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. 

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

Remedial math.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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There is another way:

Refuse taxpayer money.

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.

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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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

——

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

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.

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”

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.”

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.

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.

Ray Carter

The results of nationwide testing show that students in Oklahoma lag behind students in nearly all of the 50 states when it comes to reading proficiency. Those results represent more than hardship for individual students or a loss of bragging rights for state officials.

According to experts, Oklahoma’s low reading outcomes also translate into a significant, lifelong drain on taxpayer resources and the state economy as students emerge from the K-12 system unprepared for work or college.

A recent report from the Education Consumers Foundation, “The Cost of Failure to Teach Reading: Projections From 3rd Grade Reading Scores,” shows millions of dollars in increased taxpayer expenses are likely to occur in Oklahoma given the many children who do not read proficiently in the state.

“For every student who fails to master reading by grade 3, taxpayers are subjected to what amounts to a hidden annual surtax—one that cumulates with each graduating class,” the report stated. “It is levied in the form of added local, state, and federal tax-funded resources absorbed by the resulting school dropouts and unprepared graduates.”

The reason for the added taxpayer cost is simple: Students who do not learn to read are far more likely to be unemployed or underemployed as adults and therefore rely more on government services.

——-

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?

Link:

It has to do with Justice Jackson’s comments that when Black newborns are delivered by Black doctors, they’re much more likely to survive, justifying racially discriminatory admissions.

We now know the study contained fraud🧵

I’ll start with their least bad offenses, before moving to the worst of it.

Firstly, the authors were warned not to make causal claims because they lacked the fixed effect I said they needed. They made those claims anyway.

Gavin Baker:

Worth watching, especially for anyone skeptical on DOGE.

@AntonioGracias is one of my closest friends, one of the most exceptional people I know and extremely high integrity.

Grateful to him, Elon and many others for serving 🇺🇸 at DOGE.

Richard Zach:

https://richardzach.org/2025/03/accessible-open-textbooks-in-math-heavy-disciplines/The challengeThe authoring platform of choice in many math-heavy disciplines is LaTeX. It produces typeset documents of excellent quality and handles formulas and mathematical diagrams extremely well. Practically every researcher or instructor in mathematics, physics, and computer science is adept at using it, and it has a wide user base outside these core disciplines as well (e.g., philosophy and economics).

Unfortunately, it only produces PDF output. PDF is not an accessible format: it does not scale well to display on tablets or phones, text does not reflow, it contains no semantic information (e.g., what’s a heading or what’s a list), images, formulas, and diagrams are only visually accessible. This creates difficulties for readers who rely on alternative presentations of material (in other colors, text sizes, fonts, or in non-visual formats, i.e., audio or Braille) or who simply want to access the material on a device not the size of a printed page (e.g., on a smartphone or small e-reader).

Corrinne Hess:

Underly received about $850,000 from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, out of the $1.1 million she’s raised since February. Kinser received almost $1.7 million from the Republican Party of Wisconsin, out of about $2.2 million raised total, according to her committee report and a late filing.

Kinser, who has never been elected to public office, said Tuesday night she is proud of the campaign she ran and she won’t stop working for children.

“We cannot settle for only three out of 10 children reading well enough to go to college or have a career,” Kinser said.

——-

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

Link:

FPF recently collaborated with Wiredto allow the magazine to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. “Public records are disappearing. The National Archive is in disarray,” Stern said. “It’s going to be harder and harder to get documents out of the administration.”

He added that citizens can protect press freedom on paper, but that’s not enough.

“But if there’s not a functional, viable press to use those protections and to carry out that work, then everything you’ve accomplished is academic,” Stern said. “So I think the first thing folks can do to support the press is subscribe to their news outlets and put some money in news outlets’ pockets and in journalists’ pockets so they can continue to exist.”

Alex Shieh:

Around 2 a.m. on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I launched a public database mapping all 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University and sent each one a simple email: What do you do all day?

Ostensibly, it was a journalistic inquiry. The site, which I named Bloat@Brown, was somewhere between FaceMash (Mark Zuckerberg’s college project that scraped student ID photos and let users rank who was hotter) and DOGE. But instead of using Zuckerberg’s ELO-style rankings — a numerical method originally developed for ranking chess players — my site, Bloat@Brown, used retrieval-augmented generation and a custom GPT-4o pipeline to rank administrators by their operational importance.

First, I scraped the internet — job boards, the student newspaper, LinkedIn — to gather whatever I could about each employee. I fed that data into GPT-4o mini to generate a rough utility ranking. The results weren’t definitive — there is only so much information on the public web — but they seemed directionally accurate. (Like obvious DEI jobs triggered a DEI filter, for instance.) 

While my roommate slept, I worked from the common room in my dorm’s basement — the same room that floods whenever it rains and thus has plastic tarps, industrial fans, and wet floor signs permanently set up despite Brown’s tuition and fees rising to $93,064 a year. Brown’s financial woes also mean that the school runs a $46 million annual budget deficit while professors constantly complain they’re underpaid. So, where is our $93,064 a year actually going?

After doing some digging, I discovered that much of the money is being thrown into a pit of bureaucracy. The small army of 3,805 non-faculty administrators is more than double the faculty headcount, and makes for roughly one administrator for every two undergrads. In the US, the cost of college tuition has far outpaced inflation because, for one, administrative staff count has drastically outpaced growth in the student population — a cause for concern since, in the 20th century, universities were affordable and ran fine with a fraction of today’s staffers.

Frederick Hess:

The federal higher-education apparatus that’s so familiar today was far more modest under Reagan or George H.W. Bush. While the federal role expanded significantly during the 1990s, with new lending programs, tax credits, and Clintonite initiatives, the George W. Bush administration focused its education efforts on K-12. (Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ second-term Commission on the Future of Higher Education was laudable but didn’t ultimately amount to much.)

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has inherited a deep roster and an aggressive game plan.The modern era of turbocharged federal involvement in higher education really commenced during the Obama years. The Obama team ran wild: weaponizing Title IX, devising onerous new “gainful employment” regulations for for-profit (and only for-profit) colleges, making Washington the nation’s sole source of college lending, and unilaterally rewriting the terms of the brand-new Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

During Trump’s first term, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos chose not to respond in kind. Instead, she mostly sought to restore the traditional order. A principled Reagan conservative focused on expanding K-12 school choice, DeVos didn’t have much of a playbook or mandate for higher education, other than trying to undo some of the Obama-era excesses.

Emily Kopp:

A researcher who argued that infant mortality is higher for black newborns with white doctors because of racial bias omitted a variable from the paper that “undermines the narrative,” according to the researcher’s internal notes.

The study forms a keystone of the racial concordance field, which hypothesizes patients are better served by medical providers of the same race, and has served as a rationale for affirmative action. It faces new questions just as universities move to defund their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs or face legal action.

The August 2020 study in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluded that the gap in mortality rates between black newborns and white newborns declines by 58% if the black newborns are under the care of black physicians. A possible driver of the phenomenon could include a “spontaneous bias” by white physicians toward the babies, the researchers wrote.

The paper’s most high-profile booster was Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who cited it as evidence for the benefits of affirmative action in her dissent in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that universities that considered the race of college applicants had violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: University Spent Over $200,000 On ‘Diversity’ Course Teaching Physicians That Healthcare Is Racist)

“For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug: it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live,” reads an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges. “Yet due to the enduring and significant underrepresentation of minorities in the health professions, many minority patients will not receive care from a racially diverse team or from providers who were trained in a diverse environment.”

More.

Daniel Leonard:

In some sense, AI tutors prove more useful for students for the exact same reasons that high-quality human tutors have always been effective. “When you have that one-on-one instruction, or small group instruction, the instruction caters to your needs,” Sal Khan—founder of Khan Academy—told us in November. “If a student is finding something easy, then a tutor can move ahead or go deeper. If they’re struggling, a tutor can slow down.”

In another study from last year, an AI-powered tutor helped Harvard undergraduates learn physics more effectively—and in less time. To optimize the bot for learning, the researchers prompted it with a set of constraints—including “Only give away ONE STEP AT A TIME, DO NOT give away the full solution in a single message,” and “You may CONFIRM if their ANSWER is right, but DO NOT tell [students] the answer.”

One hundred and eighty-six physics undergrads were split into two groups: Half received a standard physics lecture, and the other half stayed home to work through the same material under the guidance of the AI tutor. When the researchers compared students’ scores on a pre- and post-lesson assessment of the material, “the learning gains for students… in the AI-tutored group were over double those for students in the active lecture group.” The AI tutor group also worked through the material 10 minutes faster than their peers—and reported higher levels of engagement and motivation. 

more.

Paige Bright, Alan Edelman, Steven G. Johnson

This course, intended for undergraduates familiar with elementary calculus and linear algebra, introduces the extension of differential calculus to functions on more general vector spaces, such as functions that take as input a matrix and return a matrix inverse or factorization, derivatives of ODE solutions, and even stochastic derivatives of random functions. It emphasizes practical computational applications, such as large-scale optimization and machine learning, where derivatives must be re-imagined in order to be propagated through complicated calculations. The class also discusses efficiency concerns leading to “adjoint” or “reverse-mode” differentiation (a.k.a. “backpropagation”), and gives a gentle introduction to modern automatic

Karen Vaites:

Last year, I wrote about a specific, promising development in Wisconsin: the state published the strongest ELA curriculum list in the country.

Unfortunately, the work in Wisconsin prior to that development, and since, underwhelms.

I’m overdue to write about the broader context in Wisconsin, mostly because progress on curriculum improvement has stalled, and I should continue the story. Also, Wisconsin elects a new state superintendent this week, so it’s a good time to revisit the tenure of state superintendent Jill Underly.

From a national lens, Wisconsin offers a cautionary tale for everyone calling to shift power back to states and for the legislated path to literacy gains.

Wisconsin’s Legacy And the Underly Era

Wisconsin is one of the rare states that elects its state superintendent, and this seems to have the unfortunate effect of politicizing the role more than usual. The state’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is described by locals as a “political factory.” Current governor Tony Evers is a former state superintendent, so DPI roles are viewed as a political springboard. Notably, Deputy Superintendent Thomas McCarthy has no education background, he’s a career state politico.

This context helps explain why the state has a lackluster track record on academics. In addition, DPI literacy leaders are known to follow discredited educational philosophies.

Barbara Novak, the Director of Early Literacy, is a historic Balanced Literacy devotee. Novak is the former President of the Wisconsin Reading Association (WSRA), which lobbied against the WI Dyslexia Guidebook and the recent Act 20 literacy legislation. She has been with DPI for more than a decade; during that time, DPI has made few efforts to advance “science of reading” initiatives, in stark contrast to the other states.

A few illustrative stories:

——

more.

——-

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

“Hilarius Bookbinder”:

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been a while since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the United States. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the NFL. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

Reading

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wakehere. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

———

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:

I have made one more update to my State Curriculum Map tracker.

While @WisconsinDPI stopped maintaining the website with 2021 curriculum data by district, parents retained the info, so have been able to publish it openly. Link added.

Note that parents are also the only source of 2024-25 curriculum data by district in WI.

Why is this transparency work falling to parents? A fair question to ask of @underlyforwi.

Prem Thakker:

Samah Sisay of the Center for Constitutional Rights told Zeteo that one’s visa being revoked does not mean that their status would be too. Unlike student visas – which are entry documents that allow someone to enter the country – student statuses are what allow people to stay in the US. To maintain one’s status, a student has to fulfill certain requirements, like being properly enrolled in classes, keeping documents up to date, and following work restrictions.

A student’s visa could expire or be revoked for any number of reasons, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean their status to stay would be taken away, too. Some of these statuses, which are typically overseen by university officers, are now allegedly being unilaterally revoked by ICE instead. While university officers often oversee status in the SEVIS system, Sisay said that DHS can technically revoke status without a university actively disenrolling a student.

Still, the practice is alarming students and university staff across the country. As one official put it, “Someone at ICE pushed a button, and now [students] are ‘illegal’ through a process that absolutely should not be happening.”

Dave Cieslewicz:

Some of my liberal friends have expressed their unhappiness over my endorsement of Brittany Kinser for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. 

So, let me expand on my reasons. 

When I was at the city of Madison and there was a managerial opening I always first thought about how that department was functioning. If things were going good, I’d want to promote from within. If things were rocky, I’ld look to the outside. 

You can’t take an honest look at DPI and conclude that things are in good shape there. Wisconsin is behind average on test scores, behind most states on recovery after COVID, not great on attendance and we have the widest racial achievement gap of any state in the nation. 

So, the first question I need to ask is, why do we want to stick with the status quo?

Well, the status quo has a ready answer: it’s just a question of money. To be exact, the incumbent, Jill Underly, wants to spend the state’s entire $4 billion surplus on public education. But she proposes no changes, no reforms and she would ask for no accountability — no improvements in test scores or anything else. It also just doesn’t add up because if we use all that one-time money in this biennium, what do we do in the next one? 

Moreover, it’s just simply untrue that money is the problem for most districts. In fact, last year Wisconsin communities passed referendums worth more in total than any year in history. Here in Madison we haven’t voted down a school referendum in 20 years and we just passed the largest combined operating and capital referendums in our history — a total of $506 million. Milwaukee also passed its largest referendum ever.

—

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?

Denis Campbell:

Cashless societies may be a sad fact of modern life for those with a nostalgic attachment to the pound in their pocket, but doctors have discovered one unexpected benefit of the decline of coins.

Far fewer children are having surgery after swallowing small items that could choke or kill them, and the scarcity of loose change is likely to be the reason.

The number of children in England needing an operation to remove a foreign body from their nose, throat or airway fell significantly between 2012 and 2022, NHS figures show.

The fall has been greeted with relief by doctors and surgeons, who for years have been warning of the dangers posed by young children ingesting magnets, tiny batteries and other risky objects.

Microsoft Research:

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) in knowledge workflows raises questions about its impact on critical thinking skills and practices.

We survey 319 knowledge workers to investigate 1) when and how they perceive the enaction of critical thinking when using GenAI, and 2) when and why GenAI affects their effort to do so.
Participants shared 936 first-hand examples of using GenAI in work tasks. Quantitatively, when considering both task- and user-specific factors, a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges and opportunities for developing GenAI tools for knowledge work.

IFRG:

New public recordsreleased Thursday by the Institute for Reforming Government’s (IRG) Center for Investigative Oversight reveal how the Department of Public Instruction’s lenient enforcement of Milwaukee Public Schools’ 2024 finance deadlines set up different, more destructive outcomes than DPI’s stricter enforcement in previous years.

Superintendent Underly’s DPI released the records March 5, 2025, 8 months after IRG’s June 17, 2024, request. DPI fulfilled the complete records request only after IRG, represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, threatened legal action.

WHY IT MATTERS

DPI took a gentler approach with MPS than other school districts in years past, despite accurate financial documents being essential to determining state aid for all Wisconsin school districts. DPI has the ability to withhold funding if districts miss deadlines.

——

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

kanji master:

When students begin the journey of learning Japanese, they are met with a fascinating yet complex writing system composed of three scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Take, for example, the sentence “新しいゲームを買いました。” (Atarashii geemu o kaimashita.), which means “I bought a new game.”

Dave Cieslewicz:

It’s the parents of those high-achieving students who are demanding the change and they’re demanding it in response to new state programs granting automatic admissions to the UW for kids who rank in the top 5% of their classes and automatic admissions to UW campuses outside of Madison for those in the top 10%.

The current system doesn’t work because, in addition to there being no weighting of grades, there isn’t even any class rankings. So, how can you tell if any kid is in the top 10%? Even worse, the district has been trying to move away from assigning grades at all with a pilot program at one high school which would replace letter grades with “Advanced,” “Proficient,” “Developing” or “Emerging.” (I note that there are only four of these and so none that equates to an “F.” I assume that if there were one it would be something like “Could Be The Next Einstein.”)

The bottom line here is that merit is finding its way back into the Madison public schools. This whole movement — no weighted grading, no class rankings, downplaying letter grades altogether — is born of the notion that merit is just a construct of the oppressors. And the liberal parents of those high-achieving kids might actually buy that in theory. 

Until it stands in the way of their kid getting into the UW.

——

“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District

“Hilarious Bookbinder”

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

——-

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?

Simpson Street Free Press

SSFP student reporters and local journalists interview candidates for this year’s school board race. If you missed our forum, now’s your chance to catch up! Stay informed and get to know who’s on the ballot.

——

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?

Gokul:

SF on Saturday morning: a large % of Waymos are ferrying solo kids (8-14 yo), presumably to sports or other activities.

A friend told me that 85% of parents at their kids’ SF school use Waymo for kids pickup / drop off: earlier it was ~10% using Uber and Lyft.

Shows how Waymo has grown by expanding the market, serving segments who otherwise were non-consumers of ride sharing.

Nicole Shanahan:

What exactly is a “continuing resolution”? What’s the difference between an “omnibus” and a “minibus”? And why do these always seem to come with the threat of a government shutdown every few months? My conversation with @RepThomasMassie.

Alex Chalmers:

Martin Goodson, then of the Royal Statistical Society, dubbed the ATI “at best irrelevant to the development of modern AI in the UK”.

The criticism hasn’t slowed. Matt Clifford’s AI Opportunities Action Plan recommended that the government should “consider the broad institutional landscape and the full potential of the Alan Turing Institute to drive progress at the cutting edge”. While Clifford was too diplomatic to say the quiet bit out loud, in government speak, this is code for suggesting that the ATI was not fulfilling its intended purpose.

UK Research and Innovation, the UK’s main research and innovation funding body, is running out of patience. Its quinquennial review of the ATI, published in 2024, was politely scathing about the institute’s governance, financial management, and the quality of its most recent strategy (dubbed Turing 2.0).

There aren’t many areas of consensus across the UK’s fractious tech community, but the ATI has come to play an oddly unifying role. From left to right and north to south, there’s a sense that the institute is running out of friends and time.

Transformer:

Large language models display impressive capabilities. However, for the most part, the mechanisms by which they do so are unknown. The black-box nature of models is increasingly unsatisfactory as they advance in intelligence and are deployed in a growing number of applications. Our goal is to reverse engineer how these models work on the inside, so we may better understand them and assess their fitness for purpose.

The challenges we face in understanding language models resemble those faced by biologists. Living organisms are complex systems which have been sculpted by billions of years of evolution. While the basic principles of evolution are straightforward, the biological mechanisms it produces are spectacularly intricate. Likewise, while language models are generated by simple, human-designed training algorithms, the mechanisms born of these algorithms appear to be quite complex.

Dan Cohen:

And the companies are not wrong about genuinely impressive improvements. Six years ago in this newsletter, I wrote about some initial testing I had been doing with computer vision APIs from Google and Microsoft, a first attempt to analyze the photo morgue my library had recently acquired from the Boston Globe. There were glimmers of hope that these pre-GPT tools could help us identify topics in millions of photographs that lacked rigorous metadata, and I found even 80% accuracy to be promising. Now our library’s digital team, much more capable than I am, has created an abstracted interface to all of the main multimodal AI services and is testing the ability of these services to provide subject headings and descriptions, with much better results (although all of the services are still imperfect).

Fellow historian Benjamin Breen has documented similar advances in his testing of AI. The latest models are scarily on par with a first-year doctoral student in history in some areas, able to provide solid context and advanced interpretations of documents and images, even complex ones that require substantial background in a field. The frontier models are much better than most doctoral students in other tasks, such as translation and transcription. Handwriting recognition for historical documents, in particular, has been among the hardest problems for computer scientists to solve, and cracking it will have a significant impact on historical research. Historian Cameron Blevins has shown that custom GPTs are now on a path to a solution that could make archives and special collections much more searchable and readable in ways that might transform our ability to do history. What these other tests of artificial intelligence show is that significant AI progress may lie not in some kind of examination endgame, of perfect answers to tough questions, but in the important, but often hidden, middle stages of a research project, when evidence is being assembled and interpreted.

-Anna Stokke:

www:

WisPolitics summary:

Co-author Sen. John Jagler, R-Watertown, said the standards give parents a false impression of how their kids are doing in school. He also said it’s a problem that data can’t be compared year-to-year, which is problematic considering learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

He said the state should go back to the previous standards put in place when Evers led DPI. 

“We need to do better, we need to go back,” Jagler said, referencing his comments to DPI during the public hearing on the bill. 

Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, criticized what he called “huffing and puffing” about the changes, asserting standards were never lowered and were part of periodic changes that take place over the years. 

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Nick Rommel:

Those new standards lowered the threshold for what is considered proficient on the Forward Exam state test, and replaced terms like “below basic” with “developing.”

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He vetoes it. Makes perfect sense. #disappointed

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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.

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?

Ed Bachrach and Ted Dabrowski

In 1994, the General Assembly awoke to a then-unheard-of pension debt of $17 billion. In typical Illinois fashion, lawmakers cooked up a 50-year repayment plan to “fix” the problem. It was called a ramp because little of the debt was repaid immediately, and most of it was pushed out decades into the future. A graphic of the repayment schedule looks exactly like an upward-sloping ramp. Gov. Jim Edgar signed the bill into law, giving it its name. 

Conveniently, all pension benefit increases passed since then — and any increases in benefit obligations found due to poor actuarial assumptions — have been pushed onto the ramp. It’s how $17 billion in outstanding pension debt at the state level has now turned into a whopping $144 billion.

Kevin Hartnett:

Every day, researchers search for optimal solutions. They might want to figure out where to build a major airline hub. Or to determine how to maximize return while minimizing risk in an investment portfolio. Or to develop self-driving cars that can distinguish between traffic lights and stop signs.

Mathematically, these problems get translated into a search for the minimum values of functions. But in all these scenarios, the functions are too complicated to assess directly. Researchers have to approximate the minimal values instead.

It turns out that one of the best ways to do this is by using an algorithm that Isaac Newton developed over 300 years ago. This algorithm is fairly simple. It’s a little like searching, blindfolded, for the lowest point in an unfamiliar landscape. As you put one foot in front of the other, the only information you need is whether you’re going uphill or downhill, and whether the grade is increasing or decreasing. Using that information, you can get a good approximation of the minimum relatively quickly.

Although enormously powerful — centuries later, Newton’s method is still crucial for solving present-day problems in logistics, finance, computer vision and even pure math — it also has a significant shortcoming. It doesn’t work well on all functions. So mathematicians have continued to study the technique, figuring out different ways to broaden its scope without sacrificing efficiency.

Last summer, three researchers announced the latest improvement to Newton’s method. Amir Ali Ahmadi of Princeton University, along with his former students Abraar Chaudhry (now at the Georgia Institute of Technology) and Jeffrey Zhang (now at Yale University), extended Newton’s method to work efficiently on the broadest class of functions yet.

Via Teddy Schleifer:

Steve Davis of @DOGE: “The reason I’m here is… I think the goal is incredibly inspiring. I think most of the taxpayers in the country would agree that the country going bankrupt would be a very bad thing… I think the thing that’s special right now, is we actually believe there is a chance to succeed. That there is an administration that is supportive and a great cabinet and just a great group that will actually make success a possible outcome.”

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Billions!

US Debt clock.

Open the books:

Open the Books took a look at where else the department’s money has been going in its fruitless pursuit of better outcomes.

Our auditors made the big picture clear recently, as auditors traced every agency’s headcount and spending changes over the decades (READ MORE: MAPPING GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT)

The department’s headcount has actually decreased slightly since 2000, by about 13.9% (4,930 vs. 4,245). But by 2024 annual spending was 749% of what they’d been at the turn of the Millenium! (Open the Books, FOX News)

What follows is just a brief laundry list of wasteful spending examples that can help explain the explosive growth.

These grants from recent years include some of the usual suspects like DEI and gender politics…plus millions headed to Chinese firms!

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WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Commentary.

UWM & Thompson Center

Instructors: Arne Duncan, Margaret Spellings

Perspectives from Former US Secretaries of Education

Featured Speakers: Arne Duncan (Obama administration) and Margaret Spellings (GW Bush administration)

Moderator: Dr. Simon J. Bronner

Location: Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on the UWM at Waukesha campus, 1500 N. University Dr., Waukesha, WI

Sponsored by the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership and hosted by UWM at Waukesha.Free and open to the public, registration required.

WisPolitics email summary:

The record spending in Wisconsin’s state schools superintendent race between education consultant Brittany Kinser and incumbent Jill Underly has now hit $4.5 million.

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

Eugene Volokh:

From Chief Judge Eric Melgren’s opinion yesterday in Schmidt v. Huff (D. Kan.):

Gardner Edgerton High School is a part of USD 231 and is located in Johnson County, Kansas. USD 231’s Superintendent is Defendant Brian Huff. Plaintiff Carrie Schmidt is the mother of two students, a sophomore and a senior, who attend Gardner Edgerton High School.

Plaintiff’s son, a high school senior, is on the Gardner Edgerton wrestling team. Plaintiff volunteered to help make “snack bags” for the wrestlers on the days they have wrestling matches. With permission, Plaintiff uses the teacher’s lounge on the first floor to put together the snack bags. Once the snack bags are made, they are placed in the wrestling team’s coolers. Plaintiff often takes pictures of the completed snack bags and sends them to the coaches and Athletic Secretary, so they know where everything is located. This system was already in place before Plaintiff volunteered. Plaintiff has helped make snack bags for the wrestling team since at least 2023.

Amy Reichert:

USC went woke, now it’s BROKE.
A new, just released internal memo reveals that @USC—where tuition is a staggering $73,260—relied heavily on $1.35B in federal funding last year.
Here’s what’s happening:

Roger Simon:

One of the key areas in which Americans voted for change on November 5, 2024 was education. Candidate Donald Trump promised to overhaul it in multiple ways, even to eliminating the bureaucratic and useless US Department of Education under which education has only gotten worse.

President Trump has a reputation for honoring his pledges and it is already apparent he is moving forward.

Education—public, private or homeschooled—is arguably the most important function of a free society. It is also among the most complex, affecting nearly every citizen.

The process of reform will take years as the failures in our system have been many. No one person or initiative can do it alone. Even with DEI putatively jettisoned and education policy returned to the states, where it was always intended to be, much work remains.

The Inoculator encompasses one specific but hugely important area.