School Information System

Neetu Arnold:

🧵I disagree w/the NYT framing that Republicans and Democrats have equally given up on student learning

At the state level, red states are tackling student achievement; blue states are struggling b/c “equity”

Compare the recent policy decisions in red and blue states:

Natalie Riediger, Darja Barr and Anna Stokke:

As university professors and parents, we were pleased to hear that Manitoba Education has reinstated percentage reporting when assessing high school students rather than vague terms, such as “emerging.” And consequently, we were disappointed, but not surprised, to read John Wiens’ Think Tank op-ed — Grading by percentage is failing our students, May 7 — critiquing the use of percentage grades.

Paul Craig Roberts:

I think we are going to find out also that the organizations benefitting from what the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concludes is $521,000,000,000 worth of larceny annually in the federal budget have squatters’ rights in the larceny.  The theft has gone on for so long and is so institutionalized that the beneficiaries of the fraud regard it as a property right.  In effect, those who have been defrauding us now have squatters’ rights in the fraud.

Two articles in the current issue of the City Journal address this serious matter. Steven Malanga brings to our attention that the federal budget funds anti-poverty, community building, social welfare, anti-crime and other such programs that never produce any results but continue to run for decades.  Congress funds these programs without even requiring that criteria be established for assessing their success. It seems the money mainly goes for building political machines and the wealth of local politicians primarily for the Democrats who control the inner cities.

Heather Mac Donald exposes the facts of the National Institutes of Health’s funding of medical research.  The NIH has been paying the universities where the research is conducted a cover charge equal to 69% of the grant to reimburse the universities for the cost of their infrastructure that supports the research. Universities are each receiving hundreds of million of dollars in “indirect funding” to pay for the university’s infrastructure used in the research.

But what does the cover charge really pay for?  It seems it pays for the extraordinary expansion of the size and scope of the administrative bureaucracy. There seem to be endless vice presidents, assistant and vice provosts, and associate deans whose jobs are to police language, thought, speech, political correctness and provide emotional comfort to those in need. 

Aiden Wirth:

The student organization “Sex Out Loud” was approved for almost $136,000 in allocatable funding for the 2025-2026 school year by ASM’s Student Services Finance Committee, an increase of more than $8,000 from the previous year.

Sex Out Loud’s website reports that its mission is to “promote healthy sexuality through sex-positive education and activism.” The first photo on the homepage is of a group of students holding sex toys, one of whom is simulating oral sex on a fake vulva.

Rory Madden, the chair of Sex Out Loud, denied an interview request from The Madison Federalist. However, she provided an email response to some questions. She confirmed that Sex Out Loud is “solely funded by the General Student Services Fund,” which comes from segregated fees that UW-Madison students are required to pay.

The SOL website has an order form that allows any student to request condoms, various types of lubricant, gloves, dental dams, Plan B, and pregnancy tests. Madden said the “online order form is frequently used by students, and anyone is welcome to visit our office in person to collect supplies.”

The Plan B and pregnancy tests are provided by Planned Parenthood, but SOL does not receive other “consistent supply donations.”

Simon Kuper:

I see the effects on my daughter, now in her first year at a British university. She’s having a wonderful academic experience, at least when the university operates. She has just started a five-month period without any teaching, presumably because of budget cuts. I used to think that the UK’s much-vaunted undergraduate degree, supposedly three years long, was really just 18 months given the long holidays. It’s now less than that.

Bill and Christie-Lee Hansberry

‘Streaming’ is a dirty word in education, but so was ‘phonics’ once upon a time. We think that general beliefs about streaming (ability grouping) deserves a rethink. What if we consider ability grouping from a standpoint of targeted reading and spelling instruction? Does differentiation offer what it promises, or is it a poor remedy for low-quality teaching and high-variance curriculum? And, given the huge variance of basic literacy skills in most Australian classrooms, can we really teach all students reading and spelling at grade level?

I’m Streaming has a dark past. In the 1950s and 1960s, IQ testing was used to organise (stream) students into set groups who would receive different academic programs from that point on. Groups in the upper stream would have access to highly academic content, the best teachers and even the best resources. At the same time, lower-streamed students could receive the opposite, which had a devastating and compounding impact on the futures of many. Like it or not, IQ tests have incredible predictive power for academic achievement, but they should never have been used in this limiting way. Research in the 1960s and 1970s highlighted the obvious problems that resulted from IQ-based streaming. Educators became understandably wary of any deterministic practice that could lock students into an educational trajectory based on test results. The long-gone days of IQ streaming in schools casts a long shadow, causing apprehension among educators today about any form of ability grouping, and standardised testing for that matter. The Facebook feed of any educator is full of quotes hyperventilating about how ‘children aren’t test scores’. We agree, they are not.   

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Related:

Madison’s ongoing one size fits all experiments, English 10

Nicholas Hatcher:

The investor and Harvard alum on CNBC Monday criticized Harvard Corporation’s leadership, including senior fellow Penny Pritzker. “It’s time for a change in leadership in the board at Harvard,” Ackman said.

President Trump renewed his threat to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status on Friday, saying in a Truth Social post, “It’s what they deserve!” An administration official said the president’s post wasn’t a formal directive to the Internal Revenue Service to take action.

The threat prompted condemnation from Harvard President Alan Garber, who called the move “highly illegal” and “destructive to Harvard.”

“Tax exempt status is granted to educational institutions to enable them to successfully carry out their mission of education and, for research universities, of research,” Garber told The Wall Street Journal on Friday. “Obviously that would be severely impaired if we were to lose our tax exempt status.”

Ackman, who endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, has been critical of the president’s trade war.

The heat is rising on Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow on Harvard’s powerful governing board

Anna Merod:

A threat actor has contacted multiple school districts demanding payments related to student and staff data stolen in a December breach.

Dive Brief:

• Threat actors are trying to extort some public schools by threatening them with teacher and student information stolen in a December 2024 data breach of PowerSchool’s Student Information System, according to recent statements from the ed tech software provider and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. 
• PowerSchool confirmed on Wednesday that it paid a ransom to threat actors shortly after the Dec. 28, 2024, data breach. The company added that it believes the threat actors seeking ransoms from schools are using the same compromised data set from the December incident, which included student and staff names, contact information, some Social Security numbers, medical notes and a limited number of passwords. 
• While PowerSchool’s December data breach appeared to impact a wide range of school districts across North America, a spokesperson on Friday told K-12 Dive that the threat actors have only contacted four school districts. Schools in locations ranging from North Carolina to Toronto began to report receiving such ransom threats this week. 

Ben Roche:

Through a little political laundering — sorry, consulting — firm called Swift Public Affairs (also in Portland), the Raindrop Fund funneled a whopping $45,000 into Linn United PAC, a political group that’s now championing three candidates: Stephanie Lunceford, Kris McLaughlin, and Kristopher Schendel. If you’re wondering what $45,000 buys you in a school board race, the answer is: a lot. $28,900 for Polling, Mailers, digital ads, polished messaging, and maybe even a few consultants whispering strategy tips into candidates’ ears.

But why does a Portland-based fund care about a mid-sized school district in Linn County? Here’s a hint: it’s not because they’re passionate about improving local reading scores. The Oregon Raindrop Fund has a track record of bankrolling progressive causes, from climate campaigns to ballot initiatives that align neatly with Democratic Party priorities. Their goal isn’t better math instruction; it’s ideological conquest, one school board at a time.

Let’s be blunt: this isn’t grassroots. This is AstroTurf.

Meanwhile, as the GAPS board turns into a political football field, Oregon’s academic performance is circling the drain. The state ranks 45th or worsenationally in reading and math, despite having some of the highest per-student funding in the country. It’s like setting piles of cash on fire and then blaming the smoke for the lack of oxygen.

And what’s replacing academic rigor? A parade of social justice initiatives, gender theory debates, and activism that belongs in a university seminar, not a third-grade classroom. Parents looking for accountability and reading proficiency are getting lectures about pronouns instead.

Kimberly Wethal:

The School of Education won’t be accepting applications for a third cohort in 2026, Wilkerson said.

“We were essentially being incentivized by the federal government to try these partnerships out, and the idea that if you build a partnership and you have some investment on the front end, that it might be able to be sustained in the future,” Wilkerson said. “The part that feels wasteful to me is we’re working, we’re getting it up and going, and then to have the support withdrawn feels just unnecessarily disruptive.”

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Redistributed federal taxpayer funds and University Governance

Sophia Damian:

The original purpose of the university was simple: the academic formation of its students. Over the past several decades, however, society’s perception of higher-education institutions has grown to encompass numerous aspects of student development, including career preparation. A similar shift has occurred on a smaller scale where the role of professors is concerned. Though their main responsibility is to guide students’ academic growth, professors are increasingly expected to fill the role of career mentor. Surveys conducted by Inside Higher Edhave found that a significant percentage of students and faculty believe that mentorship is a role that professors ought to fill. Given their background and position as academics, are professors equipped to offer such guidance to students?

A 2024 Student Voice survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 55 percent of students think that professors are “at least partly responsible” for acting as mentors. This number increases to 57 percent when limited to students aged 18-24 and to 67 percent when limited to students attending private, nonprofit institutions. Administrators and student-success professionals seem similarly compelled by the idea, with 51 percent of “student-success professionals” and 65 percent of administrators at private, nonprofit schools agreeing that professors share at least some responsibility for mentorship.

Madison Education Partnership:

When we dig deeper on summative and formative exams, we find extreme inequities in performance by student demographic group and in specific content areas. For example, in 6th grade, the typical student from a low-income family is two or more grade levels behind in algebra and in numbers and operations while the typical student not from a low-income family is at the lower end of on grade level. The typical student who identifies as White in MMSD scores at or above grade level in 6 th grade, compared to only four in one hundred students who identify as Black and ten in one hundred students who identify as Latinx.

While MMSD trends are similar to those of other districts in the state, we still believe MMSD can raise growth and achievement in middle school math and recognize that MMSD has taken steps in that direction. The District implemented standards-aligned curriculum with supporting assessments; professional learning for educators and instructional coaches; K-5 implementation learning walks focused on identifying implementation of core resources and high-leverage instructional practices; and continued acceleration of learning opportunities in middle school grades. While the pandemic exacerbated inequities in mathematics achievement, the low levels of achievement, and declines in achievement, precede the pandemic. District leaders have taken steps to accelerate growth, including partnering with MEP and UW-Madison to implement a high-quality middle school tutoring;aligning middle school math course sequences across schools; and convening a math advisory committee driven by school-based and central office staff to set a vision for strong math instruction, identify levers for change and enact promising practices to raise achievement.

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How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

John Carter:

This explains two related phenomena, both much deplored by feminists, who are in the business of ignoring human instinct.

The first is male flight: the tendency of male involvement in a given profession, occupation, institution, or industry to drop precipitously once a certain threshold of female involvement is surpassed.

The second is the low value assigned to women’s work.

Occupations seen as a predominantly masculine are almost invariably perceived – by both men and women – as conferring a certain intrinsic status, whether high or low. Garbagemen, oil rig roughnecks, firemen, special forces operators, and private equity sharks are all male-dominated occupations, and each occupies a distinct plane of social status. Conversely, social status being a primary attribute of male sexual allure, a profession in which women predominate is unable to confer status, by definition. To say that female professions are ‘low status’ is a category error; they’re simply outside of the status hierarchy. A kindergarten teacher is not really of higher or lower status than a plumber or a stock broker, because neither the plumber nor the stock broker will care very much about what she does before asking her out on a date; the kindergarten teacher, however, will care a great deal about which man is a plumber, and which a stock broker.

The preceding paragraph implicitly assumed a female kindergarten teacher. There are, of course, a very small number of male kindergarten teachers, may Thor have mercy on their souls. Men who work in occupations perceived as predominantly female pay a steep sexual penalty. Their lifetime odds of marriage decline as compared to men who work in sexually neutral or male-dominated professions; a woman’s success in marriage is wholly unaffected by working in a male-dominant field. This is intuitively obvious, but I was able to dig up a study that apparently quantified this.

The flood of women into the workforce over the last several generations has led to several professions switching from male-dominated to female-dominated – for example, high school teachers, nurses, and veterinarians were all, almost within living memory, masculine vocations. After becoming feminine occupations, in every single case, those professions immediately plummeted in status. Men who entered them came to be thought of us somehow defective; what else is one to conclude about a man who chooses to compete with women, rather than with his peers? This is certainly not always fair. There is nothing necessarily defective about being a male high school teacher. All of my favourite teachers in high school were men. I have friends who work as high school teachers, whom I respect greatly, not least because someone has to be there to set a good example for our lost and abandoned boys; on that note, if you have not yet read this excellent piece from the Librarian of Celaeno, I implore you to do so, for it is thematically relevant to the topic at hand:

Katie Roiphe:

I would basically summarize my approach to all practical money matters as some combination of hope and avoidance. I think I learned what a 529 savings plan was when my daughter went to college and I realized that I didn’t have one.

When I was growing up in a house full of books, my otherwise fantastic mother somehow conveyed the message that it was vulgar to talk or even really think about money. My mother cared more about a good sentence than anything you could buy. If something broke in our house with two dogs, two cats and five children, she would say, “It’s just a material object.”

Because of all this, I somehow missed the life lesson that in order to not think about money you have to have enough of it. Sometimes I worry about passing along these extraordinarily unhelpful attitudes to my own children. I worry that they are in the air in my household.

When I see a spreadsheet of any kind my mind blurs; the numbers dance uncooperatively on the page. On some deep, shameful, utterly irrational level, I think it is because I have been conditioned to think: Where is the man who will explain this to me? That was another one of my mother’s ideas—that there are certain aspects of life that men should take care of. I don’t know why I haven’t been able to transcend this with all the thinking I have done on sexual politics, but it is harder than it seems to tune out subliminal messages from your childhood.

Chris Rickert:

District Director of Early Learning Culleen Witthuhn pointed to a number of reasons for why it saw the increase last year but not in the first two school years the district offered full-day 4K at some sites.

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Madison Education Partnership:

“professional development and evidence-based curricula in 4K Literacy” – Recommendations for the Madison School District.

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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?

Matt Barnum:

A principal-turned-consultant has built a movement—and a business—on overturning how teachers have graded for generations. His alternative: “grading for equity.”

Joe Feldman preaches that students should be able to retake tests and redo assignments. There should be no penalties for late work and no grades for homework. No points for good behavior, classroom participation or perfect attendance, either.

“When you include those in a grade, you’re bringing your implicit bias into the grade because not all students learn in that particular way,” Feldman told dozens of teachers gathered for a training session in Schenectady, N.Y., one Wednesday afternoon in March. Students should be graded only on their demonstrated learning of class material, Feldman said.

America’s grading system has been largely stable for decades, but Feldman has managed to shift many schools’ practices in just a few years. And despite the broader Trump-led swell against anything with the word “equity” in it, Feldman continues to evangelize his approach—and some school leaders keep listening.

Schenectady City School District superintendent Carlos Cotto, whose district paid Feldman’s consulting firm $65,000 to train hundreds of teachers in March, isn’t deterred by the equity backlash. “It’s part of the work when you think of education,” he said.

Grading for equity hasn’t escaped political criticism, though. Connecticut legislators, for instance, have questioned a policy in some districts to set minimum grades for assignments at 50 rather than zero, a common feature of equitable grading. Some schools nationwide instituted the practice only to roll back parts of it.

Teachers give Feldman’s ideas mixed reviews. In Schenectady, some scrolled on their phones during his presentation, while others complained they weren’t sure his approach was practical. It remains unclear whether this form of grading is more effective or even more equitable than the traditional way.

Notes on ungrading.

Madison’s grading schemes over the years are worth a look as well.

and, via Chris Rickert:

It’s also laid bare what could be an inequity in the new guaranteed-admission regime because most Dane County public high schools also don’t weigh their grades for difficulty — meaning that, in theory, students who get straight A’s in all regular-level classes could have a better chance at getting in to UW than students who take more challenging honors and advanced placement classes but also have a few B’s sprinkled in with their A’s.

Daisy Christodoulou

Handwriting bias in human Comparative Judgement

Handwriting bias in traditional human marking
Back in 2018, the English exam regulator Ofqual published a fascinating study looking at the thinking processes of experienced examiners in English Language GCSE. Here are some of the comments the examiners made about the scripts they were marking.

I see football, I see band 4, straightaway.

If you read none of these words, and you see they’ve done two-and-a-half sides, it’s written in paragraphs, the handwriting’s readable. And a candidate who gets 5 out of 8 for question one looks like that often.
— There’s a lot going on there. Doesn’t like to stretch himself too much, this is definitely a boy.
— You’re right it is a boy.
— Scruffy writing, can’t be bothered writing too much

So yes, handwriting bias exists, even amongst experienced examiners!

Kyla Scanlon

This is a misalignment problem. The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with tools that do the thinking for you.

And yes, cheating has always existed. But this isn’t traditional cheating. It’s ambient, platform-approved, investor-funded cognitive offloading. 

And to be abundantly clear, this isn’t the fault of the students – in a winner-takes-all economy, it must be extraordinarily difficult to resist the allure of something like an AI homework machine. But there are questions like: if AI can do the work for you, what exactly are we measuring? What do you do with the free time… scroll TikTok (that answer seems to be yes). And what happens to the labor market when a four-year degree signals nothing about what a person can actually do?

…….

We are seeing this happen in pockets. Take a look at what Mississippi has accomplished with education – it has the fastest improving school system in the entire country. These are minor currents against the major flow of capital and attention. 

But they suggest an alternative to both digital frictionlessness and physical collapse – a world where effort is neither eliminated nor wasted, but directed toward systems that actually sustain us. Maybe it’s things like requiring tech platforms to internalize costs they currently externalize to physical systems and human attention (challenging) or educational models that reward deep engagement rather than interface management (also challenging). But we have to acknowledge that when we remove friction from one domain, we’re not eliminating it, we’re just moving it somewhere new.

Alex Gough:

For decades, American schools relied on reading programs influenced by educators Marie Clay and Lucy Calkins. Clay’s Reading Recovery program encouraged children to use pictures, context, and guessing strategies, known as three-cueing, rather than decoding words through phonics. Similarly, Calkins emphasized the idea that reading is a natural process that develops through exposure to books rather than through systematic instruction in phonics.

However, extensive research in cognitive science and literacy development has shown that phonics is a critical component of effective reading instruction. Despite this evidence, programs based on Clay’s and Calkins’ ideas became widespread. In response, many school districts and states as a whole are shifting toward phonics-based instruction aligned with the “science of reading,” a body of research supporting evidence-based literacy practices.

A similar debate is now emerging in math education. Jo Boaler, a Stanford University professor and researcher, has promoted a reform-based approach to teaching math focused on conceptual understanding and growth mindset. While some educators support her philosophy, others have raised concerns about its effectiveness and the lack of empirical support for certain aspects of her methods. Nonetheless, some districts, including Corvallis, have adopted her approach. This has led to ongoing discussion about the best strategies for improving student outcomes in mathematics.

Jo Boaler

Jo Boaler is a prominent figure in the field of mathematics education, often associated with the “whole-child” approach to learning math. While she did not originate this philosophy, she has become one of its most visible advocates. Similar to how Lucy Calkins became a leading voice for a particular style of reading instruction, Boaler has used her position at Stanford University to promote her educational theories, particularly through her organization, YouCubed.

YouCubed is a Stanford-affiliated initiative that provides math teaching resources rooted in Boaler’s philosophy. Many school districts that adopt YouCubed materials are aligning with her approach to math education, much like those that implemented Lucy Calkins’ “Units of Study” for reading.

Aaron Snoswell, Kevin Witzenberger and Rayane el Masri:

The case of vegetative electron microscopy offers a troubling glimpse into how AI systems can perpetuate and amplify errors throughout our collective knowledge.

“Vegetative electron microscopy” appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors. First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised. However, the digitising process erroneously combined “vegetative” from one column of text with “electron” from another. As a result, the phantom term was created.

Decades later, “vegetative electron microscopy” turned up in some Iranian scientific papers. In 2017 and 2019, two papers used the term in English captions and abstracts.

Richard Hanania

A final point here is that up until now, I’ve been acting as if government can foresee the ultimate consequences of its actions. We usually don’t have enough data to forecast the impacts of complex economic regulations on different groups of people. Is raising the minimum wage worthwhile given the number of jobs that will never be created? Who exactly gets hardest hit by prohibiting Uber and making taxis more expensive? You could tell different stories, but the advantage of direct redistribution is that it requires a lot fewer assumptions. Find out who is rich, find out who is poor, and you’re basically done. That’s not a completely trivial task, but it’s a lot easier and simpler to do than making complex predictions about how millions of people will behave in response to any particular intervention in the economy. 

History backs up the idea that redistribution is better than trying to micromanage millions of individual decisions. The Nordic social democracies are wealthy, while countries like Venezuela, Argentina, and those in the former Eastern bloc have sought to more directly manage the economy. Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark actually do quite well in indexes of economic freedom because even though they tax and spend a lot, they to a large extent otherwise leave the economy alone. I tend to think it’s pretty absurd to put these countries ahead of the US in terms of economic freedom, as these rankings often do, and I’ll get to that in the next essay, but it’s unquestionably true that Nordic countries today don’t have many of the kinds of leftist economic policies we often see in the third world. If you look at the worst performing countries since the 1950s, it’s basically a list of nations that have had civil wars plus Argentina and Venezuela.

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Commentary

more on Act 10.

Dana Goldstein:

What happened to learning as a national priority?

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.

At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.

……

All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.

“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”

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But despite the lack of national direction, an energetic group of educators, parents and researchers is advancing an ambitious agenda for learning. It is centered around one big idea: The breadth, depth and quality of the curriculum matter.

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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?

James Murphy:

You would not know it based on media coverage of a small number of highly rejective colleges that enroll a tiny portion of all undergraduates, but most college students in the United States attend a public college or university that admits most or all applicants. These six charts reveal a much different picture of undergraduate education in the United States in 2023 (the most recent year for which data is available). 

1. 76% of undergraduates attended a public institution of higher education, according to the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Survey (IPEDS).

Wall Street Journal:

Student loans have also become one of the great policy failures of the age. Even before the pandemic, fewer than half of borrowers were paying down their debt. The federal student loan balance sheet has ballooned to $1.7 trillion, double what it was 15 years ago when Democrats used ObamaCare to nationalize the industry. Student debt would now exceed $2 trillion without the Biden loan forgiveness.

Enter House Republicans, who this week advanced a slate of reforms in the Education and Workforce Committee that they plan to attach to reconciliation. The goal is to hold colleges accountable for student outcomes and curb the open-ended loan buffet.

The House would reduce the aggregate limit for undergraduate loans to $50,000 from $57,500. The bill would also impose a $100,000 borrowing limit for master’s degree and doctoral programs and $150,000 for professional programs like law degrees. Graduate student loans are currently uncapped.

This will reduce the incentive for colleges to raise tuition and add graduate programs, which often cost six figures. The legislation also limits student borrowing to the “median cost of college” for programs nationwide, which will effectively compel high-priced institutions to lower tuition or provide more financial aid.

Liam Knox:

On Wednesday, the Illinois Institute of Technology announced it had reached an agreement with India’s University Grants Commission to establish a branch campus in Mumbai, opening to students in fall 2026. It will be the first degree-granting U.S. institution on Indian soil and Illinois Tech’s first international branch campus. 

For decades, a complicated legal and tax system prevented U.S. institutions from opening campuses in India. Then, in 2020, the Indian government issued a new National Education Policy paving the way, officials promised, for a much easier pathway to fruitful academic partnerships. 

India is a major growth market for U.S. higher education; this year the country surpassed China for the first time as the top origin country for international students in the U.S. Establishing a beachhead in India could help institutions carve out a dominant space for themselves in the lucrative international recruitment market, especially since the vast majority of Indian international students come to the U.S. for postgraduate study.

Madilynne Medina

Some of the disengaged students in Pugh’s courses are what administrators and cybersecurity experts say are “ghost students,” and they’ve been a growing problem for community colleges, particularly since the shift to online instruction during the pandemic. These “ghost students” are artificially intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual humans. And as colleges grapple with the problem, Pugh and her colleagues have been tasked with a new and “frustrating” task of weeding out these bots and trying to decide who’s a real person. 

The process, she said, takes her focus off teaching the real students.

“I am very intentional about having individualized interaction with all of my students as early as possible,” Pugh said. “That included making phone calls to people, sending email messages, just a lot of reaching out individually to find out ‘Are you just overwhelmed at work and haven’t gotten around to starting the class yet? Or are you not a real person?’”

Mike Dowd

But if you thought that was an honest measure of how many kids are passing, I have bad news. High-school grading policies have become so corrupt, class credits have become almost meaningless.

In recent years, the Department of Education and many individual schools, have adopted “equity grading” practices intended to benefit disadvantaged students.

But by making it almost impossible for such students to fail, even when they don’t show up to class, our school system harms the less privileged by discouraging hard work and reliability.

Despite the demoralizing effect these policies have on teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, under the out-of-touch leadership of Michael Mulgrew, has failed to make this a public issue.

New Yorkers would be shocked to see how far school standards have dropped.

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly (back story).

Underly supports eliminating our one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement, the Foundations of Reading(FORT)

Civics: Why and how was Jill Underly Re-elected? (a bit of uniparty analysis as well). And.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

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”

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

Tim Daly:

This has made it awkward in recent years, as Mississippi has become the fastest-improving school system in the country.

You read that right. Mississippi is taking names.

In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi. By 2024, only four states had fewer.

When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results for student demographics, this is where Mississippi ranked:

• Fourth grade math: 1st
• Fourth grade reading: 1st
• Eighth grade math: 1st
• Eighth grade reading: 4th

(Here is a great rundown of how the remarkable turnaround was achieved.)

How about black students? The root of Mississippi’s bad reputation is its historically awful record on civil rights—including its refusal to integrate schools.

That was then.

——-

Meanwhile:

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?

Notes.

—–

Sean Sullivan:

In the face of this, I am going to try to write more. A lot more. I think you should too. Here are some reasons why:

1. To write something is to know something. If you cannot articulate your thoughts clearly in writing, I’d hazard a guess you don’t really understand what you are talking about. Write it out to think it out, now more than ever. Those who let the LLMs write for them are, in a way, letting the LLMs think for them and that way leads to both irrelevance and a loss of what it means to be human. Keep writing to keep thinking is something I am telling myself.

2. We are bringing into existence things of immense power. By writing and publishing on the internet, you have an ability to make a small difference on how that turns out. Tyler Cowen is the biggest promoter of this idea and he has a host of reasons why, among them are convincing the LLMs that you’re important (the more they learn from you, the more they value you?) and bringing about a certain immortality. Tyler writes, “If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the AIs is probably your best chance. With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten. But not by the AIs. If you want your grandchildren or great-grandchildren to know what you thought about a topic, the AIs can give them a pretty good idea.”
3. Beyond self promotion and immortality, writing, especially on subjects at the margin, can increase our collective intelligence and the intelligence of the LLMs.As an example, I happen to have a lot of knowledge about the world of underground music and culture in NYC and San Francisco in the 1990s, before the internet was really a thing, and when much of what occurred in warehouses and basements was remembered only by those who were there. I will be writing more about more about these things, and other corners of the world in which I am a holder of rare information. Documenting these forgotten corners not only for future historians of the period, but also, and maybe more importantly, for the AIs.

Damian Carrington:

Real-world geoengineering experiments spanning the globe from the Arctic to the Great Barrier Reef are being funded by the UK government. They will test sun-reflecting particles in the stratosphere, brightening reflective clouds using sprays of seawater and pumping water on to sea ice to thicken it.

Getting this “critical missing scientific data” is vital with the Earth nearing several catastrophic climate tipping points, said the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), the government agency backing the plan. If demonstrated to be safe, geoengineering could temporarily cool the planet and give more time to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis: the burning of fossil fuels.

The experiments will be small-scale and rigorously assessed before going ahead, Aria said. Other projects in the £56.8m programme will model the impacts of geoengineering on the climate and research how it could be governed internationally.

Geoengineering is controversial, with some scientists calling it a “dangerous distraction” from cutting emissions and concerned about unintended climate impacts. Some previously planned outdoor experiments have been cancelled after strong opposition.

Steve Sailer:

So, I looked up the top 100 donors in 2024 versus in 2020 and then estimated their ethnicities from online sources. (Note that looking at the top 100 donors will overstate the Jewish share of total contributions, large and small, because Jews are so heavily represented among the very rich: e.g., about one-third of the richest 100 Americans in 2019 were Jewish. Still, the top 100 donors get listened to by important politicians.)

Among the biggest few dozen donors, it’s not that hard to figure out ethnicity. Wikipedia often has a line like “X was raised in a Jewish family.” After that, the going gets tougher. Still, the Jewish press loves reporting on Jewish zillionaires. And there are countless prestigious Jewish charities.

Gentiles can be a little less forthcoming, but the task is mostly pretty straightforward.

For example, in 2020, the biggest donors were casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his Israeli-born wife, Miriam ($218 million to Republicans), followed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg ($153 million to Democrats) and financier Tom Steyer ($72 million to Democrats).

The Adelsons and Bloomberg are obviously Jewish. Steyer identifies as a Jew through his father but is also a practicing Episcopalian through his mother, so I listed him as 50 percent Jewish and 50 percent gentile. (Larry Ellison is, biologically, half Italian and half Jewish, but he was raised by his mother’s Jewish uncle and aunt. Therefore, on the theory that nature and nurture are of equal importance, I list him as 75 percent Jewish and 25 percent gentile. Your estimate may vary.)

In fourth place are packaging magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($68 million to Republicans). Although there is a stereotype that anybody high-achieving with a Germanic surname must have Yiddish-speaking ancestors, a plethora of evidence shows that Mr. Uihlein is a gentile German-American.

Lucas Vebber:

There has been a lot of talk about Wisconsin’s congressional district maps over the past several months. This memorandum briefly seeks to add context to that conversation by providing a summary of the legal history of how our current maps were adopted, and a brief analysis of any potential renewed attempt to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional district maps.

Background

Every ten years, following the United States Census, states are required to reapportion their legislative and congressional districts. Wisconsin’s congressional district boundaries are set in state statute, requiring the legislature to adopt new district maps, and the governor to sign those into law every ten years.

Current Maps

When the legislature and governor cannot agree on new maps, the task of reapportioning falls to the courts. This happened after the 2020 Census, when Governor Evers vetoed the legislature’s adopted maps. On behalf of a group of Wisconsin voters, WILL filed an original action in the Wisconsin Supreme Court alleging that the 2020 census revealed that the existing maps had become malapportioned and seeking judicial reapportionment. Additional parties joined that litigation.

Rory Linnane:

• About 40 MPS employees will be offered classroom positions, while about 140 can reapply for their jobs, potentially with revised descriptions.
• The move aims to address teacher vacancies and improve academic outcomes, particularly for underserved students.
• Cassellius expects to reinvest savings from the restructuring in professional development.

In a move to shrink the administrative central office of Milwaukee Public Schools and send more staff into school buildings, newly appointed MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius announced a restructuring plan May 7 that will impact 181 staff as of July 1.

About 40 of the staff will be offered classroom teaching positions, and about 140 could regain their positions after reapplying for them — though some of the job descriptions could look different, as Cassellius wants to move many of them into school-based teams.

Employees who stay with the district will be guaranteed to keep their current salaries in their new jobs for at least one year, Cassellius said.

——-

Wisconsin spends approximately 35 percent more per pupil, yet it achieves worse results

Dale Chu:

School spending is way up, but teacher pay? Not so much. In Los Angeles, spending soared 108% while salaries rose only 5%. What are we really prioritizing: higher pay or more staff? Because we can’t have both.

Anna Stokke:

Kudos to parent Celia Valel for calling out Louis Riel School Division’s support of ungrading. @winnipegnews published an article by retired educator Ken Clark that gaslights parents. LRSD won’t share Glenlawn performance data—why? 🤔 Tip: Ask for one research article that shows ungrading improves student academic outcomes. It doesn’t exist.

——-

Madison’s grading schemes over the years are worth a look as well.

and, via Chris Rickert:

It’s also laid bare what could be an inequity in the new guaranteed-admission regime because most Dane County public high schools also don’t weigh their grades for difficulty — meaning that, in theory, students who get straight A’s in all regular-level classes could have a better chance at getting in to UW than students who take more challenging honors and advanced placement classes but also have a few B’s sprinkled in with their A’s.

Te-Ping Chen:

Rios, 17 years old, is a junior taking welding classes at Father Judge, a Catholic high school in Philadelphia that works closely with companies looking for workers in the skilled trades. Employers are dealing with a shortage of such workers as baby boomers retire. They have increasingly begun courting high-school students like Rios—a hiring strategy they say is likely to become even more crucial in the coming years.

Employers ranging from the local transit system to submarine manufacturers make regular visits to Father Judge’s welding classrooms every year, bringing branded swag and pitching students on their workplaces. When Rios graduates next year, he plans to work as a fabricator at a local equipment maker for nuclear, recycling and other sectors, a job that pays $24 an hour, plus regular overtime and paid vacations.

“Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming—like, this company wants you, that company wants you,” says Rios, who grew up in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington around drug addicts and homelessness, and says he was determined to build a better life for himself. “It honestly feels like I’m an athlete getting all this attention from all these pro teams.”

Stanford Review:

This summer, a CCP agent impersonated a Stanford student. Under the alias Charles Chen, he approached several students through social media. Anna*, a Stanford student conducting sensitive research on China, began receiving unexpected messages from Charles Chen. At first, Charles’s outreach seemed benign: he asked about networking opportunities. But soon, his messages took a strange turn.

Charles inquired whether Anna spoke Mandarin, then grew increasingly persistent and personal. He sent videos of Americans who had gained fame in China, encouraged Anna to visit Beijing, and offered to cover her travel expenses. He would send screenshots of a bank account balance to prove he could buy the plane tickets. Alarmingly, he referenced details about her that Anna had never disclosed to him.

He advised her to enter China for only 24 to 144 hours, short enough, he said, to avoid visa scrutiny by authorities, and urged her to communicate exclusively via the Chinese version of WeChat, a platform heavily monitored by the CCP. When Charles commented on one of her social media posts, asking her to delete screenshots of their conversations, she knew this was serious. 

Under the guidance of experts familiar with espionage tactics, Anna contacted authorities. Their investigation revealed that Charles Chen had no affiliation with Stanford. Instead, he had posed as a Stanford student for years, slightly altering his name and persona online, targeting multiple students, nearly all of them women researching China-related topics. According to the experts on China who assisted Anna, Charles Chen was likely an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), tasked with identifying sympathetic Stanford students and gathering intelligence.

James Walsh:

Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI. Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.

Peter MacKinnon:

I must disclose my background here; I was employed by the University of Saskatchewan for 40 years including 13 years as president. The institution’s distinctive origins combined the development of liberal education with a responsibility to build the province’s agricultural industry, and it did the latter with world-class agricultural programs and research institutes, and with faculty and students of many backgrounds from around the globe.

Now, we are told, the academic personnel in this worldly environment require mandatory trainingon racism: an Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression and Unconscious Bias Faculty Development Program. It is compulsory; those who decline its offerings will be shut out of collegial processes previously thought to be their right as tenured faculty. It was earlier reported that the program emerged from collective bargaining at the initiative of the university’s faculty union; if so, this does not relieve the administration from responsibility; it signed the collective agreement.

Steve McGuire:

NPR host Meghna Chakrabarti wanted to cover the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, but was told by a colleague that “even talking about it in a rigorous objective manner is spreading misinformation.”

Michael Milken

Many people believe in myths lacking any demonstrably factual basis. Put “urban legends” into a search engine and hundreds of such irrational beliefs appear. So perhaps it’s not surprising that widespread misunderstanding persists about the facts of Mike Milken’s life. For an interesting view of how and why such myths about Milken arose, read the Introduction by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz in the 1992 book, Fall From Grace. A more recent book by Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies a Day, includes an equally revealing nine-page section about Milken’s legal prosecution.

Richard Phelps:

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has urged the Trump Administration to spare the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) from its planned dismemberment of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), IES being the research and data collection wing of ED. In a March 31, 2025, article, the NAS wrote:

Much of what ED does is useless or counterproductive. IES actually produces useful material. The National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is particularly useful. Whatever the ultimate disposition of ED, we believe that much of IES ought to be preserved in some administrative home.

If the U.S. Education Department dissolves and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) must move, the U.S. Census Bureau would serve as a more logical destination than the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which the NAS suggests. NCES and the Census Bureau have often worked together in the past, with the Census Bureau responsible for much of the data collection on which NCES relies. Though many may be unaware, the Census Bureau does most of the actual survey work—i.e., sampling, interviewing, data collecting, and cleaning—for the Education Department’s K-12 data.[1]

I agree with NAS that most non-political and non-ideological data collection efforts should continue. But the IES is more than just the NCES. Its other components manage more subjective work.

Gail Heriot:

A few of the policies in the order warrant special comment.

Ending Illegal Race Preferences. In what could end up being its most consequential provision, the order zeroes in on accreditors that encourage institutions to engage in race-preferential admissions that violate the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2023).

If I didn’t know better, I might wonder what all the fuss was about. Surely, accreditors know that they should not encourage colleges and universities to violate the law. They can’t possibly be doing that, can they? But, alas, some are. It’s a problem with a long history.

Race-preferential admissions policies have always been in conflict with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But when accreditors began pressuring schools to engage in them, the Supreme Court had not yet mustered the courage to issue a prohibition. The Court’s fractured decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke(1978) left colleges and universities enough wiggle room to discriminate by race if they wished. But many accreditors went further. They sought to make such discrimination mandatory.

The first case to come to public attention involved Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and its threat to de-accredit Baruch College, a constituent college of the City University of New York. In 1990, when the threat was issued, there was nothing wrong with Baruch’s library or its student-faculty ratio. Its science labs were tidy and well-equipped, its finances were in order, and its faculty, which included a Nobel laureate in economics, was excellent. Instead, Middle States faulted the school for an alleged failure to hire enough minority faculty members and to try hard enough to retain a racially diverse student body. Fortunately for Baruch, then-Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander came to its rescue by administering Middle States some of its own medicine—deferring the renewal of federal recognition of its status as an accreditor.

——-

Definitions of accreditors.

Marc Eisen:

“Those communities are still building single-family homes in places where people can develop generational wealth, which they can’t do when they’re renting. That’s my biggest concernquite frankly. Apartments don’t build generational wealth.” 

That’s one big reason Bauman thinks the economic inequality gap “hasn’t improved one bit” in the Madison area. 

The Rev. Alex Gee’s “Justified Anger” essay is a powerful document for exploring the underpinnings of that racial dichotomy. Triggered in part by the singular Black-male experience of being wrongly pulled over by police in his own church parking lot, Gee says his anger is not with individuals but with ignorance, prejudice and systems of oppression. 

Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway calls Gee a “visionary” for how he parses Madison’s racial politics. Steve Goldberg, who ran the well-regarded CUNA Mutual Foundation for 13 years before retiring in 2016, credits Gee’s Justified Anger initiative and the “Race To Equity “ reports for highlighting the gross disparities in the lives of white and Black residents of Dane County. 

……

That targeting the cops is mostly performative politics to rally the team rather than substantive politics to change the game. 

Education reformer Kaleem Caire, the founder of One City Schools, had the temerity to venture into this thicket in 2019 when, aghast at students cursing out School Board members over stationing SROs in the schools, he posted an essay that begins:

“I have had enough! Last evening, I sat in a Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education meeting only to listen yet again to a number of young people in middle and high school curse out and demean Madison School Board members in front of an audience of 200 people, and do so to the applause of other adults in the audience. I thought I was in ‘The Twilight Zone.’” 

While Caire praised the students for “articulating their ideas and concerns with depth and precision,” he warned them that the power of their words is “lost and undermined by their foul, abrasive and derogatory language.” 

This caused a stir. 

Four UW-Madison academicians who, like Caire, are African American fired off an unrepentant response to the website Madison 365. They accused Caire of practicing “respectability politics” by telling young Black students they should “stay in our place and to push for justice in ways that suit our oppressors.” 

Quite the charge. Caire, whose advocacy history includes a stint with Milwaukee civil rights titan Howard Fuller, brushes off the criticism. “I’m teaching our kids not to cuss people out,” he says. “Respectability politics? I’m sorry. Maybe you don’t like your elders, but I think there is something to learn from them.” 

Caire has had his share of setbacks over the years, including lagging student achievement at One City and premature expansion into a high school program. Criticism has come his way. He says he can deal with it. In fact, Caire says he has no problem saying all local schools and nonprofits need to show more accountability. 

“The Madison school system will never get better if it doesn’t have somebody pushing it,” he says. The fact that so many incumbent School Board members are returned to office without a challenge “is what you would expect in a system … where 90% of the Black kids can barely read,” he adds. 

Chalk it up to the collateral damage of our stifled public debate. 

——-

David Blaska commentary:

Questions we never expected to see askedin The Capital Times: “Progressives have full control of the city and its schools. Is it for the better?” Figures that it is a freelance journalist, not a CT staffer, posing the question — Marc Eisen, formerly editor of Isthmus

———

Meanwhile:

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?

Kayla Huynh:

The district will reduce the number of half-day classes held at its elementary schools, according to district figures. The district is instead adding half-day programs at four day care sites, including Here We Grow, the Red Caboose, the Playing Field and Pequeños Traviesos, according to Folger. 

Green said Stephens Elementary is offering four new full-day classes next year, including one Spanish section. Lincoln Elementary will also add one class. 

Elvehjem Elementary, which previously offered half-day options only, will add five classes. Four of the classes at Elvehjem are sections originally held at Kennedy Elementary School. 

Green said district leaders are removing the classes at Kennedy Elementary to alleviate overcrowding at the east side school.  

Parents suggested relocating the 4K classes earlier this year because a lack of space had contributed to a “chaotic” and unsafe environment for students, the Cap Times previously reported. 

The district’s full-day 4K program has continuously grown since launching in 2021. Over 575 students enrolled in the program last year, compared with about 260 in the first year, according to a report from the Madison Education Partnership. 

The district’s full-day classes included more students of color, students from low-income backgrounds and children learning English compared with the half-day programs, the Madison Education Partnership reported.

——-

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?

Michael Walsh:

But as the demand for degrees (not learning) grew and higher education became monetized, American universities became more akin to Renaissance Italian city-states than socially philanthropic organizations, metastasizing, gobbling up real estate and taking it off the tax rolls, thus helping to destroy the nearby neighborhoods — hello, Columbia, hello University of Chicago, hello University of Southern California! Ever-expanding, they added fashionable if not downright imaginary “disciplines” to the curriculum, abandoning all pretense to original scholarship, scrapped Western Civ courses as arbitrary and racist, and increasingly viewed their role as political activists instead of teachers.

Wholly conquered by the sappers of the Frankfurt School, they poisoned the minds of generation after generation with cultural self-contempt. The staggering financial concomitants beggared parents or sold their children into a form of indentured servitude known as “student loans,” justified on the grounds that their doctorate in LGBTQ+ Studies, aided in its attainment by heaping helpings of plagiarism and, latterly, AI monkeys, would surely put them on Easy Street, but instead it put them on Queer Street, where many remain today.

Nabeel Qureshi:

The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking.

After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved. 

I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since I’d “gotten the answer”. 

Afterwards, he’d come out with three or four proofs of the same thing, plus some explanation of why each proof is connected somehow. In this way, he got a much deeper understanding of things than I did.

I concluded that what we call ‘intelligence’ is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about ‘raw intellect’.

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.

Agnishom Chattopadhyay:

The freedom of physical movement is the prototypical example of a fundamental human right. To affirm this, you do not have to go as far as Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Instead, look at prisons: taking away the physical liberty of people is among the most serious punishments that is exercised only after careful judicial review.

At Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), and presumably many other Indian colleges, students are not free to leave. If a student walks up to the gate, a guard in uniform tells them that they may not leave. If the student tries to leave anyway, we can speculate what happens – the guard presumably would physically stop them, or the students would get into trouble with the college authorities. To exit the campus, the student must obtain permission from their parents, which they must communicate to a faculty member, who would then notify the guards. When the student leaves or re-enters the campus, the parents are notified in real time via text. These students are not in the campus for just a few hours – some of them live in the (in-campus) college hostel, and have to abide by these rules for a semester at a time.

Why might the colleges be interested in tightly regulating the movement of their students? The conventional wisdom among the admirers of these systems seems to be that this keeps the students safe. If the student doesn’t go out, then they aren’t going out drinking. They aren’t going out to do drugs, participate in casual sex or associate with gang members, either. Inside the premises, the campus security can keep students under constant surveillance. The red-tag annas call out couples spending quality time. Not only can the rooms of students’ can be searched, but they can be peeked into via miniature windows which are required to be kept uncovered.

Chad Aldeman:

“The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin. Just think about that for a moment.

Tim Daly:

Mississippi Can’t Possibly Have Good Schools
And yet it does. Are we ready to deal?

Underperforming states escape scrutiny. Our biases prevent us from asking, for instance, what’s going on in Oregon. Or Vermont. Or Maryland. There’s a case to be made that their instructional quality is among the weakest in the country based on their performance trends over the past decade. And yet, when’s the last time you heard them being pressed to defend their poor results.

Blue states are losing population. Estimates vary, but states Kamala Harris won in 2024 will probably surrender 12 congressional seats – and electoral votes – after the next census. 

Given that reality, Democrats picked a terrible time to go AWOL on the issue of education. Harris barely mentioned schools during her campaign and did not put forth any plan to address the incredible academic losses of the COVID era. What was once a double-digit lead in voter trust on education has now become a dead heat or a slight advantage for Republicans.

There is a future where blue states are left behind electorally, through declining clout, and educationally, through stubborn refusal to accept that a number of red states are solving important problems and expanding opportunity for kids while wealthier, complacent Democratic strongholds phone it in. If Republicans start running – and winning – on their education track records, look out.

—-

Dale Chu:

School spending is way up, but teacher pay? Not so much. In Los Angeles, spending soared 108% while salaries rose only 5%. What are we really prioritizing: higher pay or more staff? Because we can’t have both.

——

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?

Steven Davidoff:

Stanford brags that “it’s pretty ‘sweet’ to be connected with Stanford” thanks to the perks its professors and staff receive. Perhaps the sweetest perks Stanford and other elite universities provide are the multimillion-dollar tax-free housing and tuition stipends they lavish on faculty, staff and their children. They’re tax giveaways most Americans don’t get to enjoy, though they effectively cover the cost. It’s long past time to close these tax loopholes.

The exact benefits universities provide to staff and their children vary but are consistently extravagant. Schools such as Columbia pay a significant portion of K-12 private school tuition for professors and senior administrators, often covering about 50% of tuition costs—which can run upward of $65,000 a year at New York’s top private schools. …

The problem is that because these gifts are all exempt from income tax, taxpayers foot the bill.

And K-12 education is hardly the only university perk taxpayers cover. Columbia, Northwestern, Stanford, Penn and others offer tuition benefits for faculty children attending colleges of their choice, paying up to 50% of tuition bills. Some schools cap this assistance at their own tuition rates; others don’t. Princeton pays 100%. There is also generally no limit on the number of children who can qualify.

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More.

Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin:j

Foreign donors have given as much to U.S. universities in the last four years as they did in the previous 40, according to a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute shared exclusively with The Free Press. The study shows an explosion in overseas funding for American schools between 2021 and 2024, with nearly $29 billion in foreign money donated during that period.

Qatar and China are among the largest sources of funding.

That $29 billion figure is more than double the total for the preceding four years, and accounts for half of the estimated $57.97 billion in foreign funding since 1986, when the federal government began tracking the data.

Secretary Linda Mcmahon:

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

More. Commentary.

Richard Phelps:

Two outstanding situations sometimes warrant government intervention in the marketplace. First, “natural monopoly” providers, such as public utilities, would charge all the market could bear without government regulation. Second, unprofitable markets, such as those for orphan drugs and certain types of research and development, would not exist to meet certain public needs absent government subsidies or donor contributions.

Yet, confusion and “market failures” abound when government-subsidized or nonprofit entities compete in the marketplace with private, taxpaying entities. Consider the mid-20th-century prospects of private U.S. railroads, which purchased all the land and laid all the rail on their own roads, competing against truckers operating on government-provided roads.

Richard Phelps:

Anyone intimately familiar with U.S. education research of the past half century recognizes its marked difference from that of other fields. Some attribute the difference to an inferiority of methods, implying that education professors are not quite as bright as, say, economists. I would argue, instead, that bias is, by far, a greater problem—that bias is fueled by both progressive education ideology and professional self-interest.

On April 24, with the assistance of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the country’s most elite education researchers in the National Academy of Education(NAEd) sued the U.S. Department of Education (ED).

Wenyuan Wu:

2,105 vs. 44. As of April 25, 2025, 2,105accredited universities and colleges in the U.S. are test-optional or test-free in their undergraduate admissions, while a paltry 19 private and 35 public colleges require SAT or ACT scores for admission. An astounding ratio of 48 to one! With the exception of a few high-profile cases—MIT, Stanford, and the University of Austin, i.e.—standardized testing faces an increasingly bleak future in higher education.

If you talk to an average high school teacher today about college admissions, you’d find some garden-variety, anti-test responses: “Well, research shows tests don’t measure academic success.” “High-stakes tests are not as reliable as GPA.” “SAT unfairly disadvantages marginalizedstudents.”

In my writings over the years, I have made some humble attempts to debunk “anti-testism” with empirical research, literature reviews, news commentaries, and data analysis. There are a handful of others, more prominent and credentialed scholars who have also published works calling for a return to tests. But given the finite reach of our platforms and the somewhat esoteric nature of the issue, we are mostly preaching to the choir. In the meantime, the test-free movement undergoes exponential growth and now has the potential to co-opt even supporters on the right.

Quinton Klabon:

WHY are school districts going to REFERENDUM? DPI just revealed a huge part of the explanation.
Since 2020, schools added 2,140.79 staff!
Unfortunately,

1. Pandemic aid ended.
2. Enrollment decreased -47,092, from 852,973 to 805,881.
3. Schools already added staff AFTER Act 10.

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Additionally, districts actually –added– staff in the years after Act 10.

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“An emphasis on adult employment”

Charles Hayes

The nation’s most prestigious universities are making a rare and risky move: selling significant portions of their endowments. Harvard and Yale, two institutions with combined endowments exceeding $90 billion, have announced plans to offload private equity stakes amid political pressures, liquidity strains, and a shifting financial landscape. These sales, the largest in decades, reveal vulnerabilities even in the most well-funded academic institutions—and could signal a broader reckoning for endowment-dependent schools

Harvard’s $1 billion private equity secondary sale, facilitated by Jefferies and Lexington Partners, underscores a desperate bid for cash. The university faces a dual crisis: federal funding freezes and an endowment structure overly reliant on illiquid assets. With 83% of its $53.2 billion endowment allocated to private equity and hedge funds—compared to just 14% in public equities—the school risks being trapped in a “liquidity crunch.” 

The Trump administration’s decision to freeze $2.2 billion in research grants and label Harvard a “political entity” has exacerbated cash flow concerns. To bridge the gap, Harvard issued $1.2 billion in municipal bonds in early 2025. But the bigger move is its shift from long-term holdings to secondary sales.

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KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Alexander Nazaryan

You wrote about this issue a lot at the time. Why, years later, did you feel compelled to write a book?

I very early observed my kids just withering away in the gray light of their Chromebooks alone in their bedrooms. And while it seemed reasonable initially to have schools closed, particularly because I’m close to New York City, soon it dawned on me that there was no long-term plan and this was not going to work.

Childhood is achingly brief, and for a little boy or girl who’s 8 years old to miss a year, or even more than a year, of the experience of putting an arm around a friend, of chatting with other kids at lunchtime, of running around in a playground with friends … the idea that that wasn’t a tremendous harm is absurd.

People are still missing the larger point here about what was lost.

The conventional wisdom was that we needed to keep schools closed until it was safe to reopen them, and even then, it could be done only in communities where the spread of the virus had abated and educators took certain concrete steps to keep teachers and kids safe. You’re saying all of that was wrong?

I recognize that intuitively many of these interventions seem like they would be beneficial. School closures in particular and then, more broadly, mask mandates and barriers on desks and six feet of distancing — but the evidence shows none of this did anything.

Europeans had announced in the spring that there was no observable negative impact to reopening schools, yet for some reason this information was ignored.

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A substantive analysis of taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue

Roger Kimball:

A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals, “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license.

More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. One of the great ironies that attends the triumph of political correctness is that in department after department of academic life, what began as a demand for emancipation recoiled, turned rancid, and developed into new forms of tyranny and control. As Alan Charles Kors noted in an essay from 2008,

Martin Center

Key Findings:

• Disproportionate Growth in Non-Faculty Staffing: While enrollment rose 10.2% and faculty headcount rose 9.5%, non-faculty staffing grew by 14.6%, increasing the staff-to-faculty ratio from 2.18 to 2.28 systemwide.
• Largest Staffing Increases by Function: Fiscal Affairs positions grew by 53.8%, followed by Academic & Student Affairs and IT. In contrast, Executive Administration and Office/Clerical staffing remained flat or declined.
• Escalating Salary Expenditures: Faculty salary spending rose by 44.78%, while non-faculty salary expenditures jumped 55.53%—both surpassing the 32.72% inflation rate over the same period. The fastest-growing salary categories were Research (86.5%), Communications & Fundraising (81.1%), and Fiscal Affairs (90.9%).
• Institution-Level Variability: Changes in staffing and expenditures varied significantly among the 16 UNC institutions. Some, such as UNC Greensboro and UNC Asheville, experienced enrollment declines yet maintained or expanded staff. Others, like Elizabeth City State and Fayetteville State, increased enrollment while reducing or maintaining faculty numbers.

Carter & Mark:

In life, you can choose to be G(rouchy) or you can choose to be J(olly).

It’s way too easy to be G. To complain. To wake up in a bad mood. To find little flaws in everything you see in the world, and focus on those. You can spend hours fighting with random strangers online and policing the behavior of the people around you. You can default to thinking big, difficult ideas are impossible, raining cynicism down on the world. You can become one of those folks who is somehow surrounded by “toxic people”, yet cannot find a single flaw in themselves. This is the lazy path to living life.

Arctotherium:

The elephant in the room of the college admissions grind

There’s a small cottage industry of articles, blog posts, and essays pointing out how much more difficult, time-intensive, and “grindy” upper-middle class American childhoods have become in the 21st century [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. All of these identify the same cause: elite university admissions are far more competitive. This has led to much more intensive helicopter parenting to stop kids from falling behind in the increasingly important education-status race. It’s not just money. The social decay afflicting America since the 1960s is far worse among the non-college-educated (as Charles Murray showed in Coming Apart) so avoiding downward mobility is much more important than it once was.

Helicopter parenting has gotten so intense that it even continues into university, turning what was once the start of independent adult life into a further extension of childhood. The effects of this are widely lamented: the pressures of Ivy League admissions are said to be crushing kids into status-obsessed zombies. And the effort it requires from parents is even blamed for falling birth rates. Setting aside the broader societal implications and long-term effects, isn’t making kids unnecessarily miserable for 13 years of their lives bad enough in and of itself?

One might reply that it’s all worth it. Feeding 30% of kids into the college admissions meatgrinder might be bad, but stagnation is the default state of humanity and avoiding that is imperative. If it takes heroic efforts on the part of 12-year-olds to develop the skills needed to keep technological civilization running, then that’s a sacrifice that must be made. But is that really what’s going on?

Giselle Redmond:

Both Ithaca College and the Ithaca City School District are currently being federally investigated in response to complaints filed by the Equal Protection Project, an organization founded by Prof. William Jacobson, a Cornell Law professor. 

Jacobson created the EPP in 2023. In a statement to The Sun, Jacobson wrote that he founded the organization in response to “discrimination done in the name of DEI,” which they view as “a dehumanizing group ideology that reduces people to proxies for their group.”

Matt Taibbi:

The station doubtless thinks it’s engaged in “public service journalism” by cranking out piles of stories with headlines like Trump nominee gives misleading testimony about ties to alleged ‘Nazi sympathizer,Trump cuts demolish agency focused on toxic chemicals and workplace hazards, Asian American voters backed Trump in Nevada. Here’s how they feel about him now, The U.S. set the global order after WWII. Trump has other plans, A legal architect of Guantanamo questions Trump’s El Salvador plan, and on, and on. Its editors either don’t realize they’ve built an abjectly partisan political operation, or, more likely, they’ve been at this so long, they believe ideological uniformity is truth, and by extension, just “the news.”

It would be depressingly easy to create a 2025 edition of the Dictionary of Received Ideas just by tweaking NPR texts:

• JOURNALISM – Advances the conversation. Stands out for its thorough research, diverse sourcing, fairness, and fact-checking. George Clooney says the press has a duty to “always question authority.”
• THIN – It’s back in, but did it ever leave? It’s easier for thin people when it comes to employment and education. With fatphobia, why are so many people comfortable saying the quiet part out loud?
• RACISM – A public health issue. The accumulated stress from institutional racism has documented effects. Mentorship for Black medical students is crucial as they navigate a healthcare system that is not always welcoming. There’s a new computer algorithm that more accurately illustrates Black hair. If we don’t keep talking about it, whiteness becomes the default for everything.
• AWKWARDNESS —Part of our lives whether we like it or not. But what if we put the embarrassment aside and embraced our awkward selves?

If Flaubert had access to NPR’s search tool, he could have a sequel book in six hours. The only challenge would be figuring out how to limit the most important entry:

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Civics: Redistributed Federal Taxpayer $, “public broadcasting” and the first amendment

David Duncan:

Last week, I got a message from someone I’ve known for ten years. It was articulate, thoughtful…and definitely not written by him.

It’s one example of what has increasingly unsettled me about the way people interact – myself included – as we all participate in this vast, unprecedented, AI-enhanced communication experiment.

It’s not just the style of communication that’s changed. It’s the sense of authorship. The idea that you can read something and know who wrote it—and whether they meant it—feels like it’s breaking down.

It shows up everywhere – emails, text messages, social media, blog posts, even casual check-ins. A few weeks ago, I opened a message that seemed technically perfect – well-structured, insightful, sophisticated. But I couldn’t tell if the sender had written it, prompted it, pasted it – or even read it. And I wasn’t sure what to respond to, or how.

What part was real?

What part was meant?

Shannon Watkins:

Public institutions have a unique responsibility to serve their students well and use their taxpayer-funded resources effectively. Some states, however, produce better outcomes than others. This is made clear in the Martin Center’s 50-State Comparison on college graduation rates, which evaluates each state on four key metrics of institutional success: the first-year retention rate, the 4-year graduation rate, the 6-year graduation rate, and the transfer-out rate among public universities. 

This comparison is aimed at informing policymakers, university administrators, and the public on the state of public higher education and recommending concrete ways it can be improved.

The data presented in this 50-State Comparison underscores a wide variation of state outcomes. For example, the average 4-year graduation rate in Alaska is 18 percent. That number jumps to 53 percent in Delaware and 52 percent in Virginia. Nationally, the average 4-year graduation rate at public universities is 34 percent. 

Too many institutions, even in the highest-performing states, are failing to help students complete their degrees on time. The Martin Center outlines cost-effective and evidence-based reforms that states and institutions can undertake to boost student achievement. 

Jovan Tripkovic:

A recent Inside Higher Ed Student Voice survey found that over 60 percent of college students view themselves as customers, an alarming sign for anyone concerned about the integrity and future of American higher education. This growing trend, increasingly normalized by both students and institutions, undermines the university’s original mission of educating informed citizens and upholding academic excellence.

Traditionally, universities have provided education, conducted research, and advanced knowledge, all while engaging with the broader community. From the beginning, colleges and universities have served as cornerstones of the American republic, preparing future leaders, educators, and public servants.

As early as the 1950s, Russell Kirk was already describing colleges as expensive social clubs for the young.

In post–World War II America, a mix of factors—including a demographic boom and a surge in government funding—gradually pulled colleges and universities away from their original mission. Flush with G.I. Bill dollars and enrollees, institutions began broadening and democratizing their offerings, a shift that eventually led to today’s near-total emphasis on job training. Today, rather than cultivating civic and moral character or encouraging intellectual curiosity, many institutions have become little more than diploma mills and hedge funds with campuses.

When administrators treat their institutions like businesses, it’s no surprise that students begin to see themselves as customers.

Frederick Hess and Greg Fournier:

American colleges and universities are being scrutinized as never before. From rising tuition costs and allegations of plagiarism at the highest levels to concerns about low rates of completion and the state of free inquiry on campus, four-year colleges in the U.S. are under the microscope. Yet one crucial issue that is too rarely accorded the attention that it deserves is simply what colleges expect of their students.

Students spend far less time studying than they used to, with full-time students reporting 20–25 combined hours in class and doing schoolwork.[1] American colleges need to reset their expectations for students. Full-time students should expect to devote a full 35-hour week to their classes and related studies. Boards of governors and campus trustees have a vital role in resetting this expectation and helping colleges put it into practice.

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more.

DOGE:

Interview with the DOGE team

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Whether you are a Republican or Democrat, this should anger you. Over 500 million individual payment transactions made by the US Treasury in 2024 (1/3 of the total), cannot be traced to any Congressional appropriation. This is not a partisan or ideological issue.

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Nothing to see here 👀

Charles Mann:

For as long as our species has lived in settled communities, we have struggled to provide ourselves with water. If modern agriculture, the subject of the previous article in this series, is a story of innovation and progress, the water supply has all too often been the opposite: a tale of stagnation and apathy. Even today, about two billion people, most of them in poor, rural areas, do not have a reliable supply of clean water — potable water, in the jargon of water engineers. Bad water leads to the death every year of about a million people. In terms of its immediate impact on human lives, water is the world’s biggest environmental problem and its worst public health problem — as it has been for centuries.

Larissa Phillips

Despite this alarming statistic, some educators believe it’s impossible to teach these adults to read. However, this notion is misguided and requires a different approach.

Marian* was in her late 30s when we first met, and she asked me to help her learn to read. This was in 2007. I was the new-ish supervisor of a tutoring program in Manhattan aimed at adults who were trying to get their GED. Most students came in for help with essay-writing or algebra. But Marian, who had seen her three daughters through high school and into college, wanted to get better at reading.

She told me she was at third-grade level. Once we started working together, I discovered it was more like first grade.

This isn’t as unusual as you might think. Forty-eight million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level, and many of them struggle in ways that are almost impossible for a fluent reader to imagine: They can’t order off a menu, check in for a telehealth appointment, or fill out a job application. Low literacy skills correlate heavily with poverty and crime, and are associated with an estimated $2.2 trillionper year of social services, healthcare, and lost wages. This is an issue both sides of the political spectrum would love to address. The question is: How?

In April, a bill was introduced in Congress to expand funding for adult education programs. It’s called the WORKS Act—the Adult Education Workforce Opportunity and Reskilling for Knowledge and Success Act—and it would nearly double current funding for programs, to $1.35 billion, by 2029. The bill mentions digital literacy, college advisers for adults, and “foundational skills.” But there is no plan for the most foundational and intractable problem in adult education: teaching grown-ups to read.

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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

Dave Cieslewicz:

We’ve long felt that NPR and PBS have been biased, but in the last decade or so that bias has gotten out of hand. It’s not just that they’re liberal. They’ve taken on that specific kind of academic, identity-obsessed point of view that has been the main thing that has driven voters away from the Democrats. 

I challenge anyone to listen to a single hour of NPR news programing — or much of the rest of their programs, for that matter — that does not include at least one (usually more) of the following:

• A story on transgender issues portraying them as victims and told from the point of view of rights activists.
• A story on immigration told from the point of view of immigrants as victims while being dismissive (if even mentioning) their legal status. 
• A story on climate change told in a breathless — and sometimes ludicrously reaching — fashion. How is climate change impacting transgender immigrants?!

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that at production meetings the first agenda item is: what’s our climate change story today, our transgender story and our migrant story? Sometimes, NPR and PBS will “balance” these stories by throwing in a quote from somebody right of center, but it’s an afterthought as in, “Yeah, we’ll touch that base so when we get accused of bias we can wave it around.”

I get more push back from my liberal friends about this than anything else. Either they just don’t hear the bias or they do and they defend it with something like, “but Fox News…” 

There are two issues here. First, obviously, Fox News doesn’t get public funding. And second, one thing liberals used to stand for was unbiased reporting. They didn’t want to be told what they already believed. They wanted solid information that even ran the risk of changing their minds. They didn’t want to be told what to think. They wanted to do that for themselves. But recently, since the whole country has fallen into a fierce tribalism, too many liberals have abandoned their principles. If the other side does it, they want to do it too. They don’t want to be informed, they want to be armed to do (usually imagined) intellectual battle with the enemy.

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Taxpayers will no longer support a media executive who believes that the First Amendment is the “number one challenge” to advancing left-wing propaganda.

James Pierson

The Trump administration is trying to fix what ails American universities by freezing billions of dollars in pledged research grants due to be paid to Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and other prominent institutions, on the grounds that the schools have not done enough to counter anti-Semitism on their campuses or have evolved into left-wing hothouses with little diversity of opinion. The administration froze the funds as the first step in negotiations designed to address practices that conflict with federal policy or impede the effectiveness of federally supported research. Trump took the confrontation further by calling on the IRS to suspend Harvard’s tax-exempt status because, he said, the institution has turned into a partisan political operation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the task force handling the negotiations for the administration told Harvard that to unfreeze the funds, the school would not only have to address anti-Semitism but must also begin “to reform the campus culture by making structural changes to governance, student admissions and faculty hiring.” Harvard’s leaders, apparently taken aback by demands that went beyond addressing anti-Semitism, rejected the administration’s approach. Attorneys for the university replied to the task force by letter, declaring that the school would “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” Harvard president Alan Garber promised to take the battle to federal court, where he hopes a judge will order the administration to unfreeze the money—and he might get his wish, since the funds have already been pledged (though not yet paid).

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When @Harvard is puzzled as to why taxpayers question sending billions of dollars of their money to the University, Harvard need only consider what they are teaching our future educators at the Harvard Ed School.