School Information System

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

The cost of K-12 transparency should be zero

James V. Shuls

How much are you willing to pay to find out what your local public school is teaching? On its face, the question sounds absurd. The cost of transparency should be zero.

When the Show-Me Institute launched the Curriculum Transparency project in 2022, which examined the extent of diversity, equity, and inclusion materials in schools, we sent out Sunshine requests to every school district in the state. In return, we received bills totaling nearly a million dollars ($908,192). For example, Lee’s Summit sought $40,609 to comply with our request.

Notes on School Performance Awareness

Tim Daly:

Fast-forward to 2025. Public satisfaction with schools is the lowest ever recorded. In a recent Gallup survey, respondents were asked to name our nation’s most important problem. Three percentsaid education. Back in 2000, it was five times that many and education topped the list of concerns, beating out perennial hits like crime and taxes.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris barely discussed education on the stump and were not asked about their plans in debates.3

Let’s face it: Education is an also-ran issue. Given that student outcomes are mired in a long depression, that’s worrisome.

How did we get here?

Education’s run as a top public concern was relatively brief, as Rick Hess and others have pointed out. There are several possible explanations for its decline:

Parental School Choice Chat

Shannon Bream:

Video

Florida’s John Kirtley on School Choice

Pioneer Institute:

In this week’s episode of The Learning Curve, co-hosts U-Arkansas Prof. Albert Cheng and American Federation for Children Senior Fellow Shaka Mitchell interview John Kirtley, Managing Partner and co-founder of Keswick Partners, and founder and Chairman of Step Up for Students, a nonprofit that manages Florida’s state-funded K-12 scholarship programs serving over half a million students. Kirtley shares his journey from the private sector into education reform in the late 1990s, and why business leaders must actively engage in shaping K-12 policy. He reflects on Florida’s steady, incremental expansion of school choice programs, explaining how this long-term approach built a critical mass of school choice families despite longstanding opposition, and offers lessons for newer ESA states like Arizona, Texas, and Iowa that seek to accelerate growth. Mr. Kirtley addresses challenges ahead, from ensuring a strong supply of high-quality private schools to managing the complexities of universal ESA programs. He also discusses how to measure and maintain accountability in parent-driven school choice programs, strategies to reverse stagnating NAEP scores, and the opportunities presented by the new federal education tax credit program. Mr. Kirtley also asked that we share this compelling school choice video: Drop The Suit Rally in Tally 2016.

Governance and the University of Virginia

The tussle over democratic control of Virginia’s public universities is turning into a royal rumble. Last week a committee of the state Senate, controlled by Democrats, held a brief meeting to reject 14 of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s appointees to three college boards, on top of eight voted down in June. Republicans argue this action is a legal nullity. Next up, the state Supreme Court?

The president of the University of Virginia resigned recently under Trump Administration pressure over the school’s diversity initiatives. George Mason University (GMU) is under similar heat, after the Education Department found it was “illegally using race” in hiring. State Sen. Aaron Rouse, the Democratic committee chair, claims the moves from Washington aren’t about civil rights but “dismantling public education to advance a partisan agenda.”

Dismantling? Partisan agenda? If the rejections hold for Mr. Youngkin’s 22 picks, GMU will have 10 vacancies of 16 board seats, meaning it generally lacks a quorum to do business, though some governance decisions can be made by its executive committee.

The people voted down weren’t yahoos. At GMU, they include Charles Cooper, a prominent D.C. litigator, Maureen Ohlhausen, who sat on the Federal Trade Commission, and Will Moschella, former principal associate deputy attorney general. Democrats hope their gubernatorial nominee, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, wins in November so she can fill the openings instead.

We know how to make schools effective. What’s lacking is leadership committed to doing so.

Roland Fryer:

In 2012, my graduate student Will Dobbie and I collected unprecedented data from nearly 50 New York City charter schools to see which practices truly boosted student learning. Class size and teacher credentials—political obsessions for decades—mattered little. What mattered most were five concrete, replicable practices:

more instruction time,

high expectations,

frequent teacher feedback,

data-driven instruction and

high-dosage tutoring.

Together, these five tenets explained roughly half the difference between effective and ineffective schools.

Armed with that evidence, we searched for districts willing to test the model—from Haiti to Harlem. Most weren’t interested. But in Houston, superintendent Terry Grier opened the door. Together we applied the Five Tenets in 20 struggling public schools serving nearly 20,000 students. We lengthened the school year by 20%, brought in hundreds of tutors, replaced 95% of principals and half the teachers while retraining the rest, embedded data into instruction, and built a culture of high expectations. It was one of the most ambitious social experiments in American public education.

The results were astonishing. In elementary-school math, students gained the equivalent of four extra months of learning a year—enough to erase the racial achievement gap in less than two years if we implemented these practices in the lowest-performing half of schools nationwide. In secondary schools, where skeptics said reform was impossible, students gained nearly eight additional months of learning in a nine-month school year. These were bigger effects than those produced by the Harlem Children’s Zone. Bigger than Success Academy. Bigger than anything else I’ve seen in my career.

For context, cutting class size yields about three months of extra learning. Teach for America adds two months in math. Head Start delivers about two months in early literacy. The Houston schools doubled those gains—year after year. By the third year, elementary students had accumulated the equivalent of an extra academic year. In middle and high school, it was two. These weren’t “miracle kids” or “superhuman teachers.” The system—not the students—changed.

Math results were jaw-dropping, but reading proved stubborn. Gains were modest in elementary school and nearly zero in secondary school—mirroring what even the best charter schools have found nationwide.

A Tiny Texas High School Football Team Hasn’t Won a Game in Years. They’re Not Giving Up

Jordan Ramp:

You don’t see Fort Hancock coming—until you do. Traveling south along I-10 from El Paso, there are no welcome signs pointing toward the small West Texas town. But then, as you near the Mexican border, there’s that navy blue water tower emblazoned with text looming large against the horizon. “Fort Hancock Mustangs,” it reads. “6-Man State Football Champions.” The writing commemorates the local high school’s football program, which won Texas state titles in 1986 and again every year from 1988–1991.

The water tower is the best-kept structure for miles around; its preservation says a lot about the importance of the sport in an otherwise remote community. But last week, when Fort Hancock High School honored the one hundredth anniversary of its founding ahead of a football game against the visiting Fort Davis Indians, the celebration was less about the way things are than about the way they were thirty years ago, when the home team was winning.

A lot has changed since that run of championships. The Mustangs’ currently own one of the longest losing streaks in the state; their last victory came in October of 2021. When they took the field to start their 2025 season, on August 29, they were chasing a simple goal: to live up to the legacy so vital to their town’s recent history. To win a single game.

Commentary on “ai” and High School

Ashanty Rosario:

AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.

During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.

These incidents were jarring—not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become.

A property tax revolt is spreading

Steve Contorno

The frustration is cutting across partisan lines. Last year, voters in nine states approved referendums to cap or curb rising assessments, from tying bills to inflation in Georgia to New Mexico and Colorado expanding tax exemptions for veterans who own homes there. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Texas, Indiana, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere have approved tens of billions of dollars in property tax relief over the past 18 months.

To some, though, such measures fall short. Grassroots campaigns in Michigan and Ohio are now gathering signatures for ballot initiatives that would abolish property taxes altogether. In Texas, Republican state Rep. Brian Harrison has proposed a state constitutional amendment to end them there by 2031.

“Never-ending property taxes are unethical, immoral and incompatible with private property rights,” Harrison said, “and need to be thrown to the ash heap of history.”

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Chicago school board votes down payday loan for pension costs

Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider:

By the way, Mr. Johnson’s appointees control the board 11-10. Its previous members resigned en masse in October, amid a showdown with the now-fired Chicago Public Schools Chief Pedro Martinez, who opposed the mayor’s last high-risk borrowing plan. That proposal failed, but Mr. Johnson stacked the board with new members whom he expected to get with the progressive program. Instead, the board has reached the same conclusion about Mr. Johnson’s reckless borrowing, and all the new board members elected by voters last fall voted no.

Everyone in Chicago knows his loan gambit would have made the fiscal problem worse for CPS, which is already under a pile of debt. When Mr. Johnson first floated the idea of short-term borrowing last year, an internal schools memo reported by Chalkbeat Chicago noted that taking out more loans would doom its already lousy bond rating.

“This could be thought of as putting your credit card payments that you can no longer afford on your mortgage payments,” the memo said. “It allows cash to be freed up for other expenses, but it seeds a costly legacy of future amounts of larger debt to be paid back and it does not solve the issue of being fiscally responsible.”

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Stanford’s Graduate Student Union Tries to Stifle Dissent

Jon Hartley:

I’m working as a teaching assistant while studying for a doctorate in economics at Stanford, but a campus union is trying to get me fired. The Stanford Graduate Workers Union wants my head on a plate because I refused to sign a membership form and pay dues. I won’t fund an organization whose values and tactics I don’t support.

In June, the union began seeking to bar graduate students who refuse to pay dues or agency fees from working as teaching or research assistants. That threat is now a reality. The university has told me and several other teaching assistants that we will be fired unless we pay up.

At the University of Chicago, graduate students in a similar position have taken their union to federal court, arguing that forced support of the union violates their constitutional rights. In Graduate Students for Academic Freedom v. Graduate Students United, the plaintiffs—including Jewish students—say they are being compelled to fund a union that promotes the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, a stance they view as antisemitic.

The graduate unions at both Stanford and Chicago are registered as local chapters of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a national union that funds progressive activism. In 2015, it became the first national union to support the BDS movement. The Chicago lawsuit, filed in July 2024, invokes Janus v. Afscme, the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling that public employees can’t be forced to subsidize political speech they disagree with. The Stanford Graduate Workers Union similarly adopted an anti-Israel statement in 2023.

Textbook Bias Is a Real Problem

Anna Low:

Skim through the voting section of McGraw Hill’s civics textbook, and you’ll see images from Hillary Clinton’s and Elizabeth Warren’s campaigns (whilst any campaign photos of a certain recent victor who won the popular election are notably absent). Grab the same publisher’s World Historytextbook, and you’ll read that the First Intifada was a “mostly unarmed uprising against Israeli occupation,” conveniently omitting discussion of the 200 murdered Jews. A small oversight, some might say.

Despite conservative efforts to remove DEI, CRT, and other suspect ideologies from classrooms, progressivism remains entrenched in the institutions of American education, including schools of education, accreditors and authorizers, school boards, curricula, unions (duh), publications and conferences, and professional organizations.

Many of these have faced scrutiny, but the multibillion-dollar textbook industry — dominated by major players like Scholastic, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill — has gone largely unexamined. And scrutiny they deserve. At the corporate level, they rival liberal arts campuses in their progressive orthodoxies.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Municipal Spending & Debt Practices

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Total operating spending across Wisconsin cities and villages increased sharply in 2023 after a period of high inflation, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum’s 2025 Municipal DataTool. That was essentially the case in southern Ozaukee County municipalities, though at least one saw a significant jump while another’s spending dropped. The report, released last week, looks at a decade of operating spending using reports compiled by the state Department of Revenue for 2023 and 2024. Dashboards within the tool focus on property taxes, municipal spending, debt, fund balances, shared revenue (a key form of state aid), property values and income and population.

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.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Middle Class Squeeze

More U.S. consumers now say they’re dialing down spending than when inflation spiked in 2022. Over 70% of people surveyed from May to July plan to tighten their budgets for items with large price increases in the year ahead, according to the University of Michigan’s economic sentiment survey.

High earners were much more likely to keep spending as usual, Joanne Hsu, the Michigan survey’s director, said in her analysis.

Executives at IHOP, McDonald’s and Denny’s have said their middle-class customers are on the hunt for deals, while many lower-income diners are staying away altogether.

At IHOP, customers are choosing cheaper menu items and buying fewer drinks. Denny’s data showed more people who make between $50,000 and $75,000 are coming in for promotions like its $5 breakfast.

Remember the Children of Annunciation

Matthew Hennessey:

The murder of children is a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance. If something like Wednesday’s bloodletting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis had happened only once in our nation’s history, it would be the kind of thing to stop every one of us dead in our tracks. Yet it’s happening with regularity, and the great American spectacle keeps rolling along.

The sad reality is that the shock of Minneapolis wore off by kickoff on Saturday. College football is back. Pumpkin spice is coming. Life rumbles on.

I don’t say this to shame you. I’m as guilty as anyone of avoidance and distraction. The daily pressures of household and work are relentless. They demand attention. But snap out of it. Remind yourself that in the United States of America a madman killed two children and wounded 18 in a church attached to a school. It was less than a week ago. Remember, if you can, how your first thought was to wonder what it would feel like if it had been your children in those pews, diving for cover as stained glass rained down around them—your children in a complete panic, your children crying out in fear, your children lying dead in pools of blood.

What is to be done? Complacency in the face of such evil is unforgivable.

Arming teachers isn’t the solution. That’s too much to ask of those whose greatest joy in life is to see the pride of accomplishment in a child’s eyes. I’m not one to put a halo on teachers, but I can’t see the wisdom in putting holsters on them either. That’s a road we could go down only after first admitting that something essential about America has been permanently broken. Kids deserve to learn in pleasant and inviting environments, not behind fortress walls.

Teen jobless rates are higher in states with higher minimum wages

Most economic research shows high minimum wages increase teen unemployment, though there are no doubt other contributors. In a tight labor market, wage mandates may have less of an effect on hiring. But when the economy cools and competition for labor weakens, higher minimums make it more costly to hire teens.

The upshot is that teens lose chances to learn critical life skills, such as showing up on time, following orders and juggling tasks. Politicians love to claim credit for raising the minimum wage, but they never consider the unintended casualties—idle young people who will be less equipped for future careers and life.

USA 250: Meet Abigail Adams, the Warren Buffett of Revolutionary America

Jeanne Abrams:

Abigail Adams has been celebrated in popular culture as a strong, brilliant woman who was an indispensable political adviser to her husband, John Adams, and a savvy steward of the family homestead.

But there was another side to Abigail Adams that hasn’t drawn nearly as much attention: She was also an astute, successful businesswoman and investor.

Her skills certainly didn’t go unnoticed in her time. Thomas Jefferson, for one, saw her as exceptional in her grasp of business matters. He described her as one of the “most attentive and honourable economists” in a letter to James Madison, and he praised her financial acumen and her direction of the couple’s financial affairs while John Adams was stationed in Europe on behalf of the fledgling American government.

Building a business

Indeed, Jefferson could have used her help with his own finances. Although he was a member of Virginia’s aristocratic planter class, he notoriously died in significant debt. He overspent on home remodeling and luxuries, including exquisite furnishings, artworks and hundreds of bottles of fine wine he brought back from his stint in Paris as the American minister to France.

“Woke broke Sun Prairie High School”

David Blaska

Your irascible host is a proud graduate of Sun Prairie Sr. High School, Class of 19xx … well, never mind. The farm village of our youth had a working blacksmith (he was village president) and a harness maker on Main Street. In the years since, the city has grown more populous than Manitowoc, requiring two brand new high schools in striking new buildings. The newest, SP West, opened in 2022 and serves 1,300 students 9-12.

Since our school days in detention hall, a bad case of diversity, equity, and inclusion has infected Sun Prairie’s public schools no less than Madison’s. The troubles afflicting them are a direct result of educators’ obsession with race.

The city is in a justifiable uproar over the criminal charges brought against the dean of students at SP West of sexual exploitation of a child (two counts) and 13 counts of possession of child pornography — all felonies. Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier allegedly bought booze for under-age girls in exchange for nude photos, secretly took 200 photos of girls, and engaged in sex acts on school grounds. The dean of students!

He’s the third district employee to be charged with sexual misconduct involving students since December 2022!

Not even a teacher’s license!

Nothing that we have seen dispels the notion that Gilkey-Meisegeier was a DEI hire. A long and distinguished academic career? The man didn’t even have a teachers license! The WI Dept of Instruction was quoted to saythat Gilkey-Meisegeier had applied for a teaching license but failed to complete the necessary steps to be granted one! Plus, he was only 28 years old when he took the job in the 2023-24 school year! The school district said it waived away several previous arrests for drunk driving on the grounds that it is illegal to deny employment for an offense unrelated to his job duties. Was he the only applicant?!

“I have tried to understand how we could spend so much money on big city schools and get such terrible results”

New Gingrich:

I could never understand why the education bureaucracies and teachers’ unions could tolerate terrible outcomes for millions of children (most of them poor and minority) and do nothing to fix the system. Then I read “Failure Factory.” Now, I see the corruption clearly. Papst has done the entire country an enormous service by exposing this astonishing record of failure.

Baltimore City Schools spent $1.7 billion in 2024 (up from $1.3 billion in 2017). That year, only 10 percent of the students scored proficient in math. In 2017, 11 percent of students met mathematics proficiency requirements. Further, student enrollment dropped from 82,354 in 2017 to 75,811 in 2024. So, taxpayers paid $400 million a year more for 6,543 fewer students – and math scores got worse.

Local reformers have no hope of getting real change, because the unions who make a living off the school system wield the power. Virtually every administrator (730 administrative staff) and most of the teachers (4,930) form an army for defending the indefensible. They care about their paychecks, not educational achievement.

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Chicago Public Schools Now Have a Junk Credit Rating. What’s Next?

Thomas Savidge

As debt service continues to devour an already unsustainable budget, do not expect student learning outcomes to improve.

On August 28, 2025, Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the fourth-largest school district in the US,passed a $10.2 billion budget and is facing a $743 million deficit. Prior to the budget passage, the big three credit rating agencies each rated CPS General Obligation (GO) Bonds “non-investment grade speculative,” also known by the more pejorative title “junk bonds.” CPS bonds receiveda Ba1 rating from Moody’s and a BB+ rating from both S&P Global and Fitch Ratings.

The name “junk” refers to the risk that investors face that CPS will not make interest payments or repay the principal when the bond fully matures. To offset this risk, junk bonds offer high interest rates to attract investors. This is especially significant because GO bonds are backed by “the full faith and credit” of CPS, meaning the district promises to use all existing revenue to pay back the debt and, if necessary, raise new taxes to pay the debt.

Unfortunately, these ratings are justified. Research from the Illinois Policy Institute found that CPS suffers from chronic budget deficits as well as billions of dollars in debt and unfunded pension liabilities despite record-high operating revenue. The problem is persistent overspending. As my colleague Corey DeAngelis wrote, CPS officials and staff “put their own desires before the needs of children.”

The situation at CPS, however, will not be contained within Chicago. The budget stress could put additional stress on the state of Illinois, which is already teetering on the edge of the fiscal cliff.

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

James J. Heckman and Sadegh Eshaghnia

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

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

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

Student Housing Inequality

The Leading Edge

In effect, some institutions have created “neighborhoods” on university campuses separated by wealth. This practice resembles the segregated socio-economic layout of many American cities, where the wealthy cluster in one area of town and those of lesser financial means live “on the other side of the tracks.”

Does luxury housing and the price gaps in residence hall housing shape student experience and academic performance? I assembled a research team funded by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International (ACUHO-I) to tackle this question. What we discovered after two years of data collection should concern administrators and students alike. Universities became so focused on attracting students through admissions that they overlooked how housing policies would affect those same students once enrolled.

UW-Madison Budget Notes: Law School Edition

Liam Beran:

Several UW Law School employees, including the director of the school’s public defender training clinic, have been laid off in response to mandatory university-wide budget cuts.

“None of us wanted to make layoffs or reduce hours but, given that the vast majority of our [general] revenue goes towards salary, there was unfortunately no way of avoiding that,” UW Law Dean Dan Tokaji wrote in an Aug. 7 email to all staff and faculty. “We have notified those who will be most directly affected by those cuts, and do not anticipate that further cuts of this nature will be necessary in the coming academic year.”

Greg Bump, UW-Madison assistant director of media relations, says in an email that he does “not have” the exact number of layoffs but suggested that Isthmus file a public records request for the number.

Tokaji wrote that the actions were necessitated by an order in June from UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin directing the university’s schools and colleges to cut 5% of their budgets for the coming fiscal year. Mnookin cited federal “uncertainty and risks” in directing the cuts. University officials have instructed division heads that layoffs are meant to be a “last resort.”

The law school is also cutting funds for supplies and other expenses, including travel, catering and library acquisitions, according to Tokaji’s email.

Sports and Speech

Corrinne Hess:

There were parents who took part, there was a WIAA official who took part, no one stepped up to help the kids,” Byrd said.

After the incident, Waterford Union High School District conducted an investigation. According to district findings, volunteers were intentionally mispronouncing students’ names, middle school students were referring to Rufus King students as “gangsters,” and a WIAA meet official used racially insensitive language directed at a King athlete.

Byrd said her daughter was “shaken and upset.”

“It’s one of those things you see on TV but doesn’t seem real,” Byrd said. “But it was real that day.”

The school released a statement, saying officials were “committed to holding students accountable.”

The Waterford incident wasn’t an isolated event.

Academia’s Quiet Aristocracy: Revolutionizing Research Assessment Through Open Inquiry

Farid Zaid:

Yet nowhere does the principle reshape outcomes more quietly – and more consequentially – than in academia, where it is not just results but the architecture of ambition itself that bends to its logic.

Universities present themselves as arenas of merit, where brilliance rises naturally toward recognition. Yet in reality, the world of journal publishing, citation counts, and institutional prestige resembles a reputation marketplaceskewed by legacy and access. Influence compounds along familiar lines, while those outside established networks find themselves locked out of visibility, relevance, and reward. Innovation, it seems – unless safely packaged – is a dangerous wager. And so, countless ideas, like that buried talent, are hidden away before they are ever given a chance to grow.

Metrics were meant to illuminate excellence.But instead of casting light, they have thickened the shadows – entrenching privilege, narrowing inquiry, and rewarding only those already standing in the spotlight.

The idea that scholarly excellence could be measured with precision is a relatively recent invention. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF), introduced in the mid-twentieth century, marked the beginning of this shift – offering first libraries and then academic publishers, universities, and funding agencies a seemingly neutral way to quantify influence and impose order on the ambiguity of peer judgment. Over time, additional metrics such as citation counts, universityand journal rankings, and the h-index amplified this logic, promising to identify scholarly value with algorithmic efficiency. It was a technocratic vision of academic meritocracy: detached, rational, transparent, and fair.

“The neighborhood where a child grows up matters much less to his success than what his parents do”

What drives social mobility? The answer matters to policymakers and families alike. A wave of highly publicized research has led public policy and public discussions astray. It claims that the neighborhood a child lives in is the key factor that shapes his life. While this idea has been around for decades, it has recently gained more traction. Mainstream media have promoted the idea in article after article, arguing that ZIP Code is destiny and a major source of inequality in the U.S.

If the causal relationship between neighborhoods and child outcomes is strong, policymakers can implement a simple and effective solution: relocate struggling families to residential areas with better conditions. But this has been tried. In the 1990s the Department of Housing and Urban Development moved families out of high-poverty neighborhoods in the so-called Moving to Opportunity experiment. Moving to a better neighborhood had some benefits, but it didn’t improve employment outcomes for adults or educational outcomes for youths.

“Families spent fortunes on tutoring classes, students faced suffocating pressure”

Ma Junjie:

…. (with suicides after exam setbacks becoming grimly familiar), and entrepreneurs spoke endlessly about their “success stories” while quietly burying the unseemly details of how their first fortunes were made. In a country obsessed with upward mobility, failure was unforgivable.

I was born in Hebei, one of the provinces once derisively referred to as part of China’s “Mountains-and-Rivers Four” – regions known for scarce educational resources and overwhelming populations. For generations, students there have endured the brutal gauntlet of the gaokao, the college entrance exam often described as “thousands of troops crossing a single-plank bridge.” More than a decade ago, I was one of the few who managed to cross it. The exam changed my life: I left the countryside, entered the city, studied abroad, and eventually became an urban resident. For years, my story was retold in my hometown as a model of success, a reminder to parents that education could still offer an escape from China’s entrenched urban-rural divide and the cruel “scissors gap” of opportunity.

Yet on my most recent trips back, I was struck by conversations that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago. Parents no longer speak obsessively about their children’s test scores. Instead, they share a grim realism: even in the cities, prospects are bleak. The coveted positions in state-owned monopolies are all captured by the children of officials and state-owned enterprise (SOE) executives. Private firms are synonymous with endless overtime and burnout. Low-end work – delivering food, driving ride-hailing cars, cleaning homes, or working as security guards – barely sustains a living and is seen as no more dignified than staying in the village, marrying early, and caring for aging parents.

Notes on the Taxpayer Funded Madison School District’s Grading Policies

Former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:

Well, okay, so not the whole board. Just one and a half of the seven members. Those members are Nicki Vander Meulen and Martha Siravo. The issue is weighted grading. The state of Wisconsin has set up a system that guarantees admission to the highly sought after Madison campus to high school students who rank in the top 5% of their class. Those in the top 10% are automatically admitted to other schools in the system.

That has made class ranking more important than ever, so the question now arises how fair those rankings are. If a student leans on easier courses and pulls a 4.0, she can rank above another student who takes the most rigorous courses and earns a 3.9. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Well, that’s what Vander Meulen thinks. Siravo says she’s not sure, but she’s justifiably unhappy that the administration of Superintendent Joe Gothard made that decision without consulting the board and has been slow to answer her questions about the policy.

The official administration answer is: “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,”

“fears of too many parents who worry that Madison’s public schools are not rigorous enough.”

“I think most of these policies (“equitable grading”) are not good for math students”

Joye Walker:

I am OK with test retakes (one per test) if a student scored below 75% on a test, and the maximum possible retake score is 75%. It encourages students to do their best the first time rather than try to play the system (which is what they do), and it allows for some recovery for the good student who bombs one test.

I am very OK with zeros, particularly on homework that is not attempted. In my experience, completing homework is a very valuable part of learning math. Each day, I cruised the room and looked at everyone’s homework. Sometimes I was spot checking but mostly, I was looking for problems that students had with it. In precalculus honors, for example, there were usually three or four problems that gave many students problems, and I always addressed all questions. Occasionally, I assigned a problem that only a handful of students would/could do, and that was OK. It challenged the top students and I always made it clear that such problems wouldn’t be on any test.

I am also OK with zeros for tests or quizzes that were never taken.

One policy I didn’t see listed was the one about deadlines. The last year that I taught, we couldn’t impose deadlines on anything, so that, for example, a student could turn in a large stack of homework on the last day of the trimester and we were expected to accept it without penalty. I am very opposed to this because the idea of homework is that it facilitated learning as we moved toward a test. It was counted as zero points once we took the test over that chapter.

“fears of too many parents who worry that Madison’s public schools are not rigorous enough”

Taxpayer Funded “Madison West High School had the most police calls for service last school year”

Chris Rickert:

…. of any district middle or high school, data from the police department show.

Police responded to the school at 30 Ash St. 185 times between Sept. 3, 2024, and June 11, or about once every 1.5 days. That would include calls about issues outside the school that might not have anything to do with the school’s students or staff.

Police responded to four battery calls, for example, and two for traffic-related hit-and-runs.

The vast plurality of the calls, 65, are for “stratified policing” — a police department term indicating that police are meeting at the school about ongoing public safety issues and not for particular incidents.

Police spokesperson Anthony Vogel said that officers generate the call type to show they are “providing a police presence” in an area.

Five years after the Madison School Board voted to remove school resource officers from the four main high schools, West had by far the most such police presence call types of any of the four schools. There were only 20 at Memorial last year, four at La Follette and four at East.

The police department’s records custodian redacted the reasons for three calls to West, saying “the information contains highly personal details related to a sensitive investigation and disclosing it would likely harm important public interests without providing any significant benefit to the public.”

——-

Gangs and School Violence Forum

Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006. More.

——-

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

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 end of critical thinking in the classroom

By Ashanty Rosario

During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.

These incidents were jarring—not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become. Many homework assignments are due by 11:59 p.m., to be submitted online via Google Classroom. We used to share memes about pounding away at the keyboard at 11:57, anxiously rushing to complete our work on time. These moments were not fun, exactly, but they did draw students together in a shared academic experience. Many of us were propelled by a kind of frantic productivity as we approached midnight, putting the finishing touches on our ideas and work. Now the deadline has been sapped of all meaning. AI has softened the consequences of procrastination and led many students to avoid doing any work at all. As a result, these programs have destroyed much of what tied us together as students. There is little intensity anymore. Relatively few students seem to feel that the work is urgent or that they need to sharpen their own mind. We are struggling to receive the lessons of discipline that used to come from having to complete complicated work on a tight deadline, because chatbots promise to complete our tasks in seconds.

Milwaukee proposes a move to a pre-K-6 and 7-12 grade model

Corrinne Hess:

She wants to move to a pre-k-6 and 7-12 “junior high” model.

The junior high students would be located in MPS high schools, Cassellius said.

“With some modernization, those facilities could really be wonderful school environments for our students to be able to do career programming,” Cassellius said. “I think it would give a more well-rounded education to our students.”

Any changes to grade configurations would need approval from the Milwaukee Board of School Directors.

Gov. Tony Evers’ instructional audit released in June confirmed that having too many different grade spans makes improvement and accountability efforts difficult, said MPS School Board President Missy Zombor.

Surrogate Mom for Students

Sabine Martin:

Morgan’s most popular service is birthday trunk reveals.

“I work with the families to curate very specifically to their student what they would like them to have, taking into account allergies, favorite items from home, just very, very specific to their Badger traditions, cultures, maybe things they’ve always done growing up, and then rolling that into an experience for the student,” Morgan said.

A look at Business School Faculty Pay

Michelle Lowry:

We examine the determinants of business school faculty pay, using detailed data on compensation, research, teaching, and administrative service. We estimate that a top-tier journal publication is worth $116,000, with significant variation across disciplines. Second-tier publications are worth one-third as much, and other publications have no impact. Further analysis of salaries and cross-discipline publication records suggests that researchers are compensated based on the journals they publish in rather than the departments they belong to. Conference presentations and teaching evaluations have significant but smaller effects than top-tier publications. Faculty administrators earn a premium, with department chairs receiving 11-35% and deans 58-94%. Post-Covid-19, real faculty pay has fallen more than in comparable fields and the sensitivity of pay to research performance has weakened.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: “A failure to spend less is at the root of the country’s political problems”

:

That number underlies the crisis. With France’s budget deficit hitting 5.8 per cent of GDP, François Bayrou, the fourth prime minister since 2024, wants to cut €44bn from the ever-expanding budget. Since parliament won’t let him, he’ll probably lose a vote of confidence on Monday. Then on Wednesday, protests and strikes aim to “block” an already blocked country. Why can’t France spend less? And where might this end?

Contrary to popular belief, France’s state wasn’t always massive. At liberation in 1944, many people lived on farms without even rudimentary public services, such as electricity or running water. Pensions used to be ungenerous. In 1970, the effective average age of retirement was 68, exactly the age at which the average French man (in an era when most workers were men) died. In 1995, six governments of developed countries were higher spenders than France.

Then, when the euro arrived in 2002, French politicians calculated that with the European Central Bank printing their money, they could spend with impunity. The prodigality peaked in pensions: French retirement now averages 25 years, about the longest in human history. But spending is also relatively high on health, infrastructure in cities (though not in France’s vast countryside), and — oddly for an obsessively over-centralised country — on local civil servants. Meanwhile, France’s private sector has borrowed merrily too.

French politics is personalised around the figure of the president. After the former Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron got the job in 2017, the word “neoliberal” pervaded French discourse. France is now routinely described as a “neoliberal wasteland”, its state supposedly slashed by Thatcherites. In the new post-truth era, other absurd beliefs went mainstream, such as the notion that France was uniquely cursed (as witness world-leading French pessimism in opinion polls) or that it was heading for racial civil war.

….

Because France overspends domestically, it can’t afford to help Europe resist Vladimir Putin. Its defence budget is still only 2 per cent of GDP. I recently visited a weapons factory that makes surveillance drones. I imagined it was producing thousands, but was told, “The French military has 14.”

NIL Open Records Request Response

NIL = “Name Image Licensing”

University of Wisconsin Madison Public Records // Athletic Department.

“sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s”

The Economist:

A blunter explanation is that people just cannot be bothered. Professor Bate got everyone in a bate with his comments about students not reading: saying such things, he admits, might seem “old fogeyish”. Speak to professors, however and they all lament their students’ waning attention spans. When Professor Rose began teaching, he taught “Bleak House”. He would not attempt it today, he says, partly because of “constant pressure” from university deans to “assign less and less and less reading” and partly because “students simply won’t read it”. In multiple surveys young people describe reading as “boring” and “a chore”.

It is possible to say: who cares? English professors may well lament a fall in literacy, but that may be simple self-interest: less a concern about a declining custom than a declining number of customers. Yet literacy affects more than university reading lists. For one thing, increasing literary sophistication seems to lead to increasing political sophistication. At its simplest, Athenians in the fifth century BC could begin to practise “ostracism”—voting to banish people by writing their name on ostraka, scraps of pots—because, as William Harris, an academic, points out, they had achieved “a certain amount of literacy”.

By contrast, decreasing literary sophistication may lead to decreasing political sophistication. Our analysis of Britain’s parliamentary speeches found that they have shrunk by a third in a decade. We also analysed almost 250 years of inaugural presidential addresses using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. George Washington’s scored 28.7, denoting postgraduate level, while Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, the reading level of a high-schooler.

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

“2/3 are not proficient”

Richard Belcher:

Even with some improvements, I don’t see a single Dekalb grade in which more than 35% of students are proficient in math or literacy. So 2/3 are not proficient. Damn!

Civics: A look at the United Kingdom

Mr Star:

In the past few years, however, this kind of parochial reputation has fallen to the wayside as a far darker, more ominous picture of the United Kingdom has taken shape. ‘The Yookay’ (coined, I believe, by Mythoyookay) has come to describe, in all its bizarre and misshapen glory, the haunting aesthetics replacement migration has introduced to the quintessential and quaint England that many had in their heads. Meanwhile, the work of men like Adam Wren to uncover and catalogue the insanity of the grooming gang situation and the seemingly still ongoing cover-up surrounding it, has darkened the reputation of the entire nation to all who learn about it. ‘Adventure travel’ Youtubers like Bald and Bankrupt have gone as far as to film themselves ‘exploring’ the impoverished slums of Northern England – revealing scenes that seem reminiscent of ‘“a collapsing civilization” as one Youtube commenter put it.

Civics: Censorship, Free Speech and the UK

Ann Althouse Summary:

Lineham recently talked to Joe Rogan for 3 hours, embedded below. I’ve listened to it in full. Lineham is very intense on the subject of censorship and transgender issues and women’s rights. It’s hard to notice from America, but he is a substantial pop culture figure in the UK and Ireland, and it’s painful to see him persecuted.

Virginia Higher Education Governance

The legal question is whether these 22 board members have in fact been rejected. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares told the schools in a June letter that the power to refuse confirmation of Mr. Youngkin’s appointees “rests with the General Assembly as a whole,” and it “requires more than action by a single committee of one house.” If so, they could keep serving until the next legislative session. A Fairfax County judge ruled against that view in July, which is what’s being appealed.

This legal limbo is a particular problem for GMU, which faces a deadline to resolve allegations that it violated the Civil Rights Act. In late August the Education Department offered the school 10 days to accept its terms, which included a public apology from President Gregory Washington. So far he has declined.

“An apology will amount to an admission that the university did something unlawful,” his attorney wrote to GMU’s board. The government’s claim that the school discriminated in hiring and promotion “borders on the absurd,” the letter said, arguing that “no job applicant has been discriminated against by GMU,” and the Education Department is misconstruing Mr. Washington’s remarks on diversity.

At risk is millions in federal research funding for GMU, which doesn’t have a huge endowment like Harvard or other private schools that have tangled with the White House. In recent years a $1.5 million grant supported GMU research on “underwater explosions and their effects on civil engineering infrastructure,” and $3.2 million funded a project with an Army institute to study hemorrhagic diseases.

Perhaps one way out of this mess would be to fire Mr. Washington, though can the board do that if it lacks a quorum? In a Friday statement, the board said it hopes to negotiate with the Education Department. If that fails and Mr. Washington won’t bend, then Democrats may have locked George Mason into legal liability and thrown away the keys.

“Superhero” Thoreau Special Education Teacher Challenges Madison’s Race-Laden Scoring System

WILL:

The News: WILL has filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) on behalf of Kally Bishop, a highly skilled special education teacher at Thoreau Elementary, a part of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). Kally was “surplussed” or involuntarily transferred over less qualified teachers based on the District’s race-laden scoring system. WILL’s complaint with the EEOC is the first step to taking legal action against the school district.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, stated, “MMSD’s hyper focus on race is both wrong and illegal. The unfortunate and entirely predictable result is the District losing one of its best teachers at the expense of its most vulnerable students. We hope that this case exposes how the District’s rubric is being applied.”

WILL Client, Kally Bishop, stated, “I loved my job at Thoreau Elementary and was heartbroken to be forced out after so many years there. No teacher or student should ever be discriminated against based on their race.”

Our Client: Kally was a Cross-Categorical Teacher at Thoreau Elementary, a position that focuses on students with disabilities. Kally specifically worked with non-verbal students who struggle with basic communication skills. During her career, Kally has worked hard to develop techniques to help these students succeed and reach their highest potential. She loved her job at Thoreau and gained the trust and respect of both parents and her peers.

MMSD’s Scoring System Raises Serious Questions: In 2021, MMSD adopted a new scoring system for determining how educators are surplussed. Seniority was replaced by a weighted “rubric” of four scores, but the highest, by far, is so-called “culturally responsive practices.” This criterion is heavily race-based, openly encouraging teachers to prioritize “students of color” over other students to receive the highest score. When this new system was adopted, the superintendent and the school board told the public that it was intended and designed to protect “teachers of color.” And the circumstances surrounding Kally’s transfer are highly suspicious and suggest that this scoring system was applied, in practice, as a proxy for race discrimination.

“fears of too many parents who worry that Madison’s public schools are not rigorous enough”

Wisconsin State Journal:

new state law requires the Universities of Wisconsin System to admit any high school student who finishes in the top 5% of their class to its flagship campus, UW-Madison. Students who finish in the top 10% of their class get direct admission to most other UW System schools. It’s a great program to encourage more bright students to attend one of Wisconsin’s fine universities.

2 Madison School Board members criticize administration on weighted grading

Chris Rickert | Wisconsin State Journal

But the program has caused some problems in the Madison School District. Madison wasn’t used to ranking high school students by GPA and has had to adopt some new policies. One controversial choice was to not weight a student’s GPA based on course difficulty. That means a student who coasts through easy courses can have a higher GPA than students who challenge themselves with honors and AP classes.

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

Doomscrolling, poor literacy instruction, and overscheduling are some of the reasons cited for a generational decline in students reading for pleasure.

Greg Toppo:

A quarter-century ago, David Saylor shepherded the epic Harry Potter fantasy series onto U.S. bookshelves. As creative director of children’s publisher Scholastic, he helped design and execute the American editions of the first three novels in the late 1990s.

But when the manuscript for J.K. Rowling’s fourth book landed on his desk, Saylor sat up straight: It was huge. Bigger, more complex and narratively intricate than virtually any storybook ever aimed at children.

“I had to really think,” he said in a recent interview. “‘How are we going to typeset this book? How are we going to print a million copies? How are we going to get enough paper?’”

——

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Jordana Hunter and Nick Parkinson

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

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

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

Why teach calculus in the age of AI

Pablo Rodríguez Sánchez

Enters technology

For several decades now, it is possible to solve these problems using symbolic computation software packages, available for computers and even for some pocket calculators. Since the explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines, access to such tools is easier than ever. So, if you want to know the derivative of some function, you can just ask your favourite AI engine via your smartphone, and you’ll (most likely) get the correct answer.

All of this raises a valid question: why bother learning all those tedious methods

The best antidote for maths anxiety is great teaching

Adults use maths every day, whether it’s to compare grocery prices, pay bills or interpret statistics in the news.

Adults with weak maths skills are more likely to struggle with employment, have poor mental healthand suffer homelessness.

When students feel anxious about maths, it can impede their performance.

While a little stress is actually helpful — it means we care and helps us focus — too much stress jams up our working memory, which we need to solve maths problems.

Students with high anxiety might make careless errors, misinterpret questions or sit staring vacantly at a maths problem, too overwhelmed to start.

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More.

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

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Civics: Gerrymandering Wars

Michael Bahareen:

Perhaps even more troubling than court battles is the growing normalcy of political persecution. Democrats surely believe their efforts to pursue impeachment and, later, legal action against Trump were sound and morally right. But in an era whose political ethos seems to be defined by “their side did it first,” Republicans inevitably saw these and other actionsas little more than retribution against a president whose politics Democrats did not like. They have thus become very supportive of Trump’s second-term efforts to go after people whom they don’t like.

Gerrymandering is just the latest front in this war. And while it’s true that Republicans fired the first shot with their 2010 project REDMAP and did so again by pursuing mid-decade redistricting, Democrats’ hands certainly aren’t clean here, either. But what is most worrisome is that this latest escalation is undoubtedly setting a new precedent for future redistricting. The parties will now see it as imperative to not only draw as favorable maps as possible in states that they control but to do it whenever they feel like it. Failing to do so, the thinking will go, could consign them to minority status in the House for years. An easy fix would be a federal ban on political gerrymandering, which House Democrats proposed in 2019 but did not see through.

Notes and links on gerrymandering.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Property Taxes

Jeff Fong:

Despite the fact that getting rid of property taxes is Not a Good Idea, that doesn’t mean that existing property tax regimes are necessarily optimal. Property taxes, after all, punish development because they factor in the value of the house or whatever other structure happens to be built on top.6 Instead of abolishing property taxes, shifting to land value taxation (LVT) would constitute an actual improvement.

In brief, an LVT works like a property tax, but only applies to the value of a parcel’s land (i.e. it doesn’t tax the value of any buildings or infrastructure on top). So, if you own a $350,000 property where the land component is worth $50,000 (and the building is valued at $300,000) an LVT would only tax you based on the $50,000 value of your land.

civics: “Because the incentives aren’t there”

Eric S Raymond:

Public service announcement: there is an extremely easy way to tell when you can trust the experts and “follow the science”, versus when you can’t.

The corruption of science has a purpose, and the purpose is to provide rationalizations for the assertion of political power.

Anytime you hear scientists and experts saying something that operates as a rationale for politicians to Do Something, the way to bet is that you’re being scammed.

Conversely, politically neutral science is almost never corrupted by anything worse than petty careerism. Because the incentives aren’t there.

Some of us learned this 40 years ago from contemplating the “scientific” literature on firearms policy. Took the lies and gaslighting around COVID to make the general public aware.

The biggest political earthquake is yet to come, around the utter neo-Lysenkoist travesty that “climate science” has become.

Taxpayer Funded Madison Grading: “students who do well in harder courses could end up being ranked the same as students who do well in less-challenging courses”

Chris Rickert:

Madison last week announced that it would not shift to weighted grading for the purposes of the Wisconsin Guarantee, and it has posted its policy for what to do when there are ties among the top 5% and 10% of students.

Essentially, every student with a GPA that places them in the top 5% or 10% of their class will have that designation noted on their transcripts, even if that means that more than 5% or 10% of the total class is designated as such.

The district gives the example of a class of 574 students. Five percent of 574 is about 28, but if more than that number of students have GPAs that put them in the top 5% — because their GPAs are the same — then all those of those students will be considered in the top 5%.

“If more than the top 28 are tied by GPA, all of these students will have the ‘top 5%’ of class notation on their transcript,” the district policy says. “For example, if 41 students are tied for the top 5% by GPA, all 41 students will receive the top 5% notation.”

The same expansive approach would also apply to those deemed in the top 10%.

In a statement from its communications office, the district points to the letter of the law for why it believes this approach is legal.

The district “identifies its students in the top 5% and top 10% based on students’ GPAs as the sole criterion,” it said, adding that it’s not ranking students who fall outside of the top 10%.

The communications director for Republican state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, the law’s main author, said the law does not “contemplate” Madison’s approach to calculating the top 5% and 10% of students.

———

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

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

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

The California Teachers Association (CTA) has given $3 million to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign for Proposition 50, a redistricting measure that will appear on the state’s Nov. 4, ballot

CJ Womack:

The CTA contribution, filed Aug. 23, went directly to “The Election Rigging Response Act, Governor Newsom’s Ballot Measure Committee,” which backs Prop 50.

The measure originated from a three-bill package in July, where Democrats used a “gut-and-amend” tactic on A.B. 604 and S.B. 280, along with A.C.A. 8, to grant the legislature temporary control of redistricting for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 election cycles. The state’s independent Citizens Redistricting Commission would resume authority in 2031.

“If this redistricting scheme goes through, voters will have no reason to trust politicians,” Assemblyman Carl DeMaio told Campus Reform. “Politicians will choose their voters; voters will not choose their politicians.”

California State Superintendent of Education candidate Sonja Shaw also criticized the union’s support. “The California Teachers Association is behind every attack on our kids, pushing confusion in classrooms, protecting only those who fit their narrative, and selling out teachers to back Newsom’s gerrymander,” Shaw wrote on X.

CTA’s Issues PAC is one of the state’s largestpolitical spenders, previously funding school funding measures and union protections. The union has not released a formal statement on its Prop 50 contribution.

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Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz:

Making Things up, “ai” edition

David Barry:

This is all a nonsense. I suspect that Cowen saw how well o3 performed in his field of economics, and wrongly generalised to assuming that it is reliable in other areas.

But perhaps you are not convinced by my evidence. o3’s final answer cited an editorial from Volume V of Lasker’s Chess Magazine, and my various links have been to digitised archives of other publications. Might OpenAI have got themselves an illicit digital copy of the Magazine that I was unable to locate, so that o3 could give correct information from it without being able to cite it?

No. Moravian Chess still exists, and you can buy Volume V (among others) for 29 euros plus postage. Here is my copy:

Higher Ed Has a Bigger Problem Than Trump: Universities should see the president’s interventions as a wake-up call, not the root of their troubles

By E. Thomas Finan

Universities should see the White House’s campaign as a wake-up call rather than the root of their troubles—a warning that they have to rebuild trust among not just prospective students, parents, and donors, but also voters and elected officials across party lines. America’s higher education has always depended to some degree on the patronage of its elected leaders, an arrangement that has often been a civic boon, encouraging schools to respond to public needs and serve the common good. Today, universities have to prove that they can uphold their end of the deal.

Why did books start being divided into chapters?

Sydney Review of Books:

Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.

I often return to an essay by Lydia Davis about an unusual experiment in translation. Better known for her work on French writers like Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot, Davis had in this case tried to translate a literary text, not from French but rather from English into English. The text in question was Laurence Sterne’s unfinished 1768 novel, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick. Even a glance at its first page suggests why the book might require translation. Here is how it begins:

America Needs Tough Grading: Undeserved As mean a bad education and deprive the world of students’ potential

‘You’re really smart. What the hell is wrong with you?” Yale English Prof. Lawrence Rainey asked one of us (Mr. Katz) over a beer-stained table at a local pizzeria after grading his first college paper in 1987.

The grade in question was a C-plus, the same grade that Ms. Gold received on her first college paper, at Princeton in 2013. We had each arrived at college thinking we were hot stuff: straight-A students from private schools in New York. We were quickly knocked down a peg.

This formative moment would be nearly unimaginable today. At Yale, some 80% of undergraduate course grades are A or A-minus. Harvard’s statistics are about the same. Princeton held out for a while, but since it abandoned its policy of capping the percentage of A-range grades in 2014, grade-point averages have soared. Grade inflation isn’t limited to the Ivy League: GPAs have been rising nationwide for decades. Skyrocketing tuition has turned students into paying customers who expect to be praised, not challenged.

This fall, as professors sit down to grade their students’ first papers, we urge: Challenge your students. Don’t worry about being liked. Worry about being respected.

Students will respect you if you respect them by being honest about the quality of their work and taking the time to help them do better. Often you and they are both fully aware that they haven’t really tried. Make them want to try. You never know the difference your feedback could make. Our C-plus papers were both about Homer, and we went on to become classicists. Would this have happened if our professors had let us coast on unearned confidence?

Working parents face stress, guilt, and financial challenges during summer break

Alexandra Citrin-Safadi:

Now, people who have been talking about summering like it is the 1990s will call this an invented problem. Just let them run around the park! Stop over-programming the children! Let them live! And spiritually, I fully agree. Except I’d prefer to avoid a visit from Child Protective Services for letting my soon-to-be kindergartner roam the New York City streets unattended.

Rebuttal to the Alpha School review defending the existing educational system

Navi Kabra:

Today, the opposition gets a chance. Here’s an article that could be seen as a rebuttal¹ to the Alpha School review, which essentially argues that all these exciting new experimental schools are bound to fail because they fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of schools.

I think this article has some significant flaws, rambles a bit in the middle, and seems a little contradictory in a few places, but it does make a bunch of good points. So here are some interesting excerpts.

The primary point the review makes is this:

In the same way that democracy is the worst form of government ever invented except for all the others, conventional school is the worst form of motivating students to learn except for all the others.

On to the main points of the argument. First, schools aren’t primarily for learning:

What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?

So what are schools for, then?

School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.

While we all complain about how bad schools are, we can pretty much all agree that school does make some difference:

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The War on Knowledge

Dan Lerman:

At the private school where I once taught, the idea was that spelling got in the way of creativity. So I watched as kids wrote ‘macien’ for ‘machine’ at age 14. Tuition was $60,000 a yea

But schools have decided that facts are no longer worth teaching.

In many classrooms today, the very idea of committing information to memory has become unfashionable. As I tour schools for my daughter, we are often assured that facts will surely not be the focus of her education. “We don’t do rote memorization,” teachers proudly declare with a condescending wink. As if memorization were an outdated relic of a less enlightened era.

But without facts, what are students actually learning?

At the progressive Brooklyn private school where I once taught, spelling wasn’t corrected until middle school. Focusing on spelling, we were told, got in the way of creativity.

I then watched smart, curious kids write macienfor machine at age 14, then wilt when people involuntarily gasped at their failed spelling attempts. Their writing was often expressive and insightful . . . and incoherent. They probably weren’t even aware of the $60,000 per annum price tag, or they might have raged against that macien.

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]