School Information System

Hadley Freeman

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

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

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

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

David McGrath 

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

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

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

Celeste Biever

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

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

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

Arnold Kling:

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

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

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

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

Luisa Colon:

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

Joan Westenberg:

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

Why?

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

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

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

Kimberly Wethal:

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

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

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

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

Chris Rickert:

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

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

Shyam Sankar:

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

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

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

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

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

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more.

George Leef:

What has gone wrong?

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

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

Stephanie Hegarty:

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

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

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

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

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The Demographic Future of Humanity:

Facts and Consequences

Credentialism and family formation.

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Choose Life

Corrinne Hess:

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

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

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

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Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Carl Smith:

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

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

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

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more

Janan Ganesh:

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

Rebecca Lowe:

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

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

Alex Tabarrok summary:

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

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

Steve Blank:

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

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

Naomi Epps Best:

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

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

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

Becky Jacobs

“What upsets me the most about these … is very rarely are there actual metrics attached to it,” Wilde said.

Mnookin will qualify for the $150,000 if she continues as chancellor through June 30 and “her performance remains satisfactory,” according to her contract with the UW system. Although her contract doesn’t specify what “satisfactory” means, the document says Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and the Board of Regents will evaluate the chancellor.

“When you have just a generic goal with no specific metrics attached, how do you really, truly know that it’s been met?” Wilde asked. “What is ‘satisfactory’ performance? What is ‘poor’ performance? What is ‘excellent’ performance? There’s no definition there.”

Mnookin declined to comment this week on the bonus and her plans to stay at UW-Madison. Rothman and the Board of Regents currently consider Mnookin’s performance to be satisfactory, Pitsch confirmed to the Cap Times.

The Board of Regents offer different rewards to other leaders across the Universities of Wisconsin. Starting in 2026, all the chancellors outside of UW-Madison could earn up to 15% on top of their base salaries if enough first-year undergraduate students continue for a second year. Specific targets vary among campuses. UW-Green Bay needs to retain 70% of first-year students this fall, while UW-La Crosse’s has to keep 87%.

James Marriott

English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry. Half the labour of writing a history of English must lie in gathering encomia to the subject by its besotted disciples. To the patrician epicures and monied amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the 20th century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret), the study of literature was “a glory of the universe” or “the spring which unlocks the hidden life”. For the evangelists of the critic FR Leavis and charismatic secondary school teachers of the Sixties it was a moral crusade that pitted humanity against the spirit-killing incursions of machine civilisation: English had “life-enhancing powers”, and its study was essential if a modern person hoped to retain “any capacity for a humane existence”. Collini winces fastidiously at some of these “soaring affirmations”. And indeed, such confident panegyrics read strangely in an age when the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking. Today, English is reduced to doing its pathetic, blundering best to ape the sciences, grinding scholars through the Research Excellence Framework and promising students “transferable skills”, that mad but unkillable doctrine beloved of prospectus writers which holds that studying ecocritical perspectives on early Shelley is useful preparation for making PowerPoints at PWC.

Matteo Cargnelutti, Catherine Brobston, John Hess, Jack Cushman, Kristi Mukk, Aristana Scourtas, Kyle Courtney, Greg Leppert, Amanda Watson, Martha Whitehead, Jonathan Zittrain

Large language models (LLMs) use data to learn about the world in order to produce meaningful correlations and predictions. As such, the nature, scale, quality, and diversity of the datasets used to train these models, or to support their work at inference time, have a direct impact on their quality. The rapid development and adoption of LLMs of varying quality has brought into focus the scarcity of publicly available, high-quality training data and revealed an urgent need to ground the stewardship of these datasets in sustainable practices with clear provenance chains. To that end, this technical report introduces Institutional Books 1.0, a large collection of public domain books originally digitized through Harvard Library’s participation in the Google Books project, beginning in 2006. Working with Harvard Library, we extracted, analyzed, and processed these volumes into an extensively-documented dataset of historic texts. This analysis covers the entirety of Harvard Library’s collection scanned as part of that project, originally spanning 1,075,899 volumes written in over 250 different languages for a total of approximately 250 billion tokens. As part of this initial release, the OCR-extracted text (original and post-processed) as well as the metadata (bibliographic, source, and generated) of the 983,004 volumes, or 242B tokens, identified as being in the public domain have been made available. This report describes this project’s goals and methods as well as the results of the analyses we performed, all in service of making this historical collection more accessible and easier for humans and machines alike to filter, read and use.

Equable:

The latest issue brief from Equable Institute reveals that rising teacher retirement costs driven by pension debt are placing significant financial pressure on K–12 school districts across the country—resulting in cuts to educator compensation, support services, long-term savings, and more.

The analysis, based on a survey of over 1,000 school district leaders and board members nationwide, finds that at least one-third of school districts have cut or deferred spending due to rising pension costs over the past five years. In states where legislatures pay pension costs directly, half of school leaders believe those expenses have led to lower state funding for public education.

Wayne Joubert:

Sometimes a paper comes out that has the seeds of a great idea that could lead to a whole new line of pioneering research. But, instead, nothing much happens, except imitative works that do not push the core idea forward at all.

For example the McCulloch Pitts paper from 1943 showed how neural networks could represent arbitrary logical or Boolean expressions of a certain class. The paper was well-received at the time, brilliantly executed by co-authors with diverse expertise in neuroscience, logic and computing. Had its signficance been fully grasped, this paper might have, at least notionally, formed a unifying conceptual bridge between the two nascent schools of connectionism and symbolic AI (one can at least hope). But instead, the heated conflict in viewpoints in the field has persisted, even to this day.

Another example is George Miller’s 7 +/- 2 paper. This famous result showed humans are able to hold only a small number of pieces of information in mind at the same time while reasoning.  This paper was important not just for the specific result, but for the breakthrough in methodology using rigorous experimental noninvasive methods to discover how human thinking works—a topic we know so little about, even today. However, the followup papers by others, for the most part, only extended or expanded on the specific finding in very minor ways. [1] Thankfully, Miller’s approach did eventually gain influence in more subtle ways.

Oscar Levin:

This text aims to introduce select topics in discrete mathematics at a level appropriate for first- or second-year undergraduate math and computer science majors, especially those who intend to teach middle and high school mathematics. The book began as a set of notes for the Discrete Mathematics course at the University of Northern Colorado. This course serves both as a survey of the topics in discrete math and as the “bridge” course for math majors, as UNC does not offer a separate “introduction to proofs” course. As this course has evolved to support our computer science major, so has the text. The current version of the book is intended to support inquiry-based teaching for understanding that is so crucial for future teachers, while also providing the necessary mathematical foundation and application-based motivation for computer science students. While teaching the course in Spring 2024 using an early version of this edition, I was pleasantly surprised by how many students reported that they, for the first time, saw how useful math could be in the “real world.” I hope that this experience can be replicated in other classes using this text.

Guy Chazan:

on process, which it states is “based on merit, not ideology” and has traditionally been insulated from political interference. The board said the integrity of that process was “now undermined”.

Political appointees at the state department had cancelled Fulbright scholarships for dozens of academics and students, mainly on the basis of their research topics, according to people familiar with the matter.

The prestigious Fulbright Program has long been considered one of the pillars of US cultural diplomacy. It has been widely seen as enhancing America’s relations with its allies, with many Fulbright alumni rising to leadership roles in government, the sciences and the arts.

Trump administration critics say the Fulbright is the latest victim of the White House’s assault on symbols of US soft power. President Donald Trump has terminated funding for the Voice of America broadcasting network; dismantled USAID, the country’s main agency for international aid; and withdrawn from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization.

A senior state department official said the 12 members of the Fulbright board were “partisan political appointees of the Biden administration”, and it was “ridiculous” to believe they would “continue to have final say over the application process”.

Summary:

Harvard is a well-chosen target—not only for its prestige and wealth but also because it has a lot to answer for. Its failure to control antisemitism on campus is only the most recent example. Harvard is the wellspring of DEI madness: Justice Lewis Powell’s controlling opinion in University of California v. Bakke (1978), which established “diversity” as an excuse for racial discrimination for the next 45 years, was based on what he called “the Harvard College program.”

Harvard’s defenders say that much of what the university does is worthwhile, and that is no doubt true. But what is the public interest in propping up the conglomerate known as Harvard Corp., which refuses to shut down or reform departments and subsidiaries that are a public menace?

The educational crisis of 2023-25 refreshes the lesson of the financial crisis of 2008-09: When we treat an institution as too big to fail, we invite moral hazard.

Corrine Hess:

Students in Ohio saw an 11 percent improvement in their Algebra 1 assessments after using virtual reality for one year, according to the first randomized-control trial conducted from September 2022 to April 2023. 

Shannon Cox is the superintendent who brought virtual reality to 16 school districts in southwestern Ohio. 

Cox heads the Montgomery County Educational Service Center. In Ohio, there are more than 50 educational service centers that provide administrative, academic, fiscal and operational support services to schools and districts. 

According to Cox, bringing virtual reality into the classroom gave students a kinesthetic connection, a real world connection and a career connection to math.

“We knew that we needed to teach differently, because students learn differently,” Cox said. “It’s a different world, and we needed to give teachers different resources to help them do that.”

Seventy-eight percent of students surveyed in Ohio said the technology helped them understand math, 83 percent said it made learning math more interesting and 84 percent said it helped them see how math is used in the real world.

Cox said the feedback from teachers, even veteran teachers, was also positive.

Frankie Block:

World history students in Philadelphia’s public high schools begin a unit about “The Gilded Age and Progressivism” with the question: “What do you need to overthrow oppression?”

The answer outlined in the class curriculum skirts any complexity about the era in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century when industrialization ushered in vast economic, political, and social change. Instead, here is what Philadelphia’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction said students should conclude: “ ‘New horizons of industry’ lead to ‘greed and exploitation.’ ”

The curriculum is recommended only to teachers, which means they have the power to decide whether to follow it in their classrooms. But some teachers said the curriculum’s mere existence shows that Philadelphia public schools are fixated on teaching history through an “oppressed versus oppressor” framework.

Joseph Cox:

CBP, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it needs this data to support state and local police to track people of interest’s air travel across the country, in a purchase that has alarmed civil liberties experts.

The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its ownpurchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.

IN.gov

Attorney General Todd Rokita has sent letters to Butler and DePauw universities concerning their respective diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and practices, which may violate federal and state civil rights laws and the terms of the universities’ nonprofit statuses. 

The letters follow a similar inquiry sent by Attorney General Rokita to Notre Dame University on May 9. 

“The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that racial discrimination of any kind in our education system is repugnant to our civil rights laws, even if done supposedly to help groups claimed to be disadvantaged or underrepresented,” Attorney General Rokita said. “Hoosiers are rightfully concerned that some education institutions treat students, faculty, staff and others differently based on race under the guise of DEI. We are investigating to determine whether universities’ DEI programs are consistent with the law.” 

Publicly available materials and statements from university leaders suggest that various aspects of Butler’s and DePauw’s operations may be governed by policies that treat individuals — including students, prospective students, faculty, staff and job applicants — differently based on the individuals’ race or ethnicity; employ race in a negative manner when making admissions or hiring decisions; or utilize racial stereotyping. 

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more.

Paul Kiernan:

The changes outlined by Edlow would effectively kill the OPT program, said Stuart Anderson, who now runs the National Foundation for American Policy, which supports high-skilled immigration. That would make it impossible for many foreigners to start U.S. businesses after they graduate and significantly dim the allure of American universities for international students, he said.

In a 2022 study, Anderson found that immigrants founded or co-founded 319 of 582 U.S. startup companies that had achieved valuations of $1 billion or more, including Stripe, Instacart and Epic Games. Nearly half of those had been founded by immigrants who attended U.S. universities as international students, the study said. Instagram was co-founded by a Brazilian, Mike Krieger, who studied at Stanford University.

Anna Stokke podcast

In this episode, Anna Stokke interviews The Right Honourable Sir Nick Gibb, former Minister of State for Schools in England. Nick discusses the bold, evidence-based reforms he led over a decade to reverse declining academic performance in English schools. From phonics-based reading instruction to math mastery, he explains how high expectations, rigorous curricula, and a focus on teacher training transformed outcomes—helping England rise to 4th in the world in reading on PIRLS and one of the highest-performing countries on TIMSS.  This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in meaningful education reform.

Carl Hendrick

I don’t particularly like the term science of learning. It implies a single cohesive entity with an agreed-upon, codified set of laws or prescriptions, when in reality it’s a loose and evolving body of interdisciplinary research, drawing from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, education, and design. It offers probabilistic insights, not fixed rules. 

However, those different disciplines often converge on similar instructional implications such as the importance of managing cognitive load, using retrieval practice to enhance memory, providing worked examples to reduce unnecessary problem-solving strain, spacing learning over time, and ensuring that novices receive explicit, guided instruction before being asked to solve problems independently. 

I was five years into my career as a teacher working in an inner-city London school before I learned any of this, and it profoundly changed my practice. I later discovered that many teachers are in the same boat – they were never taught how learning happens, and like me, want to teach their students better, by using approaches grounded in evidence rather than fads, intuition or well-meaning but unproven methods. 

However, despite the substantial empirical support underpinning the core elements of learning, there remains a persistent undercurrent of scepticism among some educators. This scepticism often manifests in critiques that systematically overlook the considerable evidence base supporting these methodologies.

CDR Salamander

I have to remind myself to give a little grace to those who are stationed or work at the Naval Academy. Change is hard. Liberation can be difficult. 

Not everyone there was marching down the yard with a bullhorn in one hand, and the Little Red Book in the other. No, as in most leftist takeovers, most just tried to keep their head down and survive. Do good where they can, and hopefully not be denounced and thrown to the baying crowd. Some decided to take advantage of the moment, and Viktor Komarovsky-like, made good for themselves by ingratiating themselves with the cadre.

Some, however, were true believers. Chasing either US News college rankings, virtue signaling to their peers in civilian institutions, or, at its worst, saw an opportunity to make radical cultural change in the U.S. military through its future leaders.

Being in a hard-left part of the country made it even easier, if not inevitable. If you think the political monoculture in DC is bad, it is even worse in Annapolis. Such intellectual terrariums can create some fragile creatures that have difficulty with any contact with the outside world. Throw in all the perils of going full-academic at the university level…well…without some careful self-care, things can get wobbly fast. 

In the profession of arms, a solid understanding of history is essential, foundational knowledge. It isn’t an elective—it is an existential requirement.

Chris Rickert:

Despite the generally positive overall picture, the foundation also notes that for six of the 15 measures for which data on race are available, “Wisconsin’s racial disparities are some of the largest in the country.” 

Those measures are: 

• Low birth weight: 16.6% of Black children, 6.5% of white children. 
• Failure to graduate high school on time: 29% of Black children, 6% of white children.
• Eighth graders who don’t score proficient in math on national assessments: 93% of Black children, 55% of white children.
• Child and teen deaths: 79 deaths per 100,000 Black children, 24 deaths per 100,000 white children.
• Children living in families with a high housing cost burden, meaning more than 30% of income is spent on housing: 44% of Black children, 16% of white children.
• Children living in high poverty areas: 30% of Black children, 1% of white children.

For the first three measures, the gap between Black and white children was the largest in the country. For the last three, it was the second largest behind Kansas, Arkansas and Michigan, respectively. 

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adison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Cate Zueske

Property taxes most hated tax for fixed income families

About 1,153 students in the Green Bay Area Public School District use a voucher to attend a private school, amounting to $12 million in state aid. That’s just 3.8% of the district’s $311 million budget—even though those students represent over 6% of enrollment.

A similar story holds statewide.  On average, Wisconsin school districts receive $15,569 in state and local revenue per student, while choice schools receive $10,798.  Statewide, spending on choice students represents about 4.6% of total educational spending even though choice students are about 6.5% of total enrollment. Bottom line: taxpayers are getting more value per dollar.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average taxes – about $25k per student, along with long term, disastrous reading results.

John Miller:

In this episode of “Office Hours,” John J. Miller, director of the Dow Journalism Program, discusses why Hillsdale has a journalism minor (but no major!), how aspiring journalists can still make a living despite the decline of journalism, how to improve your own writing, and why no one should pursue a Ph.D. in journalism. This is the thirteenth in a series of virtual visits with Hillsdale faculty.

Callum Borchers

Liaw, 27, has a master’s degree in political science and, judging by his quiz-show performances, an expansive knowledge of everything from the Middle Ages to pop music. He won $59,398 in three contests that aired last week.

He is also unemployed and lives with his parents. At his request, “Jeopardy” host Ken Jennings introduced him at the beginning of each episode as a “recent graduate and stay-at-home son.”

“I figured even if I lost my first game, at least I could make people laugh,” he says. 

It worked. Liaw’s self-deprecating humor made him an overnight legend on social media, where people say he is, like, pretty much living their dream, lol.

The phrase “stay-at-home son” was added to the Urban Dictionary in 2007 as an insult to be hurled at an unmotivated man-child. Lately, though, members of the generation that brought us “quiet quitting” and “lazy-girl jobs” have embraced the label as an ironic badge of honor. .

Gerard Baker:

But according to a new report in the Journal, there is one respect in which Harvard is the top “party” school. It is the favorite academic institution of the Chinese Communist Party.

The story says the Chinese leadership regards Harvard as the best training ground for the many thousands of midcareer bureaucrats it sends for executive education and postgraduate studies at U.S. campuses. Alumni include a former vice-president and the country’s top U.S. trade-relations negotiator. Sons and daughters of prominent communist leaders have also studied there.

Readers of a certain mindset will smile inwardly when they hear that the college at the pinnacle of America’s higher education is also the place where the elite of America’s principal geopolitical adversary go to learn how to turn their country into the dominant superpower. Revolutionary Marxists committed to the ultimate destruction of Western civilization and American-led capitalism? At Harvard? Of course. Where else would they go?

I jest—a little. Harvard’s faculty—in economics, the hard sciences, medicine and mathematics especially—still comprises some of the greatest minds on the planet; the research conducted there remains world-beating, and even in some undergraduate humanities programs I am told it is still possible to get a proper education with a minimum of mandatory indoctrination about decolonization, intergenerational racial equity, exploitative capital or gender studies. Harvard’s status as a magnet for the world’s best and brightest is still beneficial for the U.S. While those communist princelings will mostly go back home and figure out how to destroy us, many of the finest international students attracted to U.S. universities will stay and contribute greatly to American prosperity and welfare.

Armin Rosen:

The world of the 21st century is mystifyingly complex, but we at least have obscure bureaucratic documents, like Kenya’s Gazette Supplement 181 of 2024, to help us peer into the machinery through which the planet often works.

The document, dated Oct. 4, 2024, and carrying the name of Kenya’s minister of foreign affairs, announced that the Kenyan government had granted full diplomatic immunity to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. An organization must affirmatively ask Kenya’s highest leadership for such privileges, which they can only grant through a vote of the full cabinet and with the support of the country’s president and deputy president. The immunity announcement was a complete surprise to Kenyan political watchers, and did not say who at the foundation was being immunized or why. The government has never willingly disclosed any of the details of whatever agreement it reached with the Gates Foundation, then in the process of…..

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More.

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Was the $5 Billion Worth It? A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters–and regrets, Mea Culpa on Small Learning Communities; Does More Money Matter?

Ann Althouse Summary:

For years, YouTube has removed videos with derogatory slurs, misinformation about Covid vaccines and election falsehoods, saying the content violated the platform’s rules. But since President Trump’s return to the White House, YouTube has encouraged its content moderators to leave up videos with content that may break the platform’s rules rather than remove them, as long as the videos are considered to be in the public interest. Those would include discussions of political, social and cultural issues….

Larry Lee

Agricultural education is expanding in schools, even though fewer young people are growing up on a farm.  

Cheryl Zimmerman is the Executive Director for Wisconsin FFA, and also Secretary for the National FFA.  She tells Brownfield this could be a record year for attendence with a large number of proficiency awards, FFA stars, and growing membership. “We have seen a record number. We are at 27,556 members. This is the highest membership in the history of our organization since 1929.”

Zimmerman says Wisconsin will present charters to two new chapters. “The La Crosse middle school chapter is going to receive a charter at the opening session, as well as the Algoma FFA. They’ve reactivated.”

LaCrosse is the only middle school FFA chapter in Wisconsin, and the state’s first in over 30 years.

Mme Lockhart

Teachers are expected to use evidence-based approaches and strategies- yet no one has ever trained us how to read and interpret research!

Huge thanks to @rastokke who, this past weekend at the @researchEDCan conference, shared this 1-page “red flags for education research” for teachers and, just as importantly, the literacy coaches and consultants who are telling us what to do! Find it here: annastokke.com/_files/ugd/596…

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

Sasha von Oldershausen:

At the turn of the twenty-first century, measles, a highly contagious respiratory illness, was declared eliminated from the United States, thanks to herd immunity achieved through a critical mass of vaccination. Yet at the beginning of this year, Katherine Wells, the public health director for the city and county of Lubbock, found herself in the midst of a measles resurgence. The disease, which most commonly affects children, found its way into a Mennonite community in nearby Gaines County, where vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) hover at around 82 percent, well below the national average of 93 percent. Two children from there died of the disease, in February and April. It wasn’t just the deaths that shook Wells, who has two young daughters. “Putting a child on a ventilator or having them be in the hospital for multiple days because of dehydration or they can’t breathe—it’s tough on those little bodies,” she said. Texas Monthly spoke with Wells by phone in April, when Lubbock was still at the heart of an outbreak in Texas that had sent more than sixty people to the hospital, then once again in May, when the reported number had exceeded eighty.

Dissident Teacher:

With a captive audience, guaranteed revenue, and increased funding for poor performance, public schools have little incentive to ensure any child learns.

There’s an enormous disconnect between what parents think public schools do and what the system actually produces. People believe schools exist to educate kids.

They don’t.

Like so many other systems run by the government, public schools exist to perpetuate themselves and increase their power. They do this by employing people who will vote as a bloc to ensure their continued employment and, thus, the system’s growth.

I experienced twenty years of relentless and purposeful mission creep as a teacher in three large suburban school districts in densely-populated California metros.

The California Department of Education says it spent $16,881 per pupil

in the 2020-21 school year, 282% more than the $6,036 they spent per student in 2000.1

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Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

NPR summary

House Republicans’ reconciliation bill, which includes a first-of-its-kind national private school voucher program, is now heading to the Senate.

The proposal would use the federal tax code to offer vouchers that students could use to attend private secular or religious schools, even in states where voters have opposed such efforts.

Debates about voucher programs have raged on throughout the years. But what does the research say? NPR education correspondent Cory Turner unpacks it. 

Michael T. Nietzel, 

The new university would focus on building a skilled STEM workforce, concentrating on globally competitive areas such as automation, logistics, biotech and computing. It would grant stackable credentials in those areas, which could be combined with other degrees a student might earn.

The school expects that its initial class, to be enrolled “in the coming years,” will consist of about 500 students, with projections that total enrollment could eventually grow to about 1,500 undergraduates and 500 non-degree learners over time. Initial plans call for students’ tuition to be fully covered in order to “attract enterprising candidates with entrepreneurial spirit.”

Today’s announcement was made at the Heartland Summit being held this year in Bentonville. The Summit is an annual event organized by Heartland Forward, a non-profit policy think tank that aims to to stimulate economic growth in the central region of the United States.

According to its website, Heartland Forward has a goal of generating $500 million of economic impact for the middle states by 2030 through a focus on four pillars: innovation and entrepreneurship, talent pipelines, health and wellness, and regional competitiveness.

Philip Hamburger:

The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve done to higher education, let alone what should be done with their jobs.

The federal government is no better at re-evaluating higher education. It’s focusing on the tools available to it: enforcing antidiscrimination laws and defunding science (even though scientists aren’t typically the culprits).

The academic failures of universities and colleges are obvious enough. Departments generally appoint their own faculty members—so that once a department is ideologically captured, it tends to tilt further in the same direction, inevitably producing instruction and research that, considered as a whole, is slanted. Institutions then inculcate conformity, punish dissenters, and apply harsh disciplinary proceedings. Put another way, the recent antisemitism didn’t develop in a vacuum. It was nurtured amid ideological capture and selective enforcement of the rules. These are substantial impediments to the pursuit of truth

Rahul Pandey:

Here’s the core idea that changed my perspective on productivity: Action leads to motivation, not the other way around. You should not check your email or scroll Instagram while you wait for motivation to “hit you.” Instead, just start doing something, anything, that makes progress toward your goal, and you’ll find that motivation will follow.

For example, if I have a high-priority, complex bug-fixing challenge at work, my approach is to decompose the problem into something much simpler. Could I simply add a log statement that prints the value of a relevant variable? My goal at this point is not to solve the bug, it’s simply to take a tiny step forward.

Parshin Shojaee*†, Iman Mirzadeh*, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scal- ing properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily fo- cus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. How- ever, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse.

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But anybody who thinks LLMs are a direct route to the sort AGI that could fundamentally transform society for the good is kidding themselves. This does not mean that the field of neural networks is dead, or that deep learning is dead. LLMs are just one form of deep learning, and maybe others — especially those that play nicer with symbols – will eventually thrive. Time will tell. But this particular approach has limits that are clearer by the day.

Dr. Drang:

I checked out a copy of Raúl Rojas’s The Language of Mathematics: The Stories behind the Symbols at my local library this morning. As the subtitle says, it covers the history and eventual standardization of many many mathematical symbols. The book is several years old, but the English translation (by Eduardo Aparicio from the original Spanish) is new. I first read about it in this Scientific American article (that’s an Apple News link).

Manuel G. Pascual

“Surveillance in the U.S. didn’t begin with Trump, nor will it end when he leaves the White House. The foundations for the current state of techno-surveillance were laid over decades, with bipartisan support for policies that normalized invasive practices in law enforcement, the military, and border control,” says the Bahraini civil rights activist Esra’a Al Shafei, who has been studying this issue for years, in a conversation with EL PAÍS. “This system is fueled by large budgets allocated to intelligence agencies, as well as private providers, all under the pretext of national security and crime prevention.” Companies like Palantir, Anduril, and GEO Group are providing Washington with digital tools to build this entire surveillance infrastructure.

Trump continues to add layers to this system. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed in April that it is using a tool called Babel X to collect social media information about travelers who may be subject to increased surveillance, according to the agency itself. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for its part, has acknowledged using another program, SocialNet, which aggregates data from more than 200 sources, including Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and dating apps.

Tom Perkins:

The University of Michigan is using private, undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups, including trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations, the Guardian has learned.

The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.

Zach Goldberg:

Concept creep describes the phenomenon in which morally potent terms expand beyond their original definitions into ever broader applications. As these terms become more diluted, they also become politically weaponized, shifting public perceptions, priorities, and policy.

In August 2020, I illustrated in these pages how terms like racism, white supremacy, and privilegesaw a dramatic surge in media usage, significantly reshaping public and political perceptions and discourse. The same dynamic, I feared, was beginning to reshape another crucial term: genocide.

Genocide is going the way of racism and white supremacy, I observed on Oct. 19, 2023. Israel hadn’t yet invaded Gaza, but the mainstream media template for response to Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7 attacks was already set. Sure enough, by 2024, mentions of genocide in The New York Times (1.43% of all articles) had eclipsed the paper’s earlier peak for white supremacy (1.41% in 2020) and, though not matching the peak for racism/racist(s) (7.2% in 2020), still reflected a similar pattern of conceptual escalation.

DataRepublican (small r)

NEW SPREADSHEET DROP: Where Was Biden when he signed all his EOs? I’ve compiled a comprehensive spreadsheet tracking Biden’s physical location on 1,000+ exact dates of Executive Order and Pardon from his presidency — for the purpose of investigating autopen use.

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Grok on the autopen origins. More results.

Pamela Paul:

The “Notice of No Contact” order landed in May’s inbox on Feb. 15, 2022. It was stern and lawyerly and contained a bulleted list of prohibited behaviors between May, then a Tulane freshman, and her former roommate: No approaching each other at any time. No communicating through third parties. No social media interactions whatsoever.

The directive, which came from Tulane’s division of student affairs, was “based on the right of every Tulane community member to avoid contact with another community member if such contact may be harmful or detrimental.” Though the measure was purportedly “nondisciplinary,” it ended on an ominous note: “A violation of this Order could result in an immediate interim suspension and against [sic] conduct charges to you.” 

Kate Selig and Simon J. Levien

A Harvard spokesman declined a request for an interview, noting the Abigail Adams Institute’s independence from the university. But Alan M. Garber, the university president, recently pledgedto speed up the creation of a campus initiative on viewpoint diversity, and in a May letter responding to the Trump administration, he said that the two have “common ground,” including in fostering “intellectual diversity.”

Some students and faculty members have criticized the administration for caving to right-wing demands. But students who participate in the institute said the campus needs more places open to heterodox opinions.

Shani Agarwal Hood, who earned a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2023, sought out the institute when she arrived at Harvard in search of a literary salon culture, friends and free inquiry.

She believes Harvard hasn’t always struck the right balance between fostering a respectful and inclusive environment and protecting free expression. As a Catholic, she said, her views have sometimes clashed with those of her peers.

Wall Street Journal:

Before the reforms, public-safety workers could retire at age 50 and receive a pension credit of 3% of their final salary for every year they worked. That means a 50-year-old firefighter who earned $250,000 could retire with a $187,500 annual pension for life—and thereafter work a part-time job that qualifies him for Social Security.

The 2013 reforms reduced the maximum pension credit for new hires to 2.7% and required them to work until 57 to receive it. If they retire earlier, their credit is reduced. Workers are also required to contribute half of the actuarial “normal cost” of their pensions, which doesn’t include the tab for the unfunded liability caused by prior benefit increases.

Despite the 2013 reforms, governments are still drowning in pension debt, which has prompted repeated tax hikes. For every $10,000 that a state firefighter earns in compensation, the state pays $5,000 into the state pension fund. For highway patrol officers, the charge is $7,000. Private workers no doubt wished their employers chipped in 50% to 70% of their salaries to their 401(k)s.

AJ Bayatpour:

The DPI might have distanced itself from NAEP standards, but new MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius is blasting out the district’s abysmal NAEP scores.

Showing this slide in a budget presentation is a remarkable departure from what we’ve previously seen out of MPS

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Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

Marc Thiessen:

This is both necessary and long overdue. For years, China has been engaged in a systematic effort to target U.S. universities, using Chinese students to conduct extensive espionage and intellectual property theft on elite campuses across the United States — which has helped fuel China’s technological and military growth.

To understand how China uses its students as spies, read the stunning investigative report published last month by Stanford Review reporters Garret Molloy and Elsa Johnsonin which they documented the infiltration of Stanford University by the Chinese Communist Party. “The CCP is orchestrating a widespread academic espionage campaign at Stanford,” Johnson told me and my co-host, Danielle Pletka, in a recent podcast interview. “Stanford is in the heart of Silicon Valley,” she added, “and that’s a huge incentive for China.”

Aaron Sibarium:

The Harvard Law Review retaliated against a student editor for allegedly leaking documents to the Washington Free Beacon and demanded, as part of the journal’s disciplinary process, that he request their destruction, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. The demand came as the law review was under a document retention order stemming from multiple federal probes, raising questions about whether the journal was also trying to interfere with a government investigation.

The Justice Department told Harvard on May 13 that it was investigating reports of racial discrimination at the journal, according to the New York Times. A week later, the law review instructed a student who was cooperating with the government in that investigation, Daniel Wasserman, to round up the documents he’d allegedly shared.

The Economist

Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started routinely terminating females. Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.

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The Demographic Future of Humanity:

Facts and Consequences

Credentialism and family formation.

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Choose Life

Rep. Ro Khanna:

Such an absurd lowering of standards would do students a disservice. And not only is this approach wrong on the merits, it’s been shown to be ineffective in raising outcomes for students. In San Leandro, which implemented similar changes in 2016, lowering the standards for grading hasn’t led to a significant reduction in disparities. Recently, I spoke out against the Palo Alto Unified School District’s plan to take away honors biology after already cutting honors English — moves I fear will have negative long-term impacts on all students.

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more.

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“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District. Madison elected officials have generally been silent on our long term, disastrous reading results.

Katie Buehler:

BREAKING: A 9-0 Supreme Court rules Wisconsin violated the First Amendment by denying a Catholic charity group an exemption to the state’s unemployment tax. #SCOTUS supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf…

more.

Anna Hansen:

Officers are in the early stages of investigating “alleged criminal activity involving inappropriate relationships with staff,” according to a statement from Lt. Ray Thomson.

Thomson did not say how many staff members had been placed on leave, but said that investigators believe the allegations are solely within the high school.

In an email to parents signed by Superintendent Brad Saron, Principal Jen Ploeger and other district leaders, the district said the investigation involved “inappropriate communications and relationships between staff and students from Sun Prairie West High School. Any staff members currently involved in the investigation have been placed on administrative leave and no longer have access to school district facilities or resources.”

Glenn Reynolds:

And these problems are rife throughout the academy. A Smith College commencement speaker this year even had to surrender her honorary degree when it turned out her speech had been stolen.

It’s not just about copying. There’s also a widely acknowledged “replication crisis”: Scientists publish papers reporting results, but it’s increasingly impossible for others to reproduce those results, leading to what some have called an existential crisis for research.

We’re told cuts to federal spending on higher education will imperil research, but such claims would be more troubling if the “research” were of more reliably high quality. 

It’s an open secret that the pressure to produce a constant flood of papers that are publishable and, better yet, interesting enough to spark headlines leads to corner-cutting, “data torture” and overclaiming — or, sometimes, outright fraud.

The result is an expensive self-licking ice cream cone of grant applications and publications, but the actual contribution to human knowledge is often lacking.

Of course, research isn’t the only justification for higher education; we had colleges and universities long before professors saw academic publication as the major goal of their jobs. 

Chun Han Wong:

Some U.S. politicians have said that China’s Communist Party is harvesting expertise in American academia to ultimately harm U.S. interests. The Trump administration has cited these criticisms among others to back its efforts to force a major cultural shift in U.S. colleges, which many conservatives regard as bastions of liberal and left-wing ideology.

American universities have played leading roles in shaping China’s overseas training programs for mid-career officials, which Beijing started arranging at scale in the 1990s as a way to improve governance by exposing its bureaucrats to Western public-policy ideas and practices.

Other U.S. colleges that have offered executive training to Chinese officials include Syracuse, Stanford, the University of Maryland and Rutgers, according to publicity materials and other disclosures. Syracuse’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, for instance, helped set up postgraduate programs in public administration at Chinese universities in the early 2000s.

Chris Rickert:

The two had nonetheless remained on the district’s payroll, although amid the investigation district leaders have refused to say what they were doing. Leading Southside have been an interim principal and assistant principal. 

In the Wednesday email, district Superintendent Joe Gothard says Southside’s current leadership team “will select a group of staff, parents, teachers, and community members” to participate in a community panel that will work with district human resources to hire a new principal. Such a panel was not used when Terrell was hired as a principal in 2020, the district has said, because of complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

——

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Molly Beck

St. Francis School District supt Deb Kerr, a former state superintendent candidate, kicks out a reporter for trying to cover a public school board meeting on camera. Here’s the full video: tiktok.com/t/ZP8MXbcNv/

More.

And.

Jillian Lederman:

When Noah Werksman began his first final exam in law school, the classroom was half-empty. “There were 60, maybe 70 people in our cohort,” he says in an interview. “At least 30 students were missing.”

Mr. Werksman, 27, came to Pepperdine Caruso School of Law in Malibu, Calif., in the summer of 2023. “It was what we call a racehorse exam,” he says of the final. “It’s pretty guaranteed you’re not going to finish, but you have to move as fast as possible and rack up as many points as you can.”



Ashley Belanger:

OpenAI is now fighting a court order to preserve all ChatGPT user logs—including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering—after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence.

“Before OpenAI had an opportunity to respond to those unfounded accusations, the court ordered OpenAI to ‘preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying),” OpenAI explained in a court filing demanding oral arguments in a bid to block the controversial order.null

Johana Bhuiyan:

US immigration authorities are collecting and uploading the DNA information of migrants, including children, to a national criminal database, according to government documents released earlier this month.

The database includes the DNA of people who were either arrested or convicted of a crime, which law enforcement uses when seeking a match for DNA collected at a crime scene. However, most of the people whose DNA has been collected by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the agency that published the documents, were not listed as having been accused of any felonies. Regardless, CBP is now creating a detailed DNA profile on migrants that will be permanently searchable by law enforcement, which amounts to a “massive expansion of genetic surveillance”, one expert said.

The DNA information is stored in a database managed by the FBI called the Combined DNA Index System (Codis), which is used across the country by local, state and federal law enforcement to identify suspects of crimes using their DNA data.

Hillsdale:

Hillsdale College’s K-12 curriculum is content-rich, balanced, and strong, and with emphasis upon the four core disciplines of math, science, literature, and history, with attention to music, art, physical education, and foreign languages. 

Hillsdale College has written and published multiple curriculum products. These include a complete collection of lesson plans for teaching American history, civics, and government K-12, Literacy Essentials: The Journey from Spelling to Reading, and the K-12 Program Guide. 

Ilya Shapiro

American higher education is in crisis. Pathologies that had been growing for decades and were catalyzed by Covid mania burst into the open after Hamas’s attack on Israel. As financier-activist and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote following Claudine Gay’s resignation, anti-Semitism tends to erupt where political cultures decay. At many “elite” universities, that decay has taken the form of ideological indoctrination, academic corruption, racial discrimination, and contempt for broader society. These institutions have compromised their basic pedagogical and research missions, along with core values like free speech, due process, and equality under law.

Yet while legacy universities dominate headlines, a transformation is taking place elsewhere, and it deserves more attention. Students are voting with their feet, abandoning the “colds and scolds” of the Northeast for more favorable climates—both intellectual and meteorological.

Rachel Cohen:

The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they themselves are younger and have more energy. Others hope for larger families so may need to start conceiving earlier, or may prioritize making sure their own parents have many years to spend with grandkids. 

Of course, discussing reproductive timelines is fraught. Having others invoke the fact that women experience a decline in fertility with age feels intrusive and insensitive. And the conversation is even trickier today, when anti-abortion activists are pushing a conservative pro-baby agenda from the highest echelons of government and the Heritage Foundation is putting out literature blaming falling birth rates on too many people going to graduate school. (The evidence for that is very weak.)

———

The Demographic Future of Humanity:

Facts and Consequences

Credentialism and family formation.

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Choose Life

Benjamin Rothove:

After former UW-Madison chief diversity officer LaVar Charleston was demoted due to a pattern of “poor decision-making,” the Trump Administration started crackdowns on DEI in universities across the country, and a report released by the state legislature revealed that the Universities of Wisconsin failed to track spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, UW-Madison and UW Health have made changes to DEI on campus.

Charleston had served as the director of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement, so Provost Charles Isbell Jr. was named to temporarily lead the DDEEA until an interim director could be found. As of June 2nd, a replacement for Charleston still had not been hired.

However, UW-Madison created a new position called “special advisor for access and community” to “advise leadership in the development of the university’s overall plans regarding access and community.” Professor and associate dean Percival Matthews was appointed to the role and will “report directly to the chancellor and provost.”

Matthews leads the School of Education’s Center for Community and Well-Being, which was preceded by the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. The CCWB occupies the same office space as the OEDI did.

Richard Vedder:

Over a mere two days recently (May 14-15), the major daily news outlets serving higher education, Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, reported the following:

1. Data collected by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) reveals that state-government support of universities rose by a minuscule inflation-adjusted 0.8 percent in the last year, an actual decline after adjusting for enrollment or income growth;
2. Penn State University has announced plans to close seven campuses;
3. The U.S. House of Representatives appears poised to make sharp reductions in federally guaranteed student-loan support, for example capping support for graduate and professional students and forcing colleges to share in losses from students defaulting on their loans;
4. Congress seems poised to sharply increase current federal endowment taxes for applicable private schools, expanding the number of affected schools beyond 50;
5. A study reveals that inflation-adjusted compensation for faculty members fell over three percent over the decade 2013-2023, while rising by four percent for higher-education staff, further indicating the increased collegiate domination by bloated administrations and the downplaying of core academic functions;
6. Financially shaky Bastyr University in Washington said it wanted to sell its main campus in order to get funds to operate.

Higher education is paying a very high price for allowing leftish ideological predilections to dominate policy decisions on college campuses, putting the achievement of certain perceived social-justice goals ahead of a merit-based promotion of the core mission of discovery and the dissemination of knowledge and ideas—truth and beauty.

Anna Bryson:

Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, is putting pressure on the Virginia Board of Education to include social studies exam scores in the state’s new school accountability system, which is set to take effect this fall.

The new system will publicly rank each Virginia school in one of four performance categories: distinguished, on track, off track and needs intensive support. The criteria for each ranking include test scores in reading, writing math and science – but not social studies.

VanValkenburg sent a letter to the Virginia Board of Education on Monday, asking members to incorporate social studies exam scores into the school accountability system. The letter’s signers include leaders of the American Historical Association, National Council for the Social Studies and the Virginia Social Science Association, among other organizations.