Compensation for government jobs is higher relative to GDP per capita the poorer the country. In other words, government workers are most overpaid in poor countries. Excessive public-sector compensation in low- and middle-income countries distorts labor markets on two margins: queues (rent-seeking to win jobs) and misallocation (talent and taxes diverted from the private sector).
In my two posts Massive Rent-Seeking in India’s Government Job Examination System and The Tragedy of India’s Government-Job Prep Towns I drew attention to the first margin, rent-seeking losses from the queues. India’s most educated young people—precisely those it needs in the workforce—often devote years of their life cramming for government exams instead of working productively. These exams cultivate no real-world skills and entire towns have become specialized in exam preparation. I argued using a back-of-the-envelope calculation that the rent seeking losses alone could easily be on the order of 1.4% of GDP annually. More tragically, large numbers of educated young people are inevitably disillusioned. Finally, because pay is so high, the state can’t staff up; India has all the laws of a rich country with roughly one‑fifth the civil servants per capita.
Two macro papers quantify the other margin of loss: who ends up where.
The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) is rolling out a new math curriculum for grades K-8 adopted by the Board of Education for the 2025-26 school year, marking a major step in the district’s mission to give all students a stronger foundation in mathematics.
The curriculum adoption is designed to expand access to high-quality instruction, integrate engaging digital tools, and provide targeted support and resources for teachers and families. The district continues to offer Algebra 1 for 8th grade students, with a formal recommendation on Algebra 1 policy expected in 2026.
“San Francisco’s public schools are focused on helping every student build confidence and competence in math to be set up for lifelong success,” said SFUSD Superintendent Dr. Maria Su. “The newly adopted materials for elementary and middle grades are designed to give students a more well-rounded math education by focusing on three key areas: being able to solve math problems accurately; helping students understand the why behind the math, not just the steps; and teaching students how to apply math to solve problems in everyday life.”
Meta’s guidelines allowed its bot to tell a shirtless 8-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece — a treasure I cherish deeply.”
No, it’s actually not at all acceptable for a stranger, human or designed to seem like one, to comment on a child’s “youthful form.”
It’s disgusting and horrifying, all the more so because these standards were allegedly approved by multiple Meta teams, including legal and public-policy staffers.
Chicago’s finances were already on life support. Now, with a single piece of legislation, the state of Illinois has pushed the city closer to fiscal collapse—and put every American taxpayer at risk of footing the bill.
On August 1, Governor J. B. Pritzker signed a bill that ranks among the most financially reckless in Illinois history. It includes pension “sweeteners” for Chicago police and fire employees hired after 2011. Experts estimate that it creates $11 billion in new liabilities and drops the “funded ratio” of Chicago police and fire pensions to just 18 percent, meaning that they have just 18 cents on hand for every dollar owed. (Actuaries consider funded ratios below 40 percent as being at the point of no return.)
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.
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.
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
Citadel’s workforce once numbered 1,100 in downtown Chicago, most of whom were compensated well above the $200,000 threshold Mayor Johnson now wants to tax. In a few short years, Citadel’s Chicago headcount now is at just 250, we understand.
Once company bosses make up their minds that the “privilege of doing business” in a certain place is no longer worth the expenseand headache, it doesn’t take long for them to act.
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.
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.
Imagine the campaign against that reform, so recently touted as the right thing to do in California: We’re doing it right, but if Texas is doing it wrong, we’ve got to seize the power to do it wrong like the way we did in the bad old days.
Stephen Colbert put Illinois governor JB Pritzker on the hot seat by making fun of Illinois’s outrageously gerrymandered congressional map.
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows Illinois has created a meager 15,500 net new jobs since the governor took office in January of 2019. It’s the nation’s 4th-worst performance among the 50 states. Contrast Illinois’ performance to growth in Georgia, which has added more than 360,000 net new jobs. Or Arizona, with more than 338,000 new jobs. Or the biggest job creators, Florida and Texas, with 1.1 million and 1.5 million net new jobs, respectively.
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.
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.
(Particularly not a lover. Eew, that last word shrieks off the page like a sick bat!) Unfortunately, we’re not far off from A.I. coming with skin, hair, and orifices, and Ezra writing, “My Surprising Bedroom Experience With ChatGPT.” This is the new con: “True, you’ve begun to reject tools like Google because their biases have become painfully visible, but what if you could ____ your search engine? Would that change your mind?”
All those Philip K. Dick novels and Pink Floyd albums that warned me as a kid against human-machine incest are paying off, as urban Northeastern intellectuals (my people, the disillusioned writer sighs) have hopped on another crazy hobby horse. After creepy authoritarian crusades against free speech, informed consent, even meat via the search for “sustainable protein,” the new come on in, the water’s warm clarion call tells people to stop worrying and love their machines, in some cases literal
Over a single weekend in August, 1,200 technology contractors found themselves locked out of their systems, their access badges deactivated, their projects suspended indefinitely. The mass termination wasn’t the result of budget cuts or strategic pivots—it was the fallout from a corruption scheme that reached into the highest echelons of Walmart’s Global Tech division.
The retail giant’s abrupt severance of ties with Caspex-sourced contractors followed the firing of a Global Tech vice president who had been orchestrating an elaborate kickback operation. Daily payments starting from $30,000 flowed from contracting agencies seeking preferential treatment in Walmart’s vast technology ecosystem, sources familiar with the investigation revealed.
This dramatic purge represents far more than an isolated corporate scandal. It illuminates a shadowy economy of influence-peddling that has metastasized throughout the technology sector’s contingent workforce infrastructure, creating systemic vulnerabilities that industry observers suggest could trigger widespread operational disruptions across corporate America.
And it’s older colleagues who stood by nodding it all through.
From Rhodes Must Fall, a student campaign to press the university into removing a smaller-than-life-size statue of the Victorian imperialist from the façade of Oriel College, to the mass sit-ins of Black Lives Matter and the pro-Palestinian encampments of recent summers, each season has brought a new style of ideological fast fashion. At least such political posturing will have provided ripe material for student satire magazines, you may think. Well, not exactly: our own college’s satirical publication was forcibly shot down by a student vote (on account, of course, of its politically wrong-thinking transgressions).
When a satire of the modern-day woke university finally appears, it is likely to make its villain the kind of intolerant, blue-haired, placard-wielding undergraduate who has so shamelessly cast themselves as the protagonist of the past decade’s culture war. The more we have seen of university life, however — as undergrads, then PhD students and finally teaching — the clearer it has become that the damage being done by woke ideology is not confined to student skirmishes, but has infected academia at every level: taught content, research, disciplinary norms and even institutional design. In fact, the conventional emphasis on the menace of woke student activism risks getting things backwards. There is indeed an important generational component to the malaise gripping universities. But the culpable figures are not students. They are those academics in positions of authority and secure employment who have negligently allowed the culture to be trashed, leaving a mess for the next generation to clear up.
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.
If this were the most perverse consequence of having the global lingua franca, we might still think it was well worth it. But there is another. I wonder how much of Britain’s economic sloth, its resistance to reform, comes from being able to coast on the pre-eminence of English. Countries that seem stuck often have a cushion that explains their inertia. For France and Italy, it is tourism. If an appreciable chunk of national output comes from visitors, that can cover a lot of sins. Natural resources are another example of an illusory advantage, as Nigerians and Venezuelans have found over the decades. Even the dollar, that “exorbitant privilege”, backfires on the US to the extent that it allows the country to avoid hard budgeting questions. Hence the debt problem.
If Britain has a cushion, it is language. (As well as perhaps geographic location.) It guarantees not just a minimum of outside interest in a fading power, from rightwingers or otherwise, but hard income. As the main anglophone economy outside America — an obvious place for Emea corporate headquarters, a natural destination for bright graduates — we can get away with an awful lot. But that means we try to.
Several states have banned (see also “regulated,” “put guardrails on” for the polite phraseology) the use of AI for mental health services. Nevada, for example, passed a law (AB 406) that bans schools from “[using] artificial intelligence to perform the functions and duties of a school counselor, school psychologist, or school social worker,” though it indicates that such human employees are free to use AI in the performance of their work provided that they comply with school policies for the use of AI. Some school districts, no doubt, will end up making policies that effectively ban any AI use at all by those employees. If the law stopped here, I’d be fine with it; not supportive, not hopeful about the likely outcomes, but fine nonetheless.
But the Nevada law, and a similar law passed in Illinois, goes further than that. They also impose regulations on AI developers, stating that it is illegal for them to explicitly or implicitly claim of their models that (quoting from the Nevada law):
(a) The artificial intelligence system is capable of providing professional mental or behavioral health care;
(b) A user of the artificial intelligence system may interact with any feature of the artificial intelligence system which simulates human conversation in order to obtain professional mental or behavioral health care; or
(c) The artificial intelligence system, or any component, feature, avatar or embodiment of the artificial intelligence system is a provider of mental or behavioral health care, a therapist, a clinical therapist, a counselor, a psychiatrist, a doctor or any other term commonly used to refer to a provider of professional mental health or behavioral health care.
To help bridge the gap between legal education and legal practice, in 2014 the American Bar Association adopted a requirement that law students take at least six credits of “experiential” courses. Despite limited research on the effects of this reform, the ABA is currently considering a new reform that would require law students to take twice as many experiential credits to graduate. We provide new evidence for this debate by studying the evolution of experiential legal education and the impacts of the 2014 reform. We compile data reported by law schools to the ABA to document a dramatic rise in the number of experiential opportunities available to students even before the reform, and we find no evidence that the reform improved bar passage rates or employment outcomes. However, we also find no evidence that the reform increased tuition. We then use transcript data from one law school to study how the 2014 reform impacted students’ course selections. We find evidence suggesting that the reform expanded access to clinics primarily to students least inclined to benefit from them but without displacing students most inclined to benefit from them.
They number among President Trump’s most dedicated supporters. For decades, they have fought the good fight—on their own time and on their own dime—against politicians and pundits enriched by billions of dollars from the federal government and some of the world’s wealthiest foundations. They endured steady streams of abuse and ridicule from some pundits, journalists, and politicians. Other pundits, who may or may not be sympathetic, declare that they won the battle against the overwhelming odds. But they know that they did not.
They supported Donald Trump because he seemed to agree with them, articulating their frustrations, clamorously and unequivocally. “Common Core is a disaster,” he said, “Common Core means Washington tells you what to study.” He has been proven right on both counts.
Those supporters are soccer moms who observe Common Core’s effects up close with their own children. They are local activists who recognized Common Core right away for what it was: the latest in a long string of progressive education white elephants. They had seen it all before, for example, in the calamitous “New Standards” projects in California, Kentucky, and Maryland around the turn of the century. Those states eventually mustered the good sense to cut bait and release those dysfunctional programs, only to have the same program designed by the same people imposed upon them from above a decade later.
Common Core’s primary selling point in the late 2000s and early 2010s was to standardize learning standards across states so that state performance could be compared on a common metric—apples to apples, as it were. The biannual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) already compared state student achievement. But, advocates argued, NAEP was not based on a common curriculum across states, offering laggard states an excuse that NAEP made apples-to-oranges comparisons.
Abstract: The authors read a systematic sample of “working papers” downloaded from the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) from the past quarter century—the years 2000 to 2024. They looked for “dismissive literature reviews” in the introductory and concluding sections of the papers. A dismissive review is one declaring an absence of previous research, or previous research worth referencing, for example: “there is no previous research on,” “this is the first study of,” and “surprisingly, few studies have broached this topic.” Typically, dismissive reviews are raw declarations, made without mention or evidence of having conducted a literature search.
All working papers retrieved for the topic “education” are classified into three groups (lacking a true education focus, containing no dismissive reviews, containing one or more).
The authors provide summary descriptive statistics for various quantities by category and a 1000+ line list of all the working papers retrieved and the dismissive reviews we found, which are highlighted within verbatim text. Dismissive reviews’ character and variety are discussed along with their implications for public policy.
KEYWORDS: Citation manipulation, research integrity, literature review, dismissive review, research literature, false novelty claims, firstness claims, citation cartels
Take New York, for example. In its latest “Making the Grade” report, the Education Law Center adjusted school spending figures relative to their regional labor market costs. It gave New York’s school funding system an A for the total amount of money it sent to public schools, a B for the distribution of those funds among schools and an A for the amount of money it spent relative to the state’s overall gross domestic product per capita.
Overall, New York came out as one of the top-rated school funding systems, if not the highest-rated.
And yet, New York students perform slightly below national averages. While its schools spent $33,970 per student, $15,509 more per pupil than the rest of the country, in Fiscal Year 2022 its students trailedoverall student performance in fourth-grade math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the “Nation’s Report Card.”
But it’s not just New York. The relationship between school spending and student outcomes is weaker than you might imagine. To make the fairest comparison possible, I used the Education Law Center’s spending figures, which are adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and the demographically adjusted NAEP scores from the Urban Institute.
The graph below shows the results for 2022, the latest year for which comparable spending figures are available. As you can see, New York is an extreme outlier: It spent more than any other state, and its results were in the bottom half. Other high-spending states like Vermont, New Jersey and Connecticut also got pretty poor results given their investments.
Which states do well on this metric? Texas, Florida and Mississippi all stand out for getting strong student outcomes despite not spending that much.
In the termination letter, Vakunta castigated Bishop for being “derelict” in his responsibility as a city leader, saying Bishop failed to participate in the general management of the civil rights agency or make changes following a series of disciplinary actions. She called his actions, conduct and behavior “an utter rupture of the bonds of trust.”
The discipline started three years ago with a letter in March 2022, then with a verbal warning in October 2022 and a one-day suspension in December the same year, according to the termination letter. Bishop was also suspended for three days in August two years ago, then for five days in June last year. Bishop received his final warning Nov. 7 last year, a week before the Mayor’s Office received a joint complaint about Davis. Bishop was suspended for 10 days.
While the Trump administration enthusiastically embraces disruptive digital assets and deregulation, it is at the same time undertaking an unprecedented assault on the foundations of America’s traditional policymaking order.
Under the banner of boosting growth, the president has been threatening to fire Powell and other top Fed officials in a bid to curb the central banking independence that has underpinned America’s economic foundations for over half a century.
For the past few decades, the meetings in Jackson Hole against the backdrop of Wyoming’s rugged mountains have come to embody the power and prestige of central bankers, with their debates on monetary policy transmission, quantitative easing and inflation dynamics.
But the economists listening to Powell at the Jackson Lake Lodge, which has been battling an influx of bats in recent weeks, are aware that the ascendancy of the technocrats is in danger of being thrown dramatically into reverse.
“When I speak to economists, they’re dispirited,” says Glenn Hubbard, a chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers under George W Bush, citing the broad discontent among many Americans with experts. “They know economic policy lost a very important thread with the public.”
Hubbard, now a professor at Columbia University, adds: “My fear is that if they don’t pick up that thread, the populist frenzy is only going to get worse.”
When students needn’t even bother to blame Fido for their missing homework, something’s gone wrong with the schools. Yet 52% of K-12 public teachers in a new survey say their school or district has adopted at least one “equitable” grading policy, such as no zeros for missed assignments, no penalties for turning in late work, or unlimited retakes on tests.
The good news is that teachers hate it: 81% said a no-zeros policy is “harmful to academic engagement,” including 80% of “teachers of color,” the Fordham report says. Some of the quotations from surveyed teachers are unsparing: “Being given a 50 percent for doing nothing seems to enable laziness.” “Ridiculous.” “Insulting to the students who work.” “Most teachers can’t stand the gifty fifty.”
A majority of teachers, 56%, said a policy of no late penalties is harmful, compared with 23% who liked that. On letting students retake tests, the teachers were divided, with 41% supporting it, and 37% against. But in general, 71% agreed “grading policies should set high expectations for everyone.” Only 29% approved of reforms “to be fairer” to disadvantaged students.
“Equity grading is not leveling the playing field,” one teacher said. “It is simply lowering standards so that school districts look like they are meeting kids where they are, when in fact they are hiding their failures behind ‘equitable’ policies.” Another worried A grades “are passed out like Halloween candy. Whether a student learned anything is nearly irrelevant.”
Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges.
The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.
With consequences ranging from teacher attrition to declining student learning, schools have failed to enforce fundamental behavioral standards.
With consequences ranging from teacher attrition to declining student learning, schools have failed to enforce fundamental behavioral standards.
Since at least 2022, the education world has been preoccupied with the “teacher exodus”: a troubling trend of teachers quitting at record rates. Though attrition has eased somewhat since its pandemic peak, it remains stubbornly high. Deteriorating classroom conditions are a big reason. Teachers cite chronic student misbehavior as the top source of stress and burnout, ranking it above workload and even pay.
Longtime educator Ben Foley is one of many who found the situation unbearable. After more than two decades teaching middle school in California, he resigned midyear, worn down by classrooms that had descended into chaos. He described the daily environment as “anarchic,” with students routinely ignoring basic instructions, roaming the room, throwing things, and roughhousing. Foley likened the experience to “death by a thousand cuts,” explaining that “for every request I make, several kids flat-out defy it.”
The excellent Don Boudreaux on comparative advantage, one of the deepest and most important ideas in economics.
As a new semester begins this is a good reminder that MRU has great videos for learning and teaching economics, all entirely free and open. (Of course, these videos pair delightfully with Modern Principles of Economics).
Using AI would feel like cheating, but Tom [who works in IT in the UK government] worries refusing to do so now puts him at a disadvantage. “I almost feel like I have no choice but to use it at this point. I might have to put morals aside.”
Others, despite their misgivings, limit how they use it, and only for specific tasks. Steve Royle, professor of cell biology at the University of Warwick, uses ChatGPT for the “grunt work” of writing computer code to analyse data. “But that’s really the limit. I don’t want it to generate code from scratch. When you let it do that, you spend way more time debugging it afterwards. My view is, it’s a waste of time if you let it try and do too much for you.” Accurate or not, he also worries that if he becomes too reliant on AI, his coding skills will atrophy. “The AI enthusiasts say, ‘Don’t worry, eventually nobody will need to know anything.’ I don’t subscribe to that.”
Part of his job is to write research papers and grant proposals. “I absolutely will not use it for generating any text,” says Royle. “For me, in the process of writing, you formulate your ideas, and by rewriting and editing, it really crystallises what you want to say. Having a machine do that is not what it’s about.”
Working parents with young children are stretched thin; a year of daycare can easily cost more than a year of tuition at an in-state college. At the same time, child-care workers are severely underpaid, often earning barely enough to get by and with no real path to ever make much more.
It is a problem with broad repercussions for the entire economy. Parents who can’t afford quality care, or can’t find it, can’t work. Young adults who are scared off by the cost of care might be less likely to have that second child, or even to have children in the first place.
So, is there even a solution? We asked leading thinkers to weigh in.
Northwestern statement on the settlement with former coach Pat Fitzgerald, notes that the evidence established no player reported hazing to Fitzgerald, nor did he condone or direct any hazing.
WATCH: Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates tells attendees at the Netroots Nation conference, “you have to create the crisis by which the boss…the government can no longer ignore you.”
Gates and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson are now pressuring Chicago Public Schools board members to approve around $200 million in junk bonds at the Aug. 28 budget vote.
The schools’ chief budget officer says this borrowing would trigger a “downward spiral” of more credit downgrades, higher borrowing costs, and cuts to the classroom.
But the CTU and the mayor see creating this crisis as leverage to demand more money from Springfield.
It’s like setting your house on fire and hoping the insurance pays out.
Like Ms. Alexander, Said attracted admirers and critics. One of his most influential intellectual competitors was Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), author of a 1993 essay and a 1996 book both titled in part “The Clash of Civilizations.” Huntington didn’t deny the existence of anti-Arab prejudice, but he thought the differences between the West and the Arab and Islamic worlds were deep and profound.
“The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” he wrote. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Said called Huntington’s book “belligerent” in an essay (published shortly after the 9/11 attacks) titled “The Clash of Ignorance.”
Huntington wasn’t Said’s only prominent critic. Historian Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) wrote a sharp critique in his 1993 book, “Islam and the West.” “Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies” (2004), by Ian Buruma and Ivishai Margalit, also challenges Said’s thesis, arguing that Western intellectuals have a long tradition of painting the West in disfigured, grotesque ways.
“The environmental movement provided a point of fracture for the Democratic coalition.” Of the contemporaneous secessionist movement in Michigan’s Northern Peninsula, Burd writes: “Arguing that environmental legislation hindered economic possibilities and threatened notions of political autonomy, politicians and residents throughout the region disputed much of the new environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, driving a wedge through traditional Democratic strongholds throughout the Great Lakes region.” In Minnesota, the split came in 1978.
Thoughts on GCSE Grades. 🧵 In general we’re not at peace with the realities of grading. You can’t have comparative standards AND have everyone succeed above a certain level. The bell curve is not imposed.. there’s no conspiracy. It’s an outcome of cohort performance.
What the Jacobs family didn’t know — couldn’t have known — was that they were now involved in what would becomeone of the worst medical research scandals of this century. Prominent scientists would see their careers derailed. Duke,an emerging biomedical powerhouse, would be disgraced. Patients would die of their cancers not knowing their finalmonths of treatment had been compromised by scientific fraud.
The scandal would also prove a crucial test for a leader quickly rising through the ranks of academia. The dean overseeing clinical research at Duke Medical School at the time was Sally Kornbluth. Today, she is the president of theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. She is helming one of the top research institutions in the world during a periodof unprecedented upheaval in science, at a time when President Trump and his allies have precipitated — andcelebrated — the ouster of at least five leaders of elite universities, four of them women.
high-level city of Madison administrator with multiple past disciplinary actions against him was allowed to retire from his position after his most recent violations of city policy, records released Thursday show.
Byron Bishop, who previously served as the Department of Civil Rights’ equal opportunities division manager, was formally disciplined six times going back to March 2022, according to an Aug. 6 memo to him from Deputy Mayor Linda Vakunta with the subject line “termination of employment.”
A city employee since 2016, Bishop’s last day was Aug. 6. Under the terms of his departure, he will be paid the remainder of his $134,158.96 annual salary through the end of this year, city spokesperson Dylan Brogan said
Every working parent knows that it is staggeringly expensive to put a child through daycare—but it depends a lot on where you live.
The median cost of sending one child to daycare for five years is about $44,000 across the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Labor Department data. In 26 counties, the median cost for five years of daycare is more than $100,000.
U.S. median: $43,945
What’s the cost of five years of daycare today?
Search the map below to see how the median cost to send one child to daycare until kindergarten compares across the country.
In 2005, a “working definition” of antisemitism was posted on the website of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, a research institute founded by the European Union. It described antisemitism, somewhat vaguely, as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” Even less precise were the eleven examples of antisemitism that followed, many of which focussed on Israel. Among them was “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
In the two decades since it was introduced, this definition has not been endorsed by most leading scholars of antisemitism, in part because critics believe that it blurs the line between hostility toward Jews and criticism of Israel. It has been a different story in the political arena, where the reception of the definition has been nothing short of astonishing. In 2016, a slightly altered version of the definition was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization. To date, more than forty governments have adopted it as well, notwithstanding the definition’s lack of precision. In his forthcoming book, “On Antisemitism,” the historian Mark Mazower argues that, to some of the definition’s promoters, its vagueness has been a virtue rather than a drawback. The definition emerged at a time when campaigning against antisemitism was becoming a growing priority—and a highly effective fund-raising tool—for organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. What increasingly concerned these groups was not classical antisemitism, which, by the end of the Cold War, appeared to be declining, but the “new antisemitism,” which manifested in what they saw as the demonization of Israel.
The Madison School District on Friday said it will maintain its current unweighted grading system for high schoolers.
The decision means that for the purposes of ranking students for a new state guaranteed college admission program, there is currently no way to distinguish students who take more challenging courses from those who take less-challenging courses.
“Our decision to keep what’s currently in place reflects our belief in the importance of a system that supports equity, maintains transparency and reflects our community’s values,” Mary Jankovich, the district’s executive director of college, career and community readiness, said in a Friday evening news release.
Under the new program, known as the Wisconsin Guarantee, students who rank in the top 5% of their class are guaranteed admission to the Universities of Wisconsin’s flagship UW-Madison campus, while students who rank in the top 10% are guaranteed admission to the system’s 12 other four-year 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.
Altogether, the US receives about 5 trillion gallons of precipitation a day. Most of that (63%) gets returned to the atmosphere via evapotranspiration. Much of the rest ultimately flows into the Gulf of Mexico (11%), Pacific Ocean (6%), and Atlantic Ocean (2%). About 10% gets stored in surface bodies of water (lakes, reservoirs) or underground aquifers, and 6% flows back into Canada. The remaining 2% is consumed by people in various ways.
If you spend time in American classrooms today, especially in schools shaped by the dominant ideas of social and emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP), you might get the impression that the world is a broken and dangerous place — and that wise and loving adults equip children to navigate it successfully by making them aware of just how bad things are.
We think we’re helping them. But what if we’re not?
That question lies at the heart of a compelling and underappreciated body of research led by Jeremy Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Clifton studies “primal world beliefs,” or “primals” — deep, often unconscious assumptions about the nature of the world. Is it safe or dangerous? Enticing or dull? Alive or mechanistic? His work suggests that these beliefs shape everything: our sense of well-being, our resilience, our openness to experience, even our mental health outcomes.
Clifton’s research has not made its way into teacher-training programs, education-policy debates, or district SEL initiatives. The only mention I’ve found of it in a publication aimed at teachers is a 2022 Education Week interview in which Clifton offered a quiet warning: “Don’t assume teaching young people that the world is bad will help them. Do know that how you see the world matters.” This quiet warning, if heeded, could spark a revolutionary change in American education. It could also guide those seeking to respond more productively to the mental health crisis afflicting America’s children.
The blue blacklist: In a new memo, the center-left think tank Third Way is circulating a list of 45 words and phrases they want Democrats to avoid using, alleging the terms put “a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities.” It’s a set of words that Third Way suggests “people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats.”
They span six categories — from “therapy speak” to “explaining away crime” — and put in sharp relief a party that authors say makes Democrats “sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.” In the document, titled “Was It Something I Said?” Third Way argues that to “please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant,” according to the memo.
Among the blacklisted terms: privilege … violence (as in “environmental violence”) … dialoguing … triggering … othering … microaggression … holding space … body shaming … subverting norms … systems of oppression … cultural appropriation … Overton window … existential threat to [the climate, democracy, economy] … radical transparency … stakeholders … the unhoused … food insecurity … housing insecurity … person who immigrated … birthing person … cisgender … deadnaming … heteronormative … patriarchy … LGBTQIA+ … BIPOC … allyship … incarcerated people … involuntary confinement.
“We are doing our best to get Democrats to talk like normal people and stop talking like they’re leading a seminar at Antioch,” says Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president of public affairs. “We think language is one of the central problems we face with normie voters, signaling that we are out of touch with how they live, think and talk. In recent weeks, this has become a bit of a thing, with comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman highlighting how insane Dems can sometimes sound. Also, elected officials like [Delaware Rep.] Sarah McBride and [Kentucky Gov.] Andy Beshear are begging their colleagues to just be normal again.”
With a 7% budget cut, UW-Madison Libraries is closing the Astronomy, Mathematics and Physics Library at 4 p.m. Friday. The campus Social Work Library will shutter also at the end of the coming school year, and others will have reduced hours.
Madison lost two men in recent weeks who, in each of their own ways, were nothing less than outstanding educators.
Marvin Meissen was one of the Madison School District’s innovators, an acclaimed champion of the teaching of science, one of those unsung heroes who do so much to inspire our young people, including members of his own family, on the importance of education.
Marvin developed the science program at La Follette High School when it opened in 1963, and his success there propelled him to the science coordinator post for all of Madison’s public schools. His work turned hundreds of Madison students on to successful careers in the sciences.
Later in his Madison schools’ career, Marvin served as assistant principal at West High and then principal at Velma Hamilton Middle School before his retirement in 1994.
He passed on his love for education to his five children, all of whom became teachers. Two of his sons, Phillip and Michael, earned their doctorates in education. Michael went on to become principal of La Follette High, where his father had pioneered the science curriculum. A granddaughter, Kristina Meissen, has also earned her doctorate, all from the UW-Madison.
Was everyone tolerating this practice until the City reporter openly objected to it? Why was the City reporter’s envelope delivered inside a potato chip back if it was not understood to be wrong? The NYT writes, “No established American news organization permits its reporters to accept cash payments for covering events” and “The Times’s ethical guidelines explicitly prohibit receipt of such gifts.” And the NYT reporters seem to have witnessed the open delivery of red envelopes, without snack-food camouflage. Perhaps The City was viewed as in the gray zone between “established American news organization” and news organizations that had already been initiated into a system of paying for news coverage.
The NYT doesn’t explain its waiting to publish. Perhaps it was working on a more detailed story explaining pervasive corruption and it just got scooped.
Even more thoroughly documented are the civil rights violations via racial discrimination. Considering it righteous to treat some racial groups preferentially in admissions and hiring, university administrators and faculty frequently wrote emails and reports about racial goals and about the different procedures used for different races of applicant. These illegal practices continued even after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admission—a fact that’s easily proven via these documents and statistical evidence.
Early in Trump’s second term, the U.S. Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to state education departments nationwide outlining the federal government’s stance against DEI. It said schools have “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism,'” creating DEI programs in response.
Trump officials argue those DEI programs — such as scholarships or hiring plans intending to boost racial diversity — are illegal and discriminatory against White and Asian people, in particular.
In February, the federal government directed states to sign an agreement on DEI, or risk losing federal funding. States were asked to certify that they won’t break antidiscrimination laws through the use of DEI programs.
Gone already are the days when using AI to write an essay meant copying and pasting its response verbatim. To evade plagiarism detectors, kids now stitch together output from multiple AI models, or ask chatbots to introduce typos to make the writing appear more human. The original ChatGPT allowed only text prompts. Now students can upload images (“Please do these physics problems for me”) and entire documents (“How should I improve my essay based on this rubric?”).
Not all of it is cheating. Kids are using AI for exam prep, generating personalized study guides and practice tests, and to get feedback before submitting assignments. Still, if you are a parent of a high schooler who thinks your child isn’t using a chatbot for homework assistance—be it sanctioned or illicit—think again.
The AI takeover of the classroom is just getting started. Plenty of educators are using AI in their own job, even if they may not love that chatbots give students new ways to cheat. On top of the time they spend on actual instruction, teachers are stuck with a lot of administrative work: They design assignments to align with curricular standards, grade worksheets against preset rubrics, and fill out paperwork to support students with extra needs.
Nearly a third of K–12 teachers say they used the technology at least weekly last school year. Sally Hubbard, a sixth-grade math-and-science teacher in Sacramento, California, told me that AI saves her an average of five to 10 hours each week by helping her create assignments and supplement curricula. “If I spend all of that time creating, grading, researching,” she said, “then I don’t have as much energy to show up in person and make connections with kids.”
It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long.
Yet a paper posted on February 10 left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo, just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.
“We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that,” said Itamar Oliveira of the University of Birmingham, who has spent the past two years trying to prove that the conjecture was true. In her paper, Cairo showed that it’s false. The result defies mathematicians’ usual intuitions about what functions can and cannot do.
So does Cairo herself, who found her way to a proof after years of homeschooling in isolation and an unorthodox path through the math world.
What happens to your spending when you have a child? We recently spoke with new parents from across the country to hear how it went for them.
Spoiler: None of them said having a baby was cheaper than they expected.
Americans would have to spend $20,745 to buy a basket of goods and services commonly used in a baby’s first year, versus $15,775 for a similar basket in 2022, according to BabyCenter, a parenting website.
Three families gave us a peek at their credit-card charges, Amazon orders and overall monthly spending. Take a look:
You may have left the education system. But did the education system leave you?
One strange realisation as you get older: A lot of the behaviours you were punished for in school are rewarded in adulthood, and a lot of the behaviours you were rewarded for in school are punished in adulthood.
A large part of adulthood isn’t learning anything new; it’s just unlearning lessons from school, debugging the code the education system has written in your head—line by line, habit by habit, assumption by assumption.
Here’s a list of behaviours punished in school — but rewarded in adulthood:
1. Questioning the highest status person in the room – At school, it’s easy to see your teachers as gods that can’t be questioned. That’s the default assumption the school whispers to you: teachers are the highest-status people in the room. One of the biggest red pill moments comes in your early 20s. A person you know who is lost and confused says to you: “I’m unsure what to do with my life, so I’m going to become a teacher. It’s got great holidays!” You then do the mental maths: “What % of the teachers I put on pedestals at school were just lost people figuring things out?!”. And the same is true now: “What % of people I’m putting on pedestals now are just grown-up children figuring things out?”
The first shock came on New Year’s Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne. “A throng of about a thousand young men was forming,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle explained. “Most of them were from the North African-Arabic region.” In scenes Merkel would later describe as “abominable”, the report continued, “packs of men were hunting down women, cornering many of them. There were sexual assaults, rapes.”
The police response was somewhere between clueless and callous. One young woman told the German media later how she was trapped in the crowds and then suddenly “someone had his hands between my legs”. When she tried to report this at a police station where “there were lots of girls, all crying uncontrollably”, she was told to go elsewhere. A public police statement said the celebrations in Cologne had been “relaxed”.
In the end, it was probably this staggering denial that riled people the most. In her memoirs, Merkel dedicates just one paragraph to the incident in Cologne. There is no compassion for the victims, just a cool assessment that the delayed response “gave rise to the impression that the authorities were trying to cover something up”. Merkel’s main concern, then as now, was political. As the leader of a nominally centre-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she faced plenty of internal pressure for her generous refugee policy. But the public mood also tipped. The “Welcoming Culture” that dominated the news dissipated quickly. Asked in one representative poll in January 2016, 73% of respondents felt dealing with “asylum” and “refugees” was the most urgent government priority.
United States Custom and Border Protection officials have sweeping powers to search anyone’s phone when they are entering the country—including US citizens. Newly released figures show that over the past three months, CBP officials have been searching more phones and other devices than ever before.
My friend Jim is helping me see science’s current troubles from an historical perspective. And that’s making me, the end-of-science guy, even gloomier about science’s prospects.
James E. McClellan III is professor emeritus of the history of science at Stevens Institute of Technology, where I teach. Together with the late historian Harold Dorn, Jim wrote Science and Technology in World History, which traces human knowledge-seeking and invention from the Stone Age to the digital age. It’s deeply researched and yet fun to read, quite the accomplishment.
Jim has been re-researching and re-writing his book for a new edition, and I’m reading his updated chapters as the finishes them. One theme jumps out at me: Power, not truth, has always been the primary aim of human knowledge-seekers. Almost all ancient societies accumulated knowledge for practical reasons: because it helps us heal, feed and house ourselves, plan ahead, travel and communicate, kill our enemies and so on.
The exception is the Hellenistic empire, which resulted from the conquests of Alexander the Great (tutored by Aristotle) and lasted for three centuries. Greek rulers built the library of Alexandria and other centers of learning, where scholars could indulge their curiosity just for fun. Within reason.
The Romans, who displaced the Greeks, cared a lot about medicine and engineering, but they didn’t invest much in research for its own sake. Either did ancient civilizations that emerged in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India and the Americas. For most cultures, religion served as the source of ultimate truth.
Not until the 19th century, long after Newton had done his thing and when the industrial revolution was under way, did Europe and the U.S. begin recognizing the economic, medical and military potential of research untethered to specific practical goals. And only after World War II did governments invest heavily in “basic” research, hoping for more spinoffs as nifty as The Bomb.
The volume he selected was “Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall In Love With the Process of Becoming Great.” It isn’t exactly “Anna Karenina.” At a modest 118 pages, it’s the kind of self-improvement manual that an enterprising salesman could finish on a flight from Dallas to Cincinnati.
But its messages, told through parables delivered by a Japanese master to a young American pupil, are clear. Excellence is a slog that requires consistent, tiring work. Setbacks are part of the process. Humbly committing to improvement is its own reward.
“Everybody focuses on that final result and what it looked like and all those things,” Day said recently. “We needed to get back to the beginning of the process—and focusing on the process and not necessarily focusing on the result.”
Chippewa Falls Middle School teacher Alisha Neinfeldt has been named the 2025 Wisconsin History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The award honors a top K-12 educator in each state for their work teaching American history and has been awarded since 2004.
“History teachers play an essential role in helping students understand the past, build critical thinking skills, and develop a deeper appreciation for the people and events that shaped our nation,” James G. Basker, president and CEO of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, said in a press release. “We are proud to recognize educators who go above and beyond to make history engaging, meaningful, and relevant in their classrooms.”
Billionaire Bill Ackman has a new fascination: a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed-teach children in two hours.
Alpha School is launching a New York City location in September, and the investor and social-media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution, according to people familiar with the matter.
On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha’s co-founder, its principal and others on a panel discussion at his Hamptons home. The panel on K-12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of the Milken Institute’s Hamptons Dialogues.
Alpha School, which calls its teachers “guides,” says it uses AI-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools despite the condensed days.
The schedule allows students to do hands-on activities in the afternoon, which the school says help them build life skills. These include 5-mile bike rides “without stopping” for kindergartners, and exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans.
The start of another school year is within the next week for many school districts across the state. However, many still have unfilled full-time classroom teacher positions.
According to Teach Iowa, there are still over 500 classroom teacher positions that are unfilled across the entire state. Out of those, 30 are world language teachers.
Joe Carter, superintendent at the Algona Community School District, said that applications for for all positions have greatly declined over the past decade.
Reading for pleasure in the US has declined by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years according to analysis of the daily lives of Americans, supporting several smaller studies that suggest fewer people are using their leisure time to read.
Analysing data from the US government’s American Time Use Survey, researchers at the University of Florida and University College London found that of the 236,000 Americans surveyed the proportion who read for pleasure on an average day fell from 28 per cent in 2003 to 16 per cent in 2023.
“This is not just a small dip — it’s a sustained decline of about 3 per cent per year,” said Jill Sonke at the University of Florida. “It’s significant and deeply concerning.” The results will be published in the journal iScience.
The study included any kind of reading done for enjoyment or purposes other than work or school, including ebooks on screen or listening to audio books, as well as traditional books, newspapers and magazines in print. Although electronic media have added many new ways to read, the researchers expressed confidence in their methodology.
US Reading decline is dramatic over the last 20 years, but no decline among teens…because they never read much in the first place, a point I’ve been harping on for years, as people often focus on social media & teens re: ⬇️in reading.
Tony Evers has been in charge of Wisconsin education policy since 2009 (& effectively since 2001). Republicans have been completely unable to educate voters about the generational failure he caused. He’ll ride off into the sunset without facing any electoral consequences
———
The funny thing about Catholic schools is that they spend about half as much per pupil as their public schools counterparts. It’s often a very no frills education: older buildings, less technology, fewer sports fields, etc.
They’ll blame school funding, but Wisconsin is 21st in per pupil funding while Mississippi is 44th.
——-
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.
These foundations are eliminating middle school algebra and promoting “numberless math,” which is leaving students paying the price.
Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter, Liz, who oversees the Heising-Simons Foundation and its nearly billion-dollar endowment.
What Liz Simons has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science, but his daughter’s foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Heising-Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K-12 mathematics education according to social justice principles.
The revamp the advocates seek is profound. They reject well-established practices of math instruction while infusing lessons with racial and gender themes. The goal is to motivate disadvantaged students while dispensing with the traditional features of math, like numerical computation, that they struggle with on standardized tests – considered an oppressive feature of white supremacist culture.
In many quarters, including corporations and universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are in retreat due to pressure from the Trump administration and the courts. Not so in public education, with curricula that are locally controlled and largely insulated from the dictates of Washington. That allows progressive foundations and like-minded charitable trusts to continue to pour millions of dollars into reshaping math education for black and Latino kids, including a $800,000 grant this year from the Heising-Simons Foundation, even though there exists no credible research showing that the social justice approach improves their performance.
“Politicians, and legislatures, even school boards,” are often too “hamstrung” to get things done, Bob Hughes, the director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation, said at an online symposium on the need for racial equity policies in America’s classrooms. Philanthropy, he added, faces fewer barriers in making rapid changes.
For UW-Madison, the most significant changes involve the elimination of Grad PLUS Loans and limits to Parent PLUS Loans, effective next year. These federal programs paid for education expenses not covered by other financial aid, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Hundreds of UW-Madison students borrowed money through these loans in recent years, according to the university.
In May, leaders of Wisconsin’s public, private, technical and independent colleges and universities raised alarm over proposed changes to Pell Grants, which generally support low-income students. Those changes never materialized in the final bill, though.
Federal lawmakers also defunded SNAP-Ed, a grant program that teaches people how to live and eat healthily. UW-Madison’s Division of Extension received over $8 million each year to run FoodWIse and provide local nutrition education to Wisconsin communities.
In late July, the division sent layoff notices to 92 employees across the state, including four educators and one administrator in Dane County.
Locally, FoodWIse taught children and adults how to make healthy food choices at schools, senior centers and local community centers. FoodWIse also collaborated with food pantries, recreation and school programs.
In my posts The Sputnik vs. DeepSeek Moment and The Answers, I contrasted America’s reaction to Sputnik—expanded funding for education in math, science, and foreign languages; creation of agencies like ARPA; higher federal R&D spending; recruitment of foreign talent; and reduced tariff barriers—with the more recent U.S. response to China’s rise as an economic and scientific power, which has been almost the reverse.
BP’s modern version (also called the reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Finnish master student Seppo Linnainmaa[BP1][R7]. In 2020, we celebrated BP’s half-century anniversary! A precursor of BP was published by Henry J. Kelley in 1960 [BPA]—in 2020, we celebrated its 60-year anniversary.
In the 2020s, it was still easy to find misleading accounts of BP’s history [HIN][T22][DLP][NOB]. I had a look at the original papers from the 1960s and 70s, and talked to BP pioneers. Here is a summary based on my award-winning 2014 survey[DL1] which includes most of the references mentioned below.
The minimisation of errors through gradient descent (Cauchy 1847 [GD’], Hadamard, 1908 [GD”]) in the parameter space of complex, nonlinear, differentiable, multi-stage, NN-related systems has been discussed at least since the early 1960s, e.g., Kelley (1960) [BPA]; Bryson (1961) [BPB]; Pontryagin et al. (1961); Dreyfus (1962) [BPC]; Wilkinson (1965); Tsypkin (1966) [GDa-b]; Amari (1967-68) [GD2,GD2a]; Bryson and Ho (1969); initially within the framework of Euler-LaGrange equations in the Calculus of Variations, e.g., Euler (1744).
Steepest descent in the weight space of such systems can be performed (Kelley, 1960 [BPA]; Bryson, 1961 [BPB]) by iterating the chain rule (Leibniz, 1676 [LEI07-10][DLH]; L’Hopital, 1696) in Dynamic Programming style (DP, e.g., Bellman, 1957 [BEL53]). A simplified derivation (Dreyfus, 1962 [BPC]) of this backpropagation method uses only the Leibniz chain rule [LEI07].
The systems of the 1960s were already efficient in the DP sense. However, they backpropagated derivative information through standard Jacobian matrix calculations from one “layer” to the previous one, without explicitly addressing either direct links across several layers or potential additional efficiency gains due to network sparsity.
When Dariya Quenneville’s infant daughter was ready for solid food, she skipped the mushed up avocado and banana. On the menu instead? Raw egg yolk and puréed chicken liver.
“She would just teethe on that and soothe herself,” said Quenneville, 31.
Schizandra is what her mom calls a “carnivore baby.” Most of her diet is meat, along with other animal-sourced foods like eggs and butter. “She’s an easy baby,” said Quenneville of her daughter, now almost 2. “I believe that the food in the diet is a very, very big piece of that.”
With the carnivore diet rising in popularity among adults, babies and toddlers are getting in on it, too. Moms swap tips—think directions for whipped bone marrow—on Facebook forums with names like Carnivore Motherhood.
Some parents say they’re inspired by social-media stars: A handful of doctors who are raising their own carnivore babies have YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands and even millions of subscribers. Rising interest in protein and concerns about ultraprocessed foods are causing some people to look at carnivore-style diets. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a carnivore champion, has loudly expressed his affinity for beef tallow.
How many of the people who would’ve been in your generational cohort aren’t here because they were aborted?
Between the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationdecision in 2022, women had access to abortion because of the Supreme Court’s decision to establish a woman’s constitutional right to it based on the right to privacy. During that time, Americans underwent tens of millions of abortions. Given that America only experienced tens of millions of births in that same timeframe, the answer to my question is likely a nontrivial portion: a potentially sizable part of the generations that have been born since 1973 may have been aborted.
Using data from the Guttmacher Institute—a nongovernmental organization sprung out of Planned Parenthood in 1968 with the aim to expand reproductive rights globally—we can see that aborted generation members have been a very sizable percentage of every generational cohort since the Roe v. Wade decision.1
If we naïvely tally up America’s abortions, we can see that potentially over a quarter of Gen X and Millennials were aborted, nearly as many Gen Z met that fate, and almost a fifth of Gen Alpha were treated the same way.
These figures help to contextualize the human toll of abortion—these are, at minimum, millions of lost lives. But these numbers are off when it comes to describing the number of people who would be in these generations were it not for abortion. If we want to understand how large generations would be without abortion, we have to account for the effect of abortions on completed fertility.
The relationship between induced abortion and long-term mental health is not clear. We assessed whether having an induced abortion was associated with an increase in the long-term risk of mental health hospitalization.
If approved by city leaders, most agencies would receive increases of 1% to 8% from previous spending levels. One exception would be a 30% budget increase requested by the City Clerk’s Office.
The office is restructuring this year after the resignation of longtime City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl. City Attorney Michael Haas, who is serving as interim clerk, is asking for a $791,000 budget increase to help with next year’s expected workloads.
Moving forward, Madison plans to hold City Council elections at least once every year after adopting staggered terms for alders. More funding is also needed for voter engagement in historically underrepresented wards and for responding to requests for city records, Haas said.
The clerk’s office’s annual budget would grow to $3.4 million.
Larger city agencies, such as the police and fire departments, are seeking smaller increases as a ratio of previous funding levels. But these requests would draw more in total from the city’s general fund, which pays for many day-to-day expenses like salaries and services.
Both the Police Department and Fire Department are requesting 2% increases in funding next year. The police budget would grow by $1.9 million to nearly $100 million. The fire budget would increase by $1.5 million to $77 million.
———
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.
The fascination with what some call “genetic optimization” reflects deeper Silicon Valley beliefs about merit and success. “I think they have a perception that they are smart and they are accomplished, and they deserve to be where they are because they have ‘good genes,’” said Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “Now they have a tool where they think that they can do the same thing in their kids as well, right?”
Grading policies have long been debated in American schools, but only recently have “equitable” reforms taken center stage.
Policies like “no zeros,” eliminating late penalties, and allowing unlimited retakes aim to make grading fairer for disadvantaged students. But critics argue that these changes inflate grades, erode accountability, and ultimately harm student learning—and many teachers agree.
In the first nationally representative survey to examine this issue, America’s K–12 teachers finally got a chance to weigh in. The verdict: Most teachers report feeling pressured to give higher grades, and say these policies reduce academic engagement, even in schools without formal mandates.
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.
A federal appeals court rejected T-Mobile’s attempt to overturn $92 million in fines for selling customer location information to third-party firms.
The Federal Communications Commission last year fined T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, saying the carriers illegally shared access to customers’ location information without consent and did not take reasonable measures to protect that sensitive data against unauthorized disclosure. The fines relate to sharing of real-time location data that was revealed in 2018, but it took years for the FCC to finalize the penalties.
Nowhere on this first page of search results is the producer of the product, who might actually have the best answer to your question(s). Of course, if all you wanted to do is buy some Porta, well, your resultsweresold to the highest bidders.
This is no longer useful search, and it’s getting worse. Even DuckDuckGo has a similar problem with the search term I just suggested, though they at least claim that they protect your private information. In April, the US District Court held that Google violated antitrust law, specifically because the Google search methodology has been abused. What will happen from that decision is still unknown, but I don’t think it makes a lot of difference.
Follow the money. Always follow the money. The reason why Google wants you to use an Android device, the Chrome browser, and their Search engine is simple: that gives them full control over you, and they can track and promote to their heart’s content. But you might have noticed that third thing in the stack of things I got from a Google search: an AI response. And this leads me to my original bold-faced assertion, above: in the coming year or two, search as we know it will disappear and be replaced by AI interaction.
Law enforcement agencies reported nearly 1.3 million criminal incidents on school property from 2020 to 2024, according to a new FBI report. That includes 540,000 assaults and 45,000 sex offenses. “Kids shouldn’t be trapped in dangerous schools,” writes Corey DeAngelis, a school choice advocate.
I think that the answer is “AI Alignment” has an implicit technical bent to it. If you go on the AI Alignment Forum, for example, you’ll find more math than Confucius or Foucault.
On the other hand, nobody would view “pharmaceutical alignment” (if it were formulated as “[steering] pharmaceutical systems toward a person’s or group’s intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles”) as primarily a problem for math or science.
While there always are things that pharmaceutical developers can do inside the lab to at least try to promote ethical principles – for example, perhaps, to minimize preventable hazards, even when not forced to – we also accept that ethical work is done in large part outside of the lab; in purchasing decisions, in the way that pharmaceutical marketplaces operate, in the vast mess of the medical-industrial-government complex. It’s a problem so diffuse that it hardly makes sense to gather it all into one coherent encyclopedia entry.
The process by which the rest of the world influences the direction of an industry, by way of purchasing, analyzing, regulating, discussing, etc., is Selection. This comes from the terminology of evolution – in this framing, dinosaurs didn’t just decide to start growing wings and flying; Nature selected birds to fill the new ecological niches of the Jurassic period.
Broad historical instruction has given way to boutique narratives.
Imagine, for a moment, the year is 2500. Human civilization is gone, lost to disaster, time, or neglect. One day, an alien research team lands in what was once North Carolina and begins to study the ruins of a place once known as Duke University. Buried beneath centuries of sediment, they find a course directory from the Department of History, dated 2025. What would these visitors conclude about American history? Would they know about the Revolutionary War and its heroes, Washington crossing the Delaware, the debates at Valley Forge, the intellectual courage of the Founding Fathers? Would they learn about the immigrants who built the railroads, the entrepreneurs who transformed an agricultural society, or the soldiers who fought fascism across two oceans?
At Duke, far too few American History professors specialize in non-identitarian fields. Almost certainly not. They would come away knowing far less about the broad sweep of American history—its political transformations, economic changes, diplomatic turning points, and cultural achievements—than about a narrow range of faculty preoccupations, many of them rooted in identity politics or highly specialized subfields. The result would be a picture of the past that is partial, fragmented, and skewed toward present-day concerns, leaving much of the nation’s history unexplored. But why do I, a Duke history major now in my fourth year, say this?
More striking still, over 51 percent of the department’s American History offerings are explicitly devoted to themes of racial- and social-justice movements.
The sculpture’s letters contain encrypted messages. Though they appear as one giant grid, “Kryptos” consists in fact of four sections, each themed and encoded differently, now known as K1, K2, K3 and K4. The first three sections were decoded by professionals and enthusiasts decades ago and their solutions are public knowledge.
Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud.
Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud.
More than a third of Texas students attend rural schools, and despite their communities’ support, many of those schools have been on the brink of financial ruin for years. Not far down the road from Marathon, Alpine Independent School District and Marfa ISD are both running deficits of around $1 million, despite having some of the lowest teacher salaries in the state. Nearby Valentine ISD operates out of an unrenovated 1910 schoolhouse and has recruited six teachers from the Philippines to keep its doors open. The Marathon school is also feeling the pinch. We sometimes teach two classes at once; we rely on online coursework to meet curriculum requirements; two of our fluorescent lights emit a sinister drone the district can’t afford to address; and our track has completely peeled away in places, revealing the layer of concrete underneath.
In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott held public-education funding hostage because a coalition of Texas Democrats and rural Republicans refused to pass his universal voucher program. But this spring the levee finally broke, and lawmakers passed two landmark education bills. One, House Bill 2, offers rural schools a long-awaited lifeline, investing $8.5 billion in public education over the next two years. The second, Senate Bill 2, earmarks billions to fund private school tuition through education savings accounts (ESAs), taxpayer-funded accounts parents can use for private school or homeschooling. Some fear it may mark the beginning of the end for public education in rural Texas.
Could a state try to join the scholarship program only for some uses, such as tutoring at public schools? That would defeat Congress’s intent, and maybe prompt a legal challenge. Or perhaps the Treasury Department can write the program’s implementing rules to make clear that the parameters of the scholarships are set by Congress. That would mean Democratic governors can’t take some and reject others, as if this were a school lunch menu.
In North Carolina, it might not matter, given the GOP’s margin in the Legislature. “Either you support school choice, or you don’t,” said state Sen. Phil Berger, that chamber’s GOP leader. “I look forward to holding Gov. Stein accountable and overriding his veto to ensure North Carolina can participate in President Trump’s signature school choice initiative.”
Given the program’s 2027 launch date, other Democratic governors are going to get the same question, and some might be thinking of 2028. A spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said last month his administration is reviewing the law and “awaiting additional federal guidance.”
Yet the choice is clear: Giving students access to the scholarship funds can help families at no cost to the state. But it might upset the teachers unions.
For generations, Americans have chased opportunity by moving from city to city, state to state. U.S. companies were often quicker to hire—and to fire—than employers in other parts of the world. But that defining mobility has stalled, leaving many people in homes that are too small, in jobs they don’t love or in their parents’ basements looking for work.
Others are slapped with “golden handcuffs.” Those who bought homes when mortgage rates were low or have stable white-collar jobs are clinging to them rather than taking big leaps.
This immobility has economic consequences for everyone. The frozen housing market means growing families can’t upgrade, empty-nesters can’t downsize and first-time buyers are all but locked out. When people can’t move for a job offer, or to a city with better job opportunities, they often earn less. When companies can’t hire people who currently live in, say, a different state, corporate productivity and profits can suffer.
Young graduates who don’t land good jobs soon after college often never really recover from those years of diminished earnings, widening the gap between the economy’s winners and losers.
The Wyoming Education Association doesn’t want families getting those dollars. In a lawsuit filed in June, the union argued that because the state constitution requires the Legislature to maintain a “complete and uniform” public school system, lawmakers cannot fund “private education that is not uniform.” A state judge granted an injunction on the ESA program last month.
Wyoming’s Attorney General and parents are appealing at the state Supreme Court, and the law is in their favor. Wyoming’s constitution also directs the Legislature to “suitably encourage means and agencies calculated to advance the sciences and liberal arts.” The ESA program is a way of doing so. It’s not creating a new system of schools.
It also isn’t killing the existing school system. The $30 million ESA program has its own general-fund appropriation, which doesn’t divert dollars directly from public schools—whose per-pupil funding approaches $20,000. District funding is tied to enrollment, so public schools could lose money if students leave, but that’s happening even without the scholarships.
As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the Moon “before” 2030.
Then, last Friday, the space agency and its state-operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, successfully conducted a 30-second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket’s center core with its seven YF-100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mengzhou spacecraft in June. A version of this spacecraft is planned for lunar missions.
On track for 2030
Thus, China’s space program is making demonstrable progress in all three of the major elements of its lunar program: the large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft, which will carry humans to lunar orbit, plus the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the Moon before the end of this decade.
But they also hoped for a big family, and wanted to get started. Sure, Brittany was making $10 an hour working a retail job at Home Depot. But Michael’s union construction job paid more than triple that, and he’d owned his own home, a modest two-bedroom outside Cincinnati, for more than a decade.
So the two took the plunge, and in 2012, they welcomed their first baby. Brittany was 20; her husband, 34. The birth was difficult. Her son’s umbilical cord was wrapped around his head, and he had to be extracted from her birth canal, fracturing her pelvis. Still, she was smitten. “Your heart grows three sizes,” she recalls. “I couldn’t stop looking at him.”
The Ivys now have five children, ages 3 to 12. They know they aren’t the norm.
More Americans than ever are putting off having children—or not having them at all. The U.S. total fertility rate is around an all-time low, and far below the rate needed to keep the population stable. The average age of women giving birth in the U.S. has risen to nearly 30 years old, up from 27 years old in 2000, according to government data.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the floods that devastated New Orleans and its schools. The recovery effort in the years after the storm reshaped the city’s education system, ushering in reforms and innovations with ripple effects across the country. Join Bellwether for a series of conversations with leaders, policymakers, and experts who were there and helped shape education in New Orleans during the past 20 years. We’ll explore how the city’s schools have changed, the challenges that remain, and what it means for America’s education system more broadly. Join us for the following sessions: Where We Started: Policy Conditions and Constraints in August 2005 (Monday, Aug. 18 at 12:00pm ET) Featuring Former Senator Mary Landrieu, Doug Harris, Jamar McKneely, Alexina Medley, and Andy Rotherham (moderator) How Charters Changed the Game Post-Katrina (Monday, August 25 at 11am ET) Featuring Leslie Jacobs, Dana Peterson, Jim Peyser, and Juliet Squire (moderator) Career Pathway Innovations in New Orleans (Thursday, Aug. 28 at 2:00pm ET) Featuring Aaron Frumin, Claire Jecklin, Cate Swinburn, and Alex Cortez (moderator)
One could argue that the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century. Willingham has observed that we have learned more about how people learn in the last 25 years than in the previous 2,500 combined. His book Why Don’t Students Like School? examines how that recently acquired understanding can be used to accelerate learning.
Yet, however great his influence has been in the United States, it has been far greater in my own country, England. In fact, while the U.S. is perhaps the world’s largest exporter of educational ideas, it is an “equal opportunity exporter”—pushing out transformative ideas both powerful and catastrophically misinformed. Our efforts in England across a decade to understand the difference between good and bad ideas in education has led to a transformation of our schools from moribund to global leadership at exactly the time the U.S. has continued to struggle.
Many “progressivist” ideas that came to dominate teaching emanated from Teachers College Columbia in New York in the 1920s under such luminaries as William Heard Kilpatrick and John Dewey, based on the ideas of the 18th century Romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He thought that a rigorous academic education stifled the natural creativity and goodness of children; better to have them learn through “self-discovery” or projects than by teacher-led instruction, with less emphasis on the importance of knowledge and more on a set of amorphous skills such as learning how to learn and critical thinking.
These ideas carry different names and have different emphases. But whether it’s “constructivist,” “child-centered,” or “progressivist,” the results wherever they are tried are the same: a weaker education system where children’s life chances, particular those from poorer families, suffer.
Over time in Britain this ideology was increasingly absorbed by our schools, from the 1970s to its peak in the 2000s, and it did enormous damage to our education system. The U.K. plummeted down the OECD rankings of nations’ education standards, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In reading, the U.K. fell from seventh in the year 2000 to 25th by 2009 and in math from 8th to 27th over that period.
Five former players filed a civil lawsuit against Moseley, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and Justin Doherty, who served as the administrator for women’s basketball and retired as UW’s senior associate athletic director for external communications in April. The players claim psychological abuse by Moseley and that Doherty was aware of the issue but took no action to protect the players.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are former Badgers Alexis Duckett, Krystyna Ellew, Mary Ferrito, Tara Stauffacher and Tessa Towers. The lawsuit was filed in District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and seeks compensatory and punitive damages among other penalties.
The ability to read by the end of third grade is a critical skill for a child’s success — not only for the remainder of his or her K-12 journey and later educational outcomes but for future career opportunities, earnings potential, and economic mobility.
Statewide, third-grade reading proficiency has been steadily declining for a number of years. Data from the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment reports nearly 54 percent of third graders aren’t meeting grade-level reading benchmarks.
How does your district measure up? Are reading scores where they should be or is there room for improvement? Use the database below to see reading proficiency results from the 2024 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment. According to the Minnesota Department of Education, students who do not take the test are excluded from the assessment results and do not impact a district’s MCA proficiency calculation.
——-
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.
That’s it. We can throw away all those outdated paper books. Children will learn directly from an AI which, coincidentally, is sold by the company. We can trust their studies on such matters and be assured that they have no ulterior motive.
But, ah my friends, I have told a slight untruth. I didn’t ask that question. Frederick James Smith asked the question to Thomas Edison in 1913. The question was about the new and exciting world of motion pictures.
College-admissions experts note that the rise in these schools’ popularity has allowed them to become more selective, boosting their prestige even further among high-school students.
From 2014 to 2024, the last full year for available admissions data, Auburn University’s freshman-class acceptance rate decreased from 85% to 46%; Clemson University’s dropped from 52% to 38%.
Advertisement
The trend line holds even for the South’s most selective colleges: Rice University’s acceptance rate dipped from 14% to 8%; Emory University’s, from 26% to 15%.
By contrast, elite Northeastern universities have only been able to maintain their enrollments by taking in more foreign students.
Why are young people are flocking to Southern universities?
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today announced U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a criminal illegal alien responsible for driving while intoxicated and causing the fatal car wreck that killed two American teens in Dane County, Wisconsin.
On August 13, 2025, ICE arrested Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila—a criminal illegal alien from Honduras—who struck a vehicle while driving the wrong direction on a highway, killing 18-year-old Hallie Helgeson at the scene on July 20. Martinez-Avila also gravely injured 19-year-old Brady Heiling who died from his injuries on July 25.
Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila was charged with two counts of felony vehicular homicide and impaired driving by Wisconsin law enforcement. ICE lodged an arrest detainer for this illegal alien’s arrest and removal from the country. Despite this sanctuary jurisdiction giving ICE less than an hour notice to make the arrest, ICE nabbed this criminal alien.
One respondent shared a particularly striking personal experience. After transferring from a rural Chinese school to an elite private school in Shenzhen, they witnessed a completely different approach to money and opportunity:
“I remember two incidents vividly: A female classmate said she ‘grabbed’ a 20,000 yuan bag, then sold it for over 50,000 yuan half a month later. Another male student used his network to find ways to make money through importing, eventually trading up to get the latest iPhone. Meanwhile, back in my hometown, most parents couldn’t afford an iPhone 4S even after selling oranges for half a year.”
The contrast isn’t just economic — it’s philosophical. These students weren’t just wealthy; they were entrepreneurially native. They instinctively understood concepts like arbitrage, network effects, and opportunity costs that many adults never grasp.
At some point in junior high, I had to choose a “shop.” My school in Mexico offered some sensible, safe options such as music, typing, and shorthand. But the ones most boys wanted were the two slightly dangerous ones — Electronics and Electricity or Metalwork.
These were not tucked-away electives; they had pride of place at the far end of the schoolyard, in two corrugated steel warehouses butted against each other like twin workshops in a small industrial park.
I chose Electronics and Electricity.
The proximity of the two classes meant a constant back-and-forth — a lot of joking, teasing, and the occasional informal competition to see who could cause more noise or sparks.
In my shop, we learned how to solder electronics and cables together. We played with full-voltage circuits, wired light fixtures, and installed electrical plugs. We were 13 and 14-year-old boys using tools that could burn us, shock us, and — if we ignored the teacher’s warnings — put us in the hospital. The boys next door were welding in full gear, cutting and filing metal, and doing things that came with a real risk of tetanus. I can’t recall a single accident bad enough to stop a class, though there were burns, scrapes, and the occasional singed eyebrow.
And we loved it.
We gave each other electric shocks for fun. We raced to see who could wire a circuit the fastest or the cleanest. There was no discussion about “toxic masculinity” — just a roomful of boys learning to master tools and danger.
A former Chicago Public Schools student has been sentenced to five years in prison for bringing a loaded machine gun to school, but he is not expected to spend any time in an actual prison.
Marquis Terry, 20, pleaded guilty to possession of a machine gun in exchange for the sentence from Judge Kenneth Wadas. However, after receiving a variety of sentencing credits, Terry is not expected to spend any time in prison.
Didja catch the part where he is….20 years oldand still considered a “student”?
The case began on March 20, 2024, when Terry, then 19, was sent home from a field trip with his classmates at Association House High School, 1116 North Kedzie, in Humboldt Park. A Chicago Police Department arrest report said Terry was sent home from the outing in an Uber for “disruptive behavior” that prosecutors said involved smoking marijuana.
That afternoon, the school’s principal searched Terry’s locker, expecting to find more marijuana. Instead, prosecutors said, the principal opened a backpack and discovered a loaded .45-caliber Glock pistol with an extended ammunition magazine and a “switch” device — an illegal attachment that allows pistols to generate automatic gunfire. Police said the gun had been reported stolen from Henderson, Kentucky.
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
A Phoenix Union High School District board meeting turned contentious when board member Jeremiah Cota was blocked from reciting the Lord’s Prayer after being told it could not precede the board’s “land acknowledgement.”
The August 7 incident was captured in a video posted to Cota’s X account, showing the board parliamentarian interrupted the prayer, stating, “We cannot have a religious prayer before the land acknowledgement.”
Land acknowledgements are statements recognizing that an event or institution is located on land historically inhabited or claimed by indigenous peoples. In recent years, many government agencies, universities, and school districts have begun including them at the start of public meetings, often framing them as part of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Cota’s X profile states he is a tribal member of the Free People of the San Carlos Apache.
Tyler Cowen joins Mitch Daniels to explore AI’s promise, economic threats from debt and regulation, and the need for bold, intelligent policy to secure economic growth, innovation, and individual liberty. Cowen discusses his views on immigration, COVID lockdowns and addresses societal fear of confronting rapid technological change.
China has implored officials to hold fewer meetings and slash the length of official reports, ordering a nationwide campaign to tackle the “stubborn and persistent ills” of “formalism and bureaucracy” in the government.
A directive published this week by state media called on officials to “improve document quality”, ensure they “adhere to a ‘short, practical and concise’ writing style” and limit themselves to 5,000 characters.
The statement said departments should reduce the number of official documents they produce annually, and submit a written explanation if the amount increases.
Meetings should also be consolidated and streamlined, the directive said, with speeches not to exceed one hour. The number of people in attendance should be subject to strict controls.
