School Information System

Danny Westneat: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——

More.

Apollo looks beyond New York as it plans second headquarters.

Steven Yoder:

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

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

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

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

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

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

james Hankins:

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

Noam Scheiber

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

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

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

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

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

John:

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

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

Ivy Exile:

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

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

James Bohn:

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

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

Tim Sands:

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

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

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

Ben Rothove:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Badger Institute:

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

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

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

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

Jasmine Li:

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Oks:

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

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

Joe Gothard:

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

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

——

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

The Economist:

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

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

arctotherium:

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

Ruy Teixeira

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

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

Stewart Baker:

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

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

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

Te-Ping Chen and Lauren Weber:

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

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

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

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

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

Milena Garrone

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Masnic

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

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

Balaji:

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

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

Will Austin:

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

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

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

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

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

Jon Styf:

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

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

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

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

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

Teagan King:

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

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

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

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

———

Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Ron Coleman:

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

Diane Ravitch:

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

He wrote: 

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

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

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

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

Molly O’Shea:

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

——

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

Kenny Carmody:

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

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

Jessica Weinkle:

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

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

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

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

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

More.

Paul Thacker:

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

Juan David Rojas

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

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

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

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

Ashlea Ebeling:

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

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

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

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

John Sailer

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

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

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

[Related: “Belling the DIE Cat”]

Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

Sabine Martin:

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

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

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

Becky Jacobs:

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

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

Kenin M. Spivak:

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

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

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

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

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more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Solomon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More.

The Heartland Post Staff

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

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

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

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

Washington Post:

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

By John Kass

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

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

moment in the Milwaukee Public Schools – MPS union negotiation:

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

MILWAUKEE TEACHERS UNION NEGOTIATION

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

Becket Adams

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

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

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

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

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

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more.

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

Rahim Nathwani

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

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

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

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

Paul Vallas:

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

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

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

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

Jason Morganbesser:

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

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

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

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

Jocelyn Gecker:

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

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

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

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

Christopher Weaver:

Quick Summary

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

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

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

Scott Johnson:

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

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

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

Erin Gretzinger

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

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

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

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

Jim Gash:

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

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

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

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

Colleges have strayed from their core mission

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

Katy Grimes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molly Macek

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

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

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

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

Molly Macek

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

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

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

Presenter: Julie Mead

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

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

WILL:

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

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

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

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Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy.

Notes and links on current Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

Liam Beran

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

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

Shaun Maguire

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

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

considering adding driverless technology to its vehicles

.”

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

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

Jim Polzin:

Both Collins boys went on to play basketball for John Boyle at Madison East High School. Both went on to play hoops in college, Mike at Dartmouth and Steve a three-time captain at Lawrence. Mike became a highly successful venture capitalist, and Boyle figured Steve, an intelligent, hard-working type just like his older brother, would end up choosing a career along those same lines.

Instead, Steve became a mathematics teacher and prep boys basketball coach, producing a highly successful career in his own right. The second part of that path ended last Saturday night at the Kohl Center, where Collins made official what was one of the worst-kept secrets in town: He’s retiring after a remarkable run of 28 seasons at Vel Phillips Memorial High School.

Collins, who will continue teaching until the end of the school year, had decided last summer that it was time to retire. That he helped guide the Spartans to a share of the Big Eight Conference title and an appearance in the WIAA Division 1 state championship game provided an appropriate exclamation point at the end of a career that included many wins and championships.

Maddie Hanna:

At home, Pooja Garg’s children don’t have phones or tablets. She monitors what they watch on Netflix.

But when her sixth grader goes to school in the Lower Merion School District, “he’s gaming all the time,” Garg said — on a school-issued Chromebook. When Garg has volunteered during indoor recess, kids are playing on computers.

“They’re not thinking critically,” Garg said. “They’re on their laptops.”

Garg was among dozens of Lower Merion parents, and some students, who voiced their frustrations with the district’s use of technology at a community meeting Monday at Harriton High School.

The meeting came amid a mounting parental backlash to technology in schools that has been playing out in communities across the region, and country.

“We’re hearing from parents constantly on this issue,” said Alex Bird Becker, a Wallingford-Swarthmore parent who is co-lead of PA Unplugged, a group pushing back on devices in schools.

Jon Keller:

Companies are fleeing, residents are bolting, colleges are closing, hospitals are bleeding, and the federal government is rerouting our funding to red states. Inside the unraveling of the Bay State’s future—and why the clock is ticking for all of us.

It was hardly a surprise. The parade of departures in Massachusetts has become almost routine. New Hampshire politicians spent last year’s holiday season gloating over their latest gifts: business transplants like the 250 employees of power equipment manager SynQor, formerly of Boxborough, and security and healthcare technology company Analogic, gone from Peabody with 500 jobs in tow. Massachusetts’ Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act tracker reported an unusually high toll in January: 905 employees canned at 10 companies, from CRRC (the once-touted Chinese subway-car manufacturer whose woes have stalled MBTA service) and biotech stalwarts Takeda and Thermo Fisher to Zipcar—born in Cambridge in 2000, the kind of startup that Massachusetts used to mint and hold onto—and soup-and-sandwich staple Panera.

Other large layoffs can be traced back to last year. Sarepta Therapeutics slashed nearly 500 Massachusetts jobs, pharmaceutical giant GSK moved operations from Cambridge to Pennsylvania, and Symbotic, a Wilmington-based AI robotics firm—exactly the type of company Massachusetts is supposed to be incubating—cut 400 workers from its Andover facility. In December, Yankee Candle—the South Deerfield icon that built a tourist empire on scented wax—saw its parent company slash 900 jobs and shutter stores nationwide. Another Massachusetts original dramatically downsized.

….

“The truth is that the pipeline is already collapsing. At UMass Chan, Ph.D. admissions plummeted from 73 to 13 in a single year. Harvard is cutting science Ph.D. enrollment in half. Boston University has paused admissions in six fields entirely.”

Liberty Justice Center:

Case Update: A Cook County judge has denied the Chicago Teachers Union’s effort to shut down this case and has ordered discovery to move forward. Plaintiffs will now begin the process of uncovering whether CTU has met its obligations to provide full, unabridged financial disclosures to its members.  

Case Background: On October 8, the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of four Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) members, demanding that CTU produce an audit after failing to do so for four years.

Under CTU’s Constitution and Bylaws, Article VI, Section 1(d), the union is required to “furnish an audited report of the Union which shall be printed in the Union’s publication.” However, CTU has failed to meet this obligation since it published an audit only covering the first half of 2019.

“CTU members deserve to know where their money is going. After four years of silence, it’s time for transparency,” said plaintiff Phillip Weiss, who has been a CTU member since 1998. “This lawsuit isn’t just about us—it’s about the more than 25,000 educators across Chicago who rely on the union to uphold its commitments.”

Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein

When you think of free speech heroes, Joseph E. Foreman might not be the first name that comes to mind. But in an Ohio courtroom last week, Foreman, better known as Afroman, demonstrated in often hilarious fashion why America’s commitment to freedom of speech is the dread of tyrants big and small.
Local sheriff’s deputies raided his rural Ohio home in 2022 with a warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping. Officers smashed in the front door and searched the house with guns drawn. Afroman wasn’t home, but his wife and young children — then 10 and 12 — were. He would later rap: “Did you have to traumatize my kids?” Cops who conducted the search said his songs mocking the raid traumatized them, which is what landed Afroman in court.

If you’re not familiar with his work, Afroman’s music doesn’t suggest he’s a drug kingpin or human trafficker. In fact, he’s best known for his 2000 song “Because I Got High” — which consisted of a list of things he didn’t do, because he got high.

Andrew Mark Miller:

The Michael Morton Act, a Texas law enacted after a wrongful conviction case, requires prosecutors to turn over most evidence in their possession to the defense, including information that could be favorable to the accused.

O’Connell says that the law mandates that “exculpatory mitigating evidence” must be given to the defense.

“It’s clear they didn’t turn over the evidence of why they felt they could indict the city and the city was legitimately scared about this enough that the city went out and hired their own criminal defense attorney,” O’Connell said. “So one of two things is true, either he had the evidence and he didn’t produce it to us, or he didn’t have any basis to indict the city, and he was just threatening them, and that would be official oppression anyway.”

Grayson Sewell:

The West Bend School Board (WBSB) voted unanimously to merge West Bend East and West High Schools, beginning with the 2027-2028 school year, during their meeting Monday night.

The West Bend high schools have been split as East and West for 55 years, beginning with the 1970-71 school year, yet have always shared one campus, making it Wisconsin’s, and one of the country’s, most unique high schools.

Since the two schools in one building have been unveiled, there have been several attempts to put the toothpaste back in the tube and consolidate them back into one high school, but until now those attempts had been unsuccessful.

Thomas Briggs

Later today, the SFUSD Board of Education will vote on a new math placement policy for the district’s middle schools. In 2014, Algebra 1 courses were removed from middle schools as part of a “detracking” effort by the district to address racial gaps in advanced math placement. This idea, of course, was a terrible one. Despite some early calls from proponents about the “promise” of detracking, like this op-ed from Jo Boaler, the end results were predictably terrible. Achievement gaps likely increased, advanced course enrollment fell, and trust in the public schools declined. 

It took nearly ten years and sustained focus from parents and politicians to get the Board to vote in 2024 to restore middle school algebra to all middle schools by the 2026-27 school year. And voters demanded the restoration again a month later, overwhelmingly passing Prop G (~80% in favor), a ballot measure calling for the return of middle school algebra classes. 

What the district is actually proposing to deliver — after all of that — is a system where only 2 of 21 schools have a real pathway to standalone algebra. At the other 19, even students who qualify will need a counselor meeting and signed parental consent to opt out of their normal grade-level math course. 

This result is frustrating, but also hardly surprising: What do you think eliminating Algebra 1 in middle school meant? No math anxiety? No unequal enrollment numbers?

More on Boris Johnson, here.

Johnson’s talk was sponsored by the Tommy G. Thompson Center and Young America’s Foundation.

The event was recorded. I’ll post a link when it appears online.

An aside, I was impressed with the number and substance of student questions along with the Dean of Students strong reminder to all attendees about the first amendment.

—–

Samara Kalk Derby

Hartshorn’s boyfriend Dylan Field, 22, a history major, said, “He’s a pretty divisive figure. And I think anytime you get the chance to see a (former) head of state speak at your school, you take it.”

Chris Jesu Lee

Everyone hates mainstream Asian American culture right now. Everything Everywhere All At Once not only won too much of everything everywhere all at once, but it also did so very Millennially, complete with weepy parental apologies and Reddit humour. The 2nd generation Asian American summit was reached, and the long-standing fight for media representation lost whatever shield of pioneering idealism it once enjoyed.

In late February, there was online fervour over a new short story published in The Georgia Review entitled “Hatchling” by Rucy Cui.3 For anyone familiar with contemporary Asian American literary fiction, “Hatchling” is nothing out of the ordinary. All the familiar tropes are there: a straight Asian American female protagonist, memories of weird and/or abusive parents, interpersonal annoyances involving a white boyfriend, on-the-nose incidents of racism, and a pervasive mood of resigned melancholy. If you asked a squad of 2010s Asian American literary fiction connoisseurs to identify a short story or novel that contains these elements, each could come up with a different but correct answer. Some may call this type of writing diaristic, but I imagine reading someone’s diary would be a riveting experience.

But what was extraordinary about “Hatchling” was the widespread mockery the story received. In the past, only a few Asian American men would’ve complained and then be dismissed as misogynists. However this time, everyone was expressing the same exasperation over why this cliched and boring type of story kept being foisted on us again and again and again. People have eyes and ears, and the truth will be said aloud eventually.

As someone who’d gotten into a lot of trouble in the 2010s for criticizing narratives like “Hatchling,” I found this whole episode extremely cathartic. Back in 2022, Current Affairs published my essay, “Asian American Psycho,”4 which attacked Asian American culture for being capable of only producing stories like “Hatchling.” Based on a previous experience, I was half-expecting the magazine to apologize for, or even pull, my piece due to public outcry. When that didn’t happen, I knew that something had changed.

Mary Spicuzza:

She said she was devastated after losing a 2015 case involving a brother and sister in foster care, one in which she remembers a Dane County judge telling her “the law did not matter” and separated the children.

“I decided then and there that I could do so much better,” Lazar said. “And I decided to run for circuit court in my home county of Waukesha.”

Lazar, 62, now a judge on the Waukesha-based District 2 Court of Appeals, is the conservative candidate in this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race. She is running on a platform of returning “fairness, independence, and integrity to the bench.”

State Supreme Court races are officially nonpartisan, but in recent years have become bitterly polarized. And it’s hard to imagine two candidates who are more polar opposites than Lazar and her opponent, Democratic-backed state Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor. The state’s highest court is currently controlled 4-3 by liberals after years of conservative majorities.

Friends, former coworkers and supporters describe Lazar as hardworking, diligent and thoughtful. But Lazar’s opposition to abortion, her past work at the Wisconsin Department of Justice under Republican leadership, and some of her decisions as a judge have drawn criticism from liberals.

The election is April 7, and early voting started March 24. The winner is elected to a 10-year term.

—-

Corey DeAngelis:

Arizona Senate passed a bill requiring school districts to spend at least 60% of their operational funding on classroom instruction and teachers.

The vote was 16 to 12.

All Democrats voted against it.

——

Jill Barshay:

Spoke with @arneduncan at @aefpweb in Chicago last week on how Democrats lost parents when it comes to education.

His take: Covid closures + no clear vision = opening for GOP to tap into fears.

His Rx: stand for academic excellence + accountability in school choice.

——-

Scott Manley:

Per pupil spending has more than doubled since 2000. We have more money, fewer kids to educate, and a bloated education bureaucracy that grew by more than 8,000 non-instructional staff in our schools. High property taxes are a choice, and districts have chosen poorly.

Jeremy Louwerse

Staff saw bumper pay packets and brought in too many new workers for the revenue it was generating, authorities said.

Meanwhile the district has seen student enrollment dwindle from 16,000 in 2016 to under 12,000 last year across 24 schools in the region.

In a stark warning, Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, told the school in a January board meeting: “You have some serious cash issues.”

He added: “Far more serious than any other district in the state. I don’t understand why you are always out of cash.”

Samuel Abrams:

When the College Board announced, in the summer of 2002, that it would stop “flagging” the test scores of students who were given special accommodations for the SAT, the gold standard exam for college admission, disability advocates were thrilled. “A triumphant day for millions of people with dyslexia and other disabilities,” exclaimed Thomas Viall, the executive director of the International Dyslexia Association. “With the -scarlet letter’ gone, people with disabilities are given the chance to succeed, based on their abilities.”

For years the College Board had placed a mark alongside the test scores of students who were given special accommodations. That could mean Braille for the blind or appropriate tools for the physically disabled, but for the most part the special arrangement meant more, even unlimited, time to take the test.

Indeed, the scarlet letter disappeared in October of 2003, but not everyone was so sanguine about the possible consequences. Miriam Freedman, an attorney specializing in issues of testing, standards, and students with disabilities, expressed the concern of many academics and practitioners (“Disabling the SAT,” Education Next, Fall 2003) that the deflagging decision would drive requests for special accommodations skyward as more students saw an opportunity to secure an advantage without anyone knowing it.

Corrinne Hess:

The 1776 Project PAC was launched in 2021, with financial backing from GOP megadonor and Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, owner of Pleasant Prairie-based Uline, to support school board candidates who said they would overturn the teaching of “critical race theory.”

Girdusky told WPR he started the group because schools were closed during the pandemic. 

“Initially I focused on trying to open schools because it was poor for learning,” Girdusky said. “And then I started really working on trying to get a better curriculum in education.” 

Wisconsin is one of a handful of states The 1776 Project PAC has focused on. Girdusky says that’s because of the strong parent groups based here who want to improve public education. 

“I know the conservatives are all lumped in with the voucher system but I think public education serves an important thing not only for local communities, but for the culture as well,” he said. “I’ve seen members do really interesting, vibrant things, like how to get Singapore math into schools, or cellphone banning.”

——-

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Matthew Yglesias

A parent’s complaint about his child’s experience with a popular piece of education technology called i-Ready went viral recently, seemingly earning applause from two of the major education schools of thought: parents upset that schoolwork isn’t challenging enough for their kids and people on the left upset about the education reform consensus of the Bush/Obama years. 

I was a little taken aback by this because my son’s school uses i-Ready and, while he has various complaints in life, it has never been a big source of grievance for him. 

So I gave him Ryan Moulton’s article to read. He offered to write a whole response column himself, but I decided to stay on the safe side of child labor laws and do some reporting on his views rather than have him write the take. 

Broadly speaking, I would say Moulton’s characterization of his family’s experience with i-Ready did resonate with my kid; he just saw the irksome parts as less irksome,1 and he felt the adaptive features were not as inept as depicted. Generally speaking, i-Ready time is not his favorite thing about school, but he doesn’t see it as this monstrous imposition.

Ben Cohen:

There has never been a better time to sell parents all the stuff their kids need to play sports. Families are now shelling out more than $40 billion every year on children’s sports activities, according to Aspen Institute research. As much as they may rant about the intensity, time commitments and increasingly absurd economy of youth sports, there is no way to escape it—or avoid their nearest Dick’s Sporting Goods. 

As it turns out, youth sports have been very good to Dick’s. Over the past decade, the company’s revenue has roughly doubled. Last year, it generated a record $14.1 billion in sales. Instead of shopping online or schlepping kids to multiple stores, parents just stop by Dick’s for everything they need.

Mass Daily News:

Graduation rates up 22% while test scores drop — BPS banned failing grades and spent $120K on ‘equitable grading’ consultants

Mayor Michelle Wu took a victory lap over Boston Public Schools’ highest graduation rate in district history. A new analysis says the numbers are a mirage.

BPS posted an 81.3 percent four-year graduation rate for 2025, up from 59.1 percent in 2006, according to recently released data. Wu insisted the district isn’t “lowering any expectations” or “moving the goalposts and making it easier for people to get by.”

But a detailed analysis published by City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, lays out a case that the graduation rate surge has come not from students learning more — but from the district making it easier to pass.

The test scores tell a different story

While graduation rates have climbed, SAT scores for BPS students have remained flat. The average BPS student hovers around the College Board’s college-readiness benchmarks, with many falling below.

The gap is worse for the students the district claims to be helping most.

Low-income students saw their graduation rate rise by 12 percent between 2017 and 2025. Their math scores dropped by 5 percent over the same period.

——-

A handful of rich folks are basically bankrolling MA.

@MassGovernor & @MassDems crushing the rest of us.

Top 1% (32,800 people) → 38.2% of all MA income taxes
Top 5% (164K people) → 58.8%
Top 10% (328K people) → 69.8%
Bottom 50% (1.64M people) → 3.9% — avg income $32,188

Quinton Klabon:

🚨NEW 2023 NATIONAL SCHOOL SPENDING DATA🚨
🎉🥳🎉

523 districts over 15,000 students
Wisconsin rank/percentile:

Racine: 25th/95th
Milwaukee: 56th/89th
Madison: 58th/89th
Green Bay: 62nd/88th
Kenosha: 154th/70th
Appleton: 178th/66th

——-

3931 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

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

T Greer:

That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.”2The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.3

The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.

Nicholas Carr

Now that we’ve begun to talk of MOOCs retrospectively, the time has come to update my previously published survey of the history of hype and wishful thinking that has for more than a century surrounded technologies for automating education by replacing teachers and classrooms with machines and media. I am adding a new entry to the list. I suspect it won’t be the last addition.

Mail: Around 1885, Yale professor William Rainey Harper, a pioneer of teaching-by-post, said, “The student who has prepared a certain number of lessons in the correspondence school knows more of the subject treated in those lessons, and knows it better, than the student who has covered the same ground in the classroom.” Soon, he predicted, “the work done by correspondence will be greater in amount than that done in the class-rooms of our academies and colleges.”

Phonograph: In an 1878 article on “practical uses of the phonograph,” the New York Times predicted that the phonograph would be used “in the school-room in training children to read properly without the personal attention of the teacher; in teaching them to spell correctly, and in conveying any lesson to be acquired by study and memory. In short, a school may almost be conducted by machinery.”

Movies: “It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture,” proclaimed Thomas Edison in 1913. “Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years.”

Radio: In 1927, the University of Iowa declared that “it is no imaginary dream to picture the school of tomorrow as an entirely different institution from that of today, because of the use of radio in teaching.”

Colin Redemer:

The American university is broken. The people running the universities know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts to make sure you can’t do anything about it.

The story has been told so many times in conservative circles that retelling it risks being a bore: William F. Buckley warned us in 1951 about the free fall that had already begun in higher education. Allan Bloom sounded the alarm in 1987. Ross Douthat offered his critique in 2005. A generation of conservatives has poured time, treasure, and talent into reforming higher ed. We’ve funded centers, endowed chairs, launched institutes, filed lawsuits, and written enough op-eds to fill the Library of Alexandria. Yet still—still—the average graduate of an American university is more likely to be able to explain the nuances of “systemic oppression” than to tell you who wrote The Federalist Papers.

That should be a sign that the old approach, whatever its merits, was fundamentally wrong—not because the diagnosis was wrong, but because the strategy was. As Aristotle says, we should deliberate about means, not ends. Conservatives have been trying to reform the university from within a system that is designed, at every level, to resist exactly the kind of reformation we seek. It is time to stop playing a rigged game and build our own system.

The Unassailable Fortress

To understand why reforming higher education is so difficult, you must first understand what the American university used to be. It was once a place where the Puritan Cotton Mather could write lovingly about Harvard’s mission to train ministers for the Reformed churches of New England. Now Harvard is dead, as the departure of James Hankins clarifies. What we have now is something else entirely.

Jeff Hamilton

With its soft lighting and cosy couches, the classroom hangout at the River East-Transcona School Division high school is supposed to be a safe space for students to decompress.

But that changed one Monday in January.

That day, after the supervising teacher had left the room, a teenage girl says she was sitting on the floor with her back against a love seat when a much larger male student sat down on the cushion directly behind her, boxing her in between his knees.

She said he reached over and forced his hands beneath her shirt, grabbing her breasts for several minutes while she froze and did not speak or move.

“I was too scared to say anything.”

A month later, sitting in her living room surrounded by family members, the girl recounts what happened.

The alleged assault was traumatic enough, the girl and her family say, but the response from school administrators and senior division staff felt like betrayal.

CD Howe

Strong math skills are essential for careers that drive Canada’s economy, including technology, artificial intelligence, finance, and data science. To remain globally competitive and address long-term income gaps, improving math achievement among Canadian students must be a national priority.

The link between early math skills and later academic success is well established (Duncan et al. 2011; Siegler et al. 2012). Early math achievement also correlates positively with future career earnings. According to Werner et al. (2024), math achievement in childhood is a better predictor of adult earnings at age 30 than reading, health, or social-emotional skills. These effects were observed across all demographic groups.

Canada ranked in the top 10 in math on the 2022 PISA survey, an international OECD assessment of 15-year-olds. However, ranking near the top of a falling curve does not imply that all is well. Math achievement has been falling for well over a decade, beginning well before the COVID-19 pandemic. More Canadian students now struggle in math, fewer excel, and in several provinces, the decline is roughly equivalent to two or more years of schooling.

The OECD estimates that a 20-point drop on PISA roughly equates to about one year of learning (OECD 2023). Math scores in all provinces declined more than 20 points since 2003. Seven provinces experienced declines of over 40 points,¹ representing approximately two years of lost learning, while the 58-point drop in Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador is close to three years.

Dashboard link:

Hi Kid:

——-

And in case you hear something about traditional district schools being underfunded, ask yourself: Is record-high per-pupil spending not enough? If $18,592 per child isn’t enough, what dollar figure would be?

——-

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

Jay Rogers:

“When the address you give the Secretary of State is a law office, and the address you give your mortgage lender is Washington, and the address you give Beijing-linked donors is wherever the money flows—your relationship with California is transactional.”

——-

Somewhat related: DPI lawyer Ben Jones who oversaw sexual harassment issues appointed to judicial seat.

Danielle DuClos:

He oversaw the department’s legal strategy and educator misconduct investigations. Jones has also worked in private practice representing school districts and municipalities.

——-

Governor Evers appointed Jones to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2025. Happily, we have a competitive election: Huma Ahsan.

I’m glad reporter DuClos is covering former DPI lawyer Jones’ activities.

Ben Henry:

Fewer workers mean a drop in income tax, which is the state’s main revenue source.

“It’s very serious. They’re all very important things,” said Tyler Schipper, an economics professor at the University of St. Thomas emphasized about the impacts of fewer workers on the tax base.

“How do you get people to come here, how do you get corporations to open up here and hire people,” he added about the challenges to reverse this trend.

Schipper also said states typically have a couple of options to address this issue — adjust the budget, which could lead to job and program cuts, and increase taxes. 

Republican Sen. Eric Pratt from Prior Lake expressed concern about the burden on taxpayers. 

“They absolutely should [be worried]. Because not only might we see a drop in income tax, but we could potentially see a drop in business tax collections too,” Sen. Pratt said.

Chris Rickert:

Judges and judicial candidates, for example, are barred from publicly endorsing or speaking on behalf of a party’s candidates or platforms. They are also not supposed to “participate in the affairs, caucuses, promotions, platforms, endorsements, conventions, or activities of a political party or of a candidate for partisan office.”

Marta Jewson:

Update: After publication, Lamplighter confirmed KIPP’s board voted on the 3-page resolution at its March 12 meeting. The certificated copy submitted to the Orleans Parish School Board indicates the resolution was prepared before the meeting.

Frederick Douglass High School students, parents and staff could not have known KIPP New Orleans Schools would vote to shutter the historic St. Claude Avenue building at what appeared to be a routine monthly board meeting last week. 

The main agenda item for the 9-school charter network’s public meeting stated simply: “CEO Report.” The only vote listed was a monotonous meeting minute approval.

But KIPP New Orleans voted to shutter a 600-student school that day. 

That’s problematic, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press attorney Virginia Harnick said in an interview.

“It’s jammed into a CEO report. It’s so opaque — and just for ‘information’ the public has no idea what’s going on,” Harnick said. “They have no idea that a vote is going to be heard about a school closure and that the vote is going to move students.”

In what was scheduled as a 5-minute report, CEO Rhonda Kalifey-Aluise, must have delivered seismic news to prompt the charter board to take up a school closure vote. 

Martha Gimbel

As the debate about our AI future continues to rage, I find myself wondering if we’re all going to become like the main character in my favorite 19th century novel, North and South. The heroine is a young woman during the Industrial Revolution who has to adjust to a whole new way of thinking and living and a host of new societal norms. Sound familiar?

Every day we read about the potentially huge effects AI will have on the labor market, the economy and society. Although many people speak about the future with certainty, we don’t really know what’s to come. People thought the invention of the cotton gin would finally help end slavery. In fact, it massively increased it. On the other hand, weavers on the eve of the Industrial Revolution were right that their livelihood would be decimated by the introduction of “the new machinery.”

It’s too soon to say with any confidence what effect AI will have on the labor market (or the economy or society). Many people claim it’s already leading to job losses, but the best evidence we have suggests that hasn’t started yet. That doesn’t mean we should ignore it or look away — but it does suggest we might be better served examining lessons from the past than merely speculating about the future. As Winston Churchill once said, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

If you want to feel what living through a massive technological shock and its aftermath looked like, it’s time to take a step back from the large language models and read some of the great novels of the Industrial Revolution.

The White-Collar Weavers

Today’s conversation about the labor markets and AI often proceeds as if we’ve never seen this sort of shiftbefore. In particular, people focus on the effect the AI boom may have on higher-wage workers, rather than the lower- or middle-wage jobs that were most affected by the earlier disruptions of computers and automation. However, that dynamic isn’t new. Technological change has altered “high-quality” jobs before.

Jerry Neumann:

around 1500, the Swiss physician Paracelsus noticed that Galenic [medical] treatments did not actually make patients better, and that some treatments—like mercury for syphilis—worked even though they made no sense within humoral theory. Paracelsus began to advocate listening to evidence rather than deferring to the authority of the long dead: “The patients are your textbook, the sickbed is your study.” In 1527, he even staged a public burning of Galen’s work. His vision took centuries to take hold—nearly 300 years later, George Washington died after an aggressive bloodletting—because people are more inclined to believe neat and simple stories like Galen’s than to confront messy and complex reality.

Paracelsus started with what worked and followed that to why. First-principles thinkers start with a hypothesized “why” and then insist it works, regardless of the results. Are our modern entrepreneurship thinkers more like Paracelsus, driven by evidence? Or more like Galen, sustained by the elegance of their own story? In the name of science, let’s look at the evidence.

Buckley Institute:

The DEI-related staff to student ratios are also significant. Across all of Yale, there are 13.4 per 1,000 students, with the DEI student to staff ratio reaching peaks of 53.6 per 1,000 students in the School of Medicine and 23.6 in the School of Public Health.

In a telling example, the School of Public Health launched an Activist in Residence Program in 2022. The most recently appointed activist in residence is now referred to as “Community Scholar” and remains on the School of Public Health staff.

Brian T. Fitzpatrick:

I have been a member of the law faculty at Vanderbilt University for nearly twenty years. Even though my faculty has grown over that time, there are fewer conservatives now than when I joined. We are down to four—a mere ten percent or so of the tenure-track faculty—and two of the four are nearly 80. Remarkably, that probably makes us the most ideologically diverse department in the entire University.

Everywhere I turn, I hear university leaders saying we need more conservatives in academia. There is little doubt anymore that they are right: scholars need skeptics to point out research weaknesses; students need provocateurs to help them engage with unfamiliar ideas; we all need balanced academic studies to help us make good public policy. But what I do not hear from many of these leaders is how they are going to do it. I have been thinking about this for many years, and I have some bad news: it is going to be difficult. I canvass the possibilities below and propose massive external pressure as the most promising course. But, first, it may be illuminating to break the problem down into its components: supply and demand.

The Supply Problem

The supply problem is that very few conservatives want to go into academia. I don’t blame them. Conservatives are discriminated against at every level. At the bottom, I have seen my colleagues refuse to interview an amazing legal scholar for a job because he went to a very conservative undergraduate institution when he was 18 years old. In the middle, a conservative member of my tenure-track faculty has not led any of our dozen or so academic programs—and that’s where the money is—in over fifteen years. At the top, how many university academic leaders are conservative? To my knowledge, there are none at my university and very, very few anywhere else: a former law clerk to Justice Scalia was made the provost at Harvard—after he left the Republican Party.

John Hindraker:

Again, no surprises. High-tax states are collapsing before our eyes, and, of course, it is the states with the most population that lose the most net income.

However, I would point out one anomaly: the awful performance of Minnesota. Minnesota lost $1.5 billion of income in 2023, almost the same as Ohio. But Ohio has more than twice Minnesota’s population. Likewise, Minnesota lost one and one half times the net income of Michigan, but Michigan’s population, too, is close to double that of Minnesota. So on a per capita basis, only Maryland shares the basement with Minnesota. Per capita, even the disaster that is Gavin Newsom’s California rates only slightly worse than Minnesota.

Maybe someone will tell Minnesota voters about this between now and the Fall.

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🔴 Red states gained $37.2 billion in income and 492k filers.
🔵 Blue states lost ~$40.8B and 520k filers.

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But now, looking at the deficits caused by absurd spending, and tax policies accelerating revenue erosion, I can say avoid all General Obligation muni’s in California, Illinois & New York.

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I got this email yesterday from CA State Board of Equalization, the new California sales tax rates effective April 1st.

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Here is the satellite view of JB Pritzker’s home away from home, away from Illinois, indeed away from the US, but near his billions in an offshore tax haven

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Voting with your feet.

And.

Paul Runko:

So it’s time for K-12 public education to have a “Moneyball” moment. Here’s the “stats” that should matter when schools construct their teacher rosters:

1. Classroom Management

Students can’t learn if they are constantly distracted by their peers or chaos in the classroom. Principals, administrators, and school board members can easily observe a teacher’s classroom management skills by spending just 10 minutes looking through the classroom door window. Teachers trained well in classroom management and who maintain control of their classrooms will produce better student outcomes and stronger academic results.

2. Literacy Background

All teachers should have experience incorporating reading instruction into their classrooms. Yes, even the physical education teachers. The literary crisis in America is so severe that every subject must reinforce students’ reading ability. When hiring teachers in any subject, hiring managers should prioritize candidates with literacy instruction training who have demonstrated their ability to apply those principles. 

3. Direct Instruction

Students learn best by direct instruction of a knowledge-rich curriculum. While this point is still debated, it’s unclear why. Proponents of education fads like “inquiry-based learning” make interesting arguments against direct instruction but fail to provide evidence for abandoning it. Teachers joining schools should be trained in direct instruction and committed to using it for all students.

4. Subject Area Expertise

All teachers should know the subject that they are teaching. It may sound obvious, but the truth is that some do not. Teacher shortages and other factors can result in educators being hired to teach an unfamiliar subject and teacher education programs that emphasize pedagogy over content, combined with lack of rigor in university course content, often leave many new teachers unprepared for public school classrooms.

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Fast Lane Literacy

1998! Money and school performance.

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Legislative Letter to Jill Underly on Wisconsin Literacy

Greg Lukianoff:

Afroman reminds the world that you should be able to mock power without fear in this country, because we are a free people. @TheFIREorg exists because that’s not always true in practice, but I’d like to thank @ogafroman for reminding Americans that he wasn’t just standing up for his own rights. The right to dissent belongs to us all.

Matt Mahan:

We spend 55% more per student than Mississippi — and get worse outcomes. 85% of Mississippi’s third graders read at grade level. In California, it’s just 49%. Clearly, the question shouldn’t be how we spend more — the question should be how we spend better so that our kids can succeed.

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Wisconsin early literacy map.

Leigh Searcy:

Goodman has not been charged with criminal wrongdoing. She is accused of abusing her office in a way that breaks the public’s trust. Six cases are cited in the articles of impeachment, including one that involves a fatal hit-and-run.

Before the vote, some house Democrats spoke up and said there has been no showing of a high misdemeanor or crime in office. House Minority Leader Pamela Stevenson questioned the articles of impeachment.

“The standard has not been met here – where is the crime?” Stevenson said.

Republican Jason Nemes, who chaired the impeachment committee, said Goodman has not followed the law.

“If you say the law says this but I’m going to do that instead then you do not deserve the black robe that you have been entrusted with,” Nemes said.

On Monday, Goodman defended her decisions and said some are seeking impeachment because they disagree with her rulings. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said Thursday that impeaching a judge would set a dangerous precedent.

The resolution outlines five Articles of Impeachment against Goodman. The articles charge her with:

• Abusing the powers of her office;
• Defying binding precedents established by the highest courts of the Commonwealth;
• Defying statutes enacted by the General Assembly and rules of the Kentucky Court of Justice; and
• Interfering with the rights and powers of the grand jury, trial court jurors, and attorneys to perform their roles.

Following the adoption of the resolution, the Speaker of the House will appoint a committee and staff to prosecute the articles. The chair of that committee is required to lay the Articles of Impeachment before the Kentucky Senate within five days.

Jonathan Turley:

As a Chicago native, I have watched my home city unravel under the policies of Mayor Brandon Johnson and the ultra-left city council. Controlled by groups like the teachers’ union, the city has continued to spend lavishly on progressive causes and bloated pension funds while destroying its own economy. The city has a more than $1 billion budget gap, with a roughly $150 million deficit. Roughly, two-fifths of the budget is now going toward debt service and pension costs. The city council is following a familiar death spiral. It is turning to higher taxes against the very industries that it needs to drive the economy. That now includes a roughly 20 percent tourist tax on hotels. These politicians are doing what the Chicago fire failed to achieve: kill a major city.

Johnson has been pushing for irresponsible measures to grab cash now and pay later schemes. Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) lost a fight to secure a $200 million loan to avoid having to reduce the budget or staff. Johnson and the union pushed for a corporate “head tax.” Barely able to convince many companies to stay in the state, Chicago would actually make it more costly to hire Chicagoans with an additional $ 21-per-employee tax.

The city council just approved an $830 million borrowing plan to finance infrastructure projects by selling bonds. Notably, the council had to bar Johnson from giving the money to the teachers’ union, given his history of dependency on the union. However, the bond will now make the debt crisis even more acute. The bond agreement allows someone else to pay the massive accrued debt after 20 years.

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Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker has $pent million$ on Wisconsin Candidates.

Patrick Denice, and Shahar Dangur-Levy

Using student-level transcript data and information about instructional mode among public high school students in Massachusetts, this study examines the impact of disruptions to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ math coursetaking trajectories. We find that rates of advancement (that is, of taking a higher-level math course in one year compared to the prior year) decreased during the 2020-21 school year—especially among students who spent a greater share of the year in remote instruction. Findings also reveal widening race-based and socioeconomic gaps in math advancement at higher levels of remote instruction. These disruptions contribute to stratification in two ways: students who do not advance in one grade level are less likely to attain higher levels of math in high school generally, and the variation in disruption by race and socioeconomic status means some students fell even further behind in subsequent grades.

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more.