School Information System

Charles Hayes

The nation’s most prestigious universities are making a rare and risky move: selling significant portions of their endowments. Harvard and Yale, two institutions with combined endowments exceeding $90 billion, have announced plans to offload private equity stakes amid political pressures, liquidity strains, and a shifting financial landscape. These sales, the largest in decades, reveal vulnerabilities even in the most well-funded academic institutions—and could signal a broader reckoning for endowment-dependent schools

Harvard’s $1 billion private equity secondary sale, facilitated by Jefferies and Lexington Partners, underscores a desperate bid for cash. The university faces a dual crisis: federal funding freezes and an endowment structure overly reliant on illiquid assets. With 83% of its $53.2 billion endowment allocated to private equity and hedge funds—compared to just 14% in public equities—the school risks being trapped in a “liquidity crunch.” 

The Trump administration’s decision to freeze $2.2 billion in research grants and label Harvard a “political entity” has exacerbated cash flow concerns. To bridge the gap, Harvard issued $1.2 billion in municipal bonds in early 2025. But the bigger move is its shift from long-term holdings to secondary sales.

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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.

Alexander Nazaryan

You wrote about this issue a lot at the time. Why, years later, did you feel compelled to write a book?

I very early observed my kids just withering away in the gray light of their Chromebooks alone in their bedrooms. And while it seemed reasonable initially to have schools closed, particularly because I’m close to New York City, soon it dawned on me that there was no long-term plan and this was not going to work.

Childhood is achingly brief, and for a little boy or girl who’s 8 years old to miss a year, or even more than a year, of the experience of putting an arm around a friend, of chatting with other kids at lunchtime, of running around in a playground with friends … the idea that that wasn’t a tremendous harm is absurd.

People are still missing the larger point here about what was lost.

The conventional wisdom was that we needed to keep schools closed until it was safe to reopen them, and even then, it could be done only in communities where the spread of the virus had abated and educators took certain concrete steps to keep teachers and kids safe. You’re saying all of that was wrong?

I recognize that intuitively many of these interventions seem like they would be beneficial. School closures in particular and then, more broadly, mask mandates and barriers on desks and six feet of distancing — but the evidence shows none of this did anything.

Europeans had announced in the spring that there was no observable negative impact to reopening schools, yet for some reason this information was ignored.

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A substantive analysis of taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue

Roger Kimball:

A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals, “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license.

More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. One of the great ironies that attends the triumph of political correctness is that in department after department of academic life, what began as a demand for emancipation recoiled, turned rancid, and developed into new forms of tyranny and control. As Alan Charles Kors noted in an essay from 2008,

Martin Center

Key Findings:

• Disproportionate Growth in Non-Faculty Staffing: While enrollment rose 10.2% and faculty headcount rose 9.5%, non-faculty staffing grew by 14.6%, increasing the staff-to-faculty ratio from 2.18 to 2.28 systemwide.
• Largest Staffing Increases by Function: Fiscal Affairs positions grew by 53.8%, followed by Academic & Student Affairs and IT. In contrast, Executive Administration and Office/Clerical staffing remained flat or declined.
• Escalating Salary Expenditures: Faculty salary spending rose by 44.78%, while non-faculty salary expenditures jumped 55.53%—both surpassing the 32.72% inflation rate over the same period. The fastest-growing salary categories were Research (86.5%), Communications & Fundraising (81.1%), and Fiscal Affairs (90.9%).
• Institution-Level Variability: Changes in staffing and expenditures varied significantly among the 16 UNC institutions. Some, such as UNC Greensboro and UNC Asheville, experienced enrollment declines yet maintained or expanded staff. Others, like Elizabeth City State and Fayetteville State, increased enrollment while reducing or maintaining faculty numbers.

Carter & Mark:

In life, you can choose to be G(rouchy) or you can choose to be J(olly).

It’s way too easy to be G. To complain. To wake up in a bad mood. To find little flaws in everything you see in the world, and focus on those. You can spend hours fighting with random strangers online and policing the behavior of the people around you. You can default to thinking big, difficult ideas are impossible, raining cynicism down on the world. You can become one of those folks who is somehow surrounded by “toxic people”, yet cannot find a single flaw in themselves. This is the lazy path to living life.

Arctotherium:

The elephant in the room of the college admissions grind

There’s a small cottage industry of articles, blog posts, and essays pointing out how much more difficult, time-intensive, and “grindy” upper-middle class American childhoods have become in the 21st century [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. All of these identify the same cause: elite university admissions are far more competitive. This has led to much more intensive helicopter parenting to stop kids from falling behind in the increasingly important education-status race. It’s not just money. The social decay afflicting America since the 1960s is far worse among the non-college-educated (as Charles Murray showed in Coming Apart) so avoiding downward mobility is much more important than it once was.

Helicopter parenting has gotten so intense that it even continues into university, turning what was once the start of independent adult life into a further extension of childhood. The effects of this are widely lamented: the pressures of Ivy League admissions are said to be crushing kids into status-obsessed zombies. And the effort it requires from parents is even blamed for falling birth rates. Setting aside the broader societal implications and long-term effects, isn’t making kids unnecessarily miserable for 13 years of their lives bad enough in and of itself?

One might reply that it’s all worth it. Feeding 30% of kids into the college admissions meatgrinder might be bad, but stagnation is the default state of humanity and avoiding that is imperative. If it takes heroic efforts on the part of 12-year-olds to develop the skills needed to keep technological civilization running, then that’s a sacrifice that must be made. But is that really what’s going on?

Giselle Redmond:

Both Ithaca College and the Ithaca City School District are currently being federally investigated in response to complaints filed by the Equal Protection Project, an organization founded by Prof. William Jacobson, a Cornell Law professor. 

Jacobson created the EPP in 2023. In a statement to The Sun, Jacobson wrote that he founded the organization in response to “discrimination done in the name of DEI,” which they view as “a dehumanizing group ideology that reduces people to proxies for their group.”

Matt Taibbi:

The station doubtless thinks it’s engaged in “public service journalism” by cranking out piles of stories with headlines like Trump nominee gives misleading testimony about ties to alleged ‘Nazi sympathizer,Trump cuts demolish agency focused on toxic chemicals and workplace hazards, Asian American voters backed Trump in Nevada. Here’s how they feel about him now, The U.S. set the global order after WWII. Trump has other plans, A legal architect of Guantanamo questions Trump’s El Salvador plan, and on, and on. Its editors either don’t realize they’ve built an abjectly partisan political operation, or, more likely, they’ve been at this so long, they believe ideological uniformity is truth, and by extension, just “the news.”

It would be depressingly easy to create a 2025 edition of the Dictionary of Received Ideas just by tweaking NPR texts:

• JOURNALISM – Advances the conversation. Stands out for its thorough research, diverse sourcing, fairness, and fact-checking. George Clooney says the press has a duty to “always question authority.”
• THIN – It’s back in, but did it ever leave? It’s easier for thin people when it comes to employment and education. With fatphobia, why are so many people comfortable saying the quiet part out loud?
• RACISM – A public health issue. The accumulated stress from institutional racism has documented effects. Mentorship for Black medical students is crucial as they navigate a healthcare system that is not always welcoming. There’s a new computer algorithm that more accurately illustrates Black hair. If we don’t keep talking about it, whiteness becomes the default for everything.
• AWKWARDNESS —Part of our lives whether we like it or not. But what if we put the embarrassment aside and embraced our awkward selves?

If Flaubert had access to NPR’s search tool, he could have a sequel book in six hours. The only challenge would be figuring out how to limit the most important entry:

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Civics: Redistributed Federal Taxpayer $, “public broadcasting” and the first amendment

David Duncan:

Last week, I got a message from someone I’ve known for ten years. It was articulate, thoughtful…and definitely not written by him.

It’s one example of what has increasingly unsettled me about the way people interact – myself included – as we all participate in this vast, unprecedented, AI-enhanced communication experiment.

It’s not just the style of communication that’s changed. It’s the sense of authorship. The idea that you can read something and know who wrote it—and whether they meant it—feels like it’s breaking down.

It shows up everywhere – emails, text messages, social media, blog posts, even casual check-ins. A few weeks ago, I opened a message that seemed technically perfect – well-structured, insightful, sophisticated. But I couldn’t tell if the sender had written it, prompted it, pasted it – or even read it. And I wasn’t sure what to respond to, or how.

What part was real?

What part was meant?

Shannon Watkins:

Public institutions have a unique responsibility to serve their students well and use their taxpayer-funded resources effectively. Some states, however, produce better outcomes than others. This is made clear in the Martin Center’s 50-State Comparison on college graduation rates, which evaluates each state on four key metrics of institutional success: the first-year retention rate, the 4-year graduation rate, the 6-year graduation rate, and the transfer-out rate among public universities. 

This comparison is aimed at informing policymakers, university administrators, and the public on the state of public higher education and recommending concrete ways it can be improved.

The data presented in this 50-State Comparison underscores a wide variation of state outcomes. For example, the average 4-year graduation rate in Alaska is 18 percent. That number jumps to 53 percent in Delaware and 52 percent in Virginia. Nationally, the average 4-year graduation rate at public universities is 34 percent. 

Too many institutions, even in the highest-performing states, are failing to help students complete their degrees on time. The Martin Center outlines cost-effective and evidence-based reforms that states and institutions can undertake to boost student achievement. 

Jovan Tripkovic:

A recent Inside Higher Ed Student Voice survey found that over 60 percent of college students view themselves as customers, an alarming sign for anyone concerned about the integrity and future of American higher education. This growing trend, increasingly normalized by both students and institutions, undermines the university’s original mission of educating informed citizens and upholding academic excellence.

Traditionally, universities have provided education, conducted research, and advanced knowledge, all while engaging with the broader community. From the beginning, colleges and universities have served as cornerstones of the American republic, preparing future leaders, educators, and public servants.

As early as the 1950s, Russell Kirk was already describing colleges as expensive social clubs for the young.

In post–World War II America, a mix of factors—including a demographic boom and a surge in government funding—gradually pulled colleges and universities away from their original mission. Flush with G.I. Bill dollars and enrollees, institutions began broadening and democratizing their offerings, a shift that eventually led to today’s near-total emphasis on job training. Today, rather than cultivating civic and moral character or encouraging intellectual curiosity, many institutions have become little more than diploma mills and hedge funds with campuses.

When administrators treat their institutions like businesses, it’s no surprise that students begin to see themselves as customers.

Frederick Hess and Greg Fournier:

American colleges and universities are being scrutinized as never before. From rising tuition costs and allegations of plagiarism at the highest levels to concerns about low rates of completion and the state of free inquiry on campus, four-year colleges in the U.S. are under the microscope. Yet one crucial issue that is too rarely accorded the attention that it deserves is simply what colleges expect of their students.

Students spend far less time studying than they used to, with full-time students reporting 20–25 combined hours in class and doing schoolwork.[1] American colleges need to reset their expectations for students. Full-time students should expect to devote a full 35-hour week to their classes and related studies. Boards of governors and campus trustees have a vital role in resetting this expectation and helping colleges put it into practice.

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more.

DOGE:

Interview with the DOGE team

Charles Mann:

For as long as our species has lived in settled communities, we have struggled to provide ourselves with water. If modern agriculture, the subject of the previous article in this series, is a story of innovation and progress, the water supply has all too often been the opposite: a tale of stagnation and apathy. Even today, about two billion people, most of them in poor, rural areas, do not have a reliable supply of clean water — potable water, in the jargon of water engineers. Bad water leads to the death every year of about a million people. In terms of its immediate impact on human lives, water is the world’s biggest environmental problem and its worst public health problem — as it has been for centuries.

Larissa Phillips

Despite this alarming statistic, some educators believe it’s impossible to teach these adults to read. However, this notion is misguided and requires a different approach.

Marian* was in her late 30s when we first met, and she asked me to help her learn to read. This was in 2007. I was the new-ish supervisor of a tutoring program in Manhattan aimed at adults who were trying to get their GED. Most students came in for help with essay-writing or algebra. But Marian, who had seen her three daughters through high school and into college, wanted to get better at reading.

She told me she was at third-grade level. Once we started working together, I discovered it was more like first grade.

This isn’t as unusual as you might think. Forty-eight million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level, and many of them struggle in ways that are almost impossible for a fluent reader to imagine: They can’t order off a menu, check in for a telehealth appointment, or fill out a job application. Low literacy skills correlate heavily with poverty and crime, and are associated with an estimated $2.2 trillionper year of social services, healthcare, and lost wages. This is an issue both sides of the political spectrum would love to address. The question is: How?

In April, a bill was introduced in Congress to expand funding for adult education programs. It’s called the WORKS Act—the Adult Education Workforce Opportunity and Reskilling for Knowledge and Success Act—and it would nearly double current funding for programs, to $1.35 billion, by 2029. The bill mentions digital literacy, college advisers for adults, and “foundational skills.” But there is no plan for the most foundational and intractable problem in adult education: teaching grown-ups to read.

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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

We’ve long felt that NPR and PBS have been biased, but in the last decade or so that bias has gotten out of hand. It’s not just that they’re liberal. They’ve taken on that specific kind of academic, identity-obsessed point of view that has been the main thing that has driven voters away from the Democrats. 

I challenge anyone to listen to a single hour of NPR news programing — or much of the rest of their programs, for that matter — that does not include at least one (usually more) of the following:

• A story on transgender issues portraying them as victims and told from the point of view of rights activists.
• A story on immigration told from the point of view of immigrants as victims while being dismissive (if even mentioning) their legal status. 
• A story on climate change told in a breathless — and sometimes ludicrously reaching — fashion. How is climate change impacting transgender immigrants?!

I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that at production meetings the first agenda item is: what’s our climate change story today, our transgender story and our migrant story? Sometimes, NPR and PBS will “balance” these stories by throwing in a quote from somebody right of center, but it’s an afterthought as in, “Yeah, we’ll touch that base so when we get accused of bias we can wave it around.”

I get more push back from my liberal friends about this than anything else. Either they just don’t hear the bias or they do and they defend it with something like, “but Fox News…” 

There are two issues here. First, obviously, Fox News doesn’t get public funding. And second, one thing liberals used to stand for was unbiased reporting. They didn’t want to be told what they already believed. They wanted solid information that even ran the risk of changing their minds. They didn’t want to be told what to think. They wanted to do that for themselves. But recently, since the whole country has fallen into a fierce tribalism, too many liberals have abandoned their principles. If the other side does it, they want to do it too. They don’t want to be informed, they want to be armed to do (usually imagined) intellectual battle with the enemy.

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Taxpayers will no longer support a media executive who believes that the First Amendment is the “number one challenge” to advancing left-wing propaganda.

James Pierson

The Trump administration is trying to fix what ails American universities by freezing billions of dollars in pledged research grants due to be paid to Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and other prominent institutions, on the grounds that the schools have not done enough to counter anti-Semitism on their campuses or have evolved into left-wing hothouses with little diversity of opinion. The administration froze the funds as the first step in negotiations designed to address practices that conflict with federal policy or impede the effectiveness of federally supported research. Trump took the confrontation further by calling on the IRS to suspend Harvard’s tax-exempt status because, he said, the institution has turned into a partisan political operation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the task force handling the negotiations for the administration told Harvard that to unfreeze the funds, the school would not only have to address anti-Semitism but must also begin “to reform the campus culture by making structural changes to governance, student admissions and faculty hiring.” Harvard’s leaders, apparently taken aback by demands that went beyond addressing anti-Semitism, rejected the administration’s approach. Attorneys for the university replied to the task force by letter, declaring that the school would “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” Harvard president Alan Garber promised to take the battle to federal court, where he hopes a judge will order the administration to unfreeze the money—and he might get his wish, since the funds have already been pledged (though not yet paid).

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When @Harvard is puzzled as to why taxpayers question sending billions of dollars of their money to the University, Harvard need only consider what they are teaching our future educators at the Harvard Ed School.

Corrine Hess:

This year, that money has been used to increase the recruitment, retention, and diversification of school counselors, school psychologists and school social workers.

DPI learned Tuesday the grant would be canceled. At this time, DPI believes the state will still be able to access the initial funding of $2 million through Dec. 31, 2025. But the remaining four years — totaling $8 million — will be canceled.

“At a time when communities are urgently asking for help serving mental health needs, this decision is indefensible,” State Superintendent Jill Underly said in a statement. “These funds – which Wisconsin used to make meaningful change for our schools – were helping districts and our higher education partners develop new mental health professionals, providing a career opportunity for our current high schoolers.”

But the Trump administration says the Biden administration, in awarding the grants, violated “the letter or purpose of Federal civil rights law.”

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more.

Edited by Helen Rose Fives and Michele Gregoire Gill

Teachers’ beliefs play a fundamental role in the education landscape. Nevertheless, most educational researchers only allude to teacher beliefs as part of a study on other subjects. This book fi lls a necessary gap by identifying the importance of research on teachers’ beliefs and providing a comprehensive overview of the topic. It provides novices and experts alike a single volume with which to understand a complex research landscape. Including a review of the historical foundations of the field, this book identifi es current research trends, and summarizes the current knowledge base regarding teachers’ specifi c beliefs about content, instruction, students, and learning. For its innumerable applications within the fi eld, this handbook is a necessity for anyone interested in educational research.

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more.

AJ Bayatpour

Waukesha is the latest school district dealing with Wisconsin’s demographic problem.

Declining birthrates are fueling declining enrollments. Administrators are presenting their plan to reduce the buildings footprint here by up to 15%. With 23 schools, that could be 2-3 closures

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Meanwhile, Madison is expanding buildings and taxes amidst declining enrollment.

David Clarey:

Milwaukee police are mulling a trade: 2.5 million mugshots for free use of facial recognition technology.

Officials from the Milwaukee Police Department say swapping the photos with the software firm Biometrica will lead to quicker arrests and solving of crimes. But that benefit is unpersuasive for those who say the trade is startling, due to the concerns of the surveillance of city residents and possible federal agency access.

“We recognize the very delicate balance between advancement in technology and ensuring we as a department do not violate the rights of all of those in this diverse community,” Milwaukee Police Chief of Staff Heather Hough said during an April 17 meeting.

Quanta:

Asking scientists to identify a paradigm shift, especially in real time, can be tricky. After all, truly ground-shifting updates in knowledge may take decades to unfold. But you don’t necessarily have to invoke the P-word to acknowledge that one field in particular — natural language processing, or NLP — has changed. A lot.

The goal of natural language processing is right there on the tin: making the unruliness of human language (the “natural” part) tractable by computers (the “processing” part). A blend of engineering and science that dates back to the 1940s, NLP gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies another way to target us with ads. It was also ground zero for the emergence of large language models — a technology that NLP helped to invent but whose explosive growth and transformative power still managed to take many people in the field entirely by surprise.

Jay Bhattacharya:

I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.

To be clear, maximum transparency regarding the research we support is our default position. Since the release of NIH’s 2008 Public Access Policy, more than 1.5 million articles reporting on NIH-supported research have been made freely available to the public through PubMed Central. While the 2008 Policy allowed for an up to 12-month delay before such articles were required to be made publicly available, in 2024, NIH revised the Public Access Policy to remove the embargo period so that researchers, students, and members of the public have rapid access to these findings.

NIH is the crown jewel of the American biomedical research system.  However, a recent Pew Research Center study(link is external) shows that only about 25% of Americans have a “great deal of confidence” that scientists are working for the public good.  Earlier implementation of the Public Access Policy will help increase public confidence in the research we fund while also ensuring that the investments made by taxpayers produce replicable, reproducible, and generalizable results that benefit all Americans.   

Christopher Rufo

Harvard Graduate School of Education is an ideological disaster, but, even worse, a verified midwit factory. Imagine ascending to the supposed pinnacle of “elite institutions” and having to slurp up the same slop as some left-wing junior-high teacher training in Topeka.

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Related: Jennifer Cheatham and what’s different, this time?

citizen vs machine

YLE:

Finnish Parliament voted on Tuesday to approve a law that restricts the use of mobile devices by pupils at primary and secondary schools.

The new rules are expected to come into force after the summer break, in August.

The law does not entirely ban the use of mobile phones at school, and their use will be permitted in certain situations. But generally, the use of phones during class time will be prohibited.

Pupils will need to get special permission from teachers to use their phones, to assist them in studies, or to take care of personal health-related matters, for example.

Karl Zinsmeister:

“It has always been like this.”

“You can’t possibly change that.” 

“We don’t work that way here.” 

“That’s not how it’s done.”

Administrative resistance to reform has left Washington littered with dysfunctional tar pits. For literally 20 years the FAA has been “rolling out” NextGen, its desperately needed tech modernization of air traffic control, and still nothing is properly automated. The Pentagon has failed its annual audit for the last seven years running, yet no heads have rolled. The federal retirement system is administered, in the year 2025, on paper forms hand marked in ink and stapled together. The VA has more than doubledits staff and quintupled its costs (the budget soaring from $67 billion to $370 billion in the last two decades), yet backlogs, service lapses, and administrative scandals abound. 

In My West Wing, a new book drawing lessons from my years in the White House, I describe many encounters with governmental dead zones like these. Take, for instance, air traffic control. In the first 60 days of this year, there were 100 dangerous aviation incidents in the U.S., including one that killed 67 people when an American Airlines flight smashed into a helicopter at Reagan National Airport in D.C. Those 100 incidents and close calls were actually less than we experience over two months of a typical year. Last-minute interventions by our skilled pilots and ground controllers prevent most such emergencies from taking lives, but the longstanding reality is that we are enduring more peril in the air than we ought. This all stems from the failure of our federal government to maintain a modern air traffic control system.

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more.

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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

That led to all kinds of silliness. Here in Madison the culmination of the ludicrousness happened when a student stumbled on the fact that a big rock on the UW campus had been referred to by an offensive name… once… a hundred years ago. So, the UW spent $50,000 to move the rock to an undisclosed location where it could no longer do “harm.”

That incident was just slap stick, but real harm was done when the UW was complicit in trashing the reputation of one of its most accomplished alums. Frederic March was not only a great actor, but he was an early champion of civil rights. For reasons that will remain a mystery, he was briefly a member of a campus group calling itself the Ku Klux Klan. The chancellor ordered up an investigation which found that it appeared to be a sort of academic honors society and it never engaged in any racist activity. Nobody knows why they chose that unfortunate name, but March was not a racist. In fact, quite the opposite. No matter. At the height of this madness, March’s name was stripped from a campus theatre and responsible adults in the campus administration refused to replace it, disregarding the sifting and winnowing done by their own study. 

All of that was at the height of the terror. One thing Donald Trump has accomplished is to change the atmosphere so that it’s hard to imagine that this kind of madness would take place in the current environment. To be sure, Trump has done this the way he’s done everything else: he’s used a sledge hammer when a scalpel was called for. Nonetheless, an environment where administrators might feel free to say that they were not going to move a rock because somebody once called it by a bad name and they weren’t going to trash a good man because he once belonged to an organization with a similarly bad name would be a refreshing change.

So, while I don’t agree with everything that’s being done at the Federal and state levels to push back on DEI, I do very much welcome a broad adjustment back to sanity.

But one place that is as resistant to change as any is public education. We don’t have to look hard for an example. See the “unconference” sponsored by DPI. To quote last Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal story on this:

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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Will Flanders

Last year, (taxpayer funded Wisconsin) DPI changed Forward Exam standards-lowering the bar for proficiency in WI. Curiously after the election, DPI released data that “unrigs” the results to show what trends would have been. We put that data into district-by-district graph. 🧵

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14% reading proficiency in Beloit on the Forward Exam turned into 22% through standards changes.

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Proficiency before & after DPI changes

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly (back story).

Underly supports eliminating our one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement, the Foundations of Reading (FORT)

Civics: Why and how was Jill Underly Re-elected? (a bit of uniparty analysis as well). And.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Maggie Macintosh:

Manitoba’s largest school division has removed a rare entry exam used to sort graduating elementary students into different academic streams.

Tomas Apodaca and Colin Lecher 

The website that lets Californians shop for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, coveredca.com, has been sending sensitive data to LinkedIn, forensic testing by CalMatters has revealed. 

As visitors filled out forms on the website, trackers on the same pages told LinkedIn their answers to questions about whether they were blind, pregnant, or used a high number of prescription medications. The trackers also monitored whether the visitors said they were transgender or possible victims of domestic abuse. (See the data on our Github repo.)

Helen Raleigh:

The secret of Mississippi and Louisiana’s educational success is not secret at all; it is about returning to the fundamentals and following the evidence. Mississippi’s Republican-led legislature has implemented effective education reforms in 2012 that prioritize phonics — teaching students to sound out words — and enforce a retention policy for third graders who do not meet essential reading benchmarks. Furthermore, the state invests $15 million each year, or approximately $32 per student, into training teachers on literacy and providing dedicated reading coaches in schools.

The reform has produced remarkable results, with Mississippi’s fourth graders’ reading scores rising from 49th in the nation in 2013 to the top of the rankings (after adjusting for demographics) in 2024. The progress among black students is particularly impressive. According to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, the reading scores of the state’s black fourth graders have improved from 45th to third place during the same period. This reflects the effectiveness of Mississippi’s literacy program, which has provided a learning gain equivalent to a full year of schooling. Moreover, the state’s graduation rate has seen a significant rise from 72 percent in 2013 to 89.9 percent in 2024.

This drastic improvement has been dubbed as the “Mississippi Miracle,” and even caught the attention of Vice President J.D. Vance, who praised Mississippi’s education success on X.com: “This is pretty incredible. Smart education reform drastically improved Mississippi’s schools.”

Gov. Reeves declared in an interview that the education outcome in his state “is really not a miracle at all. It’s really a result of conservative reforms implemented in public education — they’re making a huge difference for kids.”

Ron DeSantis:

Per capita debt trends — federal vs Florida Florida’s per capita debt is declining and the per citizen share of the state debt is less than $500. The per citizen share of the federal debt: $105,000

Rick Esenberg and Dan Lennington:

In addition to facing charges for battery, Flores-Ruiz had another problem: he was an illegal immigrant. ICE officers were alerted by Milwaukee County to his arrest, and they matched his booking fingerprints to another set taken at his prior deportation.

Knowing Flores-Ruiz would probably be in court, ICE agents went to the courthouse on the morning of April 18, checked in with court personnel, identified themselves and explained their plan to arrest Flores-Ruiz after the hearing. Law enforcement officers frequently arrest individuals in county courts and jails. The reason is simple: it’s a safe and controlled environment, free of weapons and with a significant law enforcement presence nearby.

This was all routine and there were no objections. ICE agents explained and agreed to arrest Flores-Ruiz in the hallway after the hearing was complete.

Ivy Exile

To significant extents, the pandemic was exploited as the most tremendous of opportunities, and it’s not hard to understand why. Culturally and institutionally, public health has increasingly attracted and rewarded zealous and literal-minded technocrats who feel that achieving a rationally equitable global society is mainly just a matter of funding and empowering enough credentialed experts to supervise. By January 2021, with a new administration in charge, new standards of respectability and cooperation were becoming ever more standardized. All the norms were largely based on assumptions circa the beginning of 2016, when Brexit was but an unthinkable lark to be vanquished and Hillary Clinton was an inevitable shoo-in to break the glass ceiling and usher in six or seven Supreme Court seats for whatever we, the global intelligentsia, knew was needed.

From an establishmentarian perspective, it was supposed to be a new year zero, and an irresistible chance to restore the natural order. It was, of course, inevitable that the nation-state would wither away, and that soon we elites in the know would more or less enact the enlightened United Federation of Planets as seen on Star Trek. It was not that people such as Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Francis Collins were monsters, but that they acted monstrously in their arrogance and imperiousness and hubris in striving to enact what they felt they might achieve.

——

A substantive analysis of taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue

Alex Tabarrok:

Yale has approximately one administrator for every undergraduate student (see also here and here). Years of simmering tension about the growth of administration relative to faculty has now been brought forward. President Trump has threatened to cut funding to Yale, the Yale administration has threatened to stop hiring faculty and raises, some faculty are now threatening to revolt.

Over 100 Yale professors are calling for the University administration to freeze new administrative hires and commission an independent faculty-led audit to ensure that the University prioritizes academics.

In a letter written to University President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel, signatories addressed the “collision of two opposing forces: extraordinary financial strength and runaway bureaucratic expansion.”

…Professor Juan de la Mora, a letter’s signee, said that a significant number of Yale professors believe that the institution is using funding for “improper” purposes and neglecting the school’s founding principles of emphasizing faculty and students.

Aaron Sibarium:

The Harvard Law Review has made DEI the “first priority” of its admissions process. It routinely kills or advances pieces based on the author’s race. It even vets articles for racially diverse citations.

And guess what? Editors at the top journal put all this in writing.🧵

Corrine Hess:

Artificial intelligence enables a computer system to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as problem-solving, decision-making, translation and written language. 

Trump’s order establishes the White House Task Force on AI Education. The task force will establish “public-private partnerships to provide resources for K-12 AI education, both to enhance AI-related education but also to better utilize AI tools in education generally.” 

In Milwaukee Public Schools, teachers have been encouraged to use AI tools. Osborn has a subscription to a service that allows her to use AI to create images for her classes. 

MPS was going to block ChatGPT but later decided against it. 

Osborn thinks AI can be useful for students at times. But when her students are writing, she turns it off. 

“If you want to use AI to proofread something, I think that’s OK,” she said. “But if you want to use AI to write your whole essay, not so much.” 

In July 2024, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released AI guidance for schools and libraries. 

Stanford Report

A civics education helps students see for themselves why democracy is important,” said Coyne, an advanced lecturer in political science and the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching. “We take that idea and spend some time talking together about what it means and give them the tools to be critical in a constructive way. I believe that’s also a civic skill.”

SCI is also about to launch a senior honors program.

SCI currently supports three postdoctoral fellows who combine teaching seminars on civic history and thought, constitutionalism, and political economy with their own research on topics relevant to the education of citizens. For example, postdoctoral fellow Simon Luo is examining the rise of China and how political actors shape its future. Next academic year, the number of SCI postdocs will grow to five. 

Meanwhile, SCI collaborates with other campus efforts such as ePluribus Stanford and the Democracy Hub, which seek to cultivate a campus culture in which open and constructive dialogue thrives and learning across differences flourishes.

“Disagreement about politics – about the basic terms on which we should live together – is a feature and not a bug of a democratic society,” said Satz, the Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of H&S, faculty director of the Democracy Hub, and university liaison for ePluribus Stanford. “That said, there are skills and values that need to be in place to make such disagreement productive. SCI will continue to build on what students have learned in COLLEGE, further preparing them for lives of engaged citizenship.”

Karen Mulder:

Hillsdale is the only college in Michigan that does not accept federal funding, operating completely independently of government handouts and subsidies. Schools like Michigan State University and the University of Michigan are learning that federal dollars come with strings, and those strings are taught.

The two colleges—the biggest in the state—are both members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and have passed, or are urging their faculty senates to pass, a “mutual defense compact” out of fear of retaliation from the administration.

Rutgers University initiated the charge, urging Big Ten schools to pass similar resolutions to commit funding and legal resources to defend the schools against potential federal funding withdrawal.
Hillsdale, however, requires no such compact because, since 1984, the college has rejected federal funds.

“Hillsdale does not accept even one penny of federal or state funding for student grants, loans, or scholarships,” the college’s website reads. “Being steadfastly and completely independent of taxpayer support is essential to being a truly independent institution—one not beholden to government regulations that conflict with our educational mission.”

Some of Hillsdale’s Michigan neighbors fail to recognize those same principles yet assert that the Trump administration meets their demands, not the other way around.

The administration cites pro-Palestinian protests and rhetoric, as well as destructive DEI measures on campus, as reasons for pulling funding.

“Shouting, preventing people from going to class, threatening them personally. That breaks down the academic community,” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn said. “They shouldn’t be doing that. And it’s, you know, because the [1964] Civil Rights Act is written in a certain way; if they permit that kind of activity, Harvard is in violation of that act, and that act applies to every organization in America.”

Ironically, Hillsdale’s financial freedom is rooted in similar frustrations about the federal government asking the college to do things it didn’t want to do. In Hillsdale’s case, it was recording and collecting diversity statistics.

Kimberly Wethal

On April 9, nonprofit Defending Education, also known as Parents Defending Education, filed a complaint with the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights over UW-Madison’s Lawton Undergraduate Minority Retention Grant program. Though only UW-Madison is named in the complaint, the Lawton grant law applies to all Universities of Wisconsin schools and has been codified in state law for more than 40 years.

The Lawton grant, which provides up to $4,000 annually for members of some minority groups for up to four years of their college education, was created in 1985 to help improve graduation and retention for in-state students. Qualifying races and ethnicities include those who are Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and of specific Southeastern Asian heritage, including those from the nations of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Becky Jacobs

In the lawsuit, a group of Wisconsin taxpayers — including some from Madison — argue the grant program is discriminatory and violates the equal protection clauses in the U.S. and Wisconsin constitutions by narrowing eligibility based on race.

Wisconsin’s Second District Court of Appeals sided with WILL and the taxpayers in a February decision, determining the program is unconstitutional.

“If only white and Asian students were eligible for the … grant program — obviously then automatically excluding Black American, Hispanic and American Indian students — such a program would not withstand constitutional scrutiny for two seconds, and properly so,” the unanimous decision, written by Judge Mark Gundrum, says.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul then filed a petition last month asking the state Supreme Court to weigh in.

John Hindraker:

The crime, such as it was, was never solved, which I assume means that, like nearly all instances of campus racism, it was an inside job. When it became clear that no progress was being made, I wrote the dean of the law school an email suggesting some investigatory tips. For example, the portraits were covered with glass which in all likelihood bore fingerprints. The dean did not respond to my email, nor, as far as I could tell, was the “crime” looked into any further.

That incident gave rise to some soul-searching the part of the law school’s dean, Martha Minow. Quoting myself, at the link above:

The Dean of the law school, Martha Minow, said that racism is a “serious problem” there. Really? Minow has been the Dean since 2009. Why has she allowed racism to flourish? Where has this “serious problem” been manifested, and what has she done about it? Who, exactly, are the “racists” who have created this serious problem?

I expressed skepticism as to Dean Minow’s sincerity. She certainly didn’t think that she, or anyone on the Harvard Law School staff, was a racist. So why would racism be a “serious problem” at the law school? Through the magic of “systemic racism,” racism without racists. 

This is what we still see today. Harvard thinks it has a duty to combat racism. But why? Are there a lot of racists on Harvard’s faculty, or in its administration? If so, they should be fired. But of course, that isn’t what they mean. It is “systemic racism”–racism in the air–that they are combatting through their superior virtue. This is why Harvard and so many other institutions have engaged for many years in affirmative action, DEI, in other words, race discrimination. They do it to reverse the effects of “systemic”–i.e., non-existent–racism. Discriminatory policies on Harvard’s part are a sign of virtue.

Brad Nguyen:

Memorising addition and subtraction facts is vital for making progress in maths and helps students access more complex tasks.

When I speak to teachers who are concerned about the maths proficiency of children, a common theme is that they are seeing too many students who cannot fluently recall basic addition and subtraction facts. Parents, too, are often surprised that schools are not helping their child to memorise addition and subtraction facts.

Let’s define what I mean by memorisation. I mean that when prompted with something like 8 + 4, they can respond with 12 quickly and effortlessly. What is not memorisation is applying a strategy to effortfully work out 8 + 4, say, by counting on using your fingers.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: being able to apply a strategy to derive a fact is a worthy instructional goal. My sense is that there is consensus amongst teachers that teaching students strategies is a good thing. Is there the same consensus around memorising facts? No, but there should be! So, why should children memorise addition and subtraction facts?

Alexander Furnas, Timothy Lapira and Dashun Wang:

Science has long been regarded as essential to policy-making, serving as one of the primary sources of evidence that informs decisions (1, 2) with its particular epistemic authority (3). Its role has become especially vital, as many pressing societal challenges today—from climate change to public health crises to technological advancement—are intricately linked with scientific progress. However, amid rising political polarization (4), a fundamental question remains open: Is science used differently by policy-makers in different parties? Here we combine two large-scale databases capturing policy, science, and their interactions to examine the partisan differences in citing science in policy-making in the United States. Overall, we observe systematic differences in the amount, content, and character of science cited in policy by partisan factions in the United States. These differences are strikingly persistent across fields of research, policy issues, time, and institutional contexts.

Will Flanders

DPI still claims they didn’t lower the standards, but this data release proves that to be a lie. It’s time we stopped allowing DPI to lie to us on the continuing failures of our public schools.

——

Quinton Klabon:

DPI uploaded scores in the least usable way possible, so I did it for you!

——

more.

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly (back story).

Underly supports eliminating our one elementary teacher content knowledge requirement, the Foundations of Reading(FORT)

Kasen Stephensen:

During my junior year at Stanford, I remember an assignment where we filled out a five-year plan with a professional and personal goal for each year. I planned to marry my then-fiancée that year, so my personal goals were straightforward: have a wedding and start having kids over the following years. I knew my situation in life relative to my classmates was unusual, but I didn’t realize how different my approach was until I shared my plan in a small group setting.

Out of the four or five students, only one other person mentioned anything related to dating or relationships, and that was to “start thinking about dating” four years out of college. They all described getting married as an objective for later and were surprised I would consider marrying so young. Shouldn’t I establish myself financially or professionally first, then seek a spouse? 

In sociological research, this perspective is known as the “capstone” conception of marriage. Adherents see marriage as a culminating achievement sought after some time exploring sexually, establishing a financial base, and maturing. As the median age at which Americans get married for the first time has crept steadily upwards for the last 40 years—to almost 29 for women and just over 30 for men—this perspective has become the de facto norm. 

While this seems like a reasonable approach, it comes with two major risks. First, it assumes that one can successfully get “established” before getting married. With soaring home prices, record student debt, persistent inflation, and a competitive job market, obtaining the independence or financial stability thought “necessary” may be perpetually out of reach for many individuals, particularly among the working class. Secondly, waiting until an indefinite later can force one’s hand when biological and social deadlines converge in the early 30s. One woman, interviewed by clinical psychologist Meg Jay for her book, The Defining Decade, described this convergence as “musical chairs”:

Austin Berg

According to polling conducted earlier this year by M3 Strategies – the most accurate pollster in the 2023 Chicago mayoral election – public opinion on the CTU has flipped.

For the first time in modern city history, the union is underwater with Chicago voters.

Just 29% of Chicagoans had a favorable opinion of the CTU while 60% had an unfavorable opinion (-31 net). Asked about CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, 18% had a favorable opinion while 55% had an unfavorable opinion (-37 net).

Gates and CTU Vice President Jackson Potter are now facing a unified opposition slate in the May 16internal elections for union officers. In the race for CTU president, members will decide between Gates and veteran CPS educator Erica Meza.

——-

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the very first times I’ve ever heard a journalist with a corporate outlet tell DC journalists that they themselves bear responsibility for the collapse in public trust in this part of the media, due to the elevation of a partisan mission over reporting. Kudos @AlexThomp:

CJ Womack:

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 mandates that all U.S. institutions annually report foreign gifts exceeding $250,000, a requirement the the department claims Harvard has failed to fulfill. 

The letter demands comprehensive records from the school, including lists of foreign gifts, grants, contracts, communications with foreign governments, and details on expelled foreign students or faculty with foreign affiliations. 

The Department is also seeking names and backgrounds of Harvard affiliates tied to foreign governments, following reports that Harvard received $150 million from foreign sources between January 2020 and October 2024. 

This demand follows a December compliance agreement between Harvard and the department, which required the university to improve its reporting practices, as noted by The Harvard Crimson.

Arjun Panickssery

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”
— 107-word sentence from Stuart Little (1945)

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen(died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

So the decline predates television, the radio, and the telegraph—it’s been going on for centuries. The average sentence length in newspapers fell from 35wps to 20wps between 1700 and 2000. The presidential State of the Union address has gone from 40wps down to under 20wps, and the inaugural addresses had a similar decline. (From Jefferson through T. Roosevelt, the SOTU address was delivered to Congress without any speech, and print was the main way that inaugural addresses were consumed for most of their history.) Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders dropped from 17.4wps to 13.4wps between 1974 and 2013.

Michael Fragoso

And that could pose a problem for fans of the filibuster in the Republican-led Senate. Senate Republicans are highly motivated to address immigration. Having negotiated the last two significant, bipartisan immigration deals in the Senate, I have the scars to prove it. Republican senators are unlikely to sit by while the courts prevent Trump from using his broad immigration and national-security powers to enact his core agenda. Expecting them to cater to the demands of seven Democratic senators in order to fix a problem created by Democrats may be a bridge too far.

The Supreme Court is a governing body, just like Congress and the executive. The timely resolution of the controversies surrounding Trump’s immigration agenda is as much a question of governance as of jurisprudence. If the Supreme Court dithers and allows the judiciary to play politics with immigration enforcement, it may well raise the political temperature until 50 senators see no choice but to abandon the filibuster.

Leader McConnell protected the filibuster in no small part to protect the Supreme Court. It would be a tragic irony if the Court’s indecision and timidity precipitated the filibuster’s demise.

Matthew Ygelsias:

The dumbing of America

Nat Malkus from the American Enterprise Institute observes that, to the extent they are available, test scores for American adults are also in decline.

In other words, the flagging performance of American students isn’t just about something that’s happening in schools; it’s about something that’s happening in our society at large. He glosses a few different theories, but I think it’s pretty obviously a combination of smartphones, social media, and short-form video. If you give people more stuff to do, they read less. Our son loves to read, but he obviously loves playing Fortnite and watching Minecraft streamers on YouTube even more. He reads a lot anyway because he loves it, because he was taught well at school, and because we make books available for him at home. But mostly he reads a lot because there are large swathes of time when gaming and watching videos are simply off-limits.

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

By D. Graham Burnett

Let me offer a dispatch from the impact zone. When I first asked a class of thirty Princeton undergraduates—spanning twelve majors—whether any had used A.I., not a single hand went up. Same with my graduate students. Even after some enthusiastic prodding (“Hey! I use these tools! They’re incredible! Let’s talk about this!”), I got nowhere.

It’s not that they’re dishonest; it’s that they’re paralyzed. As one quiet young woman explained after class, nearly every syllabus now includes a warning: Use ChatGPT or similar tools, and you’ll be reported to the academic deans. Nobody wants to risk it. Another student mentioned that a major A.I. site may even be blocked on the university network, though she was too nervous to test the rumor.

In one department on campus, a recently drafted anti-A.I. policy, read literally, would actually have barred faculty from giving assignments to students that centered on A.I.(It was ultimately revised.) Last year, when some distinguished alums and other worthies conducted an external review of the history department, a top recommendation was that we urgently address the looming A.I. disruptions to our teaching and research. This suggestion got a notably cool reception. But the idea that we can just keep going about our business won’t do, either.

On the contrary, staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: “We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness. And it won’t hold for long. It’s time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular.

San Francisco Chronicle:

But for an even bleaker example of how state leaders are failing to rise to the urgency of the moment, Californians should consider the response to AB1121 from Assembly Member Blanca Rubio, D-Baldwin Park (Los Angeles County).

The seemingly uncontroversial bill would require California teachers in transitional kindergarten through fifth grade to be trained in the “science of reading,” which emphasizes the importance of foundational literacy skills, including phonics — or sounding out words. It would also require schools to adopt an evidence-based reading curriculum in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade. Backed by decades of interdisciplinary research, this approach has proven to be particularly effective in teaching young kids how to read — regardless of their mother language. 

———

more.

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Don Surber:

So why not just answer the questions? 

Retraction Watch says it is “tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process.” Among the retractions it watches are NEJM’s.

The journal had a doozy one.

On January 10, 1980, NEJM published a letter from Jane Porter and Hershel Jick, M.D., of the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance, Program Boston University Medical Center, Waltham, Massachusetts, under the headline, “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.”

The letter said, “Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively. Although there were 11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The addiction was considered major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.”

Michael Ford:

The concept of academic freedom, however, is operationalized via bureaucratic documents such as university policies and, in some cases, law. But, as those of us in public administration know, bureaucratic policies and procedures are only as strong as the willingness of people to buy into them. In other words, a policy and even a law loses meaning if it conflicts with culture and action. I wonder, is it possible to attack something that does not really exist in practice? OK, to be fair, academic freedom exists on paper, but in practice the culture of higher education does not (in my and many others’ experiences) reflect the stated commitment.

Culture reflects institutional norms which are an outgrowth of institutional realities. One such reality is a never-ending cycle of austerity, especially at non-flagship institutions, that has left little room for the fearless advancement of knowledge so crucial to the mission of higher education. When there is a constant risk of program and resource cuts, faculty will seek to keep their head down to avoid falling victim to those cuts. Now is not the time to be perceived as a troublemaker on a college campus. Those of us in public administration often research and comment on the political institutions that oversee our public universities, putting us in an awkward position of weighing the pros and cons of pursuing research that may generate a backlash.

This is not to say the recent attacks on higher education are not real, nor am I suggesting that we collectively give up on academic freedom. I am suggesting that it is time to evolve past the goal of defending academic freedom and instead define and build a new culture of academic freedom. The challenge facing higher education mirrors our larger democratic challenge: We have a generation of people being asked to defend something that they never truly experienced or fully benefited from. The mid-career academic at most universities has known only austerity, political interference and a crisis of confidence in higher education throughout their professional career.

Alina Chan:

Resulting subpoenas uncovered a conspiracy to avoid legally mandated oversight by deleting all emails “relating to origin”.

The ranking Democrat called this a “stain on the legacy”.

It’s not partisan.

—-

A substantive analysis of taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue

Jill Barshay:

DOGE has been demanding 50 percent cuts to the $190 million a year testing program. Nearly all the work is handled by outside contractors, such as Westat and ETS, and five-year contracts were awarded at the end of 2024. But instead of paying the vendors annually, DOGE has diced the payments into shorter increments, putting pressure on the contractors to accept sharp cuts, according to several former Education Department employees. At the moment, several of the contracts are scheduled to run out of money in May and June, and DOGE’s approval is needed to restart the flow of money. Indeed, DOGE allowed one NAEP contract to run out of funds entirely on March 31, forcing ETS employees to stop work on writing new questions for future exams. 

Reading and math tests are scheduled to start being administered in schools in January 2026, and so additional disruptions could derail the main NAEP assessment altogether. NAEP is taken by a sample of 450,000 students who are selected to represent all the fourth and eighth graders in the nation, and each student only takes part of a test. This sampling approach avoids the burden of testing every child in the country, but it requires Education Department contractors to make complicated statistical calculations for the number of test takers and the number of test sections needed to produce valid and reliable results. Contractors must then package the test sections into virtual test booklets for students to take online. The Education Department also must get approval from the federal Office of Management and Budget to begin testing in schools — yet another set of paperwork that is handled by contractors. 

William Jacobson:

We then go on, as we always do, to explain in detail why the classification of “students of color” violates federal and state law, and even Drake’s own nondiscrimination policy, and we ask OCR to open an investigation.

The filing generated substantial media coverage in Iowa and beyond.

Dan:

Boggle is a word search game. You form words by connecting adjacent letters, including along diagonals. Longer words score more points. Good words on this board include STRANGERS and PLASTERING. After you spend three minutes trying to find as many words as you can, you’ll be struck by just how good computers are at this.

Using the ENABLE2K word list, this board has 3,625 points on it coming from 1,045 words. This board has more points than any other. Try any other combination of letters and you’ll get a lower score. While I’ve long suspected this board was the winner, I’ve now proven it via exhaustive search.

Many people have searched for high-scoring boards before, but no one has ever constructed a computational proof that they’ve found the best one. This is a new, first of its kind result for Boggle.

Christopher Rufo

No, Alex, I’m mocking the idea that our universities resemble anything like “neutrality, fairness, and openness.” The real question is what to do when they become hyper-ideologized and openly discriminatory. And the answer cannot be “keep sending them unlimited public funding.”

Alex Tabarrok:

A powerful but grim essay by John McGinnis, Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern. For decades, the federal government—driven by the left—expanded its control over universities. The right, most notably Ronald Reagan, tried to resist, shielding civil society from state overreach. They failed. Now, a new right has turned to the left’s playbook and is imposing its own vision of the good society. Chris Rufo mocks classical liberals like myself and their naive ideas of neutrality, fairness and open institutions. Principles are for losers. Seize power! Crush your enemies. Rufo does know how to crush his enemies. But what happens when the devil turns? Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization. Hayek’s civil society dies in the rubble.

——

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.

 Scott Slocum

Ted joined Scott to talk about why so many Illinois metro areas dominate the rest of the country when it comes to property taxes, why the celebration over the state’s latest job numbers is so wrong, why Gov. Pritzker should focus on promoting literacy in schools instead of his pet issues, and more.

Holly Baxter:

“I have a couple of problems with that attitude,” says Oster. “One, I think it’s not respectful. I mean, my general sense is that… women are adults, pregnant women are also adults, and we should tell people actual evidence so they can make choices for themselves. That’s a core belief. But I also think even from an efficacy standpoint, I am not sure that this approach is actually delivering the thing you want. In part because if you tell people a thousand rules and you express them as if all of them are equally important, and people are just like: ‘Well, I can’t do all of them. Like, I can’t do all of those things,’ or like, ‘Well, I guess probably doing half of them is fine. I’ll just sort of pick whatever half I think I would like,’ then you’re actually not in a good position. Because you haven’t helped people prioritize.” A person who gets told a fully abstinent approach to cigarettes and alcohol is equally important might reason they can only achieve one, so they’ll smoke lightly throughout their pregnancy, for example. And we know that the babies of people who smoked in pregnancy have much worse outcomes than the babies of mothers who had a glass of wine a week.

Addy Osmani

What happens if this trend continues unchecked? For one, you might hit a “critical thinking crisis” in your career. If an AI has been doing your thinking for you, you could find yourself unequipped to handle novel problems or urgent issues when the tool falls short. 

As one commentator bluntly put it: “The more you use AI, the less you use your brain… So when you run across a problem AI can’t solve, will you have the skills to do so yourself?”. It’s a sobering question. We’ve already seen minor crises: developers panicking during an outage of an AI coding assistant because their workflow ground to a halt.

Over-reliance can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Microsoft study authors warned that if you’re worried about AI taking your job and yet you “use it uncritically” you might effectively deskill yourself into irrelevance. In a team setting, this can have ripple effects. Today’s junior devs who skip the “hard way” may plateau early, lacking the depth to grow into senior engineers tomorrow. 

If a whole generation of programmers “never know the satisfaction of solving problems truly on their own” and “never experience the deep understanding”from wrestling with a bug for hours, we could end up with a workforce of button-pushers who can only function with an AI’s guidance. They’ll be great at asking AI the right questions, but won’t truly grasp the answers. And when the AI is wrong (which it often is in subtle ways), these developers might not catch it – a recipe for bugs and security vulnerabilities slipping into code.

Fox6 Milwaukee

The Brief

• • A teacher at Milwaukee’s Rufus King High School has been charged with four felony counts of sexual misconduct, accused of sexually harassing students.
  • Students described sexually explicit remarks and inappropriate touching by Erica Allemang-Reinke.
  • Allemang-Reinke was scheduled to have her initial court appearance on Thursday, April 24.

Ann Althouse summary

Speaking of frustrated, I’m frustrated. I want to know a lot more about the praise Zuckerberg received years ago for his grandiose promises of charity — especially in the field of education. But who got the money? Chan and Zuck’s friend Liu, now departed? Give me some tough reporting. Don’t just waft the anti-DEI suspicion that fits the general anti-Trump slant of the newspaper. “Some families wonder” — ugh.

Elizabeth Bratton

A Cambridge professor was paid over $1 million by the FBI between 1991 and 2017 for his assistance to the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC), according to recently published de-classified documents.

The documents reveal that the FBI used a Confidential Human Source (CHS) by the name of Halper to investigate potential ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A 2016 payment request of $5,000 revealed that Halper had been “integral in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” while a $25,000 payment request from the same year was labelled as being “for services performed on the Crossfire Hurricane / Typhoon investigations”.

“Crossfire Hurricane” was a counterintelligence investigation into potential links between Russian intelligence and members of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, with Crossfire Typhoon being a sub-operation that formed part of the wider Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

The report stated that the CHS had provided the FBI “with unique access to targets who are very difficult to gain access to” and had been “more than willing” to do “whatever [he] could do in order to assist the FBI in its mission”.

Glenn Greenwald:

When Hillary was in the Obama Admin, they invented one of the most radical powers in US history: to drone-assassinate US-born citizens with no due process.

It not only claimed that right but carried it out, murdering al-Awlaki in Yemen and, 2 weeks later, his 16-year-old son.

Stefanie Waldek, Katherine McLaughlin, Elizabeth Stamp, Maya Chawla

Though all of these schools are beautiful, for a college campus to be considered the coolest, we think it has to transcend aesthetics alone. Perhaps the award should go to Mount Holyoke with its strong focus on sustainability. All new constructions on campus are built to meet LEED silver requirements, and older ones have been renovated where appropriate to conserve energy. However, a modernist devotee may push back and say Florida Southern College is the coolest—not just because of the 13 beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright–designed buildings on the ground, but because it’s the site with the highest volume of Wright structures in one place. But nature lovers might argue for the scenic setting of the University of California, Santa Cruz, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. And, of course, when it comes to cool, it’s hard to beat a campus surrounded by the energy of a big city such as Columbia. All 64 schools on this list are AD-approved; after reading, decide for yourself which campus should be crowned the coolest.

Joanne Jacobs Summary:

Toppo asks the key question: “By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no significant increase in infections. Why weren’t we in lockstep with Europe?”

“A uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment in America is one large reason,” Zweig responds. Schools seemed set to reopen in fall of 2020. The American Academy of Pediatrics was all for it. Then, on July 6, President Trump tweeted: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL.” Four days later, the pediatricians reversed course and opposed reopening. 

Trump hatred “so dramatically distorted the lens through which they were seeing the world that they conducted themselves in a fashion that was completely disconnected from reality,” says Zweig, who once considered himself on the the left.

——

A substantive analysis of Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue.

Liz Essley Whyte, Douglas Belkin and Sara Randazzo:

Columbia University’s president had already been hounded out of office, but her ordeal wasn’t over.

Four days after she stepped down under government pressure during fraught federal funding negotiations, Katrina Armstrong spent three hours being deposed by a government attorney in Washington, D.C. The lawyer grilled Armstrong over whether she had done enough to protect Jewish students against antisemitism.

As she dodged specifics under questioning, the lawyer said her answer “makes absolutely no sense” and that he was “baffled” by her leadership style.

“I’m just trying to understand how you have such a terrible memory of specific incidents of antisemitism when you’re clearly an intelligent doctor,” he said.

The attorney in the room during the April 1 deposition, a senior Health and Human Services official named Sean Keveney, is part of a little-known government task force that has shaken elite American universities to their core in recent weeks. It has targeted billions of dollars in federal funding at premiere institutions such as Columbia and Harvard, with cascading effects on campuses nationwide. Now it is pressing to put Columbia under a form of federal oversight known as a consent decree.

Quinton Klabon:

Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Act 20 science of reading moment; watch both parts!😭

• pick Amplify: Core Knowledge!
• admit past mistakes (11th-biggest district, bottom quartile results)
• CKLA does 80% of work for teachers, advances slow and fast readers, builds background knowledge

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has issued a warning to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and its Superintendent, Jill Underly, to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, or potentially lose federal funding. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has set a deadline for Thursday, April 24th, and DPI has said they plan to disregard the Trump Administration’s request, which is causing a negative reaction from school districts who rely on these federal funds.  

WILL’s Guidance to School Boards: WILL is building a coalition of districts that want to affirm compliance with federal non-discrimination laws and is encouraging them to reach out to ED directly to seek guidance on how to secure their federal funding. 

The Quotes: WILL Education Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “If Underly doesn’t reverse course by the deadline today, Wisconsin school districts could lose access to critical federal funding. And when that happens, expect calls for more state funds from Wisconsin lawmakers, program cuts and even more referendums resulting in higher property taxes on hardworking Wisconsin families.” 

Chad Aldeman:

Oof, look at these staffing versus enrollment trends in Los Angeles Unified. Percentage change from 2012-13 to 2024-25:

Student enrollment: ↓ 29%
Classified staff: ↑ 42%
Teachers: ↓ 11%
Other certificated support: ↑ 90%
Certificated admin: ↑ 15%

———

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Robin Wigglesworth, Kate Duguid, Costas Mourselas and Ian Smith

 “It’s unstable because there is a lot of supply [of US government debt].”

Indeed, the conundrum confronting those regulators and policymakers that might still want to neuter these strategies is that the Treasury market has come to depend upon them. 

The gross US government bond holdings of all hedge funds that report to the SEC stood at nearly $3.4tn at the end of 2024, and has roughly doubled just since the beginning of 2023, according to the OFR. Much of this will be held through myriad other strategies, but judging by the size of the short Treasury futures positions, most estimates are that fixed-income relative-value hedge funds in aggregate probably hold roughly $1tn of Treasuries.

That would mean that these strategies now hold almost as much US government debt as Japan’s central bank, the single biggest overseas holder, and more than China’s official holdings. With foreign investors already nervous about the Trump administration, it means the health of the Treasury market might be hostage to the very same trades that occasionally cause it palpitations. 

A senior executive at one of the world’s largest trading firms concedes that the growing presence of hedge funds and trading firms in the Treasury market would inescapably make it more volatile. This in turn could lead to investors demanding higher yields as compensation. However, given the scale of US government debt issuance, their involvement is necessary.

Heather Peske

It’s nearly universal: Teachers with master’s degrees almost always get paid more than teachers without. The presumption is that the master’s degree signals a greater level of knowledge and skill. But what if I told you that aspiring elementary math teachers who go through graduate-level teacher prep are often less prepared than teachers who go through an undergraduate program?

That’s just one of the big takeaways from the National Council on Teacher Quality’s (NCTQ) new report, Teacher Prep Review: Solving for Math Success. In our analysis of over 1,100 elementary teacher preparation programs across the country, only 2% of graduate programs earned an A or A+, meaning they dedicate sufficient time to preparing teachers on how to teach math and on the essential math content.

The average graduate program dedicates less than one course credit to foundational math content knowledge, reaching barely more than 10% of the minimum recommended by math experts, practitioners in the field, and the research. In fact,because of this paucity of time, more than 8 in 10 graduate programs earned an F in our review. 

Undergraduate programs are doing better on average, but many still fail to meet the minimum expectations for math content instruction. 

——-

Notes and links on singapore discovery connected math.

John Sailer

This is fascinating. More than 100 Yale professors have called for an audit of the university’s sprawling bureaucracy.

The audit, they say, would “preempt potential federal intervention” and send the message: “Yale prioritizes intellectual vitality over bureaucratic inertia.”

Heather MacDonald:

Disparate-impact theory holds that if a neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately negative effect on underrepresented minorities (overwhelmingly, on blacks), it violates civil rights laws. It has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions, the use of grades for medical licensing exams, credit-based mortgage lending, the ability to discipline insubordinate students, and criminal background checks for employees and renters. It has been used to eliminate prosecution for a large range of crimes, including shoplifting, turnstile jumping, and resisting arrest; to end police tactics such as proactive stops (otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk); and to purge safety technologies like ShotSpotter and speeding cameras from police departments.

In none of those cases has it ever been demonstrated that the disfavored standard was implemented to exclude blacks or other minorities from a position, opportunity, or right. The genius (if a diabolical one) of disparate-impact theory was that it obviated any need to show discriminatory intent on the part of a targeted employer or institution. Discrimination was inferred simply by the effect of the colorblind standard.

Disparate-impact theory preserved the hegemony of the civil rights regime long after the original impetus for that regime had all but disappeared. One would be hard-pressed today to find any mainstream institution that discriminates against blacks in admissions, hiring, or promotion. The reality, in fact, is the opposite: every mainstream institution is desperate to hire and promote as many remotely qualified blacks as possible; it is white males who are disfavored and excluded from positions based on their skin color.

——-

more.

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Duty News:

Ten-month-old babies and toddlers who grew up during the coronavirus crisis were unable to distinguish between frightened and happy faces, research by Utrecht University has shown.

The researchers wanted to find out if the social restrictions during the pandemic, such as mask wearing and lockdown, influenced the early neurological development of babies.

“It’s the age when babies learn much from facial expressions,” researcher Carlijn van den Boomen said. “They learn to distinguish and interpret emotion.”

Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe

According to several Princeton faculty members, “demographic evolution” is a euphemism for racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring. A 2021 internal report outlining best practices for faculty recruitment described how staff were trained to “increase the diversity of the applicants at every step in the process.” The report advised search committees to discount negative references for minority candidates and to ensure that every shortlist included at least “two women and/or two underrepresented minority candidates.”

The implicit message from Eisgruber and the administration: don’t hire white men unless absolutely necessary. According to one professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, this meant abandoning merit-based hiring in favor of race-based preferences—the only way, given the current pipeline, to accomplish Eisgruber’s stated goal of increasing “by 50 percent the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members from underrepresented groups over the next five years.”

Though many of these policies relied on euphemism, some were openly and explicitly discriminatory. The university’s Target of Opportunity Program, which was cancelled shortly before the 2024 presidential election, made funding available for departments to hire “candidates from groups that are underrepresented on campus.” According to conversations with Princeton professors, this referred primarily to racial minorities and women. The program covered half of each hire’s salary, allowing departments to bring on new faculty without bearing the full financial burden. In effect, the administration created financial incentives to prioritize hiring racial minorities.

Brian Potter

You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting someone trying to build humanoid robots. The Humanoid Robot Guide lists 47 different humanoids made by 38 different manufacturers, and this Technology Review article claims 160 companies worldwide are building humanoids. Many of these manufacturers are startups that have raised (or are raising) hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. 1X Technologies has raised around $125 million in funding, Apptronik has raised $350 million, and Agility Robotics is looking to raise $400 million. Figure AI has raised $675 million, and is aiming to raise $1.5 billion more. Since 2015, humanoid robot startups have raised more than $7.2 billion.

Other manufacturers are existing companies trying their hand at humanoids. Tesla is developing its Optimus humanoid, Unitree its G1, Boston Dynamics its Atlas. A variety of Chinese EV manufacturers, such as Xpeng, Xiaomi, and Nio, are also trying their hand at humanoids (and why not, as both electric vehicles and humanoid robots are fundamentally collections of batteries, electric motors, sensors, and control electronics).

These humanoids are also getting increasingly capable. Boston Dynamics has been showing off its humanoid capabilities for years, with the most recent Atlas iteration displaying the ability to run, crawl, somersault, and cartwheel. Unitree has shown off its G1 doing kung fu, boxing, flips, and kip ups. Booster Robotics has shown its T1 kicking a soccer ball, and EngineAI has shown its humanoid doing elaborate dance routines. And while not quite as showy, a variety of humanoids now have the ability to walk with a smooth, human-like gait, including (but not limited to) Figure’s 02, Tesla’s Optimus, and Xpeng’s Iron. This past weekend, a humanoid half marathon was held in Beijing, where 21 humanoid robots competed to complete the race (though only 6 finished, and they did so with significant help from human assistants).

William Jacobson

The ABA proposal to force DEI into mandatory law school education has been back and forth over the years as the political winds shifted, with the ABA Temporarily Suspending DEI Enforcementafter Trump’s Inauguration. In March 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi Warned American Bar Association To ‘Immediately’ Abandon Diversity Mandates.

So the current EO on ABA accreditation has been a long time in the making. I’m proud that I was against the ABA before it was cool to be against the ABA.

Harold Ristau:

The public space has never been a theologically or morally neutral one; therefore, the Church has and will continue to heed the divine obligation to speak into it the holy Word of God. Only a godless culture would dare to claim that the public sphere is somehow neutral. The New Testament clearly announces the darkness of this present age (Eph 6:12). Yet, those who boldly lift their voices on behalf of the Church and her Lord in the public sphere, which is more important now than ever as we approach the final parousia (The second coming of Christ), are facing intensifying persecution for doing so. Over the last few years, a frenetic buzz around Christian Nationalism has spread throughout our churches. Just as the apostle Paul evangelized more boldly in his most fiery trials, so also must we defend the traditional Christian and Lutheran response to anti-Christian public policy, rhetoric, and other subversive actions against Christendom in our Christian vocations within all three estates.

In contrast to active Christian participation, the quietistic response of Christians today places a wedge between Church and state, claiming the role of the Church is limited to prayer and that the role of a Christian is, at most, voting. This is neither Biblical nor Lutheran. It appears that those who most strongly advocate against Christian activity in the public sphere are the ones who failed to respond appropriately to the “pandemania” during the recent pandemic. They appear to hide behind screeds on Christian Nationalism as a reason to avoid participation in the public sphere and to justify what amounts to a soft-antinomian behaviour.

AAC&U

More than 1 in 3 faculty say they have less academic freedom today when it comes to teaching content without any interference (35%), speaking freely as citizens (36%), and speaking freely when participating in institutional governance (38%).

More than half (53%) are concerned about their ability to express what they believe as scholars to be correct statements about the world and worry that their beliefs or activities as faculty members may make them targets of online harassment.

Significant percentages of faculty have faced restrictions on what they can say in faculty and department meetings (36%) or on social media (33%) and what they teach in their courses (24%).
52% of faculty have altered the language in something they have written in order to avoid controversy; most refrain from using terms or words they believe might be perceived as offensive by their students (62%), by administrators (57%), by other faculty members (57%), or by institutional staff (54%).

53% believe classroom discussion of controversial topics or issues should be encouraged and should occur frequently because of its educational value.
93% believe faculty should intentionally invite student perspectives from all sides of an issue.
57% encourage mutually respectful disagreement among the students in their courses either “quite a bit” or “a great deal,” and 70% believe that the amount of mutually respectful disagreement among their students is “about right.”

Just 12% believe classroom discussions should be halted if views are expressed that some students feel causes harm to certain groups of people, and just 5% believe a required reading or other assignment should be dropped if it includes such views.

Annie Linskey:

Last June, as President Joe Biden sequestered himself in the presidential retreat at Camp David to prepare for a crucial first debate against challenger Donald Trump, one of his top advisers noticed that something was off.

Though Biden had been a voracious political animal for decades, he didn’t know details about what Trump had been saying about him on the campaign trail. At one point the president left debate prep and “shuffled out the door to the pool,” where he “sank into a lounge chair and fell asleep,” according to Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, who helped to run his debate preparation efforts.

Biden, who at 81 was the oldest person ever to hold the presidency, seemed “befuddled” by discussion of his own domestic agenda. Klain was “struck by how out of touch with American politics he was.”

This account comes from “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History,” a book by journalist Chris Whipple published in January. It’s one of several new books about the 2024 campaign that at least partly address the question now at the center of assessing Biden’s legacy: What was the true state of his mental faculties while he served as president?

Justin Lahart:

In the 1950s, around 35% of private-sector jobs in the U.S. were in manufacturing. Today, there are 12.8 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S., an amount equal to 9.4% of those private-sector jobs.

President Trump says his sweeping tariff regime is aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. Economists are skeptical that tariffs could make that a reality, and worry that the damage they create will outweigh any benefits.

To understand whether restoring manufacturing to the U.S. is possible, it helps to first understand how the U.S. lost its place as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse.

Starkey comics

The diversity of English dialects in the United Kingdom is enormous.

It’s common for people from either side of a river, mountain, or even town to speak noticeably different ways, with particular features that immediately mark someone out as being from a specific area, to those who have an ear for it.

This is pretty normal in any large region that has been speaking a language continually for 1600 years. You will find the same thing in Germany, Norway, France, and countless other countries. Languages evolve over time, and physical distance between regions means that new features often spread slowly, leading to dialectal differences. Sometimes these differences are small, and only easily recognised by people from the relevant region. Other times there are very clear distinctions, with neighbouring dialects sounding almost like different languages to those unaccustomed to them.

Here I have tried to capture as much nuance as possible. I’ve spent the last few years pooling together every study, survey, map, and database I can find, and then subjecting my image to several rounds of peer feedback. The members of my Facebook group, “Ah yes, the British accent”, were also a huge help in trying to make these borders as accurate as possible. The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made. But it is still very much unfinished, and it always will be.