School Information System

Wall Street Journal:

The Magnolia State has since climbed to ninth from 49th place in fourth-grade reading scores on the NAEP tests, often called the nation’s report card. Its low-income students outperform those in all other states. States including Virginia, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Indiana have followed Mississippi’s lead in recent years by returning to phonics.

Enter California, which is now jumping on the caboose. The Legislature this month passed (unanimously if you can believe it) a law to require the state Board of Education to adopt instructional materials aligned with phonics-based reading. Schools would also get more money to train teachers in phonics.

“We need to create the best opportunities for all kids to read, not just for those who can afford after-school tutors,” said Democratic Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio, the bill’s sponsor. Hear, hear. The state has much work to do. Some 44% of California fourth-graders failed to meet basic reading standards last year on the NAEP test.

Teaching students through phonics won’t by itself solve the country’s K-12 literacy crisis, but it’s an encouraging sign that lawmakers can learn from their blunders and from success in other states.

Ernesto LondoñoHamed Aleaziz and Ann Hinga Klein:

The superintendent of the Des Moines Public Schools system was detained on Friday by federal immigration authorities, who say he has been living and working in the United States illegally. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said that the superintendent, Ian Roberts, had received a deportation order from an immigration judge in May 2024. He entered the United States in 1999 on a student visa, ICE officials said, and had no work authorization. Dr. Roberts, who was born in Guyana, had faced weapon possession charges from several years ago, the officials said.

On Friday afternoon, as scores of parents and other residents gathered in downtown Des Moines, waving signs and chanting in protest of the superintendent’s detention, school officials told reporters that they needed more information to understand the situation. 

“This is challenging on many levels, and the reality is that we may not have additional answers right away,” said Matt Smith, an associate superintendent who was tapped to lead the school system temporarily after the superintendent’s detention on Friday morning. 

ICE agents approached Dr. Roberts while he was in his vehicle, and he sped off, according to a statement issued by the agency. He was later found, and his vehicle was found abandoned near a wooded area, the statement said. The agency said that he had a loaded handgun, $3,000 in cash and a hunting knife when he was detained. 

The ICE detainee locator website showed that Dr. Roberts was being held at the Pottawattamie County Jail, in western Iowa. 

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To be fair, whomst amongst us can honestly say that we haven’t been an illegal Guyanese immigrant with a prior firearms charge and gotten a position as Superintendent of the largest school system in the State of Iowa?

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Parents in Des Moines need to blow up the Governor’s phone and email. The search firm failed to disclose the criminal record. The school board was grossly negligent in failing to review a criminal background, and every student in the district was in danger under his leadership. Do NOT underestimate the severity of this.

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This is what I found on the Consulting Company – I think it’s time to start doing Open records requests.

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Ian Roberts, the Des Moines school superintendent arrested by ICE, has so many inconsistencies in his public biographies that it’s amazing that no one questioned his identity before.

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The firm that led the search for Ian Roberts to take over as superintendent at Des Moines Public Schools has scrubbed the hire from its website.

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The Des Moines superintendent arrested today wasn’t just an illegal alien — he oversaw an Affirmative Action Program giving teachers free degrees in “Culturally Responsive Leadership” and educating students through a “social justice lens.” 👇

Erin Gretzinger:

On one of his first days with Mann Carey Elementary’s staff, Brown asked people to write down all the anxieties they were carrying into the new school year. When they were done, he had them all crumble up their responses and put them into a bag.

For a staff meeting on the first Monday of the school year, Brown gathered the group on a basketball court and pulled out the bag full of notes. He then put the notes into a pan with charcoal and lighter fluid, and set it on fire.

“I said, ‘We’re burning the burdens. We’re burning the past. We’re rising out of the ashes into something new and transformational,’” he recalled. “The only way we can be better is together and not divided.”

Born and raised on Madison’s south side, Brown graduated from West High School in 1992. After studying history at Delta State University in Mississippi, he came back to Madison for a job working with youth at the Dane County Neighborhood Intervention Program. At the time, the program was based at 501 E. Badger Road — the same building where Mann Carey Elementary is now.

His first job in education came years later in 2005 at the Madison Metropolitan School District, where he worked as a minority services coordinator. Brown went on to get his masters in education with an emphasis on principalship. He also worked at Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District as a dean of students and later became the district’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion, and student achievement.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Sean Davis:

Two of the Madison area’s best high school boys basketball seniors won’t be in area gyms this winter.

Former Oregon standout Vaughn Karvala and Madison West all-time leading scorer Michael Wilson both transferred to prep schools for their final season, adding their names to the recent trend of high-level players exiting Wisconsin.

Karvala, ranked no. 30 in the class of 2026 according to SC Next, transferred to Bella Vista College Prep in Scottsdale, Arizona, while Wilson is now attending Victory Rock Prep in Sarasota, Fla.

CWBChicago

The Chicago Board of Education on Thursday unanimously approved a $2 million settlement with a former student who was groomed and sexually assaulted by a security guard at Paul L. Dunbar Career Academy in Bronzeville.

The guard, Tywain Carter, is serving an eight-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in May 2023 to criminal sexual assault of a minor by a person in a supervisory position.

Sabine Martin:

The data show a 7% decline in total international student enrollment this fall, a decrease of 490 students, and 9% fewer new graduate and professional students.

The student enrollment numbers are based on data collected on the 10th day of classes.

UW-Madison’s international student enrollment drop is smaller than a national projection from the Association of International Educators that estimated a 15% decrease for this fall based on federal data.

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Related: elite over production.

Tyler Durden:

The FBI deployed nearly 300 plainclothes agents to the US Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, in an effort that became so chaotic it caused an internal schism within the agency that led many rank-and-file at the bureau that core competencies had been lost to “wokeness,” and that employees had become “pawns in a political war,” according to an after-action reporthidden from the public for over four years until it was obtained by Just the News. 

Anonymous complaints were sent to the after-action team by scores of FBI agents and other personnel – many from the bureau’s premier Washington field office (WFO) – detailing how agents were sent into a dangerous situation without proper safety equipment or even the ability to identify themselves as armed officers to other police agencies.

Most common among the complaints was that under former directors Chris Wray and just-indicted James Comey, the bureau had become infected with political bias and liberal ideology that treated the Trump-supporting Jan. 6 protesters much differently from Black Lives Matter rioters from the summer of 2020. 

Disclose.tv:

The FBI secretly deployed 274 plainclothes agents into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot crowds, a fact hidden for over four and a half years until current Director Kash Patel’s team turned over a 50-page after-action report to Congress. Agents lacked proper safety gear and clear identification, risking misidentification by other law enforcement. One agent wrote, “I wish you all would pay more attention to our safety than what type of masks we wear.”

Rank-and-file agents slammed the bureau’s leadership, claiming political bias infected operations under James Comey and Chris Wray. “Our response to the Capitol Riot reeks of political bias,” one agent stated. Another wrote, “We have been used as pawns in a political war.”

Document.

More.

This post has gone viral, but it isn’t true. That’s not what the report shows.

It identifies that 274 agents were deployed that day in response to all the events. It does not say how many were wearing plainclothes or if any were among the crowds before the rioting.

Marcel Preuss, Germán Reyes, Jason Somerville, Joy Wu

Elites disproportionately influence policymaking, yet little is known about their fairness and efficiency preferences — key determinants of support for redistributive policies. We investigate these preferences in an incentivized lab experiment with a group of future elites — Ivy League MBA students. We find that MBA students implement substantially more unequal earnings distributions than the average American, regardless of whether inequality stems from luck or merit. Their redistributive choices are also highly responsive to efficiency costs, with an effect that is an order of magnitude larger than that found in representative U.S. samples. Analyzing fairness ideals, we find that MBA students are less likely to be strict meritocrats than the broader population. These findings provide novel insights into how elites’ redistributive preferences may shape high levels of inequality in the U.S.

Irina Manta:

My coauthors Cassandra Robertson, Zoe Robinson, and I have published a symposium piece entitled “Public Health Policy as Public Choice Failure” in the Houston Journal of Health Law & Policy, in which we use a public choice lens to examine the United States’ often-unfortunate public health journey. Here is the abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought a devastating toll, causing over a million deaths in the United States along with widespread disability and economic disruption. Yet the magnitude of these costs was not inevitable—it was shaped by the policy choices made in response to the crisis. This Article argues that the U.S. pandemic response suffered from public choice dynamics that systematically skewed policymaking away from the public interest. Examining three key policy areas—vaccine rollout, mask mandates, and ventilation standards—the Article demonstrates how misaligned political incentives led officials to prioritize short-term appeasement of a pandemic-weary public over science-based strategies that would maximize long-term welfare. In each domain, political actors faced strong incentives to downplay risks, overpromise solutions, and delay difficult decisions, resulting in a pandemic response that was often too little, too late, and too beholden to partisan interests. The Article concludes that reckoning honestly with these failures is a crucial first step toward reforming our public health institutions and ensure a more effective response to the next crisis. It offers recommendations for rebuilding public trust, depoliticizing public health communication, and institutionalizing science-based policymaking. More broadly, the Article underscores the urgent need to realign political incentives with the public interest in the prevention of and response to public health emergencies.

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A deep drive into taxpayer funded Dane County Madison Public Health’s covid lockdown mandates is long overdue.

Joanne Jacobs summary:

Before the pandemic, 85 percent of students attended traditional public schools, she writes. Almost 9 percent were in private schools. After the pandemic, the number fell below 80 percent. It “hasn’t rebounded.” Private school enrollment has held steady.

One third of students in mostly black districts are not in traditional public schools, Barshay notes. Students in high-poverty districts also are more likely to “lost” to their neighborhood schools.

Some of the missing students enrolled in charter schools, which saw their share of enrollment rise from 5 percent to 6 percent. “Virtual” schools’ share rose form 0.7 percent to 1.2 percent. As vouchers expand, private schools may begin growing too, but there’s not much evidence of that yet.

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Where have all the students gone?

Robert Pondiscio

Over the past few weeks, I’ve published two major pieces about a body of psychological research that I believe deserves much wider attention in K–12 education. One appears in the October issue of National Review, titled “There’s Too Much Doom and Gloom in the Classroom.” The other is a chapter in the book Mind the Children: How to Think About the Youth Mental Health Crisis, edited by my AEI colleagues Naomi Schaefer Riley and Sally Satel. Because these pieces are either behind a paywall or between the covers of a book, I want to bring the discussion here.

The research at the center of both is Jeremy Clifton’s work on primal world beliefs, or “primals.” I consider it among the most important and eye-opening ideas I’ve encountered in over two decades in education thought and practice—important for two reasons: First, it’s almost completely unknown in K–12. In fact, the only mention I could find in a publication for educators was 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.”

Cremieux:

We can see the Will Rogers phenomenon at work in this instance because the overall slope was -0.015 standard deviations per year. For those with less than twelve years of education the slope was -0.039, whereas for high school graduates, the slope was -0.041. For those attending college the slope was -0.034 versus -0.027 for people who had some college but didn’t graduate; the slope was -0.019 for college graduates, -0.018 for those currently in graduate or professional school, and -0.024 for those with graduate or professional degrees.

The overall slope is less than the slope for any individual level of education because people are sorting across the levels in exactly the way I suggested.

So, are we getting dumber? Unfortunately, this wouldn’t show it. If the authors ever release or return to the data to analyze whether the changes are measurement invariant and how they appear after post-stratification, then we can know. Until then, we’ll be left guessing.

Sabine Martin:

The new fee, which took effect Sunday, does not apply to existing visa holders.

The H-1B visa program, which started in 1990, is a competitive system that allows employers to temporarily hire professionals from abroad for “specialty occupations.” They must have a bachelor’s degree or higher and they can only stay in the country for a maximum of six years, including renewals.

Over the last decade, 60% or more of H-1B employees approved each year worked a computer-related job, but other top fields include architecture, engineering and education, according to the Pew Research Center.

More than 2,000 Wisconsin employers have used the program to hire nearly 30,000 employees in the last decade, averaging about 2,600 a year, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.

The government grants 85,000 new H-1B visas through a lottery each fiscal year, but universities and nonprofits are exempt from that cap.

Christopher Rufo:

In the 1960s and 1970s, America witnessed a wave of political terrorism. Left-wing radicals hijacked airplanes, set bombs in government buildings, and assassinated police officers in service of political goals. The perpetrators were almost always organized, belonging to groups like the Weathermen or the Black Liberation Army. These groups demanded the release of prisoners, denounced capitalism, or called for violent revolution against the United States. Their members were radical but largely lucid, justifying their actions with appeals to a higher cause.

In recent years, a new form of terror has emerged: decentralized, digitally driven violence organized not around coherent ideologies but around memes, fantasies, and nihilistic impulses. The perpetrators of this low-grade terror campaign do not belong to hierarchical organizations or pursue concrete political aims. More often, they come from ordinary families and lash out in acts of violence without discernible purpose.

New Discourses:

Cultural Marxism is a challenging term that refers to a broad Leftist social phenomenon that took place in the West through the twentieth century into the present. Based upon but modifying the Communist religion of Karl Marx, Western (Cultural) Marxism sought to find a way to infiltrate and seize the means of production of Western Civilizational culture in the hopes of opening it up to socialism (or Communism). In the 1910s through the 1930s, the Western Marxist movement truly was a Cultural Marxism. From the 1930s to the 1970s, this line of thinking was developed primarily by the Frankfurt School, which developed Critical Theory, or Critical Marxism, sometimes referred to as Neo-Marxism. Since the 1970s, it has gone Woke, adopting Intersectionality as a form of American Maoism. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay offers a thorough beginner’s overview of the whole of Cultural Marxism in four parts: Marxism and the relevant historical context; Cultural Marxism; Critical Marxism; and Woke Marxism, connecting the highlights of this movement to the challenges of the present day. Join him and share this with your friends who are looking for a good starting place to learn about his work!

Alyssa Rosenberg

During my time as a parenting columnist, I conducted a really delightful interview with an executive at Scholastic who told me that they could never acquire enough kid-oriented non-fiction. It was the sort of observation that I never would have made on my own but that immediately made sense to me: of course kids want to understand how the world works, and there is so much to try to make sense of. There are plenty of books and series that meet that need in marvelously creative ways, from Jerry Pallotta’s “Who Would Win?” books that teach animal science through a series of imaginary cage matches to the delights of the DK Eyewitness series. 

I also think that children’s natural curiosity about the world is something to keep in mind when considering what makes for compelling picture book illustration. Now, it’s absolutely the case that an excellent combination of words and illustrations can make technical drawings and blueprints fascinating: David Macaulay’s whole career is proof of that. But especially for younger children who aren’t reading on their own, I find myself drawn to illustration that is technically specific but illustrated without obsessive precision.

A wonderful example of what I mean is “Road Builders,” a 1994 step-by-step guide to building a stretch of highway. As you’ll be able to tell from the creases and tears in the photos that follow, this is one of the Imagination Library selections that my children love the most.

No one who looks at “Road Builders” would ever think for a second that it’s anything other than hand-drawn. The wobbles and asymmetries are visible from the cover and are visible throughout the book. 

Simms Taback, the illustrator, isn’t aiming for realism here; there’s a depth of field to his scenes, but no real attempt to give the characters or vehicles mass, or to project shadows from every direction.

But despite being very deliberately hand-drawn, Taback’s illustrations include a really wonderful amount of detail. If he draws a dump truck in profile, he’ll be clear to capture the wires and hydraulics. Wheels have clearly-delineated rivets. Vehicles have model numbers. Construction helmets have tape with the owners’ name scribbled on them as well as labels with the brand name

Rana Foroohar:

Of all the attacks on valuable things that Donald Trump is mounting — on free speech, financial reporting standards, climate regulation, relations with allies — one of the most dangerous is his assault on K-12 public education in the US.

The White House, along with many Republicans, would like to see the Department of Education disbanded and schooling in America privatised with a voucher system that would give parents public money to pay for independent school tuition. Not only does this pull resources away from already underfunded public schools, but it tends to support well-off families and religious schools disproportionately.  

So I had a rare moment of pleasant surprise amid a truly dismal news cycle when I read, a few days ago, that Republican efforts to promote school vouchers have so far done very little to lower enrolment in public schools. A new study by Tulane University academics found that in the 11 states that had adopted vouchers since 2021, the system had only increased enrolment in private schools by about 3-4 per cent.

Kelsey Piper:

But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVIDand has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.

The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”

Consider this the latest chapter of the “Mississippi Miracle,” which has seen the state climb from 49th in the country on fourth grade reading to ninth nationally. This rise has received a great deal of coverage in publications ranging from The New YorkTimes to The New York Post. And yet, it still feels as if what’s taking place in the Deep South still has been grossly undersold.

First, it’s not just Mississippi — Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements.

Second, many people who aren’t too focused on education policy seem to imagine Mississippi has simply stopped underperforming, that they’re now doing about as well as everyone else.

This is not true. They haven’t just caught up to your state; they are now wildly outperforming it. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools. Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi(where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.)

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Chris Rickert:

others have criticized as a dumbing down of standards to make it appear students know more than they actually do.

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

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Sarah Mervosh:

“The U.S. is an example of frogs in the boiling water when it comes to talent,” said Jamie Merisotis, chief executive of the Lumina Foundation, which is focused on higher education and work force credentials. Because the United States has a large and diverse economy, he said, “it’s harder to see when the rest of the world is catching up.”

The world’s highest-performing countries not only produce students who outscore the brightest American students at the top. They also manage to lift far more students up to a base level of skill — something some experts believe is only going to become more important in a world of artificial intelligence.

“A.I. can do the first draft of the memo or solve the math equation,” Mr. Merisotis said. “It is the worker who needs to understand what they are reading, be able to ensure it is accurate and decide what to do next.”

Fundamental reading and math skills are needed for a wide range of jobs, employers and industry leaders said, from health care workers calculating medication dosage and documenting patient care to truck drivers navigating the nation’s highways.

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Will Flanders:

The full report card is needed for a deeper dive, but compared to the most fair public school group (low-income students), private school choice students once again have significantly higher proficiency levels in the MPCP, RPCP and statewide programs.

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Abigail S. Gerstein and Ella F. Niederhelman:

Harvard School of Public Health Dean Andrea A. Baccarelli received at least $150,000 to testify against Tylenol’s manufacturer in 2023 — two years before he published research used by the Trump administration to link the drug to autism, a connection experts say is tenuous at best.

Baccarelli served as an expert witness on behalf of parents and guardians of children suing Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of Tylenol at the time. U.S. District Court Judge Denise L. Cote dismissed the case last year due to a lack of scientific evidence, throwing out Baccarelli’s testimony in the process.

“He cherry-picked and misrepresented study results and refused to acknowledge the role of genetics in the etiology” of autism spectrum disorder or ADHD, Cote wrote in her decision, which the plaintiffs have since appealed.

Baccarelli, who was a professor at Columbia University’s public health school at the time, declined to comment on his involvement in the case.

The plaintiffs paid Baccareli $700 an hour for his expert testimony, according to a 2023 deposition.

“I work for more than 200 hours, so it’s about $150,000,” Baccarelli said in the deposition.

But Catherine E. Lord — a professor of Psychiatry and Education at the University of California, Los Angeles — said it is not uncommon for medical professionals to be paid for expert testimony.

Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock:

Here’s how this happens. As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.

If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through. If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped.

Will Flanders:

The New Forward Exam results are available in Wisedash this morning. No time yet for a deep dive, but it looks as if, overall, the state has held relatively steady with the inflated performance levels of last year.

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Preston Cooper

Students are becoming savvier consumers when it comes to postsecondary education. In an AEI report published earlier this month, I documented that low-quality colleges are seeing massive declines in enrollment. These trends in consumer choice extend to what students elect to study once they arrive on campus. Increasingly, students are majoring in subjects with higher typical salaries.

In total, the Class of 2023 earned 2.1 million bachelor’s degrees—up from around 1.8 million degrees awarded to the Class of 2010. But almost all of that increase is down to rising interest in high-wage college majors such as engineering, computer science, and nursing.

The number of degrees conferred in fields of study where the median early-career salary exceeds $60,000 grew by 60 percent between 2010 and 2023. This accounted for almost all the rise in bachelor’s degree attainment during that time period. Combined, college majors paying lower starting salaries saw just an eight percent increase in degree conferrals over the same time frame.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas:

Biological computing is “massively parallel,” decentralized, and noisy. Your cells have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 quintillion ribosomes, all working at the same time. Each of these exquisitely complex floating protein factories is, in effect, a tiny computer — albeit a stochastic one, meaning not entirely predictable. The movements of hinged components, the capture and release of smaller molecules, and the manipulation of chemical bonds are all individually random, reversible, and inexact, driven this way and that by constant thermal buffeting. Only a statistical asymmetry favors one direction over another, with clever origami moves tending to “lock in” certain steps such that a next step becomes likely to happen.

This differs greatly from the operation of “logic gates” in a computer, basic components that process binary inputs into outputs using fixed rules. They are irreversible and engineered to be 99.99 percent reliable and reproducible.

Biological computing is computing, nonetheless. And its use of randomness is a feature, not a bug. In fact, many classic algorithms in computer science also require randomness (albeit for different reasons), which may explain why Turing insisted that the Ferranti Mark I, an early computer he helped to design in 1951, include a random number instruction. Randomness is thus a small but important conceptual extension to the original Turing Machine, though any computer can simulate it by calculating deterministic but random-looking or “pseudorandom” numbers.

Parallelism, too, is increasingly fundamental to computing today. Modern AI, for instance, depends on both massive parallelism and randomness — as in the parallelized “stochastic gradient descent” (SGD) algorithm, used for training most of today’s neural nets, the “temperature” setting used in chatbots to introduce a degree of randomness into their output, and the parallelism of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which power most AI in data centers.

goacta.org:

Virginia state law requires public universities to protect the First Amendment rights of all students, faculty, and invited guests. They must do this by creating policies, developing materials, and educating students about their speech rights. Virginia’s leading public universities have adopted policies of varying quality to comply with state requirements, but, as the following survey from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and College Pulse shows, more work is needed to provide a true culture of free expression for all campus members.

Our survey of 2,345 students and recent alumni from George Mason University (GMU), James Madison University (JMU), the University of Virginia (UVA), Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Virginia Tech (VT), and William & Mary (W&M) reveals high rates of self-censorship and intolerance for intellectual and political differences. Despite the state’s requirement that students be educated about their speech rights during orientation programs, only 21% of students recall receiving such training. Over half of students and alumni surveyed said the political climate on their campus prevents them from expressing their beliefs because others might find them offensive. Forty-three percent said they would feel uncomfortable expressing their views on a controversial subject during an in-class discussion. A staggering 68% of students believe professors should be reported to the university for making comments students find offensive. Our survey also reveals variations in these results between the six universities and between different student demographics. Explore the full survey report to learn more.

Barton Swaim:

A day later the Times issued a correction: “An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement.”

Six Times employees worked on the story—two named in the byline, four more mentioned as contributors at the end. None, evidently, bothered to wonder how such a person as they described could also be a ferocious proponent of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. The thought process seems to have been: Kirk was a right-winger, right-wingers by definition hold retrograde opinions, so an antisemite Kirk surely was. Progressive commentators insisting, days after his assassination, that his killer was a Republican—the indefatigably mistaken Laurence Tribe is one—leaned on a similar sort of syllogism.

A columnist at the Washington Post, meanwhile, was let go this week after (among other things) posting a quotation of Kirk, the sentence slightly rewritten to make it look as if he were claiming black women generally aren’t as smart as whites. Kirk expressed his views abrasively, but common sense and love of country should have told the columnist that the exponent of such a view wouldn’t attract a mass following in 21st-century America. I choose to think she didn’t doctor the line deliberately.

Colin Woodward

The book the model is based on, American Nations, is a history of the entire continent north of the 25th parallel, including what’s now Canada and northern Mexico. Until now, I’d never had a proper map of what that looks like, facilitating research across borders. The map’s been popular with the public as well, with the post introducing it garnering unprecedented organic internet traffic. 

Note Spanish Caribbean’s extension to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The region probably includes parts of the “Spanish Main” — the northern, Caribbean coast of South America — and maybe some other island locations as well, but, it being peripheral to our core study area in North America, I haven’t done the research into all that. First Nation, of course, includes Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. 

Central and Southern Mexico likely belong to “post-Aztec” and “Maya” regional cultures, the latter extending into parts of Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. Someday, hopefully in collaboration with regional experts, maybe there will be a South American Nations map as well.

Wisconsin Eye and WILL.

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

FIRE:

Google condemns jawboning now, but it failed to stand up for the rights of its users when it mattered.

FIRE will continue to call on private institutions to stand up for their rights — no matter who is in office.

——

Jimmy Dore:

In 2021 I was censored on YouTube & Facebook for accurately reporting that the Covid Vaxx did NOT stop transmission of the virus.

Now everyone knows this, but at the time people still thought it was an actual vaccine & believed the Pharma bought & corrupted corporate media.

Glenn Greenwald:

Huge numbers now outraged by the FCC’s Kimmel threats were happy when Biden/Dems threatened Big Tech to ban dissent.

Whichever is worse, they share the same rotted principle (yet many conservatives condemned the FCC and Bondi, while almost no liberals opposed Biden’s scheme).

But Dems’ censorship under wasn’t only about coercing Big Tech to remove dissent. Key Dems like AOC forced Apple, Google and Amazon to remove the social media app Parler because they claimed it was allowing dangerous speech — and it did so once Parler had become the #1 most downloaded app in America.

One reason @rumblevideo is such a vital guarantor of internet freedom is it rejects all government censorship demands of the kind Google, Meta, etc. submitted to.

Rumble has even lost access to large markets over it (France, Brazil) but its free speech mission is paramout.

The FIRE:

Google should not have waited to acknowledge it was pressured by the Biden administration to block content on its platforms.

Google condemns jawboning now, but it failed to stand up for the rights of its users when it mattered.

FIRE will continue to call on private institutions to stand up for their rights — no matter who is in office.

Ben Thompson:

tech platforms need to lead the way in reestablishing cultural mores around free speech, and not just to get their “get out of jail free” card back. Tech is dominant culturally in a way it wasn’t when the cultural mores around free speech were established, and the most generous interpretation of their actions over the last decade is that they were afraid to assert their power, bowing to the wishes of the loudest voices in the media and in their own companies.

In fact, the best way to avoid partisanship and to be the neutral arbiter all of the platforms say they want to be is to decline to take positions on all issues but one: the importance of free expression. That is the key enabler of finding a path forward on all of those other issues, and is the foundation of a free society. That, in a nutshell, has been Stratechery’s approach to politics, and it has served me well; I think it would scale just as well to the largest companies in the world.

Off the Press:

YouTube creators kicked off the platform for “repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies” will have an opportunity to “rejoin” in line with revised policies that allow “a wider range of content” on those subjects, its parent Alphabet told the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday.

Issued in response to committee subpoenas in February 2023 and March 2025, the letter from Alphabet’s law firm insists its commitment to free expression is “unwavering and will not bend to political pressure,” while blaming senior Biden administration officials, “including White House officials,” for “unacceptable and wrong” pressure to censor content that doesn’t violate YouTube policies.

From President Biden on down, administration officials “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation,” Alphabet said, claiming it “has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”

The letter insists that “YouTube never had Community Guidelines prohibiting discussion of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” has never operated a paid third-party checking program and “will not empower fact-checkers to take action on or label content across the Company’s services.”

——

Many taxpayer funded school districts use Google services, including Madison.

House Judiciary:

1. The Biden Administration censorship pressure was “unacceptable and wrong.”
2. Public debate should never come at the expense of relying “authorities.”
3. The company will never use third-party “fact-checkers.”
4. Europe’s censorship laws target American companies and threaten American speech, including the removal of “lawful content.”

—-

Because they support censorship as long as it targets their political opponents

——

Thrilled to see Google is now implementing what X did three years ago to support free speech. Community Notes continues to set the industry standard for a transparent, community-driven system that provides accurate context to posts, while effectively reducing its spread by decreasing engagement and virality

Neal McCluskey:

The school choice movement is not a conspiracy. It is an ordinary political effort that stems naturally from a fundamental question of mass education in a diverse society: How do you handle plural values, identities, and educational desires? But you would not know that from The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, which would have you believe that a handful of advocates, generously funded by an even tinier group of right-wing billionaires, has somehow foisted choice on an unwitting country.

The Privateers is authored by Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University education policy professor who has been in the school choice world since the early 2000s. Cowen has been an investigator on private choice program assessments, and he writes that what he has seen from the choice movement has increasingly alarmed him. So much so that “there must . . . be a reckoning” (12).

One big part of Cowen’s narrative is that a few wealthy people with names you have likely heard—DeVos and Koch—and others you likely have not, like the Bradley Foundation, have for decades funded advocacy work by choice advocates that masquerades as objective research. My own think tank, the Cato Institute, is among those identified, but more of Cowen’s attention is devoted to university denizens, especially Paul Peterson at Harvard, and his one-time students Patrick Wolf and Jay Greene, who moved on to the Walton family-funded Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and in the case of Greene, eventually to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ashley Jochim, Michael J. Petrilli, David Griffith, Ph.D and Adam Tyner, Ph.D.

Ashley Jochim, principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and mom of four, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith on the Education Gadfly Show to continue our debate on private school choice and regulation. She also discusses how Democrats’ defense of public schools often clashes with families’ real experiences, and why clear, consumer-facing information is essential to making choice work.

On the Research Minute, Adam Tyner highlights a new NBER study from Chicago showing that giving principals more autonomy can boost student achievement— though effects vary widely depending on leadership capacity.

Waldo Dib:

If you studied university in many parts of the Middle East, try asking yourself or any of your friends what their favorite part of university was, and a lot of them will say the dorm life, late-night conversations, or the campus freedom. Very few will tell you their favorite part was what they learned in class.

A few days ago, I was lazily browsing Hacker News when I came across a provocative blog post titled “Math is Erotic.” Without going into too much detail about the contents of the post itself — which, for reference, has very little erotica — the part that really caught my attention was below:

The function universities have long played is less one of educating than of credentialing.

I studied Environmental Engineering in Jordan, and more than 10 years after graduating, the above resonates on a profound level with me. I assume a lot of people from the Arab world and South Asia would relate to this, too.

At the risk of sounding like yet another entrepreneur talking smack about university education, hear me out: the German Jordanian University, where I studied, was a conveyor belt clattering along slowly to secure jobs abroad for young Jordanians. As the name implies, engineering students were meant to spend 4 years in Jordan, and another mandatory year in Germany. It started as a joint project in 2005 between the governments of Jordan and Germany.

Will Flanders Summary:

The title of this thread on the Wisconsin Reddit is both funny and sad because WI should only WISH to be Mississippi when it comes to NAEP scores.

Dan Lennington:

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.

But it works.

——-

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. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Daniel Buck:

New study:

It charts payroll data and student test scores in 12,000 districts

It finds a negative correlation between teacher salary increases and student performance

Khari Johnson:

A California attorney must pay a $10,000 fine for filing a state court appeal full of fake quotations generated by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.

The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court and came with a blistering opinion stating that 21 of 23 quotes from cases cited in the attorney’s opening brief were made up. It also noted that numerous out-of-state and federal courts have confronted attorneys for citing fake legal authority.

“We therefore publish this opinion as a warning,” it continued. “Simply stated, no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations— whether provided by generative AI or any other source—that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified.”

The opinion, issued 10 days ago in California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal, is a clear example of why the state’s legal authorities are scrambling to regulate the use of AI in the judiciary. The state’s Judicial Council two weeks ago issued guidelines requiring judges and court staff to either ban generative AI or adopt a generative AI use policy by Dec. 15. Meanwhile, the California Bar Association is considering whether to strengthen its code of conduct to account for various forms of AI following a request by the California Supreme Court last month.

Joanne Jacobs:

High school students are earning career credentials in greater numbers than ever before, writes Patrick O’Donnell on The 74. But there are “massive mismatches between the credentials students are earning and what employers seek.”

Preston Cooper

I divide colleges into five groups based on several measures of student outcomes: graduation rates, student loan repayment rates, and earnings after enrollment. Students who choose different institutions experience wildly different outcomes. At colleges in the top fifth of student outcomes, students are four times as likely to graduate, twice as likely to repay their loans, and earn over $20,000 more per year relative to their peers at colleges in the bottom fifth.

We can track enrollment patterns in each group of colleges over time. Colleges in the bottom fifth of student outcomes lost 47 percent of their undergraduate enrollment between 2010 and 2023. Together, the bottom two-fifths of colleges by student outcomes account for almost all the drop in college enrollment since 2010. Meanwhile, colleges in the top fifth grew enrollment by 8 percent.

WILL:

WILL unveiled a new report, “The WILL of The People: A Roadmap to Enforce Wisconsin’s Citizenship Voting Amendment,” which outlines a clear process to audit Wisconsin’s voter rolls using existing state and federal data. The report offers an important perspective to both elected officials and voters, ahead of the Wisconsin statewide elections in 2026.

In 2021, WILL conducted a comprehensive and highly respected audit of Wisconsin’s 2020 election. While that report addressed many areas of election administration, one key question remained unanswered: the extent of non-citizen voting. This new roadmap directly addresses that gap, providing policymakers with the tools to enforce the will of voters.

The Quotes: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “Last November, 71% of Wisconsin voters approved a constitutional amendment making clear that only U.S. citizens may vote in our elections. Now it’s incumbent on state leaders to follow through and enforce it. Our plan gives policymakers a practical, common-sense roadmap to ensure the will of the voters is respected and Wisconsin’s elections remain secure.”

Wall Street Journal:

Chicago has been carrying on as though no reckoning would ever arrive for its chronically underfunded pensions, but is everyone awake now? Chicago’s four public pension funds are among the nation’s most underfunded, with more pension debt than 44 states, according to the Illinois Policy Institute. The city carries more than $35 billion in pension debt and a credit rating barely above junk status.

In July that didn’t stop Springfield from throwing gas on the fire for public unions. Against the advice of budget watchers, Democrats passed a bill to increase pension payments for Chicago police and firefighters that added billions of dollars to pension liabilities and tanked their funding ratios.

They knew what they were doing. In a memo emailed to Deputy Governor for Budget and Economy Andy Manar in July, Chicago chief financial officer Jill Jaworski explained that the proposed changes in the pension benefits would reduce the funded ratio for both the police and firefighter funds to under 20%. “Many actuaries consider a funded ration under 20% to be technically insolvent,” she wrote.

Ms. Jaworski said city contributions to the funds would increase by an estimated $60 million in the first year and add $6.6 billion to city contributions over 30 years. And while the bill was supposedly designed to bring city safety workers into parity with their downstate peers, the city workers aren’t required to pay the same share of their payroll toward pensions. The bill “makes no provision for funding the enhanced benefits,” she wrote.

Jamie McKane:

The University of Oxford has fallen out of the top three universities in the UK for the first time, according to The Times and The Sunday Times Good University Guide for 2026.

Both Oxford and Cambridge universities have been supplanted by Durham University, which now holds the third-place spot among the top universities in the UK.

Oxford and Cambridge are tied for fourth in the 2026 rankings, after falling due to their relatively poor performance in the latest National Student Survey.

Durham University was named The Times’s University of the Year, although the number-one ranked university in the UK remained the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) for the second year in a row.

Second place was held by the University of St Andrews, again for the second consecutive year

It started before Covid, and it keeps getting worse.

Matthew Yglesias:

What we do know is that federal K-12 policy used to place a hefty premium on “accountability” for local school districts. Students were supposed to either demonstrate a solid level of results, or else show clear signs of improvement. If a district couldn’t achieve one or the other, there were supposed to be consequences. 

There was significant bipartisan backlash to this accountability regime, and it was dismantled on a bipartisan basis during Obama’s second term. 

I find this backlash fascinating. The whole idea of “No Child Left Behind” (N.C.L.B.) had become a big national joke by the time the Every Student Succeeds Act passed and shifted schools away from accountability. Teachers union stakeholders didn’t like N.C.L.B. Conservative decentralizers didn’t like it. Normie high-S.E.S. parents were annoyed at their kids needing to take tests, and normie low-S.E.S. parents didn’t like to hear that their kids were doing badly in school. All around, almost everyone seems to have decided they’d prefer a system that put less emphasis on trying to tell whether kids were learning and taking action if they weren’t.

Chad Aldeman makes an interesting point about this. He notes that if you look across the full range of subjects and grade levels, the declines are not particularly concentrated in any specific demographic group, but they are concentrated among the weaker students. The trends for 12th-grade math scores are particularly stark in this regard, but it’s not unique in the history of American education outcomes.

———

more

———

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Corrinne Hess:

State Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay, was one of the authors of the reading bill known as Act 20. He says he now wants to create similar legislation for math. 

During a press conference on Sept. 10, Kitchens said a bill will be introduced soon that will include math screeners to provide testing and individualized plans to help struggling students catch up. 

“This bill is not going to be the full solution to the problem, but I think it’s going to be a very good first step in addressing a very serious problem,” Kitchens said. 

Act 20 was a bipartisan effort, but implementation wasn’t easy and a fight over funding made its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. 

——-

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!)

Tyler Cowen:

Assume the courts do not strike this down (perhaps they will?).

Will foreigners still be hired at the entry level with an extra 100k surcharge?  I would think not,as university budgets are tight these days.  I presume there is some way to turn them down legally, without courting discrimination lawsuits?

What if you ask them to accept a lower starting wage?  A different deal in some other manner, such as no summer money or a higher teaching load?  Is that legal?  Will schools have the stomach to even try?  I would guess not.  Is there a way to amortize the 100k over five or six years?  What if the new hire leaves the institution in year three of the deal?

In economics at least, a pretty high percentage of the graduate students at top institutions do not have green cards or citizenships.

——-

University of Wisconsin Madison h1-b data.

Antigone:

Campbell Bonner’s is not quite a household name, even to professional Classicists. In his day, he was well-known and respected, and not just in his home country. But he was not a populariser, and contented himself by toiling in obscure regions, where he judged that he could do the most good. The Classical scholar described in the following essay, vigorous and versatile, is in many ways a self-portrait.

Bonner was born in 1876, the son of a Tennessee judge. He was educated first at the recently-established Vanderbilt University, before heading north to the more venerable Harvard University for his PhD. This he earned in 1900, with a Latin dissertation on the myth of the Danaids (translated here). In it he demonstrated not only the expected linguistic mastery over a wide range of ancient texts, but also an interest in the new fields of anthropology and comparative religion. Frazer’s Golden Bough is cited, as is his commentary on Pausanias. Bonner’s “strange adventure of the mind” had begun.

After graduation Bonner spent a year in Berlin, where he heard Wilamowitz lecture, before visiting the Mediterranean. In Greece he sailed through the islands with Martin Nilsson, the great Swedish scholar of ancient religion. Returning to America, he took up a position at Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. He would hold this until 1907, when he was offered a job at the University of Michigan. Thereafter he spent the rest of his life in Ann Arbor.

The watershed in his career came in 1920, when the University of Michigan began acquiring Greek papyri from Egypt under the initiative of Francis Kelsey. This, as Bonner describes it, “diverted the energy of several men into new channels.” He was one of that number, though too modest here to name himself. His first papyrological publication appeared in 1921; the last in 1954, the year of his death. Among these were three major editions: The Papyrus Codex of the Shepherd of Hermas, The Last Chapters of Enoch in Greek, and The Homily on the Passion by Melito, Bishop of Sardis. Hardly household names either; but there was work to be done, and Bonner did it well. In such a way a man may build his reputation.

RFK, Jr.

“And one of those things is if we lost our constitutional rights in this country and that our children were raised as slaves.”

Ann Althouse summary.

Karin Brulliard

New Mexico, long at the bottom of state rankings for child well-being and educational outcomes, is on the verge of launching a first-in-the-nation program aimed at helping reverse those trends: free child care and preschool for all resident families, regardless of income.

Daniel Willingham:

How could researchers determine whether extended use of digital devices leaves people unable to focus? A straightforward test would compare the ability to focus among students who engage in a great deal of digital activity with those who seldom engage in it. Many researchers have taken that tack. They often test children from infancy to about age six separately from older children, reasoning that the young brain is more vulnerable to change.

And the results? For both older and younger children, the average of dozens of studies reveals a modest negative correlation: More screen time is weakly associated with poor attention regulation.

Now, this kind of study has an obvious limitation—it finds a correlation, but correlation is not causation. Thus, although one is tempted to conclude that digital activities negatively impact attention, it’s also possible that children who have greater difficulty focusing attention find digital activities more appealing than children who do not have such challenges.

Researchers have tried to address this problem by conducting longitudinal studies. That means they measure screen time and attention (at, say, age nine), and then measure them again in the same children months or years later. If more screen time at age nine predicts worse attentional control at age 11—even after accounting for the level of attentional control at age nine—that suggests screen time may contribute to later attention problems. Conversely, if worse attentional control at age nine predicts increased screen time at age 11, that indicates that attention difficulties may lead children to use screens more. The temporal sequence can help clarify the direction of causality.

Using this method, most studies of younger (birth to pre-K) or older (K–12) children support the hypothesis that screen time is associated with poorer attentional control. The size of the observed relationship varies, but on average, it’s small.

Jonathan Guthrie:

Chats about the other British taboo — money — may have been equally faltering. Families will already have answered the essential question of how university costs will be met, provisionally at least. Many freshers will remain as unfamiliar with day-to-day money management as they are with set texts they were supposed to read over the summer.

Financial illiteracy is among the many defects us older people reflexively discern in the young. Under-18s scored an average of 2.3 correct answers out of 10 in a UK quiz run by the Centre for Economics and Business Research and financial website Wealthify. Mean scores rose steadily with age.

Aarya Mukherjee

One campus graduate student, who received the message and was provided anonymity due to fears of retaliation, claimed the release targeted Muslim and Arab individuals who had previously expressed support for Palestine.  

“I think (the message was sent) to anybody who has ever been accused of antisemitism, which of course, includes a lot of Palestinians,” the student said. “Whenever we teach about Palestine, it usually leads to an investigation. I think they flagged and sent all of that information to the federal government.”

The student claimed they had been the subject of a false report of antisemitism to the campus Title IX and XI Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination, or OPHD. They said other students who received the notification had OPHD cases that were determined to be unsubstantiated or stand open. 

Gal Elidan and Yael Haramaty

Our research comes to life in Learn Your Way. The interface brings together multiple, personalized representations of content including: (1) immersive text, (2) section-level quizzes, (3) slides & narration, (4) audio lessons, and (5) mind maps.

• Immersive text: Breaks the content up into digestible sections that are augmented with generated images and embedded questions. Put together, these transform passive reading into an active multimodal experience that follows learning science principles.
• Section-level quizzes: Promote active learning by allowing a user to interactively assess their learning, and uncover existing knowledge gaps.
• Slides & narration: Offers presentations that span the entire source material and include engaging activities like fill-in-the-blanks, as well as a narrated version, mimicking a recorded lesson.
• Audio lesson: Provides simulated conversations, coupled with visual aids, between an AI-powered teacher and a student that models how a real learner might engage with the material, including the expression of misconceptions, which are clarified by the teacher.
• Mind map: Organizes the knowledge hierarchically and allows learners to zoom in and out from the big picture to the details.

The above representations give learners choice and are all adapted to their selected grade level and personal interests. Throughout the experience, the interactive quizzes provide dynamic feedback, guiding students to revisit specific content areas where they struggled. This marks our first steps towards true personalization.

Tyler Durden:

President Trump’s executive order earlier this year to dismantle the Department of Education comes as the president highlighted a disturbing and inconvenient truth about Baltimore City’s Democratic Party-run “failure factory” school system: 40% of public high schools have zero students proficient in math. This damning statisticfollows eight years of Fox45 investigative reporter Chris Papst’s coverage of the crime-ridden city’s education crisis. Keep in mind, the metro area is mainly controlled by leftists at City Hall, with virtually no diversity when it comes to Republicans holding positions of power.

A new report by Papst released this past week may catch the White House’s attention, highlighting yet another inconvenient truth about the stunning failure of Baltimore City Public Schools in terms of academic outcomes, proving that simply throwing more taxpayer funds at the problem is not a viable solution.

Jane’s Marriott:

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

The counter revolution

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Janen Ganesh:

What dates the picture, besides Bette’s unpersuasive fat suit, is that higher education is spoken of throughout as a remote and impenetrable exotica, which I suppose it was in 1895 (when the film is set) or even 1945 (when the film was made). The subsequent expansion of universities is about as civilising a thing as western societies have done since the war.

It might also be what brings them down. Polls have suggested for a while that education is more or less the best predictor of one’s openness to populism. Voters without a degree favoured Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 14 points. Among postgraduates, she won by a scarcely believable 32 points. There was a similar pattern with Brexit. As the university year begins, it is timely to explain why.

Joe Stafford:

A new study from The University of Manchester has found that a well-known mental health intervention for children may be no more effective than the usual social and emotional learning (SEL) programs already being taught in primary schools.

The research, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, was led by experts from the Manchester Institute of Education working alongside colleagues from the University of Dundee and Necmettin Erbakan University in Turkey. After looking at whether Passport: Skills for Life helped to improve children’s mental well-being, they found that it appeared to make little difference compared to what schools were already doing.

Passport is designed to help children aged 9 to 11 manage their emotions, cope with stress and build good relationships. It includes 18 weekly lessons covering topics like feelings, friendships and handling change.

Teachers who were trained in the program delivered these lessons in class—the idea was that by helping children to build strong emotional and social skills, it could prevent mental health problems like anxiety and depression.

Chuck Mason:

Every nation is built on a set of generally accepted ideas, beliefs, and assumptions that define concepts of justice, peace, freedom, property, equality, and acceptable sexuality and conduct that become the foundation for society.  That nation remains relatively stable until the ideological foundation changes, as radical ideas and theories cast a new vision of equality and justice that criminalizes the past and demands liberation for the future.  This ideological crisis results in bloodshed as irreconcilable visions of equality and justice compete for supremacy until one ultimately defeats the other.  This is the story of the battle between the Jewish and Christian West and Marxism throughout the 20th century.  The battle has come to America.  It’s as vulnerable to Marxism as any nation.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn warned us: “Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”

If you’re incredulous, ask those who suffered under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot what happens when equity captures the hearts and minds of young radicals who were willing to liquidate over 100 million to achieve the utopian promise.  Kirk’s death reveals that equity has no intention of leaving America unscathed.

The right is incapable of accepting the reality that equity is entrenched in America and refuses to accept that they can’t vote their way out of this ideological war.  The left has no idea that equity opens a Pandora’s box that pours out an incomprehensible bowl of wrath upon America.  As long as these two facts remain unchanged, the nation’s future is as predictable as Charlie Kirk’s tragic death.

Patrick Mcilheran:

Yet asked the other day about whether he’d wave his hand to let Wisconsin taxpayers use a new federal tax credit for education-related donations, the governor slammed the door. He told a reporter it would be “catastrophic” for public schools, even though the new program allows donations to go to public school students for, say, tutoring, technology, books or other extra help.

Yet Evers said no. Why?

Evers’ rejection is early: Only four other governors have weighed in. A Republican in Tennessee and a Democrat in North Carolina opted their states into the program, and Democrats in Oregon and New Mexico opted out. Everyone else is still making up their mind.

“We have 15 months to discuss this before you absolutely have to make a decision,” said Dale Kooyenga, head of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, a nonpartisan group that frequently weighs in on school reform. The tax credit — a dollar-for-dollar reduction in a taxpayer’s liability up to $1,700 — only starts in the 2026 tax year, meaning Wisconsin wouldn’t have to send Washington a list of approved “scholarship granting organizations,” through which Wisconsinites could send donations, until the start of 2027.

Kooyenga pointed out that while the program’s outlinesin law are known, some details are hazy. How would families get scholarship money? Unknown. Can Wisconsinites get a credit for donating to organizations in states where governors said yes? Probably. Can an organization from another state set up an office in Wisconsin? Unclear, say Kooyenga and others.

That’s because while the law is passed, not a line of regulations to implement it has  been written.

“It’s unfortunate a decision was made prior to getting all the details,” said Jim Bender, the Badger Institute’s education consultant.

Taleb:

Here @stephen_wolfram accurately points out that scientists that come up with new ideas & frameworks are more often the experienced ones, not the young as we tend to believe.

Abigail Nichols

A group of former students recently filed a lawsuit against 32 universities and two college admission organizations for allegedly “inflating the price of attendance” through early admissions.

The lawsuit states that while early admission boosts a student’s chance of acceptance, it requires them to withdraw other applications and “pay whatever tuition and fees the school demands of them.” 

Edward Diver, an attorney representing the students, told The College Fix the group filed the lawsuit “primarily to end the broken status-quo represented by binding Early Decision.” 

“We hope that our lawsuit puts an end to the anticompetitive practices alleged in our complaint,” he said.

The lawsuit accuses universities including Brown, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Barnard, Columbia, and Duke of “participating in practices that entrench patterns of inequality of access while inflating the price of attendance.”

It also claims the schools agreed not to compete for students admitted through early decision, which raises tuition and fees while reinforcing “a system widely acknowledged to be unfair and harmful.”

Katie Ebner-Landy

It is hard to find a philosopher who writes well. One can list the good stylists on one hand: Bernard Williams, for the clear frankness of his prose; Stanley Cavell, whose writing self-reflectively folds in on itself like origami; Friedrich Nietzsche, whose dazzle and exclamation seduce many people into questionable ideas. David Hume is typically seen as part of this crowd. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher wrote in many genres: not only essays, dissertations and treatises, but dialogues, impersonated monologues and biographies. Hume adored the literary celebrities of his day, like the essayist Joseph Addison, who founded The Spectator magazine,and the French moralist Jean de La Bruyère. He was also unfailingly committed to finding a way to bridge the divide between scholars and society, between a world that was ‘learned’ and one that was ‘conversible’. However, it was Hume who helped to divide what we now call ‘literature’ from what we now call ‘philosophy’. He did so by posing a devastating challenge to the prestige of one literary tool that had long been considered a legitimate method in which to practise philosophy: the character sketch.

Julie Jargon:

Parents are getting so fed up trying to keep their teens off phones that some are bypassing the usual lectures and parental controls and are instead offering cash, and even cars.

Jennifer Abbott, a small-business owner in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she made a deal with her two kids to each get $1,800 when they turn 18—if they can stay off social media until then. “It’s all or nothing,” Abbott says. “They’re both pretty pumped about it.”

Her son, Beckett, 12, says the money will help with college. Her daughter, Evie, 11, says she plans to invest. “I’ll put it in the bank maybe, for it to multiply,” she says.

Abbott says she realizes her kids are still young enough that they don’t feel like they’re missing out. Her goal is to normalize life without social media before it becomes a dependency—and while $1,800 still seems like a lot of money to her children.

“If we offered this to them at 16, they wouldn’t take it,” she says. “They’d be asking if there’s compound interest.”

Frank:

I am a high school teacher. As this study finds, banning phones hurts our best students. Unlike Tyler, I do have a problem with these policies. Studies like this dont even measure the ways that phones help our best students the most: they allow students to access real teachers, better teachers, sources of knowledge and learning that are beyond what they are stuck with in our public schools. There are many actions we could take that would boost grades. We could adopt singapore’s culture or the Japanese juku system. We could become as draconian as you like to boost grades for low-performing students. But to what end? Maybe there is one Peter Scholze who could boost his early learning by 5 pct, even 100 or more pct depending on what schhol he is in, with a phone. Is banning it from him worth boosting the algebra 1 scores of 20,000 future real estate salesman by 3 percent? Phones are new. Teachers have no idea how to use them. They are devices that contain the entire world’s knowledge and kids want to use them – and we are banning them? Any teacher who wants to ban phones is taking the easy way out.

WILL

The News: On behalf of three high school students and a coalition of Wisconsin parents, WILL filed an amicus brief in West Virginia v. B.P.J, a case currently before the Supreme Court of the United States. WILL argues that laws limiting girls’ sports to biological girls do not violate Title IX. We also explain that the decision will impact bathrooms and locker rooms, and we urge the Court to directly overrule lower court decisions (including from the Seventh Circuit) that require schools to give boys access to girls’ facilities. Our brief provides several real-life examples of the harms that occur when boys can access girls’ spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms.

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Luke Berg, stated, “For far too long, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana have been burdened by the Seventh Circuit’s deeply flawed rulings that schools must allow transgender-identifying boys to access girls’ facilities. We hope the Supreme Court’s decision will not only protect girls’ sports but also clarify that those decisions are no longer good law—and never have been.”

Scott Johnson:

“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just over-billing,” Thompson explained. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”

Chang Che:

Today, at 56, Song-Chun Zhu is one of the world’s leading authorities in artificial intelligence. In 1992, he left China for the US to pursue a PhD in computer science at Harvard. Later, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he led one of the most prolific AI research centres in the world, won numerous major awards, and attracted prestigious research grants from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. He was celebrated for his pioneering research into how machines can spot patterns in data, which helped lay the groundwork for modern AI systems such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. He and his wife, and their two US-born daughters, lived in a hilltop home on Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive. He thought he would never leave.

But in August 2020, after 28 years in the US, Zhu astonished his colleagues and friends by suddenly moving back to China, where he took up professorships at two top Beijing universities and a directorship in a state-sponsored AI institute. The Chinese media feted him as a patriot assisting the motherland in its race toward artificial intelligence. US lawmakers would later demand to know how funders such as UCLA and the Pentagon had ignored “concerning signs” of Zhu’s ties to a geopolitical rival. In 2023, Zhu became a member of China’s top political advisory body, where he proposed that China should treat AI with the same strategic urgency as a nuclear weapons programme.

WILL:

Based on our findings, the district allocates additional resources to certain students and schools based on skin color alone. The Trump Administration needs to fully investigates this unlawful, race-based approach.”

WILL Client, Miranda Stovall, stated, “Parents need to see what’s happening with their children and their tax dollars. A child’s race should never determine their value, yet this is the message JCPS is sending to every student in the district––including my own. This practice is unlawful, immoral, and harms every student in the district.”

Additional Background: JCPS allocated more than $35 million in “Racial Equity Funding” for the 2024–25 school year alone, which provides certain schools with hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional funding based on their percentage of students of color. This includes discretionary funds that allocate an additional $1,000 to $1,500 per pupil for minority students simply because of their race.

Via Chris Arnade:

The woke were warned their tools could be turned against them but couldn’t imagine history’s arc bending rightward. (I struggled to imagine it myself.) Now populists facing the same warning keep implying no future censorious left could exceed what we’ve had already. (We’ll see.)

——-

Andrew Sullivan:

“We all became used to soft-liberal bias on TV and newspapers for years like background music, and it didn’t delegitimize them entirely.

Ryan Moser:

We may be witnessing something similar today. Silicon Valley has already produced alternative institutions that serve many of the same functions as traditional business schools. Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, offers networking opportunities, credential signaling, access to capital, and practical education, but with a crucial difference. It rewards people who can build things, not just manage them.

This suggests we’re entering a period where two elite classes will coexist: the legacy professional-managerial class, still holding institutional power but increasingly marginalized, and an emerging elite defined by technical competence and measurable output. The transition will likely take decades, with established managers maintaining their positions even as the pathways that created them disappear.

For young people watching this unfold, the implications are stark. The old ladder is burning, rung by rung. Those who would have become management consultants may need to become applied data scientists; those who would have been people managers may need to become product builders. The new elite pathways are still being forged, but they share a characteristic the old system often lacked: they reward people who can actually do the work, not just coordinate it.

Anne-Marie Alcantara:

Madeleine Scherzer worked as a lifeguard all summer so she could afford the perfect outfits for her senior year of high school. She bought a $148 Free People sweat set and a $68 Lululemon T-shirt, plus other items from Altar’d State, Adidas, Pacsun and LoveShackFancy so her haul would really pop on TikTok. In total, she spent about $700.

“I really focused on more of the name-brand stuff,” said Scherzer, 17. “I know what other girls are buying at my age.”

Back-to-school shopping isn’t what it used to be. Where families once hit the mall to refresh basic wardrobe staples and hit up Staples for pencils and notebooks, now teenagers have made a ritual of ordering or buying heaps of designer clothing, expensive beauty products and trendy backpacks. From the outside, their “haul” videos on TikTok might seem like inordinate displays of wealth and status, but for the people who make and consume them, they’re a rite of passage. Teens and tweens watch to figure out how to fit in and cultivate their personal style. A tale as old as time, just now with a smartphone.

Alyssa Lukpat and Victoria Albert:

College campuses were historically considered a haven for activism. Not anymore.

Students returning to school are grappling with the fallout from the Trump administration’s detention of foreign student protesters and universities tightening rules for demonstrations.

“It’s going to be a very tense fall,” said graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi, who is returning to Columbia University after spending two weeks in immigration detention this spring.

It has been roughly six months since the Trump administration arrested Mahdawi’s classmate and fellow protester, Mahmoud Khalil, an opening salvo in what has become a battle over the limits of free speech on college campuses.

Khalil and other foreign students living legally in the U.S. spent weeks to months in immigration detention centers far from their families. Others gave up their fight to stay in the country.

Will Flanders summarizes Jill Underly’s Speech:

Dr. Underly (Wisconsin DPI Superintendent) mentions that graduation rates are at record highs, but what good are high rates if graduates can’t read their diploma? Even with inflated proficiency standards, only 41.9% of Wisconsin high schoolers meet expectations in reading.

Dr. Underly complains that funding is “inadequate,” but the average school district in Wisconsin now has nearly $18,000 in revenue per student. A class of 20 students represents $360,000 in taxpayer value. Money is not what is holding our schools back

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more.

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Green Bay Area Public Schools lowered the academic threshold for their gifted and talented program because not enough black kids got in…

Over the weekend, Texas became the 29th state to guarantee a Personal Finance course for all high school students. Once all state laws are fully implemented, 76% of U.S. HS students will take a standalone Personal Finance course before graduating. More: ngpf.org/blog/press-rel…

——-

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

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Shaka Mitchell:

This is not just an education problem. It is a workforce problem, a civic problem, and an economic problem. The United States cannot hope to remain globally competitive if its education system is producing historically low levels of achievement among its high school graduates. Fortunately, school choice offers a proven model for beginning to turn things around.

II. School Choice as a Path Forward

Families deserve more than a one-size-fits-all education system. School choice allows parents to select the environment that best suits their children—whether that is a traditional public school, a public charter school, a private or parochial school, a micro-school, or a homeschool setting. Beginning as small pilot programs in the 1990s, school choice has gone mainstream, with 74 publicly funded private school choice programs in 32 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico. Over 1.3 million students are enrolled in private choice programs today.

School choice is not about abandoning public education. It is about ensuring accountability and creating a broad menu of options that meet unique needs. Decades of research demonstrate that competition introduced by school choice improves outcomes not only for participating students but also for those who remain in traditional public schools. By expanding options, we foster innovation, responsiveness, and higher performance across the entire system.

III. Student Learning Outcomes

Evidence from across the nation confirms that school choice improves student achievement. In Milwaukee, the first city to establish a modern voucher program, rigorous evaluations found higher graduation rates among choice participants. In Washington, D.C., students receiving Opportunity Scholarships were more likely to graduate from high school than their peers.

Parents consistently report greater satisfaction with choice programs, citing safety, academic quality, and values alignment. These outcomes matter because education should not be measured only by dollars spent, but by the transformation of student lives and the outcomes those students go on to achieve. Of course, when evaluating education outcomes, it is natural to first examine student learning. Over 200 empirical studies have examined the impact of school choice on students, parents, schools, and state budgets – 84% found positive effects with most of the remainder finding neutral effects. Beyond those who participate in school choice programs, a now large body of research has examined the effect of choice programs on students who remain in public schools. 27 out of 30 studies show positive (27) or neutral (1) effects on the test scores of students who remain in public school. This debunks the myth that students “left behind” will falter. School choice brings with it the injection of innovation into public school systems that often lack financial and academic performance incentives.

——

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Megan Brenan:

A record-low 35% of Americans are satisfied with the quality of education that K-12 students receive in the U.S. today, marking an eight-percentage-point decline since last year. This is one point below the previous historical low recorded in 2000 and 2023for this Gallup question that dates back to 1999.

Several other ratings of the U.S. K-12 education system provide a similarly bleak assessment. Only about one-quarter of Americans think K-12 schools are headed in the right direction, while just one in five rate them as “excellent” or “good” at preparing students for today’s jobs and one in three say the same for college.

Yet, parents of current K-12 students are nearly twice as satisfied with their own child’s education as they are with education in the U.S. K-12 parents are also slightly more likely than U.S. adults in general to rate different aspects of education positively, including the direction of education in the U.S. and schools’ preparation of students for the workforce and for college. Still, none of these ratings is near the majority level.

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More.

——-

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

Since 2013 NAEP math scores have dropped 11 points for eighth-graders and five points for fourth-graders—and the declines are steepest for the lowest-performing students. Twelfth-grade scores have dropped six points. Thirty-nine percent of eighth-graders and 45% of twelfth-graders scored below “basic” proficiency in 2024. 

Scores were trending up before 2013, so what explains the slide? Researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education cite “lowered expectations, inflated grades, and obscured learning gaps.” In recent years, some states have abolished standardized tests or lowered proficiency standards that help keep schools accountable. Only six states still require high school exit exams, compared to 24 in 2013. 

Schools also increasingly make it easier for students to get good grades no matter their performance. Especially after Covid, “schools confronted students’ academic struggles and demotivation by making math easier—exactly the opposite reaction to what students needed,” says the report. The truth comes out on standardized tests, and in college and the workplace where those skills are needed.

Students who struggle with math aren’t served well by being relegated to less rigorous “tracks” in early grades with no option to catch up. The report urges states to prepare all students for Algebra I by eighth grade. Some districts have dropped eighth-grade algebra in the name of equity, another example of low expectations harming students.

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 State Board Approves Lower Passing Score for High School Graduation Test

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!)

Hollis Robbins:

The reporting on the new Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression College Free Speech Rankings focuses on how things haven’t changed. The headline of Johanna Alonso’s excellent piece is “Students Report Less Tolerance for Controversial Speakers.”

To be clear, the issue of tolerance for campus speakers—and the physical safety of speakers and attendees—remains paramount, as last week’s violence made clear. But for me, FIRE’s study misses the single most profound change on college campuses: AI, and the reality that students are increasingly doing their intellectual exploration privately, not publicly. FIRE’s survey doesn’t ask what questions students are asking their AI models in the privacy of their dorm room or quietly on their laptops during lectures. Yet Inside Higher Ed’s recent surveymakes this clear: “Most students are using generative AI for coursework, but many are doing so in ways that can support, not outsource, their learning.” As one student put it, faculty members and leaders “need to understand how accessible and potent it is.”

FIRE’s approach conflating intellectual freedom (the right to speak) with intellectual obligation (the expectation that one should speak) belongs to an older era. The study’s methodology treats public expression of controversial political views as an expected norm rather than a choice complicated by AI and social media. Students who report discomfort expressing their views in classroom discussions, campus common areas or on social media are counted as evidence of a “chilling climate,” regardless of whether these students have any desire to engage in public discourse.

Chris Rickert:

A liberal law firm has filed a class action lawsuit against the city of Madison on behalf of 193 absentee voters whose votes in last year’s November election went uncounted.

Plaintiffs in the 24-page suit, filed Wednesday in Dane County Circuit Court, are eight of those voters. They allege a series of mistakes — since acknowledged by the city — disenfranchised them and other voters from the Downtown and Near West Side, and that in the weeks after the election, officials failed to take any action that would have seen their votes tallied as part of a final, state-mandated canvas.

”The city had multiple opportunities to make this right, and it clearly had the duty to do so,” Kacy Gurewitz, staff counsel at Law Forward, said in a news release. “These voters invested substantial time in participating in this election, and they did everything right, but the city of Madison failed them.”

Ryan Mauro:

Since 2016, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), now run with his son Alexander, has poured over $80 million into groups tied to terrorism or extremist violence. The evidence is stark: Open Society has sent millions of dollars into U.S.-based organizations that engage in “direct actions” that the FBI defines as domestic terrorism. These groups include the Center for Third World Organizing and its militant partner Ruckus Society, which trained activists in property destruction and sabotage during the 2020 riots, and the Sunrise Movement, which endorsed the Antifa-linked Stop Cop City campaign, in which activists currently face over 40 domestic terrorism charges and 60 racketeering indictments. At the same time, Open Society awarded $18 million to the Movement for Black Lives, a group that co-authored a radical guide that glorifies Hamas’s October 7 massacre and instructs activists in the use of false IDs, blockades, and economic disruption.

Nor is the danger confined to America’s streets. Open Society has funneled more than $2.3 million into Al-Haq, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in the West Bank and long accused of ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which the European Union and the United States designate as a foreign terrorist organization. Grants to Al-Haq between 2016 and 2023 ranged from $400,000 in general support to an $800,000 institutional award. In September 2025, the U.S. State Department sanctioned Al-Haq, citing its role in advancing campaigns that “directly engaged in the [International Criminal Court’s] illegitimate targeting of Israel.” That means Soros’s foundation has not only financed extremist groups within the United States but also funneled millions abroad to entities now formally sanctioned by Washington.

Wall Street Journal:

The latest university leader to resign under pressure by the Trump Administration is Northwestern University President Michael Schill, who made his announcement Thursday amid a freeze in federal research funding for the school. Some of President Trump’s demands of colleges are over the top, but Mr. Schill was one of the biggest appeasers of last year’s anti-Israel campus mobs.

Northwestern’s campus was occupied by an encampment in the spring of 2024, and in exchange for partially removing it, Mr. Schill gave in to the protesters. The school agreed to new scholarships for Palestinian students, new Palestinian faculty, and a new “safe space” on campus for Middle Eastern and Muslim students. That was a big win for the campus agitators, who got real results from their flagrant breach of university norms.

Mr. Schill’s agreement stands as a monument to the lunacy that governed college campuses across the nation during that moment, which included coddling protesters and failing to protect students from blatant antisemitism. After decades of focus on microaggressions and decolonization narratives, many of these universities found themselves lacking coherent moral leadership to address the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. The heads of America’s liberal institutions lost their nerve to stand down the mob.

Quinton Klabon:

Fun Wisconsin #StateOfEducation facts:

• state funding has nearly been at all-time highs since 2018
• private school market share is lower now than when vouchers began
• public schools employed more people than ever in history with the fewest students since 1992

——

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

DAISY CHRISTODOULOU

Why the picky, picky detail matters

Last month, Nick Gibb, the former UK Schools Minister, published a memoir about his 10+ years in office. He was central to the big educational reforms England introduced since 2010: phonics teaching, a knowledge-rich curriculum, school autonomy, and assessment reform. 

I wrote the foreword to the book, and I’ve written before on here about the success of these reforms. So I’m hardly a neutral observer, but for what it is worth I think the book is fantastic, and it has been getting rave reviews from others too (see here, hereand here.) 

In my foreword, I emphasised the importance of content knowledge not just for education, but for politicians and policymakers. Nick Gibb really understood education. He’d done his research and visited hundreds of schools. He was given the time to develop his understanding too, because unlike most junior ministers, he wasn’t reshuffled to a completely different department after 15 months. 

The educationalist Siegfried Engelmann liked to talk about the importance of the “picky, picky detail”. If you’re trying to teach a student what a verb is, it matters if all the examples you give have the verb as the second word. Picky detail really matters for policy reform too. In this post, I will focus on two aspects of England’s assessment and accountability reforms where attention to detail made a huge difference, and where policymakers in other areas could learn a lot.

Joseph Menn

Research by a U.S. security firm points to the country’s leading player in AI providing higher-quality results for some purposes than others.

Ryan Craig,

Because I’m an investor, I receive an inordinate number of pitches from companies seeking funding. Like CORPUS, the Netherlands-based 9-story, 135-foot human-shaped structure that offers an interactive “journey through the human body,” now seeking funding to build additional giants in China. Or less likely but potentially lucrative opportunities like a “poultry hotel” combining a 5-star hotel with an industrial-scale poultry farm (side benefit: guests get fresh eggs and chicken). Or a new fast-casual Asian brand that promises to revolutionize the U.S. dining scene. “Our strategy is simple,” says the pitch. “We aim to replicate the success of the other ‘John’ brands. Think Papa John’s, Jimmy John’s, and Taco John’s.” The investor presentation also mentions Johnny Rockets and Long John Silver’s. What’s missing? Asian John’s! The other Johns “have already helped build [the] Asian John’s [brand].” According to the founder (John), the key to success is locating “next to one of the other Johns. We put it next to a Jimmy John’s.” The marketing campaign writes itself: “There’s a new John in town.” Watch out Panda Express!

Daniel Buck:

To argue that schools of education have gone bonkers is akin to penning an op-ed that the Titanic sank. The fact is given. Does anyone dispute it?

The most-assigned books and essays for prospective teachers are a heady mixture of race essentialism, gender theory, and outright Marxist kookery. Trainees learn much of critical-consciousness raising, Marxist praxis, and gender as a performative act but little of classroom management, curricular sequencing, or instructional practice. Unsurprisingly, research into the impact of these programs finds that teachers who attend them are no more effectivethan alternatively trained or even untrained career transitioners.

Since at least the 1960s, schools of education have housed some of our most radical thinkers.Since at least the 1960s, schools of education have housed some of our most radical thinkers. Many leaders of the terroristic Weather Underground found refuge in them, for example. And, since then, along with a handful of law schools, education schools have introduced into public consciousness many of conservatives’ bugaboos, from critical race theory to microaggressions and white fragility.

The scholarship that such schools produce often reads like the sweaty rantings of a schizophrenic.The scholarship—a gracious thing to call it—that such schools produce often reads like the sweaty rantings of a schizophrenic. Skim any education-school publication list, and you’ll find a mess of auto-ethnographies, case studies, and glorified op-eds championing the latest progressive classroom intervention. Notably absent are randomized-controlled trials, quasi-experimental studies, or meta-analyses proving the theories actually work.

Education schools are indeed, as a former Harvard president once called them, a “kitten that ought to be drowned.” Such disdain is typically how conservatives discuss them: Schools of education delenda est. Or they follow Milton Friedman’s recommendation to abolish licensure policies and let the market sort it out.

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

Matt Taibbi:

It’s too bad Bret Stephens never debated Charlie Kirk. He’d have had to defend the idea that students at places like the University of Chicago are not only “smarter” than ignorant red-staters (and students at schools like Cambridge), but more schooled in the “Western tradition” of “skepticism,” as opposed to “certitude.”

Does Stephens mean currently? If so, that’s rich. The cultural schism now widening under all of us in America has surely been caused at least in part by a shift in the attitudes of the very people Stephens calls “the greatest scholars.” Professors abandon skepticism for certitude in a range of hot-button issues, including a conspicuous one that may have had an impact on Kirk’s murder, transgender ideology. 

And “smarter”? Stephens needs a fresh look at what passes for instruction and re-examine whether students are really being taught to think better. He should ask if it’s not instead true that institutional America is and has been systematically ripping off its young, a question Kirk threw at students everywhere, often with devastating results. It’s not surprising that scenes of kids who casually admit they “hate books” but were welcomed to pay tuition anyway haven’t made too many of the “Kirk’s greatest misdeeds” reels currently circulating:

…..

college embarrasses its customers…

William Galston:

Charlie Kirk was right when he tweeted last May: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.” Attorney General Pam Bondi somehow didn’t know that, saying last Monday that the Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” She then backpedaled under bipartisan pressure.

As Kirk’s statement suggests, there’s a distinction between what is legal and what is moral. The right to say something doesn’t mean that saying it is the right thing to do. Anyone can tell you that what you said is false, or dangerous, or something no decent person would say. But no one has the right to prevent you from saying it.

The alternative is to give government the power to muzzle you. The optimists’ case for free speech rests on the belief that what is right or true will ultimately win out in the marketplace of ideas. The realists’ case rests on the proposition that letting government decide what people are allowed to say puts us on the road to autocracy. Government officials will try to suppress speech that challenges their policies, embarrasses them or angers them. Unless dissenters enjoy the strongest possible legal protections, the sphere of permitted speech contracts, and the power of government to do whatever it wishes expands.

President Trump’s recent comments about critical news coverage of him underscore this risk. When “97% of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal personally.”

By Erika Edwards, Jason Kane, Stephanie Gosk, Mustafa Fattah and Joe Murphy:

A monthslong NBC News data investigation finds that much of the U.S. doesn’t have the protection needed to stop the spread of deadly diseases. St. Louis is a window into the problem communities face nationwide.

More.

Chris Rickert:

Amid an ongoing investigation into a former Sun Prairie West High School staffer, the Sun Prairie School District has named the school’s second acting principal of the just-started academic year.

Recently retired Middleton High School Principal Peg Shoemaker will take over for West’s Associate Principal Ed Ford, according to a Tuesday news release from district leaders. Ford had just been named acting principal on Sept. 4 to replace Jennifer Ploeger.

Ploeger, who had been principal since 2022, was placed on paid leave amid an investigation into former Dean of Students Robert Gilkey-Meisegeier.

Gilkey-Meisegeier, 30, has been charged in state court with two counts of sexual exploitation of a child and 13 counts of possession of child pornography, and indicted in federal court for attempting to produce and possessing child pornography. Victims in the cases include West students, according to authorities.

Walter Kirn:

Seizers are generally – maybe universally — structured as mysteries, detective stories, ever-tantalizing, ever-unsatisfying. Research is required, and rewarded, compelling you to do more research. But their real genius as dramas is that they have many, many streams or branches, and perhaps an unlimited number, or so it seems. In fact, they aren’t open-ended, they just feel that way, like a lot of good stories do when you’re in the middle of them and are stumped for solutions. “I’d thought I’d solved it but then the suspect died, and then it felt like anything could happen.” These forking paths and lanes of possibility are also quietly patrolled by traffic cops, and not just passively. You take a certain road at a certain time and at a certain speed (all factors matter), and you might hit a roadblock. One put there just for you. And perhaps not permanently. Tomorrow it’s gone.

This is the nuclear-level capability that makes seizers something truly new, even if the tropes and games they use are rooted in tradition. (Ancient tradition.) Dramatic productions of the older sort might strike different people in different ways, but, for the most part, they unite the audience. They provoke a common response in a shared space, or a metaphoric shared space. “The nation’s living rooms.”

Barbara Oakley:

The assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University is a human tragedy first: Two young children lost their father; a wife lost her husband. But it is also a cultural tragedy, revealing corrosion at the heart of our civic life. Violence against speech is the final symptom of a disease that begins much earlier—in our failure to teach the value of hearing other voices early on, in schools.

Our brains are built to form habits. The basal ganglia—deep learning circuits that automate whatever we repeat—don’t absorb only tennis serves or piano scales. They also wire in patterns of thought. If the only messages we hear are one-sided, the brain’s habit circuits carve them into grooves of thought that resist change.

Rigidity at the neural level breeds rigidity at the civic level. Economists studying East Germany, including Harvard’s Alberto Alesina, found that decades of socialist rule left scars on behavior: Citizens became more cautious, less entrepreneurial, and slower to trust. A society that punished initiative and rewarded conformity trained its population to avoid novelty. Those scars of enforced consensus outlasted the Berlin Wall.

Neuroscience also shows that cognitive flexibility isn’t automatic. Like any skill, it must be trained. In a paper titled “One cannot simply ‘be flexible,’ ” Ghent University cognitive scientist Senne Braem and colleagues showed that when people are rewarded for switching tasks, they later switch more readily—even without realizing why. When switching is discouraged, they become more rigid. Flexibility is like a muscle: It grows with practice, feedback and time.

Wall Street Journal:

As a result, unions do it regardless of the legality. “Washington has seen 78 school districts strike since 1976,” the Columbian newspaper said in 2018. “Injunctions were filed in 25 of those,” but in 12 of them “teachers defied the injunctions.” Unions calculate that getting a hefty contract might outweigh any penalty imposed by a judge. After a 2018 strike, Evergreen teachers nabbed a salary increase of 11.5%.

The state Legislature could change the calculus by adding penalties for public union strikes, but Washington politics is union friendly. This spring lawmakers passed a bill, effective in January, to let striking workers collect unemployment benefits, though the money must be paid back if a court deems the walkout illegal.

Open The Books:

Debates about public school funding sometimes include an underlying assumption that more funding results in better student outcomes. Available data tells a more complex story. Our review of 12,531 school districts across the country shows a negative correlation between overhead and student performance. In other words, districts that spent more on teacher and administrative pay saw their students’ standardized test scores drop.

Using the Open the Books proprietary database of government salaries across America, we calculated how much each U.S. state increased its total public school payrolls from 2019 to 2023. We compared that number to the change in each state’s ranking on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which measures reading and math skills for 4th and 8th graders.

VIEW THE DATA HERE

By plotting the percentage change in payroll, state by state, versus the percentage change in the national rankings of its districts, a surprising picture emerges. Growing payrolls are not closely correlated with improved performance among districts in a given state. In fact, the opposite correlation appears. There is a mild inverse relationship between these two data sets. Higher overhead costs are associated with lower test scores. [1]

…..

This research suggests that an increase in administrator pay is a more likely cause of the negative correlation with student achievement.

Administrative bloat in public schools is not new. Benjamin Scafidi, an Economics of Education professor at Kennesaw State University, found that the number of non-teaching staff at U.S. schools increased by 702% from 1950 to 2009, while the number of teachers increased by only 252%. Meanwhile, student scores on the NAEP fell.

Scafidi wrote that this “irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars is indefensible,” and that was before the surge in salaries over the last few years. From 2010 to 2022, the number of administrative staff rose by another 41%, while overall school employment rose by only

——

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

Where would I be without the Madison School Board?

Every month or so they provide me with fodder for this blog. Why, just last week the district touted a new logo for which they paid an out-of-state design company $100,000, only months after the voters gave them another $600 million in taxing authority to spend, we thought, on actual education.

The Board provides me with so much material that I really should pay them. But then again I don’t need to as they’re poised to double their own salaries and give themselves taxpayer financed health insurance.

The Board will soon vote to make official a pay increase from $8,000 to $15,000. The Board president will get more and they’ll also get stipends to attend meetings that one would think are part of the job and should be covered by their salary. And then there’s the health insurance that will cost taxpayers about $200,000 a year if all seven board members take it.

According to a story in the Wisconsin State Journal, Board member Savion Castro summed up the reasons when he stated that most school boards are structured for “older, whiter, wealthier folks,” but that’s not an accurate reflection of the Madison district’s diverse student body, and increasing pay could make board positions “more accessible to the folks that look like the students and the families of the district.”

But, wait a minute. Four of the current board’s seven members are people of color, and two identify as having disabilities. There are no white men on the Board and nobody is wealthy. And in fact, one of the most dedicated, impactful board members in recent decades was Mary Burke, who committed the unpardonable sins of being both white and wealthy.

And while I’m on the topic, the philosophy behind Catro’s remark is pretty dangerous. Because he’s saying we should discourage public service based on race and income. In principle that’s what Jim Crow was.

….

And as for diversity, the real diversity we lack on this Board is diversity of opinion. There’s not a single member of this group that cares about taxpayers, good order in the schools, test scores or the fact that Madison is losing students to other districts and charter schools. Instead, all seven members of the Board are, like Castro, obsessed with identity politics.

——

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

WILL:

The News: WILL has unveiled a new policy report, “Closing Wisconsin’s Math Gap: A Call for Early Numeracy Reform,” sounding the alarm on declining math achievement and offering solutions to reverse the crisis. The report draws on lessons from seven states that have led the way in implementing serious, practical, and bipartisan numeracy reforms. These efforts build on early literacy reforms adopted by dozens of states around the nation, including Wisconsin.

The Quotes: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, stated, “Without strong math skills, Wisconsin’s students will struggle in school, at work, and in life. This report highlights practical and bipartisan success stories from seven states that acted, and now it’s time for Wisconsin to do the same. If we want our kids to succeed in school and our workforce to stay competitive, we must start building a stronger math foundation in the early grades.”

WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “School districts don’t have to wait for the Legislature to act. Our model policy gives school boards a clear framework to identify struggling students, support teachers, and close early skill gaps before they grow.”

———

Math Forum Audio / Video and Links.

Chris Rickert:

In the survey that opened Sept. 2 and closes Sept. 26, district residents are asked to rank their top five priorities for the district. Among the choices are the “ability to have choice in school options such as magnet, STEM, Charter” and “access to language immersion programs such as Spanish (dual-language immersion) or other options.”

Green said that in her 11 years with the district, she doesn’t recall asking residents about whether they’d like options outside of the neighborhood schools framework. But the district has fielded plenty of questions from the public about it, she said.

“The community I’ve heard over the years, even just since I’ve been here, really an arts academy or a school for the arts, I’ve heard quite a bit, based on the arts-rich community we live in,” she said. “I’ve heard STEM, also.”

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The September survey is part of the district’s broader review of school attendance area boundaries. Dubbed “Building for the Future,” the review also is aimed at figuring out the best uses for two plots of district-owned land on the Far East and Far West sides, and evaluating district programs and options to make sure the district is “responsive to the needs of the city’s rapidly changing community,” according to the district’s communications office.

———

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

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ann Althouse summary

“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed.“

Said Sonia Sotomayor, quoted in “Sotomayor rebukes calls to ‘criminalize free speech’ in apparent swipe at Pam Bondi/The justice, in public remarks, didn’t name the attorney general, who has come under fire for comments to target people over ‘hate speech'” (Politico).

And so ends the decades long push — by the left — to criminalize hate speech. Thanks, Justice Sotomayor!
Posted b

Bloomberg:

Chicago is stepping in to lend cash to its underfunded pensions so they have enough money to avoid asset sales to cover retirement checks as they wait for property taxes to come in after a computer issue delayed collections.

——

more.

Amy Kazmin:

Italy’s official rates of pet ownership — about 40 per cent of households report having at least one pet — may still be well below those of the UK and the US, at 60 per cent and 66 per cent respectively. But Tortorella, who also runs a dog day-care in the centre of Rome, says that while Italians have always loved dogs, “in the last 10 years, dogs or cats have really become treated as a member of the family. It’s a new, pet-friendly culture. They do the same things for their dogs as you can do with a child.”

From dog day-care with pick-up and drop-off shuttle services, to specialised pathology labs, to the organisation of solemn pet funerals, new enterprises are catering to the needs of the full pet life cycle.

In 2022, Italians spent €6.8bn on petcare, according to Nomisma, an Italian consultancy. While dogs were once fed table scraps, people are increasingly fussy over what they give them. “They worry about what they eat, the quality,” Tortorella said. “Now people cook for their pets.”

Wall Street Journal:

Discussing Kirk’s work on college campuses, Ms. Bondi mentioned the “disgusting” antisemitism on display at many universities, and so far so good. But wait. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” the country’s top law enforcer told a podcast. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

Kirk would want a word. “My position is that even hate speech should be completely and totally allowed in our country. The most disgusting speech should absolutely be protected,” he once told a crowd. “The ACLU used to hold this viewpoint. The American Civil Liberties Union, they sued so that legitimate Nazis could march through downtown Skokie.”

Why? “As soon as you use the word ‘hate,’ that is a very subjective term,” Kirk said, in a video posted by his group in 2020. “Then all of a sudden it is in the eyes, or it is in the implementation, of whomever has the power.”

He was right, as governments around the world are proving almost daily. Armed British police recently arrested Graham Linehan, a TV sitcom writer, and reportedly questioned him about his posts on the internet, including one that read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” He says it was a joke, and it’s stupid, but criminal?