School Information System

Chris Rickert:

Madison last week announced that it would not shift to weighted grading for the purposes of the Wisconsin Guarantee, and it has posted its policy for what to do when there are ties among the top 5% and 10% of students.

Essentially, every student with a GPA that places them in the top 5% or 10% of their class will have that designation noted on their transcripts, even if that means that more than 5% or 10% of the total class is designated as such.

The district gives the example of a class of 574 students. Five percent of 574 is about 28, but if more than that number of students have GPAs that put them in the top 5% — because their GPAs are the same — then all those of those students will be considered in the top 5%.

“If more than the top 28 are tied by GPA, all of these students will have the ‘top 5%’ of class notation on their transcript,” the district policy says. “For example, if 41 students are tied for the top 5% by GPA, all 41 students will receive the top 5% notation.”

The same expansive approach would also apply to those deemed in the top 10%.

In a statement from its communications office, the district points to the letter of the law for why it believes this approach is legal.

The district “identifies its students in the top 5% and top 10% based on students’ GPAs as the sole criterion,” it said, adding that it’s not ranking students who fall outside of the top 10%.

The communications director for Republican state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, the law’s main author, said the law does not “contemplate” Madison’s approach to calculating the top 5% and 10% of students.

———

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

CJ Womack:

The CTA contribution, filed Aug. 23, went directly to “The Election Rigging Response Act, Governor Newsom’s Ballot Measure Committee,” which backs Prop 50. 

[RELATED: California State University system is expanding ChatGPT to all students and faculty in the name of equity]

The measure originated from a three-bill package in July, where Democrats used a “gut-and-amend” tactic on A.B. 604 and S.B. 280, along with A.C.A. 8, to grant the legislature temporary control of redistricting for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 election cycles. The state’s independent Citizens Redistricting Commission would resume authority in 2031.

“If this redistricting scheme goes through, voters will have no reason to trust politicians,” Assemblyman Carl DeMaio told Campus Reform. “Politicians will choose their voters; voters will not choose their politicians.”

California State Superintendent of Education candidate Sonja Shaw also criticized the union’s support. “The California Teachers Association is behind every attack on our kids, pushing confusion in classrooms, protecting only those who fit their narrative, and selling out teachers to back Newsom’s gerrymander,” Shaw wrote on X.

CTA’s Issues PAC is one of the state’s largestpolitical spenders, previously funding school funding measures and union protections. The union has not released a formal statement on its Prop 50 contribution.

——-

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

David Barry:

This is all a nonsense. I suspect that Cowen saw how well o3 performed in his field of economics, and wrongly generalised to assuming that it is reliable in other areas.

But perhaps you are not convinced by my evidence. o3’s final answer cited an editorial from Volume V of Lasker’s Chess Magazine, and my various links have been to digitised archives of other publications. Might OpenAI have got themselves an illicit digital copy of the Magazine that I was unable to locate, so that o3 could give correct information from it without being able to cite it?

No. Moravian Chess still exists, and you can buy Volume V (among others) for 29 euros plus postage. Here is my copy:

By E. Thomas Finan

Universities should see the White House’s campaign as a wake-up call rather than the root of their troubles—a warning that they have to rebuild trust among not just prospective students, parents, and donors, but also voters and elected officials across party lines. America’s higher education has always depended to some degree on the patronage of its elected leaders, an arrangement that has often been a civic boon, encouraging schools to respond to public needs and serve the common good. Today, universities have to prove that they can uphold their end of the deal.

Sydney Review of Books:

Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.

I often return to an essay by Lydia Davis about an unusual experiment in translation. Better known for her work on French writers like Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot, Davis had in this case tried to translate a literary text, not from French but rather from English into English. The text in question was Laurence Sterne’s unfinished 1768 novel, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick. Even a glance at its first page suggests why the book might require translation. Here is how it begins:  

Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz:

‘You’re really smart. What the hell is wrong with you?” Yale English Prof. Lawrence Rainey asked one of us (Mr. Katz) over a beer-stained table at a local pizzeria after grading his first college paper in 1987.

The grade in question was a C-plus, the same grade that Ms. Gold received on her first college paper, at Princeton in 2013. We had each arrived at college thinking we were hot stuff: straight-A students from private schools in New York. We were quickly knocked down a peg.

This formative moment would be nearly unimaginable today. At Yale, some 80% of undergraduate course grades are A or A-minus. Harvard’s statistics are about the same. Princeton held out for a while, but since it abandoned its policy of capping the percentage of A-range grades in 2014, grade-point averages have soared. Grade inflation isn’t limited to the Ivy League: GPAs have been rising nationwide for decades. Skyrocketing tuition has turned students into paying customers who expect to be praised, not challenged.

This fall, as professors sit down to grade their students’ first papers, we urge: Challenge your students. Don’t worry about being liked. Worry about being respected.

Students will respect you if you respect them by being honest about the quality of their work and taking the time to help them do better. Often you and they are both fully aware that they haven’t really tried. Make them want to try. You never know the difference your feedback could make. Our C-plus papers were both about Homer, and we went on to become classicists. Would this have happened if our professors had let us coast on unearned confidence?

Alexandra Citrin-Safadi:

Now, people who have been talking about summering like it is the 1990s will call this an invented problem. Just let them run around the park! Stop over-programming the children! Let them live! And spiritually, I fully agree. Except I’d prefer to avoid a visit from Child Protective Services for letting my soon-to-be kindergartner roam the New York City streets unattended.

Navi Kabra:

Today, the opposition gets a chance. Here’s an article that could be seen as a rebuttal¹ to the Alpha School review, which essentially argues that all these exciting new experimental schools are bound to fail because they fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of schools. 

I think this article has some significant flaws, rambles a bit in the middle, and seems a little contradictory in a few places, but it does make a bunch of good points. So here are some interesting excerpts.

The primary point the review makes is this:

In the same way that democracy is the worst form of government ever invented except for all the others, conventional school is the worst form of motivating students to learn except for all the others.

On to the main points of the argument. First, schools aren’t primarily for learning:

What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?

So what are schools for, then?

School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.

While we all complain about how bad schools are, we can pretty much all agree that school does make some difference:

——

More on the Alpha School.

——

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dan Lerman:

At the private school where I once taught, the idea was that spelling got in the way of creativity. So I watched as kids wrote ‘macien’ for ‘machine’ at age 14. Tuition was $60,000 a yea

But schools have decided that facts are no longer worth teaching.

In many classrooms today, the very idea of committing information to memory has become unfashionable. As I tour schools for my daughter, we are often assured that facts will surely not be the focus of her education. “We don’t do rote memorization,” teachers proudly declare with a condescending wink. As if memorization were an outdated relic of a less enlightened era.

But without facts, what are students actually learning?

At the progressive Brooklyn private school where I once taught, spelling wasn’t corrected until middle school. Focusing on spelling, we were told, got in the way of creativity.

I then watched smart, curious kids write macienfor machine at age 14, then wilt when people involuntarily gasped at their failed spelling attempts. Their writing was often expressive and insightful . . . and incoherent. They probably weren’t even aware of the $60,000 per annum price tag, or they might have raged against that macien.

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Mark Simon:

When the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) takes center stage as the anchor sponsor of this fall’s Committee to Protect Journalists Annual Dinner, one name should remain unspoken: Jimmy Lai. Mentioning Lai in a New York City ballroom would ring hollow, given the WSJ’s news division has conspicuously ignored his trial—the most significant human rights case in Asia and a critical test of basic freedoms in Hong Kong, a city that still claims to be a global financial hub.

Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media owner, writer, and champion of liberty—and my boss—is being prosecuted under the city’s draconian National Security Law. His media companies have been shuttered; his home for the past 1,707 days, a Hong Kong prison cell. Lai’s case has drawn intense global scrutiny, with over 30 major outlets—AP, AFP, Bloomberg, CNN, The New York Times, and nearly every UK news organization—covering it in the two days since the trial’s conclusion. Yet, the WSJ’s news pages remain silent. 

The WSJ’s editorial board, however, has steadfastly supported Lai, a personal friend to several members and a figure whose busts of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman adorned his media group’s lobby. Their advocacy is organic, rooted in a shared passion for free markets and free people. 

The WSJ’s news division, however, tells a different story. Apple Daily, Lai’s tabloid, and the WSJ were always distinct—our scrappy, in-your-face style clashed with their polished restraint. Still, the tension felt personal. In the mid-2000s, I invited the WSJ’s then-Asia Chief Editor for a day on Lai’s boat with journalists from other outlets. The rebuff was sharp, accompanied by criticism of Apple Daily and Next Magazine’s journalistic standards and our supposed failure to “understand China.”

Corrinne Hess:

“I can’t just come in with big plans. I need to make those big plans with the community,” Cassellius said. “I’ve said all along that this is going to be community-led and community-driven, and these listening sessions are a way to be able to demonstrate that to the community.”

Laundry list of issues leads to distrust of the school district

Cassellius arrived in Milwaukee after the school district faced one of its most tumultuous years in recent memory.

First, there was a battle to convince taxpayers to boost district funding through a hefty property tax increase. By a margin of just 1,720 votes, voters approved a $252 million referendum in April 2024.

But just one month later, financial mismanagement by former Superintendent Keith P. Posley and several members of his team was revealed.

Veronica Dagher:

Kelly Palmer, Chicago | Child’s age: 2

I opened a 529 college savings account when my son was born and shared the contribution link with friends and family. (The plan will typically generate a direct link to your child’s gifting page so others can contribute but won’t give them the ability to access your account details such as the account balance). It took the pressure off us having to save during our child’s first year and shielded our house from an onslaught of toys and clothes our baby would grow out of quickly. We continue to share the link before our son’s birthday each year. For his coming birthday, he would be thrilled to open yet another firetruck toy, but someday he will realize a contribution to his 529 was a more valuable gift.

Joe Wrote:

Putting aside the undemocratic and elitist nature of this philosophy, it creates a self-sustaining, destructive cycle. Not only are donors’ interests different than working-class interests, but it also turns the relationship between the Democratic Party and its supporters into one of lecturer and lectee. That would be bad enough on its own, but when you add in that many of these lectures are naked attempts to sell unpopular, grotesque policies that benefit the elite and sacrifice basic morality, we can see why the Democratic brand is underwater, even with its most loyal supporters.

Two recent episodes show the poisonous nature of the Democrats’ top-down thinking.

Earlier this week, two competing Palestine resolutions were introduced to the resolution panel at the Democratic National Committee’s annual summer meeting. The first, put forth by 26-year-old progressive Allison Minnerly, called for an arms embargo on Israel and immediate recognition of a Palestinian state. Both these positions reflect the will of not only Democratic voters, but also Americans. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 75% of Democratic voters, 66% of Independents, and 60% of Americans oppose sending military aid to Israel. It also found that half of all American voters think Israel is committing genocide (77% of Democrats and 51% of Independents).1 By all available evidence, Minnerly’s resolution matches the will of Democratic voters, the sentiment of most Americans, and, most important of all, reality. Even the Israel-based observers B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights have called Israel’s actions a genocide, joining the global consensus.2Recognizing reality is often good politics, as is being proven by Zohran Mamdani’s healthy lead over pro-Israel centrists, and the growing number of former AIPAC donees who are now refusing the group’s money in the 2026 midterms.3

Nate:

Read the terms of service. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t pick defaults.

Yesterday, Anthropic quietly flipped a switch. If you’re a Claude user, your conversations are now training data unless you actively say no. Not when you give feedback. Not when you explicitly consent. By default, from day one.

Here’s what changed: Previously, Claude didn’t train on consumer chat data without your explicit thumbs up or down. Clean, simple, respectful. Now? Everything you type becomes model training fodder unless you navigate to settings and opt out. And if you don’t opt out, they keep your data for up to five years.

I’m not here to pile on Anthropic. The reaction across Reddit and tech forums has been predictably negative – privacy advocates are disappointed, users feel blindsided, and everyone’s comparing this to the same moves OpenAI and others have made. What I want to talk about is something more fundamental: this is exactly why you can’t get comfortable with defaults in AI.

Think about it. You pay for Claude Max, you develop workflows, you integrate it into your thinking process. You are human and you like stability and you naturally assume the deal you signed up for is the deal you’ll keep. But the ground shifts. Yesterday’s privacy-first approach becomes today’s opt-out system. Tomorrow? Who knows what changes.

Ethan Savka:

Deprioritizing objective measures of merit in service of racial goals is extremely foolish,” Kingsbury told The College Fix in an interview.

To determine his findings, published Aug. 6 in City Journal, Kingsbury submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to all 93 U.S. public medical schools, seeking admissions data on race, undergraduate grades, Medical College Admission Test scores, and acceptance rates for students admitted in 2024. 

Once the responses came in from 23 of the institutions, the data revealed statistically improbable patterns. 

“Twenty-three medical schools have answered my request, including flagship institutions in states like Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri, New Mexico, and Colorado. The data they provided make it clear that schools are at least skirting the Supreme Court’s decision, if not violating it outright,” Kingsbury wrote.

“…It’s reasonable to ask whether the 23 medical schools that responded to my request are indicative of all 93 public medical schools in America. The answer is likely yes.” 

The disparities were especially stark at Eastern Virginia Medical School and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, where black applicants were about 10 times more likely to be accepted than white or Asian applicants with similar grades and test scores.

Eric S Raymond:

Undoubtedly, the funniest thing about the current political scene is hearing people scream about fascism descending on the US in one breath, then advocating censorship and disarmament of civilians in the next. Do they even listen to themselves?

Elsa Johnson:

After that I started screenshotting our conversations. I was beginning to suspect that Charles might be working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and he could be trying to recruit me as a spy. 

I know it sounds paranoid, but I had heard of other Stanford students receiving communications like this out of the blue — especially those studying science, tech, engineering or mathematics. 

Generally, it’s the same playbook: a person claiming to be a Chinese student “slips into your DMs”, or direct messages. They start out friendly with inquiries about your home life and ask whether or not you have mutual friends. Sometimes they point out shared interests and invite you to hang out.

Then the hard sell begins, with offers of an all-expenses-paid trip to China. They might flatter you with compliments and claim you can make money in the country as a social media star. If the conversation progresses, they may ask about your research, academic achievements over the years or the software you might use in class.

And this is exactly what happened with Charles. He shared videos of another woman he claimed was a Stanford student. “She was on a TV show in China and is famous now!” he wrote.

Chiz Kidd:

Motivation

Machine learning (ML) is a powerful field driven by mathematics. Whether you’re building models, optimizing algorithms, or simply trying to understand how ML works under the hood, mastering the core equations is essential. This blog post is designed to be your go-to resource, covering the most critical and “mind-breaking” ML equations—enough to grasp most of the core math behind ML. Each section includes theoretical insights, the equations themselves, and practical implementations in Python, so you can see the math in action.

This guide is for anyone with a basic background in math and programming who wants to deepen their understanding of ML and is inspired by this tweet from @goyal__pramod. Let’s dive into the equations that power this fascinating field!

Ashlea Ebeling:

Once you filter parenting decisions through the lens of taxes, you will find plenty of discounts on the enormous cost of parenting. Sure, there are the basics to think about, such as the child tax credit that every parent should take, if eligible. That just went up, by the way, to $2,200 per child. But there’s more. Daycare. Summer camp. Private school. College. Braces. Therapy. Sneakers.

Many parents don’t take up the challenge. To maximize your tax benefits, you have to study, and you have to do it before tax season in most cases. That is especially important now because of changes that help parents in the big new tax law.

Are you ready?

Samuel Jay Keyser

Made at the high point of Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock, Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” was a poke in the eye of abstract expressionism. Not only was it blatantly mimetic, but it was being blatantly mimetic with a mundane commercial product found in every supermarket and corner grocery store in America. When people think of repetition in painting, they probably think first of these iconic soup cans.

But not all repetition is as in-your-face or as disruptive as “Campbell’s Soup Cans.” One painting from the Impressionist period is particularly pertinent. I am thinking of “Paris Street; Rainy Day” by Gustave Caillebotte. Currently housed in the Art Institute of Chicago, it was originally exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1877. It is probably Caillebotte’s best-known work. I consider it a masterpiece and regret that I have never seen the real thing. Even so, it never ceases to bowl me over. Discussions of it typically focus on the incredible verisimilitude of the painting, the sense that it is photographic in its vivid capture of an ordinary moment. Thus, art critic Sebastian Smee observes in an article in The Washington Postdated January 20, 2021:

Keith Harris:

The University of Minnesota doesn’t exactly have money to throw around these days. Funding from the U.S. government is no longer reliable, tuition is skyrocketing, programs are disappearing, and to make up for an additional $150 million they’ll be paying student athletes this year, the U is charging every student a $200 surcharge.

So when a little bird (with tenure) happened to point out to us that the Board of Regents is shelling out $15 million over five years to a local marking firm called Rise and Shine, we got to wondering what our public university was getting for the money.

And here, via a survey sent out to students last week, are at least some of the new branding taglines under consideration:

Jeffrey Selingo:

The analysis found that elite colleges are slightly more likely to send alumni to a Fortune 50 company, but not by much. In terms of sheer numbers, very few Fortune 50 employees attended highly selective colleges, because those schools’ enrollment numbers are tiny compared with higher education as a whole. Your future coworkers in any company are roughly four times as likely to have graduated from a college with an acceptance rate above 40% than from a more selective school, according to the Lightcast research. And as those coworkers move through their careers, many will end up in the executive suite.

Last year, Nature published a study with the headline, “The most successful and influential Americans come from a surprisingly narrow range of ‘elite’ educational backgrounds.” The study focused on just 34 elite colleges attended by some Fortune 500 CEOs. But an appendix revealed that 378 other colleges also had alumni running Fortune 500 companies. Duke and Brown each had three graduates on the list, but so did Ball State, Louisiana State, San Diego State and many other schools.

The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that life is made up of two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game has a fixed endpoint, with winners and losers. That’s college admissions. An infinite game goes on and on and has no definite winners. That’s the career that comes after college. In trying to master the finite game of getting into an elite college, we too often lose sight of the infinite game of life.

Take Colleen McAllister, who turned down an offer of admission from Cornell University to attend Ithaca College, drawn by its communications school and a generous financial aid package. When I met her at an alumni event, she told me that she spent a semester at Ithaca’s Los Angeles program, where she interned for a production company. After graduation, she eventually found herself up for a job at Illumination, the animation studio. “I had, at that point, done so many different internships and entry-level jobs,” she told me. “I was happy to take out the trash, happy to do the coffee run. I was willing to read everything that crossed the desk.”

Brian Jabarian:

AI-generated text is everywhere: hard for orgs to assess human performance. Can we detect it while min false accusations? Yes! With

@alexolegimas we audit detectors, show incredible accuracy ~0 (!!) false pos & neg; and we offer a policy framework for evaluating trade-offs.

James Kierstead with Michael JohnstonForeword by Prof Douglas Elliffe

Grade inflation in the United States:

From 1940 to 2012, the percentage of grades that were A’s went from 15% to 45%.

C’s went from 35% to less than 15%.

GradeInflation.com
Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities

More from Steve McGuire.

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?

Ravi Gupta:

The fine print is striking. When Katrina hit in 2005, roughly 60 percent of New Orleans schools were labeled “failing” by the state. Today, that number is zero. High school graduation rates have soared from 54 percent to 78 percent. College enrollment has jumped by 28 percentage points. Students across all demographics—Black, White, low-income, students with disabilities—have posted dramatic gains that would be the envy of almost any school system in the country.

Harris’s team anticipated and tested the obvious objection: that the student population must have changed after such a massive displacement like Katrina. Perhaps the student body became more affluent? Less needy? They worked with the U.S. Census to track who actually returned, and their finding deflates the skeptics’ favorite excuse: “The demographics of the district changed for families that had school-aged children… almost not at all.” Even more compelling, when they tracked individual students who attended school both before and after Katrina, those same children were learning at faster rates in the new system.

Yet if you scan the national education discourse today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any major elected leaders talking about New Orleans. This represents a dramatic shift. A decade ago, President Barack Obama himself celebrated the city’s progress, telling a New Orleans audience in 2009 that “a lot of your public schools opened themselves up to new ideas and innovative reforms,” and that “we’re actually seeing an improvement in overall achievement that is making the city a model for reform nationwide.”

But that early attention has given way to virtual silence. This silence isn’t accidental—it’s the result of a success story so politically inconvenient that it threatens the foundational beliefs of both sides of America’s education debate.

———

Ben Binday:

NEW: Hundreds of unseen docs indicate Josh Shapiro gained an unprecedented level of influence at Penn, sought to ban its main pro-Palestinian group, and had a “partnership” with a significant pro-Israel group on campus.

Anna Stokke:

Powerful comments from @ToddTruitt76508 to Maryland State BOE. Why does Carrie Wright get it for reading, but NOT math?
“staff cited NCTM’s 2023 fluency position paper…that cites an opinion article of the Lucy Calkins of math, Jo Boaler who has proudly proclaimed she never learned her times tables”
youtube.com/live/qhPADx_75…

———

More:

Alex Tabarrok:

Trump has put tariffs on the economics agenda in a way that hasn’t been true for decades. As a new semester of principles of economics begins, here are some resources for teaching tariffs.

Comparative Advantage (video)

The Microeconomics of Tariffs and Protectionism (video)

Why Do Domestic Prices Rise with Tariffs? (post)

Trade Diversion (Why Tariffs on More Countries Can Be Better)(post)

Secretary @ Columbia via Steve McGuire:

Columbia University asked its community members about priorities for its next president.

Academic freedom was the second most popular response.

DEI didn’t make the top 5.

——-

Jason Locasale:

Scott Kupor:

Given that, does “a billion here, a billion there” still amount to “real money?” The answer is unequivocally “yes,” and President Trump’s administration is committed to demonstrating that.

The federal budget in less than one page

To understand why, we first need to understand the federal budget in a bit more detail. There are three big areas of the $7 trillion in federal spending:

Mandatory spending – these are programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Some people collectively refer to these as “entitlements” – commitments the federal government has made to cover health and retirement benefits for older Americans and less fortunate Americans. Today, we spend approximately $4 trillion in this bucket.
Interest payments on the debt – we have to “service” our $36 trillion debt, or pay people interest for the privilege of lending us that money. Today, the U.S. spends approximately $1 trillion in this bucket.
Discretionary spending – this is the catch-all bucket for everything else. It includes lots of stuff, but a few of the big items are: (i) the roughly 2.4 million non-military federal employees (e.g., IRS, Commerce, Interior, and a whole hosts of other federal agencies); (ii) Defense-related personnel and other spending; and (iii) Veterans Affairs. Today, we spend approximately $2 trillion in this bucket.
Luckily (or not, depending on your view of taxes), the federal government also collects some money each year, the vast majority of which comes in the form of tax payments that you and I pay. The government collects about $5 trillion today, leaving us $2 trillion in the hole.

Lots of people may debate the size of the debt, how much is too much and what are the longer-term implications. But one thing is clear: a growing debt means you must pay interest payments each year to satisfy your lenders. That’s “dead money,” meaning we’re paying lots of interest without getting anything of value in return.

Kejal Vyas:

Kidnappers released his family after nearly a month in exchange for a $1,000 ransom, Mexican state prosecutor records show. The family has lived since then at a shelter in this border city, where Atencio has worked construction and food delivery jobs to support them.

Their fate and well-being are part of a mounting political challenge for Latin American leaders including Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum. She has sought to earn goodwill with the U.S. on matters including trade by fighting drug cartels more aggressively than her predecessors and helping curb illegal migration to the U.S. Now, with Mexico’s economic ties with its largest trading partner as uncertain as ever, the ramifications of Trump’s immigration policies are giving her new domestic problems to solve.

“This whole problem is like a monster growing before us, and there’s little we can do about it,” said Román Domínguez, an evangelical pastor who runs a shelter for a few dozen migrants in Ciudad Juárez, near the pedestrian bridge to El Paso, Texas.

Steven Pinker:

As @rosehorowitch notes, the average GPA at Harvard is 3.8/4. Harvard administrators, laughably, call this “grade compression” (not “inflation”), & one said, with a straight face, that perhaps our students are performing better & better. I knew this was codswallop, so went to the objective, multiple-choice final exam scores over the 20+ years I’ve taught at Harvard. With the help of Dr Nicole Noll (preceptor) I found that performance sank by 10 percentage points (quoted in the article).

——-

Steve McGuire:

One common response to reports of grade inflation at Harvard is that the students are elite so of course they get A’s. But Harvard’s own data show this was not always the case, and Professor Pinker provides evidence below that performance has in fact declined over time.

Paul Alivisatos:

Now: Taking these questions in reverse order, first, with regard to administrative efficiency, we are reducing the number of administrative leadership positions, both centrally and in divisions and schools. This involves reducing the number of university senior leadership roles, including fewer officers and asking leaders to take on additional portfolios. We are reducing some staff positions in select administrative areas. We are also strongly encouraging streamlining of some elaborate divisional and academic structures that are burdensome to faculty time. Importantly, these changes to the divisions will have the effect of returning resources and faculty time to where they are best used: toward teaching and scholarship. 

Second, new capital projects are critical for our future, but we have to be able to afford them. We need to create new spaces for the most demanding new areas of inquiry, while preserving and renewing our many beautiful historic buildings. We cannot do this by continuing to support large projects primarily with financing. We have established new guidelines requiring that we secure philanthropic or other external support prior to embarking on any new projects. Accordingly, we have substantially scaled down plans for the New Engineering and Science Building; we will build the essential underground specialized space for quantum information science and technology and a more limited above ground footprint than originally planned, but will still include essential teaching labs. Concurrently, much needed renewal of the historic buildings spanning the Central Quads is one the highest priorities for our present philanthropic fundraising efforts.

Third, we are acting to better serve students at all levels.

Susan Goldsmith:

The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense.

When these depressing statistics were published in a high school newspaper in mid-1997, black parents were troubled by the news and upset that the newspaper had exposed the problem in such a public way. Seeking guidance, one parent called a prominent authority on minority academic achievement.

UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor John Ogbu had spent decades studying how the members of different ethnic groups perform academically. He’d studied student coping strategies at inner-city schools in Washington, DC. He’d looked at African Americans and Latinos in Oakland and Stockton and examined how they compare to racial and ethnic minorities in India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and Britain. His research often focused on why some groups are more successful than others.

Braden Cartwright:

At a time when Stanford is firing employees to save money, newly released IRS documents show the university paid 18 employees $1 million or more in the previous fiscal year.

Stanford announced in July that it was laying off 363 employees this fall as part of a $140 million budget cut caused by reduced federal research funding and a higher endowment tax.

Stanford Management Company CEO Robert Wallace, who handles the university’s investments, was the highest-paid employee last year with a salary of $6.3 million, IRS forms show.

Katherine Bindley:

Base salaries for nonmanagerial workers in AI with zero to three years experience grew by around 12% from 2024 to 2025, the largest gain of any experience group, according to a new report by the AI staffing firm Burtch Works, which analyzed the compensation of thousands of AI and data-science candidates. The report also found that people with AI experience are being promoted to management roles roughly twice as fast as their counterparts in other technology fields. They’re jumping the ladder as a result of their skills and impact instead of their years on the job.

“There is a significant salary difference between a machine-learning engineer job and a software-engineer job,” says Anil K. Gupta, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and co-lead of its AI job tracker.

Databricks, the data-analytics software company whose value has skyrocketed during the AI boom, plans to triple the number of people it hires right out of school this year, in part because of their familiarity with AI.

Hannah Erin Lang:

Leza and Anthony Dieli are saving about $1,000 a month for their 7-year-old daughter, Zoey. This money isn’t for college tuition or summer camp or medical expenses. It is to support her once she is an otherwise independent adult.

There is a novel strain of financial advice that suggests supporting grown children isn’t a reason to be ashamed. It is probably necessary, and sometimes even desirable. The Dielis decided to start saving early. Leza graduated college during the 2007-09 recession, worked a string of unhappy jobs and racked up credit-card debt. She doesn’t want that for Zoey.

“I want her to feel like she has options,” Leza said.

Whether they plan for it or not, plenty of parents are likely to find themselves in the same boat. About 60% of parents with children ages 18 to 34 said they had helped their kids financially in the previous year, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey. Parents are finding that the rising expenses that trail them from their child’s birth through college are now extending well into adulthood.

They commonly chipped in for housing, debt payments and everyday expenses such as groceries, according to a Bankrate survey last year. A third of younger millennial home buyers got help with the down payment from friends or family, according to an April report from the National Association of Realtors.

Ivana Greco

Even if schools aren’t doing their part. 

Every week, my four kids and I go to our local public library and check out dozens of books. We’re certainly not alone: The library is usually packed with kids, parents, babysitters, and grandparents. Our public library is a vital community resource, and it is more than doing its part to get kids reading books. Unfortunately, it’s fighting an uphill battle: The statistics are pretty grim. In 1984, 70 percent of 13-year olds said they read for fun at least once or twice a week. By 2023, that number had dropped to 36 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—and college professors are increasingly befuddled by students who arrive on campus unable to tackle lengthy and complex reading assignments.  

Doubtless a complex interaction of causes is at fault in these trends: The impact of short video on attention spans and the long-term impact of learning loss due to the COVID pandemic remain topics of debate. Some schools have failed to adequately teach students the fundamentals of phonics, leaving them struggling with the basics of reading. For older students, reliance on AI may decrease their motivation to do the reading formerly needed to get a passing grade. Educators and social scientists will be struggling for years (if not decades) to pick apart this tangled web of issues. 

Babylon Bee:

Trump’s plan was praised by national security experts, who cited it as a brilliant maneuver to reduce China’s influence on global affairs in the long term by shrewdly allowing their students to be made substantially less intelligent at educational institutions in the U.S.

Steve McGuire:

25 years ago, Harvey “C-“ Mansfield decided he would “distribute two sets of grades to his students: an initial grade he thinks they deserve, and then a second grade—the one that will go on their transcript—which will be ‘based on Harvard’s system of inflated grades.’”

——-

2001 (!):

Students who take Government 1061, “Modern Political Thought,” this semester, won’t get just one grade from Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. ’53, they will get two.

In lecture Thursday morning, Mansfield announced he will distribute two sets of grades to his students: an initial grade he thinks they deserve, and then a second grade–the one that will go on their transcript–which will be “based on Harvard’s system of inflated grades.”

Mansfield is one of Harvard’s most ardent opponents of grade inflation. He has voiced concern about grade elevation at Faculty meetings and even with University President Neil L. Rudenstine.

“[But] the administration has done nothing about this glaring flaw in education,” Mansfield said in an interview Friday.

More.

“Without the threat of poor grades, students have largely stopped trying in their courses.”

and:

Not a single student can read at grade level in 30 Illinois schools.

Rose Horowitch

In the era of grade inflation, students at top colleges are more stressed than ever.

During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting.

They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.

Last year, the university set out to study the state of academics at Harvard. The Classroom Social Compact Committee released its report in January. Students’ grades are up, but they’re doing less academic work. They skip class at a rate that surprises even the most hardened professors. Many care more about extracurriculars than coursework. “A majority of students and faculty we heard from agree that Harvard College students do not prioritize their academic experience,” the committee wrote.

———

More.

———

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?

Bethany Mandel:

If you read the NYT newsletter in the morning hoping to understand the news, good luck knowing anything notable about what happened in Minneapolis yesterday.

Scott Johnson:

If Minnesota is a state trans refuge, Minneapolis must be the capital. In the wake of the mass shooting yesterday at Annunciation Church by trans madperson Robin Westman, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey instructed us: “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity.” He means to shut down those of us who have do not concur in the wisdom of the party’s program.

Frey also disparaged “thoughts and prayers” for the two children and others injured in Westman’s murder spree. He apparently wants to tout gun control. “Gun violence” is the question and “gun control” is the answer. Amen.

Westman’s reported video/manifestos include anti-Semitic and anti-Christian phrases and symbols as well as calls to kill President Donald Trump and destroy the state of Israel. He wrote of murdering “filthy Zionist Jews,” that “six million wasn’t enough,” and “free Palestine,” the New York Post reported yesterday. “If I will carry out a racially motivated attack, it would be most likely against filthy Zionist jews,” Westman reportedly wrote in a journal that the paper said was “full of antisemitic slurs.”

It sounds like a slightly expanded edition of the whole party package. Miranda Devine gets inside Minnesota’s political culture in her New York Post column “Deadly Minnesota school shooting reflects tragic cost of a disordered society — including Dem leaders who lost the plot.”

The lineup of public officials at the press briefing after the shooting yesterday is a joke: Walz, Frey, O’Hara, Minneapolis public safety commissioner Toddrick Barnette, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. They make for an unintentionally satirical portrait of political clowns. It is the visual counterpart to Devine’s column.

We have followed the exodus of sworn officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, the demoralization of the department under Chief Brian O’Hara, the lawlessly lax law enforcement of Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, the promotion of Minneapolis and Minnesota as “sanctuary” jurisdictions for illegal immigration, and so on. Minneapolis is down some 350 officers of the more than 900 that populated the ranks at the time of the death of Saint George Floyd. Five years later, Minneapolis’s police department more than 150 officers short of the legal minimum.

——

The Star Tribune.

——

Media coverage of the latest tragedy hits another new low.

It’s the most glaring example I can remember of a news organization apologizing for its own reporting. 

——

Free Beacon:

The transgender perpetrator of Wednesday’s attack on a Catholic church and school in Minneapolis, Robin Westman, was born Robert but changed his name at 17 years old because he identified as a female, court records show. Here’s how mainstream media reports described him.

Elizabeth:

There is joy and happiness after desistance, after the state attempts to destroy your family. It’s not always easy to find, but it’s there.
You don’t have to go along with any of it. Step up and start parenting again. It’s not your job to be their friend.

——

David Bernstein:

Listened to @NPR for the first time in months. Lengthy reporting on the shooting today, completely avoided saying anything about the shooter and the shooter’s ideology, except for admonishing Sen. Klobuhar for referring to the shoot as a “he” when “their gender identity is not known at this time.” NPR has totally become a parody of itself.

Wall Street Journal:

The details are still emerging about the person who shot up a church full of Catholic school children in Minneapolis on Wednesday at a celebratory Mass for the first week of the new school year. But the signs so far point to a case of a young person, as in many other such tragedies, beset by a murderous madness.

Law enforcement identified the suspect as 23-year-old Robin Westman of suburban Minneapolis. News reports say the transgender woman who had changed her name from Robert had attended the same Annunciation Catholic School that the children attended, and that Westman’s mother had been an employee there.

Diana Nerozzi:

The Minnesota shooter wrote in his manifesto:

“I am sick of my hair, I want to chop it off. I only keep it because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself.”

Karol Markowicz:

But there’s no discussion allowed about what to do when a child declares themselves transgender. No one may point out that gender dysphoria is often a symptom of a much larger mental health problem.

The American Medical Association, a professional group of physicians that has become a wholly political entity in the last few years, only suggests one path, that of “gender-affirming care” — and urges that “forgoing gender-affirming care can have tragic health consequences, both mental and physical.”

———

Ann Althouse summary.

Dean Ball:

The plaintiffs (Raine’s parents) are suing for damages in tort (both products liability and negligence) as well as under California’s Unfair Competition Law for injunctive relief, which means a request for a court to require (“enjoin”) a defendant to either do something or stop doing something. In this case, the plaintiffs are requesting injunctive relief that amounts to public policy:

…an injunction requiring Defendants to: (a) immediately implement mandatory age verification for ChatGPT users; (b) require parental consent and provide parental controls for all minor users; (c) implement automatic conversation-termination when self-harm or suicide methods are discussed; (d) create mandatory reporting to parents when minor users express suicidal ideation; (e) establish hard-coded refusals for self-harm and suicide method inquiries that cannot be circumvented; (f) display clear, prominent warnings about psychological dependency risks; (g) cease marketing ChatGPT to minors without appropriate safety disclosures; and (h) submit to quarterly compliance audits by an independent monitor.

The complaint, of course, is one side of the story, crafted by attorneys to be as persuasive as possible. For example, the complaint includes few references to, and no quotes of, any efforts by the model to encourage Raine to seek mental healthcare, talk to a human, or take other preventive steps (and I’m sure GPT-4o did this many times). In addition, the complaint makes clear that Raine routinely jailbroke the model, telling it he was asking questions about suicide for purposes of fiction he was hoping to write. 

We have not yet heard OpenAI defend itself, and we have not had a trial, where new facts and context might well come to light.

Quinton Klabon:

Read Wyatt’s piece! But people misdiagnose how school spending grew.

Whether Walker or Evers, pre-Act 10 or post-, we spend LESS per student member on administration and operations!

Sadly, we spend WAY less on instruction too.

Cost increases are facilities and support staff.🧵

I will point out Wisconsin is 1 of 7 states with no direct state facilities funding. Ohio even funds private school renovations and expansions.

Jason Zweig:

Why does the smart money keep flunking Investing 101?

During the 2008-09 global financial crisis, many of the world’s biggest investors found themselves in dire need of cash because they had sunk too much money into assets that couldn’t be publicly traded.

Now they’ve made the same mistake all over again.

Over the past couple of decades, no group of investors has piled into what are called alternative assets more eagerly than the endowment funds of major colleges and universities. In their rush to emulate the stellar success of Yale University’s endowment head David Swensen, who died in 2021, educational institutions pulled tens of billions of dollars out of stocks and bonds and poured it into hedge funds, private equity, venture capital and other investments that don’t trade publicly.

The result looks nothing like the portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds that has long been a guidepost for many investors. On average, in fiscal 2024, educational endowments with more than $5 billion in assets held only 2% in cash, 6% in bonds, 8% in U.S. stocks and 16% in international stocks, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. That left two-thirds of their total holdings in private funds and other non-traditional assets that can’t readily be turned into cash.

Matt Barnum:

After months of targeting universities over antisemitism allegations, the Trump administration is turning to a new focus: whether schools are using proxies for race in admissions to diversify student bodies.

This emphasis is emerging in recent edicts from federal agencies and in the White House’s scrutiny of specific universities.

In late July, Attorney General Pam Bondi warned in a memo against using “unlawful proxies” for race—such as geography or applicant essays on overcoming hardships—in admissions. Soon after, the U.S. Education Department announced it would require universities to report new data on applicants, broken down by race, to “ensure race-based preferences are not used.”

Universities have been prohibited from using racial preferences in admissions since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023. The Trump administration suggests schools may be flouting the ban, though universities say they comply.

For conservatives and the administration, the current push represents a common-sense strategy to enforce and extend the Supreme Court’s ruling. Others say this approach distorts the court decision and could depress Black student enrollment, which has already fallen at some top colleges.

Oyin Adedoyin:

Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, Notre Dame and the University of California, Berkeley, were among the schools that wanted her. Few offered her need-based financial aid. Her parents had been saving, but not enough to cover full tuition for both her and, eventually, her little sister, nevermind the law school Ana Sofia also wants to attend. The cost of one year of undergrad these days can approach $100,000.

“It’s like you’re paying the salary of a recent graduate just to start going to college,” said Gabriel Gómez, Ana Sofia’s father.

Parents spend 18 years trying to decide what’s worth it for their children in a world of rising costs. For those who send their kids to college, the decision over where to go is in its own category. There is the wide-eyed optimism of launching a child into the world. There is also the potential to drain savings and rack up student loan debt. Many parents are reluctant to weigh in too much on the choice of schools, wanting to avoid tipping the scales.

Gabriel, a director at a manufacturing company, tried not to put too much pressure on Ana Sofia to pick a college based on price. What if she chose a cheaper school and ended up unhappy? But the Irvine, Calif., resident couldn’t stop himself from comparing the costs to the much lower ones in Mexico, where he and his wife, Marcela Garza, grew up and went to school.

Eugene Volokh:

From the University of Oregon School of Law’s dean Friday …

In February 2025, a civil rights complaint was filed against the Oregon Law Review (OLR) student organization, based on events that occurred in the 2024 spring semester. In August 2025, the university’s Office of Investigations and Civil Rights Compliance completed its investigation and issued a report. …

In April 2024, while selecting articles for the 2024-25 Volume 103, the OLR chose not to offer publication to an author who indicated they were faculty at Tel Aviv University. No law school administrators or faculty were involved in this decision. …

In early August, the university completed its investigation, finding the law school administrator not responsible for any policy violation. The university did, however, find the OLR responsible for violating University of Oregon policy and the Student Conduct Code. The investigation found that OLR engaged in conduct that, on its face, was discrimination based on perceived national origin. …

Gail Cornwall: 

within the next two years, a majority of U.S. kids will be subject to some sort of phone-use restriction [in schools].

…Part of the reason that I feel so strongly about getting phones out of classrooms is that I know what school was like for teachers without them. In 2005, when I was 25 years old, I showed up at a Maryland high school eager to thrill three classes of freshmen with my impassioned dissection of Romeo and Juliet. Instead, I learned how quickly a kid’s eraser-tapping could distract the whole room, and how easily one student’s bare calves could steal another teen’s attention. Reclaiming their focus took everything I had: silliness, flexibility, and a strong dose of humility.

Today, I doubt Mercutio and I would stand a chance. Even with the rising number of restrictions, smartphones are virtually unavoidable in many schools. Consider my 16-year-old’s experience: Her debate team communicates using the Discord app. Flyers about activities require scanning a QR code. Her teachers frequently ask that she submit photos of completed assignments, which her laptop camera can’t capture clearly. In some classes, students are expected to complete learning games on their smartphone.

Wendy Wang:

A kiss-cam moment at a recent Coldplay concert went viral: a tech company CEO was caught on camera embracing a woman who was not his wife, an HR executive at the same company. The story spread like wild fire, and that public display of infidelity stirred up many conversations on men, women, and cheating—raising questions that are worth exploring with data. How common is cheating today? Are men with higher status jobs more likely to cheat? How does work status relate to cheating?

To better understand cheating among adults in the workplace, I looked at the data from the General Social Survey (GSS) for men and women ages 25 to 54, the prime age range with the highest rate of labor force participation. I combined the data in each decade to be able to look beyond fluctuations in a single year and focus on the overall trend.

——-

more.

Jon Hartley and Dylan Rem:

On June 27th, many graduate students on campus received an ominous email titled “Termination Request” sent by Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU) leadership, including Liam Sherman, the Vice-President for Membership, and Orisa Coombs (who signed off on her emails as “UE Local 1043 President”), the president of the SGWU. The emails demanded that university administrators terminat the students immediately for simply failing to pay dues to the Union, as mandated by the recent collective bargaining agreement signed between the University and the student union in 2024. 

Some graduate students on campus have objected to joining the student union, which is affiliated with and sends money to the United Electrical Workers (UE), a nationwide union that funds progressive activism. The Union is now attempting to employ aggressive methods of extracting payments from graduate students to the tune of several hundred dollars.

Benji Edwards:

A hobbyist developer building AI language models that speak Victorian-era English “just for fun” got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn’t know had actually happened until he Googled them.

“I was interested to see if a protest had actually occurred in 1834 London and it really did happen,” wrote Reddit user Hayk Grigorian, who is a computer science student at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.

For the past month, Grigorian has been developing what he calls TimeCapsuleLLM, a small AI language model (like a pint-sized distant cousin to ChatGPT) which has been trained entirely on texts from 1800–1875 London. Grigorian wants to capture an authentic Victorian voice in the AI model’s outputs. As a result, the AI model ends up spitting out text that’s heavy with biblical references and period-appropriate rhetorical excess.

Grigorian’s project joins a growing field of researchers exploring what some call “Historical Large Language Models” (HLLMs) if they feature a larger base model than the small one Grigorian is using. Similar projects include MonadGPT, which was trained on 11,000 texts from 1400 to 1700 CE that can discuss topics using 17th-century knowledge frameworks, and XunziALLM, which generates classical Chinese poetry following ancient formal rules. These models offer researchers a chance to interact with the linguistic patterns of past eras.

According to Grigorian, TimeCapsuleLLM’s most intriguing recent output emerged from a simple test. When he prompted it with “It was the year of our Lord 1834,” the AI model—which is trained to continue text from wherever a user leaves off—generated the following:

Kerry Kavanaugh:

25 Investigates was there in early August when hundreds of teachers spent four days in Mansfield in literacy instruction training.

“Today we’ve got 300 teachers representing 84 districts across the state learning the basis of evidence-based early literacy instruction,” said Patrick Tutwiler, Massachusetts Secretary of Education.

The trainings, that fully funded by the state, were dubbed ‘Literacy Launch Institute’ and are just part of Massachusetts’ efforts to improve literacy skills for students statewide.

As reported by 25 Investigates first in February a national report revealed that 60% of Massachusetts 4th graders were reading below grade level, with even higher percentages among Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students.

The trainings targeted educators in grades Kindergarten through 3rd. Tutwiler says it’s crucial to target those students in the youngest grades.

Jean Twenge, Jenet Erickson, Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox:

Clearly, many single women today perceive getting married or becoming a mother to be transitions of loss. But is this perception true?  

New data paint a different picture. In the 2022 General Social Survey (GSS), the nation’s leading social barometer, married mothers are happier than single childless women as well as married childless women and unmarried mothers.¹⁰ Other surveys have found similar results.¹¹

To better clarify how marriage and motherhood are linked to women’s happiness, we fielded the Women’s Well-Being Survey (WWS) of 3,000 U.S. women, ages 25 to 55, conducted by YouGov in early March 2025 (for details, see About the Data and Methodology). We wanted to know: Why are married mothers the happiest group of women? 

Happiness

Consistent with previous surveys, our new survey finds that married mothers are happier than unmarried women or women without children. Nearly twice as many married mothers say they are “very happy” as unmarried women without children.  

——-

more.

Michael Walsh:

When did reporters become “journalists”? When I started out at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 1972, nobody called himself a “journalist.” We were reporters, and proud of it. “Journalist” had a snooty air to it and seemed to be reserved for the newspaper trade’s bigdomes who wrote editorials. The rest of us wrote news stories.

I started out, as reporters did in those days, on general assignment, writing the weather story and tallying the numbers of dogs killed each year on Monroe County highways. Later I did time on the night rewrite desk, working from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. — working hours I still pretty much keep. Nobody had a degree in “journalism.” You learned your trade by watching and imitating the old guys (there were very few women in newsrooms in those days), some still sharp and on their game, and others wrecked old hulks adrift in the Sargasso Sea of the office, the city desk.

But they could still teach, and my earliest stories fell under the ken of one John B. Kenney, a gruff oldtimer who showed me the ropes. He advised me to add my middle initial, “A.” to my byline, correctly observing there were a lot of Irish-American kids with my first (very common) and last (fourth commonest name in Ireland) names and thus help avoid confusion. It was good advice but I didn’t take it, and to this day Amazon has real trouble with disambiguating me from a dozen other Michael Walshes, some of whom are priests, authors of books on religion, or Hitler apologists, but none of whom is me.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Her resignation is effective immediately, according to a news release sent out shortly before 9 p.m. Monday. 

The news release said Kamoku emailed the board, saying, “I have enjoyed my 2.5 years of service, but the time has come for me to prioritize my children and my job.”

Kamoku was elected in spring 2023. Her position on the board is up for election in April, but the District says her resignation “opens up a Board seat for a new Board appointment” and information on how to apply would be released in the future.

Teddy Ganea:

UChicago’s financial position is clear: Unlike near-peer institutions, its endowment is not large enough to sustain its spending and debt. The university carries nearly $6bn in debt while running annual budget deficits exceeding $200m, all on an endowment three times smaller than Stanford’s. 

To compensate, the university has focused on expanding lucrative certification programs, increasing donations, raising tuitions, and cutting costs, though many faculty and students viscerally disagree with the administration on which costs to cut.

Yet these debates neglect the most important factor: the UChicago endowment’s weak returns, driven by poor investment decisions.

educate podcast:

Silva didn’t know anything about how children learn to read or how they should be taught, so he started searching online. As he soon discovered, virtually all kids can learn to read — if they are taught the right way. The problem is that many American elementary schools aren’t doing that.

“We never looked at brain research. We had never, ever looked at it. Never.”- Jodi Frankelli

The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn’t come naturally. The human brain isn’t wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics. 

“There are thousands of studies,” said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. “This is the most studied aspect of human learning.”

But this research hasn’t made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don’t know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

———-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Joel Kotkin:

In response, many firms are now focusing on building tangible products rather than merely shifting algorithms for commerce or generating more social media. In the aerospace and defence sectors, for example, AI is seen not as an end but a tool. It is a means to enhance human creativity and productivity rather than replace it. “Software is not in the greatest position with AI,” Delian Asparouhov, who runs a firm focused on in-space manufacturing, told me. “Now people are shifting to hard tech. Designing and building spaceships still needs people.”

This could spell trouble for elite universities, but represents a major advantage for schools that teach the practical skills companies actually need. So far, these opportunities are largely concentratedin red and purple states in the Midwest and South — the regions most focused on reshoring manufacturing and other industries from overseas.

Attitudes are shifting alongside these economic changes. One recent survey found that roughly 83% of Generation Z feel that learning a skilled trade can be a better pathway to economic security than college — including 90% of those already holding college degrees. Indeed, as college enrolment has dropped between 2020 and 2023, trade school enrolment grew by 10%. These changes suggest that as practical skills gain value, regions offering them are likely to attract both talent and jobs.

California is already losing hard tech jobs to emerging players in Texas and the South. Between 2022 and 2023, Texas led the country in new tech jobs, while California remained largely flat. Florida came in second, with Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina also posting significant gains. Looking ahead, CompTIA (the Computing Technology Association) projects that Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina will see the fastest growth in tech over the next decade.

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Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen:

This paper examines changes in the labor market for occupations exposed to generative artificial intelligence using high-frequency administrative data from the largest payroll software provider in the United States. We present six facts that characterize these shifts. We find that since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks. In contrast, employment for workers in less exposed fields and more experienced workers in the same occupations has remained stable or continued to grow. We also find that adjustments occur primarily through employment rather than compensation. Furthermore, employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor. Our results are robust to alternative explanations, such as excluding technology-related firms and excluding occupations amenable to remote work. These six facts provide early, large-scale evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market.

Chris Rickert:

Two Madison School Board members are criticizing district administration for not keeping them in the loop before deciding last week not to weight grades when ranking high schoolers for a new college admissions program.

Nicki Vander Meulen said the board should decide whether students are awarded additional grade point average credit for taking more-challenging classes.

Martha Siravo, meanwhile, said that questions she had about the issue went unanswered for months.

Vander Meulen thinks students should get a GPA boost for taking more honors or advanced placement classes. Siravo says she never received enough information from administrators to take an informed position on the issue.

——-

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

Déjà vu: English 10 and Small Learning Communities.

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ian Leslie:

The written word, fundamental to Western society for hundreds of years, is in retreat. Evidence for this has accumulated on different fronts, from time-use surveys to studies of cognitive processing. For a survey, read these recent articles by Sam Freedman for Comment Is Freed and John Burn-Murdoch for the Financial Times. We can debate the speed with which this is happening but no longer the direction of travel. It’s happening across societies, and the drop-off is steepest among the highly educated people who tend to constitute our elites. 

We can’t pin this one on the phones since it is hardly a new trend. When Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death in 1985, he blamed TV for the marginalisation of writing, which he argued had had a ruinous effect on the intelligence of our political discourse. But smartphones seem to be accelerating the changes that Postman was decrying. Social media started out as text based, but the dominant platforms – TikTok and YouTube – are now primarily visual and oral/aural. The LLMs we use are text-based for now, but will probably follow the same trajectory.

The age of literacy is not literally over: the majority of people in developed nations will continue to read and write. Books will sell in large numbers for a long time to come (I hope). But the written word will not be as central to our societies as it was, and this has profound ramifications, because it isn’t just about swapping one tool of communication for another. It’s about how we use our intelligence. We can learn about where we’re headed by looking at how pre-literate people used their intelligence.

———-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Alex Tabarrok

Compensation for government jobs is higher relative to GDP per capita the poorer the country. In other words, government workers are most overpaid in poor countries. Excessive public-sector compensation in low- and middle-income countries distorts labor markets on two margins: queues (rent-seeking to win jobs) and misallocation (talent and taxes diverted from the private sector).

In my two posts Massive Rent-Seeking in India’s Government Job Examination System and The Tragedy of India’s Government-Job Prep Towns I drew attention to the first margin, rent-seeking losses from the queues. India’s most educated young people—precisely those it needs in the workforce—often devote years of their life cramming for government exams instead of working productively. These exams cultivate no real-world skills and entire towns have become specialized in exam preparation. I argued using a back-of-the-envelope calculation that the rent seeking losses alone could easily be on the order of 1.4% of GDP annually. More tragically, large numbers of educated young people are inevitably disillusioned. Finally, because pay is so high, the state can’t staff up; India has all the laws of a rich country with roughly one‑fifth the civil servants per capita.

Two macro papers quantify the other margin of loss: who ends up where.

SFUSD

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is rolling out a new math curriculum for grades K-8 adopted by the Board of Education for the 2025-26 school year, marking a major step in the district’s mission to give all students a stronger foundation in mathematics.

The curriculum adoption is designed to expand access to high-quality instruction, integrate engaging digital tools, and provide targeted support and resources for teachers and families. The district continues to offer Algebra 1 for 8th grade students, with a formal recommendation on Algebra 1 policy expected in 2026.

“San Francisco’s public schools are focused on helping every student build confidence and competence in math to be set up for lifelong success,” said SFUSD Superintendent Dr. Maria Su. “The newly adopted materials for elementary and middle grades are designed to give students a more well-rounded math education by focusing on three key areas: being able to solve math problems accurately; helping students understand the why behind the math, not just the steps; and teaching students how to apply math to solve problems in everyday life.”

Karol Markowicz

Meta’s guidelines allowed its bot to tell a shirtless 8-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece — a treasure I cherish deeply.”

No, it’s actually not at all acceptable for a stranger, human or designed to seem like one, to comment on a child’s “youthful form.”

It’s disgusting and horrifying, all the more so because these standards were allegedly approved by multiple Meta teams, including legal and public-policy staffers. 

Austin Berg:

Chicago’s finances were already on life support. Now, with a single piece of legislation, the state of Illinois has pushed the city closer to fiscal collapse—and put every American taxpayer at risk of footing the bill.

On August 1, Governor J. B. Pritzker signed a bill that ranks among the most financially reckless in Illinois history. It includes pension “sweeteners” for Chicago police and fire employees hired after 2011. Experts estimate that it creates $11 billion in new liabilities and drops the “funded ratio” of Chicago police and fire pensions to just 18 percent, meaning that they have just 18 cents on hand for every dollar owed. (Actuaries consider funded ratios below 40 percent as being at the point of no return.)

——-

Paul Vallas:

Mayor Johnson’s “Tax the Rich” rhetoric masks his intent to solve Chicago’s budget woes with a Seattle style “gross-receipts tax” on business payrolls that projects to raise $1.5B. The group behind the tax is the Institute for the Public Good, which is aligned with the CTU.

Should it pass, or any version of the city’s old Head Tax — a per-employee tax on Chicago businesses — the big sucking sound you hear will be businesses and jobs exiting Chicago.

Meanwhile, the Mayor’s review team proposed a raft of 26 other taxes and fees to be placed on all individuals regardless of income. They include a tax on drivers (congestion tax), restaurant meals, bottled water, garbage pickup, etc.

——-

Needless to say, this is not helping CTU’s push for a bailout from Springfield.

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more.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson CTU background.

He forgot that he won 17% to 16% because only a third of the city voted. There was no mandate.”

Johnson, who does not call himself a democratic socialist but believes in many of the same principles as Mamdani, was swept into office by a coalition underpinned by the powerful Chicago Teachers Union and the city’s Black and brown voters. He vowed to unite fractured coalitions and lift up the most vulnerable. He represented change, and his strong roots in the community as an activist, a parent and a resident of a neighborhood that struggles with crime gave hope around new efforts toward equality across a city long deeply segregated by race and income.

How does Chicago’s debt compareto other major cities’ debt? It’s pretty bad.

Frank is right: Chicago’s debt is bad. Additionally, Chicago can’t seem to control its expenses either. From 2020 to 2025 the city budget ballooned 50%, climbing from $11.6 billion to $17.3 billion, while NYC’s and LA’s budgets only grew by about 29%. @FrankCalabrese

Citadel’s workforce once numbered 1,100 in downtown Chicago, most of whom were compensated well above the $200,000 threshold Mayor Johnson now wants to tax. In a few short years, Citadel’s Chicago headcount now is at just 250, we understand.

Once company bosses make up their minds that the “privilege of doing business” in a certain place is no longer worth the expenseand headache, it doesn’t take long for them to act.

Curiously, Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker has been an active donor and presence in the Wisconsin Democrat Party, including a “keynote speaker”. Money.

The latest on Pritzker: 

.@GovPritzker just signed this billand in one stroke of his pen transformed Chicago police and fire pension funds from 25% funded to 18% funded

$11B added to the $36B, with one signature.

There are 2 paths to dealing with pension liabilities: political courage or kick the can. Here, Pritzker is courting organized labor for his expected prez run in ’28 and will let the city of Chicago and future governors deal with the consequences of this fiscal malfeasance.

Namely, Pritzker is promising new pension benefits for the worst-funded pension systems in the nation because he’s running for president and wants support from government union labor.

The Illinois Constitution locks in those promises for eternity. Pritzker won’t be around to face the consequences. But a generation of working Chicagoans will be. We are stuck with the tab — whether in cuts to services or higher taxes.

Going to Illinois to protest gerrymandering is like going to Wisconsin to protest cheese.

And to think that Gov Pritzker has presidential ambitions.

Pritzker, who once campaigned promising to support efforts to take the mapping pen out of politicians’ hands, eventually supported the maps produced by his fellow democrats.

Remember when Soros and Pritzker poured money into Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race to gerrymander Wisconsin in favor of the democrats……

Imagine the campaign against that reform, so recently touted as the right thing to do in California: We’re doing it right, but if Texas is doing it wrong, we’ve got to seize the power to do it wrong like the way we did in the bad old days.

Stephen Colbert put Illinois governor JB Pritzker on the hot seat by making fun of Illinois’s outrageously gerrymandered congressional map.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows Illinois has created a meager 15,500 net new jobs since the governor took office in January of 2019. It’s the nation’s 4th-worst performance among the 50 states. Contrast Illinois’ performance to growth in Georgia, which has added more than 360,000 net new jobs. Or Arizona, with more than 338,000 new jobs. Or the biggest job creators, Florida and Texas, with 1.1 million and 1.5 million net new jobs, respectively.

Chicago School Board

Up until Friday, I thought growth plus fiscal discipline might have been enough to rebuild Chicago’s finances. Now I’m honestly not sure if the city has any chance of turning a corner without changes to the state constitution and/or bankruptcy.

Chicago Teacher Union

Just two weeks before school starts, @ChiPubSchool blindsided 1,200 custodians with layoffs, leaving custodians without a job, income, or healthcare and leaving our students with dirty and unsafe schools.

In response, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates called Tarver a deadbeat dad, continuing her habit of personally insulting her political opponents. But every word of Tarver’s speech is correct. A case in point: On the pension sweetener bill, Johnson and his Springfield lobbying team were completely missing in action.

Matt Taibbi:

(Particularly not a lover. Eew, that last word shrieks off the page like a sick bat!) Unfortunately, we’re not far off from A.I. coming with skin, hair, and orifices, and Ezra writing, “My Surprising Bedroom Experience With ChatGPT.” This is the new con: “True, you’ve begun to reject tools like Google because their biases have become painfully visible, but what if you could ____ your search engine? Would that change your mind?”

All those Philip K. Dick novels and Pink Floyd albums that warned me as a kid against human-machine incest are paying off, as urban Northeastern intellectuals (my people, the disillusioned writer sighs) have hopped on another crazy hobby horse. After creepy authoritarian crusades against free speech, informed consent, even meat via the search for “sustainable protein,” the new come on in, the water’s warm clarion call tells people to stop worrying and love their machines, in some cases literal

CTOL

Over a single weekend in August, 1,200 technology contractors found themselves locked out of their systems, their access badges deactivated, their projects suspended indefinitely. The mass termination wasn’t the result of budget cuts or strategic pivots—it was the fallout from a corruption scheme that reached into the highest echelons of Walmart’s Global Tech division.

The retail giant’s abrupt severance of ties with Caspex-sourced contractors followed the firing of a Global Tech vice president who had been orchestrating an elaborate kickback operation. Daily payments starting from $30,000 flowed from contracting agencies seeking preferential treatment in Walmart’s vast technology ecosystem, sources familiar with the investigation revealed.

This dramatic purge represents far more than an isolated corporate scandal. It illuminates a shadowy economy of influence-peddling that has metastasized throughout the technology sector’s contingent workforce infrastructure, creating systemic vulnerabilities that industry observers suggest could trigger widespread operational disruptions across corporate America.

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more.

John Maier and Daniel Kodsi:

And it’s older colleagues who stood by nodding it all through.

From Rhodes Must Fall, a student campaign to press the university into removing a smaller-than-life-size statue of the Victorian imperialist from the façade of Oriel College, to the mass sit-ins of Black Lives Matter and the pro-Palestinian encampments of recent summers, each season has brought a new style of ideological fast fashion. At least such political posturing will have provided ripe material for student satire magazines, you may think. Well, not exactly: our own college’s satirical publication was forcibly shot down by a student vote (on account, of course, of its politically wrong-thinking transgressions).

When a satire of the modern-day woke university finally appears, it is likely to make its villain the kind of intolerant, blue-haired, placard-wielding undergraduate who has so shamelessly cast themselves as the protagonist of the past decade’s culture war. The more we have seen of university life, however — as undergrads, then PhD students and finally teaching — the clearer it has become that the damage being done by woke ideology is not confined to student skirmishes, but has infected academia at every level: taught content, research, disciplinary norms and even institutional design.
In fact, the conventional emphasis on the menace of woke student activism risks getting things backwards. There is indeed an important generational component to the malaise gripping universities. But the culpable figures are not students. They are those academics in positions of authority and secure employment who have negligently allowed the culture to be trashed, leaving a mess for the next generation to clear up.

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more.

Dale Chu

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No More Excuses, Minnesota. Let’s Teach Kids to Read.

———

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Janan Ganesh

If this were the most perverse consequence of having the global lingua franca, we might still think it was well worth it. But there is another. I wonder how much of Britain’s economic sloth, its resistance to reform, comes from being able to coast on the pre-eminence of English. Countries that seem stuck often have a cushion that explains their inertia. For France and Italy, it is tourism. If an appreciable chunk of national output comes from visitors, that can cover a lot of sins. Natural resources are another example of an illusory advantage, as Nigerians and Venezuelans have found over the decades. Even the dollar, that “exorbitant privilege”, backfires on the US to the extent that it allows the country to avoid hard budgeting questions. Hence the debt problem.

If Britain has a cushion, it is language. (As well as perhaps geographic location.) It guarantees not just a minimum of outside interest in a fading power, from rightwingers or otherwise, but hard income. As the main anglophone economy outside America — an obvious place for Emea corporate headquarters, a natural destination for bright graduates — we can get away with an awful lot. But that means we try to.

Dean Ball:

Several states have banned (see also “regulated,” “put guardrails on” for the polite phraseology) the use of AI for mental health services. Nevada, for example, passed a law (AB 406) that bans schools from “[using] artificial intelligence to perform the functions and duties of a school counselor, school psychologist, or school social worker,” though it indicates that such human employees are free to use AI in the performance of their work provided that they comply with school policies for the use of AI. Some school districts, no doubt, will end up making policies that effectively ban any AI use at all by those employees. If the law stopped here, I’d be fine with it; not supportive, not hopeful about the likely outcomes, but fine nonetheless.

But the Nevada law, and a similar law passed in Illinois, goes further than that. They also impose regulations on AI developers, stating that it is illegal for them to explicitly or implicitly claim of their models that (quoting from the Nevada law):

(a) The artificial intelligence system is capable of providing professional mental or behavioral health care;

(b) A user of the artificial intelligence system may interact with any feature of the artificial intelligence system which simulates human conversation in order to obtain professional mental or behavioral health care; or

(c) The artificial intelligence system, or any component, feature, avatar or embodiment of the artificial intelligence system is a provider of mental or behavioral health care, a therapist, a clinical therapist, a counselor, a psychiatrist, a doctor or any other term commonly used to refer to a provider of professional mental health or behavioral health care.

Adam Chilton, Peter A. Joy and Kyle Rozema

To help bridge the gap between legal education and legal practice, in 2014 the American Bar Association adopted a requirement that law students take at least six credits of “experiential” courses. Despite limited research on the effects of this reform, the ABA is currently considering a new reform that would require law students to take twice as many experiential credits to graduate. We provide new evidence for this debate by studying the evolution of experiential legal education and the impacts of the 2014 reform. We compile data reported by law schools to the ABA to document a dramatic rise in the number of experiential opportunities available to students even before the reform, and we find no evidence that the reform improved bar passage rates or employment outcomes. However, we also find no evidence that the reform increased tuition. We then use transcript data from one law school to study how the 2014 reform impacted students’ course selections. We find evidence suggesting that the reform expanded access to clinics primarily to students least inclined to benefit from them but without displacing students most inclined to benefit from them.

Richard Phelps:

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

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

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

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

——

much more on Common Core.

Richard P. Phelps and Cathryn MacArthur

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

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

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

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

Chad Aldeman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More.

Enjoyiana Nururdin:

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

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

Claire Jones and Sam Fleming:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More:

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

Berry Arnold:

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

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

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

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

Alex Tabarrok: 

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

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

Emine Saner: 

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

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

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

Te Ping Chen:

Child care in America is broken.

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

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

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

Adam Rittenberg:

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

Austin Berg:

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

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

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

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

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

———

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

Jon A. Shields and Yuval Avnur:

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

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

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

Julie Nelson:

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

——-

Somewhat related:

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

Tom Sherrington

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

Mike Damiano

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

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

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

Chris Rickert:

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

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

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

Luke Glawacki:

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

Alana Pipe:

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

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

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

Eyal Press

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

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