School Information System

By Theodore Schleifer and Steven Rich

….wealthy Democrats, many of whom are seeking anonymity to avoid reprisals from President Trump, even as they donate tens of millions of dollars at a time to defeat Republican candidates. In the 2024 election cycle, over 40 percent of the nearly $2 billion raised by the largest Democratic super PACs came from entities that did not disclose their donors, according to the Times analysis. That was twice the rate of the largest Republican super PACs that cycle. Alexandra Acker-Lyons, an adviser to several prominent progressive donors, said that liberals had to use everything in the campaign finance arsenal to fight Mr. Trump. ‘When we get power, we can change all of the rules so that everyone plays nice,’ Ms. Acker-Lyons said. ‘But until we have power, we can’t do that.'”

Kenneth A. Shores, Hojung Lee

This chapter provides an overview of K-12 public school finance in the United States by tracing how funding systems changed over time, how they operate today, and how well they advance core policy goals.

Section 2 documents the long-run shift from local property tax finance toward larger state and federal roles, driven by economic crises, legislation, and litigation. Section 3 describes the contemporary funding system, including the distinct roles of state, local, federal, and non-governmental revenues. Section 4 explains the core functions of state finance formulas, focusing on adequacy baselines, required local effort, and incentives for additional local spending. Section 5 reviews the school finance reform movement, showing how litigation moved from equal protection to equity and then to adequacy, with contemporary examples from Washington, California, and Tennessee. Section 6 evaluates school finance in terms of efficiency and equity, reviewing evidence that additional revenues improve achievement and long-run outcomes, generate broader social benefits, affect housing markets, and remain unevenly distributed across places and student groups.

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Boston Globe:

Those middle-schoolers are then more likely to go to private schools that don’t face the same issue, prioritizing a place where they can play right away. Balter noted that 17 of 45 middle school youth players in town are already at a private school.

Balter acknowledged there are downsides, including socialization and transportation issues for middle-schoolers. At the same time, he believes there should be more consistency so every school has the same rules in place .

“It’s this cascading effect that happens, and that’s where we are now,” Balter said. “For us to build it back up, it would be great to be able to combine the younger kids into this somehow. I’m not saying this is some simple snap your fingers, but I think this should be relooked at all over again. Where can we come out on it?”

Wellesley athletic director John Brown believes COVID has had a ripple effect that is showing itself more than ever. While passionate lacrosse players continued to play the sport during the pandemic, others decided to stop; those who did so casually in fifth grade are now 10th-graders who have no desire to return.

Sophia Cope:

In practical terms, this TFR means that anyone flying their drone within a half mile of an ICE or CBP agent’s car (a DHS “mobile asset”) is liable to face criminal charges and have their drone shot down. The practical unfairness of this TFR is underscored by the fact that immigration agents often use unmarked rental cars, use cars without license plates, or switch the license plates of their cars to carry out their operations. Nor do they provide prior warning of those operations.

The TFR is an Unconstitutional Infringement of Free Speech

While the FAA asserts that the TFR is grounded in its lawful authority, the flight restriction not only violates multiple constitutional rights, but also the agency’s own regulations.

First Amendment violation. As we highlighted in the letter, nearly every federal appeals court has recognized the First Amendment right of Americans to record law enforcement officers performing their official duties. By subjecting drone operators to criminal and civil penalties, along with the potential destruction or seizure of their drone, the TFR punishes—without the required justifications—lawful recording of law enforcement officers, including immigration agents.  

Fifth Amendment violation. The Fifth Amendment guarantees the right to due process, which includes being given fair notice before being deprived of liberty or property by the government. Under the flight restriction, advanced notice isn’t even possible. As discussed above, drone operators can’t know whether they are within 3000 horizontal feet of unmarked DHS vehicles. Yet the TFR allows the government to capture or even shoot down a drone if it flies within the TFR radius, and to impose criminal and civil penalties on the operator.

Samuel Hammond:

Anecdotally, I suspect the spread of Potemkin civil society is the flip side of America’s overproduction of college-educated knowledge workers: if you’re unable to cut it at McKinsey, a nonprofit job is a good deal, providing lower but stable pay in exchange for social prestige. Of course, as a collective action problem, the advocacy arms race could easily be forestalled by amending nonprofit law or the U.S. tax code. But who would fund that white paper? The endogeneity of U.S. policymaking to organizations dependent on private philanthropy makes reforms aimed at reining in the sector nearly impossible to imagine. As a result, nonprofits and foundations remain deeply undertheorized compared to, say, corporate governance or public administration.

Ultimately, the size and scope of America’s nonprofit sector is powered by generous charitable deductions, an unusually progressive income tax, lax rules and oversight, the depth of U.S. capital markets which create windfalls that must be quickly dispersed to hit payout thresholds, and a large ecosystem of private foundations, trusts, and endowments. In 2016, 1.44% of U.S. GDP was donated to nonprofit organizations, more than any other country and nearly twice as much as New Zealand, the runner up. An incredible 38 of the 54 largest private foundations in the world by endowment value are based in the U.S., while Canada has only one. Simply put, the scale of U.S. private philanthropy is unlike anything in the world.

Separate from its ideological composition, the peculiar power of American philanthropy likely weakens U.S. state capacity, creating intrinsic barriers to the left’s vision of social democracy. Sweden and Norway, for example, have some of the lowest rates of nonprofit employment in Europe, rivaled only by former communist countries. Yet they also have some of the highest rates of social capital. The secret seems to be Scandinavia’s rich history of mutual aid, which culminated in universal, publicly administered social programs that crowded out the need for third-party providers, combined with sector-wide collective bargaining agreements that reduced the need for “advocacy without representation.” It’s a legacy that’s recently begun to reverse under what most leftist sociologists would recognize as the dreaded influence of neoliberalism.

By Will Solfiac

Our managerial elite will go the way of the Mamluks, the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth and the Moriori 

One of the most bizarre characteristics of those who struggle to maintain what’s left of the liberal international order is their refusal to accept reforms that might head off its destruction. It’s not hyperbole to say that the entire rise of what is termed “right-wing populism” by its opponents stems from the unwillingness of mainstream political parties to control immigration. Considering that the continued growth of right-wing populism makes the position of the old liberal consensus ever more precarious, you’d think the latter’s defenders would have decided to compromise. Mostly, they have not.

And they could have; the forms of immigration that voters most strongly object to are also those which have the fewest practical benefits. If mainstream political parties had managed to shut down the fraudulent asylum system, enabled deportation of foreign criminals, and heavily restricted flows from countries where immigrants are particularly likely to be net drains on the state or to cause social problems, this would have taken a lot of the wind out of the sails of right-wing populist parties. Yet with the partial exception of Denmark, mainstream parties have been unwilling to do this. Currently, Shabana Mahmood is attempting to save Labour from electoral extinction by adopting aspects of the Danish model, but is being met with vociferous opposition from within her own party.

The reason for this unwillingness is, of course, ideology. It’s obvious that the asylum system functions primarily as a way for young men, and later on their families, to bypass formal immigration routes and achieve settlement in Britain. It’s also obvious that a disproportionate amount of the problems of immigration in general come from a few parts of the world. Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter. The system’s advocates seem to live in a world made up of rhetoric, where principles take precedence over reality.

Juliet Samuel

I bring it up because Labour, already exhausted, is rattling around in the back of the broom cupboard for the old biscuit tin labelled “closer ties with Europe”. We are told that its “youth mobility scheme” (free movement, but just for “youth”) will be controlled by an “emergency brake”. Rachel Reeves wants “closer alignment”. And Sir Keir Starmer is preparing his big “reset” summit next month.

A decade ago, stay or leave was the first big call I had to make as a columnist. I had just joined The Daily Telegraph and the careerist thing to do was to side with the paper’s readers and editorial line in voting out. But I had spent six years covering different parts of the corporate world and I didn’t see much hunger for an entrepreneurial restart of the British state from businesses I wrote about. Some finance types privately admitted that their “heart said out” but their “head said stay”.

They were all morbidly afraid of losing political access in Brussels, where Treasury officials tied everyone up in knots, supposedly in the national interest. I sat through an enactment of Brexit negotiations and concluded the EU would, to use the technical term, absolutely screw us. And there was a feeling of cultural affinity with European friends. So I opted for Remain. But I now think it was the wrong call.

I am sure that sounds deeply weird to most people. Even Brexit’s most ardent supporters wince when asked what it has achieved. But since 2016, Britain’s troubles have vindicated the essential argument: that autonomy and manoeuvrability matter more than scale or legal practice. Large economic zones or political configurations are neither inherently safer nor riche

#rin Gretzinger and Danielle DuClos:

Online court records show Goldman posted $5,000 for bail and his next court date is May 11. Goldman’s attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The school district placed Goldman on leave and is conducting an internal investigation. In a statement, the district didn’t indicate whether Goldman was on leave with or without pay.

The state Department of Public Instruction, which licenses teachers, is also investigating Goldman, according to online licensing records.

The recent Cap Times investigation examined a prior case in the Madison school district involving David Kruchten, an East High School teacher now serving 12 years in prison after recording students with hidden cameras. Three students who were a part of a lawsuit against the district told the Cap Times that Madison schools had failed to protect them from being groomed by Kruchten.

More than five years after Kruchten’s arrest, the Cap Times found the district lacked policies:

Sabine Martin:

In a March meeting with Rothman, Regents President Amy Bogost and Vice President Kyle Weatherly disclosed that an “unidentified majority of the Board of Regents had lost confidence in my leadership,” Rothman wrote in a March 26 letter to Bogost.

Rothman said the request surprised him because of “all that my team and I along with our universities have accomplished to move the Universities of Wisconsin forward.”

Article: 5 things to know about UW system President

Bogost and Weatherly gave him three options: announce his retirement for the end of 2026, resign with 120 days’ notice, or be fired, Rothman wrote.

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Under Rothman’s leadership, the UW system tightened teaching requirements for professors and redesigned general education courses to make it easier to transfer between schools.

The policies are a result of the state’s biennial budget negotiations, settled in July, which yielded a $256 million increase for the UW system but also mandated reforms.

During the fall semester, faculty across the UW system protested the teaching requirements, saying they threaten campus autonomy.

Faculty Senate bodies at more than half of the campuses voted against the measure, and a petition with hundreds of signatures circulated, saying the UW system’s policy, based on the law, overstepped its bounds.

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Scott Manley:

The Evers Board of Regents: if you successfully negotiate huge increases in funding and campus buildings for UW in exchange for viewpoint diversity, DEI reforms, and requirements that professors actually teach, we will fire you.

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Dave Cieslewicz:

In fact, the need for reform was underscored later when it was revealed, thanks to an audit demanded by Vos, that the Madison campus’ DEI programs had been wildly mismanaged.

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Tristar Daily:

Key Findings from the Interim Report

– Deficiencies and Observations: Nearly 175 deficiencies were identified across various sections of the report, indicating systemic issues.

– Financial Mismanagement: 

  – Disbursements: $1,145,909.97 flagged as waste or abuse, with about $1,112,750 linked to contract-related spending.

    – Issues included inadequate oversight, unsupported or duplicative billings, and activity outside procurement controls.

  – Payroll Issues: Approximately $33,159.97 in payroll-related transactions, including unsupported vacation payouts, were also noted.

– Policy Violations: An additional $1,729,522.81 in transactions violated district policies but did not reach the level of waste or abuse. These included improperly documented areas such as P-cards and travel reimbursements.

– Internal Control Failures: 

  – Significant failures in record-keeping, such as the inability to provide employment verification records for 100 out of 250 sampled employees.

  – Poorly maintained employee records and fragmented information systems have hindered audit processes.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Scott Manley:

In reality, we are funding students at a level twice as much as we were in 2000 – about $18,592  per student each year. That’s more than fifty percent higher than the tuition to attend UW-Madison this year. If we can give a world-class college education to UW students for $12,186,  how is $18,592 not enough for K-12 students?

Even accounting for inflation, per-pupil funding has increased since 2000. So, while the  Democrats like to plead poverty for schools, student funding is at an all-time high.

The fact of the matter is that Wisconsin doesn’t have a problem with the amount of money spent on education; we have a problem with how that money is spent. The chart below shows public school student enrollment, teacher staffing levels, and non-teacher staffing levels for the last twenty years – and reveals the spending problem in stark terms.

Reid J. Epstein, Shane Goldmacher:

Federal election law prohibits foreign citizens or people who are not permanent residents from donating directly to federal candidates or political action committees. Lying to or obstructing Congress is a crime.

The memos instigated a meltdown at the highest levels of ActBlue, one of the Democratic Party’s most vital financial organs.

Steven Ertelt:

The dismissal fulfills the terms of a January 2025 settlement in which California dropped all chargesagainst Daleiden and undercover reporter Sandra Merritt. The agreement required no jail time, no fines, no admission of wrongdoing and no probation.

In exchange, the pair entered a “no contest” plea to a single misdemeanor video-recording charge, which was to be entered as a judgment in six to 12 months, then converted to a “not guilty” plea, dismissed and expunged.

Seven of the original 14 charges had previously been dismissed for lack of probable cause.

The prosecution began under then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris after Daleiden’s 2015 videos were released. In the January 2025 statement marking the initial settlement, Daleiden described the case as political lawfare.

“After enduring 9 years of weaponized political prosecution, putting an end to the lawfare launched by Kamala Harris is a huge victory for my investigative reporting and for the public’s right to know the truth about Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby body parts. Now we all must get to work to protect families and infants from the criminal abortion-industrial complex,” he said.

Defense attorney Steve Cooley, former Los Angeles County District Attorney, sharply criticized the long-running effort.

“In my 5 decades as an attorney, 40 years of which were as a prosecutor, I have never seen such a blatant exercise of selective investigation and vindictive prosecution. The California Attorneys General who initiated this case and pursued it for nearly 10 years should be ashamed for weaponizing their office to pursue people who were merely exposing illegality associated with the harvesting and sale of fetal body parts,” Cooley said.

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Choose life.

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James O’Keefe:

It took 11 years defending himself over one story. This is what they do to people who hold them accountable.

Nobody is held accountable because the people who have the power to do so are afraid of the retaliation. But David is different. His love of truth was greater than his regard for himself.

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When I first heard about the baby parts scandal I thought it was clearly outrageous conservative propaganda. Then I saw how Planned Parenthood behaved in the gender years and I thought “hang on. Was that story true?”

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It was true.

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Russell Brand:

I didn’t know that aborted human body parts are sold by abortion clinics for profit.

No wonder the journalist who exposed it was hounded by the state.

Jonathan Turley:

Many in education have long pushed equity cards and “identity markers” to get students to define themselves by their race, disability, gender, or other criteria. Even computer science teachers are told to tailor their lessons to identity markers. Such markers are treated as essential to creating “Identity safe classrooms.”

There are even DEI games where children are encouraged to “match” their identity groups.

At the NDP convention, people were given equity cards to give preference to certain identities over groups such as males or whites. The problem is that the cards create an entitlement that can clash with others’ claims to speak first.

The cards were based on identity categories, including gender, race and ethnicity, LGBTQ+ status, and Indigenous status. You were supposed to be able to jump ahead of others because of your priority identity.

One video shows a person holding up their green gender equity card to claim the right to speak first as another woman waves her pink race equity card to speak. What followed were objections to people not yielding to those with greater priority or right to speak with one noting that cards for people who identify as Black women “have no value outside of this space.”

Steven Yoder:

In April 2024, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul made a bold promise: The state would revamp its approach to literacy and boost state reading scores by double digits. “We’re turning the page on how we teach students how to read,” she said in front of a first grade class in Albany. The state would raise the share of third graders reading proficiently from 45 percent to 60 percent or higher, she said. 

She’d just signed budget legislation, branded “Back to Basics,” that was supposed to ensure that every school district adopts a strategy of teaching dubbed the “science of reading.” The approach reflects decades of research showing that, among other things, children learn best when they’re explicitly taught phonics: the relationship between letters and the sounds they make. 

The law set aside $10 million to retrain 20,000 teachers on that evidence-based instruction and gave the money to the main state teachers union, New York State United Teachers, to use in developing the course. Last September, the union launched it. 

But the course doesn’t reflect the latest research and in fact promotes a teaching strategy that’s been found ineffective and could actually impede students’ progress, literacy experts say. Those reviewers say the course contains far too much material from the now outdated reading method that Hochul said she wanted to see replaced. 

Scott Bauer:

The president of the 25-campus Universities of Wisconsin said in a letter obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday that he’s been told to either resign or be fired, but has been given no reason and won’t step aside from the 165,000-student system.

Jay Rothman, president of the university system since 2022, said in the letter addressed to the head of the Board of Regents dated March 26 that he’s been given no reason why regents want him to leave. 

Rothman said he’s been told that his options are to resign or retire, and that if he doesn’t then the board “was prepared to terminate my employment despite all that has been accomplished.”

The Board of Regents held a closed emergency meeting on Wednesday night to discuss personnel matters. 

“The Board is responsible for the leadership of the Universities of Wisconsin and is having discussions about its future,” Amy Bogost, board president, said in a statement to AP. “We don’t comment on personnel matters.” 

Rothman declined to comment when reached via email on Thursday.

“I believe my letter speaks for itself,” he said.

Jamie Dimon:

“Our head count in Manhattan when I got to JPMorgan was 35,000 and now is 26,000. Our head count in Texas started at 11,000, now it’s 33,000. That’s what happens.”

Jamie Dimon on why companies are leaving New York:

“Highest individual taxes, highest estate taxes, highest corporate taxes, anti-business sentiment.”

“When I grew up as a kid in New York City, there were 120 of the Fortune 500 headquarters there. In the 1970s, 60 of the 120 left, including Exxon, GE, IBM, Union Carbide. They’re all going to Texas.”

The Hill & Valley Forum 2026

Will Flanders:

If lowering our education standards in Wisconsin was the right thing to do, why is DPI doing everything it can to hide the process that led to it?

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What started as questions about a panel of experts used by DPI brought revelations of a $368K “waterpark workshop.”

The story is now much bigger.

Read about the $8 million + project to administer and change the state’s Forward Exam.

New details 👇

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Much more on our endlessly challenged Wisconsin DPI, here.

And, Jill Underly.

By Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar, Jelte M. Wicherts & Robb Willer

Huge meta-research project puts claims in social-science papers to the test
Three experts discuss lessons learnt from a large-scale dissection of the reproducibility, analytical robustness and replicability of published results.

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Rahm Emanuel — Obama’s Chief of Staff, Clinton’s political director — just said it.

“We lost the plot.”

Emanuel: 50% of American kids aren’t reading at grade level. Reading and math scores at a 30-year low. The Democratic Party’s response was bathroom access and trans athletes in women’s sports.

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and….

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Greg Lunkianoff

Also one of the least politically diverse departments and at the bottom of hours spent studying of any major. So many of the problems in K-PhD originate in Ed schools including some of the worst speech policing policies.

I believe Ed schools need to be completely rethought

Bill Melugin:

The CBP One app was originally created to streamline trucking cargo for vehicles crossing the border.

The Biden admin altered it to allow 50,000-60,000 otherwise inadmissible aliens from around the globe to enter the U.S. every single month for two years straight.

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Unlike Google or other major tech companies, Facebook had to be threatened/coerced, which it was because it allowed Trump to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Obama personally threatened Zuckerberg into sweeping censorship in November 2016.

www

The Official Golden Thread Curriculum offers a storied approach to intellectual formation, emphasizing rigor, coherence, and the pursuit of truth. Developed in exclusive partnership with Hillsdale College, this adaptable framework provides a deep historical understanding grounded in the great tradition of the humanities. By tracing the trajectory of the West from the ancient world to the modern era, these offerings illuminate the figures, faiths, and ideas that shaped our civilization.

Tyler Cowen:

After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three.

One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.

When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.

This month, the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement that gave Women’s National Basketball Association players a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.

It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.

“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.

Dave Cieslewicz:

For example, in 2024, Madison voters approved a record $507 million capital improvements referendum. One of the largest items in that referendum was $85 million for a new, bigger building to house Sherman Middle and Shabazz High schools. Yet, that building is at only 50% of capacity, and projections are for enrollments to go down. Before asking taxpayers for half a billion dollars, it would have made sense to do an attendance area study first to determine how existing schools could be more efficiently utilized. But that study is only being conducted now — after the referendum was passed by the voters.

At the same time that voters approved the capital referendum, they also OK’d an ongoing $100 million operating budget increase, most of which will go to pay for staff. But over the last decade, while the district experienced an 8% decline in enrollment, it increased the staff by around 2.6%, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. 

And, as an aside, we need to ask why the district is losing students in the fastest-growing big city in Wisconsin. Over the past decade, while those enrollment numbers fell, the city’s population increased by roughly 15%.

Finally, those referendums came with no promises of accountability. Gothard should have explained how actual student performance would be enhanced because of those investments. As it is, test scores continue to lag the rest of the state, truancy levels remain high and the racial achievement gap has not budged despite decades of focus on it.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

The Economist:

Until recently, most leading AI research was produced by experts based in the West. That is changing. In 2025, for the first time, more studies presented at the world’s top AIconference had lead authors based in China than in either America or Europe. To better understand the international ebbs and flows of AI talent, The Economist tracked the education histories of researchers who presented papers at the December 2025 edition of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the world’s largest and most prestigious AI gathering. More than 21,000 papers were submitted to NeurIPS, of which roughly a quarter were accepted. MacroPolo, a now-shuttered think tank, analysed the change in educational background of NeurIPS authors in 2019 and 2022. We applied their method to a random sample of 600 papers (authored by almost 4,000 researchers) from 2025.

In 2019, 29% of AI researchers who presented at NeurIPS began their careers in China.

By 2025 half did. Over the same period, the share who started out in America fell from 20% to 12%.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Such radical evolution has also been characteristic of the later American military, which has often been faulted for entering a war unprepared, naive, overconfident, and poorly led—but never remained so for long. Despite democracy’s innate unease with military culture and standing armies, within a year of America’s entering wars, the nation’s assets of individualism, fluidity between classes, openness to experimentation and innovation, meritocracy, affinity for technological change, economic dynamism, and love of liberty have consistently resulted in rapid adaptation and eventual success over much more experienced enemies.

The American Revolution established the tradition of a flexible military that quickly evolves from a disorganized and confused peacetime militia to deadly wartime soldiers. For example, at the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas, July 21, 1861), in the initial engagement of the Civil War, an imposing but disorganized and poorly led Union force of 35,000 raw recruits was routed and humiliated by a smaller but more spirited Confederate army. Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the few heroes that day on the losing Union side, and soon to be a general, left the flotsam and jetsam of Bull Run utterly depressed but still eager to bring about changes. He feared that the North’s armies were so disorganized, poorly equipped, and badly trained that they might never be able to invade and defeat the Confederacy, then about three-quarters the size of Europe.

Chris Rickert:

Madison School District teacher exchanged nearly 130,000 messages with a female student and repeatedly told her he loved her and pressured her for increasing amounts of physical contact, a criminal complaint alleges.

Eliav M. Goldman, 29, was charged Tuesday with felony grooming and sexual misconduct for his behavior with the student, which began in June, before the girl’s freshman year in high school, and stretched into March, according to the complaint.

Goldman was in his third year as a choir, general music and theater teacher at Toki Middle School, according to the school’s choir and theater site, and also was listed as an adviser for Memorial High School’s drama, debate and forensics club.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde:

Which of the rationales I outlined last Tuesday for traditional higher education still hold up against AI? As I noted in a later post, the answer depends on the college-major pair. A finance degree from Wharton and a psychology degree from a commuter college are different products, so AI will affect them in very different ways, and we need to always think at the margin. The twelve rationales fall into three categories: 🅐 Mostly resilient to AI: signaling, networking, and cultural capital at highly selective institutions, commitment for time-inconsistent students, the hold-out period for traditional-age students, proximity to the research frontier at research universities, and physical infrastructure. 🅑 Highly vulnerable: skill acquisition, topic curation, and assessment. 🅒 Entirely dependent on the college-major pair: credentialing (robust where statutory, fragile where normative), peer effects, and cultural capital (robust at selective institutions, negligible elsewhere). Let me go through them one by one. ① Signaling. Robust at the top, irrelevant at the bottom. The signaling value of a STEM degree from an Ivy is untouched by AI, because the signal comes from admission and from the ability to complete the degree. By contrast, a degree in humanities from a non-selective institution is a weak signal, because both admission and completion are easy. AI opens the door to alternative ways of assessing competence (for example, personalized evaluations) that may soon compete with degrees from weaker institutions. So the student who was already indifferent between attending a mid-ranked institution and entering the labor market now has a third option.

Tyler Cowen:

The subtitle of the piece is “Evidence From Chinese and Swedish Twins.”  Abstract:

Economists have long studied how parental behavior shapes within-family inequality, yet empirical findings remain mixed. Using twins data from China and Sweden, we examine the predominant mechanisms reported in the literature. Parents in both countries invest similarly during childhood. Inter vivos transfers, however, differ: Chinese parents reinforce income inequality, whereas Swedish parents distribute wealth equally; the reinforcing pattern reflects exchange motives. Bequests are divided equally in both countries. Parental education plays a key role: less educated parents reinforce income inequality, whereas more educated parents transfer wealth equally. Cross-country differences in parental education may thus help explain the mixed findings.

Heartland post:

A family liaison at Thoreau Elementary School in the Madison Metropolitan School District faces three felony charges after allegedly photographing a naked second-grade student with severe autism in the student’s private calming room and sending the image to her former partner with the message, “This is what’s going on at my job.”

Tatianna Jefferson, 28, is charged with capturing and distributing an intimate representation without consent, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dane County. The neglecting-a-child charge was later dropped, court records show. Jefferson signed a signature bond and is scheduled to appear in court on May 11.

The incident occurred in October 2025 in a school room designated for the student, who requires constant supervision due to his disability. The student has a documented history of removing his clothing at school because of sensory issues. Staff had been instructed to cover him with blankets and move him to a private bathroom. The “live photo,” lasting about five seconds, showed the student lying nude on a gray beanbag chair with his genitals visible. According to police, the camera flipped at the end, briefly capturing Jefferson’s face.

Jefferson shared the image with her former partner, who was on parole. He forwarded it to his then-girlfriend, hoping she would report Jefferson.  A fourth-grade girl later recognized Jefferson in the photo when it appeared on her sister’s phone. The girl’s mother reported the matter to school officials, triggering a police investigation that began Jan. 27. Officers visited the school Jan. 30 and confirmed the photo matched the calming room. Jefferson was interviewed Feb. 2.

———

37.4% of Thoreau 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Erin Gretzinger:

Under state open records laws, the Cap Times obtained the open-ended survey responses, which reveal the extent of tension in the community over what should be the school district’s priorities as it redraws school boundaries.

While dozens stressed the importance of diverse schools and equitably distributing resources, many also urged the school district to prioritize short commutes and avoid breaking up neighborhoods into different schools. 

But demographically, parts of Madison remain sharply divided along racial and socioeconomic lines, meaning the preference for neighborhood schools could clash with desires to prioritize student diversity.

“Be mindful of race so that new boundaries do not create more segregated schools,” one person wrote. “It would be great if Madison neighborhoods were not so segregated, but they are.”

“Allow students to attend the school that they live closest to; do not bus students across the city for diversity’s sake,” another wrote.

Names of the survey respondents were not provided by the school district, which cited privacy concerns.

The responses aren’t comprehensive and don’t proportionally represent Madison schools’ student population. For example, about 78% of respondents identified as white, while 39% of Madison’s students are white.

Still, the hundreds of survey responses reflect what MGT’s consultants said are common frictions in school boundary reviews, providing a glimpse into the competing questions Madison school officials must weigh as they prepare to bring the first scenarios for new maps to the community in May.

…..

District leaders are also using the review to evaluate special programs and school options as part of a larger effort to attract families amid unexpected enrollment drops and increasing open enrollment rates out of the district.

The last boundary and attendance area review in the Madison school district was in the early 2000s. The district didn’t work with an external consultant and the School Board at the time ultimately made few changes, Green said

———

Madison enrollment notes.

Where Have All The Students Gone? 1995-2024

Curiously, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools (Van Hise/Hamilton)…..

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Teagan King:

At Sherman/Shabazz, Superintendent Joe Gothard said the new buildings will help the school district prepare for Madison’s anticipated growth.

“We’re celebrating what’s to come: Spaces that support modern teaching and learning, foster collaboration and ensure that every student feels welcomed and supported,” he said. “And just as important, they will continue to serve as anchors for the surrounding community for decades to come.”

——-

Madison enrollment notes.

Where Have All The Students Gone? 1995-2024

Curiously, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools (Van Hise/Hamilton)…..

Washington Post:

Higher graduation rates are something to celebrate, so long as they’re actually backed by an increase in academic achievement, but Boston’s standardized test scores tell a different story.

Mayor Michelle Wu (D) says her city’s graduation rate at public high schools — 81.3 percent last year, the highest in district history — came without “lowering any expectations” or “moving the goalposts.”

Then why did 73 percent of the class of 2019 graduate, with an average SAT score of 1016, while the class of 2025 had an average score of 1004?

In what has become a pattern across America, graduation rates have increased while standardized test scores dropped sharply and have yet to recover. The evidence suggests kids are not actually better prepared.

Consider how much Boston’s Class of 2025 struggled to meet expectations on the MCAS, the state’s standardized test, when they were in 10th grade. Less than half of students met or exceeded expectations in English and fewer than 40 percent did in math. On both subjects, Boston students fared well below the state average.

——

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Chicago Tribune:

Cook County’s property tax system is a Rubik’s Cube for even those relatively steeped in assessments and equalization factors value to decipher. So pity the ordinary property owners who have to pay the taxman two times every year.

All they know is that the tax cost of owning a home — you know, that thing we call the American Dream — keeps growing at rates that seem unsustainable. And, naturally, they want to know who to blame.

One Cook County officeholder, Assessor Fritz Kaegi, already has felt the public’s anger, losing his Democratic primary reelection race to challenger Patrick Hynes. Kaegi in many respects simply was the messenger who got removed for being in a post directly related to property taxes when many Chicago homeowners got the bad news late last year that their taxes had soared due to the pandemic’s deflating effect on commercial property values.

So leave it to the always-canny Cook County treasurer, Maria Pappas, to issue a comprehensive report less than two weeks after voters made their displeasure known at the polls — saying to residents, in effect, “No, it’s not your imagination. Property taxes really are that bad.”

——-

Despite record funding for K-12 education and Gov. Evers’ 400-year veto providing $325 per pupil per year for the next four centuries, 72 school districts are asking taxpayers for even more money.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Heartland Post:

A whopping 72 Wisconsin school districts have placed referendums on the April 7 ballot seeking just over $1 billion in additional local funding, mostly through property tax increases for operations and debt.

62 of the questions are operational referendums that would allow districts to exceed state revenue limits for day-to-day expenses such as staff salaries, programs and maintenance. The remaining questions seek borrowing authority for capital projects. The requests come even as statewide K-12 enrollment has declined, with the state losing more than 14,000 public school students last year and 68 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties seeing enrollment drops.

Gov. Tony Evers dramatically expanded school funding authority in 2023 when he used a partial veto to extend an annual $325 per-pupil increase to district revenue limits for 400 years, a move upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. State K-12 education funding has reached all-time highs in recent years, as districts spent a record $17,400 per student in the 2023-24 school year.

Despite the increases in state support, many districts say they face budget pressures from rising costs, special education needs and fixed expenses that do not shrink with fewer students. Wisconsin public school enrollment has fallen about 7% since 2002, outpacing the national decline.

Dissident Teacher

Teaching them about einstellung was their warning. They were all smart enough to reverse engineer an answer when given a textbook. All I did was explain to them that without actually doing the work, they weren’t building the neural framework that would allow them to recall and do the work on their own on quizzes and tests.

They took the test in my class with no book, no device, and no phones. That first test taught most of them that einstellung was real and they weren’t immune, no matter how smart everyone had been telling them they were since kindergarten. They had to do the work or they wouldn’t be able to do it under testing conditions which mimicked the conditions under which they’d take the AP exam.

The ones who took that lesson to heart ended up with Bs and As in my class. The ones who continued to take the shortcut ended up with Ds and Fs.

Alex Tabarrok: 

It’s well known that grade inflation has “degraded” the informational content of grades at many colleges. At Harvard, two-thirds of all undergraduate grades are now A’s—up from about a quarter two decades ago. In response, a Harvard faculty committee has proposed capping A grades at 20 percent of each class (plus a cushion for small courses). That may give professors some cover to resist further inflation, but it doesn’t solve the real problem.

The real problem is not inflation per se. It’s that students are penalized for taking harder courses with stronger peers. A grade cap leaves that distortion intact—and can even amplify it. As Harvard economist Scott Kominers argues:

A grade cap systematically penalizes ambitious students for surrounding themselves with strong classmates. Perverse course-shopping incentives ensue as a result. A student who is prepared for an advanced course but concerned about landing in the bottom 80 percent may choose to drop down preemptively—seeking out a pond where they are a relatively bigger fish. As strong students move into lower-level courses, competition for A grades increases there while harder courses continue to shrink—reducing their A allocation further and driving more students away.

Clare Ansberry:

“The more, the merrier,” says Vincent Day, who has separate clusters of close friends, some revolving around music, some around work, others from his kids’ school and a half-dozen from high school. Day, who comes from a family of nine children, makes friends easily and values rich and varied ties.

“I call people all the time. I’m just one of those types of people,” he says.

The number of people we consider close friends changes over time, peaking in our teens and early 20s and shrinking as we get busier with kids, work and aging parents. With less free time, we tend to become more selective about who we share it with, focusing on the most meaningful connections.

Many of us lose friends over time. People drift away, physically and emotionally.

Jeffrey Hall, professor of communications studies at the University of Kansas, doesn’t have a magic friend number, but says there are downsides to extremes.

Having no friends can make a person terribly lonely. Having only one friend that you depend on for everything can leave a person floundering if something happens to that person.

Will Flanders:

That Wisconsin schools are somehow “underfunded” is pure misinformation. Below is inflation adjusted spending since 2000. We spend MORE than we did in 2000. We spend within $200 of the all time highs right before Act 10. The media needs to start questioning this narrative.

——-

more.

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Maria Pappas:

Property taxes in Cook County increased at double the rate of inflation and well above the rate of wage growth during the past 30 years, a study by Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas found.

Local governments in Cook County imposed $19.2 billion in property taxes in 2024, up nearly 182% from the $6.8 billion taxed in 1995, according to the report.

During those three decades, inflation rose by 91%, while average wages grew by about 161%. That means property owners now must devote a larger percentage of their earnings to taxes and, if the trend continues, even more in the future.

Shannon Whitworth:

For example, the Obama administration implemented a race-based disciplinary approach for secondary schools. In practice, this policy led many schools to limit discipline to avoid racial disparities in disciplinary outcomes, reducing accountability for students’ unacceptable behavior in school.

In turn, that policy encouraged disruptive behavior in classrooms. It also created an environment not conducive to learning for those students interested in getting an education, according to a report by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

Safety, cultural and academic standards, discipline, quality instructors, parental engagement and student leadership are the foundation on which successful education is based. For example, Milwaukee Lutheran High School is a choice school where the vast majority of students are economically disadvantaged Black kids who attend by virtue of a school choice voucher. 

In the last few years, the school has undergone a security overhaul. It introduced armed security, advanced weapons detection, intrusion detection systems and additional cameras. It implemented cultural and safety measures, such as school uniforms, a revised student code of conduct, teacher support to elevate academic standards, and additional counselors to help students with greater learning challenges. The goal was to reduce stress and increase accountability throughout the student body.

——-

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Renaud Beauchard

Some books explain events, and others explain the world in which events become possible. Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control(Henry Holt, March 2026) belongs firmly to the second category. A former US Army infantry and intelligence officer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Siegel is not a theorist who stumbled upon power. He watched it operate, up close, against living populations. 

That experience planted the seed for his landmark 2023 essay in Tablet magazine, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” which was immediately recognized by some of the sharpest minds of our moment — N.S. Lyons, Matthew Crawford, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, among others — as something rare: a genuinely illuminating text. The book that has grown from it is not merely an expansion. It is the definitive account of how liberal democracy, understood as government by consent, was quietly displaced by what Siegel calls the information state.

What is the information state? It is a regime that governs not through legislature or courts or votes, but through the invisible digital architecture that now mediates nearly every dimension of public life. Siegel’s definition is evolutive: “a state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals” is replaced by “a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms.” 

The Foucauldian resonance is deliberate and precise. This is governmentality in the strict sense, a rationality of rule that targets conduct rather than territory, that operates through security mechanisms and the management of populations rather than through the old instruments of force and law, blurring the distinction between the two. Its goal, Siegel insists, was never simply to censor, never merely to oppress. It was to rule. The kind of brazen censorship we observed during the Biden era and that is so tempting to our warring rulers again is not a bug; it is a feature of the new normal.

What gives Siegel’s thesis its particular force is the paradox at its center. The great ills the information state claims to remedy — disinformation above all — are self-referential products of the surveillance-and-attention-based internet upon which the state now depends for its very operation. The machine generates the pathology it then offers to cure. As Siegel puts it with characteristic precision, the politicians loudest in condemning platforms like Facebook or Twitter do not take the obvious step of seeking to make them less powerful. 

Sadie Gurman & Douglas Belkin:

The Trump administration is suing Harvard University, alleging the school violated Jewish students’ civil rights in the latest escalation of the government’s yearlong campaign against the Ivy League school.

The suit alleges Harvard failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli students by ignoring hostility on campus and refusing to enforce antiharassment rules. The suit, being filed Friday in federal district court in Massachusetts, seeks to compel the school to comply with civil-rights law and recover millions of taxpayer dollars that Harvard accepted while allegedly in violation of the law.

Harvard is currently set to receive more than $2.6 billion in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services, among other federal agencies, according to the lawsuit.

Colleges including Harvard allowed antisemitism to flourish on campus after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, the administration alleged. “This Justice Department has no tolerance for such brazen violations of federal law,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s civil rights division, which brought the suit.

Danny Westneat: 

A decade ago, when King County first asked voters for $392 million in property taxes for the Best Starts for Kids program, the only group opposing it called itself “Smart Choices King County.”

“This levy sounds nice,” the group wrote in the 2015 voters guide. “But it is a ‘blank check’ without details on how it will be spent.”

“They don’t tell you before the fact what you’re buying,” one member told The Seattle Times.

This critique was correct. Elected officials even acknowledged it at the time. But they argued that figuring out grants for early learning and child-support groups later, on the fly, was a nimbler approach that would better serve the community.

The critics lost the argument. Fast-forward to today. This funding, which ballooned past $1 billion when a second kids levy was approved in 2021, is at the center of the mushrooming grants scandal at King County.

It turns out some of the groups started taking the money but not doing the work. Some were obvious scams, what one county employee called a “blatant misuse of funds.” But with little oversight the county kept right on paying out the money, and fired one employee who called attention to possible fraud.

Of 36 contracts later reviewed by an auditor, 19 showed possible improper payments or fraud. This audit covered only about 2% of the money spent on grants in a year, so it could be just the tip of the fraudberg.

Bottom line: The program was too much of a blank check.

The grants for kids and other programs clearly needed more guardrails. The most damning sentence in a blockbuster Seattle Times investigative report last week was when a former state auditor summed up King County’s internal reaction: “It seems like their response was just, ‘Oh well.’ ”

——

More.

Apollo looks beyond New York as it plans second headquarters.

Steven Yoder:

In April 2024, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul made a bold promise: The state would revamp its approach to literacy and boost state reading scores by double digits. “We’re turning the page on how we teach students how to read,” she said in front of a first grade class in Albany. The state would raise the share of third graders reading proficiently from 45 percent to 60 percent or higher, she said. 

She’d just signed budget legislation, branded “Back to Basics,” that was supposed to ensure that every school district adopts a strategy of teaching dubbed the “science of reading.” The approach reflects decades of research showing that, among other things, children learn best when they’re explicitly taught phonics: the relationship between letters and the sounds they make. 

The law set aside $10 million to retrain 20,000 teachers on that evidence-based instruction and gave the money to the main state teachers union, New York State United Teachers, to use in developing the course. Last September, the union launched it. 

But the course doesn’t reflect the latest research and in fact promotes a teaching strategy that’s been found ineffective and could actually impede students’ progress, literacy experts say. Those reviewers say the course contains far too much material from the now outdated reading method that Hochul said she wanted to see replaced. 

That assessment comes as reading scores in New York are falling while those of a few states that have invested heavily in evidence-based literacy instruction are rising.

“There are just lots of inaccuracies and very old citations,” said Susan Neuman, a New York University professor who specializes in early literacy development, after viewing a sample of 18 slides from the course. “We’ve spent $10 million on this? Can I get a refund?” 

james Hankins:

We’d be grateful to anyone and all who could help Allen Guelzo and I promote our new Substack, The Golden Thread, which is meant to interest readers and support teachers of our 2-vol. work. We are trying to bring back the study of Western civilization after 40 years of neglect. goldenthread.substack.com

Noam Scheiber

Political observers on the left and right had very different views on whether Zohran Mamdani would be a good mayor of New York City. But one thing they agreed onwas why so many young college graduates supported the self-proclaimed democratic socialist.

As Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Trump backer, put it in an interview with The Free Press after last fall’s election: Too many people graduate from college with useless degrees, sky-high debt and long odds of owning a home. The graduates saw Mamdani as a solution to these problems. “If you proletarianize the young people,” Mr. Thiel said, “you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”

He’s not wrong, at least about the economic challenges facing recent college graduates. Student debt has escalated over the past few decades, while housing is increasingly inaccessible for young Americans, especially in high-priced areas like New York and San Francisco.

Perhaps most alarmingly, recent college graduates are having a harder time finding work. Between 1990 and 2018, it was almost unheard-of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for five straight years now.

It appears that the white-collar job market will continue to soften this year. And almost all of these problems precede the impact of artificial intelligence, which is still in the early stages of cannibalizing human labor.

John:

About four months ago, I apparently told someone I was going to build an interactive periodic table website. You know how it goes — you say something on the internet, and then months later someone reminds you that you actually have to do it. So when I posted on r/webdev about some free tools I’d built, I figured it was finally time to deliver.

So here it is. No excuses, no vaporware — a fully interactive, completely free periodic table of elements. Every element, every property, every electron shell diagram. Four months late, but I’d like to think it was worth the wait.

Ivy Exile:

Increasingly, the impeccably credentialed experts promised to harness algorithms and artificial intelligence to automatically impose an indisputable vision of “social justice” determined outside of the democratic process. No longer would the backward bigots in Tulsa, Omaha, and Cleveland have a say in our democratic society; instead, expert “stakeholders” in Washington, New York, Boston, and the Bay Area would magnanimously shepherd “our democracy” and protect it from the ignorant masses.

So it was with a disgusted sense of recognition that I devoured journalist Jacob Siegel’s disturbing new book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, an immediate contender for book of the year and likely of the decade. A U.S. Army combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Siegel traces the seemingly inexorable rise of authoritarian managerialism to the emergence of bureaucratized nation-states in the late 19th century, with dreams and theorizing stretching back centuries. Vastly expanding upon an essay Siegel wrote for Tabletmagazine in 2023 that went mega-viral, the narrative details how the march of technology has enabled ideologues and opportunists to manipulate and attempt to herd electorates.

James Bohn:

Starting in the early 2010s, Wisconsin undertook market-oriented policy reforms that substantially enhanced economic freedom in the state as measured by two widely cited indices. This analysis uses data from border counties with Illinois and Minnesota and state-level migration data to assess the impact of Wisconsin’s “experiment in economic freedom” on the state‘s economic performance.

• Throughout most of the 20^th century, Wisconsin’s policy environment was generally characterized by high taxes, strict business regulation, and labor laws that favored unionization. This was an expression of the Progressive governance model, of which Wisconsin was one of the first adopters.
• Beginning around 2011 Wisconsin broke sharply with that tradition and began an “experiment in economic freedom.” The major policy changes driving this shift included significant reductions in the state and local tax burden, the enactment of right-to-work legislation, the passage of Act 10, and the introduction of a targeted tax credit that dramatically reduced effective tax rates on income from manufacturing and agricultural activities.
• These reforms increased the state’s ranking in widely cited indices that measure economic freedom. In the early 2000s, Wisconsin consistently placed near the bottom of these rankings. During the 2010s, Wisconsin quickly climbed into the second quintile in both major indices, where it remains today.
• This paper assesses the impact of these reforms by comparing economic growth in Wisconsin’s border counties with counties on the other side of the border in Illinois and Minnesota (both of which remain near the bottom of state economic freedom rankings). This analysis supports the view that Wisconsin’s market-oriented reforms promoted growth. Further, analysis of interstate migration shows that Wisconsin has fared better in attracting and retaining working-age and higher-income taxpayers than these neighboring states since the reform era began. These results are consistent with decades of international and state-level evidence showing a strong link between increased economic freedom and prosperity.
• The gains from Wisconsin’s experiment in economic freedom are real but fragile. Recent proposals in Madison include a higher top income tax rate, rollback of the manufacturing and agriculture tax credit, repeal of Act 10, and repeal of right-to-work. Lawmakers will decide in the years ahead whether to return to the Progressive model or continue Wisconsin’s experiment in economic freedom.

Tim Sands:

As a university president for 12 years and a faculty member at three Power Five (now Four) institutions since 1993, I have long observed the interplay between National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I athletics and the university. Now as the chair of the NCAA Division I Board of Directors and a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference board, I have a front-row seat as the college sports landscape is being radically upended. I have a responsibility, as do my peers, to use the influence and power of our positions to act in the long-term interests of our institutions and our students. There are actions that we alone can take, and now is the time to step forward.

Borrowing from biological principles, the relationship between athletics and the university can be described as mutualistic symbiosis at best, and parasitic symbiosis at worst. There is no question that DI-level athletics benefit the university by advancing regional and national branding and creating an indelible bond through shared experiences between students, alumni and the institution. The latter brings application demand, enrollment yield, partnerships and sponsorships. The former drives philanthropy and the local economy, especially in small college towns like Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech. The problem is, we can’t accurately quantify the aggregate indirect financial impact of athletics on the university. Instead of making rational decisions about athletics expenditures, these decisions are largely driven by emotion.

Athletics departments exercise disproportionate emotional leverage over the resources of the university proper, despite representing a small percentage of the operating budget (about 8 percent for Virginia Tech). If funds can be extracted from the university, students or donors, there is very little negative feedback in the system to prevent ever-escalating coaches’ salaries, massive investments in facilities and increasingly convoluted methods for paying players. Without controls based on clarity around the return on investment, athletics can become parasitic, driving institutions toward financial unsustainability.

Ben Rothove:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s faculty lobbying organization presents itself as a voice for all UW-Madison professors, but it has overwhelmingly taken progressive policy stances on issues including male participation in women’s sports and race-based practices in higher education.

The Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate (PROFS) was founded in 1976 by the UW-Madison faculty senate. Its goal is to advocate “on behalf of UW-Madison faculty before state legislators, the governor, the Board of Regents, members of Congress and the public.”

The executive committee of the faculty senate serves as the PROFS Board of Directors, while the Steering Committee directly oversees PROFS activities and determines the organization’s positions.

In the 2023 to 2024 and 2025 to 2026 legislative sessions, PROFS lobbied for or against 78 bills. It lobbied against 30 bills, 28 of which were Republican. Of the 48 bills it lobbied in favor of, 24 were bipartisan, 6 were Republican and 18 were Democratic. In 2025, PROFS total lobbying expenditures exceeded $60,000.

Senate bills and assembly bills are distinct, even if they cover the same topics. The Federalist counted them separately because Wisconsin’s official lobbying system does so. However, the overwhelming majority of bills PROFS registered support for or against in the assembly had a similar bill counted in the senate.

The lobbying group opposed AB 446 and SB 445, which would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. These were the only bipartisan bills opposed by PROFS in the last two legislative sessions. PROFS opposed no Democratic bills in the same timeframe.

Badger Institute:

“Bohn’s piece is nothing less than a tour de force that illustrates the real-world benefits of limited government, free markets and business-friendly policies. It powerfully demonstrates why the Mandate is such an important undertaking,” said Nichols.

Subsequent research will be released incrementally through October. Subjects and recommendations will focus on a wide range of topics, including taxes, spending, education, healthcare, housing and energy.

Four years ago, the Institute’s initial Mandate for Madison resulted in a 300-page book of policy recommendations. The effort helped shape public policy that resulted in the authorization of dental therapy, the return of resource officers to Milwaukee Public Schools, swifter justice for victims of crime, and increased funding for choice and charter schools.

“Policymakers must resist calls to roll back the market-oriented reforms of recent years,” said Eisen. “The 2026 Mandate for Madison will provide evidence-based guidance for continuing Wisconsin’s movement toward greater economic freedom.”

Jasmine Li:

Holly Govan left New York ready for an adventure abroad at the University of St Andrews in a cobblestone-street town 3,000 miles from home.

Instead, the Upper East Sider got paired with a roommate from lower Manhattan.

“Practically every person you hear sounds American,” Govan says. “You think you’re coming to get this Scottish or international experience, and there’s just so many Americans.”

The picturesque Scottish university, once the secret of private-school students from the East Coast, now boasts a student body that is about 20% American. With more than 2,200 American students, it beat even Oxford for the highest number of U.S. university expats last year, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

It’s not just royal fans wanting to follow in the footsteps of Prince William and Kate Middleton at the 600-year-old campus. Students worn down by the hypercompetitive, expensive American experience are looking overseas, and St Andrews, a top 5 university in the U.K. with a four-year degree structure, often tops the list.

In 2025, applications from U.S. students rose 16.4% from a year earlier.

David Oks:

When all is said and done, and the final accounting is made of all human ambitions and achievements and follies, and the final historian turns to that strange realm of human endeavor that we call “computing,” that strange enterprise that gradually grew to encompass an unbelievable share of human life and redefine the entire world around its logic: what will that final historian have to say? Probably they will start with the forerunners, with Llull and Babbage and Lovelace; and then turn to the true pioneers, to Turing and Church and Shannon and von Neumann; and then the masters of hardware, Noyce and Kilby, and of software too, Ritchie and Dijkstra; and eventually they will arrive at PageRank, recommendation systems, neural nets, the transformer architecture, and whichever system ended up bootstrapping itself into superintelligence and thus inaugurating an entirely new epoch of history. But somewhere in their chronicle of this grand arc, for at least a few pages, they will have to talk about the electronic spreadsheet.

The electronic spreadsheet. Is there any tool as ubiquitous and yet so unloved? It would not be an exaggeration to say that Microsoft Excel, the product that today defines the spreadsheet category, is the most successful piece of application software ever made, counting about a sixth of humanity among its users and deciding the terms on which trillions of dollars in capital are allocated. And yet you will struggle to find people who love the spreadsheet. You will find people who wax poetic about the beauty and elegance of certain pieces of software—about Linux, or Rust, or particularly fast Python package managers. But you will be hard-pressed to find a true admirer of Excel.

Joe Gothard:

I want to sincerely thank the community members who havewrittenletters to the editor about my recent comments in a March 2 Wisconsin State Journal article. In it, I used “tax rate” when I meant “tax amount.” I realize my wording missed the mark, and I regret any misunderstanding this caused.

My consistent message has been that increased property assessments are a factor driving the rise of overall property tax bills, and I apologize for adding any confusion by conflating the complexities of property valuations with the mechanics of K-12 education funding.

Throughout my 33-year career in public education across multiple districts, I have focused on how changes in property value and state policy interact to determine what property taxpayers ultimately pay. In Wisconsin, a core issue remains: The state has chronically underfunded our public schools for decades, forcing many districts to go to referendums to maintain basic operations. In addition, due to an outdated general school aid funding formula, the Madison School District must rely on local property taxes to pay for 89% of shared educational costs.

This is unsustainable. In comparison, Green Bay, Kenosha, Racine and Milwaukee (four of the “Big 5” districts) only rely on local property taxes for 34% to 38% of their shared costs. Furthermore, while some assume that increased general school aid will benefit the Madison district, the reality is quite different.

This year, the Madison School District has more than 25,000 students and received $49 million in state aid. By comparison, smaller districts such as Neenah, Sun Prairie and West Allis-Milwaukee — each with about one-third of Madison’s enrollment — are slated to receive $52 million, $62 million and $57 million, respectively.

I am deeply grateful for the unwavering support our community has shown through past referendums, which have allowed us to maintain programs and services for students. But the disparity in how the state funds public schools highlights a systemic issue. It is time for a meaningful change in how the state supports our students and our taxpayers.

One way the state can do this is by supporting legislation to increase the reimbursement rate for special education and provide sum-sufficient funding for these costs (meaning the state covers the full amount promised). Private voucher schools receive sum-sufficient appropriations and reimbursement rates higher than those of public schools. When the state covers only a portion of the cost of these critical services, local property taxpayers ultimately cover the $62 million gap.

Wisconsin is sitting on a significant state budget surplus. Investing these resources into special education services would provide real relief while ensuring schools have the resources needed to serve all students. A more balanced approach to school funding, including a new approach to general aid disbursements, is necessary. Our students can’t continue to wait, and our property taxpayers cannot continue to shoulder additional tax costs.

——

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

The Economist:

PDFs still have drawbacks. They are a pain to view on a smartphone. Copying data from them is fiddly. Software tools that read screens for blind people struggle with PDFs. The file type, which Adobe relinquished control over in 2008, is also a vehicle for malware: a fifth of email-based cyber-attacks utilise PDF attachments, according to Check Point, a cyber-security firm.

Lately another source of criticism has emerged. The large language models underpinning generative AI are often bamboozled by PDFs, reading a page set in columns from left to right rather than top to bottom, say, or getting confused by headers and footers. Trouble parsing PDFs is one of the reasons AI chatbots occasionally “hallucinate”, generating nonsense

arctotherium:

Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.

Ruy Teixeira

The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.

Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:

Stewart Baker:

The nation is close to marking the tenth anniversary of the discredited Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which saw the FBI and Justice Department seeking a FISA intercept against Carter Page by relying on false news stories and a partisan oppo research dossier. These days, nobody defends the Carter Page warrant process, but ten years later we still haven’t figured out how bad the abuse was. In fact, just last week we learned that Carter Page was not the only U.S. political figure subjected to a dubious FISA surveillance.

The disclosure was made by Senator Grassley, who offered evidence of improprieties in a FISA surveillance order against Walid Phares, a prominent conservative Mideast expert who advised both the Romney and Trump campaigns. By 2018, the Crossfire Hurricane work had been taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller. At the time, the FBI had already obtained three FISA orders (an original and two renewals) for surveillance of Phares. Doubts about the process were raised by an FBI agent who was testifying in the investigation of another agent for misconduct. The agent testified that the three earlier surveillance orders had done little to bolster the case against Phares; if anything, the facts collected by the FBI undercut the original application for FISA surveillance:

Per reporting from another agency and what we learned from the investigation up to the point of the third renewal, there were no corroborating facts that tied {Phares] to certain facts that we thought were originally true. For instance, there was nothing confirming [Phares] received a large money payment, and nothing confirming [Phares] had a meeting in another country for the purposes of the initial allegation. I pointed out these specific corrections to the application in numerous instances throughout the FISA certified copy process. This was circa 2018. I sent these edits to Kevin Clinesmith who said, “We can’t send this to DOJ.”  Kevin set up a meeting with DOJ and led a discussion on the FISA renewal. I provided arguments for how the information had changed our understanding of our initial analysis. In response they said, “We don’t know for sure” and that the statements they used in the FISA to describe the Target was “broad enough” to cover the differing perspectives.”

Te-Ping Chen and Lauren Weber:

Today’s paths to the middle class don’t just run through college or traditional manufacturing work. The Americans who make it are open to change, persistent and jump at unconventional opportunities. Many find openings in hands-on fields such as healthcare, and they lean on short-term credential programs as steppingstones to new careers.

She was determined to keep her grades up and took community-college classes in high school. To pay the bills at Eastern Michigan University, she worked two jobs, at the cafeteria and as student supervisor.

“My fear of instability pushed me more toward working,” Runels said.

In 2017, her junior year, she dropped out after a surprise pregnancy. She started a cleaning business during the pandemic, toddler in tow, but made only around $1,000 a month.

In 2022, a cleaning client who was an executive at a local Goodwill told her about its job programs. One involved making outdoor furniture from wooden pallets. Her instructors there referred her to another program: welding.

Milena Garrone

Carmen, another senior under a pseudonym in Chan’s calculus class, acknowledges his insensitive comments, but believes that his teaching and role as an educator was overall positive. “I definitely oppose the comments he made, as someone who has struggled with body image stuff, and as an outspoken feminist,” she said. However, she believes that Chan’s intention with his problems was to engage students with quirky questions, not make them uncomfortable. “I don’t think he realized that people might have been hurt by his jokes. I think he had fundamentally good intentions, and that he was just trying to find a way to connect with what he saw as immature teenagers who were struggling to pay attention in class,” she said. 

However, other students felt that Chan’s comments and actions were harmful and created an uncomfortable environment. Tabitha, a senior under a pseudonym and a former Algebra 2 student of Chan’s, found Chan’s behavior concerning. While she also experienced strange comments in class and questionable math problems, she also highlighted what she saw as inappropriate behavior online. “He followed many of his girl students on Instagram, including me, who were underage… he likes their posts, he’s commenting on their posts,” she said. On one occasion she ran into him outside of school, and he later messaged her on instagram. “I also spotted him in public once and he DM’ed me afterwards and he was like, ‘I saw you’,” she said. Once, during class, he asked her if she had a ‘sugar daddy’ when she mentioned that she was waiting for her dad to pick her up.

Additionally, Tabitha believes that he favored his female students and treated them differently than their male counterparts. “I feel like he did take a favoritism towards the girl students. Sometimes he would give them food and snacks and little rewards and such, which kind of seems unprofessional to me,” she said. Other students said that Chan had given out food in class, but Kara said, “Whenever he had food it was an invitation for the whole class to eat.” She did not interpret it as preferential treatment.

Tabitha wasn’t the only student who was uncomfortable with Chan’s actions. Emma, a senior under a pseudonym who took his Algebra 2 class junior year, said that she liked him as a teacher but was uncomfortable with certain behaviors he would show. He would come to help her with math, she said, and touch her shoulder while doing so. One time, she said, he came up to her and a friend in class and said “Girls are either pretty or they can do math.” After Emma had left his class, over the summer, Chan’s Instagram account began following her. He would like Instagram stories that she posted in “Festival outfits,” she said. Once, he DMed her to ask about access to Baker Beach, where she had previously posted pictures in a bikini. She did not respond, and Chan did not pursue further contact on Instagram after that one instance.

San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) School Employee Code of Conduct with Students lists “maintaining personal contact with a student outside of school by electronic communications, including social media,” as a violation of Professional Adult/Student Boundaries.

Mike Masnic

At this point, I really have to question the seriousness of anyone who claims that the evidence shows that social media is bad for kids. We’re now reaching a point where the research is increasingly overwhelmingly pointing in the other direction. I’ve posted it before, but I’ll post this list again:

• Last fall, the widely respected Pew Research Center did a massive study on kids and the internet, and found that for a majority of teens, social media was way more helpful than harmful.
• This past May, the American Psychological Association (which has fallen for tech moral panics in the past, such as with video games) released a huge, incredibly detailed and nuanced report going through all of the evidence, and finding no causal link between social media and harms to teens.
• Soon after that, the US Surgeon General came out with a report which was misrepresented widely in the press. Yet, the details of that report also showed that no causal link could be foundbetween social media and harms to teens. It didstill recommend that we act as if there were a link, which was weird and explains the media coverage, but the actual report highlights no causal link, while also pointing out how much benefit teens receive from social media.
• A few months later, an Oxford University study came out covering nearly a million people across 72 countries, noting that it could find no evidenceof social media leading to psychological harm.
• The Journal of Pediatrics recently published a new study again noting that after looking through decades of research, the mental health epidemic faced among young people appears largely due to the lack of open spaces where kids can be kidswithout parents hovering over them. That report notes that they explored the idea that social media was a part of the problem, but could find no data to support that claim.

Balaji:

That brings us to the present day. While AI will disrupt Hollywood, the bureaucracy, lawyers, doctors, and many other state-licensed jobs….it has also created a window where legacy media can just publish facts (or I should say assertions) once again.

However, I think there will be much more to it than that. Cryptographically verifiable assertion is the endgame, because too many people (justifiably!) no longer trust the say-so of legacy media corporations.

Will Austin:

Will Austin is a former public school teacher, principal, and the founder of Boston Schools Fund. You can find his writing on Substack at Boston Focus.

In towns large and small across Massachusetts, headlines these days warn of impending school budget cuts because of yawning budget shortfalls. Boston, which shed hundreds of teachers just two years ago, is not an exception: On Wednesday night, the School Committee voted unanimously to release 300 to 400 employees for the next school year to address the district’s fiscal crisis.

Losing educators is devastating for communities. Unfortunately, current Massachusetts law may make it worse. State statute requires municipalities to lay off teachers based on seniority. As Boston and other communities go through the painful process of rightsizing their districts, they won’t be able to consider the effectiveness of their teachers in many, possibly most of their decisions. 

This is fundamentally unfair to younger teachers and educators of color who will be the first to lose their jobs — as well as for the children they work so hard to serve.

Why are school districts facing these budget cuts? Federal funding looms large. Pandemic-era funding expired last year, and the Trump administration created discord when for no apparent reason it terminated $106 million in funding for summer school and other out-of-school programs in Massachusetts last year. Boston is facing its own revenue crunch, with lost commercial tax revenue and fewer children, which further drives down state and federal aid.

Jon Styf:

(The Center Square) – The Dairyland Sentinel is asking the Wisconsin Department of Justice to intervene in what it believes is an unfulfilled public records request.

The publication has continued to request a contract between the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and Forward Exam test contractor Data Recognition Corp. related to a standards-setting conference in the summer of 2024 in the Wisconsin Dells that would have justified DRC’s use of non-disclosure agreements with conference attendees.

The contract was first requested in January 2025 and again in February. Dairyland Sentinel Publisher Brian Fraley asked DOJ to intervene in the matter based upon guidance that Attorney General Josh Kaul published last year.

“DPI has tried to convince reporters that this issue has been settled,” Fraley told The Center Square. “It has not.”

Fraley’s initial report on the conference led Wisconsin’s Joint Committee on Finance to delay a $1 million funding request to DPI with the committee later releasing $1.75 million to the department after the committee asked questions about the conference.

Teagan King:

This year, 25,029 students are enrolled in Madison schools, a 0.5% decrease from last year, when 25,155 attended.

Enrollment also has fallen statewide over the past five years, according to data from the Department of Public Instruction released earlier this month.

Larger 12th-grade classes than incoming freshman classes are partially to blame for the drop in the high school population, as well as families choosing other options such as the Early College STEM Academy, according to Soldner and Cindy Green, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.

“We see students leaving the district at middle school, which is also causing smaller class sizes to come into the high school,” Green said. “We do see an uptick of some of those students coming back to us, but I think over the last four years in our analysis, we’re starting to see the effects of that into these smaller class sizes coming into high school.”

———

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Ron Coleman:

DOJ restrained funds it couldn’t trace to any fraud – over $10 million in untainted assets. That was money the founders needed to pay their lawyers💼.
The government later admitted it broke the law🥱. But by then, Shah had already gone to trial without the lawyers he wanted.

Diane Ravitch:

A reader who calls himself “Gitapik” shares his experience with the introduction of new technology into the special education programs for which he was responsible in New York City public schools. 

He wrote: 

As a former tech guy for our five District 75 special education sites in Brooklyn, I had quite a ride on this tech roller coaster. I was in on it from the beginning.

I applied for and received multiple very large state grants in technology. Once the money was received, I would choose, order, and facilitate installation of what technology went where in all the sites. From classroom computers, iPads, laptops, Attainment Stations, and Smartboards to full scale labs. It was a very big undertaking.

This also included conducting professional  development classes and individual training session sessions…very often to an unappreciative audience.

My sales pitch was always the same: this is a wonderful tool for you to incorporate into your standard every day teaching methods. You can turn it on and off in order to create interest and  spur on new ideas. I would even give examples of how I, a teacher, would do a class, using the different devices.

Molly O’Shea:

There is a Supreme Court case in California that said that once an employee has been offered retirement benefits, even if they’re currently an employee, you can never restructure their retirement benefits.

——

Whose pocket is the $14,000,000,000 in?

Kenny Carmody:

From General Groves who oversaw the Manhattan Project and the deliberate suppression of radiation health data to Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who ran MKUltra’s most extreme programmes. The through-line is not conspiracy. It is institutional continuity. The same networks. The same funding streams. The same willingness to use human beings as experimental subjects in the service of power dressed as science.

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

Jessica Weinkle:

Indeed, it is quite a small group running a very loud legal campaign to skirt democratic policymaking process concerning the national energy system on which we all rely. 

There is much to be concerned about the health of our democratic policymaking process, to be sure. But there is no improvement to be gained by using the courts “to require a rapid transition away from fossil fuels by judicial fiat,” as Trembath and Nordhaus put it. 

A recent Maryland Supreme Court decisiondealing with municipal government pursuit of these ends put it another way: “No amount of creative pleading can masquerade the fact that the local governments are attempting to utilize state law to regulate global conduct that is purportedly causing global harm.”

On the other hand, there is concern about the ability of private philanthropic trusts or foundations to upend democratic life. This concern has deep roots. 

In 1912, when John D. Rockefeller sought Congressional support to create a private foundation, various voices expressed concern that the wealthy elite would be able to influence politics not just through their current industrial might, but also ideologically from beyond the grave in perpetuity. At the time, the board chair of the American Civil Liberties Union testifiedthat, “it seems to me that this [Rockefeller] foundation, the very character, must be repugnant to the whole idea of a democratic society.”

More.

Paul Thacker:

Imagine how crazed the Washington Post, NPR, and New York Times would be if emails showed the Trump White House edited CDC public remarks.

Juan David Rojas

Over the weekend, Mexico’s Internal Revenue Service (SAT) rescinded tax permits for more than 100 NGOs, terminating their ability to receive donations and qualify for tax exemptions. Many have a path to restoring their NGO status, but around a dozen were liquidated outright for failing to comply with fiscal rules. These moves form part of a broad crackdown on waste and foreign interference in Mexico by the ruling left-wing Morena party under President Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). 

The Mexican opposition and its allies in the international press have decried these actions as proof of the country’s alleged “democratic backsliding.” In reality, opposition-aligned NGOs like Mexicanos Contra La Corrupción y la Impunidad (MCCI) form part of an artificial civil society complex that was funded, in part, by the now defunct USAID. Upon assuming office in 2018, one of AMLO’s first initiatives was to restore state control over functions that previous governments had devolved to NGOs and private companies. His administration slashed over $300 million of state support for NGOs and reclassified all contractors as state employees, effectively ending their role in government.

Since 2013, Mexico’s Anti-Money Laundering Statutehas required NGOs that receive more than $7,000 in donations to reveal the identities of individual donors; those that receive over $15,000 must report individual transactions to authorities. These restrictions were geared towards combating organized crime amid the country’s ongoing drug war. Before Morena came to power, the country’s tax authority exercised loose oversight of foreign funding for NGOs, much as it allowed corporations and the wealthy to skirt their tax obligations. 

AMLO’s and Sheinbaum’s crackdowns on tax evasion and strict enforcement of NGO regulations have prompted figures like MCCI founder Claudio X. González to accuse Morena of running a “narcodictatorship.” This claim has been picked up north of the border by Republicans and many liberals, despite the fact that the Washington-aligned PRI and PAN governments that preceded Morena are known to have had deep cartel ties. But the average Mexican will tell you that the cartels are only one powerful interest group exerting a corrupting influence on the nation’s politics, and foreign-backed NGOs are another. 

Ashlea Ebeling:

The Trump accounts coming this summer let parents jump-start tax-advantaged retirement savings for a child at birth.

By the time the kids retire, they could end up with giant retirement accounts. The real power play is for parents to contribute $5,000 a year for 18 years, then help them convert the account to a Roth IRA so that it can ultimately be accessed tax- and penalty-free.

“This is the biggest win that people can have if they want to set their kids up for retirement,” said Ryan Greiser, a certified financial planner with Opulus in Doylestown, Pa. He’s planning to open accounts for his three children, ages 3, 5 and 7.

The strategy likely only makes sense after setting aside funds in other accounts for nearer-term expenses, such as college, and funding the parents’ retirement. Add it all up and a married couple with two kids might commit upward of $100,000 annually into other tax-advantaged accounts, such as 401(k)s and 529s, before even thinking about adding to Trump accounts for their kids’ retirement.

John Sailer

The Ohio State University is currently seeking a professor of “Philosophy of Race,” an area of expertise that includes “the epistemological significance of race or racism” and “race in the philosophy of science.” Its Department of Physics seeks a professor whose main focus is “issues relevant to educational equity.” And its Department of Anthropology recently sought an archaeologist whose work emphasizes “decolonization, feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and/or Indigenous ontologies.”

These roles reflect a trend across the country, whereby faculty job listings increasingly demand a specialization in such topics as social justice, critical race theory, and intersectionality. Remarkably, Ohio State might be the worst offender in the nation—surpassing even such progressive bastions as the University of California, Berkeley. To add to the university’s 132 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officers, a striking number of the new faculty job listings at Ohio State read like calls to progressive activism.

Ohio State’s DEI-themed faculty hiring boom started with its now-outgoing president, Kristina M. Johnson, who promised in her first “State of the University” speech to hire scores of new faculty with a focus on race and equity, setting the goal of “100 underrepresented and BIPOC hires in all fields of scholarship.” Out of this goal came the Race, Inclusion and Social Equity (RAISE) initiative, a series of cluster hires that promises to transform Ohio State for years to come. Already, through the RAISE initiative, Ohio State has created 48 faculty jobs that will focus on such themes as “Climate, Race, and Place” and “Racial Equity by Design.”

[Related: “Belling the DIE Cat”]

Wall Street Journal:

Kentucky lawmakers wasted no time overriding Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a bill to opt the state into the federal tax-credit scholarship program. The House voted 77-14 and the Senate 31-5 last week. But Mr. Beshear may not care because his real priority is a likely run for the White House.

The Governor all but announced his presidential run last week with a scathing attack on Vice President JD Vance and his book “Hillbilly Elegy.” Mr. Beshear says he’s a more authentic representative of Appalachia and the working class than the Veep.

Speaking of authenticity, Mr. Beshear took to the Lexington Herald-Leader last week to defend his veto, claiming we at the Journal “refused to consider publishing” his defense. That isn’t true. We offered him the chance to write a letter to the editor in response to our editorial and received no response.

Sabine Martin:

Differing views about Flock cameras in Madison, on UW-Madison’s campus and at the state Capitol have come to a head atop five of the city’s traffic signal poles. 

Madison officials discovered in recent months that five license plate surveillance Flock Safety cameras — one on UW-Madison’s campus and four on Capitol Square — are mounted on city-owned property and may be in violation of city rules.

Fueled by artificial intelligence, Flock cameras capture images of car license plates passing by, as well as a vehicle’s visual markers, such as its color, make and model, bumper stickers and crash damage. Unlike traditional surveillance cameras, the data is sent to Flock’s network, which, in most cases, other law enforcement agencies can access.

Becky Jacobs:

The UW-Madison Police Department started using automated license plate reader cameras provided by the company Flock Safety about eight months ago. There was no public discussion or announcement about the cameras at the time, said Marc Lovicott, a department spokesperson.

Campus police have declined to disclose where its eight cameras are currently located on campus, but Lovicott said the cameras are visible to the public.

Kenin M. Spivak:

More than 100 Trump family members, supporters, and advisors were targets of Democrats’ lawfare after the 2020 presidential election, including more than a dozenTrump lawyers who were disbarred, or suffered other financially devastating discipline for giving legal advice to Trump and his campaign.

Jim Troupis is one of those lawyers. Troupis spent more than 30 years at the pinnacle of Wisconsin’s legal profession before his life was turned upside down for advising Donald Trump about potential fraud in the 2020 election. The abuse began with frivolous complaints to the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) and state bar. Then, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, another Democrat seeking fame in the pantheon of Donald Trump-haters, unfathomably indicted Troupis for doing that which Kaul said he should do.

It violates due process for a state to indict someone for following its advice, or to suppress exculpatory evidence. Yet, Kaul did both, leveraging misconceptions about alternative electors to falsely allege that Troupis led Republicans to commit election fraud.

Troupis received his law degree from Northwestern University and began his career in Illinois, before moving to Madison, Wisconsin. There, as chair of the litigation practice at Michael Best & Friedrich, he was instrumental in taking the firm from 12 lawyers to a nationwide force. Troupis was highly respected for his counsel on election law, with clients such as the Republican Party, governors, judges, the state legislature, numerous presidential campaigns, and voter integrity programs. He was a principal author of Wisconsin’s recount statute and election law, and served on the Special Joint Legislative Committee on Election Law. From 2015 to 2016, he was a circuit court judge.

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more.

Jon Bernstein, Sam King, Mark Lorion, Ron O’Hanley, Corey Thomas:

IF SCHOOL SYSTEMS hand out high school diplomas that do not reflect real learning, students pay the price through fewer opportunities, lower earnings, and diminished confidence. In the coming months, the governor and state education leaders will finalize a new statewide high school graduation policy. They should adopt a requirement that ensures every student has mastered core academic skills and knowledge they will need for success.

Massachusetts has long been a national leader in education, but that advantage is at risk. Student achievement is declining, and racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps are widening. These trends threaten not only the state’s economic competitiveness, but, most importantly, the futures of individual students, particularly those who rely on public education as a pathway to opportunity. 

The high school graduation requirement is a powerful tool the state can use to reset expectations for students. A diploma must do more than mark time spent in classrooms; it must guarantee readiness. It should signal that a student can read critically, write clearly, reason mathematically, and apply knowledge in real-world settings. A diploma must represent real readiness for college, careers, and civic life. 

As leaders of some of the largest business associations in the state, whose members employ thousands of Massachusetts residents, we see the consequences when students graduate without essential skills. They struggle, businesses struggle, and the entire economy suffers. 

That’s why we’re urging the Healey administration to set and enforce a rigorous, statewide high school graduation standard that is aligned with the demands of a competitive, knowledge-based economy, and to require that every graduate demonstrate they have truly met the standard by passing a common, uniform assessment.

Jay Solomon

In the weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched their joint assault on Iran, perhaps no American has more aggressively and publicly rallied behind the Islamic Republic than Calla Walsh. From her new base in Lebanon, the 21-year-old Cambridge-raised activist has taken to social media and left-wing podcasts to incite her fellow countrymen and women to sabotage U.S. and Israeli defense contractors wherever they can find them. On March 3, she mocked four American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike, posting: “They all died fighting for fascism, genocide, pedophilia, and cannibalism.” She attached pictures of the dead Americans. In recent days she reposted a list of missile-production sites inside the U.S.

“We have a duty to escalate,” Walsh told her host on the Psychic Militancy podcast last Saturday from Beirut, noting that “lockdowns” of weapons factories and vandalism alone are “not sufficient at this point.”

She added: “And as the genocide and these wars of aggression continue to escalate, much more is demanded of people in the West.”

Walsh looks every part the art-school hipster, with her thick-rimmed glasses and a mop of curly hair. But she’s a chameleon of terror. Five years earlier, as a 16-year-old, Walsh was fawned over by The New York Times for being a young, social media-savvy activist who was helping to shake up the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. But as a monthslong investigation by The Free Press shows, she’s thrown her allegiance squarely behind the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Axis of Resistance, which includes the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The U.S. government has placed her on a suspicious persons watch list for her expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran, U.S. officials told me, as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups.

Over the past few years, Walsh’s radicalization has played out in real time on X and Instagram. She quickly moved from political organizing for the Democrats to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to conducting guerrilla-style raids on Israeli defense companies in New England, for which she received jail time in 2024. She has regularly called for the assassinations of Israeli officials and their allies in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In October, she formally relocated to Beirut, The Free Press learned, where she has established herself as a regular contributor to Iranian state media, particularly the English-language site of Tehran’s Press TV on which Washington has imposed sanctions. She is actively engaging in propaganda and information-warfare operations on behalf of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah, which is fighting Israeli forces in south Lebanon.

———

More.

The Heartland Post Staff

22-year-old North High School special education instructor faces child sexual assault charges after district reports multiple victims

A special education instructor at Eau Claire North High School was arrested Wednesday on two felony counts of child sexual assault after the Eau Claire Area School District reported a potential inappropriate relationship between a staff member and a student, police said.

Nadia M. Horn, 22, of Eau Claire, was taken into custody following an investigation by the Eau Claire Police Department. She was transported to the Eau Claire County Jail and is awaiting her initial court appearance. Bond was set at $1,898.

Horn faces charges of sexual assault of a child by a school staff person, under Wisconsin statute § 948.095(2), and second-degree sexual assault of a child, under § 948.02(2). Police said the investigation identified multiple victims.

Washington Post:

On Wednesday, the 84-year-old formally introduced legislation that would impose a federal moratorium on all new data centers until artificial intelligence can be brought to heel. Sanders wants to hold innovation hostage until AI companies are prohibited from “releasing harmful products into the world,” whatever that means. His bill would even ban U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not impose all the “safeguards” he demands.

By John Kass

The highly rated retired common-sense Cook County judge had something bothering him, something heavy on his mind, about the way the law was being used as a political cudgel, to beat the opposition senseless.

He thought this trend of attacking one’s political opponents under the color of law was hurting the republic and threatened to tear it apart.

And so, he shared what was on his mind publicly right here at your favorite website for common sense, JohnKassNews.com. His column led off with a photograph of my choosing, that of snarling billionaire, George Soros who used some of his vast fortune to elect leftist pro-criminal prosecutors in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York and other big cities. Law enforcement was demoralized and anarchy and lawlessness reigned.

He had retired honorably from the bench and answered the call of senior judges to return to the bench and help reduce a vast backlog of cases. And his essay written for me was compelling to those who didn’t like the modern American trend of lawfare, which is about using the courts to beat your political opponents into a puddle of goo under the color of law.

Quinton Klabon:

moment in the Milwaukee Public Schools – MPS union negotiation:

MTEA knows full, July inflationary raises “would have significant return on investment. We’re a school district. We don’t often talk or think about return on investment. It’s not part of how we discuss our work.”

MILWAUKEE TEACHERS UNION NEGOTIATION

• union said $46,000,000 deficit “not insignificant” but “minute” against $1,600,000,000 budget (2.9%)
• union did not answer raise cut options (not all staff, later in year)
• MPS reapply to Head Start 2027
• video

Becket Adams

Ehrlich wasn’t just wrong but horribly wrong, and with disastrous consequences. He is one of history’s great villains. But to hear the Times describe him at his passing, you would think he was both brilliant and mostly right. 

Instead of portraying him accurately as a loon and a miserable scaremonger — which he certainly was — we are simply told that he faced some criticism over the years from “conservatives and academic rivals.”

At what point is mercy toward cranks cruelty to the public? The media have not been this forgiving since Anthony Fauci rode off into the sunset with his $400,000-a-year taxpayer-funded pension.

That episode of media “mercy” was arguably worse than what we’re seeing now for Ehrlich. Unlike the supposed expert on overpopulation, Fauci wasn’t merely wrong about key aspects of his supposed field of expertise — from the effectiveness of masks to those completely arbitrary and nonscientific social distancing rules. It also seems clear that he outright lied about many things, including the extent to which the U.S. was funding gain-of-function virus research in the Chinese city where the first COVID cases were identified.

Yet the media’s treatment of Fauci hasn’t been to challenge authority, but to discourage uncomfortable questions. Those who persisted in asking the obvious risked being labeled racists or fringe conspiracy theorists by our nation’s most prestigious newspapers, or even being censored by the Biden Justice Department. To this day, our esteemed news media treats this effort to silence you as a good and noble thing.

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more.

——

985 days ago, I referred Dr. Fauci to then-AG Merrick Garland. 672 days ago, I referred him again. 254 days ago, I sent my referral to Pam Bondi. Still no response from DOJ.
At this rate, accountability is optional—and Americans deserve better.

Rahim Nathwani

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article showing that a YouCubed paper presented data that didn’t match the public record.

Before writing that article, I replied to the X post in which the co-author, Stanford University Education Professor Dr. Jo Boaler, shared a link to the paper. She did not respond. I then filed a public records request with Healdsburg Unified School District (HUSD). That request led to a series of email exchanges with the paper’s other co-author, Dr. Erin Fender.

Dr. Fender was responsive from the start, even though she’s a busy school administrator. She runs day-to-day operations as both Director of Alternative Education and Principal of a community school at the Sonoma County Office of Education.

She told me that, although the chart was labeled HUSD, it in fact showed data from one specific school: Healdsburg Elementary School (HES). She shared the spreadsheet in which she had assembled the data. Unfortunately, the discrepancy wasn’t just a labeling problem. Even the HES data didn’t match the spreadsheet:

Paul Vallas:

Primary election results and recent polling offer a glimmer of hope voters are ready to address the greatest challenge facing the city, and the CTU’s destructive stranglehold over the city’s schools

If there was one unequivocal winner in last week’s Democratic primary, it was Governor J.B. Pritzker. Pritzker bet big on his lieutenant governor, Juliana Stratton, in the open U.S. Senate primary, backing her with his endorsement and millions of dollars in outside spending through his Illinois Future PAC. The most unequivocal loser was the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which saw seven of the 13 candidates it endorsed lose contested seats. That outcome offers hope that voters are beginning to grasp the danger the CTU poses to the future of the city’s children.  

Super PACs tied to the pro‑Israel lobby, the cryptocurrency industry, and emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence also spent heavily in Illinois, with mixed results. None could claim a sweeping victory. In the most important races, ideological differences among Democrats were minimal — nearly all ran as assertive anti‑Trump candidates, leaving little daylight on national issues. Stratton’s edge came not from a unique message but from Pritzker’s financial war chest and the mechanics of a crowded primary.

Many Illinoisans are understandably frustrated with an electoral system that entrenches incumbents, discourages challengers, and depresses voter turnout — while underwritten by special‑interest Super PACs and Pritzker’s seemingly unlimited campaign funds. Yet within that uncompetitive landscape, this primary did offer a ray of light for those who want accountability in education policy: the CTU’s political machine extended its losing streak.

Jason Morganbesser:

By contrast, “technology” in 1967 would have meant computers, but also rockets, supersonic aviation, the Green Revolution in agriculture, new medicines, and more. Society was advancing on many different fronts.

I believe progress has slowed since then. How does one measure this? It is extremely difficult, but that is no excuse for nihilism. There’s a basic, Econ 10 intuition, which is that cornucopian tech progress should trickle into productivity gains and income growth, which we have not seen. The younger generations, starting with the millennials and their boomer parents, believe they will do worse than their parents, and unless something changes, I am inclined to believe them. Or there’s the literal question of how fast we’re moving—after building ever-faster sailing ships in the 16^th through 18^th centuries, ever-faster railroads in the 19^th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20^th century, we hit a peak with the Concorde, which was decommissioned in 2003. If you factor in the post-9/11 airport security theater, we travel considerably more slowly than we did in the 90s. Or on health, life expectancies are not going up as fast as they were earlier in the 20th century.

I prefer to measure outputs than inputs, but there are around 100 times as many PhDs being produced today as there were in the 1920s. Even if we say things haven’t slowed, and we are making as much progress as we did in the ‘20s—when we formalized quantum mechanics, discovered penicillin, etc.—then the productivity of the average scientist is 99% lower today. That in itself is worth understanding and is at odds with the cornucopian story of progress that we normally tell.

Figuring out “why” we stagnated is even harder than the already difficult question of how much progress we are making. My cop-out answer is that “why” questions are over-determined. There’s a “nature” explanation—we picked the low-hanging fruit and ran out of ideas. The “nurture” explanation that I’m more inclined to, which is more optimistic, is that our culture changed, that people became risk-averse; science became feminized, bureaucratic, and regulated.

Jocelyn Gecker:

The assignment involves no laptop, no chatbot and no technology of any kind. In fact, there’s no pen or paper, either.

Instead, students in Chris Schaffer’s biomedical engineering class at Cornell University are required to speak directly to an instructor in what he calls an “oral defense.”

It’s a testing method as old as Socrates and making a comeback in the AI age. A growing number of college professors say they are turning to oral exams, and combining a variety of old-fashioned and cutting-edge techniques, to help address a crisis in higher education.

“You won’t be able to AI your way through an oral exam,” says Schaffer, who introduced the oral defense last semester.

Christopher Weaver:

Quick Summary

Indiana is barring Piece by Piece Autism Centers from billing its Medicaid program after a Journal article detailed the company’s practices.

Piece by Piece received the highest per-patient payments in 2023, averaging $340,000, in part by raising list prices up to $640 an hour.

Piece by Piece received the highest per-patient payments in 2023, averaging $340,000, in part by raising list prices up to $640 an hour.

Scott Johnson:

Do you remember the massive Biden-era censorship case that was litigated mostly as Missouri v. Biden? I wrote about the case in several posts including “Walk away, Joe.”

The case resulted in a disappointing Supreme Court opinion that avoided the merits on the ground of standing in Murthy v. Missouri. I anticipated the result after the oral argument of the case which I summarized in “To the Supreme Court”(citing Professor Philip Hamburger’s article “Courting censorship”). John commented on the result in the post “Anticlimax.”

We now reach the point in the story that Aristotle called peripeteia, or a sudden reversal of fortune. Following up on his massive critique of administrative law, Professor Hamburger founded the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Professor Hamburger has written us to draw attention to the NCLA press release announcing the settlement and consent decree resolving Missouri v. Biden on favorable terms. This is the portion of the press release announcing the resolution (links omitted):

Erin Gretzinger

These spots make up Lake View’s nature stations, which are part of the north-side Madison school’s outdoor education programming. With the help of volunteers and grant funding, Lake View’s five-acre campus has transformed over the last decade into a collection of vibrant outdoor learning spaces.

“Being able to provide learning spaces that exist beyond the four walls of the classroom was very important to the school community,” Principal Nkaujnou Vang-Vue said in an interview with the Cap Times. “It gets utilized every single day here at Lake View. If you come out — especially during the lunch recess time — every single nook and cranny of our outdoor space is being utilized by our students.”

Vang-Vue’s years of work on the school’s outdoor education playland led the Wisconsin Association for Environmental Education to name her the group’s 2026 Administrator of the Year. 

——-

64.7% of Lakeview students student scored lower than 75% of the students in the national literacy comparison group.

Jim Gash:

Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people is capable of freedom.”

If he was right, then it is imperative for any free society ‒ if it is to remain free ‒ to educate its people in virtue.

This was the exact purpose of some of the places that formed the earliest foundations of the academy, the schools of ancient Athens. The Athenians’ understanding of education consisted of something deeper than mere knowledge acquisition or career preparedness. It was “paideia” ‒ the formation of virtuous citizens.

Nearly every institution of American higher education was founded with this same goal in mind. Somewhere along the way, many in higher education drifted off the path.

Colleges have strayed from their core mission

In his prophetic work of educational philosophy, “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis details this loss of virtue education in the educational institutions of the West. In moving from being places seeking to raise up human beings of wisdom and virtue to being places that exist merely for the disconnected pursuit of knowledge, Lewis argues, we create “men without chests.”

Katy Grimes:

Is the failure of civic education the primary cause of ideological partisanship in society? That was the question in a debate Thursday hosted by Pepperdine University and The Steamboat Institute, centered around a question that’s becoming increasingly relevant across Los Angeles and all of California:

Are schools failing at civic education — and is that driving today’s political divide?

The timing is especially interesting as California students are failing so significantly in math and English, the state ranks at the bottom of most of the 50 states. On the 2024 NAEP eighth grade reading exam, a meager 28 percent of California students taking the test scored at the proficient level. The story was even worse in math. On the 2024 NAEP eighth grade math exam, only 25 percent—just one in four—California students scored at the proficient mark.

This raises questions about whether students are being equipped for informed civic engagement. At the same time, campuses across Southern California have seen rising protests and tensions over political speech, which has really put a spotlight on issues around civil discourse.

The debate between two very different professors who are seeing these trends firsthand in the classroom, is a back and forth on whether the roots of today’s political division start in schools — or somewhere else.

“Leaders for a polarized political environment need to understand civic virtue and how public policy is made,” said Pete Peterson, Dean of Pepperdine University, in his opening.

Molly Macek

Michigan’s public education system fails to prepare enough students with basic literacy skills. Reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, markedly declined over the last couple decades. The state’s fourth grade reading score now ranks 44th in the nation.[*]

Mississippi’s trajectory looks quite different, as Graphic 1 below demonstrates. The Magnolia State’s performance on the fourth grade reading test landed in ninth place — up from 49th in 2013. Its average reading score increased from 12 points below the national average to five points above it. Michigan’s score dropped from four to five points below the national average over the same period.

All students appear to have benefited from Mississippi’s improvements in literacy. Students from low-income households scored higher in fourth grade reading than similarly situated students in any other state. In fact, Mississippi’s low-income students scored three points better than Michigan’s average score for all students. Michigan’s low-income students scored fifth worst relative to other states.

While Mississippi’s achievement in fourth-grade reading had gradually improved since the NAEP was first administered, its most significant gains occurred after 2013, when the state passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. The percentage of the state’s fourth graders who tested at a proficient level or higher increased by 11 percentage points between 2013 and 2024. Conversely, the national average on the reading test decreased by four percentage points during that period.[1] The state’s remarkable success in improving reading achievement since the legislation’s adoption has been dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.”

Molly Macek

In 2023, the governor signed a law eliminating a state requirement that third grade students who can’t read at grade level be held back. Academic experts generally agree that third grade is a make-or-break point for reading proficiency. A student who is not reading at grade level but still advances to the fourth grade is highly unlikely ever to catch up. That disadvantage makes all future learning harder, usually causing lifelong damage, especially in careers. Retaining students in third grade also strengthens school accountability by encouraging a comprehensive effort to get them reading when it matters most.

Mississippi shows how much this reform matters. The Magnolia State has made national headlines for turning around its educational outcomes in recent years, and as I show in a paper published Tuesday, the Mississippi Miracle is built on a foundation of third-grade retention for students who are not reading at grade level, which the state mandated in 2013. Mississippi has since gone from 12 points below the national average to four points above in fourth-grade reading performance.

Michigan, on the other hand, moved in the opposite direction. The third-grade retention policy that Whitmer repealed in 2023 was a dead letter even before that. Schools could bypass retention requirements if parents requested it, which is largely what happened when the law went into effect. In the 2021-22 school year, with students reeling from pandemic closures, only 42 percent of third-graders passed the state’s English language arts test, but only one-tenth of students who should have been retained were.

Presenter: Julie Mead

This is a free, hybrid talk hosted on March 25, 2026 at 6:00 PM CDT by League of Women Voters of Sheboygan County. No registration necessary for this event. 

Why do there seem to be so many school referenda? Has something changed? How does public school funding work? What are the stressors on public school funding? This presentation will explore these issues and provide an opportunity for you to ask questions concerning this important issue.

WILL:

.@WILawLiberty is excited to announce Dr. Cade Brumley as our Keynote Speaker at the 2026 School Board Summit!

📚 Focus: Transforming Education: Lessons from Louisiana’s Reform Efforts
📍 Renaissance Milwaukee West Hotel
📅 Friday, April 24, 2026

REGISTER NOW: zeffy.com/en-US/ticketin…

——-

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Notes and links on current Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

Liam Beran

Inbox: In a statement released just now, the Madison Metropolitan School District says it recently learned a Memorial High School teacher “may have had an inappropriate relationship with a student.”

MPD is investigating. The teacher “was immediately placed on leave.”

Shaun Maguire

AlexNet and post-AlexNet eras. The AlexNet results came out in October 2012. To the relatively small number of people paying attention, it was shocking. Neural networks had been around for decades but they had stalled out. It was basically a research backwater. And then AlexNet showed that if you make them “deep” by throwing a huge amount of compute (for the first time in the form of GPUs rather than CPUs) and data at them then you can obtain a gigantic performance improvement.

The exact timelines for Elon aren’t clear but it seems he instantly understood the significance of AlexNet and by May of 2013 it was reported that Tesla was “

considering adding driverless technology to its vehicles

.”

If you go back to the pre AlexNet era, AI was broken into two distinct philosophical camps. Statistical learning vs Bayesian learning. After AlexNet, in my opinion, AI divided along new lines: vision vs language (computer vision vs NLP). After AlexNet, vision was in a renaissance, and language was in what turned out to be a short lived lull.

There was a casual debate at the time around if the best pathway to AGI was via vision or language? Nobody knew for sure but in 2013 it seemed like vision was the most promising.