The DPI might have distanced itself from NAEP standards, but new MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius is blasting out the district’s abysmal NAEP scores.
Showing this slide in a budget presentation is a remarkable departure from what we’ve previously seen out of MPS
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Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
This is both necessary and long overdue. For years, China has been engaged in a systematic effort to target U.S. universities, using Chinese students to conduct extensive espionage and intellectual property theft on elite campuses across the United States — which has helped fuel China’s technological and military growth.
To understand how China uses its students as spies, read the stunning investigative report published last month by Stanford Review reporters Garret Molloy and Elsa Johnsonin which they documented the infiltration of Stanford University by the Chinese Communist Party. “The CCP is orchestrating a widespread academic espionage campaign at Stanford,” Johnson told me and my co-host, Danielle Pletka, in a recent podcast interview. “Stanford is in the heart of Silicon Valley,” she added, “and that’s a huge incentive for China.”
The Harvard Law Review retaliated against a student editor for allegedly leaking documents to the Washington Free Beacon and demanded, as part of the journal’s disciplinary process, that he request their destruction, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. The demand came as the law review was under a document retention order stemming from multiple federal probes, raising questions about whether the journal was also trying to interfere with a government investigation.
The Justice Department told Harvard on May 13 that it was investigating reports of racial discrimination at the journal, according to the New York Times. A week later, the law review instructed a student who was cooperating with the government in that investigation, Daniel Wasserman, to round up the documents he’d allegedly shared.
Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started routinely terminating females. Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.
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The Demographic Future of Humanity:
Credentialism and family formation.
——-
Choose Life
Such an absurd lowering of standards would do students a disservice. And not only is this approach wrong on the merits, it’s been shown to be ineffective in raising outcomes for students. In San Leandro, which implemented similar changes in 2016, lowering the standards for grading hasn’t led to a significant reduction in disparities. Recently, I spoke out against the Palo Alto Unified School District’s plan to take away honors biology after already cutting honors English — moves I fear will have negative long-term impacts on all students.
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more.
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“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District. Madison elected officials have generally been silent on our long term, disastrous reading results.
BREAKING: A 9-0 Supreme Court rules Wisconsin violated the First Amendment by denying a Catholic charity group an exemption to the state’s unemployment tax. #SCOTUS supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf…
more.
Officers are in the early stages of investigating “alleged criminal activity involving inappropriate relationships with staff,” according to a statement from Lt. Ray Thomson.
Thomson did not say how many staff members had been placed on leave, but said that investigators believe the allegations are solely within the high school.
In an email to parents signed by Superintendent Brad Saron, Principal Jen Ploeger and other district leaders, the district said the investigation involved “inappropriate communications and relationships between staff and students from Sun Prairie West High School. Any staff members currently involved in the investigation have been placed on administrative leave and no longer have access to school district facilities or resources.”
And these problems are rife throughout the academy. A Smith College commencement speaker this year even had to surrender her honorary degree when it turned out her speech had been stolen.
It’s not just about copying. There’s also a widely acknowledged “replication crisis”: Scientists publish papers reporting results, but it’s increasingly impossible for others to reproduce those results, leading to what some have called an existential crisis for research.
We’re told cuts to federal spending on higher education will imperil research, but such claims would be more troubling if the “research” were of more reliably high quality.
It’s an open secret that the pressure to produce a constant flood of papers that are publishable and, better yet, interesting enough to spark headlines leads to corner-cutting, “data torture” and overclaiming — or, sometimes, outright fraud.
The result is an expensive self-licking ice cream cone of grant applications and publications, but the actual contribution to human knowledge is often lacking.
Of course, research isn’t the only justification for higher education; we had colleges and universities long before professors saw academic publication as the major goal of their jobs.
Some U.S. politicians have said that China’s Communist Party is harvesting expertise in American academia to ultimately harm U.S. interests. The Trump administration has cited these criticisms among others to back its efforts to force a major cultural shift in U.S. colleges, which many conservatives regard as bastions of liberal and left-wing ideology.
American universities have played leading roles in shaping China’s overseas training programs for mid-career officials, which Beijing started arranging at scale in the 1990s as a way to improve governance by exposing its bureaucrats to Western public-policy ideas and practices.
Other U.S. colleges that have offered executive training to Chinese officials include Syracuse, Stanford, the University of Maryland and Rutgers, according to publicity materials and other disclosures. Syracuse’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, for instance, helped set up postgraduate programs in public administration at Chinese universities in the early 2000s.
The two had nonetheless remained on the district’s payroll, although amid the investigation district leaders have refused to say what they were doing. Leading Southside have been an interim principal and assistant principal.
In the Wednesday email, district Superintendent Joe Gothard says Southside’s current leadership team “will select a group of staff, parents, teachers, and community members” to participate in a community panel that will work with district human resources to hire a new principal. Such a panel was not used when Terrell was hired as a principal in 2020, the district has said, because of complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
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?
St. Francis School District supt Deb Kerr, a former state superintendent candidate, kicks out a reporter for trying to cover a public school board meeting on camera. Here’s the full video: tiktok.com/t/ZP8MXbcNv/
More.
And.
When Noah Werksman began his first final exam in law school, the classroom was half-empty. “There were 60, maybe 70 people in our cohort,” he says in an interview. “At least 30 students were missing.”
Mr. Werksman, 27, came to Pepperdine Caruso School of Law in Malibu, Calif., in the summer of 2023. “It was what we call a racehorse exam,” he says of the final. “It’s pretty guaranteed you’re not going to finish, but you have to move as fast as possible and rack up as many points as you can.”

OpenAI is now fighting a court order to preserve all ChatGPT user logs—including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering—after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence.
“Before OpenAI had an opportunity to respond to those unfounded accusations, the court ordered OpenAI to ‘preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying),” OpenAI explained in a court filing demanding oral arguments in a bid to block the controversial order.null
US immigration authorities are collecting and uploading the DNA information of migrants, including children, to a national criminal database, according to government documents released earlier this month.
The database includes the DNA of people who were either arrested or convicted of a crime, which law enforcement uses when seeking a match for DNA collected at a crime scene. However, most of the people whose DNA has been collected by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the agency that published the documents, were not listed as having been accused of any felonies. Regardless, CBP is now creating a detailed DNA profile on migrants that will be permanently searchable by law enforcement, which amounts to a “massive expansion of genetic surveillance”, one expert said.
The DNA information is stored in a database managed by the FBI called the Combined DNA Index System (Codis), which is used across the country by local, state and federal law enforcement to identify suspects of crimes using their DNA data.
Hillsdale College’s K-12 curriculum is content-rich, balanced, and strong, and with emphasis upon the four core disciplines of math, science, literature, and history, with attention to music, art, physical education, and foreign languages.
Hillsdale College has written and published multiple curriculum products. These include a complete collection of lesson plans for teaching American history, civics, and government K-12, Literacy Essentials: The Journey from Spelling to Reading, and the K-12 Program Guide.
American higher education is in crisis. Pathologies that had been growing for decades and were catalyzed by Covid mania burst into the open after Hamas’s attack on Israel. As financier-activist and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote following Claudine Gay’s resignation, anti-Semitism tends to erupt where political cultures decay. At many “elite” universities, that decay has taken the form of ideological indoctrination, academic corruption, racial discrimination, and contempt for broader society. These institutions have compromised their basic pedagogical and research missions, along with core values like free speech, due process, and equality under law.
Yet while legacy universities dominate headlines, a transformation is taking place elsewhere, and it deserves more attention. Students are voting with their feet, abandoning the “colds and scolds” of the Northeast for more favorable climates—both intellectual and meteorological.
The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they themselves are younger and have more energy. Others hope for larger families so may need to start conceiving earlier, or may prioritize making sure their own parents have many years to spend with grandkids.
Of course, discussing reproductive timelines is fraught. Having others invoke the fact that women experience a decline in fertility with age feels intrusive and insensitive. And the conversation is even trickier today, when anti-abortion activists are pushing a conservative pro-baby agenda from the highest echelons of government and the Heritage Foundation is putting out literature blaming falling birth rates on too many people going to graduate school. (The evidence for that is very weak.)
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The Demographic Future of Humanity:
Credentialism and family formation.
——-
Choose Life
After former UW-Madison chief diversity officer LaVar Charleston was demoted due to a pattern of “poor decision-making,” the Trump Administration started crackdowns on DEI in universities across the country, and a report released by the state legislature revealed that the Universities of Wisconsin failed to track spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, UW-Madison and UW Health have made changes to DEI on campus.
Charleston had served as the director of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement, so Provost Charles Isbell Jr. was named to temporarily lead the DDEEA until an interim director could be found. As of June 2nd, a replacement for Charleston still had not been hired.
However, UW-Madison created a new position called “special advisor for access and community” to “advise leadership in the development of the university’s overall plans regarding access and community.” Professor and associate dean Percival Matthews was appointed to the role and will “report directly to the chancellor and provost.”
Matthews leads the School of Education’s Center for Community and Well-Being, which was preceded by the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. The CCWB occupies the same office space as the OEDI did.
Over a mere two days recently (May 14-15), the major daily news outlets serving higher education, Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, reported the following:
Higher education is paying a very high price for allowing leftish ideological predilections to dominate policy decisions on college campuses, putting the achievement of certain perceived social-justice goals ahead of a merit-based promotion of the core mission of discovery and the dissemination of knowledge and ideas—truth and beauty.
Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, is putting pressure on the Virginia Board of Education to include social studies exam scores in the state’s new school accountability system, which is set to take effect this fall.
The new system will publicly rank each Virginia school in one of four performance categories: distinguished, on track, off track and needs intensive support. The criteria for each ranking include test scores in reading, writing math and science – but not social studies.
VanValkenburg sent a letter to the Virginia Board of Education on Monday, asking members to incorporate social studies exam scores into the school accountability system. The letter’s signers include leaders of the American Historical Association, National Council for the Social Studies and the Virginia Social Science Association, among other organizations.
Grade point average cutoffs to graduate with Latin honors for the class of 2025 remained unchanged from their record high last year.
This year, a GPA of 3.98 or higher earned the distinction of summa cum laude, while at least 3.95 and 3.90 merited magna cum laude and cum laude distinctions, respectively, according to Paul McKinley DRA ’96, Yale College’s associate dean for communications. The class of 2023 was the first class for which the cutoff for summa cum laude was as high as 3.98.
“In my experience, grades are inflated pretty much across the board and A’s hardly mean anything anymore,” Andy Nilipour ’25 wrote to the News.
Nilipour is one of 12 seniors interviewed by the News who found the high Latin honors cutoffs unsurprising given the persistent grade inflation at Yale. Some said the Latin honors system disadvantages students in STEM disciplines that tend to award lower grades.
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Grade inflation at Yale College:
Top 5% GPA: 3.98 or higher
Top 15% GPA: 3.95 or higher
Top 30% GPA: 3.9 or higher
Watertown High School’s scholarship program Monday evening carried a hefty price tag. Not for the school district or the students, but the donors who endowed the funding for many of the area’s best to continue their academic studies.
$723,145 was announced at Monday evening’s ceremony, split among 76 graduating WHS seniors. Those receiving the funding have a wide range of future plans, including four-year universities, trade schools, and more.
In addition to the local scholarship money received by the students, many also received financial aid or scholarship packages from the universities or colleges they will be attending, increasing the total aid.
The top 14 earners as well as the full list of scholarships can be found on Page A4.
Can it really be that Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (KSG) teaches nothing about the fundamental principles of liberty and individual rights (especially free speech) at the heart of America’s constitutional order, which would be subversive to any Chinese student? Are there any courses that even expose students—any students, not just foreign students—to, say, the Federalist Papers?
It is hard to tell from the KSG’s website. Although it does have a complete course list and faculty descriptions, it does not provide either the syllabus or reading list for any specific course, but I don’t see any likely candidates. To the contrary, what you see from the course offerings are two main things: lots of technical instruction on advanced econometrics, finance, advanced managerial theory, and other quantitative skills, and a lot of courses clearly anchored in contemporary progressive fetishes, such as—wait for it!—climate change (eight courses on the issue); social justice; a three-course sequence on inequality and social policy, because you can’t possibly understand inequality from just one course, even at Harvard, and fifty courses related to gender. KSG’s curriculum includes a total of 35 coursesrelated to “racism & bias.”
I can only spot maybe three KSG faculty who aren’t conventional liberals or deep leftists, and no real conservatives to speak of. I can’t see a single course where someone might read the Federalist Papers, or any kind of serious exposure to the thought of the founding era. Instead, you can take “DPI-348: Progressive Alternatives: Institutional Reconstruction Now,” by noted radical Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The course description reads, in part:
There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.
Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”
School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”
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When people lament the state of financial education in America, they aren’t complaining about these kids.
More than 120 high-schoolers competed in the National Personal Finance Challenge in Atlanta that ended Monday. It was run by the Council for Economic Education, which brought together the top four-person teams among some 18,000 state-level competitors. Scripps Ranch High School in San Diego took the top prize.
The final round asked the remaining four teams to supply short answers to 20 questions about everything from mortgage discount points to 401(k) matches. We turned a selection of them into multiple-choice questions.
Rowan Ward, a sophomore who was on last year’s winning team at Severn School in Severna Park, Md., offers this advice on answering the questions: “Go with your gut and think logically. What makes sense to you?”
Notably, few of America’s foreign students are westerners. No European nation even shows up in the top 10 countries for foreign students. The UK is in 15th place and France is only in the 20th. Only Canada, right across the border, is in the top 5, but accounts for only 2.6% of foreign students. Nigeria accounts for three times as many foreign students as France, Iran sends more foreign students than the UK and Pakistan far more than Spain. While most American students who study abroad go to Europe, European students are not going to America.
International students are mostly non-westerners and that’s by design. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, after extensive lobbying by Ivy League colleges, began bringing third world students to America to counter Communist influence. Beneficiaries included Barack Obama Sr and Shyamala Gopalan, the mother of Kamala Harris, along with other radicals, who found positions in the United States and left behind radical children who undermined America.
Whatever benefits we may gain from foreign students are more than outweighed by 8 years of Obama and by the destruction wreaked by the wayward children of other ‘international students’. And those benefits are at the heart of the debate taking place right now.
Shen Lu, Liyan Qi and Ming Li:
One in every four international students comes from China, and Chinese students form a particularly large share of the student body at top U.S. schools. After they graduate, many assume key roles in U.S. science and engineering endeavors.
A big decline in Chinese enrollment could severely cut into schools’ bottom line and damage U.S. competitiveness, say U.S. experts. “The economic costs are apparent,” said Yingyi Ma, a sociologist at Syracuse University who studies international students in the U.S. “The talent cost has even graver consequences.”
Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz:
We analyze the most comprehensive dataset on U.S. school board elections. We find that nearly half of races go uncontested and that incumbents are reelected more than 80 percent of the time when they run. Because many incumbents retire instead of running for another term, however, turnover is high (with 53 percent of incumbents replaced in a typical election cycle). School board turnover is also only weakly related to student learning rates. These dynamics–high turnover disconnected from school performance challenges–occur across both urban and non-urban districts, regardless of student demographics and local media environments. Together, these results suggest that local democracy produces high leadership churn and minimal incentives to improve student learning, two findings that can inform debates regarding the benefits and costs of local democratic governance.
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more.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
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?
Levine and Van Pelt compare the present moment to the Industrial Revolution. Colleges and universities, they argue, are facing a “Great Upheaval” as digital learning, shifting student demographics, and changing employer demands render the traditional model obsolete. Rosenberg critiques the sector’s paralysis—elite schools tinker around the edges while regional and small private colleges hemorrhage relevance, students, and money.
Vedder is more direct: Many of these institutions shouldn’t be saved. Their value proposition—skyrocketing tuition in exchange for middling outcomes—is no longer viable. And Shapiro’s Lawlessframes the decay as not just financial or operational, but legal and cultural: colleges and universities have abandoned the principles of due process, viewpoint diversity, and open inquiry, and have instead become leftist echo chambers increasingly at odds with their civic mission.
Each author targets the economic dysfunctions plaguing the higher education sector. Tuition has soared even as the return on investment for many degrees has plummeted. Administrative bloat and lavish capital spending on non-academic amenities have widened the disconnect between costs and outcomes. Meanwhile, online platforms and nontraditional providers are undercutting traditional colleges and universities with more flexible, affordable, and often more relevant credentials.
I again emphasize that the falling birth rate is bad.
The Demographic Future of Humanity:
Credentialism and family formation.
——-
Choose Life
William Mao and Veronica Paulus
Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics, when it is supposedly so hard to get into this ‘acclaimed university’?” McMahon wrote in reference to an introductory math course launched last year that she derided as “remedial.”
McMahon is not alone in criticizing Harvard’s academic rigor.
Her argument that the University has gone soft on academics echoes long-standing conservative criticisms that Harvard has become too easy — rooted in what they argue is a practice of accepting applicants and promoting faculty for the diversity they bring to campus, rather than their intellectual merit.
Even among Harvard faculty, most of whom are not inclined to sympathize with McMahon or the logic in her letter, separate but related concerns that some students are increasingly putting academics on the back burner are widespread. A January committee report on classroom norms found that students prioritize extracurricular commitments over their classes — a trend, the report’s authors wrote, that most faculty view “with alarm.”
More than a dozen students, faculty, and administrators told The Crimson that they disagreed with McMahon’s suggestion that Harvard students are intellectually weak. But many also conceded that student priorities have shifted.
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During its test optional phase (2020-2025), about one-quarter of admitted students didn’t submit either an SAT score or an ACT score
The biggest concern most of us have is the complete lack of oversight and no accountability in terms of civil rights violations. Oregon seems to be in a persistent state of lawsuits placed upon them regarding discriminatory practices against disabled students, and it looks like other discrimination suits are heading this way, too.
They misallocate SPED dollars, engage in and encourage restraint and seclusion of kids because of their “behaviors” instead of investing in paradigms parents and teachers are asking for.
So my questions are:
What would happen to the civil rights division of the Dept. of Education if this bill passes?
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more.
Do this course https://github.com/henki-robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2
Totally free, don’t need to buy anything just a computer.
I’ve been designing electrical hardware for robots for the last 4 years for a big corporation and I can tell you, the fun and money is in the software but having another skill is awesome. Robotics is a place where multiple fields converge and if you find a good team they will help you to grow.
Embedded is the adjacent field after you complete the course. Maybe something like zephyr project.
If you want to get you feet wet with mechanical. Buy a A1 mini and play with onshape (www.onshape.com) to design your first pieces, supports for the motors or the board, try create you own gripper.
As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully. Start with the RP2040 or the RP2350, they are cheap and well documented. This skill will evolve hand by hand with the embedded coding. Start small. Learn about H-bridge and brushed motors before doing the jump to the bigboys and FOC control with brushless. Get a cheap soldering iron. If you can, a clone of the JBC C245 tips. Is the most versatile and you can find stuff in alie xpress for 45 or 50$ and would be similar to the tools you will find in the field without breaking the bank.
My foregoing comments might seem to strike a note of hopelessness, but nothing could be further from the truth. I am full of optimism. I see signs of intellectual renewal popping up all around me like saplings from the ashes of some great forest fire. In time, I hope — though I dare not trust — that we will again become a people who demand of our representatives both eloquence and truth, both classical erudition and Christian virtue.
One such sapling is the book I now hold in my hands, the inaugural volume in a series called Finding Our Words, under the editorship of Allison Ellis. This series collects, under various themes, foundational texts in the Western canon, what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” These editions are aimed at the middle or high school student looking to gain a classical education. The selections are accompanied by remarkably good introductions by Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus and On Being Civilized. Further, students are given memorization assignments following each reading, consisting of the most critical extracts.
Finding Our Words is right. Only by immersing ourselves in the best words of our forebears, savoring them on our tongues, reciting them over and over until they rest permanently in our hearts, feeling the sting of tears even after the thousandth recitation, only then will we recover something of the culture that made these words possible in the first place. Only by making their words our own will we be able to speak our own words with their command of language.
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Related: Read American Democracy.
The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve done to higher education, let alone what should be done with their jobs.
The federal government is no better at re-evaluating higher education. It’s focusing on the tools available to it: enforcing antidiscrimination laws and defunding science (even though scientists aren’t typically the culprits).
The academic failures of universities and colleges are obvious enough. Departments generally appoint their own faculty members—so that once a department is ideologically captured, it tends to tilt further in the same direction, inevitably producing instruction and research that, considered as a whole, is slanted. Institutions then inculcate conformity, punish dissenters, and apply harsh disciplinary proceedings. Put another way, the recent antisemitism didn’t develop in a vacuum. It was nurtured amid ideological capture and selective enforcement of the rules. These are substantial impediments to the pursuit of truth.
Part of the problem comes from government. It’s often said that we’re seeing the results of the left’s march through the institutions. But government policies, often based on twisted interpretations of civil-rights laws, accelerated ideological and administrative dominance.
As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” It’s a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision.
The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You’re in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character.
I know, I know: Lots of students will say, “I don’t have time to work on cultivating my character! I just need to be able to get a job!”
It’s totally fair for them to be focusing on their job prospects. But your job is to focus on something else — something that will help them flourish in the long run, even if they don’t fully see the value in it now.
As readers may know, I began by thinking a lab leak was unlikely, even impossible, as the source of the virus that emerged suddenly in Wuhan at the end of 2019. But during the late spring of 2020 I saw evidence that this hypothesis was in fact quite plausible and needed investigating at the very least. I teamed up with the molecular biologist Alina Chan to write Viral, our book about the search for evidence on both sides of that question. I remained unsure what happened at that stage. Then in the autumn of 2021 more startling evidence emerged to support the lab leak. I now think that is by far the most likely explanation.
Yet still the scientific establishment refused to take the hypothesis seriously, let alone investigate it. There are over 20 million people dead, and you don’t want to know why? Imagine if this were their reaction to a chemical spill that killed thousands of people, or a nuclear accident that killed tens of thousands. This killed millions. I tried to get the Royal Society and The Academy of Medical Sciences to debate it, but they refused: too controversial, they said!
Journals like Nature and Science barely touched the topic and even then only to dismiss the lab leak in condescending tones without bothering to engage with the evidence. Science journalists steered clear of the biggest story of their careers lest it annoy their sources. Yet the public, the world’s governments, and the intelligence community all soon came to the conclusion that a lab leak probably did cause the Wuhan outbreak. I found this institutional ostrich act by Big Science deeply disturbing.
In 2024 I was approached by a single member of the editorial board of a respected biological journal with a request that I team up with a British biologist with relevant expertise and compose an academic paper setting out the case for the lab leak hypothesis: he hoped the journal would consider it. With the help of Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, and advice from Alina Chan, I drafted such a paper. The paper was rejected; I suspect that it was another case of not wanting to rock the scientific boat.
Several endowment officials said schools also might balk at locking up too much money in long-term investments. They will need cash on hand to pay chunky tax bills and fund capital calls they might have committed to years earlier. Capital calls require clients to fund investment commitments they previously made. Many schools also already have much of their money in long-term investments and might not want to add more.
Lobbyists for schools have spent months visiting Capitol Hill trying to soften the potential blow. The schools say they are modeling for various possibilities, but haven’t started making wholesale changes to their investment portfolios.
At least five schools are expected to be in the 21% tax bracket: Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all of which have endowments of about $25 billion or more. The rate would also apply to other schools with endowments of more than $2 million per U.S. student, potentially sweeping in other schools such as the California Institute of Technology, with an endowment of $4.3 billion.
While people who have spent years cultivating their writing skills might bemoan the arrival of AI-assisted writing, there is also a much more optimistic way to view these changes. Until now, the ability to write well was inherently elitist. People fortunate enough to have the time and financial capacity to pursue higher education were better positioned to produce excellent writing.
In the blink of an eye, that has changed. AI is enabling anyone, regardless of education level, to create well-written documents and do so in pretty much any language. It’s a profound change, and it’s also profoundly threatening to institutions such as colleges, which are collecting tuition used in part to teach traditional long-form writing skills to students who will rarely use them after they graduate.
But to lament that good writing will no longer be the exclusive province of elites is, well, elitist. A far better response is to celebrate the arrival of a technology with the promise of truly democratizing written communication.
As documented by a growing list of newsstories, generative AI systems sometimes output false information. In fact, there is some evidencethat hallucinations are an inherent aspect of large language model (LLM) outputs. But hallucinations are an easily solvable problem.
First, anyone using AI to write can examine the resulting text and remove any assertions of fact that are not easily and reliably verifiable. The people who have ended up in hot water for inadvertently turning in documents containing AI hallucinations have failed to successfully do this checking.
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It feels like education is about to be overrun with this kind of thinking and a small number of classical schools will be the only places left where kids still read great books in full and learn to write well on their own.
As is often the case, this debate hinges on definitions.
So Harvard’s pushback seems to boil down to: “We are not teaching a remedial math class, we are simply remediating math in a class.” Is that a distinction without a difference?
In the end, as I said to Randazzo, “You don’t get to choose what goes viral,” but hopefully in continuing to put a spotlight on the facts about what students lost during the pandemic, and the student journalism that brought these stories to life, we can gain some perspective on what we owe all our students to make things right.
On May 17, the Oakland, California, teachers union ended a two-week strike—the union’s third strike in five years. The district offered a substantial salary increase for teachers before the strike even began, but negotiations remained deadlocked for days over the union’s other demands. The Oakland Education Association (OEA) put forward several “common good” proposals that included drought-resistant shrubs, a Climate Justice Day, reparations for Black students, and converting unused school and office buildings into housing for homeless kids and their families.
Most of these “common good” issues were outside the legal scope of teachers’ contracts, but as The Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out, OEA is not a rogue branch of the teachers union. The National Education Association (NEA)—the largest labor union in the U.S. representing teachers and other school faculty—explicitly tells teachers to bargain for the “common good,” advising union branches that, “When we expand the continuum of bargaining, we build power, and go on the offense in order to fight for social and racial justice.”
What makes the NEA’s bargaining approach so remarkable is the fact that this union and its counterpart, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have recently inflicted profound racial and social injustice on the country’s school children in the form of extended school closures.
As an Oakland public school teacher, I was a staunch supporter of the teachers union and was a union representative at my school for three years. In 2020, however, I began to disagree with the union when it prevented me from returning to my classroom long after studies proved that school reopening was safe, even without COVID-19 mitigation measures. In my experience, the union’s actions were not motivated by sincere fears, but rather by a desire to virtue-signal and maintain comfortable work-from-home conditions.
Although union bosses like Randi Weingarten continue to obfuscate their role in school closures, the historical record is clear: The union repeatedly pushed to keep schools closed, and areas with greater union influence kept schools closed longer. Politicians, public health officials, and the media certainly had a hand in this fiasco, but the union egged ondramatic news stories, framed school reopening as a partisan issue, and directly interfered in CDC recommendations. Teachers saw firsthand that virtual learning was a farce and that children were suffering. While there may be plenty of blame to go around, teachers’ abandonment of their own students was a special kind of betrayal.
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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?
But the district is not holding itself accountable where it matters: student performance. For whatever reason, Madison taxpayers have never demanded that the school board set goals for the results of all that investment. Last November voters overwhelmingly approved two referendums, totaling $607 million, the largest increase in MMSD history. And they did that on blind faith. The district never tried to trim costs to keep the numbers down and they never once offered to explain how all that new money would result in things like better test scores, lower truancy rates or a narrowing of the racial achievement gap.
The best of those investments is the focus on reading at an early age. I’m excited for that. But I’d like to see the district announce some specific goals with regard to reading scores in a few years.
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Balaji on accountability:
Tech fixes things, and journos destroy things. We can see this from Atlantic owner Laurene Powell Jobs’ career, as her life’s work involves destroying American cities:
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The #MississippiMiracle shows that effective education is possible, even on a tight budget.
With conservative reforms and a focus on phonics, Mississippi’s test scores are soaring, proving that the right approach can change lives.
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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?
Polygenic testing startups are Silicon Valley at its most audacious: promising to make future generations healthier and smarter, while inviting deep controversy over the soundness of the science and its potential for harm. Studies have shown that assigning “risk scores” for polygenic diseases is still a crapshoot, the results “random” and “inconsistent,” while critics claim they over-rely on data from people of European descent and offer parents a dangerous illusion of control. Hank Greely, a bioethics and law professor at Stanford University who taught Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui, said polygenic risk scores are “unproven, unprovable, unclear,” and that couples who have used them to select embryos have “wasted money.” He told me his former student Siddiqui was “very smart” but had likely “gotten ahead of her skis.”
“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” he posted on his Truth Social platform early on Memorial Day. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”
The announcement, which provided no further specifics, comes as Trump continues to apply pressure on Harvard as part of a broadside against what he calls “woke” ideology and antisemitism on college campuses. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said it was cutting off Harvard’s ability to enroll international students before a federal judge temporarily halted the move.
Trump’s plan would likely face further legal scrutiny, especially if Congress appropriated the grant money in question for specific purposes.
Harvard has been locked in a battle with the Trump administration since March, when the government said it was reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal funding over antisemitism concerns. Harvard filed a federal lawsuit against the government, arguing the Trump administration has violated the university’s constitutional rights as well as due process.
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.
2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).
Their “AI Existential Risk” ideology had the financial backing of $1.6 billion from a few Effective Altruism billionaires, namely Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn, Vitalik Buterin, and Sam Bankman-Fried (yes, the convicted felon).
Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy is by far the largest donor to most of the “AI Existential Risk” organizations.
Nowadays, the “AI Existential Risk” ecosystem encompasses hundreds of organizations. Many advocate extreme authoritarian measures to stop/pause AI. They include “requiring registration and verifying location of hardware,” “a strict licensing regime, clamp down on open-source models, and impose civil and criminal liability on developers.”
ControlAI even proposed a 20-year pause, because the “default” is human extinction by Godlike AI, and “two decades provide the minimum time frame to construct our defenses.”
Staying informed about this growing “AI existential risk” ecosystem is important. So, the information below aims to familiarize you with the various players involved.
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more:
All of this turned out to be profoundly wrong. Now, ironically, many of the Doomers — who prior to DeepSeek had tried to ban American models now currently in use — are trying to rebrand as “China Hawks.” If they had their way, the U.S. would have already lost the AI race!
I want to focus on the ethics: why some students (and non-students) think they have a moral right – or even a duty – to disrupt universities to force them to do certain things.
Here is my best effort to reconstruct the reasoning behind these occupations.
Premise 1. The Israeli government is doing terrible things in Gaza and should stop
P2. If there is something I can do to make a terrible thing stop then I ought morally to do it
P3. This university in my city has a student exchange programme with some universities in Israel
P4. If I disrupt the operations of this university sufficiently, they may agree to end the exchange programme in exchange for ending the disruption [Intermediate goal]
P5. Ending the exchange programme would [by some mysterious means] make the Israeli government stop doing terrible things [Final goal]
Conclusion. Therefore, I ought to disrupt the university
I think there are three major ethical failures in this argument.
Note: Although I am focusing on the case of anti-Israel protestors, the same 3 general ethical failures will apply to other cases, such as the student protests demanding bans on cooperating with fossil fuel companies.
The World War-era historians—Spengler, Toynbee, Quigley—operated at intellectual levels we can’t match today. Despite our “progress” myth, we’ve intellectually regressed. These giants accurately predicted our 21st century collapse: atheism, caesarism, social alienation, population decline. Their most urgent warning? BUREAUCRACY would destroy Western civilization if left unchecked. We ignored them, and now it’s devouring everything that made our civilization great, exactly as they predicted.
This isn’t just wrong. It’s a problem. There are lessons for our education community and for both political parties.
Edu-Snobbery Hurts Us All
• We miss opportunities to help kids. I’m not saying we should go “full Finland” and turn Mississippi into a junket destination and object of hero worship. It’s not perfect. As just one example, Mississippi’s 8th grade reading results are not as impressive as its 4th grade outcomes. But we need to celebrate their thoughtful statewide strategy that has dramatically improved results without a colossal increase in spending. Their progress is not a fluke. It’s a clue.
• Underperforming states escape scrutiny. Our biases prevent us from asking, for instance, what’s going on in Oregon. Or Vermont. Or Maryland. There’s a case to be made that their instructional quality is among the weakest in the country based on their performance trends over the past decade. And yet, when’s the last time you heard them being pressed to defend their poor outcomes? They’re getting a pass.
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“The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin. Just think about that for a moment. Wisconsin spends about 35 percent more per pupil to achieve worse results.”
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Mississippi’s Momentum for Improving Reading Achievement by Kymyona Burk
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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?
A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology monitored brain activity in students taking notes and found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing and memory. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that has many experts speaking up about the importance of teaching children to handwrite words and draw pictures.
The new research, by Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), builds on a foundational 2014 study. That work suggested that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking, says van der Meer, a professor of neuropsychology at NTNU. “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying,” she says. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.” But when taking notes by hand, it’s often impossible to write everything down; students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it—prioritize it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before. This conscious action of building onto existing knowledge can make it easier to stay engaged and grasp new concepts.
Along with wearing masks and social distancing, students living on campus would be expected to wear a coin-size “BioButton” attached to their chests with medical adhesive. It would continuously measure their temperature, respiratory rate, and heart rate, and tell them whether they’d been in close contact with a button wearer who’d tested positive for Covid-19. In conjunction with a series of daily screening questions, the button would let them know if they were cleared for class.
Top universities are financial titans, generating investment profits that mirror those of Wall Street firms. They are health care companies; the University of Pennsylvania gets half its revenue from the hospitals it runs. They commercialize the inventions that spring from their labs. They sell four-year subscriptions for rent and classes to their students and lifelong memberships in an elite club to their donors (posthumous, if the checks are big enough).
By revenue, UPenn is bigger than BNY Mellon; Columbia is as big as Coinbase. But these universities operate on profit margins thinner than those of a grocery store. In short, they make a lot of money but spend almost all of it.
many undergraduate computer science programs, this is the absurd reality we face when trying to combat plagiarism. Everyone agrees plagiarism is wrong. Everyone wishes they could stop it. Everyone has access to the tools that find it. But no one seems willing to take any action.
Why bother?
The most important goal is to keep the course fair for students who do honest work. Instructors must assign grades that accurately reflect performance. A student who grapples with a problem — becoming a stronger programmer in the process — should never receive a lower grade than one who copies and pastes.
Finally, as educators, we also hope that the accused student can learn difficult lessons about ethical behavior in the classroom rather than the workplace.
Given the regressivity of property taxes and Cook County government’s overreliance on them, it is fair to say property taxes are a delicate issue for Chicago residents. With billions in federal COVID money squandered and CPS schools’ insatiable appetite for an ever-increasing share of taxes growing exponentially, the burden of property taxes falling on residents, in particular middle-income families, and the poor, will worsen. Illinois residents surveyed in a recent poll cited taxes as the biggest reason for state and local population loss, with almost 50 percent of current residents saying they would leave the state if they could.
In Cook County, it is not simply the weight of overall taxes that is punishing residents, but it is also the confusion and unfairness of the whole system. Taxpayer anger is growing. Meanwhile, Cook County’s political power brokers are playing the blame game and are scrambling to do damage control with property tax relief measures. The gamesmanship is reflected in the finger pointing between County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi over property tax billings and in the most recent efforts by the county to provide targeted relief for residents.
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notes on Madison’s 20.2% Property Tax increase (assessments are up 9.1%); 25k per student
Because text-generating bots like ChatGPT offer an easy way to cheat on papers and other assignments, students’ embrace of the technology has stirred uneasiness, and sometimes despair, among educators. Teachers and pupils now find themselves playing an algorithmic cat-and-mouse game, with no winners. But cheating is a symptom of a deeper, more insidious problem. The real threat AI poses to education isn’t that it encourages cheating. It’s that it discourages learning.
To understand why, it’s important to recognize that generative AI is an automation technology. You can speculate all you want about computers eventually attaining human-level intelligence or even “superintelligence,” but for the time being AI is doing something that has a long precedent in human affairs. Whether it’s engaged in research or summarization, writing words or creating charts, it is replacing human labor with machine labor.
Thanks to human-factors researchers and the mountain of evidence they’ve compiled on the consequences of automation for workers,1 we know that one of three things happens when people use a machine to automate a task they would otherwise have done themselves:
A once-prominent Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired this week for outright fabricating data on numerous academic studies of dishonesty and unethical behavior. The timing couldn’t be worse for Harvard: The troubled university currently faces a critical dispute over funding and foreign student visas with the Trump administration.
Francesca Gino was regularly cited as an authority by prominent left-leaning outlets such as National Public Radio and the New York Times. Both outlets now admit that Gino’s research was likely fabricated. Disturbingly, the flaws in her research were exposed not by the allegedly robust university system of peer review, …
Writing and learning with AI is the typewriter, the word processor, the encyclopedia, and the almanac rolled into one. Seeing it as something scarier than that is just fear of new tools and new paradigms. Again. It is not surprise that we’re seeing so much writing about concerns—writers are the ones who are directly challenged. Just as electrical engineers were challenged by software abstracting out hardware.
Some will say not all abstraction layers are created equally. Not all tools are “harmless”. And they would conclude if they believe that about AI that AI needs more scrutiny sooner and that we should slow down before we understand. The challenge is the future doesn’t just wait around for everyone to come to a consensus. It arrives with new tools in hand. That’s what happened in 1984 when Macintosh arrived. That’s what is happening with AI.
AI is here. It’s already happening.
District courts can announce new law and do so all the time. But they shouldn’t be able to govern the entire country on that basis. They should only be able to rule for the parties before them.
It’s different when the government is violating clearly established law. Why? Because of a problem Justice Kagan identified at the oral argument. Say the president has issued a blatantly unconstitutional order—for example, ordering the detention of anyone who criticizes the administration. Any plaintiff targeted under this order would win in court in a heartbeat. But in each case, the government could simply decline to appeal. The circuit courts and the Supreme Court would never hear the case. If district courts couldn’t enjoin the practice, the administration could legally keep locking people up for as long as it wanted, and the burden would be on every individual victim to sue for his own release.
And though Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 requires four times as much electricity, China has a huge advantage in terms of energy production, says Doug O’Laughlin, an analyst at SemiAnalysis who has studied Huawei’s new AI supercomputers. “China has been adding energy production for the past 10 years, and has the entire supply chain on lock to continue to do that,” he adds.
SMIC, which makes Huawei’s processors, is now the third-biggest chip maker in the world, and has managed to innovate in the manufacture of high-quality chips despite having older-generation, pre-export-ban tech.
Meanwhile, our political class.
Last fall, Harvard expanded its entry-level math offerings, with a new version of its introductory calculus course that meets five days a week instead of the usual four. Students are given a skills test to determine whether they need the extended course, Kelly said.
The extra time each week is devoted to reviewing algebra skills to make the calculus more accessible, Kelly said. The No. 1 challenge for students in calculus is command of algebra because the knowledge has sometimes faded, he added. “The extra support will target foundational skills in algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning that will help you unlock success,” the class description says.
The Harvard Crimson student newspaper wrote an article about the new offering in September, saying that it was “aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills,” without noting that it is a calculus course.
Fast forward to March 18, when Marc Porter Magee, the head of an educational advocacy organization, posted the Crimson article on X, writing: “Meanwhile, for the first time in its history Harvard has been forced to offer a remedial algebra course to its undergrads.”
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A ProPublica editor is defending Harvard against a Trump administration accusation that the school’s own student reporting suggests is accurate.
Democrats (and journalists) defend elite institutions at their political & professional peril.
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more.
Harvard PR: “We are not teaching a remedial math class, we are simply remediating math in a class. There is a huge difference between the two you would understand if you went to Harvard.”
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Is it fair to call it remedial? That’s all semantics. WSJ and Harvard’s Director of Introductory Math says no, but it’s clearly intended for Ivy League students who aren’t prepared for a standard semester-long Calculus I course, so I think that description is apt
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2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math
How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis
Singapore Math
Discovery Math
Three days before the start of the 2024-25 school year, the San Francisco Unified School District sent an email telling freshman parents that their kids had been automatically enrolled in a two-semester ethnic studies class. The course — which covers such topics as structural racism, colonialism, and the relative merits of capitalism versus socialism — had been an elective for a decade, but families were now being told it had been made a requirement of graduation.
What parents didn’t know was that the day before, Lainie Motamedi, the school board president at the time, had sent a different email — this one to the district’s general counsel. In it, she noted that the board had never approved funding for the year-long requirement. Motamedi presented two options: The district could seek immediate approval from the board, or pause plans to teach the course.
Motamedi had been hearing from teachers about how the new mandate could mess with students’ schedules, and parents had begun reaching out to express concern. She was sure the budget didn’t include information on the new graduation requirement and had receipts to back it up.
Junior Ashley Poole was named a 2025 Truman Scholar on April 18, marking the first time a Hillsdale student has received the prestigious national award.
Poole, a Texas native, is one of just 54 students selected from across the nation this year for the scholarship, which honors college juniors who demonstrate exceptional leadership potential and a commitment to public service.
“When I heard that I had gotten it, it was a really fun day, and I was very taken aback by how excited everyone was for me,” Poole said.
Each college or university may nominate up to four juniors for the Truman Scholarship. Finalists are chosen from each state based on the student’s home state. Poole was one of 11 finalists from Texas, and was ultimately one of two selected from the state, though most states nominate one scholar per year.
Poole traveled to Texas the first week of March for her finalist interview, held at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library.
Each jurisdiction listed will receive formal notification of its non-compliance with Federal statutes. DHS demands that these jurisdictions immediately review and revise their policies to align with Federal immigration laws and renew their obligation to protect American citizens, not dangerous illegal aliens.
Note that the list can be reviewed and changed at any time and will be updated regularly. No one should act on this information without conducting their own evaluation of the information.
And a private university like Harvard could choose to ignore the administration’s demands — but that means forfeiting federal research funding, which puts it at an unfair disadvantage when competing for students, faculty and donors with universities that continue to receive massive federal payouts.
If Harvard and other private universities truly seek freedom, therefore, they should demand that federal research funding be phased out altogether.
Harvard should argue that since all federal funding comes with some government strings attached, it infringes on intellectual freedom. Instead, Harvard is demanding more government funding and objecting only to the specific nature of the strings or to the way they are currently being pulled.
“The administration and others have said conservatives are too few on campus and their views are not welcome. In so far as that’s true, that’s a problem we really need to address,” Harvard President Alan Garber told NPR.
Garber said the university needed to address a lack of “viewpoint diversity” on its campus, sharing how students don’t feel free to speak their minds. He added how faculty members have to “think twice” before teaching certain subjects. Garber said people have come forward claiming a stifling environment on campus.
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During an interview with the 25-year-old Chinese student who was Harvard’s valedictorian, two old American men were fighting behind her – it was like some kind of metaphor.😂
Moody’s downgraded U.S. debt to a notch below its top rating, citing chronic budget deficits and rising debt-service costs. The rating agency lagged behind S&P Global Ratings and Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. in 2011 and 2023, respectively. Moody’s may have been late because it believes in the Keynesian model that government spending lifts economic growth.
Markets on Monday reacted poorly to the downgrade, as well as comments by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that there may be more bad tariff news coming. He said the April 2 “reciprocal” tariffs could return for some countries if they don’t agree to President Trump’s supposedly generous terms. The 30-year Treasury bond yield hit 5% for the first time since autumn 2023, before falling back, and the 10-year appears to be settling near 4.5%.
It’s interesting to compare California elected officials reaction to rigor reduction plans in the taxpayer funded San Francisco Unified School District:
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie:
We owe our young people an education that prepares them to succeed. The proposed changes to grading at SFUSD would not accomplish that.
I have conveyed our view to SFUSD. We are optimistic that there is a better path forward for our kids and their future.
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San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:
I try to stay in my San Jose lane, but as a former East Side public school teacher I have to say — this is a terrible disservice to our students. Lowering standards does not help children. It hurts them.
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Blue tape.
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Seems like a good day to highlight the fact that Superintendent Su pulled her own sons out of SFUSD after middle school and put them into parochial high schools.
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San Jose has an annual budget of approximately $3 billion and one city employee for every 112 residents, San Francisco has one city employee for every 21 residents. Despite having 125,000 fewer residents, San Francisco has more than four times the number of public workers.
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Starting to realize that education polarization and the shift of rich people to the Democrats turned the entire Democratic party into a scheme to funnel donor money to useless people
Regarding your recent post on reading and media, I would be curious for your thoughts about my observations teaching junior high and high school for the last few decades.
I (and some of my other colleagues) have noticed the following:
1. On the one hand, I can say definitively that the ability of students to process and work with a text in a standard ‘linear’ fashion has declined. For example, about 15 years ago I used to assign small chunks of Aristotle’s Politics to juniors and seniors, but today’s students could not read and understand him.
2. On the other hand . . . the ability of students to find patterns or links between texts has increased substantially. Just this past semester I taught a theology class to 9th-10th graders and wanted to introduce them to typological and patterned thinking. I was shocked how fast they picked this up, and many very quickly found plenty of connections in the text that I did not see. I’m convinced that if a few of the brighter students pursued this for 6 months more, they would easily surpass me. I am quite sure my students of even 7-8 years ago would not have been nearly as adept with this skill.
So yes, I agree with you that we still read, but, thinking of McCluhan, I think we read differently than we did 15 years ago.
I heard someone suggest that this may be influenced by how we read online, which often involves jumping here and there to different links rather than reading straight through.
About $478 million, or 20.2% more than last year. It’s a percentage increase that “is more than twice as large as the previous record for the district in our data going back to 1994,” according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.
The increase is being driven by several factors, according to the Policy Forum, including the recent referendums, an increase in the amount the district can raise under state revenue limits, and a year-over-year projected decrease in state aid.
The property tax levy is best compared to the district’s all-funds budget, which includes items such as debt payments and building projects. Spending across all funds is expected to be $661.7 million next year, an 8% year-over-year increase.
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The uptick in participation comes in part from MSCR’s recent expansion to programming, Roth said. The school district added more clubs and middle school athletics options. Over 1,200 middle school students regularly attended MSCR’s after-school activities this year, a 60% jump from last year, according to school district figures.
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Total planned spending is $661,690,867 for 26,374 students or $25,088 per student.
Meanwhile, Madison, where we tax & $pend more then most yet have long tolerated disastrous reading results.
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?
Jim Bender and Patrick McIlheran
A reform that wonks are calling “decoupling” — an excellent way to simplify school choice funding and eliminate choice’s impact on property taxpayers — is being opposed by the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials on the grounds it will, among other things, eliminate a source of “negative attention” that choice critics have long used to mount opposition.
Don’t fix the problem, in other words, because then there won’t be an unfixed problem to continue to complain about.
The reform WASBO opposes is logical and straightforward. All funding for Parental Choice Programs and independent charter schools would come from direct state aid, thereby “decoupling” school funding from local funding formulas and preventing any impact on local property taxes.
This is already how it works in Milwaukee, and school reformers are pushing for the same decoupling throughout the rest of the state.
In a recent piece disingenuously entitled “The Price of Parallel Systems,” the WASBO’s research director, Anne Chapman, writes that one of the problems with decoupling is that it would “make the fiscal impact of voucher schools effectively imperceptible to the typical taxpayer.”
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Meanwhile, Madison, where we tax & $pend more then most yet have long tolerated disastrous reading results.
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?
Seattle Public Schools is dismantling its gifted and talented program, which administrators argued was oversaturated with white and Asian students, in favor of a more “inclusive, equitable and culturally sensitive” program.
The district began phasing out its Highly Capable Cohort schools and classrooms for advanced students in the 2021-22 school year due to racial inequities, the school district notes.
The program will completely cease to exist by the 2027-28 school year, with a new enrichment-for-all model available in every school by the 2024-25 school year.
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more.
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deja vu over the decades in Madison: English 10 and Madison expands its least diverse schools.
Another way of putting the nuttiness problem is to note that the importance of oral culture has risen. YouTube and TikTok for instance are extremely influential communications media. I am by no means a “video opponent,” yet I realize the rise of video may have created some of the problems that are periodically attributed to “the decline of reading.” Again, we might have most of those problems whether or not reading has gone done by some amount, or if it instead might have risen.
Maybe the decline of reading — whether or not the phenomena is real — just doesn’t matter that much. And of course only some reading has declined. The reading of texts presumably continues to rise.
Of those 3,825 human decisions, our AI agreed with 3,118 and disagreed with 707. That’s an 82% agreement rate, which is similar to the typical human-human agreement across our projects.
What about those 18% of disagreements? This is really important. It’s easier than you think to get 82% human-AI agreement. What really matters is what they are disagreeing about! Reassuringly, most of the human-AI disagreements were small. Of the 707 judgements where the human and AI disagreed, 50% were under 21 points, 90% were under 60 points, and 97% were under 80 points. (Our scale is fine-grained, and runs from about 300 – 700).
3% of the decisions – 21 in total – were above 80 points. That is 3% of the total disagreements, but just 0.5% of the total number of human judgements.
Some element of disagreement is always going to exist with assessments of extended writing, whoever is judging it. This is a very low rate of serious disagreement, and one that we think is acceptable.
After a failed referendum in April, there was no question that the Watertown Unified School District would have to reduce its number of buildings. Indeed, even before the $7 million recurring operating referendum failed, it was expected that at least one elementary school building would close.
Tuesday evening, a special meeting saw architecture firm Plunkett Raysich Architects (PRA) and construction consultants JP Cullen present the School Board with a number of options as to how the physical footprint may be reduced.
Sarah Karp and Mila Koumpilova
And yet, Chicago Public Schools’ graduation rate has continued to inch up — from 81% in 2019 to 85% in 2024. Part of the reason: School district officials are giving students more chances to make up work and pass their classes even after weeks of absences.
In short, it’s easier now to miss a lot of school and still graduate.
“We as a system have been focused on not punishing students for being absent, but really understanding what are the barriers and trying to work actively to address that and also to support them not to miss learning opportunities,” said CPS Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova.
The intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.
Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.
Making technology companies ask artists’ permission before they scrape copyrighted content will “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight,” Sir Nick Clegg has said.
The former deputy prime minister, who spent almost seven years working for the social media giant Meta, sided with technology companies when asked on Thursday about the clash over AI copyright laws.
Here is who will help set Wisconsin school report card standards.
There is not much they can do. The law is specific and key districts would get mad.
So, wait for 2029 when DPI updates reading/maths standards, raise test cut scores to NAEP, and remake report cards accurately.
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Meanwhile:
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?
Issue: Whether school officials may presume substantial disruption or a violation of the rights of others from a student’s silent, passive, and untargeted ideological speech simply because that speech relates to matters of personal identity, even when the speech responds to the school”s opposing views, actions, or policies.
JUSTICE ALITO, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins, dis-
senting from the denial of certiorari. This case presents an issue of great importance for our
Nation’s youth: whether public schools may suppress student speech either because it expresses a viewpoint that the school disfavors or because of vague concerns about the likely effect of the speech on the school atmosphere or on students who find the speech offensive. In this case, a middle school permitted and indeed encouraged student expression endorsing the view that there are many genders.But when L. M., a seventh grader, wore a t-shirt that said “There Are Only Two Genders,” he was barred from attending class. And when he protested this censorship by blocking out the words “Only Two” and substituting “CENSORED,” the school prohibited that shirt as well. The First Circuit held that the school did not violate L. M.’s free-speech rights. It held that the general prohibition against viewpoint-based censorship does not apply to public schools. And it employed a vague, permissive, and jargon-laden rule that departed from the standard this Court adopted in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503 (1969).
IFS:
When a Golden West College student who fled Iran described illegal immigration as a “cancer” and called to eradicate Hamas, the school’s College Disciplinary Officer didn’t defend his free speech rights from those who sought to silence him—she threatened the student with discipline.
Now that student and others are fighting back to defend their First Amendment rights.
The Institute for Free Speech has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of Matin Samimiat, Annaliese Hutchings, and Young America’s Foundation (YAF). The suit challenges the college’s unconstitutional speech policies and their enforcement. The case arises from the students’ efforts to establish a YAF chapter on campus and speak openly about controversial political and social issues.
The board closed the schools due to declining enrollment in the East Texas district. The last few months have been spent deciding where the dislocated students, teachers and staff would go.
Lufkin ISD lost about 1,600 students to other nearby school districts and independent charter schools over 15 years. The district now faces more competition in the years ahead. The Texas Legislature in early May approved a private school voucher program that will allow families to use tax dollars to send their students to private schools.
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Locally, Where have all the students gone?
The police arrived at Maxie Allen’s door at midday on January 29th. None of the six officers seemed to know much about why they were there, recalls Mr Allen. But they read out a list of charges and searched the house, before arresting him and his partner and taking them to the police station, where they were held for eight hours. The couple’s alleged crime? Disparaging emails and WhatsApp messages about their daughter’s primary school.
A Canadian YouTube channel that was dominating the platform during the country’s recent election has vanished, after the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reached out to the social media giant, and branded it a ‘content farm’ in a Friday hit-piece.
San Francisco school officials killed plans Wednesday to test out alternative ways to grade some high school students after politicians and parents panned the proposal in the wake of misinformation about it.
An estimated 70 teachers in 14 high schools — about 10% of the educators in grades nine to 12 — were expected to participate in a voluntary program to align grades more closely to student learning rather than attendance, participation or other factors. Some of those factors included whether a student brings in cans for a food drive or whether their parents sign a permission slip, according to the background information provided by the district on the “Grading for Equity” initiative.
That could also mean giving students multiple chances to take tests or redo essays and reconfiguring the grading scale to address inherent problems with a 100-point grading scale — which disproportionately assigns an F for 0 to 59 points, but only 10 points each for the other grades.
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San Francisco Public Schools Convert F’s to C’s, B’s to A’s in Equity Push
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Kane:
The “consultants” being paid by SF public schools to implement “Grading for Equity” (no homework, F’s count as C’s) is @CrescendoEdGrp
I am trying to sunshine their contract right now from @SFUnified
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SFUSD is delaying a planned “grading for equity” initiative which was universally condemned online this week.
Why was this even considered? Because @SFUnified is built on a broken foundation of bad ideas that start with SFUSD’s vision, mission, and values.
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Insane that SF public schools’ “Grading for Equity, Fs are now Cs” bullshit would have flown under the radar if @TheVOSF hadn’t covered it.
I’m still sunshining the contract by @SFUSD_Supe to pay consultant @CrescendoEdGrp for this “equity” plan despite a $114M district deficit.
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San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie:
We owe our young people an education that prepares them to succeed. The proposed changes to grading at SFUSD would not accomplish that.
I have conveyed our view to SFUSD. We are optimistic that there is a better path forward for our kids and their future.
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San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:
I try to stay in my San Jose lane, but as a former East Side public school teacher I have to say — this is a terrible disservice to our students. Lowering standards does not help children. It hurts them.
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The great irony of our time is that Mississippi is successfully working to fix one of the most broken school systems in the country while San Francisco works to destroy what was once one of the best school districts in the country.
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the san francisco board of education must immediately fire the superintendent. if they do not, they must all be removed from power.
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We have a new generation of common sense Democrats with @DanielLurie and me speaking out on this absurd grading for equity policy. I am glad the superintendent took notice after a few hours and backtracked.
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Walter Kirn:
A guide at the Mark Twain museum in Hartford once told a friend of mine during a tour: “Did you know Mark Twain dropped out of school in his teens to work in print shops and on a river boat? Just think how much greater a writer he would have been if he’d finished high school!”
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San Francisco schools is trying its absolute hardest to make sure all middle income families who could move out of the city do so right away
“Grading for Equity” is going to be a real disaster and I guess this is a boon for SF private schools and Burlingame housing prices.
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This is, on its face, absolutely retarded.
It’s also a disgrace that this comes from the preeminent tech capital of the world.
This will, however, be very good for housing prices in areas surrounding SF.
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Todd Davis:
Basketball games played in San Francisco will no longer count the number of baskets scored by each team.
This antiquated measurement of team performance does not take into account team’s vibes and therefore it does not take into account who the real winners are.
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“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District. Madison elected officials have generally been silent on our long term, disastrous reading results.
The challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline. If we can reconfigure the academic talent pipeline and ensure that those who believe in the classical mission of the university both choose academia and prosper in it, then the reform movement will succeed. If not, no list of policies, from securing campus free speech to dismantling DEI offices, will restore public trust in our universities.
Academia’s pipeline problem has deep roots. For more than a decade, universities have created special career paths for scholars whose mission is to advance the cause of social justice. In my recent City Journal series, I interviewed more than a dozen scholars and dug into hundreds of pages of public records to unpack this scholar-activist pipeline.
The series shows how administrators have used clever fellow-to-faculty hiring schemes to strong-arm departments and hire hundreds of professors throughout the country. Their tools include: undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral fellowships; faculty “cluster hiring” programs; faculty support grants; and administrator development programs. All have enjoyed ample funding from private foundations and the federal government.
On paper, these programs aim to promote demographic diversity. In practice, they heavily favor scholars whose research demonstrates a commitment to social justice, ensuring that a critical mass of scholar-activists advance through the academic ranks.
In Tuesday’s preliminary rounds, Ethan correctly spelled promyshlennik, which is a Russian trader or industrialist, and picked the correct definition of tantrum.
Ethan admitted to being nervous, but said he knew how to spell the word as soon as he heard it. He quickly and confidently spelled the word after asking for a definition and the word’s origin.
Without seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers in August in a system that awards a passing C grade to as low as a score of 41 on a 100-point exam.
Were it not for an intrepid school board member, the drastic change in grading with implications for college admissions and career readiness would have gone unnoticed and unexplained. It is buried in a three-word phrase on the last page of a PowerPoint presentation embedded in the school board meeting’s 25-page agenda. The plan comes during the last week of the spring semester while parents are assessing the impact of over $100 million in budget reductions and deciding whether to remain in the public schools this fall. While the school district acknowledges that parent aversion to this grading approach is typically high and understands the need for “vigilant communication,” outreach to parents has been minimal and may be nonexistent. The school district’s Office of Equity homepage does not mention it and a page containing the SFUSD definition of equity has not been updated in almost three years.
Grading for Equity eliminates homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that matters is how the student scores on a final examination, which can be taken multiple times. Students can be late turning in an assignment or showing up to class or not showing up at all without it affecting their academic grade. Currently, a student needs a 90 for an A and at least 61 for a D. Under the San Leandro Unified School District’s grading for equity system touted by the San Francisco Unified School District and its consultant, a student with a score as low as 80 can attain an A and as low as 21 can pass with a D.
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My immigrant dad asked me where the missing 10% went when I scored a 90. He came to America for the chance to work hard & pursue excellence. Giving A’s for 80% & no homework is not equity—it betrays the American Dream and every parent who wants more for their kids.
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San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie:
We owe our young people an education that prepares them to succeed. The proposed changes to grading at SFUSD would not accomplish that.
I have conveyed our view to SFUSD. We are optimistic that there is a better path forward for our kids and their future.
———
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan:
I try to stay in my San Jose lane, but as a former East Side public school teacher I have to say — this is a terrible disservice to our students. Lowering standards does not help children. It hurts them.
———
The great irony of our time is that Mississippi is successfully working to fix one of the most broken school systems in the country while San Francisco works to destroy what was once one of the best school districts in the country.
———
Walter Kirn:
A guide at the Mark Twain museum in Hartford once told a friend of mine during a tour: “Did you know Mark Twain dropped out of school in his teens to work in print shops and on a river boat? Just think how much greater a writer he would have been if he’d finished high school!”
———
This is, on its face, absolutely retarded.
It’s also a disgrace that this comes from the preeminent tech capital of the world.
This will, however, be very good for housing prices in areas surrounding SF.
———
“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District
So, why do we teach English literature (or “language arts,” as some secondary schools now call it) at all? According to the nineteenth-century British literary critic Mathew Arnold, the purpose of studying and teaching literatureis “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” In Arnold’s day, people had a pretty good idea of what was “the best that is known and thought”: it was Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and The Bible, alongside vernacular works by greats like William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Wordsworth. Writers like Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were later added.
The link between funding and the public has frayed.
Federal programs have mirrored that drift. The NEA’s grant language in recent years emphasized “capacity building,” “access strategies,” and “administrative equity plans.” ArtsHERE, launched in 2023, directed over $12 million toward “equity-centered frameworks,” focused more on internal processes than public-facing work. The long-term cultural impact of these efforts remains unclear. But that approach is now being reassessed. Whether or not the Trump administration succeeds in eliminating the NEA and other cultural agencies, the programs funded via these agencies are no longer assumed to reflect the public interest. For the first time in years, there is an opening to reconsider how public funding in the arts should be used and what it should be used for.
Some ventures already point the way. The Lamp, founded in 2020, is a journal of Catholic arts and letters supported by a small team and the Catholic University of America. It has built a national readership through editorial seriousness and clarity of purpose. Wiseblood Books, founded in 2013, is a small Southern press publishing fiction, poetry, and monographs grounded in craft and moral imagination. Both have earned attention through focus and substance, despite working with limited resources. They show what becomes possible when good work is pursued steadily and with conviction. Yet efforts like these remain rare.
One way to replicate these efforts would be for the NEA to create its own cultural accelerator—a short-term program focused on helping serious new institutions take root. The model exists in other fields. Y Combinator, one of the best-known startup incubators, has launched companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe by offering early-stage ventures structure, mentorship, and a public debut. The goal is to help founders establish the conditions for something lasting. Such a model could serve the arts.
ADH:
Last summer I made the case for bringing the principle of Dune’s Butlerian Jihad — “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” — to our broader discourse on AI. It seemed like a good way to bind together the various felt and thought objections to AI into a common credo. And a good way to distinguish between benign forms of so-called “AI” (spotting tumors, for instance) and the sycophantic imitations of humanity being peddled by the various broligarchs.
Since then, this “hard no” movement against AI has started to take shape. For one the t-shirt game keeps getting better. Traps are being set on the internet to punish AI scrapers and poison datasets. The new Chicago pope bashed AI in his first big speech. Just in my literary corner of the world, anti-AI clauses are becoming standard in book contracts and magazine submission forms. A recent episode of AppleTV’s The Studio ended with a crowd at ComicCon — and Ice Cube — chanting “fuck AI.” Last week there was a WorldCon kerfuffle (sigh) over using ChatGPT in part of the panel selection process.
(My WorldCon take is that, well intentioned though it was, feeding an AI a list of names and asking it to compile dossiers of their scandals and transgressions is a pretty dystopian use-case.)
The story of my undergraduate alma mater’s unofficial motto, coined by Woodrow Wilson in 1896, is illustrative. “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” has always been much more than a slogan. The school’s Nassau Hall served as the nation’s capitol for four months and eight days in 1783. Nine Princeton alumni served on the Constitutional Convention in 1787. And there has not been a year without a Princeton alumnus in the U.S. House of Representatives since its first meeting in 1789.
But not content to serve just our nation in a globalized world, the university revised Wilson’s motto in 1996 by adding “and in the Service of All Nations.” And then, in the wake of controversy surrounding Wilson and inspired by a speech delivered by alumna Sonia Sotomayor, it was changed again in 2016 to read “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.” As one alumnus said at the time in the official university press release, “It captures the latest narrative of world affairs. We are not just nations separated by borders. . . we may even be nationless. . . service to humanity is apt.”
more.
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This backlash has been brewing for a long time, and the more surprising thing is it hasn’t happen earlier
The Circuit Justices do not apply uniform rules when it comes to emergency applications. Justice Jackson, for example, refused to promptly call for a response in Libby v. Fectau, a case where the majority ultimately granted emergency docket relief.
I have also been keeping my eye on Trump v. AFGE. On May 9, A federal district court issued a TRO against the Trump Administration to block the removal of certain employees. On May 16, the Solicitor General applied for an emergency stay with Circuit Justice Kagan. And Kagan did absolutely nothing. She didn’t even call for a reply.
On May 22, the District Court entered a preliminary injunction, which the government promptly appealed. On May 23, the Solicitor General filed a letter with the Supreme Court, withdrawing the stay application. The short letter states:
Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”
It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work. As of this writing, Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 is hard to find on Amazon. Searching for it on the site won’t show the book, but a Google search will. 404 Media was able to purchase a copy and confirm that the book no longer contains the reference to copying Bree’s style. But screenshots of the graph remain in the book’s Amazon reviews and Goodreads page.
Last yr, DPI met behind closed doors to lower the standards for the Forward Exam. Now, they will apparently do the same thing for the state report card. We need transparency in these meetings. Why are these standard settings that effect all WI families held behind closed doors?
——
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”
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”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
State law requires outside investigators whenever the death of a person involves law enforcement. In these cases, little information is typically released by investigators until a district attorney decides whether to charge officers with a crime.
Last fall, however, Dane County authorities released a 911 call recording that provided new information about the circumstances in a deadly police shooting even while the case remained under review by Ozanne.
In August, a Fitchburg police officer fatally shotKevin Price, 28, sparking questions about what happened before and after the shooting. Then in October, under state open records laws, local news outlet Isthmus obtained a 911 call recording as well as reports on police and ambulance dispatches for the case.
The records were released by Dane County Public Safety Communications, which falls under the county executive’s administration and is a separate agency from the District Attorney’s Office.
1. Federal grants. Because few, if any, law schools receive substantial federal grants, this lever is not very effective against law schools—directly. But see item 5 below. …
4. Accreditation/bar admission/student loans. The federal Department of Education recognizes the American Bar Association as an accreditor for law schools. In addition, law schools which are a part of a university, as most are, also receive the benefit of the university’s accreditation. This could matter for purposes of student loans and bar admission. Federal student loans and grants are available only to students attending accredited institutions so a loss of accreditation could be devastating to schools that depend on students being able to finance their education through federal student loans, which is probably true of every law school. Students might still be able to obtain private student loans, though those can be more expensive and lack the income-based repayment options available for federal loans.
I’m not sure how much this matters to bar admission; if states concluded that the federal government had cancelled a law school’s accreditation for inappropriate reasons, I imagine they could change their rules to allow graduates of that school to be admitted. The federal budget bill as it stands at the moment would limit the amount of federal student loans available to students attending professional schools, which might also impact some students, and thus some schools.
5. Impact of being part of a broader university. Even if law schools are not directly affected by the loss of federal aid, etc. they might be indirectly affected if they are part of a broader university. Universities that depend heavily on federal grants, for example, and that lose those grants, or get lower reimbursement rates on those grants will have less resources. That may affect their budgetary arrangement with their law school. …
Want to be a champion speller?
Stick to the basics — like chocolate ice cream and cookies — find a superhero you can identify with, read a lot and, of course, practice, practice, practice until you just don’t want to practice anymore. (And then practice some more.)
These are a few of the things the Wisconsin State Journal learned recently about Jacob Martonito and Ethan Robert, this year’s winner and runner-up, respectively, of the Badger State Spelling Bee. The Wisconsin bee is sponsored by the State Journal.
Jacob, a 12-year-old sixth grader from Classical Charter School in Appleton, and Ethan, a 12-year-old seventh grader from New Berlin’s Eisenhower Middle School, are on their way to the biggest American bee of them all — the 100th anniversary, in fact, of the Scripps National Spelling Bee this week in National Harbor, Maryland, a few miles south of Washington, D.C.
A rigorously documented, independent, community-led report detailing how Wauwatosa’s school governance has broken down over the past several years—academically, financially, and administratively.
——-
Meanwhile:
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The electrical engineer’s Solve SF app lets users file 311 reports about issues like graffiti or sidewalk poop in as little as 10 seconds, roughly five times faster than the city’s official app. It’s McCabe’s passion project, it’s free to use, and has been boosted online by the political organization GrowSF.
But the city is about to kill the vital mechanism the app runs on.
Officials from the city administrator’s office on May 13 told McCabe, who lives near the Castro, they’re shutting down the Open 311 API program, which allows third-party apps and other programs to pull from and send data to the city’s 311 service.
More than 1 million international students attend colleges across the United States each year, bringing billions of dollars to the American economy and bolstering the nation’s science and technology sectors. Many of them now find themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s battle to exert control over some of the nation’s elite universities.
Those students have been a critical part of U.S. institutions of higher education for decades, contributing to the nation’s economy and research, experts say.
Ann Althouse summary:
Thompson responds: “Well, this person went on to say that when you’re voting for a President you’re voting for the aides, uh, around him. But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides. These are White House aides. These were unelected people. And one of the things that really I think comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which, I think, is what this person is talking about.”
It’s like fighting fire with fire — fighting the destruction of the democracy with the destruction of democracy. You had to destroy the village to save it. Noted.
