School Information System

David Blaska:

We wanted Ray Mendez to run for school board this year but he has more sense than that. No entity in local government more needs a disrupter than the Metropolitan Madison Board of Education. We introduced the gentleman to Werkes readers in November 2025.

Mr. Mendez picks up on a platform this on-line scribbler campaigned on a few years ago: school discipline.

“The grooming case at Memorial and the head-stomping assault at Westmade headlines,” Mr. Mendez tells us. A week ago, a 14-year-old was arrested for breaking a 13-year-old’s arm in a fight at Sennett middle school. “They are not random events,” Ray maintains. “After each incident, we hear the same language about care, equity, and process. … Then very little changes.”

‘Reshuffling risk’

Mr. Mendez says the school board is looking at but unlikely to reform the student Behavior Education Plan (found here) instituted by the terminally Woke superintendent, Jennifer Cheatham, in 2014. The BEP is on the agenda today 04-17-26 by the policy committee, consisting of Nicki Vander Meulen, re-elected on April 7, and Maia Pearson, arrested for disorderly conduct in December 2025. Except there is no agenda. The meeting isn’t even posted because, the district spokesperson says MMSD don’t need no stinkin’ public notice. Actual words of Edell Fiedler: “The policy committee meets on an ad hoc basis; because it comprises only two members of the Board of Education, no legal notice regarding its meetings is required.” The UniParty has spoken!

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There is no evidence that Wisconsin public schools would be better with more money. MPS spends ~$24k per student per year (30% above the average). It’s the worst district in the State, one of the worst in the entire US.

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Given the calcification of the traditional education system, there is a calamity of epic proportions coming for districts that put their head in the sand and act like all is fine.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

3888 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Neetu Arnold

In recent months, leaders in several cities and states have touted their schools’ sky-high graduation rates. Such figures usually justify celebration—but not when state exams and standardized test scores show weak results. Praising high graduation rates could mislead families about what their kids really know, setting them up for unpleasant surprises later in life.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for example, recently touted his state’s highest-ever graduation rate: 84.9 percent. The state’s lieutenant governor highlighted the “meaningful and long overdue” progress for Native American students, whose graduation rate has improved by nine percentage points since 2021.

Yet scores for Native Americans declined on state high school exams over the same period. Today, just over a third of Native-American students are reading proficiently, while only 17 percent are proficient in math.

Declining test scores extend to other students as well. On eleventh-grade math, proficiency dropped from 41.4 percent to 35 percent between 2021 and 2025. On tenth-grade reading, about half of students are proficient, down from almost 60 percent in 2021. And nearly two-thirds of students don’t meet grade-level standards in high school science, with 42 percent scoring at the lowest level.

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By far, the simplest way to “fix education” is to change definitions until the number goes up.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

3888 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

By Kenneth G. Pringle

Key Points

• The Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 tax protest exemplify American resistance to taxation.
• Grover Norquist’s 1986 Taxpayer Protection Pledge has been signed by nearly 1,400 elected officials.
• The debate over taxation continues, with some advocating for tax increases on the wealthy and others for further reductions.

The tension is obvious—an expensive government that needs to be financed versus a populace that works hard for its money and questions the value of sending it off to Washington or the state capital.

The Libertarian Party helped codify the modern antitax stance in its 1972 platform.

“[W]e are opposed to all government activity which consists of the forcible collection of money or goods from citizens in violation of their individual rights,” it reads. “Specifically, we support the eventual repeal of all taxation.”

The end of all taxation is hard for anyone to imagine. But, with taxpayers busy with the hated chore of filing their annual returns, it’s a good time to take a look back at the testy relationship between Americans and taxes.

Via Jay Greene:

Radical political activism fueled by foreign governments and international movements was largely driven out of organized labor by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. That act required private sector unions to certify that the leaders of “any national or international labor organization of which it is an affiliate or constituent unit” were not members of the Communist Party if they wished to bring issues before the National Labor Relations Board. This empowered the anti-communist factions that had been struggling against external communist efforts to control their unions to purge the communists from leadership. The triumph of the anti-communists in private sector unions produced a political change that spilled over to public sector unions as well. As a result, unions in both sectors were able to focus on pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members rather than be hijacked to pursue the extraneous political agendas of foreign radicals.

But the removal of radical foreign influence from organized labor has not endured. To illustrate the increasing political extremism of organized labor, this report presents an analysis of graduate student unions organized by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the National Education Association (NEA). This analysis shows that the higher education affiliates organized by teacher unions obsessively pursue political activism that is tightly connected to the agendas of foreign governments and movements. America is entering a new kind of cold war, but this time it has allowed organized labor to be used as a fifth column for foreign interests. It should come as no surprise that the rising anti-Americanism in the teacher unions is connected with an alarming increase in antisemitism.

Kelsey Piper:

The replication crisis changed the social sciences — except for ed research

Jo Boaler is a professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, with an enormously influential body of work arguing that students learn math faster and more effectively through her “discovery”-based methods. Her work got Algebra removed from middle schools across the Bay Area.

It is some of the most incompetently or dishonestly conducted research I have seen in a decade as a journalist.

Take one example: A report she gave at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics on the stunning success of her innovative new math curriculum at “Railside” (she did not disclose the name of the real school where the study took place). This was a poor, disadvantaged California school, where, she said, students adopting her curriculum rocketed ahead of students attending schools with traditional curricula.

When other researchers looked into her work — combing through every school in California to figure out which one “Railside” might be, so they could look at the performance data that Boaler had declined to share — they found that Boaler had compared the top two quartiles of students at “Railside” to the middle quartiles of students at the other schools; that “Railside” students were in fact dramatically underperforming students at the other schools on every single mathematical ability test conducted during the study period, except the one that Boaler highlighted in her presentation. And the one she did highlight was actually conducted on a population of students who weren’t even exposed to the innovative new curriculum.

Roger Pielke Jr.:

This week, I am returning to the University of Colorado Boulder campus for the first time since I retired from the university in 2024. I was invited to participate in the university’s Conference on World Affairs, where I’ll participate on two panels tomorrow — both livestreamed: one on climate change (9:30AM MT) and one of federal funding for research (2:00PM MT). Today, I’ll guest lecture in an upper-level atmospheric science course (buckle up students!).

I appreciate the invitation, surely a positive sign of an intellectual thaw. At the same time, the university gave in to a demand that I be removed from the original climate panel I was assigned to — so they created a new panel for me to be on. But any progress is good progress. If you come to my panels tomorrow, please do say Hi!

Returning to campus prompted me to take a look back at my posts here at THB on problems in U.S. universities, in the context of recent data indicating that public confidence in U.S. higher education has rebounded a bit off the lows of recent years, as shown below. 

Over the past few years I’ve had the good fortune to visit more than a dozen universities, to meet with university leaders in public and private institutions, and to participate in AEI’s new Center for the Future of the American University. The small rebound in public opinion reflects what I’ve observed firsthand: there are indeed some positive signs that university leaders are correcting course. There is much work still to do.

I have updated and integrated my writings on ‘the university problem’ into a report — the first in what will become a continuing THB feature: Deep Dive Reports. The idea: synthesize a series of arguments and data into a single accessible document — more in-depth than a single post, less sprawling than a long series. All reports will have updated data and figures that THB readers are free to use and share.

Wesley Yang:

Earlier this year, Fairfax calls police on his wife and accuses her of assault. Police declare that the accusation is not supported by evidence and take no action against his wife.

Deborah Acosta:

A shortage of private school openings in South Florida is prompting wealthy families to build new campuses for their children.

Real-estate developer Jeff Greene spent $50 million to build The Greene School, which features advanced classes such as aeronautics and costs $50,000 a year in tuition.

Other wealthy individuals, including Stephen Ross and Adam Neumann, are also developing new schools, with some facing community pushback.

He recruited Karen Yung from ElevateED, a private school nonprofit, to run the Wellington school, called Wingrove Academy. She hired as chief executive Jeff Clark, the former president of Avenues School, an international private school that opened its first location in Manhattan in 2012.

Jenna Gloeb:

A sixth-grade teacher who had been named a finalist for Minnesota’s 2026 Teacher of the Year award has withdrawn from consideration after Alpha News inquired about publicly available, sexually explicit images showing the educator dressed in bondage wear and participating in simulated sex acts with several men.

(Warning: Some readers may find the images in this article disturbing)

More.

Dave Cieslewicz:

It gets even more confusing when we realize that there is no clear frontrunner. Usually, a big entity like this wants to wait for the field to clear out before they back the eventual winner. At only 1% in the polls and lagging the rest of the field in fundraising, nobody would pick Roys as the likely winner of the primary. 

She does take perhaps a more strident pro-union position in that she is seemingly vowing to actually kill Wisconsin’s voucher program. She claims that it has “failed.” That’s a curious indictment for a program that is the choice for 60,000 families and growing. 

Another possibility is the union doesn’t like what they’ve seen so far with Rep. Francesca Hong in the lead with 14% and Mandela Barnes at 11%. They may view those candidates, as I do, as the weakest to go up against Tom Tiffany in November. But if that were their strategy, there’s nothing about Roys, who is a credible candidate, that makes her stand out as more electable than other credible candidates Sara Rodriguez, Joel Brennan, David Crowley or Missy Hughes. 

So it’s head-scratching. But even if she loses, Roys will still be a state senator while her party is very likely to gain the majority there. So, she’ll be in a position to help them no matter what. And I suppose that this is the most plausible reason of all.

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Related: Act 10.

Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Teacher Union and the 2026 Wisconsin Governor Election

The Economist:

hen in 2012 Britain’s politicians tripled the maximum tuition fee for undergraduates, critics feared youngsters would go off degrees. They need not have worried. Participation kept going up. By 2024 about 60% of young Britons had some kind of post-secondary qualification, up from 48% when fees were raised. Only five rich countries boast rates higher than that.

The worry these days is that universities are enrolling more students than is wise. A furore over student debt has rekindled old claims that the system is rife with “low value” degrees. The Conservatives say Britain should cut by around 100,000 the number of students entering higher education each year (652,525 Britons began undergraduate courses in 2024). They say this would generate savings that might be spent on lowering the interest on the debts of existing graduates.
Discussions about dud degrees split into two debates. The first is whether universities competing fiercely for new recruits have cut entry requirements far below what is smart. In 2024 more than 10% of freshers on full-time undergraduate courses had no A-levels (or equivalent qualifications), up from only about 3% ten years before. Data suggest that about a quarter of such students drop out, twice the average rate.

Jacob Shell:

….. but there is very little in the report explaining why this has been the trend. And you can’t solve a problem that you haven’t properly diagnosed.

Consider: academia would appear to have very good structures already in place (such as tenure and a host of free speech rules and traditions), for fostering intellectual diversity. The Yale Report vaguely acknowledges that over the 2010s in particular these structures failed. But it does not explain the failure other than to refer (vaguely) to issues like tuition costs and self-contradictory new institutional missions. I actually agree with the report that tuition and confused mission statements are relevant to the emergence of ideological groupthink. But it’s not clear just how this connection works–and at any rate, I think something deeper is bei

Timur Kuran:

Hampshire College Professor Noah Romero on Decolonizing Education:

“The future depends on Indigenous knowledge [Anti-Capitalist Values]. If we want to decolonize education, that means undoing, dislodging, subverting, all those things that make up the foundational DNA [Capitalism] of everything that we see navigating a settler society like the US.”

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more.

Will Manidis:

“(Cynicism) lets you act as though your role in the world is to sort the worthy from the unworthy, instead of learning to love, to build, to discern honestly, and to leave judgment where it belongs.”

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more.

Jacob Wolf:

As the United States approaches its semiquincentennial celebration, Americans would do well to examine how we talk and, indeed, how we think about our national heritage. Any honest reflection must begin with an uncomfortable admission: we have largely failed to inspire young Americans with a durable sense of civic pride or even national gratitude. The great challenge of our time is therefore not political but pedagogical—it consists in educating future Americans as to what makes our nation both unique and uniquely laudable. Across the political landscape, one encounters a troubling disillusionment with American ideals, coupled with a profound ignorance of our institutions. Worse still, young Americans possess little sense of our history—except perhaps its failings—and even less appreciation for the costs of freedom. Like heirs to an unearned fortune, we have grown weary, and even embarrassed, of our riches, with no sense of duty to preserve them into the future.

Much of the blame rests with the university. Too often, institutions of higher education inculcate in students a reflexive skepticism toward our inherited moral and civic order, rather than equip them to understand and evaluate that order on its own merits. In response, many reformers have sought to cultivate a civic renaissance through renewed collaboration between state legislatures and universities. These developments reflect a growing recognition that an indoctrination in what Roger Scruton called the “culture of repudiation” is no education at all. Policymakers have accordingly begun to question whether such an education truly serves the public good—and, consequently, whether it merits public support. Increasingly, state funding has therefore been conditioned on the establishment of schools, departments, and initiatives around civic education and civil discourse.

Andy Smarick:

Most students in higher education attend public institutions, and those institutions are governed by public boards. This paper finds that 87% of undergraduates in four-year public colleges and universities attend schools whose boards are controlled by their state governors.

This fact differentiates American public higher education from American public K–12 education, where nearly all students are in schools governed by locally elected boards (instead of the governor or some other state authority). This also differentiates public higher-education institutions from private higher-education institutions, which have private boards insulated from external pressure. For reform-minded public policy professionals, therefore, state governors are the crucial entry point for improving higher education in the United States.

Since governing boards hire and fire college presidents and set the most important campus policies, U.S. governors could dramatically reform public higher education through their appointment power alone. Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s public-college students are in states won by Donald Trump in 2024, so winning governors’ races could transform higher education.

This paper maps out the primary governing entity for college boards in every state in the U.S. and offers suggestions for transforming public boards.

Bill Glahn:

In the Edina case, according to the original police complaint, Amiir and two confederates were en route to the Mariucci ice hockey arena on the campus of the University of Minnesota for the Edina High School graduation ceremony when pulled over by Minneapolis city cops. The three did not make it to the graduation site, the location of the Wayzata HS double shooting a few days prior.

Ali was caught with the 10 mm pistol described above during the traffic stop.

Edina HS will hold its 2026 graduation ceremony at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, home of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings.

Devin Dwyer

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Wednesday delivered a televised broadside against progressivism, a political philosophy he described as an existential threat to America and the principles that founded it 250 years ago. 

“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” Thomas said in a speech at the University of Texas Austin Law School pegged to the nation’s upcoming milestone birthday. 

A spirit of “cynicism, rejection, hostility and animus” toward America — by Americans — has taken hold, Thomas said in remarks carried live on CSPAN.

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Entire unedited appearance attached below.

Ingezonden

What we are not getting rewarded for, is being open about how complex, messy and uncertain research results can be. For articulating all those pesky assumptions our inferences are based on – or even for worrying about them too much ourselves. For showing how variable our results are, depending on the models we choose apply to our data. For being transparent about all the decisions we make as part of our scientific workflow, at best based on reasoned and reasonable trade-offs between practical feasibility and maximum rigor rather then self-serving opportunism.

For spending the time, effort and money needed for collecting high-quality data when there are cheaper short-cuts available. For showing the results of our analyses that don’t fit so nicely with the story. For admitting that the data are simply too noisy to provide a clear signal. For taking the time that is necessary to complete research projects that adhere to FAIR principles, rather than just pumping out another publication. For doing the kind of theoretical and empirical grunt work that is needed to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge instead of just telling interesting “new” stories.

By no means universally, with large variations between different areas of study and between academic communities, and with incremental improvements over time. But still way too pervasively.

Harvard Summer School:

For decades, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences publicly released an annual financial report each fall, offering a detailed snapshot of its revenues, expenses, and long-term fiscal position.

This year, it did not.

The FAS has not published its fiscal year 2025 financial report — typically released in the fall — marking its first break from the practice in nearly two decades. The report, however, was commissioned.

A version obtained by The Crimson shows that FAS brought in $1.78 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, an increase of roughly $106 million, or about six percent, from the previous year.

Total expenses, meanwhile, reached $1.79 billion, leaving the school with a $7.7 million deficit — a reversal from a $2.9 million surplus the year prior.

www

Since the Great Recession left technology as a rare spot of optimism in American industry, computer science has been among the fastest-growing college majors in the country, according to indispensable degree data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

From 2008 to 2024, the number of four-year computer science degrees granted rose about fivefold. That’s more than double the pace of the next fastest-growing large majors: exercise science, nursing and mechanical engineering.

Now there are signs that the 15-year boom in computer science education may be ending or at least morphing. The change is not showing up in graduations — at least not yet. But we can see it in enrollment data from the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse, which crunches numbers from 97 percent of U.S. universities.

Student enrollment in computer science at four-year colleges fell 8.1 percent in the fall of 2025. In absolute numbers, it’s the biggest one-year drop of any major discipline going back to at least 2020. In a single year, computer science fell from the fourth-largest undergraduate major to sixth. (Business, health and liberal arts have consistently taken the top three spots.)

Joanne Jacobs

Graduation rates are up since the new rules went into effect for the Class of ’23, she writes. “But at the same time, high school students’ scores on state math and reading tests have declined.”

Statewide, about one-fifth of students use credentials to earn a diploma, but it’s 40 percent in Philadelphia. 

Students with low test scores can graduate if they’re enrolled in a specific career and technical education program or pre-apprenticeship, she writes. However, many schools don’t offer these programs. 

Many options for “evidence” can qualify a student for graduation, including “a full-time job offer, a dual-enrollment credit, and an AP or IB score,” Redelmeier writes. The easy-to-earn credentials are by far the most popular.

A project by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

The tech tree is an interactive visualization of technological history from 3 million years ago to today. A work in progress, it currently contains 2206technologies and 2839 connections between them

Washington Post:

But the support staff union’s concerns weren’t about education at all. Its negotiators wanted the district to give them more work hours, hire fewer nonunion subcontractors and rescind a previous layoff of tech workers. This left families wondering whether their kids would be able to go to school as the district haggled over labor contract minutiae for non-teachers late into the night.

Mayor Karen Bass (D) intervened to ensure a strike wouldn’t occur, but her contribution wasn’t so much a negotiation as a surrender. The support staff union got what it wanted, which includes a 24 percent raise over three years.

——-

Related: Act 10.

Milwaukee County pension scandal trial primer

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Maddie Hanna:

About 200 parents signed a petition to opt out of receiving school-issued Chromebooks. They say kids are spending time using low-quality programs, and fear impact to cognitive development.

Matthew Weaver

One of the UK’s leading museums has accepted demands by a Chinese firm that publishes its catalogues to remove images that fall foul of the country’s censorship laws.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has agreed to requests by the Chinese printing company to delete maps and images from at least two recent exhibition catalogues, according to documents released to the Guardian after freedom of information requests.

Like other prominent institutions, including the British Museum, Tate and the British Library, the V&A often uses Chinese printers because they can produce catalogues at half the cost of British or European companies.

But in doing so, they have to accede to censorship requests relating to any topics or images deemed sensitive by the Chinese government, such as Buddhism, Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square and pro-democracy activities.

The disclosures from the V&A lay bare the detailed scope of China’s censorship on museum publishers. They show how Beijing’s red pen even extends to historical maps and photographs on seemingly unrelated subjects such as Fabergé eggs and British Black music.

1636 Forum

Now comes the hard part: repetition and constant reinforcement

HARVARD ELECTIONS: For Board of Overseers elections, we recommend: Salvo Arena, Nisha Kumar Behringer, Trey Grayson, Alfredo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena, and Philip Harrison. For Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) Elected Director elections, we recommend: Mia Esther Alpert, James P. “Jimmy” Biblarz, Allison Charney Epstein, Medha Gargeya, David Lefer, and Jakob Haesler. 

In February, we explained that the mission statements of Harvard’s schools should function as a clear north star — an organizing principle that helps leaders set priorities, explain them, and return to them when the path forward is unclear. Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) mission statement at the time, centered on nurturing HMS’s own community, made that harder to do.

On Thursday, HMS published a new mission statementalongside a revised set of Community Values. With its revisions, HMS has made its north star clearer.

Maddy Savage

Sweden’s government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.

But doubling down on analogue tools has drawn criticism from tech companies, educators and computer scientists, who argue it could impact pupils’ employment prospects, and even damage the Nordic nation’s economy.

At a high school in Nacka just outside Stockholm, final-year students are unpacking laptops from rucksacks and tote bags, alongside items they say they used less frequently a few years ago.

“I now go home from school with new books and papers often,” says Sophie, 18. She says one teacher “has started printing all the texts that we use during the lesson”, while a digital learning platform in maths lessons has been swapped out for textbook-only teaching.

Jessica Reidl:

Annual Budget Deficits are Projected to Approach $4.4 Trillion Within a Decade (p. 7)

 Interest to Consume 31% of Revenues Within a Decade, More Than Half By 2056 (9, 79)

 The U.S. Now Has the OECD’s Largest Budget Deficit and 4th Largest Debt (21-22)

 How Did Washington Go from Budget Surpluses to Escalating Deficits? (28, 49)

 Rising Social Security & Medicare Shortfalls Drive 2023–36 Deficit Rise (45-47)

 Debt in 30 Years Reaches Between 175%–379% of GDP, Depending on Baseline (59)

 What is Driving CBO’s Projected $138 Trillion Deficit over 30 Years? (61–67)

 How Much Does Social Security Add to Annual Deficits and the Debt Per Year? (71-72)

 Each 1% Interest-Rate Rise Adds $57 Trillion (or 60% of GDP) to 30-Year Debt (75-78)

 A Menu of Tax Increase Options With 10-Year and Long-Term Estimates (81)

 Taxing the Rich Could Raise at Most 1% or 2% of GDP (84)

 Does the U.S. Have the OECD’s Most Progressive Tax Code? (92-93, 102)

 What Really Caused the 1990s Budget Surpluses? (110)

 The Comprehensive Budget Record of Presidents Bush (112-113), Obama (114–121),

Trump (122–126), and Biden (127-132)Methodology

“Smarter Articles”:

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) represented, in the United States at least, the triumph of measurable outcomes over meaningful learning. Under its regime, schools were judged by their students’ performance on standardised assessments. The consequences of poor scores were severe: funding cuts, staff dismissals, school closures. The entirely predictable result was what educators came to call “teaching to the test,” a practice in which classroom instruction was narrowed to the specific content and formats that would appear on state exams.

The effects were devastating and well-documented. Subjects not covered by standardised tests, including art, music, physical education, and social studies, were minimised or eliminated outright. Some principals eliminated recess to devote more time to test preparation. Science was replaced with additional maths drills. Social studies gave way to language arts worksheets. The phrase that captured this era most succinctly was “sit, get, spit, forget,” a cycle in which students received information passively, regurgitated it on an exam, and promptly forgot it, having never engaged with it at any depth.

The situation in the United Kingdom has followed a parallel trajectory. Successive reforms since the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, the expansion of league tables in the 1990s, and the intensification of Ofsted inspections have created an accountability culture that rewards measurable outcomes above all else. Teachers in England report spending enormous amounts of time on assessment preparation, data tracking, and administrative compliance, time that might otherwise be devoted to the kind of open-ended, inquiry-driven teaching that develops critical thinking. The Department for Education published expanded guidance on AI in education in June 2025, stressing that AI tools should support rather than replace subject knowledge and that students still need a strong foundation in reading, writing, and critical thinking to use these tools effectively. But guidance is one thing; structural reform is quite another.

Arthur Brooks

Inflation is in the news again. Grade inflation, that is.

Last week, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University was scheduled to vote on a proposal to cap A grades, subjecting them to a limit of 20 percent plus four students per class. The proposal also included a plan to link academic honors not to grades, but to a percentile-ranking metric. This came after a long period of grade inflation at the university, to the point that in the academic year 2024–25, 66 percent of students were awarded As, and 84 percent received either As or A-minuses.

Alarm over this trend has been rising for years. In the words of Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, “Our current grading practices are not only undermining the functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the college.”

Kinstantin Kakaes:

As they related in a preprint on January 3, 2026, AlphaEvolve had found that the Bruhat intervals in these particular permutation groups had a surprisingly special structure. When the researchers studied the intervals, they found that they formed higher-dimensional cubes called hypercubes. “If you look at what AlphaEvolve was thinking, I was super surprised,” Libedinsky said. “If it was a human, it would be an extremely creative human.”

AlphaEvolve had answered a question they didn’t know they had. “We didn’t ask AlphaEvolve to find big hypercubes,” Ellenberg said. “We asked it to find something else, and we thought about it and realized it was a gigantic hypercube which we had not anticipated was there.”

As Williamson put it, “It’s a structure that’s been sitting there for 50 years in front of our nose. We just hadn’t noticed it.”

Older machine learning methods had previously enabled such serendipitous mathematical discoveries, too — uncovering patterns no one had thought to look for. But in the past, Williamson said, it was a “real engineering effort. … You need to know how to code, spend a lot of time looking at details of neural network training. It was basically extremely difficult for a mathematician with no significant machine learning background to do this.”

Russell Shaw:

In 1996, I was a freshly minted high-school history teacher offering a lesson about the presidential election. Ned, who sat in the back row, was doing what Ned always did: making his classmates laugh. He had a gift for the well-timed quip. His comebacks flew so quickly, it was as if he’d prepared them in advance. Generally, he seemed to invest more energy in entertaining the room than in whatever we were studying.

A few years ago, Ned reached out to me on Facebook. He is now a high-school English teacher. In his message, he recalled in great detail the debates we’d had about the Civil War, the play our class had performed about Vietnam, the days I had assigned students to bring in a newspaper article and explain it to the class—which is when he had started reading the paper. And all this time, I’d assumed Ned hadn’t been paying attention.

Truth be told, in my 30 years in schools, I’ve met a lot of kids like Ned: the ones who won’t stop with the commentary; the ones who raise a hand not to answer a question but to challenge its premise; the contrarians and antagonists who make some teachers quietly miserable. These students can be exhausting. They are also among the most important in any school, and the ones whom educational institutions tend to be the most at risk of failing.

Schools are, among other things, reward systems. The adults dispense grades, awards, and leadership positions, and the students who most often accumulate these tend to be the ones who make teachers’ lives relatively painless: They do what they’re told and give the adults what they want. To be clear, teachers aren’t intentionally cultivating blind obedience; they simply have a roomful of students and not enough time, which may lead them, understandably, to reward compliance.

Asimov Press, Ulkar Aghayeva

Published research papers are far from literal accounts of the process of scientific discovery. In contemporary scientific practice, once publishable results are obtained, the actual path taken to reach them becomes more or less irrelevant. Dead ends and false trails are omitted, and out of the messy process of raw research emerges a coherent narrative following clean, linear lines of argument.

But in the space between the hands-on, physical reality of experimental science and the structured narratives fit for printed journals, sits a special genre of scientific writing: lab notebooks. They are the closest witness to “science in the making” (short of live video recordings, which only became available at scale recently).

Historically, scientists recorded ideas and experiments in their lab notebooks with a very restricted audience in mind, sometimes just their colleagues within a research group. For this reason, though some are distinguished by a more literary style and read almost like diaries, most of these records are highly abbreviated and undecipherable to outsiders.

Daniel Jonas Roche:

Pratt Institute faculty members have launched a petitionaimed at reversing proposed cuts to contact hours for the Humanities and Media Studies Department’s Architecture Writing Program (AWP). 

The AWP’s goal is to strengthen the critical thinking capacities of Pratt architecture students. Writing workshops and course readings introduce students to the humanities and are meant to help them better articulate their designs in the studio.

Instructors affirm that the AWP is important for counteracting AI in the classroom, as more architecture students lean on AI for writing assignments. The AWP is also majorly beneficial for students whose first language is not English, faculty note. Pratt School of Architecture students conduct research in coursework in a dedicated reading room that opened in 2023. The space in the basement of Higgins Hall holds the William “Bill” Menking Book Collection, the library of AN’s cofounder and longtime editor-in-chief.

The provost office at Pratt first proposed cuts to AWP contact hours in the 2024 academic year, according to Cameron Crawford, AWP faculty. Professors started pushing back against the cuts that summer. The administration again floated the cuts earlier this year.

Casey Mack, AWP faculty, told AN that professors met with the administration in early April, however the administration refused to make concessions. Mack said he and AWP faculty members will continue to fight the cuts.

Scott Niederjohn,:

Unwinding distortions in higher education starts to bite into student lending, college funding

There is new evidence that some students hurt themselves economically by going to college — a fact Republicans are using to limit student loans.

The phenomena has one state, Indiana, passing a law to end some academic programs altogether.

Pat Garrett:
See how much three major policy changes could cost you and your family

In the years leading up to 2010, property taxes in Wisconsin were on a steady upward trajectory, with residents paying roughly 20 to 30 percent more than the national average. Those trends put Wisconsin near the top nationally in property tax burden.  

That trajectory began to shift in 2011. Reforms such as Act 10 and tighter limits on local spending were enacted to slow the growth of major cost drivers affecting local governments and school districts and ultimately reduce pressure on property taxpayers. 

For more than a decade, those reforms delivered results. Property tax growth stabilized, and Wisconsin moved closer to the national average on a per capita basis. The figure below demonstrates that progress. Wisconsin still ranks 10th nationally in property taxes as a share of home value, so there is still work to be done. But the trend shows that we’ve made meaningful progress over time. 

But that progress is now at risk. 

Wiseye:

On April 15, 2026, the Assembly Committee on Government Operations, Accountability, and Transparency will hold an informational hearingon Department of Public Instruction policies, procedures, and compliance regarding open meetings laws and open records laws; standard-setting and benchmarking process for the Forward Exam.

Speakers:

• Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Dr. Jill Underly, State Superintendent of Public Instruction; Leadership and agency representatives as determined by DPI (Dr. Underly was Invited, but is unable to appear.)
• Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Andrew Hoyer-Booth, Legislative Liaison
• Institute for Reforming Government Jake Curtis, General Counsel and Director of Center for Investigative Oversight; Quinton Klabon, Senior Research Director

——-

Dairyland Sentinel:

So far, DPI has said.
They dragged their feet on fulfilling our open records request because:
1) They had staff vacancies in their legal department
2) The request was from an advocacy organization that has been critical of DPI
And…

IRG:

“DPI can’t continue to duck and hide when it comes to the 2024 conference that ultimately led to Superintendent Underly lowering Forward Exam cut scores. The fact that they sent two individuals to defend the process who weren’t DPI employees in 2024, and certainly didn’t attend the conference in question, is an insult to taxpayers,” said Jake Curtis, IRG General Counsel.

Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Jill Underly was invited by the committee but sent staff instead. Notably, the staff who testified on her behalf were not DPI employees at the time of the 2024 conference under question. 

IRG announced on Tuesday that it filed a complaint to hold DPI accountable for its secret meeting that led to DPI lowering test score standards. Actions taken at illegal meetings are voidable under state law. If a court determines that DPI violated Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law by conducting the meeting in secret, a judge could declare the newly adopted controversial testing standards invalid.

——-

Jon Styf:

The sexual misconduct work that Judge referenced that were heightened after a Capital Times report into how DPI handles teacher license investigations occurred after the public records response from DPI was delayed.

Rep. Mike Bare, D-Verona, asked Nedweski and Curtis if they would join him in a request for more funding for DPI for public records responses. He said that committee meetings like Wednesday’s unfairly add to educator and public school mistrust.

“The mistrust is growing because of theater like this,” Bare said.

Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard, said that Democrats always attempt to use discussions about DPI’s actions to push for more funding for the department.

“The solution provided from the other side is almost always money,” Steffen said. “I reject that. I know the public does as well.”

——-

Corrinne Hess:

“There’s a lot of fog right now of how things played out in 2024, because you have this meeting that happened that we have no records of other than a private vendor worked with DPI on standardized testing,” said State Rep. Nate Gustafson, R-Omro. “Then we have the superintendent come out and lower standards across schools. And there is this cost with no record of what the standard is.” 

——-

Vanessa Kjeldsen:

“You are setting a very impactful policy on academic standards for students throughout the state. You have no parents present. No legislators present. No members of the public involved,” said state Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie. 

———-

Benjamin Yount:

Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Gillett, on Wednesday said the Department of Public Instruction “failed” to answer even basic questions about changes to the Forward Exam, and the now-infamous watermark weekend, at the Assembly transparency committee’s hearing. 

“[Tuesday’s] hearing once again shows that DPI is actively withholding records from the public over its attempt to quietly lower school standards behind closed doors,” Wimberger said. “These changes were only made to cover-over Superintendent [Jill] Underly’s failures, and weaken success standards for our students.”

DPI officials told lawmakers that the hearing into the waterpark weekend was a “distraction” and was “repetitive.”

———-

——-

more.

A Dane County Judge appointed by Governor Evers – Ben Jones – was previously a DPI attorney.

DPI notes & links.

Jill Underly.

Chad Aldeman

Congratulations! High school graduation rates in your state are hitting all-time highs!  

But before you crack open the champagne, you should know that only a small fraction of those students can do high school-level math. Those graduates may struggle if they try to go to college, qualify for military service or pursue other technical training. 

How big is this problem? And how does it vary across the country? In a recent project for The Collaborative for Student Success, I set out to quantify the disparity between a state’s high school graduation and math proficiency rates. We dubbed this the Graduation Gap.

Because states define high school math proficiency differently, the precise gaps are not perfectly comparable across states. But in many places, the disparities are shockingly large. In California, for example, 86% of high school students are graduating within four years, yet just 30% of 11^th graders pass the state math test. Florida reports a 90% graduation rate while 44% of students reached only level 3 out of 5 on end-of-course exams in algebra and geometry. The state warns that students performing at this level “may need additional support for the next grade/course.”

Karl Scholz:

Enrollment is the area where we have the least clarity. And it’s important because tuition is the single most influential factor in our operating (E&G) budget. Competition for prospective students—especially non-resident students—is fiercer than it has ever been, as universities across the country try to offset losses in international enrollment, uncertain state appropriations, rising costs due to geopolitical tensions, and cuts to research funding. Decision day for prospective students isn’t until early May, so we simply don’t have a full picture of enrollment yet. 

What I can tell you is many outstanding professionals are working extraordinarily hard on this. Derek Kindle and his enrollment management team have been effective and creative since the day he arrived. Provost Chris Long and our deans have been actively engaged in recruitment. Our faculty and staff are doing critical work on retention, from the redesigned First-Year Interest Groups launching next fall to new undergraduate research opportunities and expanded advising in the areas where data tell us it matters most. I’m grateful to everyone who is part of this effort.

——-

more. Commentary,

Yale:

To President McInnis:

In April 2025, you asked our committee to examine the problem of declining trust in higher education. Your charge emphasized the need to engage a variety of perspectives, both within the university and beyond. While you specified a few important issues, such as the problem of self- censorship on campus, you afforded our committee a broad mandate to conduct our work as we saw fit. We now submit this report of our deliberations and recommendations.

We undertook this task at a difficult moment for higher education in the United States. You encouraged us to take the long view. As you noted, the problem of declining trust did not emerge out of nowhere over the past few months or years. Nor is it a challenge that will be met through short-term solutions. We welcomed your call to think big, tell the truth, and entertain controversial ideas.

Our research took us in many directions. We discussed tuition prices and admissions policy, political bias on campus and technology in the classroom, self-censorship and university governance and grade inflation. We examined what other universities were doing and tried to figure out how Yale measures up. Our research engaged issues of public trust—what the university looks like from the outside in—but also complementary issues of trust within the university itself.

We believe the issue of declining trust is real, urgent, and must be addressed. We focused our recommendations on Yale, but we hope they may prove useful to others in higher education as well.

Our committee’s work brought us face to face with some of higher education’s greatest challenges and blind spots. At the same time, we were heartened by the widespread enthusiasm for what colleges and universities do, and what they can yet be.

——

Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems

——

From the Yale Report: “Faculty … worry that the wrong book on a syllabus or the wrong idea expressed on social media may damage their careers or get them fired. [They endure] pressures to conform to campus opinion, especially on matters involving race, gender, and sexuality.”

Melissa Whitler:

Minneapolis Public Schools withheld nearly $3 million owed to an employee health care trust account beginning in 2024, according to a heavily redacted report prepared by the law firm Greene Espel late last year and obtained by the Reformer as part of a public records request.

The school district’s financial maneuver, which has not previously been reported, risked creating a shortfall in the health care account, known as voluntary employee benefits association, or VEBA, under the IRS tax code. 

The withheld funds included both employees’ and employer’s contributions to health insurance premiums. Because the district self-insures, money from that account is used to pay health care claims, which is why the fund is supposed to be walled off to prevent raiding for other uses. It’s unclear whether the withholding violated any laws or collective bargaining agreements with district unions. 

The money was restored, according to the Greene Espel report, but the situation led to a high-profile termination and resignation and forced the district to spend heavily on an outside consultant to manage its finances.  

Arjun Neil Alim:

Hong Kong should replace Cantonese with Mandarin in schools in order to boost its competitiveness, the chief executive of one of the territory’s biggest companies said on Tuesday.

“We should really revamp our public education system. Our next generation has to be much more connected to China in terms of language and culture,” said Hui Kuok, chair and group chief executive of the Shangri-La luxury hotel group.

Kuok is the daughter of Robert Kuok, founder of the hotel group and Malaysia’s richest man.

“One way to do this could be over time to make Putonghua [Standard Mandarin] the main medium of instruction in schools,” she said, speaking at HSBC’s Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong.

“Another way could be for Hong Kong to invite some of the best public schools in China to open campuses here, just like we have done for international schools for decades.”

Mandarin is increasingly common in Hong Kong across trading floors and in business contexts as large numbers of mainland Chinese professionals arrive in the territory.

Matt Taibbi:

Like the rest, Obama began reversing every promise right after election, expanding extrajudicial assassinations to Americans while saying things like “It turns out I’m really good at killing people.” He brought Hillary in as Secretary of State. She promptly birthed a giant new shit-ball in Libya and advocated for at least one more regime change war in Syria before leaving to gorge on bank cash and prepare for the 2016 Faceplant. Obama then completed an epic Circle of Non-Change by replacing her with Kerry, an all-time hack who entered office with an astonishing re-re-repudiation of his beliefs, saying both he and Defense Minister Chuck Hagel “opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq” as Senators, an all-time lie.

Dave Cieslewicz:

So, the Regents wanting to part ways with their own president (the one they had selected), isn’t all that surprising or all that unusual in the annals of corporate, nonprofit or governmental settings. But usually this plays out in predictable ways which it did not in this case. 

Having been part of these kinds of situations both as mayor and as a member of nonprofit boards, here’s how it usually goes. First off, nobody is surprised. By the time it gets to this point, the manager knows what’s coming. If anything, boards tend to wait too long to act. They want to avoid the uncomfortableness and so they try to convince themselves that the situation will improve. It never does. 

So when confronted with the inevitable, the manager falls on his sword in exchange for some kind of severance and a lot of face saving. There’s almost always a formal or verbal nondisparagement agreement. The manager is allowed to resign, retire or take time to find another job. The parties agree to speak no evil of the other. 

What was unusual about this case was that both those things were missing. Rothman claims he was blindsided — the Regents claim he wasn’t. But there’s no question that legislators and the public had no inkling that this was coming, save for the rearview mirror of the DEI agreement resignation threat. And Rothman, once confronted with the reality that he had lost the confidence of the board, did not go quietly. 

All of which drives me to a set of conflicting conclusions. On the one hand, I now think Rothman should have done the honorable thing, He should have accepted the inevitable reality that he could not continue without the confidence of his bosses and announced that he had decide to retire or return to private law practice at the end of the year. He could have said, quite honestly, that he had accomplished all that he had set out to do. The Regents probably would have even thrown him the nicest party possible provided by UW catering.

——-

More.

Paul Kiernan and Roshan Fernandez:

Unions representing teachers and principals had already struck deals over the weekend. The United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents some 35,000 public-school teachers, said it won an average pay increase of nearly 14% over two years. The union representing principals and assistant principals, Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, said it earned a 12% raise over two years.

Negotiations with the third union, representing about 30,000 employees including bus drivers, custodians and special-education aides, lasted until hours before the start of school on Tuesday. SEIU Local 99 said it won a 24% wage increase over three years.

The deal avoided the closure of more than 1,300 public schools, since all three unions agreed to strike in solidarity if any one of them was unable to reach an agreement.

The threatened strike came as pandemic-era funding streams for education are running out, squeezing school districts around the country. At the same time, California’s powerful unions are under pressure from members to keep up with sky-high housing costs in one of the country’s most expensive metro areas.

California school districts receive most of their funding from the state government, which is legally required to spend 40% of its normal budget on education. The Legislative Analyst’s Office, a nonpartisan state agency that advises California’s legislature, in February warned that revenues are vulnerable to a stock-market downturn and urged lawmakers to be cautious about committing to new spending.

Better Results with Lower Spending: Public Education in Massachusetts and New York

Frederick Kaufman:

In 1989, as the Cold War began to fade and the eastern frontier opened, a young, penniless would-be Russian writer made the classic trip from Moscow to Paris to meet the man he had selected to be his intellectual mentor. The mentor was the writer Alain de Benoist. Born in 1943, De Benoist had started his career in 1960 as a literary critic at Lectures Françaises, a review founded by Henry Coston, the former vice president of the Anti-Jewish Journalists Association during the war. Coston was later appointed by Marshall Pétain as head of the Information Bulletin on the Jewish Question, the official press organ of the Bureau of Jewish Affairs in charge of the spoliation and the deportation of Jews under Vichy. Lectures Françaises also published the first Holocaust deniers in Europe (who all happened to be French).

As for the young penniless Russian, that was Alexander Gelyevich Dugin, Putin’s future own personal, paranoid mystic Rasputin—and today the transgressive cultural icon of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and other trendy podcasters and influence peddlers on the American right. Because of his newfound status in these precincts, Dugin has become the object of mystified fascination, with commentaries parsing his words to uncover the hidden agenda being hawked by his acolytes in the so-called influencer class. However, such endeavors have been largely confused, variously identifying disparate ideological currents depending on the critics’ own inclinations. Consequently, American commentators who criticize Dugin and his new American followers as “communists” are misled. Dugin’s vision, such as it is, owes as much to the mystical darkness of Russian feudalism as it does to third-worldist and right-wing trends that emerged in post-World War II France and to 21st-century chaos.

C. Jarrett Dieterle:

In 2011, Wisconsin made national news headlines when then-Gov. Scott Walker attempted to reform public sector collective bargaining as a part of his push for fiscal responsibility. At the height of the Tea Party movement, what became known as Act 10—which restricted the areas public sector employees could collectively bargain over—quickly transformed into a political hornet’s nest.

Democratic state lawmakers infamously fled the state for Chicago in an effort to block a vote on the bill as it was winding its way through the legislature, and Walker eventually faced a recall election.

He survived. This year, Act 10 turns 15. By all available evidence, it has worked exactly as intended. But despite the law’s positive impact for Wisconsin taxpayers and the state fisc, it is facing a questionable legal challenge that may finally doom it.

When Walker took office in 2010, Wisconsin was staring down the barrel of a $3.6 billion budget deficit. One of Walker’s primary responses was to push Act 10; the law allowed bargaining over wages but not things like pensions and health insurance. It also put state government employees on the hook for covering 12 percent of the premium costs for their government-provided health insurance plans, in addition to mandating more employee contributions to pensions.

Francesca Procopio,Quan Zhou, Ziye Wang, Agnieska Gidziela^,, Kaili Rimfeld, Margherita Malanchini and Robert Plomin:

Individual differences in performance on tests of cognitive ability is one of the oldest and most studied areas of genetic research (Knopik, Neiderhiser, DeFries, & Plomin, 2017). The majority of this research focuses on general cognitive ability (g) (Plomin & Deary, 2015), which is the highest level in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) hierarchical model of intelligence (McGrew, 2009). Family, twin and adoption studies converge on the conclusion that g is about 50% heritable (Chipuer, Rovine, & Plomin, 1990). A surprising finding is that the heritability of g increases dramatically across the lifespan – from about 20% in infancy to 40% in childhood to 60% in adulthood (Briley & Tucker-Drob, 2013; Haworth et al., 2010; Plomin, 1986).

Much less is known about the genetics of the middle level of the CHC model, which includes 16 broad factors such as reasoning, comprehension-knowledge, processing speed, reading and writing, and quantitative knowledge (Coyle & Greiff, 2021). These factors encompass hundreds of individual tests that comprise the lowest level of the CHC model. We refer to this middle level of the CHC model as specific cognitive abilities (SCA), even though we acknowledge that these factors are not completely independent of g. Despite the fact that SCA are correlated with g, it seems reasonable to review research that attempts to assess domains that are more specific than g, such as reading and writing, visual processing, and short-term memory.

——

What your genes say about how you think

Francesca Procopio,Quan Zhou, Ziye Wang, Agnieska Gidziela^,, Kaili Rimfeld, Margherita Malanchini and Robert Plomin:

Individual differences in performance on tests of cognitive ability is one of the oldest and most studied areas of genetic research (Knopik, Neiderhiser, DeFries, & Plomin, 2017). The majority of this research focuses on general cognitive ability (g) (Plomin & Deary, 2015), which is the highest level in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) hierarchical model of intelligence (McGrew, 2009). Family, twin and adoption studies converge on the conclusion that g is about 50% heritable (Chipuer, Rovine, & Plomin, 1990). A surprising finding is that the heritability of g increases dramatically across the lifespan – from about 20% in infancy to 40% in childhood to 60% in adulthood (Briley & Tucker-Drob, 2013; Haworth et al., 2010; Plomin, 1986).

Much less is known about the genetics of the middle level of the CHC model, which includes 16 broad factors such as reasoning, comprehension-knowledge, processing speed, reading and writing, and quantitative knowledge (Coyle & Greiff, 2021). These factors encompass hundreds of individual tests that comprise the lowest level of the CHC model. We refer to this middle level of the CHC model as specific cognitive abilities (SCA), even though we acknowledge that these factors are not completely independent of g. Despite the fact that SCA are correlated with g, it seems reasonable to review research that attempts to assess domains that are more specific than g, such as reading and writing, visual processing, and short-term memory.

Molly Beck:

Guv race news: WEAC, the state’s largest teachers union, endorses Democratic state Sen. Kelda Roys for governor.

——

A bit of history:

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

———

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

3888 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 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]

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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

WILL:

The Wisconsin Constitution grants the Legislature the authority to determine education policy and to effectuate school funding and charges the Superintendent of Public Instruction with the task of supervising public instruction, not the judicial branch. Moreover, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s Choice Programs 30 years ago.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “Courts are not legislatures. They do not get to design or run state school finance systems. That is a policy decision for elected representatives. We’re proud to stand with parents, taxpayers, and schools who value the separation of powers and want a system that prioritizes student success and academic achievement. This lawsuit is a direct threat to that, and we are going to fight it.”

Potential Harm to Our Clients: The parents and taxpayers we represent believe that they will be harmed if the Plaintiffs’ demands are met because it would fundamentally alter our education system in ways that are harmful and likely result in an increase to state and local taxes without increasing educational performance. They also believe parents should have the freedom to choose where their children are educated, and that expanding those choices has increased access to a quality education for students across the state.

Our other clients, School Choice Wisconsin Action, Impact Christian Schools, Green Bay Area Catholic Education, St. Marcus Lutheran School, Shoreland Lutheran High School and Catholic Memorial High School, seek to defend school choice in Wisconsin from a new attack after decades of success. Tens of thousands of children and their families will be significantly harmed if the choice programs are reduced or eliminated, which is a stated goal of the lawsuit.

——-

more.

A Dane County Judge appointed by Governor Evers – Ben Jones – was previously a DPI attorney.

DPI notes & links.

Jill Underly.

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

3888 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Natalie Eilbert:

When Cap Times reporters Erin Gretzinger and DuClos wrote about Eliav Goldman, a Madison teacher recently arrested and charged on two counts of sexual misconduct against a student and grooming a child for sexual activity, we learned he was among the first to be charged under the new anti-grooming laws. But their story also showed disturbing gaps in the Madison School District’s policies related to sexual misconduct, despite a case five years prior that should have compelled the district to create explicit anti-grooming policies.

As one former student said during the 2021 sentencing of David Kruchten — a former East High School teacher convicted on federal charges after students on field trips found hidden cameras in their hotel rooms — the teacher’s behaviors “tainted every single one of his victims’ high school experience, and we will continue to feel these repercussions for years to come.”

I know what she means. I experienced it firsthand in my girlhood, though I never knew to call it grooming until I read DuClos’ “Dismissed” series. 

When I was 12, I began taking private guitar lessons from an independent music store across the street from my high school. I wanted to be in a femme rock band with my friends with all the Riot Grrrl ferocity of Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill. To my surprise, I found myself drawn to classical guitar. By 13, I was playing Paganini sonatas with my eyes closed. I warmed up with a complex rendition of Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind.” I was excited about my potential.

My teacher made me feel special and told me often I was talented. At first, it was motivating. So why did my stomach hurt before lessons? Why did I eventually dread going? I wanted to make him proud of me, but the feeling I associated with that got complicated around the time I started high school.

Not long into my lessons, my guitar teacher called me precocious. He started complaining about his girlfriends to me, sharing graphic details of his sex life. And he told me on a few occasions that he wished they could be more like me. Other times, to tease me, he would flick guitar picks at me, aiming to get them down my shirt. He would bring in gifts for me. He took photos of me, too.

———-

A Dane County Judge appointed by Governor Evers – Ben Jones – was previously a DPI attorney.

DPI notes & links.

Jill Underly.

Dairyland Sentinel

At the center of the dispute is a four-day “standard setting” session held at a resort, where education officials reviewed and adjusted benchmarks for the state’s Forward Exam. Critics say those changes effectively lowered the bar for what counts as student proficiency.

——

A Dane County Judge appointed by Governor Evers – Ben Jones – was previously a DPI attorney.

DPI notes & links.

Jill Underly.

Jason Mandell:

A reporter had tagged along with our valedictorian, Loren Easton, and found the freckled 17-year-old wrestling with disappointment, a sense that we hadn’t lived up to the school’s expectations. “All we cared about was getting into good colleges and we didn’t even do that well,” Easton told the reporter. The truth was that 44 percent of us had gotten into an Ivy League school. But for Easton, who spoke for at least some portion of our class — and who’d chosen the University of Pennsylvania after being rejected by his first choice, Dartmouth — it was less about the data and more about the feeling that we weren’t a particularly impressive bunch. “We’re not like last year’s senior class, which had so many geniuses, so many stars,” he lamented.

This obsession with achievement is familiar to anyone who has been in the orbit of an elite private school. Since time immemorial, or at least since the mid–20th century, affluent parents with soaring ambitions for their children have jockeyed for precious slots at schools prized for vaulting grads to the Ivy League and into illustrious careers. When the president of the class above mine got into Harvard, the only person visibly prouder than him was his mother, who immediately traipsed through the halls wearing a crimson sweatshirt emblazoned with the university’s crest.

My father, a corporate lawyer who often reminded his sons that “a man can never be too thin, too rich, or too well dressed,” worked his way up and out of the middle class without the benefit of brand-name schools. When he wrote the first of a handful of $15,000 tuition checks to Horace Mann (which now costs $68,700 annually, more than a Harvard undergraduate degree), I think my dad imagined I’d develop excellent posture while readying myself for a career as a Supreme Court justice, literary titan, or captain of industry.

Instead, after graduating from Pomona, a small liberal-arts school in California, I spent my early 20s playing in a series of ill-fated bands whose achievements — performing at Central Park’s SummerStage and various Verizon Wireless amphitheaters, signing a publishing deal — were thrilling but fleeting. I also spent a few years writing screenplays no one wanted. I did manage to wrangle $1,000 from William Shatner to rewrite a comedy he’d dreamed up, but he didn’t like my take and the movie never got made.

Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri

Summary:

• Hospital service costs nationally have surged 260% since 2000—nearly three times faster than Wisconsin median household income (+83%) and Midwest CPI (+77%).
• Family health insurance premiums have exploded 365% since 1999, from $5,809 to $26,993. Wisconsin hospitals now charge the fourth-highest prices in the nation—and the highest in the Midwest—at 321% of Medicare rates.
• Hospitals drive 31% of all U.S. health spending ($1.5 trillion of $4.9 trillion in 2023), making their prices the single biggest barrier to affordability.
• 69% of Wisconsin employers say rising health care costs have already forced them to cut hiring, slash investment, reduce compensation, or raise prices.
• Workers bear a crushing share: family premium contributions have jumped 338% since 1999, while average single deductibles have more than tripled (+233% since 2006). Rising hospital prices act as a hidden “payroll tax on labor,” suppressing wages and jobs outside health care.
• The same procedure can cost vastly different amounts across Wisconsin hospitals. Median negotiated rates for a diagnostic colonoscopy, for example, range from around $1,469 at Marshfield/Sanford to more than $4,600 at Froedtert Milwaukee— yet patients and employers rarely see these prices.
• Policy imperative: Price transparency must be the flagship response. Mandate full federal compliance, build a state-sponsored price-comparison tool, create a mandatory all-payer claims database, and strengthen antitrust scrutiny of hospital mergers.

Scott Johnson:

LET’S HEAR IT FOR DESIREE OSTROUSHKO. The Star Tribune somehow overlooked her in its profile of Mr. Normal:

Statement from the daughter and sister of the family that attacked Savanah Hernandez yesterday. pic.twitter.com/iMw3hbdVGw

more.

Xiao Hai:

My dad was the youngest of seven siblings. He was an exceptional athlete back in elementary school. He was also talented at beating people up. In his own words, he could “throw three kids to the ground just like throwing three chickens back into their coop.” But because our family used to own land, he was not allowed to go to high school. Instead he went back home and tended sheep with his father. He’d leave their two dozen sheep by the riverbank and catch fish, or search for bird eggs in the reeds with his friends. The communal dining hall never had enough food, and the boys were always hungry.

My mum’s education also ended with middle school. She went on to work as a nurse in the village clinic until she met my dad through a mutual acquaintance. After they married, she quit her job and became a full-time mother. My sister, Yongzhen, once said that we four siblings had held her back. Mum just smiled and said, “Nobody can look into the future.” She’s now in her 60s, but she still works out in our field every day.

Yongzhen was born in 1983, followed by my older brother, Liushun, two years later. I arrived in 1987, followed by my little brother, Liutong, in 1990. By the time I was born, my family was so poor that my parents struggled to put enough food on the table. Dad started thinking about leaving the village and finding work elsewhere.

Wisconsin Right Now:

Amy Bogost, the president of the UW Board of Regents, told a panel of concerned lawmakers that the Regents are “not political hacks,” but revealed that fired President Jay Rothman’s performance review was not documented beyond her own personal notes, which she hasn’t released.

State Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield) asked Bogost to clarify whether any discussion or improvement requests with Rothman “were put in writing and in file and available.” What was said during any performance review is the matter of heated dispute between Rothman and Bogost. He’s claimed on television that he was caught by surprise to learn that the Regents had lost confidence in him, and disputed Bogost’s claims that he was privy to good-faith discussions about his performance.

Jeremy Portnoy

The State of Texas has become as synonymous with crippling public school debt as it is with oil wells and tumbleweeds. 

Its public schools have $148.3 billion in bond debt – the most of any state by far – that will eventually have to be repaid, along with an additional $88.3 billion in interest. For every dollar of borrowed money public schools use to improve education, they must give 59 cents to outside creditors, including large institutions such as Wells Fargo and State Farm, as well as hedge funds.

This costly debt burden, which is lining the pockets of investors with money that could be going to teachers and students, is the result of a convoluted school funding system that makes Texas an outlier nationwide. 

Decades ago, to keep state taxes low and funding for education in check, legislators handed more of the financial responsibility for education to school districts that depend on local property taxes. Districts, in turn, began dipping into the bond market for help. But what started as a way to renovate aging buildings and security systems morphed over the years into a borrowing frenzy, with some districts constructing fancy campuses and athletic facilities. 

Henry Liu:

“I don’t think anybody cares,” Colin Dunkley LAW ’26 wrote to the News, adding that he suspects the rankings matter more for students at schools moving into and out of the top 14. 

In this year’s U.S. News report, the Law School moved down to second place, where it is tied with the University of Chicago. Stanford now occupies the top spot. 

Yale’s drop comes about four years after former Dean Heather Gerken decided that the Law School would no longer submit data to U.S. News for its rankings. At the time, she characterized the rankings as “profoundly flawed” in a statement published on a Law School webpage. She criticized the rankings for discouraging students from public service careers by classifying students who were awarded Yale’s post-graduate fellowships for public service as unemployed. Gerken did not respond to the News’ request for comment on Thursday.

Using public data, U.S. News continued to rank Yale Law School and other schools that stopped reporting data. 

Several law students and professors largely dismissed the significance of the Law School’s new rank. 

Mahpara Faatin

The Harvard Graduate School of Education is not accepting applications to its Doctor of Education Leadership program for the 2026-2027 academic year as the program undergoes a redesign, according to HGSE spokesperson Paul Belsito.

The Ed.L.D., a three-year doctoral program that prepares students for senior roles in school districts, government agencies, and education nonprofits, is one of two fully-funded doctoral tracks at HGSE. Students admitted to the program receive full tuition coverage, a stipend, and a paid third-year residency placement.

Belsito wrote that the pause is tied to a planned overhaul of the program’s structure rather than financial pressure on the school.

“Characterizations that budget cuts have reduced admissions rates is not accurate,” he wrote in a statement. “The Ed.L.D. program is undergoing a planned programmatic redesign to ensure it continues to meet the evolving needs of learners and education leaders.”

Belsito added that HGSE is “experiencing a very strong admissions cycle” across its programs and “looks forward to welcoming a talented cohort this fall.”

The Ed.L.D. launched roughly 15 years ago and admits up to 25 students each year, drawing faculty from across Harvard’s schools. Its curriculum combines two years of coursework with a year-long residency at a partner organization — often a school district, state agency, foundation, or education startup.

Mary Grassa O’Neill, a senior lecturer affiliated with the program, said she had not been told of specific problems prompting the pause and understood the decision as a routine review of a program that had not been substantially revisited since its founding.

“This is a 15-year-old program,” O’Neill said. “The world has changed a lot in 15 years, and so they’re taking a look at it.”

Corri Hess

Milwaukee Public Schools plans to add about 150 teachers and paraprofessionals to classrooms next school year. 

The positions were announced Monday, one month after MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said she planned to cut about 200 non-classroom staff positions. 

Cassellius said external audits of the district and meetings last summer with parents both highlighted heavy staffing at central office and less resources going into classrooms. 

“I can see with my own eyes how hard it is with so many students in the classroom,” Cassellius said.  “So obviously, with 91 percent of our students not reading on grade level at fourth grade, it is essential that we give our kids a fighting chance where teachers have a reasonable amount of students to teach to read.”

MPS is planning to add 89 licensed classroom teachers, bringing the total number of teaching staff from 3,903 to 3,992, and 63 paraprofessionals to its schools. They will also add five school psychologists. 

Daniel Boguslaw, James Baratta:

This week, the Congressional Black Caucus will quietly support an effort to reauthorize surveillance powers that were used to spy on Black Lives Matter activists in 2020, the Prospect has learned. According to multiple congressional sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, CBC support for the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) comes after Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the powerful ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, successfully lobbied CBC leadership to stand down on reforming the vast intelligence authority.

Section 702 grants U.S. intelligence agencies the authority to collect communications data on foreign intelligence targets abroad. In practice, however, it has allowed those agencies to amass troves of data on American citizens. The National Security Agency (NSA) is one of many FISA authorities with warrantless accessto Americans’ communications data, which the agency has been known to purchase from U.S.-based companies.

Privacy advocates like the Brennan Center for Justice contend that the intelligence community’s efforts to reduce the number of U.S. person queries completed under Section 702 only reflect known searches, as the FBI has “neither tracked nor audited these queries as required by law.”

——

Glenn Greenwald:

In the wake of the 2013 Snowden reporting, the House had a bill co-sponsored by John Conyers (D-MI) and Justin Amash (R-MI) to rein in NSA spying on Americans. It was on its way to passage– the first time since 9/11 USG powers would have been reduced — but Obama got Nancy Pelosi to whip Dem votes against it, and so it failed by a few votes.

Since then, Mike Johnson and now the Congressional Black Congress have acted to ensure that the NSA’s domestic spying powers under FISA 702 continue with no reforms or safeguards. In other words, Dem call Trump Hitler but even the CBC works to ensure there are no limits on the NSA’s domestic spying power under him.

Will Flanders:

Interesting that DPI has removed files revenue files from their website that I used to disprove the narrative that schools are underfunded. I used the files to show that school districts have more inflation-adjusted money than in 2000. Wonder why they were removed? 🤔

Related:

Scott Calvert:

But critics counter that a potential 50% jump in property-tax bills, even phased in over five years as envisioned, would overburden residents already feeling higher prices for groceries, gas and other essentials. Some opponents say the town should instead cut what they deem to be excessive local government salaries and bloat.

Nicole Pollack & Chris Rickert:

Brent Schultz, with his 2-year-old granddaughter, votes in Tuesday’s election at the Fitchburg Community Center. Voters in Fitchburg and Sun Prairie, two of the fastest-growing cities in Wisconsin, have both rejected operating referendums in recent years that city leaders said were needed to keep services in line with population growth.

In Sun Prairie, the vote wasn’t even close: The city’s $3.95 million operating referendum failed Tuesday by nearly 17 points.

The city of about 40,000 asked voters to increase their property taxes to continue city services at current levels, add a police officer and two firefighters and increase wages for part-time firefighters to accommodate a growing city.

With state revenue limits preventing the city from simply raising taxes on its own, failure to pass the referendum would mean “cuts to programs, services and staffing,” Mayor Steve Stocker warned.

Of the 11,735 Sun Prairie residents who voted on the question, 58.4%.rejected it compared to 41.6% voting in favor.

Samara Kalk Darby:

A 41-year-old Madison man was arrested Friday after law enforcement officials found an unnamed chemical in a campus research lab.

Officers from the UW-Madison Police Department, along with investigators from the Madison Fire Department’s Hazardous Incident Team, responded to the lab for a report of an unknown odor coming from items in an office.

Evidence was collected and later tested positive for the presence of a chemical, UW-Madison Police spokesperson Marc Lovicott said without naming the chemical.

On Friday evening, after an investigation and a confession, a lab employee was arrested on tentative charges of second-degree reckless endangering safety and booked into the Dane County Jail, Lovicott said.

Karen Vaites:

A recent study “compared trends before and after dyslexia laws were enacted across 47 states, ” and the findings were grim:

“First, more than half of the states with these new laws showed no significant shift in identifying learning disabilities related to reading. Some states identified more students, some fewer, but there was no consistent national pattern.

Second, reading achievement among students identified with learning disabilities often declined, rather than improved, after these laws passed in many states, including Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and West Virginia.”

To the surprise of no one, the report highlights1Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama as bright spots. These Southern Surge states excel on implementation. It’s the only way.

The study offers another reminder that policy alone is not progress. As the authors put it: 

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

3888 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Daisy Christodoulou

Student attainment follows a continuous distribution. The image below gives a much better representation of how it works.

Why this is a problem

Grades are just lines drawn on an underlying distribution. They don’t correspond to sudden leaps in student attainment. When you treat them like they are discrete categories, it causes big distortions, as you can see in the image below.

Paul and George both have the same grade. But Paul has more in common with John, in the grade below. And George has more in common with Ringo, in the grade above.

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

When McPherson Middle School in central Kansas banned cell phones in school four years ago, they didn’t reconsider their school-issued Google Chromebooks that were actively being used in the classroom and at home. It wasn’t until December of last year that it asked its 480 students to give up the laptops as well.

Administrators found that without their phones, students were using school laptops for distracting activities like watching YouTube or playing games, rather than learning. Some were even using their school Gmail accounts to tease other students, the New York Timesreported.

Now, the school has transitioned to using laptops only for specific teacher-assigned activities. Meanwhile, the unused laptops sit in carts in the back of classrooms, and children take notes the old-fashioned way: on pen and paper.

“This technology can be a tool. It is not the answer to education,” said McPherson’s principal, Inge Esping, who won Kansas’s middle school Principal of the Year award for 2025. 

Students who want to use the laptops for extra work at home can also borrow a Chromebook from the school library, the Times reported.

——-

“Google’s education push has proved lucrative. Education accounts for 60% of global Chromebook market share as of 2025, boosting the Chromebook total market to $14 billion.” @marcoquiroz10

Rebecca Redelmeier

When Pennsylvania introduced new graduation requirements four years ago, lawmakers said there would be options for students who struggled with standardized tests to show they were ready for college or careers.

Monica Hawk, CEO of Philadelphia’s One Bright Ray Community High School, understood the aim. But in her role running six accelerated high schools, she also had concerns. Some of her students were months or years behind in school before returning to get their diplomas. Few could pass state tests. 

In addition, the new requirements would mean a new bureaucratic headache. And she wouldn’t have more money, staff, or resources earmarked to help. 

So Hawk focused her team on a graduation pathway established by the requirements that she called her school’s “fail-safe plan.” Students still have to pass their main classes. But the pathway’s additional requirements have nothing to do with academic achievement.

Mary Pat Dries, Brookfield “letter to the editor” in the Journal-Sentinel

I hate to say “we told you so,” but we told you so! Do you remember in 2011, when there were mass protests for months at the Wisconsin State Capitol and democratic members of the Senate fled the state to deny a quorum for the Act 10 Bill?

Now 15 years later, a report from the Department of Public Instruction found that 1,700 potential teachers who finished an education degree in 2023-24 didn’t go on to teach in Wisconsin (“Report highlights red flags for state’s retention of new teachers”).

A Green Bay based roundtable, led by State Superintendent Jill Underly, discussed reasons contributing to the teacher shortage in Wisconsin. It’s no surprise that compensation was a major factor pointing to budget short falls in school districts.

One statistic in this article stood out to me. When considering inflation, since 2010, before Act 10, teacher compensation has fallen $25,000 in 2024. If you were fresh out of college with loans for undergraduate and graduate degrees, would you stay in Wisconsin to teach?

———

Dan Lennington:

In the last 15 years, MPS enrollment has declined by 19% while total spending has increased 19%. Amazingly they only have a $50m “shortfall”

———

Act 10. More.

If not to teacher salaries, where is this money going?

Wisconsin school spending exceeds pre-Act 10 levels even after inflation – Badger Institute

Of the five districts included among the plaintiffs, three — Green Bay, Adams-Friendship, and Necedah — collect more than the state public-school average of $18,592 in revenue per pupil, according to the state’s most recent publicly available figures, from the 2023-24 school year.

Johnny:

I built CourtWatch.us — a free public database for American citizens who deserve safer communities.
You can track which judges released defendants who then got rearrested, skipped court, or violated their release conditions. All public records. All free.
I started with Orange County FL and will be expanding to all 67 Florida counties and eventually every state in the country. This first batch of info is from 2024 and since public reports are released in March/April for the previous year, data is behind. But I wanted to see if this is plausible. After adding 2024,I’ll add 2025 and then figure out how to get real-time-data uploaded.

It’s in beta — would love to know what you think 👇
Numbers don’t lie, but criminals do.
courtwatch.us

Tessa West

But the newest workplace generation—Gen Z—is unlike anything we’ve seen. Through a combination of having fewer real-world relationship experiences, spending their education years in remote environments, and learning to communicate largely through asynchronous methods, these 20-somethings have missed opportunities to develop the skills needed to navigate the complex world of work. 

The result is that many are woefully unprepared for surviving—let alone thriving—in their jobs.

We already can see what this means for both employees and the organizations that hire them. For one thing young employees are struggling to fit into these organizations. There is a lot of turnover, because new hires who don’t acclimate don’t last long.

What’s more, whether they are pushed out or leave willingly, younger employees often go without a clear sense of what went wrong, so they’ll never get better. And those who do stay often find the experience unfulfilling and frustrating, while their bosses are at a loss, wondering why the new workers just don’t get it.

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde

I was struck by how much the prose and content had been dumbed down. In places, it truly read like a middle-school textbook. I went back to the older editions I had kept, and a side-by-side comparison from 2000 forward shows a clear deterioration with each revision. In 2000, students were reading a serious work. The current edition is not.

As an economist, I suppose I should not be surprised. Four rational agents shape the outcome, and not one of them has any reason to defend quality.

The publisher maximizes revenue per student, not learning. Simpler prose and lighter material may reduce what students learn, but they raise adoption rates: instructors find the book “easier to teach with” and students complain less. Learning outcomes are an externality.

The instructor worries about teaching evaluations and grade inflation. Assign an easy textbook, and students are content; you hand out A’s to most of them, and your workload drops. The instructor who assigns the harder book and earns lower evaluations bears a private cost for a public good. A textbook collective action problem.

more.

Good point. I see five reasons:

1) When university was for 10-15% of the age cohort, the entering student could handle serious prose. Massification changed the median reader, and publishers adjusted to the actual audience.

2) Teaching evaluations, which became widespread in the 1970s and were tied to tenure decisions by the 1980s, gave the instructor’s natural desire to avoid complaints a formal channel into personnel files. Before that, students could grumble, but it went nowhere.

3) Grade inflation, kicked off during Vietnam (when failing a student could get him drafted), turned into a one-way ratchet that no department can unilaterally reverse. Also, by its very nature, grade inflation unravels over time.

4) The consolidation of textbook publishing into a handful of firms meant competition shifted from intellectual quality to ease of adoption.

5) And the decline in sustained reading among adolescents means students genuinely arrive less prepared for demanding text than they did forty years ago, which makes the dumbing down partly demand-driven, not just supply-driven.

Patrick Mcilheran:

Part of an ongoing Badger Institute series about teacher loss in Wisconsin schools and what policy makers and administrators can do about it.

Facing an increasingly difficult market for hiring teaching talent, leaders of Wisconsin independent schools are developing useful strategies even as they look to the state for some fundamental policy and financial reforms.

“I think a teacher’s job is to be a lifelong learner themselves,” said one of those leaders, Kimberly Desotell, president of the GRACE Catholic schools system in Green Bay. “You can’t do the same thing you did today in teaching tomorrow. … We always have to be improving.”

One key response: Retain the talent a school has through deliberate and sustained coaching to help educators grow better at the work they chose. Others: changes in the timing of student teaching, alteration of certification requirements, and closing the funding gap with traditional public schools.

Matt Barnum:

Three years ago, as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan rolled out an AI-powered tutoring chatbot, he predicted a revolution in learning.

So far, the revolution hasn’t happened, he acknowledges. 

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Khan gives this analogy: Imagine he walked into a class, sat in the back of the room, and waited for students to seek out help. “Some will; most won’t,” he said. That’s been the experience with AI tutoring, he said. It doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn or fill in gaps in knowledge needed to ask questions.

Khan’s comments are an acknowledgement that AI has not quickly allowed for the creation of an effective super-tutor, as some initially hoped. It’s an early indication of the limits of AI to drive massive learning gains, long an unrealized goal of various technologies. While Khan remains optimistic about various uses of AI in education, he’s also come to see its limits.

“I just view it as part of the solution; I don’t view it as the end-all and be-all,” Khan said in our interview.

Joanna Williams:

But King’s is not the only institution to have lowered standards in this way. Oxford and Cambridge are among the other universities moving away from exams. At the University of the West of England, students can write field-trip reports or book reviews, design a book jacket, write a pitch or record a podcast. These are no doubt fun activities. Some, perhaps, are challenging. But crucially, success does not depend on students having read extensively, thought deeply and marshalled their ideas, either under time pressure or in a longer written form.

Unsurprisingly, this is reflected in grade inflation. More than 75 per cent of all students now leave university with a first-class or 2:1 degree, with the most dramatic increase taking place between 2010 and 2020. Chinese students studying in the UK have wryly labelled Britain’s higher-education system ‘easy in, easy out’, because not only is it easier to get accepted on to courses than in the US or China, but assessments are also less stringent. In other words, easy admission is followed by low expectations and easy-to-meet academic standards. 

So, the academics at King’s College are absolutely right to decry ‘dumbing down’. But the fact that they had to take their complaints to the national press raises uncomfortable questions about who runs our universities. If lecturers themselves are not setting standards, expectations and assessment methods, then who is?

Chalk & Talk:

In this episode, Anna is joined by Dr. Montserrat (Montse) Gomendio, a former Secretary of State for Education in Spain.  Montse is also a former Deputy Director of Education for the OECD, the international organization that administers the PISA test. Drawing on global data, including from PISA, Montse explains why some education systems consistently perform well while others struggle to improve.

Teagan King:

The Madison School District had 41 high school students named 2026 National Merit Scholarship Program finalists, more than any other district in the state, the district said Wednesday.

West High School had the most finalists in the state with 27, followed by 10 finalists at Memorial High School and four at East.

“These students have demonstrated extraordinary academic achievement, and this recognition is a testament to their hard work and the support of their families and teachers,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said in a statement. “We are incredibly proud of each of them and look forward to seeing what they accomplish next.”

About 6,930 National Merit Scholarships will be awarded this year, including 2,500 single-payment $2,500 scholarships, 830 corporate-sponsored scholarships for students meeting specific criteria and about 3,600 college-sponsored merit scholarships.

———

287 Wisconsin students were named National Merit Semifinalists.

2026 Wisconsin cut score: 215. State average: 217.6 // median: 218.

Lila Shroff:

William Liu is grateful that he finished high school when he did. If the latest AI tools had been around then, he told me, he might have been tempted to use them to do his homework. Liu, now a sophomore at Stanford, finished high school all the way back in 2024. “I have a younger sibling who is just graduating high school,” he said. “Our educational experience has been vastly different, even though we’re just two years apart.”

By the time Liu graduated, ChatGPT was already causing chaos in the classroom. But the automation of school is intensifying. If at first teachers worried about students using chatbots to write essays, now new agentic tools such as Claude Code are allowing students to outsource even more of their work to the machines. Need to take an online math quiz? Write a biology-lab report? Create a PowerPoint presentation for history class? AI can do all of this and more. One high schooler recently told me that he struggles to think of a single assignment that AI wouldn’t be able to do for him.

As a measure of just how good AI has become at schoolwork, consider a new bot called Einstein. Several weeks ago, the tool went viral with big claims: “Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline,” a website advertising the bot explained. All that a student had to do was hand over their credentials for Canvas, the popular learning-management platform, and Einstein promised to do the rest. No matter the task, the bot was game: Einstein boasted that it could watch lectures, complete readings, write papers, participate in discussion forums, automatically submit homework assignments. If a quiz or a final exam was administered online, Einstein was happy to do that too.

When I first came across Einstein, I was skeptical: Flashy AI demos have a way of overpromising and under-delivering. So I decided to test the tool out for myself. Because I’m not a college student, I enrolled in a free online introductory-statistics class. The course website explained that the class was self-paced and that it could help undergraduates, postgraduates, medical students, and even lecturers build up basic statistical knowledge. I set the bot loose, and in less than an hour, Einstein had worked through all eight modules and seven quizzes. There were some hiccups—the bot took one quiz 15 times—but it ultimately earned a perfect score in the class. As for me? I hardly so much as read the course website.

Natalie Kitroeff:

And so that’s a result that, in some ways, seemed predictable and even inevitable, because Mississippi is a pretty poor state. It doesn’t spend a lot on education. But slowly but surely, they started turning things around. By 2019, they were about in line with the national average. And now, they are a top 10 state for fourth graders learning how to read.Natalie Kitroeff

Wow.

Sarah Mervosh

Yeah. And I think something even more impressive is if you adjust for poverty and other demographics, like race, Mississippi is the number one place in the country for fourth graders learning reading and math and the number one state for eighth grade math.Natalie Kitroeff

OK, just explain that for me. When you say, when you adjust for poverty, it’s number one for these metrics. What do you mean exactly by that?Sarah Mervosh

Some of the best states that traditionally are seen as having the best education are the richest states — places like Massachusetts or New Jersey — because rich kids just score higher. But if you adjust for the student population that they’re serving. So how does a state serve its poor kids? Or if it has a lot of kids who are learning English.

So when you look at the students that it has, how does the state do? Mississippi does really well. Poor kids in Mississippi are scoring better on national tests in fourth grade than poor kids in almost any other state. So basically, what that’s telling me is that Mississippi is one of the best places in the country for a poor child to get an education.Natalie Kitroeff

OK. So that’s pretty remarkable. And all that is happening, of course, in a context where America’s schools are not doing well on the whole. The trends are bad. Test scores generally are down across the board.

Christian Keil:

And yet, it was. America took the early internet more seriously than any other nation, and owned the new, digital era as a result. From 1997 to 2001, the United States spent an average of 1.1% of GDP on the Internet, or more than $300 billion in today’s dollars. This investment laid a foundation robust enough to survive even a historic boom-and-bust cycle, and to support what would become the world’s most important and largest companies.

Today, 19 of the world’s top 25 companies are American, and none are Japanese.

America won not because it learned how to manufacture cars and consumer electronics better than Japan, but because the American economy was a more fertile ground for early internet companies like Netscape, AOL, Amazon, and Google — and because American capital markets exuberantly doused those companies, and hundreds more, with the capital they needed to build infrastructure, to recruit the world’s top engineers, and to onboard millions of people onto the internet. Or in short, because America’s economy was dynamic enough to seize a new opportunity, and Japan’s was not.

Ben Southwood:

As Matt Yglesias rightly says, this is a worrying signal of declining state legitimacy: even the centre-left parties don’t believe they can make the case for the state raising taxes and spending them on public goods

——

More.

Kim Kozlowski:

U-M was not the only university working to address diversity, Schlissel said. What was different from other universities is that U-M generated a campuswide strategic plan focused on the DEI goal that was put into action within Michigan’s legal constraints. 

After five years elapsed, an evaluation of the initiative showed some success but the percentage of underrepresented students increased for some but not as much for Black students, Schlissel said.

“It was a mixed bag, but the idea was it would be a project that evolved,” Schlissel said.

Schlissel emphasized that he is no longer part of high-level university discussions. But his observation is that many reasons led to the national backlash against the DEI effort, including political divides, heightened identity politics, the tenor from Washington, universities not always openly debating challenging issues and a lack of a definition of what DEI really means.

Brian McGill, Danny Dougherty and Micah Maidenberg

The Wright brothers made history when they flew a gasoline-powered plane into the air for 12 seconds one morning in 1903. Little did they know that more than a century later, American scientists would operate robotic vehicles on Mars.

Innovation has been a defining feature in U.S. commercial aviation and government programs, helping them reach new heights. And despite numerous setbacks, including tragic accidents, the country has often been able to stay at the forefront of flight. 

Companies often worked closely with government agencies to ramp up the industry and, at times, help the U.S. gain an edge over rivals. The U.S. Postal Service stoked the early airline business by hiring planes to ship mail; the Pentagon’s demand for rockets, satellites, fighter jets and more has boosted military and aerospace contractors.

Christopher Kuo:

The drones can dart across fields at 100 miles an hour, punch through windows and bowl over assailants.

The sleek, black machines aren’t destined for battlefields in Ukraine or skies above the Middle East. Instead, they will hurtle through the hallways of high schools in Florida and Georgia.

Mithril Defense is deploying fleets of drones—called “Black Arrows”—for schools as part of state-funded programs to increase security and reduce gun violence.

The machines can screech, flash strobe lights and shoot pepper gel to deter assailants—while operated by pilots at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Executives from Mithril and law-enforcement officials said the drones could reduce student casualties by reaching attackers faster than police or school-resource officers.

“It’s revolutionary,” said Volusia County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Todd Smith, who oversees safety and security for the county’s schools in Florida. The drones are expected to be installed in Deltona High School on Monday and be ready for use this fall. “This is the future.”

Huma Ahsan:

During this campaign, I expected opposition from across the aisle. What I did not anticipate was resistance from within the Democratic Party itself. Too often, institutions that claim to champion diversity fall into patterns of tokenism elevating a few voices while sidelining broader movements for structural change.

In this race, that reality became clear. Efforts were made behind the scenes to influence endorsements, to pressure local leaders, and to shape the outcome in favor of a preferred candidate. These actions raise important questions about who truly holds power, and whose voices are heard within our political system.

At its core, this campaign stood for a simple but powerful idea: Our courts belong to the people. No political party, elected official or institution should dictate who serves as judge. That decision belongs to the voters.

This campaign began out of deep concern about government overreach, about the erosion of judicial independence, and about communities living in fear. It was fueled by the belief that our legal system must do better, and that the people most impacted by it must have a voice in shaping it.

Throughout this journey, I was inspired by the next generation of leaders in Dane County: leaders who are unafraid to challenge entrenched systems and demand something better. I was equally moved by the many community members, across backgrounds, who made space for this conversation and engaged with these ideas.

Huma for judge.

Former Wisconsin DPI Lawyer Ben Jones Elected Judge after being appointed by Gov Evers. April 7, 2026 election results.

more:

Also, keep in mind—the Democrat leadership has only asked Swalwell to step away from the governor’s race and not to resign from Congress. That fact alone explains the true motivations here

—–

Eric Swalwell is illustrative of modern blackmail politics. He was being recorded with hookers. Obviously everyone knew. He goes along with the program, and is fine. Once he departs, then the walls come tumbling down. You think he’s the only Congress member compromised. No way.

Kaleem Caire:

We have raised nearly $52 million in private philanthropy over eleven years to bridge a gap that should never have been ours alone to bridge.

What distinguishes One City from other public charter schools in Wisconsin isn’t just our academic growth. No other charter school in Wisconsin was established with the specific purpose of serving as a testing ground for innovation for others to learn from. One City was. Our 2017 charter application explicitly mentioned the concept of demonstration schools. This legislation doesn’t create a new purpose for One City; it fulfills the purpose we were created for, and something I have dedicated my entire professional life to.

Once again, I didn’t return home just to start a charter school. I came back to create a new pathway for charter schools to achieve their holistic mission and promise: to act as laboratories of innovation that help all public schools and the children they serve get better. The Demonstration Public School Act accomplishes this.

What the Demonstration Public School Act Will Do The Demonstration Public School Act does not allocate funds from school districts. It is an additional investment in research and development to establish a teaching-hospital-like model for K-12 education. Just as teaching hospitals improve medicine through combined treatment, research, and training, One City acts as a laboratory that develops innovations, validates them via a formal UW research partnership, and freely shares them with every public school district in Wisconsin. The bill mandates this. Dissemination is not optional; it is part of the contract. I have attached a document to this email that further describes our impact as a demonstration public school model.

The $4 million this legislation allocates annually would help us, if selected by the OEO, pursue a goal that should matter to every Wisconsin educator, policymaker, and parent: reaching 80% proficiency in ELA/Reading and Math among One City scholars within five to seven years. That is not just an aspiration. It is the minimum we will accept, because anything less leaves our children economically stranded in an AI-driven economy that is already eliminating entry-level jobs that once provided young people without college credentials a starting point. We are developing the model, the data, and the documentation so that what works here can be implemented in classrooms across Wisconsin.

Pat Garrett:

The News: New Richmond Parents for Strong Schools has filed a federal lawsuit against the New Richmond School District, alleging that its bathroom policy violates the rights of high school girls under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. WILL represents the Association—which includes both parents and female students—seeking an end to the district’s policy and a declaration that the girls’ civil rights were violated by the district’s actions.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “Girls should feel safe at school and their privacy should be respected. New Richmond schools left parents and young girls no choice but to go to court and sue to end this ridiculous policy allowing biological boys into the girls’ bathroom. WILL is proud to represent this association of parents and students to bring an end to this destructive and dangerous policy.”

WILL Client, High School Junior, Ella Frei, stated, “Protecting girls by not allowing boys in the girls’ bathroom shouldn’t be controversial—it should be common sense. We are not going to abandon our identity as girls or ignore the real privacy concerns the school district has forced on us.”

By Thérèse Boudreaux:

The U.S. government added $1.2 trillion to the national debt over the past six months, borrowing $163 billion during March alone, the Congressional Budget Office reports.

At the current rate of borrowing, federal deficits are on track to top $2 trillion by October, the end of the current fiscal year. 

But the president’s recent budget request – which lawmakers will use as a blueprint for the 12 fiscal year 2027 appropriations bills – calls for $2.1 trillion in discretionary spending alone, without touching entitlement program spending.

“Both Congress and the President continue to ignore the urgent need to get our borrowing under control,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement.

“As lawmakers consider the budget process for the upcoming fiscal year, we hope that they come up with plans to reduce deficits from the too-high 6% of GDP to a more sustainable 3% of GDP; secure our nation’s ailing trust funds for Social Security, Medicare, and highways; and ultimately fix the broken process that got us into this mess.”

Teagan King:

The programs are shuttering at the end of this school year, the district confirmed Monday, after President Donald Trump’s administration cut funding for AmeriCorps initiatives like United Way’s Schools of Hope last year.

“We are deeply grateful to United Way of Dane County, as well as the many volunteers who have supported our students,” Cindy Green, assistant superintendent of strategy and innovation, said in a statement. “We are continuing to refine how tutoring is delivered to ensure it is closely aligned with what students are learning in the classroom and grounded in the Science of Reading and evidence-based approaches.”

Literacy-focused tutoring program Elementary Schools of Hope and math-focused Achievement Connections have served more than 113,000 Madison students over the past 28 years with the help of almost 23,000 community volunteers.

A Corporation for National and Community Service grant has funded Schools of Hope, providing AmeriCorps members who serve as tutor coordinators in elementary schools. United Way of Dane County matches the grant with additional funds.

The AmeriCorps grant funding was about $500,000 per year and will end in August.

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

3888 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Preston Cooper

Starting next week, the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) committee will consider a 151-page proposed amendment to the current regulations governing college accreditors—those higher education watchdogs that rarely bite. The draft language can and will change as the committee considers it, but it’s likely that the Education Department will move forward with the core of the proposed rule.

The proposal represents a massive step forward for what has been, frankly, a broken form of college oversight. Summarizing all 151 pages here would use up too much ink. Instead, I’ll focus on four major provisions that stood out as particularly impactful:

• Creating a smoother pathway for aspiring accreditors to gain recognition from the Education Department;
• Discouraging accreditors from ratcheting up degree or credential requirements for licensed professions;
• Requiring accreditors to look more keenly at student achievement outcomes at the colleges they oversee; and
• Improving transferability of credit between accredited colleges.

Let’s dive into each of the four provisions in turn.

Valerie Pfeiffer & Matthias R. Mehl &

Our lives are lived day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute. This fine-grained, equally spaced resolution of time means we do not always perceive changes in the small, everyday things around us, like the slow deterioration of the road we drive on every day. Sometimes we need to take a step back and examine them from a more distant perspective, for example, when unexpectedly hitting a newly formed pothole.

Such an “unexpected pothole” was recently afforded to us when analyzing several data sets jointly within the scope of a registered replication report (Tidwell et al., 2025). These data feature estimates of daily spoken words for 2,197 participants based on a careful analysis of passively sampled ambient audio recordings of their daily lives. The participants, ranging in age from 10 to 94, were part of 22 studies conducted over the span of 14 years and resided (mostly) in the United States as well as Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The report yielded an estimate for the average number of spoken words per day of 12,792, an estimate noticeably lower than what a prior study from 2007 yielded using

the same method (M = 15,959; Mehl et al., 2007). After

verifying that this was not a mathematical error, we decided to put the hypothesis that we had lost words over time to the test.

By relating the estimates of participants’ daily spoken words to the year their data were collected, we discovered that for each year between 2005 and 2019 an average of 338 fewer words were spoken per day, b =

-338, 95% credible interval (Crl) = (-652, – 25), as estimated using Bayesian multilevel modeling. At first glance, 300 or so words seems like a small, insignificant loss, as if it would not make much of a difference. And indeed, this finding ultimately was buried in a publication full of seemingly more interesting, larger, and more controversial findings.

But, as trivial as 338 words a day may feel, the loss of these daily spoken words unavoidably adds up. It means that pach vegr wo shok more than 120000

Jacob Siegel

In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.

The pandemic dumped jet fuel into the growing counter-disinformation machine while extending its controls into the physical world. That brought the information state into people’s everyday lives. This was something different from the drama of false allegations about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia that plagued the Trump presidency. Though Russiagate dominated the news cycle, it was essentially a political crime against abstractions like the “rule of law” and the “democratic process.” Normal people who did not devote their time to scrolling newsfeeds could mostly choose to ignore the sordid Trump-Russia drama. Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates removed the “normie” exemption.

The senseless cruelty of preventing people from attending outdoor weddings and visiting sick relatives in their final moments. The images of authorities in New York City placing locks on children’s playgrounds. Authorities in Venice, California, using bulldozers to shovel thirty-seven tons of sand into the city’s iconic skatepark to prevent kids from playing outdoors. Prolonged school closures that isolated children and caused generational learning losses, hurting poor and disadvantaged kids worst of all. The brazen flouting of these restrictions by the upper classes and political elites. At Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party, for instance, where the former president and his hundreds of celebrity guests on Martha’s Vineyard danced with their faces exposed while the army of workers hired for the event were forced to wear masks. The fact that the technique of lockdowns was imported into the United States from the authoritarian surveillance state of China, where the virus originated. The even more galling fact that mere discussion of the virus’ origins was labeled a racist conspiracy by the most venerated institutions of science and journalism.

By imposing excessive and arbitrary policies while attempting to conceal vital information about the pandemic, the state provoked a public backlash. In turn, government officials treated the backlash not as legitimate democratic dissent, but as proof that unregulated misinformation was fueling domestic extremism. They responded by doubling down on the same policies, tightening their information controls, and imposing new methods of digital cancellation like “debanking” that cut off people’s access to their own financial accounts. Official repression and popular revolt fed off each other in a cycle that radicalized both sides and laid bare the realities of mass manipulation and digital dependency in the information state.

Alec Johnson:

The Arrowhead School Board voted not to renew the contracts of four teachers despite community opposition.
Superintendent Conrad Farner cited declining enrollment and budget shortfalls as reasons for the staffing cuts.

Parents, students, and residents voiced strong support for the teachers during a public comment period.

The district aims to balance its budget and improve academic performance, which has seen fluctuating state report card scores.

The Arrowhead School Board voted not to renew the contracts of four teachers April 8 despite overwhelming opposition from parents, students and residents who packed the school’s South Campus library.

After deliberating in closed session for almost an hour and 40 minutes, the board came back into open session and unanimously approved issuing notices to consider not renewing the teaching contracts of social studies teacher Tim Tower, language arts teacher Katie Herrmann, science teacher Brian Corry and math teacher Mark Leoni. By the time the board’s vote took place just before 10:30 p.m., most of the crowd had gone home, leaving just a handful who stayed for the board’s decision.

During the public comment period earlier in the meeting, most of the 28 people who spoke – a mix of parents, residents, students and former Arrowhead staff – questioned the district’s rationale. Many of the comments drew loud rounds of applause.

——

Dan Lennington:

Arrowhead has lost ~20% of its students in the past decade. It’s no surprise teachers will lose their jobs. And achievement has declined. If you can’t do basic things, you’ll lose students when parents have a choice.

Jennifer McWilliams:

The shift from Zero Tolerance to Restorative Justice (RJ) represents one of the most significant pivots in educational history. Pushing for Marxists “equity” has resulted in the violence we see in classrooms today and the #1 reason why teachers are quitting.

Timeline

2014: The U.S. Department of Education deemed zero-tolerance discipline policies racist and oppressive, citing their disproportionate impact on black and brown students, often resulting in higher rates of suspensions, expulsions, and disciplinary referrals. In an attempt to rectify these disparities, the Department issued guidance to replace zero-tolerance policies with Restorative Justice (RJ) approaches.

2016: Schools in all 50 states began adopting Restorative Justice policies because it is a cornerstone of Social Emotional Learning (SEL). Instead of creating safer environments as promised, our schools are more violent and chaotic than ever.

Only 17% of voters say schools are doing a good job at enforcing student behavior policies.

——

More.

Alex Rogers & George Hammond:

Elon Musk’s xAI has filed a lawsuit challenging Colorado’s landmark AI bill as the Trump administration and leading industry players try to stop US states from regulating the technology. 

Colorado’s bill, set to take effect in the summer, was the first state-level initiative passed to impose protections against “algorithmic discrimination” in AI systems.

Musk’s AI lab, which recently merged with rocket group SpaceX, says the bill would force it to “promote the state’s ideological views on various matters, racial justice in particular” rather than its own “disinterested pursuit of truth”.

The lawsuit is the latest move in a battle between AI companies, President Donald Trump’s administration and individual states over regulation of the burgeoning technology. 

AI start-ups have pushed back against efforts to impose guardrails in California and New York, and Trump’s AI advisers made clear they wanted the federal government to control regulation with a light-touch national framework.

Musk’s company, known for its model Grok, claims Colorado’s bill would violate First Amendment free speech protections. 

“Its provisions prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the State of Colorado dislikes, while compelling them to conform their speech to a state-enforced orthodoxy on controversial topics of great public concern,” according to a filing in federal court on Thursday.

——

more.

Rachel Canter:

No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the “Mississippi miracle.” From 1998 to 2024, fourth-grade reading and math scores in my home state—the nation’s poorest—rose from among the worst in the country to among the best. When adjusting for demographic factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.

Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research. Last fall, for example, the Wall Street Journal editorial boardmarveled that “even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by returning to phonics” as Governor Gavin Newsom prepared to sign a major new reading bill into law. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded.

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

3888 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 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?

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.