School Information System

Sir John Glubb:

Education undergoes the same gradual transformation. No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to serve their country. Parents and students alike seek the educational qualifications which will command the highest salaries. The Arab moralist, Ghazali (1058-1111), complains in these very same words of the lowering of objectives in the declining Arab world of his time. Students, he says, no longer attend college to acquire learning and virtue, but to obtain those qualifications which will enable them to grow rich. The same situation is everywhere evident among us in the West today.

XVI High Noon That which we may call the High Noon of the nation covers the period of transition from the Age of Conquests to the Age of Affluence: the age of Augustus in Rome, that of Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad, of Sulaiman the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire, or of Queen Victoria in Britain. Perhaps we might add the age of Woodrow Wilson in the United States.

All these periods reveal the same characteristics. The immense wealth accumulated in the nation dazzles the onlookers. Enough of the ancient virtues of courage, energy and patriotism survive to enable the state successfully to defend its frontiers. But, beneath the surface, greed for money is gradually replacing duty and public service. Indeed the change might be summarised as being from service to selfishness.

John Robb:

He posits that the process of collapse takes ~250 years.

Each collapse is unique and likely due to external factors, but the process making the collapse possible is due similar internal factors.

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Grok summary:

Top 10 Topics from “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival”

Biography of Sir John Glubb: Details Glubb’s early life, military service in World War I, career in Iraq and Jordan, and post-retirement writings on the Middle East.

Importance of Broad Historical Study: Argues for studying the full 4,000-year history of the human race across cultures to derive practical lessons, rather than narrow national or periodic focuses.

Limitations of Traditional Historical Education: Critiques school history as parochial (e.g., focused on Tudors or Crecy), propagandistic, and emotionally biased, limiting objective learning.

Lifespans of Historical Empires: Presents a table of 11 empires (e.g., Assyria, Persia, Roman Empire) with average durations of about 250 years, noting gradual rises and falls.

Irrelevance of Technological Changes to Empire Duration: Emphasizes that advances in transport or weapons (e.g., spears vs. artillery) do not alter the ~250-year lifespan of empires.

Human Generations as a Yardstick: Proposes the 25-year human generation as a consistent unit explaining empire cycles, equating 250 years to roughly 10 generations.

The ‘Outburst’ Phase of Empire Formation: Describes sudden, explosive expansions by small, obscure nations (e.g., Macedon under Philip, Arabs under Mohammed) conquering superpowers.

Characteristics of Pioneering Conquerors: Highlights traits like poverty, hardiness, aggression, improvisation, and fearless enterprise in early empire-builders, contrasting with defensive “decadent” foes.

Causes and Motivations of Racial Outbursts: Explores greed for loot vs. admiration for civilization as drivers, with examples like Attila’s Huns (short-lived plunder) vs. barbarian founders of European dynasties.

Providential Benefits of Empire Cycles: Suggests a divine wisdom in 250-year rotations, allowing diverse races to contribute unique virtues (e.g., philosophy, administration) to humanity before succession.

10 Most Obscure but Salient Points

Arbitrary but Illustrative Dates: Empire start/end dates are approximate due to gradual expansions/declines, yet their ~250-year similarities persist despite “accidents of fortune,” underscoring pattern over precision.

Roman Empire Division: Splits Rome into a 233-year Republic (260-27 B.C.) and 207-year Empire (27 B.C.-A.D. 180), ending the latter with Marcus Aurelius due to ensuing chaos, rebellions, and invasions.

Babylonian Exception: Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian Empire lasted only ~74 years before Cyrus’s overthrow, illustrating that not all empires reach full lifespan but still fit the broader pattern.

Assyrian vs. British Territorial Shapes: Foot-soldiers limited Assyrians to land neighbors (e.g., Medes, Egypt), while British ships enabled overseas conquests (e.g., India, Australia) but not European rivals—yet both endured ~250 years.

Macedonian Pre-Eminence Post-Alexander: Despite Alexander’s death causing general infighting and rival empires, Macedonian dominance lasted 231 years, attributing longevity beyond one genius to generational momentum.

Arab Conquest Timeline: From Mohammed’s death in 632, Arabs dismantled Persian and Eastern Roman Empires in ~20-70 years, reaching from the Atlantic to Northern India/China frontiers by ~702.

Mongol Empire Scale: Starting as “savage tribes” in 1211 under Genghis Khan, Mongols built one of history’s largest empires by 1253, spanning Asia Minor to the China Sea in just 42 years.

Gothic Capital Seizure: In A.D. 711, 12,000 Arabs crossed Gibraltar, defeated a larger Gothic army, and marched 250 miles through unknown territory to capture Toledo unopposed.

Analogous Human Lifespan: Like empires’ 250-year average mirroring a 70-year human life (with exceptions like infant deaths or longevity), generational turnover provides a biological constant amid historical flux.

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Rory Linnane

The future is uncertain for Carmen Northwest, a charter school campus serving middle and high school students on Milwaukee’s northwest side since 2013.

Milwaukee School Board members were scheduled at a committee meeting Nov. 13 to vote on whether Milwaukee Public Schools should extend a contract that gives the school its right to exist as a public school and receive public funds.

After some school board members were critical of performance at the school and some criticized the foundational model of independently run charter schools, the committee voted to defer judgment on the contract extension, leaving onlookers in suspense until the full board is set to vote on the contract Nov. 20.

“We can’t ignore the ongoing academic concerns,” Milwaukee School Board President Missy Zombor said. “Year after year, the data shows that Carmen Northwest continues to have substantial room for improvement in academic proficiency.”

Rory Linnane

Two Milwaukee charter school operators are making moves to leave the oversight umbrella of Milwaukee Public Schools, instead operating under the authority of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Milwaukee College Prep and Carmen Schools of Science & Technology have applied to UWM for authorization of some of their schools beginning in the next school year, after their current contracts with MPS are set to expire, public records show.

Charter schools, in order to exist under state law, must secure a contract from their local school board or certain other bodies, such as UWM. That body is expected to oversee the performance of the schools, only renewing contracts if the schools live up to their promises.

Rather than seek renewals from MPS, Carmen and Milwaukee College Prep are looking to primarily answer to UWM going forward. The financial impact to MPS is difficult to measure. As an authorizer, MPS collects fees from charter schools but also spends funds on services for those schools.

A 2018 Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis found MPS collected about $2,261 per Carmen student and used the funds to pay for district-wide services. It was difficult to tell if the funding matched the value of services that Carmen might have benefited from, the Forum found.

Alvin Christian, Brian Jacob and John D. Singleton

The share of college students identifying as disabled and using academic accommodations (e.g., extended test time) has dramatically increased over the past two decades. We link course tran-scripts, disability office records, and K-12 special education histories at a large public flagship to study accommodations. We provide three main findings. First, we show usage has risen sharply—between 2011 and 2024, usage rose from 4% to 10%, driven by a fourfold increase in mental-health diagnoses. A decomposition exercise indicates K-12 disability growth explains about one-quarter of this increase. Second, we document stark socioeconomic disparities in use.

Conditional on prior documented disability, men and Asian students are less likely to apply and be approved, and conditional on applying, high-income students are more likely to be approved. Third, using student fixed effects and comparisons between approved and non-approved applicants while controlling for rich observables, we find that accommodations yield substantial benefits. Approved students withdraw from fewer courses, earn higher GPAs, persist longer, and are more likely to major in STEM—driven by greater persistence among existing STEM students. Together, these findings clarify the sources of growth and gaps in use and provide some of the first evidence on the academic returns to accommodations in higher education, with direct implications for STEM diversity and retention.

Stephen L. Morgan and Sol Bee Jung

The Coleman Report argued that family background is a fundamental cause of educational outcomes, while demonstrating the weak predictive power of variation in expenditures and facilities. This paper investigates the effects of family background, expenditures, and the conditions of school facilities for the public high school class of 2004, first sampled in 2002 for the Education Longitudinal Study and then followed up in 2004, 2006, and 2012. The results demonstrate that expenditures and related school inputs have very weak associations not only with test scores in the sophomore and senior years of high school but also with high school graduation and subsequent college entry. Only for postsecondary educational attainment do we find any meaningful predictive power for expenditures, and here half of the association can be adjusted away by school-level differences in average family background. Altogether, expenditures and facilities have much smaller associations with secondary and postsecondary outcomes than many scholars and policy advocates assume. The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report—that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment—is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago.

Louise Eccles:

Not many state schools have societies dedicated to rigorous discussion — instead Labour plans to bring it into ordinary lessons

Classroom debating will become commonplace in most subjects under the new national curriculum, rather than “the preserve” of private schools, the education secretary has said.

Private schools, which can deviate from the national curriculum, have often been viewed as better at developing oracy skills in pupils through group discussions, regular presentations and debates.

There are minimal spoken language requirements for children aged 11 to 14 in the key stage 3 curriculum and in some subjects, such as geography and history, they are non-existent.

In the revised curriculum, the Department for Education is expected to add more specific requirements to make sure children are developing oral skills in more subjects.

In history, for example, pupils might discuss the relative strength of different historical sources, while in geography, students may present a case study on a natural disaster.

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Carl Hendrick:

This is very misjudged. If by “oracy skills” we mean rich vocabulary, sophisticated sentence structures, deep background knowledge, then we have very good evidence on how to teach those.
Class debating and discussion are great for all kinds of reasons but they are often the end point of those processes not necessarily the means to get there. As we have seen so many times before, this kind of ‘skills first’ fallacy confuses the outcome with the mechanism.

Pamela Snow:

Recently, I attended two Sydney events that have given me pause for (further) thought on the mixed state of play in Australian education. These were the Australian School Improvement Summit on Wednesday October 29, and the researchED Conference at St Catherine’s School on Saturday November 1. For those of you unfamiliar with researchED, it is a platform that hosts low-budget events, always on Saturdays, so teachers and researchers can come together, share ideas and discuss existing and evolving evidence concerning education across year levels and sectors. 

At both of these events, there was discussion about the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum, for all students, but most particularly those whose backgrounds create a lack of financial, social, and human capital that can only be offset by strong educational experiences curated by classroom teachers. 

Natalie Wexler is a US education writer and commentator, author of two highly regarded texts,  The Knowledge Gapand Beyond the Science of Reading, and co-author, with Dr Judith Hochman, of The Writing Revolution. Wexler was a keynote speaker at both of the above events, acknowledging first that the focus on explicit and systematic phonics instruction in recent years has been entirely appropriate, because of the serious and harmful policy and practice deficiencies highlighted in Emily Hanford’s American Public Media Sold a Story podcast.  

Wexler’s central thesis (like many before her) is that effective decoding skills are the necessary but not sufficient toolkit for students’ reading success. She highlights the complex factors that can stand in the way of children’s comprehension of text. These include knowledge of increasingly complex vocabulary, mastery of more elaborate sentence structure, inferencing ability, and the application of prior (background) knowledge when reading. Of course, different factors may be more or less in play to create difficulties for different children reading the same text.

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Clayton Burns:

Professor James Engell of Harvard English in a recent email to me:

“Over my more than forty years of teaching I’ve found students at all levels increasingly untouched by any formal study of grammar, rhetoric, imagery, or verbal patterns.”

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Claire Murphy
A blunt new report from the University of California at San Diego has ignited a fierce debate about declining student readiness and what that says about the state of higher education.

The report, compiled by an internal faculty group, painted a grim picture of the math and writing skills of the first-year class at UC-San Diego,

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Standardized Testing Task Force – University of California 2020

Corey DeAngelis:

The recent elections make it clear: Socialist politicians are poised to rack up more wins unless we confront the root cause of their growing appeal among the young. That root is the government school system, a vast apparatus that indoctrinates millions of impressionable minds each year, convincing them that big government is the solution to every problem.

The far-left brainwashing unfolds for seven hours a day over 13 formative years. Just as American children step off this factorylike conveyor belt, they become eligible to vote, and they are primed to buy into the socialist lies they have been sold.

Consider the evidence from a TIPP poll of 18- to 25-year-olds, conducted for the League of American Workers just before the November elections. It found that young voters are overwhelmingly in favor of teachers unions (48% net favorable), despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they function as de facto money laundering operations for the Democratic Party. The same poll showed young voters had a 10% net positive rating of socialism.

Kaylee Staral:

The Waukesha School Board voted Wednesday night to close Bethesda, Hawthorne and Whittier elementary schools beginning in the 2026-27 school year.

The board approved the plan — E1 — on an 8-1 vote. The decision also moves the K-8 STEM program to Horning Middle School and shifts dual-language programming to Banting, Heyer and Lowell.

Tal Hagin: 

Some models, like standard generative LLMs (for example, basic ChatGPT), rely solely on patterns learned during training to generate responses. While they are often used by people to verify information, they do not access external sources in real time and cannot verify facts, producing instead what is statistically likely given their training data.

Other systems, often called retrieval-augmented models (for example, Grok, Perplexity, Gemini), combine generation with live data retrieval. When asked a question, these models can fetch relevant documents, news posts, or web content, and then generate answers conditioned on that retrieved information. This allows them to provide citations and reference recent events. However, even retrieval-augmented systems still do not independently verify the accuracy of the sources, as they assume the retrieved material is reliable.

These systems appear alive, responsive, knowledgeable, and, perhaps most importantly, impartial. In a world of eroded trust, this feels refreshing. Users often treat AI outputs as neutral, objective, and infallible. As a result, large language models such as ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini have effectively become the digital public’s latest fact-checkers; responding instantly, in confident, well-structured paragraphs that appear authoritative in ways journalists or fact-checkers rarely can.

Becky Jacobs:

UW system administrators went too far this fall with proposed changes to how general education course credits transfer, according to faculty and staff across the Universities of Wisconsin.

“It’s a clear overreach,” said Amy Lewis, an assistant professor of music at UW-Madison who co-leads the United Faculty & Academic Staff union on campus.

The proposed changes stem from the state budget approved by lawmakers this summer. While lawmakers approved a roughly $256 million increase in funding for Wisconsin’s 13 public universities, that additional funding came with strings attached.

Students were already required to take some general education courses to graduate. By next fall, all credits for these courses must also be transferable and satisfy general education requirements across the system.

Lawmakers instructed the UW system’s governing body, the Board of Regents, to “establish policies for the appropriate transfer of credits” and submit their proposal to a legislative committee by the end of this year.

UW system administrators recently released a draft policy, which drew criticism from faculty and staff. The policy goes beyond what the law requires by creating a new general education framework, employees argue.

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Related:

Madison: English 10

“about 4% of Madison students completed a dual enrollment course, compared with almost 26% statewide”

Larissa Phillips:

This was a bit shocking. It was our fourth year doing the county fair—an exhilarating, exhausting several-day event that both of my kids normally looked forward to for months. But one thing was different this year: My son was 15. He’d been slouching around the fairground in aviator sunglasses, scowling and sighing, and was even sent out of one competition to change out of flip-flops into proper footwear. And now he’d won an entire division. Specifically, the Pack Goat division—whereby he had to lead his pet goat over bridges, through tunnels and puddles, and around tubs of foliage.

His follow-up text was even more shocking.

“Now I have to do Master Showman.”

Even in the best of his adolescent years, when he still loved the fair, competing in Master Showman—in which the winners from each division compete in a final ultimate event—would have been unnerving. And for me, a transplant from the city still barely managing to navigate the entirely foreign culture of the county fair, the thought of my son competing in this ultimate showdown was overwhelming.

Joanne Jacobs:

“The story of EdTech has largely been one of expensive failure,” Hendrick writes. There’s evidence that AI tutoring can be highly effective, if structured to supplement human teaching. However, “many uses of AI in education actively harm learning.” Research confirms what teachers suspect: “When AI does the thinking, students stop doing it themselves.”

Younger AI users show the greatest decline in critical thinking ability, a recent study showed. Students may think they’re understanding, but they’re mistaken.

WILL:

On behalf of a Wisconsin parent, WILL has notified Lighthouse Learning Academy that it is prepared to take legal action over the school’s refusal to provide certain non-religious individualized curriculum materials merely because the materials were created by a Christian company.

Lighthouse is a district-authorized charter school that operates with more flexibility than traditional district schools, allowing families greater involvement in the education of their children. Parents may choose instructional materials that best fit the learning needs of their children.

Our client, Mrs. Karen Sharkey, selected non-religious materials from an award-winning publisher that provides resources to homeschoolers and charter schools across the country. Lighthouse denied several of her selections after objecting to the publisher’s Christian affiliation and expressing unfounded concerns that the content was religious in nature.

The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “Lighthouse Learning Academy is drawing a line in the sand for all the wrong reasons. Denying a parent’s selections for curriculum to best fit the needs of her child because of a Christian affiliation is misguided and illegal. WILL stands ready to protect Mrs. Sharkey’s right to choose the best coursework for her child and to demand that the school applies its policies fairly to all parents.”

Tanner Nau:

More than 10 percent of new students at a prestigious California university are taking math that covers what they should have learned as far back as elementary school.

Sarah had 9 pennies and 9 dimes. How many coins did she have in all?

Solve (10 − 2)(4 − 6x) = 0

California officials expect math students in public school to know the first answer by the end of second grade—and the second answer by the end of eighth grade. But when some incoming college students were asked these questions, about 20 percent could not correctly count the number of coins, and over 80 percent were unable to solve the equation.

A report released last week by the University of California San Diego, which has about 45,000 students and is one of America’s highest-ranked public universities, said that the number of entering first-year students whose math skills fall below middle-school level “increased nearly thirtyfold” from 2020 to 2025—to roughly one out of every eight new students.

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“the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8”

more.

Karen Vaites:

Getting rid of public gifted education programs will accelerate the enrollment crisis hitting American public schools

When Zohran Mamdani came out in favor of eliminating New York City’s gifted and talented program in the earliest grades, it represented the latest chapter in an ongoing debate about gifted and selective schooling options in our nation’s largest district. 

One might have thought this was political suicide. Advanced academics are super-popular, as Josh Dwyer noted in his recent overview of public polls. Eliminating tracking was the sixth-least-popular Democrat policy in a recent review of national polls, scoring almost as low as “defund the police.” Going to the dentist is more popular than detracking.

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more.

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You don’t gain any friends maintaining a high bar in education (or really any other part of our public life). That’s why you need leaders who have the courage of their convictions.

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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?

Kelley:

The fact is that high schools are graduating kids with As and Bs in advanced math courses who haven’t mastered foundational skills. The data from the UCSD report makes that clear. 20% took calculus in high school! Their GPA in math classes is ~3.6!
This is happening all over the country. Kids are over-reliant on calculators and generous grading policies.
Because the UC system does test-blind admissions, these kids look like skilled math students. (Applicants are not allowed to even submit ACT or SAT scores at UC schools.) Their foundational math gaps are only identified when they take the freshman math placement exam (no calculator allowed) and find out they aren’t qualified for pre-calc or higher math at the collegiate level.

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“This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools

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The degree of rot here is similar to that disclosed in the boardroom of the firm in the first act of Margin Call. In this case, there are no captive buyers to dump this ongoing human calamity onto — and it is not unique to one college. This is everywhere, everyone knows it, everyone knows why it happened, and everyone knows that nothing has happened to stop it from happening into perpetuity.

Danyela Souza Egorov

The real aim is revealed in Weingarten’s choice to devote most of its pages to attacking her political opponents—especially supporters of school choice—and defending the interests of the American Federation of Teachers.

Claiming that 90 percent of kids in America attend public schools, Weingarten argues that the school-choice movement will destroy the institutions responsible for educating our citizens and nurturing democracy. For starters, that figure is outdated. Data from the 2021 Census indicate that the share of public school students stood at 81.9 percent. And that’s before the expansion of universal school choice in states like Texas and New Hampshire. Half of American children now have access to school choice.

Weingarten characterizes the school-choice movement as a conspiracy orchestrated by Christopher Rufo, Moms for Liberty, and other right-wing activists—a “plot to destroy public education,” in her words. The real drivers of the choice movement, however, are parents like Virginia Walden Ford, a black, low-income mother in Washington, D.C., who grew frustrated watching her son struggle in public school and helped create the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program—the nation’s first federally funded voucher initiative.

Weingarten also insists that vouchers are devised by whites to undermine desegregation. This isn’t just wrong—it gets the history completely backward. In fact, some teachers’ unions fought vouchers because they facilitated integration.

Robert Pondiscio

Between 2020 and 2025, the number of UCSD students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold—from under 1 percent to roughly one in eight. The university has been forced to redesign remedial math to cover elementary-school material and create an entirely new course to reteach high-school algebra and geometry.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but…what did you expect?

Every force in American education has been working toward this moment. Covid was catastrophic, but the rot began long before. The UCSD report attributes the collapse to “the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.” That last phrase is a euphemism for low-income, minority youths whose interest K–12 education’s love affair with “equity” is intended to serve. But the report exposes how intellectually bankrupt that impulse has become—as if we can get students to and through an elite university by force of will and noble sentiment rather than the hard, cumulative work of academic preparation.

The University of California’s “test-blind” experiment has been a disaster. When UC’s Board of Regents eliminated the SAT and ACT in 2020, it left admissions officers relying almost entirely on high-school grades, which were functionally meaningless.  Among students placed into Math 2, UCSD’s most remedial course, one in four had earned a perfect 4.0 in high-school math. Grades told admissions officers next to nothing about whether an applicant could actually do the work.

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“This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.”

Kate Armanani

Chicago Public Schools Office of the Inspector General is urging district officials to reform travel policies amid “questionable, excessive and even exorbitant” spending on overnight trips, according to a report released Wednesday.

CPS travel expenditures, including airfare and lodging, more than doubled between fiscal year 2019 and 2024, surging from $3.6 million to $7.7 million, the report said.

Over and over, CPS staffers exceeded spending limits, bypassed required preapprovals and expensed activities “of dubious necessity or value to students.”

“Many taxpayers would find some excursions described in this report objectionable and even excessive — especially in tight budget times,” the report said.

The Office of the Inspector General is the independent oversight body for CPS, charged with investigating allegations of financial mismanagement, fraud and employee misconduct. Its recent findings come on the heels of the district’s protracted budget battle — a saga that left officials cash-strapped and scrambling to prevent classroom cuts. CPS faced a $734 million deficit before passing a $10.2 billion budget in August.

MGSD Financial Crisis FB Group:

Here are the cliff notes from tonight’s meeting:
📃 Superintendent Proposal:
26-27 School Year:
CGS → 4K-2
District office and MG21 → TPS
Sell district office and Maywood to cover future capital projects/improvements (details can be found in board docs for this meeting)
🏫 Possible School Restructuring:
Despite increase in housing, since 2017 enrollment has remained level
Capacity Report: https://drive.google.com/…/1GI5u9rQdALgZsPGIPlY…/view…
School board members completed a gallery walk to look at plat maps of properties owned by the district (available on board docs).
Projected numbers show progressively less students with a total of 50+ less students 4K-2 in five years. Also, 4K students are only half day, but reflected as full day in these numbers.
4K-2 projected enrollment:
26-27 – 462
27-28 – 432
28-29 – 437
29-30 – 429
30-31 – 429
CGS capacity = 540
A traffic reduction solution needed to support transition. Cost may be prohibitive, need this before making any final decisions.
There may be some staffing impact on up to two FTE custodial staff and possibly a health room assistant role. This is still being reviewed. (Updated)
💲Facilities Costs:
We don’t want to have any empty district buildings, we want to maximize our use of space.
District Office and MG21 can relocate more easily than anyone else if we see an unexpected future increase in enrollment and need to reopen all or part of TPS.
Maywood: All agree it’s a good idea to authorize a broker to evaluate the value of the property (not necessarily sell). Some concern about what would happen in Monona if Winnequa was outgrown. By getting rid of Maywood and District Office, there is no contingency for growth like there is with TPS in Cottage Grove.
MG21: Concerns about losing some possible integrity of the program, connections to community, etc. by relocation. Could District Office parcel be split? Keep half, sell other half to keep MG21 in Monona? There are more Cottage Grove kids in MG21 than Monona.
The 4K-2 decision has to be made by the December Board Meeting so parents know where they are sending their kids next year and staff know where they will be.
**Wrapcare was not mentioned at this meeting.

2025 Monona Grove Capacity Study.

Erin Gretzinger:

Ian Folger, a spokesperson for the district, declined to identify the individual who created the new logo or comment on why the district paid Fieldtrip the same amount of money for less work. Edell Fielder, the district’s senior executive director of communications, said the individual who created the logo wants to remain anonymous.

“We believe you’ve gotten everything you need for this story from our Office of Public Records and don’t have more to add,” Folger wrote in an email.

The new logo, launched in September, depicts an “M” standing for Madison with the Capitol dome on top of the letter. An open book in red and green underneath the “M” symbolizes “knowledge, growth, inspiration and literacy as the foundation of learning,” the district wrote in a statement announcing the new logo.

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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?

Robert Pondisco:

A small handful of prominent Democrats want their allies to rethink opposition to private school choice and embrace newfound opportunities. But is the party ready?ALEXANDER RUSSONOV 12, 2025Way back in the 2000s and early 2010s, Democrats For Education Reform (DFER) played a major role on the education scene, pushing for high standards, charter schools, and old-school accountability.

However, DFER’s struggles were already becoming obvious nearly a decade ago, and while quasi-public charter schools may be less controversial than they once were, education reform has been in full retreat since then.

Former Providence, Rhode Island mayor Jorge Elorza aims to change all that. As the new head of DFER, Elorza is calling for Democrats to to rethink their traditional opposition to public funding of private school choice.

“There’s nothing inherently conservative or Republican about private school choice,” says Elorza in an interview conducted before last week’s elections.

So far, there are only a few high-profile figures who have publicly embraced this position: Elorza, Arne Duncan, and Rahm Emanuel. And last week’s election results may discourage blue-state politicians and candidates from reconsidering their views.

Dan Goldhaber, Stephanie Liddle, Suvekshya Gautam

While achievement gaps have been widely studied, less attention has been given to how these gaps relate to students’ patterns of academic mobility—that is, how students’ relative academic standing changes from early to later grades. Using rich administrative data from Washington state, we apply an academic mobility framework to examine both test-based and non-test outcomes for student subgroups defined by race/ethnicity and gender, tracking their progress from 3rd grade through high school. Our findings align with prior research: after controlling for other student characteristics, higher performance on 3rd or 8th grade assessments strongly predicts better high school outcomes, including test scores, GPAs, college-level course-taking in math and ELA, graduation rates, and lower rates of absenteeism and disciplinary incidents. We also find that early math achievement is a stronger predictor of later outcomes than early ELA performance. Although some initially low-performing students demonstrate upward mobility, 3rd grade test scores remain powerful predictors of long-term academic trajectories. Students who begin behind tend to stay behind. Though magnitudes of academic mobility vary significantly across outcomes and subgroups, Asian students, especially Asian females, were the most upwardly mobile subgroup while Black males were often, though not always, the least mobile. Gender gaps also vary in size nearly always favoring females. Our results underscore the need for earlier and more intensive interventions to change the educational trajectories of students who struggle academically.

Dissident Teacher:

Qualities necessary for your child’s success and happiness like discipline, perseverance, risk-taking, curiosity, and integrity are undermined by public school.

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American government schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something American public schools no longer provide, if they every did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in government-run schools in California.

Eric Topol:

What if learning a second language could provide you three more years of healthy aging or, alternatively, speaking only your mother’s tongue was linked to a loss of five years of healthspan? These are the implications of an important new study published on Monday. First, let’s review a bit of background.

Over the past two decades there have been many reports that multilingual individuals have improved cognition compared with their monolingual counterparts with better attention, task switching, working memory and potential protection from Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not just advantages for functionality. Brain structure studies in multilingual vs monolingual participants have shown increased gray matter density in key regions (caudate nucleus, left inferior parietal cortex) that are linked to executive function, such as this frequently cited 2004 paper [Figure in linked article]. This feature is known as neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change and reorganize its neural connections throughout life. Note how the gray matter density increase is maximum when proficiency in a second language occurs as a younger age.

UC Academic Council Standardized Testing Task Force:

In sum, mean differences in standardized test scores between different demographic groups are often very large, and many of the ways these tests could be used in admissions would certainly produce strong disparate impacts between groups. However, UC weights test scores less strongly than GPA, and comprehensive review appears to help compensate for group differences in test scores. The distributions of test scores among applicants are very different by group, but the distributions of test scores among admitted students are also very different by group, and in almost exactly the identical way. The Task Force did not find evidence that UC’s use of test scores played a major role in worsening the effects of disparities already present among applicants and did find evidence that UC’s admissions process helped to make up for the potential adverse effect of score differences between groups.

Yet this is not to conclude that consideration of test scores does not adversely affect URM applicants. If
standardized test scores must be compensated in order to achieve the entering class sought by UC, that is reason to question whether it is necessary to use the tests at all, and/or whether it is possible to design an alternative instrument that does not require such compensation. UC admissions practices do not fully
make up for disparities that persist along lines of race and class. Whether these disparities arise from test scores, GPA, or others among the 14 factors that comprise comprehensive review at UC, the outcome of UC admissions processes is that many of the populations historically excluded from opportunity are still underrepresented by wide margins. Some members of the Task Force emphasized UC’s responsibility to assist disadvantaged and URM students who attend schools with lesser resources than those attended by students from affluent families, and they worried that continuing to use tests would help preserve the status quo. These members contended that the University has an obligation to interrupt perpetuation of inequality, especially when the state played a historic role in creating it, and must do more to serve the state’s aspiring college students more equitably.

—–

Marc Porter Magee:

The charts the political leaders of CA didn’t want anyone to see.

Alex Tabarrok summary:

Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).

In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021)

(The figure gives some examples of remedial class material and the percentage of students getting the answers correct.)

The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”

———

Much more, here:

“This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.”

Roshan Fernandez:

A recent internal report found that Harvard is dishing out too many A’s, and that the current undergrad system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and “damaging the academic culture of the College more generally.”

The report prompted uproar from some Harvard students who say they already study a lot, sleep very little and face immense stress to perform academically. Many feel they worked hard to get into Harvard, only for the school to contemplate moving the goal posts.

“You admitted these students because they have straight A’s, and now they’re getting a lot of A’s, and it’s like, ‘This is a problem.’ And I’m thinking, how on earth is that a problem?” said Summer Tan, a Harvard senior.

Harvard’s report on its undergraduate college found that about 60% of grades were A’s during the 2024-25 school year, a jump from about 25% in 2005-06. The median GPA upon graduation is now 3.83, up from 3.29 in 1985.

Making the Grade

Boone Simms

The curriculum for teachers in training at Michigan State University’s top-ranked College of Education has been flagged for lessons that focus on concepts that denigrate white people and promote critical race theory, drawing steep criticism from GOP students and leaders in the state.

MSU student Adrianna Mobley provided a stack of lessons to The Federalist, which published an investigative report in late October detailing how course materials “have a constant focus on race and a consistent dismissal of capitalist principles.”

At the same time, Young America’s Foundation published details of a mandatory course for students in the program called “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education.”

It teaches that educators “who cling to their Whiteness cannot participate in abolitionist teaching because they are a distraction, are unproductive, and will undermine freedom at every step, sometimes in the name of social justice,” according to one of its textbooks.

MSU’s is currently ranked #1 by U.S. News for elementary and secondary education.

Jeremy Horpedahl

Addendum: Several comments have asked how much of these trends can be explained by the rise of dual-income households. The answer is some, but not all of it, which I have written about before. Dual-income households were already the most common family structure by the 1980s. There hasn’t been an increase in total hours worked by married households since Boomers were in their 30s. You can explain some of the increase up until the Boomers by rising dual-income households, but this doesn’t explain the continued progress since the 1980s. And as Scott Winship and I have documented, even if you look just at male earnings, there has been progress since the 1980s.

Alex Tabarrok:

And even though it says so in the chart and in the text let me say it again, this is inflation adjusted and so yes it’s real and no the fact that housing has gone up in price doesn’t negate this, it’s built in. We would have done even better had NIMBYs not reduced the supply of housing.

Steve McGuire summarizes the UCSD report.

As a major cause at UCSD in particular, they point to a significant increase in students admitted from “Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)” schools, which are “California public schools in which more than 75 percent of the school’s total enrollment is composed of students who are identified as either eligible for free or reduced-price meals, or English learners, or foster youth.”

Students from these LCFF+ schools make up a large chunk of those students needing remedial classes:

More.

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Andrew Follett:

Those are results for university students at UC San Diego.

Only 87% can do math at 1st grade level; just 19% can do math at 8th grade level.

However bad you think it is, its worse.

Universities get 30 times more inflation adjusted gov’t cash then they did in the 1950s.

——

Alex Kontorovich:

Oof. Is there a way to verify this independently? I’m not sure our experience at Rutgers is quite this bad… but it’s also, on the average, nothing to write home about. (We also have outstanding undergrads who will go on to do amazing things. It’s a big place.)

——-

Steve Miller

The 18,424 California public high school students admitted to UCSD in 2024 could have been selected entirely from the 53,085 who had exceeded the math standards on their 11th grade state math test.

——

Gavin Newsom’s veto message, 2019:

“replicating the state’s high school assessment with the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or American College Test (ACT) … exacerbates the inequities for underrepresented students”

——

Grok summary:

Introduction: This 54-page report, released on November 6, 2025, by the Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions (SAWG) at UC San Diego, examines a sharp decline in incoming freshmen’s academic preparation—especially in math and writing—over the past five years. Driven by factors like the COVID-19 pandemic, the end of standardized testing, grade inflation, and increased enrollment from under-resourced high schools, the report warns that admitting underprepared students risks their success and strains university resources. It analyzes trends, admissions processes, and prior fixes, then proposes targeted recommendations to better align admissions with student readiness and institutional capacity, emphasizing math remediation, holistic reviews, and systemwide reforms.10 Most Obvious Points

1. Severe Math Decline: From 2020–2025, students needing below-middle-school-level math remediation (Math 2/3B) surged nearly 30-fold at UC San Diego, affecting about 1 in 8 incoming freshmen in 2025, despite most having completed required high school math with good grades.
2. Writing Challenges Persist: Around 19% of incoming students require remedial writing courses (AWP 3/4A), stable since 2018 but linked to national literacy declines; in 2024, 41% of remedial math students also needed writing help.
3. Pandemic Impact: COVID-19 disrupted K-12 education, widening preparation gaps, especially in quantitative skills, with effects lingering post-2020.
4. No Standardized Tests: Eliminating SAT/ACT requirements since 2020 has made it harder to gauge readiness, contributing to mismatched admissions.
5. Grade Inflation and Under-Resourced Schools: High GPAs from Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF+) high schools often don’t reflect skills, leading to over-admission of underprepared students.
6. Enrollment Growth: UC San Diego’s undergraduate population expanded rapidly, amplifying the influx of underprepared students.
7. Holistic Review Process: Admissions use a 1–5 score based on academics, extracurriculars, and context, but it under-predicts math/writing needs, especially for quantitative majors.
8. Portfolio Use in Arts: Portfolios aid arts admissions but lack feedback loops, causing inconsistencies in evaluating creative readiness.
9. 2025 Fixes Fell Short: Last-minute efforts, like flagging low-math-risk students, reduced but didn’t solve the problem for the incoming class.
10. Urgent Recommendations: Implement a “Math Index” to predict remediation needs, cap remedial enrollments at 300 by 2026–27, require early summer placement tests, and reassess major math requirements.

10 Substantive but Least Obvious Matters

1. Interlinked Deficiencies: Math and writing gaps are increasingly correlated—e.g., in 2024, 2 in 5 severe math-deficient students also needed remedial writing, up from prior years, suggesting broader analytical skill erosion.
2. UCSD-Specific Surge: While all UCs saw declines, UC San Diego’s remedial math enrollment grew 10x faster than systemwide averages, tied to 25% higher in-state admissions from LCFF+ schools compared to peers like UCLA.
3. Placement Test Evolution: UC San Diego’s post-2023 Writing Placement Process (WPP) incorporates student self-assessment and unproctored essays, differing from the old systemwide AWPE, but it hasn’t stemmed the 19% placement rate rise.
4. Math Index Mechanics: The proposed index would use transcript data (courses, grades, high school) and historical placements to score risk, integrated into major matching—e.g., steering high-risk students toward B.A. over B.S. tracks with lighter math loads.
5. High School Feedback Loops: Recommendations urge direct outreach to mismatched schools (e.g., those with 80%+ A/B grades but 50%+ placement failures) to audit curricula and curb inflation, potentially via joint workshops.
6. Major Shaping Nuances: Admissions “shape” classes by reserving spots (e.g., 70% capped for biology), but low holistic scores (1–2) from underprepared applicants inflate waitlists, indirectly boosting remedial loads in uncapped majors like social sciences.
7. Summer Bridge Potential: Beyond tests, pair early remediation with mandatory summer “boot camps” for at-risk students, leveraging data showing 20–30% skill gains from similar programs at other UCs.
8. Faculty Role Expansion: The Committee on Admissions (CoA) should lead annual Math Index recalibrations and post-cycle audits, including correlating holistic scores with 4-year graduation rates to refine equity adjustments.
9. Systemwide Grading Probe: Advocate UC-wide calibration of high school GPAs using common benchmarks (e.g., IB/AP equivalencies), as variations—e.g., 0.5 GPA inflation in LCFF+ districts—disproportionately affect selective campuses.
10. Standardized Test Revival Case: While not mandating return, the report cites peer data (e.g., MIT/Caltech reinstatements correlating with 15% better placement predictions) and urges BOARS to study feasibility, balancing access with reliability.

James Marriott

Collins Dictionary informs us that 2025’s “word of the year” is “vibe coding”, the amateur practice of using AI to write computer code. Almost every dictionary now offers a word of the year. The idea is to seek publicity, and presumably “connect” with younger demographics who pay little attention to lexicography. In recent years the Oxford English Dictionary has descended from its ivory tower to recommend the neologisms “brain rot”, “rizz” and “goblin mode”. I suppose these owlish efforts at hip are preferable to the pious Merriam Webster which has recently elevated “democracy”, “integrity” and “feminism”.

Well, it is easy (and enjoyable) to scoff. But the proliferation of words of the year also reflects a real phenomenon: we are living through a period of linguistic innovation that is probably unprecedented in the history of English. In a culture widely regarded as stuck, with its endlessly self-reproducing superhero franchises and stale literary scene, our language is a heartening source of creativity.

The main motor of change is, of course, the internet. Language production has been radically democratised. Words no longer have to get into newspapers or onto television to gain wide currency. They can bubble up anywhere and spread with alacrity online, jumping across cultures and continents.

Jonathan Turley:

It is not clear whether the district will appeal. An en banc decision will often get closer scrutiny from clerks in petitions for certiorari. The question is whether the district wants to risk doubling down on a losing hand if the Supreme Court affirms the judgment. Some advocates may be leery of rolling the dice on a further appeal given the implications of an adverse decision on pronouns that applies nationwide.

Institute For Reforming Government

“DPI’s state report cards say rich districts are worth the property taxes, even when they aren’t, and poor districts meet expectations, even when they don’t. Meanwhile, DPI underrates many of Wisconsin’s best districts,” said Quinton Klabon, Senior Research Director at the Institute for Reforming Government. “Parents should not have to play a guessing game about where their children can learn best.”

DIG DEEPER:

• DPI’s calculation of graduation, attendance, and absenteeism inflates ratings for all schools, making a 1-star overall rating nearly impossible. For example, 17.1% of Beloit students do not graduate in 4 years, but DPI awarded Beloit a 5-star graduation rating.
• DPI benefited low-poverty schools twice. By lowering Forward Exam standards in a way that disproportionately raised Advanced scores in the mathematics section, DPI doubled the amount of children scoring in the highest category (21.1% in 2025 compared to 9.5% in 2023). DPI’s changes to report cards also resulted in  the average Achievement score, measuring test proficiency, rising from 60 to 65. For example, Verona received a large boost from these changes despite average mathematics performance.
• DPI’s Growth score, measuring actual achievement against expected student achievement, helps create erratic results across the state. For example, DPI rated the low-performing Destiny High 3 stars due to supposed 5-star Growth.

——-

Will Flanders:

Despite claims to the contrary, changes to the report card have shifted more schools into the “Exceeds” and “Significantly Exceeds” expectations categories.

WILL:

Despite stagnant or declining proficiency rates statewide, fewer schools are being rated as underperforming—suggesting that DPI’s new cut scores are masking real declines in student achievement. 

Table 1 shows the percentage of schools in Wisconsin that were rated in each category of the report card for this year and last. Despite DPI claims that the changes wouldn’t lead to much of a shift in categories, the percentage of schools in the state rated in the lowest three categories has actually gone down once again.  The largest increases were in the “Significantly Exceeds Expectations” category.   

——-

Kayla Huynh:

The DPI warned against comparing overall scores on the latest report cards to previous years but said some of the data used to measure performance is still comparable.

——-

Cory Brewer:

Wisconsin schools with proficiency rates in reading as low as 12% were rated as “Exceeds Expectations.” Yes, you read that correctly. See this thread for more details.

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Dan O’Donnell:

Wisconsin is now the single worst state in the nation at educating black children but somehow not a single school district in the state failed to meet expectations on the new Department of Public Instruction report cards. Here’s how DPI cooked the books to hide its failure:

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Tom Tiffany:

94% of Wisconsin school districts meet or exceed expectations in @WisconsinDPI’s 2024–25 report cards.

Yet only 31% of our kids can read at grade level.

Something isn’t adding up. DPI and the Evers-Rodriguez admin hide failure instead of giving parents honest information.

———-

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?

Danielle DuClos:

After Evers dropped the 2017 rule changes while serving as state superintendent, neither his successor, Carolyn Stanford Taylor, ​nor the current state superintendent, Jill Underly, promulgated similar measures. Underly says the Department of Public Instruction is now working on two related rules, though.

Facing pressure from critics after the Cap Times investigation, Underly in recent weeks has called on legislators to better define grooming in state law and argued existing laws don’t give the Department of Public Instruction enough power for its investigations. The department has also published additional information about surrendered or revoked licenses and pledged to provide more details in the future.

Evers ran the agency for about a decade, starting in 2009. Voters first elected Evers governor in 2018 and to another four-year term in 2022.

When he took office as governor in 2019, Evers appointed Stanford Taylor to lead the Department of Public Instruction for the remainder of his term. Voters then elected Underly to be state superintendent in 2021 and to another four-year term in April.

Evers and Underly declined requests for interviews.

In a statement, Underly said proposed rule changes under Evers predated her administration, and the agency has been working for more than a year on an administrative rule creating an educator code of ethics.

———

Wisconsin Legislature launches audit of DPI licensing processes following sexual misconduct, grooming cases

Karen Vaites:

It was released earlier this year by @PADeptofEd – then removed from its website hours later, following public outcry.

@JoshShapiroPA @PDESecretary, and leaders @JasonOrtitay @SenatorHughes @RepJFleming, this is not good.

It’s incomprehensible, for starters.

I’m told Shapiro seeks reading reform and local leaders worked hard for the PA literacy bill.

Still, no one understands how this list came to be.

As a native of Chester County, this hits close to home(town).

Document link.

Maya Keshavan

The district under the leadership of Richard Carranza and his irresponsible Board of Education was starstruck by Dr. Jo Boaler’s math philosophy. They believed people would be more successful if they waited until ninth grade to take Algebra I.

Never mind that this makes no sense at all. The people who could afford to bypass this delay would. Who is left? The people who can’t pay to play and rely on the district to provide them with the same access as their resourced peers.

What went on was the antithesis of equity and SFUSD set back focal populations for years. To this day people sneeringly point to SFUSD when those who are rightfully concerned about the opportunity gaps try to address the problems.

The real story is lost and with it the accountability.

From press releases to presentations SFUSD wrote a story where they were the heroes. They told the credulous public that Algebra repeat rates had dropped from 40% to 8%. And as icing on the cake, more students were taking advanced  classes than ever before. None of this was true.

Carl Hendrick:

I’ve found myself wrestling with two disturbing questions: Firstly, does learning itself obey the laws of material reality, or does it resist them? And secondly, if it obeys them, then does the emergence of artificial intelligence mean that teaching itself is fundamentally algorithmic, that what we’ve long considered an irreducible human art is actually a computable process? Not just faster, or cheaper, or more scalable, but genuinely more effective at producing learning? 

The optimistic vision is compelling: every child receives expert, tireless, infinitely patient instruction calibrated precisely to their needs. The achievement gap narrows because the students who most need help finally get it, not in sporadic bursts but continuously, systematically. Teachers are freed from the grinding mechanics of delivery and assessment to focus on what machines genuinely cannot do: motivation, relationship, the human dimensions of learning.

But there’s a darker reading of AI, one I think we should take seriously. If teaching becomes demonstrably algorithmic, if learning is shown to be a process that machines can master, then Penrose’s ghost returns with a different question: what does it mean for human expertise when the thing we most value about ourselves, our ability to understand and to help others understand, turns out to be computable after all? Not insight, but instruction. And if instruction is algorithmic, then what exactly is left that makes human teachers irreplaceable? 

Sophia Proneikos

The Book Boat Women of the Mississippi 1904
In 1904, when river towns along the Mississippi had little access to schools or libraries, a small group of women brought knowledge to the water. They were known as the Book Boat Women educators, widows, and dreamers who turned old barges into floating libraries that drifted from town to town, delivering books, newspapers, and hope to riverside families.
One of them, Eleanor Finch, a former schoolteacher from Iowa, spent her savings on a decommissioned cargo barge. She and two friends painted it white, filled it with donated books, and christened it The Knowledge Belle. They loaded it with shelves, kerosene lamps, and a hand-cranked printing press that produced small pamphlets of local poetry and news.
As the Book Boat drifted downstream, children would run to the shore, shouting, “The library’s here!” Farmers traded apples, quilts, or cornmeal for borrowed books. In a time when literacy was rare in rural America, the women taught reading lessons right on deck often by lantern light as river fog curled around the hull.
During one harsh winter, when the river froze, Eleanor refused to stop. She walked miles across icy banks carrying sacks of books on her back, ensuring no child missed their reading. “The river”, she said, “only sleeps. The stories do not”.
By the 1910s, their floating library inspired copycat boats in Minnesota and Illinois, spreading learning through the heartland. The Book Boat Women proved that education could travel even on restless waters.

Erin Gretzinger and Olivia Herken:

By next school year, every public school district in Wisconsin will be required to restrict cell phones in classrooms after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed a bipartisan bill into law.

While most Dane County schools already have some kind of cell phone policy in place, several districts, including the Madison Metropolitan School District, will have to make updates to comply with the new law.

Wisconsin is the 36th state to adopt statewide cell phone restrictions in schools, which supporters say helps limit distractions in classrooms and improve kids’ mental health. Florida became the first state with a ban in 2023, and 25 other states this year have enactedpolicies restricting or altogether banning phones in schools.

School districts across Wisconsin have until July to adopt policies that prohibit cell phones or other personal communication devices, like a tablet or laptop, from being used during instructional time.

Evers said he wishes the Legislature took a different approach to the bill but he signed it into law anyway to do what was best for kids.

Douglas Belkin:

President Trump has made an example of Ivy League universities, attacking, cajoling and fining them in brisk succession. There’s a notable exception: Yale University.

In New Haven, Conn., the school’s conspicuous absence from the crosshairs has become a subject of intense campus speculation—among professors, students and even parents.

“This is the $64,000 question,” said Evan Morris, a Yale professor of radiology and biomedical imaging. “My colleagues and I are all looking at each other and waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

The question hung over October’s Yale Family Weekend, as parents partook of cherished traditions like performances by the Yale Glee Club, lectures by distinguished faculty and tours of the neo-Gothic-style campus.

During a talk with moms and dads, university President Maurie McInnis was asked why Yale had been spared. She said there was no obvious answer, according to the Yale Daily News.

“Whether it is that long tradition, the long tradition we have of encouraging open debate… or whether it’s we’re at the end of the alphabet, I don’t have that answer,” McInnis told the gathering, according to the student paper.

Allysia Finley:

Unemployable college grads blame capitalism, but the real culprit is higher-ed subsidies.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp attributed Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York mayor to a reverse class warfare: “I think the average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is highly annoyed that their education is not that valuable, and the person down the street who knows how to drill for oil and gas, who’s moved to Texas, has a more valuable profession.”

He has a point. Colleges are graduating a surfeit of young people who lack hard or even soft skills. Even as employers complain about a dearth of qualified workers, a growing college-educated proletariat can’t find jobs they want to work. They believe their degrees aren’t being adequately rewarded by the free market and blame capitalism.

The real culprit is enormous government subsidization of higher education, which has distorted the labor supply. More than seven million bachelor’s degree recipients have entered the labor force since January 2020. Meanwhile, the number of workers without college degrees has declined by about 200,000 and those with associate degrees has shrunk by 1.1 million.

As baby boomers in blue-collar professions retire, labor shortages are growing in industries like construction, trucking and manufacturing. President Trump’s deportations compound the problem. Nearly 50% of small-business owners reported few or no qualified job applicants last month in a National Federation of Independent Business survey. “Finding qualified workers is proving to be impossible,” a Missouri manufacturer told the NFIB. The sentiment was echoed by a California auto shop: “We need to teach the trades in high school again. Trade jobs can pay well, but there is a real shortage of people willing/able to do the job.”

Too many young college grads are unemployed because they aren’t willing or able to do the jobs that are available. As of October 2024, 30.4% of 20- to 29-year-olds who had earned bachelor’s degrees that year weren’t working, compared with 21.9% for those who had earned associate degrees during the same period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Youyou Zhou:

Find where to move based on your priorities.

The United States is reaching its lowest birth ratein history, but that alarming outcome isn’t necessarily intentional. Pew Research Center data show that the majority of young Americans today still want to have children: More than 7 out of 10 people in their 20s and 30s have or plan to have at least one child, and the majority of nonparents between ages 18 and 34 say they want to be parents someday.

Then pressing questions come in: Can people afford it? (Cost is often the top reason cited by people who avoid or delay having children.) Would children be able to grow up in a secure environment with access to a good education? And do people feel safe to conceive given the varying level of abortion access? Research shows that in states where abortions are bannedmothers are more likely to die from unwanted pregnancy and infant mortality increased due to birth defects.

The answers often depend on where people live. Child care is highly expensive in some parts of the country, but there are places where raising a childdoes not cost half of a family’s income. Meanwhile, where children grow up still plays a crucial role in their future success.

Kayla Huynh:

• Wisconsin’s audit committee has ordered a review of the Department of Public Instruction’s process for handling educator misconduct.
• The bipartisan audit committee unanimously approved the audit at a meeting Nov. 5.
• The audit follows criticism of State Superintendent Jill Underly over the handling of sexual misconduct and grooming allegations against school staff.

The state Legislature’s bipartisan audit committee on Nov. 5 ordered a review into the Department of Public Instruction’s process for removing, suspending or restricting educator licenses.

The audit comes as State Superintendent Jill Underly has received criticism for her department’s handling of grooming and sexual misconduct allegations against licensed school staff.

The Legislative Audit Bureau will examine the DPI’s oversight of educator misconduct cases, including the quality of its investigations, the steps for revoking or suspending licenses and whether the agency’s policies follow state law. The audit will also review the DPI’s staffing, resources and investigator training.

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Wisconsin Legislature launches audit of DPI licensing processes following sexual misconduct, grooming cases

———

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?

John Schindler:

Democrats winning the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, which are blue-to-purple states, hardly constituted any surprise. Less pleasant was the election of Jay Jones as Virginia’s attorney general, notwithstanding that Democrat’s own troubles with the law and his making murderous threats about Republicans and even their children. Jones is a sociopath but Democrats voted for him anyway.

Tuesday’s big news was the election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York City, which is the plain triumph of the radical socialist Left wing of the Democrats, a turning which portends bumptious politics for the whole country for the remainder of this decade. Mamdani’s victory is a remarkable story no matter one’s politics. How a 34-year-old political neophyte whose practical experience for the job is as light as a feather managed to score the mayor’s job in America’s biggest city stands as something for the record books.

As for Mamdani himself, there’s not much to say. The son of privileged immigrants, Muslims from South Asia by way of Uganda, Mamdani possesses all the au courant progressive luxury views of his ilk, the expensively educated (his father is a Marxist Ivy League professor). Mamdani is a proud democratic socialist who is photogenic and ran an innovative social media-driven campaign. He was greatly helped that his opponents were the loathsome Andrew Cuomo, who lingers in New Yorkers’ minds as the grandma-killer during COVID-19, and the fun but hopeless GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa and his cats, who was hampered by the reality that Republicans barely exist in NYC outside Staten Island.

Michael Cuna & Elaine Shen:

Despite dramatically expanded access to selective U.S. colleges, first-generation students persistently trail continuing-generation peers in GPA, internship attainment, and early-career outcomes. We identify a key mechanism: the hidden curriculum unwritten strategies like cold-emailing alumni or strategically engaging faculty essential for success yet unknown and costly to discover without guidance. Leveraging survey and administrative data from 100,000+ undergraduates across 20 public universities, we document stark disparities: first-generation students invest 14-26% less in these high-return hidden actions while over-investing in formal tasks. Stan-dard explanations–income, ability, or preferences–do not fully explain these gaps.

Through a field experiment at UC Berkeley, we isolate causal channels by randomiz-ing information on action availability (awareness) versus returns (beliefs): awareness treatments close the 30% baseline gap almost entirely. Finally, we develop an AI college advisor to expose underlying search frictions in an online experiment; first-generation students allocate just 11% (versus 16%) of queries to hidden topics and follow up about 48% less on hidden curriculum nudges. However, an “active” AI that increases awareness, narrows these search gaps and follow up behaviors. By formalizing the hidden curriculum as dual informational frictions, we demonstrate that overcoming these invisible barriers requires more than equal access.

Ray Jetha:

Not everyone was on board with the idea. Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, the same startup incubator where Lessin was farming for prospects, warned founders on an internal forum not to attend.

“You don’t need finishing school. You need to build something great, make your users happy, and have craftsmanship. We’re just here to make stuff. We’re not here to impress anyone by how fancy our shit is,” Tan wrote on X. 

“The truly wealthy are wealthy in meaningful relationships and the outcome of actually making something people want, not bullshit appearances or impressing people or running power moves or playing zero sum dominance games,” he added. 

Still, the class was free, and so was the wine. A few hundred founders applied for Etiquette Finishing School, and about 50 were accepted. Not everyone showed up.

One founder, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was there to learn to be “less feral.” A meeting with a Japanese conglomerate made him realize he had no idea how to be a “functioning adult in polite society.” 

Ian Mansfield:

However, for the purposes of this article, it’s also the document that introduced the concept of Time Immemorial.

Although often used as a general phrase for “a very long time ago”, it specifically refers to events that occurred before 3rd September 1189.

Anything before that date is time immemorial.

Explicitly why 3rd September 1189 was chosen as the barrier between that which we know and that which we don’t has itself been lost to time.

But a very good theory exists.

That date marks the coronation of King Richard (the Lionheart), the three-tims predecessor of King Edward I, and a good theory exists about why great-grand uncle was the point at which time immemorial began.

At the time, a legal policy allowed defendants to cite oral history passed down from their grandfather in disputes over land ownership. However, for the purposes of this situation, grandad could be dead, but so long as dad was still alive, and would swear that he heard it from his dad, that could stand up in court.

Vance Ginn:

Note from Adam: There is growing momentum to limit or repeal state and local property taxes, which poses an interesting dilemma for libertarians and fiscal conservatives. Advocates see property taxes as relatively efficient, transparent, and minimally distortionary, while critics argue they fuel government growth, undermine secure property rights, and make housing more expensive. The following guest post by Vance Ginn, who writes the Let People Prosper Substack, makes the case for the continued push for property tax repeal. In a follow-up guest post, Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation will make the case for property taxes as an important source of revenue. 

Property ownership is the cornerstone of a free society. It reflects the natural right of individuals to control what they create, earn, or voluntarily exchange with others. From that right flows responsibility, independence, and the ability to build a legacy.

Yet today, homeowners must pay the government every year simply to keep what they already own. Property taxes are not a reasonable price for local services—they are an outdated, overly coercive, and economically destructive way to fund government. They should end.

Across Texas, Florida, Wyoming, Iowa, andMontana, more people are realizing that property taxes—once accepted as a “necessary evil”—are neither necessary nor moral, especially when government spending is not properly restrained. The principle is simple: nothing is free, but ownership should be secure once it’s earned.

———

more.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported above average tax & $pending, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

———

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?

Olivia Herken:

Another bill Evers vetoed would have required school boards to let residents inspect a school district’s textbooks, curriculum and instructional materials. Residents can already request to review learning materials, but the legislationwould have required school districts to respond to such requests within 14 days, as well as publish a list of textbooks on their website. Republicans have unsuccessfully introduced the policy in the last three sessions, with Evers vetoing it once before.

The legislation comes at a time when books and curriculum are under more scrutiny by parents and politicians. Supporters said the bill would improve transparency and rebuild trust between parents and schools, while opponents said it was a means of fearmongering in classrooms.

“My position has not changed, nor have my concerns about the Wisconsin State Legislature’s continued attempts to create burdensome statewide mandates for schools without providing any funding to successfully implement such mandates,” Evers said in his veto memo.

Bojan Tunguz:

Unfortunately the US Academia produces a glut of PhDs, with absolutely no regard for the professional or career prospects of those PhDs. The latest figures put the number of newly minted PhDs in the US at 58,000. Arguably the only jobs where PhD level skills are directly relevant are those in Academia itself, but those jobs have been becoming increasingly hard to get. The latest estimate is that there are only about 10,000 – 12,000 tenure track job openings in the US each year. Some fraction of the surplus is captured by the postdoc market, but not enough to make the whole system sustainable. 

PhD education is primarily subsidized from two sources of funding – grants from the government and the paltry teaching stipends that most PhDs have to resort to. There are ethical problems with both of them. The government funding is, obviously, downstream from taxes. So we are asking the public to pay for (costly) skill acquisition that in most cases have absolutely no practical value. The response to this argument is that the value of (PhD) research is that it expands human knowledge. OK, maybe. But the fact is that 80-98% of all PhD theses are never cited. IMHO, the problem is even worse than that. There is a very powerful publishing-citation cartel in place that operates through you-cite-my-student-I-cite-yours mechanisms. So in other words, it is highly unlikely that the PhD system we have right now in place is even close to being the optimal system for creating new insights and knowledge. 

Another challenge to the skeptical view of the value of PhD is that those programs help create objective, rigorous thinkers, something that is valuable across the board in our society. This is a variation on the “transfer learning” theory of the value of education, which, I am sorry to say, has not been verified through any kind of actual empirical study. A few attempts to validate it have been, at best, inconclusive. And anyone who has sat through a single faculty meeting would find the notion that these people are “objective, rigorous thinkers” laughable.

Michael Tracey:

The Obit:

James D. Watson, who entered the pantheon of science at age 25 when he joined in the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of the most momentous breakthroughs in the history of science, died on Thursday in East Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 97.

His death, in a hospice, was confirmed on Friday by his son Duncan, who said Dr. Watson was transferred to the hospice from a hospital this week after being treated there for an infection.

Dr. Watson’s role in decoding DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, would have been enough to establish him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. But he cemented that fame by leading the ambitious Human Genome Project and writing perhaps the most celebrated memoir in science.

For decades a famous and famously cantankerous American man of science, Dr. Watson lived on the grounds of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which, in another considerable accomplishment, he took over as director in 1968 and transformed from a relatively small establishment on Long Island with a troubled past into one of the world’s major centers of microbiology. He stepped down in 1993 and took a largely honorary position of chancellor.

Sarah Scire:

One thing that stood out? None of the students — even in an elective course about media — confessed any interest in becoming a journalist. A few could name news organizations they trusted but others said the news came to them through social media or what friends shared or what they overheard as their parents were watching television. They had questions for me, too, including several about the pitfalls, challenges, and ethics of being a journalist.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been unprepared, then, to read a new report from News Literacy Project that surveyed American teenagers about their attitudes towards journalists. But “Biased,” “Boring,” and “Bad”: Unpacking perceptions of news media and journalism among U.S. teens still wasn’t a fun read. The online survey asked 756 teenagers (ages 13-18) nationwide about their views and found:

• An overwhelming majority of teens (84%) described news media with negative words — often characterizing media as intentionally deceptive or invoking negative emotional feelings. The top five words submitted by teens were “Fake, “Crazy, “Boring, “Biased,” and “Sad,” according to a very depressing word cloud published in the report.

John Trasviña

Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District’s grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.  

Zach Groshell:

This is borne out of the real-life phenomenon of “packet teaching” – where some hodge podge of random material from TPT replaces focused instruction.

The format of a piece of paper providing a scaffold (ex: a number line so they don’t have to draw a messy one) is still sound.

Sam Clamons:

Biology can be hard to intuit, in part because it operates across vastly different scales, from single atoms all the way up to entire ecosystems. Students of biology therefore often first meet its agents and mechanisms through metaphors: molecules are charged balls connected by sticks! evolution designs organisms to maximize their fitness! mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell! While metaphors give us qualitative handles to grasp, they often oversimplify complex ideas.

This is because most metaphors fail to address specifics — especially regarding numbers. Consider another common bio-metaphor: DNA is the blueprint of the cell. That’s useful for conceptual understanding, but how big is this blueprint? Is it as big as a novel or an encyclopedia? How much space does it take up? It’s possible to look up or calculate the answers to these questions; the human genome is 6.2 billion base pairs, which takes up about 10 cubic microns. But how big is that compared to the total volume of a cell? Is it most of it or just a tiny fraction?

To answer questions like these, you need more quantitative metaphors. Whereas a standard metaphor says that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, a quantitative metaphor says how big a battery a mitochondrion would be, say, if a cell were a toaster. If qualitative metaphors are like containers, then quantitative metaphors are closer to yardsticks.

Patrick Mcilheran:

A family’s huge bet on bettering the lives of thousands of Milwaukee children is moving a step closer to launch as St. Augustine Preparatory School starts taking names for its $104 million north campus in Glendale.

The project takes place in a time of rising parental demand for better options in Milwaukee. Even as the number of school-age children in Wisconsin fell, attendance at independent schools via the state’s parental choice program rose 6.9 percent last year.

This week, St. Marcus Lutheran School, long a mainstayon Milwaukee’s north side, opened a $25 million expansion to accommodate 200 more students.

Further north, it was just two years ago that the philanthropists behind St. Augustine, Gus Ramirez and his family foundation, announced they would buy the campus of suddenly-closed Cardinal Stritch University and convert it into a second location for Aug Prep.

School leaders are now far enough along on construction to start showing it off to prospective students with “hard hat” tours on Saturday morning and a promise to open the doors for good by August of 2026.

Aug Prep, as it brands itself, already runs a decade-old school, kindergarten through 12^th grade, on Milwaukee’s south side, that now fills facilities completed in only 2023.

Suevon Lee:

The admissions policy for Boston’s prestigious exam schools is once again changing, after the school committee approved a proposal Wednesday evening that could result in fewer Black and Hispanic students earning spots.

Under the new policy, a fifth of open seats at the three schools will be offered to top-performing kids citywide, based on grades and test scores. Bonus points for applicants attending high-poverty schools will be eliminated, and extra points for kids without stable housing will be reduced.

The remaining 80% of open seats will be distributed as they are now: Applicants will vie for spots against other kids in their same socioeconomic tier based on grades and test scores.

“Even though I may not like all of the options that we have … we have to move forward,” said Boston Schools Committee Chairwoman Jeri Robinson, who voted in favor of the changes. “Stopping this process now only frustrates actual families for whom this will be a next step.”

The proposal is meant to simplify the policy for more “fair and equitable access to the exam schools,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said at the meeting. She said it can be “sometimes mathematically impossible” for an academically-qualified student to earn a coveted seat because of where they live in Boston.

John Hilliard:

The changes, which will apply to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science, will eliminate bonus points for applicants coming from high-poverty schools, and reduce points for students who are homeless, live in public housing, or are in state custody. A fifth of seats at each school would be open to any qualifying student, regardless of socioeconomic considerations.

———

Madison: English 10

“about 4% of Madison students completed a dual enrollment course, compared with almost 26% statewide”

Census.gov

As recently as 2020, there were just three states where older adults outnumbered children: Maine, Vermont, and Florida. By 2024, this number had increased to 11, with Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia joining their ranks.

Choose life.

Corrinne Hess

WIAA executive director Stephanie Hauser said the organization is transparent to its more than 500 members.  

But she said that because WIAA does not receive any taxpayer dollars, it should not have to abide by state open meetings law. 

“It is similar to a church or other private sector entity,” Hauser said. “We are very committed to a clear decision-making process. We publish those on our website.” 

Bill co-author, state Rep. Cindi Duchow, R-Delafield, said even though WIAA isn’t a governmental organization, it has a “de facto monopoly” over Wisconsin student athletes.

Duchow said WIAA decisions on eligibility can cost students college scholarships. 

Xavier Miller:

Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami.

The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue.

The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing. The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price.

Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over.

Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.

Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores.

Liu He:

In the latest episode of transnational repression by the Chinese state, the NYC-based inaugural IndieChina film festival had to delist 2/3 of their films today. The authorities contacted virtually every film director (and in some cases their families), and threatened actions if they do not refrain from presenting films in New York.

We are witnessing a watershed moment in the expansive global ambitions of the Chinese police state, which is venturing far beyond the border of China. Indeed, it is hard to miss a growingly daring gesture from the state security apparatus abroad. In recent months, we’ve already seen a new wave of exit bans against, disappearances of, harassment of families of overseas Chinese students returning to China for vacation, as well as foreign passport-holders being held arbitrarily and indefinitely.

Direct repression against targeted individuals couples with the ongoing operation of global surveillance, overseas police stations, community monitoring via student and townsman associations, and exports of great firewall technology. As domestic dissent gets reduced to exceedingly negligible efforts, the police state turns its attention abroad.

——-

Vicky Xu:

This actually happened: while my husband cooked chicken (45 min), I ran a research sprint on British academics’ research ties to China to assess the landscape, since we recently moved to the UK and research for work. I identified 29 cases that raise research security questions

Erin Gretzinger:

Madison school district officials who spoke with the Cap Times said the district wants to expand dual enrollment options to increase students’ access to college credit, with a focus on increasing on-site classes. The expansion would offer more alternatives to off-campus programs that pull students out of their schools and AP classes that require students to pass one high-stakes test to earn college credit.

“Students and their families are recognizing that the opportunity to earn college credits while still in high school is really important,” said Meg Filkins, the district’s director of career and technical education. “I think a lot of the work that we are still engaging in is helping students determine what are the courses that will get them the most bang for their buck.”

College credit trade-offs

Among the Madison school district’s class of 2025, about 65% of students left with some kind of college credit — the district’s highest percentage in five years. But how students earned that credit greatly varied.

The district has three main pathways to earn college credit: AP courses, which students take at their high school; dual credit courses, also taken at their school; and state-mandated dual enrollment programs and the district’s early college academies, which largely take place at either Madison College or the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

….

The report noted that while many teachers have higher degrees in education-related fields, not many have higher degrees in other subjects. For example, virtually any math teacher can be eligible to lead an AP Calculus class, but they would need a master’s or Ph.D in math to teach a calculus class for UW-Madison or Madison College.

“That’s often the hurdle for schools to offer dual enrollment,” Cramer said.

Still, the state Legislature has recognized on-site dual enrollment classes as the best avenue to expand college credit options to students.

——-

Deja vu: Credit for non Madison School District Courses …

The Economist:

The idea of liberating parents is an attractive one. And the idea of all children, regardless of parental income, playing and learning together from just after birth is a pleasant one. Yet there is a problem. The best evidence on the impact of free (or almost free) universal from-birth child care indicates that it can harm children.

How can this be? There is, after all, lots of evidence—in the form of small, randomised controlled trials—in support of similar schemes. The most influential trial began in 1962 when a group of three-year-old children in Ypsilanti, a small city near Detroit, were enrolled in a programme at Perry Elementary School. The organisers found children who lived in poor households and struggled in tests, and then either enrolled them or put them in a control group. For the next two years, those enrolled attended a daily two-and-a-half-hour pre-school programme, where they “planned”, “did” and “reviewed” play activities in groups of five or six. A teacher also visited them at home once a week.

…..

This shift in Quebec, but not in the rest of Canada, is about as good an experiment in how such a policy affects children as it is possible to find. To work out its impact, Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michael Baker of the University of Toronto and Kevin Milligan of the University of British Columbia tapped into a wealth of data on children in Quebec collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth, which gathers details on child care, teacher evaluations, test scores and behaviour reports.

The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.

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more.

Priscilla DeGregory

A Virginia jury has found a former elementary school administrator liable for $10 million in the shooting of a first-grade teacher by a 6-year-old student nearly three years ago.

Former first-grade educator Abigail Zwerner sued Ebony Parker, the former vice principal of Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va., for gross negligence, alleging Parker failed to act on multiple warnings that the 6-year-old boy had a gun and was acting alarmingly the day of the January 2023 shooting.

After over five hours of deliberation on Wednesday and Thursday, the seven-person jury ruled in favor of Zwerner — who had been seeking $40 million in damages.

Ann Althouse summary:

GENERAL SAUER: Dames & Moore… said, this particular provision, where Congress has given these broad verbs, I mean, “regulate” is a capacious verb, admittedly, so are “nullify,” so are “void,” so are, frankly, all the other verbs there in the — the language in IEEPA. The way the Court thought about it is we’re looking at this through the lens of Justice Jackson’s opinion in Youngstown. And the Court held specifically that these verbs placed the President in Youngstown Zone 1. The Court held that — that he’s subject — subject to the widest latitude of judicial interpretation….  

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Why — could you tell me why it is that when Congress intended to permit a president to regulate by imposing tariffs, it’s always used “tariff” and “regulate.”… 

GENERAL SAUER: Respectfully, this Court came to the opposite conclusion, if I may, in Algonquin…. What it held was the phrase “adjust imports,” which includes a verb that’s narrower — 

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: But it was in the context… of activities that had to do with raising and lowering duties. Here, the noun — the verbs that accompany “regulate” have nothing to do with raising revenues in the form of taxes… 

Jeffrey Carter:

In the days of the American Revolution, Civil War, and both World Wars, the wealthy of our country sent their sons into battle. They fought and died for their country. Vietnam changed that. Heck, the signers of the Declaration were all wealthy, and many lost their fortunes because of it. Having skin in the game is a big deal.

During Vietnam, if you were connected, you could figure a way out of going to war if you wanted to. Even President Trump figured a way out. Bone spurs or something. President Clinton dodged the draft, and President Bush was in the Texas Air National Guard. Sure, I know Vietnam became an unpopular war, but the truth is the establishment elite from the WW2 generation didn’t want to see their sons fight in one after what they went through. You can’t blame them for their feelings, but it had adverse consequences. Additionally, there was the draft. You went even if you didn’t want to go if you had a low draft number. That is, unless you had strings to pull.

Today, Da Nang Dick lies about his service but gets to be a Senator. Tim Walz lies about his service, but gets to govern the state of Minnesota. They make a mockery of military service.

Contrast that with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. All served. Their benches and backbenches served. 

This is somewhat changing with our last conflict, which shouldn’t have happened. It’s a volunteer military, and that is a good thing.

Holly Korbey:

What happens when every teacher in the state gets trained in cognitive science and evidence-based teaching practices?

I first met Margaret Lee sometime last year, when she was still the director of organizational development for the Frederick County Public Schools in Frederick County, Maryland, a socioeconomically and racially diverse district of nearly fifty thousand students about an hour west of Baltimore. At the time, I was really digging into the research on teaching and learning. I’d launched this newsletter and focused my other reporting on it as well. But I was looking for something specific: was anybody beyond the grassroots group of insurgent teachers I’d connected with on social media trying to put that research into practice at scale? It was all well and good to talk about cognitive science principles—but I wondered if (and how) big, slow, lumbering school districts might actually move the needle using them?

Lee was the first person to give me a glimpse of what evidence-based teaching and learning might look like at scale. With support from district leadership, over the last decade she’d transformed both early teacher training and ongoing professional learning into something evidence-based, usable and practical; pointed curriculum and instruction in all subject areas toward research on what worked; and homed in on specific research-based moves, like explicit instruction and retrieval practice, shown to work with all students.

Impressed with Frederick County’s slow and steady improvement for all student groups—including the groups who often stubbornly remain farthest behind—I wrote a story about the work, focusing on the part about “scale.”

——-

Matt Bateman:

One consequence of working for a very data-centric private school is that I routinely hear stories from parents about extremely high end private schools that are academically and behaviorally mediocre or just poor. Basically a 50 thousand dollar/year placebo.

——-

Kelsey Piper:

in California, too, I’ve heard a weird number of stories of parents assuming that the high price tag and good reputation meant a private school would offer rigorous academic instruction and then it….didn’t.

Mike Clark

The seeds for the improbable Public League title run were planted 16 years ago on a bumpy grass field in Little Village. New Life, a neighborhood nonprofit offering a variety of services, decided to start a 16-inch softball summer league. The goals: to break down barriers, build community and prevent violence by defusing gang conflicts, among other things.

The field at Farragut wasn’t the best. DeMateo, who was the umpire for those early games, recalls “six-inch divots” that created what players called “the Farragut hop.”

But the league, which started small, kept growing. There are now 20 teams playing at two local parks: La Villita and Piotrowski. At the end of the season, the top teams from both sites come together to play for the championship at UIC.

Andrew Kerr:

A prominent U.S. virologist who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic privately informed the U.S. intelligence community in January 2020 that the Chinese lab may be responsible for the outbreak. But in his public remarks to congressional staffers one month later—and after meeting with former White House health adviser Anthony Fauci—the researcher stayed mum about the Wuhan lab and lent credence to the discredited wet market theory.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill virologist Dr. Ralph Baric warned the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during a closed-door presentation with the agency’s Biological Sciences Experts Group on or around Jan. 29, 2020, that the Wuhan lab, which was conducting risky gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses similar to the one that causes COVID-19, may have accidentally released the virus into the human population. Baric’s presentation, which the Washington Free Beacon obtained from a whistleblower, went beyond mere speculation: Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on coronaviruses, Baric experimented with coronaviruses in 2015 with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s top researcher, Shi Zhengli. Later, in early 2024, he testified to House investigators that he had privately warned Shi that her lab lacked sufficient biosafety protections and that he always believed a lab leak origin was possible.

——

Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”

Colbey Decker:

I testified before the Wisconsin legislature in support of the Constitutional Equality Amendment. As a mom, I shared how my white son with a severe reading disability was waitlisted and deprioritized for specialized education resources in @Greenbayschools—simply because of his race. The district’s “High Priority Strategies” explicitly favors First Nations, Black, and Hispanic students, leaving others invisible. This isn’t equity; it’s discrimination.

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

Per Figure ES-1, the results suggest that teachers are skeptical of the five “equitable” practices that are the focus of the resulting report, at least one of which (those same results suggest) has now been adopted by no less than half of America’s public schools and nearly three-quarters of the country’s “majority minority” middle schools.

Figure ES-1: Teachers are skeptical of most “equitable” grading practices.

more.

Danielle DuClos:

State legislators called both hearings this week in response to reporting by the Cap Times that uncovered hundreds of sexual misconduct and grooming investigations conducted by the department from 2018 through 2023.

In a joint statement, the audit commitee’s co-chairs — Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Oconto, and Rep. Robert Wittke, R-Caledonia — said Underly and the department “failed at their most basic oversight role.”

“In the coming weeks and months, state auditors will work to get the answers from DPI that the public deserves,” Wimberger and Wittke said.

The Cap Times revealed the department uses a rudimentary internal tracking system — a Google spreadsheet — to document its misconduct investigations and has two investigators to work on 113 cases on average each year.

Joe Chrisman, head of the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, outlined the audit ordered by legislators will likely examine, among other components:

• Trends in the allegations received and investigated by the department
• The duration of the department’s investigations
• Written policies and procedures the department uses for its investigations and whether those were consistently followed
• How the department gathered evidence, assessed information, and documented its investigations and decisions
• Trends in the department’s investigation determinations over time
• Fiscal, staffing and technology resources used by the department for investigations
• How the department’s investigation processes are similar to or different from those used by other Midwestern states

The Department of Public Instruction hasn’t previously conducted audits of its investigation practices or produced annual reports on investigation data, according to spokesperson Chris Bucher.

Other state education departments — such as Arizona, Idaho and Pennsylvania — publish reports on license investigations each year, including data on how many investigations were conducted, the types of conduct investigated and investigation outcomes.

……

Underly also wants educators in private schools to be required to hold a Department of Public Instruction educator license. Current state law limits the Department of Public Instruction’s authority to investigating licensed educators for misconduct.

……

She has declined requests by the Cap Times to discuss the department’s educator misconduct investigations, saying an interview would create a “conflict of interest” since she oversees teacher licenses.

…….

‘We believe in transparency’

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Kayla Huynh:

• Wisconsin’s audit committee has ordered a review of the Department of Public Instruction’s process for handling educator misconduct.
• The bipartisan audit committee unanimously approved the audit at a meeting Nov. 5.
• The audit follows criticism of State Superintendent Jill Underly over the handling of sexual misconduct and grooming allegations against school staff.

The state Legislature’s bipartisan audit committee on Nov. 5 ordered a review into the Department of Public Instruction’s process for removing, suspending or restricting educator licenses.

The audit comes as State Superintendent Jill Underly has received criticism for her department’s handling of grooming and sexual misconduct allegations against licensed school staff.

The Legislative Audit Bureau will examine the DPI’s oversight of educator misconduct cases, including the quality of its investigations, the steps for revoking or suspending licenses and whether the agency’s policies follow state law. The audit will also review the DPI’s staffing, resources and investigator training.

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More:

Since the first installment of Dismissed published:

• State Superintendent Jill Underly increased access to misconduct data
• Legislators held 3 hearings
• Nonpartisan state auditors are auditing DPI’s license misconduct investigations

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Kimberly Wethal

Lawmakers will audit the state Department of Public Instruction’s process for granting and revoking licenses for educators as the criticism over how the agency investigates cases of teacher misconduct continues.

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Accountability and the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI

Mark Treinen:

I’ve been doing journalism a long time and don’t recall a public official ever demanding a “public correction” of an entire story, and then proposing a bunch of fixes to the exact problems highlighted in the @CapTimes story.

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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?

Heather L Taylor, PhD, MPH, LDH, Pablo Cuadros, MPH, MaKenzie Gee, MS, Nir Menachemi, PhD, MPH

A total of 132 studies met inclusion criteria, yielding 454 unique outcomes. Lockdowns and school closures were associated with detrimental health effects in the majority of outcomes analyzed, including over 90% of mental health, obesity-related, and health-related social need outcomes (child development/education, employment, access to food, and economic/financial stability). Analyses focused on vulnerable populations, such as racial and ethnic minorities, low-income groups, and individuals with disabilities, were significantly more likely to report detrimental outcomes than the general population.

Conclusion

Given how lockdowns and school closures may affect population well-being, policymakers should carefully weigh both the benefits and harms of these interventions, including how they may affect vulnerable populations. We conclude with policy recommendations to mitigate ongoing harms and inform more evidence-based decision-making.

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Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”

Corrinne Hess:

Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly announced several changes on Tuesday to strengthen student safety amid criticism of her agency’s handling of accusations of sexual misconduct by educators.

Underly also announced DPI would create a new online database to expand DPI’s existing pubic license look-up tool so the public can see teacher licenses that have been revoked or surrendered.

“Our process is strong and our commitment to transparency is unwavering,” Underly said. “But that does not mean we are standing still.” 

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more.

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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?

Tao Tan:

In its first nine months, the Trump administration has thoroughly disrupted the American higher education landscape. It has cancelled federal grant funding, pressured university leaders to resign, and circulated a draft compact that ties preferential access to future funding to institutional policy changes. Critics call the administration’s actions overreach or even extortion.Supporters see this as long-overdue accountability.

The controversy has at least exposed a deeper structural truth. The storm now hitting American higher education did not start on January 20, 2025. Its conditions were created almost eight decades ago, when universities began building their budgets around federal aid, federal research, and federal policy. Successive programs, such as the GI Bill, the National Science Foundation, and Title IV aid, all deepened the partnership between the federal government and higher education. 

The Trump administration has simply highlighted the reality that even private universities in America are highly dependent on public support. Today, on average 25% of all university revenue either originates in or is facilitated by the federal government. 

Many faculty earnestly believe in the inviolably private character of their institutions. Even administrators, often more aware of their institutions’ federal entanglements, may not realize how systemic and universal this interdependence has become: In 2025, nearly all universities depend on public money—which depends on public trust and public confidence. 

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Alex Karp:

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Zohran Mandani:

“The average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is annoyed their education is not that valuable, and that the person who knows how to drill for oil has a more valuable profession”

“I think that annoys the —— out of these people”

Peter Bernegger

My testimony at the Capitol yesterday Nov 5th in Madison in favor of a bill to ban the use of drop boxes in Wisconsin – 6min video link below.

Liberal State Rep Lee Snodgrass begins by falsely claiming there is no voter or election fraud when using drop boxes in elections.

Where I’ll add here to my testimony I have internal documents from the City of Milwaukee election office that they have worked with very corrupt non-profits Souls to the Pols and MICAH to commit election fraud by stuffing drop boxes unlawfully with absentee ballots.
rumble.com/v718rsm-democr…

Mario Buildreps:

Our analysis of about 1,200 ancient pyramids and temples reveals a global pattern of alignment with past geographic poles. This suggests significant crustal deformation, supporting—but differing from—Charles Hapgood’s pole shift hypothesis.

The timing of these shifts precisely matches the temperature rhythm of the last ice ages, with a mere 0.4% probability of coincidence. This forces a re-evaluation of history: these structures were built over hundreds of thousands of years, with some dating to the dawn of Homo sapiens. While many were later modified, their original orientations were preserved.

This revolutionary evidence opens a new scientific field—Archaeorientation—challenging conventional timelines and rewriting deep antiquity.

Brandon Vigliarolo:

If you’re filing an immigration form – or helping someone who is – the Feds may soon want to look in your eyes, swab your cheek, and scan your face. The US Department of Homeland Security wants to greatly expand biometric data collection for immigration applications, covering immigrants and even some US citizens tied to those cases.

DHS, through its component agency US Citizenship and Immigration Services, on Monday proposed a sweeping expansion of the agency’s collection of biometric data. While ostensibly about verifying identities and preventing fraud in immigration benefit applications, the proposed rule goes much further than simply ensuring applicants are who they claim to be.

First off, the rule proposes expanding when DHS can collect biometric data from immigration benefit applicants, as “submission of biometrics is currently only mandatory for certain benefit requests and enforcement actions.” DHS wants to change that, including by requiring practically everyone an immigrant is associated with to submit their biometric data.

“DHS proposes in this rule that any applicant, petitioner, sponsor, supporter, derivative, dependent, beneficiary, or individual filing or associated with a benefit request or other request or collection of information, including U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals and lawful permanent residents, and without regard to age, must submit biometrics unless DHS otherwise exempts the requirement,” the rule proposal said.

DHS also wants to require the collection of biometric data from “any alien apprehended, arrested or encountered by DHS.”

Arthur Kane:

On top of about $810 million in 2024 for individual lawmakers’ office accounts, the House appropriates billions more for other operations of the House, including perks like a childcare center and an office of attending physician so members didn’t have to deal with waiting for a primary care.

David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, a non-partisan, nonprofit that looks out for the use of taxpayer money, said there needs to be a review of all the Congressional spending after The Center Square told him about some of the disbursements detailed in the House office accounts.

“Serving the public should be, you know, public service. [In the past] it was somebody sacrificing something to come to Congress,” Williams told The Center Square. “Now you’re just showered with perks, with benefits, travel, car allowances, now a housing allowance. So it’s turned from public service to really enriching yourself as a member of Congress.”

Sam Fleming, Amy Kazmin and Claire Jones:

The US government’s debt burden is on track to exceed levels in both Italy and Greece for the first time this century, according to IMF forecasts, underscoring the parlous state of America’s public finances.

General government gross debt in the US will rise by more than 20 percentage points from now to reach 143.4 per cent of the country’s GDP by the final year of the decade, IMF forecasts show, exceeding previous records set after the pandemic.

That comes as the IMF estimates that the US budget deficit will hover above 7 per cent of GDP every year until 2030 — the highest of any rich nation tracked by the fund for this year and the rest of the decade.

Italy and Greece have long been highlighted by economists for their fragile public finances. Both countries were at the heart of the euro area sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2012, with Greece requiring a bailout and restructuring overseen by the IMF and EU.

But government debt burdens in both European countries are projected to be on a downward trajectory at the end of the decade as they keep a tight grip on their budget deficits.

By contrast, the US debt-to-GDP ratio will still be rising in 2030, according to the IMF data released this month, with the Congressional Budget Office expecting it to increase for decades thereafter.