Bill Lueders:

The Opee Awards, now in their 19th consecutive year, recognize outstanding efforts to protect the state’s tradition of open government as well as highlight some threats to it. They are being announced in advance of national Sunshine Week (sunshineweek.org), March 16-22. Winners were invited to appear at the Wisconsin Openness Awards Dinner in Madison on March 6, part of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s annual convention.

The Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that seeks to promote open government. It consists of about two dozen members representing media and other public interests. Sponsoring organizations include the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, Wisconsin Broadcasters Association and Wisconsin Associated Press.

The judging committee for this year consisted of Lueders, council Vice President Christa Westerberg (who recused herself from several categories in which she had connections with nominees), former La Crosse Tribune editor and publisher Rusty Cunningham, Wisconsin Newspaper Association executive director Beth Bennett, and WMTV 15 news director Jessica Laszewski.

Kayla Huynh:

The latest scratch cooking experiment is part of the district’s effort to correct the food and nutrition department’s budget problems. Those financial woes are mostly due to low participation in school lunch, Perkins previously said.   

Meal participation last school year was 24% below pre-pandemic levels, according to district officials. Chehak said the district has made some progress to increase school lunch participation this school year but the numbers plateaued this winter.

Lucas Robinson:

“This is a major screwup, one that is both politically damaging and legally troubling for Madison’s City Clerk’s Office,” Amato said in an email, noting that the office already is embroiled in investigations and a lawsuit over uncounted ballots in the 2024 election.

“It raises even more red flags about growing incompetence and mismanagement,” Amato said.

The contest between Amato and incumbent Ald. John Guequierre is one of two closely watched council races on the West Side, where residents tend to be more skeptical of city efforts to boost housing density and the $22 million property tax referendum passed in November to stabilize the city budget.

District 19 encompasses most of the city’s West Side, including neighborhoods such as Wexford Village, Parkwood Hills, the Highlands and Spring Harbor.

Institute for Reforming Government

WHY IT MATTERS: Repealing Act 10 would set the stage for devastating impacts to state and local taxpayers. It would wipe out hundreds of dollars in annual property tax savings for homeowners and result in potential mass layoffs of public employees and dramatic cuts to state and local programs.

THE QUOTE: “If the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirms a Dane County Judge’s decision to repeal Act 10, Wisconsin taxpayers will pay the price,” said Jake Curtis, General Counsel and Director of CIO of IRG. “Wisconsinites must understand the potential cost if the Wisconsin Supreme Court decides they should foot the bill of repeal.”

WHAT’S NEXT: State courts impact everyday Wisconsinites’ lives and IRG’s new Court Watch initiative will lead in educating on the importance of the judicial branch.

——-

Related: Act 10

Matt Taibbi:

As is standard in any story relating to Trump, a lot of the press hysteria about these stories ignore key angles. Both the crusade against DEI and Trump’s Hannibal-esque assault on Columbia University at least in theory could be looked at as anti-discriminatory moves, designed to get the government out of the business of sponsoring racist/stupid policies ranging from segregated graduation ceremonies (“Multicultural Celebrations,” in Columbia parlance) to segregated dorms (“Special Interest Communities,” in Columbia terms) to the forced diversity statements which have been an affront to the First Amendment for a while. Even harsh punishment of schools like a Columbia for failing to enforce Title VI responsibilities with regard to pro-Palestine protests could have been okay, if the administration had stuck to demanding that schools halt genuinely discriminatory practices like blocking movement using human chains or barring “Zionists” from entering certain areas.

Instead, Trump mangled the whole effort by bending all the way over for Israel and Bibi Netanyahu through a series of asinine moves, beginning with his 2019 Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism. That enshrined the concept of using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which includes clearly legal speech like “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination… by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about… the power of Jews as collective.” We just lived through nearly a decade without comedy and now Donald Trump, basically the political version of Don Rickles, wants to make stereotypesillegal? Forget that this and subsequent moves like his updated antisemitism order from this year openly conflict with the First Amendment, under which hate speech is protected. The broader stupidity is agreeing to the premise that we’re undergoing such an “unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination” that we need to punch a hole in the Constitution to fix it. 

This is the exact same concept, and maybe dumber, than the post-George-Floyd rushes to declare racism a “public health crisis” of such virulence that it superceded the other speech-crushing state of emergency of that period, the Covid lockdowns. If Trump is half the negotiator he says he is, he’ll tell Israel and AIPAC they can have their Gaza Riviera or whatever else he’s promising in the way of support, but they can keep their hands off the Bill of Rights, thank you very much. Hell, even the man who wrote the IHCR definition, Kenneth Stern, said it was never intended to be used as a speech code (see FIRE interview). Trump and Vance last week seemed to have no problem standing up to Volodymr Zelensky, and by extension Europe, to protect American interests. They should be willing to do the same to save the Bill of Rights from a handful of lobbyists, unless they really are Israel’s bitches. 

Trump never talked like a civil libertarian, which is fine. His schtick was always to play the opposite, coming off as a parody mix of Mobutu and Dirty Harry, like that time he told a crowd of police: “Please don’t be too nice” to suspects. But despite some unnerving episodes and 400+ actions filed against him by the ACLU, first-term Trump wasn’t the civil liberties disaster TV said he was. He spent most of that first four years as a high-profile stand-in for more commonplace victims of national policing authority, as Democrat opponents deployed everything, including digital censorship, political spying, sixties-style FBI leaks and “disruption,” and extravagant use of laws like the Espionage and KKK Acts to go after him. Trump said crazy things, but it was his lawyer’s office getting tossed. He was on the receiving end of the bigger civil liberties overreaches.

Matt Taibbi:

Is it infuriating to see people who kept mum during years of assaults on the First Amendment suddenly acting broken up about its future? Of course. But that doesn’t mean they’re all wrong. There are serious concerns about the new administration. I spoke with Tyler Coward, lead government counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, the group that did such incredible workdefending civil liberties during the digital censorship era:

Matt Taibbi: Let’s start with the broader issues and work our way toward [Palestinian activist] Mahmoud Khalil. Could you walk me through some of the recent speech controversies involving the Trump administration?

Tyler Coward: First, student political protests at institutions have been around for almost as long as institutions have existed. I was just on a panel this past weekend at the Stetson University Higher Education Law and Policy Conference, and a professor who does education law and the history of education law talked about protests, dating back to the Whiskey Rebellion era. Then obviously, even before the 60s, we had a big protest movement in the 30s. There’s a lot of overlap between workers’ rights protests, and organization and labor organizations in the UK and the strikes there, and progressive and labor-type movements on campus in the U.S.

When I started at FIRE 10 years ago, there were campus protests centered around invited speakers. A lot of invited speakers were protested and shouted down at institutions. They tended to be right of center.

C Bradley Thompson:

In “The Moral Issue of Our Time,” I defined thecentral moral conflict of Western Civilization as reducible to one fundamental alternative: the ethic of selfishness versus the ethic of selflessness. Most philosophers and theologians throughout history have viewed selfishness as the problem to be solved or overcome, and selflessness in one form or another as the solution.

The few advocates of selfishness (and by a few, I mean a handful) hold that the pursuit of happiness is man’s primary moral obligation, while the proponents of selflessness hold that pursuing the happiness of others is man’s primary moral obligation. In general terms, what we might call the “pro-self” approach regards virtue as those actions taken in pursuit of values that seek to improve one’s own life, while the “anti-self” approach regards virtue as those actions that deny and sacrifice a man’s selfish values for the sake of others.

Throughout the history of Western Civilization, the idea of “selfishness” was long considered by most philosophers and theologians to represent the source of all immorality. (Related concepts such as “self-interest” or “interest” were likewise morally suspect, but not as vilified as “selfishness.”) Selfishness has always been treated as morally tainted, or, worse, as the lowest human impulse—an impulse, desire, or passion (as opposed to reason) that leads to predatory grasping often at the expense of others—to self-love, to self-satisfaction, to self-seeking, to greed, to avarice, to love of gain, to money-making, to cupidity, to luxury, to corruption, and then on to lying, cheating, stealing, and worse for one’s own gain.

By contrast, virtually the entire tradition of Western (if not world) moral thought defined ethical action as synonymous with selflessness and self-sacrifice. The essence of moral action from the ancient to the modern world has been identified with subordinating or sacrificing one’s own interests for the sake or needs of others. Indeed, Western Civilization has not, for the most part, developed a moral alternative to the code of self-less-ness. In its modern form, the common word used to define to the ethic of selflessness and self-sacrifice is altruism (a word invented by the nineteenth-century French philosopher, Auguste Comte), which runs in one form or another to and through the marrow of Western culture.

Charles Murray:

As a libertarian, I see no contradiction between believing in a Moral Law that commands me to be selflessly altruistic and opposing laws that farm out that obligation to government programs. One of the most powerful forces that made limited government work in nineteenth-century America and could make it work in twenty-first century America is the natural tendency of free people to help each other, and the most powerful force for deadening that impulse and impeding the provision of effective help is the substitution of bureaucracies for individuals, families, and communities.

Glenn Greenwald:

Every 18-24 months or so, this museum-worthy tweet is discovered by new factions of people who had never previously seen it, and it really does unify a wide range of people in a way that few other tweets have managed to do:

more.

The US Govt sent billions to Kiev, only for Ukrainian intel agencies and “independent media” to repeatedly smear US politicians and journalists on officials lists of “Russian propagandists”: all for questioning Biden’s war policy.

Turns out those entities were funded by USAID.

Chicago Maroon:

In 1890, the newly chartered University of Chicago aimed to“remove the mind of the student from the busy mercantile conditions of Chicago.” Architect Henry Ives Cobb envisioned a campus with one central quadrangle surrounded by six others, spanning 22 acres of land.

David Bessis:

It’s catchy title, but there’s something to it: since the time of Euclid, we’ve been operating under flawed assumptions on the nature of math. Everyone knew something was wrong, and everyone was confused. The good news is that we may finally be in a position to fix this.

If you’re not familiar with the issue, please take a look at this quote from Wikipedia:

There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline.

Erica Yokoyama and Momoka Yokoyama:

Schools in Beijing will introduce artificial intelligence courses to primary and secondary students to strengthen China’s goal to dominate the sector.

From the coming fall semester, which starts Sept. 1, schools in China’s capital will offer at least eight hours of AI classes per academic year, the Beijing Municipal Education Commission said in a statement on its website. Schools can run them as standalone courses or integrate them with existing curriculum, such as information technology and science, it said.

more.

Don Surber:

He wrote, “in a letter addressed to members of the Senate, which I obtained, Everett B. Kelley, head of what I believe is the country’s biggest federal government employee union—the American Federation of Government Employees—asks senators to vote no on the House-produced continuing resolution, and says that a shutdown is actually preferable to passing the bill.”

Kelley wrote, “AFGE is particularly struck that even as the Senate prepares to debate and vote on [the continuing resolution], the Trump administration has announced its intention to effectively destroy the Department of Education regardless of whether Congress approves or disapproves of that decision.” 

Marshall said the letter also says they categorically reject the idea that voting against the CR means voting for a shutdown. They then go on to discuss that the administration just unilaterally canceled the collective bargaining agreement with TSA workers and declared the agency union-free.

Angie Schmitt:

In fact, this data flies in the face of key Democratic/Progressive talking points on education, which appear to be bordering on flat-earth-level wrong. For example: 

Claim #1: More money will fix everything!!!

Normie Democrats have been insisting that more money would fix everything in education since forever. If ONLY the MEAN Republicans would fully fund public education, everything would be amazing, but they DON’T because they’re BAD! But this new evidence completely contradicts that. 

Tim Daly at The Education Daily has a great post about this (which is rage fueling me this morning). Daly called the result further evidence of an “Education Depression.” He holds up Oregon — which will fill in nicely as a stand in for blue states/progressive education dogma of late here. The state has become a black hole for money while student performance has fallen off a cliff, SMDH.

———

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

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?

Capital Times Editorial:a

In contrast, Underly is backed by the state’s most ardent advocates for public-school students and teachers. Many of her backers are Democratic legislators, and she’s supported by the party. But, more importantly, she’s supported by educators who work in the state’s urban and rural schools, technical colleges and universities.

American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin Vice President Jon Shelton, says, “(Underly) has always shown a commitment to ensuring that the voices of educators have a seat at the table and in the decision-making processes, both with the Department of Public Instruction, but also modeling that for local school districts.”

The Wisconsin Education Association Council recently endorsed the incumbent based on Underly’s decades-long record as a teacher and school leader, with WEAC President Peggy Wirtz-Olsen noting, “Dr. Underly has committed to repairing or replacing the school funding formula so it is equitable to all students regardless of their ZIP code.”

WEAC hailed Underly’s “comprehensive plan to support public education” by focusing in her second term on “early childhood education and universal 4K access, teacher recruitment and retention; mental health and health supports; and adequate public-school funding.”

——-

more.

——

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

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?

AJ Manaseer:

It is a mathematical certainty that at least one, if not all, of Chicago’s pension funds will default if there is a protracted downturn and no external assistance.

In fact, they are already FUBAR.

Actuaries describe a pension fund that drops below a 40% funded ratio to have crossed the point of no return.

What is the funding ratio of Chicago’s 4 pension funds?

23.5%*

——

Illinois has less money on hand to pay its bills than any other state in the nation: it has just 28 days of reserves

Timur Kuran:

The criteria for a PhD naturally differ across disciplines. But if they differ to the point where the standards of one discipline look like a joke to most others, something fundamental has gone wrong. The empirical dissertation mentioned below ignores elementary statistics.

Brigham Tomco:

In her first official news interview since her identity became public, Pounds told the Deseret News that despite the stress of public life, she has redoubled her commitment to apply her big tech background to mapping out the web of government connections that she believes has led to unresponsive leadership and wasted taxpayer dollars.

The AI revolution

For someone who describes herself as deaf and nonverbal, Pounds says AI technology has transformed her relationship with her children by increasing their ability to communicate. Pounds also believes AI has the power to revolutionize the relationship between citizens and their government.

“AI has fundamentally changed the balance of power when it comes to government transparency and accountability,” Pounds wrote via email because she said her autism makes real-time sign language difficult in interviews.

For too long, technology has been used by government authorities to surveil and regulate the public, according to Pounds. But with unregulated AI tools in public hands, she predicts that dynamic is about to flip 180 degrees.

“Now, everyday citizens can use AI to analyze government spending, track decisions, and uncover waste and corruption on a scale that was previously impossible,” Pounds said.

And Pounds has exactly the skill set to pave the way.

Jay Greene:

Foreign students also added financial resources to U.S. universities because they tended to pay full tuition and sometimes brought with them large donations from wealthy foreign governments or families. In the context of the Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the West, foreign students who learned about the American political system and its values could bring ideas about individual liberty and representative democracy back to their home countries.

After 1977, foreign enrollment at U.S. universities crept higher, slowly at first, before it dramatically skyrocketed over the last two decades. Nationwide, the percentage of international students on college campuses has now nearly tripled since 1977. At our leading universities, the percentage of students from abroad has reached critical mass, averaging about a third but sometimes approaching half of total enrollments.

More.

Todd Milewski:

The base fees totaled $357,000 per year for events at Camp Randall Stadium (football), the Kohl Center (boys basketball and individual wrestling), the Field House (team wrestling) and Goodman Diamond (softball). The charge for WIAA girls and boys golf tournaments at University Ridge Golf Course stayed fixed at the student rate for each daily participant.

The 2018 agreement between the university and the WIAA, which expires this year, had facility rental fees that were based on a cut of gross ticket sales revenue at the Kohl Center, Field House and Goodman Diamond. Those are still in place in the new contract signed in February, but a fixed payment also is included.

The facility rental fees are locked in through the 2028-29 school year, when Wisconsin can propose new amounts. If the sides can’t agree on the costs then, the contract is torn up, and the sides must negotiate on a new contract.

Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh said financial details weren’t the priority in negotiating a new contract with the WIAA.

“We felt a responsibility and an excitement to host the championships,” he said. “Really, the conversations were dominated by the logistics, by the scheduling. That was the most difficult piece to work through.”

Makena Kelly and Zoe Shiffer

The Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services have both recently considered using a GSA chatbot internally and in their outward-facing contact centers, according to documents viewed by WIRED. It is not known whether that chatbot would be GSAi. Elsewhere in the government, the United States Army is using a generative AI tool called CamoGPT to identify and remove references to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility from training materials, WIRED previously reported.

Grace Hall:

From high school to law school

Bruce Mehlman:

The biggest chasm in American politics today is not rich vs poor, white vs non-white, women vs men or rural vs urban. It’s college-educated vs non-college educated. How did we get here and what does it mean for society, politics & governance? We will discuss these issues with a true expert and author of an excellent new book, Polarized by Degrees.

WILL

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is inviting school board members, district administrators, and key staff and faculty, for a day of professional development to better the educational experience Wisconsin’s students receive.  

The 2nd Annual School Board Summit will be held on May 9th. It will bring together experts from several facets of education policy and legal arenas. You are not going to want to miss it. REGISTER NOW

Corrinne Hess:

But the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association’s transfer rules are preventing Macy from getting to play softball for one year, due to the organization’s transfer rules.

Now the family is suing the WIAA and the Baraboo School District. 

According to the WIAA, “A student who transfers from any school into a member school will be subject to the transfer rules for one calendar year, unless the transfer is made necessary by a total and complete change in residence by parent(s).”

Transfer rules are in place to prevent schools from “stacking” the best players.

But Macy’s mom, Emily, says her daughter is not gaming the system. 

Charlie Eaton,  Albina Gibadullina

We develop a theory of elite embeddedness in which social organizations parallel to the economy can provide advantages via private information and reciprocity from other elites. The growing representation of private equity and hedge fund managers on university boards of trustees is analyzed to show how this increasingly wealthy sub-group of financiers gained elite social ties despite the decline of bank-based interlocks between corporate boards. We find evidence that financiers secured trustee positions both because of their high rates of elite degree holding and their attraction to trustee appointments at the most selective schools. We also find that private equity firms attained higher investment returns when their general partners held more trustee positions. The results suggest that benefits accrue to elite intermediaries from social closure in parallel social organizations such as universities.

Tyler Cowen Summary:

In this new system, is the CCP still the smartest or most powerful entity in China?  Or does the spontaneous order of various AI models more or less “rule it”?  To what extent do the decisions of the CCP become a derivative product of Manus (and other systems) advice, interpretation, and data gathering?

What exactly is the CCP any more?

Does the importance of Central Committee membership decline radically?

I am not talking doomsday scenarios here.  Alignment will ensure that the AI entities (for instance) continue to supply China with clean water, rather than poisoning the water supply.  But those AI entities have been trained on information sets that have very different weights than what the CCP implements through its Marxism-swayed, autocracy-swayed decisions.  Chinese AI systems look aligned with the CCP, given that they have some crude, ex post censorship and loyalty training.  But are the AI systems truly aligned in terms of having the same limited, selective set of information weights that the CCP does?  I doubt it.  If they did, probably they would not be the leading product.

(There is plenty of discussion of alignment problems with AI.  A neglected issue is whether the alignment solution resulting from the competitive process is biased on net toward “universal knowledge” entities, or some other such description, rather than “dogmatic entities.”  Probably it is, and probably that is a good thing?  …But is it always a good thing?)

Paul Caron Summary

Following up on my previous post, ABA Legal Ed Council Suspends Diversity Accreditation Standard In Wake Of Trump Executive Order And DOE Letter:  ABA Journal, ABA Legal Ed Council Suspended Diversity Standard; AG Bondi Wants It Scrapped:

A move last month by the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to suspend the accreditation standard originally titled “Diversity and Inclusion” doesn’t go far enough, according to a Feb. 28 letter from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who wants the council to abolish it “immediately” or risk the right to accredit law schools.

The council’s February move to suspend enforcement of Standard 206 until Aug. 31 came in the wake of an executive order from the Trump administration mandating the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and demands by the U.S. Department of Education that academic institutions eliminate DEI polices or risk federal funding cuts.

While Bondi applauded the suspension, “there is just one appropriate course: The standard must be repealed in its entirety,” she wrote. “And there is no reason to wait; the council should repeal the standard immediately.” …

Oversight:

We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his presidency.

All used the same autopen signature except for the the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year. Here is the autopen signature.

Sai Gaddam:

We are 25 years into the MOOC era. We have near unlimited access to the world’s best teachers on YouTube, and yet our education system isn’t producing independent thinkers. How is this possible?

It struck me that our education system is not just “useless” it is actively hurting all learners. We keep devising ways and means to keep them in artificial bubbles where all learning is boiled down to information transfer.

Like wild animals raised too long in captivity, our students have lost crucial survival skills for the real world. Our education system isn’t just failing them — it’s domesticating them into helplessness, training them for a life of being spoon-fed.

We’ve known this for a while now. This wonderful paper diagnosed this problem forty years ago. Knowledge isn’t abstract — it’s tied to context and authentic practice. Yet here we are, actively constructing these walled-off sealed-off classrooms.

Scott Yenor:

Educators on the right and left condemn grade inflation in K-12 and universities. Inflated grades mark the transformation of education from actual learning to credentialing.

Grade inflation at America’s universities is a national scandal. GPAs were already inflated in the 1980s. According to a 1991 study, GPAs increased from 2.38 to 2.91 between 1962 and 1985 in select departments at eight prominent schools. Only 13 percent of course grades were above a B+ in 1962, a number that doubled by 1985. In 2012, 42 percent of grades were A’s. More than 50 percent of students routinely exceeded B+ in their classes in 2020. The median grade-point average for college graduates increased from 2.7 in 1987 to over 3.25 in 2020.

In 1962, there was nearly half a grade-point gap between “high-grading” departments such as English, political science, philosophy, and art and “low graders” such as chemistry and math. A gap remained until at least 2010, when one studyrevealed that 71 percent of education-class grades were A’s, along with 67 percent of music grades, while only 29 percent of math grades were A’s. This gap has narrowed or disappeared today. Average math GPAs have spiked above 3.25, and engineering averages were 3.17 in 2020, according to Best Colleges. Both figures were higher than social-science GPAs. The Covid spike has taken grades even higher across the board.

If only one university tries to address the grade-inflation crisis, its students are at a significant competitive disadvantage.

John Nichols summary

The contest pits two people with very different views against one another. Underly — who taught in rural schools before becoming an elementary school principal, school district superintendent, university academic advisor and administrator, and assistant director at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction — was elected to serve as superintendent in 2021. She’s an ardent advocate for public education.

Kinser, identifies as an education consultant and has lobbied for groups that support school choice and controversial voucher schemes.

In this campaign, Kinser has emerged as a favorite of Wisconsin Republicans. Her bid is being managed by Amy Loudenbeck, a former GOP legislator who in 2022 was the party nominee in a high-stakes but ultimately unsuccessful bid to take over and remake the Wisconsin Office of the Secretary of State. Billionaire Republican megadonors, such as Diane Hendricks and Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, are top supporters of Kinser.

Underly is backed by prominent Democrats, unions and advocates for public education in a race where she argues, “As the Trump administration presses forward with its reckless and destructive slash-and-burn operation impacting Wisconsin’s children and families, historic state investments into public education are not just needed, they are critical to our state’s survival.”

——

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

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?

Joshua Dunn

For several decades, the high priestess of the balanced literacy movement has been Lucy Calkins of Columbia University, who directed the now-defunct Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Calkins once estimated that her Units of Study reading curriculum had been adopted by as many as one in four U.S. elementary schools. Irene Fountas of Lesley University and Gay Su Pinnell of the Ohio State University have also been primary purveyors of balanced literacy, through their Fountas and Pinnell curriculum. At the core of the trio’s approach was an article of faith: the key to literacy instruction is getting children to love reading. This was supposed to be accomplished by having teachers read aloud to them and then letting children choose which books they wanted to read, according to their own interests. The curricula also relied on “cueing,” in which students guess at words based on “context clues” instead of sounding them out.

While these concepts made intuitive sense—antipathy toward reading wouldn’t seem likely to engender learning to read effectively—the evidence in their favor was underwhelming. In fact, one can’t learn to love reading unless one learns to read, and literacy instruction based on good feelings has not been up to the task. While the programs’ problems have been documented for many years, awareness of these shortcomings didn’t penetrate the public consciousness until the education journalist Emily Hanford produced the 10-part podcast Sold a Story, launched in 2022. Listening to the series leads one to the inescapable conclusion that Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell, and their followers have inflicted reading deficiencies on millions of American children.

In 2022, in response to criticism, Calkins released an updated version of Units of Study that put more emphasis on phonics and drew from science-of-reading research. The following year, Columbia’s Teachers College dissolved Calkins’s Reading and Writing Project. School districts throughout the country, including New York City, turned away from balanced literacy.

——

notes and links on balanced literacy

 overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

By Holly Kurtz & Laura Baker:

Teachers’ overall job satisfaction is shifting in a positive direction, according to Education Week’s Teacher Morale Index, a year-over-year, multifaceted gauge of how teachers feel about the profession.

In the 2024-25 school year, the national Teacher Morale Index is +18 on a scale of -100 to +100, suggesting that teachers, overall, view their jobs more positively than negatively. That score is a significant climb from last year’s -13. 

The Teacher Morale Index, developed by the EdWeek Research Center, measures teachers’ levels of confidence and enthusiasm about their work based on responses to three survey questions that were part of a larger, nationally representative poll fielded among more than 2,500 teachers last fall.

While the overall measure of +18 presents an improving picture nationally, morale levels look quite different depending on the state teachers are working in. That’s why the EdWeek Research Center’s survey of teachers last fall set out to capture representative samples of educators in all 50 states. We wanted to show the variability in the state-specific findings in order for district and school leaders, along with policymakers, to better understand the mood of their teacher workforces closer to home.

David Sharfenberg:

And the people who should have held them to account — the academics and journalists charged with speaking truth to power — too often fell down on the job.

The costs of the shutdowns were enormous: trillions of dollars in deficit spending to stave off economic ruin; massive learning loss, concentrated among the least advantaged children; the special pain of leaving loved ones to die alone in dreary nursing homes and emergency rooms; a further cleaving of our already divided society.

And despite all the sacrifice, the United States still had a much higher death rate than other wealthy nations.

At a critical moment, American science abandoned its most fundamental tenets. It forsook inquiry, it muzzled debate.

And American democracy did no better. Reasonable skepticism was cast as tinfoil-hat conspiracy mongering. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube were purged of heresy.

For Macedo and Lee, the story is clear: The pandemic was a monumental test of the American system — and the system failed.

That pronouncement feels a little overwrought in parts of the book. Though the authors promise in their introduction to be careful about criticizing what happened in the past based on what is known in the present, they don’t always live up to their pledge.

____

Covid era Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate and Lockdown policies.

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

Frederick Hess:

By summer 2020, it was increasingly clear that kids weren’t at risk and weren’t major sources of spread. And yet, when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos called to reopen schools, she was lambasted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “messing with the health of our children.” When Missouri Governor Mike Parson called in July for his state’s schools to open, the Missouri Democratic Party slammed his call as “despicable and morally reprehensible.” Such vitriol was routine when teachers unions or the mainstream media discussed governors, like Ron DeSantis or Brian Kemp, who insisted that schools open that fall. Then, of course, there were the school boards that ridiculed parentswho wanted schools reopened, dismissing them as whiners who just wanted “their babysitters back.”

Teachers unions energetically resisted reopening, with members out protesting using fake body bags, caskets, and tombstones as props.

In fall 2020, teachers were taking to outlets like Education Week and CNN to decry the “coronavirus-deniers” who wanted schools to reopen, arguing “I love my students” but “don’t want to die.” There was the oft-heard claim that the push to reopen schools was, well, racist (as with the teacher who asked “Are We Going to Let ‘Nice White Parents’ Kill Black and Brown Families?”). The Chicago Teachers Union flatly explained that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

For their part, education leaders insisted that they would reopen if only they had more money. This tactic played neatly into school leaders’ propensity for insisting that schools are perpetually starved for funds. (New York City’s chancellor lamented, “We are cutting the bone. There is no fat to cut, no meat to cut.” At the time, his was one of the nation’s highest-spending districts, with a district bureaucracy that cost $5 billion a year, to which he’d added 340 central-office positions the prior year.) In the meantime, district leaders were left to assert that virtual learning was a decent-enough alternative, proclaiming: “For those who say we need to get back to school, we say SCHOOL IS IN SESSION. Teachers are teaching their hearts out during live virtual instruction every day.” Parents felt gaslit.

Robert Wright:

Despite strong market signals that they will continue to fail financially and/or fall short of achieving their missions, few U.S. universities have tried grading reform as a means of attracting more or better students. Structural barriersrooted in misaligned incentives stymie institution-wide reforms, while maverick professors often run afoul of students who prefer the relative ease of multiple choice and other memorization-based tests. The existence of top-down and bottom-up impediments at existing universities suggests that new higher-ed entrants, such as the University of Austin (Texas) and Reliance College (Chicago), will form the bulk of the vanguard of much-needed academic reform.

University presidents now stay on the job an average of just 5.7 years. Deans last on average only about five years and Provosts but three. The general strategy appears to be to quickly make superficial changes to secure a higher post at a higher-paying school, or to transition into a lucrative consulting gig or cushy faculty appointment in a professional school before retirement. Like Wall Street execs trying to juke quarterly numbers, university leaders prefer shallow reforms with catchy titles likely to appeal to relatively uninformed stakeholders.

University leaders prefer shallow reforms with catchy titles likely to appeal to relatively uninformed stakeholders.

Andy Uhler:

Last Saturday, Zach Holbrooks walked into a mobile measles screening and vaccine clinic he had helped set up.

As the executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, which includes Gaines County, he dropped by to check on how many shots the crew had given out so far that day.

“Has it been busy today?” Holbrooks asked the two staffers in what’s normally a livestock show barn on the outskirts of downtown Seminole. “Not so far. We’ve only given one,” they replied.

Holbrooks works and lives in this town, the county seat, which in the last few weeks became the epicenter of the largest measles outbreak in three decades.

Brownstone Institute:

“This is the way the world ends,” T.S. Eliot wrotein 1925. “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Ninety-five years later, the pre-Covid world ended with a nationwide sigh of submission. Democrats remained silent as government mandates transferred trillions of dollars from the working class to tech oligarchs. Republicans dithered as states criminalized church attendance. Libertarians stood by as the nation shuttered the doors of small businesses. College students obediently forfeited their freedoms and moved into their parents’ basements, liberals accepted widespread surveillance campaigns, and conservatives greenlit the printing of 300 years’ worth of money in sixty days. 

With rare exception, March 2020 was a bipartisan, intergenerational capitulation to fear and hysteria. Those who dared to object to the freshly-mandated orthodoxy were subject to widespread contempt, derision, and censorship as the US Security State and a subservient media corps muzzled their protests. The most dominant forces in society used the opportunity to their advantage, pillaging the nation’s treasury and overthrowing law and tradition. Their campaign was devoid of the triumph of Yorktown, the bloodshed of Antietam, or the sacrifices of Omaha Beach. Without a single bullet, they overtook the republic, overturning the Bill of Rights in a quiet coup d’état. 

Perhaps no episode better exemplified this phenomenon than the House of Representatives on March 27, 2020. That day, the House planned to pass the largest spending bill in American history, the CARES Act, without a recorded vote. The $2 trillion price tag was more money than Congress spent on the entire Iraq War, twice as much as the cost of the Vietnam War, and thirteen times more than Congress’s annual allocation for Medicaid – all adjusted for inflation. No House Democrats objected, nor did 195 out of 196 House Republicans. For 434 members of the House, there were no concerns of fiscal responsibility or electoral accountability. There wouldn’t be a whimper, let alone a bang; there wouldn’t even be a recorded vote.

But there was one voice of dissent. When Representative Thomas Massie learned of his colleagues’ plan, he drove overnight from Garrison, Kentucky to the Capitol. “I came here to make sure our republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent and empty chamber,” he announced on the floor. 

——-

Covid era Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate and Lockdown policies.

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

Joanne Jacobs summary:

New York City’s Catholic schools are closing their doors, writes Ray Domanico in City Journal. Families with children are leaving the city, and parents who might have turned to Catholic school in the past are choosing tuition-free charter schools.

A small group of Catholic high schools has learned how to survive in the new environment, he writes. Some have gone co-ed. Others have opened middle schools. But many Catholic schools “lack the resources and expertise needed for new thinking,” he writes. The archdiocese is not leading the way.

Troy Jollimore:

Not very sophisticated AI-generated papers are easy to spot—if, again, you know what to look for. In terms of both syntax and tone, they all sound roughly the same. Very neutral, very bland. Regardless of the nature of the question, they address the issues at hand in the same highly methodical manner, first developing a systematic framework, then balancing competing considerations against each other to arrive at an overall judgment. Sometimes they will provide quotations, giving page numbers that, as often as not, do not seem to correspond to anything in the actual world. These, again, are the ones that are easiest to pick out. I have little doubt that there are others that are more sophisticated, and that some get past me.

To judge by the number of papers I read last semester that were clearly AI generated, a lot of students are enthusiastic about this latest innovation. It turns out, too, this enthusiasm is hardly dampened by, say, a clear statement in one’s syllabus prohibiting the use of AI. Or by frequent reminders of this policy, accompanied by heartfelt pleas that students author the work they submit. 

North American college instructors are accustomed to adversity. Our society has always manifested strongly anti-intellectual tendencies. (In the past, this was perhaps more true in the US than Canada; I’m not sure how much, if at all, this remains the case.) One mainstream view is that practical intelligence, or street smarts, constitutes a more valuable form of intelligence. Those who emphasize theory, study, and scholarship are often viewed as marooned in ivory towers with expertise that is mostly, if not entirely, spurious.

Eric Gilliam:

In this piece, I dive into exactly how Bell Labs ensured that their researchers were working on the right problems. This piece will be the first in a series examining what modern applied research orgs can learn from the great dragons of industrial R&D — places like Bell Labs, GE Research Laboratory, and DuPont’s research department.

Institutions like these not only had Nobel prizes to their names, but each — even though they’ve diminished for various reasons — was quite profitable too. They had their differences, but they all stumbled upon many aspects of managing their research operations that were rather similar. The managers of these organizations — and other researchers at the time — often felt the management decisions they made were common sense rather than some great discovery.

However, these common-sense decisions are things we often don’t do today – but almost certainly should.

Martijn Faassen:

To introduce succinct data structures it’s useful to compare them to compression. You use compression to shrink the size required to represent this data. Compression can be useful to save disk space, or transmit less data over the network, or to save memory. But to do anything useful with compressed data, such as access it or query it, you first need to uncompress it again. Then afterwards if you want to save space, you need to compress it again.

Succinct data structures are different: they store their content in a compact fashion like compression, but the compact form of the data has useful properties. You can still use it!

This is a field that seems to have emerged in computer science relatively recently; many of the important data structures were invented in the last 25 years.

Adam Bertram:

The good news is that you don’t have to choose between frustrating your staff and leaving the door open to hackers. Here are some key considerations for fighting MFA fatigue.

Get smarter with risk-based authentication. Not every login needs MFA. Adapt your process to risk level. Low-risk actions shouldn’t need them, saving your staff hassle.

Underscore the need for education. People are your first line of defense. Teach your staff the value of MFA, how to identify suspicious requests (even when they just want to make the alerts stop) and why healthcare is such a tempting target for cyberattacks.

Consider FIDO2. Look into advanced standards, such as FIDO2, that use security keys or built-in biometrics. These are harder to fake and less annoying for users.

Daniela Blei:

To prepare for this initiation, I bought a lifetime supply of index cards. On each four-by-six rectangle, I distilled the major points of a book. My index cards—portable, visual, tactile, easily rearranged and reshuffled—got me through the exam.

Yet it never occurred to me, as I rehearsed my talking points more than a decade ago, that my index cards belonged to the very European history I was studying. The index card was a product of the Enlightenment, conceived by one of its towering figures: Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, physician, and the father of modern taxonomy. But like all information systems, the index card had unexpected political implications, too: It helped set the stage for categorizing people, and for the prejudice and violence that comes along with such classification.

Kayla Huynh

The new benchmarks are lower than the NAEP-aligned scores, which Underly has said are “an extremely high standard to meet, beyond grade-level knowledge.” McCarthy said educators requested the change and 100 teachers consulted with the department about the new system as part of a routine effort to update standards. 

“That’s the right approach,” McCarthy said. “NAEP is a national benchmarking tool, not a state accountability measure. It does not measure Wisconsin academic standards, which are used by teachers to deliver instruction.”

But state Republican leaders remain unconvinced. Some have criticized the move as a deliberate effort to inflate students’ test scores. Under the new system, over half of grade school students in the state scored proficient or higher in math and English last school year. 

The new system has also complicated efforts by state policymakers, school district leaders and parents to measure success over time. The scores are now calculated so differently that the Department of Public Instruction cautions against comparing to years before the change.

George Leef:

Courts have repeatedly ruled that colleges and universities violate the First Amendment rights of professors when they retaliate against them for having said things administrators dislike. Nevertheless, such cases continue to arise. Victories for freedom of speech have not stopped the abuse of power by intolerant officials.

The reason why is that those officials don’t have to fear personal liability for their actions. The school might lose, but the officials won’t have to pay for the costs they caused. The money to pay damages comes from the school, not from them. And why is that? The answer is “qualified immunity.”

Jamie Sarkonik

The University of Alberta is hiring a dean of public health. Salary range: $248,918 to $364,750.

Job requirements include a “demonstrated commitment” to DEI. This, in a conservative-governed province, at a university that recently claimed to be ditching DEI.

Richard Vedder:

Colleges and universities across the country are burdened with inefficiently utilized facilities, leading to unnecessary costs, wasted space, and misplaced financial priorities. This policy brief, authored by economist Richard Vedder, examines the systemic mismanagement of campus facilities and proposes market-based reforms to optimize space usage, reduce waste, and refocus universities on their core academic mission.

Key Findings

• Severe Underutilization: Campus buildings are frequently vacant during weekends, summers, and even during peak academic hours.
• Perverse Incentives: Universities continue constructing new facilities despite declining enrollments, fueling financial strain.
• Regulatory Burdens: Public universities face excessive labor and construction regulations that drive up costs.
• Misplaced Priorities: Institutions prioritize extravagant student amenities over necessary building maintenance.
• Lack of Market Discipline: Unlike private-sector organizations, universities do not leverage competitive market forces to manage space efficiently.

Beni Edwards:

“Our study shows the emergence of a new reality in which firms, consumers and even international organizations substantially rely on generative AI for communications,” wrote the researchers.

The researchers tracked large language model (LLM) adoption across industries from January 2022 to September 2024 using a dataset that included 687,241 consumer complaints submitted to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), 537,413 corporate press releases, 304.3 million job postings, and 15,919 United Nations press releases.

By using a statistical detection system that tracked word usage patterns, the researchers found that roughly 18 percent of financial consumer complaints (including 30 percent of all complaints from Arkansas), 24 percent of corporate press releases, up to 15 percent of job postings, and 14 percent of UN press releases showed signs of AI assistance during that period of time.

The study also found that while urban areas showed higher adoption overall (18.2 percent versus 10.9 percent in rural areas), regions with lower educational attainment used AI writing tools more frequently (19.9 percent compared to 17.4 percent in higher-education areas). The researchers note that this contradicts typical technology adoption patterns where more educated populations adopt new tools fastest.

Connor Jones

Research from a leading academic shows Android users have advertising cookies and other gizmos working to build profiles on them even before they open their first app.

Doug Leith, professor and chair of computer systems at Trinity College Dublin, who carried out the research, claims in his write up that no consent is sought for the various identifiers and there is no way of opting out from having them run.

He found various mechanisms operating on the Android system which were then relaying the data back to Google via pre-installed apps such as Google Play Services and the Google Play store, all without users ever opening a Google app.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner:

Yes, Emanuel inherited a city in bad shape, but he ended up making Chicagoans’ situation even worse.

We covered Mayor Emanuel extensively during his time in office. He showed initial promise when he tried to push for 401k retirement plans for city workers and when he first took on the teachers unions. Unfortunately, Emanuel rapidly descended into failure after he abandoned his Rahmbo persona. 

The Chicago Teachers Union ended up rolling over him during two subsequent contract negotiations. Homicides spiked in 2016. The city’s pension crisis worsened. Credit downgrades and record property tax hikes followed. 

Rachel Treisman:

Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018. All but 10 were from his right arm, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

He “never missed a single appointment,” the agency said, and “expected nothing in return.” Blood donors are not compensated financially under Australian law.

“James was a remarkable, stoically kind, and generous person who was committed to a lifetime of giving and he captured the hearts of many people around the world,” Lifeblood CEO Stephen Cornelissen said in a statement. 

Eugene Volokh:

An excerpt from the 11,000-word opinion in Hartzell v. Marana Unified School Dist., decided today by Ninth Circuit Judge Milan Smith, joined by Judges Wallace Tashima and Bridget Bade:

Following an incident on February 7, 2020, at Dove Mountain K-CSTEM school (Dove Mountain), Plaintiff-Appellant Rebecca Hartzell was banned from the school premises. Hartzell claims that she was banned from the school in retaliation for her protected speech. Defendants-Appellees, the Marana Unified School District (the District) and Andrea Divijak, the principal at Dove Mountain, assert that Hartzell was banned because of her conduct; specifically, they allege that Hartzell assaulted Divijak….

Hartzell is the parent of eight school-aged children, five of whom attended Dove Mountain during the 2019–20 school year. Divijak was serving as the principal of Dove Mountain at that time. In August 2019, the District opened Dove Mountain, a new kindergarten through eighth grade school. Dove Mountain is a part of and run by the District….

Hartzell has a master’s degree in special education and a doctorate focusing on applied behavioral analysis and autism. She also became an associate professor of practice at the University of Arizona, and a director of the master’s program in applied behavioral analysis at that institution….

On February 7, 2020, Dove Mountain hosted an event where students presented projects they had been working on for a few months. Two of Hartzell’s children were scheduled to present in different rooms simultaneously. While attending the event, Hartzell saw Divijak in a classroom and approached her. Hartzell was accompanied by one of her children, who attended preschool at Dove Mountain. No other children were present.

Jennifer Gaither

The name Baltimore City College may not mean much to the rest of the world, but it means a whole lot to people who live in Baltimore.

Baltimore City College, or “City,” founded in 1839, is the third oldest public high school in the nation and is typically ranked in the top high schools in the city and state.

It enrolls students selectively, using a composite score based on grades and standardized test scores. Its enrollment is 66% Black. It is also the only Baltimore City public high school to offer the prestigious International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma.

Before COVID-19, City was a school where academic excellence and educational equity were central to its mission. Students feared earning anything less than an A. “I was terrified of failing. I would study my butt off,” said McKenzie, Class of 2023.

But just a few years later, that culture had changed. “Failing isn’t failing anymore,” McKenzie admitted.

At City and so many other schools, the pandemic response didn’t just disrupt learning for a few weeks. It dismantled the culture that once supported student success. Long after schools returned to in-person instruction, students struggled to find motivation and connection, administrators implemented harmful policies, and educators began treating students with indifference rather than care.

———

Covid era Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate and Lockdown policies.

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

MU Law Poll

In the election for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 61% lack an opinion of incumbent Jill Underly and 69% haven’t heard enough about her opponent, Brittany Kinser. #mulawpoll

——

and

In 2013, slightly more people were concerned with property taxes than with school funding. In 2015 through 2018, a substantial majority was more concerned with school funding. Since 2019, there has been a steady increase in concern for property taxes . #mulawpoll

——-

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

I taught a grad course on AI Agents at UCSD CSE this past quarter. All lecture slides, homeworks & course projects are now open sourced!

I provide a grounding going from Classical Planning & Simulations -> RL Control -> LLMs and how to put it all together

Greg Ashman:

Thousands of primary school students will be tested on their mathematics knowledge as part of a landmark NSW numeracy screening trial to be rolled out from next term.

NSW will run the maths screening check for year 1 students across 150 public schools, testing about 5000 pupils on basic skills including counting, ordering numbers and simple addition and subtraction.

more

——

2007 math forum audio video 

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Remedial math

Madison’s most recent Math Task Force

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

Open The Books

We measured how much each school was spending on staff to push DEI; how much they were receiving in federal grants and contracts; and how much cash was coming from overseas, including adversarial nations like China, Saudi Arabia, or Qatar.

The results were stunning. For the first time, they’re gathered here in an exhaustive report.

Andrew Mir:

The media also have contributed to their own decline. How? “Some of the wounds are self-inflicted,” writes Rosen. In particular, he refers to the struggle of the newsrooms to increase diversity while maintaining the “view from nowhere.” “See the contradiction?” asks Rosen. “Under-represented journalists are to simultaneously supply a missing perspective and suppress it—in order to prove their objectivity,” he complains. While tendentious, Rosen’s argument is interesting for what it reveals about the industry.

Journalists once considered objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality as cardinal virtues. Now professors at top journalism schools treat these as false standards. The flip happened during Donald Trump’s first presidency, when top editors concurred with rank-and-file journalists that they must not give equal consideration to views that clashed with “democratic” values. For example, there could be no legitimate opposing perspective, they argued, on matters of sexual abuse. There could be no “other side,” they insisted, when fascism loomed. Journalists must not seek false balance in their coverage.

The command to disregard the “wrong side” soon extended to politics and social issues. Objective reporting, on this view, demonstrated a false “view from nowhere,” while stories that tried to reflect competing views indulged in “bothsidesism.” Each term carried a pejorative connotation.

Behind this change of labels is an epistemological shift in discourse production. For most of the twentieth century—from the muckrakers of the Progressive Era and pioneering investigator Ida Tarbell to Walter Cronkite’s Vietnam War coverage—journalism’s theorists and practitioners fought for their duty to report the news. Today, journalists often get criticized when they cover, investigate, and discuss certain events. Indeed, media critics and journalism professors often urge that journalists not report certain events.

Jill Barshay:

Unlike other statistical agencies in the federal government, such as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, NCES does not have many statisticians on staff. That is because congressional appropriation rules limit the hiring of full-time staff at the Education Department and require that most of NCES’s budget be spent externally. Woodworth estimates that 90 percent of its data gathering and reporting work is contracted out to private firms and organizations. Even some of its websites with .gov domains are actually maintained by outside contractors. Woodworth also said that NCES does not operate its own facility to hold all the data. Instead, the federal government pays the same private research organizations to keep it in their data centers. 

“I’ve been arguing for a long time that the biggest bang for the buck is to actually hire more federal staff and stop using so many contractors,” Woodworth said. Outside contractors are not only paid more than federal workers, but the contract payments also include overhead costs for office space and employee benefits and a profit margin. That makes them a prime target for cost-cutting. 

With DOGE’s contract cancellations, the duties of maintaining historical data and making data available to the public were canceled along with the collection of new data. “We don’t really know for sure what’s going to happen to that data,” Woodworth said. 

Dan Shafer:

In the upcoming Spring Election, the highest-profile race is the one for Wisconsin Supreme Court, the latest in Wisconsin’s seemingly endless number of everything-on-the-line elections. 

The undercard, then, is the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Elections for this ostensibly nonpartisan office have not always attracted much attention, but this year’s race might buck that trend.

And while in Wisconsin, statewide races are often decided by razor-thin margins, elections for State Superintendent have historically not been all that close. In the 2021 election, an open contest with no incumbent, Dr. Jill Underly won by a more than 15-point margin, defeating Deborah Kerr by about 58% to 42%. That was closer than the marks that now-Governor and former State Superintendent Tony Evers was re-elected with, receiving more than 60% of the vote in both 2013 and 2017 after winning an open race in 2009 with just over 57% of the vote. Evers’ predecessor as State Superintendent, Elizabeth Burmaster, received at least 60% of the vote both times she ran for the role. The election for State Superintendent has not been one decided by a less than double-digit margin since John Benson was re-elected to the position in 1997, winning 54.7% of the vote. 

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So, races for this office have not been closely competitive for quite some time. And while those who have won elections for State Superintendent have been relatively more Democratic-aligned, it’s still been a role in the tradition of the office being a nonpartisan one, and has been a role held largely by former school administrators. 

But now, in 2025, we could very well be looking at a more competitive election for State Superintendent than we’ve seen in some time. Given the dynamics in this race and how closely tied outcomes and turnout might be to the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court, it stands to reason this could end up being the closest race for the office we’ve seen in decades. 

Brittany Kinser  — an education consultant and former executive at a charter school, who also was the CEO (and a lobbyist) for pro-charter nonprofit City Forward Collective — advanced to the head-to-head general election after advancing in the primary, coming in second behind Underly. Underly ended up with 38% of the vote, Kinser with 35% and Jeff Wright, superintendent of Sauk Prairie Schools, was the odd man out with just over 27%. 

There are a couple different ways you could read these results. One is that the two Democratic-aligned candidates, Underly (who was endorsed by WisDems) and Wright (a self-described Democrat) combined for more than 65% of the vote, suggesting that this race might not be all that close, after all. 

—-

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

FIRE:

Free speech on college campuses is a proud American tradition, and — on public campuses — protected by the First Amendment. President Trump’s message this morning, combined with other recent executive orders threatening punishment for protected speech, is deeply chilling. 🧵

——

Glenn Greenwald:

Everyone should be happy for @TheFIREorg’s existence, which does what ACLU long ago did: defend free speech without regard to ideology or party.

They made their name defending conservative speech from campus censorship, but here explain why attacks on Israel critics is as bad:

Fire:

Good. Government officials cannot mislabel protected speech as a “threat” to silence speech they disagree with. That’s classic censorship that the First Amendment forbids.

Christopher Harris

Fewer students may be choosing to study higher-level maths for the HSC because they had been taught by primary school teachers who were “maths avoiders” and developed a negative attitude toward the subject, Sydney University vice-chancellor Professor Mark Scott has said.

Scott made the comments at an Engineers Australia conference on Wednesday, an event for experts to find ways to avoid a looming shortage of professional engineers and increase the number of women enrolling in engineering degrees.

—-

more.

——

2007 math forum audio video 

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Remedial math

Madison’s most recent Math Task Force

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

Justin Murphy:

Either federal judges have become saints, or something is suppressing impeachments.

What is the probability we’d observe zero impeachments from 2011-2024? Using the Poisson distribution, I think it’s somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it’s very fishy.

What’s even crazier is that there is a clear political story behind all of this.

The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred.

Then in 2008 the federal judges “reformed” themselves, which seems to have made things even worse. I have to look into this more, obviously a complicated issue.

Tim Shipman:

Young women are now consistently earning more than their male counterparts for the first time, according to a report that warns of a social “crisis” gripping young men.

Women and girls aged 16 to 24 in both white-collar and blue-collar jobs make nearly 10 per cent more on average than their male peers, according to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank.

The report, Lost Boys, highlights how a generation of young men are facing far worse outcomes than young women in education and beyond, falling further behind by virtually every yardstick, while changing social attitudes leave them feeling isolated.

“Boys and young men are in crisis,” the report says. “Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind. And by some margin.

“From the day they start primary school, to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls.”

Quinton Klabon summary

NEW DPI 2023 TEACHER REPORT

• highest rate in Midwest of students in teacher programs
• PROBLEMS: only 67% teach in Wisconsin, 19% quit before year 3
• HUGE change in FORT reading passage: old test: 41%, new test: 72% (MA: 60%, 94%)
• best FORT rates: Carroll, Madison, Stout

——

Underly: “I support Eliminating the Foundations of Reading (FORT)” Teacher Test

By W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric:

What worries us is the insufficient safety precautions the researchers took when studying this coronavirus.

Research laboratories have different levels of security, based on its categorization on a biosafety level scale, from BSL-1, the lowest, to BSL-4. Lower-security labs are used for studying infectious agents that either don’t cause disease in people or pose only moderate risk. The higher-security laboratories are for studying pathogens that can spread in the air and have the potential to cause lethal infections.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. 

BSL-4 labs are the ones featured in movies where scientists walk around in what look like spacesuits with air hoses and shower in decontamination chambers when their work is done. BSL-3 labs limit access to specifically trained staff members, have locking double doors for enhanced security and specific air handling and sterilization systems. Workers wear head-to-toe personal protective equipment and are under medical surveillance for signs of laboratory-acquired infection that could pose a risk to others.

——-

Zeynep Tufekci:

Ralph Baric and Ian Lipkin in the NYT raising the alarm on a new Cell paper where Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists experiment on ANOTHER coronavirus that can infect humans under grossly inadequate biosafety precautions.

“could have significant risks for people worldwide.”

Related:

Covid era Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate and Lockdown policies.

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

Anna Hansen:

Now that Southside Elementary has its long-awaited new name, the Madison School District is eyeing its next re-christenings.

While district officials draft the necessary paperwork and place their orders for the new Lori Mann Carey Elementary signage, Conrad A. Elvehjem and Charles Lindbergh Elementary Schools are on deck for renaming during the 2025-2026 academic year, according to Carlettra Stanford, assistant superintendent of school leadership.

The legacies behind those two names are complicated.

——-

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Kayla Huynh

But Wisconsin students remain behind years after the public health emergency disrupted learning, according to a national study on academic recovery this month. 

The average Wisconsin student is over a third of a grade level behind in math and half of a grade level behind in reading compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to results from the Education Recovery Scorecard. Average U.S. students are nearly half a grade level behind in both subjects, the report shows.

The study, produced by Harvard University researchers, scored how states progressed in math and reading since 2019. Researchers combined federal test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress with statewide assessments, including Wisconsin’s Forward Exam. 

Wisconsin ranked 16th among 43 states in math recovery and 30th in reading between 2019 and 2024. In Madison, students are 72% behind grade level in reading and 84% behind in math compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to the report.

“We have to do everything we can to help catch our students up,” Underly said on the campaign trail four years ago. “As state superintendent, I’ll be a champion of our public schools, students, their families and our educators to help us recover from this pandemic.”

Underly, who is now campaigning for a second term, advanced to a runoff election this April after Wisconsin voters narrowed the candidates for state superintendent in a Feb. 18 primary election.

Backed by Democrats, Underly will face Milwaukee education consultant Brittany Kinser, who is backed by Republicans. Kinser’s campaign has focused on restoring high academic standards for students and improving children’s skills in math and literacy.

——-

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

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?

Richard Rubin and Kara Dapena

No matter how you measure it, the U.S. government is spending significantly more than it did a decade ago. As President Trump prepares his joint address to Congress on Tuesday, the debate over federal spending is front and center. Over the past decade, government spending has surged, driven by pandemic relief, rising costs for entitlement programs and increased defense budgets. Now, some Republicans are pushing to roll back spending to 2019 levels, arguing that cuts are necessary to reduce the deficit and offset tax cuts.

Let’s take a look under the hood at where the money is going and where spending has grown the most since 2015:

Te-Ping Chen:

In America’s most surprising cutting-edge classes, students pursue hands-on work with wood, metals and machinery, getting a jump on lucrative old-school careers.

School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century. They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college.

With higher-education costs soaring and white-collar workers under threat by generative AI, the timing couldn’t be better.

In a suburb of Madison, Wis., Middleton High School completed a $90 million campus overhaul in 2022 that included new technical-education facilities. The school’s shop classes, for years tucked away in a back corridor, are now on display. Fishbowl-style glass walls show off the new manufacturing lab, equipped with computer-controlled machine tools and robotic arms.

Interest in the classes is high. About a quarter of the school’s 2,300 students signed up for at least one of the courses in construction, manufacturing and woodworking at Middleton High, one of Wisconsin’s highest-rated campuses for academics.

“We want kids going to college to feel these courses fit on their transcripts along with AP and honors,” said Quincy Millerjohn, a former English teacher who is a welding instructor at the school. He shows his students local union pay scales for ironworkers, steamfitters and boilermakers, careers that can pay anywhere from $41 to $52 an hour.

Wall Street Journal:

Three men, including two sitting local officials, are facing federal charges that they tried to steal a 2021 mayoral election in Pennsylvania. It didn’t work, but an indictment unveiled last week alleges that they falsely registered nearly three dozen people living elsewhere to addresses in Millbourne, population 1,200, before requesting and filling out fraudulent mail ballots.

Pennsylvanians can update their voter registrations on a website that verifies identity by asking for a driver’s license number. Prosecutors say the men “persuaded many of their non-Millbourne friends and acquaintances to show them their driver’s licenses or other documents,” promising that out-of-towners “would not get in trouble as long as they did not vote in another election in November.” Other ID details were allegedly taken nonconsensually, including from Mr. Hasan’s business.

Once the outsiders were registered to Millbourne, the feds say the defendants then used the website to request mail ballots, which they cast for Mr. Hasan. In some cases they allegedly “forged the voters’ signatures.” In others, the vote was presented “to the non-Millbourne resident to whom the ballot had been addressed, and the non-resident signed the envelope.”

The effort failed, and the Democratic mayoral candidate won the 2021 race, 165 to 138. All three men pleaded not guilty to the charges this week, according to court records.

On the one hand, this was caught despite the small number of ballots involved. That’s a reason for confidence in much larger margins, such as when President Trump won Pennsylvania in 2024 by 120,266 votes, and also when he lost it in 2020 by 80,555.

On the other hand, it’s alarming how easy such a scheme appears to be. What if a foreign adversary got its hands on hacked or leaked driver’s license data? The indictment—and the long time after the 2021 to bring charges—is another argument for states to pull back from the Covid-19 voting laxity of absentee-for-everybody. The price of democracy is vigilance, and voting fraud isn’t a myth.

David Pilling interviews Bjorn Lomborg:

“I hope to provide a tailwind to good ideas and a headwind to bad ideas,” he says, advocating, for example, more spending on heart disease prevention, which is cheap, and less on curing cancer, which is expensive.

Not surprisingly, Lomborg stirs fierce emotions. He has been accused of cherry-picking data, flouting scientific methodology and of wearing T-shirts in inappropriate settings. He has been cast as a heartless rationer and a peddler of false dichotomies. At a book event in Oxford, someone shoved a baked Alaska pie in his “smug face”. A former head of the UN climate panel compared him to Hitler. Both incidentally ended up as his friends.

A blond pin-up for the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing think-tank, and admired by people like Joe Rogan, the Donald Trump-endorsing podcaster on whose show he recently appeared, Lomborg is hard to pigeonhole. Bill Gates consults him and Lomborg spends his time worrying about how to spend aid in poor countries. He is pro-trade and pro-immigration, not exactly typical rightwing positions.

So who is he, I wonder as I walk through the crisp blue light of London’s Docklands. He has chosen the Bonnane Restaurant & Pizzeria, a large glass and chrome affair with a view across the Thames of the spiky, hedgehog-reminiscent O2 Arena dome.

“I love pizza and we could incorporate this into the conversation,” he had written somewhat unpromisingly, though at least he’s entering into the spirit of Lunch with the FT.

Tyler Durden:

The point here is that the Administrative State – aloof from executive control – has taken to itself prerogatives such as immunity to dismissal and the self-awarded authority to shape policy – creating a dual state system, run by unelected technocrats, which, when implanted in departments such as Justice and the Pentagon, have evolved into the American Deep State.

Article Two of the Constitution however, says very bluntly: Executive power shall be vested in the U.S. President (with no ifs or buts at all.) Trump intends for his Administration to recover that lost Executive power. It was, in fact, lost long ago. Trump is re-claiming too, the Executive’s right to dismiss ‘servants of the State’, and to ‘switch off’ wasteful expenditure at his discretion, as part of a unitary executive prerequisite.

Of course, the Administrative State is fighting back. Turley’s article is headlined: They Are Taking Away Everything We Have: Democrats and Unions Launch Existential Fight. Their aim has been to cripple the Trump initiative through using politicised judges to issue restraint orders. Many mainstream lawyers believe Trump’s Unitary Executive claim to be illegal. The question is whether Congress can stand up Agencies designed to act independently of the President; and how does that square with the separation of powers and Article Two that vests unqualified executive power with one sole elected official – the U.S. President.

How did the Democrats not see this coming? Lawyer Robert Barnes essentially says that the ‘blitzkrieg’ was “exceptionally well-planned” and had been discussed in Trump circles since late 2020. The latter team had emerged from within a generational and cultural shift in the U.S.. This latter had given rise to a Libertarian/Populist wing with working class roots who often had served in the military, yet had come to despise the Neo-con lies (especially those of 9/11) that brought endless wars. They were animated more by the old John Adams adage that ‘America should not go abroad in search of monsters to slay’.

In short, they were not part of the WASP ‘Anglo’ world; they came from a different Culture that harked back to the theme of America as Republic, not as Empire. This is what you see with Vance and Hegseth – a reversion to the Republican precept that the U.S. should not become involved in European wars. Ukraine is not America’s war.

The Deep State, it seems, were not paying attention to what a posse of ‘populist’ outliers, tucked away from the rarefied Beltway talking shop, were up to: They (the outliers) were planning a concerted attack on the Federal expenditure spigot – identified as the weak spot about which a Constitutional challenge could be mounted that would derail – in its entirety – the expenditures of the Deep State.

more.

NY Post

“ai” summary:

A Manhattan Institute report highlights the challenges in combating “wokeness” in academia, emphasizing the need for a long-term strategy beyond federal intervention or new leadership.

www

Calculus Made Easy is a book on calculus originally published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson, considered a classic and elegant introduction to the subject.

I read “Calculus Made Easy” by Silvanus P. Thompson and it’s still to this day my inspiration for explaining complex technical topics to lay people. It’s a fantastic book, and even if you know math you must read it if you want to understand how to teach complexity to others. (source)

The Economist

Few things agitate Robert F. Kennedy junior, America’s new health secretary, more than the rate of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among American children. And for good reason: one in nine children aged 3-17 years has been diagnosed with ADHD, two to three times the rate in other Western countries. On February 13th, Mr Kennedy’s first day in office, President Donald Trump put him in charge of a special commission tasked with working out, in the next 100 days, why so many American children have ADHD and other chronic conditions.

By Aaron Zitner , Siobhan Hughes and Gavin Bade:

The spending fight is one aspect of a broader discussion about whether Congress has ceded too much power to the president, either by passing laws that expand his authority or empowering him through their own inaction.

The Constitution assigns to Congress the power to levy tariffs, and some lawmakers within both parties say they have gone too far in delegating that authority to the president. Separately, a handful of lawmakers within each party want to scale back laws that give the president enhanced powers during emergencies, which Trump has cited in some of his actions regarding energy production, tariffs and immigration.

Other separation-of-powers battles could be on the horizon, including one over the authority of federal courts as they consider the legality of Trump’s executive actions.

Ben Unglesbee:

• Penn State University plans to close some of its 19 smaller commonwealth campusesin the coming years as it faces financial and demographic pressures, university President Neeli Bendapudi said Tuesday. 
• Bendapudi tasked three Penn State officials with leading a group that will make a final recommendation in the coming weeks on which of 12 campuses under review should close.
• Excluded from the review are Penn State’s seven largest commonwealth campuses — in Abington, Altoona, Behrend, Berks, Brandywine, Harrisburg and Lehigh Valley.Those locations account for 75% of Penn State’s commonwealth enrollment and 67% of faculty and staff, Bendapudi said.

Dive Insight:

Bendapudi attributed the decision to cut the university’s commonwealth footprint to changing demographics, noting that populations of many of the commonwealth campuses’ home counties are expected to decline over the next three decades. 

Kevin Eyer:

Here’s the problem: By the time that the Navy, writ large, understands all the errors and failures that contributed to this particular chain of events, a standard strategy may well have been enacted, i.e., “Nothing to see here, folks.  Move along.”  You see, the Navy doesn’t like to discuss “family business” with taxpayers, who may ask awkward, and potentially embarrassing, questions. It is much easier to pin the tail on one specific, commanding officer donkey.

During the first decade of this century, the commanding officer a ship was referred to, by the staff of Commander Naval Surface Forces, as “the sacrificial captain,” and for good reason.  Holding one person up to the public, as the single point of failure in any specific disaster, forestalls further, probing questions that often don’t have easy answers.

In the end, this may mean that larger systemic issues remain unresolved. Rather, blame is often placed at the door of the ship in question, and everyone else who might have been, in one way or another, complicit, simply moves out of the blast pattern until it’s safe to go back to exactly what they were doing before. 

Kimberly Wethal:

The NIH’s order attempted to drop the reimbursement rate for all colleges to 15%, a move that would cost UW-Madison about $65 million a year for costs such as maintaining facilities and paying support staff.

UW-Madison has also received some stop-work orders from the federal government but has not elaborated on what work was affected.

Background summary via grok 3:

Summarizing the past 20 years of graduate school admissions history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison) involves piecing together available data and trends, though comprehensive year-by-year historical admissions data for the full period is not entirely detailed in a single accessible source. Based on the information available from the UW–Madison Graduate School’s official resources and related data points, here’s an overview:

Over the past two decades (roughly 2005–2025), UW–Madison’s Graduate School has maintained a reputation as a top-tier research institution, influencing its admissions landscape. The Graduate School oversees admissions for over 148 master’s and 120 doctoral programs across 13 schools and colleges, with specific requirements varying by program but adhering to a minimum undergraduate GPA of 3.0 (on a 4.0 scale) for the last 60 semester hours or equivalent. Admissions are a shared process between individual academic programs and the Graduate School, ensuring a selective yet decentralized approach.

Data from the Graduate School’s official site indicates that in recent years, such as Fall 2023, the admission rate was approximately 32%, with a yield rate (enrollment rate of accepted students) of 42%. While this is a snapshot, it suggests a competitive yet accessible process, likely consistent with trends over the past 20 years given UW–Madison’s stable reputation as an R1 research university and Public Ivy. Enrollment figures show growth in graduate student numbers, with around 14,300 graduate and professional students enrolled in 2024, up from 9,430 in 2012–2013, reflecting an increasing demand for advanced degrees.

Historical trends over the 20-year span likely include increased selectivity due to rising application numbers, driven by UW–Madison’s growing research prominence—ranking sixth in U.S. research expenditures by 2023—and its appeal to both domestic and international students. The introduction of data transparency initiatives, such as the Graduate School Data dashboards launched around 2018, provides insight into admissions selectivity, yield rates, and demographics for the past five academic years, suggesting a focus on accessibility and diversity in recent times. For instance, international applicants must demonstrate English proficiency, a consistent requirement likely tightened over time with standardized tests like TOEFL or IELTS, though exceptions exist for those educated in English-speaking institutions.

Funding has been a significant factor, with 91% of PhD students receiving full funding (e.g., assistantships, fellowships) in Fall 2023, a trend likely sustained or improved over the decades to attract top talent. The median time to degree (5.8 years for PhDs, 1.8 years for master’s in 2023–2024) suggests a focus on rigorous, research-intensive programs, a hallmark of UW–Madison’s graduate education historically.

While specific annual admission statistics for the full 20-year period are not publicly aggregated in one place, platforms like TheGradCafe.com (covering 2006–2025) indicate that applicants have consistently shared outcomes, pointing to a competitive process with variability by program. Broader contextual shifts, such as technological advancements in application processes (e.g., online applications becoming standard) and global events like the COVID-19 pandemic, likely influenced application volumes and admissions policies around 2020–2021, though exact impacts are not detailed here.

In summary, over the past 20 years, UW–Madison’s graduate admissions have likely evolved from a selective, research-driven process to an even more competitive yet inclusive system, reflecting growth in applicant pools, program offerings, and institutional prestige, underpinned by strong funding support and a commitment to diversity and transparency.

Sources:

• Graduate School | UW–Madison – Graduate School Data (grad.wisc.edu): Provides recent admissions rates (e.g., 32% for Fall 2023), enrollment stats, funding details, and transparency initiatives.
• Graduate Admissions & Enrollment Data – Graduate School | UW–Madison (grad.wisc.edu): Offers insights into selectivity and yield for recent years.
• University of Wisconsin–Madison – Wikipedia: Enrollment trends (e.g., 14,300 graduate students in 2024) and historical context.
• TheGradCafe.com: Community-reported admission results from 2006–2025, indicating competitiveness over time.

Note: Exact year-by-year data for the full 20 years isn’t fully available in these sources, so some inferences are based on trends and recent statistics. For a complete historical dataset, direct access to UW–Madison’s internal records would be required.

Ann Althouse summary:

And isn’t it rich — isn’t it ironic — to hear Trump antagonists rail about concealment and lack of clear lines of responsibility when they did not seem to care much about the radical opacity of the “Biden” administration? We’re supposed to worry now about the “multiplication of the executive” when you didn’t worry about the absence of any true executive and nothing but a multiplicity of executive substitutes?

Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri

• We use population migration data from IRS to describe the age and income compositions of taxpayers and their dependents moving in and out of Wisconsin in each year between 2012 and 2022.
• Wisconsin lost about 8000 individuals (taxpayers and their dependents) and over $400 million of income to other states in each year between 2012 and 2016.
• The net inflows of individuals were around zero in each year between 2017 and 2022, while the net inflows of income remained negative, because average income was higher among outflows than inflows.
• Different from 2012, when Wisconsin lost taxpayers of all ages and all income levels to other states, Wisconsin gained some middle-aged and older taxpayers as well as taxpayers with relatively high income (e.g., $100,000-$200,000) in 2022.

Read Full Report

Ji-Ha:

A beginner-friendly introduction to stochastic calculus, focusing on intuition and calculus-based derivations instead of heavy probability theory formalism.

Sempé – Le bus 66 pic.twitter.com/MadsQErpao

— Hervé Labatut (@GeorgesBerger) February 28, 2025

Andrew Wolf

Gone are the days when reading a book was the preferred means to knowledge, replaced by the rapid consumption of digital media and the allure of screen-based entertainment. This phenomenon is growing in America, and it is pronounced among our youth.

One consequence is that we appear to be reading less these days, and while our attention span does not (yet) rival that of the much-maligned goldfish (eight seconds), it is getting discernibly shorter.

First, is this thinking true? And, second, do our technological gadgets predispose us to this phenomenon? Are we sacrificing something important, turning from books to bots? The truth is in the numbers.

Heritage

From 1950 to today, there’s been a 100% increase in the number of students in public schools, a 243% increase in the number of teachers, and a 709% increase in the number of non-teaching staff, which are largely administrative positions. Only 47.5% of people in the public school system are actually teachers.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Stephen Gandel and Joshua Franklin:

Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues.

The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April and has not been previously reported, was missed by both a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was approved to be processed at the start of business the following day.

A third employee detected a problem with the bank’s account balances, catching the payment 90 minutes after it was posted. The payment was reversed several hours later, according to an internal account of the event seen by the Financial Times and two people familiar with the event.

Benni Edwards:

On Thursday, Inception Labs released Mercury Coder, a new AI language model that uses diffusion techniques to generate text faster than conventional models. Unlike traditional models that create text word by word—such as the kind that powers ChatGPT—diffusion-based models like Mercury produce entire responses simultaneously, refining them from an initially masked state into coherent text.

Traditional large language models build text from left to right, one token at a time. They use a technique called “autoregression.” Each word must wait for all previous words before appearing. Inspired by techniques from image-generation models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, text diffusion language models like LLaDA (developed by researchers from Renmin University and Ant Group) and Mercury use a masking-based approach. These models begin with fully obscured content and gradually “denoise” the output, revealing all parts of the response at once.

While image diffusion models add continuous noise to pixel values, text diffusion models can’t apply continuous noise to discrete tokens (chunks of text data). Instead, they replace tokens with special mask tokens as the text equivalent of noise. In LLaDA, the masking probability controls the noise level, with high masking representing high noise and low masking representing low noise. The diffusion process moves from high noise to low noise. Though LLaDA describes this using masking terminology and Mercury uses noise terminology, both apply a similar concept to text generation rooted in diffusion.

Andrea Guzmán:

The building’s location is listed as 48804 TX 4 in Brownsville—not far from SpaceX’s Starship launch facilities—and has an estimated construction cost of $20 million for phase 1 of the project. The building, which is listed as 34,365 square feet, has a proposed mid-April date to start construction. The expected completion is January 2026. 

Ad Astra bills itself as a “project-based learning” environment that emphasizes science, technology, engineering and mathematics in its curriculum. An existing location in Bastrop has a permit to teach 21 students and welcomes children ages 3 to 9. Tuition there is subsidized for the 2024–25 school year, but the website notes that tuition will be in line with local private schools that include an extended day program in future years. 

In South Texas, meanwhile, SpaceX previously ran an Ad Astra school, KUT reported. The school’s nonprofit paperwork says it opened in Brownsville in 2021 then ceased operations in June 2023. Before then, Musk and his Ad Astra co-founder Josh Dahn operated the school at SpaceX’s facilities in Hawthorne, California. Dahn runs an online school called Astra Nova. 

more.

AJ Bayatpour

Just in: The Milwaukee Health Department is shutting down Trowbridge Elementary, starting March 3, citing “unsafe lead dust levels.”

John Sailer:

David Turner is a fellow and Assistant Professor of Black Life and Racial Justice at UCLA’s school of public affairs. In his spare time, Turner does community activism, having co-founded the “Police-Free LAUSD Coalition,” a group that calls for wholesale police abolition. Activism also shows up in his scholarship. In an article for Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, for example, Turner praises Black Lives Matter student activists for the way they reject capitalism and adopt a “Black queer feminist lens.”

Turner’s career trajectory is typical of professors who get their jobs via a fellow-to-faculty program—his came from the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). As I’ve written, the program serves as a side-door into faculty positions. Rather than recruiting professors through competitive searches, fellow-to-faculty programs select postdoctoral fellows who demonstrate a commitment to diversity. They then advance them into tenure-track positions, allowing administrators to push their hiring priorities unburdened by a normal competitive process.

The PPFP’s criteria raise serious questions about academic freedom, and the vast constellation of similarly oriented programs on other campuses implies extensive ideological capture. Some in academia are now ringing the alarm.

Austin Berg:

BREAKING: Chicago City Council votes 26-23 to pass Mayor Brandon Johnson’s $830M borrowing plan. The plan makes no payments on the debt in the first two years and no payments on the principal for 18 years after that. This backloaded payment schedule means the total cost of Johnson’s deal is $2B. Paid mostly by future generations of Chicagoans.

Ann Althouse summary:

Who’s in the worst position to write a book about the coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline?

Tapper then: It’s a conspiracy theory to say Biden has cognitive decline. It’s a stutter.

Tapper now: A book on the cover up pic.twitter.com/UjnQXgkzFF

Kevin Sliman:

A Penn State engineering student refined a century-old math problem into a simpler, more elegant form, making it easier to use and explore. Divya Tyagi’s work expands research in aerodynamics, unlocking new possibilities in wind turbine design that Hermann Glauert, a British aerodynamicist and the original author, did not consider.   

Tyagi, a graduate student pursuing her master’s degree in aerospace engineering, completed this work as a Penn State undergraduate for her Schreyer Honors College thesis. Her research was published in Wind Energy Science.

“I created an addendum to Glauert’s problem which determines the optimal aerodynamic performance of a wind turbine by solving for the ideal flow conditions for a turbine in order to maximize its power output,” said Tyagi, who earned her bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering. 

Her adviser, Sven Schmitz, the Boeing/A.D. Welliver Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and co-author on the paper, said Glauert’s original work focused exclusively on the maximum attainable power coefficient, which measures how efficiently a turbine converts wind energy into electricity. However, Glauert did not account for the total force and moment coefficients acting on the rotor — the spinning unit with attached blades — or how turbine blades bend under wind pressure.   

WTMJ4

The city will be fined $1,000 every day until it complies with the order.

A judge on Thursday held the City of Milwaukee in contempt of court for its failure to provide student resource officers (SROs) in Milwaukee Public Schools.

Judge David Borowski said the city will be fined $1,000 each day the City does not provide SROs beginning Feb. 27.

The Judge placed a stay on the sanction until March 15. That means, if the city does not show adequate proof of progress regarding the matter by March 15, they will be forced to pay nearly $17,000 dollars in fines.

By Becky Jacobs

More than 20 years ago, Blue Cross and Blue Shield United of Wisconsin gifted more than $300 million to each of Wisconsin’s medical schools to improve public health. In the years since, however, Wisconsin has fallen in national health rankings, and the state continues to struggle with racial disparities in low birth weights, excessive drinking, obesity and other issues. 

Wisconsin ranks among the bottom half of states for health outcomes for women and children, according to the latest analysis by the United Health Foundation. Last month, the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reported Wisconsin was one of two places where the gap in life expectancies among Black and white people had widened in recent decades. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also found Wisconsin children lag behind kids in other states for getting vaccines. 

Jesse Ehrenfeld, who oversees the public health endowment created at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa, said the dream outlined 20 years ago remains his team’s aspirational goal. 

“We have a lot of work to do to get there, and it’s not entirely clear what metric you would use to define being the healthiest state in the nation. But I think we would all agree that we’re probably not there today,” Ehrenfeld said. 

Robert Golden, the outgoing dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health, offered a similar assessment for the state. 

“We are not doing well in terms of public health,” he said. 

Glenn Greenwald:

Gross! The ordinary people and the unlicensed peasants are able to speak with and even influence elites in DC who are running the government. The NYT is horrified.

Wall Street Journal:

The progressive campaign to turn Colorado into the California of the Mountain West took a leap forward last week as Democrats in the Rocky Mountain State advanced a bill to repeal their right-to-work-lite law.

During the early 20th century, Colorado was fraught with labor militancy. To cool tensions, lawmakers in 1943 enacted the Labor Peace Act, which requires 75% of workers at a work site to approve so-called “security agreements” that compel them to pay union dues to support collective bargaining.

Congress soon afterwards passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which blessed state right-to-work laws that bar workers from being required to join unions or pay dues. Colorado’s Labor Peace Act shares the same goal as right-to-work laws—that is, preventing workers from being forced to finance unions they don’t support.

The law is one reason Colorado’s labor environment more resembles that of the 26 right-to-work states and is more attractive to employers than leftwing union bastions. About 7.7% of Colorado workers belong to a union, which is about half as much as in California (14.5%) and only slightly more than in Iowa (6.4%), Alabama (6.6%) and Nebraska (6.8%).

Unions have long sought to repeal Colorado’s law, and they nearly succeeded in 2007 until a courageous veto by then Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter. In his veto message, Mr. Ritter noted that the law threatened to damage the state’s “ability to attract new business to Colorado” and “to create new economic opportunity for all.”