Vanessa Fuhrmans, Katherine Bindley and Chip Cutter:

It’s hard to overstate how much remote and hybrid work have reshaped the postpandemic labor market. It has enabled moves to lower-cost areas, let working parents better coordinate child care and brought millions of people into the workforce—including those with disabilities. And it made it easier for mothers of young children to stay on the job, helping drive a sharp increase in the number of women working.

Tech-industry workers especially took advantage of the ability to work remotely, flocking from high-cost coast cities to cheaper locales such as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Boise, Idaho. High in demand, many commanded the same pay they made in San Francisco and Seattle. “Work from anywhere” became a favorite recruiting tactic, with some workers being told they’d never need to come back to the office.

Remote work also fueled a digital commerce boom that let online retail giants like Amazon reap record profits, and hire hundreds of thousands of people, many in far-flung places. Over 2020 and 2021, Amazon’s head count roughly doubled to more than 1.6 million employees. Then the company laid off 27,000 workers starting in late 2022.

Anand Sanwal:

In the grand theater of American higher education, few performances are as anticipated—or as controversial—as the annual unveiling of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. 

Like a high-stakes beauty pageant for academia, these rankings have become a cultural touchstone, influencing the decisions of countless students, parents, and even the very institutions they aim to evaluate. 

But beneath the glossy veneer of numerical precision lies a system rife with flaws, manipulations and unintended consequences.

I’ll propose a better way below but first, why are the US News Best Colleges rankings so useless?

Graham Hillard:

Are the men and women who staff America’s colleges rugged individualists determined to swat away the overweening hand of the state? Or are they simply greedy? An ongoing dispute over attendance-related recordkeeping and compliance has brought the question newly to the fore.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed last month, the conflict began when the federal Department of Education released proposed guidance intended to “clarify, update, and consolidate certain provisions that apply to distance education.” Nestled among the new rules was a requirement that universities take and report student attendance in virtual classes, lest (to borrow IHE’s paraphrase) “students drop out of online courses while the institution continues to collect federal Title IV financial aid funds.”

The federal government wishes not to pay colleges to educate students who no longer exist.In describing its proposal, the education department noted that “institutions can often easily determine when students stop attending a distance education course.” Because “institutional systems are already monitoring when students submit assignments,” noting that an enrollee has failed to do so in a timely manner is typically as simple as consulting one’s learning-management software (e.g., Blackboard).

As standard practice dictates, the feds conceded that “the proposed regulatory change would add a burden for institutions.” Nevertheless, this hardship was expected to be minimal:

Kevin McAllister:

Prestigious private colleges and universities occupy the upper tier of the list, with Stanford University placing No. 2 and Princeton University, which topped the overall rankings, coming in at No. 3. In total, private universities claimed 36 of the top 50 spots on the salary list.

Beyond MIT, other colleges with robust STEM programs also finished strong: Georgia Tech landed fourth, the California Institute of Technology sixth and Harvey Mudd College seventh. The Missouri University of Science and Technology, the Milwaukee School of Engineering and Michigan Technological University also landed in the top 15.

Dan Lennington:

Enrollment figures from @UWMadison show racially discriminatory admission policy WAS hurting Asian, white, & int’l students. First, consider UW’s targets: black admission rate ballooned to over 63%, exceeding overall admit rate.

Will Flanders:

Admitting students to college based on merit shouldn’t be controversial. New data from UW Madison make it clear that wasn’t happening prior to SCOTUS decision last year. In some universities, Asian students have benefitted. Here, Asian & white students benefit.

Matt Shaver:

Fascinating new data on the severity of chronic absenteeism in MN schools from MDE.

Interesting that while the number of chronically absent students doubled from 18/19 to 21/22 the slices of absenteeism have been pretty stable.

How does this compare to other states?

Bill Whitaker:

problem as this is, it’s also not a whodunit. We know who’s responsible. It’s the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel that are based in Mexico. They dominate and control the entire global fentanyl supply chain, starting in China, going to Mexico, coming into the United States.

Milgram told us this crisis began 10 years ago… when the cartels started to wrestle control of the supply chain from China and began making fentanyl in clandestine labs in Mexico.

Bill Whitaker: So these two drug cartels from our neighbor, from Mexico, are responsible for almost 70,000 American deaths a year?

Anne Milgram: Yes.

Chicago Tribune:

Johnson has demanded that CPS — already the nation’s largest junk-bond issuer, paying more than $800 million annually just to service its mountain of ongoing debt — add another $300 million in high-cost debt to cover teacher raises and to make a $175 million pension payment whose responsibility has ping-ponged in recent years between the city government and CPS. A new schools boss hired specifically to strike a deal with a militant and unreasonable union presumably would need to add far more than $300 million to the maxed-out CPS credit card in order to buy labor peace.

The strategy pursued by the unholy alliance of Johnson and CTU is becoming clearer by the day. Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders, all Democrats and supporters of organized labor, have refused the Johnson-CTU demands for hundreds of millions more in state funds to finance CTU’s membership growth. They’ve done so despite CTU president Stacy Davis Gates’ racially charged attacks on them when she didn’t get what she wanted from Springfield.

So now Johnson and Davis Gates’ seeming gambit is to deliberately sink CPS into insolvency so that the state has “no choice” but to bail out Chicago’s schools, nearly 40% of which are enrolled with half or fewer of the students they were designed to serve. That’s unconscionable, and is why this school board has a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers to continue to display the courage it’s shown so far. A new CEO piling more debt on CPS only will make the inevitable job of right-sizing this district all the more painful.

More.

Chicago Public Schools is in dire financial straits, yet Chicago Teachers Union blocks closing of near-empty, failing schools. – Wirepoints

More than two years ago, we sounded the alarm on this issue by highlighting CPS’ 20 most empty schools. Like Douglass High School, capacity 912, with just 35 students enrolled. Or Austin High School, capacity 1,776, with just 172 students enrolled. The kicker? Not a single kid in either of those schools could read at grade level based on 2023 testing.

The problem is far bigger than those 20 schools. CPS has more than 163 schools – about one-third of the district’s traditional schools – that are less than half full. 

Below we lay out the 100 most empty traditional schools in Chicago. This is not Martinez’s list – that has not been released – but these schools certainly do deserve closure/consolidation.

Will Flanders & Shannon Whitworth:

In a recent op-ed published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona articulated a series of criticisms about school choice in Wisconsin, opting instead to defend a failed status quo of one-size-fits-all education. His arguments lean heavily on national talking points commonly used by opponents of school choice, revealing a significant misunderstanding of the realities of Wisconsin’s education landscape, including both school choice options and public education.

Recent polling shows that 68% of Wisconsin voters support school choice, including 47% of Democrats and 69% of independents. Furthermore, the liberal-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a legal challenge to the program, and Gov. Tony Evers agreed to direct more funds towards the program in the last state budget.

Here’s a closer look at the misconceptions in the Secretary’s column and why they warrant reconsideration. His first claim is that Wisconsin schools are underfunded. However, data from the Department of Education —under Cardona’s own administration—paints a different picture. Wisconsin’s spending on education is among the highest in its history. The reality is that we are spending more on education per student in Wisconsin today than we were in 2000—and have more than doubled education spending over the past fifty years after adjusting for inflation, and ranks among the top half of states in spending.

More:

Please stop using 2010 as the magic year that all education spending must be compared to. 2010 is the highest level of spending in WI history. Advocates for more spending point you there for a reason. We are spending more today than at almost any other point.

And.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Frank Newport and Joy Wilke:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the U.S. general fertility rate reached an all-time low in 2011, at 63.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The fertility rate has dropped 11% from 1990, when there were 70.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44.

The finding from Gallup’s Aug. 22-31 survey suggests that the changes in the U.S. birthrate in the last few decades apparently are not related to a change in Americans’ underlying attitudes toward children. It may be that fewer women are having children or that women, on average, are having fewer children, but the data show that the general interest in having children has remained constant — and high.

Younger Americans Want Children; Those With Kids Would Repeat Decision

More than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 40 have children, and another 40% do not currently, but hope to have children someday. Only six percent of Americans aged 18 to 40 do not have, and do not want to have, children.

Choose life.

Barry Sautman

What drew you to ethnic minority issues in China?

I’d been to Xinjiang perhaps three or four times many years ago. I was concentrating on a particular subject, which was preferential policies. At that time I was studying them broadly, going to different minority areas including Tibet, Xinjiang, Guizhou, Sichuan, Inner Mongolia. That was in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s.

From that I got interested in ethnic minority policies more generally because there was a debate in China about them.

Some said preferential policies and ethnic policies were not broad enough and they weren’t directed sufficiently to closing the socioeconomic gaps that existed between Han people and minority people.

The other side was people who said that basically ethnic regional autonomy had created a vested interest on the part of minority officials particularly.

Www

Near the end of the period, shortly before the bell rang, the door opened and Granny sauntered in with her usual Granny Holloway attitude. “How did they do?,” she asked. “Marvelous,” said Mrs. Abels. “They were completely in my hands.”
Granny then faced us and said “And that, my students, is how a dictator takes over a nation. Not with guns or tanks or laws or mandates. They do it using false promises and gifts”
I can’t remember a lesson all through 12 years of public school that made such an impression on me and has stayed with me.

Jay Greene:

Foreign students can make important contributions to every college campus but there are downsides as well. My alma mater the University of Pennsylvania is now 25% international and over 35% if you include the optional practical training programs. Should we reserve more spots for American citizens for our best universities and our medical school residency programs. Does turning American universities into global educational centers undermine its critical function to inculcate American values in our future American elite. 

Austin Berg:

NEW: Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates is calling attention to Chicago Public Schools borrowing during Pedro Martinez’s tenure as CFO.

But Jill Jaworski, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hand-picked CFO, served as a financial advisor on $7.6B in CPS borrowing across 19 deals from 2011-2019. You can find the full list of deals in the table below.

So why is Gates calling attention to borrowing under Martinez, but not Jaworski?

Because she’s trying to draw attention away from her reckless demand for the schools to issue a $300M payday loan to pay for the union’s contract demands. It would cost $700M+ over the life of the deal.

The misdirection isn’t working.

Vibhuti Agarwal:

Earlier this year, hundreds of students were bused in for an overnight stay at the Nature Valley Resort, a mid-budget hotel just outside India’s capital.

There wasn’t much partying or communing with nature. Instead, the students pored over an exam paper that they had each paid about $15,000 to $20,000 to have an advance peek at.

Now, many of the people who planned and hosted that cheating holiday have been arrested. Police have filed a 900-page indictment against at least half a dozen suspects—including a police officer with advance access to the exam paper—for gaming an exam to recruit thousands of officers.

India is facing an epidemic of cheating in college-entrance and job-recruitment exams, as the sheer number of people competing for a tiny pool of opportunities creates a lucrative opportunity for people to help students gain an advantage, often at an enormous cost to their families.

John Kass:

The mayor of Chicago would rather protect the violent over his citizens. He’d rather embrace repeat gang offenders than the people who need his protection.  As the corrupt corporate media becomes anxious and defensive about Johnson’s self-destructive reasoning, like the clownish leftist fools mocked by Matt Walsh in “Am I a Racist?” a great city is dying.

Now Johnson’s approval rating is an abysmal 27 percent makes him the most unpopular mayor of a Democrat Convention city in decades.

He has lost allies in the Chicago City Council by not paying attention to what is important: The people of his city. They want to be safe as possible. But he wants to get rid of the ShotSpotter technology that helps police make quick arrests. Johnson apparently doesn’t like that and his political inexperience and buffoonery allowed the City Council to organize against him.

And obviously the schools don’t educate the children. They can’t even read or do math at grade level, a national disgrace, but now more panic attack news for the mayor: News reports that the schoolteachers were told to give passing grades to illegal migrant children who are squeezing the native born out of classrooms.

Violent crime on the increase—not decreasing as the liars of corporate media keep prattling on about. Crime is up 40 percent over 2019 levels. And we already know that Chicago is the murder capital of America.

Some of you may have noticed something about this column written by a longtime Chicago newspaper man. I’ve put in links to Wirepoints.org and the Illinois Policy Institute, but not the Chicago Sun Times or my old paper the Tribune. Why not? The Trib went woke and broke and neither paper covers crime as they used to.

Tyler Cowen Summary:

Taylor would owe 25% tax on this gain or between 50-100M which would be greater than her additional earnings of 20M.

Property taxes where assessed values are aggressively increased is a close to home, small version of the crazy unrealized capital gains tax scheme.

Thea Lim:

But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.” 

Not-job, or whatever name you prefer—“quitting time,” “off duty,” “downtime”—is where we restore ourselves from a mere jelly, precisely by using our internal meter to determine the criteria for success or failure. Find the best route home—not the one that optimizes cost per minute but the one that offers time enough to hear an album from start to finish. Plant a window garden, and if the plants are half dead, try again. My brother-in-law found a toy loom in his neighbour’s garbage, and nightly he weaves tiny technicolour rugs. We do these activities for the sake of doing them, and their value can’t be arrived at through an outside, top-down measure. It would be nonsensical to treat them as comparable and rank them from one to five. We can assess them only by privately and carefully attending to what they contain and, on our own, concluding their merit. 

And so artmaking—the cultural industries—occupies the middle of an uneasy Venn diagram. First, the value of an artwork is internal—how well does it fulfill the vision that inspired it? Second, a piece of art is its own end. Third, a piece of art is, by definition, rare, one of a kind, nonfungible.

www

All too often whole school approaches to literacy are bolt-ons or blanket strategies. These are implemented with the best of intentions, but lack the nuance needed to meet subject, phase or student needs. Often these are linked to an approach that expects the English department to teach literacy. 

In my talk at ResearchEd, and here, I’m going to talk about why effective literacy isn’t just delivered by English teachers. And posing the question- how can we ‘do literacy’ better?

Effective literacy considers three domains; reading, writing and spoken language. These three domains have common sets of knowledge and skills, which overlap, interact and support one another (Breadmore et al., 2019). The three domains of literacy benefit from lots of instruction, lots of practice and lots offeedback. 

It’s unlikely that the instruction, practice and feedback can be provided in English lessons, literacy lessons, or interventions alone. One solution to this, is to equip all of our teachers to contribute to pupils’ literacy development through consistently high quality literacy instruction. 

Danny Westneat:

That’s a start but would mean more cuts elsewhere. Nobody is talking about this, but buried in a budget presentation recently was the fact that each 1% of salary reduction across the district produces $7 million in savings. So to avoid closing any schools (which was estimated to save about $25 million to $30 million), the school workforce, including administrators, could take a 4% salary cut.

If you were a teacher or principal, would you take 4% less to save your own school?

I don’t put this idea out there lightly — I’m the son of two teachers — or without bitter experience. In the last big recession, after the Seattle P-I shut down, my own union was asked to freeze our pensions. We agreed to the unthinkable, on the thought that it was preferable to have at least one daily newspaper left standing in Seattle. And for us to have jobs at all.

That schools labor contract didn’t pencil from the day it was signed. Going back on it a bit to forestall a spiraling crisis in Seattle public education ought to at least be on the table. Plus it’s easier to reverse, if the state ponies up more money, than emptying 20 schools.

MJ Koch:

But in February, she was fired. Unable to find another teaching job, she is suing the school, its trustees, and its two top officials, Head of School Felicia Wilks and Director of Teaching and Learning Eric Zahler. In the lawsuit, filed earlier this month in New York State Supreme Court, Protopappas and her attorney, Sean Dweck, claim she was the victim of “employment discrimination based upon age, race/national origin” and “retaliation after lodging complaints about the discriminatory practices at the school.” What’s more, they argue, after a student took issue with the way Protopappas, 62, conducted a class, Spence deprived her of the due process that would have allowed her to defend herself.

“I never thought that I would pay such a high price for practicing and teaching the skill of free and responsible expression and independence of mind at a school that I picked for its open-mindedness twenty-five years ago,” Protopappas told me. “I have done nothing but serve this school.”

Protopappas’s firing stems from a May 2023 incident that took place in her Advanced French class, which was being taken by eight Spence seniors. Out of the blue, according to the complaint, one student asked, “Why did France ban the hijab?”

Anna Stokke:

And I think this will be of interest to listeners no matter where you live. For example, they adopted structured literacy programs shortly after learning about the outcomes of the Right to Read reports from other regions. This initiative recently earned them a national award from Dyslexia Canada. Now, as listeners know, I love discussing math and Evergreen has also taken steps to address low math scores, so stay tuned to hear all about that.

 

Scott and I also touch on broader pedagogical narratives, the role of schools in  society, and the importance of setting high expectations for students. We wrap up by discussing the significant progress Evergreen has made in early literacy instruction. A key takeaway from this episode is that strong leadership and a commitment to addressing weaknesses can significantly impact student learning.

Walter Kirn:

The “science of”

That’s disinformation deluxe right there

Shai Goldman:

An unexpected realization dawned on me toward the end of my first semester at Columbia University. For months, I had been noticing certain oddities in seminar discussions, especially in my core literature class. Sporadically, a fellow student would make a stray, weird comment—confusing one central character with another, or misunderstanding key moments in the plot. They might mistake Hector for Agamemnon, or casually forget that Dulcinea del Toboso was of less noble lineage than Don Quixote claimed. These comments would be followed by awkward pauses, before the discussion resumed as normal.

In some classes, professors started having us read key passages of the text together, either aloud or during quiet in-class reading time. I joined them, at first imagining that a second read was a deeper read. Asked to analyze together, I might notice that my group partner had no understanding of Descartes’ ontological argument. I tried to ignore it, so as not to seem unkind.

As our final exam neared, my classmates’ study habits came into sharp relief: They seemed to be learning the material from scratch, scrambling to flip through entire swaths of the Western literary canon in a single week. It was then that I understood that, for the past few months, I had been participating in a show class, in which I was one of the only students who actually bothered to read any of the books. Apparently, the opportunity to explore the supposedly foundational texts of Western civilization didn’t matter as deeply to my peers as I had expected.

Ronald Dworkin:

The changing work environment in which many doctors practice medicine leads to such moments of uncertainty—and all but guarantees that they will occur more frequently. As more doctors work for large companies, they have bosses they must answer to. Rules for how to practice medicine have multiplied exponentially, and their bureaucratic enforcement makes doctors afraid to violate them. With science forming the bulk of their medical and post-graduate education, doctors also feel bewildered when faced with questions that touch on the moral, the political, and the philosophical.  

Wyatt Eicholz:

According to the Tax Policy Center, the average for all states for combined state and local direct general government expenditures was $11,087 per capita in 2021.ⁱⁱⁱ Wisconsin spent $10,340, less than the U.S. average and, again, less than the average of $10,527 for the Great Lakes states.

Looking again at combined state and local expenditures, the average of all states without income taxes is $11,123 compared to Wisconsin at $10,340. In this comparison, only Alaska and Wyoming spend more, an average of $17,947. In this comparison, South Dakota joins New Hampshire, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Nevada as states that spend less, an average of $9,173.

Sylvia Snowden:

Since 2022, nearly 50,000 migrants have been bused to Chicago from the Texas border. While not all of these new arrivals have opted to stay in Chicago, many who have chosen to make the city their new home have been resettled in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Now, WGN News can exclusively report that several Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teachers who work in these communities say they were told by school administrators to give migrant students passing grades last school year.

Kendall Keys:

“MPS cannot continue to give administrators big raises while at the same time laying off teachers,” Beverly Hamilton-Williams said. 

The proposed budget the school board approved this summer cut 149 teacher jobs. Still, interim superintendent Eduardo Galvan penned $200,000 salary adjustments for four administrators under an agenda item.

The salary increases would have affected Chief of Staff Paulette Chambers, Interim Chief School Administration Officer Michael Harris, Chief Human Resources Officer Adria Maddaleni and Chief Academic Officer Jennifer Mims-Howell.

The recommended adjustments were crossed off before Tuesday’s meeting started. 

“My constituents in the seventh district let me have it,” MPS school board director Henry Leonard said.

Wall Street Journal:

“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government,” Mr. Trump said in his speech to the Economic Club of New York.

He added that “as a first order of business, this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months. This will save trillions of dollars. Trillions.” That’s typical Trump hyperbole, but there’s no doubt a huge amount that could be saved merely by fixing loopholes in programs that invite fraud.

The government paid tens of billions in fraudulent unemployment benefits and Paycheck Protection grants during the pandemic. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a California prison inmate allegedly claimed more than $550 million in Covid-era Employee Retention Tax Credits. The ERTC is one of the great Beltway boondoggles and will continue to add to the deficit with dubious payouts.

But there are countless other programs that run on autopilot with little evidence that they yield any results. Does anyone think federal job training works? Or the Jobs Corps? Or for that matter, Pentagon procurement?

Kimberly Wethal 

“Only in government would you witness a 6,000 person staffing increase in an organization with no new customers,” Steffen said in a statement. “If the UW system wants the Legislature and taxpayers to take their massive $855 million budget increase seriously, they’ll need to provide much more than flowery talking points.”

Sarah Fields:

For some, it is difficult to see the text on the slides. Here is the link to the article by Children’s Health Defense and @RobertfKennedJr.

1. childrenshealthdefense.org/child-health-t…
2. childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/upl…

And the second link with the full slide show.

More.

I read the article linked. The slides are NOT the summary of CDC in house researcher Thomas Verstraeten from 1999, (though he did find problems.) The slides summarise several other studies done by who RFK calls independent experts.
It’s best to be completely factual.

Mallika Seshadri:

Ten Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) community schools will be given an opportunity to pilot new approaches to assessments in the 2025-26 academic year. 

And once the schools adopt alternative assessments, they won’t have to participate in standardized tests, other than those mandated by state and federal governments, the district school board decided in a 4-3 vote on Tuesday. 

The policy, which comes as part of the Supporting Meaningful Teaching and Learning in the LAUSD Community Schools Initiative, was authored by LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg and board members Rocio Rivas and Kelly Gonez. 

Goldberg said that over the past several decades, corporate entities have turned education’s focus away from cultivating a love for learning — and toward test taking, which she believes has become the “be-all and judge-all of schools.” 

She emphasized that multiple choice, standardized assessments are not the only way to gauge students’ learning. 

Anna North:

Even now, according to a new report released this week by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research group at Arizona State University that has studied the impact of Covid on education since 2020, the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic. 

The report — the group’s third annual analysis of the “state of the American student” — combines test scores and academic research with parent interviews to paint a picture of the challenges facing public schools and the families they serve. That picture is sobering: In spring 2023, just 56 percent of American fourth-graders were performing on grade level in math, down from 69 percent in 2019, according to just one example of test score data cited in the report. 

Declines in reading were less stark but still concerning, and concentrated in earlier grades, with 65 percent of third-graders performing on grade level, compared with 72 percent in 2019. Recovery in reading has also been slower, with some researchers finding essentially no rebound since students returned to the classroom.

The report mirrors what many teachers say they are seeing in their classrooms, as some sound the alarm publicly about kids who they say can’t write a sentence or pay attention to a three-minute video.

Claire Reid

In collaboration with research partners College Pulse and Statista, WSJ determined the nation’s top 500 colleges and universities. Rankings were based on numerous factors, including student outcomes and graduate salaries, career preparation, learning facilities and opportunities, and multiple diversity measures.

WSJ’s salaries rankings are based on salary impact — the extent to which a college boosts its graduates’ salaries beyond what they would be expected to earn regardless of which college they attended — and how long it takes to pay back attending.

Dan Lennington:

This woman’s statement here (about classifications) is 100% correct, AND it demonstrates the harm, irrationality & unconstitutionality of our laws. Biden-Harris Admin says that only certain racial groups are “disadvantaged” & worthy of “priority” or “preference.” Everyone from the Middle East is “white” according to federal law. This includes Gazans, Israelis, Egyptians, Moroccans, Iranians, Saudis, & Turks. The Biden-Harris Admin’s discrimination also targets Asians, calling them “overrepresented,” which is the subject of our latest lawsuit.
The answer to this outrageous policy is not to include new groups as “disadvantaged” or “marginalized,” but to treat all people as individuals & not as members of groups. That’s stereotyping and bigotry.

Associated Press:

In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world. 

The National Council of Teachers of English acknowledged the shift in a 2022 statement on media education, saying: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” 

The idea is not to remove books but to teach media literacy and add other texts that feel relevant to students, said Seth French, one of the statement’s co-authors. In the English class he taught before becoming a dean last year at Bentonville High School in Arkansas, students engaged with plays, poetry and articles but read just one book together as a class.

“At the end of the day, a lot of our students are not interested in some of these texts that they didn’t have a choice in,” he said.

The emphasis on shorter, digital texts does not sit well with everyone.

Jean Mackenzie and Leehyun Choi

Last Saturday, a Telegram message popped up on Heejin’s phone from an anonymous sender. “Your pictures and personal information have been leaked. Let’s discuss.”

As the university student entered the chatroom to read the message, she received a photo of herself taken a few years ago while she was still at school. It was followed by a second image using the same photo, only this one was sexually explicit, and fake.

Terrified, Heejin, which is not her real name, did not respond, but the images kept coming. In all of them, her face had been attached to a body engaged in a sex act, using sophisticated deepfake technology.

Deepfakes, the majority of which combine a real person’s face with a fake, sexually explicit body, are increasingly being generated using artificial intelligence.

Wall Street Journal:

CBO’s update for August, out Tuesday, says revenues in the first 11 months of fiscal 2024 were running 11% above a year ago. Total receipts were $4.4 trillion, including $2.2 trillion in individual income taxes (up 11%), $1.6 trillion in payroll taxes (up 6%), and $420 billion in corporate income taxes (up 29%). That kind of growth should push the budget toward balance.

Yet outlays so far this year were $6.3 trillion, up 7% once CBO excludes the Education Department’s “2023 savings” after President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness lost in court. Social Security benefits were $1.3 trillion, up 8% with cost-of-living adjustments and new enrollees. Medicare was $847 billion, up 10% after new beneficiaries and higher service costs.

Net interest on the public debt was $870 billion, up 35% thanks to higher borrowing rates. That exceeded military spending of $753 billion. Pentagon spending was up 7%, nowhere near enough to match the rising global threats facing the U.S.

The end of Covid paid fiscal dividends. Medicaid spending of $561 billion was down 1%, as those who no longer qualify were disenrolled. Other savings included $51 billion “attributable in part to the IRS’s moratorium on processing claims for the Employee Retention Tax Credit,” as well as $24 billion in decreased food assistance.

Melissa Korn:

Diversity is down at some of the nation’s most selective colleges this fall.

The share of Black students entering Amherst College fell to 3%, from 11% last school year. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where students could identify themselves racially in more than one category, the percentage dropped to 7.8% from 10.5%. And at Brown University, the share of first-year domestic students who are Black fell to 9%, from 15%.

The Wall Street Journal examined first-year classes at more than 20 colleges to see how class makeup is starting to change after last summer’s Supreme Court ruling barring schools from explicitly considering race in their admissions decisions. While some schools reported steady numbers, several posted sharp declines among racial minorities, including Black students in particular.

Leaders of those institutions, a group that includes Washington University in St. Louis and some Ivy League schools, are now trying to figure out why their numbers shook out the way they did. They argue that diversity helps all students encounter new ideas and prepares them to succeed in a multicultural society. They also say previous growth didn’t come at the cost of academic talent.

Chavie Lieber:

Kayleigh Sloan’s students are years from drinking coffee. But every day, when the first and second-graders burst into class, they get a taste of cafe culture: Sloan has meticulously renovated the room to channel a 1970s coffee shop.

Her classroom in Northern Idaho is now bathed in brown, cream and beige, for a “homey, cozy feeling,” as the 27-year-old teacher puts it. Thrifted bohemian rugs, groovy flower pillows, wicker baskets and a mod green armchair round out the ambience.

“I have been in a boring classroom where you can’t wait to leave,” she says, “but a decorated classroom that’s outside the norm is fun and inspiring.” And, “It can affect the way they learn.”

Teachers have long poured energy into enhancing their learning spaces. But now, some are crafting spaces that could grace Architectural Digest.

Ling Xin:

Award-winning Japanese mathematician Kenji Fukaya has left Stony Brook University in the US to join China’s Tsinghua University as a full-time professor.

Fukaya, previously a permanent member of the Simons Centre for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook, delivered his first lecture at Tsinghua on September 11, according to the university’s Yau Mathematical Sciences Centre.

Daniel Feldman:

Francesca Block

Another microschool owner, Shiren Rattigan, referring to the absenteeism, low pay, and culture wars in public schools, told me, “We see all these different things in societies and how it comes into the school. We’re so done with it.”

“Teachers are really wanting a space where they can express themselves,” added Rattigan, whose company, Colossal Academy, operates four microschools in the Sunshine State. “And in Florida, it’s really about being able to run a sustainable business that can be out of the red in three years, so you can make a good living for yourself doing your calling.” 

The four microschool owners and handful of microschool teachers I spoke to told me parents like the fact they can be more involved in their children’s education. “Families want to understand what’s going on,” Rattigan said. “They might not understand all the education stuff, but they want to be a part of the education of their child.” 

Corrinne Hess:

Bookmobiles. Online mental health. Reading coaches. Robots. Therapy dogs. 

These are all things Wisconsin school districts have been able to bring to students because of the $2.4 billion in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funding.

ESSER dollars were meant to help students make up for learning loss brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether that’s been accomplished is hard to measure. But there’s no question the millions of dollars that went to schools over the last three years provided educators with an opportunity to hire staff and create programs they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

Benj Edwards:

“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. “We’re going to have supervision,” he continued. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.”

Matt Taibbi:

The issue wasn’t the size of the award, but rather what that money funded. GDI puts out a product called a “Dynamic Exclusion List” — a blacklist— designed to help firms like Google “eliminate digital advertising as a revenue source” for disfavored outlets. Nearly all GDI’s blacklisted outlets were conservative, while NPR (rated “neutral, fact-based content”) and The Atlantic (a perfect 100/100) topped trust lists.

In efforts to investigate GEC, Kaminsky and I ran into the same problem: almost no other records of GEC contractors were public. An April 2020 audit of GEC by the State Department Inspector General showed a list of 39 agency contractors. As noted here before, 36 were redacted. If GEC was funding one contractor like GDI that impacted domestic news in defiance of State’s explicit legal mandate to keep its eyes overseas, how many other such contractors were there? What mischief was under these black boxes?

…..

For that reason, I raised an eyebrow at the new Committee report, which contains an entry about GEC briefing employees at Zoom. “Zoom staff asked about ‘lists’ that could be shared around ‘malign actors,’” the Committee wrote, “to which the GEC recommended the GDI and the Hamilton 2.0 dashboard”:

Daniel Libit:

NEWS: I’ve filed a public records lawsuit against @UofIllinois for its refusal to provide communications its chancellor exchanged with other @BigTen chancellors and presidents via conference’s BoardVantage portal.

Wall Street Journal:

As political attacks on the Supreme Court become more heated, the institution could use more defenders. Most of the press and the professoriate are hostile. So it’s welcome that a leading member of the appellate bar is speaking up to defend the Court and urging his colleagues to do the same.

“I believe that the criticisms of the Court’s legitimacy are unfounded,” said Kannon Shanmugam in a notable speech Monday at Duke Law School. “But more than that, I believe that attacks on the Court’s legitimacy are dangerous, undermining public confidence in the Court and imperiling the rule of law.”

Tyler Cowen:

We, the undersigned, wish to express our deep concern about the ongoing attacks by Big Tech companies and their allies against Brazil’s digital sovereignty. The Brazilian judiciary’s dispute with Elon Musk is just the latest example of a broader effort to restrict the ability of sovereign nations to define a digital development agenda free from the control of mega-corporations based in the United States. At the end of August, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court banned the X platform from Brazilian cyberspace for failing to comply with court decisions that required the suspension of accounts that instigated right-wing extremists to participate in riots and occupy the Legislative, Judicial, and Governmental palaces on January 8, 2023. Subsequently, President Lula da Silva made clear the Brazilian government’s intention to seek digital independence: to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign entities for data, AI capabilities, and digital infrastructure, as well as to promote the development of local technological ecosystems. In line with these objectives, the Brazilian state also intends to force Big Tech to pay fair taxes, comply with local laws, and be held accountable for the social externalities of their business models, which often promote violence and inequality.

Signed by Acemoglu, Zucman, Varoufakis, Cory Doctorow, Morozov, Mazzucato, Piketty, and many others.  Somehow no one is talking about this petition and its embrace of censorship?

———

Civics: an update on taxpayer funded censorship

Graham Hillard:

Earlier this year, the Martin Center’s Ashlynn Warta wrote convincingly that faculty opposition to academic cuts at UNC Greensboro was best understood as an act of self-preservation. We stand by that analysis. Nevertheless, the Martin Center has since learned that the cuts in question may well have been unethical in part. If that is the case, UNCG should reconsider whether all of its announced retrenchments are indeed in students’ and taxpayers’ best interests.

Among the motives governing program retrenchments were concerns that professors were holding students to too high a standard.As the Chronicle of Higher Education recalled in its own investigative feature last month, UNCG’s “academic-portfolio review” (APR) was conceived in late 2022 as a collaboration between university administrators and the consulting firm RPK Group. Intended to rescue the institution’s finances in the wake of a 10-percent enrollment decline since 2017, the APR took place alongside attempts to outsource custodial operations, right-size the secretarial pool, and merge redundant campus-police processes.

Yet, predictably, cuts with the potential to affect faculty assignments received the most pushback. In January of this year, the UNCG faculty senate voted to censure both Chancellor Frank Gilliam and then-Provost Debbie Storrs, asserting that the pair had “not initiat[ed] consultation with the Senate at the start of the APR process [or provided] a clear rationale of the choice of program closures.” When, on February 1, Gilliam announced his approval of 20 program discontinuations proposed by Storrs, the faculty responded with a vote of “no confidence” in the latter. (Storrs resigned in April, citing health reasons.)

John Sailer:

1/ Harvard and MIT ended mandatory DEI statements for hiring faculty. Yet a mirror image of the policy is gaining traction in federal grant applications.

The NIH, perhaps most notably, has begun rolling out mandatory “Plans for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives.”

Greg Semenza:

A Nobel prize-winning genetics researcher has retracted two more papers, bringing his total to 13.

Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”

Since pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis and others began using PubPeer to point out potential duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s work in 2019, the researcher has retracted 12 papers. A previous retraction from 2011 for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori – who with 31 retractions sits at No. 25 on our leaderboard – brings the total to 13.

William McGurn:

Presidential debates typically don’t determine the outcomes of elections, notwithstanding the large television audiences they draw and the dramatic moments they produce. But Tuesday night’s dustup between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris may be different.

Press failure has inflated it into the seminal event of the Trump-Harris race. Because reporters haven’t insisted that Ms. Harris answer basic questions, the debate, moderated by ABC News, may provide the only moment in the 2024 election when Americans get to see how Ms. Harris performs under pressure.

This failure would be appalling at any time, but the circumstances of Ms. Harris’s campaign turn simple media bias into journalistic malpractice. The vice president secured the top slot on the Democratic ticket without having to contest a single primary—and therefore without having to lay out and defend her record. This leaves her largely unknown to American voters, a situation Ms. Harris is now exploiting to reinvent herself as a moderate challenger rather than a woke incumbent.

In addition, Ms. Harris is a mother lode of unanswered questions on most of the issues that once defined her. This includes her previous support for everything from defunding the police and banning plastic straws to getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and starting from “scratch,” stances she now apparently disavows.

Duncan Agnew:

“As the district’s financial adviser, I cannot stress enough the magnitude of the financial challenges facing this district. Status quo will lead the district into either financial or academic bankruptcy,” said financial consultant Robert Grossi.

“I’ve been appointed twice by the Illinois State Board of Education in my career to oversee school districts that have been taken over by the state due to fiscal insolvency. Unless decisions are made that are bold and immediate, it is my assessment that the district is heading in that direction.”

Grossi was referring to the imminent risk, if the status quo continues, of the state taking over the district, which happens periodically with Illinois school districts that repeatedly fail to pay their bills.

The district’s spending over the last several years, which has gone up by an average of 9.75% per year since the 2021 fiscal year, was the elephant in the room. Cash on hand for District 65 was at $90 million to start this year, but Grossi and Chief Financial Officer Tamara Mitchell are projecting that number to fall to $54.96 million by the end of the year. That means the district is expecting to have 72 days’ worth of reserve funds when the 2024-25 year wraps up.

More.

www

We will run a two-day conference on remote work, including hybrid arrangements that involve a mix of onsite and offsite work. The conference is open to papers on remote-work measurement, the drivers of remote work, managing remote and hybrid workforces, performance outcomes with remote work, and the implications of remote work for workers, organizations, and society.

Minnesota parents alliance:

Everyone should listen to this Rochester Public Schools board meeting presentation. Start at the 10 min mark. Minnesotans are paying $1 BILLION dollars on MCA testing only to be told that the results don’t really tell us much and they’ll just change the test to stop measuring whether students retain facts. 😳😳😳

Paris Martineau:

In early January, Marty Sharpe thought he’d get a few dozen teachers to show up to his professional development course on using generative artificial intelligence in the classroom. After all, it was an optional workday after the two-week winter break at the Catawba County Schools in North Carolina.

Instead, Sharpe—the Catawba school district’s chief technology officer—was stunned that nearly a hundred educators signed up for the course, and that it had a waitlist. “We were maxed out,” said Sharpe, who afterward was flooded with emails from teachers who had missed the session asking him to schedule another. “It blew my mind.”

Over the last nine months, Catawba County Schools has gone all in on AI, propelled by a surge in demand from educators. Many teachers across the district’s 28 schools now regularly use generative AI tools to develop lesson plans, generate multiple choice quizzes and create customized chatbots to explain topics to students, said Sharpe.

The district recently got a six-figure, multiyear grant from the North Carolina State Board of Education to further those AI efforts. Sharpe says the district intends to use the money—up to $95,000 annually for three years—to roll out mandatory AI literacy courses for students and develop new generative AI tools for teachers.

Paul Vallas:

CTU is not only destroying the schools financial health but the city’s as well as the city picks up more of the schools costs forcing city to raise taxes & cut services including police. Schools already spend $30K per student & CTU contract demands cost $10 billion. READ ON.

    •    Since 2019 before COVID, despite enrollment loss, 8% loss, school district staff grew by 14.5%

    •    School district has ONE employee for every 7.1 students and ONE teacher for every 14.5.

    •    The district has more NON teaching staff than teachers, for every 13.8 students.

    •    Despite 8% loss in enrollment since 2019 the district hired 3% more teachers and 28% more non teacher employees.

    •    The city last year provided $900 million in additional subsidies on top of the 56% of all property taxes schools receive.

    •    Meanwhile CTU blocks closing near empty schools, improvements to schools that impact its members and wants to get rid of public charter and magnet schools to eliminate competition.

The CTU under its present leadership and their supporters pose a clear and present danger to the health of the cities finances and the welfare of its residents.

Richard Rubin:

This year’s budget deficit is on track to top $1.9 trillion, or more than 6% of economic output, a threshold reached only around World War II, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Publicly held federal debt—the sum of all deficits—just passed $28 trillion or almost 100% of GDP.

If Congress does nothing, the total debt will climb by another $22 trillion through 2034. Interest costs alone are poised to exceed annual defense spending.

Publicly held debt as a share of GDP

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

John Sailer:

1/ The country’s largest private funder of medical research is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which boasts a $24.2 billion endowment. It’s America’s second wealthiest foundation.

The NIH, meanwhile, has an annual budget of $47.5 billion.

More:

Ryan McNeil, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who advises policymakers on “harm reduction and addiction treatment interventions,” conducts his research thanks to a $2.5 million R01 grant, the gold standard of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding.

In July, as a part of his project, McNeil interviewedShawn Hill, cofounder of an organization that objects to concentrating addiction-related harm reduction services (e.g. safe injection sites) in neighborhoods like Harlem. Unsurprisingly, the two disagree, though the depth of philosophical disagreement only became explicit after the interview, when McNeil unintentionally broadcasted his unvarnished thoughts, revealing the political orientation of his taxpayer-funded project.

“That dude sucked,” McNeil groaned to his research assistant after Hill logged off, unaware that their transcription software would email all participants a recording of the entire call. “His primary concerns were basically around, frankly, white discomfort,” he later added. “Let’s try to get some more interviews with people who suck,” he said while wrapping up his unintentionally public debrief, “I want to find someone who we can give enough rope to hang themself with.”

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Derek Thompson:

I wish I saw more scientists grappling with the tradeoffs at stake here.

In fact, a 2023 paper found that the journal Nature’s endorsement of Joe Biden

1. “caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters”
2. “lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature”
3. “reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general”
4. while “estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust … were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant”

Emma Jacobs:

A future with dwindling numbers of children is one many cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, are grappling with. In Hong Kong, for every adult over 65 there are, to put it crudely, 0.7 children, and in Tokyo it is even fewer (0.5).

Even before the pandemic, Joel Kotkin, author of The Human City wrote a decade ago about the prospect of a childless city, saying that US cities “have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children . . . The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating ‘creative class’ — a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students — occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich.”

Jon Tabbush, senior researcher for the Centre for London, a think-tank, worries about the capital becoming a “more segregated city, less culturally vibrant and, in the long run, a less productive city. High house and rent prices causing poor and middle-income residents to move outwards and leave the city would likely increase racial segregation, and damage the city’s shared culture that has made some of the most popular music, art and film of anywhere in the world.”

---

Childlessness, wrote the urbanist Richard Florida in 2019, “reflects how certain neighbourhoods come to specialise in certain kinds of residents by income and stage of life”. In London, children are spread unevenly, with families moving to the outer edges. Data from the Centre for London shows that in the 20 years to 2021, there was a decline in households with at least one dependent child in the inner London boroughs of Hackney (9 per cent), Islington (7 per cent), Lambeth (10 per cent) and Southwark (11 per cent). Further east, in Barking and Dagenham, there was a 34 per cent increase over the period, spurred by low land prices and an enormous programme of housebuilding.

——

Choose life!

Aaron Sibarium:

HHS announced last week that it had launched an investigation of the clinic’s Minority Stroke Program, which is dedicated to “treating stroke in racial and ethnic minorities,” and its Minority Men’s Health Center, which screens black and Hispanic men for disease, in response to a discrimination complaintfiled by Do No Harm, an advocacy group that opposes identity politics in medicine.

“[The Office of Civil Rights] has reviewed the complaint and has determined that it has sufficient authority and cause to investigate the allegations,” HHS wrote in a letter to Do No Harm’s attorneys. “Therefore, we have initiated an investigation.”

Founded in 2023 by Stanley Goldfarb—a physician at the University of Pennsylvania and the father of Washington Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb—Do No Harm has filed more than 160 discrimination complaints against hospitals and medical schools around the country, six of which were referred by the Department of Education to HHS’s Office of Civil Rights. The probe marks the first time that HHS has agreed to investigate a hospital based on the group’s complaints, though the Department of Education has launched its own inquiries.

Ruxandra Teslo

Those critical of Communism often highlight how it’s underpinned by Envy; But I think supporting Communism is first and foremost a result of the Sin of Pride: there’s immense hubris in believing one can design a centralised economic system that beats evolutionary forces. In “The Road to Serfdom” F.A. Hayek contends that government control of economic decision-making, even with good intentions, inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Hayek was a visionary: a lot of intellectuals persisted in their love for Communism even after the horrors of the Soviet Regime became apparent. 

While at the moment outright advocacy for Communism may not be widespread among intellectuals, there remains a latent affinity for top-down control – a kind of ember of ideology that, though subdued, is still smouldering, waiting for the right conditions to reignite. Often, the catalyst for such a resurgence is the perception of a looming threat (that might very well be a justified worry in itself), such as the recent concern over misinformation. The same pride that made intellectuals believe in centralised control over the economy now leads them to often support a form of epistemic control to fight off misinformation. US even briefly had a “misinformation czar” to deal with this problem; The political and media movement feeds off the actual academic field of misinformation studies. This is a heterogeneous domain, but there is certainly an element of it that veers into justifying top-down control over the information ecosystem, often by overstating how good researchers are at detecting false information and why we should trust them. Perhaps nowhere is this overstatement more prominent than in the book “Foolproof” by Sander Van Der Linden, one of the foremost researchers in the field. If you are inclined to dismiss this book as a sort of inconsequential academic exercise, don’t! These are the kind of outlets that recommend it (particularly disappointed by Financial Times). The book also has a blurb from Marianna Spring, BBC’s first disinformation correspondent. Funnily enough, she was recently revealed to have lied on her CV – I guess misinforming employers is ok (they are evil capitalists anyway) if you are doing it for the “Greater Good”.

Event @ Goodman Center:

Thursday Oct. 3, 5-8pm, Ironworks
Movie night, discussion and resource share with pizza, ice cream and activities for kids 3+.

In 1997, Wisconsin ranked 3rd in the US for literacy, and only 13 years later, we dropped to 30th, with proficiency for our Black youth ranking last. Today, the gap between white and Black students in Wisconsin is four grades wide — larger than any other state. Our students across race, age and income-levels are struggling learning to read.

What can we do to change this story?

We start by coming together as a community.

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The University of Wisconsin System is no longer reporting enrollment by campus, making it more difficult for the public to know where their local branch campus stands financially.

Six of the 13 branch campuses have closed or will by the end of this school year, with declining enrollment cited as the primary justification for closure.

Jay P. Greene & Frederick M. Hess

We estimate that public colleges and universities spend nearly $200 million a year subsidizing faculty dues and paying conference registration fees to politicized associations. While faculty certainly have a right to participate in such organizations, they have no right to do so with public funds.

——-

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

The State of Florida is conducting its own investigation into the second attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. It is not in the best interests of our state and nation to have the same federal agencies seeking to prosecute Trump leading this investigation.

As… pic.twitter.com/l61XCoe0ls

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) September 17, 2024

Civics: Lawfare at Its Most Dishonest (Wisconsin Attorney General)

The Florida Governor also mentioned the use of open records vis a vis a state vs federal investigation…

more.

Wall Street Journal:

Democrats are pushing election-year lawfare in the states, and a case in Wisconsin is being exposed for its unfairness. Documents unsealed Thursday show that Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul is prosecuting Republicans for actions his Department of Justice and the Wisconsin Election Commission knew about and didn’t object to.

But Mr. Kaul’s office didn’t think this was criminal behavior in 2020. On Dec. 13, 2020, Assistant Attorney General Steven Kilpatrick, a Kaul deputy, emailed Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) officials Meagan Wolfe and James Witecha, sharing documents from the Trump campaign. Mr. Kilpatrick noted that in one document “there is statement that the Trump electors are going to meet and vote on Monday, Dec. 14, in the event the Supreme court case comes out in their favor after Dec. 14 — to ensure that there is a slate of elector [sic] for Trump on Jan. 6.”

Ms. Wolfe forwarded those documents to her fellow commissioners without comment, and the WEC and state Department of Justice have since acknowledged that the lawyers’ action was acceptable under state law. In a Feb. 9, 2022, memo to the WEC, the state DOJ notes that while complainants say the Dec. 14 meeting was an “unlawful” plot to undermine the election, it wasn’t illegal.

“Based upon the text of the relevant statutes, and in light of the facts, historical precedent, and related federal authorities,” the DOJ wrote, “this memorandum concludes that the Complaint does not raise a reasonable suspicion that Respondents violated Wisconsin election law.” But suddenly in 2024, when Democrats are running to “protect democracy,” AG Kaul files charges.

In July, Mr. Troupis’s lawyers filed a motion to quash a subpoena against him, and the AG asked the court to keep the motion under seal. No wonder: The motion, now unsealed, lays out historical precedent for creating an alternate slate of electors in case they are needed.

In the past, the motion notes, states have handled competing slates of electors while election results were under a legal challenge, as the Wisconsin defendants were trying to do. In 1960 Richard Nixon initially won Hawaii by 141 votes. There was a legal challenge and while the recount was under way, the motion explains, “both the Democrats and the Republicans had their respective (alternate) slates of electors meet and cast their ballots.”

The Republican slate was initially certified and sent to Congress but the judge in charge of the recount ultimately decided more votes had been cast for John F. Kennedy and the Democratic slate was sent to Congress. Vice President Nixon opened the envelopes in front of Congress and directed that Hawaii’s electoral votes for Kennedy be counted.

Kayla Huynh:

Under the agreement, employees will also get an additional 2.06% increase to their base wages if voters in November approve the Madison Metropolitan School District’s $100 million operating referendum.

——-

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Abbey Machtig

Last school year, the food and nutrition department used $1.5 million from the district’s general education fund to cover expenses. Another $2.9 million is set to be transferred this school year. 

“Those are dollars that we now don’t get to dream with in many ways,” School Board President Nichelle Nichols said Monday night.

—-

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Nusaiba Mizan:

“And then the notion that, well, you have to be a certified teacher to be effective,” Miles said. “Yes, more likely than not you will be more effective than a teacher without a certification. Yes, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean in effect where non-certified teachers will be ineffective. We came in. We changed that concept.”

It is unclear at this time what subjects and grade levels uncertified teachers are covering. Waivers to hire uncertified teachers cannot be applied to special education, bilingual education, English as a Second Language or pre-kindergarten teaching roles, according to the Texas Education Agency. ABC 13 reported that uncertified teachers were hired into prohibited positions, including special education roles, last academic year.

Matthew Ladner:

Fortunately research has repeatedly demonstrated that certification has nothing to do with student learning gains.

—-

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

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

Jackie Longo and Christopher Maynard

In the fall of 2022, more than 49 million studentswere enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools across the U.S. About 32% ended the last academic year performing below their current grade level in at least one subject. Unfortunately, many of these kids were afforded different levels of assistance to help bridge the gap. For instance, 13% of public schools didn’t provide academic tutoring, while only a little over half offered after-school instruction.

Liz Cohen, Georgetown University’s FutureEd policy director, told ConsumerAffairs that parents should consider many factors when deciding what school will best fit their child, as there can be significant differences among schools — even within the same state.

“Look at the school culture. How does the school feel? Is my child going to feel like they belong in that community?” Cohen said. “There are bright spots and wonderful schools in every state in this country,” she added.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont told ConsumerAffairs he knows how vital schools are to a state’s overall success. “The success of our state is highly dependent upon the success of our schools,” he said. “Our administration remains committed to strengthening all the schools in our state so that every child — no matter their neighborhood or family income level — has the opportunity to receive an education that prepares them for achievement.”

Adopt Gupta:

One of the features of exclusionary zoning which really surprised me are the associations with educational outcomes: test scores are better in areas with exclusionary zoning, spending per pupil is a lot higher, as are Chetty opportunity measures — these are good places for social mobility.

I think one way to rationalize this set of regulations is the decentralized nature of school funding and administration. In many developed countries around the world, there don’t seem to be massive differences in the funding or curriculum of public schools. As a result, you don’t often hear of people in, say, Italy or France moving to specific neighborhoods to access local schools. School quality is, at least compared to the US, relatively homogenous, at least at the within-city level (there do seem to be large regional variations in some of these countries). 

As a result, with less scope for educational sorting, you typically see rich people live in the center of the city. And some of these people in the city center, in places like Madrid or Buenos Aires, vote for the right wing party. This basically never happens in the US, where the rich have decamped in many cities, and city centers are invariably left-wing strongholds.

So what explains this differential sorting of people and partisanship across countries?

We can’t prove it in our data conclusively, but I think a very plausible hypothesis is that tying school quality to local conditions generates incentives for rich people to decamp for suburban areas, exclude the poor through high bulk regulatory barriers, and thereby produce enclaves of high quality educational.

Quinton Klabon

Here are four concrete things we can do to change children’s lives by this time next year

“Progress is incremental. It is something that we all have to show up for, because…if we don’t care about our kids and our public schools, then we are destined to fail.,” said Milwaukee Public School Board Vice President Jilly Gokalgandhi at the Rotary Club of Milwaukee.

She was right.

With the start of a new school year for 66,000 students, Milwaukee’s civic, business, and cultural leaders have an opportunity to consider how they have supported MPS since its financial strife in May and how the city can show up going forward. Here are four ways they could change children’s lives by this time next year:

Amit N Sawant,  Mats J Stensrud

Birth rates in Canada and the USA declined sharply in March 2020 and deviated from historical trends. This decline was absent in similarly developed European countries. We argue that the selective decline was driven by incoming individuals, who would have travelled from abroad and given birth in Canada and the USA, had there been no travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, by leveraging data from periods before and during the COVID-19 travel restrictions, we quantified the extent of births by incoming individuals. In an interrupted time series analysis, the expected number of such births in Canada was 970 per month (95% CI: 710-1,200), which is 3.2% of all births in the country. The corresponding estimate for the USA was 6,700 per month (95% CI: 3,400-10,000), which is 2.2% of all births. A secondary difference-in-differences analysis gave similar estimates at 2.8% and 3.4% for Canada and the USA, respectively. Our study reveals the extent of births by recent international arrivals, which hitherto has been unknown and infeasible to study.

Danielle DuClos:

Urban Triage also provides the county’s housing navigation services, which aim to help residents find housing and fill out rental applications. The nonprofit’s contract with the county for housing navigation and other services is $456,000, according to county records.

Last year’s nonprofit tax filings show Urban Triage had 24 employees and $2.8 million in net assets. Grayson received $292,000 in reportable compensation from the nonprofit, the documents show.

The Salvation Army of Dane County offers rental assistance and rehousing support for homeless residents through some of its programs and was awarded part of the county contract. Its housing program is restricted to families and women.

Ted Goia:

Not long ago, 12 million families in the US subscribed to National Geographic, and many held on to every issue. Even in my working class neighborhood, I saw copies displayed on home bookshelves as some kind of iconic repository of the world’s riches.

Anna Hansen

Middleton High School’s former head football coach has filed a lawsuit against the Middleton-Cross Plains School District over his resignation last year.

Jason Pertzborn, who resigned from coaching and teaching at the district in 2023 amid a hazing investigation involving the football team, filed the lawsuit Monday, alleging that the district “lied to, threatened and intimidated” him to pressure him into signing a resignation agreement.

The Middleton Police Department launched an investigation into the Middleton High School football team in early January of last year. A 22-page incident report provided to the Wisconsin State Journal through an open records request indicated that football players allegedly urinated on a fellow teammate, tried to grab his genitals in the shower, urged him to “kill himself” and engaged in additional hazing and bullying so severe one student worried the bullied player might harm himself or others.

Wall Street Journal:

The story’s theme is that in three cases last term the Chief steered the Court to help Donald Trump: “How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak.” It is slanted in the way readers have come to expect from the Times, minimizing the constitutional arguments in the cases and highlighting the political benefit to Mr. Trump. The piece spins the cases from the legal and political view of critics, notably Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the member of the Court who has been most nonplussed in public about her status as a losing Justice in many constitutional decisions.

Most striking, and damaging to the comity at the Court, are leaks about the internal discussions among the Justices. The story describes a memo from the Chief to fellow Justices in February 2022 recommending that the Justices accept the appeal over presidential immunity, as well as follow-up notes from Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Also leaked is an account of the private conversation among the Justices after an oral argument. This is a betrayal of confidence that will affect how the Justices do their work. It’s arguably worse than the leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs, the 2022 abortion case. That leaker still hasn’t been identified, but it was probably a clerk or functionary at the Court. This leak bears the possible fingerprints of one or more of the Justices.

Kayla Huynh

The total increase would be 4.12% — the maximum base wage increase allowed by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. The limit is based on inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index.

The increase would require approval from Madison School Board members. Jones said the union hopes that step will happen soon. He said union members voted to support the proposal in August.

“Given the lack of sufficient funding from the state and the expiration of federal funds related to the pandemic, we need our community to support the referendum to retain highly qualified educators and support professionals,” Jones said. “Otherwise, we anticipate higher vacancies in future years when educators leave for more stable district situations.”

Last school year, 255 employees resigned from the district by May, according to figures presented to the School Board by Jennifer Trendel, the district’s executive director of human resources. That number is a 64% decrease from 711 resignations during the 2022-23 school year.

Asked to verify the base wage proposal between the union and district leaders, Folger said the district had no information that it was able to share at this time.

——-

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Erin McCormick

It’s part of a tragic pattern playing out across the country. An average of 22 high school-aged teens died of overdoses each week in the United States in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to a 2024 study by researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles and Harvard. The same study found that the overdose rate among high school-aged kidsdoubled between 2019 and 2022, the most recent year for which data was available – even though surveys show far fewer teens are using drugs than in previous decades.

Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig and David Dunning:

Recognizing one’s ignorance is a fundamental skill. We ask whether superior background knowledge or expertise improves the ability to distinguish what one knows from what one does not know, i.e., whether expertise leads to superior meta-knowledge. Supporting this hypothesis, we find that the more a person knows about a topic, the less likely they are to “overclaim” knowledge of nonexistent terms in that topic. Moreover, such expertise protects against overclaiming especially when people are most prone to overclaim – when they view themselves subjectively as experts. We find support for these conclusions in an internal meta-analysis (17 studies), in comparisons of experts and novices in medicine and developmental psychology, and in an experiment manipulating expertise. Finally, we find that more knowledgeable people make knowledge judgments more automatically, which is related to less false familiarity and more accurate recognition. In contrast, their less knowledgeable peers are more likely to deliberate about their knowledge judgments, potentially thinking their way into false familiarity. Whereas feeling like an expert predisposes one to overclaim impossible knowledge, true expertise provides a modest protection against doing so.

Debbie Kuether:

MPS interim superintendent bumps salaries of 6 figure admins once again. I don’t think this was mentioned in the referendum…

Josh Blackman:

Randy Barnett and I have written a new essay, titled Coping With a Court One Disagrees With. This essay was inspired, in part, by a recent New York Times article that identified a “crisis” in teaching constitutional law. In our view, there is no crisis. But we can relate with professors who are having difficulty teaching decisions they disagree with. We’ve done it for the entirety of our careers. We suggests that our method of teaching may be useful for liberal and progressive professors who are having trouble coping with the current court.

Here is the abstract:

Is there a “crisis” in teaching constitutional law? In our view, there is not. Still, we can empathize. As libertarian-conservative-ish law professors, for years we taught Supreme Court decisions that we disagreed with. We teach constitutional law as a historical narrative that began at the founding and continues to this day. The narrative approach underscores the contingent nature of what at any given time appears to be fixed and unchangeable. The narrative also remains remarkably stable from year to year even as new cases are added. This approach also makes preparing one’s syllabus relatively easy to do each year, regardless of what the Supreme Court may have decided in its most recent term.

The pedagogy we developed was premised on a Supreme Court jurisprudence we largely disagreed with. Indeed, we still disagree with much of this jurisprudence, especially the cases that were decided right before, during, and after Reconstruction. While some of these cases, like Prigg, Dred Scott, and Plessy are now in the anti-canon, others like Slaughter-House, Cruikshank, and the Civil Rights Cases remain good law. This pedagogy worked before 2016 and it will continue to work no matter what happens in the future. We submit that the time is ripe for liberal and progressive professors, especially those who are having trouble coping with the current Supreme Court, to consider adopting our narrative approach to the constitutional canon and anticanon.

Nancy Moews:

Many understand Wisconsin’s eventual inability to adequately support two school systems(public and private voucher schools).

I would not oppose vouchers to non-religious private schools that would be required, like public schools, to accept all applicants and to provide for special needs students. Also, required reading and math scores should be made public at the end of each school year, no exceptions.

I’m opposed to our tax dollars going to schools that teach that only Christians or any other denomination adherents are “saved.”

Meanwhile:

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”

A recent Henry Tyson talk.

Kulak:

What changed was the rise of the professional academic avante garde and their almost immediate capture by the ethnic, sexual-socio, and class enemies of the productive classes.

Every western ethnicity has had non-aristocratic class that has always produced objects almost the exact same as the ones now derided as kitsch, indeed these traditions have been core to the folklore, mythology, ethnic identity and sense of place of western peoples… It hard to name a part of old europe that did NOT have tales and regional arts depicting some diminutive forest people, anthropomorphic animals, or sexual joke. And it’s even harder to think of ones that did not produce intense amounts of idealized folklore, and almost parodically over the top depictions of their folklore.

Just as Americans now make art of bigfoot or other cryptids, Europeans for thousands of years produced sculptures and art of their monsters.

It was only with the rise of the Avant Garde and specifically subsidies for those artists that this magical category of “Kitsch” comes about in which all the folk arts and lower-class aesthetic sensibilities as dismissed not by an aristocracy that feels noblesse oblige, but by ethnic and class enemies who need to discredit and exclude the productive national majority ethnicity from their own institutions, so that they, the capturing ethnicity and interests, might extract the tax dollars and institutional prestige the productive classes themselves generate. 

Now you might say “that’s cute but do you really care about Garden Gnomes and dogs playing poker that much?”

Anand Sanwal:

The results were predictable, if you knew where to look. In 2003, total student loan debt was around $250 billion. Today? It’s over $1.7 trillion. 

That’s not growth; that’s an explosion.

But here’s the real kicker: this debt isn’t just a personal burden. It’s propping up a deeply flawed system.

The results are insidious:

1. Millions of Americans graduate from college overloaded with debt and underprepared for the job market.
2. The institutions that create these outcomes are not held to account because market forces are not at play.
3. Colleges have no incentive to control costs or improve outcomes, as they get paid regardless.
4. Lenders keep issuing loans without regard for the borrower’s ability to repay, knowing the debt can’t be discharged.

In essence, the non-dischargeability of student loans has created a perfect storm of misaligned incentives. It’s a system that rewards failure and punishes success.

Consider these facts:

Anna Hansen:

Madison police have launched an investigation into the Goodman Community Center’s finances after an internal records review prompted by the discovery of “financial inconsistencies and impropriety,” according to a statement from spokesperson Florence Edwards-Miller.

In addition to cooperating with the police, the East Side center has retained a forensic accounting firm and made internal changes to promote financial security and integrity, Edwards-Miller wrote. 

“As an organization that prides itself on offering a helping hand to so many in our community, we find ourselves hurt by this difficult situation,” she wrote. “We are confident that the process we have in place will allow us to address this challenge and we humbly ask for your understanding, patience and continued support.”

Edwards-Miller declined to release any further information amid the ongoing investigation. Madison police spokesperson Korrie Rondorf confirmed the investigation but remained similarly tight-lipped on any additional details.

Sean Stevens:

This past spring, FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey was in the field when the encampment protests began. This gives FIRE the ability to analyze how student attitudes about free speech changed in response to the encampment protests. FIRE also conducted a separate survey on the encampment protests at 30 of the 251 ranked schools during the months of May and June. 

The data from these two surveys offer incredible insight into how students reacted to the encampment protests. Among other things, they reveal that administrators on many campuses across the country have lost the trust of their students when it comes to free speech on campus.

This Year’s College Free Speech Rankings

FIRE launched the College Free Speech Rankings in 2020, surveying almost 20,000 students at 55 colleges and universities. Every year since, we have increased the number of students and schools surveyed. This year, almost 59,000 students were surveyed at over 250 campuses — once again the largest survey of student opinion about free speech in higher education ever conducted. 

The survey responses are broken down into seven components which form the bulk of a school’s score. Schools can gain or lose points based on the outcomes of speech controversies including attempts to deplatform speakers, attempts to cancel professors, and calls to sanction students for their protected expression. The scores are then standardized, so schools are only being measured against what other schools have actually achieved — as opposed to some arbitrary standard any of us might devise. This could also mean that even the best performing schools may not be bastions of free speech, just that they are simply better than everyone else. Finally, schools were given bonuses or penalties based on their campus policies, with good policies adding a standard deviation, ambiguous policies losing half of one, and policies that clearly restrain speech losing one. 

Steve Ballmer

Abbey Machtig:

After months of negotiations, the Madison School District has tentatively agreed to a 2.06% pay increase for teachers and staff, with an additional 2.06% tacked on if a $100 million operating referendum passes in November. 

The initial increase would be more than the wage freeze originally proposed by district officials in March, but it’s only half of the 4.12% wage increase Madison Teachers Inc. requested, MTI President Mike Jones said. 

The district is asking voters to approve two referendums on the Nov. 5 ballot: A $507 million capital referendum to fund new and updated schools and a $100 million referendum to pay for the costs of operating the school district, including wages.

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Via John Robb:

“I just keep thinking about all of the videos and first hand accounts of what’s really happening that will never ever make it to the legacy media or the nightly news where so much of the older population still gets their “news” and has their worldviews shaped”

Jeffrey Brainard:

When University of Seville researcher Maria Ángeles Oviedo‑García began to look at the peer reviews some journals publish alongside their papers, she was surprised to see the same vague, generic phrases kept turning up.

“In abstract, the author should add more scientific findings.” “Discuss the novelty and clear application of the work in the abstract as well as in introduction section.”

She ultimately identified 263 suspicious reviews prepared for 37 journals in multiple disciplines between 2021 and this year. One reviewer used duplicated phrases in 56 reviews, she reported last month in Scientometrics.

By Daniel T. Willingham

Question: Memory is mysterious. You may lose a memory created 15 seconds earlier, such as when you find yourself standing in your kitchen trying to remember what you came there to fetch. Other seemingly trivial memories (for example, advertisements) may last a lifetime. What makes something stick in memory, and what is likely to slip away?
Answer: We can’t store everything we experience in memory. Too much happens. So what should the memory system tuck away? How can the memory system know what you’ll need to remember later? Your memory system lays its bets this way: if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored. Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.

A teacher once told me that for a fourth-grade unit on the Underground Railroad he had his students bake biscuits, because this was a staple food for enslaved people seeking escape. He asked what I thought about the assignment. I pointed out that his students probably thought for 40 seconds about the relationship of biscuits to the Underground Railroad, and for 40 minutes about measuring flour, mixing shortening, and so on. Whatever students think about is what they will remember.

The cognitive principle that guides this article is memory is the residue of thought. To teach well, consider what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.

Julie Jargon:

Parents worried about how much time students spend on iPads and laptops during school are trying to opt their kids out of classroom tech. They’re finding it isn’t easy.

Cellphone bans are taking effect in big districts across the country, including Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The next logical question, at least for some, is: What about the other screens? These concerned parents argue that the Covid-era shift that put Chromebooks and tablets in more students’ hands is fueling distraction more than learning.

Teachers and school systems point to the ease of online instruction and say switching for just one student puts a burden on teachers. Tech is woven so deeply into lesson plans and assessments that students using only pencil and paper would be at a disadvantage, they add.

Andrea Boyd of West Des Moines, Iowa, has spent a couple of years pushing for less school technology for her two children. When her son Colin’s school issued him an iPad in the sixth grade, he couldn’t put it down. Other students nicknamed him the “iPad kid.”

Dean Gorrell:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly recently took to defending her decision to lower the cut scores for the Wisconsin Forward Exam.

Lowering the cut scores will make it appear that a greater percentage of students are performing at higher levels. Underly offered this reason for the change: “They (the students) were appearing to be doing worse than they really were. And so, this will give us a better measure of where kids are.”

One can only imagine the psychometric gymnastics the data analysts at DPI went through to advise her on that soundbite. We’re used to gaslighting, spin, hyperbole and falsehoods from politicians, but with that statement, Superintendent Underly may have just set the new benchmark for nonsensical claims made by a politician.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the new cut scores are installed after the old cut scores were in place long enough, since 2012, to potentially yield valuable data and draw causal relationships between instruction, resource allocation and outcomes. So much for using assessments to help inform instruction, guide curricular programming and budgeting.

Lowering achievement standards does not serve the children, teachers or school districts of Wisconsin well in the short or long term.

Dean Gorrell, Verona

——

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Jessica Winter:

Such behavior—at once self-indulgent and masochistic, and as common as it is ostensibly irrational—“is basically a nonadaptive coping mechanism for the pressure and the stress that you are experiencing,” Jan Dirk Capelle, a psychologist who studies motivation, told me recently. These patterns may seem timeless, but in recent years many higher-learning institutions in the United States have felt the need to intervene. Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, in the spring of 2020, educators have seen a significant decline in virtually every metric of student performance: attendance, class participation, completed coursework, test scores. According to survey data collected during the 2022-23 school year by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, at Penn State, students’ self-reported levels of generalized anxiety, along with anxiety related directly to academics, family, and social life, still had not returned to pre-pandemic rates—and, in fact, social anxiety had continued to rise slightly. Students’ use of psychotropic medications was at its highest rate since the center began collecting such data, more than a decade ago. (Anyone with proximity to academia can find reams of anecdotal support for this bleak picture.)

The responses from colleges and universities to these worrying trends have run the gamut, from enhancing mental-health services on campus to incorporating more hands-on and student-directed learning. But there’s one lever that educators have pulled again and again: the deadline. Schools began hitting pause on strict due dates not long after the pandemic forced classes to move online. In 2022, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that faculty members from a range of colleges and universities had embraced more “fluid” and “flexible” policies on granting extensions on papers or arranging makeup exams. A writing professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, went so far as to let his students set their own deadlines. This softened stance reached younger students, too: in some public-school districts—including those in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Shaker Heights, Ohio—teachers were instructed not to dock the grades of students who turned in work late.

Carolyn Gorman:

School-based mental health initiatives have expanded over the past half-century. In recent years, troubling increases in the prevalence of school violence and youth emotional distress have prompted a sense of urgency among policymakers, leading to the bipartisan action of committing billions of dollars annually in federal funding to bolster these programs.

But school-based mental health initiatives face fundamental challenges that warrant more thoughtful attention: mental health interventions for youth are not a panacea and warrant judicious utilization; the goals of the education and mental health systems are often in conflict; and vague policy, guidance, and expected outcomes undermine accountability and confuse responsibilities within and across systems.

Policymakers and education authorities should be clear-eyed about these challenges and the unintended consequences of administering mental health services through the education system. A decades-long track record of inconsistent marginal benefit, poor implementation, and some evidence of harm tempers confidence that effective, comprehensive school-based mental health services are attainable or desirable.

Steve McGuire:

“It is not the role of the institution to render opinions—doing so risks suppressing the creativity and academic freedom of our faculty and students. Even as they seem to provide emotional support to individuals in our communities, institutional pronouncements undermine the diversity of thought that strengthens us and that is central to our missions.”

“Going forward, the University of Pennsylvania will refrain from institutional statements made in response to local and world events except for those which have direct and significant bearing on University functions. The University will issue messages on local or world events rarely, and only when those events lie within our operational remit.”