Jon Marcus:

“When you think of an average family thinking of where to send their son or daughter, that rent-plus-food piece is getting to be a bigger chunk,” said Jay Hartzell, president of UT Austin.

Though students and their families often focus on tuition, the cost of housing is going up much faster. Annual increases in college and university tuition have been shrinking, new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds. Tuition actually fell, when adjusted for inflation, between 2020 and 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But the cost of room and board rose by 14 percent more than inflation between 2010 and 2020, the College Board reports. At public universities, in-state students now pay more for room and board than for tuition.

ars technica

Reaching this conclusion does not require reading any tea leaves or consulting any oracles; one need only listen to people like Vice President JD Vance, who in 2021 gave a speech called “The Universities are the Enemy” to signal that, like every authoritarian revolutionary, he intended to go after the educated.

“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country,” Vance said, “and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Or, as conservative activist Christopher Rufo put it in a New York Times piece exploring the attack campaign, “We want to set them back a generation or two.”

Gerald Sussman:

Serving as a TA for Professor Sussman will get you three things: great advice, spectacular reading recommendations, and lots of high quality tea. I can’t share the advice or the tea, but I can compile a reading list. Some of the materials on this list represent research paths that lead to unexplored territory. Some are textbooks that express concepts so clearly they will change your life and make you weep for joy. I hope that you will get something interesting out of this reading list, wherever you are in life – there’s stuff I wish I knew about in middle school, and there are things I can’t wait to read this summer. Enjoy! (and send corrections to reading-list@aurellem.org!)

Matt Taibbi:

It would be nice if the NYCLU acknowledged that Columbia’s record is replete with moronic civil liberties offenses. It’s deplatformed with gusto, allowed or encouraged “heckler’s veto” shutdowns of events, and institutionalized compelled-speech “diversity statements” as part of its admissions process (including instructions on what to write, like “When did your privilege result in different treatment than others?”). It has the same problems with the use of race in admissions that Harvard tried to defend and lost at the Supreme Court, and its DEI programs still infect the curriculum with iron race doctrine. The School of Social Work to this day proudly waving the banner of the “PROP or “Power, Race, Oppression, and Privilege” framework,” which makes the department’s “guiding principle” the idea that “anti-Black racism and white supremacy are endemic in our systems and institutions.”

Speech codes are issued in a variety of forms. A Barnard circular even missed the irony of a George Carlin routine, announcing “the following words cannot appear on any posted information at Barnard: shit, piss, suck, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, cocksucker and tits.” These practices and more led to Columbia in 2022 being named the worst campus in the country for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), getting the country’s sole “abysmal” rating. Ironically, Harvard would soon earn a worse review.

Hollis Robbins:

California’s 34 million residents are served by the largest public higher education network in the world: 116 community colleges, 23 California State University (CSU) campuses, and 10 University of California (UC) campuses. For decades California has mandated that undergraduates complete a broad slate of lower‑division general education (GE) courses before advancing to upper‑division work in their major. Nowhere is that mandate more explicit than in the CSU, which was created expressly to teach the first two years at scale. GE is both the CSU’s primary (and historic) mission and its most expensive obligation, strained by budget deficits and by seamless transfer policies that treat courses as interchangeable parts.

Here’s the key point: if it doesn’t matter who teaches a course, it might as well be AI. And given that ChatGPT o3 is performing at PhD level, AI might well be the best teacher.
For those who don’t know the current problem: seamless transfer is California’s (and many other states’) controversial (and misguided) solution to affordability. Under Assembly Bill 928 (2021) the State folded the community college, CSU, and UC lower‑division requirements into a single pathway, Cal‑GETC, whose learning outcomes must be honored everywhere. What that means is that students may begin at a community college, amass credits at CSU, and finish at UC without anyone looking at who exactly is teaching the courses. Instructors are locked into a template: the courses must be delivered in certain particular ways if credits are to move seamlessly. Every GE class is fungible, whether taught in Bakersfield, Long Beach, or Merced, and the same course offered at a community college should cost a fraction of what it costs at a UC hospital campus.

Benjamin Breen:

The sketches survived by chance, preserved on strips of birch bark found during Soviet archaeological excavations. They had been intended for use by school children from the medieval state of Novgorod. These children, who lived around the year 1250 CE, were meant to be learning how to read and write. But one student named Onfim used them to draw. And for this reason, Onfim has become immortal.Subscribe

His doodles include horses and soldiers, battle scenes, self-portraits, and expressive stick figures that radiate personality across eight centuries.

Dave Cieslewicz:

The quality of our schools impacts everything in our community — our long-term civic capacity, our workforce, even our property values. And, by most measures, those schools are underperforming, especially by the standards of a community that values education as much as we do.

And our schools are a lot more important than the freedom to step off the sidewalk on State Street.

John Hawkins:

For a couple of decades now, I have put out a list of the best and most obnoxious quotes of the year. The most obnoxious quotes always get much more attention for understandable reasons, but that’s just how it is these days, isn’t it? The most outrageous, blood pressure-raising, anger-producing events get all the eyeballs, and the real news, brilliant insights, and uplifting sentiments tend to get ignored.

Well today, we’re going to be giving those “best of” quotes the respect they deserve. What you are about to read is a little snapshot of history, the best quotes from 2014 – to the present. Enjoy!

20) “In the past, if a 21-year-old said they had ‘trauma’, or were on the receiving end of ‘violence,’ it usually meant they’d seen their mates get blown up in the trenches, or had been shot. Now it just means they saw a Tweet.” — Charlotte Gill

Odd Lots Podcast:

US Treasuries are the most important market in the world. With some $29 trillion outstanding, they create the benchmark that informs basically every other type of borrowing. Any changes to how the bond market works would be a massive deal. But lately, there’s been a lot of chatter about how the Trump administration could radically restructure and refinance the US debt under the so-called “Mar-a-Lago Accord.” In this episode, we speak with University of Virginia law professor Mitu Gulati about how far the administration could go to legally reform this huge and important market. We also talk about how to buy Greenland and whether Trump could make a few billion by collecting on some old loans from allies

WisPolitics:

The decision had been highly anticipated by GOP lawmakers, who said they wanted to see a decision before proceeding with the state budget.

Justice Jill Karofsky wrote the lead opinion, and was joined by fellow liberals Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet and Janet Protasiewicz in finding that the veto was valid.

Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn in his dissent ripped the majority ruling, writing it can’t be justified “under any reasonable reading of the Wisconsin Constitution.” He bemoaned the court’s previous rulings on the partial veto, writing they allow guvs to continue pushing the envelope with that power and when give “a clear opportunity in this case to reboot our mangled jurisprudence, the majority responds by blessing this constitutional monstrosity, all the while pretending its hands are tied.”

He added, “The cases the majority relies on make a mockery of our constitutional order. This is a mess of this court’s making, and it is long past time for us to fix it.”

Justices Rebecca Bradley and Annette Ziegler joined Hagedorn’s dissent

—-

IRG:

However, the partial veto can be abused in ways that actually increase the size and scope of government, rather than restraining it. That’s what happened here, when Governor Evers used his pen to unilaterally create a 400-year budget increase in spending. That sort of action seems laughably wrong, but this Supreme Court majority has just upheld it. In doing so, the Court has given the governor free rein to rewrite bills, supplanting the elected legislature with a governor who can write new laws one digit, number, or letter at a time.

——

Conservatives: tremendous dissent by Justice Hagedorn explaining how weak the majority opinion is.

Corinne Hess:

With the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs under fire and its chief diversity officer position vacant, the university has created a new position: special advisor to the chancellor and provost. 

Percival Matthews, professor and associate dean in the university’s School of Education, has been appointed to a role as a special advisor to Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and Provost Charles Isbell. Matthews will focus on “access and community.”

“The new role recognizes the importance of advancing UW–Madison’s institutional efforts to create a welcoming and inclusive community for students and employees from every background,” according to Mnookin and Isbell.

archives.gov

President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14176, Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on January 23, 2025.  Records relating to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy that have been released will be available on this webpage and will be added on a rolling basis.  

The National Archives’ Role in Fulfilling Executive Order 14176

In accordance with United States law, it is the responsibility of the National Archives to serve as the final repository of the records of the United States federal government, and make those records available to the American people.  Many of the records related to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy were previously transferred to the National Archives from federal agencies but were not available to the public. The National Archives is working closely with other federal agencies across the Executive Branch to ensure that any remaining records are identified and transferred to the National Archives  as soon as possible. 

How is the National Archives Making These Records Available?

The National Archives is working with other federal agencies to review and release records related to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Records relating to the assassination of Senator Kennedy will be added to this web page on a rolling basis as they are released.

These records are being reviewed through a prioritized interagency process to ensure maximum transparency under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Researchers may encounter some information that is withheld under FOIA, as required by law. 

Will Flanders

Yesterday, this article was published that talks extensively about Wisconsin’s private school choice programs. It is full of many misconceptions and half-truths about the programs I will address here 🧵. a

The article claims that private schools deny admission to students with disabilities. I’ve yet to see a single credible claim that VOUCHER students with disabilities have been denied admission. Private schools in the choice program must take all comers.

——-

And chief among them that she fails to mention is that its parents who are making these decisions not the government.

——-

Interestingly, the rise in home school acts like tuition payers did back in more religious times: a boost for district revenue without the cost of educating their kids.

——-

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?

Becky Jacobs

The Universities of Wisconsin is set to pay a consulting firm $395,000 after a diversity leader at the system’s flagship campus was demoted over financial concerns.

The review at University of Wisconsin-Madison will be in addition to $3.1 million the Universities of Wisconsin already agreed to pay Deloitte for financial assessments of the state’s 12 other public universities and UW system administration. Those evaluations wrapped up late last year, as six of the universities faced structural deficits.

With the new review, Deloitte will assess UW-Madison’s budgetary controls and recommend improvements, according to the contract signed last month. The work is expected to take three months.

The assessment stems from the recent removal of LaVar Charleston as UW-Madison’s vice chancellor for inclusive excellence. Charleston also directed the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement.

Kayla Huynh

When Becca Schwei volunteered to help organize a volleyball tournament for East High School last fall, she was surprised to learn the school lacked a booster club.

The club had disbanded after the COVID-19 pandemic put organized sports on pause, leaving East High as the only Madison high school without an active booster.

Without the support, East High gym teacher Erin Walker and her family even began running concessions at games, a responsibility typically delegated to booster club members. 

Now, following a five-year hiatus, Schwei and other East High parents are reviving the booster club to gather donations for the school’s athletics teams. Inspired by La Follette High School’s club, the East High parents also want to begin allocating funds to the school’s 59 clubs and extracurricular activities.

——-

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?

Glenn Greenwald:

Please read this 3-0 ruling written by Reagan appointee Harvie Wilkinson, one of the US’s most respected conservative judges, a defender of executive power.

It excoriates the Trump Admin’s ignoring of the 9-0 SCOTUS order requiring it to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release.👇

Brent Barnett:

Kadence Boender tells Brownfield state officers have a lot of responsibilities. “As state reporter, I’m in charge of running our social media pages. Pretty much anything you see on the Iowa FFA Facebook or Instagram pages, me and the secretary have posted there. And then going around doing chapter visits throughout the year all over the state.”

She says the position helped her build connections. “With my teammates, with members from across the state, and members across the nation. Those connections and memories we have together is something I’ll always remember.”

Boender says FFA has helped shape who she is. “I was a shy kid as a freshman who came in. With creed speaking, I found my voice and it changed my life from there. I kept wanting to compete and kept wanting to get active and involved.” 

She spoke to Brownfield at the 97^th Iowa FFA State Convention, which concluded Tuesday, April 15^th in Ames.

Sarah Schwartz

As recently as 2019, three-quarters of K-2 teachers said that they used the three-cueing system to teach students to read, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey. But in the years since, as the science of reading movement has gained ground, the approach has faced mounting criticism. Some popular curriculum publishers have announced that they have removed the three-cueing prompts from their programs.

Still, legislating what specific instructional techniques teachers can use in the classroom has proved controversial. Teachers’ unions, for instance, have pushed back against proposed bans on three-cueing, arguing that they infringe on educators’ ability to exercise professional judgment. 

Lawmakers who have sponsored these bills say they’re a necessary protection for students in a landscape where cueing remains popular, despite other mandates in many states requiring schools to use evidence-based methods.

——-

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?

Victor Davis Hanson

Among its other requirements, the Trump administration also warned Harvard to cease using race as a criterion in its admissions, hiring, and promotion, contrary to law.

And it also directed the campus to ban the use of masks that, in the post-COVID era of protests, have emboldened violent demonstrators with anonymity.

The administration’s order to stop race-based bias was in accordance with civil rights statutes, and a recent Supreme Court decision specifically banning affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere.

No matter. Harvard claimed that the Trump administration infringed upon its First Amendment rights.

So, it has temporarily rejected the administration’s orders. At least for now, Harvard has lost its annual $2.2 billion grant of federal funds.

Former President Barack Obama, among others, lauded Harvard’s rejection of the demands of the administration’s anti-Semitism task force. He claimed the Trump administration’s efforts were ham-handed.

Chuck Ross:

Anti-Israel Harvard Law School students organized a workshop on the Ivy League campus earlier this month to edit the Wikipedia pages of more than a dozen prominent law firms, singling out some that threatened to stop recruiting at the school over its failure to rein in anti-Semitic activity.

Harvard’s National Lawyers Guild chapter, a left-wing legal advocacy group, hosted the “Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon” on April 2 at Harvard Law’s WCC student center, according to an announcement on Harvard Law’s website.

Third-year Harvard Law student Corinne Shanahan, an organizer with Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, organized the clinic for students to “gather data to edit the Wikipedia pages of Big Law firms to reflect cases they have recently argued.”

Two days later, Harvard Law student Aashna Avachat edited the Wikipedia pages of 14 law firms, mostly to add details of their representation of clients that the activist students deemed to be unsavory, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of Wikipedia edit logs.

Erin McGroarty

With the two-year, $180,000 grant, the nonprofit had expanded its citizenship test study program and had hoped to soon provide study sessions in other areas of the city, including on Madison’s east side. 

“We hit a record number of students in 2023 and then in 2024 we had another record number of students. So we’ve been trying to expand classes,” Ryan said. 

Those plans can no longer move forward. 

The organization also used some of its grant funding to contract for legal immigration assistance with Centro Hispano, a Madison nonprofit that works to elevate and support Dane County’s Latino community. Ryan said the Literacy Network will no longer be able to afford that collaboration without the federal grant. This will mean immigrants like Ramirez may be left to find their own legal resources, which can be difficult when someone is still working to learn English. 

Ramirez’s wife helped him find the citizenship program at the Literacy Network while searching for immigration lawyers in the area.

Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz

In our last post, we showed that the economic benefits of a college degree still far outweigh the costs for the typical graduate, with a healthy and consistent return of 12 to 13 percent over the past few decades. But there are many circumstances under which college graduates do not earn such a high return. Some colleges are much more expensive than average, and financial aid is not guaranteed no matter which college a student attends. In addition, the potentially high cost of living on campus was not factored into our estimates. Some students also may take five or six years to finish their degrees, which can significantly increase costs. Further, our calculations were based on median wages over a working life, but half of college graduates earn less than the median. Indeed, even when paying average costs, we find that a college degree does not appear to have paid off for at least a quarter of college graduates in recent decades. In this post, we consider when college might not be worth it and explore differences in the return to college by major.

College Is Still Worth It Even with Higher Out-of-Pocket Costs

While the average student pays about $30,000 out of pocket for four years of college, there are many circumstances under which someone would pay significantly more. We consider some of these circumstances in the chart below. In each case, we consider differences in direct costs only.

David Zwieg:

At the time of the initial closures, in mid-March, COVID was spreading quickly, but large areas in the U.S. were absent any known cases. Still, to the extent that a planned response to influenza was an appropriate universal pandemic guide, these closures were aligned with the CDC’s most recent update to its pandemic playbook, released in 2017. According to that document, an initial two-week closure of schools would be sufficient to fulfill a first objective of buying authorities time to assess the severity of the pandemic. Given the news being reported of care rationing in northern-Italian hospitals, following this plan was not unreasonable—and, as part of broader stay-at-home orders, it may have had some effect on disease transmission.

–

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

JK Rowling:

It took three extraordinary, tenacious Scottish women with an army behind them to get this case heard by the Supreme Court and, in winning, they’ve protected the rights of women and girls across the UK. @ForWomenScot, I’m so proud to know you 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿💜🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿💚🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🤍🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Don Surber:

I cannot see how a demand that Harvard end its racial discrimination violates the college’s First Amendment rights, so let’s try to figure this out.

On Friday, officials from the General Services Administration, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Service sent a letter to Garber and Penny Pritzker (Obama’s billionaire commerce secretary and sister of the governor of Illinois) in her capacity as Lead Member of Harvard Corporation.

The Trump administration’s letter said, “Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment. But we appreciate your expression of commitment to repairing those failures and welcome your collaboration in restoring the University to its promise. We therefore present the below provisions as the basis for an agreement in principle that will maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government.”

Isaiah Poritz:

Google LLC is unlawfully using its products—ubiquitous in K-12 education—to secretly gather information about school age children, substituting the consent of the school for that of parents, a proposed class action filed in California federal court said Monday.

The tech giant collects not only traditional education records “but thousands of data points that span a child’s life,” and “neither students nor their parents have agreed to this arrangement, according to the US District Court for the Northern District of California complaint.

Google’s “Workspace for Education,” a suite of cloud-based productivity apps marketed to schools, is used by nearly 70% of K-12 schools in the US, the complaint said.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Chicago’s pension plans – and the city of Chicago by extension – avoided a reckoning in 2020 after billions in federal covid aid helped the city avoid a fiscal collapse. Some of those billions were given as direct aid to the city, while billions more filtered through the economy, eventually boosting city tax revenues. The city was spared a pension squeeze for a few years.

But reality is back and the financial market’s volatility is a reminder of just how delicate the situation is for Chicago. The market’s drop this year alone has cost the city’s five major pension funds an estimated $1 billion-plus in mark-to-market losses, a big deal for a city that already has a $53 billion funding hole and pension funds that are less than 25% funded. And in case anybody’s forgotten, it’s taxpayers who’ll ultimately have to underwrite, through higher taxes, all those billions in shortfalls.

Yes, the market could come back just as quickly as it has fallen, but the current losses reveal the predicament for Chicago’s pension funds. They’re taking big risks in equities, real estate, hedge funds and private equity to keep the pension plans going, but that leaves them overexposed to running out of money if the markets have a deep and sustained downturn.

Nick Gillespie:

Today’s guest is Harvard economist Jason Furman, who was one of former President Barack Obama’s chief economic advisers and an architect of the Affordable Care Act. These days, he’s in the news for his withering critique of former President Joe Biden’s dismal economic record and two-fisted attacks on President Donald Trump’s trade policy. We talk about Furman’s defense of global markets, Obamacare’s unfulfilled promises, and why he now thinks the national debt and AI are bigger deals than he used to believe.

Bob Jones University v. United States:

The University claimed that the IRS had abridged its religious liberty. This case was decided together with Goldsboro Christian Schools Inc. v. United States, in which Goldsboro maintained a racially discriminatory admissions policy based upon its interpretation of the Bible, accepting for the most part only Caucasian students. The IRS determined that Goldsboro was not an exempt organization and hence was required to pay federal social security and unemployment taxes. After paying a portion of such taxes for certain years, Goldsboro filed a refund suit claiming that the denial of its tax-exempt status violated the U.S. Constitution.

Will Flanders

That Mississippi–a state with far more challenging demographics–has surpassed Wisconsin on the NAEP in 4th grade reading ought to be a five alarm fire for the education establishment. The answer instead from DPI was to lower student expectations–accepting failure.

——

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?

Karen Vaites:

Stellar essay by @cafeteria_duty, published by @HKorbey, on the emergence of “test-free” schools as a quality marker in progressive communities – paired with incurious attitudes about school performance.

I had a similar conversation with a pair of Brooklyn friends. They were asking me for advice on finding a school for their Kinder-age son. I talked about finding a school with good foundational support for early literacy and math skills.

Them, describing a preferred school from their school tours: “The school doesn’t test, but it’s a great school.”

Me: “What does that mean, it doesn’t test? Not at all? If your son can’t decode words, the school wouldn’t know?” 😳

Them: “Well, we are sure the school does some tests. We think, probably.”

They said this with the same moral clarity as if they had just told me they compost or eat locally-sourced foods or divest of fossil fuel investments. They were certain a non-testing elementary approach was valid and even virtuous.

——-

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?

Anna Stokke:

In my latest episode with @MichaelPetrilli, I mentioned that I think TIMSS is a better math test than PISA. Steve Wilson sent me this article from 2009, which gives PISA a D and TIMSS an A. Why does PISA get more attention than TIMSS? 🤔@tomloveless99

math.jhu.edu/~wsw/papers2/e…

Subject-matter experts reviewed the content, rigor, and clarity of the first public drafts of the “Common Core” standards released in September 2009 by the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) of the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. Using the same criteria, the same experts also reviewed the reading/writing and mathematics frameworks of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS); and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Letter grades were awarded to each.

The goal is to help U.S. educators and policymakers to judge the respective merits of these influential standards, de facto standards, and possible future standards. In particular, how do the draft Common Core standards stack up alongside extant national and international benchmarks?

Here are the grades:

Common Core Reading/Writing/Speaking/Listening: Common Core Mathematics: B

NAEP Reading: B and NAEP Writing: B

NAEP Mathematics: C

TIMSS Mathematics: A PISA Mathematics: D

PISA Reading: D

Here are the key findings, organized by framework:

Edward Helmore:

Barack Obama, Yale and other academic institutions have come out in support of Harvardafter the Trump administration elected to cut $2bn of its federal grants after the Ivy League school in Massachusetts rejected what it said was an attempt at “government regulation” of the university.

“Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect,” said a statement from Obama, the US president from 2009 to 2017. “Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”

The standoff between some of the US’s most prestigious universities and the federal government deepened overnight on Monday after Harvard rejected elevated demands by Donald Trump’s administration, which the president has called an effort to curb antisemitism on campus. Many educators, however, see the demands as a thinly veiled effort to more broadly curb academic freedoms.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said.

The Trump administration, through the multi-federal agency joint task force to combat anti-semitism, responded by freezing $2.2bn in multi-year grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard.

—-

Some headlines rise above their genre and become cultural artifacts. This is a candidate. Consider the source.

Philip Greenspun

Harvard University is in the news right now for its showdown with the Trump Administration. Remember that inequality is bad and also that the federal government should spend taxpayer dollars at the nation’s richest institutions in the richest states rather than at, for example, University of Mississippi, Ohio University, or University of Michigan (the 13th poorest state).

My question for today is how did Harvard keep the river of taxpayer cash going for so long given its explicit race discrimination polices, most famously in admissions and hiring, but also in selling theater tickets. From a 2021 post:

We have designated this performance to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members. For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run.

Proof of vaccination or negative test results required to attend.

Jill Barshay:

The scientists didn’t actually read all 1,140,328 discussion-board submissions written by 16,791 students between the fall term of 2021 and the winter term of 2024. As specialists in analyzing big data sets, the researchers fed the posts into seven different computer models that analyze writing quality, from vocabulary to syntax to readability. Ultimately, they created a single composite index of writing quality in which all the submissions were ranked on this single yardstick. 

The results? Overall student writing quality improved. The improvement was slow at first in the early months of 2023 and then it improved substantially from October 2023 until the study period ended in March 2024.

Paul Caron Summary:

College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, Most Higher Ed Employees Received Raises This Past Year That Outpaced Inflation, But Today’s Pay Still Falls Short of Pre-Pandemic Pay in Inflation-Adjusted Dollars:

New research from CUPA-HR shows that median pay increases for most higher education employees in 2024-25 remained strong, although they have dropped from the historically high increases seen in the previous two years. And although raises this past year for most employees outpaced inflation, they are still being paid less than they were in 2019-20 in inflation-adjusted dollars. The largest gap between pre-pandemic inflation-adjusted salaries and current salaries is for tenure-track faculty (who are paid 10.2% less), followed by non-tenure-track teaching faculty (paid 7.6% less). The smallest gap is for staff (paid 2.8% less).

Some of the other key findings from an analysis of CUPA-HR’s higher ed workforce salary survey data from 2016-17 to 2024-25: …

Renu Mukherjee

On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcedthat the State Department had revoked the visas of at least 300 students for participating in violent anti-Israel protests. One of the first to face deportation was Mahmoud Khalil, a former master’s student at Columbia University. Given his background, Khalil quickly became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on non-citizen terror supporters. But last month, a new face emerged: Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia.

Like Khalil, Chung is a green-card holder—but the similarities end there. She immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea at age seven with her parents and a sibling. She was valedictorian of her high school class, holds a 3.99 GPA at Columbia, and is a member of both the university’s undergraduate law review and its literary magazine.

Shabbos Kestenbaum:

Harvard has no rights under the constitution to federal funds. Harvard students have a right under the constitution not to be discriminated against. Harvard is insisting on the first point but not the second.

Summary

The report highlights sobering 2024 statistics: only 5.8% of Black 11th-graders in Madison—22 out of 310 students—were prepared for college-level reading and writing, compared to 27% of Black students nationally and 10.3% statewide. In math, just 7.1% of Madison’s Black 11th-graders were college-ready, lagging behind 8% nationally and 6.4% across Wisconsin.

Wisconsin ranks last among states in reading and math achievement for Black students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the report notes. In contrast, states like Texas, Florida, and Mississippi have improved their standings over the past two decades through sustained, targeted reforms, offering lessons Madison has yet to fully embrace.

Spanning from the 1960s to the present, the report traces Madison’s efforts to address racial inequities in education. Desegregation policies in the 1960s aimed to integrate schools but often placed Black students in underfunded classrooms with minimal support. The 1970s brought compensatory education programs, followed by curriculum reforms in the 1990s and early 2000s. Each initiative launched with promise but stumbled due to inconsistent execution, budget cuts, or leadership turnover. 

By 2020, the report states, Madison’s Black students faced a graduation rate of 65%, trailing white students’ 85% by 20 percentage points. Standardized test score gaps have similarly persisted, with Black students scoring 30% lower on average than white peers in reading and math.

Caire’s analysis identifies a troubling pattern: well-intentioned programs are introduced, encounter structural or political barriers, and are replaced before they can take hold.

———

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 Zwaagstra

Imagine you were to ask a random group of Canadian parents to describe the primary mission of schools. Most parents would say something along the lines of ensuring that all students learn basic academic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics.

Fewer parents are likely to say that schools should focus on reducing their environmental footprints, push students to engage in environmental activism, or lobby for Canada to meet the 2016 Paris Agreement’s emission-reduction targets.

And yet, plenty of school boards across Canada are doing exactly that. For example, the Seven Oaks School Division in Winnipeg is currently conducting a comprehensive audit of its environmental footprint and intends to develop a climate action plan to reduce its footprint. Not only does Seven Oaks have a senior administrator assigned to this responsibility, but each of its 28 schools has a designated climate action leader.

Other school boards have gone even further. In 2019 Toronto District School Board (TDSB) trustees passed a “climate emergency” resolution and promised to develop a climate action plan. Not only does the TDSB now have an entire department in their central office focused on this goal, but it also publishes an annual climate action report. The most recent report is 58 pages long and covers everything from promoting electric school buses to encouraging schools to gain EcoSchools certification.

Not to be outdone, the Vancouver School District (VSD) recently published its Environmental Sustainability Plan, which highlights the many green initiatives in its schools. This plan states that the VSD should be the “greenest, most sustainable school district in North America.”

——-

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:

Most of Wisconsin’s teacher preparation programs fail to spend enough time training prospective educators how to teach elementary school math, according to a recent report.

The assessment contains findings similar to an earlier report that showed teachers who graduate from Wisconsin colleges are ill-prepared to teach reading.

Of the 22 Wisconsin elementary prep programs the National Council on Teacher Quality reviewed, just three dedicated enough time instructing undergraduate students how to teach the four key topics of elementary level math. 

Madison teacher prep programs at Edgewood College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison did not meet the recommended standards, the report found. The council issued Edgewood College a “D” grade and UW-Madison a “B” grade. 

Nationwide, 16% of 838 undergraduate programs in the review met the minimum instructional hours experts recommend to adequately prepare educators to teach math in elementary classrooms. 

——-

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

Remedial math.

Andrew Jack:

He called for “a never-ending compliance review to ensure that Harvard follows the law” banning positive discrimination. He also wrote: “To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University” by freezing research grant funding or preventing it receiving subsidised student loans.

His tactics have since been implemented: from withdrawing government grants and revoking visas of foreign students protesting on campuses, to deploying artificial intelligence and “control-F” text searches to identify diversity, equity and inclusion projects to shut down.

The administration has singled out Columbia and Harvard, while cutting funds at another four elite institutions — Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Northwestern — on a list of 60 to be investigated for a range of violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination, according to a document unveiled last month by the Department of Justice.

The University of Pennsylvania has separately had $175mn in funding frozen for allowing a transgender athlete to participate in a swimming championship, although this complied with national rules at the time.

In a sign of other possible measures to come, Eden also called for a 37 per cent tax on university endowment income, and — in line with parallel recommendations from the right-wing Project 2025 group — an overhaul of the country’s accreditation systems.

He also singled out other universities that could be targeted, including Stanford, University of Washington, University of Illinois Chicago and the University of California system.

“a moment of reckoning has arrived for the west”

Eric Weinstein:

Our private research universities are not actually purely private. They are designed to be both a cryptic soft extension of the state (e.g. national security, priming the prosperity pipeline with blue sky research, truth adjudication, etc.), which is also oppositely intended as an independent check on the state and state power in times of abuse as well. This tacit and quiet knowledge, which used to be held at the AAU and the relevant professors, has been mostly lost.

So ‘overhead’ or ‘indirect costs’ is not actually overhead at all. It is supposed to be cryptic state support based on research merit to avoid political pressure to fund 3rd tier universities at the same level as Princeton. So the whole system was designed back in the Vannevar Bush era but without leaving the esoteric knowledge with modern academicians.

It’s a disaster. It was a quiet game which worked brilliantly to serve the nation and its population until lunatics started to get a foothold in the research universities.

This is why when you audit this stuff, you see waste. It wasn’t ever intended to be what it appears to be: this was the USG paying to have a totally ELITE and EXCLUSIVE quasi-private, quasi-public resource. Think Manhattan project. Think The Jasons. Think winning.

And, despite my deep dislike of how @realchrisrufo has acted towards me, his point is spot on. If the elite U.S. universities are so confused as to think that they are truly 100% private and that they should be allowed to destroy their role of ELITE service to the nation which built them up with federal dollars, that is a moment to remind them of the “Endless Frontier” agreement.

—-

US debt increase while Janet Yellen was in charge of Fed or US Treasury : $15 trillion

—-

There is another way:

Refuse taxpayer money.

Maciver:

The latest look at Gov. Tony Evers’ budget puts a price tag on just how much the governor hopes to get out of tax and fee increases, as well as new “collections” from the state. 

The Legislative Fiscal Bureau released the reportMonday. 

“In summary, the changes included in the Governor’s budget would increase net taxes by $2,223,493,200, and would increase net

fees by $356,301,800,” the LFB wrote. “In addition, it is estimated that measures…to enhance the collection of current taxes would generate an additional $189,420,400.”

“Gov. Evers told all of us during his budget address in February that he was going to cut taxes. Yet, about a month later, we are now finding out the actual truth: Gov. Evers’ budget proposal is irresponsible and unsustainable,” Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, said on Monday. “The good news is Legislative Republicans won’t let that happen and will work hard to craft a fiscally-responsible budget that both addresses our state’s priorities and delivers meaningful tax relief.”

LFB reported that Gov. Evers is proposing 14 different tax increases, and 28 proposed tax decreases.

Seattle Times:

But it’s tough to dispute the numbers she presents. Research from Roza’s Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University shows this state has spent more on education in recent years than many others, while watching student scores fall precipitously.

More information

Watch school finance expert Marguerite Roza’s presentation on the state of Washington state’s financing and student outcomes here.

To be fair, test results are not the only indicators of learning; any kid can have a bad day. But when an entire state is trending downward on tests — and there is a vast gap between students’ scores and their grades — it’s also fair to raise questions. Something is definitely not lining up.

Consider the gulf between eighth graders’ rising GPAs and their plummeting results on national math exams. While middle schoolers’ classroom grades improved to an average of 2.7 between 2013 and 2022 — the equivalent of a C+ — passing rates on the National Assessment of Educational Progress took a dive, dropping Washington from 12^th in the country to 25^th last year.

CBS:

An altar from the Teotihuacan culture, at the pre-Hispanic heart of what became Mexico, was discovered in Tikal National Park in Guatemala, the center of Mayan culture, demonstrating the interaction between the two societies, Guatemala’s Culture and Sports Ministry announced this week.

The enormous city-state of Tikal, whose towering temples still stand in the jungle, battled for centuries with the Kaanul dynasty for dominance of the Maya world.

More.

Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Shai Ben-David:

Machine learning is one of the fastest growing areas of computer science,
with far-reaching applications. The aim of this textbook is to introduce machine learning, and the algorithmic paradigms it offers, in a principled way. The book provides an extensive theoretical account of the fundamental ideas underlying machine learning and the mathematical derivations that transform these principles into practical algorithms. Following a presentation of the basics of the field, the book covers a wide array of central topics that have not been addressed by previous textbooks. These include a discussion of the computational complexity of learning and the concepts of convexity and stability; important algorith-
mic paradigms including stochastic gradient descent, neural networks, and structured output learning; and emerging theoretical concepts such as the PAC-Bayes approach and compression-based bounds. Designed for an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course, the text makes the fundamentals and algorithms of machine learning accessible to students and nonexpert readers in statistics, computer science, mathematics, and engineering.

Jay Rothman:

Last week I sent a letter to our Congressional delegation in Washington, D.C. to express my concerns about federal financial aid amid the ongoing budget process. 1/

Dave Cieslewicz:

The audit did find what I suspected: DEI is most charitably described as complex. It’s less charitably described as a mess. State government provides no clear guidance from the top about what DEI should be. The UW is so loosely managed that each campus and department could define it anyway it wanted. On the Madison campus DEI ran amok with its leader, LaVar Charleston, doling out huge raises without justification as well as spending lavishly on conferences, hotels and even haircuts and massages. And that was only discovered thanks to this audit. One thing is for sure and it goes beyond DEI: the UW’s internal management is too weak. There’s too much autonomy granted to campuses and to departments within campuses. Sometimes you need more autonomy and sometimes you need more top down. Right now the UW needs more command and control.

——-

The report. backup link.

Much more on DEI / DIE.

John Gerritsen

Large numbers of recently-appointed primary teachers lack the most basic school qualifications in science and maths, new research shows.

The Institute of Economic Research says the results of its study – which analysed the school qualifications of primary teachers who started work between 2017 and 2022 – are alarming.

It found a quarter attempted one or more NCEA level 1 maths standards, but did not get the 14 credits required for an endorsement, the benchmark required to “pass” a subject.

It said 58 percent fell short at level 1 science, while 14 percent of those studying level 1 English did not get 14 credits.

“In maths, an average of 25 percent of new teachers employed between 2017 and 2022 had failed to gain an Achieved level endorsement at Level 1. This means, on average, a quarter of all new primary school teachers who attempted could not pass at a basic level, the compulsory maths required of 15-year-olds in New Zealand,” the report said.

“If that result is concerning, then the science results are alarming indeed: people who were new primary school teachers between 2017 and 2022 had failure rates in Level 1 science, averaging 58 percent. That is, most new primary school teachers who attempted failed to pass at a basic level the compulsory science required of 15-year-olds.”

Paul Vallas:

The CTU got a raise, the taxpayers paid the bill, and students lost again

If there is any good news in the Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) new contract with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), it’s that despite intense political pressure, CPS CEO Martinez maintained a firm stance against the union on the four biggest issues: Modest pay raises, limiting additional staff increases, protecting existing instructional time, and protecting the current evaluation system. The bad news, however, is that this new contract will cost Chicago’s taxpayers $1.5 billion while doing nothing to remove obstacles CTU has set in place to block public school choices for parents or improve schools.

Let’s look at the four biggest issues.

1. The contract cost: The CTU’s original demands would have cost Chicago $10 billion over 4 years. The cost of the agreement, which mirrors Martinez’s contract offer six months ago, was settled at $1.5 billion. This total matches the previous record setting contract CTU was awarded in 2019 and similar to the contract five years ago; it arrived with no CTU concessions.

2. The pay raise: CTU had initially demanded nine percent annual raises. An absurd request, the union eventually accepted an annual four percent first year increase followed by five percent increases, with a higher pay hike for veteran teachers. However, this is in addition to the step-in-lane increases which, for the majority of teachers, will almost double their annual salary increases.

3. Staff increases: CTU had first demanded 13,900 new staff; CPS wanted to maintain current staffing levels. In the final agreement, the CTU was limited to 800 to 900 additional staff in targeted areas, primarily Special Education and Bilingual services. This comes after the district added over 9,000 full time budgeted positions, most of which they filled since 2019. The district currently has one staff member for every 7.6 students.

4. Instructional time: From the outset, CTU had insisted on additional prep time at the expense of instructional time, but the district held fast. However, for the second straight contract cycle, the district agreed to spend $1.5 billion on a deal that did not add one minute of instructional time despite it being the most effective way to improve student performance.

The Economist:

IT starts with the basics: how to thread a needle. Then, over the course of the next 30 minutes, she shows the students a few different stitches, along with how to mend a torn shirt and beautify a frayed hem. This is not a lesson at some fusty finishing school. The sewing class is part of a free, one-day course at Austin Community College (acc) called “Adulting 101”. The students range in age from their late teens to mid-40s.

The Economist:

In Louisiana, where a lottery system made the impact of school choice easy to study, voucher-carrying students saw their maths test scores fall dramatically within a year and were 50% more likely to fail than those who stayed in public schools. The evidence on whether public schools improved is mixed; in some places, like Indiana, students who stayed in them also slumped. The rare study that shows vouchers to be a boon tends to have been questionably designed: higher college enrolment among early adopters of Florida’s scheme can probably be attributed to the participation of better students.

Private schools can choose whether to take vouchers. It tends to be the shoddier ones in lower demand that do. An analysis by HuffPost found that 75% of America’s voucher-taking schools are religious; facing waning enrolment at parochial schools, the Catholic church has championed the Texas bill. States cannot force elite schools to participate. In theory, students in exceptionally bad public schools could still benefit from switching to mediocre private ones. But evidence from other states shows that the primary users of vouchers are children who already go to private schools. “That can’t possibly be a good use of public funds from a cost-benefit perspective,” says Sarah Cohodes of the University of Michigan.

Bridie Smith:

Compounding matters, the report released on Sunday also found one in four teachers lacked confidence teaching grade 5 and 6 maths, while many teachers expressed concern about their colleagues’ abilities.

“Maths in primary schools is just languishing,” said Grattan Institute education program director and report lead author Dr Jordana Hunter.

“We need to stop accepting maths mediocrity. We need to set higher standards and go after them.”

The Maths Guarantee report surveyed 1745 teachers, with one in five saying they worried about teaching maths, while 94 per cent of school leaders said at least some teachers at their school would be hesitant to teach grade 5 or 6 maths.

A 2023 global maths test found just 13 per cent of Australian grade 4 students excelled in maths, compared to 22 per cent in England and 49 per cent in Singapore.

——

Notes and links on Singapore, Disovery and Connected math.

Math forum audio / video.

Paul Vallas

CTU’s opposition to school choice combined with its assault on public school standards and accountability has created an apartheid school system in which poor families, overwhelmingly black and Latino, are trapped in failing schools

Apartheid was the brutal system of racial segregation and discrimination enforced in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The term is synonymous with deliberate separation and systemic disadvantage.

By that definition, in places where teachers unions control the schools, those public education systems are de facto state-sanctioned apartheid vehicles. In their determination to maintain an ironclad monopoly, the unions deny poor families — overwhelmingly Black and Latino — access to quality educational options. This is racist, if not by intent, but certainly in outcome.

Nowhere is this apartheid-style control clearer than in Chicago. The Chicago Teachers Union’ (CTU) leadership is determined to strengthen its monopoly over education — not only by eliminating private school options for poor families, but also by targeting public school choice. The CTU is actively working to eliminate both charter and magnet schools, which highlight the stark performance gap between those schools and severely underperforming neighborhood schools. By eliminating options, the CTU imprisons poor families in failing, half-empty schools, reform be damned. Meanwhile, they work equally hard to expand their member’s benefits and numbers, all the while protecting them from accountability.

Ashley Mowreader:

Researchers from the University of Iowa find, due to grade inflation and other differences between academic and work behavior, GPA has lost predictive validity for job performance among college graduates.

In a soon-to-publish article in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers from the University of Iowa identified that, since the 1920s, academic performance has weakened as a predictor of a graduate’s performance in job roles. 

The study shows while there is still a predictive relationship between assessment measures in higher ed and assessment in the workplace, other, more specific measures may better define this relationship, such as relevant coursework and professor evaluations. Researchers believe this insight can better support curriculum development and connect academics to careers. 

Tyler Cowen summary:

• The issue is now a global one, which has not been the case historically. German bunds now trade at a negative swap spread (the yield on cash bonds is higher than on similar tenor swaps). This is a fairly recent development. It suggests the problem has shifted from being primarily a  shortage of USD cash (though that is still true to a significant degree), to a global oversupply of longer dated bonds.
• A crunch in repo funding does not seem to be primarily responsible here. Balance sheet efficient methods of intermediating repo (sponsored repo) are more available now than they have been in the past. And they haven’t solved the problem.
• Permitting bond basis to fluctuate is quite pernicious. It meaningfully reduces the negative correlation between long bonds and risk assets. Meaningully reducing the attractiveness of holding them in a portfolio and increasing funding costs.

Some extremely telling quotes from former Biden admin officials on the challenges they had trying to advance priorities through their own bureaucracy.

more:

NGOs operate outside the chain of command. They answer to no electorate, no oversight, no public mandate. They can push any agenda they choose without accountability.

So the real question isn’t how this happened, or even why. The real question is: why were we surprised? The moment Biden took office, the plan was already in motion. NGOs had the infrastructure, the logistics, the funding pipelines; everything ready to go. They didn’t need permission. They just needed power. And when they got it, they had it all set up from day 1: overnight, we were flooded with illegal immigrants under the cover of a coordinated strategy that had been waiting in the wings.

——

locally, taxpayer funded grants have long driven policy outside of elected governance. Small Learning Communities and the one size fits all English 10 experiments are two examples.

The Economist:

“The isolation of the academy writ large, from the whole of society, is at the root of a lot of these problems,” says Greg Weiner, the president of Assumption University. Loud and lengthy protests against Israel’s war in Gaza over the past 18 months have further cemented the idea that campuses are out of kilter with mainstream opinion—and given the right an opportunity to attack universities for not doing enough to make Jewish students and faculty feel safe.

The administration has been using supposed antisemitism as grounds to demand reforms. “In some cases, these are not just unconstitutional demands, but there is also no statutory authority for them,” says Jameel Jaffer, a professor of law and journalism at Columbia University. Mr Jaffer points out that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which the administration has invoked on behalf of Jewish students and faculty, does allow for sanctions—but only after a formal investigation. Even then, “The remedial measures have to be limited to the programme found to be in violation.”

By Nicholas Eberstadt

Yet in Russia today, we see an exception to the seemingly global correspondence between educational attainment and human capital. Russia presents the curious counterexample of a country where high levels of education coexist with strikingly poor health profiles—where the population’s considerable schooling contributes only feebly to its “knowledge production” and skills-intensive international service sector.

This Russian paradox merits attention—and not for academic reasons alone. Understanding the economic and defense potential of this large and highly schooled population will be an increasingly pressing security question as the world heads into a second cold war.

International demographic and economic data illustrate the Russian paradox. I focus on Russian conditions on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic (i.e., circa 2019) rather than trends for the early 2020s, since the demographic and economic reverberations of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine severely complicate any effort to compare Russian readings with more recent soundings from other countries.

Angelique Chrisafis

France is to tighten its ban on the use of mobile phones in middle schools, making pupils at the ages of 11 to 15 shut away their devices in a locker or pouch at the start of the day and access them again only as they are leaving.

The education minister told the senate she wanted children to be fully separated from their phones throughout the school day in all French middle schools from September.

Élisabeth Borne said: “At a time when the use of screens is being widely questioned because of its many harmful effects, this measure is essential for our children’s wellbeing and success at school.”

Matteo Pazzona

Highlights

• •An examination of the relationship between inequality and crime is conducted through a meta-analysis, incorporating 1,341 estimates derived from 43 studies.
• •Income inequality has a small, if not inexistent, effect on crime.
• •Some limited evidence of positive publication bias is found.
• •Inequality metrics which are sensitive to changes in both the middle and upper segments of the income distribution exhibit higher coefficients.
• •The omission of relevant variables, such as deterrence and income, introduces a notable bias.

more.

Ann Althouse Summary:

“Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel…”
“… not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity.”

Writes Merve Emre, in “An Unsentimental Education/Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals” (NYRB).

I know you’re unlikely to have the needed subscription, but that essay will appear in a new edition of the novel, coming out next month (so wait for that edition if you’re thinking of buying the book).

And I would encourage you to click that link if only to see the top of the article, which is illustrated with an Elliott Erwitt photograph, “Women with a sculpture personifying the alma mater at Columbia University, New York City, 1955.”

That’s one of the best photos I’ve ever seen! And it is evocative today, with Columbia so much in the news.

Kimberly Wethal:

The Universities of Wisconsin spent $40.2 million on offices that relate in some way to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts during the 2023-24 school year, the Legislature’s Audit Bureau said Friday.

But UW system leaders say those numbers are not only “old and cold,” since they’re based on May 2024 statistics, but they are also overly broad in scope.

The Legislative Audit Bureau’s report looked at diversity, equity and inclusion spending at both the UW system and elsewhere in the executive branch of state government. In both cases, the legislative audit bureau had to estimate amounts the agencies spent on diversity efforts because agencies did not track those costs themselves.

Compared to other agencies, UW system had the most robust set of programs and initiatives relating to DEI practices.

Maggie Macintosh

School communities who scored poorly on last year’s Grade 12 pre-calculus exams are receiving more than half a million dollars combined to improve students’ skills.

Mathematician Anna Stokke said the internal announcement

appears to be an attempt to inflate scores via study cramming ahead of the second semester tests.

“The province needs a better, long-term plan to fix math scores,” said Stokke, a professor of mathematics at the University of Winnipeg.

“Preparation for Grade 12 math and pre-calculus really starts in

K to 8.”

Stokke has been a vocal critic of the province’s recent decision to loosen teacher certification requirements and no longer require elementary educators to complete six credit hours of university-level math.

In addition to reiterating calls to restore that training component, the professor called on the province to focus on recruiting more teachers who have strong math backgrounds and renewing an emphasis on helping young students master prerequisite skills.

more.

Chris Rickert:

The U.S. Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Both DPI and the Madison School District offer various programs and resources in the DEI field, although whether any of them would violate the Trump administration’s interpretation of federal nondiscrimination law is unclear.

Among the resources offered by DPI is a list of strategiesto achieve “equity and social justice.” The latter includes “restructuring school and community organizations to achieve greater educational equity and giving voice to multiple perspectives by changing the roles, rules and relationships that influence how people work, learn and interact.”

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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.

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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?

Ryan Petty:

There’s an unsettling pattern emerging in schools across the country—a growing reluctance to work with law enforcement during emergencies. The hesitation to cooperate with law enforcement—even during routine or non-emergency situations—has roots that go back decades. It’s often shaped by ideological views that are skeptical of police presence in schools, sometimes framing law enforcement not as partners in safety, but as potential threats to students. 

While the intention may be to protect children, the result is a breakdown in trust and collaboration that puts everyone at greater risk when real emergencies occur. Bureaucratic protocols, ideological resistance, and, in some cases, outright disdain for police officers are putting students and staff at risk. As a good friend of mine, a school safety expert says, “the time to exchange business cards is not during a crisis”. Said another way, the time to forge the relationships necessary to protect the lives of students and educators is not the day of a tragedy.

The recent incident at Ridgeview Middle School in Columbus, Ohio is just the latest, and perhaps most shocking, example of what happens when adults in the room lose sight of their most important responsibility: keeping children safe.

Link:

Classical education may be “old school,” but its renaissance in the U.S. is among the fastest-growing—and most promising—developments in K–12 education today. To inform parents, teachers, school leaders, lawmakers, and citizens interested in the revival of classical liberal arts education, this database offers a survey of almost 900 schools that make up the movement today, drawing from the nine largest classical school associations:

Asher Lehrer-Small

Houston ISD teacher salaries could soon range from $64,000 to $101,000 per year depending largely on employees’ performance ratings, ending a long-time practice of paying educators based on years of experience, according to a district document.

HISD on Tuesday released long-awaited plans for a “pay-for-performance” system for its 10,000-plus teachers, which would go into effect starting with the 2026-27 school year — becoming the nation’s largest such model, Superintendent Mike Miles said. The proposal marks a step toward a goal Miles has articulated since soon after Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath appointed him to run the district in mid-2023 as part of a state takeover.

Teachers would receive one of six levels of pay based on how they score on a recently-passed performance rating formula, according to the plan. Educators at 130 schools that are part of Miles’ overhaul model would receive an extra $3,000 or $9,000 per year, depending on what subject they teach.

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more

Rick Hess:

All of this anguished activity has been accompanied by the plaintive cry of, “How could this happen?!”

The answer is simple: Over the past decade, schools and colleges carelessly embraced an agenda that was out of step with mainstream American values. Education leaders blithely went along for the ride as ideologues, grifters, and opportunists transformed sensible intuitions about fairness and opportunity into toxic dogmas—and then into the lingua franca of American education.

Colleges went all in. By 2022, nearly half of large institutions used DEI when awarding tenure. In practice, that typically entailed mandatory “DEI statements,” loyalty oaths that 56 percent of moderate faculty (and 90 percent of their conservative peers) describe as “ideological litmus tests.” Last spring, progressive Harvard University law professor Randall Kennedy condemned DEI statements as “pledges of allegiance” that screen out conservatives and those who “show insufficient enthusiasm for the DEI regime.” Indeed, many institutions looked at diversity statements before bothering with actual qualifications. At the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, DEI statements alone were used to reject as many as three-quarters of professorial applicants.

DEI dogma was omnipresent in K–12, too. Parents shared tales of third graders who were ashamed of their “whiteness” or who tut-tutted their parents for using outdated gender terminology like “boys” and “girls.” The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History featured an online guide for “Talking about Race” in K–12 that rejected “hard work,” “self-reliance,” and “be[ing] polite” as habits of “white culture.” The famed KIPP charter schools ditched their 25-year-old mantra “Work Hard. Be Nice” as a legacy of “white supremacy” culture that threatened efforts to “dismantle systemic racism.” In January 2025, a national survey of high schoolers reported that over a third have teachers who “often” or “almost daily” tell them America is a fundamentally racist nation.

Formerly mundane teacher-training workshops offered a striking illustration of how far things had gone. The Equity Collaborative taught educators that “independence,” “individual thinking,” and “self-expression” are racist hallmarks of “white individualism.” Teachers in Seattle learned that we live in a “race-based white-supremacist society,” in Buffalo that they should embrace “queer-affirming network[s] where heteronormative thinking no longer exists,” and in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ [gender] identities.” A raft of similar examples were available pretty much anywhere someone filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

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“the grant made me do it”

David Keene:

As president, George W. Bush proudly assured visitors that he and no one else was “decider.” Just who was the “decider” in the Biden White House as the president of the United States slipped into senility remains an unanswered question.

That may be about to change. Insider accounts are dribbling out about President Biden’s inability to run the country. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ “Fight” hit bookstore shelves last week. Chris Whipple’s “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History” will be published this week and includes devastating observations from Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff from 2021 to 2023.

Neither book addresses that question head-on, but both detail the mental deterioration and insider concerns about their boss’ ability to do his job. Mr. Klain, a competent insider with years of experience, writes of his concern about a president who could not understand his programs or the mood of the voters. Mr. Klain prepared Mr. Biden for the debate with Mr. Trump and was shocked by his mental and physical deterioration since Mr. Klain left the White House. Both “mock” or practice debates ended early because the president was tired and almost incoherent. Mr. Klain told Mr. Whipple he feared the debate would be “a nationally televised disaster.” It was.

Yet Mr. Klain, like others in Mr. Biden’s inner circle, urged him to run for a second term, knowing he wasn’t capable of serving. They and their allies in the media covered up his true condition and assured his party’s leaders and voters that he was up to the job and could win a second term. Even after the debate that would end Mr. Biden’s candidacy, Mr. Klain told Mr. Whipple that he believed Mr. Biden should have stayed in the race and could have defeated Mr. Trump.

Mr. Klain’s account confirms that Democratic operatives were planning to run Mr. Biden for a second term, in a disservice to the man they worked for and in betraying the duty they owed their country. Many justified their actions after the election by claiming they thought Mr. Biden, unlike Vice President Kamala Harris, would have defeated Mr. Trump.

Corrinne Hess

Schools that fail to comply with the Trump administration’s directive about diversity, equity, and inclusion may be at risk of losing Title I funding.

This school year, Wisconsin received about $216 million in Title I funds. About $82 million of that money went to Milwaukee Public Schools.

Underly said the request from the Department of Education potentially violates required procedural steps, is unnecessarily redundant and appears designed to intimidate school districts by threatening to withhold critical education funding.

“We cannot stand by while the current administration threatens our schools with unnecessary and potentially unlawful mandates based on political beliefs,” Underly said in a statement. “Our responsibility is to ensure Wisconsin students receive the best education possible, and that means allowing schools to make local decisions based on what is best for their kids and their communities.”

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more.

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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.

Karen Pilarski:

Declining enrollment is nothing new to many school districts, including the School District of Waukesha. Due to this, the district is considering what the future will look like and making decisions accordingly. During the Finance and Facilities meeting on Monday, Superintendent Jim Sebert made a presentation called “Optimizing Our Future.” Sebert said due to enrollment dropping, the district’s goal is to reduce building capacity by 10-15% to be in line with the current enrollment trends. The focus will be on K-8 schools.

“We’re calling this optimizing our future because we are in a good position as a school district. The financial stewardship that this board and boards before have shown the way we work together, administratively and as a board; however, enrollment is not what it used to be, and so we know that that’s not a Waukesha problem, that’s not just a Wisconsin problem, that’s a nationwide situation,” Sebert said.

Sebert said the district’s last two schools were built and opened in 1993 to address increases in enrollment which were projected and peaked in 2012/2013 at just over 13,000 students.

“However, today, though, we see our enrollment dropping. It’s projected to drop through 2034 on the studies we have done, and we currently hover right around 10,500 students,” he said.

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Amidst declining enrollment, Madison is building schools…

Sarah Volpenhein:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has lost at least $12.6 million in anticipated research dollars after President Donald Trump’s administration recently canceled four of its research grants, part of a national crackdown on funding for transgender issues, COVID-19 and diversity.

The details, tucked into a lawsuit filed late last week, shed more light on how cuts at the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency that awards billions of dollars annually to universities, are affecting UW-Madison, one of the nation’s top research institutions.

UW-Madison officials have previously spoken broadly about possible cuts and the potential for harmful effects on lifesaving research but rejected public records requests seeking copies of stop-work orders on specific research projects. The latest legal filings provide an accounting of projects that have been halted and the dollar amounts tied to them.

In March, the National Institutes of Health began canceling active research grants in earnest, saying the projects “no longer effectuate agency priorities.” The grants targeted for cancellation, by the hundreds, related to transgender issues, COVID-19 or diversity, equity and inclusion.

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Grok 3 summary.

Holly Mathnerd:

In the last few years, I have gotten at least 200 emails from loving parents who are crushed because their kids went to college and decided that their parents were oppressors whose politics (usually not conservative—usually normal, non-leftist-wacko Democrats) made them toxic. After a lot of fighting during the four years of school, their adult children now refuse relationships with them.

In addition, parents whose kids are approaching college age have been emailing me to request advice for several years now. They read my tweets, back when I was active on Twitter—my Twitter account still exists and I read the news there without ever tweeting, but I was once addicted to it—about how intense the Woke brainwashing efforts were, and how hard it was not to give in to it. They emailed me because they were desperate to know how to help their kid not fall for it.

Parents are right to be worried. I had a based therapist helping me, or I would have absolutely, 100%, there is no doubt in my mind, fallen for all of it. That should be a humiliating admission, but it isn’t.

Maoist re-education camps are in fact quite good at achieving their objectives.

I have written about how hard it is—even for me—not to slip into the reductionist thinking that today’s universities inculcate, how the first notion that jumps to mind when a man is rude, or even just awkward, is always an idea put there by a professor. And here are some thoughts about why the marginalization narrative is so easy for colleges to brainwash kids into. It is profoundly tempting: it sets up a scenario for everyone except heterosexual white guys such that if they fail, it’s not their fault, but if they succeed, they’re a superhero. It took a great therapist challenging these notions regularly—like asking me if I really think men conspire with each other to keep women who share their interests as far away as possible—to help me question these narratives and not fall totally under their sway. Even so, the brainwashing did damage and I still have to work to root these ideas out. I recently wrote about how deeply the brainwashing entrenched negative ideas about men that a difficult childhood gave me, and how it even gave some of those ideas to people with no similar histories:

John Sailer

Are these bad funding requirements? I’ve long argued that they are.

Is it a violation of academic freedom to make conditions for funding? I don’t think so. And until now, Eisgruber and the other university leaders circling the wagons haven’t seemed to care.

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Related: “small learning communities”.

Corrinne Hess:

A high school senior from Middleton is representing herself in court against the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association’s transfer rules that are keeping her from playing lacrosse her last year of high school. 

Keira Cason, 18, attended a private boarding school in Connecticut until last year, when she withdrew halfway through her senior year for health reasons. 

She moved home and decided to redo her senior year at Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart, in Madison. 

Greg David:

Those are the major conclusions of a new report on the system called “Footing the Bill,” released Monday by the Community Service Society and the Progress and Poverty Institute, aligning those two progressive groups with fiscal organizations like the Citizens Budget Commission and real estate groups like the Real Estate Board of New York in calling for an overhaul of property taxes in the city.

The organizations will be hosting a “birthday party” panel discussion Monday in conjunction with the report’s release, all part of an effort to prompt mayoral candidates to address a looming issue campaigns have conspicuously avoided.

“I find it a little distressing that candidates are not mentioning the property tax,” said Martha Stark, the former city finance director who is a key force behind Tax Equity Now New York, the group trying to force changes through a lawsuit pending in state Supreme Court. “Maybe that is failure on our part.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of a state Court of Appeals decision that found the city’s property system illegal. Since then, its replacement has “aged poorly,” according to the report — which echoes the findings of many other studies and media investigations in the past.

Jeet Heer:

Thomas Jefferson’s personal reputation has been much tarnished in recent years as historians have uncovered ever more damning evidence of the secret shackled family he sired with the enslaved Sally Hemings, yet his historical significance looms the larger precisely because he, more than any other founding father, embodied the crucial discrepancy between lofty ideals and tawdry reality. Jefferson dreamed of a new nation that was not only independent but also enlightened. Toward that end, he created in 1825 the University of Virginia, with the goal of bringing the best minds of Europe over to nurture the fledgling youth of the new republic, who would be given free space in a “University of Adolescent Liberty” to pursue the life of the mind.

Recruiting the first cohort of University of Virginia professors, Jefferson hired five Europeans (four British, one German) and three Americans. But importing scholars was an easier task than creating a country hospitable to learning.

Jefferson’s problem was the students, not the teachers. The students at the University of Virginia tended to be, like Jefferson himself, plantation gentry with the hauteur intrinsic to the slave-owing class. They had little appetite for mental exertion, preferring to gamble and brawl rather than learn Latin or algebra. Suffused with a good-old-boy ethos, they prized manly belligerence and regarded the studious with contempt.

These strapping young men would have their slaves carry their books, which they themselves rarely deigned to open. They would regularly challenge each other and their professors to duels. They rioted with the chant, “Down with the European professors!” In September of 1825, after professors had been attacked with bricks and bottles, a campus gathering took place in the university’s rotunda. A tearful Jefferson, sitting on a long table with fellow former presidents James Madison and James Monroe, addressed faculty and students, trying to achieve calm with a mixture of disciplinary efforts and pleas for the students to govern each other.

John Sailer:

It contributes to universities’ left-wing bent.

At Columbia University, the Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy Project created a curriculumto help college students imagine a “society without jails and prisons.” At Morgan State University, the Black Queer Everything initiative developed “transformative pedagogies” about “racism, inequality, and injustice.” And at UCLA, the Race in the Global Past through Native Lensesprogram promoted using “tribal critical race theory” to interpret precolonial history.

Beyond their radical bent, these programs have one thing in common: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds them. The organization’s namesake made his mark on American politics a century ago as Treasury secretary. Today, his foundation injects identity politics into our universities and bankrolls the career development of activist scholars.

In past City Journal articles, I’ve shown how universities advance identitarian activists into faculty positions. I’ve reported on administrators’ clever recruiting tactics to select ideologically aligned scholars, which raise serious questions about academic freedom. This scholar-activist pipeline, I’ve shown, benefits extensively from federal funds.

But perhaps the key player in this scheme is the Mellon Foundation. Documents I’ve acquired through public records requests reveal the extent of the $8 billion behemoth’s influence on every level of higher education—and its support for the scholar-activist pipeline.

Arjun Panickssery:

The “Mississippi Miracle” started in 2012 when the Republican governor/legislature introduced phonics-based instruction and began to hold back ~10% of 3rd graders per year who fail a reading test

Corrine Hess:

Almost 25 percent of Wisconsin fourth graders lack basic math knowledge

NCTQ evaluated 22 elementary teacher prep programs in Wisconsin to determine if they dedicate enough time to key math content topics and math pedagogy.

The report found 14 percent of the state’s programs earned an “A+” or an “A” by dedicating at least 135 instructional hours to numbers and operations, algebraic thinking, geometry and measurement, and data analysis and probability. 

Those schools were the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point; UW-Milwaukee and UW-Oshkosh.

Four schools received an “F,” which means they are dedicating fewer than 90 instructional hours to math content topics and math pedagogy. 

Those schools are: Alverno College’s undergraduate and graduate program, Carthage College, UW-Platteville and Wisconsin Lutheran College.

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more. Commentary.

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Notes and links on Singapore, Disovery and Connected math.

Math forum audio / video.

Teacher Prep Review:

Unfortunately, many elementary students in the United States do not receive adequate math instruction. Nearly a quarter of fourth graders, over 850,000 children in the U.S.⁴—roughly the entire population of San Francisco—lack basic math knowledge and skills, such as locating numbers on a number line or subtracting multidigit whole numbers.⁵

Improving math achievement for students starts with ensuring that their teachers have the knowledge and skills they need to teach effectively. There is a persistent misconception that anyone with a high school diploma has the requisite math knowledge to teach elementary math. In reality, teaching elementary math requires both a conceptual understanding of foundational mathematics and pedagogical knowledge of how to teach the concepts.⁶

Teachers need to know how to do more than just follow the steps in math to get the right answer. They need to know why those steps work. It’s like the difference between a basketball player and a coach. The player can follow directions and specialize in their role, but the coach needs to understand the bigger picture—the why behind every move. In other words, teachers need to deeply understand the math they want students to learn and must have the specialized knowledge of how to teach it, including recognizing and correcting student misconceptions.

Elementary teachers themselves report that they do not feel ready to provide strong math instruction. Many elementary teachers do not feel adequately well prepared to teach many areas of math.⁷ In fact, one in four elementary teachers reports feeling anxious doing math.⁸Teachers suffering from math anxiety have a negative impact on their students’ math outcomes.⁹ Providing aspiring teachers with strong preparation offers an antidote to math anxiety by helping them become the confident and competent math instructors students need.

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Notes and links on Singapore, Disovery and Connected math.

Math forum audio / video.

Alyssa Lukpat, Vera Bergengruen and Gretchen Tarrant Gulla:

Federal agents moved a Turkish student arrested in Massachusetts to Louisiana despite a judge’s order barring her transfer without notice.

Rumeysa Ozturk is being held at an immigration center in Louisiana, attorneys for the administration said Thursday. Judge Indira Talwani’s order that a 48-hour notice must be given before her transfer came too late, the attorneys said.

Ozturk, a Ph.D. student on a student visa, was taken into custody Tuesday outside her off-campus apartment building in Somerville, Mass., according to Tufts University and court records. She was on her way to meet friends and break her fast for Ramadan when she was detained, her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said.

Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar, wasn’t charged with any crime and wasn’t allowed to speak to her attorney until she was already in Louisiana, according to her legal team.

Agents in masks and street clothes approached Ozturk on the street and led her away in handcuffs as she screamed, according to video of the detention.

Matthew Perrone:

Marks agreed to give Kennedy’s associates the ability to read thousands of reports of potential vaccine-related issues sent to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. But he would not allow them to directly edit the data.

“Why wouldn’t we? Because frankly we don’t trust (them),” he said, using a profanity. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”

Marks spoke to the AP on Sunday, after officials in Texas confirmed the nation’s second measles-related death in an unvaccinated child this year. Marks attributed the death to the tepid response from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which again encouraged the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine on Sunday but has also promoted claims about vitamin A supplements.

link:

I’ve found that most of the technical books published before about 1964 never had their copyrights renewed, so now are in the public domain. So I am endeavoring to digitize and post some selected books relating to the “vacuum tube age” of electronics here.

Many – maybe over half now – of these books were scanned by other people and contributed for me to post here. Many, many thanks to all the individuals who have helped out with this endeavor. I find that I do not have much time to scan books these days – the demands of the “day job” have increased much over the past few years – so I’m not doing a lot of scanning myself. If you have material that you would like to contribute, please send me an email.

I have checked to the best of my ability to confirm that these works have expired copyrights and are now in the public domain. If you have information to the contrary, please contact me at:

One Percent Rule:

There are books, and there are books. Why we read and what we read matters. There are some books with titles like Anna Karenina, Invisible Man, Walden, Steppenwolf, books that are spoken of as “must reads.” I always question why? Why should we read them? What will the value be for me? Of course I understand they will broaden my mind and probably introduce me to sentences longer than most emails.

But beyond the resume-padding or the vague promise of sophistication, some of these books hit a nerve. They don’t just educate; they irritate. They challenge your assumptions, your habits, your sense of who you are. They’re uncomfortable. And that’s precisely the point.

Nobel Laureates are famous for reading from a wide range of genres. For instance, Peter C. Doherty, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1996, stated that he would “spend a great deal of time reading anything and everything.” Another Nobel Prize winner, in Physics (2005), Roy J. Glauber, indicated: “My first salvation was reading. I visited the local public library regularly and began reading the great adventure stories of Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas and Walter Scott.”

Book lists of ‘must-reads’ have never appealed to me. I tend to reach for the obscure, the out-of-print, the books with cracked spines and questionable theses, those such as Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen. A few years ago I read Where Troy Once Stood, a book whose central claim is that the Trojan War took place not in Anatolia, but in England. It’s far from the canon, but it was bold and meticulously argued. It made me think, and not just about Homer or geography, but about the value of contrarian voices and what it means to question what ‘everyone knows.’ That kind of reading, difficult, sometimes a little mad, is not so different from tackling the books on the Mensa list. Both ask you to engage, not skim. To stay with the argument, even if it leads somewhere strange.

Rana Forhoohar:

For years now, colleges and universities in the US, both public and private, have been spending more on bureaucracy and less on actual teaching. Since the 1970s, the ratio of faculty to administrators has flipped, in large part because they have become not just places of education but lifestyle centres. College campuses now offer mental health services, intramural sports, entertainment, luxury dorms and gourmet food. Until recently, DEI initiatives proliferated (the latter are now under legal threat following the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in 2023).

You need more people to run all these things. And while college administrators used to be promoted from inside the academy itself, they are now largely drawn from business schools and professional management programmes. These people are often disconnected from the core mission of teaching and yet their ubiquity and high salaries (often into six-figures) force schools to push up the cost of tuition. 

Between 1979 and 2021, the price of a four-year degree tripled, even after accounting for normal inflation. That translates into more teaching being done by lower-paid adjuncts rather than full-time faculty.

Mike Colias:

Mike O’Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor. The sales executive’s note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous—but came with a twist.

Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand violations committed by his co-workers over the years.

During a 2019 sales meeting to discuss a new vehicle launch, a colleague blurted out: “Let’s not reinvent the ocean.”

At another meeting, in 2016, someone started a sentence with: “I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”

For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary.

After one colleague declared: “It’s a huge task, but we’re trying to get our arms and legs around it,” O’Brien quipped: “Adding ‘legs’ into the mix makes it sound kinda kinky.”

Jenna Telesca Joseph Pisani and Jennifer Calfas:

A federal judge ordered immigration authorities to stop their efforts to detain a Columbia University junior who participated in pro-Palestinian protests until further notice from the court.

Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order, a day after Yunseo Chung sued the Trump administration to prevent her deportation. The judge, appointed by President Bill Clinton, scheduled a hearing for May 20.

The Department of Homeland Security issued an arrest warrant for the 21-year-old student on March 8, according to court records. Chung, a permanent resident, moved to the U.S. at age 7 from South Korea.

Her lawyers say she has broken no laws and the Trump administration is seeking to strip her green card because of her advocacy work.

“Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation—may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express political views disfavored by the current administration,” they wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security said it was seeking Chung’s deportation in line with immigration law. “Yunseo Chung has engaged in concerning conduct, including when she was arrested by NYPD during a pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College,” a spokesperson for the department said. Columbia declined to comment.

Molly Fischer:

Columbia’s capitulation was in line with a general trend toward circumspection. The memory of Congress grilling university presidents in 2023 seems to be fresh among leaders in higher ed: few want to risk either their jobs or their budgets by saying the wrong thing. A handful of exceptions have stood out; for example, President Christopher Eisgruber, of Princeton, who wrote a piece for The Atlantic about “The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia.” (This week, the Administration suspended dozens of grants to Princeton.) But perhaps none has been as voluble or persistent as Michael Roth, who has been president of Wesleyan since 2007.

Roth is a historian and a Wesleyan alumnus who, as an undergraduate, designed a major in the history of psychological theory. His scholarship has dealt with Freud and memory but also colleges as institutions, in books such as “Safe Enough Spaces” (2019) and “The Student: A Short History” (2023). Recent years have brought an increasingly political thrust to both his writing (for national media and his presidential blog) and to his work as president. In 2023, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, Wesleyan ended legacy admissions.

When Wesleyan students joined the national wave of protests over the war on Gaza, Roth—who describes himself as a supporter of both free speech and Israel’s right to exist—tangled with student protesters as well as with those who wanted him to shut the protests down. Meanwhile, in interviews and essays, he took administrators at other colleges to task for embracing the principles like those found in the “Kalven report”—a 1967 document out of the University of Chicago, which advanced the argument that universities should almost always remain scrupulously neutral. (Such stances were, he told me, “a cover for trying to stay out of trouble.”) As the Trump Administration has ramped up its attacks on the academy, Roth has continued to publish widely, urging fellow-leaders to stand up for their principles. “Release Mahmoud Khalil! Respect freedom of speech!” he concluded in a recent column for Slate, which argued that the Columbia activist’s arrest “should terrify every college president.”

John Richards:

Education, Skills and Labour Market
In terms of national scores in reading, mathematics, and science among sampled students at age 15, Canada continues to rank among the top ten countries in the 2022 PISA survey.

At first glance, one might conclude all is well. However, Canada’s national trends have consistently declined since initial benchmarking of the three subjects in the early 2000s. The largest subject decline is in mathematics.

The four large-population provinces – Quebec in particular – have composite mathematics scores well above the OECD average. Five of six small-population provinces score statistically at the OECD average. Newfoundland scores below the OECD average.
Like the proverbial frogs slowly boiling in water, Canadian provinces are at risk of ignoring their problems until too late, as happened in Sweden a decade ago – and is currently taking place in many US states.

The Council of Ministers of Education in Canada (CMEC) could facilitate a coordinated response among provinces to address weaknesses identified in PISA. For example, CMEC could promote superior Quebec mathematics practices. Another example: provinces could pay attention to BC’s superior high-school completion rate in provincial schools.
Press Release

Dr. Eric Ostermeier

In 1909, Superintendent Charles Cary was elected to his third of five terms with a 35.6 percent plurality victory, defeating rural school inspector LaFrance Wood of Nielsville by 4.5 points in a four-candidate field.

The subsequent 28 elections for the office had been decided by an average of 31.2 points prior to Tuesday’s race.

The closest election for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Wisconsin history took place for an open seat in November 1857.

In that cycle, Democratic Wisconsin State Historical Society secretary Lyman Draper of Madison eked out a 0.4-point victory against 1853 (Whig) and 1855 (Republican) nominee John McMynn of Racine. Republicans and Democrats each won multiple statewide offices on the ballot that cycle in very close races.

All told, the 2025 election is the 11th most narrowly decided for Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction since statehood. Aside from the 1909 election mentioned above, all other races decided by less than six points took place between 1851 and 1892.

Only four of 39 incumbent Superintendents of Public Instruction were defeated in their quest for another term in Wisconsin:

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More.

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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.

Brendan W. Sullivan

How do you know whether something is true or not? Surely, you’ve been told that the angles of a triangle add to 180 ◦ , for example, but how do you know for sure? What if you met an alien who had never studied basic geometry? How could you convince him/her/it that this fact is true? In a way, this is what mathematics is all about: devising new statements, deciding somehow whether they are true or false, and explaining these findings to other people (or aliens, as the case may be). Unfortunately, it seems like many people think mathematicians spend their days multiplying large numbers together; in actuality, though, mathematics is a far more creative and writing-based discipline than its widely-perceived role as ever-more-complicated arithmetic. One aim of this book is to convince you of this fact, but that’s merely a bonus. This book’s main goals are to show you what mathematical thinking, problem-solving, and proof-writing are really all about, to show you how to do those things, and to show you how much fun they really are!

Robert McMillan:

A black Volvo rolled slowly down a quiet street while passengers armed with waterguns scanned for their target. Then at two minutes before 5 p.m., high-school senior Gabriel Pardini emerged from a YMCA.

From his middle seat, Graham Iwanchuk raised his Nerf Super Soaker XP35 and fired through an open window. Pardini never stood a chance. He was out of the game.

They were playing Senior Assassin, a citywide game of water-pistol tag that’s become a rite of passage for students across the country—and a major headache for school administrators.

Variations of the game date back to the 1980s, but today it is played with an app called Splashin. Each week the app gives every five-person team a squad to target. Their assignment: take them out with a splash of water. Iwanchuk’s team, the Last Troll, is part of a game that involves 250 other seniors at their school. Every hit is recorded on video and uploaded on the app, where they are widely shared and dissected.

Teenagers sneak into bedrooms, get younger siblings to knock on doors while they hide in the bushes and enlist spies to give up a target’s location. Players can use pretty much anything that gets you wet, from a water balloon to a hose. But water pistols are the weapon of choice.

John Richards and Tingting Zhang

Scores on international tests have been falling. Without better teaching, students will be ill-prepared for a data-driven world.

Canada’s declining K-12 education system is sending out worrying warning signals. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Canadian students ranked in the top 10 among OECD countries. But that doesn’t mean all is well, and the most alarming signs are in mathematics.

Math was the only subject where Canada’s national average dropped below the benchmark score of 500. Even worse, for the first time one of our provinces — Newfoundland and Labrador — scored significantly below the OECD average. Math is fundamental to future economic competitiveness, yet we are failing to equip students with basic numeracy skills.

More.

Jessica Grose:

Florida would join Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Alaska in lowering their testing standards or graduation requirements of late. After the absolutely dismal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores from 2024, which showed that a higher percentage of eighth graders scored “below basic” in reading than at any point in the test’s 30-year history, you would think that states’ education leaders would be putting serious time and effort into helping their students thrive. The NAEP is a congressionally mandated federal exam given to fourth graders and eighth graders every two years and 12th graders about every four years to track educational progress across the country.

All of this is reminding me of something President Trump said in the spring of 2020 about the coronavirus, “‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” If we stop testing America’s students, we’ll have fewer bad headlines about how poorly they’re doing.

Unfortunately, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, agrees with President Trump’s executive order that the Department of Education should go away, but she hasn’t stopped there. As a consequence of the huge job cuts McMahon has enacted so far, she has hobbled the federal government’s ability to gather statistics on student achievement, effective teaching practices and student literacy. The Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers this data, “is now left with fewer than 20 federal employees, down from more than 175 at the start of the second Trump administration,” according to Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.

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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.

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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?

Glenn Greenwald:

For those interested, here’s the criminal op-ed that Tufts PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk wrote with 3 other students in the university paper that resulted in her being put on the Canary Mission list and then detained off the street by ICE. Criminal op-ed:

More:

A student on a green card at Columbia University in New York who organised protests last summer against Israel’s attacks on Gaza was taken from his house and is still being detained in Louisiana. He has not been accused of breaking any law. Another student on a green card at Columbia managed to preempt attempts to detain her with a lawsuit, but the administration is nonetheless trying to revoke her green card because she attended protests.

A student at Tufts University in Boston who wrote an article last summer for a student newspaper criticising Israel’s attacks on Gaza was taken off the street and is now being detained in Louisiana. The only crime she is accused of is not having a valid visa – because the administration suddenly revoked it before detaining her. 

An Indian student of Georgetown University in Virginia was arrested outside his home for ‘spreading Hamas propaganda’ for social media posts supporting Gaza, but has not been accused of any crime. He is being detained in Louisiana.

Dan Lennington:

Wisconsin’s AG is pilloried for his conduct, wasting taxpayer money and incurring unnecessary overtime expenses. The entire opinion is here: kaulorder.tiiny.site

John Sailer

This piece is particularly fascinating.

Summers calls for an “aggressive reform agenda” to put excellence over identity, truth over social justice. Says it won’t happen via normal processes that “give[s] too much power to faculty members who have political agendas.”

Abdel Abdellaoui, Hilary C. Martin and Peter M. Visscher 

In civilizations, individuals are born into or sorted into different levels of socio-economic status (SES). SES clusters in families and geographically, and is robustly associated with genetic effects. Here we first review the history of scientific research on the relationship between SES and heredity. We then discuss recent findings in genomics research in light of the hypothesis that SES is a dynamic social construct that involves genetically influenced traits that help in achieving or retaining a socio-economic position, and can affect the distribution of genes associated with such traits. Social stratification results in people with differing traits being sorted into strata with different environmental exposures, which can result in evolutionary selection pressures through differences in mortality, reproduction and non-random mating. Genomics research is revealing previously concealed genetic consequences of the way society is organized, yielding insights that should be approached with caution in pursuit of a fair and functional society.

Joe Miller and Hannah Murphy:

A person close to X said Harper’s case “raises a concern that [X] users’ speech might be curtailed if the government is allowed to have access to users’ data without a court-approved search warrant”.

They added: “This issue is not specific to X. It means that the constitution does not prevent the government from snooping through any user’s account on any social media platform or financial platform.”

The timing of the intervention by X — the only individual corporation to have filed a brief in the case to date — is notable given the Trump administration’s use of public material on social media to vet migrants.

The Department of Homeland Security last month proposed broadening the collection of social media account handles from visa applicants and those wishing to apply for residence in the US.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

By Reuters

The investigations were “just the beginning” of the Justice Department’s attempt to eradicate DEI programs, the media release said.

Stanford University said in a statement it began taking steps to comply with the Supreme Court decision immediately after it was issued.

“We continue to be committed to fulfilling our obligations under the law. We do not have details about today’s announcement, but we look forward to learning more about their concerns and responding to the department’s questions,” Stanford spokesperson Dee Mostofi said in an email.

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The University of California said it has adhered to a ban on affirmative action in admissions since California voters approved one in the ballot initiative Proposition 209 in 1996.