he sees Trump accounts as a “great starting point at shifting our economy toward the next generation.” Millennials and Gen Z, he says, are the first generations to inherit a worse country and economy than their parents. “We need to fix that, and soon, or else we will lose our country to socialism,” he said, pointing to how Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was able to win the New York City mayoral election in part by appealing to young people’s economic anxieties.

Kimberly Strassel:

The Minnesota story—in which Somali fraudsters bilked taxpayers out of more than $1 billion—has many ugly story lines to choose from. It’s a parable of failed assimilation and the need for policies that heat the melting pot. It’s another warning of identity politics, of fraudsters using “minority-owned” status to cash in and crying “racism” to evade scrutiny. It’s a scandal of politicians who looked the other way, more eager to win votes than to enforce the law.

President Trump has for his part sought to co-opt the story for his own priority: immigration. He’s raged about ungrateful Somali immigrants, paused immigration applications from 19 countries, and ramped up immigration enforcement operations in the Minneapolis area. This might excite the base, but it’s diverting attention from a far better policy opportunity.

Because at root, this is a story of broken welfare. Of a federal government that shovels more than $1 trillion annually into more than 80 major “antipoverty” programs (and countless minor ones)—a system too complex to ensure even basic integrity. And of a state that preened as a model of social welfare, its own lavish benefits drawing many immigrants, and invited a plundering.

Open Justice UK:

Working directly with survivors and using community crowdfunding, our organisation has lawfully acquired and redacted these court documents, ensuring that the realities of grooming gangs are documented accurately and responsibly. By providing this material, we help researchers, journalists, policymakers, and members of the public understand how these cases unfold in court and why open access to justice records is vital for safeguarding and future prevention.

Jon Marcus:

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared with 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data shows.

“This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom.“

It’s fourth period in the auto lab at Madison’s Vel Phillips Memorial High School, and a dozen students maneuver between nearly as many cars.

At one bay, a junior adjusts the valves of an oxygen-acetylene torch and holds the flame to a suspended Subaru’s front axle to loosen its rusty bolts. Steps away, two classmates tease each other in Spanish as they finish replacing the brakes on a red Saab. Teacher Miles Tokheim moves calmly through the shop, checking students’ work and offering pointers.

After extensive renovations, the lab reopened in 2024 with more room and tools for young mechanics-in-training. What visitors can’t see is the class recently got an upgrade, too: college credit.

Through a process called dual enrollment, high schoolers who pass the course now earn five Madison College credits for free and skip the class if they later enroll. Classes like these are increasingly common in Wisconsin and across the country. That’s allowed more high schoolers to earn college credit, reducing their education costs and giving them a head start on their career goals.

Wisconsin lawmakers and education officials want more high schoolers to have this opportunity. But these classes need teachers with the qualifications of college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply.

That leaves many students — disproportionately, those in less-affluent areas — without classes that make a college education more attainable.

———

A long running issue: Credit for non Madison School District Courses. More, recent history

Other school systems allow students to take off campus courses at nearby technical or 4 year colleges. Teacher union issues seek to have been dealt with….

Justin Murphy:

This Oliver Sacks story is NUTS. Really significant. An absolute catastrophe for the Humanities. Or rather several brand names in the contemporary prestige public humanities.

You think LLMs hallucinate?

Wait until you see what humans have been doing at The New Yorker!

———

Kevin Bass:

Now we find even many of Oliver Sacks’s case studies were fabrications.

People think I am exaggerating, but the amount of fraud and misconduct in science is beyond comprehension. It goes far beyond what the most trenchant critics say publicly. (In private, they shock even me.)

———

Chris Arnade:

I just always assumed Oliver Sacks was bullshitting — if you write enough about talking to people you can usually spot the fabricated, hyped, exaggerated — too perfect narratives, too cinematic, too clean cut hero/goat.

Jordan Adams

In brief, the current state of our schools is the result of a model of education that discounted students actually knowing and understanding things, that cast aspersions on authority figures like students’ teachers and parents and those who have come before them, that viewed students first as social problem-solvers and then as outright political pawns and partisan activists, and that built an apparatus of gatekeeping and grift that repelled not only conservatives but also the most talented and capable individuals from becoming teachers and education leaders. In this vacuous, politically charged environment, woke was injected and thrived, reinforcing this self-sabotage in a vicious cycle.

So tackle the woke and actually enforce transparency and reforms (instead of presuming passing a law or policy will magically fix everything without any oversight). But Republicans must do more. They must reform education to remove the conditions that allow woke to flourish, and that fundamentally means returning education to forming wise, virtuous, and highly capable future citizens. It means focusing on academics and character. It means casting a vision, a return to what school was meant to be.

To deliver on education and save the country, Republicans need look no further than how our Founding Fathers were educated, what they said about education, and what parents are demanding today: Classical Education.

Junyi Hou, Andre Lin Huikai, Nuo Chen, Yiwei Gong, Bingsheng He:

Large language models are increasingly embedded into academic writing workflows, yet existing assistants remain external to the editor, preventing deep interaction with document state, structure, and revision history. This separation makes it impossible to support agentic, context-aware operations directly within LaTeX editors such as Overleaf. We present PaperDebugger, an in-editor, multi-agent, and plugin-based academic writing assistant that brings LLM-driven reasoning directly into the writing environment. Enabling such in-editor interaction is technically non-trivial: it requires reliable bidirectional synchronization with the editor, fine-grained version control and patching, secure state management, multi-agent scheduling, and extensible communication with external tools. PaperDebugger addresses these challenges through a Chrome-approved extension, a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolchain that integrates literature search, reference lookup, document scoring, and revision pipelines. Our demo showcases a fully integrated workflow, including localized edits, structured reviews, parallel agent execution, and diff-based updates, encapsulated within a minimal-intrusion user interface (UI). Early aggregated analytics demonstrate active user engagement and validate the practicality of an editor-native, agentic writing assistant. More details about this demo and video could be found at this https URL.

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Andrew Akbashev:

Basically, this AI writer removes a big part of PhD education.

It takes over your brainwork.

Yes, it saves your time by writing for you.

But you skip the essential thinking & analytical process because you don’t need to write anymore.

In my view, this is a dangerous road.

Retraction Watch

Authors of the first “Matters Arising” commentary published August 6 noted the article projected the global gross domestic product would be lowered by 62 percent by 2100, “an impact roughly 3 times larger than similar previous estimates.” The authors of the critique also pointed out the PIK authors had used a dataset for Uzbekistan with “anomalies.” By removing the Uzbek dataset, the estimate in the original paper “aligns closely with previous literature,” the critique reads.

In a second Matters Arising, published a week later, Christof Schötz, a researcher at the Technical University of Munich in Ottobrunn, Germany, and a researcher at PIK, argued the analysis in the paper “underestimates uncertainty … rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.” 

The PIK press office responded to our request for comment from the authors, including more information regarding the new data and where they plan to submit for publication, with a copy of the embargoed retraction notice, as did Nature’s press team. 

Alessia Degraeve:

Michigan State University (MSU) is training future teachers to see classroom inequity primarily through the lens of race—ignoring the deeper forces that most shape student success: class, family stability, and quality of early education. 

In the school’s elementary and secondary education programs, every student must take “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education.” Young America’s Foundation (YAF) obtained the syllabus for this required course. It is built entirely around one textbook.

At the top of this syllabus, in large bold print, is the word “REQUIRED.” What follows is a declaration: “There is one required book for this class. It is We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love.”

Why do teachers need to approach diverse students differently than white students? Why does the course assign only one textbook—without exposing students to competing perspectives?

Abigail Shrirer:

My instinct is to live as lightly as possible so I can be nimble. If I’m honest, this has always been a problem of mine to some extent. Like, when we moved to New York, I didn’t want to have to buy furniture and commit to a new place, so we signed onto a two-year furnished sublet. This all has downstream effects: We have a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old. I know stability is essential for them. And if I’m really, really honest, I grew up in a family with some instability, so I worry that I’m re-creating that by refusing to commit to a long-term home.

But I genuinely, in my bones, think chaos is coming. What do I do? How do I build a stable life when I’m convinced we need to be ready to run? —Love, Your Friend in Need, Nellie

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Ever notice that a peculiar sadness inheres in plastic forks and paper plates?

No one ever settles into a folding chair, no matter how sturdy. Couples who live together for years, telling themselves that they’re as good as married, rarely seem to believe it. The fact is, you don’t really tuck into a meal on squeaky Styrofoam. “My girlfriend” neither carries the ring nor commands the respect of “my wife.

……

Impermanence alienates and unnerves us.

Overinvest, never underinvest, in people around you and in those you love.

Particularly in a world with poor visibility, they are the closest thing any of us has to security. Give the community you inhabit a real shot and make a go of ensuring it succeeds.

Thompson Reuters and West Publishing vs Ross intelligence:

Copying protectable expression to create a competing substitute isn’t innovation: it’s theft. This basic principle is as true in the AI context as it is in any other. ROSS Intelligence Inc. copied copyrighted, editorial content from Westlaw, West Publishing Corporation and Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH’s (together, “TR”) legal research platform, to create its own legal research platform. Given those undisputed facts, Judge Bibas sitting by designation in the District of Delaware correctly held that, under binding Supreme Court precedent, ROSS’s creation of a direct substitute for Westlaw was copyright infringement and not fair use. D.I.770 (“Op.”).

In terms of copying protectable expression, this case is not about who owns “the law.” ROSS did not copy from Westlaw to get access to the law—it already had the law. This case is about ROSS’s copying of legal analysis, including at least 2,243 headnotes from Westlaw that its own expert found were dissimilar from the cases (the “West Headnotes”). For over a hundred years and as recently as 2020, the Supreme Court has upheld “the reporter’s copyright interest in

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more.

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Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO.

Jared Cooney Horvath:

When people think about excessive technology in schools, their minds usually go to phones. But according to a new book from neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, we’re overlooking the true culprits: the laptops sitting on students’ desks. In “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning—and How to Help Them Thrive Again,” Horvath explains why consuming information through screens leads to falling performance, fractured attention, and the slow erosion of rigorous thought.

We’re proud to publish an exclusive, adapted excerpt from the book that answers an urgent question: Why, after generations of progress, are today’s children less intellectually capable than their parents? —The Editors

This might be one of the hardest truths today’s parents have to face:

Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.

The daughter who once loved school, but now dreads it. The son who used to devour books, but now scrolls until midnight. Fading memory, slipping focus. Something is wrong, and many of us have felt it.

Matthew Yglesias:

The first time I ever heard a land acknowledgment, I was on a panel at a nonprofit conference in Colorado. A Native woman stood up in the audience and started shouting and demanding the floor. Most people were confused, but a few were cheering her on. When the moderator let her speak, she asked to do a “land acknowledgment.” I didn’t know what that was, but she was granted permission and said something about the land to scattered applause before we moved on. 

As far as activist tactics go, it was pretty good. 

It was much easier for a progressive moderator at a conference with mostly progressive attendees to just say yes than to try to have the woman forcibly removed. It’s a small-bore example of the strategic logic of nonviolent protest, and it succeeded in getting large swathes of progressive America to preemptively start doing land acknowledgments. 

The 2024 Democratic platform, for example, commences with a fairly innocuous land acknowledgment, stating that they were gathering on “lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial.” But the Native Governance Center’s guide to Indigenous land acknowledgments tells us, “Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonizers.” 

I think it’s worthwhile to consider the distinction here

Matt Ridley

According to analysis by the Washington Post, it is not just Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democratic party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president last year. The topic has dropped to the bottom half of a table of 23 concerns among Swedish youths. Even the European Parliament has voted to exempt many companies from reporting rules that require them to state how they are helping fight climate change.

It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, best-sellers and research grants. Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm counts. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored or, in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in the law or practice.

But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming. I first wrote a doom-laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realized the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, canceled, blacklisted, called a “denier” and generally deemed evil. In 2010, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was not likely to be a catastrophe – so it is welcome to see him come round to my view.

Margot Cleveland:

This email may represent the first public evidence that the Biden Administration’s DOJ knew the special counsel’s office planned to subpoena congressional Republicans. But the scandal is even greater because in “concurring” in Smith’s use of subpoenas to target communications of members of Congress, the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section expressly acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the proposed course of action.

“As you are aware, there is some litigation risk regarding whether compelled disclosure of toll records of a Member’s legislative calls violates the Speech or Debate Clause in the D.C. Circuit,” Principal Deputy Chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section John Keller wrote in a May 17, 2023 email to two top members of the special counsel’s team. Significantly, that email then cited the controlling precedent of United States v. Rayburn House Office Building, 497 F.3d 654, 662 (D.C. Cir. 2007), citing that appellate court decision’s holding that under the Speech or Debate Clause, “[t]he bar on compelled disclosure is absolute.” That email also cited In re Grand Jury Investigation, 587 F.2d 589, 594 (3d Cir. 1978) as establishing “[t]he caselaw is clear that a legislator asserting the invasion of the Speech or Debate Clause privilege by use of a grand jury subpoena to a third party may intervene and oppose such use.”

Aaron Garth Smith

That teachers’ wages have stagnated over two decades of growth in public school funding highlights deep structural problems in K–12 finance.

large body of research shows that effective teachers are the most important school-related factor in determining student success, making teacher compensation a key policy lever. “We need to pay all teachers more—and effective teachers even more,” said Heather Peske of the National Council on Teacher Quality in a recent SCHOOLED debate on teacher pay.

Peske has a point. The nationwide average teacher salary fell by over 6 percent between 2002 and 2022, going from $75,152 to $70,548 in 2023 dollars, according to new Reason Foundation research. In total, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries fell in 40 of 50 states, as shown in Table 1.

It’s also a fact that teacher salaries are tied to educational attainment and years of experience, meaning that high-performing teachers—and those in shortage areas like math, science, and special education—aren’t paid more for their results or expertise.

To put the right incentives in place, bold teacher pay reforms are needed. But to maximize the long-term impact of these policies, it’s important to address the root causes of stagnant salaries. Examining data both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic reveals structural problems in K–12 finance that keep dollars out of teacher paychecks.

Laura Meckler, Beth Reinhard and Clara Ence Morse:

“I have come across what I think is a great way to relieve the suffering of tens of millions of kids,” Yass said in an interview with The Washington Post in the offices of Susquehanna International Group, the behemoth trading firm in the Philadelphia suburbs that he co-founded. “To most people it’s like if you’re a libertarian billionaire, you must be Lex Luthor trying to do something nefarious. If I gave to a hospital, you wouldn’t be saying that.”

To Yass, political spending when it’s on behalf of pro-voucher candidates is akin to charity, benefiting children and families who need a champion to face down teachers unions. “They needed a philanthropist,” he said. “I felt it was my role to be that philanthropist.”

But teachers unions and other critics see vouchers as an assault on public schools, which serve the vast majority of children. They complain that private schools face little accountability for the money they are given or their academic results. They also are allowed to pick and choose their students. In several states, critics note, most of the beneficiaries were already attending private schools when they joined the voucher program; some of those families may have struggled to pay tuition on their own, but for wealthier parents, it was a windfall at taxpayer expense. (Yass, for the record, thinks vouchers should go to all families — even those as wealthy as his.)
Critics say his giving represents an absurd amount of influence for one person, who can press his political agenda simply because he is rich.
“If you picture a man spraying a fire hose at the political system, that’s how he has reshaped how Pennsylvania politics work,” said Arielle Klagsbrun, a liberal activist who helps run a coalition of groups that oppose Yass, and who co-wrote the essay Yass was emailed about in January 2023. “This is the agenda of one billionaire trying to push his beliefs and whims on the rest of the state.”

The Economist:

HRISTMAS STOCKINGS may contain more surprises than usual this year, as children open presents that can talk back. Toymakers in China have declared 2025 the year of artificial intelligence (AI) and are producing robots and teddies that can teach, play and tell stories. Older children, meanwhile, are glued to viral AI videos and AI-enhanced games. At school, many are being taught with materials created with tools like ChatGPT. Some are even learning alongside chatbot-tutors.

In work and play, AI is rewiring childhood. It promises every child the kind of upbringing previously available only to the rich, with private tutors, personalised syllabuses and bespoke entertainment. Children can listen to songs composed about them, read stories in which they star, play video games that adapt to their skill level and have an entourage of chatbot friends cheering them on. A childhood fit for a king could become universal.

It is a future filled with opportunities—and hidden traps. As real kings often discover, a bespoke upbringing can also be a lonely and atomised one. What’s more, as their subjects often find out, it can create adults who are ill-equipped for real life. As AI changes childhood for better and for worse, society must rethink the business of growing up.
Being reared by robots has advantages. Tech firms are already showing how AI can enhance learning, especially where teachers and materials are scarce. Literacy and language-learning have been boosted in early trials. The dream is that, with an AI tutor, children can be saved from classes pitched to the median, in which bright pupils are bored and dim ones are lost. If you want a version of this leader for an eight-year-old Hindi-speaker, AI can rewrite it; if they would prefer it as a cartoon strip or a song, no problem.

White House:

1. How American “Strategy” Went Astray
   To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world. And to get that right, all Americans need to know what, exactly, it is we are trying to do and why.
   
2. A “strategy” is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means: it begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available, or can realistically be created, to achieve the desired outcomes.
   
3. A strategy must evaluate, sort, and prioritize. Not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy. The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests; that is the sole focus of this strategy. American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short—they have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.
   
4. After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

——

Competence and Merit – American prosperity and security depend on the development and promotion of competence. Competence and merit are among our greatest civilizational advantages: where the best Americans are hired, promoted, and honored, innovation and prosperity follow. Should competence be destroyed or systematically discouraged, complex systems that we take for granted—from infrastructure to national security to education and research—will cease to function. Should merit be smothered, America’s historic advantages in science, technology, industry, defense, and innovation will evaporate. The success of radical ideologies that seek to replace competence and merit with favored group status would render America unrecognizable and unable to defend itself. At the same time, we cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding “global talent” that undercuts American workers. In our every principle and action, America and Americans must always come first.

Building up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges

David Lloyd Dusenbury and Philip Pilkington:

With harmony, slight things grow to greatness. With discord, great things shrivel and fail.

—Matteo Ricci, 1596¹

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama caused a stir by publishing an article in the National Interest titled “The End of History?”. A State Department and Rand Corporation analyst at the time, Fukuyama confessed that he was feeling something out of the ordinary. “We may be witnessing,” he said, “not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such.” Did this fill him with dread? Not really. Post-history was not brought on by catastrophe but, fortunately, by the apotheosis of what he called “the Western idea.” And apparently, liberal democracy is the Western idea. The “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” had not, therefore, come like a thief in the night, but rather, like a liberal technocrat.²

Not everyone was convinced. In fact, Fukuyama’s 1992 book in the same vein, The End of History and the Last Man, was negatively reviewed; Perry Anderson, a historian of the Left, was struck by “the virtual universality of the rejection” of Fukuyama’s thesis: “For once,” he observed, “most of the Right, Centre, and Left were united in their reaction.”³

It is telling, though, that Fukuyama made his move by channeling a feeling. For whatever his critics said, his idea matched the Western mood circa 1990, which could accurately be called euphoria. What Fukuyama hailed as the preordained triumph of liberal democracy quickly became an axiom. His sense that liberal ideology had not just outlasted Soviet communism but had transcended the whole realm of “ideological struggle” took root in Washington, and then in London and Berlin. His notion that “we have already emerged on the other side of history” spread rapidly in Western policy circles.⁴ Many liberals, especially in the up-and-coming Boomer generation, felt that they had truly won the great game of history.

Richelle Wilson:

Recent test scores show that only about half of Wisconsin students are proficient in reading. Those numbers are even more stark for Native American students. 

In 2022, only 5 percent of Native third graders in Brown County were reading at grade level.

“To find out that 95 percent of our children were struggling — it hurts,” Jennifer Webster, who serves on the tribal council for Oneida Nation, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” 

——-

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Erin Gretzinger and Erin McGroarty

State and local officials are focusing efforts to keep children from online spaces that encourage violence, as a Wisconsin agency reports a noted increase in tips about school safety.

This year, tips to the state Office of School Safety jumped by 30%, including nearly 240 tips about concerns of a planned school attack. 

In the Madison school district, officials told the Cap Times the school safety tips they field most on a day-to-day basis originate on digital devices and online platforms.

State officials, including Office of Children’s Mental Health Director Linda Hall, say online activity and social media increase the risk that young people will fall into unsafe spaces on the internet, which can harm emotional health and expose them to violence. 

“We used to always talk about stranger danger. Now we have to have those conversations with kids, but put it in the digital context,” Hall said. “It’s not just watching out for somebody who might be on a street corner, trying to lure them into a car. It’s what’s happening while they’re online.”

Manuel Ansede: 

In the autumn of 2020, with humanity terrified by the deadly second wave of the coronavirus, a scientific journal published a study with a solution: jade amulets from traditional Chinese medicine could prevent COVID-19. The proposal was outlandish, but the editor-in-chief of the weekly, Spanish chemist Damià Barceló, defended its quality controls. That journal, Science of the Total Environment — one of the 15 that publishes the most studies worldwide — has just been expelled from the group of reputable publications by one of the leading evaluation companies, after dozens of irregular articles were discovered. The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.

Damià Barceló, 71, took over as editor of the journal in 2012. In just two years, he doubled the number of studies published. In a decade, he increased the number tenfold, with the journal reaching nearly 10,000 articles annually. As the number of articles increased, the quality declined, because there was a perverse incentive to accept mediocre work: to publish research open access in the journal, a scientist has to pay $4,150 plus taxes.

Nicholas B. Creel:

Samantha Fulnecky, a University of Oklahoma psychology student, received zero points on an essay assignment after citing the Bible in her response to an article about gender roles. The instructor, a transgender graduate student, called the paper “offensive” and said it lacked empirical evidence. The case has since become a national scandal. The instructor has been suspended, and the student has filed both a grade appeal and a religious-discrimination complaint. The student is likely to win on both counts.

Bryan Caplan:

Only a small minority of pregnancies have horrible physical consequences, and people who are contemplating an abortion rarely claim otherwise. But when contemplating an abortion, many if not most prospective parents predict horrible mental consequences for themselves. In the vernacular: “A baby would ruin my life.” If my argument so far is correct, the correct reaction to such claims is not to stonewall with: “Too bad” or “Trust women.” The correct reaction is to ask: “Is it really true that a baby would ruin your life?” 

The strongest known evidence on this question is Diana Foster’s “Turnaway Study,” which uses what economists call a regression discontinuity design to estimate a long list of causal effects of abortion. Foster interviewed women in abortion clinics who were near the legal cutoff. Some turned out to be just below the cutoff — and normally ended up getting an abortion. Some turned out to be just above the cutoff — and normally ended up getting a baby. 

I learned about Foster’s work twelve years ago, but only recently did I read her full book: The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having ― or Being Denied ― an Abortion.* Foster walks readers through the study and the co-authored research that came out of it. The book is careful, thorough, wide-ranging, well-written, and creative. While Foster is obviously deeply pro-choice, her methods are sound and her presentation is transparent. The book’s most notable findings:

1. Women who managed to get abortions had almost exactly the same self-reported well-being as the turnaways: “Shortly after being denied an abortion, women had more symptoms of anxiety and stress and lower levels of self-esteem and life satisfaction than women who received an abortion. Over time, women’s mental health and well-being generally improved, so that by six months to one year, there were no differences between groups across outcomes. To the extent that abortion causes mental health harm, the harm comes from the denial of services, not the provision… Yet once the pregnancy was announced, the baby born, and the unknown fears and expectations realized or overcome, the trajectory of mental health symptoms seems to return to what it would have been if the woman had received an abortion.” To illustrate, here’s the key figure on depression from the book.

———

Choose life.

Leor Sapir:
At their conferences, closed to outsiders and the press, the gender clinicians allowed themselves to speak freely. They spoke about the boys who said they wanted to be girls and the girls who felt they were meant to be boys, and the medical and surgical interventions that would make them appear as the opposite sex. The clinicians also discussed new procedures for a new type of patient—some of them adolescents—who wanted to be made to look as if they had no sex at all.

In one of the videos, obtained exclusively by The Free Press, from the 2021 conference of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, Amy Penkin, a social worker with the Transgender Health Program at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) spoke about one such case. Penkin told the audience about Sky, who she described as an 18-year-old recent high school graduate who was living on his own for the first time.

Penkin explained that Sky expressed a desire to look like “a Barbie down there.” Sky, Penkin said, reported “being asexual, never having had sex, and having no desire to have sex in the future.” Indeed, Sky did “not want to feel any pleasurable sensation and hope[d] removal of all erogenous tissue [would] be possible,” according to Penkin.

Brian Blase:

This morning, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a damning report showing that the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges are highly vulnerable to fraud. The report was requested by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith.

As a result of expanded subsidies and porous federal oversight, the federal exchange approved subsidized health insurance for 23 of 24 fictitious applications submitted by GAO. In addition, GAO found that tens of billions of dollars in advanced subsidies to health insurers have not been properly reconciled. Together, these failures show that the ACA exchanges lack even minimal oversight and are rife with fraud and abuse that is hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars.

GAO’s findings are strong confirmation of Paragon research into improper and phantom enrollment. We identified an estimated 6.4 million improper enrollees in fully subsidized plans in 2025. The massive surge, driven by people unaware of their enrollment or with other coverage, has caused a doubling in the percentage of exchange enrollees without any medical claims from 2021 to 2024.

Patrick T Brown:

The fertility crisis in the United States is, in large part, a marriage crisis. Births to married women are only a tick below where they have been since the late 1980s, while births to unmarried women have fallen precipitously, by as much as 30% from a 2007 peak.

Conservatives, who’ve long bemoaned single parenthood, have scant reason to cheer this outcome. It’s not that people are waiting to have kids until after marriage. Rather, they’re increasingly opting out of committing to partnership and parenthood altogether. And as new research shows, progressives, especially, are less likely to find either marriage or parenthood worth pursuing. This, even as Americans on the Right of center remain committed to both.

Alex Tabarrok:

TABARROK: I do agree that it is puzzling that the interest rate on bonds is so low. Hanno Lustig and his co-authors have an interesting paper on this. They point out that not only is it the case that we have all of this debt with no plans to pay it, as far as we can tell right now, but the debt is not a very good asset in the sense that when will the debt be paid? If it is going to be paid, it’s going to be paid when the times are good. That means that you’re being paid when GDP is higher and the marginal utility money is low.

When is the debt not paid? When does it get bigger? It means when the economy is doing poorly. The debt as an asset has the opposite kind of structure than you would want. It’s not like gold, which arguably goes down in good times and goes up in bad times. You get some nice covariance to even out your portfolio. The debt as an asset is positively correlated with good times, and that’s bad. You should expect the interest rates to be much, much higher than they actually are.

Henry Oliver:

The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modelled more closely on spoken English.

What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.

Budget Document with curious “security” applied:

Madison’s budget website.

Erin Gretzinger:

This year’s budget is 10% higher in both revenue and expenses compared with last year’s, with additional spending focused on priorities like expanding 4K options and boosting staffing, which went up by nearly 60 full-time equivalent positions. About 81% of the district’s budget goes toward staff compensation and benefits.

More:

An annual enrollment tally at the Madison school district declined by more than 100 students this fall, marking the first decrease in two years and falling far below the district’s own estimates that predicted an increase for the 2025-26 school year.

Across Wisconsin, every school tallies its enrollment on the third Friday of September to help determine state funding levels for districts. This year, the Madison Metropolitan School District counted 25,557 full-time equivalent students. That’s down 110 from last fall.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K-12 tax and $pending practices.

——

Michael Torres:

A 62% increase in funding (adjusted for inflation) has resulted in a 2% DROP in reading performance among Illinois 4th graders over 22+ years.

Kelsey Piper:

When there’s a scandalous “false miracle” in the education world, it’s usually one of two things: direct cheating on a test or careful selection of the population that takes the test. So if you see a sizable improvement in education results, it’s worth looking out for both of those.

When I first began looking into the “Mississippi Miracle,” wherein a low-performing southern state shot up in fourth-grade reading scores from 49th place to ninth place, I was worried about being taken in by yet another fraudulent success story in the world of education. So, I tried to figure out: Was I looking at education, or was I looking at selection?

In particular, a major plank of Mississippi’s reading reforms is a test of basic reading fluency administered at the end of third grade. Kids who don’t pass it are held back a year. For at least five years, people have argued that maybe this, rather than any actual teaching skill present in Mississippi, is what’s driving the state’s improvements.1

A provocative new article from Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky, and Daniel H. Robinson in Significanceargued that, in fact, nearly all of Mississippi’s results are driven by the third-grade retention policy, not by the phonics instruction, curriculum changes, or the teacher training that accompanied them. It has gone viral, with lots of glee in certain quarters, where it was sometimes taken as proof that there’s nothing other states need to learn from Mississippi after all.

This is an important debate, but I’ve been dismayed to see their article treated as a significant contribution to it. It’s badly mangled with straightforward factual errors that should undermine anyone’s confidence the authors did their homework — for example, the authors claimed that “the 2024 NAEP fourth-grade mathematics scores rank the state at a tie at 50th!” In fact, Mississippi ranked 16th on the fourth-grade math NAEP assessment.2 Unsurprisingly, the authors’ errors are not limited to these sorts of factual claims but also extend to their core argument, which is wholly unpersuasive.

Karen Vaites:

A word about That Sloppy Paper on Mississippi:

What struck me most was its arrogance.

A smug tone and talk of “facts of arithmetic” accompanied a paper that badly misstated Mississippi’s math outcomes. Accurate outcomes on left, sample of their paper on right.

Really, check the tone in this segment (and the paper generally).

Somewhat related:

Modern education policy (getting rid of phonics, banning middle school algebra, eliminating honors classes, prioritizing equalization instead of education) isn’t happening because that’s what families want.

These policies happen when families and voters aren’t paying attention, and if we want schools to switch their focus back to education and excellence, it will only happen if families and voters demand it.

Quinton Klabon:

Is the Mississippi Miracle in reading real? Yeah!

If anyone ever debunks it, it will not be people who cannot read a ranking chart.

“To their credit, when I reached out to the authors about this mistake, they acknowledged it and reached out to get it fixed before publication.”

Kelsey Piper:

All right, my response on Mississippi is up. I think the strongest argument is simply that steady improvements in every decile for the last twenty years cannot be explained by a one-off change in which students are retained in 2015.

Karen Vaites:

Are you tired of sloppy and straw man-heavy pieces by Mississippi naysayers?

Me, too.

I take up that That Sloppy Paper.

More importantly, I ask you to look into Louisiana, the land of NAEP gains untainted by 3rd grade retention.

It’s arguably the more promising model for state reform, anyway.

My latest:

————

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Michael Barba:

A Mission District nonprofit that San Francisco paid more than $14 million in recent years to distribute groceries and help kids is at risk of losing city funding over serious concerns about its finances, according to city monitors.

Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth was flagged by the controller’s office in a report released Tuesday as one of two city-funded nonprofits that demonstrated “a pattern of severe fiscal or programmatic concerns” last fiscal year.

The controller found that HOMEY had failed to disclose debts, produced dubious financial reports and had no clear plan for resolving its financial issues, records show. Although it acknowledged its cash-flow issues, HOMEY disputed the other findings.

“What upsets me the most is that they are saying we are bad actors,” said HOMEY Executive Director Roberto Alfaro. “That is totally not the case.”

The findings were one aspect of the 44-page annual report, which detailed how the controller sought to hold nonprofits accountable for the $1.63 billion that San Francisco paid them last fiscal year, largely to address homelessness and other systemic issues.

WTMJ:

Students at Milwaukee High School of the Arts got an unexpected holiday surprise Monday when actor Hugh Jackman walked into their music class with a special message and gifts.

The visit wasn’t just a celebrity appearance. For students like Jasper Davidson, a senior creative writing major, it felt like validation of their artistic dreams.

“It felt validating, it felt like we were appreciated,” Davidson said.

Heather Gillers:

Things aren’t looking good for Harvard’s big bet on bitcoin.

The country’s oldest and richest university supersized its wager on the cryptocurrency last quarter, ramping up its holdings in iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF to nearly half a billion dollars. Even after Tuesday’s rebound, bitcoin has dropped more than 20% this quarter—dragged down in a crypto rout hitting everyone from Wall Street to retail investors to holders of the U.S. president’s meme coin.

Harvard could have gotten out unscathed—or even with a small gain—if the school had sold its holdings in early October, before prices dropped. The average price Harvard paid couldn’t be learned but if the school still holds some or all of the 4.9 million shares it bought last quarter, the best-case scenario would be a 14% loss on those holdings.

Open Justice UK:

Working directly with survivors and using community crowdfunding, our organisation has lawfully acquired and redacted these court documents, ensuring that the realities of grooming gangs are documented accurately and responsibly. By providing this material, we help researchers, journalists, policymakers, and members of the public understand how these cases unfold in court and why open access to justice records is vital for safeguarding and future prevention.

Sean Hollister:

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one — but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that.

I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka “swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear,” and that’s where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.

They’re not all bad. For example, “Origami model wins prize” and “Hyundai, Kia gain share” seem fine, even if not remotely as interesting as the original headlines. (“Hyundai and Kia are lapping the competition as US market share reaches a new record” and “14-year-old wins prize for origami that can hold 10,000 times its own weight” sound like they’re actually worth a click!)

But in the seeming attempt to boil down every story to four words or less, Google’s new headline experiment is attaching plenty of misleading and inane headlines to journalists’ work, and with little disclosure that Google’s AI is rewriting them.

Rose Horowitch

The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” one professor at a selective university, who requested anonymity because he doesn’t have tenure, told me. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.” Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation. Instead of leveling the playing field, the system has put the entire idea of fairness at risk.

Forty years ago, students with disabilities could count on few protections in higher education. Federal law prohibited discrimination against disabled students, but in practice schools did little to address their needs. Michael Ashley Stein, a disability-rights expert who teaches at Harvard Law, recalled the challenges of attending law school as a student using a wheelchair in the 1980s. “I sat in the back of the classroom, could not enter certain buildings in a normal way, became the first person on the law review with a disability, and dragged myself up the stairs,” he told me.

The Americans With Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, was meant to make life fairer for people like Stein. The law required public and private institutions to provide reasonable accommodations to individuals with “a physical or mental impairment” that “substantially limits one or more major life activities.”

Gregory Lyakhov:

Public school districts have a responsibility to educate students, safeguard taxpayer money, and provide families with opportunities for success. However, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has become a national example of how a school system collapses under mismanagement, political patronage, and an absence of accountability.

A report from the Chicago Board of Education’s Office of Inspector General uncovered $23.6 million in misused spending—specifically, spending on lavish and often unapproved travel: $1,000-a-night hotel rooms, airport limos, luxury suites, and “professional development” trips that doubled as vacations. One teacher stretched a four-day seminar into a weeklong Hawaiian resort stay costing $4,700.

Emma Pettit:

Did a student paper arguing for traditional gender roles and identities deserve its failing grade? Or was that mark proof of political bias, and of academe’s hostility to religious conservatives?

That debate is unspooling at the University of Oklahoma. There, Samantha Fulnecky was recently asked in a psychology course on lifespan development to respond to an academic article. In her short reaction paper, Fulnecky wrote that while the article “discussed peers using teasing as a way to enforce gender norms,” she did “not necessarily see this as a problem,” according to screenshots of her paper that were posted on X by the university’s Turning Point USA chapter. That’s because “God made male and female and made us differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose.”

Max Tani:

The piece also seemed to divide staff, and reignited years-old internal tensions between some younger, more left-leaning members of staff and management.

“People are really upset,” one Times journalist told Semafor.

In a series of posts on Bluesky, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie said, “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi.” On Friday, he deleted his posts, saying they violated the Times’ social media guidelines. Bouie also deleted subsequent posts on Sunday that also seemed to express frustration at the Times’ decision to publish the story, and shared a post that said “NYT & many of its elite white readers are still obsessed with race-conscious college admissions.”

The paper would not comment on whether it had compelled Bouie to delete the posts.

Times columnist Lydia Polgreen did not comment on whether the story was newsworthy, but wrote that as a biracial person with African parents, she easily understood why Mamdani checked a box on his college admissions form identifying as Black or African American.

Christopher Rufo:

The New York Times beat us on the Zohran scoop, but we beat the New York Times on the Somali fraud scoop. Make no mistake: although we have significantly fewer resources, this is a competition between peer institutions and, more often than not, we’re beating them to the story.

Ted Balaker:

Maybe we shouldn’t shield kids from complex controversies

Imagine if students at one of our nation’s highest-ranking universities couldn’t do grammar school math. Well, administrators at the University of California, San Diego recently discovered that plenty of their students struggle with math they should have learned a long time ago.

Here’s an example: Rounding is a third-grade skill, yet 61% of UCSD students who were placed in a remedial math course couldn’t round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred.

Keep in mind that UCSD placed sixth in US News & World Report’s national rankings of public universities. Also keep in mind that 94% of the students placed in the remedial math course had completed an advanced math class in high school such as pre-calculus, calculus or statistics. And keep one more thing in mind — those students received an average grade of A- in those advanced high school math classes.

College students should be able to round correctly, and what if they could? What would that tell us? Not much. If they could answer a dozen other standardized questions correctly that would tell us more, but maybe not much more.

How would most college students answer a different kind of question, say, one like this: Are WNBA players underpaid?

Maybe it makes me a crazy homeschool parent, but when he was 10, I had my son tackle that question.

Erin Gretzinger:

School officials also told freshman Aurelia Bergstrom — who has been diagnosed with a low incidence neuro genetic condition of unknown origin which leads to global developmental delays — that she had to pass a tryout under the same requirements as other swimmers. Her mom, Krisjon Olson, said the policy change would “functionally disqualify” her daughter. 

The parents pushed back as the swim season began but neither the school nor district budged. After the families went public with their concerns, more than three dozen people submitted written comments or spoke at a School Board meeting, urging the Madison Metropolitan School District to allow the girls to swim and support inclusive athletics more broadly.  

A few days after the meeting, Shukla and Bergstrom were let back on the team in time to compete in three meets before the season ended. 

While the parents said they appreciated the community’s support and the school’s reversal, they told the Cap Times they still have questions about why their daughters were cut in the first place and missed much of the season. Who was involved in the decision to oust their daughters or bring them back also remains unclear to the families. 

The parents, other families and advocates say the debacle raised doubts about the school district ensuring access to athletics for disabled students. Last school year, students with disabilities represented about 16% of the district’s enrollment, or about 4,100 children. 

The response has also struck a chord with some families as federal protections for disabled students are under pressure from the Trump administration. 

By Danielle DuClos

In a recent high-profile case of educator sexual misconduct, the parents of a Kenosha student are suing their school district and their daughter’s former teacher after administrators concluded the teacher groomed the girl when she was 14.

Christian Enwright, 31, pleaded guilty to 15 counts of disorderly conduct in April. Prosecutors accused him of a “sexually charged” social media relationship with the student, according to the criminal complaint.

The plea and the family’s lawsuit have gained widespread attention, including from legislators at the state Capitol. This fall, lawmakers cited the Enwright case while proposing to criminalize grooming a minor for sexual activity.

Educator sexual misconduct and grooming often only become publicly known when an educator is arrested and charged with a crime.

A Cap Times investigation found that more than 200 educators were investigated by the state Department of Public Instruction from 2018 through 2023 following allegations of sexual misconduct or grooming, a likely undercount of the true prevalence of these behaviors. In November, the Legislature ordered an audit of the department’s handling of misconduct investigations in response to the Cap Times reporting.

The Enwright case is a rare instance in Wisconsin where educator misconduct resulted in new legislation and changed school policies. It’s also unusual that Enwright’s conduct resulted in criminal charges, despite no criminal penalty for grooming in state law.

Aaron Smith:

States have amassed nearly $400 billion in teacher pension debt, which is about $9,285 per student in public schools.

What governments owe teachers far exceeds how much they’ve saved, a problem that will be exacerbated by declining enrollment.

Chicago Public Schools alone has over $16 billion in net pension liabilities.

Here are the top ten public school districts in total pension debt:

Ronald Purser

In classrooms today, the technopoly is thriving. Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience. Students aren’t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively. We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice. Critical pedagogy is out; productivity hacks are in. What’s sold as innovation is really surrender. As the university trades its teaching mission for “AI-tech integration,” it doesn’t just risk irrelevance—it risks becoming mechanically soulless. Genuine intellectual struggle has become too expensive of a value proposition.

The scandal is not one of ignorance but indifference. University administrators understand exactly what’s happening, and proceed anyway. As long as enrollment numbers hold and tuition checks clear, they turn a blind eye to the learning crisis while faculty are left to manage the educational carnage in their classrooms.

The future of education has already arrived–as a liquidation sale of everything that once made it matter.

Jill Barshay:

In a fragmented system where every district makes its own choices, evidence is one of the few forces capable of offering coherence. And the statistics that track the nation’s schools — achievement, inequality, enrollment, finances — are irreplaceable. As it stands now, there is a lot we won’t know, measure or trust in the future of education. 

The deeper irony is that the cuts did not simply weaken the field of education research, they compromised the country’s ability to see its own school system clearly. Reform may indeed be overdue. But rebuilding confidence in federal data — and recovering the institutional knowledge lost in a single chaotic year — will take far longer than the dismantling.

Hannah Black:

I compulsively read whatever perspectives I could find online by people who regretted having children. No one who didn’t want a child would have read so much about the experience of having children. I was looking for an armature to make conscious a decision that I had already unconsciously made. Regret is a popular topic in contemporary writing on motherhood, sparkling with the static of a broken taboo. The only comparable regret discourse I can think of is the liberal media’s desire to flush out people who regret voting for Trump. I recall very little of what I read, but I remember a comment by a woman who said she did not relate to regret discourse because before her child was born she would spend hours looking mindlessly at her phone, and now her days were full of the meaningful labor of childcare. This comforted me because I too had empty time to fill. Time, like a uterus, expands to fit what’s inside it. Children, little human clocks, youth coming around again like lunchtime, illuminate the stretchy, incomprehensible texture of time. The single most common thing parents of older children say to me is, “Enjoy it, it goes by so fast!” Everyone says it in the same tone, nostalgic and conspiratorial, stunned by the fact of finitude. Becoming a parent is like joining a subculture of the majority. Like queer culture, it is structured around the illegibility of love, but it’s not remotely queer, it’s the least queer love of all: the heavy paste of parenting’s social form completely conceals its destabilizing, romantic heart.

Regret hallucinates a bridge between what does and does not happen, an anchor securing the unlived life to the lived one. The regret I experienced after my earlier abortion stemmed not only from having made what I thought was a wrong decision, but from my refusal to acknowledge the decision’s total reality. The regret allowed me to live two lives, the life of reality, in which I was not a mother, and the life of regret, in which the baby was still at stake, still an open question and, in a way, I was its mother. The non-baby of my regret would now be old enough to vote, and they have left home, but they still visit sometimes, especially now I start to realize that I will most likely only ever have one child. And I regret that. “One is better than none,” a stranger I confided in at a playgroup once told me, as we watched a room full of babies play. I repeat the phrase to myself often, as a talisman of my narrow escape from the annihilating power of my indecisiveness.