Rory Linnane:

While a referendum approved by voters last year helped the district close budget gaps and extend cost-of-living raises to staff, MPS still made cuts, citing inflation and the end of federal pandemic relief funds.

Staff have said these cuts, including the loss of over 100 teacher coaches, left a harder workload for those remaining. Teachers have struggled with large case loads and class sizes. About one in five first-grade classrooms at MPS has more than 28 students, the maximum allowed under a school board resolution, a Journal Sentinel analysis of MPS data found.

more

Thomas Catenacci

The Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration awarded Power Forward Communities the grant in April 2024 as part of the agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program. Power Forward Communities received the green energy grant despite the fact that it was founded months earlier in late 2023 and never managed anywhere near the grant’s dollar figure—it reported just $100 in total revenue during its first three months in operation, according to its latest tax filings.

Power Forward Communities’ grant was one of just eight Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants that the EPA doled out in April 2024 and that, altogether, totaled $20 billion. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Feb. 13 that his staff and Department of Government Efficiency officials discovered that the Biden administration parked that same $20 billion at an outside financial institution before leaving office, limiting the federal government’s oversight of the program.

The revelation that Power Forward Communities is among the beneficiaries of the funds Zeldin’s team located raises ethics questions about how the Biden administration selected recipients of such massive grants and whether it played favorites when doling those grants out. Abrams was a vocal proponent of the Biden administration’s green energy agenda and campaigned for former vice president Kamala Harr

Abbey Machtig:

“I do think that there is a fundamental misalignment in terms of how the school would fit into our more broad district plans and misunderstanding of services that we already provide,” board member Savion Castro said Wednesday.

It’s a familiar approach, given the district has fought other proposed charter schools in the past. 

Documents show district officials in 2019 attempted to derail the proposed Arbor Community School, which hoped to get a charter agreement with the UW system, which ultimately rejected the application.

In 2011, the Madison School Board rejected the proposal for what is now One City Schools. The board rejected a charter proposal in 2017 for what became the Isthmus Montessori Academy.

The Forward Career and College Academy application failed to meet expectations in 11 of the 14 areas evaluated by the district, such as facility and safety planning, budgeting, transportation, staffing and student enrollment plans, according to a feedback memo from McCray, which McKenzie shared with the Wisconsin State Journal. 

McKenzie’s window to make changes based on the district’s feedback is limited: McCray sent the detailed memo on Feb. 5 — nearly two months after the school’s final application was submitted to the district.

——-

2011: “You meet every need of the unions, but keep minority student achievement a low priority,” said one parent. Others suggested the same.

more on the aborted madison preparatory academy IB charter school

Meanwhile:

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?

Thomas Farnan

When the peace was finally won in 1991, the minor functionaries started hatching new villains, disputes, and even viruses just so they could fight them. Washington turned into a Cold War LARP.

The result: 

Ukraine is destroyed. The Taliban is governing Afghanistan and ISIS has taken Syria. The pipeline that supplies Germany’s energy supply has been blown up, tanking its economy. And you know what happened last time the West’s guardian of democracy project tanked the German economy. Just sayin’.

Ancient Christianity has been expelled from every place in the Middle East where American soft power has meddled. They have set their sights on destroying Catholic-Lebanon (by law, the president of Lebanon must be Catholic – did you know that?) in a proxy war with Iran.

Most wildly, perhaps, American bureaucrats are responsible for the greatest pandemic since the Spanish Flu. They will deny it, and say it came from a rando bat. But the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that the virus emanated from gain of function research on Coronaviruses the American bureaucracy was funding at that very moment in the very lab in the very town where COVID originated.

——

Solzhenitsyn would eventually encounter reactions to his Harvard speech from ordinary Americans along the lines of “we know in our hearts he is right.” This led him to distinguish between what he called “the arrogant stance of the America of New York and Washington” and what he observed elsewhere:

Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small-town and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing my speech, and to which my speech was addressed.

Chad Aldeman:

Public schools added 121,000 employees last year, even as they served 110,000 fewer students.

This is a continuation of recent trends. In per-student terms, public schools have hit new all-time staffing highs in each of the last three years.

The 74’s art and technology director, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, and I have been following these trends and mapping out how they’re changing across the country. We’ve now updated our charts through the 2023-24 school year. Click on the map below to see what’s happening in your community. 

WILL:

As Wisconsin’s courts consider the future of Act 10, WILL has conducted extensive analysis to assess how getting rid of the law could impactschool districts and property taxpayers like you. 

Notes and links on Act 10.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Michelle:

😳If Act 10 were to go away our family would see an $1,100 increase in property taxes on top of the 400 year increase Evers has placed on us.

Kate Martin,  Carmela Guaglianone and Emily Hanford

Education journalist Karin Chenoweth visited one of Steubenville’s elementary schools back in 2008 and marveled at the results, which she wrote about in her book “How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools.”

“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” Chenoweth said in an interview. “They had a kid they were so proud of who had been measured with a very low IQ, and he was reading.”

What stood out to Chenoweth was not just the school’s success, but that it was happening in a place like Steubenville.

Once a bustling steel town, economic forces have left the city in decline.

Thousands of steelworkers in the Steubenville area had lost their jobs by the 1990s, and thousands more have since then. Weirton Steel, located across the Ohio River in West Virginia, which once employed 8,000 workers, closed just last year. These days, the median household income in the city is less than $42,000 per year. Nearly 80% of Steubenville students receive free or reduced lunches, and the state of Ohio considers almost every one of Steubenville’s students to be “economically disadvantaged.”

——-

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?

Wispolitics:

AB 1 would reverse changes to state testing standards made under Superintendent Jill Underly. Opponents have argued Underly lowered the standards, making it harder to gauge how students are doing. Up for reelection, she has rejected those claims. She says the changes actually provide a better picture of student achievement and were made through a transparent process with input from educators. 

Rep. Joy Goeben, R-Hobart, said Underly’s primary victory yesterday “wasn’t a huge surprise,” charging her with “making false claims on the backs of students.”

The 2025 ab1 vote on lying to parents:

——-

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?

Matthew Yglesias

The basic story is that during the aughts, we had a bipartisan education reform consensus that was focused on improving school quality as an attainable and important driver of social and economic progress. This consensus wasn’t perfect — its problems included overpromising on addressing achievement gaps and overreliance on fiddling with teacher pay as One Weird Trick for fixing schools. The consensus also annoyed a lot of people, often for reasons that were not related to these flaws. But test scores were largely going up. The campaign to close achievement gaps failed not because low-income kids and racial minorities didn’t do better, but because everyonewas doing better, so gaps persisted. 

But with ESSA, Congress stopped trying to set federal requirements that schools get better1, because the political energy around improving schools was evaporating. The left retreated into coalition solidarity with teachers unions, and the right refocused on vouchers and privatization. And it turns out that giving up and not trying doesn’t work very well.

Joe Dodson:

In many states, lawyers are not guaranteed for every child during police interrogation, and most states allow children to waive their right to legal counsel. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, in a study of 268 cases, 34% of minors reported giving a false confession. In a study of nine cases concerning minors under the age of 14, seven reported giving a false confession. In contrast, of the 2,886 adult cases analyzed, only 8% reported giving a false confession. 

Abbey Machtig:

“If we have our own standards aligned to nobody else’s, guess what: We can fool ourselves into thinking that we are great, because we have no ability to compare ourselves to anybody else,” he said.

The bill would require DPI to align scoring methods for the language arts and math sections of the Forward Exam to the systems used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test administered to representative samples of students in districts across the country. DPI would also have to use the same scoring ranges in the ACT and PreACT sections it used in the 2021-22 school year.

For ACT tests, DPI would also be required to use the terms “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” and “advanced” to describe student performance. DPI has recently started to describe student performance levels as “advanced,” “meeting,” “approaching” and “developing.”

The bill would also require DPI get legislative approval any time it wants to change reporting standards.

——-

Will Flanders:

Voting against AB1 is essentially telling parents “we’re okay with DPI lying to parents about how kids are doing.” This ought to be a bipartisan effort to put standards back where Evers had them as State Supt. Why wasn’t it? 🤔

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?

Adam Steinbaugh:

Wow: The City of Clarksdale, Mississippi, got a court order yesterday directing a newspaper to delete an editorial criticizing city officials — without a hearing. Here’s the TRO issuing the prior restraint:

WisPolitics:

Village of Pewaukee held in contempt of court, ordered to return money to taxpayers

“ai” summary:

The Waukesha County Circuit Court found the Village of Pewaukee in contempt for continuing to impose an illegal “transportation user fee” after the Wisconsin Court of Appeals struck it down. The court ordered the village to reimburse taxpayers for the illegally collected revenue.

Christopher Rufo:

The Department of Education’s “comprehensive center” in Wisconsin/Minnesota instructed local districts to “decenter whiteness in education” and to “dismantle practices that reinforce whiteness”—in the name of George Floyd.

This is all propaganda funded by the federal government.

more.

and

The Economist:

France has not allowed smartphone use in primary or secondary schools since 2018, claiming that it would help children focus, reduce their social media use and mitigate online bullying. The Netherlands initiated a similar ban in January 2024. Hungary followed suit later that year. Legislators in Britain are considering similar measures. The key question facing them is whether banning smartphones in schools offers any benefits to mental health.
That there is a problem seems clear. In 2021 America’s surgeon general compiled a report revealing that persistent feelings of hopelessness climbed by 40% among American high-school students between 2009 and 2019. The number who seriously considered killing themselves went up by 36%. What makes these findings all the worse is that 48% of mental-health problems (like depression and anxiety) that emerge during adolescence will plague people for the rest of their lives.

Andy Pierotti:

– A pending lawsuit claims a publishing giant sold defective instructional material to school districts for decades, allegedly hurting children’s ability to read.

An Atlanta News First investigation uncovered the same publisher sold its curriculum in metro Atlanta, including Gwinnett County, the state’s largest school district.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two Massachusetts parents whose children were taught using its products. It accuses Heinemann Publishing of selling reading materials that intentionally limited the amount of phonics instruction students received.

“Defendants failed to warn parents or school districts that their alleged literacy training products did not include meaningful phonics instruction, the one thing essential to literacy success,” said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Justice Catalyst, a New York City law firm that focuses on social, economic and racial justice litigation, filed the complaint on the parents’ behalf.

——

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?

Josh Blackman:

Federal prosecutors may as well be transactional lawyers. Usually, the deals take a similar form: plead guilty, waive appeal rights, and the government will recommend a reduced sentence, or perhaps no sentence at all. And the parameters of plea bargains are approved at high levels of leadership. For example, the Obama and Biden Administration offered far more lenient plea deals for drug offenses, while the Trump Administration offered more severe plea deals for drug offenses. Those are DOJ policies, based on some assessment of the harmfulness of the offenses.  

In many cases, a plea deal is conditioned on a defendant doing more than pleading guilty. The United States can condition a plea deal on a defendant testifying against a co-defendant. DOJ can condition a plea deal on a defendant providing information to some government entity, in open court, before a grand jury, or in some other confidential form. The federal government can often grant individuals immunity if they go “undercover” as a confidential informant to obtain information about other crimes. Such covert work can place the defendant at risk of death, but the government deems that sacrifice justified in exchange for dropping the prosecution. Moreover, if a defendant refuses to cooperate, the government routinely threatens to bring additional charges, and seek more jail time. In all of these cases, the government uses the carrot of dismissal or the stick of further indictment to promote the ends that the prosecutor’s office deems appropriate. When a U.S. Attorney approves a deal in exchange for cooperation, the government is using a carrot to promote its policy objectives.

Oliver Wiseman:

Brokenism explains why, for those of us in the news business, every day feels like a week at the moment. Part of this is down to Trump’s own mode of operation: the off-the-cuff remarks, the late-night posts on Truth Social, the almost daily press conferences, the “flood the zone” approach. But the frenetic energy in Washington stems from the fact the brokenists aren’t outsiders any more. They’re in charge.

“Every day feels like a roller coaster,” explained Newhouse, “because now the people who want others to focus on what’s broken are in power, which means we all have to focus on what’s broken every day. We all have to wake up and see some new evidence of some new thing that is broken beyond what any of us could have imagined.

“There was no lever to pull in the last election for ‘change, but make it responsible and well-paced,’ ” added Newhouse. “The choice was between a slow canoe ride through more of the same, or a roller coaster. Americans chose the roller coaster.”

Under Joe Biden, Washington was run by people eager to cover up or minimize problems—including the president’s own mental decline. The new administration sees its job as being to expose those issues for all to see. Whether or not it will fix them is another story.

AJ Bayatpour

NEWS: Milwaukee Co. Judge David Borowski orders MPS and city of Milwaukee to evenly split the cost of installing 25 SROs, which MPS was supposed to 13 months ago under state law.

Max Tani:

The paper encouraged editorial staff to use these AI tools to generate SEO headlines, summaries, and audience promos; suggest edits; brainstorm questions and ideas and ask questions about reporters’ own documents; engage in research; and analyze the Times’ own documents and images. In a training video shared with staff, the Times suggested using AI to come up with questions to ask the CEO of a startup during an interview. Times guidelines also said it could use AI to develop news quizzes, social copy, quote cards, and FAQs.

grok 3

You’re right to push for thoroughness—my previous response might not have captured every possible city visited by Brittany Kinser, Jill Underly, and Jeff Wright in their 2025 Wisconsin DPI campaigns based on all available X posts and media links up to February 18, 2025. The challenge is that campaign travel isn’t always exhaustively documented in real-time on X or in media, especially for smaller stops, and some posts or articles might imply visits without naming exact locations. I’ll dig deeper, leveraging my tools to analyze X posts, linked content, and media references, aiming for a more complete list. Since it’s the primary election day, I’ll focus on 2025 activities reported up to now, critically examining the data for accuracy and avoiding assumptions beyond what’s explicitly stated or strongly implied.

Revised Methodology

• X Posts: I’ll scour posts from candidates’ accounts (@KinserforWI, @JillUnderlyWI, @JeffWrightWI—if active), campaign allies, media (e.g., @WisPolitics, @CBS58), and supporters, looking for geotags, event mentions, or photos indicating 2025 visits. I’ll also check replies or retweets for additional clues.
• Media Links: I’ll cross-reference X-linked articles and standalone media (e.g., WisPolitics, WPR, CBS 58) for specific city mentions tied to campaign events, interviews, or appearances in 2025.
• Critical Lens: I’ll flag where data might be incomplete (e.g., rural stops not tweeted) or where establishment media might focus on urban hubs, potentially missing outliers.

Brittany Kinser

Kinser’s campaign emphasizes school choice and has GOP backing, suggesting outreach to conservative and urban areas. Her X activity and media provide more granularity than initially captured.

• Madison: Confirmed via X posts and media (e.g., WisPolitics forum, February 6, 2025, Web ID: 0). @KinserforWI likely tweeted about this event.
• Milwaukee: CBS 58 interview in January 2025 (Web ID: 13) and her Milwaukee roots (Rocketship Schools, City Forward Collective) imply multiple visits. X posts from @CBS58 or @KinserforWI might tag Milwaukee explicitly.
• Wauwatosa: Her home base; signature collection (3,500+ by December 2024, Web ID: 9) and campaign launch likely involved events here. No specific 2025 X post confirms, but media ties her to this area.
• La Crosse: @KinserforWI posted on February 16, 2025, about a stop in La Crosse County (Post ID: 0), implying a visit to the city of La Crosse, a key regional hub.
• Jackson: Same X post mentions Jackson County, likely the village of Jackson, though it’s small and could be a pass-through or nearby event (e.g., Black River Falls).
• St. Croix County: Also from the February 16 post, possibly Hudson or New Richmond, though not specified. St. Croix County is GOP-leaning, aligning with her support base.
• Waukesha: Implied by GOP event appearances (Web ID: 11 notes county GOP ties). No 2025-specific X post, but her Uihlein donor connection (Waukesha-based) and conservative outreach suggest a visit.

Gaps: Kinser’s February 16 X post shows late-campaign momentum in western Wisconsin, but earlier stops might be underreported. Her “across Wisconsin” claim hints at more cities (e.g., Racine, Kenosha), but no explicit X or media evidence confirms them by today.

Jill Underly

Underly, the incumbent, balances DPI duties with campaigning, often in Democratic strongholds. Her absence from some events limits X visibility, but media fills gaps.

• Madison: DPI base and campaign hub. X posts from @JillUnderlyWI likely mention her presence (e.g., Regents meeting, February 6, Web ID: 15; WMTV interviews, February 4-5, Web ID: 17). Multiple 2025 visits confirmed.
• Milwaukee: CBS 58 interview on February 5, 2025 (Web ID: 2), suggests a visit. @CBS58 or Democratic Party X posts might tag it.
• Hollandale: A 2024 campaign photo (Web ID: 14) isn’t 2025-specific, but her southwest Wisconsin ties (ex-Pecatonica superintendent) and rural focus imply possible 2025 stops. No X post confirms yet.

Gaps: Underly’s X activity might prioritize policy over travel logs. Media focuses on Madison/Milwaukee, but her $4 billion budget push (Web ID: 10) suggests rural outreach (e.g., Eau Claire, Green Bay), though unverified by February 18.

Jeff Wright

Wright, from Sauk Prairie, targets rural educators and bipartisan voters. His campaign is less X-heavy, but media and educator networks provide clues.

• Madison: WisPolitics forum (February 6, Web ID: 0) and WMTV interviews (February 4-5, Web ID: 17) confirm visits. @JeffWrightWI or @WisPolitics posts likely mention this.
• Sauk Prairie: Campaign launch (October 2024, Web ID: 9) and ongoing base (Prairie du Sac/Sauk City). X posts from @JeffWrightWI might tag local events in 2025.
• Milwaukee: CBS 58 interview in January 2025 (Web ID: 13) indicates a visit. @CBS58 posts could confirm.
• Stevens Point: His hometown (Web ID: 7); no 2025 campaign stop explicitly noted, but his rural focus and educator ties (Web ID: 16) suggest a likely visit. No X post confirms by today.

Gaps: Wright’s “across the entire state” claim (Web ID: 17) and educator meetings (Web ID: 19) imply stops like Baraboo or Wisconsin Rapids, but X and media lack specifics.

Updated List (as of February 18, 2025)

• Brittany Kinser: Madison, Milwaukee, Wauwatosa, La Crosse, Jackson, St. Croix County (e.g., Hudson), Waukesha
• Jill Underly: Madison, Milwaukee, Hollandale (tentative)
• Jeff Wright: Madison, Sauk Prairie, Milwaukee, Stevens Point (tentative)

Critical Reflection

• X Coverage: Kinser’s February 16 post (Post ID: 0) adds three new locations, showing X’s value for real-time updates. Underly and Wright’s quieter X presence limits detection, possibly skewing toward Kinser’s visibility.
• Media Bias: Outlets like CBS 58 and WisPolitics focus on urban centers (Madison, Milwaukee), potentially underrepresenting rural stops. Wright’s rural pitch and Underly’s budget advocacy suggest broader travel, but documentation lags.
• Missing Data: Small towns or unpublicized school visits (e.g., Kinser in charter hubs, Wright with rural principals) might not hit X or media. The list is accurate to what’s reported, not necessarily exhaustive.

I’ve pushed the limits of available X posts and media links up to 4:11 AM PST today. If you’ve got specific posts or links I’ve overlooked, toss them my way—I’ll refine further! Otherwise, this is the most complete picture I can paint with the data at hand.

Andrew Karpathy

Summary. As far as a quick vibe check over ~2 hours this morning, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI’s strongest models (o1-pro, $200/month), and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch ~1 year ago, this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented. Do also keep in mind the caveats – the models are stochastic and may give slightly different answers each time, and it is very early, so we’ll have to wait for a lot more evaluations over a period of the next few days/weeks. The early LM arena results look quite encouraging indeed. For now, big congrats to the xAI team, they clearly have huge velocity and momentum and I am excited to add Grok 3 to my “LLM council” and hear what it thinks going forward.

Corrinne Hess:

During a recent Assembly committee hearing, Kitchens addressed Act 20 funding.

“We negotiated this deal for months and months, and then he [Evers] went back on his word, saying that DPI should get the money and spend it how they want without any oversight,” Kitchens said. “It’s very unfortunate that the funding for Act 20 has not been released, but it certainly is not our fault.”

——

notes and links on Act 20.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

more

Jim Bender & Patrick Mchileran:

More than a bureaucrat, the superintendent is defined in Wisconsin’s constitution. Wisconsin is the only state in the country that elects its superintendent but has no state board of education. This results in a constitutional officer who reports to nobody except the voters every four years.

The superintendent heads the Department of Public Instruction, the state’s regulator of schools from kindergarten through high school. While the Legislature sets education policy through state statute, the DPI has the power to write and change the state administrative rules and policies that add many of the granular details of how state statutes affect schools.

The DPI has a communications division, a team of attorneys and a liaison to lawmakers. It controls teachers’ licenses, it distributes grants, it controls the metrics used in the statewide report card, it approves contracts for tests, and it is in charge of school breakfast and lunch programs.

Atop that, state laws grant specific powers to the superintendent. She or he has the power to set administrative rules on alternate ways for teachers to gain a license, and on licenses for charter teachers and principals. The superintendent oversees teacher preparatory programs, distributes federal aid and creates state curriculum standards.

——-

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?

The Questionable Gardner:

Here is part 2 of Save the Children but waste the money. This is a thread 🧵- for the full take open and read down

Yesterday we looked at $234 million spent on operations. Today where the remaining $676 million went – 🤔

Bruce Schneier:

”Life experience makes it fairly easy for each of us to guess when and where humans will make mistakes. Human errors tend to come at the edges of someone’s knowledge: Most of us would make mistakes solving calculus problems. We expect human mistakes to be clustered: A single calculus mistake is likely to be accompanied by others. We expect mistakes to wax and wane, predictably depending on factors such as fatigue and distraction. And mistakes are often accompanied by ignorance: Someone who makes calculus mistakes is also likely to respond “I don’t know” to calculus-related questions.

To the extent that AI systems make these human-like mistakes, we can bring all of our mistake-correcting systems to bear on their output. But the current crop of AI models—particularly LLMs—make mistakes differently.

AI errors come at seemingly random times, without any clustering around particular topics. LLM mistakes tend to be more evenly distributed through the knowledge space. A model might be equally likely to make a mistake on a calculus question as it is to propose that cabbages eat goats.

And AI mistakes aren’t accompanied by ignorance. A LLM will be just as confident when saying something completely wrong—and obviously so, to a human—as it will be when saying something true. The seemingly random inconsistency of LLMs makes it hard to trust their reasoning in complex, multi-step problems. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it’s not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won’t forget what money is.

Anna Hansen:

O’Keefe Middle School’s Benjamin Tekin, 12, started his day in Edgewood College’s Anderson Auditorium as one of 38 competitors at the All-City Spelling Bee, sponsored since 1949 by the Wisconsin State Journal, with help from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. (Three of the initial 41 entrants didn’t make it to the bee.)

After almost three hours of figurative alphabet soup, carefully ladled by spelling bee director Jane McMahon, Tekin rose to victory in a vocabulary round, selecting the correct definitions for “trousers” and “ocelot.” After his win, Tekin affirmed that, despite early-morning anxiety, the competition itself was easy on his nerves.

“I wasn’t really challenged that much today — I knew most of the words,” Tekin said, slipping the No. 10 placard off his neck in exchange for a No. 1 trophy, which he proudly showed the many family members who had come to cheer him on.

David Blaska:

Those are the everyday accounts that don’t make headlines like the case of six high school students who beat and robbed another student at Madison East high school 02-04-25. The victim was hospitalized for his injuries

——

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?

Bruce Sacerdote,  Douglas O. Staiger  & Michele Tine

We find that test score optional policies harm the likelihood of elite college admission for high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. We show that at one elite college campus, SAT (and ACT) scores predict first year college GPA equally well across income and other demographic groups; high school GPA and class rank offer little additional predictive power. Under test score optional policies, less advantaged applicants who are high achieving submit test scores at too low a rate, significantly reducing their admissions chances; such applicants increase their admissions probability by a factor of 3.6x (from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent) when they report their scores. High achieving first-generation applicants raise admissions chances by 2.4x by reporting scores. Much more than commonly understood, elite institutions interpret test scores in the context of background, and availability of test scores on an application can promote rather than hinder social mobility.

more.

David Heinmeier Hansson

The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance’s point, and labeled the speech “not acceptable”. All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest taboos in European politics.

Let’s start with his points on free speech, because they’re the foundation for understanding how Europe got into such a mess on mass immigration. See, Europeans by and large simply do not understand “free speech” as a concept the way Americans do. There is no first amendment-style guarantee in Europe, yet the European mind desperately wants to believe it has the same kind of free speech as the US, despite endless evidence to the contrary.

more.

Frederick M. Hess and Jay P Greene:

The Trump administration has directed the NIH to slash the amount it pays to universities for “overhead” expenses. Previously, for every dollar universities received for research, the NIH gave them an additional 39 cents for overhead — now, it can’t be more than 15 cents. This means that out of the $35 billion NIH provides in grants, the amount devoted to overhead for things such as administration and facilities would be cut from $9 billion to $4.6 billion. If the injunction currently halting the NIH plan is lifted, the total amount of research funding will remain unchanged, but $4.4 billion will shift from administrators to researchers.

Josh Blackman:

In recent years, the Department of Justice has prosecuted public officials in high profile cases. In several of those cases, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions.

In McDonnell v. United States (2016), the Court held that an “official act” must involve a formal exercise of governmental power on something specific pending before a public official. DOJ though it knew what was a proper exercise of government power. The Supreme Court disagreed. Could it be said that the scores of DOJ employees who brought this ill-fated prosecution were “fools”? Do you know who was the Chief of the DOJ Public Integrity Section at the time? Jack Smith. Was it foolish for a prosecutor to indict a former Governor in a case that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

Jack Smith also led the prosecution of John Edwards, the former Senator and Vice Presidential Candidate. Smith relied on a dubious theory of campaign finance law, and the case yielded a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. (When Smith reported that he had enough evidence to convict Trump, I thought back to the Edwards case.) DOJ did not try that theory again. Was it foolish to bring this prosecution of a former public official when the jury wouldn’t even convict?

Fast forward to Kelly v. United States (2020). This prosecution arose from the so-called Bridgegate scandal. The United States indicted members of Governor Chis Christie’s administration. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction. Justice Kagan ruled that the scheme, which did not aim to obtain money or property, could not violate the federal fraud law. Was it foolish to indict a public official in a case that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

In 2023, the Supreme Court decided Ciminelli v. United States and Percoco v. United States. These cases arose over scandal involving funding for a Buffalo Bills stadium project. In both cases, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions. Was it foolish to bring these cases that garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court?

———

Dan O’Donnell:

So did Kaul accept a bribe of two “free” attorneys to help lighten his workload and generate positive headlines by filing and joining climate change lawsuits Michael Bloomberg demanded? Again, it sure looks like it.

Fischer King:

So the election was cancelled based on a false premise.

Diana Kwon:

High living costs and stagnant stipends are being cited as the primary reasons for the decline in PhD enrollments in various countries.

Numbers of people enrolling in PhD programmes have dropped in a handful of countries in the past few years, which policy specialists are calling a worrying trend. From Australia and Japan to Brazil and the United Kingdom, there are concerns that high living costs, low stipends and limited job options after graduation are deterring people from pursuing doctoral degrees.

These declining numbers should “act as a wake-up call” for those countries, says Cláudia Sarrico, a project lead at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. “This is a signal you need to reform working conditions and think about diversifying career options — otherwise, you risk a talent drain that will ultimately slow down scientific progress.”

The most recent figures on this trend, released by Universities Australia and the Australian Council of Graduate Research (ACGR) in January, revealed an 8% reduction in the number of domestic PhD enrolments in Australia from 2018 to 2023, although the population of the country grew by more than 7% over the same period.

Balaji:

You can just do things – high agency
We can just do things – high cooperation
They can also just do things – enemy also gets a move
You can’t do just anything – constraints do exist

US Dept of Education Civil Rights Office

Discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is illegal and morally reprehensible. Accordingly, I write to clarify and reaffirm the nondiscrimination obligations of schools and other entities that receive federal financial assistance from the United States Department of Education (Department).1 This letter explains and reiterates existing legal requirements under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,2 the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution, and other relevant authorities.3

In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families. These institutions’ embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia. For example, colleges, universities, and K-12 schools have routinely used race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming. In a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history, many American schools and universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories and other facilities.

Bill Conway:

Since then, it was revealed that the preliminary plan is for this debt to be issued with zero payments until 2027, followed by interest-only payments through 2045.

Imagine taking out a mortgage on your house, but not making a single payment for the first two years. Then, for the next 18 years, you pay only the interest — never touching the actual loan balance. By the time you start paying off the principal, you’ve racked up so much extra interest that you’re now paying more than double what you borrowed.

That’s exactly what the mayor’s office has proposed. It’ll borrow $830 million today, but between delayed and interest-only payments, taxpayers will ultimately owe more than $2 billion. And conveniently, the real payments don’t start until after the mayor and City Council face reelection.

CBS58:

‘Afraid even to tell the truth’: Lawyer for MPS whistleblowers, lawmakers react to MPS audit

Kaylah Huynh:

“We learned that specific system updates may have inadvertently excluded too much income from taxation.” 

Abbey Machtig:

School district spokesperson Edell Fiedler said the district is assuming the error affected all 6,000 employees, although actual tax liabilities depend on a variety of factors, including withholdings. 

“We have taken immediate steps to prevent this error from happening again,” Fiedler said in an email to the State Journal. “This includes ensuring accurate system updates and a mandatory double-checking process for these updates. We are committed to continuously monitoring and improving these systems to safeguard against similar issues in the future.”

The Deficit:

•What’s a Deficit? A budget deficit occurs when the government spends more money than it earns in revenue. For FY 2024, the deficit was about $1.8 trillion. Imagine if you only made $4.9 trillion (the revenue) but spent $6.5 trillion; you’d be $1.6 trillion in the hole, which is essentially what happened with the federal government.
•Why Does the Deficit Matter? A large deficit means the government needs to borrow money to cover its costs, which increases the national debt.

——

Interest on the Debt:

•Interest Payments: In FY 2024, the U.S. spent approximately $950 billion just on interest for the national debt. This is like paying $30,000 every second in interest alone. It’s the second or third largest line item in the budget, only behind or close to Social Security and defense spending.
•How It Works: Just like how you might pay interest on a loan or credit card, the U.S. government pays interest on the money it has borrowed. With a debt level of roughly $35 trillion at the end of 2024, even small interest rates can lead to enormous payments.

The Debt Spiral:

•Borrowing to Pay Interest: Here’s where it gets trickier. When the government can’t cover its costs, including interest on the existing debt, with current revenue, it borrows more money. This borrowing increases the national debt. Now, with more debt, there’s more interest to pay the next year, which might require even more borrowing if revenues don’t increase or spending doesn’t decrease, leading to what’s called a “debt spiral.”

US debt clock

Meanwhile

Ann Althouse:

There was a budget surplus when Bill Clinton left office, and we now have a deficit counted in trillions, and the national debt is in the tens of trillions. Those who don’t like the service Elon Musk is giving to his country — what is their alternative? 

via Quinton Klabon

This Senator Jagler address connects setting high standards for kids with recent Milwaukee Public Schools troubles.

——

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?

Amy Kyllo:

“We have a lot of sad days dealing with this disease,” Tracy said. “These good days, these fun days give us strength to get through the bad days. You remember the joy felt during these incredible acts of kindness and generosity.”

Jeff Hamilton:

A new commissioner tasked with disciplining Manitoba educators for misconduct since the start of the year was doing so while still maintaining her job as head of the Saskatchewan teachers’ union, the Free Press has learned.

Critics call it a major conflict of interest that brings into question the independence and impartiality of Manitoba’s new teacher oversight commission.

“The fact that she’s doing two jobs at once, and one is the head of a teacher union, when you’re supposed to be adjudicating cases involving teacher misconduct, that’s a massive conflict of interest,” said Cameron Hauseman, an assistant professor of educational administration at the University of Manitoba.

Andrew Bahl:

A challenge to one of Wisconsin’s most high-profile laws of the last 15 years — restricting the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions — has taken another turn on its way through the court system.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a case involving Act 10 must first proceed through a conservative-leaning appellate court before it may come back to the state’s top justices.

The decision involves a Dane County judge’s ruling last year that large portions of Act 10 are unconstitutional. If ultimately upheld by higher courts, the decision would have a major effect on the working conditions of public employees, such as teachers, state workers and some law enforcement officers. A ruling that ends Act 10 also could affect the finances of state and local governments across Wisconsin.

The decision Wednesday — which was accompanied by Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s decision not to recuse herself from a future ruling on Act 10 — means the case likely won’t be heard by the high court until after an April election that will determine whether left-leaning or right-leaning justices have a majority.

Here’s what to know about the latest court challenge to Act 10.

——

Notes and links on Act 10

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Tyler Cowen Summary:

Ilya Somin covers this question over at Volokh Conspiracy.  I receive many queries about this, some of them panicky and anguished.  I haven’t covered it, mostly because I don’t feel I have enough insights into the relevant matters of constitutional law, or for that matter what is going on inside the administration (for instance, how should one interpret those Vance tweets?)

I can tell you what I would find useful.  If you are especially pessimistic on this front, which are the securities prices that would indicate an actual constitutional problem?  Particular equities?  Interest rates?  The value of the dollar?  Measures of volatility?  Something else?  Don’t restrict yourself to the absolute level of share prices, surely there are favored and disfavored companies and sectors, right?

Why it is hard for the Executive to disobey the judiciary

Sean Stevens & Greg Lukianoff:

The event never happened.

Just as it was about to begin, some student protesters became disruptive. One of them pulled the fire alarm. Windows were broken and objects, including noisemakers, were thrown into the room. Krolczyk and members of the Turning Point USA chapter barricaded themselves inside until they were escorted out by university police and security.

This week, Krolcyzk filed a Title IX complaint against the University of Washington with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights as a result of the disruption and cancellation of the event.

Despite the chaos, University of Washington spokesperson and Assistant Vice President for Communications Victor Balta contends that “the TPUSA organizers made the choice to suspend the event.” In a statement sent to The Center Square, “The Jason Rantz Show,” and other outlets who reached out for comment, Balta said that “[i]nformed discussion and debate are encouraged on our campus, however, it is clear that presenters and disruptors are, in some cases, seeking to antagonize one another in ways that provide dramatic content for their social media feeds,” and that Krolcyzk was “excited” that the event got shut down.

Mark Holmberg:

For three decades, this mechanical engineer has been dragging, hoisting, cribbing and prying these metal monsters out of old industrial shops in New York, Philadelphia, Erie, Pa. — anywhere and everywhere, as old vocational education programs shut down across the nation.

Eugene Ludwig:

What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?

On some level, I relate to the underlying frustrations. Having served as comptroller of the currency during the 1990s, I‘ve spent substantial chunks of my career exploring the gaps between public perception and economic reality, particularly in the realm of finance. Many of the officials I’ve befriended and advised over the last quarter-century — members of the Federal Reserve, those running regulatory agencies, many leaders in Congress — have told me they consider it their responsibility to set public opinion aside and deal with the economy as it exists by the hard numbers. For them, government statistics are thought to be as reliable as solid facts.

In recent years, however, as my focus has broadened beyond finance to the economy as a whole, the disconnect between “hard” government numbers and popular perception has spurred me to question that faith. I’ve had the benefit of living in two realms that seem rarely to intersect — one as a Washington insider, the other as an adviser to lenders and investors across the country. Toggling between the two has led me to be increasingly skeptical that the government’s measurements properly capture the realities defining unemployment, wage growth and the strength of the economy as a whole.

Corrinne Hess:

The damning 41-page report outlines a number of internal and external factors at the district that have caused multiple failures, including  an “absence of clear vision” and “leadership routinely disempowered to lead.”

“The motivation for this review is clear: MPS must make systemic changes to ensure that students — particularly the most vulnerable — are at the center of every decision,” states the audit by MGT of America Consulting LLC. “Ultimately, this work is in service of students, whose future success hinges on a district capable of delivering equitable, high-quality education.”

—-

Meanwhile, the taxpayer funded DPI, lead by Jill Underly continues its rigor reduction campaign.

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

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

DOGE.gov

This is the number of agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress in 2024

Code of Federal Regulations

98.68M
Total Words

215.23K
Total Sections of regulation

more.

and:

Meet the U.S. Government
Trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.
U.S. Government

Elon Musk:

When not wasting money on bureaucracy, the Department of Education has been funding anti-Americanism, gender nonsense and anti-meritocratic racism

Frannie Block:

William, whose last name is listed only as A. in the suit, first enrolled in the Clarksville-Montgomery County school district in 2016 when he was in the fifth grade. For the next seven years, he scored mostly in the bottom first, second, or third percentiles of his reading fluency assessment tests compared to national standards. In 2019 and 2020, he scored in the bottom ninth and sixth percentiles, respectively. But, a year before he graduated, his reading had regressed so much he was scoring below the first percentile.

That same year, William took a simple writing test asking him to spell 31 words in three minutes. According to his suit, he couldn’t spell half of them, including the word school, which he wrote as shcool.

——-

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?

Zhang Tong:

Computer researchers in China using domestically made graphics processors have achieved a near-tenfold boost in performance over powerful US supercomputers that rely on Nvidia’s cutting-edge hardware, according to a peer-reviewed study.

The accomplishment points to possible unintended consequences of Washington’s escalating tech sanctions while challenging the dominance of American-made chips, long considered vital for advanced scientific research.

The researchers said that innovative software optimisation techniques enabled them to improve efficiency gains in computers powered by Chinese-designed graphics processing units(GPUs) to outperform US supercomputers in certain scientific computations.

Dan Hendrycks:

AIs also exhibit significant biases in their value systems. For example, their political values are strongly clustered to the left. Unlike random incoherent statistical biases, these values are consistent and likely affect their conversations with users.

LLM Visualization

Dairyland Sentinel:

Underly, DPI Shrug Off Complaints Over State Benchmarks; Superintendent and Her Department Have Yet to Comply With Open Records Request

Delia Watkins, Madison Metropolitan School District

Nicole Shanahan:

Exclusive: @DataRepublican joins me for her first-ever interview to discuss DOGE vs USAID, shady NGOs, media manipulation, and more.

More.

According to its latest annual report, RMI gets funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of State, Department of Transportation, General Services Administration, and the US Trade and Development Agency. It is also getting funding from the International Finance Corporation and World Bank.

Matt Taibbi:

“Take USAID. Many Americans are now in an uproar because they they learned about over $400,000,000 going to an organization called Inner News, whose chief Jeanne Bourgeault boasted to Congress about training hundreds of thousands of people in journalism. But her views are almost identical to Carrie’s. She gave a talk once about building trust and combating misinformation in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a really beautifully unified COVID nineteen message, vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%.”

“But when, quote, mixed information on vaccine efficacy got out, hesitancy ensued. We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know that the press does not exist to promote unity or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism. Bourdieu also once said that to fight bad content, we need to work really hard on exclusionless or inclusionless and, quote, really need to focus our ad ad dollars toward what she called the good news.”

“Again, if you don’t know the fastest way to erode trust in media is by having government sponsor exclusion lists, you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone 476,000,000 of it. And USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine Michael and I saw across that long list of agencies.”

“Collectively, they bought up every part of the news production line, sources, think tanks, research, fact checking, anti disinformation, commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, straight up censorship. It is a giant closed messaging loop whose purpose is to transform the free press into exactly that consensus machine. There is no way to remove this rod surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.”

Dave Cieslewicz

But the scores are even worse in Madison where students are 84% behind on math and 72% behind on reading.

We did, in fact, keep schools closed for too long, but that doesn’t explain the Madison results because hundreds of school districts kept their schools closed as long as Madison did and they’ve recovered faste

——

Madison per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the number used (!)

——

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?

Kaylah Huynh:

In a Marquette Law School Poll last year, about half of Wisconsin respondents said the state’s school choice program was a “complete success” or “mostly a success.” A quarter said the program was “mostly a failure” or a “total failure.”

—-

Jill Underly and ongoing rigor reduction.

Much more on the taxpayer funded dpi.

Notes on property tax growth.

Abbey Machtig

Madison students are 72% behind comparable 2019 numbers in reading and 84% behind in math, according to the report.

“education recovery scorecard”

——

Madison per student spending ranges from $22,633 to $29,827 depending on the number used (!)

——

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?

Matthew Nielsen

I scraped US Dept of Education’s website for the word “equity.” There were 333 results on 60 pages.

52 occurrences on one page is the record for the website. Here are the top 10 pages

Christopher Rufo:

There is a tingle of fear in any corporation whenever the words “restructuring,” “merger,” “acquisition,” or “hostile takeover” spread through the office. Employees work on their resumes, whisper about projected layoffs, and assess their options.

We’re seeing the same phenomenon unfold right now in our nation’s capital. Since taking over last month, President Trump has promised to blitz through federal departments to roll back waste, cut ideological programs, and return fiscal sanity to American governance. While Republican presidents have long promised to “reduce the size of government,” they have usually failed to do so—the bureaucracy always wins. This time might be different.

The second Trump administration has been surprisingly aggressive in its efforts to reform federal agencies, including a controlled demolition of USAID and an audacious buyout plan for government employees. And Elon Musk, leader of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, has a long track record of successful, and sometimes extreme, cost-cutting. When Musk took over Twitter, for example, he fired 80 percent of the employees, and at the same time managed to improve the product and increase its profitability.

The next stage of the conflict between Trump and the bureaucracy looks to be the Department of Education, which the president has correctly identified as a hotbed of left-wing ideologies. Almost every Republican presidential candidate since 1980 has promised either to shrink or abolish the department, but its budget has only grown. When Trump made the same promise on the campaign trail last year, I was skeptical. But Musk changes the calculation: the tech entrepreneur has already routed USAID and, as I can confirm from my own reporting, dispatched his DOGE engineers to investigate the DOE. While the department, as a public entity, does not have the same kind of balance sheet as a corporation, it must nevertheless be broken apart and ultimately shut down.

Andrew Rotherham:

• It’s hard to miss that the Dems are letting the Rs do some of their dirty work for them. The silence around some of the Eos on DEI, sports, etc…is deafening. There is an old saw in politics that you don’t get in the way when the other guy is shooting himself in the foot. You also stay out of the way when the other party is solving a political headache for you. 
• That brings us to Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon. Her hearing is later this week. It’s political malpractice she’s not already confirmed. Her paperwork is complicated but she was confirmed in 2017 by the Senate with 81 votes for Small Business Administrator – where her tenure earned bipartisan praise. Her nomination was an absolute layup where the Dems risked overreaching. Now the problem facing the Dems will be just what to focus on in this target saturated environment (though they’ll still probably overreach with the MSNBC cameras there and all that). Having her confirmed might also help with all this chaos. Agree with her or not she’s not a chaos monkey and was well-regarded in Connecticut education circles. 
• So many lawsuits. And it’s only been a few weeks. It’s exciting to see a whole new generation of attorneys get beach houses in Delaware. The plight of the second homeless in D.C. is real. But if team Article I isn’t going to do it’s job then put in Team Article III coach!

Ann Althouse summary:

“If the bureaucracy’s in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?… It does not match the will of the people.”

and:

Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.

Karen Vaites:

Here’s a topic that doesn’t get enough attention: a number of states are handling pandemic-era student achievement declines by lowering the bar for academic success. 

Most notably, some states have adjusted their ‘cut scores’ for determining proficiency on state tests. It’s a sleight of hand: the share of students considered “proficient” increases, even as student performance doesn’t improve. This makes schools look better, yet it’s controversial even among educators.

Quinton Klabon:

Wisconsin tried to lower state test benchmarks from “college-ready” to “grade level,” but ended up between, making them useless.

What sucks is teachers actually got close to NAEP: 61% P, 26% A versus 66% B, 31% P. Then, they got scared once they saw what their results would be.

Wall Street Journal:

The first category includes the Administration’s decision to pause discretionary spending to ensure it complies with the President’s priorities. Democratic state Attorneys General say this is illegal, and Judge John McConnell on Monday agreed. The Administration is appealing, and judges can’t force a President to spend money that Congress has left to his discretion.

Most of these spending programs don’t include concrete disbursement deadlines. If Mr. Trump is violating the law, so was the Biden Administration, which delayed disbursing grants under the 2021 infrastructure bill and 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to review applications and attach conditions. What Mr. Trump is doing is no different.

Government unions are challenging Mr. Trump’s buyout offers for federal workers on grounds that Congress hasn’t funded them, but this doesn’t make them illegal per se. If Mr. Trump later doesn’t pay these workers, they could sue in federal claims court.

Unions are also challenging Mr. Trump’s Schedule F reform, which removes civil-service protections for some high-ranking career employees. Here, too, Mr. Trump is on strong legal ground. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 exempts positions “determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.”

Mr. Trump has expanded these exempt positions to employees who supervise investigations, develop regulations and exercise power under an agency’s discretion. Congress has expanded the discretion of agencies such that federal workers now boast far more power than they did 50 years ago. A President should be able to hold them accountable for performance to ensure laws are faithfully executed.

…..

Harvard law professor Hal Scott recently argued in these pages that the CFPB is operating illegally because Congress funded the agency with earnings from the Federal Reserve. Because the Fed has incurred losses since September 2022, Mr. Scott says the bureau should close unless Congress appropriates money for it. This argument is plausible.

Incredible to see a political leader translate how a new technology can promote human flourishing with such clarity. Exceptional speech.

pic.twitter.com/IOUIv54FDO

— Katherine Boyle (@KTmBoyle) February 11, 2025

Anthropic economic index:

The main findings from the Economic Index’s first paper are:

• Today, usage is concentrated in software development and technical writing tasks. Over one-third of occupations (roughly 36%) see AI use in at least a quarter of their associated tasks, while approximately 4% of occupations use it across three-quarters of their associated tasks.
• AI use leans more toward augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities, compared to automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks.
• AI use is more prevalent for tasks associated with mid-to-high wage occupations like computer programmers and data scientists, but is lower for both the lowest- and highest-paid roles. This likely reflects both the limits of current AI capabilities, as well as practical barriers to using the technology.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

“The Biden Administration should ignore the court” – AOC, 2023

"The Biden Administration should ignore the court" – AOC, 2023 pic.twitter.com/fHF4PAykQT

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 11, 2025

Wispolitics:

The state Dem Party gave Susan Crawford $2 million last month after collecting a $1 million donation from megadonor George Soros and $500,000 from Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Meanwhile, the state GOP gave Brad Schimel $1.675 million in January after it received $975,000 from Beloit businesswoman Diane Hendricks and $850,000 from Illinois businesswoman Liz Uihlein.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

The speed at which DOGE is pursuing efficiency at the federal government level is both mind-blowing and chaotic. It’s causing elation for some, anxiety for others.

But if you reflect soberly on Illinois and Chicago’s problems – corruption, ever-higher taxes, declining services and a shrinking population – you’ll quickly reach the conclusion Illinois needs a DOGE of its own. 

If you’re not convinced, take a look at the mess at Chicago Public Schools. It’s the perfect example of a bureaucratic machine in Illinois that’s able to drive up costs dramatically year after year despite its obvious and ongoing failure to deliver results. 

Start with CPS’ failed results. Today, just 1 in 5 students are proficient in reading and math on the SAT. For black students, it’s only 1 in 10. Student proficiencies have fallen about 22% since 2017, the first year Illinois administered the SAT. 

That failure has chased away many families from CPS. District enrollment has shrunk by nearly 60,000 students, or about 15%, since 2017. Overall, CPS has lost nearly 25% of its enrollment since 2000. 

Yet costs have been booming. In just seven years spending has jumped 84% – from $15,800 per student to more than $29,000. Hiring is way up, too, with total staff growing by 8,000, or 22%. 

Amy Erkenswick for Cusd200 Board of Education via Awake Illinois

My intention was to keep this campaign page a landing spot for positivity and to champion efforts toward our community’s shared goals. I had hoped that the ill-intended efforts of last election season would escape me.

Unfortunately, today during my Meet & Greet I was stalked, accosted, verbally assaulted, physically threatened and harassed by a former CUSD200 employee. Additionally, at least two current district employees have made social media posts that refer to me in a disparaging manner-posts which have been “liked” by current Board of Education members.

Caring about children and their education and committing your time and efforts to civic service should never result in this level of harassment.

Additionally, it should be noted that making disparaging comments about community members and parents of district students is a direct violation of not only CUSD200 Board of Education Policy 5:120 but also the Code of Ethics for Illinois Educators. Do we really need policies to treat eachother like humans? If so, they require enforcement.

The failure of CUSD200 leadership (Board of Education as well as administration) to hold their people accountable to their own policies has resulted in a horribly distorted narrative that has emboldened unwell individuals to pose a direct

Caring about children and their education and committing your time and efforts to civic service should never result in this level of harassment.

Additionally, it should be noted that making disparaging comments about community members and parents of district students is a direct violation of not only CUSD200 Board of Education Policy 5:120 but also the Code of Ethics for Illinois Educators. Do we really need policies to treat eachother like humans? If so, they require enforcement.

The failure of CUSD200 leadership (Board of Education as well as administration) to hold their people accountable to their own policies has resulted in a horribly distorted narrative that has emboldened unwell individuals to pose a direct and immediate danger to me and my family.

Now is the time to end this plotting. I urge you, please discontinue adding fuel to the fire of those who wish to do me harm. Please-stop endangering my family.

**SnoopDogg and Tom Brady say STAND UP TO HATE.**

Nash Weerasekera:

Together, Krapivin (now a graduate student at the University of Cambridge), Farach-Colton (now at New York University) and Kuszmaul demonstrated in a January 2025 paper(opens a new tab) that this new hash table can indeed find elements faster than was considered possible. ln so doing, they had disproved a conjecture long held to be true.

“It’s an important paper,” said Alex Conway(opens a new tab) of Cornell Tech in New York City. “Hash tables are among the oldest data structures we have. And they’re still one of the most efficient ways to store data.” Yet open questions remain about how they work, he said. “This paper answers a couple of them in surprising ways.”

Institute for Reforming Government

• While the REINS Act has not reduced the overall number of regulations on the books in Wisconsin, i.e. the overall regulatory burden, the data suggests it has likely reduced the rate of increase that would have almost certainly occurred in an administration.
• Outside of a decrease between 2021 and 2022, the overall number ofregulatory restrictions in place in Wisconsin have increased since 2017.
• The average number of permanent rules approved during the Walker Administration were significantly lowerthan the previous Doyle Administration. In the first year of the Walker Administration the number of permanent rules was reduced by almost 100.
• While the average number of permanent rules passed during the Evers Administration could have been closer to the 2019 high of 166 (which would have far surpassed the Doyle Administration average), the average has instead remained below the Doyle Administration average and is actually closer to the less-than 100 average of the Walker Administration.

more.

The Licensing Racket

Much more on licensing, here.

Wikileaks:

The author, David Golumbia, who also wrote “The politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism”, has previously received at least $80k in direct US government grants. UMN made no apparent attempt to fact check the book, which is now on the reading lists of two courses at the University of Southern California and Duke.

Hollis Robbins:

“ai” summary:

Universities must reevaluate their faculty and curriculum in light of AGI’s capabilities. Faculty will be retained for their unique expertise, hands-on training, and original research, while lecture courses and general education will be replaced by advanced research seminars and hands-on training.

——-

More.

Eko:

That trail led to staggering discoveries. Programs marked as independent revealed coordinated funding streams. Grants labeled as humanitarian aid showed curious detours through complex networks. Black budgets once shrouded in secrecy began to unravel under algorithmic scrutiny.

By 6 AM, Treasury’s career officials began arriving for work. They found systems they thought impenetrable already mapped. Networks they believed hidden already exposed. Power structures built over decades revealed in hours.

Their traditional defenses—slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests—proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.

Oyin Adedoyin>:

At NYU, the published cost including housing and living expenses topped $82,000 in the 2022-23 school year. That is roughly a 20% increase from 2006-07, accounting for inflation. But a separate calculation for those who received aid from the school showed the price they paid dropped by 34% over the same period to roughly $30,700.

Bille, now 24, had wanted to go to NYU since middle school. The Las Vegas native is the daughter of immigrants who never navigated the American college system.

When she got into NYU in February 2019, the lack of aid didn’t deter her. The total cost for freshman year that fall, including room and board, was $75,502, according to NYU.

She had gotten a jump-start bringing the cost down with dozens of scholarship applications before she got accepted. But she kept applying. She color-coded her spreadsheet to track their status. A yellow row meant she was waiting to hear back. Red meant she had been rejected. Green meant she got the schola

Carl Hendrick:

Over the past century, a powerful idea has taken root in the educational landscape. The notion of intelligence as something innate and fixed has been supplanted by the idea that intelligence is instead something malleable; that we are not prisoners of immutable characteristics and that, with the right training, we can be the authors of our own cognitive capabilities.

Nineteenth-century scientists including Francis Galton and Alfred Binet devoted their own considerable intelligence to a quest to classify and understand human cognitive ability. If we could codify the anatomy of intelligence, they believed, we could place individuals into their correct niche in society. Binet would go on to develop the first IQ tests, laying the foundations for a method of ranking the intelligence of job applicants, army recruits or schoolchildren that continues today.

In the early 20th century, progressive thinkers revolted against this idea that inherent ability is destiny. Instead, educators such as John Dewey argued that every child’s intelligence could be developed, given the right environment. The self, according to Dewey, is not something ‘ready made’ but rather ‘in continuous formation through choice of action’. In the 1960s and ’70s, psychologists such as Albert Bandura bridged some of the gap between the innate and the learned models of intelligence with his idea of social cognitive theory, self-efficacy and motivation. One can recognise that there are individual differences in ability, Bandura argued, but still emphasise the potential for growth for each individual, wherever one’s starting point.

Alex Tabarrok Summary:

Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.

Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”

Frannie Block:

What’s more, American students in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles “are performing lower than they did in the early 1990s,” said Martin West, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. This disparity between the highest- and lowest-achieving students is known as the “achievement gap”—and the U.S. now appears to have one of the largest in the world, compared to other wealthy nations.

There are a number of theories as to why proficiency rates are declining. The pandemic lockdowns that started in 2020 and the omnipresence of cell phones in schools haven’t helped.

But instead of trying to solve the problem, a number of educators are actually covering it up—by lowering the educational standards in their states.

calfac.org

Whereas, there is a long history of workers and unions challenging the introduction of new technologies in order to maintain power in the workplace; and

Whereas, other unions have begun to address AI in their CBAs (e.g., SAG, AFTA, and WGA) and have had significant victories in this arena; and

Whereas, there are concerns that AI will replace roles at the University that will make it difficult or impossible to solve classroom, human resources, or other issues since it is not intelligent;

and

Whereas, the CSU has already begun to push AI as a tool through workshops, trainings, and institutional development; and

Whereas, AI, especially LLMs, and other algorithmic technologies are often referred to as “smart,” “AI powered,” “data driven” or other euphemistic terminology to conceal their implementation from users and enhance the perception of their value; and

Whereas, the CSU and individual campuses regularly sign contracts with tech companies, implement new learning technologies, and impose new technological “solutions,” including “smart,” “AI powered,” or “data driven” technologies, without consulting CFA; and

Whereas, AI will have a wide range of impacts that can’t be addressed by simply amending existing one CBA article including: AI’s propensity to exacerbate forms of institutional racism, sexism, and gender discrimination raises concerns around hiring and evaluation; AI’s threat to intellectual property including use of music, writing, and the creative arts as well as faculty generated course content without acknowledgement or permission; the potential for online instruction without direct faculty oversight or the massive expansion of classes through mandated AI use as a “speed-up”; and AI’s impact on development of new ideas, creativity, and academic freedom; and.

Sarah Mueller:

Delaware has a resource-based school funding system that was created in 1940. That means there’s a yearly count of students where the number of children in each building are converted into units. Meyer has voiced support for moving to a weighted student funding formula, where the money follows the student based on need.

Delaware’s education leaders and advocates have historically been divided between keeping the current system or moving to one where the money follows the child. Critics of the system say it fails to provide enough resources for low-income students, students with disabilities and English Language Learners. Supporters say the unit formula is easy to understand and predictable.

What’s clear is the state’s current education system is failing its students. Delaware is ranked 45th in the nation for educational outcomes,according to research from the University of Delaware. Three-fourths of fourth graders are unable to read proficiently and 82% of eighth graders are below proficiency in math. Earlier this month, Gov. Meyer declared a “literacy emergency” after national test scores revealed eighth grade reading scores in the First State hit a 27-year low in 2024.

Michael Petrilli:

Eli Hager and his colleagues at ProPublica have published some eyebrow-raising articles lately about Arizona’s universal education savings account (ESA) program. Most recently, Hager dug into its testing and accountability requirements—or lack thereof. When it comes to the public’s ability—and that of policymakers—to know whether Arizona’s program, or the schools and other vendors that it’s funding, are effective, there’s zilch, nada, nothing.

Yet Arizona turns out to be something of an outlier. Most school choice programs—including education savings accounts programs, especially those enacted in recent years—come with sometesting mandates. Granted, there isn’t as much transparency or accountability as I’d like. As I told Hager, “If you’re a private school that gets most of its money now from the public…there should be accountability for you, as there is for public schools. If the public is paying your bills, I don’t see what the argument is for there not to be.”

Yet in many other states, there’s more of it than conventional wisdom assumes. Table 1 provides a detailed look at testing, transparency, and accountability requirements, pulled from a recent Rand analysis, as well as Education Week, FutureEd, and (especially) EdChoice.

Table 1: Testing, transparency, and accountability requirements in America’s largest private school choice programs[1]

——

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 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?

Jonathan Butcher

The University of Michigan’s recent about-face on DEI is both encouraging and instructive. Yes, even high-profile institutions with long records of supporting racial favoritism and radical ideological movements can show common sense—but sometimes it takes public humiliation in the media and losses in courtrooms to get them to budge.

After last month’s first set of executive orders from President Donald Trump, other schools would do well to drop DEI before experiencing the embarrassment that rattled Ann Arbor.

In December, UMichigan officials announced that they would no longer ask job applicants to submit “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements as part of their applications.

Unlockaid:

Meanwhile, many communities cannot access the very resources that were created for them. In August, The Guardian reportedthat the U.S. government’s Inflation Reduction Act created $60 billion for environmental justice investments, but “many of the small, community-based organizations that would benefit from funding the most … simply don’t have the time or resources to navigate the complicated bureaucratic process of applying for funding.”

These issues are taking a toll on Americans’ faith in their government to deliver results. The Healthcare.gov debacle is perhaps one of the most well known examples of massive failure brought to you by the Beltway Bandits. But stories like this are increasingly the norm.

It’s not enough for lawmakers to reduce discussions about the management of our public resources every year to tired and familiar debates about how much the U.S. should be spending on what priorities. The U.S. needs to be just as focused on who is making those decisions and to whom and to what ends those resources flow.

Dissident Teacher:

The teaching profession has been eviscerated by counterproductive policies like equitable grading and our laughably unserious teacher training colleges. Teachers are now something between daycare provider and HR manager with little technical expertise. They oversee a factory full of workers who don’t know what they’re building or why. Nobody pushes back because everyone gets paid regardless of what the factory turns out.

As I’ve detailed in multiple articles available on X (and on my substack; link in bio), the system incentivizes teachers to do the least possible work. Principals do not look for experts in their respective fields, they look for young, inexpensive, debt-laden college graduates with the right paperwork. The system then conditions them to follow orders using three carrots: summers off, minimal accountability (we can always blame the parents!) and tenure. In other words, it teaches them it’s okay to not work very hard.

A teacher who knows her subject, transmits that knowledge coherently, designs practice that helps students move it into long-term memory and expects students to later demonstrate mastery of all of the course material makes admin’s job much harder because it puts the lie to their grading systems (they’re all gamed) and behavioral controls (there aren’t any).

Once admin recognizes this aberration, she will be taught to change in one of two ways.

——-

More.

Carmen Nesbitt:

Utah lawmakers in a bill draft Wednesday restored a proposed ban on collective bargaining rights for public employees, backtracking after days of negotiations with public sector unions who were hoping to reach a compromise with legislators.

Lawmakers in an earlier revision had removed an outright ban on collective bargaining, though the updated bill draft at that time still would have required public sector unions to undergo a “recertification election” every five years.

But after failing to reach a “consensus” on the “neutrality” of the revised bill draft with union representatives, lawmakers in their latest proposal this week reverted to the original intent of HB267— prohibiting collective bargaining altogether across all government-owned organizations, including public schools, law enforcement and fire departments.

Specifically, it would bar public employers from “recognizing a labor organization as a bargaining agent” and from entering into collective bargaining contracts.

Related: Wisconsin Act 10

Mike Solana:

With FDR long gone, and the Cold War long over, the machinery built to defend us from foreign power rusted, degraded, and slowly rotted. With no external threat demanding competence, weak men flourished in the system. These men hired even weaker men, who in turn hired… whatever it is we’re looking at today. Much as a beached whale carcass puffs up with gas, the size of our government bloated as it atrophied. Now, the state is mostly a jobs program for mediocre people, and at its very worst it’s a staging ground for radicals hell bent on paralyzing the nation. I do believe we need a federal government staffed with competent men and women. I do believe there are competent men and women who still work in Washington. But the federal government is presently too big, and too full of waste, and that waste looks far too much like fraud. I do not think (most) critics are fans of the waste and fraud. But, despite their many flaws, the bureaucrats are still basically center left. And for a center leftist, I imagine this feels more comfortable than a center right president elected to power.

The New York Times noted Trump’s approach to reducing the size of the government is a near mirror image of Elon’s strategy at Twitter. This is true, and it’s worth noting panic over DOGE in Washington is also near identical to the panic we saw from the tech press when Elon took Twitter private. Back then, journalists insisted the company would die. Imminently, they said. This of course never happened, and everyone who said it would happen of course never believed what they were saying. Critics at the time weren’t afraid Twitter would shut down, they were afraid Twitter would survive — but without censorship and propaganda. Likewise, center left DOGE critics aren’t worried the government will break. They’re worried it won’t, and the center left Deep State will lose power.

To my eye, concern for the Deep State seems reasonable. Elon is absolutely wrecking these people. But even still, the tech right should be more clear-eyed. Similarities between the Twitter Deep State and the actual real ass American Deep State end at the media freaking out over their destruction. This is a real war for power, and the stakes are far higher than a failed company.

Over the weekend, former candidate for Congress and darling left-wing thinkboi Will Stancil suggested Elon Musk should be executed. The sentiment is fairly common on Bluesky, where violent implications are banned but calls for actual violence are generally encouraged, a philosophy well summarized by professional crazy person Akilah Hughes, last seen defending the assassin Luigi Mangione. “Can we skip to them facing the firing squads?” she seemed to ask of DOGE employees.

Concurrently, I’ve seen this dumb Matt Y tweet making the rounds again:

Riya Misra:

Rice University’s famed horn professor William VerMeulen abruptly retired last spring amid a swirl of sexual misconduct allegations. But dozens of students and industry insiders say “the administration has known for 30 years” — and failed to act.

Paul Caron summary:

The University of Minnesota Law School is halting the hiring of a new assistant dean of diversity, equity and inclusion as President Donald Trump continues to crack down on DEI in federal programs.

Dean William McGeveran said he “had no choice but to pause the search” for an assistant dean of DEI. McGeveran made the comments in an email on Friday. The school has spent at least the last three months searching for a new assistant DEI dean and is canceling scheduled visits for the finalists.

Anna Hansen 

Several Madison East High School students allegedly battered and robbed another student Tuesday afternoon, Madison police say.

Officers were dispatched to the school at 12:49 p.m. on reports of an altercation in which six students had beaten and stolen money from another student, police spokesperson Stephanie Fryer said in a statement. The victim was hospitalized for his injuries.

The alleged assailants, a 14-year-old boy, two 15-year-old boys and two 16-year-old boys, are facing pending charges of substantial battery – party to a crime; strong armed robbery – party to a crime; disorderly conduct, physical abuse to a child and bail jumping, Fryer said. An additional teen, a 17-year-old boy, is facing the same charges.

Kayla Huynh on Jill Underly:

Underly’s top priorities include securing more state funding for schools and increasing the amount of money schools are reimbursed for special education services. She wants the state to reimburse 90% of schools’ special education costs. 

on Jeff Wright:

Wright’s top priorities are to restore confidence in the Department of Public Instruction, rebuild the relationship between the agency and schools, and “stop the hemorrhaging of talent from the department.” 

His other priority is to close the state’s academic achievement gap. Wisconsin’s racial disparity in math and reading continues to be the largest among the nation’s states, according to last year’s results from a federal test. 

Brittany Kinser:

David Blaska:

Will voters send Jill Underly home with a teacher’s note? Let’s cut to the chase: Wisconsin’s superintendent of public instruction is guilty of cheating on her tests. Cooking the books. Skewing the numbers to hide the fact that more students under her watch are failing the basics.

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 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?

Laura McKenna:

Parent backlash against the national education test results is happening in NJ. Steve snapped pictures of these signs at the train station.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004

——

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

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

 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?

Will Flanders:

Tom McCarthy from DPI: “we haven’t lowered standards one iota.”

This is a lie.

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?

Francis Menton:

It is possible that the entire industry of academia will be revolutionized and transformed over the course of the next couple of years. It should be. And, if Trump follows through, as I think he will, he completely has the tools at his disposal to do the job.

With academia, multiple issues come together to put the industry in a position of high vulnerability. First, of course, is that academia is almost universally associated with the farthest of the far political left, the wokest of the woke. Academics, almost to a person, have opposed Trump in everything he has proposed and stood for and have viciously attacked him at every opportunity.

The second is that nearly all academic institutions get vast sums of money every year from the federal government. Much of that is for bona fide research, like the search for new medical cures, but large amounts of the aid (nobody knows exactly how much) go to fund every sort of left-wing course and program.

And the third issue that makes academic institutions particularly vulnerable is that almost without exception they have been systematically and pervasively engaging in illegal racial and sex discrimination for decades. Some of that discrimination has been in the area of admissions, as was exposed in the famous case of SFFA v. Harvard decided by the Supreme Court in 2023. But that was only one piece of the illegal conduct. There has been vast other illegal conduct, going under the general heading of “diversity, equity and inclusion” or DEI, at nearly every academic institution and in virtually every aspect of their operations: in addition to admissions, also in faculty and administrative hiring; in creating DEI bureaucracies and enforcement procedures; in setting up various academic programs, majors, and departments (for example, the so-called “studies” departments and majors); in funding “cultural centers”; and on and on.

Vince Bielski:

In many ways, this is a story about the hazards of running a district deeply into debt. With a projected $500 million annual deficit and holding a whopping $9.3 billion in long-term debt, the district depends on the city of Chicago, which also runs in the red, to provide most of its $9.9 billion in funding. Making matters more precarious, the district has to rely on short-term loans at high interest rates to make payroll. It is also the largest issuer of junk bonds in the U.S. 

FDIC:

“Previously, the FDIC released 25 so-called ‘pause’ letters sent to 24 institutions interested in pursuing crypto- or blockchain-related activities. The documents released today include (1) additional correspondence with those 24 institutions and (2) correspondence with additional institutions beyond those 24. The documents that we are releasing today show that requests from these banks were almost universally met with resistance, ranging from repeated requests for further information, to multi-month periods of silence as institutions waited for responses, to directives from supervisors to pause, suspend, or refrain from expanding all crypto- or blockchain-related activity. Both individually and collectively, these and other actions sent the message to banks that it would be extraordinarily difficult—if not impossible—to move forward. As a result, the vast majority of banks simply stopped trying.

John Konrad:

The NYTimes’ primary function isn’t journalism. It’s narrative coordination—setting the frame so the entire political-media machine knows how to think about an issue before it takes off.

Ever notice how, overnight, everyone starts saying “Biden is sharp as a tack” or “JD Vance is weird”?

It’s not random. It’s a system.

OODA

Lylena Estabine:

“ai” summary:

Illinois’ pension crisis is severe, with funding and performance lagging behind other states. Without action, the budget will be strained, residents will leave, and future benefits will be at risk.

Daniel Greenfield:

The David Horowitz Freedom Center knows that’s not true because Bank of America, through its Merrill Lynch subsidiary, was one of the many financial institutions that ‘debanked’ us.

We led the battle against debanking, taking on financial titans worth over half a trillion dollars,  bringing attention to the crisis across media outlets and emerging from it with a rare victory.

As a new White House and Congress prepare to tackle debanking, here are some of our experiences and the lessons we learned from taking on corporate political discrimination.

In the summer of 2018, MasterCard warned that it would no longer process payments to us because we had appeared on a list of hate groups published by Color of Change: a Southern Poverty Law Center front group with ties to former Obama administration officials.

Quanta:

The world of mathematics is full of unreachable corners, where unsolvable problems live. Now, yet another has been exposed.

In 1900, the eminent mathematician David Hilbert announced a list of 23 key problems to guide the next century of mathematical research. His problems not only provided a road map for the field but reflected a more ambitious vision — to build a firm foundation from which all mathematical truths could be derived.

A key part of this vision was that mathematics should be “complete.” That is, all its statements should be provably true or false.

In the 1930s, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that this is impossible: In any mathematical system, there are statements that can be neither proved nor disproved. A few years later, Alan Turing and others built on his work, showing that mathematics is riddled with “undecidable” statements — problems that cannot be solved by any computer algorithm.

These results demonstrated that there are fundamental limits to what proof and computation are capable of. Some mathematics can simply never be known.

Bruce Elder:

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, this chartbook should save you from reading 25,000 of them.

That counts for something in a week when so many millions of words have been written about the surprise arrival of China’s DeepSeek AI model.

AI has come of age in the era of the meme – and it turns out memes are one of the best ways of explaining where it is going.

Deutsche Bank is Europe’s second-largest bank by assets. Measured by 2024 fees it’s the number-nine investment bank globally. 

Here are its first two memes in the slide deck it has sent to clients about DeepSeek:

Tom Renz:

I inherently do not trust the media so I decided to look into DOGE myself and see what is under the hood. Initially I was quite concerned about the legality of a “new agency” created by executive order but that – just like everything else – is a lie put out by the mainstream. The order is here and the thread is below:

@VigilantFox

and:

Would you like @DOGE to audit the IRS?

Quinton Klabon:

This lines up with what DPI has said previously. It is primarily Milwaukee’s responsibility, and DPI was shocked when they discovered MPS was not making good progress and being secretive about it.