School Information System

The Batch

Even though the U.S. is still ahead, China has tremendous momentum with its vibrant open-weights model ecosystem and aggressive moves in semiconductor design and manufacturing. In the startup world, we know momentum matters: Even if a company is small today, a high rate of growth compounded for a few years quickly becomes an unstoppable force. This is why a small, scrappy team with high growth can threaten even behemoths. While both the U.S. and China are behemoths, China’s hypercompetitive business landscape and rapid diffusion of knowledge give it tremendous momentum. The White House’s AI Action Plan released last week, which explicitly champions open source (among other things), is a very positive step for the U.S., but by itself it won’t be sufficient to sustain the U.S. lead.

Now, AI isn’t a single, monolithic technology, and different countries are ahead in different areas. For example, even before Generative AI, the U.S. had long been ahead in scaled cloud AI implementations, while China has long been ahead in surveillance technology. These translate to different advantages in economic growth as well as both soft and hard power. Even though nontechnical pundits talk about “the race to AGI” as if AGI were a discrete technology to be invented, the reality is that AI technology will progress continuously, and there is no single finish line. If a company or nation declares that it has achieved AGI, I expect that declaration to be less a technology milestone than a marketing milestone. A slight speed advantage in the Olympic 100m dash translates to a dramatic difference between winning a gold medal versus a silver medal. An advantage in AI prowess translates into a proportionate advantage in economic growth and national power; while the impact won’t be a binary one of either winning or losing everything, these advantages nonetheless matter.

Lylena Estabine:

Illinois has the nation’s worst public pension crisis. Nationwide analysis from the Equable Institute shows Illinois state pensions remain fiscally unstable and threaten retirees and taxpayers, underscoring the need for reform.

The Equable Institute’s annual report on the state of public pensions nationwide reaffirms that Illinois pensions continue to lag the nation in funding and are in desperate need of reform.

If the state fails to fix its pension issues, the budget will continue to be strained, people will continue leaving the state over high taxes and future pension benefits could be at risk. Preserving the cost savings of Tier 2, offering retirement choice to state employees and constitutional pension reform should all be implemented if Illinois is to have any hope of gaining fiscal stability.

Comparing pension debt to the state’s gross domestic product helps measure the state’s ability to pay based on the local tax base. By that measure, Illinois ranks as the nation’s worst: unfunded obligations equal 19.02% of state GDP, up from 18.52% a year ago. In other words, roughly one-fifth of everything produced in the state would be required just to erase the shortfall.

That’s driving up the burden on taxpayers, whose contributions to state pension systems have grown nearly 20-fold, from $614 million in fiscal year 1996 to $11.2 billion in fiscal year 2025. The heavy pension bill explains why Illinoisans pay the highest effective property tax rate in the country.

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Chicago’s pension crisis is heading for a Detroit-style collapse

Steven Tucker

As we shall see, in the wake of the Southport stabbings, there are even now proposals to ban knives outright, or at least all sharp and pointy ones—you may have thought no other kinds of knives would even be possible. It’s all ban this, ban that, ban the other in the country these days…ban everything, in fact, other than that which truly does need banning: the continued uncontrolled inrush of those who wield the knives, not the wholly inanimate and therefore innocent knives themselves.

“Maybe the best class of persons to ban would be the idiot politicians who repeatedly impose new and unnecessary problems upon their own people.”

A Matter of Knife and Death
There is a desperate pretense among the U.K. ruling class that, by opening the country up to mass immigration over the past few decades, they have DEFINITELY NOT also simultaneously opened the place up to massive and intractable problems that, like the immigrants themselves, were previously largely alien to it. But this is just not true.

WILL:

On June 27, 2025, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark decision reaffirming that parents have a constitutional right to control the religious upbringing of their children, even when their children attend a public school. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled that the Montgomery County School District in Maryland violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by revoking parents’ ability to opt their children out of reading books with LGBTQ+ themes that conflicted with their religious beliefs.

The Court emphasized that parental rights do not end at the schoolhouse gate. The ruling establishes a nationwide requirement: when public schools include instructional materials on controversial topics such as gender identity, they must accommodate families with sincere religious objections by offering and respecting an opt-out right to parents.

This decision has immediate implications for parents across the country as they prepare for the 2025-2026 school year. Parents should know their rights and take proactive steps to protect them. WILL offers a parental opt-out form, a template notice letter for teachers to inform families, and a model school board policy that parents can share with their local board to ensure schools comply with the ruling and respect religious liberty.

Why was this case brought?

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more.

Why do so many teachers abandon their teaching careers, and what strategies can we employ to retain them?

You’ve probably heard the stat: half of all new teachers leave within five years. It’s been doing the rounds for years, quoted in policy papers, union speeches, and the more despairing corners of Twitter. The truth is a little less stark. The most recent Department for Education figures show that around 32% of teachers in England leave within five yearsof qualifying. Nearer to a third than half, but still a staggering number.

According to the best estimates we have, around 900,000 people under 60 in England and Wales hold qualified teacher status. Yet only about 492,000 of them are currently teaching in state-funded schools. That means roughly 400,000 qualified teachers – nearly half – are doing something, anything, else.1

And the trend is getting worse. In 2023–24, for the first time in over a decade, more teachers left the profession than joined. According to the School Workforce Census, 41,736 full-time equivalent teachers entered the state sector, while 41,212 left—a wafer-thin net gain of just 524 teachers. But once part-time staff are accounted for, the workforce actually shrunk by around 400 teachers overall. In practical terms, schools are now losing teachers faster than they can hire them.

Camus:

Powerful speech by Bret Weinstein: “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we must zoom out if we are to understand the pattern that we are gathered here to explore, because the pattern is larger than federal health agencies and the COVID cartel. If we do zoom out and ask, what are they hiding?” “The answer becomes as obvious as it is disturbing. They are hiding everything. It will be jarring for many to hear a scientist speak with such certainty. It should be jarring. We are trained to present ideas with caution as hypotheses in need of a test. But in this case, I have tested the idea, and I am as certain of it as I am of anything. We are being systematically blinded.” “It is the only explanation I have encountered that will not only describe the present, but also, in my experience, predicts the future with all but perfect accuracy. The pattern is a simple one. You can see it clearly and test it yourself. Every single institution dedicated to public truth-seeking is under simultaneous attack.” “They are all in a state of collapse. Every body of experts fails utterly. Individual experts who resist or worse in an attempt to return their institutions to sanity, they find themselves coerced into submission. If they won’t buckle, they are marginalized or forced out.” “Those outside of the institutions who either seek truth alone or who build new institutions with a truth seeking mission face merciless attacks on both their integrity and expertise. often by the very institutions whose mission they refuse to abandon. There is a saying in military circles, once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.” “I have no doubt that given an hour, the people on this panel could point to 100 examples of the pattern I have just described, while finding even a handful of exceptions would pose a significant challenge. We are left in a fool’s paradise. Our research universities spend huge sums of public money to reach preordained conclusions.” “Professors teach only lessons that are consistent with wisdom students have picked up on TikTok, even when those lessons contradict the foundational principles of their disciplines. Once proud newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post only report important stories after they have become common knowledge.”

“Morticians must now raise the alarm over patterns missed by medical examiners. The CDC has become an excellent guide to protecting your health, but only for people who realize you should do the opposite of whatever it advises. The courts, the last holdout in this ongoing inversion of reality, are now regularly used as a coercive weapon of elites against those who threaten them.” 

“We have literally witnessed the Department of Homeland Security attempt to set up a truth ministry and declare accurate critique of government as a kind of terrorism. To my fellow patriots in the West, The pattern is unmistakable.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Wisconsin State Journal

“Generally, when we see local district enrollment stagnant as population of a city increases, that is often an indicator to check the school choice environment,” said Rachel Williams, an assistant professor studying education policy at UW-Madison.

Progressive Madison likes to blame private school vouchers for siphoning students and revenue away from public schools. We understand that concern.

Yet Rickert’s reporting found that open enrollment among public schools accounts for far more students leaving. The Madison district lost a net total of 13,000 students through open enrollment over the last two decade — along with $90 million in state funding that followed them. State voucher programs for private schools reduced Madison’s school aid by far less: $20.5 million.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Nic Pavao:

Because Treasury saw the elephant in the room. As Janet shopped around bonds to anyone that would take a meeting, China, Japan, Europe — there was no appetite for 30 year U.S. bonds with interest rates under 2% when Debt-to-GDP was above 120% following COVID stimulus. The market wouldn’t touch them — even if we asked.

So it wasn’t worth asking — because again, at this point, Treasury and Fed are just managing optics. So instead of refinancing our liabilities at historic lows, we front-loaded the interest burden. Which means the window for monetary discretion — raising or lowering rates, modulating the money supply, nudging inflation — is effectively closed. 

At this point, lowering rates will be seen as an inflationary signal, and the bond market will punish us in turn. Just ask Japan.

Eric S Raymond:

But. If you stand idly by as an academic while your university engages in illegal and immoral racial discrimination, I don’t think you have any actual grounds for complaint when your failure to oppose that discrimination comes back around to bite you in the ass.

Would I like to live in a world where research funding for titans like Tao isn’t subject to political winds? Why yes, I would.

I’d also like to live in a world where the Marxists who corrupted the university system are all dead or exiled and institutions of higher learning have returned to affirming the highest values of the civilization they serve.

Joe Pinsker:

The 45-year-old lawyer in Boulder, Colo., today is a homeowner with ample retirement savings but worries his wealth could suddenly disappear. He keeps an emergency fund that could cover his expenses for years.

Mitch Horowitz

Gardner misstated the facts, which were long available. I wrote critically about the lab deception myself in 2022:

In the early 1970s, J.B. Rhine’s then-independent lab (faced with declining institutional support his center had migrated off [Duke University’s] campus) was itself rocked by a fraud scandal. A charismatic and driven medical student handpicked by Rhine as his institutional successor was caught faking results. Rhine was resolute and transparent in rooting out and exposing the fraud and laying groundwork for improvements.

But Rhine cannot wholly be spared blame. He handpicked his own Judas. “He had barely been there three years,” wrote authorized biographer Denis Brian, “when, in 1973, Rhine appointed this man in his early twenties director of the institute.” [5]

It is possible that Rhine, a former Marine with square-jawed good looks and poised manners, saw in this “bright young dynamo” a formidable newcomer who could take parapsychology to its next stage of public acceptance. From my perspective, it would have been wiser for Rhine to place his stock in the less-Olympian looking but more integral and erudite Charles Honorton (1946–1992) with whom Rhine never seemed to personally connect. Although Honorton’s career was cut short by ill-health, the scientist proved the field’s natural intellectual heir, but without the garland of institutional inheritance. [6]

Brandi Bennett

Minnesota was once a progressive trailblazer. Now it is a case study in how not to govern. We didn’t get here overnight. A toxic mix of political naïveté, bureaucratic laziness and ideological vanity has flung open the gates to fraudsters who now treat Minnesota taxpayers like a bottomless ATM.

www

Hyman Rickover, also known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy”, built the first nuclear-powered submarine and civilian nuclear reactor.

As the U.S. returns once more to an era of shipbuilding and building nuclear energy infrastructure, understanding Rickover’s management methods is of even greater importance.

This website is a searchable digital archive of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s speeches, congressional testimonies, and memos. It includes over 2,500 pages of documents, including over 1,800 pages of never before seen digitized artifacts from the U.S. Naval Academy Archives

Sawyer Merritt summary:

@xAI is donating millions of dollars to help four schools in the Memphis, Tennessee area with years of deferred maintenance.

For each of the schools, xAI is offering project management, construction, installation, replacement, and/or repair of the following:
• General School – Painting of hallways, common areas, and classrooms; windows; lighting upgrades or modernization; plumbing and restroom modernization; HVAC and A/C units; landscaping and beautification upgrades and modifications.
• Outdoor Athletic/Outdoor – Turf or natural grass football, baseball, soccer, and open play fields with associated bleachers; an athletic track; scoreboard; fencing or barriers; landscaping and beautification upgrades and modifications.
• Indoor Athletic – Indoor basketball court with associated bleachers, a weight room and exercise area, lighting upgrades or modernization, and a scoreboard
• Specialized Areas (library, cafeteria, auditorium, etc.) – Chemistry and technology labs with associated materials and resources; modular walls for individual study or collaborative work; furniture, wayfaring signage, and audio-visual equipment; lighting upgrades or modernization; and climate control systems and supportive technology.

xAI is not asking for anything in return from these communities. They just want to help and invest in the community where they have their AI supercomputer. xAI referred to these as “in-kind donations,” meaning the company would pay for them directly, with no funds changing hands between the company and the school district.

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more.

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Memphis spends about $1,900,000,000 for students 106,000 students or $17,924 each.

Madison taxpayers spend more than $25,000 per student, this despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Jessica Costescu:

A congressional investigation has uncovered new ties between Harvard University and the Chinese Communist Party, including the school’s years-long role in training rising CCP elites, three top Republicans revealed Wednesday.

Reps. John Moolenaar (Mich.), Tim Walberg (Mich.), and Elise Stefanik (N.Y.)—who chair the Select Committee on the CCP, the Committee on Education and Workforce, and House Republican Leadership, respectively—told Harvard president Alan Garber in a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that whistleblowers detailed the Ivy League university’s partnerships with CCP entities, which have been in place for at least a decade.

Will Flanders and Cory Brewer:

• A new federal tax credit scholarship program allows individuals to receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs).
• SGOs then award scholarships to families for educational expenses, including private school tuition, tutoring, and other educational resources.
• Wisconsin’s governor must opt in for the state to participate, allowing SGOs to operate and families to access scholarships.
• The program uses private funding and does not create new government bureaucracy.

For decades, Wisconsin has been a pioneer in providing educational options to families, but this has generally only been available to those who choose to opt out of traditional public schools via private school choice or programs like open enrollment. A new federal option could open funding opportunities for all Wisconsin kids, but the state must choose to participate.

Provisions in the recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” created the first-ever federal K–12 tax credit scholarship program. Under the bill, individuals can receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700 per year for donations to certified Scholarship Granting Organizations, or SGOs.

SGOs, in turn, award scholarships to families for a wide range of qualifying expenses. This could include tuition at a private school but many services for other kids as well. For example, an SGO could be created to provide special education therapies or tutoring for public school students, homeschool curriculum, books, software, transportation and other supports already permitted under federal Coverdell accounts.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Harvard Kennedy School:

This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping young people’s schooling experiences, opportunities, and outcomes, and the role of schooling experiences in shaping young people’s notions of gender and sexuality. In many ways, the course is about the “hidden curriculum” of heteronormativity and cisnormativity, or the subtle practices in schools that privilege heterosexual, gendered identities and ways of being. As such, students in the course will apply the concept of the hidden curriculum to the study of gender and schooling in order to understand why and how children and youth with different gender identities experience schooling differently and why and how heteronormative schooling detrimentally impacts all students.

Mark Judge:

It’s understandable, and rational, that the American people don’t trust the media. Time and time again the media have proven themselves to be untrustworthy.

Still, I sometimes find myself wondering how different things might have been, how the press could have saved itself, had reporters just been willing to work with honor and walk down the painful road of introspection when they were wrong.

That last phrase, “walk down the painful road of introspection,” is not my own. It belongs to Bob Woodward, the “legendary” Washington Post reporter. Woodward became famous for his coverage of Watergate in the 1970s. A lot of conservatives dislike Woodward, and I understand why. Yet if we completely ignore the legacy media we overlook some gold.

In this case, the gold is “The Press vs the President,” a long series of articles by Jeff Gerth published in January 2023 in the Columbia Journalism Review. It is the most comprehensive, well-written, and damning indictment of the media I have ever read, and the kind of reporting that makes one consider all news events in a new light. For example, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s release of formerly classified documents revealed the truly deep and evil extent of the Russiagate hoax. The documents detail how the intelligence community set up President Trump for failure in 2016 by falsely claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin. The media peddled garbage, ignored contradictory evidence, and sometimes flat-out lied. For me, Gabbard’s revelations put an exclamation point on “The Press vs the President.” (Seriously, go read it.)

One of the people interviewed in Gerth’s series is Bob Woodward. In January 2017, Woodward went on Fox News to dismiss the Steele dossier, which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, as a “garbage document.” The Steele dossier was opposition research that claimed Trump was hanging out with prostitutes in Moscow and was in the pocket of Putin. 

You’d think that such a statement coming from the media’s Watergate hero would have had some effect on the Washington Post—but it didn’t. Jeff Gerth describes what happened next:

Andy Kessler:

Freedom of the press should mean freedom from government control that comes via funding. Spectrum license renewal still overhangs over-the-air TV network owners. The Fairness Doctrine, adopted in 1949, forced media to run opposing views. Its repeal in 1987 allowed media to pick sides and flourish, from Rush Limbaugh to MSNBC. Government-funded media—politicized and with raw momentum of swamp support—was always asking for trouble and should have also ended in 1987.

Video killed the radio star, and now social media has been killing broadcasters. Ask Stephen Colbert and his $40 million-losing “Late Show.” Artificial intelligence will stir the pot in new and not yet imagined ways. Such is progress. Of course, digital media inherits many old problems. Social media censored posts about Covid vaccines, often goaded by the Biden administration. Republicans and the Trump administration want to break up Big Tech for stifling conservative voices.

The First Amendment’s press freedoms should be absolute, including freedom from government-funded outlets. Freedom of thought and expression and freedom from government interference are critical to a functioning society. Even Oscar the Grouch would agree.

Janet Johnson and John Whittle:

When academic achievement and advanced enrollment diverge

In 2009, North Carolina administrators were becoming more aware that enrollment in advanced math classes was not done by academic achievement, largely due to the new trend of federal grants aimed at increasing enrollment of low-income and minority students. The North Carolina Association of School Administrators hired us to work with SAS to investigate how math placement related to math achievement in all school districts in the state.

SAS Institute analyzed academic scores and math course enrollment patterns for all of North Carolina and for each school system. SAS Institute is a leading global provider of advanced analytics and statistical software, with over 12,000 employees and more than 80,000 customer sites in 140 countries, making it a major player in enterprise data solutions across industry and academia. Their analysis revealed the extent of these placement gaps. Among 7th graders with strong statistical predictions for success in advanced math, fewer than 50% were actually placed in 8th-grade algebra. At the same time, many students in those advanced classes had lower success predictions than students who were not recommended for the class.

This is not a small problem affecting a few students. This analysis revealed a systematic failure affecting tens of thousands of children across North Carolina alone, wasting human potential on a massive scale. The study done in 2009 showed that about 35,000 North Carolina middle school students were predicted to be successful in 8th-grade algebra but were not enrolled. They went on to take 9th-grade algebra, and more than 25,000 of them scored at the highest level on the 9th-grade algebra end-of-grade test. Yet despite this demonstrated high performance, they remained in the standard track rather than advancing to more rigorous mathematics courses, such as Honors, Advanced Placement, or IB math classes.1

Gregory Mankiw: (grok summary)

In this lecture delivered on July 10, 2025, as the Martin Feldstein Lecture, Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw pays tribute to Martin Feldstein’s influence on his career and the field of economics, describing himself as Feldstein’s “grandstudent” through mentors like Harvey Rosen and Larry Summers. He recounts personal experiences working under Feldstein at the Council of Economic Advisers and teaching Harvard’s introductory economics course.

The core of the lecture addresses the U.S. fiscal trajectory, highlighting concerns over rising government debt relative to GDP, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects to reach 156% by 2055 under current law, exacerbated by recent legislation like the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Mankiw contrasts this with historical patterns where debt spikes during crises (e.g., wars, recessions, pandemics) but declines afterward through growth, inflation, and prudence.

He outlines five potential resolutions: (1) extraordinary economic growth (e.g., via AI and biotech, though he deems it unlikely); (2) government default (citing historical examples like U.S. abrogation of gold clauses in the 1930s and Trump’s 2016 comments); (3) large-scale money creation leading to inflation or hyperinflation (referencing Germany, Zimbabwe, and potential fiscal dominance); (4) substantial spending cuts (politically challenging, especially for entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, despite initiatives like the Department of Government Efficiency); and (5) large tax increases (viewed as most likely, estimating a 4% of GDP fiscal gap requiring about 14% higher tax revenue, potentially via a value-added tax (VAT) to align closer to OECD averages).

Mankiw argues the U.S. is a low-tax nation compared to peers (28% of GDP vs. OECD’s 34%) and suggests a VAT as an efficient consumption-based tax, though politically difficult due to bipartisan resistance to broad tax hikes. He warns of a potential crisis if bond markets lose confidence, drawing on past predictions and cartoons for illustration, and ends optimistically that an educated public might enable rational policy, referencing historical debt reductions.

The lecture includes footnotes, acknowledgments, and a reference list.

5 Most Important Points

The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is projected by the CBO to rise to 156% by 2055 under current law, with no end in sight, worsened by recent legislation like the “Big Beautiful Bill,” diverging from historical post-crisis declines.

Five possible ways to halt rising debt are outlined:

extraordinary growth (unlikely despite tech optimism),

default (historically precedented, including U.S. in the 1930s),

money creation (risking inflation/hyperinflation),

spending cuts (politically treacherous for entitlements), and tax increases (most probable to close a ~4% of GDP fiscal gap).

The U.S. is a low-tax country (28% of GDP in revenue) compared to OECD peers (average 34%), making tax hikes feasible economically but blocked by bipartisan consensus against raising taxes on 99% of Americans.

A value-added tax (VAT) is proposed as an efficient solution, averaging 7% of GDP in OECD countries, taxing consumption without distorting savings, though it could reduce work incentives.

Without action, a debt crisis could arise suddenly, as bond markets lose faith (e.g., recent Moody’s downgrade), forcing painful reforms, though historical U.S. debt reductions offer hope for a benign outcome.

5 Most Obscure Points

Mankiw describes himself as Feldstein’s “grandstudent” twice—first via Harvey Rosen (Princeton) and later via Larry Summers (MIT)—and notes working for Feldstein at the CEA in 1982-83 and teaching Ec 10 at Harvard in 1985.

In the 1930s, the U.S. partially defaulted by abrogating gold clauses in bonds under FDR, upheld by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, as detailed in Sebastian Edwards’s book “American Default.”

Donald Trump’s 2016 quote calling himself the “king of debt” and suggesting renegotiating national debt by offering “half” back in a crashed economy is cited as evidence default isn’t unimaginable.

Peter Fisher’s quip that the federal government is “an insurance company with an army” highlights that defense (13%) and entitlements (>50%) dominate the budget, with civilian employee compensation only 4%.

Historical U.S. debt reductions occurred without major disruptions from 1790-1830, 1860-1900 (corrected in text to 1800-1900), and 1945-1975, contrasting with current projections.

This summary and lists are based solely on the document’s content, ensuring factual accuracy by cross-referencing page details and avoiding any external assumptions or additions. The language is clear, structured for readability with concise sentences, bullet points, and logical flow to facilitate easy understanding.

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more.

Jakey Lebwohl, Emma Park and Zach Rausch, via a kind reader:

Denise Champney: As a school based SLP for over 25 years, I have witnessed this trend first hand. I work directly with lower performing students and frustratingly watch how their learning is impacted when they are handed a chromebook. This technology creates another barrier to their learning. For example, with the ease of tech, these children are given academic accommodations (i.e. typing rather than writing, speech to text, audio versions of texts and so on) without being provided adequate opportunities to fully develop those skills. While accommodations are important at times, technology has allowed these tools to be used excessively and I would argue reduces the opportunity for children to develop these skills. How can we truly measure the missed opportunities a child with dyslexia has to develop their reading skills when they always have the ability to listen to a story or math problem because it is presented on a screen? How can we accurately measure how giving a child with ADHD a device that is designed to rob their attention and expect them to learn to their fullest potential? How can we expect children with fine motor weaknesses to develop their skills when they are always allowed to type rather than write? Our current education system is so focused on gathering data through progress monitoring using a computer that children who are struggling learners will continue to fall further behind. Add AI to the mix and this gap will grow even wider.

Jakey Lebwohl
Thank you for your comment, Denise. There are many ways digital tech might hurt struggling students the most – perhaps it is most distracting for those with low conscientiousness or executive functioning skills, who are more likely to struggle. It might make cheating easier, and if lower-performing students are more likely to cheat, they will be more affected by the change. Your comment suggests another possible mechanism: computers that imperfectly monitor progress and replace in-person monitoring might leave students who need the most help behind.

National Education Association (NEA):

via Grok 4: ### Brief Summary of the NEA Handbook 2025
The 2025 NEA Handbook is an online resource published by the National Education Association (NEA), detailing its governance documents, including the Constitution, Bylaws, Rules, policy statements, and business items. It outlines NEA’s vision for great public schools for every student, mission to advocate for educators and unite for public education’s promise, and core values like equality, democracy, professionalism, partnership, and collective action. The handbook addresses ongoing challenges, emphasizing NEA’s historical role in protecting students and educators through eras of threat, with a focus on current political attacks under the second Trump presidency, including Project 2025’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education, cut funding, promote discrimination, and divert resources to private schools. It includes historical context like the 1966 NEA-ATA merger, the Code of Ethics for the education profession, and topics such as AI in education, academic freedom, and student rights.

#### Top 10 Issues Addressed
1. **Political Threats to Public Education**: Discusses intensified attacks under Trump, including gutting federal funding and closing the Department of Education via Project 2025.

2. **Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)**: Opposes assaults on DEI, LGBTQ+ rights, and efforts to nationalize book bans and censorship.

3. **NEA’s Vision, Mission, and Core Values**: Emphasizes advocating for educators, equality, democracy, professionalism, partnerships, and collective action.

4. **Historical Role and Mergers**: Covers NEA’s founding in 1857, the 1966 merger with the American Teachers Association (ATA), and milestones like the 1958 Miami Beach convention.

5. **Protection of Vulnerable Students**: Addresses impacts on immigrant, transgender, and low-income students, including threats of deportation and erosion of civil rights.

6. **Funding and Resource Diversion**: Critiques diverting taxpayer funds to unaccountable private schools and eliminating programs like arts, music, and job training.

7. **Code of Ethics for the Education Profession**: Outlines principles for educators, focusing on student dignity, equality, and professional standards (repeated extensively due to OCR artifacts).

8. **Use of Artificial Intelligence in Education**: Dedicates sections to AI’s role, though content is truncated and repetitive.

9. **Academic Freedom and Student Rights**: Covers rights, responsibilities, and protections against violence, substance abuse, and discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

10. **Governance and Organizational Structure**: Includes details on Representative Assembly, committees, affiliates, and policy on issues like subcontracting, sustainability, and teacher preparation.

#### Ten Most Obscure Points Raised
1. **NEA-ATA Joint Committee Actions**: Worked with textbook publishers to identify Black writers, editors, and consultants in the 1950s.

2. **Health Studies on Black Children**: Sponsored courses and publications on race relations and minority group problems via the Joint Committee on Child Health.

3. **1952 Policy on Convention Locations**: Authorized holding Representative Assemblies only in cities ensuring equality in accommodations.

4. **Symbol of the United Education Profession**: Mentioned briefly as a governance element without further description.

5. **Tennessee Code References**: Lists “Tennessee Code, 37, 38, 59” in the index without context.

6. **UniServ Advisory Committee**: Noted as a specific committee at pages 16, 34, 77, with no detailed explanation.

7. **Think Tanks Mentions**: Obliquely referenced at pages 7, 8, 16, 63, possibly as external entities influencing policy.

8. **Transportation of Cars**: Listed in index under transportation issues at pages 238, 239, 247, 277, 279, 308, amid student transport topics.

9. **Unaccredited Immigrant**: Singular mention at page 221, 356, 404, likely a typo or obscure policy on immigrant status in education.

10. **Repeated “We Want of The” Phrase**: OCR artifact causing extensive repetition in page 13, obscuring text about educator valuation and protection.

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

The number of Wisconsinites employed as apprentices has grown considerably over the last decade and reached a record high in 2024, according to data from the state’s Department of Workforce Development. That year, 17,509 individuals participated in Wisconsin’s Registered Apprenticeship Program, which was more than 77% higher than in 2013 (Figure 1).

This is welcome news at a time when employers in the state continue to report struggles to find needed workers in many occupations. That is the case not only in the construction and manufacturing industries but also healthcare, education, agriculture, and more. In many cases, this problem is intensifying as baby boomers retire and fewer young people are available to replace them. It is critical, therefore, to ask whether our current landscape of registered apprenticeships and related programs such as the state’s Youth Apprenticeship and Certified Pre-Apprenticeship programs is reaching its full potential to train future workers.

Anna Marie Yanny:

The authors found the organization’s state-certified “pre-apprenticeship” programs could be expanded to better prepare people across the state to enter the state’s apprenticeship program. Pre-apprenticeship programs help people get their prerequisites. 

“We found those programs only exist in a few places in Wisconsin, mainly in Milwaukee and Dane counties,” Peterangelo said. “(That’s) despite there being demand from throughout the state.” 

Dana Levenson

The good news: The combined funding level of Chicago’s four direct pension funds — fire, laborers, municipal employees, and police — increased by 2.4%, reaching 25.4% at the end of 2024 compared to 2023.

The bad news: That funding level is still just 25.4%.

To put this in perspective, publicly held companies are required to maintain pension funding levels of at least 100%. It’s widely accepted that state and local governments should aim for at least 80%. IBM, for example, has 123% of its pension liabilities funded, and the state of Virginia is at 81%.

Chicago’s pension crisis has been unfolding for over two decades. But now, more than at any point in the past 25 years, the situation is critical. There’s a very small margin between 25.4% and 0%. And with legislation awaiting Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature that would enhance benefits for police and fire pensions, projections show funding levels could drop to just 18% in the coming years. That leaves even less room before hitting zero. Our retired city of Chicago employees — and those planning to retire — deserve far better.

The pension funding level (or “funded ratio”) measures a fund’s financial health. It represents the amount of money currently on hand compared to what’s needed to meet all current and future obligations. For context, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Chicago’s pension funds were fully funded or close to it. In 2005, the combined funded ratio was closer to 70%. By the end of 2024, it had plummeted to 25.4%.

——-

Paul Vallas:

Mayor Johnson’s “Tax the Rich” rhetoric masks his intent to solve Chicago’s budget woes with a Seattle style “gross-receipts tax” on business payrolls that projects to raise $1.5B. The group behind the tax is the Institute for the Public Good, which is aligned with the CTU.

Should it pass, or any version of the city’s old Head Tax — a per-employee tax on Chicago businesses — the big sucking sound you hear will be businesses and jobs exiting Chicago.

Meanwhile, the Mayor’s review team proposed a raft of 26 other taxes and fees to be placed on all individuals regardless of income. They include a tax on drivers (congestion tax), restaurant meals, bottled water, garbage pickup, etc.

——-

Needless to say, this is not helping CTU’s push for a bailout from Springfield.

——-

more.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson CTU background.

He forgot that he won 17% to 16% because only a third of the city voted. There was no mandate.”

Johnson, who does not call himself a democratic socialist but believes in many of the same principles as Mamdani, was swept into office by a coalition underpinned by the powerful Chicago Teachers Union and the city’s Black and brown voters. He vowed to unite fractured coalitions and lift up the most vulnerable. He represented change, and his strong roots in the community as an activist, a parent and a resident of a neighborhood that struggles with crime gave hope around new efforts toward equality across a city long deeply segregated by race and income.

How does Chicago’s debt compare to other major cities’ debt? It’s pretty bad.

Frank is right: Chicago’s debt is bad. Additionally, Chicago can’t seem to control its expenses either. From 2020 to 2025 the city budget ballooned 50%, climbing from $11.6 billion to $17.3 billion, while NYC’s and LA’s budgets only grew by about 29%. @FrankCalabrese

Curiously, Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker has been an active donor and presence in the Wisconsin Democrat Party, including a “keynote speaker”. Money.

The latest on Pritzker:

.@GovPritzker just signed this bill and in one stroke of his pen transformed Chicago police and fire pension funds from 25% funded to 18% funded

$11B added to the $36B, with one signature.

There are 2 paths to dealing with pension liabilities: political courage or kick the can. Here, Pritzker is courting organized labor for his expected prez run in ’28 and will let the city of Chicago and future governors deal with the consequences of this fiscal malfeasance.

Namely, Pritzker is promising new pension benefits for the worst-funded pension systems in the nation because he’s running for president and wants support from government union labor.

The Illinois Constitution locks in those promises for eternity. Pritzker won’t be around to face the consequences. But a generation of working Chicagoans will be. We are stuck with the tab — whether in cuts to services or higher taxes.

Going to Illinois to protest gerrymandering is like going to Wisconsin to protest cheese.

And to think that Gov Pritzker has presidential ambitions.

Pritzker, who once campaigned promising to support efforts to take the mapping pen out of politicians’ hands, eventually supported the maps produced by his fellow democrats.

Chicago School Board

Up until Friday, I thought growth plus fiscal discipline might have been enough to rebuild Chicago’s finances. Now I’m honestly not sure if the city has any chance of turning a corner without changes to the state constitution and/or bankruptcy.

Chicago Teacher Union

Just two weeks before school starts, @ChiPubSchool blindsided 1,200 custodians with layoffs, leaving custodians without a job, income, or healthcare and leaving our students with dirty and unsafe schools.

In response, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates called Tarver a deadbeat dad, continuing her habit of personally insulting her political opponents. But every word of Tarver’s speech is correct. A case in point: On the pension sweetener bill, Johnson and his Springfield lobbying team were completely missing in action.

The Economist

Yet, as Mr Storey also notes, his businesses generally paid black miners more than most white miners were earning in Britain at the time.

His bequests were many and munificent. Along with benefactions to Cape Town University, Rhodes gave the huge sum of £100,000 ($500,000 at the time, equivalent to almost $20m today) to Oriel, his old college. He also set up the famous Rhodes scholarships at Oxford University, with the explicit provision in his will that no applicant should be disqualified “on account of his race or religious opinion”. Some of the loudest proponents of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign have been Rhodes scholars from Africa.

Rhodes predicted that what he built would last. In a baleful sort of way, Mr Storey says, this is true. Many in the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign link South Africa’s inequities to Rhodes’s racially restrictive policies. The African National Congress’s Freedom Charter of 1955 “did not mention him by name, but it amounted to nothing less than a call for the rooting out of the legacy of Cecil Rhodes”, since it was his “colonialist achievements that presented so many obstacles to those who sought a country based on equality, including equal access to land, mines and housing”. Rhodes believed his reputation would remain “fresh with the praise of posterity”. Today it carries a whiff of faeces.

Chinese Doom Scroll:

An extremely long article transcribing a lecture by Zhao Hong, a researcher in Law at the Beijing University of Law: “The worst is those parents who have a criminal record. Why does kin punishment still exist?”

“Hello, everyone. I am Zhao Hong, a professor at law school.

I often talk about good and evil in my classes, but I almost never meet evil people in life. By coincidence, I came by an opportunity to come into touch with people who have broken the law for various reasons and heard their stories. I slowly began to break my assumptions about this group.

Due to their criminal background, they’ll become depressed, humiliated, even angry and hateful. Trapped by their identity as a “criminal”, what they face is inescapable systematic discrimination and psychological humiliation.

What I want to share with people today is the stories of these criminals. I want to talk about their red letter, and the continuous effort law workers have put towards removing these red letters.

The iceberg of criminals:

Rick Hess:

enjoyed reading your recent discussion with Alex Baron, “How Much Autonomy Should Teachers Have Over Instructional Materials?” In particular, I was struck by your skepticism about whether “high-quality instructional materials” are always high quality. I have a lot of sympathy for your observation that: “A lot of these determinations seem to depend heavily on whether materials check certain boxes or are assembled by curriculum designers who know the tricks of the trade. That’s not necessarily a recipe for rich, rigorous instruction.”

Those who have read my book Out on Good Behaviorknow that in my 8th grade algebra classes, I used Mary P. Dolciani’s 1965 Modern Algebra: Structure and Method in place of the official textbook the school was using for a few reasons: I didn’t care for the topic sequence of the required textbook. There was a dearth of word problems and a notable lack of instruction on how to solve them. Finally, the exercises did not scaffold problems very well. Algebra wasn’t the only class where I was dissatisfied with the school’s preferred textbook. For my nonalgebra classes, I used the approved text, but I supplemented it with materials from other books. 

Having spoken with other teachers, I know I am not alone in using external materials. Many teachers decide to use materials of their own liking based on their experience or knowledge of the research on how students learn. I look at such decisions as a form of civil disobedience. Teachers who are doing good work shouldn’t have to pivot to the latest “shiny new thing.”

However, there is a larger issue. Many of the math textbooks that are considered to be “high-quality instructional materials” adhere to the math standards of a particular state. In most cases, such standards are either the Common Core math standards verbatim or a slightly morphed version of the same. The problem is that in either case, as Tom Loveless has described it, embedded within the Common Core-derived standards are the “dog whistles” to reform math. By reform math, I mean educational progressives’ pedagogical ideas that emphasize “conceptual understanding” at the expense of procedural fluency.

——-

2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

George Wiebe:

The Department of Homeland Security has asked the Dane County Sheriff’s Office to hold a woman charged with homicide by drunken driving and other crimes for deportation.

But Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett called the request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement unconstitutional and said deporting the woman would deny justice for the victims and community.

The woman is from Honduras and was in the country illegally, according to ICE.

“Dane County does not honor ICE arrest detainers,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an email to the Wisconsin State Journal. “When sanctuary jurisdictions ignore ICE detainers, they are protecting criminal illegal aliens at the expense of American citizens.”

Barrett said he doesn’t consider Dane County or Madison to be sanctuary jurisdictions, calling the term “too broad.”

Nate Anderson:

According to The Clorox Company, which makes everything from lip balm to cat litter to charcoal to bleach, this is exactly what happened to it in 2023. But Clorox says that the “debilitating” breach was not its fault. It had outsourced the “service desk” part of its IT security operations to the massive services company Cognizant—and Clorox says that Cognizant failed to follow even the most basic agreed-upon procedures for running the service desk.

In the words of a new Clorox lawsuit, Cognizant’s behavior was “all a devastating lie,” it “failed to show even scant care,” and it was “aware that its employees were not adequately trained.”

“Cognizant was not duped by any elaborate ploy or sophisticated hacking techniques,” says the lawsuit, using italics to indicate outrage emphasis. “The cybercriminal just called the Cognizant Service Desk, asked for credentials to access Clorox’s network, and Cognizant handed the credentials right over. Cognizant is on tape handing over the keys to Clorox’s corporate network to the cybercriminal—no authentication questions asked.”

Corbin Hiar:

Hundreds of documents show how researchers failed to notify officials in California about a test of technology to block the sun’s rays — while they planned a much huger sequel.

A team of researchers in California drew notoriety last year with an aborted experiment on a retired aircraft carrier that sought to test a machine for creating clouds.  

But behind the scenes, they were planning a much larger and potentially riskier study of salt-water-spraying equipment that could eventually be used to dim the sun’s rays — a multimillion-dollar project aimed at producing clouds over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.

Greg Ip:

If humanity’s existence were threatened by plague, nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, people would surely demand action.

But what if the threat came from our own, passive acceptance of decline? This is not some theoretical curiosity: It is a reasonable extrapolation of globally declining fertility rates.

People aren’t demanding action. In fact, some think a smaller population is actually a good thing.

Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, economists at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in demographics, want to change that. Their book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People” is a deep dive into the facts and consequences of depopulation, and an impassioned argument against letting it happen.

They rest their argument not on the familiar need for workers to propel economic growth or shore up Social Security but on a more fundamental proposition: More people is a good thing in and of itself.

“ai”.gov

The Presidential AI Challenge seeks to inspire young people and educators to create AI-based innovative solutions to community challenges while fostering AI interest and competency. Students and educators of all backgrounds and expertise are encouraged to participate and ignite a new spirit of innovation as we celebrate 250 years of independence and look to the next 250.

US Attorney General:

One of our Nation’s bedrock principles is that all Americans must be treated equally. Not only is discrimination based on protected characteristics illegal under federal law, but it is also dangerous, demeaning, and immoral. Yet in recent years, the federal government has turned a blind eye toward, or even encouraged, various discriminatory practices, seemingly because of their purportedly benign labels, objectives, or intentions. No longer. Going forward, the federal government will not stand by while recipients of federal funds engage in discrimination.

This guidance clarifies the application of federal antidiscrimination laws to programs or initiatives that may involve discriminatory practices, including those labeled as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) programs.l Entities receiving federal funds, like all other entities subject to federal antidiscrimination laws, must ensure that their programs and activities comply with federal law and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, religion, or other protected characteristics-no matter the program’s labels, objectives, or intentions. In furtherance of that requirement, this guidance identifies “Best Practices” as non-binding suggestions to help entities comply with federal antidiscrimination laws and avoid legal pitfalls; these are not mandatory requirements but rather practical recommendations to minimize the risk of violations.

Entities that receive federal financial assistance or that are otherwise subject to federal anti- discrimination laws, including educational institutions, state and local governments, and public and private employers, should review this guidance carefully to ensure all programs comply with their legal obligations.

———

more. and.

Daisy Christodoulou

Economically valuable skills are complex skills.

However, it’s also true to say that very simple skills don’t command much economic value. If a new technology makes a task very easy and efficient, it can completely eliminate any economic value in providing the task. Suppose LLMs get so good that anyone can ask them about a legal issue and get a perfect answer. In that case, people are not going to pay someone a large hourly rate to ask the question for them! They’ll cut out the middleman and ask it themselves.

So a student who is typing an essay question into an LLM, handing the output to their teacher and justifying it on the grounds that “this is what professionals do in their day job” is not making a good argument.

If that really is all the professional is doing, their job is not going to be around for long.

Are LLMs really so good that they will make most current professional jobs obsolete?

In my previous post, I gave an example of a job that has been made obsolete by technology – ancient Greek marathon runners. No-one now employs runners to deliver messages. They send text messages or hire cars instead.

Douglas Belkin, Liz Essley Whyte and Natalie Andrews:

The deal follows Columbia University’s agreement to pay $200 million to the federal government over three years to settle allegations it violated antidiscrimination law and to restore federal funding.

The $50 million Brown is paying is to Rhode Island workforce-development organizations of the school’s choosing; it will be paid over 10 years. The agreement doesn’t include any payments or fines to the federal government, said Brown President Christina Paxson in a letter to the school community.

A federal funding freeze that began in April “posed enormous challenges for Brown’s research mission and financial sustainability,” Paxson wrote. Left unaddressed, the freeze “would have undermined our ability to conduct life-saving research and to offer our students a world-class education.”

Jonathan Bilyk:

On June 27, a three-justice panel of the Illinois First District Appellate Court overturned the decision by the Chicago Board of Education to dismiss Kimberly Bulow from her teaching position at Infinity Math, Science & Technology High School on Chicago’s West Side.

In the ruling, the justices said CPS’ decision to fire Bulow over the incident amounted to a decision to punish the teacher for the behavior of an unruly and violent young male, who posed a threat to Bulow’s basketball players and everyone else in the gym that day.

The case centered around Bulow’s actions to intervene in a fight involving a male student, identified in court documents only as “J.B.,” J.B.’s friends and a group of other young male rivals.

Law.com

The decision to move ahead with a three-year appointment allows opportunity for continued growth of the dean and Colorado Law, as well as greater flexibility for the new provost during a period of transition,” Nicole Mueksch, Director of Issues Management at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Law.com in an email Monday.

Ann Huff became provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs on July 15, succeeding Russell Moore, who served for 15 years, according to the school, but before Moore stepped down as provost, he made the decision to reappoint Inniss with support from Chancellor Justin Schwartz, who became chancellor on July 1, 2024, according to Mueksch.

Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School since 1990, settled a lawsuit for $160,000 against the university and Inniss in February 2024, in which Campos alleged he suffered pay discrimination based on race and retaliation after reporting the alleged racial discrimination.

Nisheeth Vishnoi:

The frontier has come home. The same engines that mastered games and folded proteins are now aimed at children—their minds, their time, their curiosity. Childhood itself, reframed: not as a journey to be nurtured, but a system to be streamlined.

To its founders, this is progress. Why waste hours in lecture halls when software can deliver content at precisely your level, at precisely the right moment? Why learn with peers who might slow you down? Why not optimize education like we’ve optimized everything else?

But what begins as personalization quickly becomes flattening. What starts as adaptation ends in control.
When you train for performance, you lose the space to wonder.

But let’s pause. This essay is not just about Alpha. It’s about a broader cultural shift that Alpha exemplifies—a shift toward optimizing learning as if it were a game to be won or a pipeline to be accelerated.

And let me be clear: Alpha is addressing a real problem. Much of school does waste students’ time—forcing them to sit through lectures pitched too high or too low, rewarding compliance over curiosity. Alpha’s model tries to change that: compressing core instruction into focused, adaptive sessions, and freeing afternoons for projects, expeditions, and real-world engagement. There’s something compelling in that vision.

But as this model expands, we must ask: what may get lost when learning becomes just another system to optimize?

Ben Cohen:

The smartest AI models ever made just went to the most prestigious competition for young mathematicians and managed to achieve the kind of breakthrough that once seemed miraculous.

They still got beat by the world’s brightest teenagers.

Every year, a few hundred elite high-school students from all over the planet gather at the International Mathematical Olympiad. This year, those brilliant minds were joined by Google DeepMind and other companies in the business of artificial intelligence. They had all come for one of the ultimate tests of reasoning, logic and creativity.

The famously grueling IMO exam is held over two days and gives students three increasingly difficult problems a day and more than four hours to solve them. The questions span algebra, geometry, number theory and combinatorics—and you can forget about answering them if you’re not a math whiz. You’ll give your brain a workout just trying to understand them.

Because those problems are both complex and unconventional, the annual math test has become a useful benchmark for measuring AI progress from one year to the next. In this age of rapid development, the leading research labs dreamed of a day their systems would be powerful enough to meet the standard for an IMO gold medal, which became the AI equivalent of a four-minute mile.

Morgan Sung:

The San Francisco-based Internet Archive now has federal depository status, joining a network of over 1,100 libraries that archive government documents and make them accessible to the public — even as ongoing legal challenges pose an existential threat to the organization.

California Sen. Alex Padilla made the designation in a letter sent Thursday to the Government Publishing Office, which oversees the program. In the letter, shared exclusively with KQED, Padilla praised the Internet Archive for its “digital focus” and said it “is leading the way when it comes to providing online library services.”

“The Archive’s digital-first approach makes it the perfect fit for a modern federal depository library, expanding access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape,” Padilla said in a statement to KQED. “The Internet Archive has broken down countless barriers to accessing information, and it is my honor to provide this designation to help further their mission of providing ‘Universal Access to All Knowledge.’”

Sovann AP Linden & Mateo H. Petel

Widely seen as “Stanford’s technical MBA” and located in the school of engineering, the program has a quasi-monopoly on entrepreneurship courses. At its center is a founder-first curriculum that treats entrepreneurship not as an extracurricular, but as a core intellectual pursuit. Courses such as Lean LaunchPad, Technology Venture Formation (known on campus as MS&E 273), and Hacking for Defense allow students to earn academic credit for building real companies. 

Many of these classes either require or strongly recommend having an MS&E teammate — effectively making the program a gatekeeper to Stanford’s most startup-relevant coursework.

“What you’re seeing is engineers signing up to these MS&E classes, switching to MS&E as a co-term, or just getting to know the MS&E folks personally” said an alum. The real secret is that you don’t need to work on a startup on top of your studies, rather MS&E makes it easy to get credit for working on a startup project, with professors often connected, or acting as angel investors.

Applications for these classes are competitive, and a team several graduate students, including MS&E, co-founded Stanford Founders, a student organization, to help with team formation. Stanford Founders has now grown to the largest on-campus graduate founders association, hosting its own Demo Day and attracting numerous investors.

Ian Miller

Sure, you can mandate masks, but what does are the effects for those who are forced to wear them? What does it cost in terms of lost social cohesion, normalizing anti-social behavior? What are the trade-offs that result from closing schools, from forcing businesses to shut down, or locking down society?

Are there harms to physical, emotional, or verbal development?

These are important questions that were completely ignored by those in power during the pandemic, because they were inconvenient to the architects of the covidiocy.

But new research is out confirming yet again that the collective absurdity of Covid policies caused immense damage and permanent harm to a generation of children. For nothing.

———-

Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”

Via Anna Stokke:

Granted I’m 68, a grandfather, and old school, but my view of the current public school performance is that it sucks.

We somehow have come to accept that poor performance is OK as long as you feel happy. What a crappy way to go through life.

It’s painful to watch a high school student working at your local store unable to make change when the cash register doesn’t do it for them!

This started 30 years ago when the Prairie provinces agreed on a math curriculum that focused on problem solving without ensuring you have basic arithmetic skills to solve the problem. I recall a meeting at Salisbury-Morse Place School introducing the program to parents of Grade 1 students and I was vocal about the road this would lead to: students unable to solve the problem because they can’t do the math. Students will either score 90 and above or fail miserably, but that’s OK as long as they are happy.

It’s taken 30 years, but I told you so.

The standard must start with the university requirement and work back from there.

High school final exams – yes, you have to get stressed and study – must be written by the university to establish entrance requirements.

The time for coddling has long past, and yes parents, you need to help your kids with their homework and take responsibility for your child’s success.

Bill Allan

Winnipeg

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Billy Binion:

That shouldn’t happen in America, but taking on the entrenched federal civil forfeiture system is challenging,” said Bob Belden, an attorney at I.J. (which represented Martin), in a statement via email. “Unfortunately, there is not a clear path to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. We know that several Justices are alarmed at how civil forfeiture works in America and hope that the right case will work its way to the Court.”

Ann Althouse summary:

Matt/Slim was one of the organizers of the event. He couldn’t get people to show up, and neither could Colbert. Numbers are numbers. The First Amendment protects your right to speak but it won’t assemble an audience for you.

Ellen Gamerman

Parenting that’s light on discipline has dominated the culture in recent decades. But critics blame the approach for some of Gen Z ’s problems in adulthood. They cite surveys that show young adults struggling with workplace relationships (was it because their parents never told them “no”?) and suffering from depression and anxiety (was it because their parents refereed all their problems?).

For parents who have spent years trying to meet their children’s emotional needs without slipping into overt permissiveness, FAFO can sound blessedly simple.

Dillon, 35, knows the approach can be off-putting. “Maybe your kids wouldn’t like that, but, not to be rude, my kid is tougher than yours,” said the mother of two outside Richmond, Va. 

Daniel Buck:

Scrolling through UW-Madison’s course catalog for teachers

“Understand how racism is endemic to the U.S. public school system… Consider how policies system white dominance…”

———-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Greg Ashman:

Which is all very well, but what does it have to do with education faculties? 

Imagine you were to walk into your favourite education faculty and state that you see educating an individual as providing them with valuable knowledge much like making deposits of money at a bank. How do you think those around you would react? What if you wrote this in an essay and submitted it for assessment? I suspect you would be met with widespread disapproval.

What if you claimed that education was the process of posing problems for students to grapple with, set in familiar contexts? I suspect you would be met with approval.

Both ideas come from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed—which itself did not emerge from a vacuum and drew on older ideas—but I suspect the above would play out regardless of whether you, or anyone listening to you, had read this book or were familiar with the ideas. Instead, what perpetuates these attitudes is a cycle of approval and disapproval. We are highly attuned to the sentiments of those around us and that is part of our biologically primary ability to fit in and learn the rules of our society. Just as an electromagnetic wave needs nothing more than the waxing and waning of electric and magnetic fields to propagate through space, ideas need nothing more than the waxing and waning of approval and disapproval to propagate through time.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Chris Rickert:

Enrollment growth in Madison schools has not kept pace with population growth in Madison and its suburbs, or with enrollment growth in surrounding districts. Why is that?

There are competing interests. There’s choice, there’s the perception, there’s many reasons why families choose to send their children to our schools. I want us to improve that. I want us to be the district that people want to send their children to.

A year ago, I asked our team this question: What is the enrollment strategy for the Madison Metropolitan School District? And I was not satisfied with what I heard and the efforts underway, so we began about a year ago creating some enrollment strategies for MMSD. Part of that is understanding what the rates of our enrollment are, what the historical trends are, and with a lot of folks talking about the growth in Madison and the vicinity, it’s a really important time for us to ensure that our district is looked at as a reason why people want to come to Madison and enroll in our schools.

What do you mean by “perception”?

I know during COVID, we were one of the districts that was closed. There were other districts that were open. I know that at times we get the perception that our schools aren’t safe, that they’re unruly. Many times there are narratives that can perhaps happen in one school and it becomes a blanket perception about all of our schools. These are things in a larger district — especially in a growing city like ours — that we just have to work together as a large community, one that does really value its public schools.

Are you surveying families who live in the Madison district but decide not to go to district schools?

———-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Becky Jacobs:

Each Friday, students unload thousands of pounds of food and quickly stock shelves at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s pantry, just in time for shoppers to arrive.

The Open Seat Food Pantry serves an average of 1,500 visitors a month. Last fall, the number of visits nearly doubled from the previous year.

“We’ve seen a huge, huge, huge increase in demand” for food help on campus in recent years, said Chloe Shomo, an incoming UW-Madison senior who works at the pantry.

Madison College also has seen an increased need for food assistance, and to accommodate that growth the school recently relocated its pantry to an upgraded space, with an e-pantry and more ways to access healthier food, said Denise Holin, a student health educator and pantry coordinator.

From last summer to this spring, the Cupboard Student Food Pantry helped nearly 1,600 students and distributed over 20,000 pounds of food and supplies at Madison College’s Truax and Goodman South campuses, Holin said.

Becky Jacobs:

Four months ago, while facing a host of financial challenges from the federal government, Wisconsin’s flagship public university asked all schools, colleges and divisions to outline plans for slashing their budgets.

Today, those plans remain unclear in the community. University of Wisconsin-Madison administrators have declined to discuss how their cuts could affect employees and students, and have withheld records that could shed more light on what’s at risk.

Campus leaders have publicly disclosed only the overall scale of cuts, announcing in June that schools and colleges need to shrink their budgets by 5% and administrative units face a 7% cut. They’ve called the step needed “to help protect our long-term financial viability” and said layoffs should be considered “a last resort.”

University leaders expect “many of the necessary reductions can be borne by trimming non-personnel expenses, leaving some vacancies unfilled, and, in some instances, moving existing expenses to alternative funding sources,” according to a statement at the time.

Matt Taibbi:

In private, executives all year have called this what it is (“A massacre,” an ABC exec told CNN’s Oliver Darcy, comparing the lay-off merry-go-round to Squid Game). In public however pundits are continuing to play out a hollow charade, acting as if these collapses are a confounding Scooby Doomystery, or explained by an evil political conspiracy surrounding an upcoming Paramount merger. Poor Willie Geist — I have a soft spot for the guy despite his longstanding role as the Ed McMahon of Morning Joe — went on Today to do a feature about how, yes, The Colbert Report is losing assloads of money, but the political “context” is “impossible to ignore”:

Many factors are converging to cause these changes, from the overall decline of big-budget TV variety shows (TV in general, really) to changes in the political weather, but those outraged responses reveal the biggest: an epidemic sense of entitlement. It’s true that media companies were once happy to support news shows that lost money, as a way to fulfill their federal mandate to broadcast content in the “public interest.” But the Communications Act of 1934 wasn’t written to ensure revenue from sports and sitcoms endlessly bailed out the dimwit producers of error-factory news programming. People like Colbert and Hayes think they have a license to get the biggest stories wrong forever, lose money forever, get paid tens of millions to do both those things, and proudlydisplay all these qualities to audiences without consequence. Try that on television for ten straight years, and life really will come at you fast.

datarepublican:

The graph below shows the 501(c)(3) grant network for the Barack Obama Foundation. But it could be almost any major nonprofit. They all look like this.

——

more:

The claim is largely true, based on investigative reports from outlets like the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, and independent journalists such as Sue Pascoe of Circling the News. These sources detail how $100 million raised through the FireAid benefit concert—organized by celebrities and linked to the Annenberg Foundation—for victims of the 2024 Los Angeles wildfires was distributed. Funds came from ticket sales, sponsorships, and donations, with promises of aiding recovery.

AFT Press Center:

I have never looked forward to our TEACH conference as much as I have this year. That’s because of you—the educators in this room and the educators of this nation. It’s been a tough year; I don’t know if it has ever been more challenging. Yet you make a difference in your students’ lives, no matter what. You build your students’ confidence to think independently and with creativity. You help each student realize their unique potential. You create community—in our classrooms, our schools, our neighborhoods. You are our nation’s future-makers.

And you do all this as you deal with everything from budget cuts to culture wars—with class sizes that are too high and salaries that are too low, amid so much divisiveness. You have done this while officials, whose job it is to support teaching and learning, make your jobs harder.

Even our ability to make our classrooms welcoming spaces has gotten harder. I think about the teacher in Idaho who was ordered to remove a sign she had in her classroom for years: “Everyone is welcome here.” She was told by her administration, this year, that this was a political opinion, not a sacrosanct responsibility. Can you imagine that reassuring children that they are in a safe, welcoming space is now an act of insubordination?

William Briggs:

The same sort of thing is true for DIEing at universities. Year or so back, I suggested we ought to allow the left to have its way at universities. Let them DIE to their hearts’ content. Fire all non-perverted white and Asian tmen, hire only Victims. Indoctrinate students with gusto. Bend all subjects toward Victim theory. (My suggestion then was we be allowed to have the same freedoms, which of course the left would never permit.)

We should encourage universities to DIE. Cheer them on!

The reason is simple. The faster they DIE, the faster they die. After they keel over from their gruesome manic suicide, leaving behind only smoking wrecks and the corpses of those who were considered ideologically impure (i.e. everybody), we march in and revivify campuses and refit them for their true purpose.

They have gone some way down this path, and making inexorable progress. Yet students still willingly matriculate into them. Why?

Universities largely survive still because of the misperception by employers that people with “degrees” are more valuable than those without, which forces the young into the camps. While it’s true “degrees” yet have value for a few purposes, this is obviously increasingly false for most. Some employers are catching on and softening the “degree” requirement, which is well.

Joanne Lipman:

I recently asked Google to show me pictures of a grandmother. It shot back pages of kindly old women with clouds of gray hair and orthopaedic shoes. None looked like Sharline Andersen, 60, an energetic events director in Fresno, Calif., who raised four daughters while working and is now a grandmother of 12, including half a dozen step-grandkids. “I don’t see retirement as anything close to my future,” she says. “I feel like I have a lot of energy left and a lot left to give.”

Antonio Gracias:

While I disagree with the statements of the AFT, I also want to thank them. I appreciate their efforts to safeguard the pensions of teachers and other public servants across America. As a nation, we are united in service to our country, as well as in gratitude to the many who sacrifice and serve for the benefit of all of us, including our teachers. We know that by understanding each other, we are best positioned to achieve our common goals. Like the AFT, I am committed to fairness, democracy, economic opportunity, and high-quality education, healthcare, and public services for our students. Should the AFT ever want to have a conversation with me, I promise to approach the discussion with an open heart and mind. My request is that the AFT also do the same and promise to open their hearts and minds to me. Perhaps, if we listen to each other with compassion and our mutual love of America, we can understand each other better. I also believe that understanding each other is the first critical step to finding solutions to the important problems that face our country today.

I hope this is a moment where our compassion can be stronger than our anger.

Finally, I am deeply grateful for the support we received from teams across the government. Their dedication and patriotism will always inspire us. It was a great privilege to serve alongside them as we worked to strengthen our nation for all Americans. As I have under both Republican and Democratic administrations, serving my country when called upon will always be an honor.

———

More on Gracias.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Wyatt Eicholz

By the numbers

Wisconsin’s district-run public schools had $18,592 of revenue per pupil, an all-time high and more than twice what it was in the school year ending in 2000, according to the most recent figures from the Department of Public Instruction.

The figure’s peak status holds even after adjusting for inflation.

In 2023-2024, school districts in Wisconsin took in $15.3 billion in revenue and educated 827,397 students as counted by the DPI for school finance purposes. Dividing one by the other gives a per-pupil revenue figure.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Amanda Castro:

The “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” developed by engineers brought into government under Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, is programmed to scan about 200,000 existing federal rules and flag those that are either outdated or not legally required.

According to a PowerPoint presentation dated July 1 that was obtained by the newspaper, the tool estimates that approximately 100,000 of those rules could be eliminated, primarily through automation with minimal human input. The projection claims this could save trillions in compliance costs and spark increased external investment.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), AI has already reviewed over 1,000 regulatory sections in under two weeks. Similarly, it was responsible for “100% of deregulations” at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), according to the PowerPoint presentation. The Post, however, reported it was not able to confirm the use of AI at the agency independently.

When asked about the use of AI for deregulation, White House spokesman Harrison Fields emphasized to the newspaper that “all options are being explored” to meet the president’s deregulation goals. He clarified that no single plan has been finalized, and the effort is still in early, creative stages with ongoing consultation within the White House.

DOGE plans to complete agency-specific deregulation lists by September 1 and finish nationwide rollout by January 20, 2026—labeled in internal documents as “Relaunch America.” Agencies are currently receiving training on how to integrate the AI tool into their regulatory review process. The presentation claims the tool could save 93 percent of the labor typically required to gut federal rules, reducing what would usually take 3.6 million work hours to just 36.

Steven Calabresi:

I do not think it was necessary to do that. I think Interim U.S. Attorneys, whose 120-day appointments have expired without the Senate ever voting on their nominations, can be reappointed to an indefinite number of 120-day terms as Interim U.S. Attorneys by the Attorney General under 28 U.S.C. § 546 until and unless the Senate votes down their nominations and so long as they have been nominated for the office in question.

The 120-day term limit does not bar reappointment if done by district court judges. Given that cross-branch appointment of inferior officers is unconstitutional, as I will explain below, there is no reason why 28 U.S.C. § 546 ought to be read as precluding the reappointment of nominated U.S. Attorneys whom Senators do not have the votes to defeat but whose confirmations they are able to delay.

Attorney General Robert Jackson in his famous speech on the role of the federal prosecutor pointed out that from 1789 to the present-day U.S. Attorneys have always required Senate confirmation because of their “immense power” and because they need to win “an expression of confidence in [their] character by both the legislative and the executive branches of the government.” Jackson’s point is certainly true. But a Senate minority that lacks the votes to reject a nominee cannot be rewarded if, after 120 days, they have used Senate procedure to prevent a vote from taking place.

This issue is coming up all over the country right now because Senate Democrats refuse to allow floor votes on President Trump’s nominees to be U.S. Attorney. The matter is thus of great practical importance in the District of New Jersey and in other Districts as well.

Kevin Bass:

If you want to understand why the universities have become stupid, you have to understand that the universities have literally become stupid.

The average undergraduate IQ has fallen by nearly 20 points in 80 years–massive.

This drop has happened at every level of education

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Watch out for more property tax hikes. Chicago governments are bleeding and officials won’t reform spending, so it’s hard to see how they avoid going after both homeowners and businesses.

Start with the city. Chicago’s Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski says a property tax increase is “likely” needed to cover the city’s $1 billion budget hole. (Mayor Johnson later downplayed the need for a hike even though he proposed a $300 million hike last year.)

Then there’s Chicago Public Schools’ own $734 million deficit and the likely need for a property tax hike there, too. Pile on top of that the tax hikes needed to bail outthe $771 million shortfall at the Regional Transit Authority. 

Oh, and property taxes will go up even further if Gov. Pritzker signs the police and fire pension booster billthat’s sitting on his desk right now. It calls for nearly $7 billion more in taxpayer contributions to the public safety pension plans through 2055.

Musa al-Gharbi

How a new “woke” elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status—without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged

More.

Liam Knox and Michael Smith:

Rufo says the Education Department is considering a proposal that would ensure all US universities that receive federal funding — the vast majority — adopt many of the same conditions that Columbia University agreed to in a deal this week. He sees the plan, which he first outlined with the Manhattan Institute this month, as a way to swiftly broaden President Donald Trump’s higher-education agenda.

Lucy Foulkes & Jack L. Andrews

In the past decade, there have been extensive efforts in the Western world to raise public awareness about mental health problems, with the goal of reducing or preventing these symptoms across the population. Despite these efforts, reported rates of mental health problems have increased in these countries over the same period. In this paper, we present the hypothesis that, paradoxically, awareness efforts are contributing to this reported increase in mental health problems. We term this the prevalence inflation hypothesis. First, we argue that mental health awareness efforts are leading to more accurate reporting of previously under-recognised symptoms, a beneficial outcome. Second, and more problematically, we propose that awareness efforts are leading some individuals to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems. We propose that this then leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms, because labelling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual’s self-concept and behaviour in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling. For example, interpreting low levels of anxiety as symptomatic of an anxiety disorder might lead to behavioural avoidance, which can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms. We propose that the increase in reported symptoms then drives further awareness efforts: the two processes influence each other in a cyclical, intensifying manner. We end by suggesting ways to test this hypothesis and argue that future awareness efforts need to mitigate the issues we present.

Richard Reeves:

There’s much here I agree with her on. But I also think she’s framing the argument for representation in teaching far too narrowly, and in the process making it harder to address. I’ll address each of her points in turn, challenge some outlandish claims about Scandinavia, and finish with a plea not to falsely equate a positive movement for more men in our schools with a negative blame campaign against women teachers.

1. Girls have long been ahead of boys

Grose correctly writes that the gender gap in favor of girls in K-12 education is not a recent development, writing:

[T]he research that really surprised me was a meta analysis from 2014 by Daniel and Susan D. Voyer that showed that girls have been outperforming boys in school since 1914. This suggests that female academic achievement is hard to correlate with the post-1972 impact of Title IX or other downstream consequences of second-wave feminism. And going back further, I find it hard to believe that a teaching force trained before women had access to their own credit cards was somehow favoring girls, when the society around them wasn’t even sold on higher education for women.

But this is not breaking news to scholars in the field. If I may be permitted quote myself on this point, in Of Boys and Men I wrote:

Richard Rubin and Kara Dapena

Most of the tax cuts, measured in dollars, go to the highest-income households. But relative to their share of the existing tax burden, more goes to middle-income households. The middle 20% of taxpayers pay 10% of taxes and get 13% of the tax cut. The top 20% pay 67% of taxes and get 60% of the tax cut.

Basically, the overall tax pie is getting smaller. High-income people who received tax cuts will pay a bigger piece of that smaller pie and still come out ahead. Democrats will often describe a tax cut as a distribution program and judge its effects by looking at how much of the overall money goes to each income group. Because rich people pay the most taxes, their tax cuts are also, in dollars, typically the largest from an across-the-board tax cut. 

This math drives Democrats’ “tax cuts for billionaires” arguments. Republicans chose to keep all the 2017 tax cuts, including those for the highest-income households, because they viewed the 2017 law as an economic success and also wanted to keep lower rates for businesses that pay taxes through individual tax returns.

But there are other ways to look at the same data. One is to look at the tax cut as a share of people’s previous tax bills. Lower-income people typically don’t pay much federal tax to start with and by this metric therefore will see some significant reductions.

Let’s look at another metric, often preferred by economists. It compares a group’s tax cut to its after-tax income, giving a sense of how financially significant a tax cut is to a particular household. This shows that the biggest winners aren’t the bottom 20% or top 1%, but the group just below the top 1%.

Households with the same income pay different taxes depending on where they live, their deductions and how they get their money. The new law, in some cases, exacerbates those differences. Many people at the bottom of the income scale pay payroll but not income taxes, and so they won’t see much change. 

Natalie Andrews, Douglas Belkin and Sara Randazzo:

The White House is seeking fines from several universities it says failed to stop antisemitism on campus, including hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard University, in exchange for allowing the schools to access federal funding, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The deal that the Trump administration struck with Columbia University on Wednesday is now a blueprint for negotiations with other universities, a White House official said. Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government over three years to settle allegations it violated antidiscrimination law and to restore its federal grants.

The administration is in talks with several universities, including Cornell, Duke, Northwestern and Brown, the person familiar with the talks said, though it sees striking a deal with Harvard, America’s oldest university, as a key target.

The White House hopes to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard, in a deal that would make Columbia’s $200 million payment look like peanuts, the person said.

John Burn-Murdoch:

One of the most striking but under-discussed insights from this year’s World Happiness Report was that the marked worsening in young adult mental health over the past decade is primarily, if not exclusively, an Anglosphere phenomenon.

The share of young adults regularly experiencing stress and anger has risen sharply over the past 15 years in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. But it has been largely stable elsewhere in the west, according to detailed data from the Gallup World Poll used in the report.

Laura Silver, Scott Keeter, Stephanie Kramer, Jordan Lippert, Sofia Hernandez Ramones, Alan Cooperman, Chris Baronavski, Bill Webster, Reem Nadeem and Janakee Chavda:

Americans trust each other less than they did a few decades ago. The share of adults who said “most people can be trusted” declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, according to the General Social Survey.

In a 2023-24 Pew Research Center poll, an identical 34% said most people can be trusted.

Who says most people can be trusted?

Social trust seems to be rooted partly in personal experience. People learn to trust others based on how they themselves have been treated. But scarring events that reduce trust – like losing a jobor experiencing discrimination – may happen to people in some groups more often than others, leading to differences in trust across society.

Amory Gethin

This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor

Harriet Shawcross and Dipanjan Sinha:

Thirty million Indians want a job on the railways, but a fiendish general-knowledge test stands in their way

During the most recent recruitment drive there were around 90,000 positions on offer and roughly 30m people went for them

Late last year, he found out from a friend that the exam had been announced. He checked the Ministry of Railways website and sure enough, there was the date: November 27th 2024. In a few weeks, the moment he’d spent his adult life preparing for would be here.

Since India started liberalising its economy in the 1990s, its GDP per head has increased eightfold. The country now has the world’s fastest-growing large economy.
Yet many Indian graduates struggle to find work. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) nearly a third of them are jobless. Walk-in interviews draw massive crowds. At the start of this year a video went viral showing thousands of engineers queuing to apply for open positions at a firm in the western city of Pune (local media reported that only 100 were available).

John Arnold:

Nearly everyone has given up on urban K-12 reform. Politicians no longer talk about it. There’s but one city, Houston, attempting wholesale reform and early results are incredibly promising. Cities from across the US are starting to pay attention.

In 2023, after years of falling outcomes, Texas took over HISD, dissolved the elected school board, and appointed a new superintendent. Freed from short-term electoral pressures, the district was able to make difficult but necessary reforms, particularly with personnel.

Houstonians knew the district was failing and wanted change, but not this change. The community was outraged by the state takeover and even more so with many of the changes. The conflict was palpable: state vs city, Republican vs Democrat, white vs black/brown.

The first year was incredibly tense around the city. There were protests. People pulled their kids out of the district for other options. The press was scathing. Everyone was waiting for the takeover to fail. But it didn’t.

After the first year, the number of A and B rated schools rose from 93 to 170. The number of D and F rated schools fell from 121 to 41. Local criticism quickly became more muted. With substantial gains in year 2, criticism has quieted further.

School reform is hard. Many efforts have failed or fizzled out. The head will eventually leave, and local governance will return. The big question is whether the gains will endure.

Meanwhile, politicians in most other places have given up, settling for poor outcomes rather than making tough, unpopular decisions to improve them. That’s certainly not the right answer. Houston might be a blueprint for cities and states with the will for change.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

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?

Brooke Muckerman:

• The company is also providing STEM workshops, donating equipment, and supporting job fairs.
• The Musk Foundation donated $350,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Memphis, allowing two high school club sites to reopen.

xAI, which has set roots in Memphis to build up its supercomputer campuses, has helped Memphis-Shelby County Schools with HVAC upgrades and other facilities needs, a representative from xAI said July 25.

The representative said the company has visited John P Freeman Optional School, Fairly High School and Westwood High School, inspected HVAC and plumbing systems, athletic fields and gyms and put together a “large list” of items and defects with principals and administration.

The schools are all located near the first data center facility xAI established in Memphis. MSCS has struggled with the aging infrastructure in many of its school buildings and is staring down at least $1 billion in deferred maintenance.

They completed some work in April and May, the representative said, like getting fans back and operational and opening up some ductwork.

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Memphis spends about $1,900,000,000 for students 106,000 students or $17,924 each.

Madison taxpayers spend more than $25,000 per student, this despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Amory Gethin

This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor.

Sabine Martin

UW-Eau Claire faculty leader has been suspended for the next school year without pay after he flipped a table in April that the university’s College Republicans chapter set up on campus for Election Day. 

José Felipe Alvergue, who served as UW-Eau Claire’s English Department chair, won’t return to campus to teach for the academic year and faces disciplinary actions through a settlement with the university.

His suspension is over the April 1 incident at an event the university’s College Republicans student chapter held to support conservative candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court Brad Schimel and Republican-backed state superintendent of public instruction candidate Brittany Kinser. 

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

We have a big problem in Chicago. The city’s public safety pension funds have an obligation to pay $68 billion in pension benefits to police and firemen over the next 30 years. To meet those future obligations, the funds need $26 billion in investments right now. 

But the funds have just $6 billion in assets today. Absent a bailout, the pension funds will never have enough money to meet their obligations. 

And yet – unbelievably – Illinois lawmakers have passed a new bill to make things worse. They’ve increased  the obligations of those pension funds by sweetening the benefits of police and firefighters hired after 2010 – so-called Tier 2 workers. If Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs the bill, that $68 billion obligation will jump by several billion, to something over $70 billion. 

But assets on hand? Still $6 billion. Meaning the funds will be even more broke.

Mark Edmundson:

“What’s your idea of Paradise?”

I posed this question to the 12 students in my class on John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost.” Lots of sparkling answers came. It was a wonderful group. At the end, a young woman named Jessica turned to me and asked, “What about you, sir?” Jessica had a predilection for calling me “sir”—various valences of irony applied, usually soft. “What’s your idea of paradise?”

My answer was out before I had time to think much about it.

“This,” I said, “sitting here with you, talking about Milton.”

I think that one of the best freedoms in the world is the freedom to sit in a quiet room and try to get at the wisdom in great writing with a group of students. Milton can help you think about almost any consequential human subject. How shall we govern ourselves? Milton endorses humane hierarchy in which those on top take particular care of those below, who respond, if all is well, with gratitude. The environment? Milton reflects on that too—paradise is a garden, after all. Tend your garden with care. Look out for the animals and don’t eat them! Adam and Eve are vegetarians.

I am never tired of Milton and neither, it seems, are my students. And I sometimes give quiet thanks for the freedom to teach “Paradise Lost” as I like.