School Information System – Page 46 – Curated Education Information

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

James Baker and John Diamond:

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?

“Many academics admit that the number of nonfaculty staff has grown to uncomfortable levels”

Maya Sen:

. A recent report showed that Stanford has roughly one administrator for every student—an unflattering statistic that calls into question higher ed’s priorities. But administrators have proliferated in part because of government requirements that won’t disappear with a funding cap. Universities receiving grants, for instance, must comply with important but costly regulations to protect the safety of human subjects as well as data privacy.

On the other side of the balance sheet, cutting university funding affects more than academics. Research institutions can be local economic engines, creating jobs and driving innovation. The University of Alabama, the state’s largest employer, received $334 million in NIH funds in 2024 alone. Capping indirect costs at 15% would cost it around $70 million a year, shrinking its economic footprint.

There’s a better solution than a blanket cap. Universities could instead commit to addressing administrative bloat and shoring up research integrity—both reasonable points that academics themselves have flagged. Given the choice, many researchers would rather see more money flow to actual research than administration. And adopting replication policies for research findings, already standard in many top academic journals, would bolster integrity.

Indirect cost rates of 70% are likely a thing of the past, but smart maneuvering could give universities a win, hand Republicans a victory, and keep vital research on solid footing.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: “Government debt has exceeded $36 trillion and continues mounting, with no end in sight

Budget hawks have been rare in Washington since 2010, when the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission put forth a comprehensive plan to reduce spending and increase revenue, only to see it sink. Today, the problem is dire. Our ratio of federal debt held by the public to gross domestic product has grown from 61% in 2010 to 100% this fiscal year. Left uncorrected for another four years, we will surpass the historic high of 106% that America hit at the end of World War II.

It’s little wonder that more Republicans and Democrats are voicing concerns that American global power—backed by economic strength—is threatened by growing budget deficits. It’s time lawmakers seek solutions rather than argue about who’s to blame.

Several factors drive deficit spending, including an aging population and rapidly rising medical costs. But the major reason is reckless spending.

President Trump deserves credit for trying to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient to reduce deficits. His decision to create the Department of Government Efficiency put a much-needed brake on wasteful government spending.

We caution the president, however, against relying on tariffs to raise revenues. Tariffs engender ill will among allies and other trading partners and allow China to seize a greater global role. Further, tariffs risk domestic inflation by raising the costs of goods. As the president will remember, high prices caused political problems for Democrats last fall.

civics: Our three part system and governance

www

Over the past century the Congress has created a whole series of quasi-independent boards and commission to carry out a variety of hybrid functions on the basis that the areas in which they operate are specialized, and appointed board members/commissioners with expertise in these areas are best able to carry forward the intentions of Congress. This has spawned the attack of the three and four letter agencies on the Executive Branch — FTC, SEC, ICC, NLRB, FCC, MSPB, etc. Some have a limited connection to a traditional Executive Branch Department, but Congress designed them to operate largely independent from the Department. Others, by design, are independent of any other Department.

But who do the heads of these agencies work for? The Trump Administration is flexing its own lawfare muscles to argue that the heads of these boards/commissions/agencies/offices, where they wield executive power to enforce the law, work for the President. Because they wield power that is derived from the President, they cannot do so without being accountable for their conduct to the President. The Trump Administration is arguing it is a separation of powers violation for Congress to limit a President’s ability to remove them from office, i.e., stop them from asserting the executive power they derive only from him.

The decline in friendliness

Karol Markowicz:

Loneliness is a silent killer. A US surgeon general’s report from 2023 found it as dangerous as smoking, “associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death” — while upward of 60% of Americans feel lonely on a regular basis, surveys have found.

Along with the impact on personal well-being, the trend is dangerous for America itself. A nation that lacks interpersonal relationships is a lower-trust society, more prone to crime and unrest.

The United Kingdom has been accused of launching a political “foreign cyber attack” on the United States following the issuance of a secret snooping order to Apple

Duncan Campbell:

An unprecedented letter from the US Congress, released today, accuses the UK of “a foreign cyber attack waged through political means”. The claim refers to a Home Office secret demand last month (reported by Computer Weekly here, hereand here) that Apple break the security protecting its Advanced Data Protection cloud security system to let British spies into anyone’s secure files.

In a letter to the recently appointed US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, senator Ron Wyden of Colorada and representative Andy Biggs of Arizona bluntly ask the administration to kick the UK out of the 65-year-old UK-USA signals intelligence sharing agreement, commonly known as Five Eyes, if they do not now withdraw the demand to Apple.

”If the UK does not immediately reverse this dangerous effort, we urge you to reevaluate US-UK cyber security arrangements and programmes as well as US intelligence sharing with the UK,” the new DNI was advised.

Politically, on other issues, the signatories are on opposite sides of US politics. Wyden is a liberal democrat who has campaigned for healthcare and the environment; Biggs is a loud Trump supporter and a noted organiser of the “MAGA squad”. Wyden, from Oregon, serves on the Senate Intelligence and Finance Committee; Biggs, from Arizona, chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance.

Blogging in the aged of “ai”

Giles

My post about blogging as writing the tutorial that you wished you’d found really took off on Hacker News. There were a lot of excellent comments, but one thing kept coming up: what’s the point in blogging if people are using ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek to spoon-feed them answers? Who, apart from the AIs, will read what you write?

I was asking myself the same question when I started blogging semi-regularly again last year, and this post is an attempt to summarise why I decided that it was worthwhile. The TL;DR: blogging isn’t just about being read — it’s about learning and thinking, and having a durable proof that you can do both.

Let’s start off by summarising the two big reasons to blog about what you’ve learned, as you learn:

It helps you make your newly-gained knowledge concrete.
It will help other people in the future — they might be looking for the information you blogged about, and find it on your blog.

Legislation and Homeschooling

Hanna Schmid:

Democratic state lawmakers are making another attack on parents’ rights and educational choice in Illinois. A bill would require homeschooling parents to file annual reports to avoid truancy charges, be credentialed and have their curriculum reviewed.

A bill filed by Democrats in the Illinois General Assembly would attack parental rights and educational choice in Illinois, seeking to undermine 75 years of homeschooling freedoms granted by the Illinois Supreme Court in People v. Levison.

It would make Illinois the first state in the nation to increase restrictions on parents’ freedom to educate their own children. It would also make it easier to create additional restrictions on homeschooling.

Illinois already made history in 2023 when it became the first state to remove a private school choice program for 15,000 low-income students and limit parents’ educational options. It did so after intense pressure from teachers unions, which have put $20 million into campaigns since 2010, including funding 4 in 5 lawmakers as of 2023.

House Bill 2827 was filed by state Rep. Terra Costa Howard, D-Lombard, and has been co-sponsored by eight other Democratic members of the House as of Feb. 18. Teachers unions have invested over $2 millionin the nine sponsors’ campaigns.

Universities are failing the social bargain once again by not having honest debates about the NIH funding.

Vinay Prasad:

During the covid-19 pandemic, universities made one big mistake. above all else. They refused, consistently to host any debates on the most important policy issues of the day. For instance, no university debated school closures in 2020 or 2021 to my knowledge. There are only a handful of debates about lockdown, largely outside of universities. No University had a debate on mask mandates or masking in 2020 or 2021. No University had a debate on whether or not vaccines should be mandated, including to people who have already had covid, and that those who don’t comply should be terminated.

These are some of the most consequential public policy decisions of the 21st century and universities did not host debates. They did so at their peril, and now popular opinion of universities is in the toilet.

Against this backdrop comes reforms to the NIH funding system. Universities are making the exact same error as before. They refuse to host debates on what the right indirect cost rate should be. They refuse to debate whether or not the current system of study sections is optimized.

Wellness and athletics

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Sarah’s death prompted the athletic department to pour more money into mental health resources. Her family channeled their pain into purpose, forming the Sarah Shulze Foundationin her honor. Her friends, too, became mental health advocates.

Despite the NCAA’s recent increased focus on mental health, collegiate athlete suicide rates are on the rise, according to a 2024 study. Although the rate remains lower than the general population, researchers said more prevention efforts are warranted. Suicide is now the second most common cause of death among collegiate athletes, second only to accidents.

The pressures on this population only continue to mount. The expansion of the Big Ten this year to include West Coast teams increases travel demands. Social media has opened up athletes to online abuse, especially as more states legalize sports betting. A new era where athletes can monetize their brand creates expectations from companies and collectives for athletes to live up to their endorsement deals.

How do parents choose Milwaukee schools?

Quinton Klabon:

This is 1 of the coolest things I have done. We did an unbiased, deep poll of Black and Latin Milwaukee parents to see how and why they pick the schools they do. 🧵

In short, parents lack the information they need to make the best match for their children.

We were shocked by some of our findings. Here are 5 key points based on how the parents responded:

They must travel far for what they want. Parents most wanted schools with great academics (35%) and extracurriculars (15%), but also preferred a school that was close (22%). But too few good options are near their homes; 25% of parents had switched their child’s school within the last 3 years. Seeking quality, 85% sent their children to a school outside their neighborhood. In fact, 29% enrolled in a school more than 15 minutes’ drive away. Without good schools in every neighborhood, blight will dissolve the fabric of communities.
Families with the least resources struggle to choose schools. Parents who were unmarried or cohabitating, lower-earning, who seldom or never attend religious services, and are younger were less likely to know of great schools, prioritized distance over academics, and switched schools more often. For example, only 27% earning under $40,000 made academics their top reason for choosing their kids’ schools, while 43% earning over $40,000 did. That leads to lots of student disruption and too many low-performing schools, particularly on the North Side.
Parents cannot choose the highest-performing schools if they do not know what they are. Thirty-eight percent of north siders had never heard of Saint Marcus; 34% of south siders had never heard of Reagan. Nearly 50% had no name recognition of terrific options like UCC, LUMIN, and ALBA. If even top schools with waiting lists have less name recognition than your average TikTok star, why are we surprised when parents move away?
Milwaukee Public Schools are their default choice. Ninety percent who picked a traditional MPS school for their oldest child also enrolled their other children in traditional MPS schools. However, only 75% of private-school parents and 55% of charter-school parents had all of their children in choice. Many parents only use choice-school alternatives after trying MPS.
Parents do not want their children to stay in Milwaukee. Only 32% wanted their children to settle down in Milwaukee someday, and only 20% more hoped for Milwaukee County. Black and low-earning parents were especially skeptical. It does no good for our region if we produce talent that buys a plane ticket out the first chance they get. Better schools will keep our families here.

The Report:

Massive student turnover, low academic performance, and distaste for Milwaukee are the consequences of a school system that overwhelms parents,” said Quinton Klabon, IRG Senior Research Director. “Families will continue to leave the city without higher-quality schools and an easy way to discover them.”

“New Trier High School Led On Woke Education. It Should Lead The Way Out”

Mark Glennon

February 28. It’s probably coincidence, but remarkably so.

That date eight years ago marked the beginning of the backlash against school practices and policies that, today, go widely under the label of “DEI” – diversity, equity and inclusion. That was Seminar Day at New Trier High School in north suburban Chicago.

This February 28 marks the culmination of that backlash. It’s the Department of Education’s announced deadline for schools of any kind to put a firm end to DEI.

It’s not, however, the legal aspect of the federal government’s mandate that should matter, important as that is. Instead, willing compliance with the spirit of the new policy is simply the right thing to do, and there are reasons why New Trier should lead the way. Seminar Day pioneered the misguided and divisive approach to “social justice” issues now ridiculed as “woke.” Its critics were right then and their warnings came to pass. America ultimately agreed and rejected wokeness in schools and elsewhere, contributing in no small part to November’s election results.

Seminar Day was a mandatory, all-day event with the stated goal of “understanding today’s struggle for racial civil rights.” But the problem, from its critics’ perspectives, was that the agenda was brazenly one-sided, divisive, and radically that of the political left. Understanding civil rights, according to Seminar Day’s teachings, meant force-fed dogma of propositions that are now mostly rejected, such as all whites are oppressors and all blacks victims, micro-aggressions exist everywhere, America is systemically racist and white supremacists are lurking around every corner.

civics: the political money life cycle

datarepublican (small r)

The true cycle of money and power is this:

Soros (among others) used his wealth to install key politicians.

Once in office, they funneled public funds into propaganda and NGOs designed to manipulate us—conditioning voters to elect even more of their kind.

In turn, these politicians ensured Soros and his allies grew richer. But Soros is now just a fragment of the monstrous machine he helped unleash.

What began as his influence has morphed into a self-sustaining Leviathan—one that thrives on our ignorance.

It is up to us, the people, to wake up and destro

Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud

Jacob Buckman:

This week, I was thrilled to read about the first well-documented case of explicit academic fraud in the artificial intelligence community. I hope that this is the beginning of a trend, and that other researchers will be inspired by their example and follow up by engaging in even more blatant forms of fraud in the future.

Explicit academic fraud is, of course, the natural extension of the sort of mundane, day-to-day fraud that most academics in our community commit on a regular basis. Trying that shiny new algorithm out on a couple dozen seeds, and then only reporting the best few. Running a big hyperparameter sweep on your proposed approach but using the defaults for the baseline. Cherry-picking examples where your model looks good, or cherry-picking whole datasets to test on, where you’ve confirmed your model’s advantage. Making up new problem settings, new datasets, new objectives in order to claim victory on an empty playing field. Proclaiming that your work is a “promising first step” in your introduction, despite being fully aware that nobody will ever build on it. Submitting a paper to a conference because it’s got a decent shot at acceptance and you don’t want the time you spent on it go to waste, even though you’ve since realized that the core ideas aren’t quite correct.

Wisconsin’s public schools are losing students faster than districts are downsizing their staff

Wyatt Eicholz

Statewide, the number of students enrolled in a traditional district-run public school fell to about 791,956 in the 2024-25 school year. The number has been in steady decline since a slight bump in 2013-14 to over 873,500 students, as figure 1 shows. The rate of decline increased after the 2019-20 school year, with a drop of more than 25,000 students

Over nearly the same period, the number of teachers employed in the state has hovered between about 60,000 and 63,000. As figure 2 shows, district-run schools employed 61,652 teachers statewide in 2009-10. That fell by more than 1,600 teachers to 60,003 in 2011-12, but the number then steadily ticked upward to a second peak of 62,398 in 2021-22. For the 2023-24 school year, the latest for which teacher all staff reports are available, there were 61,514 teachers in Wisconsin’s district-run public schools.

Notes on grade inflation and dumbing-down

Grey:

Math competitions used to be uncommon or an excuse to skip class, but are now increasingly high-stakes. This has given rise to tutoring services and coaching in an effort to increase one’s score to advance to higher levels of competition. If anything, the problem is not dumbing-down, but that the existing curriculum–even AP courses and taking calculus in high school–is not good enough anymore. To have any hope of distinguishing oneself requires good placings on difficult competitions. This directly contradicts the common narrative on Twitter that prospective college students are unprepared. In reality, all evidence suggests that today’s incoming freshmen, especially at top colleges, are the most academically prepared and qualified of any generation.

A frequently cited statistic of grade inflation is the rise in average GPAs, suggesting that coursework or grading standards have become easier. However, an alternative explanation is that students are earning higher GPAs because they are smarter and better prepared, thanks to the increasingly competitive and selective admissions process at these institutions:

Racism Litigation at the University of California

ABC7

The father of a Palo Alto teen who garnered national attention for getting rejected by 16 colleges and hired by Google as a software engineer has filed a new lawsuit on Feb. 11 against the University of California and five UC campuses — UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB and UC Davis — as well as the U.S. Department of Education, for racial discrimination.

“What we’re trying to get out of this is a fair treatment for future Asian applicants going forward, including my other kids and my future grandkids,” says Nan Zhong.

His now 19-year-old son, Stanley Zhong, is a co-plaintiff, along with their group called SWORD, Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination, comprised of other students and families who feel Asian Americans are often discriminated against in the college admissions process.

Stanley Zhong had a 4.42 GPA from Gunn High School and 1590 out of 1600 on the SATs. He also founded his own document-signing startup and tutored underserved kids in coding. His college rejections and his employment offer from Google became a lightning rod in the national debate over the college admissions process.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A fiscal crisis is looming for many US cities

John Ronnie Short:

Cities also spend a lot of money on employees, and many large cities are struggling to fund pensions and health benefits for their workforces. As municipal retirees live longer and require more health care, the costs are mounting.

For example, Chicago currently faces a budget deficit of nearly $1 billion, which stems partly from underfunded retirement benefits for nearly 30,000 public employees. The city has $35 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and almost $2 billion in unfunded retiree health benefits. Chicago’s teachers are owed $14 billion in unfunded benefits.

Policy studies have shown for years that politicians tend to underfund retirement and pension benefits for public employees. This approach offloads the real costof providing police, fire protection and education onto future taxpayers.

A first-of-its-kind analysis by Nature reveals which institutions are retraction hotspots.

Richard Van Noorden

Two days before the end of 2021, administrators at Jining First People’s Hospital in Shandong, China, issued a highly unusual report. The hospital announced that it had disciplined some 35 researchers who had been linked to fraud in publications, such as fabricating data. These sanctions were part of a countrywide crackdown motivated by concerns about a flood of sham medical papers emanating from hospitals.

The problem was that some young physicians at hospitals had purchased fake manuscripts from paper mills: companies that churn out fraudulent scientific reports to order. These doctors were under pressure because they were required to publish papers to get jobs or earn promotions, says integrity sleuth Elisabeth Bik in California. Sleuths such as Bik soon began spotting signs of this problem, identifying duplicated images in large numbers of papers. They publicized the issue and a wave of retractions followed.

This surge can now be seen in a first-of-its-kind analysis of institutional retraction rates around the globe over the past decade, for which Nature’s news team used figures supplied by three private research-integrity and analytics firms. Jining First People’s Hospital tops the charts, with more than 5% of its total output from 2014 to 2024 retracted — more than 100 papers (see ‘Highest retraction rates’). That proportion is an order of magnitude higher than China’s retraction rate, and 50 times the global average. Depending on how one counts, the hospital could be the institution with the world’s highest retraction rate.

Notes on Parenting & Tutors

Katie Rophie:

At a curriculum night, my son’s English teacher told the gathered parents that tutors should not be writing papers for students. Maybe I am naive, but I was a little shocked. This was a Brooklyn school, not a place with billionaires taking private jets to St. Barts for the weekend. I knew ChatGPT was an issue, which also came up, but this seemed somehow more corrupt and orchestrated. In the midst of the collegial evening, the teacher’s comment suddenly illuminated, for a moment, the ugly fact that rich people weren’t just buying opportunities for their children but were brazenly cheating.

The practice is hardly uncommon. David Blobaum from the National Test Prep Association told me that he was approached by a parent to write a kid’s college essay and he refused. “Honestly, these parents should think of themselves as hiring a criminal, not a tutor,” he said. I heard about another tutor who did write a college essay for a kid, after a certain amount of moral struggle, figuring that if she didn’t do it someone else would.

By now the caricature of rich parents trying to buy a way into the Ivy League for their children is familiar, but some of what I heard was still startling. A tutor at an otherwise legitimate tutoring business told me that the company sends her “a ninth-grade math homework, and I finish it and send it back without ever even meeting the kid.” Or they send a U.S. history paper to be written in the next three hours.

FAFSA data by school

Quinton Klabon:

Here is a fun weekend project. The federal government puts up FAFSA completion for district, charter, AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS.

We do not have data on how many private high schoolers attend college. This is not that (and college is not the only good goal), but there is some relation.

Wisconsin Governor Priorities: “Inseminated person” instead of “mother”

Cathy Kozlowicz:

The bill recognizes same-sex marriage by making references in the statutes to spouses gender-neutral. The terms “wife,” “mother,” “father” and “husband” were replaced with gender-neutral terms, such as spouse and person.

In one section covering artificial insemination, “the husband of the mother” was changed to “the spouse of the inseminated person.”

RGA Executive Director Sara Craig issued a statement Friday: “Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ latest left-wing push isn’t just out of touch, it’s offensive to mothers. Being a mother is the greatest privilege I will have in my lifetime, and every mother I know feels the same. If Tony Evers can reduce motherhood to an ‘inseminated person’ then our society is lost.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this month to bar transgender student athletes from participating in NCAA women’s sports. On Feb. 21, the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, which oversees most of the state’s high-school athletics programs, changed its policies so only athletes “designated as females at birth” will be allowed to compete in girls’ competitions.

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Governor Evers “year of the kid” starts by erasing “mothers” and “fathers”

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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?

civics: the “first batch of ai civil servants”

Teo summary

China deploys R1 to comprehensively automate their governance. This is probably a bit of a bigger deal than DOGE fights in salt mines.

@layer07_yuxi explains that a lot of compute capacity was locked in 1K A100s-level datacenters, useless for training. All that comes online now.

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Where did the DeepSeek team attend university? Not in the United States.

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Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

“So we doubled the budget and the result is 80% of CPS students are illiterate and innumerate”

Patrick J. Bayer (Duke University – Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)) Peter Q.. Blair (Harvard University – Harvard Graduate School of Education), Kenneth Whaley (University of South Florida):

Tyler Cowen:

I remain happy to provoke my readers:

The United States ranks low among peer countries on the ratio of teacher spending to per capita GDP. Is this (in)efficient? Using a spatial equilibrium model we show that spending on schools is efficient if an increase in school spending funded through local taxes would leave house prices unchanged. By exploiting plausibly exogenous shocks to both school spending and taxes, paired with 25 years of national data on local house prices, we find that an exogenous tax-funded increase in school spending would significantly raise house prices. These findings provide causal evidence that teacher spending in the U.S. is inefficiently low.

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Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Scott Bauer and Ali Swenson:

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?

UW-Madison ranks 12th for a grad program that doesn’t yet exist

Becky Jacobs

The University of Wisconsin-Madison ranks among the nation’s top graduate schools for a doctoral degree the university doesn’t even offer — yet.

The conundrum in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings is likely explained by UW-Madison’s already strong reputation in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, said William Karpus, dean of the university’s graduate school.

Over 100 faculty members conduct research related to ecology and evolution across campus, said Sean Schoville, a professor of entomology. However, the university doesn’t provide a formal graduate degree focused on the topics.

Schoville said he and others at UW-Madison have tried to create a doctoral program focused on these areas for almost five years. They recently received approval from multiple university groups. Next, the proposal is expected to go before the UW system Board of Regents in April.

civics: influence and $pending on the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election

Crawford is benefiting from hefty donations from Democratic philanthropist (billionaire) George Soros; Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker; Gloria Page, the mother of Google co-founder Larry Page; and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Schimel pointed to those donations to say big spending by outside forces is “happening on both sides.”

The only outside group spending large amounts of money on Crawford’s behalf is the liberal A Better Wisconsin Together, which says it has spent $1 million on digital and television ads. In the 2023 state supreme court race, the group spent more than $6 million on behalf of the liberal candidate who won and flipped control of the court after 15 years with conservatives in the majority.

Jeff Wagner:

How do you write a story about Musk spending money to support Schimel without mentioning the $1 million and $500K donations respectively from George Soros and JB Pritzker to the Wisconsin Democratic Party which then made a $2 million donation to Crawford?

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More.

Math couple solves major group theory problem after 20 years.

Kristina Armitage:

Sylow normalizers, like the subgroups they’re built out of, can tell mathematicians a lot about the original group. But McKay hypothesized that this connection was far stronger than anyone had imagined. It wasn’t just that a Sylow normalizer could give insights into a finite group’s overall structure. He asserted that if mathematicians wanted to compute a crucial quantity that would help them characterize their group, they’d just have to look at one of a particular set of Sylow normalizers: The Sylow normalizer would be characterized by the exact same number.

This quantity counts the number of “representations” of a certain type — ways you can rewrite elements of the group using arrays of numbers called matrices. Such a tally might seem arbitrary, but it gives mathematicians a sense of how the group’s elements relate to each other, and it is involved in calculations of other important properties.

NATO Phonetic Alphabet Converter

www

🎯 Struggling to spell your name or email over the phone? Say it using our official NATO phonetic alphabet!

The Predatory Dynamic in Madison Schools

Dave Cieslewicz:

If you ever wonder what people mean when they use the phrase “word salad”, here’s what they mean:

“There is a predatory dynamic of coming into a district like ours and saying that you are going to resolve something as deep-rooted as racialized inequity through a school that pairs young people with professional opportunities,” Madison School Board member Ali Muldrow said in recent Wisconsin State Journal story.

I know. Gives you a headache just reading it. Let me try to translate.

Muldrow is referring to a proposal for a new charter school in Madison that would focus on preparing students for a career in the trades — plumbing, electrical, carpentry, stuff like that. Careers that pay very well. Careers that give people a sense of pride and accomplishment. Careers that are badly needed as folks in those occupations are aging out.

But Muldrow and most of her fellow board members don’t like this idea because they don’t like charter schools. Any of them. Why? Because when a student attends a charter school in the Madison School District the state money follows the student. In other words, she and her colleagues don’t get to use or control that money. I suppose that’s what she means by a “predatory dynamic,”

Or maybe she means that the school proponents are trying to capitalize on and paper over the community’s concern over “deep-seated racialized inequity” by preparing Black kids for a good job. It just puts off the inevitable fight to the finish in the class struggle.

Or, I don’t know, here’s another theory. Maybe she means that by taking kids out of the Madison schools it prevents them from taking advantage of all the resources that address that deep-seated racialized inequity. Never mind that all that obsession with issues of race has resulted in a yawning — and growing — racial achievement gap. Never mind that Black kids aren’t showing up in those welcoming Madison schools at a rate far higher than their white classmates.

Facebook comments.

“The faulty promises of the McKenzie Foundation’s proposed charter school

Leland Pan:

Forward Career and College Academy would likely leave Madison’s neediest students behind, while evading public accountability.”

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?

Meanwhile:

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

notes on taxpayer funding at the US Department of Education

Nat Malkus:

Last Monday, DOGE came for the US Department of Education (ED). Specifically, it came for ED’s research arm, the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), terminating 89 contracts, purportedly valued at $881 million. But how much savings can taxpayers expect from these cuts?

DOGE’s list of the 89 terminated contracts (unsurprisingly) leaked the day after the cuts were announced. DOGE promised their own receipts by Valentine’s Day, but—in true government fashion—posted them on February 17 (more on that later). Impatient, I started chasing down the receipts myself.

DOGE’s list included each contract’s vendor and contract number and contract values—which did sum to $881,228,611. This let me match most of DOGE’s list with ED’s most recent complete contract list; however, the “Contract Values” on DOGE list seldom matched the “Current Contract Value” on ED’s list (which was the only value on ED’s list). Whenever the two values did not match, DOGE’s values were always higher, by anywhere from $100 to $31,053,151.

Unsatisfied, I next matched the full leaked DOGE list to detailed data from USASpending.gov, but I noticed something odd: while the DOGE list’s values often—but not always—matched a USASpending.gov contract value, they did not consistently match the same type of contract value.

Where did the DeepSeek team attend university? Not in the United States.

Ryan Allen:

The news that DeepSeek released an AI large language model (LLM) that rivaled OpenAI shocked the world. The small Chinese firm reportedly achieved this feat at a fraction of the price done by the American counterpart, undercutting the business model with a comparable model that is cheaper and open source.

While there have been quibbles about how exactly the DeepSeek team achieved this breakthrough, I was interested in the people behind the model, particularly where they were educated. One claim that I kept hearing was that they were all educated in China, without returnees from American universities.

It is no secret that Liang Wenfeng, the founder and CEO of DeepSeek, was a graduate of Zhejiang University, receiving both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Engineering from the elite Chinese institution. In building his company, ChinaTalkquoted Liang in an interview:

The team behind the V2 model doesn’t include anyone returning to China from overseas — they are all local. The top 50 experts might not be in China, but perhaps we can train such talents ourselves.

This lack of returnees, or so-called “Sea Turtles” (hǎiguī, 海龟), is fascinating because the trend for years was Chinese students studying in the US and bringing back home innovations. There has been a conception that Chinese universities could not match the US (or other world leaders) in advanced research. The so-called glass ceiling meant that they could achieve a good ranking but could not be among the very elite.

notes on academia, taxpayer funds and meritocracy

Timur Kuran:

All 5 are true: 1) DOGE has scrapped many stupid projects. 2) DOGE has axed many useful academic projects. 3) Universities lost their way, inviting the ongoing massive backlash. 4) The backlash is generally popular. 5) Universities have done little to regain the public’s trust

notes on staffing and the taxpayer funded Milwaukee schools

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.

civics: the taxpayer funded grant industrial complex writ large

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

Aborting another independent Madison Charter School

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

civics: “Washington is a gain of function experiment wrapped in hero’s journeys draped in delusions of grandeur”

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.

growing k-12 staff amidst declining enrollment

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.

Wisconsin Act 10 Property Tax Calculator

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.

Kate Martin, Carmela Guaglianone and Emily Hanford

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.

Curriculum and Literacy Achievement: Steubenville

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

“Changing standards to mask the problem is unacceptable,” Goeben said.

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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 recent bipartisan consensus on declining test scores is concerning.

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.

Bill prohibiting police from lying to children has passed the Virginia Senate

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.

Legislation to Improve Wisconsin k-12 Rigor

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?

Civics: Freedom of speech Litigation

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:

civics: litigation and taxpayer “fees”

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.

Notes on the taxpayer funded “comprehensive center” in Wisconsin/Minnesota

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.

and

Smartphones & Schools

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.

Lawsuit claims schools purchased reading material that hurt children

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Jim Bender & Patrick Mchileran:

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?

Civics: “More than 90% of federal criminal cases end up in plea bargains”

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.

notes on “brokenism”

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.

“Borowski said both Milwaukee Schools and city will be held in contempt if SROs aren’t in schools 10 days from now”

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.

civics: The New York Times is fully committed to developing and implementing internal AI tools

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.

Wisconsin 2025 DPI candidate geography summary – work in progress

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.

Notes on grok 3

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.

an update on Litigation, rule making and lawfare around Wisconsin’s long term disastrous literacy results

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-

Notes on taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI governance (and outcomes)

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

The Questionable Gardner:

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?

Where does the taxpayer money go? Save the Children

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 – 🤔

Human Mistakes vs AI Mistakes

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.

The All-City Spelling Bee champion attributes his success to reading

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.

“There are no consequences for bad behavior anymore …”

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Bruce Sacerdote, Douglas O. Staiger & Michele Tine

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?

How Test Optional Policies in College Admissions Disadvantage High-Achieving Applicants from Disadvantaged Backgrounds

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.

civics: Free Speech and Europe notes

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.

Frederick M. Hess and Jay P Greene:

Notes on redistributed federal taxpayer funds and higher education

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.

civics: “the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions.”

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.

Are PhDs losing their appeal? Why are fewer students enrolling in doctoral programs?

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.

civics: Getting things done – analysis

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

Civil Rights and Redistributed Federal Taxpayer Funds

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.

k-12 tax & $pending climate: Chicago’s debt growth plans

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.

Cronyism and Lying in Milwaukee Public Schools

CBS58:

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

K-12 tax & $pending climate: Madison School District Accounting Accuracy

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.”

k-12 tax & $pending climate: The Deficit & debt spiral explained

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?

notes on Wisconsin Education standards

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

A coaster wagon upgrade

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.”

“Manitoba’s new teacher oversight commissioner also leads Saskatchewan educators’ union”

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.

Wisconsin Act 10 Lawfare and litigation update

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

Sean Stevens & Greg Lukianoff:

Civics: notes on our three part government system

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

“deplatforming”

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.

Reviving the joy and honor of working with your hands will strengthen our nation

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.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate:“unemployment is higher, wages are lower and growth less robust than government statistics suggest”

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.

Governor’s taxpayer funded audit: “Milwaukee Public Schools are not in a position to ensure student success”

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

civics: Unconstitutionality Index 18.5

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

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

A high schooler from Tennessee, Frannie Block reports, graduated with a 3.4 GPA despite having difficulty reading. Now, he is suing his school district.

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

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Chinese GPUs outperform Nvidia chips by nearly tenfold in supercomputer simulations, according to a recent study.

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.

“ai” and values

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

“experts” and Wisconsin k-12 rigor reduction

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

Civics: open data and governance discussion

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.

Civics: more on taxpayer funded censorship

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.”

$pending more Madison taxpayer funds amidst declining achievement

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

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

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Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

commentary on parental school choice and the Wisconsin DPI Superintendent 2025 election (total spending?)

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.”

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Jill Underly and ongoing rigor reduction.

Much more on the taxpayer funded dpi.

Notes on property tax growth.

“achievement” and the well funded Madison school district

Abbey Machtig

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

“education recovery scorecard”

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

——

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]