WGBA:

Schools across Northeast Wisconsin planned for growth for decades. Now, many districts are planning for the opposite.

In Green Bay, some classrooms are getting quieter. 

Green Bay Area Public Schools has lost more than 1,200 students in the past three years, and leaders say the decline is continuing.

Public schools are shrinking across Wisconsin. Here is why

“Similar to almost every other district in the state and nationwide, we are seeing a decline in enrollment and the decline continues,” said GBAPS Superintendent Vicki Bayer.

District leaders say fewer students mean difficult choices now and even tougher decisions ahead.

“We have closed seven schools, and we have been consistently decreasing our staffing at the same rate of enrollment decline,” Bayer said.

——-

More.

By Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz

Across the private and public health sectors, the increases have been driven by rising hospital prices, high payments under a consumer protection law that changed how some doctors are compensated, and the growing use of artificial intelligence in doctors’ offices, according to benefits consultants and industry analysts. Several large employers also pointed to a rising bill for expensive specialty prescriptions, like cancer drugs and GLP-1 medicines.

—-

….. and what Americans can learn from healthcare systems in Britain and Canada.

Obamacare.

Paragon Institute:

Federal health programs are the nation’s largest fiscal challenge, consuming a rapidly growing share of federal tax revenue while failing to deliver commensurate improvements in health outcomes. This paper argues that Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA exchanges, and related federal policies share a common flaw: their financing structures reward higher spending, cost shifting, consolidation, and enrollment growth rather than value, competition, accountability, and efficiency. In Medicare, payment distortions, growing reliance on general revenues, and the Inflation Reduction Act’s Part D redesign have increased costs and weakened sustainability. In Medicaid, provider taxes, intergovernmental transfers, and state-directed payments have encouraged states to maximize federal reimbursements rather than obtain value, though the One Big Beautiful Bill enacted major reforms to limit these financing schemes. The ACA exchanges similarly rely on open-ended subsidies, weak eligibility verification, and automatic reenrollment, contributing to improper enrollment and rising federal costs. Additional policies, including the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance, the 340B program, and the ACA’s medical loss ratio rules, further increase spending and consolidation. The paper recommends reforms across these programs to strengthen program integrity, reduce payment distortions, improve incentives, promote competition, and place federal health spending on a more sustainable fiscal path.

——-

Obamacare notes & links.

Garry Tan:

California has managed to spend 34% more per student since 2019, yet fewer of them can read and do math at grade level.

California spent $18,798 per student in fiscal 2023, 14% above the national average. Its 4th graders scored below the national average in math, no better than average in reading, and below several states that spend far less. Only 7% of California’s Black 4th graders read proficiently. From 2018–19 to 2022–23, per-student spending rose 34% while the share of students meeting state standards fell. From 2014 to 2022, California schools lost 382,000 students and added 41,000 non-teaching staff.

What California spends

• Total. The 2025–26 state budget puts TK–12 funding from all sources at $137.6 billion, about $25,155 per student.
• Day-to-day spending. On the Census Bureau’s standard measure, California spent $18,798 per student in fiscal 2023. That is 14% above the U.S. average of $16,526 and ranks 15th of 50 states.

What lower-spending states are getting

Mississippi and Florida spend about $6,700 to $6,900 less per student than California. Both changed how they teach reading. Mississippi’s 2013 literacy law required phonics-based instruction, reading coaches for teachers, and extra help and possible retention for 3rd graders who can’t read. Florida made similar changes starting in 2002. Results from the 2024 Nation’s Report Card:

• 4th grade reading. Mississippi 219, California 212 (average scores). The national average was 214.
• 4th grade math. Mississippi 239, California 233. The national average was 237. California scored below 31 states and jurisdictions.
• 8th grade. The two states scored about the same.
• Low-income 4th graders proficient in reading. Mississippi 24%, California 18%.
• Latino 4th graders. Mississippi 26%, Florida 31%, California 19%.
• Black 4th graders. Mississippi 19%, California 7%. In California, 72% scored below NAEP’s Basic level.

——-

The State of Reading: 2026

Katrine Mose, Susanne K. Kjaer and Allan Jensen

Question  Are children conceived through assisted reproductive technology (ART) at increased risk of childhood cancer?

Findings  In a Danish nationwide cohort (N = 1 086 136), children conceived using ART had higher cancer incidence than those not conceived using ART (23.6 vs 18.3 per 100 000 person-years; hazard ratio, 1.26), with the highest incidence observed after frozen embryo transfer (41.1) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (27.9). Associations with selected cancer types were observed for these treatments but not for in vitro fertilization, and findings were similar using alternative comparison groups.

Alexander Rosenquist:

It’s a tough time to be a college president. Free inquiry has been corrupted by ideological orthodoxy, enrollment has shrunk, and trust in higher education has plunged to an all-time low. What will it take for leaders to get their house in order and win back public trust? 

On Monday, Vanderbilt University’s acclaimed chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, visited AEI to talk through his answer to that question. Diermeier has been tagged“higher ed’s most divisive chancellor” for his unsparing challenges to the sector and his insistence that its leaders work to restore foundational principles of merit, free inquiry, and academic excellence. During the fireside chat, he opened up about weak-kneed leadership, problems in the humanities, what it takes to build a culture of open discourse on campus, and more. Here are five key takeaways. 

“There needs to be a willingness to take some arrows.” Diermeier was highly critical of disciplines where scholarly standards have eroded, especially in the humanities. But he argued that problems with mediocrity and politicization can be addressed by campus leaders who are willing to champion merit, promote heterodoxy, and hold the line on hiring and tenure. His stance has drawn ferocious pushback from academics, media figures, and even some of his fellow college presidents—and has earned him the sobriquet “handmaiden of the Trump administration.” Diermeier said leaders seeking to make similar changes must learn to shrug off the attacks and stick to their guns—a task made much easier when they have a board of trustees that has their back. 

“What are you about? What are your values?” Diermeier said that other universities should cease worrying about what Ivy League institutions are doing and should instead lead with their own values. He allowed that it’s understandable that people pay attention to what happens in the Ivy League—as when protests on campuses like Columbia’s and Harvard’s “put the problems that we see on campus into stark relief”—but he argued that such goings-on should not shape the future of the sector. He urged leaders to “act with consonance, confidence, and alignment” based on their own institutional values and priorities. 

“Academic freedom in the classroom doesn’t mean you can indoctrinate and doesn’t mean you can be incompetent.” Diermeier referenced a 2025 working paper by Claremont McKenna College scholar Jon A. Shields and his colleagues, which found a stunning progressive bias in syllabi readings across a range of contentious subjects. Whether the problem is that faculty aren’t aware of competing perspectives or are simply choosing not to assign them, Diermeier argued that it’s academic malpractice. “You can’t competently teach” a course on a subject in which you’re not well versed, he said. And if faculty are only assigning readings from a perspective that they endorse, he noted, that’s a matter of indoctrination—not academic freedom. 

Via the Rabbit Hole:

You’re standing in a crowd on Saturday. You look around and think yeah. No Kings. This is what democracy looks like.

Bro.

You’re holding a sign made by a communist billionaire who lives in Shanghai.

You live in a constitutional republic.

Elections. Term limits. A free press that spent four years calling the president a fascist without one journalist being arrested.

The modern left’s definition of fascism:

You love your country? Fascist.

You want to enforce the border? Racist.

You think parents should raise their kids? Bigot.

You want to know who’s voting in your elections? Jim Crow.

Being patriotic is fascism to the modern left.

But every country has borders and enforces them. 176 countries require ID to vote. That’s the definition of a country.

But the Democratic establishment told you otherwise. And you believed them.

Congress has a 15% approval rating. 80% of Americans disapprove. 97% of incumbents got re-elected.

Chuck Schumer. 46 years. Longer than Stalin.

Steny Hoyer. 45 years. Longer than Mao.

Mitch McConnell. 42 years. 5x more than Napoleon.

Nancy Pelosi. 39 years. Longer than Henry VIII.

Maxine Waters. 35 years. Longer than Mussolini.

Bernie Sanders. 35 years. Triple Hitler’s entire reign.

Trump. 5 years and 3 months. Won the popular vote and the electoral vote.

But Trump is the king. Okay buddy.

You don’t hate kings. You hate kings that aren’t yours.
And they have you in the streets carrying their water.

Britannica:

Reformation Day, anniversary of the day Martin Luther is said to have posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany (October 31, 1517), later identified by Protestants as the beginning of the Reformation. (See Researcher’s Note: The posting of the theses.) Lutherans observe October 31 as Reformation Day and may keep the preceding Sunday as Reformation Sunday. The liturgical color is red. Many churches in the Reformed and the Evangelical traditions also mark the day, often with special services focused on the Reformation and its effects.

History of the date

The European Lutheran territorial churches at first commemorated the Reformation on various days, among them the anniversary of Luther’s birth (November 10), his death (February 18), and presentation of the Augsburg Confession(June 25). The centennial celebrations of 1617 focused attention on October 31. In the sesquicentennial year (1667), Elector of Saxony John George II decreed this date as annual Reformation Day in Saxony. German Lutheran and Union territorial churches have gradually come to follow this example and specify October 31 or the Sunday following (or preceding).

White House:

From the earliest days of our Republic, prayer and faith in Almighty God have stood as the foundation of our strength, the source of our unity, and the fount of our greatness.  This Reformation Day, I send my best wishes to the countless Christians across our country commemorating the Protestant Reformation and its enduring message of salvation by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

Five hundred years ago, William Tyndale—inspired by the work of Martin Luther—advanced the Protestant Reformation’s devotion to Holy Scripture through the publication of the first New Testament printed in English, shaping the language of the Bibles that would fortify the faith and resolve of America’s founding generation.  The Sacred Scriptures helped form the religious convictions that formed our young Nation’s founding ideals of God-given rights and individual liberty, a spiritual inheritance we honor as we continue to reflect on 250 glorious years of American Independence.  The Bible remains a cornerstone of our Nation’s character and upholds our steadfast devotion to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

David Spector

For 13 years, Adriana Aviles, a fierce education advocate and former NYPD cop, has been the ultimate insider in New York City schools. As a powerful leader on the Citywide Council on High Schools, she championed Queens District 26 as one of the best in the city. She knew the principals and the teachers — and trusted them. She was gratified that her son consistently received good grades, especially in math, throughout his K-8 years. Then, two weeks ago, she sat down with her 14-year-old son to help him review for his second math exam. What happened next left her stunned and the high school freshman devastated — and prompted her to publicly confront Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels at a town hall last week. She shared her family’s experience with The Post’s David Spector.

All through middle school, my son was, at least on paper, a numbers whiz. His report cards consistently showed A’s — his lowest grade was a B plus.  But when he slid down to a 78 on his first exam at a top high school in Queens this fall, I pulled up a chair to help him review for his next test.

———

Everyone is running a scam and families like mine are paying for it. It’s no wonder so many of my peers left and despite living in NYC for coming on 30 years, I probably will too at some point.

A Study from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy for Thomas Aquinas College

1980, 1987, and 2026 Practice Tests

Introduction

This report compares the SAT’s reading (verbal) section across nearly half a century, using three released forms: one from 1980, one from 1987, and a current paper form (Bundle 6), which we refer to throughout as the SAT 2026 test. Our central question is not simply whether the test has become easier or harder—a question that content analysis alone cannot settle—but how the College Board’s conception of college-ready reading has changed: what the test now asks students to do and what it no longer asks.

We examine the three forms along a common set of dimensions—test structure, vocabulary demand, text complexity, passage length, type of reading, topical coverage, prerequisite background knowledge, and depth of knowledge—and, where the newer form has no counterpart in the older ones, we say so rather than force a comparison.1

This analysis matters for several reasons. First, the SAT is among the most consequential assessments in American education: scores shape college admissions and scholarship decisions and are widely read as a signal of college readiness. Yet public discussion of the test’s recent overhaul has centered on format— that it is now digital, shorter, and adaptive—rather than on what its reading section actually asks students to know and do. A careful, like-for-like comparison of reading content across eras is scarce.

Admissions offices and researchers often treat scores as comparable over time; if the test now measures a different mix of skills than it did on the 1980s forms, a given score may not mean quite what it used to.

Second, this high-stakes test shapes what schools, tutors, and families emphasize, so a change in the reading section ripples back into classrooms. It is important that this consequence be accounted for.

Third, the specific things a test assumes—rare vocabulary, cultural and historical background, the ability to read a chart—bear directly on equity, because they advantage students with particular kinds of prior exposure. Documenting exactly what changed is a precondition for any informed judgment about whether the change is an improvement.

——-

More.

Isaac Robinson:

Today, researchers from Stanford, Mercor, and O*NET Resource Center, and the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paperdescribing TaskNet, a new open-source catalogue of tasks across six different occupations in the US economy, updated to reflect the impact of AI on professional work. TaskNet builds off the structure of O*NET, the US Department of Labor’s widely used map of occupational tasks. O*NET provides standardized descriptions of the tasks, skills, and knowledge associated with different occupations, helping both researchers and workers better understand occupations. TaskNet extends O*NET with a fast, scalable interviewer for identifying new tasks that will allow it to keep up with the rapid pace of change. TaskNet focuses on speaking directly to workers in order to better understand a profession, while also eliciting worker judgment on task features relevant to automation like how hard is it to judge the quality of their output or how easy it is to define success a priori.

Power The Future:

KEY FINDINGS

• Arnold’s foundation ended 2024 with approximately $4.77 billion in assets.
• Arnold has directed millions toward climate, clean-energy, carbon-pricing, and conservative-branded energy organizations.
• In Ohio, national clean-energy philanthropy helps fund conservative-facing energy advocacy.
• In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt entered a formal partnership with Arnold Ventures involving up to $10 million in matching funds.
• In Indiana, the leader of an Arnold-funded health-policy organization entered the governor’s cabinet as the state adopted policies using Medicaid reimbursement to influence commercial hospital prices.
• John Arnold also has private investments in transmission and geothermal companies operating in sectors his philanthropy supports.

Natalie Winters:

The restricted documents show how that coordination translates into public messaging. Both were accessible through Local Progress’s public resource page for elected officials, despite their distribution restrictions.

Contact with officials. A script for everyone else.

The April memo followed a Justice Department demand for Wayne County’s 2024 ballots and related records. 

Michigan officials disputed its premise, saying the prosecutions demonstrated working safeguards and that allegations from a 2020 civil lawsuit had been rejected.

ESRN’s memo describes national and state partners preparing for escalation. It then identifies their connection to government:

“Partners on the ground are monitoring developments closely and maintaining open lines of communication with election officials.”

The next section, titled “What You Can Say,”points to messaging guidance and a social media toolkit. It says partners should amplify statements from Michigan’s statewide election officials and support local clerks and election workers.

Mark Levine:

Today my office has released a major new report on student enrollment in NYC.

We found that k-12 enrollment in our public schools has fallen by 187k since 2013, with a projected decline of an additional 128k students by 2034.

As total enrollment declines, NYCPS is serving a student population with growing needs. The number of students with disabilities is increasing. In the most recent school year, approximately 73% of students were in poverty and 14% were homeless or living in temporary housing.

Our report finds the drop in enrollment is driven by declining births and families with children leaving NYC, with a particularly notable drop in public-school enrollment as students transition from elementary to middle school.

These trends have massive implications for our schools that we have only barely begin to grapple with. My hope is that this report will spur a long overdue conversation about what the era of falling student enrollment means for NYC, and what we can do to reverse or slow it. 🧵

Miranda Devine:

Two of the FBI agents most closely identified with the FBI’s politicized operation to smother the Hunter Biden corruption scandal are facing their first taste of accountability.

Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides were chargedFriday with allegedly lying to Congress about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“I don’t have any knowledge of said laptop,” Floris testified to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 when asked about Hunter Biden’s MacBook, which the FBI seized in December 2019.

Yet she had been intimately involved in every aspect of the FBI’s handling of the laptop from the start, prosecutors allege in stunning detail.

Floris had been the deputy assistant director of the FBI and “functional head” of the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which ran a covert operation before the 2020 election called “Round River,” specifically to collect all derogatory reports about Hunter Biden from FBI informants and falsely flag them as “Russian disinformation.”

Benavides was the Section Chief of FITF, and he and Floris were “active participants in regularly classified briefings they hosted for the FBI agents and prosecutors on the Hunter Biden case, prosecutors allege.

John D. Sailer:

On September 29, 2025, a group of nonprofit leaders and university insiders gathered at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C., to talk through how to defend America’s embattled colleges and universities. Over three days, the group discussed how to make higher education “a right for all,” how to “protect and/or rebuild DEI,” and—more practically—how to collaborate on upcoming elections. 

The event was the soft launch of the Alliance for Higher Education (AHE). The group, which debuted publicly in January, represents those who believe that higher ed should fight back against its critics and would-be reformers. This resistance includes political activism: “Our tradition of institutions not speaking out about politics has simply backfired,” Mike Gavin, the alliance’s inaugural president, wrote in a whitepaper I obtained. At the meeting, the group planned student voting campaigns that would, according to other documents I obtained, “focus on opportunities to flip.”

This wink-and-nod partisanship was an odd fit for many at the gathering, which featured a who’s who of higher-education nonprofits, including senior leadership from PEN America, the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), and the American Council on Education (ACE). As nonprofits, these groups are not conventionally partisan.

It likewise represented a new strategy from AHE’s key backer. Also present at the meeting was Carolyn Dinshaw, a senior program officer at the $7.8 billion-endowed Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her attendance was no surprise: the event, as one email I obtained put it, was “Mellon-backed.” Though the relationship has never before been made public, the Alliance for Higher Education is Mellon’s brainchild. Mellon played a critical role in forming the group.

——-

More.

Ben Rothove

More than a decade after Yale University sparked national controversy for a memo that warned against culturally insensitive Halloween costumes, universities continue to promote similar guidance.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison shared a “Halloween Cultural Awareness” article from University Housing on its Instagram story on Oct. 30.

“Costumes that are culturally insensitive can negatively impact others,” the guidelines warn. “Before choosing a costume that represents a culture or an identity that you don’t hold, think about the significance of culture and how we can appreciate and learn from differing backgrounds rather than appropriating other identities in a harmful way.”

“Cultural Appropriation” is “when someone adopts aspects of a culture that’s not their own,” according to the article. It is “viewed as disrespectful when cultural elements are copied from a marginalized culture by members of the dominant culture and used outsize of their cultural context.” Examples included “Katy Perry’s approach in several music videos” and “stereotyped costumes.”

Students are encouraged to think about whether their costume comes “from a culture that has been historically or currently discriminated against or oppressed.” They are also encouraged to think about the significance or sacredness of costume items. For example, “Eagle feathers are earned in certain indigenous communities and gifted to individuals by elders of communities.”

Corrinne Hess:

The Board of Regents announced Johnson’s appointment Friday.  

Johnson, 57, will be the first person of color to lead the system since its creation in 1971. 

“My goal is to help our remarkable UW universities become even stronger, more connected, and more consequential to the future of Wisconsin,” Johnson said in a statement.

Johnson was one of three finalists for the position, along with Steven Gareth Holley, executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer at the University of Mississippi, and Bernard  Savarese, vice president for academic affairs, research, and student success at the University of Tennessee System.

She replaces Jay Rothman who was fired in April in a unanimous decision by the Regents.

In March, Berkeley’s Hung-Hsi Wu asked the European Mathematical Society a question that sounds too simple to need an hour: what is the mathematics we teach in school? His answer is that what American textbooks have carried for seventy years does not deserve the name — it defines almost nothing, explains almost nothing, and rarely says why any of it matters. Three reforms tried to replace it and fell short, he argues, because nobody had written down the alternative in enough detail for a teacher to use. So he spent twenty years writing it: six volumes, 2,402 pages, K through 12. The five principles he says any replacement must satisfy fit on a single page.

Our overview, with a link to the full talk: [link]

——

2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Erin Gretzinger:

Some high schools, including the Madison school district, use unweighted GPAs, which award equal points for all courses regardless of difficulty. Others, like Middleton-Cross Plains, employ weighted GPAs that give more points for more rigorous classes like AP courses.

Depending on the approach, different challenges arise. With unweighted GPAs, some worry about having to break ties or creating perverse incentives for students to maximize their GPAs. Other school officials doubt weighted GPAs account for differences in students’ access to advanced coursework and feel the approach may discount the value of other experiences like arts or career-focused courses.

Nearly two dozen school districts, including 10 in Dane County, have sought exemptions from the state Department of Public Instruction to use different ranking methods and create tiebreaker policies, according to records obtained by the Cap Times under state transparency laws. Districts secured approval to use a range of tiebreaker criteria, including ACT scores, attendance records, extracurriculars and, as a last resort, randomly drawing names.

While early research indicates the Wisconsin Guarantee isn’t making a significant differencein who applies to and enrolls at UW-Madison — the state’s public flagship university — the patchwork landscape of the law’s implementation underscores the admission promise’s ongoing effects in communities.

“It’s a little bit like the Wild Wild West,” said David Lang, a dean at California State University at Sacramento who’s studied rankings systems. “It’s not just kids and families that are going to game the system … but school districts at large are also trying to kind of game this out and try to figure out how to play within the rules.”

——-

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Scott Carlson:

What does Cowen predict? In a nutshell: Hyperselective colleges will be fine — at a minimum, they will remain valuable as an elite matchmaking service. Big public universities will also by and large be OK — diminished in academic quality but still desirable as a social experience. Small private institutions are in for a world of pain. At all colleges, real learning will increasingly take place between motivated students and their AIs. And the value of a degree will continue to slide.

Commentary.

Corrinne Hess:

Public school officials say state-imposed revenue limits make it impossible for districts to fund day-to-day operations. But opponents say school districts receive more than $18,000 per pupil — slightly above national averages — so the problem is how that money is being spent. 

Green Bay, Middleton-Cross Plains and Janesville have the three largest operating referendums on the ballots this year at  $158 million, $119 million and $98 million, respectively. All three are non-recurring. 

There are 16 school districts that had a failed referendum in April and are trying again on Tuesday. 

Damian LaCroix, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, and Dan Rossmiller, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, penned an op-ed this week saying schools aren’t asking for a “blank check.”

…..

Will Flanders, research director with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, says districts will have to reconcile that enrollment increases are not likely to happen anytime soon. 

“So in many instances there is going to have to be more severe belt tightening than we usually consider,” Flanders said. “We have districts that are on the very high end of spending that are going to referendum, and we have districts that are at the opposite end of the low end of spending, going to referendum.The nice thing in Wisconsin is that we leave it up to voters to decide.”

In April, more than 60 percent of school districts saw their referendums approved. But polling shows voter fatigue. 

———

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Sarah Sparks:

“The largest evaluation of an instructional coaching program to date…found no benefits to either teacher retention or student test scores from an intensive, expensive coaching model used in hundreds of schools”

Commentary.

LA Local:

From street sweeping to tree trimming, LA residents are seeing less of the basic services they rely on.

With the mayoral race heating up, candidates are promising to fix the problem. But LA is spending more and getting less — and whoever wins will take on a system that limits how much they can actually change.

In five years, LA’s budget grew 34%. The number of sidewalks it repaired fell 33%.

And residents are feeling the effects in their neighborhoods. In 2021, LA cut street sweeping from weekly to every other week. In Westlake, a group of volunteers responded by picking up trash the Bureau of Sanitation left behind, said Elaine Alaniz, president of the Westlake North Neighborhood Council.

When asked how she felt about the decline in services, Alaniz hesitated to speak for herself.

“I don’t even want to put feeling [into it]. Let me just tell you by the responses that I’m getting from the community,” she said.

As most Angelenos see, these aren’t isolated complaints. They point to a bigger problem: LA is struggling to keep up with the work residents expect their city to do.

LA went eight months without repaving a single stretch of road

Ila Deshmukh Towery:

With the midterms days away, all signs point toward Democrats carrying one, if not both, houses of Congress, an outcome that would be good for civic health and hygiene but could complicate education reform at the federal level. The stakes may be even greater in states, where the lion’s share of education policy is made and most education dollars are spent. Governors wield outsized influence, appointing key leaders, shaping policy agendas, and coaxing reluctant legislatures to act. Of the 36 governors’ races on tap, three will be particularly consequential for ed reform: Texas, Ohio, and Oregon. Each state has experienced extended periods of one-party control. The elections could send their education systems in sharply different directions.

Texas

Nowhere is the divide over education policy starker than in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott is seeking a fourth four-year term and Democrats haven’t won a statewide office in more than 30 years. Abbott is locked in a surprisingly tight race with State Representative Gina Hinojosa, a former Austin ISD school board president. A skeptic of standardized testing, school choice, and state takeovers, Hinojosa has pledged to fire Texas’s long-serving and effective education commissioner, Mike Morath, on “day one.” Her proposals for what would replace the current approach are less developed, but Hinojosa’s stated priorities point toward a sharp break with Abbott and Morath: a retreat from the current testing and accountability regime, an end to the state’s nascent education savings account (ESA) program, and more deference to local districts. She would, however, face stiff headwinds from a Republican-controlled legislature.

Daniel Buck:

Last spring, Milwaukee Public Schools committed to reducing class sizes, setting new guidance that schools should include no more than 22 students in kindergarten classrooms, increasing up to 32 by middle school. Earlier, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran its own analysis, finding that the majority of the district’s classrooms were already well within district recommendations. The average kindergarten classroom size was 22, for example.

At the same time, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s database reports that MPS has only seven students for every staffer. What do we make of this discrepancy? How can we explain the large gaps between class sizes and student-teacher ratios?

There will, of course, be variability due to basic enrollment differences. The Journal Sentinel’s own reporting, for example, found a spread of kindergarten classrooms ranging from as few as nine students and as many as 34. When I was a teacher, my classes varied because of scheduling constraints, students testing into or out of various classes, and enrollment differences across grades.

But how can there be one staff member for every seven students and yet classes as large as 34?

Simply put, there are way more administrators, instructional aides, janitorial workers, and other support staff than teachers. Consider the growth of students, teachers and other staff since 1959, according to datafrom the National Center for Education Statistics:Increase in… Student enrollment47%Teachers139%Principals and assistant principals210%Instruction coordinators631%Guidance counselors779%Instructional aides1,476%

In six decades, staff growth has bloated far beyond actual student growth. To put the numbers another way, in 1949, teachers were 70.3 percent of all school staff. In 2022, they were only 47.5 percent. Herein lies the explanation for the discrepancy: Districts hire lots of new people, while classes themselves remain the same size.

Kimberly Wethal:

Two Canadian citizens have been charged with illegally voting in recent federal elections, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Madison.

Monique Gignac-Yochum, 60, formerly of Hayward, and Robert Dedrick, 66, of Stoughton, have both been charged in federal court for voting in either the November 2022 or November 2024 election, or both. Both made their initial appearances in federal court Thursday.

Gignac-Yochum was charged with two counts for voting in both the 2022 and 2024 elections and faces up to a year in prison if convicted. Dedrick has also been charged with falsely claiming citizenship in August 2024 when registering to vote and then voting in the November 2024 election. If convicted, he could face up to six years in prison.

Both people were charged after investigations conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, a statement from the Western District Court of Wisconsin said.

According to a criminal complaint, Gignac-Yochum has been legally living in the U.S. since 2012 and illegally registered to vote in April 2018. Gignac-Yochum then voted by absentee ballot to the town of Bass Lake, according to voting records from the town and the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

In an interview with a Homeland Security agent, Gignac-Yochum said she had voted in several Wisconsin elections, Chadwick M. Elgersma, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, said in a statement.

Sarah O’Connor:

What would you think if you were asked in a job interview to hold up three fingers in front of your face? Perhaps you’re doing so badly that they’re checking you’re not concussed? More likely the recruiter is trying to check that you’re not an AI deepfake.

Employers are trying all sorts of things to combat fraudulent AI use in the recruitment process. There are jobseekers who use chatbots to bluff their way into jobs they’re not capable of, or pay “interview mules” to complete assessments for them. More dangerously, there are hackers who try to get hired with false identities in order to access internal systems, and even remote IT workers who turn out to be based in North Korea. The research company Gartner has predicted that one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028.

All this is leading to a culture clash inside companies. The warm and fuzzy realms of HR and recruitment are having to learn to work with the suspicious minds of the cyber security world.

One example: the HR platform Deel acquired AI cyber security company Clarity in August in order to “embed continuous identity security across the entire hiring and workforce lifecycle”.

Scott Shafer

Voters across the Bay Area will weigh in on more than 100 school board races in next Tuesday’s election. As many school districts face declining enrollment, tight budgets and difficult decisions about the role of technology in classrooms, the make-up of school boards is critical. But voters often have very little information about the candidates, what they stand for or who supports them. This year, to address that void, KQED sent questionnaires to close to 400 school board candidates to better understand their positions. We’ll talk about the issues facing school boards, how to make an informed vote and the key races in San Francisco, Oakland and beyond.

Harry Crane & Koleman Strumpf:

Curiously, polls, the other leading forecaster of elections, haven’t received anything like this level of scrutiny. Yet unlike prediction markets, we now have two examples of fraudulent polls from the current election cycle.

Over the summer the pollster Median Strategies was found to be fabricating polls, most prominently overstating the chances of a far-left candidate in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor. The firm said it was conducting a “short-term social experiment” to examine “how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Last week Wedgewood Polls admitted most of its polling numbers were also an “experiment.” This one had at least one documented effect in changing election outcomes. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary when Wedgewood’s fake numbers showed her lagging. This led donations to dry up and demoralized staffers. “It killed us,” she wrote on X. Abdul El-Sayed won the nomination and is in a tight race for the seat. Wedgewood’s phony poll may be one reason why.

Mary Anne Pazanowski:

Illinois can no longer offer in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to immigrants who are illegally in the US after a federal judge held the program unconstitutional.

A federal law that prohibits states from granting immigrants unlawfully in the country secondary education tuition breaks unless they give those same benefits to all US citizens regardless of residency expressly preempts the provisions, Judge David W. Dugan of the US District Court for the Southern District of Illinois said July 24. 

The federal law “is an exercise of the federal government’s exclusive authority ‘over the subject of immigration and the status of aliens,’” Dugan wrote. It doesn’t run afoul of the anti-commandeering doctrine because it doesn’t dictate what a state may or may not do education-wise; it acts solely to limit private individuals’ eligibility for certain benefits, Dugan said.

“Put simply, U.S. citizens or nationals must be treated no worse than illegal aliens,” Dugan said.

The state provisions provide eligibility for in-state tuition benefits to such immigrants so long as they resided in the state or proved they resided there at one time, such a graduation from an Illinois high school.

Trisha Powell Crain:

Alabama’s improvement in reading has been getting a lot of national attention lately. A new report examines how the state went from last in the nation in fourth-grade reading in 2019 to nearly matching the national average five years later.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s 40-plus-page report traces nearly three decades of Alabama’s literacy efforts, from early successes and setbacks to the changes that followed passage of the Alabama Literacy Act in 2019. 

It offers both a history lesson and a look at what educators are doing differently today.

There’s much more in the report than can be covered here, but these five findings are a good place to start. 

Alabama is making gains while much of the country struggles

Alabama was one of just two states, along with Louisiana, where fourth-grade reading scores actually improved between 2019 and 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card.

Alabama third graders, who were reading about six-tenths of a grade level below the national average in 2019, were slightly above it by 2025, according to an analysis of state test scores.

The report doesn’t claim any one policy caused those gains. Instead, it points to several changes that appear to have helped.

Transcript, slides & audio:

On October 26 at the UW–Madison Law School, Kirstin Birkhaug of Hope College made a case for reading Mercy Otis Warren. The men we call the founders wrote almost nothing systematic about civic virtue; the people who did were mostly women, excluded from office and writing instead. Warren’s argument was that liberty is only ever learned by not having it — so a republic survives exactly as long as it keeps remembering what being unfree felt like. She doubted the Constitution could do that work, pressed for what became the Bill of Rights, and when that was settled, wrote a two-volume history of the Revolution as an act of public memory.

Thomas Aquinas College:

On Thursday morning, Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy released a new study — sponsored by Thomas Aquinas College — that compares earlier versions of the SAT with the test as currently administered. “The College Board’s conception of college-ready reading,” JHU’s researchers conclude, “has changed.”

“The makers of the SAT seem to believe that the ability to tackle long and complex literary works isn’t an important skill for college students anymore. Sadly, given the state of modern higher education, they’re probably right.”

And not for the better, according to TAC Vice President and Dean Emeritus John J. Goyette.

“The makers of the SAT seem to believe that the ability to tackle long and complex literary works isn’t an important skill for college students anymore,” says Dr. Goyette. “Sadly, given the state of modern higher education, they’re probably right.”

The TAC-sponsored report — The SAT Reading Section: A Comparative Analysis of the 1980, 1987, and 2026 Practice Tests — compares SAT forms from 1980 and 1987 with a current College Board practice test. The authors document extensive modifications to the SAT reading section over the past four decades, most of which diminish the emphasis on students’ ability to read and analyze difficult texts. These include:

• Shorter passages, less than a third of their former length
• A sharp drop in the number of vocabulary questions requiring independent word knowledge, from 60 per test to 10
• The near elimination of argumentative and persuasive readings from the test, replaced by expository texts
• Replacing reading passages that assumed prior knowledge and understanding on the part of the reader with texts that reveal their meanings through contextual clues

 Vocabulary on the SAT verbal section, by form

“This shift is significant because reading, vocabulary, and comprehension are mutually reinforcing,” the study’s authors observe. “As students read more, both the breadth (number of words known) and the depth (quality of word understanding) of their vocabulary increase, which in turn supports stronger reading comprehension.”

For more than 50 years, Thomas Aquinas College has relied on the SAT to evaluate the aptitude and preparedness of its applicants. Yet since the 1980s, the College Board’s exam has undergone multiple transformations, leading College officials to question whether it still measures the same qualifications as in past decades — and whether prospective students’ test scores can be fairly compared across time.

——-

Vocabulary has collapsed.

Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%

 Kimberly Wethal:

It’s said that the hardest animal to kill is a school mascot. Maybe not so much, anymore.

According to polling from Marquette Law School released this week, about 63% of registered voters say they would rather see schools close or consolidate than pay more to keep schools open. A majority also said it’s more important to hold the line on property taxes than to fund local schools.

And while many of the hundreds of schools that have closed or consolidated in the last two decades were in rural areas, there’s not much of a geographical divide among voters on the questions, said polling director Charles Franklin.

About 72% of rural respondents said they’d rather see schools close or consolidate than raise their taxes, compared to 64% of urban respondents. Suburban areas are least likely to want to see schools close or consolidate, with 56% supporting it over higher taxes.

“If you’re a fairly small school in a town in a rural area, you probably only have one high school or one elementary school, and so closing and consolidating means, what other town nearby that may have been your football rivals in the past are you going to consolidate with?” Franklin said. “But on the other hand, the alternative is, how are you going to pay for these schools to stay open when the school-age population continues to shrink?”

The poll, conducted Oct. 14-22, surveyed 818 registered Wisconsin voters and has a margin of error of 4.3%. The partisan makeup of the poll was similar to that of previous polls, with 36% identifying as Republicans, 32% identifying as Democrats and the rest who said they were independents.

——-

David Blaska:

Madison school board is jacking upits annual budget by a healthy 7 percent. Expect to pay an additional $335 on your property taxes. Teachers are getting a 4.63% pay hike. Some contrast: Social Security COLA increase is 3.6%. WI Retirement System annuity increased 2.1%. Why do Democrats want the state to pick up K-12 costs? To better disguise the profligacy of our K-12 school system. Spending is the problem, not funding.

Brivael:

Let me explain what would actually happen.

Start in 1920. Ludwig von Mises publishes an essay that will haunt every central planner: without private property, there are no market prices. Without prices, there is no way to calculate. A bureaucrat cannot know whether a ton of steel is more useful in a satellite or in a bridge. He guesses. He guesses wrong. And nobody pays when he’s wrong.

———

More:

Nationalizing Starlink means handing over what works to those who failed with the shuttle

$54,500 per kilo with the shuttle, $2,700 with Falcon 9, figures from NASA itself

When the state can no longer compete, it confiscates

———

Kamala spent 1.5 billion in fifteen days.

Ed Martin:

The “norm?”

That language does not begin to describe what has happened. Look around at the people who have already been through this. Spend 10 minutes with John Eastman. Talk to Jim Troupis in Wisconsin. He came to my office. I will never forget it. People have mortgaged their homes. Sold property. Burned through savings. Watched careers they spent decades building get ripped apart.

Look at Cleta Mitchell. Everybody who knows anything about the legal profession knows that Cleta is a great lawyer. They pushed her out because she acted like a lawyer. And they would have done a lot worse if she had not had a family and people around her who could support her.

That is the reality. We should stop sugarcoating it.

The day before I delivered these remarks, I walked into a left-wing podcast studio and saw a picture of Charlie Kirk on the wall. I did not ask about it. I did not want to ask about it. I did not want to think about it.

But we have to think about it. We have to think about the progression.

First, people are investigated because of their politics. Then they are prosecuted. Then their professional licenses are taken away. Then they are imprisoned. Then their reputations are destroyed. Then they are bankrupted. Then the public is conditioned to regard them as something less than fellow citizens.

At some point, if that process continues unchecked, destroying people legally, professionally and financially will no longer be enough. That is why I say the end point is killing people.

It is not pleasant to say. It is much easier to talk about violated norms. But pretending not to see the trajectory does not change the trajectory.

Callie Holtermann

A few decades ago, a driver’s license was just about the most exciting thing you could offer a teenager. That little card offered a tantalizing taste of freedom. Passing the road test was a rite of passage for young adults eager to live life on their own terms; failing was a plot point in coming-of-age movies like “License to Drive” (1988, starring Coreys Haim and Feldman) and “Clueless” (1995).

These days, instructors like Batey have to go to great lengths — like invoking video games — to pique young people’s interest in getting behind the wheel.

Just over a quarter of American 16-year-olds had their driver’s licenses in 2024, a 20-point drop from the early 1980s, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

Margo Milanowski

Evanston/Skokie School District 65 is proposing a 4.99% increase to its property tax levy for the coming year, Chief Financial Officer Eric Miller told the school board at its meeting Monday.

This increase would raise a $500,000 home’s annual bill by about $110, according to Miller.

Under Illinois property tax law, school districts can increase their levy each year by either the previous year’s inflation rate or 5%, whichever is lower.

The Illinois Department of Revenue has identified an inflation rate of 2.7% tied to property taxes payable in 2027, according to a District 65 memo, but school districts can approve something called a “balloon levy” to also capture payments from new properties added to the tax rolls within the last year. Miller said the district’s current planning assumes about $15 million in new property.

“The higher request provides room for uncertainty in property values and other unknowns,” he said.

However, the district can receive only the maximum amount of taxes allowed by law. If not enough new property is added to the tax rolls to support the requested 4.99% increase, the district will only receive money from new properties actually built.

The school board is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the matter at its Dec. 14 meeting, followed by a final vote to approve the levy increase.

Chuck Chalberg:

Surely an important founding father of the DFL would think so. And who might that founding father be but Hubert Humphrey. Then the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Humphrey played a key role in uniting the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties and thereby creating the only DFL anywhere in the
country. In a very real sense, he also thought that he was working to create an enlarged, or at
least somewhat larger, tent.

But his tent was going to have some serious limits. Gone was the old Popular Front call of “no enemies to the left.” Gone, therefore, was the idea that liberals, socialists, communists, and their fellow travelers ought to gather together under the same political tent. Or should that be “hang together” under such an oversized, unwieldy tent?

Humphrey, to be sure, was a liberal. But he was something more than that; he was a liberal anti-communist. And the new party that he sought to create was to be a party committed to both liberalism and anti-communism. Today that term is virtually extinct. Not so for Hubert Humphrey. As far as he was concerned, the merging of the two parties was a time for purging as well.

As a result, unhappy Minnesota progressives, meaning some liberals and most all communists and socialists decided to join a renewed Popular Front enterprise, namely the Progressive party of Iowa’s Henry Wallace, the former vice-president of Franklin Roosevelt. That earlier incarnation of a big tent went down to a crushing defeat in the general election of 1948, but Hubert Humphrey did not. He became the first Democrat, let alone the first DFLer, to win statewide election to the U. S. senate from Minnesota. Another liberal anti-communist, namely President Harry Truman, was also elected to a full four-year term, defeating not just the Republicans, but Wallace’s Progressive party and Strom Thurmond of the splinter Dixiecrats.

……

Think of FDR’s deployment of the federal government against his political enemies, his attempt to pack the Supreme Court, and his decisions to run for a third and fourth term.

Jessica Winter:

Mayor Mamdani’s K-12 platform is increasingly perceived as a “blank space.” Some of his supporters have ideas for filling it.

Last year, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America signed up tens of thousands of volunteers to go door-knocking for the then mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. One of the canvassers was Mary Simpson, an artist and a writer in Williamsburg who co-leads her building’s tenant union. “Mamdani’s focus on affordability was what pulled me into campaigning for him,” she told me, citing his promises of rent freezes, free buses, and free child care. Simpson often canvassed in and around her neighborhood with an N.Y.C.-D.S.A. faction called Gays for Zohran—“just lovely young humans in their early twenties, who had such excitement and abandon,” she said. “I would laugh with my husband about it, because there I was, the middle-aged married mom with a public-school kid.”

Simpson, whose daughter is in second grade, prepared extensively with her fellow-canvassers on how to discuss certain topics, such as Mamdani’s views on Israel and Palestine. “I knocked on more than seven hundred doors, and I was asked about Palestine once,” Simpson recalled. “I was asked about education every single canvassing session, probably five times per session.” The campaign provided volunteers with a “Persuasion FAQ” that listed three talking points on Mamdani’s K-12 agenda: to end top-down mayoral control of New York City public schools, to reduce class sizes, and to “fully fund schools” and related programs. “His education platform was quite weak,” Simpson said. “I realized that I needed to offer my own talking points.”

What made Simpson an outlier among the canvassers, as it turned out, also gave her a potent means of connection with some prospective voters. “To be able to say, ‘I’m a local mom, and I send my child to public school, and Zohran is running on a platform of making New York City more affordable, and anything that is good for us is good for our kids’—I just started speaking from that place,” she told me. “That seemed to resonate with a lot of people.”

Boyd Institute:

Healthcare now occupies a comparable position in the American economy, accounting for roughly 15 percent of nonfarm jobs and growing.3 According to a 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, hospitals rank among the five largest employers in 22 states and among the eight largest in every state.4 In many places, the hospital is the largest employer, the most important civic institution, and one of the few reliable sources of well-paying jobs.

Healthcare also absorbs an ever-growing share of what Americans earn and spend, making up about 18 percent of today’s GDP.5 In 1979, manufacturing was about 21 percent of GDP.6

Linda Mills:

Proficiency in Greek was once mandatory at many American universities. It wasn’t unusual for students to start at 15. Chapel was often compulsory. There was a time before the SAT, the Common App, majors, minors and electives.

Since America’s first university was founded nearly 400 years ago, higher education has changed with the needs of students and society. Now, universities are due for another evolution: offering 90-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees in fields that demand immediate workforce development.
College students today face uncertain prospects fueled by the explosion of artificial intelligence, the rapidly shifting postcollege job market and high tuition costs. At New York University, we are proposing opening three-year bachelor’s degrees in nursing and hospitality. Allowing students to launch their careers a year earlier means these graduates will have lower education costs and an extra year of earning. They can also fill critical work shortages more quickly.

A handful of states and smaller colleges have already opened paths to a degree that requires roughly 90 credits instead of 120. State officials in Massachusetts and lawmakers in Oklahoma have taken up the issue. Accreditors, including the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, have also signaled their openness to shorter degrees.

Dell Cameron:

Two US senators say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding the FISA court decision while it presses Congress to renew America’s most sweeping surveillance program.

James Kunstler:

Blocking? What they mean by that is federal employees lodged in the official agencies should “help run out the clock. . . develop selective hearing. . . forgetfulness. . . or blame your workload” for whatever it takes to block enforcement of any executive action proposed by the Trump administration.

Those tactics are explicitly proposed by another org, the Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (FWAD formerly known as Federal Workers Against DOGE), which is affiliated with DRG primarily as a partner in the Renew American Democracy (RAD) strategy and through the broader Branch-4 ecosystem. Confused yet? You should be. The flak-storm of acronyms is beloved by Lefty-leftists for exactly that purpose.

RAD is run by Danielle Reiff, a 20-year veteran of USAID color revolution programs in Europe and Africa. Her co-coordinator at RAD is one Paul Zeitz, an osteopath and rabbi who worked previously for USAID in Africa and for the State Department as Director of the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, whatever that was. FWAD is led by one Beverly Schreiber

Rick Hess

Jeanne Allen is the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform. In 2021, she launched the Yass Prize, which has awarded more than $84 million to education entrepreneurs. She’s long been deeply invested in the worlds of parental activism and educational choice. And she’s out with a new book, The Education Avengers: How and Why a New Class of Heroes Is Fighting America’s Biggest Battle, which carries an enthusiastic endorsement from the directors of “Avengers: Endgame.” I was curious to hear more about the heroes, the battle, and what Jeanne sees on the ground. Here’s what she had to say.
—Rick

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Rick: Jeanne, you’re out with a new book, The Education Avengers. As a Marvel fan, I loved the title. What’s it about?

Jeanne: The book includes 12 stories of ordinary people who did extraordinary things because they saw children were being failed and decided they could not look away. They are parents, educators, entrepreneurs, and community leaders from remarkably different backgrounds.

Rick: Was there a particular “aha” moment that sparked this volume?

Jeanne: Meeting the people who have been disrupting the landscape—and realizing they each had their own deeply human stories—was a kind of “aha” moment for me. On a more personal level, a new baby boy with Down syndrome entered my family. It taught me that no matter how close you are to an issue, it doesn’t fully land until it lands in your own life. That experience showed me that there are people working themselves to exhaustion to serve typical students in atypical ways and atypical students in better, more responsive ways.

Rick: How’d you select the dozen people you profiled?

Jeanne: I was trying not to assemble a list of the most famous people in education innovation circles but to mobilize—like the Avengers—people who each bring a different “artifact” to the group. I looked for dramatically different origin stories and a shared pattern of action. Some were propelled by their children, others by faith, loss, injustice, curiosity, or a problem in education that they could not ignore.

Alison Somin:

With the Department of Education threatening to revoke its accreditation authority over law schools, the ABA has voted to pare back its diversity rules.

For more than seven decades, the American Bar Association has been recognized as an authority to accredit law schools. The Department of Education recently recommended revoking that authority, and an independent advisory board will be meeting to discuss the recommendation on September 23. The department’s report mostly emphasizes other legal concerns, but it appears it has prompted the ABA to at least reconsider its longtime work on race issues.

For years, sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly, the ABA has nudged law schools toward racial discrimination in student admissions and faculty hiring, often in defiance of relevant state and federal law. Needless to say, this history of misconduct is extremely troubling. If the Department of Education ultimately chooses to recognize another accreditor in the ABA’s  stead, it should ensure that the new authority is committed to nondiscrimination.

Several years back, researchers from Pacific Legal Foundation sent public records requests to the 50 public law schools ranked highest by U.S. News & World Report. Forty-five of these schools ultimately responded. Twenty respondents were faulted by the ABA in some way for not meeting diversity standards. Schools were criticized for not having enough minority faculty, not having enough female faculty, and not having enough racial and ethnic minority students.

Heritage:

Pamela Paul:

Those who see the humanities, heavy coursework and value of a Harvard education as gravely imperiled can take heart in the phenomenon that is Humanities 10.

On a Tuesday morning in October, Samantha Matherne paced as she marked up on a white board explaining the philosophical underpinnings of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” with segues into Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. 

The philosophy professor posed big questions to the 90 students gathered in Boylston Hall: “Why did Austen create such an unlikable heroine?” she asked. “Why read novels at all?” And finally, as the 75-minute lecture ended, “What will become of Emma—and what will become of you?”

The students burst into applause.

Hum 10, as it’s commonly known, has become the surprise hit of Harvard’s academic lineup and something of a campus institution. Demand to get into the class has surged, fueled by word-of-mouth from “Hum Alums” who talk it up on social media. Applications (essays required) shot up 40% this fall with 180 incoming freshmen vying for 90 spots. 

It’s a fever that even the professors are struggling to explain. 

The class is definitely not for padding the GPA. Students read a hefty book a week and write regular essays. There is no pass/fail option. Digital devices are verboten, and attendance is taken in every lecture (pink slips for those who arrive late).

Dan Goldhaber and  Dick Startz:

If you go back 100 years, more than half of school spending went to teacher salaries. Where the data ends—just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—the fraction going to teacher salaries had fallen to a quarter. Basically, schools are spending more money, just not on teacher salaries. As an example, Chad Aldeman tells us that over a 20-year period, per-pupil revenue doubled (after inflation) but employee salaries rose only 5%. In other words, school districts have opted to increase staffing rather than increasing teacher salaries.

Teacher salaries as a share of total public school expenditures

The Economist:

It is easy to exaggerate their economic woes

Some of clichés about millennials are still true. In America that generation, now aged between their early 30s and mid-40s, may last year have spent around $1.5bn on avocados, according to The Economist’s rough estimate. Millennials also really do buy more craft beer than other cohorts. But, across rich countries, an even more enduring stereotype about millennials has stopped fitting the facts. They are no longer struggling as they once did. Many are out-earning their parents (see chart 1). Growing numbers occupy positions of real power in business, politics and culture. Home-ownership is rising fast.

Leor Sapir:

Over the last three years, Manhattan Institute has conducted an analysis of an insurance-claims database to assess the prevalence of gender dysphoria diagnoses and of select gender-transition interventions (mastectomies) in adolescents and young adults. This project is inspired in large part by our belief that empirical gaps make it harder to obtain an accurate picture of gender-related diagnoses and practices—and thus harder to do what is best for young people.

In July, City Journal replicated a Research Connectionsstudy finding that in Oregon, about one in 65 teen girls and one in 200 teen boys received a transgender-related mental-health diagnosis between 2017 and 2023, a rate significantly higher than that of all other states except Vermont.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

Sign up for our free newsletter today.

A new analysis of data from Washington, Oregon’s neighbor to the north, shows a similarly high prevalence of transgender-related diagnoses in minors.[1] A bare minimum of 15,437 minors in the state had a transgender-related diagnosis on their health insurance claims between 2017 and 2023. The true number is almost certainly higher, as the database we use doesn’t include all insurers, and claims for 2023 were incompletely reported. In 2022, 1.73 percent of Washingtonian teen girls (ages 12–17) and 0.8 percent of teen boys had a diagnosis in their insurance claims. Among younger children (ages 8–12), the rates were 0.71 percent for girls and 0.16 percent for boys.

To put this in perspective, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-5), published in 2013, lists the rates of gender dysphoria in adult females as 0.002–0.003 percent and in adult males as 0.005–0.014 percent (noting that these were likely modest undercounts). Even measured against the DSM-5’s highest estimates, the 2022 rate among teen girls in Washington was nearly 600 times greater, and among teen boys nearly 60 times greater. In the 8–12 age group, it was roughly 240 times greater for girls and 11 times greater for boys.[2]

Deeper dive on abortion & adoption data here. [data dictionary]

Chao Deng:

Worries about rolling back school clubs and laying off teachers in this middle-class city reached a fever pitch earlier this year.

Budget strains in Methuen, a city of about 55,000 near the New Hampshire border, spurred a debate about putting cherished programs like middle-school band and elementary-school science on the chopping block. Also at risk: more than 100 positions, from custodians to teacher specialists.

By May, teachers and parents packed a city council meeting. Class sizes would balloon, they argued. Parent Anney Barrett said she worried her then-fifth-grade son, who plays trombone, would lose the opportunity to perform in a band.

“Cutting fine arts feels like a red line to me,” she said.

Similar scenes are playing out across the U.S. as K-12 student enrollment falls, putting pressure on government funding. A major culprit of falling enrollment is families having fewer children.

The debates hit hard in Massachusetts, which has long prided itself on a top-tier public education. Near Methuen in the Merrimack Valley, Dracut Public Schools are considering closing an elementary school that has shrunk to 210 students from almost 300, eliminating busing for some grades and reducing full-day kindergarten to half. In North Andover, administrators closed an elementary school last year as a result of declining enrollment, redistributing about 200 students.

Sequoia Carrillo:

One lesson she brings from her time in Virginia is that when she focused on the issues, there were allies to be found in unexpected places.

At the time, Virginia had a Democratic governor and Republican-controlled general assembly. She worked on building coalitions across the aisle and emphasized that public education is for everyone. With the midterms rapidly approaching, Moss said she’s bringing that mentality to the NEA.

“Talk about your students”

“We’re telling our members: ‘Talk about your students. What do your students need?'” she says. “Don’t make it a Democrat or Republican issue.”

Michael Petrilli, the president of the right-leaning think tank the Fordham Institute, isn’t quite so convinced: “Look, that would be a huge departure for the NEA,” he says. “They have been stalwart supporters of the Democratic Party and vice versa.”

In 2020, the NEA recommended Joe Biden for the office and in 2024 issued a formal endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Petrilli has long held reservations about the nation’s teachers unions, saying their positions often block meaningful changes to teaching and perpetuate strict salary rules that can make it hard to recruit and fill certain jobs. But he says he’s open to seeing where things go this year, especially with many state-level races leaning in the direction of the union’s longtime allies — Democrats.

“This is going to put the unions in a very good position to be able to drive education policy,” he says. “I think this is the question: What are they going to do with that power? What are they going to push these Democratic governors to get done?”

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WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Morris Andrews notes and links.

Kellen Browning:

Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot. Operatives aligned with Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for Senate, spent months recruiting candidates to peel votes from Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican.

In the summer of 2025, a staffer for Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who was eyeing a run for Senate, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: Find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can.

The staffer complied, combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state.

This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state’s Republican senator. And if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state’s unusual, four-person ballot.

The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.

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Mary Peltola has paid Marc Elias over 100K for legal services.

———-

Do you trust the news? The New York Times at UW–Madison

UATX Link:

Eric S Raymond:

“It is impossible to overstate how wrong BLM and reform activists were on this count.” I have been a successful propagandist, and I have thoughts about this.

Believing your own propaganda too much is risky even when it’s true, and extremely dangerous when it’s false. This is a chronic problem with left-wing propaganda. In an ideal world, or at least an ideal world from the point of view of a left-wing organizer, propaganda would usefully deceive and demoralize everyone outside the movement while the movement itself remains in contact with reality. But it doesn’t work that way. Really skillful propaganda has the emotional hooks to deceive everybody, including your own people. This divorces them from reality and sets them up for rude shocks when the divorce is no longer deniable. I never had this problem, because all of my propaganda was written to make the truth attractive to people who had previous incentives to reject it, rather than peddling a lie. Even so, I knew I had to remain skeptical of my own assertions in order to avoid veering off into cloud-cuckoo-land.

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Readers might enjoy a virtual visit to the Shanghai Propaganda Art Museum in the amuz app.

Ira Stoll:

‘The results speak for themselves’ says racial bias Supreme Court litigant

Newly released data on the Harvard College class of 2030 say the class is 43.2 percent Asian-American, a record high and more than double the level when Students for Fair Admissions first sued Harvard alleging racial discrimination in admissions.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that Harvard was unlawfully using race as a factor in admissions. Since then, the numbers of Hispanic and black students in the incoming Harvard classes have dipped, while the numbers of Asian-Americans have soared.

Chester Tam:

12 of Massachusetts’ 14 sheriffs just warned Governor Healey that her new ICE law could let people facing murder, rape, and kidnapping charges walk out of jail with zero notice to federal authorities.

Matt Hayes:

Who cares if it unfolded in a world of frustration, it’s all about intent and meaning.

Texas Tech billionaire booster Cody Campbell said the quiet part out loud Saturday afternoon, a brief, two sentence, 17-word red line on X after a galling 37-24 loss to Cincinnati as a double-digit favorite.

It ain’t good enough. 

And if you didn’t think college football teams had owners before, you sure as all get out do now.

There’s no excuse or reason to lose a game like this. We have to be better. @TexasTechFB.

Now, more harsh reality: Campbell isn’t backing down. In fact, he’s doubling down.

He said it, he means it — and he wants results. 

“It’s the whole ‘team’ — which these days includes all of us. Players, coaches, administrators, boosters,” Campbell told USA TODAY Sports on Monday. “In today’s landscape, we are all part of what happens out there. I’m not pointing fingers at any individual.”

But he’s making it very clear and concise that things have to change.

Brandon Brown:

It’s easy to feel like America’s public education system is defined by stagnation and decline. 

A falling national birth rate is putting more pressure on public school enrollment, even as more families choose private schools or homeschooling. Meanwhile, according to the latest PISA results, American reading scores just hit a generational low. In too many cities and communities, it all adds up to a broken status quo with no solutions in sight.

Yet there are reasons to be hopeful. Indianapolis, long a leader in education reform, offers one of them. This year, statewide proficiency rates on ILEARN—Indiana’s state test—barely moved. Schools run directly by Indianapolis Public Schools, our city’s largest school district, posted stagnant or even declining proficiency levels. Indianapolis charter schools, however, achieved gains that far exceeded state and local averages. That includes both independent charters and innovation charters that partner with the district for services.

This isn’t a one-year blip. Since the pandemic, charter and innovation schools have achieved significant English Language Arts and math proficiency gains across nearly every student subgroup. For example, Black and Hispanic students at innovation charter schools achieved ELA gains at more than four times the rate of their peers at schools directly run by IPS. Additionally, Black, Hispanic and low-income students who attend independent charter schools are two to three times more likely to achieve academic proficiency than their peers in traditional IPS schools.

No doubt, overall proficiency remains too low for schools of all types. But Indianapolis charter schools are on an unmistakably positive trajectory. It bears out the theory of change that charter schools are built on: Give talented school leaders autonomy, hold them accountable for results, and significant learning gains usually follow.

Global Preparatory Academy is a prime example of this theory in action. The school launched on the campus of a shuttered, chronically low-performing district school in 2016. Over the past decade, Global Prep has made steady academic progress and tripled its enrollment. This trajectory led school leadership to add a second campus to house their middle school grades in order to meet the demand from families. Examples like this are found across Indianapolis.

Chapin Lenthall-Cleary:

A longer version of this essay was originally published by the Eternally Radical Idea.

Suppose you’re a democratic socialist who has been invited to speak at a college campus. Who do you think would be more likely to try to silence you, a left-leaning woman or a right-wing man?

It may be reasonable to assume someone with a similar ideology would be more tolerant of your views, but new data by FIRE suggests that’s not the case. Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.

The data, taken from FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings, reveals that overall tolerance for opposing views is low among both male and female students — but the males consistently display far more tolerance than females, regardless of their politics. In fact, with the exception of male libertarians, who are slightly more tolerant, men of all political ideologies have roughly the same level of tolerance as each other. The same is true of women.

Nilam Civok:

Chicago Teachers Union Vce President Jackson Potter says the quiet part out loud:

Kids in Mississippi are learning to read at grade level. But what good is literacy if it doesn’t come with a laundry list of socialist demands for the “common good”? Any educational model that successfully teaches children without expanding government power and dependence must be rejected. After all, the goal isn’t to educate children. It’s to advance the political agenda.

Karlyn Borysenko

Exclusive.

I just infiltrated and recorded a call hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union in the United States with leftist students activists and the teachers helping them in France.

The teachers in the USA are actively coordinating with the unions in France.

And they’re calling explicitly for the fall of the United States government.

This is the full, unedited recording of the call, so no one can accuse me of taking things out of context. I will release clips separately.

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Chicago Teachers Union Abruptly Cancels Screening of Documentary on Hamas Sexual Violence Following Complaints From Anti-Israel Activists

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Johnson’s budget math gets a reality check from his own CFO

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Via.

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And the only thing that will save us is the conspirators’ inherent laziness.

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Via.

Rana Foroohar

By any definition, I have lived the American dream. My paternal grandparents grew up in mountain villages outside Trabzon in Turkey without indoor plumbing. My maternal grandfather was a Swedish orphan and his wife, my grandmother, was the ninth child of a Lancashire coal miner.

And yet, because my mother grew up in the US and my father immigrated there at a time when the American dream was still alive and well, I now have the good fortune to work with, and write for, some of the best-educated and most privileged people on earth.

The American dream has been the driving belief system of my country. If we Americans think we can do better than our parents, we are willing to put up with almost anything — grotesque wealth inequality, a non-existent social safety net and even the increasing awareness that our country is turning into a banana republic with a power-mad would-be autocrat at the helm. No wonder corruption has become a key issue in the upcoming midterm elections.

But I think class is an even bigger one. It is the backdrop for everything from the Republicans’ economic nationalism to the Democrats’ focus on the cost of living crisis and concentrated corporate power, and for specific state initiatives like the California billionaire tax that will be voted on in early November. 

The idea of getting the country’s richest 100 people to pay for healthcare for the poorest isn’t just a batty idea supported by millennial socialists. Last week, Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, declared wealth inequality a “danger to society” and called for a national wealth and inheritance tax as high as 100 per cent in some cases.

Kirby is now being pilloried by conservatives. But they should be careful. Siding with billionaires may not work well politically given that the latest Pew figures show that over 60 per cent of Americans now consider themselves working class, up six points from two years ago.

Appealing to working people has brought the Republicans electoral success in recent years. Donald Trump’s inflationary wars (both trade and hot) have undermined that appeal to some extent. Democrats are finding that economic populism is more salient than identity politics. And so, both parties are now locked in an internal, existential struggle between leadership, key donors (who want neither tariffs nor tax rises), and political reality, as they try to play the class card.

Doing so successfully requires a proper understanding of how class works in America, a topic both nebulous yet all encompassing.

Defending Education:

American students and parents face a wide variety of challenges in today’s society: gender ideology introduced for the youngest students, elements of anti-racism and critical race theory embedded into curricula and standards, union influence on teachers, foreign funding undermining learning, and more. Defending Education’s Rankings on Integrity in State Education (RISE) compares how state governments are handling these issues and what they are doing to protect students and families, and keep public education in the best interest of students.

We scored all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia on five major education categories (gender and sexuality, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, parental rights, teacher policies, and foreign influence), and ranked them based on their performance. Tennessee earns the top score in 2026, while Illinois ranks the worst, only over the District of Columbia which takes the 51st spot.

Michael J. Petrilli:

“You can just do things” is one of those memes floating around the internet, plus the name of two recent books, including one by lawyer-turned-professional poker player-turned-biotech entrepreneur Cate Hall. Another word for it is “agency.” Nike would say “Just do it.” Or as opinion columnist Matt Yglesias argues, don’t just admire a problem, do something to fix it.

It’s on my mind because of the current enthusiasm for muscular state action around teaching and learning. For decades, many of us in education policy (and ed-reform) thought these topics were taboo for state lawmakers and state ed department bureaucrats, thanks to America’s well-entrenched tradition of local control. Then a few (mostly Southern) states decided otherwise. They decided to just do things.

That’s the story of the Mississippi Marathon in a nutshell, although, as Rachel Canter explains, of course it was much more complicated. First, in the 2000s and early 2010s, state lawmakers laid a solid foundation, with higher standards, stronger assessments, a transparent A–F school accountability system, a third-grade retention policy, and investments in pre-K and literacy. Then, in 2013, Carey Wright arrived and worked to drive improvements in the core functions of schooling from her perch as state superintendent. And it worked!

She didn’t respect the timid traditional role of states versus districts—for example, just providing small grants to a few local education agencies to pilot stronger approaches to teaching reading, or merely using her bully pulpit to encourage local educators to do the right thing. No, she acted like she ran the schools and used every lever she could find to push a coherent vision of teaching and learning (especially around early reading) from the state capital to the classroom. That included directly hiring reading coaches and placing them where she thought they needed to go, designing professional learning experiences at the state level, forcing ed schools to change their ways, and leaning hard on local curricular decisions.

Other states in the South—especially Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and more recently Texas—have also used parts of this playbook. It’s similar to what our cousins across the pond in England are up to, as well. And long, long ago, Massachusetts used it to “miraculous” effect, too.

Dylan Byers:

Given its national status as “the paper of record,” the company sometimes behaves as though nothing has been officially recorded until it is recorded there. As Sam put it, “The world is their tip sheet.”

And while that posture often lives in service of a civic mission, sometimes you just have to follow simple kindergarten rules and give credit where it’s due. Securing retroactive credit for one’s work can be a blood sport, however, and many reporters resign themselves to little more than a resentful X post—perhaps aware, begrudgingly, that the only ones who care about the provenance of a revelation are the journalists themselves. (This, too, is often true!)

Yet the Times’s chemical plant story seemed like a particularly egregious expression of the genre. Shortly after seeing it, Sam reached out to Lipton by phone. “He hung up on me immediately and didn’t engage,” Sam told me. “At the very least you’d think he’d say something like, ‘Hey, that’s a good story you guys wrote. I think we built on it.’ But I think the approach from the Times is that they’re untouchable and don’t owe anyone anything for their work.”

———

Do you trust the news? The New York Times at UW–Madison

Jack DeSpain Zhou:

Bryan Caplan’s landmark book The Case Against Education defends the provocative signaling theory of education: the value of education, he claims, is about 20 percent meaningful skill development and about 80 percent signaling, and as such the education system is largely a waste of time and money. With its willingness to leap gleefully onto third rails, the book is a useful contribution to the conversation. But when I read it, I was disappointed.Our schools ought to be cathedrals of knowledge and expertise, cultivating students’ skills in the best ways we know how. The task is to build them up. So I came in excited to see what Caplan would say about the nuts and bolts of education, the things that actually help students learn. But while he has a great deal to say about the job market and the pointlessness of asking kids to learn history, art, and languages, he exhibits much less interest in what makes courses effective or ineffective at achieving their stated goals.

When he does venture into pedagogy, he presents a superficial and incurious picture of how students actually learn. He enlists expertise research to support on-the-job learning as ideal when the field arose specifically to explore why people so often failed to learn essential skills on the job. His vision of the ideal — online education providing skills to the eager better than brick-and-mortar ever could — is catastrophically mismatched with how even eager students learn well in practice. And he treats education research, a field that has been plagued with sloppy work and ideological fads, as simultaneously inconsequential and solved.

I want humans to understand the world and to build the skill to navigate it well. If you want students to learn, you should teach them directly and at a pace and depth calibrated to their current level. I think it is good and admirable that we collectively pay to allow children to attend school for free. I care about education as a good in itself — in Caplan’s terms, a “merit good” — something worth getting right no matter what the things we learn are designed to prepare us for.

Jeff Sparrow

If you work at a university today, you talk a lot with the dead. I don’t mean that as a metaphor – or, at least, not entirely.

Generative AI trains on people. Its algorithms learn from humans, requiring our quirks and idiosyncrasies to improve. If the models are exposed predominantly to the output from other AIs, they degenerate and, eventually, collapse. 

That explains a strange new trend reported by antiquarian booksellers, who told the Guardian of bulk orders for old stock, originating, they thought, from AI companies or their surrogates. The titles were bafflingly esoteric: one bibliophile described a purchase that included a manual on soil mechanics from the 1970s, a book called Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling, a history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn, and a copy of Early Australian Poetry. 

But for AI trainers, the subjects don’t necessarily matter. Back in the day, the companies vacuumed up human content from Reddit, Wikipedia and similar sites. With data now prohibitively expensive, remaindered books provide an attractive option for “destructive scanning”, in which machines slice apart bindings to feed on the creativity contained therein.

As an academic, you encounter the process at the opposite end. When you open Speed Grader to confront another bland but competent assignment, suspiciously devoid of grammatical or spelling errors, your heart sinks. You know that, in all probability, the document you’re reading was composed not by your student (whose contribution likely extended no further than dropping the essay question into Claude’s interface and adding “make it sound human”), but by a legion of absent (and, quite probably, deceased) authors, whose forgotten texts enabled an algorithm to stitch together an essay that is at least passable and often reasonably good.

Bruce Baker, Matthew Ci Carlo & Mark Weber (8th edition):

Our approach, then, is to compare states and districts in terms of not only how much they spend, but also whether that funding is adequate for students from all backgrounds to achieve common outcome goals.

Accordingly, we use a national cost model to calculate adequate funding levels for the vast majority of the nation’s public school districts. We then use these estimates to evaluate each state—relative to other states or groups of states—based on the overall adequacy of funding across all its districts (statewide adequacy) as well as the degree to which its high-poverty districts are more or less adequately funded than its affluent districts (equal opportunity). Finally, because states vary in their ability to raise revenue (e.g., some states have larger economies than others), we also assess whether states are leveraging their capacity to fund schools by measuring total state and local revenue as a percentage of states’ economies (fiscal effort).

These three “core indicators”—effort, statewide adequacy, and equal opportunity—offer a foundational overview of whether states’ systems are accomplishing their primary goal of providing adequate and equitable funding for all students. In this report, as well as the one-page state profiles that accompany the report, we present results on these three measures for each state.

State profiles.

K-12 District $pending Comparison. Madison taxpayers are overspending by 8.6% according to the 2023 analysis:

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

David Blaska:

So we don’t blame Satya Rhodes Conway for calling it quits. Well, actually, we do! Instead of confronting intolerance head on, the mayor, the Common Council, and Madison civic leaders have bended their collective knee to the bullhorn bullies for too long. Now they had come for their due.

When did it start? The rot was well underway when Dean Loumos, chairing a school resource police officer study committee, apologized to the mob for letting Blaska speak on a government issue seven years ago. It continued when the current sheriff referred to inmates of the county jail as “residents.” When the city arts department paid for murals depicting police as blood-thirsty pigs. When Satya herself demanded the immediate release of a downtown shakedown artist who weaponized race in demanding restaurateurs “Venmo Me the Money.” (“Free Yeshua!”) 

It continued when the mayor and council did not give Chief Mike Koval and his officers their full support. When Madison shrugged at the removal of a 42-ton glacial boulderfrom the university campus after the inanimate object was accused of racism. When council progressives railroaded Ald. Paul Skidmore despite forensic evidence proving that the police supporter never uttered the C-word. When Satya herself thanked police for enduring the long hours, the verbal and physical abuse at which the statue of a Civil War abolitionist was decapitated and city hall itself was fire-bombed. Then, mau maued by the mob — she took it down! When city leaders created a superfluous and powerless police monitor as a ransom payment to the very mob that drove her off the ballot.

Heather Mac Donald:

Why are female Cornell students saying that they feel unsafe on campus? Because they are surrounded by adults who are just as unhinged as they are.

On October 28, the Cornell Faculty Senate will vote on a resolution of no confidence in the university administration. The instigator of that resolution, the director of Cornell’s Latina/o Studies graduate program, published his argument for censure in the student newspaper on Friday. A week before, more than 200 Cornell professors released a manifesto expressing their “outrage” at Cornell’s alleged rape culture.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

Sign up for our free newsletter today.

If you want to understand the co-dependency between self-engrossed students and self-indulgent faculty, these two documents tell you all that you need to know.

The faculty manifesto, in the form of a group letter addressed to “Dear Cornell Students,” accuses the university of failing to “prioritize [student] safety and well-being.” The signatories claim that the administration “active[ly]” fosters a “culture” of “structural violence” and “sexual assault.”

That accusation was not alarmist enough. Two sentences later, the “culture” of structural violence has transformed into an “epidemic” of structural violence.

The faculty apologize to the students with an unctuousness worthy of a Tartuffe. “We [failed] to create spaces where you feel safe to share your experiences,” they write to their fellow players in this melodrama of victimhood.

Reality check for these stale academic tropes: Cornell has no epidemic of structural violence. If it did, the Sisterhood would presumably long ago have warned its less worldly members to stay away from such a cauldron of physical abuse.

What could go wrong? https://t.co/8zthPJSn2c

— Dale Chu (@Dale_Chu) October 26, 2026

Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation:

CESE Insights Issue 1 explores reading scores for NSW students across NAPLAN, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The assessments measure different aspects of reading, which helps explain mixed trends in results. Trend data show clear improvement in Years 3 and 5, likely reflecting strong, structured teaching of foundational skills. However, progress slows in upper primary and secondary school, where results suggest many students may struggle with more complex, real-world reading tasks.

Joseph Heath:

During the brief period in which corporations thought it would be a good idea to indulge the political sensibilities of their junior employees, it became fashionable to adopt “mission statements” that expressed the supposedly higher purpose sought by the firm in its branches and divisions. This attracted a certain measure of ridicule, such as the case of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which decided that its real purpose was not to produce mayonnaise, but rather to “reduce food waste” by transforming leftovers into “delicious meals.” The obvious objection to this, expressed in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, was the tacit assumption that the product itself could not be the purpose. This appeared to concede the essentially anti-capitalist idea that there was something unworthy or grubby about just making mayonnaise and selling it to people, which then created the need to identify a “higher,” non-pecuniary purpose in order to edify the entire operation.

The mayonnaise mission statement became the object of public controversy when a major shareholder in Unilever (the parent corporation) complained that “a company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot.” I found this a bit uncharitable, since it’s not difficult to imagine why the company would have thought the mission statement to be not only good PR, but also good HR. For most people, sitting around at work every day thinking “I’m here to make money for Unilever” is less intrinsically motivating than “I’m on a mission to reduce food waste.”

I think about this episode sometimes as I’m driving to work. Technically my job is to teach courses in philosophy. Students pay tuition, the university pays me, everyone goes home happy. The product is the purpose. No one thanks me, that’s what the money is for. I am, however, sometimes tempted by the idea that my work might have a loftier objective. Pressed to put it in the form of a mission statement, I might go with something like this: “reproducing the foundations of Western civilization, one lecture at a time.” Like the junior employees at Unilever, I find this more elevated statement of my task to be a greater source of motivation.

Glenna Goldis:

… and argue Murray and Shaw’s article doesn’t hold up without its idiosyncratic definition of sex. I’ll also highlight where I share their concerns. In an upcoming post I’ll write about legal academia more broadly and its failure to debate (and therefore understand) transgender legal issues.

Who’s Who

SCR is among the most prestigious law journals in America. Its publisher brags that it is the top constitutional law journal. Unlike most of its peers, which are edited by law students, SCR is run by distinguished faculty. Baude, the SCR editor who is listed as its contact, teaches at the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.

Jennica Pounds:

This is the final form of a project that started a hundred years ago to spread free markets and create global peace and instill self-governance throughout the world.

This is your legacy, Alex Soros.

Your father spent his life fighting Communism.
You, as his protege, will spend your life perfecting Communism.

In the name of “democracy.”

Sir Humphrey Appleby:

These developments are downstream of both specific political decisions by the British elite and the subsequent destruction of British standing and soft power.

Britain operates a very tight information environment for its media, hence public knowledge of this – Britain’s most important ally saying the dissolution of Britain is inevitable – has been minimal. Its momentousness, however, is reflected elsewhere: discussion has been widespread globally and on alternative, less controlled, media sources such as X, formerly Twitter. 

Trump’s motivations are easy to explain and derive from continued British attempts to impede his presidency and insult his person: the laughably amateurish Steele dossier and the attempt at electoral interference by the Labour Party in favor of Kamala Harris. The motivation and causes on the American side are clear; less clear are the collapse in British soft power and the motivations of the Irish side in this announcement.

This decline is global, but this article will focus on the hostility created by British actions in the US and Ireland.

Howard Blume:

Pressure has intensified on Los Angeles Unified to follow through with emergency budget cuts after a California fiscal crisis oversight team concluded that the school district is at “high risk” for insolvency — and must move quickly to avoid losing control over budget decisions. 

The state’s school Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team has concluded that the poor financial outlook has been brought on by increased hiring as enrollment declined, employee raises that exceeded the rate of increased state funding, sharply higher costs for educating students with disabilities, and maintaining classroom space for twice as many students as needed.

“The district has not fully addressed deficiencies” identified by the Los Angeles County Office of Education in its fiscal oversight letters, the team stated in a reportpresented to the school board Tuesday. “The district has not sufficiently adjusted staffing and facilities use in response to declining enrollment.” 

The financial troubles are especially concerning because the Los Angeles Unified School District has failed to meet past budget reduction targets, the report concluded, and the stakes have become higher, with solutions more painful to carry out. The projected cutbacks over the next three years include more than 6,000 jobs in a school system that has been adding employees. The current workforce is about 80,000 full- and part-time employees.

District officials are not challenging the data. 

“Los Angeles Unified has been transparent about significant financial challenges,” a district statement said. “The Board has already adopted a fiscal stabilization plan to address these challenges, including making difficult decisions to maintain the District’s financial health.”

After the presentation, Supt. Andrés E. Chait spoke of the importance of “fidelity” to the district’s “fiscal stabilization plan” and “certainly being nimble as conditions change, but for the most part adhering to what was put forth back in June.”

Arne Duncan

According to a recent Gallup poll, roughly 88% of parents believe their child is performing at or above grade level in reading and math. Yet the reality is quite the opposite: the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 31% of fourth graders are proficient readers.

We have an honesty gap in American education.

The gap is not simply between perception and reality. It is the gap between what students and families are told about progress and what academic outcomes ultimately reveal. Families cannot address challenges they do not fully understand, and schools cannot solve problems they are unwilling to name.

It’s also a gap between what school districts are paying for and what they’re getting in return. Every fall, districts invest millions of dollars in programs designed to improve student achievement. They invest heavily in educational resources which often start with the best intentions: adopting new curricula, purchasing technology, hiring tutoring providers and launching new interventions.

That challenge is particularly important given the scale of educational spending. More broadly, contracted educational services account for approximately 11% of school expenditures, or roughly $100 billion annually. National assessments show that reading and math achievement remain below pre-pandemic levels, with proficiency rates still lagging where they stood just a few years ago.

We can readily track how much money is spent, but we are often far less transparent about whether those investments are improving student learning.

And that’s particularly troubling because there is no more important investment we make as a society than the investment we make in our children. Taxpayers devote hundreds of billions of dollars to public education every year. Every education dollar represents an investment in our future workforce, our communities, and the next generation of leaders. That’s why we are right to expect evidence that those investments are producing meaningful results for students.

——-

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

James Freeman:

This has been a longstanding grievance of mine, and not just against The Times, against all the major media outlets. I’ll frequently talk to a reporter and they’ll say something like, “How would you identify yourself?” And they’re not asking for my pronouns. They’re trying to get at my politics. And sometimes I’m of course like, you know, “I’m a law professor.” And they say, “Well, how do you characterize yourself?” It’s like, “Well, I’m a constitutional law professor,” and I know what they’re getting at. Eventually I just say, fine, if you want to call me conservative, you can.

And I suspect the reason why they do this is to give their readers sort of a grounding of where I’m coming from. And if this was sort of a neutral policy that’s applied across the board, I wouldn’t have much ground to object, but I find that it’s not.

Back in February of this year, I was quoted twice in The New York Times back to back in the span of 24 hours, which is, you know, pretty cool. But I sort of noticed that both of the references were to Josh Blackman as a “conservative” law professor. And I just thought that was strange. So I went through the Westlaw archives and just sort of searched for “liberal” law professors and “conservative” law professors in the New York Times database, and it was far more likely that you’re identifying a conservative than a liberal. And those numbers are stacked because liberals are quoted even more often. So the numbers even have a greater disparity.

Sound Off: A Double Standard for ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal’ Labels?

Related: Do you Trust the News? A New York Times event at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rajiv Batra @ UW-Madison:

On October 22, Rajiv Batra came back to the department he graduated from in 1983 and spent an hour on the half of a startup nobody puts in the pitch deck. Not the idea, not the funding. The organization you have to build around them.

Batra co-founded Palo Alto Networks in 2005 with Nir Zuk, after founding VitalSigns Software and serving as the first employee at Peribit Networks, which Juniper bought. He has watched three companies from the inside, and what he told a room of computer sciences students was mostly about people.

Hire the very best for the first fifty seats and do not compromise. Thirty engineers who are genuinely the best, he said, will out-build two hundred ordinary ones. Build the culture in the first year, because you cannot install it in the third. Give equity widely, so more than five people feel they own the thing: fewer people means everybody gets richer. Do not micromanage, or your life as a founder will be miserable and the company will still fail. And when someone is not working out, deal with it, because most leaders avoid that call and the damage spreads.

He was blunt about quitting, too. Set goals a couple of years out. Miss them both and walk away rather than run what he calls a living dead company, the kind that saps your energy for a decade without ever arriving.

The questions were good ones. Can you build a company outside a tech hub? His answer was honest rather than encouraging. What about AI — does it end the software startup? He thinks not, and he thinks the people in that room are the ones who will sit between humans and the machines. And how do you pick a co-founder? He described fifteen minutes with Nir Zuk, before there was a company, that told him everything he needed to know.

His line about rules sums up the hour: “there’s no rule. You are it.”

The full transcript is online with the audio. Select any timestamp to hear that moment.

Ko Lyn Cheang

“Now I’m stuck in seventh-grade math, and it’s so boring,” said Aditya, who the Chronicle is identifying by first name only because he’s a minor. “I strongly dislike the system.”

His concerns echo those of one side of a divisive debate raging in the Palo Alto Unified School District over mathematics education, which has culminated in a contentious school board race for two termed-out seats. 

While next five-person board will have to address a substantial budget deficit, mathematics has become a defining issue for at least two candidates, one of whom sued the district after his son was prevented from taking a more advanced course the lawsuit argued he was qualified for.

The debates have centered on three main issues: whether the district is making it too difficult to skip a grade in math, if the district should track kids into separate math classes based on performance, and whether it should offer advanced classes beyond AP Calculus. 

At the core of the current debate is whether a new math framework that Palo Alto implemented in 2020 is working, part of a wider dispute in many Bay Area districts over how to balance equity and excellence. The University of California came under increasing national scrutiny over whether to bring back SAT and ACT scoresin admissions after a report about UC studentsstruggling with basic math.

Palo Alto eliminated middle school math tracking in 2020 with the purpose of ensuring all students would take algebra by eighth grade, which research has showncan improve math achievement. To do so, it compressed four years of math into three. It got rid of accelerated math courses in middle school, though students are permitted to skip a grade of math if they pass an annual test in middle school, a hurdle that’s sparked pushback. 

——-

 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Boston Weekly:

For fiscal 2025, the system recorded $59 million in operating income, equal to a margin of 0.3%, according to the Globe. Its total margin, which included investment income, was $2.38 billion.

Saggezza:

June 2008, candidate Obama: “we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.”

That year KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) put the average family premium at $12,680. KFF’s 2026 number just dropped: $28,303. Workers alone now pay $7,471, up 9% in a single year, while wages rose 3.7%.

Then 2013 brought the sequel: “For a lot of people, it will be cheaper than your cell phone bill.”

Show me the phone plan that runs $2,358 a month. Nine days before the midterms, the party that built this machine is asking for your vote again.

————

Kobeissi:

————

Brian Blase:

The ACA provides lower-income households with far larger subsidies than workers with employer coverage receive in tax benefits.

This inequity penalizes work, encourages employers to drop coverage, and shifts costs to taxpayers.

The COVID subsidies made this inequity much worse.

——-

Brian Blase:

———

——-

The taxpayer share of the premium has risen from 75% to 88% under the IRA redesign.

The existing Part D subsidy is massive.

Aaron Garth Smith: and Jordan Campbell:

While losing 34% of its students, LAUSD’s spending on compensation increased by $1.7 billion

Los Angeles Unified School District’s recent labor agreements with United Teachers Los Angeles and other unions were hailed as a win for teachers, administrators, and service employees. But the district, which spends more money than it gets each year and is losing students, doesn’t have the funds to pay for it. 

This isn’t for lack of funding: from 2002 to 2023, California led the nation in K-12 spending growth. The most recent federal data shows LAUSD spent nearly $27,000 per student in 2023. So why does the nation’s second-largest public school district have a billion-dollar structural budget deficit? 

Analysis of data from California’s State Controller’s Office, which publishes employee-level payroll data for public school districts, counties, cities, and other government entities, shines a light on the causes of LAUSD’s structural deficit and how to fix it. 

This analysis starts with an overview of our methodology, presents key findings, and discusses implications for LAUSD and state policymakers. 

Methodology 

We obtained all 11 years of LAUSD compensation data available from the California State Controller’s Office website, sorted job titles into 19 categories, and calculated inflation-adjusted spending on each category. 

While LAUSD spending figures are available elsewhere, this data allows for greater nuance in evaluating compensation trends. However, it also has limitations. Because the dataset doesn’t distinguish between part-time and full-time employees, we do not report employee counts. And, because some job titles are vague and their categories can’t be confirmed, all figures presented are estimates. 

More.

Becky Jacobs:

Data Holdings is owned by the Forest County Potawatomi Community tribe in northern Wisconsin, as a subsidiary company of Potawatomi Ventures. The company’s customers include government, healthcare, hospitality and other organizations, according to Ryan Brooks, Data Holdings’ chief technology officer and general manager.

“The Tribe’s long-term perspective and commitment to responsible and sustainable investment helped shape the development of Data Holdings from the beginning and continues to influence how we operate and grow today,” Brooks told the Cap Times in an email.

Increased development of data centers and how to regulate the facilities has prompted debate in communities across Wisconsin and the nation, and percolated in the state’s fall elections, including in the gubernatorial race.

Data Holdings opened a two-story, 46,000-square-foot facility in Milwaukee in 2013. The scale of the building pales in comparison to some larger proposed data centers in Wisconsin, such as Meta’s facility in Beaver Dam, which is expected to span more than 500 acres.

At a campus meeting this month, faculty leaders asked interim Chancellor Eric Wilcots where the university stood on data centers.

Economist:

In China there is plenty of funding for academics who are engaged in cutting-edge research in fields favoured by the Communist Party such as artificial intelligence and robotics. But the Harvard academic may be surprised to learn that on many campuses, the mood among staff is sullen. Eager though the party is to promote scientific endeavour, it is becoming more selective about who gets the state’s cash. In April the education ministry said that it had revoked 12,200 degree programmes in recent years, mainly in soft subjects such as “business management”, replacing many with majors in AI and other sciences that are the party’s priorities.

Documents reviewed by The Economist show that even in Shenzhen and Hangzhou, both big hubs of party-backed tech, universities have had their budgets cut by more than 5% this year.

Restoring happiness will be difficult. Increasingly, universities are adopting Western styles of employment, with academics often having to labour for years before being granted a permanent job, says Qiang Zha of York University. Some complain that, because of tighter budgets, universities are hiring junior staff to bolster research with no intention of giving them a permanent place. Getting a job or promotion in academia is now such a struggle that many quit. Shenzhen Middle School employs more than 100 staff with PhDs.

——-

“They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan”

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids. 

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

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.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

The Economist

In November three men and a 17-year-old boy, all Afghans, gang-raped a 17-year-old girl over several hours. Beforehand they had groomed her on Snapchat and plied her with alcohol; afterwards they fled to France in a lorry. The French authorities returned them to Britain, where they were convicted and, on October 6th, sentenced to long jail terms. In court the girl described how “listening to it all again from the lawyers kept me reliving everything that happened to me”.

Such horrors fuel suspicion of migrants. So did a recent state-issued booklet about Britain for asylum-seekers. Page five clarified that the legal age of consent is 16 and that rape is a serious crime. “I’ve never heard of someone who decided not to rape because they received a leaflet,” said Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader. The clumsy campaign fed the idea that some immigrants—notably men seeking asylum—are responsible for a disproportionate share of sex offences. Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, claims that “Afghans are over TWENTY times more likely to commit sex crimes than Brits.”

Is that true? The government does not publish crime rates by immigration status. The limited data it does release are raw counts of offences by those of each nationality, from a country-wide police database. The “20 times” claim was based on there being 13,000 Afghans in Britain, an estimate from the Office for National Statistics’ Annual Population Survey. That figure is unreliable, however, having been extrapolated from a sample of fewer than 60 individuals. In 2021 the ONS stopped publishing this population estimate owing to plummeting survey-response rates.

The Economist’s analysis suggests that the “20 times” claim is a wild exaggeration. But our numbers are hardly reassuring.

The Migration Observatory, a think-tank based at Oxford University, obtained figures through freedom-of-information requests to the Ministry of Justice. These count cautions and convictions in England and Wales, split by offenders’ nationality, between 2010 and 2024. The data detail 8m crimes, of which 106,000 are sex offences ranging from rape to consensual sex in public. The police’s recording of offenders’ nationality is messy, but we found that four-fifths of sex crimes were committed by British people. Just 0.39%—409 offences over the 15-year period—were committed by people who said they were Afghan.

Whether 409 crimes is a lot or a little depends on how many Afghans are in the country. In March 2021 the last census reported 14,300 Afghan passport-holders living in England and Wales, and another 7,100 without a passport who said they were Afghan: a total population of 21,400.

——-

John LeFevre:

The Economist put the chart on a log scale.

I wonder why they did that?

Here it is on a normal one.

Andrey Baime:

Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley professor and Fields medalist, no longer grades his students’ homework. 

After seeing how many of his students used AI to consistently receive top scores, he felt there was “no point” in paying readers to grade for correctness in homework, as AI use is now unavoidable. 

Borcherds revealed this in a sit-down interview Tuesday, following OpenAI’s announcement that AI agents apparently solved one of mathematics’ most difficult unsolved problems, the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.

“If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there’ll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can’t do better,” Borcherds said. 

Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is “not a very good system,” but at the moment, he has no alternative.

Borcherds stated he no longer knows whether to encourage students to go into the math department, as it seemed five years ago that being a mathematician was one of the safest careers from the AI boom.

GB Rango:

we are in an apocalyptic era; peter thiel wants you to study the bible, think harder about the antichrist, and (literally) save the world.

The Christianity of these lectures is central; they are necessarily Christian and rely heavily on Biblical descriptions of the end of history and the signs that herald its coming. Thiel says that he modeled them after John Henry Newman’s four-part 1835 lecture series, “The Patristical Idea of Antichrist.”

In one of the Q&A sessions with Peter Robinson, Thiel — affectionately referred to throughout as the “young” Peter, relative to the boomer-generation Peter Robinson — described himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian.” When asked if he believes that Scripture is “inspired,” he responds, “yes, it should be taken seriously, though sometimes not completely literally.” Thiel emphasized that we should study and reason about the Bible, rather than follow it blindly, and notes that one will find it to have a surprising resonance with our times. In a related discussion, he emphasized that the so-called “Great Books” are much lesser than the Bible and should not be worshipped. Instead, these books should be treated as tools to understand their times and must themselves be considered through the lens of the Bible. This approach sets up the ethos for much of the following lecture series.

The Christian eschatology that Thiel draws upon tells of an apocalyptic age dominated by a deceptive ruler referred to as the Antichrist — the portrait of this ruler is one constructed through an amalgamation of biblical sources and whose shape is up to some level of ecumenical interpretation.

Revelation tells of a beast from the sea, often interpreted as the Antichrist and his associated apparatus of power, and a beast from the land, who rises from the earth to persuade humanity to worship the beast from the sea and enforces this worship under threat of death. This latter figure is viewed as a kind of ideological or religious ally to the Antichrist, a false prophet.

Satan empowers the beast from the sea to exercise authority over all peoples, languages, and nations. It wages war against the saints, and all earthly kings surrender their power to it. From this, and other earlier biblical mentions, the image of the Antichrist as a one-world totalitarian dictator emerges. If the Bible is true, or at least “inspired,” how do we end up in such a dire situation, and what can be done to delay or prevent it, if anything?

The reign of these beasts precedes a final conflict in which Christ returns victorious; the Antichrist and false prophet are cast into a lake of fire. Christ then reigns for a thousand years, during which time Satan is bound. Satan is released after this epoch, briefly rebels, and is eternally defeated. God then passes final judgment on the dead, death and hell are cast into the lake of fire, and a new heaven and earth replace the old.

Brivael Le Pogam:

Let’s start with the only question that matters: what makes a political system work or fail? To a very large extent, it’s the economy. A country that produces wealth, that lets its citizens create, trade and build, stays standing. A country that destroys that collapses, no matter how beautiful its slogans are.

And in economics, there are really only two worldviews.

The first is collectivism. The idea that the State knows better than you. That it must plan production, set prices, run companies, decide what you earn, what you buy, and eventually what you think. The individual is just a cog serving a grand collective project: the class, the nation, the race, the people.

The second is freedom. Capitalism, property, individual liberty, individual responsibility. The idea that millions of people creating value for one another produce infinitely more prosperity than an office of planners, however brilliant they may be.

Now look at the list of the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Stalin: total planning, forced collectivization, millions dead. Mao: the Great Leap Forward and the deadliest famine in human history. Pol Pot: money abolished, cities emptied, nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population exterminated. Mussolini, the man who coined the word fascism: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” And Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, whose program proclaimed “the common good before individual good.” He subjected the entire German economy to State plans: the Four-Year Plan, frozen prices and wages, unions dissolved into a single state labor front, industrialists producing whatever the regime decided.

Their flags were different. Their designated enemies were different. But the machinery was the same: the individual doesn’t exist, only the collective matters, and the State decides everything.

Why does it always end in totalitarianism? Because collectivism doesn’t work. And when a system doesn’t work, it has only two options: admit failure or force people. They always choose force.

Ludwig von Mises proved it as early as 1920: without free prices, without a market, a planner simply cannot know what to produce, how much, or at what cost. He is flying blind. A planned economy isn’t a less efficient version of the market. It’s an impossibility.

——-

Daisy Christodoulou:

In my previous article, I explained that England’s government seems determined to move away from a set of education policies that have been very successful, and that have attracted significant international attention. 

In this post, I am going to explore the issue further. It’s a long post, split into 5 parts, so I’ve added internal hyperlinks here.

Let’s just review the policies that are changing.

There are two proposed policies that are getting a lot of attention. Neither of these has happened yet, and the details of how they will work are sparse. 

• Vocational qualifications. The government want to create new vocational qualifications for 14-16 year olds to study, and to incentivise these in league tables.
• Oracy. The government want to increase the status of oracy – better known as speaking and listening – within the English curriculum. 

There are two other policies which have already happened. These have not got that much attention, even though they are both pretty significant.

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in Fox.com on the recent MS NOW interview with Rep. Ilhan Omar. The most impressive aspect of the segment with Chris Hayes was how he could conduct an extended interview without actually asking long-standing, unanswered questions. When it comes to the art of evasion, it was a masterpiece. In case you are curious, here are the questions not asked of Rep. Omar.

Here is the column:

“I am trying to figure out the way to do this.” Those words from MS NOW’s Chris Hayes say all you need to know (and likely all you will get) from his interview on Wednesday with Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. There is a litany of questions the liberal host never asked of Omar. Those questions have only increased over the years, leading to the current criminal investigation into immigration fraud. At points, Hayes sounded more like a supplicant than a journalist given his discomfort with asking pressing questions.

The interview had the journalistic nutritional content of a Slurpee that would give any liberal a sugar high and any non-liberal a stomachache.

Many of us have stressed that these allegations are unproven, and that little evidence has been confirmed to support the underlying criminal charges. However, I have also written that Omar has been remarkably unforthcoming in rebutting the allegations or providing her own exculpatory information. Instead, she has spent years denouncing the allegations as racist or Islamophobic without addressing the specific claims.

While the Biden administration began aspects of these investigations years ago, Omar again sat for another prolonged interview without being pressed (beyond cursory questions) about long-standing allegations.

Sean Salai:

American doctoral dissertations in history, literature, philosophy, arts and culture are becoming more critical of Western culture, even as fewer people complete them.

The number of humanities dissertations dropped 49% from a historic peak of 33,473 in 2015 to 16,951 in 2025, the American Academy of Sciences and Letters reported. The dataset overrepresents large research universities, with declines most pronounced at elite schools.

Meanwhile, the share of words tied to identity politics and social theory grew tenfold from 1960 to 2025, with a sharp acceleration after 2019. That includes terms such as “intersectionality,” “decolonization,” “patriarchy,” “oppression,” “queer,” “equity,” “diversity,” “whiteness,” “marginalization,” “privilege,” “diaspora,” “disability,” “gender,” “feminist,” “systemic racism” and “social justice.”

Michael Pershan:

But not the version that researchers want.

How do American teachers teach? In 1995 and again in 1999, a team of researchers randomly selected Grade 8 math classes from across the country and hired videographers to film them. All in all one hundred sixty-four American lessons were recorded, analyzed, and then compared with hundreds of classrooms in Australia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Japan. 

This pair of studies, about thirty years old, offers the most reliable (certainly the most detailed) picture of what American math teaching actually looks like. It mostly looks like this:

Here’s this lesson’s itinerary, per the whiteboard:

1. Warm Up
2. Go Over Homework
3. Lesson 3-2, Writing Variable Expressions
4. Homework Assignment

The teacher explains terms, offers examples, leaves time for notes. Students ask for clarification. She asks questions and calls on kids to answer them. There’s about twenty minutes of this; she then assigns practice problems. This was “normal” American teaching in 1999, or at least one version of it: “Most U.S. teachers chose to spend a considerable portion of the beginning of the lesson reviewing and then practicing new material at the end,” the researchers wrote. 

Has this normal teaching disappeared? Matt Yglesias thinks so: he detects “hostility to explicit instruction” and an unwillingness in America to “show kids how to do the problem and make them practice.” Emily Hanford, in the first episode of her latest series, similarly laments that “something else took hold” in place of direct instruction—inquiry pedagogies where teachers are mere “facilitators” while students “discover math principles” and “teach each other.”

Kaitlyn Shepherd:

Last week, the Reason Foundation released its annual “Public Schools Without Boundaries” report, which evaluates each state’s open enrollment laws and ranks them based on how closely they align with a list of seven best practices.

For the third year in a row (see here for 2024 and here for 2025), North Carolina tied with Maryland, Maine, and Alaska for last place with an overall score of 0/100 and a grade of “F.” Meanwhile, Iowa, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Vermont improved their open enrollment laws, with varying degrees of success.

Open enrollment is a form of school choice that lets parents choose a traditional public school for their kids instead of their residentially assigned one, provided there are open seats. Within-district open enrollment allows students to attend any school within their home district, while cross-district open enrollment allows them to attend a school in another district.

Open enrollment can generate a number of benefits for students, families, and schools themselves. Benefits can include:

Garry Tan:

TL;DR

The Justice Department says two UCLA graduate schools, medicine and law, considered race in admissions after the Supreme Court banned the practice in 2023; UCLA denies it. The findings land as UC reconsiders its 2020 decision to drop the SAT, made over its own faculty task force’s objections, and as more than 3,000 UC faculty warn that incoming students lack basic math and writing skills.

WHAT THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT FOUND

• The law school. On Oct. 1, 2026, the department’s Civil Rights Division announced findings that UCLA Law discriminated against white and Asian applicants in admitting its 2023, 2024 and 2025 classes. The department says the school “rejected white and Asian applicants who had the same LSAT scores as admitted black and Hispanic applicants.” It also says that in 2024 and 2025 combined, “half of the admitted black applicants had LSAT scores that were at or below 90% of the admitted white applicants.” According to the findings, the school’s essay prompts were “designed to elicit information about race,” and admissions staff explained how to disclose race at recruitment events such as a “Diversity Admissions Open House.” (Findings letter)
• The medical school. On May 6, 2026, after a review lasting nearly a year, the department concluded that Geffen’s leadership “intentionally selected applicants based on their race.” It reported that admitted Black and Latino applicants had lower median MCAT scores and GPAs than admitted white and Asian applicants. The findings letter cites internal emails, training materials, and a “guiding principles” memo that, according to the Los Angeles Times, instructed committee chairs to ensure representation of applicants who “identify as BIPOC.” The department has also joined a lawsuit against the medical school brought by Students for Fair Admissions and other groups.

Jim Carlton:

Inside the School Board Brawl Rocking Beverly Hills
Fierce local election in one of America’s wealthiest enclaves pits parent against parent in battle fueled by national politics

Before security escorted her out of a school-board meeting, parent Jackie Kruger—clad in a leopard-print jacket and wide-brimmed hat—warned the board’s president that she would sue.

“You got to do what you got to do, baby,” the president, Judy Manouchehri, shot back.

Welcome to the Beverly Hills Unified School District, home to one of the nastiest local races of the year, complete with flying insults, dueling restraining-order petitions and a yard-sign whodunit involving a white Tesla with a ski rack.

The women—both attorneys and mothers of three—will meet again Nov. 3, when Kruger tries to unseat Manouchehri. Kruger, 47 years old, accuses her 46-year-old rival of hurting schools in one of the world’s most star-studded cities and fostering a climate of fear.

“When you’re at rock bottom, there’s only one place to go,” Kruger said, eyes blazing, as she munched on grapes at home last week.

Samantha Schuyler:

In March of 2026, in a nondescript, 46th-floor office overlooking lower Manhattan, about two dozen members of Scientific American’s editorial staff had gathered in person and online to talk openly about their approach to political coverage.

David Ewalt, the editor in chief, wanted them all to understand something: The magazine was not “kowtowing” to the Trump administration. In fact, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Nation, he asked staff present to “raise your hand if you’ve ever heard me say not to cover a political story.”

Two people raised their hands.

For well over a year, rumors had been circulating among the staff about top-level editors’ rejecting pitches they saw as too political, controversial articles triggering angry phone calls from Scientific American’s corporate owner, and even, on at least one occasion, ownership forcing editors to blunt language critical of the Trump administration.

Then there was what happened to the opinion department. In the first months of the new administration, it had been publishing about 15 pieces a month, many of which criticized Trump’s attacks on scientific research. But after the department published a particularly provocative column in May 2025—“Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship”—management, in what one staffer would later call an “unprecedented” move, had told the department to “pause” publishing new articles until the new editor in chief started.

The opinion department’s hiatus had worried some people more than others—there were legitimate journalistic reasons to want to emphasize breaking news, even if not everyone agreed with them. But by March 2026, nine months into Ewalt’s tenure, the opinion section seemed to be gone for good—and other departments were feeling political pressure, too. That, along with a round of layoffs, a restructuring of the newsroom, and veiled threats about the future of the magazine, had left the staff frustrated and looking for answers. Now that the new editor in chief was finally coming to the full editorial staff “to listen as well as to speak,” as one staffer put it, they began asking questions.

Dana Goldstein:

Alpha School, a fast-growing network of expensive private schools, promises to use A.I. to teach kids twice as much as they would learn in a traditional classroom in half the time. Academics take just two to three morning hours on a computer, freeing up the afternoons for workshops on vibe-coding, public speaking and sports.

The Trump administration has promoted Alpha as a model for “harnessing A.I.” to prepare tomorrow’s work force. Business leaders are talking it up on social media and podcasts, and some have signed up their own children.

For now, Alpha is a small, for-profit network, with lots of buzz and powerful backers, including the software billionaire Joe Liemandt. Its private schools serve about 1,500 students across 50 campuses.

But Alpha has huge ambitions to reach one billion students worldwide through its proprietary “A.I. tutor.”

The plan depends partly on extending its reach into public schools. Already, the Alpha software platform has been quietly adopted by several school districts in Texas and South Carolina, according to a company document reviewed by The New York Times. About 2,600 public school students are now using the software.

To reach more, Alpha needs to prove that its technology works for a broader range of children, beyond its core customer base of affluent, tech-enthusiast families. But as Alpha markets itself to districts and states, a growing number of educators, and former Alpha parents and employees, are questioning the effectiveness of the network’s high-tech, low-book model.

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Yiatin Chu:

BUT I wish the @nytimes would apply the same critical scrutiny to NYC public schools, which spend over $40K per student on average.