School Information System

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Billionaire-backed foundations are fueling a K-12 math education blitz that prioritizes fringe ideas over traditional methods

Lee Fang:

These foundations are eliminating middle school algebra and promoting “numberless math,” which is leaving students paying the price.

Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment.

What Liz Simons has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science, but his daughter’s foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Heising-Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K-12 mathematics education according to social justice principles.

The revamp the advocates seek is profound. They reject well-established practices of math instruction while infusing lessons with racial and gender themes. The goal is to motivate disadvantaged students while dispensing with the traditional features of math, like numerical computation, that they struggle with on standardized tests – considered an oppressive feature of white supremacist culture.

In many quarters, including corporations and universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are in retreat due to pressure from the Trump administration and the courts. Not so in public education, with curricula that are locally controlled and largely insulated from the dictates of Washington. That allows progressive foundations and like-minded charitable trusts to continue to pour millions of dollars into reshaping math education for black and Latino kids, including a $800,000 grant this year from the Heising-Simons Foundation, even though there exists no credible research showing that the social justice approach improves their performance.

“Politicians, and legislatures, even school boards,” are often too “hamstrung” to get things done, Bob Hughes, the director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation, said at an online symposium on the need for racial equity policies in America’s classrooms. Philanthropy, he added, faces fewer barriers in making rapid changes.

——

More.

——

2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Notes on higher education finance

Becky Jacobs:

3. Financial aid overhaul

As part of Trump’s domestic policy agenda this year, Congress passed and Trump signed into law an overhaul of federal student financial aid.

For UW-Madison, the most significant changes involve the elimination of Grad PLUS Loans and limits to Parent PLUS Loans, effective next year. These federal programs paid for education expenses not covered by other financial aid, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Hundreds of UW-Madison students borrowed money through these loans in recent years, according to the university.

In May, leaders of Wisconsin’s public, private, technical and independent colleges and universities raised alarm over proposed changes to Pell Grants, which generally support low-income students. Those changes never materialized in the final bill, though.

Federal lawmakers also defunded SNAP-Ed, a grant program that teaches people how to live and eat healthily. UW-Madison’s Division of Extension received over $8 million each year to run FoodWIse and provide local nutrition education to Wisconsin communities.

In late July, the division sent layoff notices to 92 employees across the state, including four educators and one administrator in Dane County.

Locally, FoodWIse taught children and adults how to make healthy food choices at schools, senior centers and local community centers. FoodWIse also collaborated with food pantries, recreation and school programs.

China Versus the US in the Competition for Global Talent

Alex Tabarrok

In my posts The Sputnik vs. DeepSeek Moment and The Answers, I contrasted America’s reaction to Sputnik—expanded funding for education in math, science, and foreign languages; creation of agencies like ARPA; higher federal R&D spending; recruitment of foreign talent; and reduced tariff barriers—with the more recent U.S. response to China’s rise as an economic and scientific power, which has been almost the reverse.

One can also compare America’s choices today with China’s own strategy, where the roles also seem reversed. A striking example is China’s new K visa for science and technology.

Who Invented Backpropagation?

Seppo Linnainmaa:

Efficient backpropagation (BP) is central to the ongoing Neural Network (NN) ReNNaissance and “Deep Learning.” Who invented it?

BP’s modern version (also called the reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Finnish master student Seppo Linnainmaa [BP1] [R7]. In 2020, we celebrated BP’s half-century anniversary! A precursor of BP was published by Henry J. Kelley in 1960 [BPA]—in 2020, we celebrated its 60-year anniversary.

In the 2020s, it was still easy to find misleading accounts of BP’s history [HIN][T22][DLP][NOB]. I had a look at the original papers from the 1960s and 70s, and talked to BP pioneers. Here is a summary based on my award-winning 2014 survey [DL1] which includes most of the references mentioned below.

The minimisation of errors through gradient descent (Cauchy 1847 [GD’], Hadamard, 1908 [GD”]) in the parameter space of complex, nonlinear, differentiable, multi-stage, NN-related systems has been discussed at least since the early 1960s, e.g., Kelley (1960) [BPA]; Bryson (1961) [BPB]; Pontryagin et al. (1961); Dreyfus (1962) [BPC]; Wilkinson (1965); Tsypkin (1966) [GDa-b]; Amari (1967-68) [GD2,GD2a]; Bryson and Ho (1969); initially within the framework of Euler-LaGrange equations in the Calculus of Variations, e.g., Euler (1744).

Steepest descent in the weight space of such systems can be performed (Kelley, 1960 [BPA]; Bryson, 1961 [BPB]) by iterating the chain rule (Leibniz, 1676 [LEI07-10][DLH]; L’Hopital, 1696) in Dynamic Programming style (DP, e.g., Bellman, 1957 [BEL53]). A simplified derivation (Dreyfus, 1962 [BPC]) of this backpropagation method uses only the Leibniz chain rule [LEI07].

The systems of the 1960s were already efficient in the DP sense. However, they backpropagated derivative information through standard Jacobian matrix calculations from one “layer” to the previous one, without explicitly addressing either direct links across several layers or potential additional efficiency gains due to network sparsity.

Carnivore Babies

Andrea Petersen:

When Dariya Quenneville’s infant daughter was ready for solid food, she skipped the mushed up avocado and banana. On the menu instead? Raw egg yolk and puréed chicken liver.

“She would just teethe on that and soothe herself,” said Quenneville, 31.

Schizandra is what her mom calls a “carnivore baby.” Most of her diet is meat, along with other animal-sourced foods like eggs and butter. “She’s an easy baby,” said Quenneville of her daughter, now almost 2. “I believe that the food in the diet is a very, very big piece of that.”

With the carnivore diet rising in popularity among adults, babies and toddlers are getting in on it, too. Moms swap tips—think directions for whipped bone marrow—on Facebook forums with names like Carnivore Motherhood.

Some parents say they’re inspired by social-media stars: A handful of doctors who are raising their own carnivore babies have YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands and even millions of subscribers. Rising interest in protein and concerns about ultraprocessed foods are causing some people to look at carnivore-style diets. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a carnivore champion, has loudly expressed his affinity for beef tallow.

How large would Gen X, Millennials, and Generation Z have been without abortion?

Cremieux:

How many of the people who would’ve been in your generational cohort aren’t here because they were aborted?

Between the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationdecision in 2022, women had access to abortion because of the Supreme Court’s decision to establish a woman’s constitutional right to it based on the right to privacy. During that time, Americans underwent tens of millions of abortions. Given that America only experienced tens of millions of births in that same timeframe, the answer to my question is likely a nontrivial portion: a potentially sizable part of the generations that have been born since 1973 may have been aborted.

Using data from the Guttmacher Institute—a nongovernmental organization sprung out of Planned Parenthood in 1968 with the aim to expand reproductive rights globally—we can see that aborted generation members have been a very sizable percentage of every generational cohort since the Roe v. Wade decision.1

If we naïvely tally up America’s abortions, we can see that potentially over a quarter of Gen X and Millennials were aborted, nearly as many Gen Z met that fate, and almost a fifth of Gen Alpha were treated the same way.

These figures help to contextualize the human toll of abortion—these are, at minimum, millions of lost lives. But these numbers are off when it comes to describing the number of people who would be in these generations were it not for abortion. If we want to understand how large generations would be without abortion, we have to account for the effect of abortions on completed fertility.

——-

More:

——-

choose life.

k-12 tax & $pending climate: City of Madison budget growth

Enjoyiana Nururdin:

If approved by city leaders, most agencies would receive increases of 1% to 8% from previous spending levels. One exception would be a 30% budget increase requested by the City Clerk’s Office.

The office is restructuring this year after the resignation of longtime City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl. City Attorney Michael Haas, who is serving as interim clerk, is asking for a $791,000 budget increase to help with next year’s expected workloads.

Moving forward, Madison plans to hold City Council elections at least once every year after adopting staggered terms for alders. More funding is also needed for voter engagement in historically underrepresented wards and for responding to requests for city records, Haas said.

The clerk’s office’s annual budget would grow to $3.4 million.

Larger city agencies, such as the police and fire departments, are seeking smaller increases as a ratio of previous funding levels. But these requests would draw more in total from the city’s general fund, which pays for many day-to-day expenses like salaries and services.

Both the Police Department and Fire Department are requesting 2% increases in funding next year. The police budget would grow by $1.9 million to nearly $100 million. The fire budget would increase by $1.5 million to $77 million.

———

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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?

“Genetic Optimization”

Zusha Elision:

The fascination with what some call “genetic optimization” reflects deeper Silicon Valley beliefs about merit and success. “I think they have a perception that they are smart and they are accomplished, and they deserve to be where they are because they have ‘good genes,’” said Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “Now they have a tool where they think that they can do the same thing in their kids as well, right?”

“these policies lower expectations and make students less engaged”

Grading policies have long been debated in American schools, but only recently have “equitable” reforms taken center stage.

Policies like “no zeros,” eliminating late penalties, and allowing unlimited retakes aim to make grading fairer for disadvantaged students. But critics argue that these changes inflate grades, erode accountability, and ultimately harm student learning—and many teachers agree.

In the first nationally representative survey to examine this issue, America’s K–12 teachers finally got a chance to weigh in. The verdict: Most teachers report feeling pressured to give higher grades, and say these policies reduce academic engagement, even in schools without formal mandates.

———-

———

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Konrad Putzier and Rachel Louise Ensign:

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?

T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree

Jon Brodkin:

A federal appeals court rejected T-Mobile’s attempt to overturn $92 million in fines for selling customer location information to third-party firms.

The Federal Communications Commission last year fined T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, saying the carriers illegally shared access to customers’ location information without consent and did not take reasonable measures to protect that sensitive data against unauthorized disclosure. The fines relate to sharing of real-time location data that was revealed in 2018, but it took years for the FCC to finalize the penalties.

But but but schools just need more money!”

Daniel Buck:

Countless times, the Department of Education tried just that: Sending schools piles of money.

Ya know what happened every time?

No academic improvements.

Here are four examples🧵

The Death of Useful Search (google)

Thom:

Nowhere on this first page of search results is the producer of the product, who might actually have the best answer to your question(s). Of course, if all you wanted to do is buy some Porta, well, your results were sold to the highest bidders.

This is no longer useful search, and it’s getting worse. Even DuckDuckGo has a similar problem with the search term I just suggested, though they at least claim that they protect your private information. In April, the US District Court held that Google violated antitrust law, specifically because the Google search methodology has been abused. What will happen from that decision is still unknown, but I don’t think it makes a lot of difference.

Follow the money. Always follow the money. The reason why Google wants you to use an Android device, the Chrome browser, and their Search engine is simple: that gives them full control over you, and they can track and promote to their heart’s content. But you might have noticed that third thing in the stack of things I got from a Google search: an AI response. And this leads me to my original bold-faced assertion, above: in the coming year or two, search as we know it will disappear and be replaced by AI interaction.

School Safety and Parental Choice

Joanne Jacobs:

Law enforcement agencies reported nearly 1.3 million criminal incidents on school property from 2020 to 2024, according to a new FBI report. That includes 540,000 assaults and 45,000 sex offenses. “Kids shouldn’t be trapped in dangerous schools,” writes Corey DeAngelis, a school choice advocate.

Bullying is the number one reason parents use choice programs to leave public schools, write researchers Misty Gallo, Colyn Ritter and Patrick J. Wolf. Low middle-school test scores rank second. “When public schools are not equipped to limit exposure to bullying behavior and when the academics of the middle school years are insufficient, parents flee the public schools if and when private school choice programs provide the financial means to do so.”

Why isn’t there a “pharmaceutical alignment” or a “school curriculum alignment” Wikipedia page?

Mickey Muldoon:

I think that the answer is “AI Alignment” has an implicit technical bent to it. If you go on the AI Alignment Forum, for example, you’ll find more math than Confucius or Foucault.

On the other hand, nobody would view “pharmaceutical alignment” (if it were formulated as “[steering] pharmaceutical systems toward a person’s or group’s intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles”) as primarily a problem for math or science.

While there always are things that pharmaceutical developers can do inside the lab to at least try to promote ethical principles – for example, perhaps, to minimize preventable hazards, even when not forced to – we also accept that ethical work is done in large part outside of the lab; in purchasing decisions, in the way that pharmaceutical marketplaces operate, in the vast mess of the medical-industrial-government complex. It’s a problem so diffuse that it hardly makes sense to gather it all into one coherent encyclopedia entry.

The process by which the rest of the world influences the direction of an industry, by way of purchasing, analyzing, regulating, discussing, etc., is Selection. This comes from the terminology of evolution – in this framing, dinosaurs didn’t just decide to start growing wings and flying; Nature selected birds to fill the new ecological niches of the Jurassic period.

Duke Is Abandoning American History

Sherman Criner

Broad historical instruction has given way to boutique narratives.

Imagine, for a moment, the year is 2500. Human civilization is gone, lost to disaster, time, or neglect. One day, an alien research team lands in what was once North Carolina and begins to study the ruins of a place once known as Duke University. Buried beneath centuries of sediment, they find a course directory from the Department of History, dated 2025. What would these visitors conclude about American history? Would they know about the Revolutionary War and its heroes, Washington crossing the Delaware, the debates at Valley Forge, the intellectual courage of the Founding Fathers? Would they learn about the immigrants who built the railroads, the entrepreneurs who transformed an agricultural society, or the soldiers who fought fascism across two oceans?

At Duke, far too few American History professors specialize in non-identitarian fields.
Almost certainly not. They would come away knowing far less about the broad sweep of American history—its political transformations, economic changes, diplomatic turning points, and cultural achievements—than about a narrow range of faculty preoccupations, many of them rooted in identity politics or highly specialized subfields. The result would be a picture of the past that is partial, fragmented, and skewed toward present-day concerns, leaving much of the nation’s history unexplored. But why do I, a Duke history major now in my fourth year, say this?

More striking still, over 51 percent of the department’s American History offerings are explicitly devoted to themes of racial- and social-justice movements.

Krypton’s Secret Codes

Oliver Roeder:

The sculpture’s letters contain encrypted messages. Though they appear as one giant grid, “Kryptos” consists in fact of four sections, each themed and encoded differently, now known as K1, K2, K3 and K4. The first three sections were decoded by professionals and enthusiasts decades ago and their solutions are public knowledge.

The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly

PNAS:

Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud.

Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud.

Parental Choice and Texas Taxpayer Funded K-12 Schools

Clayton Wickham:

More than a third of Texas students attend rural schools, and despite their communities’ support, many of those schools have been on the brink of financial ruin for years. Not far down the road from Marathon, Alpine Independent School District and Marfa ISD are both running deficits of around $1 million, despite having some of the lowest teacher salaries in the state. Nearby Valentine ISD operates out of an unrenovated 1910 schoolhouse and has recruited six teachers from the Philippines to keep its doors open. The Marathon school is also feeling the pinch. We sometimes teach two classes at once; we rely on online coursework to meet curriculum requirements; two of our fluorescent lights emit a sinister drone the district can’t afford to address; and our track has completely peeled away in places, revealing the layer of concrete underneath.

In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott held public-education funding hostage because a coalition of Texas Democrats and rural Republicans refused to pass his universal voucher program. But this spring the levee finally broke, and lawmakers passed two landmark education bills. One, House Bill 2, offers rural schools a long-awaited lifeline, investing $8.5 billion in public education over the next two years. The second, Senate Bill 2, earmarks billions to fund private school tuition through education savings accounts (ESAs), taxpayer-funded accounts parents can use for private school or homeschooling. Some fear it may mark the beginning of the end for public education in rural Texas.

Politics and the Right to Choose in North Carolina

Wall Street Journal:

Could a state try to join the scholarship program only for some uses, such as tutoring at public schools? That would defeat Congress’s intent, and maybe prompt a legal challenge. Or perhaps the Treasury Department can write the program’s implementing rules to make clear that the parameters of the scholarships are set by Congress. That would mean Democratic governors can’t take some and reject others, as if this were a school lunch menu.

In North Carolina, it might not matter, given the GOP’s margin in the Legislature. “Either you support school choice, or you don’t,” said state Sen. Phil Berger, that chamber’s GOP leader. “I look forward to holding Gov. Stein accountable and overriding his veto to ensure North Carolina can participate in President Trump’s signature school choice initiative.”

Given the program’s 2027 launch date, other Democratic governors are going to get the same question, and some might be thinking of 2028. A spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said last month his administration is reviewing the law and “awaiting additional federal guidance.”

Yet the choice is clear: Giving students access to the scholarship funds can help families at no cost to the state. But it might upset the teachers unions.

Notes on Family Mobility

For generations, Americans have chased opportunity by moving from city to city, state to state. U.S. companies were often quicker to hire—and to fire—than employers in other parts of the world. But that defining mobility has stalled, leaving many people in homes that are too small, in jobs they don’t love or in their parents’ basements looking for work.

Others are slapped with “golden handcuffs.” Those who bought homes when mortgage rates were low or have stable white-collar jobs are clinging to them rather than taking big leaps.

This immobility has economic consequences for everyone. The frozen housing market means growing families can’t upgrade, empty-nesters can’t downsize and first-time buyers are all but locked out. When people can’t move for a job offer, or to a city with better job opportunities, they often earn less. When companies can’t hire people who currently live in, say, a different state, corporate productivity and profits can suffer.

Young graduates who don’t land good jobs soon after college often never really recover from those years of diminished earnings, widening the gap between the economy’s winners and losers.

Litigation and the Right to Choose schools in Wyoming

Wall Street Journal:

The Wyoming Education Association doesn’t want families getting those dollars. In a lawsuit filed in June, the union argued that because the state constitution requires the Legislature to maintain a “complete and uniform” public school system, lawmakers cannot fund “private education that is not uniform.” A state judge granted an injunction on the ESA program last month.

Wyoming’s Attorney General and parents are appealing at the state Supreme Court, and the law is in their favor. Wyoming’s constitution also directs the Legislature to “suitably encourage means and agencies calculated to advance the sciences and liberal arts.” The ESA program is a way of doing so. It’s not creating a new system of schools.

It also isn’t killing the existing school system. The $30 million ESA program has its own general-fund appropriation, which doesn’t divert dollars directly from public schools—whose per-pupil funding approaches $20,000. District funding is tied to enrollment, so public schools could lose money if students leave, but that’s happening even without the scholarships.

After recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the Moon

Eric Berger:

As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the Moon “before” 2030.

Then, last Friday, the space agency and its state-operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, successfully conducted a 30-second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket’s center core with its seven YF-100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mengzhou spacecraft in June. A version of this spacecraft is planned for lunar missions.

On track for 2030

Thus, China’s space program is making demonstrable progress in all three of the major elements of its lunar program: the large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft, which will carry humans to lunar orbit, plus the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the Moon before the end of this decade.

Parenthood and Families in America, 2025

Te-Ping Chen:

But they also hoped for a big family, and wanted to get started. Sure, Brittany was making $10 an hour working a retail job at Home Depot. But Michael’s union construction job paid more than triple that, and he’d owned his own home, a modest two-bedroom outside Cincinnati, for more than a decade.

So the two took the plunge, and in 2012, they welcomed their first baby. Brittany was 20; her husband, 34. The birth was difficult. Her son’s umbilical cord was wrapped around his head, and he had to be extracted from her birth canal, fracturing her pelvis. Still, she was smitten. “Your heart grows three sizes,” she recalls. “I couldn’t stop looking at him.”

The Ivys now have five children, ages 3 to 12. They know they aren’t the norm.

More Americans than ever are putting off having children—or not having them at all. The U.S. total fertility rate is around an all-time low, and far below the rate needed to keep the population stable. The average age of women giving birth in the U.S. has risen to nearly 30 years old, up from 27 years old in 2000, according to government data.

Twenty Years Later: Education in New Orleans After Katrina noon webinar 18 August

Bellwether:

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the floods that devastated New Orleans and its schools. The recovery effort in the years after the storm reshaped the city’s education system, ushering in reforms and innovations with ripple effects across the country. Join Bellwether for a series of conversations with leaders, policymakers, and experts who were there and helped shape education in New Orleans during the past 20 years. We’ll explore how the city’s schools have changed, the challenges that remain, and what it means for America’s education system more broadly. Join us for the following sessions: Where We Started: Policy Conditions and Constraints in August 2005 (Monday, Aug. 18 at 12:00pm ET) Featuring Former Senator Mary Landrieu, Doug Harris, Jamar McKneely, Alexina Medley, and Andy Rotherham (moderator) How Charters Changed the Game Post-Katrina (Monday, August 25 at 11am ET) Featuring Leslie Jacobs, Dana Peterson, Jim Peyser, and Juliet Squire (moderator) Career Pathway Innovations in New Orleans (Thursday, Aug. 28 at 2:00pm ET) Featuring Aaron Frumin, Claire Jecklin, Cate Swinburn, and Alex Cortez (moderator)

Commentary on Educational Trends and Influences

Nick Gibb:

One could argue that the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century. Willingham has observed that we have learned more about how people learn in the last 25 years than in the previous 2,500 combined. His book Why Don’t Students Like School? examines how that recently acquired understanding can be used to accelerate learning.

Yet, however great his influence has been in the United States, it has been far greater in my own country, England. In fact, while the U.S. is perhaps the world’s largest exporter of educational ideas, it is an “equal opportunity exporter”—pushing out transformative ideas both powerful and catastrophically misinformed. Our efforts in England across a decade to understand the difference between good and bad ideas in education has led to a transformation of our schools from moribund to global leadership at exactly the time the U.S. has continued to struggle.

Many “progressivist” ideas that came to dominate teaching emanated from Teachers College Columbia in New York in the 1920s under such luminaries as William Heard Kilpatrick and John Dewey, based on the ideas of the 18th century Romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He thought that a rigorous academic education stifled the natural creativity and goodness of children; better to have them learn through “self-discovery” or projects than by teacher-led instruction, with less emphasis on the importance of knowledge and more on a set of amorphous skills such as learning how to learn and critical thinking.

These ideas carry different names and have different emphases. But whether it’s “constructivist,” “child-centered,” or “progressivist,” the results wherever they are tried are the same: a weaker education system where children’s life chances, particular those from poorer families, suffer.

Over time in Britain this ideology was increasingly absorbed by our schools, from the 1970s to its peak in the 2000s, and it did enormous damage to our education system. The U.K. plummeted down the OECD rankings of nations’ education standards, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In reading, the U.K. fell from seventh in the year 2000 to 25th by 2009 and in math from 8th to 27th over that period.

Five former Wisconsin women’s basketball players file lawsuit against former coach Marisa Moseley

Mark Stewart

The allegations of mental abuse that preceded the resignation of former Wisconsin women’s basketball coach Marisa Moseley moved to a new arena on Aug. 15.

Federal court.

Five former players filed a civil lawsuit against Moseley, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and Justin Doherty, who served as the administrator for women’s basketball and retired as UW’s senior associate athletic director for external communications in April. The players claim psychological abuse by Moseley and that Doherty was aware of the issue but took no action to protect the players.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are former Badgers Alexis Duckett, Krystyna Ellew, Mary Ferrito, Tara Stauffacher and Tessa Towers. The lawsuit was filed in District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and seeks compensatory and punitive damages among other penalties.

—-

Complaint.

Bodhana Becomes Youngest Woman To Beat Grandmaster As Adams Wins 9th British Title

TarjeiJS

Ten-year-old prodigy WFM Bodhana Sivanandan stunned the nation in the 2025 British Chess Championship in Liverpool on Sunday, becoming the youngest woman ever to beat a grandmaster and the youngest-ever to earn the Woman International Master title. Meanwhile, 53-year-old GM Michael Adams sealed his ninth national title after winning a dramatic three-way playoff.

The 111th British Chess Championship had several notable storylines, which will be covered in this recap.

Third-grade reading: How does your district measure up?

Carrion Wigfall:

The ability to read by the end of third grade is a critical skill for a child’s success — not only for the remainder of his or her K-12 journey and later educational outcomes but for future career opportunities, earnings potential, and economic mobility.

Statewide, third-grade reading proficiency has been steadily declining for a number of years. Data from the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment reports nearly 54 percent of third graders aren’t meeting grade-level reading benchmarks.

How does your district measure up? Are reading scores where they should be or is there room for improvement? Use the database below to see reading proficiency results from the 2024 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment. According to the Minnesota Department of Education, students who do not take the test are excluded from the assessment results and do not impact a district’s MCA proficiency calculation.

——-

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Books & Schools

Terence Eden:

That’s it. We can throw away all those outdated paper books. Children will learn directly from an AI which, coincidentally, is sold by the company. We can trust their studies on such matters and be assured that they have no ulterior motive.

But, ah my friends, I have told a slight untruth. I didn’t ask that question. Frederick James Smith asked the question to Thomas Edison in 1913. The question was about the new and exciting world of motion pictures.

“Because, on the whole, they’re run better”

Zachary Marschall

College-admissions experts note that the rise in these schools’ popularity has allowed them to become more selective, boosting their prestige even further among high-school students.

From 2014 to 2024, the last full year for available admissions data, Auburn University’s freshman-class acceptance rate decreased from 85% to 46%; Clemson University’s dropped from 52% to 38%.

The trend line holds even for the South’s most selective colleges: Rice University’s acceptance rate dipped from 14% to 8%; Emory University’s, from 26% to 15%.

By contrast, elite Northeastern universities have only been able to maintain their enrollments by taking in more foreign students.

Why are young people are flocking to Southern universities?

In a shocking incident, ICE arrested an illegal alien who was involved in a drunk driving car wreck that killed two high school sweethearts in Wisconsin. The tragic event occurred in a sanctuary jurisdiction

DHS.gov:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today announced U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a criminal illegal alien responsible for driving while intoxicated and causing the fatal car wreck that killed two American teens in Dane County, Wisconsin.

On August 13, 2025, ICE arrested Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila—a criminal illegal alien from Honduras—who struck a vehicle while driving the wrong direction on a highway, killing 18-year-old Hallie Helgeson at the scene on July 20. Martinez-Avila also gravely injured 19-year-old Brady Heiling who died from his injuries on July 25.

Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila was charged with two counts of felony vehicular homicide and impaired driving by Wisconsin law enforcement. ICE lodged an arrest detainer for this illegal alien’s arrest and removal from the country. Despite this sanctuary jurisdiction giving ICE less than an hour notice to make the arrest, ICE nabbed this criminal alien.

The Million-Dollar Safety Net: How Wealthy Parents Actually Foster Young Entrepreneurship

Magic Sketch:

One respondent shared a particularly striking personal experience. After transferring from a rural Chinese school to an elite private school in Shenzhen, they witnessed a completely different approach to money and opportunity:

“I remember two incidents vividly: A female classmate said she ‘grabbed’ a 20,000 yuan bag, then sold it for over 50,000 yuan half a month later. Another male student used his network to find ways to make money through importing, eventually trading up to get the latest iPhone. Meanwhile, back in my hometown, most parents couldn’t afford an iPhone 4S even after selling oranges for half a year.”

The contrast isn’t just economic — it’s philosophical. These students weren’t just wealthy; they were entrepreneurially native. They instinctively understood concepts like arbitrage, network effects, and opportunity costs that many adults never grasp.

What We Lost When Shop Class Disappeared

Hector Herrera:

At some point in junior high, I had to choose a “shop.” My school in Mexico offered some sensible, safe options such as music, typing, and shorthand. But the ones most boys wanted were the two slightly dangerous ones — Electronics and Electricity or Metalwork.

These were not tucked-away electives; they had pride of place at the far end of the schoolyard, in two corrugated steel warehouses butted against each other like twin workshops in a small industrial park.

I chose Electronics and Electricity.

The proximity of the two classes meant a constant back-and-forth — a lot of joking, teasing, and the occasional informal competition to see who could cause more noise or sparks.

In my shop, we learned how to solder electronics and cables together. We played with full-voltage circuits, wired light fixtures, and installed electrical plugs. We were 13 and 14-year-old boys using tools that could burn us, shock us, and — if we ignored the teacher’s warnings — put us in the hospital. The boys next door were welding in full gear, cutting and filing metal, and doing things that came with a real risk of tetanus. I can’t recall a single accident bad enough to stop a class, though there were burns, scrapes, and the occasional singed eyebrow.

And we loved it.

We gave each other electric shocks for fun. We raced to see who could wire a circuit the fastest or the cleanest. There was no discussion about “toxic masculinity” — just a roomful of boys learning to master tools and danger.

The Public School —>> Prison Pipeline

Arthur Sido:

CPS student gets 5 years for bringing a machine gun to school (but he won’t serve any actual prison time)

“Student” is pretty generous as you will see….

A former Chicago Public Schools student has been sentenced to five years in prison for bringing a loaded machine gun to school, but he is not expected to spend any time in an actual prison.

Marquis Terry, 20, pleaded guilty to possession of a machine gun in exchange for the sentence from Judge Kenneth Wadas. However, after receiving a variety of sentencing credits, Terry is not expected to spend any time in prison.

Didja catch the part where he is….20 years oldand still considered a “student”?

The case began on March 20, 2024, when Terry, then 19, was sent home from a field trip with his classmates at Association House High School, 1116 North Kedzie, in Humboldt Park. A Chicago Police Department arrest report said Terry was sent home from the outing in an Uber for “disruptive behavior” that prosecutors said involved smoking marijuana.

That afternoon, the school’s principal searched Terry’s locker, expecting to find more marijuana. Instead, prosecutors said, the principal opened a backpack and discovered a loaded .45-caliber Glock pistol with an extended ammunition magazine and a “switch” device — an illegal attachment that allows pistols to generate automatic gunfire. Police said the gun had been reported stolen from Henderson, Kentucky.

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

Notes on the National Council of Teachers of English Conference

Daniel Buck:

Another year, another National Council of Teachers of English Conference

Let’s look at their workshops

First up: a critique of “white supremacist curricula.”

It’s like McCarthyism.

Shakespeare? White Supremacist! Phonics? Racist! Reading? How dare you!

‘We cannot have a religious prayer before the Land Acknowledgement’

Campus Reform:

A Phoenix Union High School District board meeting turned contentious when board member Jeremiah Cota was blocked from reciting the Lord’s Prayer after being told it could not precede the board’s “land acknowledgement.”

The August 7 incident was captured in a video posted to Cota’s X account, showing the board parliamentarian interrupted the prayer, stating, “We cannot have a religious prayer before the land acknowledgement.”

Land acknowledgements are statements recognizing that an event or institution is located on land historically inhabited or claimed by indigenous peoples. In recent years, many government agencies, universities, and school districts have begun including them at the start of public meetings, often framing them as part of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Cota’s X profile states he is a tribal member of the Free People of the San Carlos Apache.

Mitch Daniels Conversation

Podcast:

Tyler Cowen joins Mitch Daniels to explore AI’s promise, economic threats from debt and regulation, and the need for bold, intelligent policy to secure economic growth, innovation, and individual liberty. Cowen discusses his views on immigration, COVID lockdowns and addresses societal fear of confronting rapid technological change.

China beseeches officials to hold fewer meetings and write shorter reports

Edward White:

China has implored officials to hold fewer meetings and slash the length of official reports, ordering a nationwide campaign to tackle the “stubborn and persistent ills” of “formalism and bureaucracy” in the government.

A directive published this week by state media called on officials to “improve document quality”, ensure they “adhere to a ‘short, practical and concise’ writing style” and limit themselves to 5,000 characters.

The statement said departments should reduce the number of official documents they produce annually, and submit a written explanation if the amount increases.

Meetings should also be consolidated and streamlined, the directive said, with speeches not to exceed one hour. The number of people in attendance should be subject to strict controls.

A look at University of Chicago Finances

Clifford Ando:

No peer institution has borrowed so much in relation to its assets; none spends remotely as large a percentage of tuition on servicing debt. Despite gifts and the surge in the stock market, the University’s endowment has actually shrunk under its current president from 2021 to 2024 because it has been liquidating assets to mask the size of its deficits.

But its story also distills forces and trends in American higher education that are corroding ideals, and wasting money, throughout the land.

America’s leading research universities distinguished themselves both in their commitment to an extraordinary ideal, namely, the creation and questioning of new knowledge in every field that touches on human existence, and in their commitment to integrating persons at every stage of learning into this process. One way Chicago and all research universities actualize these ideals is by placing undergraduate students in the classroom with faculty who perform research. Students at these universities learn from people who exist at the cutting edge of what we know.

In a 2009 strategic plan, Robert J. Zimmer, the then-president of the University of Chicago, confessed to the university’s trustees that the faculty-student ratio was lower in 2009 than it had been in 1972. This decline, Zimmer averred, “threaten[ed] our core ethos as a University that places a premium on rigorous inquiry.” And yet, after a brief amelioration, the faculty-student ratio at the University of Chicago has gotten worse nearly every year from 2011 to 2024, for the very simple reason that the University of Chicago placed itself so deeply in debt it could conceive no other way out. (There were plenty of ways out.)

——-

K-12 Tax & $pending climate: Chicago’s pension crisis is heading for a Detroit-style collapse

“The (Evers) Era locked Wisconsin families into a 400‑year property tax increase,”

Hope Karnopp:

School districts have state-imposed limits on how much money they can take in through two sources: State general aid and property taxes. The veto raises those limits by $325 per student, per year, until 2425.

So, an initial question is whether school districts will take advantage of those increases or forgo them.

When we reached out to Americans for Prosperity’s Wisconsin chapter for backup, state director Megan Novak said “history and data point to the reasonable conclusion that Gov. Evers’ veto can and will raise property taxes.”

——-

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

“But the report cards will still be inaccurate and less helpful because DPI made a flawed scale…..

Quinton Klabon:

2025 SCHOOL REPORT CARD CUT SCORES SENT TO DPI FOR APPROVAL

0 districts rated 1 star
75% of high-income schools (<30% poverty) rated 4 or 5 stars, said a member
new benchmarks (versus old)
1 star: 0 (0)
2 star: 49 (48)
3 stars: 60 (58)
4 stars: 71 (70)
5 stars: 84 (83)

Corrine Hess

For some, one of the most confusing aspects of the report cards is that sometimes those stars don’t align with student proficiency rates in math and reading.

And that isn’t likely to be changed this go-around.

———

Wisconsin DPI press release.

———

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Civics: Higher education discrimination

John Sailer:

DOCUMENTS: a UT San Antonio faculty job scoresheet gives 5 points for “Female or URM candidate.”

This is, of course, illegal. But what I’m really curious about is whoever got the “1” in that category.

Katherine Long, Ben Foldy and Sara Randazzo:

Civics: A man went to prison for assaulting me. DC Police crime stats show he was never arrested

Anna Giaritelli

The extent of crime in D.C. has been debated by the Left and Right since President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he would take federal action to crack down on problems in the District of Columbia.

But if the public wants to have an honest conversation about crime in D.C., the MPD will first have to be honest about how prevalent crime is. Without MPD’s honesty about the crimes that it has chosen to hide from its public-facing stats page, the White House cannot get an accurate picture of how bad the problem actually is and adequately fix it.

For me, the story began long before that attack. I was a Washingtonian for seven years. I was saving up money to buy a condo and planned to spend the next few decades in Washington, the intersection of politics and media. D.C.’s crime problem was something you lived with. You took Ubers and Lyfts, told others if you were walking after dark so they knew when you were home, and knew to be aware of your surroundings, almost to the point of paranoia. (Ladies?)

On a Saturday morning in 2020, I walked out of my apartment on Capitol Hill to mail a package at a post office several blocks from the U.S. Capitol. I put on my black sweatshirt and black sweatpants then headed out the door.

I never made it to the post office.

Just one block from my apartment building’s entrance, I was attacked by a large man well over six feet tall. He charged at me for a reason that I still do not understand. In broad daylight and on well-traveled 2nd Street NE next to Union Station, I fought to get away as he sexually assaulted me. If it had not been for others in the vicinity, including a construction worker named Donny who heard my screaming and ran to my rescue, I don’t know if I would be here today.

———

more:

This is the most important story I’ve told. It’s my story. I’ve waited five years to share it, and I’m ready now.

I’m Anna Giaritelli. The DC police are covering up crime. I know because they covered up what happened to me

———-

Alana Goodman:

The District of Columbia has quietly settled a lawsuit from a sergeant who accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics, court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. Police brass repeatedly told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, according to internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts the Free Beacon reviewed.

Kyra Phillips:

“I can tell you firsthand here in downtown DC where we work, right here around our bureau, just in the past six months, you know, there were two people shot, one person died…”. more.

———-

Olbrich:

In an Aug. 8 memo to the park commissioners, Tanya Zastrow, executive director of Olbrich Botanical Society — the nonprofit fundraising arm for the gardens — cited an “increase in overnight trespassers, acts of vandalism and most recently theft in the gardens” as the reason for the request.

———

Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006

School districts are spending millions of dollars on ineffective master’s degree premiums, creating a dilemma about the value of these degrees

Katherine M. Bowser

Los Angeles USD is facing a $94.5 million budget shortfall this year. Fairfax County, VA: $121 million. Chicago: $734 million. With ESSER funds expired and enrollment declining, districts nationwide face painful decisions that can impact students, such as layoffs and school closures. Identifying and repurposing wasteful spending can help ease these tough choices.

In this District Trendline, we focus on one of education’s most persistent examples of ineffective and inefficient spending—automatic salary increases for teachers who hold a master’s degree (i.e., master’s degree premiums). We find that over 90% of large districts still pay teachers more if they earn one, despite research showing they don’t improve teacher effectiveness—at a cost of millions of dollars wasted.

Ideology and the federal taxpayer funded Truman Scholars

Benjamin Rothove:

Roughly 80 percent of the 2017 and 2018 Truman Scholars remain in liberal politics within a decade after winning the federally funded scholarship, according to a College Fixanalysis.

The Fix reviewed the current public activities of Truman Scholars from the 2017 and 2018 cohorts and found at least 98 of the 122 winners have a clear connection to liberal politics, such as working for Democratic members of Congress, advocating for progressive causes, or teaching classes with a liberal focus.

In contrast, none are currently involved in conservative politics. The other winners’ ideologies could not be ascertained based on publicly available information.

The Fix similarly found 75 percent of Truman Scholars from the 2015 and 2016 cohorts remain involved in liberal politics a decade later. Only a single winner from those years could be found who today works for conservative causes.

Humanities at the University of Chicago

Clifford Ando:

On June 14, the dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities (AHD) formed and immediately charged five “working groups” with proposing significant reforms on the structure of departments; language instruction; and doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate education. The committees have until August 22 to submit their recommendations to the dean, who will in turn forward them to the provost by August 25. This timetable means that a program of reform intended to change nearly every aspect of academic life will be completed and advanced beyond the division in exactly the interval during which neither departmental nor divisional meetings take place. To achieve this unseemly haste, the process allows neither for consultation with departments nor for comparative and historical study.

Everything about the process, stated rationale, and likely outcomes of this program of reform strikes me as emblematic of the current trajectory of the University of Chicago and, indeed, of higher education as a whole. In what follows, I seek to analyze this development in terms that clarify the stakes, both internally to the University and externally to colleagues in higher education.

I first explore the charges of the committees and the rationale they have been given, both for acting at all and especially for acting quickly. I then analyze the implications of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and other federal actions for the University of Chicago. This analysis leads to the question of the incidence of funding changes at the federal level for the budget of the Division of the Arts and Humanities.

The thrust of this analysis is that the University has undertaken extraordinary quantities of leveraged spending in ways that benefit select units, while others, who have achieved high international ranking with little aid from capital spending, have instead suffered from a withdrawal of operational support in order to finance those endeavors. The present moment of reform brings that long trend to a crisis point. To understand the University’s willingness to dismantle its own excellence, I turn to an earlier moment of panicked reform induced by an earlier stage of this prolonged financial crisis, namely the expansion of the College in 2017. This leads to some final reflections on the maintenance of University ideals in an age of instability.

The Mystery of the L.A. Mansion Filled With Surrogate Children

In early May, after a baby was hospitalized with possible signs of child abuse, police showed up at a nine-bedroom mansion in this Los Angeles suburb known for lavish homes and residents with roots in China. Inside, they found 15 more children, none older than 3, living under the care of nannies.

The investigative trail led them to six more children at other homes in the Los Angeles area. A Chinese-born man and woman living in the mansion said they were the parents of all 22 children. Birth certificates list them as such. What mystified police was that the children appeared to have been born all over the U.S., and in rapid succession.

Local authorities removed the children from the homes, placed them in foster care, and called in the FBI.

The mansion, it turned out, was listed as the headquarters of Mark Surrogacy, which had arranged many of the children’s births and was managed by Silvia Zhang, the woman living there. Zhang said she was the mother of all the children.

Overregulated charter schools: Fact or fiction?

Michael J. Petrilli

Earlier this summer, Education Next published a post by EdChoice’s Robert Enlow and Michael Q. McShane, “School Choice Should Take the Road Less Traveled.” It was not my favorite take, to say the least.

The problem wasn’t so much their argument that private-school choice should be regulated differently than charter schooling. While I would quibble (and quarrel) on some specifics, I can appreciate that the rules for private-school choice should be different from those for charter schools. Otherwise we’d “de-privatize” private schools, and what would be the point of that?

No, what really bothered me was their claim—one I’ve seen many others make—that the charter sector once had great potential for innovation, but because of those dastardly authorizers and other red-tape-loving bureaucrats, charters instead became overly cautious, impeding innovation in a way that has hamstrung and limited the entire charter school movement. Here’s how Enlow and McShane put it:

Charter schools have been a school choice success but a limited one, facing increasing challenges through the years with overregulation and limited growth. Hailed initially as a way to dramatically remake education, particularly urban education, charter schools have been stymied in their impact by an authorizing and regulatory framework that has buried potential operators in the very bureaucratic structures charter schools were created to avoid. The sector has empowered a limited set of unelected functionaries to say no for arbitrary and capricious reasons. And, it has curtailed ways in which schools can experiment and try to educate children differently.

School Board Governance…. in Sun Prairie

Sun Prairie:

Following the arrest last month of a former dean of students on child pornography and exploitation charges, the Sun Prairie School Board has deemed district administrators out of compliance with policies requiring them to communicate with the board and the public.

While board members did not directly reference the district’s handling of the allegations and eventual felony charges against Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier, members of the audience cheered their action during Monday’s meeting.

Prior to the votes finding administrators had not followed the policies, a dozen parents or other residents criticized the district for failing to act sooner against Gilkey-Meisegeier and said they were worried about their children’s safety in the district.

Tricia Nowicki, who said she has a daughter at West High School, where he worked, said, “I am extremely concerned for her safety going back in the fall.”

——-

Megan Novak:

Madison Metropolitan School District Board, with one of the widest racial achievement gaps in the country, tackling the most important issues as the school year is about to begin. What a joke.

——

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Free College Prep Program….

Ella Hanley:

The Galin Scholars program is welcoming its third cohort of high school students this fall, continuing its expansion of free college prep in the greater Madison area.

The Madison-based nonprofit now supports 15 students from seven high schools. The first five students graduated from high school this summer and will begin college at Northwestern University, Lake Forest College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall.

The graduates were offered over $1.1 million in merit awards from schools where they applied, according to Galin Scholars.

Established in 2022, Galin Scholars partners with schools and families to support students with strong academic potential. The program focuses on students from low- or middle-income households and who are part of groups underrepresented in college.

Students in the program may receive academic tutoring and counseling, weekly advising, essay support, guidance on college applications and financial aid, college tours, ACT prep and transportation. The program is funded by individual and business donations, education grants and a partnership with Galin Education, a Madison-based college prep company.

———

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Joshua A. Cuevas, Bryan L. Dawson and Gina Childers:

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?

Taxpayer Funded Wisconsin DPI: One school with only 4.1% ELA proficiency was rated “Exceeds Expectations.”

WILL:

The News: WILL submitted recommendations to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) today, urging an overhaul of the state’s school report card standards. WILL’s analysis highlights DPI’s track record of inflating ratings that masks a decades-long stagnation in student achievement.

These efforts come after years of DPI making unilateral changes to the accountability system, a trend that has made it more difficult to accurately compare academic progress over time. Our letter urges DPI to use this as an inflection point for change.

The Quotes: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “Wisconsin is falling behind the rest of the country academically and changing standards only masks this decline. Instead of raising the bar, we are simply putting our heads in the sand. It’s why WILL is encouraging DPI to follow through on its commitment to Wisconsin students and adopt report card standards that give true insight into school performance.”

The Problem: WILL’s analysis exposes significant flaws in the current reporting system where schools and districts appear to perform above average:

One school with only 4.1% ELA proficiency was rated “Exceeds Expectations.”
18 schools statewide received an “Exceeds Expectations” rating despite less than 25% ELA proficiency.

To verify these findings, WILL compared DPI’s ratings to GreatSchools, an independent school rating system widely used by parents when choosing a school. A review of 309 Wisconsin schools across the state’s six largest districts showed that 50% of schools were rated higher by DPI, while only 3% were rated higher by GreatSchools. We believe that this demonstrates DPI’s ratings are overly generous and fail to accurately reflect declining student achievement.

WILL’s Recommendations: To create an honest and rigorous reporting system, WILL recommends that DPI adopt a new approach that is both accurate and transparent.

“The implications for colleges of education are more dire in that they may be failing to prepare candidates in the most essential aspects of the field”

Abstract

This study assessed the pedagogical knowledge and metacognitive awareness of pedagogy of faculty (N = 107) at a large state university in the United States. The purpose was to ascertain whether faculty could distinguish effective learning practices from ineffective ones, as determined by empirical research in learning science. Faculty responded to items regarding the efficacy of effective practices and others shown by research to be neuromyths or misconceptions. Faculty across all colleges correctly identified most of the effective practices but also endorsed myths/misconceptions, ultimately showing limited pedagogical knowledge. Tenured faculty showed stronger pedagogical knowledge than newer faculty. Faculty were also assessed on their confidence in their knowledge of pedagogical practices. Respondents demonstrated poor metacognitive awareness as there was no relationship between confidence in pedagogical knowledge and actual pedagogical knowledge. Surprisingly, education faculty scored no better in pedagogical knowledge than faculty of any other college and also showed low metacognitive awareness. Results indicate that universities preparing doctoral students for faculty positions should ensure candidates are exposed to accurate information regarding learning science. The implications for colleges of education are more dire in that they may be failing to prepare candidates in the most essential aspects of the field.

Keywords: pedagogy, learning science, cognitive myths,

Samantha Smylie and Becky Vevea

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

Killing the Humanities

Eric Adler:

University leaders in the United States are slashing the humanities left and right. If you take what they say at face value, it’s because of their limited fiscal capacities. But there is growing evidence that this isn’t the case — that it isn’t a lack of capacity so much as a fundamental lack of will on the part of administrators and boards of trustees to support humanistic education and research. How have the priorities of these university leaders wandered so far away from the age-old value of humanistic education and the true purpose of the liberal arts?

Let’s first consider some of the evidence. Back in June, Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa, announced that her institution’s new provost fired her as the dean of the Honors College that she had run for two years. Why? According to the provost, the program Frey established for the college was too expensive. But this was a puzzling suggestion. The university possesses a $1.36-billion endowment, and by all accounts Frey’s new program, which focused on reading core texts in the humanistic tradition, was phenomenally successful. Enrollment in Tulsa’s Honors College grew by over 500%. Retention rates in the college soared, and the program managed to attract multiple major grants and gifts. And although we’re often told that contemporary college students lack the skills, patience, or inclination to read great (or, now, any) works of literature, history, and philosophy, pupils flocked to Frey’s college.

Notes on High Expectations

Joanne Jacobs Summary:

In education, there’s little support for people who say, “That’s not good enough. Do better,” he writes. In a way , the consequences of low standards are life-threatening. But it’s not obvious until years later.

President Trump is reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test, which was discontinued in 2013 in favor of a “more holistic ‘barometer’ of student health,” he writes. In the past, “students who hit certain benchmarks got a certificate.” Not a big deal.

In a New York Times story, For Some, Return of Presidential Fitness Test Revives Painful Memories, a 60-year-old woman calls the test, “survive or fail. It was Darwinist.”

“Now, I don’t think Charles Darwin would think kids having to do pull-ups really captures the adapt-or-die essence of On the Origin of Species, writes Hess. “But this kind of overwrought anxiety has become pervasive, undermining our ability to set clear expectations for kids or confidently stand by them.”

k-12 tax & $pending climate: US Debt: $108,000 per person

Massimo

NEWS

The U.S. national debt is now officially over $37 trillion.

This is approximately the value of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, India and UK combined. This amounts to $108,000 per person in the U.S.

The debt is currently growing at:

$3.1M per minute
$212.9M per hour
$5.1B per day

Notes on Governance and the taxpayer funded Milwaukee k-12 schools

Terry Falk:

Partly, for that reason, new Superintendent Brenda Cassellius asked the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS) to evaluate the MPS Office of Human Resources. This is not the first time CGCS has looked at the district’s HR department. But of the 19 recommendations it made in 2019, only one was fully implemented.

At the July 31 school board meeting, CGCS Executive Director Ray Hart outlined its latest findings in a presentation.

It is not enough to simply list the 12 new recommendations here. It is more important to try to understand why reform in the district has been so difficult to accomplish.

MPS has had so many twists and turns in its organizational structure in the last 35 years. Milwaukee’s school voucher program was established in 1990. Advocates for vouchers, such as Susan Mitchell, pushed whole sale dismantling of a centralized system when she wrote in 1994, for the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute to shift control from MPS “by allowing parents to choose schools their children attend and providing them the financial resources to do so.”

Notes on Grant Funded Data Collection at the UW-Madison’s Population Health Institute

Becky Jacobs:

While more than 700,000 people use the resource each year, Johnson said, County Health Rankings and Roadmaps will soon lose its primary funder. The New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is set to end its support after 2026.

Mary Ann Lombardo, a foundation spokesperson, said the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps has been a “successful” partnership but the philanthropist is evolving how it works with partners and who it funds.

“Moving forward we are looking to support data programs that better meet the needs of community partners by providing granular and timely data for the economic, social, political and environmental factors that impact communities,” Lombardo said in an email.

Notes on George Mason University Governance

Wall Street Journal:

Trustees and boards are supposed to set policy at universities, but too often they settle for football tickets and a child’s admission. That’s one reason it’s good to see the Board of Visitors take its obligations seriously at George Mason University.

We reported last week on the debate at the Northern Virginia school over racial and gender preferences. At a meeting on Friday, part open and part closed to the public, the board voted to eliminate a variety of diversity, equity and inclusion programs that had become fronts for discrimination in admissions and hiring at the school.

This is a rebuke to Gregory Washington, the George Mason president, a vociferous advocate of “diversity” preferences who had long opposed the anti-DEI move. But it was necessary if the school is going to avoid tough sanctions from the federal Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. The DOJ is investigating the school’s policies for possible violations.

Press reports on the meeting have portrayed it as a victory for the president and Mason faculty because Mr. Washington kept his job. The Faculty Senate had rallied in support of the president against the Board of Visitors, whose members are appointed by the Virginia Governor. The current Governor is Republican Glenn Youngkin.

Faking Wokeness to Fit In: A staggering 88% of students admit to pretending to hold more progressive views than they genuinely do

Steve Stewart-Williams

A new study finds that nearly nine in ten students fake more progressive views than they really hold, often to appease professors or stay in their peers’ good graces. The habit doesn’t stop at the classroom door; even close friends and romantic partners are kept in the dark. From lecture halls to late-night conversations, students are learning that conformity pays and candor costs. If universities still see themselves as incubators of independent thought, these numbers should be a wake-up call. Can students truly develop as thinkers when honesty feels unsafe?

Below is an excerpt from an article in The Hill by the study’s authors, Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman. You can read the full piece here.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes…

Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors…

To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex…

Illinois proposes lowering scores students need to be deemed proficient on state tests

More students in Illinois would be considered proficient on the state’s annual math and reading tests under a proposal to change cut scores, which the Illinois State Board of Education is set to vote on Wednesday.

Cut scores are the scores that separate students into broad categories of achievement, now defined as below proficient, approaching proficiency, proficient, and above proficiency.

Under the proposed changes, 53% of students would be considered proficient in English language arts, 38% would be proficient in math, and 45% would be in science, according to a presentation shared by state education officials Tuesday. Last year, 41% of students were proficient in English language arts, 28% were proficient in math, and 53% were in science.

But the numbers cannot be compared year-over-year because the cut scores changed.

For example, third grade students currently must score 750 out of 850 on the math section of the Illinois Assessment of Readiness to be considered meeting proficiency standards. But under the proposed changes, they would only need to score 732 to be labeled proficient.

——

Taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI recently lowered the bar as well.

——

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Taxpayer funded Madison School Board Plans to Increase Compensation & Add Healthcare Benefits

Chris Rickert:

A majority of Madison School Board members appeared to be in favor Monday of significantly boosting their pay and making themselves eligible for the district’s employee health care coverage.

Board members cited the amount of work they do and a desire to make the seats more attractive to run for as reasons why increased pay and health coverage were needed. They also pointed to the salaries of board members for other, similar-sized and Wisconsin school districts.

“I think it’s really important to make sure that we make this — with the amount of work that we do — we make sure that this position is as accessible as possible,” board Vice President Maia Pearson said during Monday’s Operations Work Group meeting.

Board members currently make $8,000 a year, with the president of the board making $8,300. According to research by district administration, Milwaukee School Board members make $18,121, Kenosha members make $6,500, Green Bay members make $7,538.40 and Racine members make $3,600. The Madison School District, with about 25,000 students, is the second-largest district in the state.

Milwaukee is the only Wisconsin school district that makes its board members eligible for district health insurance. Making Madison board members eligible for health and dental coverage is estimated to cost the district between $82,000 and $220,000 annually.

Board members last increased their pay, from $4,200, in 2015. There was some consensus Monday during the board’s meeting that $15,000 might be an appropriate new yearly stipend.

——-

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Higher Education Litigation Database

Jessica Blake

President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape higher education and the federal government have spurred a flurry of lawsuits as higher education associations, students, legal advocacy organizations and colleges push back and seek relief through the courts.

The lawsuits started almost immediately after Trump’s first day, and almost seven months later, advocates continue to file new complaints, challenging various executive orders, guidance documents or decisions to cut grants. Inside Higher Ed is tracking some of the key legal challenges related to higher ed. That includes Harvard University’s efforts to restore more than $2.7 billion in frozen research funding and protect its ability to enroll international students as well as several lawsuits aiming to stop the dismantling of the Education Department. Of the 41 included in our searchable database, judges have ruled against the administration in two-thirds of the cases so far. You can find more analysis of the lawsuits filed so far here.

We’ll update the database regularly, so check back for updates.

Being Direct About Explicit Instruction

Sol in the Wild:

As teachers, we should spend a great deal of time refining our instructional methods based on what research tells us about how students learn best. For example, based on research I’ve consumed over the last several months, I’ve shifted intentionally toward using explicit instruction as the core of my teaching practice. But I also believe that simply using a research-based approach isn’t enough. If I want buy-in and understanding from families, I have to communicate what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and how it benefits their children.

While explicit instruction is one of the most evidence-based ways to build knowledge and skills, it often comes with misconceptions that can create confusion or resistance among parents.

Recognizing this, I’ve made it a priority not just to use explicit instruction, but to be transparent and proactive about explaining it, why it matters, how it supports learning, and what it looks like in practice.

Below I explore common misunderstandings I anticipate parents may have, the key ideas I want them to understand about this approach, and my plan to communicate effectively with parents.

What Parents Might Misunderstand

“You are just telling them the answer.”

higher education governance and comity

Rose Horowitch:

The leaders of America’s elite universities are required, by the borderline-masochistic, semi-impossible nature of their job, to be skilled in the art of performative comity. So it was a bit of a shock when, at the end of an April panel discussion, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber turned on the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, all but accusing them of carrying water for the Trump administration.

Eisgruber argued that higher education was facing a politically motivated attack, and that the two men were inadvertently making matters worse by agreeing with President Donald Trump, against the evidence, that the sector had grown illiberal and out of touch with mainstream America. The chancellors, taken aback by the public confrontation, countered that the struggles of a handful of Ivy League schools were dragging down the reputation of America’s heavyweight research institutions. Perhaps, they suggested, it was time for the Ivies’ leaders to step back and let new figures—such as themselves—represent the country’s top universities.

Jay Greene:

Eisgruber’s inability to understand politics not only exposes Princeton and other universities to significant liabilities, but also exacerbates antisemitism on his own campus. I explain how in this @DailySignal piece. dailysignal.com/2025/07/09/pri…

civics: “ai” and the legacy media

arcxp

AI is no longer a future bet—it’s a newsroom essential. In this exclusive State of the Industry report, Digiday and Arc XP surveyed over 100 media leaders to uncover how publishers and broadcasters are actually using AI today, what’s working, and where challenges remain.

Whether you’re just starting to explore AI or scaling existing tools, this report provides a grounded, data-backed look at how your peers are navigating the AI landscape—and what it means for the future of journalism.

Download the report to learn:

Unyoke the Sciences From the Humanities

Evan Morris:

Things are going badly for universities. They are in the crosshairs of an erratic and aggressive government willing to threaten anything in its path. While the government may have succeeded at securing promises for needed reforms at Columbia University, it did so by delaying or canceling scientific research funding estimated at between $400 million and $1.2 billion. But even delays that are resolved have their own costs: While a deal will restore this funding, some worthy scientists have lost their jobs and some worthy scientific research projects will not recover. To protect the sciences going forward, radical change to the composition of universities is warranted.

How do academics view the root causes of their own precarious situation? Consider a recent gathering of professors across multiple disciplines for the annual meeting of Heterodox Academy in Brooklyn last month. HxA, as it is known, is a group devoted to fostering the necessary environment and tools for airing of conflicting and unpopular (“heterodox”) views—provided they are expressed civilly. And yet, even among this group, whose members are not prone to marching in lockstep, there was remarkable consensus that the public’s distrust and the government’s ire are directed primarily at faculty in the humanities, because of their often single-minded insistence on identity politics, equity of results over merit, and abandonment of the Western canon

Academic Notes on Whitelash

Daniel Nuccio:

Hafen and Villescas wrote in their July paper— which was taken down from the journal’s website on Saturday — that as “social work moves in the direction of anti-racist education and practice, social workers of color have urgently called attention to how theme [sic] profession continues to perpetuate white supremacy and harm BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).”

The two scholars wrote that when anti-racist educators attempt to bring attention to how their field advances white supremacy in the classroom, white students attempt to “re-establish the white supremacist status quo” through resistance and the espousal of “color-blind rhetoric.”

This “[r]etaliatory white backlash,” they wrote, is best referred to as “whitelash,” which they describe as intimately entwined with the socio-relational process of white emotionality and the maintenance of racial hierarchies.

Thus, in an attempt to “expose” and “disarm” this white resistance to anti-racist education, the scholarly duo documented their own exploration of the pedagogical strategies they utilized while co-teaching two different undergraduate social work courses in 2023.

Notes on the taxpayer funded Houston School District

Mike Miles:

School starts on Tuesday, and last week we held our Convocation for teachers and staff. There was music, dancing, celebrating, and, of course, closing remarks. Our teachers and principals are ready for another strong year — the third year of the State intervention. My closing remarks are included below. I wish all of you a great start to your school year.

College Kids Schedule Literally Everything on a Calendar

Haley Zimmerman:

Some think it’s gone too far, eliminating any spontaneity and reducing life to slots on a grid. Others say that some GCal superusers just want the world to know how busy they are.

Kaitlin Martin, a senior at Georgetown University, estimates that events in GCal cover about 10 to 12 hours of her average day.

“It’s probably from an hour before class to when I’m finishing my last assignment or activity of the day,” she said. Martin uses the app to schedule her classes, her meals, her daily tasks and hangouts with friends. When she makes plans with a friend at Georgetown, one of them sends the other a calendar invite.

Why Do Some People Say There’s No Reading Crisis?

Natalie Wexler:

This pushback stems from the longstanding fear that schools will overdo phonics and kill students’ desire to read—in other words, “drill and kill.” Palubiak says that when she substitute-taught in a second-grade classroom and announced that it was time for the required 40 minutes of phonics—which, according to her, the kids didn’t need—she was greeted with boos.

Kids who don’t need instruction in phonics shouldn’t have to sit through 40 minutes of it. One problem, though, is that it can be hard to tell who needs phonics instruction and who doesn’t. It can look like kids are reading, especially with leveled texts that rely heavily on repetition of the same words. Kids can easily guess at the words rather than sounding them out.

——

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde:

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?

Iowa Mom Threatened with Lawsuit for Criticizing Curriculum at School Board Meeting

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is representing an Iowa parent with respect to a potential defamation lawsuit after she, a newly naturalized citizen from the Dominican Republic, spoke at a public school board meeting about her concerns regarding certain curricula and instructional materials used in her son’s classroom.

What Happened: Our client, Mrs. Elayne Casalins, first addressed her concerns about the curricula and instructional materials with her son’s teacher, the school principal and the superintendent. She went to the school board because no action was taken after she explained her concerns to the teacher, principal, and superintendent. She then spoke at a June 19, 2025, Belmond-Klemme Community School Board meeting to make objections to the instructional materials used in her son’s classroom and the lack of notice she was given as a parent.

She reported to the school board that a teacher made the students watch the PG-13 movie “Till” without any parental notice or consent — even though many students, including her son, were only 12 years old. She further reported that there was a discussion of Black Lives Matter, racism, and police brutality all without parental notification or consent.

Mrs. Casalins’s comments to the school board were intended to address three issues: (1) in her opinion the curricula she objected to violated Iowa state law (Iowa Code § 279.74), (2) she believed that she was denied her statutory right to object to the curricula and instructional materials, and (3) to object to the materials after the fact under School Board Policy 605.3, and to ask that their future use be reconsidered.

Following her comments, Mrs. Casalins received a threatening letter from Boles Witosky Stewart Law PLLC firm demanding that she “cease-and-desist” any public discussion regarding this matter of public concern, namely controversial curricula and instructional materials used at the Belmond-Klemme Community School. The letter was sent on behalf of the teacher employed by the school district.

The global fertility crisis is worse than you think

• 2023 was likely the first year in human history when our fertility rate fell below the replacement rate.

• The world population will start falling c. 2055.

• Never seen before, even compared to wars and pandemics.

• The consequences for the world are momentous.

• Let me describe a few of them.

Postmodern teaching fads are undermining student learning

David C. Phillips

“In most college classrooms,” wrote Alison King in a seminal 1993 article, “the professor lectures and the students listen and take notes. The professor is the central figure, the ‘sage on the stage,’ the one who has the knowledge and transmits that knowledge to the students. […] In this view of teaching and learning,” King argued, “students are passive learners rather than active ones.” And, she continued, “such a view is outdated and will not be effective for the twenty-first century.”

Instead of the transmittal theory described above, King championed a constructivist theory of learning according to which “knowledge [is] constructed—or reconstructed—by each individual knower through the process of trying to make sense of new information in terms of what that individual already knows”—a process called “active learning.” What students need, according to this view, is not a “sage on the stage” but a “guide on the side.” “Essentially,” King explained, “the professor’s role [as a ‘guide on the side’] is to facilitate students’ interaction with the material and with each other in their knowledge-producing endeavor.”

What students need, according to constructivists, is not a “sage on the stage” but a “guide on the side.”King’s article is a somewhat more modest proposal than contemporary readers familiar with the terminology might expect. But reformation efforts often trigger more revolutionary impulses in others. By 2014, Charles D. Morrison of Wilfred Laurier University was not only referring to “the now-clichéd shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’” but was also declaring that it was only “a good start.” Four years later, Ted Dintersmith even approvingly described a school that “has no teachers, just a few adult ‘guides’ who aren’t expected to be subject-matter experts or allowed to answer questions.” Since then, there has been no shortage of academic papers, magazine and journal articles, and blog posts calling for or celebrating the death of the sage on the stage.

China to restrict Tibetan language in region’s college entrance exam

John Reed:

China plans to exclude Tibetan as a core subject from the national college entrance exam for the majority of students in the autonomous region, a senior official has said, raising concerns over the future of the language.

Gama Cedain, chair of the Tibet Autonomous Region, told a press briefing this week that the change was part of reforms to the national examination and would improve Tibetans’ career prospects.

“Tibet, like other provinces and regions,” would have “unified exam subjects”, he said, such as Chinese and mathematics, and foreign languages including English, Russian, Japanese, French, German and Spanish. But Tibetan will no longer be a core subject in the exam.

“This helps students of all ethnic groups to enjoy fairer access to high-quality education, enhances minority students’ ability to learn and improves their overall scientific and cultural literacy,” he said of the changes.

Taxpayer funded grants and public interest outcomes

Ben:

Kill shot: seizing Harvard’s patents for inventions developed with federal funds, due to Harvard’s failure to disclose them, failure to commercialize them in America before other countries, and failure to convert them into practical use. From Commerce Secretary Lutnick. Not a good look for former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker — the soon-to-be-former Senior Fellow (board chair) of Harvard Corporation.

Massachusetts’ Teachers Union Seeks a wealth tax increase

MTA President Max Page

“ The passage of Fair Share, which this year is bringing in $3 billion for public education and transportation from less than 1% of taxpayers, demonstrates how a fairer, more equitable tax system can generate billions of dollars for the common good,” Page said. “Massachusetts has more millionaires — and they are wealthier — than before voters passed a constitutional amendment to place a 4 % tax on income above $1 million. Fair Share has made our state a more attractive place to live by investing in the foundations of a prosperous Commonwealth.”

The MTA Board also voted to explore ways to achieve universal access to public, preK education and debt-free access to public higher education for any resident who wants to pursue post-secondary education or career training.

“Our state Constitution guarantees the right to an appropriate public education, which has been interpreted by the courts to mean kindergarten through grade 12, Page said. “That right must be expanded to include preK and public college to be meaningful in the 21st century. If we truly want to get all children the head start they need, we must provide every child with the opportunity to attend a high-quality, public prekindergarten program. And if we are serious about social and economic justice and nurturing a culturally rich and welcoming state of involved citizens, we will provide all residents with the best vehicle for a prosperous future – public education.”

The Board of the MTA also reiterated its commitment to organize and involve all educators across the 400 local associations in the statewide union, and to remain at the forefront of defending public education against the attacks by the authoritarian-leaning administration in Washington.

——

Massachusetts is already in the top ten highest tax jurisdictions.

“A federal court certified a class that includes “any child who has been born or will be born in the United States after February 19, 2025.” If unborn children can sue to vindicate their right to citizenship…..”

US District Court alt link

ORDER

For the reasons stated in the memorandum opinion issued today, it is this 7th day of August,

2025, hereby ORDERED:

1. 2. 3. The plaintiffs’ motion for class certification, ECF 97, is GRANTED.

A class is CERTIFIED under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(2) consisting of:

Any child who has been born or will be born in the United States after February 19, 2025, (1) whose mother was unlawfully present in the United States and whose father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) whose mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary and whose father was not a United

States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

Liza, as next friend to L.B.; Ashley, as next friend to K.K.; Andrea, as next friend to E.T.P.; Niurka, as next friend to L.G.; and Juana, Trinidad Garcia, and Monica, as next friends to their future children, are DESIGNATED as class representatives.

4. Counsel for the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and the Asylum

Seeker Advocacy Project are APPOINTED as class counsel.

Deborah L. Boardman

US District Judge

———