School Information System

Becky Jacobs and Andrew Bahl:

The leader of Wisconsin’s 13 public universities said without additional funding in the next state budget, he expects more branch campus closures, decreased affordability for students, layoffs and program cuts.

“All of which will hit hardest at our most vulnerable UWs,” Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman said on social media.

State lawmakers are working this month to set Wisconsin’s next two-year budget. The Legislature’s budget writing committee, led by Republicans, was set to weigh funding for the UW system Tuesday. However, leaders of the Joint Committee on Finance postponed the discussion without explanation and hadn’t rescheduled a hearing as of Thursday, with the fate of the entire budget appearing to be up in the air.

Daily Memphian

The inspiration for FedEx came to Smith when he was a student at Yale University. He wrote a paper about overnight, reliable delivery in the digital age. His professor was not impressed and he received a C on the paper.

Smith incorporated FedEx in 1971. The company began operations in 1973.

FedEx lost money in the early years and, once, as he struggled to raise further capital for the business, he made a pitstop in Las Vegas where his winnings at the blackjack table helped keep the company afloat until it could secure further funding.

In the time since, FedEx’s operations have spanned the globe and helped reshape trade across the world. The company’s reach and impact never showed itself more than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wall Street Journal:

Step Up For Students calculates that nearly 1.8 million students, or 51% of K-12 students in the state, attended a school of their family’s choice in 2023-24. That’s one happy result of GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis’s work to expand education savings accounts (ESAs), which the state opened to any student, regardless of income, in 2023. Some 285,000 students use ESAs to attend private schools—more than the 125,000 who attend private school without them. Nearly 100,000 use Florida ESAs for students with special needs.

Another 116,000 are homeschooling, and nearly 400,000 students attend charter schools. Hundreds of thousands of students are also taking advantage of choice within the traditional public school system. Some 275,000 participate in open enrollment programs to attend schools they aren’t zoned for. Others are in career academies at public schools, or going to magnet schools.

More than 116,000 more students enrolled in choice programs compared to the year before, the nonprofit says, and it’s possible the number is higher this year. A record number of scholarship applications for the 2025-26 school year flooded in over the first weekend that applications opened in February.

A recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report projects a 20% increase in school property taxes this December, a $883 increase on the average home, driven by the two 2024 referendums and declining state aid. For a city that prides itself on deliberate work to address affordability, this tax increase is concerning. We risk pricing families out of housing, reducing school enrollment and thereby undermining the basic funding the district depends on.

What can residents do? Speak up. Ask the School Board to be prudent and strategic. Taxing authority does not require maximum spending. The board still has $40 million in authorized increases left over the next two years. Taxpayers should insist this money be used carefully, not automatically.

Moreover, in alignment with the district’s new strategic planning, the board must start evaluating what can be subtracted, not just what can be added. Every new or continuing program should be weighed against what’s not working or no longer needed.

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Madison taxpayers have long funded far above average k-12 taxes (and $pending), now nearly $25k per student. Yet we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.

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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?

MGT

The goal of this review is primarily to shed light on the school and district systems and practices that have created an environment of inconsistent student achievement. Throughout our review, the MGT team collected data aligned to the High-Quality Schools Framework, which consists of 4 Levers for school improvement. In this report, we propose that MPS adopt 3 objectives aligned to each Lever. The table below summarizes key findings and objectives

Notes

Nitesh Saxena:

New research led by Texas A&M University found that websites are covertly using browser fingerprinting — a method to uniquely identify a web browser — to track people across browser sessions and sites.

“Fingerprinting has always been a concern in the privacy community, but until now, we had no hard proof that it was actually being used to track users,” said Dr. Nitesh Saxena, cybersecurity researcher, professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Global Cyber Research Institute at Texas A&M. “Our work helps close that gap.”

When you visit a website, your browser shares a surprising amount of information, like your screen resolution, time zone, device model and more. When combined, these details create a “fingerprint” that’s often unique to your browser. Unlike cookies — which users can delete or block — fingerprinting is much harder to detect or prevent. Most users have no idea it’s happening, and even privacy-focused browsers struggle to fully block it.

George Hammond:

Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google and Meta are little more than “stochastic parrots”, a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system “for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning”.

The paper shot her to prominence and triggered a backlash in AI circles. Two of her co-authors, senior members of the ethical AI team at Google, lost their jobs at the company shortly after publication. Bender has also faced criticism from other academics for what they regard as a heretical stance. “It feels like people are mad that I am undermining what they see as the sort of crowning achievement of our field,” she says.

The controversy highlighted tensions between those looking to commercialise AI fast and opponents warning of its harms and urging more responsible development. In the four years since, the former group has been ascendant.

Aaron Sibarium:

When the Washington Free Beacon published documents showing how the Harvard Law Review selects articles based on race, the law review insisted those documents had been taken out of context.

The journal claimed the Free Beacon had quoted “selectively” from “five internal memos going back more than three years,” adding that the Harvard Law Review “considers several thousand submissions annually.”

“The Review does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication,” the journal wrote in a fact sheet published on May 27.

But according to new documents obtained by the Free Beacon, the law review eliminates more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about “author diversity.” And 40 percent of journal editors have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained in a meeting that “we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors.”

Kayla Huynh:

Even with additional funding from the referendum, the Madison school district will also rely on $22.4 million in one-time funds this year to balance its budget. Undernext year’s proposed budget, the school district would spend $9.5 million more than it receives in revenue, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, a nonpartisan, indendent research group that analyzes government decision-making. 

“We don’t have forever to close budget gaps,” Gothard said. “We’re going to need some incredible help in the future.” 

…..

The other big priority taking up a lot of time is boundary review. Madison is expected to grow. We have areas of the city being developed that we don’t necessarily have schools in, or we could have schools that are near capacity. 

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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?

Eli Hoff:

The University of Missouri athletics department has spent more than $31 million on name, image and likeness compensation for its athletes during the past year, according to financial records.

Mizzou’s NIL spending reflects the university’s push to compete in football and men’s basketball under the terms of a modern college sports landscape that has spawned a lucrative market for athletes.

The records show that nearly two-thirds of the money in 2024 went to football players and about a fourth to men’s basketball. The remainder was split among baseball, women’s basketball and lower-profile programs.

The Economist:

Until recently the “university wage premium”, where graduates earn more than others, was growing (see chart 2). More recently, though, it has shrunk, including in America, Britain and Canada. Using data on young Americans from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, we estimate that in 2015 the median college graduate earned 69% more than the median high-school graduate. By last year, the premium had shrunk to 50%.

Jobs are also less fulfilling. A large survey suggests that America’s “graduate satisfaction gap”—how much more likely graduates are to say they are “very satisfied” with their job than non-graduates—is now around three percentage points, down from a long-run advantage of seven.

Is it a bad thing if graduates lose their privileges? Ethically, not really. No group has a right to outperform the average. But practically, it might be. History shows that when brainy people—or people who think they are brainy—do worse than they think they ought to, bad things happen.

Peter Turchin, a scientist at the University of Connecticut, argues that “elite overproduction” has been the proximate cause of all sorts of unrest over the centuries, with “counter-elites” leading the charge. Historians identify “the problem of an excess of educated men” as contributing to Europe’s revolutions of 1848, for instance. Luigi Mangione would be a member of the counter-elite. Mr Mangione, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, should be living a prosperous life. Instead, he is on trial for the alleged murder of the chief executive of a health insurer. More telling is the degree to which people sympathise with his alienation: Mr Mangione has received donations of well over $1m.

……

A recent study, by Susan Carlson of Pittsburg State University and colleagues, suggests that many students today are functionally illiterate. A worrying number of English majors struggle to understand Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House”. Many are bamboozled by the opening line: “Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”

Frederick Hess:

We need a post-BS civics. In 2025, public officials seem unhealthily consumed by social media celebrity while longstanding civic norms are casually shattered. I don’t believe the problems are because of civics education but a post-BS civics could be part of the solution.

I mean, the U.S. owes $36 trillion in debt, is borrowing $2 trillion a year, and is spending $1 trillion a year just on interest payments. President Trump and a Republican Congress insist they’re tackling the problem but are eagerly pursuing a reconciliation package that’s going to make things worse. Of course, when Democrats had the wheel, they added as much debt as Senator Joe Manchin would permit.

Trump seems intent on trampling every federal law in sight. The only thing stopping him are the federal courts, which he’s proceeded to impugnas illegitimate. Of course, Democrats spent the last four years maligning the Supreme Court, smearing conservative members to undermine their legitimacy, and insisting the president should be able to pack the court.

Andrew Roth

The new state department checks are directed at students and other applicants for visas in the F, M and J categories, which refer to academic and vocational education, as well as cultural exchanges.

“It is an expectation from American citizens that their government will make every effort to make our country safer, and that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing every single day,” said a senior state department official, adding that Marco Rubio was “helping to make America and its universities safer while bringing the state Department into the 21st century”.

The Trump administration paused the issuance of new education visas late last month as it mulled new social media vetting strategies. The US had also targeted Chinese students for special scrutiny amid a tense negotiation over tariffs and the supply of rare-earth metals and minerals to the United States.

The state department directive allowed diplomatic posts to resume the scheduling of interviews for educational and exchange visas, but added that consular officers would conduct a “comprehensive and thorough vetting” of all applicants applying for F, M and J visas.

John Ellis:

Ending woke foolishness and returning universities to their former brilliance is possible only if the political monopoly is broken up. In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill explained that “a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. . . . It is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.” Only a political monopoly could have given us the collection of silly, faddish notions that is wokeness: criminals as victims, pronoun madness, defunding the police and so on.

It’s easy to understand how a monolithic political group loses its grip on sanity. A party that faces strong opposition will have its weakest and most fanciful arguments picked off and weeded out. That will clear the field of all but its strongest ideas, and leadership will then flow to people who build their party’s agenda on these strong ideas. Without the discipline of an opposition, leadership will flow instead to people who advocate the most ambitious and exciting ideas, which without opposition will gradually degenerate into absurdity.

What makes university reform so urgent is that woke folly inevitably spreads from campuses throughout our society. Children have abysmal scores in math and English partly because radical professors in college education schools persuade their teachers to give priority to “social justice” over the three Rs. The notorious political bias of the legacy media developed partly because journalists are trained in activist college journalism schools. Other professions have suffered similarly.

by Alarice McPark, age 13

The whole language approach was a reading instruction method invented by Dame Marie Clay in New Zealand in the 1970s, and it gained popularity in other countries by the late ‘90s. In this approach, children were taught to use contextual cues, such as the idea of the story, or use pictures to figure out the meaning of a word they didn’t recognize.

However, structured literacy focuses on phonics (how letters sound together) and the pronunciation of the word. This approach has been proven to be successful in many school settings worldwide, especially for students with dyslexia or low-income students. Until recently though, structured literacy was only available for children in New Zealand in certain private schools or in private tutoring.

Since 2009, educational performance has declined in New Zealand. A 2022 assessment called the Programme for International Student Assessment found that many students’ reading levels were worryingly low; 21% of the country’s 15 year olds were at the lowest level of literacy, meaning that they could do simple reading tasks, but nothing else.

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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?

Barry Garelick:

For those who wish to view my rED/Toronto presentation, my slides w/narration in “Notes” form has been uploaded to researchED/Canada’s Google Drive.

Another link.

James Koch:

Thirty prestigious independent American institutions of higher education were at some time members of the 568 higher education group (often labeled a cartel). Seventeen of them were sued by the U.S. Government and representative students who alleged that their meetings and deliberations resulted in collusion that caused students to pay higher prices. Twelve of the seventeen institutions subsequently settled their cases and by 2024 collectively had paid $284 million to do so. However, an inspection of these institutions’ pricing reveals that the median 568 Group institution lowered its average real net annual cost to its undergraduate students by 19.07% between 2009 and 2022. Further, this reduction was 1.70 times larger than the average real price reduction granted during the same period by the median institution among a sample of 475 other accredited, non-profit, independent four-year institutions and 11.63 times larger than the median price reduction granted by 78 public flagship state universities. The 568 group’s real price reductions stretched across every one of the five household income categories commonly used by the Government. Thus, there is little empirical support for the allegations that the Government has levied against the representative 568 group institution, and thus multiple members of this group appear to have paid unmerited fines to the Government to settle claims against them.

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More.

Link:

This was the standard curriculum for seventh and eighth grade English classes in Minnesota in 1908. Poems and novels that today would be considered too challenging or difficult. Students were expected to read entire books, where today we teach only snippets. How far we’ve fallen.

Meanwhile:

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?

Kimberly Wethal:

“It’s not about cutting money. What it is is about getting some kind of reforms to the broken process that we currently have,” Vos said. “We don’t have enough respect for political diversity. Heaven forbid if you’re a student who’s Jewish or has a different viewpoint on campus where you feel like you’re either targeted or the victim of potential hate. So we want to ensure that whatever happens on campus, it is a free exchange of ideas and that people understand that’s the basis for what the university should be.”

Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, told reporters following the committee meeting Tuesday that a $87 million cut to the UW system is a “non-starter.” A spokesperson for Gov. Tony Evers echoed that sentiment Wednesday afternoon.

“The university, over the last generation, has seen their budget shrink and shrink. They have not gotten inflationary increases, and they’ve had cuts,” Roys said.

Michael Torres:

I beg to differ. Given the challenges professors are now experiencing with students’ college-level literacy and attention spans, one may counter that being able to pay attention to and analyze texts of extended length on complex subject matters that one may not find immediately entertaining should indeed be a prerequisite for college. And an objective and consistent standardized exam is a valuable means to measure such ability, especially amidst the rise of rampant high-school grade inflation.

But, rather than hold students to a clear and rigorous standard, the College Board is catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues.

This extends to the changes made in the new SAT math section, as well. College Board now serves test-takers fewer questions but did not reduce the amount of time for the section correspondingly. Students taking the post-2024 SAT now have 1.6 minutes per question, compared to 1.3 minutes on the 2015-2024 SAT. (The ACT and CLT provide 1.1 minutes per question.) Additionally, a calculator can now be used for the entirety of the SAT math section.

It’s hard to predict the extent to which these changes may decrease the rigor of the SAT math section. However, they comport with a more than 15-year trend. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati trained an AI program to do SAT math questions going back to 2008, and it found that the test has been getting easier by about four points per year.

Finally, the optional essay was eliminated completely.

Freddy Brewster and Luke Goldstein:

A private group chat of Democratic Party operatives and crypto industry advocates has been secretly coordinating to push Democratic Senators to support major cryptocurrency-friendly legislation up for a vote on Tuesday. In the chat, they admitted that while “Trump’s corruption is manifesting dramatically in crypto,” it would be “political suicide” for Democrats to reject doing the industry’s bidding, even if they have reservations about the impacts on consumers and the financial system.

In the Signal chat, the contents of which were viewed by The Lever, influential Democratic figures noted they “need to win the next election, which means we can not afford to alienate a very vocal and wealthy group of donors.” 

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more.

Matthew Butterick:

Of course, predic­tions of global apoc­a­lypse are as ancient as humanity. Given the histor­ical track record—no global apoc­a­lypse yet!—those predicting apoc­a­lypse have tradi­tion­ally had a rough time being taken seri­ously. Still, there is a big differ­ence between predicting the arrival of apoc­a­lypse ex nihilo vs. a reasoned argu­ment that it neces­sarily emerges from specific human deci­sions and habits.

The Limits of Growth

This book, published in 1972, was an early effort to quan­ti­ta­tively model the effects of tech­no­log­ical change. I read it some years ago. As the title implies, The Limits of Growth consid­ered how five key global factorswould affect human devel­op­ment:

Erin McGroarty:

With his two most recent appointments, Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has now picked a majority of the current judges serving on the Dane County Circuit Court.

Voters typically choose their own county judges in elections, except when there’s a midterm vacancy. That’s where Evers has stepped in — and in Dane County, nine of the 17 circuit court judges owe their positions to his appointments.

The governor says he’s focused on ensuring a diverse judiciary representative of a diverse population. 

Legal scholars say Evers’ stated attention to diversity on the bench differs from previous governors. 

…..

“People like legal action attorneys are now becoming judges through appointment, and having those perspectives of people who have had clients that have faced eviction, clients who have come from traumatic experiences, understanding those various perspectives is really important.”

These are the nine sitting Dane County judges Evers has appointed over the past seven years: 

…….

The other eight county circuit court judges assumed their positions through elections.

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it would be useful to include the number of unopposed judicial elections as well. 

Dan Robinson 

This new policy package is expected to fund various programs, including a plan by Tohoku University in Sendai to spend around ¥30 billion ($208 million) to recruit about 500 researchers from Japan and abroad.

Japan’s move follows an announcement in May from the European Commission(EC) that it wanted to make Europe the home of science by tempting researchers and scientists to relocate there.

The “Choose Europe” scheme is to include a €500 million ($566 million) package for 2025-2027 to make Europe “a magnet for researchers,” with EC President Ursula von der Leyen saying it would promote the region as a world-leading center of research, innovation, and scientific freedom.

This came after the launch of the Safe Place For Science program by Aix-Marseille University in the south of France a month earlier. This was setup with the intention of offering a “safe and stimulating environment” for American researchers wishing to pursue their work free from persecution.

US Senator Ron Johnson:

The primary purpose of this report is to graphically show what so many Republican
leaders have repeatedly stated, including President Trump in his November 2, 2011 tweet
‘Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”1 Fueled by spending levels tha
exploded during the pandemic but never receded, our fiscal situation is far worse than when
President Trump posted that tweet in 2011. These two charts illustrate that spending explosion:

Lauren Fedor and James Politi:

“Look at the bond market. These are pretty smart, sophisticated people, and they are a little more reluctant to buy US bonds, or are ploughing money into gold or other currencies,” Johnson said. “That ought to concern people.”

Asked whether Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell should lower interest rates as Trump has demanded, Johnson said it was no longer up to the US central bank boss.

“It is beyond his control. The bond buyers are controlling this now.”

The spending bill narrowly passed through the House of Representatives last month and Trump wants to enact it by July 4. Johnson said the timeline was “pretty optimistic”.

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more.

Neetu Arnold:

Meantime, blue states and districts are lowering the bar for students in both academics and discipline. In 2021, Oregon eliminated high school graduation standards because they were allegedly harmful to minorities. San Francisco and other progressive districts have tried to implement “equitable grading” policies that deemphasize tests and deadlines. California has made it harder for teachers to maintain order in classrooms. In 2014, it became the first state to ban suspensions and expulsions for “willful defiance” among K-3 students, citing the large racial disparities in infraction rates. A decade later, California expanded this policy to middle and high school students. These kinds of policy decisions from blue states—shaped by a strong pressure to conform to rigid equity dogmas—have become a serious liability.

Republican-led states are leading on education reform by focusing on what works.. The lesson here for Democrats: any educational approach that prioritizes ideology over evidence will sacrifice student success.

Jessica Berg:

If you had walked into the classrooms at my Rockford, Illinois, elementary school a few years ago, you would have seen something very different from what happens there today. Back then, like many schools, students stayed in their grade-level classrooms throughout the day, and we delivered reading instruction accordingly.

On paper, that seemed like the right approach. But in reality, it left too many students behind — and failed to challenge others who were ready to move forward.

So, we decided to do something bold.

Ellis Elementary, followed by several other Rockford schools, started grouping students by reading ability instead of by grade. It wasn’t seamless. It wasn’t easy. But it was necessary. And the results have been worth every bit of effort.

Coming out of COVID, our students’ learning gaps were wide — and getting wider. The urgency was impossible to ignore. As teachers, we were trying everything we could to meet the needs of all our students, but our one-size-fits-all structure just wasn’t working.

Teaching whole-group lessons to a class of students who varied drastically in their reading skills meant instruction often landed in the middle — reaching few, if any, with the depth they needed.

It became clear: Our diverse learners needed diverse instruction. That shift in mindset was the beginning of everything.

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Schools Should Pursue Excellence: The Education Progress Manifesto

——-

meanwhile:

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?

Nathan Figueroa:

LLMs really are like combine harvesters; allowing one to do the work of many. And like mechanized farm equipment, LLMs are cheap, plentiful, getting smaller every day, and- most importantly- require no training to operate. “Hey CombineGPT, teach me to reap the vast fertile plains!” And off you go.

“Okay snarky man, if LLMs are so easy and plentiful why keep devs at all hmm??” Fair point. I am just a middle-man, the hired hand here to corral the cattle on Software Ranch until the day they corral themselves (it’s a cowboy analogy now ig). “Go become fine steaks and leathers!!” one boss in a stetson will yell, and the cows will oblige. Devs will take the lonely road into the sunset, and historical romance novels will rightly remember us as rugged and sexy.

I would resign myself to the role of romance-novel-hunk but I think there’s a strong case to be made that the death of the software developer has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: today might be the best time in history to learn software development. Let’s support this bold claim with commensurate bold points:

Jared N. Schachner, Julia A. Gwynne, Nicole P. Marwell, Elaine Allensworth and Marisa de la Torre

Equitably expanding technology access among K-12 students has long been viewed as critical for equalizing educational opportunities. But these interventions may influence students’ academic outcomes in unexpected ways. Prior research suggests key technological resources, like broadband Internet, are a double-edged sword, conferring both educational benefits and distractions for children. Clarifying the academic effects of technology-oriented investments is particularly important given that the amount of funding devoted to them has spiked over the last five years, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, when remote learning rendered high-speed Internet access indispensable to instruction. In this study, we leverage Chicago Public Schools’ pandemic-era broadband expansion initiative to assess whether overall levels of, and equity in, educational engagement and achievement improved with increased technology access. Analyses reveal a skill-technology complementarity: broadband program participation boosted remote learning engagement and achievement for previously high-performing students and reduced engagement and achievement for low-performing pupils. We conclude that increased technology access may come with greater costs for low-achieving students and benefits for high-achieving ones— contributing to widening pandemic-era educational inequities. Continued investments in expanding technology access without complementary supports for vulnerable students may further fuel these inequities; counterbalancing the negative effects of technology for low-achieving students is thus imperative.

via a kind email:

In this session, we will:

• Review the legal obligations under Act 20
• Discuss recommended best practices beyond the minimum requirements
• Walk through the structure and content of the WILL Model Policy and Companion Guide, and
• Answer your questions live during a Q&A

You’re invited to a free webinar on Thursday, June 26 at 1:00 PM(CT) to walk through the WILL Model Policy on Act 20 Reading and Retention and the newly released Companion Guide to Implementing Act 20.

Under Wisconsin law (Wis. Stat. § 118.33(6)), all school districts must adopt a promotion and retention policy by July 1, 2025. WILL’s model policy is designed to help school boards meet these legal requirements while also promoting early literacy, empowering parents, and supporting teachers.

———-

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?

Hillsdale:

Studying the liberal arts, if done properly, IS a search for truth, not just a source of topics for cocktail parties.

Many of our grads go on to advanced study or careers in the sciences. In 2024, we graduated the highest percentage of math majors in the U.S.

Paul Fanlund:

They have generally supported the thousands and thousands of look-alike, low-rise apartment buildings popping up on seemingly every available open lot in town, even if some are skeptical that those units will ever be truly affordable.

Yes, many of them are older. Dismissing them as stereotypical out-of-touch boomers seems to be popular.

——-

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

Richard Whitmire:

These days it’s impossible to avoid the avalanche of evidence about young men falling behind in America. Within the last month, the New York Times laid out the dismal data, the Wall Street Journal noted the rising misogyny among boys and Bloomberg documented their rising anger.

One thing you won’t read about the boys dilemma, this month or any other month: serious solutions to the problem.

After a couple of decades as an education reporter, my first book was “Why Boys Fail.” That was in 2011, one of several books written at the time about boys falling behind. Back then, it appeared we were on the cusp of finally doing something about it.

But apparently not. Fourteen years later, all we have are more studies and op-eds. No solutions. Why? The boys dilemma has three components, and the reasons for inaction are different for each component.

My focus for “Why Boys Fail” was schooling. I traced the effects of well-intended education reforms that date back to the 1989 education summit in Charlottesville, Va., where President George H.W. Bush and 49 governors laid out a national plan for ramping up education achievement. 

Graham Hillard:

Only a saint could have resisted a bit of adventurism in such circumstances. Wheelan is no saint. Though a full accounting of her crimes against neutrality would strain this article’s word count, a few lowlights demand to be mentioned.

• In May 2021, Wheelan brought her influence to bear on the then-ongoing presidential search at Florida State University, arguing that candidate (and former Republican state-house speaker) Richard Corcoran was ineligible due to his membership on the institution’s governing board. According to the SACSCOC chief, Corcoran needed to step down from the FSU board before being considered for the top position. Yet Corcoran was on the board only because, as the state’s education commissioner, he was constitutionally obligated to perform that duty. Given that fact, it is difficult to see Wheelan’s gambit as anything but an attempt to eliminate a conservative from leadership contention.
• When, in late 2022, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper (D) attempted to undermine the Republican legislature’s control of the UNC System, Wheelan made a personal appearancein Raleigh on the governor’s behalf. At particular issue was UNC-Chapel Hill’s planned School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL), an academic unit reviled by the Left for its commitment to civil discourse and a culture of free speech. According to Wheelan’s remarks to Cooper’s hastily assembled “governance” commission, UNC-Chapel Hill’s trustees would soon “get a letter [of concern]” from SACSCOC expressing dismay at SCiLL’s creation. Yet such a letter never arrived. Instead, Wheelan confessed the next day that commission chair Margaret Spellings had “asked [her] to mention” Chapel Hill’s alleged malfeasance. The university’s accreditor, in other words, came down explicitly on the side of grasping officials seeking partisan control of the state’s public colleges.
• In both 2020 and 2023, at the height of public debates about the efficacy and constitutionality of campus DEI initiatives, SACSCOC under Wheelan released a tacitly menacing “position statement” urging all accredited colleges to “intentionally cultivate and sustain inclusive and equitable processes.” Behind this gentle language lay a subtle threat. Although your elected officials may be on the side of reform, the statement plainly conveyed, your accreditor believes in DEI.

Perhaps such interference would have been tolerable had SACSCOC cultivated a reputation for excellence under Wheelan’s tenure. Alas, the opposite has been true. As the Texas Public Policy Foundation reported in 2023, SACSCOC-accredited institutions have a worse cumulative graduate-debt-to-earnings ratio than do institutions at all six of the other major accrediting bodies. Though Wheelan’s organization delights in making trouble for red-state public flagships, politically privileged schools (e.g., HBCUs) regularly skate to accreditation reaffirmation despite hideously poor graduation and loan-default rates. In the midst of yet another spat with Florida officials, this time in 2023, Wheelan made the curious claim that “Florida institutions are still myinstitutions” (emphasis added). One can’t help wondering, however, if the Sunshine State’s higher-ed accomplishments have occurred despite, not because of, SACSCOC’s oversight.

Joanne Jacobs Summary:

Douglass Academy High School on the city’s West Side spends $93,000 per student, they write. There are 28 students. Among the 27 staffers are “six regular education teachers, six special education teachers, a school counselor, a college and career coach, a conflict resolution specialist, a restorative justice coordinator and an assistant principal and principal.” The other nine staffers include two security guards, a clerk, aides and . . . Maybe a janitor?

Michael Ford:

Since 2013 I have been active in working to improve the performance of school boards in Wisconsin and beyond. Below are links to various writings, presentations, and peer-reviewed academic research related to school board governance. If there is any specific piece of research you are looking for please reach out at mford3482@gmail.com.

Dissertation

In 2013 I completed my PhD. In Urban Studies at UW-Milwaukee. My dissertation, The Impact of School Board Governance on Academic Achievement in Diverse States, was a largescale study connecting school board governance to school district performance. I concluded: “Traditional school boards can and do influence academic outcomes, meaning, improving school board governance is a legitimate approach to improving academic achievement.”

Megan McArdle:

In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

Why did they do this? Social justice. The word “equity” came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.”

——-

more. And.

——-

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

August Lamm:

It was hard to think of any wage-earning labor I’d done without that computer. Even the in-person drawing classes or talks I’d given had involved slideshows and handouts I’d made on my laptop, as well as emails and Zoom calls beforehand. I guessed I’d earned half a million dollars on my computer over 10 years.

Still, I slid it across the counter. The brushed metal was pristine, the shiny Apple logo as unmarked as the day I bought it. The man looked it over, inspecting the underside and the vents, opening it up to check the display. He offered me 200 pounds.

I wondered if I could make more on eBay, Craigslist, or a buyback site. Would Apple accept it for refurbishment? Was my computer in “great” or “fair” cosmetic condition? How many battery cycles had it accumulated over the years? Had I paid for any special features—extra RAM, a superior graphics card? Was there another kiosk down the street?

Trisha Powell Crain:

A U.S. Department of Education portal, initially promoted as a tool for parents to report school-based DEI programs, has quietly vanished from the internet – just a few months after its high-profile debut. 

The last time the site was working was May 13, according to the Internet Archive. For now, it’s unclear whether the portal is undergoing maintenance or was taken down permanently. 

Announced with strong language and a supportive quote from Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, the site launched on Feb. 27 as a place for parents to report alleged violations of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in education.

The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to multiple questions from Alabama Daily News about the “End DEI” portal’s status, including whether the shutdown was intentional or temporary. 

Chris Rickert:

Are you a Madison parent who has enrolled your child in a school outside the Madison School District?

The Wisconsin State Journal is looking to speak with Madison parents about their decision to use the state’s open enrollment program to enroll their students in other school districts, such as Monona Grove, Sun Prairie and Middleton-Cross Plains.

Interviews could be used in an upcoming story about the Madison’s School District’s comparatively low enrollment growth in a region of the state where population has been increasing steadily.

——-

Where have all the students gone?

——

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?

Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein:

The departures of Ms. Weingarten and Mr. Saunders represent a significant erosion of trust in the D.N.C. — the official arm of the national party — during a moment in which Democrats are still locked out of power and grappling for a message and messenger to lead the opposition to President Trump. In their resignation messages, the two union chiefs suggested that under Mr. Martin’s leadership, the D.N.C. was failing to expand its coalition.

Both labor leaders had supported Mr. Martin’s rival in the chairmanship race, Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Mr. Martin subsequently removed Ms. Weingarten from the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, a powerful body that sets the calendar and process for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating process.

——-

If traditional journalism dies, it will be in no small part because traditional journalists prove unwilling or unable to cover ideologically aligned figures (Biden, Fauci, Weingarten, John King) with sufficient care and skepticism.

——-

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Justin Lahart & Te-Ping Chen:

Those ages 35 to 44 with bachelor’s degrees had a 2.2% unemployment rate over the past 12 months, though that was up from 1.8% over the prior period.

This follows an April report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York saying labor-market conditions for recent college graduates “deteriorated noticeably” in the first quarter this year, even for young college graduates who have been in the workforce longer.

They found unemployment among college grads ages 22 to 27 averaged 5.8% in the first three months of this year, when President Trump’s on-again off-again tariff policies were just starting to rattle businesses and consumer confidence.

Moreover, the gap between the unemployment rate for these young graduates and the broader population became its widest in about 35 years of comparable New York Fed analysis.

The culprit, economists say, is a general slowdown in hiring. That hasn’t really hurt people who already have jobs, because layoffs, too, have remained low, but it has made it much harder for people who don’t have work to find employment. That includes everyone looking for work, but especially recent grads trying to land that first real job.

Andrew Glover:

Despite these enormous social and economic stakes, few institutions are talking about the fertility collapse. In the West, the governance infrastructure to respond to it simply doesn’t exist.

This contrasts starkly with how we have responded to other long-term threats. Climate change, for example, is discussed at every level of governance, from local councils to global treaties. It has dedicated agencies, major funding streams, and entire industries devoted to mitigating its effects. Climate concerns occupy a central place in media, politics, and academia. Fertility decline, by comparison, has attracted little sustained attention and few institutions dedicate any time or money at all to solving it. 

While the issue is finally beginning to draw more attention, for the past several decades it has been largely overlooked. When fertility trends do surface in mainstream discourse, those raising the alarm are often treated with suspicion or derision—fertility decline is portrayed as the concern of reactionaries or racists, rather than as a legitimate policy challenge worthy of serious engagement.

Gary Marcus:

The Apple paper on limitations in the “reasoning” of Large Reasoning Models, which raised challenges for the latest scaling hypothesis, has clearly touched a nerve. Tons of media outlets covered it; huge numbers of people on social media are discussing. 

My own post here laying out the Apple paper in historical and scientific context was so popular that well over 150,000 people read it, biggest in this newsletter’s history. The Guardian published an adaptation of my post (“When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it’s time to rethink the hype”) The editor tells me readers spent a long time reading it, notably longer than usual, as if people really wanted to understand the arguments in detail. (The ACM computer science society is reposting the essay, too, and there is now a French version as well).

Tons of GenAI optimists took cracks at the Apple paper (see below), and it is worth considering their arguments. Overall I have seen roughly seven different efforts at rebuttal, ranging from nitpicking and ad hominem to the genuinely clever. Most (not all) are based on grains of truth, but are any of them actually compelling?

Samuel Z. Alemayehu

We’ve seen this before. Scribes in medieval Europe once held monopoly power over the written word — until Gutenberg’s press flattened that hierarchy. Textile artisans were once the pride of cities — until industrial looms made their mastery irrelevant. In the 20th century, travel agents, typists, and retail stockbrokers all watched their professional stature — and compensation — collapse under the weight of software.

The common thread: when a profession’s value is based on exclusive access to codified knowledge or repeatable process, it is vulnerable. Prestige does not protect it. In fact, prestige often signals just how close that profession is to being automated. Once something becomes teachable, it becomes learnable by machines. Once it becomes learnable, it becomes replaceable.

The High-Skill Trap

Today’s most exalted professions — medicine, law, consulting, engineering, high finance — are all deeply codified. They’ve spent decades standardizing best practices, benchmarking performance, and reducing errors through systematic frameworks. Ironically, it is that very systematization that now makes them vulnerable.

Consider law. Allen & Overy, a Magic Circle law firm, recently began integrating Harvey, an AI platform built on OpenAI’s GPT-4, into its global operations. Harvey can draft memos, summarize documents, and perform legal research with astonishing speed. Tasks that once justified armies of junior associates are being absorbed by machines. Kira Systems and Luminance now dominate the contract review space, using machine learning to flag anomalies and suggest edits faster than any human team.

In medicine, Google’s Med-PaLM 2 is being tested in clinical settings to answer open-ended medical questions with high levels of accuracy. The story is similar at the Mayo Clinic, where the role of the radiologist is shifting from sole interpreter to a partner with an AI that can ‘see the unseen.’ As their own magazine details, these systems can detect subtle, early-stage disease patterns in scans that are often invisible to the human eye, fundamentally enhancing — and altering — the diagnostic process. Babylon Health has deployed diagnostic AI chatbots that have handled millions of patient interactions — displacing the routine diagnostic work that once occupied a vast portion of a GP’s day.

Link:

The 1930 course catalogue at Lima’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (National School of Fine Arts) announced a new class that would spark months of fierce debate in the popular press. In an open letter published in the newspaper El Comercio, Antonino Espinosa Saldaña heavily criticized the school’s inclusion of a lecture series on Inca art, stating quite bluntly that such a thing did not exist. “It was not a civilization of aesthetes, cultivators of beauty, of line, of color, of form”, the painter wrote, and while Espinosa deemed the output of earlier cultures in the region more striking, applying even these motifs to contemporary works would produce only “annoying agglomerations of incomprehensible monsters”. The ENBA’s Inca art class — and the calumny it provoked — took place against the backdrop of the ascendent Indigenist aesthetic movement, which sought to anchor Peru’s artistic future in the pre-Columbian past, skipping over, as it did so, the gilt-bedecked products of Spanish colonial rule. Debates about something as innocuous as an art class, then, were shorthand for much larger and more fundamental questions about the nature of Peruvian national identity in the modern era and the position of Indigenous people in society.

Hadley Freeman

Bravo to the education committee for finally saying what we all know to be true: for young children, screens are like — and I’m paraphrasing here, but not by much — crack, in terms of rotting their brains and being ludicrously addictive. In its new report, “Screen time: impacts on education and wellbeing”, the committee concluded, “The overwhelming weight of evidence submitted to us suggests that the harms of screen time and social media use significantly outweigh the benefits for young children.” In other words, it’s not social media that’s the problem. It’s screens themselves.

By now, bodies ranging from the World Health Organisation to the NHS have published guidelines about screen time for young children. But these guidelines are arguably too little and definitely too late: a 2020 Ofcom report found that an astonishing 57 per cent of five- to seven-year-olds in Britain have a tablet. As a result of this large-scale outsourcing of parenting to screens, last week a coalition of schools, nurseries and colleges published a letter saying that children were now starting school with speech and emotional difficulties “that are likely to have been exaggerated by or are even directly attributable to excessive screen time”. And yet the DfE has decided that those same screen-addicted kids should be tested on screens. And just to prove that too much screen time rots adults’ brains too, I’m going to respond to this mess with an internet meme: DfE! Make! It! Make! Sense!

So I emailed the department to ask — politely — what it was thinking. Why was it telling parents to give their kids less screen time while telling schools to give the kids more? Alas, to judge from the computer-says-no response I got, the DfE is now run by AI, which might explain its compulsion to test kids online: “Digital assessments reduce the administrative burden on teachers, freeing up their time to focus more on teaching and supporting pupils’ learning.” So young children will get to interact with teachers more by interacting with them less. Or something.

———

School leaders in the United States need to read this article. Like so many other things, screens and devices in schools are used because they benefit adults rather than improve student learning. It’s so tiresome.

David McGrath 

States back then provided roadside picnic tables, so we’d have lunch next to the highway, eating liver sausage and mustard sandwiches out of Mom’s picnic basket, bracing for the deafening whine of each speeding car that would pass and blow away whatever paper plate was not weighted down.

Toward evening, we kept eyes peeled for waterfront cabins to rent, and Dad would turn down a narrow gravel drive and see if there was a vacancy for a family of 10 while we waited in the car. When he emerged from a resort office, we’d study his face for evidence of success.

Barely 40, my father had been fitted by the dentist with an upper “partial,” which, when he was mulling something over, he’d move up and down with his tongue, appearing to smirk. That look usually meant that this might be the last stop and a good place to stay, subject to my mother’s approval after she heard the details about the swimming beach, number of beds, and, of course, the cost.

Celeste Biever

Around the world, teenage boys outperform girls on mathematics tests, and men are more likely to pursue related careers — despite baby boys showing no superior sense of numbers or grasp of logic. Now, a gigantic study of schoolchildren in France pinpoints that this ‘mathematical gender gap’ appears during the first year of school. The finding could help to focus efforts to stop girls from falling behind.

Boys and girls receive similar maths scores at the start of school, but boys pull ahead of girls after just four months (see ‘Watch the mathematics gender gap emerge’). A more dramatic gap in mathematical performance emerges after 12 months of school, according to the analysis, published on 11 June in Nature¹.

“This paper suggests that the gender inequalities in children’s maths performance aren’t innate or inevitable,” says psychologist Jillian Lauer at the University of Cambridge, UK. “If we want to stop girls from falling behind, we need to focus on their early experiences at school.”

Arnold Kling:

Judging by the media (which I do not consider a trusted reliable source), there is a panic on campuses about student’s cheating by using AI. But this problem strikes me as trivially easy to solve. Frankly, I suspect that what students learn about AI by cheating is probably more valuable than what the professors were trying to teach them, anyway.

If I were a professor, I would care about the student’s problem-solving process. Let us use as an example freshman economics, a subject that combines technical mathematical reasoning with critical thinking skills.

Suppose that I could interview the student, and suppose that I do this remotely. I do not want the student using AI to cheat (in some situations, I might allow or even encourage the student to use AI during the interview, but let us set that aside for now). So the student is in a setting where a monitor is paid to ensure that the student is not using an AI or cheating in some other way. The monitor can be quite low paid, and the monitor can watch more than one student at a time. You do not need a highly paid professor to be the monitor.

During the interview, I want to make sure that the student understands key concepts and uses them correctly. Concepts like comparative advantage, opportunity cost, returns to scale, production possibility frontier, and supply and demand. I might give some typical problems to analyze. For problems involving supply and demand, the student would have to show understanding of the difference between shifting a curve and moving along a curve.

Luisa Colon:

“There are studies that link plants to mood and even recovery from surgery, but my favorite quality of houseplants is that they remind us where we come from,” Guo says, pointing out that plants — via the process of photosynthesis, which provides humans and animals the oxygen they need to survive — are essential for life on earth. “So I find it a nice sense of reciprocity to take care of plants, indoors or outdoors.”

Joan Westenberg:

In 1953, a popular myth claimed that Yale graduates who wrote down their goals were significantly more successful 20 years later than those who didn’t. The study was cited in self-help books, business seminars, and motivational speeches for decades. The only problem was that the study never happened. It was completely fabricated, a ghost statistic that wandered the halls of corporate training programs like a benevolent poltergeist. But it persisted. Like a bad penny, it kept showing up for decades. 

Why?

Because it said what people wanted to believe: that clarity of ambition would bring control, that intention would yield destiny.

The cult of goal-setting thrives in this illusion. It converts uncertainty into an illusion of progress. It demands specificity in exchange for comfort. And it replaces self-trust with the performance of future-planning. That makes it wildly appealing to organizations, executives, and knowledge workers who want to feel like they’re doing something without doing anything unpredictable. But the more interesting question is: who is not setting goals? And why?

It turns out that many of the people doing genuinely innovative work avoid explicit goals entirely. They work within constraints instead.

Kimberly Wethal:

The proposal likely represented the biggest increase for any agency’s budget in the two-year budget, said Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam.

“The budget has to be right-sized to what’s affordable,” Born said. “It is a priority, but you have to be able to afford it, and it has to be reasonable.”

Critics say the increases are not enough to keep up with rising costs, forcing districts to continue seeking more money through referendums. Democrats and advocates had pushed for the state to increase the special education reimbursement rate to 60%.

Overall, Democrats had asked for $1 billion more in special education reimbursements and another $1 billion in new money for general school aid.

Chris Rickert:

A group of 32 education officials is set to work with the New Hampshire-based Center for Assessment on updating the report card metrics. Underly would have the final say on approving them. 

——-

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

Shyam Sankar:

I decided to join the military for reasons both patriotic but also intensely personal.

My father grew up in a mud hut in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state in India. He was the youngest of nine children and the first in his family to attend college—an education made possible only by his eight siblings pooling their wages. After graduation, he moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to build and run a pharmaceutical plant. Through ingenuity and an enterprising spirit, he became successful at a remarkably young age.

When I was 2, our life in Lagos ended violently. Five armed men broke into our home, killed our dog, pistol-whipped my father, and threatened my mother as they demanded money from the company safe. We fled Lagos with nothing, and started over in America.

My father took a job at a company that supplied souvenirs to theme parks in Orlando, Florida. My childhood memories are punctuated by Space Shuttle launches seen from my school courtyard, and by the bone-rattling double sonic booms of the Shuttles’ reentry. Lessons about the power of American technology were literally falling from the sky around me.

My father never again saw the material success of his youth, and he faced setback after setback in America. But he always reminded me of the counterfactual: “But for the grace of this nation, you would be dead in a ditch in Lagos.” America gave him life, liberty, and possibility.

———

more.

George Leef:

What has gone wrong?

In his latest book, Let Colleges Fail, economics professor Richard Vedder employs his insights to answer that question. The book’s subtitle, “The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education,” further elucidates his point of view. Consumers enjoy the results of markets where wide-open competition prevails, because the drive to succeed weeds out entities that fail to provide good value for the money. The problem in higher education, Vedder observes, is that competition is greatly hampered. Colleges can get into financial trouble just like failing businesses, “but, typically, third parties come to their rescue—governments allocate emergency funds and private donors respond to appeals for support,” he writes.

The higher-education system is riddled with features that protect the status quo and retard innovation.Moreover, the higher-education system is riddled with features that protect the status quo and retard innovation. Americans should therefore embrace changes that would allow much more competition than we now have.

Stephanie Hegarty:

Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: ‘Can we afford it?’

She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming – school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.

It was different when Namrata was growing up. “We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do.”

According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata’s situation is becoming a global norm.

———

The Demographic Future of Humanity:

Facts and Consequences

Credentialism and family formation.

——-

Choose Life

Corrinne Hess:

Milwaukee Public Schools isn’t supporting its teachers and doesn’t have adequate systems in place for student learning at its schools districtwide, according to the second independent audit commissioned by Gov. Tony Evers.

The 52-page report, focusing on the district’s instructional policies and methodologies, is as critical as the first audit, which the state released in February. 

The district is facing declining enrollment, teacher shortages, a high-needs student population and school displacement due to lead remediation. At the same time, teachers told auditors they don’t feel supported by the district or their principals and student discipline takes up most of their days.

———-

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? 

Carl Smith:

A new apprentice program is attracting new teachers and helping existing paraprofessionals earn certification. The U.S. Department of Labor is now allowing teachers to be included in its Registered Apprenticeship program, opening up access to federal dollars to cover the costs of teacher training. In some participating states, the cost of an education degree has come down to $20,000 on average.

The Registered Teacher Apprenticeship Program is helping North Dakota schools attract people with a passion for teaching but put off by the cost of a degree, unsure they could ever pay back the debt on a teacher’s salary. Many who take advantage of it are single mothers already working as school paraprofessionals, says Laurie Matzke, assistant superintendent of public instruction for North Dakota. The chance to keep jobs they love and earn certification at no cost is “like a miracle.”

“We’ve had a severe teacher shortage for quite a while now, especially in the area of special education,” she adds.

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Janan Ganesh:

If the illusion breaks, and a debt crisis happens, it might at least force a reassessment of the state from first principles. The only way that painful but necessary change happens in high-income democracies is through a sense of emergency. One preceded Thatcherism. Another led to reforms in Mediterranean economies post-2010. I don’t want such an event, but do envisage one. Many western states have finances that would struggle to withstand another shock. Imagine a pandemic, even half as costly as Covid. There isn’t room in some countries to raise taxes without harming incentives. (Unemployment in Britain is rising as the national insurance rise takes effect.) In a world of high rates, governments are spending more on debt interest than on education or defence.

Rebecca Lowe:

My immediate response to watching those prompt theory videos was to message a friend saying, “Any second now the hyper-detailed nuances between all the different theories of determinism go mainstream!”. I didn’t mean by this that I assumed every viewer would immediately see that the substance of these videos is grounded in the substance of complex philosophical theory. It was more that I thought these videos exemplified the way in which engaging with the idea of AI offers a route into deep philosophical thinking. You can see this in the determinism discussion that’s prefigured by the suggestion that the promptees are prompted into believing in prompt theory. And you can see it as soon as you start thinking through the complexities of the idea that each of the ‘AI actor’ characters has their own prompt-driven life.

Perhaps you think I’m being patronising. Perhaps you think rigorous discussion about free will and consciousness has been mainstream since The Matrix. Well, you’re reading this piece on my unashamedly philosophy-heavy Substack, so perhaps your thoughts on The Matrix aren’t representative of the general public! Beyond that, the silent role we humans play as prompters in these videos remind us that since The Matrix was released, we’ve gone far beyond engaging with these ideas as storylines in sci-fi movies. We’re living them! This is an age in which we speak with machines. Recent polling suggests that almost a tenth of Americans use AI every day. Every day! It’s an age in which it’s normal to hear people talk about machines ‘thinking’ and ‘reasoning’. AI has brought philosophy to the forefront of our lives, in a totally new way.

Alex Tabarrok summary:

Many colleges and universities were created in the 1960s and 1970s but the majority of elite R1s emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century, including notable private universities created from the entrepreneurial fortunes of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford, Cornell, Hopkins and Rice among others.

We are perhaps now seeing a return to that creative period with Walton, Thomas Monaghan, Patrick Collison (Arc Institute) and most notably Joe Lonsdale at the University of Austin. Tech provides both the funds and the impetus to build something new and different. As Tyler and I argued, online education and AI will change education dramatically, perhaps returning us to a now-affordable Oxford style-tutorial system with the AIs as tutors.

Steve Blank:

Using this quarter to introduce AI we had three things going for us: 1) By fall 2024 AI tools were good and getting exponentially better, 2) Stanford had set up an AI Playground enabling students to use a variety of AI Tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, NotebookLM, Otter.ai, Mermaid, Beautiful.ai, etc.) and 3) many students were using AI in classes but it was usually ambiguous about what they were allowed to do.

Policy students have to read reams of documents weekly. Our hypotheses was that our student teams could use AI to ingest and summarize content, identify key themes and concepts across the content, provide an in-depth analysis of critical content sections, and then synthesize and structure their key insights and apply their key insights to solve their specific policy problem.  They did all that, and much, much, more.

Naomi Epps Best:

On ethical and religious grounds, I requested an alternative assignment. Cary Watson, the department chairman, denied my request, suggesting I change my plans and pursue a different type of license. In an email, she described the course as “an ‘inoculation’ of sorts . . . exposing you to content you *might* come across” as a licensed therapist. She told me that if I did encounter such things in a professional setting, I could “assuredly communicate that discomfort” to clients and decline to work with them. So why did it have to be part of my training?

I appealed to the dean, the provost, the Title IX office, the university president and even Campus Ministry. I’m not sure who was more shocked, the priest reading the syllabus or me, screen-sharing sexually explicit videos and images with him.

The course is a graduation requirement, so I re-enrolled with Mr. Wei, who is new to the school. I requested the same accommodation that Ms. Watson said “Muslim women students” had received: to complete the course remotely. Mr. Wei instead scheduled a Zoom meeting with me. He promised a professional tone and said sexual disclosure wouldn’t be required.