Chris Rickert:

It’s also laid bare what could be an inequity in the new guaranteed-admission regime because most Dane County public high schools also don’t weigh their grades for difficulty — meaning that, in theory, students who get straight A’s in all regular-level classes could have a better chance at getting in to UW than students who take more challenging honors and advanced placement classes but also have a few B’s sprinkled in with their A’s.

Under the grading system used by Madison and almost all other Dane County districts, students are not rewarded with additional Grade Point Average credit for taking more challenging classes.

That means, for example, that whether a student gets an A in a history, an honors history or an advanced placement history class, that A always translates into a 4.0 GPA on the traditional 4.0 grading scale.

But under weighted grading schemes, an A in an advanced history class would translate into something higher than a 4.0, such as a 4.5 or 5.0, and especially diligent students could end up with GPAs higher than 4.0 on the traditional 4-point scale, thus boosting their class ranking and chances of getting into the UW institutions of their choice.

On March 17, the district emailed an online survey to parents and guardians to gauge their input on a possible shift to weighted grading, and it’s also soliciting feedback on the idea from students and staff, according to spokesperson Ian Folger.

——-

Madison has long moved the grading deck chairs around.

“Standards based” grading.

Infinite campus….

Vonnegut.

——-

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?

Raul Emanuel

“Democrats need to be honest with parents, too: We shuttered schools for too long in response to the pandemic, and we need to stop looking at our shoes and hoping no one highlights our role in the devastating consequences.”

——

Covid era Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate and Lockdown policies.

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

——

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?

Lucas Robinson:

That’s a massive infrastructure undertaking ahead, and aligning those buildings with the district’s climate change and sustainability goals will be a big part of their development.

To coordinate the sustainability component of those projects, the district has hired Bryanna Krekeler to be its first-ever sustainability manager.

Krekeler is a Madison native whose work and education has taken her to Minnesota, Seattle and Kansas.

Krekeler started her career as a math teacher in Seattle. She owes her interest in sustainability to that experience. During a career presentation from a student, sustainability’s role in the work of architectural engineers caught her attention.

———

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?

Lead Vaida:

As President Donald Trump takes action to limit the powers of the Department of Education, a large part of student loans remain in the hands of those who have been late in their payments. 

Roughly 40 percent of loans out of the total amount of $1.8 trillion in student loans are owned by loan holders who have not met their payments on time, CNN reported. 

The $1.8 trillion loan portfolio, which was held by the Department of Education, will now fall under the jurisdiction of the Small Business Administration following President Trump’s executive order limiting the Department’s powers, CNN wrote. 

Douglas Belkin and Liz Essley Whyte:

Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong met with anxious faculty over the weekend in an effort to generate support, warn of the jeopardy the school faces and downplay concerns that the deal the school cut with the government on Friday undermined its academic independence.

In meetings with about 75 faculty leaders, Armstrong and her team said six federal agencies are investigating the school and could pull all federal support from it. The Trump administration has already canceled $400 million in grants and contracts over concerns Columbia failed to protect Jewish students from harassment.

“The ability of the federal administration to leverage other forms of federal funding in an immediate fashion is really potentially devastating to our students in particular,” Armstrong said, according to a transcript of the meetings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “I think it is a really critical risk for us to understand.”

Lawyers for the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights are scheduled to visit campus and question faculty this week about potential violations of federal civil rights laws, people familiar with the matter said.

Columbia receives more than $1 billion a year in federal funds, Armstrong said. Much of the school’s approximately $15-billion endowment is earmarked by donors for specific programs. The school has begun to consider what it would give priority to if all federal funds were cut, according to a transcript.

Mike Markham/

On February 14, the Department of Education officially notified educational institutions receiving federal funding that they must cease race-based practices—including admissions, hiring, promotion, scholarships, administrative support, discipline, and sanctions. The potential loss of federal funding is offered as a consequence for noncompliance. This directive comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s January 21 executive order aimed at “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.”

Many have become weary of DEI in medicine, as deviations from merit-based practices can put patients in harm’s way.In recent years, many universities had ramped up DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs on campus—some admittedly as a response to the death of George Floyd and the resulting racial climate. Initiatives have run the gamut from the formation of so-called racial-affinity groups to race-based admissions and hiring practices. However, many have become weary of DEI in medicine, as deviations from merit-based practices can put patients in harm’s way.

Zusha Elinson:

Utah mom influencers sharing their traditional Mormon home lives are booming on Instagram and YouTube.

Now, the state is poised to enact dramatic protections for the kids in those videos by giving them the right to remove embarrassing clips when they are older and to share in the revenue. The governor is expected to sign a bill that would make Utah the first red state among a handful of others that have passed laws extending the rights of child TV stars to child internet stars.

The push for the legislation comes from the family of Ruby Franke, a popular Utah influencer with six children who went to prison last year for child abuse. Their 8 Passengers YouTube channel amassed over a billion views, but now her estranged husband, Kevin, and children want to stop others from using kids for clicks, likes and brand partnerships.

“Child exploitation is rampant among family content creators on social media today,” said Kevin Franke. “This exploitative industry of family content creation is a multibillion-dollar per year industry that involves numerous players, and the only meaningful way to combat it is through legislation.”

Alexander Osipovich:

Early one morning in August 2023, federal agents swept into Roman Storm’s home in a wooded suburb of Seattle to arrest him at gunpoint.

The 35-year-old software developer is set to go on trial this summer in a case that cryptocurrency advocates consider a key test for the legal treatment of blockchain technology. The crypto industry has rallied behind Storm, and some of his allies have called for President Trump to intervene and drop the prosecution, which began during the Biden administration.

Storm and two other developers co-founded Tornado Cash, a “mixer” used to obfuscate the movement of digital funds. He says its goal was to enable financial privacy—for instance, allowing people to donate crypto to assist war-torn Ukraine without drawing the attention of Russian authorities.

It also enabled more sinister activity. The Justice Department has alleged that criminals, including Lazarus Group, a U.S.-sanctioned North Korean cybercrime organization, used Tornado Cash to launder more than $1 billion of illicit assets. According to prosecutors, Storm and his co-founders made millions of dollars from Tornado Cash and knew that hackers used it to launder stolen assets.

Louisa Moller:

Two other inmates were charged with cocaine and fentanyl trafficking with bails of $500 and $4,000. Both of them were wanted by ICE and bailed out before ICE arrived. 

“Most people would not think that’s an appropriate bail,” Evangelidis said. 

How bail is set

Stephen Roth, a criminal defense and immigration attorney, says these bails are set by judges to reasonably assure someone reappears in court, not to ensure someone remains in custody. 

“There’s this list of criteria that they go through to determine if bail should be set and immigration status is not one of those categories,” Roth said. 

Maggie Severns:

When University of Michigan President Santa Ono sat down for breakfast earlier this month with a group of lawmakers from his home state, the message was clear: The school was ready to play ball with Trump’s Washington.

It was time for universities to “wake up” and start addressing the reasons why they have lost so much trust, Ono told the bipartisan group in a hotel conference room near the Capitol, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. Ono added that universities should listen to their most “vocal critics.”

University leaders, pinned between liberal faculty and the Trump administration, are quietly trying to make friends in Washington amid widespread concerns about research budgets, student aid and the White House’s quest to push academia to the right.

During his election campaign, President Trump vowed “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left,” and he has moved quickly to target diversity, equity and inclusion programs, alleged antisemitism and anything perceived as “woke.” He has threatened to pull funding from universities that don’t comply.

Wall Street Journal:

Many of the steps Columbia is now promising should have been made long ago in its own best interest. Restricting masks means rule-breakers have to take responsibility for their actions. Clear rules—clearly enforced—about time, place and manner restrictions on campus speech will raise the cost for those who want to block speakers they dislike.

The school will also incorporate into formal policy the definition of antisemitism recommended by Columbia’s own Antisemitism Taskforce last year, which makes you wonder why it hasn’t already. And it will adopt so-called institutional neutrality “institution-wide.” This means the school itself, and presumably academic departments, won’t take sides on political controversies of the day.

This principle is associated with the University of Chicago and is being adopted by much of academia. The test will be whether it is enforced throughout the institution. All of these reforms will be controversial only among those who think a university is an ivory foxhole from which to launch political movements or indoctrinate students.

E.W.

To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, …, 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us

a)2 ≤ i < 13b)1 < i ≤ 12c)2 ≤ i ≤ 12d)1 < i < 13

Are there reasons to prefer one convention to the other? Yes, there are. The observation that conventions a) and b) have the advantage that the difference between the bounds as mentioned equals the length of the subsequence is valid. So is the observation that, as a consequence, in either convention two subsequences are adjacent means that the upper bound of the one equals the lower bound of the other. Valid as these observations are, they don’t enable us to choose between a) and b); so let us start afresh.

There is a smallest natural number. Exclusion of the lower bound —as in b) and d)— forces for a subsequence starting at the smallest natural number the lower bound as mentioned into the realm of the unnatural numbers. That is ugly, so for the lower bound we prefer the ≤ as in a) and c). Consider now the subsequences starting at the smallest natural number: inclusion of the upper bound would then force the latter to be unnatural by the time the sequence has shrunk to the empty one. That is ugly, so for the upper bound we prefer < as in a) and d). We conclude that convention a) is to be preferred.

Billy Binion:

Almost four years ago to the day, the FBI entered U.S. Private Vaults (USPV), a storage business in Beverly Hills, and raided the safe-deposit boxes there, pocketing tens of millions of dollars in cash, valuables, and personal items. Among those owners was Linda Martin, from whom agents took $40,200—her life savings—despite that she had not been charged with a crime.

Those charges would never come. Although USPV itself was ultimately indicted in federal court, the government had no case against unknowing customers like Martin, in a scheme that attorneys have compared to seizing property from individual apartment units because the tenants’ landlord was suspected of criminal wrongdoing. At USPV, the agency confiscated over $100 million in valuables from a slew of such people via civil forfeiture, the legal process that allows the government to take people’s property without having to prove its owners committed any crime.

What is Deduce?

Deduce is an automated proof checker meant for use in education to help students:

Ease their way into proving the correctness of programs.

Deepening their understanding of logic.
Improve their ability to write mathematical proofs.

Glenn Greenwald:

The attacks on free speech and academic freedom at Columbia are not confined to deporting (or expelling) students who protest Israel. That’s a small part of it.

The administration is also demanding Columbia adopt the radically expanded definition of “anti-Semitism” that the EU has — which outlaws common criticisms of Israel (see below) — and then put their Middle East Department under receivership to control what professors can teach about Israel.

Just constant demands of Americans to sacrifice the country’s core values and civil liberties for this one sacred foreign country.

Extra ironic that it’s being cheered by a movement that scorned limits on academic freedom and campus speech to protect every other minority group.

Matt Ridley:

Let me place you inside a taxi travelling to Geneva airport on 12 February 2020. Inside the cab are two people. One is Dr Peter Daszak, the $400,000-a-year head of the EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation that boasted about funnelling millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to harvest wild bat viruses and do risky experiments on them. He and his organisation would later be debarred from federal funding by the Biden administration for failing to divulge vital information about EcoHealth’s support for suspiciously risky gain-of-function experiments on close relatives of the virus that caused Covid.

The other is Dr (now Sir) Jeremy Farrar, the then head of the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest charitable funder of scientific research, and now head of science at the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Farrar sent an email at 9.34am that day to: Daszak; Michael Ryan of the WHO, the person who hotly denied that the virus was airborne; Christian Drosten, a German virologist; and Bernhard Schwartländer, a former Beijing-based scientist with a tendency to fawn over the pronouncements of Xi Jinping and now former chief of staff to the Beijing-backed head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The email read:

‘Got a taxi to airport and on flight with Peter. I hope there is a paper / letter ready this week to go to Nature (and WHO) which effectively puts to bed the issue of the origin of the virus. I do think important to get ahead of even more discussion on this which may well come if this spreads more to US and elsewhere and other “respected” scientists publish something more inflammatory.’

Covid era Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate and Lockdown policies.

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

Becky Jacobs:

Then this month, in response to records requests from the Cap Times and other news outlets, UW-Madison released dozens of pages of documents from an internal financial review. The documents outline administrators’ findings and Charleston’s rationale for spending. Spreadsheets detail salary costs, travel and other expenses from the division.

Although Charleston didn’t break state law or violate university policies, “he demonstrated poor financial judgement,” Rob Cramer, UW-Madison’s vice chancellor for finance and administration, wrote to Mnookin and Provost Charles Isbell Jr. on March 12.

“Perhaps most concerning is the totality of financial choices, including highly atypical and excessive spending across multiple dimensions — from bonuses to compensation adjustments to travel, supplies and furnishing. … It was also problematic that when these concerns came to light, Dr. Charleston lacked important documentation to support many of these decisions,” Cramer added.

When Mnookin met with University Committee members Monday, faculty member Michael Bernard-Donals asked how the chancellor would respond to potential criticism about her decision. If Charleston didn’t violate policies or the law, what was Mnookin’s justification for removing him? And how did Charleston’s choices differ from other unit supervisors on campus?

Jacob Savage

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse TheNew York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six. 

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

“The literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down.”

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total). 

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

But those results are now old news. Wirepoints has just run the new Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) 2023 Report Card data and the outcomes are worse even though the impacts of covid are another year behind us. 

In 2023, there were 67 Illinois schools where not a single student tested was proficient in math and 32 schools where no student tested was proficient in reading. What’s worse, officials in those schools graduated nearly 70% of their students.

More than 12,000 students attend Illinois’ zero-proficiency schools. Every single one of those children will struggle in life because they lack basic reading and math skills

——-

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?

Hollis Robins:

Indeed, the conversion of universities into corporate juggernauts is closely connected to their drift into ideological extremism. Over the past two decades, metrics-driven leadership has transformed how universities operate. In the process, power has migrated from decentralized departments to an administrative apparatus that prioritizes enrollment growth, branding, and public impact over intellectual rigor. 

These changes might sound politically neutral. Some of them might well appeal to conservatives. Shouldn’t colleges be run more like businesses? If “tenured radicals” are the source of left-wing ideological dominance on campus, why not subject them to higher standards of accountability? But in effect, these developments have played a key role in consolidating the progressive monoculture on campuses and contributed to the politicization of scholarship and teaching. 

In eras past, when power was more decentralized, distinguished faculty voices of varied political persuasions might compete with the president from power bases inside the institution. Today, in contrast, politically active junior faculty see that attracting controversy can be a way to get ahead, while traditionally minded senior faculty who once acted as moderating forces in academic life have been sidelined as their departments and disciplines have been merged and dissolved in favor of new interdisciplinary programs. Today, the loudest faculty voices heard on campus are speaking from left-leaning interdisciplinary power bases (or affinity groups and multicultural centers) inside and outside the university. The moderate and traditional voices that once found a home in traditional departments have gone silent.

Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang:

Social media and mainstreammedia are replete with stories suggesting marriage and parenthood are not fulfilling, especially for women. Not surprisingly, many Americans now believe the key to being happy is a good education, work, and freedom from the encumbrances of family life—not getting married and having a family. These cultural developments raise an important question answered by this Institute for Family Studies research brief: Are single, childless women and men truly the happiest, or are women and men today who are married with children happier?

Clifford Winston

The economics profession should reflect on the fact that DOGE is proceeding without the input of economists because economists have downplayed the persistence and extent of government policy failures. Minimizing governmental shortcomings weakens the profession’s policymaking relevance. The legal profession should reflect on the fact that lawyers lack the requisite economic training to grasp the potentially adverse implications and social desirability of DOGE policies and actions that lawyers are facilitating and defending.

The economics and legal professions should cross-fertilize their intellectual strengths to enable future economists to formulate actionable policies and to inform future government lawyers about the implications of representing policymakers who may seek to adopt harmful policies. Cross-fertilization should begin in graduate economics and law school programs. New courses in economic policy analysis and practice for economists and lawyers interested in helping their professions contribute more effectively to the nation’s economic policies can help address the problems posed by DOGE.

I have defined a government failure as a public policy that “significantly wastes resources.” Government failure is the leading cause of resource misallocation in the United States because it encompasses the vast array of economic policy interventions that adversely affect the economy. Evidence abounds that federal government regulatory and spending policy failures result in hundreds of billions of dollars of persistent inefficiencies. When economists recommend efficient government policy reforms to correct government failures, they are effectively hoping for the best and have little justification for their recommendations because they are ignoring the extent and persistence of policymakers’ failures to adopt efficient policies. Importantly, economists are unable to revise their recommendations to take these persistent government failures into account because they do not have causal evidence that explains why policymakers institute inefficient policies and do not reform them.

Johanna Berkman

“I like noncommercial spaces,” he whispers softly, as we shuffle through the soaring Notre-Dame de Luxembourg. The cathedral is dark, lit mostly by stained glass windows and dozens of candles at the altar. He likes walking through here, he tells me, to appreciate the beauty, the stillness, and “a project meant to serve a higher purpose.” But it is also a suitably analog setting for a man who, ever since he became persona non grata in Silicon Valley back in 2017, has been living like a Luddite.

Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Bourne

Still, this shouldn’t come across as too negative. It’s easy to nitpick and ignore the forest for the trees. While the drilling example, the FDA, and possible cuts to workers tasked with deregulating other sectors of the economy are negative, they are set against many other positive firings at the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, USAID, and elsewhere. Regardless, the scale and scope of firings are consistent with a Musk-style restructuring that sometimes goes too far, and that can be later corrected with rehiring. This is primarily a theory of how DOGE cuts budgets in the agencies it targets.

3. DOGE is the first step of a public relations campaign to build popular support for spending cuts.

Eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse is an often repeated justification for DOGE. Its first target was unpopular foreign aid dispensed through USAID. DOGE’s early announcements highlighted a cut of $50 million for “condoms for Hamas” that turned out to be contraceptive aid for a province in Mozambique named Gaza. Condoms for Hamas would have certainly been ludicrous, actual contraceptive aid for Mozambique somewhat less so. Nevertheless, many Americans will rightly think that is not a priority use of their taxpayer dollars.

Still, DOGE has canceled several small-dollar projects that are just as silly, such as a Peruvian comic book about an education superhero that had to feature an LGBTQ+ character to address mental health issues. Often, the money was already spent, but at least it sends the signal there won’t be any more spending on these or similar initiatives. DOGE’s efforts to reduce spending on more popular programs like Social Security are stopped cold, such as its scrapped proposal to reduce phone services for program beneficiaries. The goal of reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is also inconsistent with the administration’s firing of Inspectors Generalwhose jobs were to monitor federal actions to reduce, among other things, waste, fraud, and abuse. 

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi (DOJ) against Westosha Central High School for endangering the safety and privacy of multiple female students. Over parent objections, the school allowed a biological male to change in the girls’ locker room and then punished female students who attempted to avoid changing in front of the male.   

The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “When schools like Westosha force girls into an inadequate choice between exposing themselves to a male student or academic penalties, they abandon all common-sense and their core mission. The law requires protections for girls to have the same educational opportunities as their male peers. The decision to punish these girls for protecting themselves must be promptly investigated by the Department of Education. We ask the department to consider the allegations in our complaint and quickly remedy these unlawful policies and practices.” 

Former Westosha parent, Nicholas Puchter, stated, “Parents send their kids to school so they can learn in a safe environment, but that’s not what happened here. My daughter was punished for standing up for her own privacy and safety. The district’s misplaced priorities left us no choice but to leave the school.”  

AJ Manaseer

Teachers in Chicago are the best paid in the nation while delivering some of the worst results in the nation.

Any responsible pushback on their extravagant demands is met with hysterical shrieks of racism or “dismantling public education.”

They share no sense of responsibility for Chicago’s dire financial condition and would happily tip the city into insolvency to line their already well-lined pockets even further.

CTU under CORE’s disastrous leadership is the most destructive force in Chicago.

more:

The Chicago Board of Education postponed a controversial budget amendment pushed by Mayor Brandon Johnson Thursday, prolonging doubt about who will pay for a new teachers contract and a $175 million pension payment to the city.

That means the latter’s cost remains on the city’s side. The city has until the end of this month to either resolve the budget gap or end the 2024 fiscal year with a deficit.

Vintage data

I think it’s time to call it: the model is the product.

All current factors in research and market development push in this direction.

• Generalist scaling is stalling. This was the whole message behind the release of GPT-4.5: capacities are growing linearly while compute costs are on a geometric curve. Even with all the efficiency gains in training and infrastructure of the past two years, OpenAI can’t deploy this giant model with a remotely affordable pricing.
• Opinionated training is working much better than expected. The combination of reinforcement learning and reasoning means that models are suddenly learning tasks. It’s not machine learning, it’s not base model either, it’s a secret third thing. It’s even tiny models getting suddenly scary good at math. It’s coding model no longer just generating code but managing an entire code base by themselves. It’s Claude playing Pokemon with very poor contextual information and no dedicated training.
• Inference cost are in free fall. The recent optimizations from DeepSeek means that all the available GPUs could cover a demand of 10k tokens per day from a frontier model for… the entire earth population. There is nowhere this level of demand. The economics of selling tokens does not work anymore for model providers: they have to move higher up in the value chain.

This is also an uncomfortable direction. All investors have been betting on the application layer. In the next stage of AI evolution, the application layer is likely to be the first to be automated and disrupted.

Reuters:

In recent weeks authorities launched an investigation into alleged forgery of official documents related to Imamoglu’s university diploma, in a move critics called the latest state effort to use the judiciary to curb dissent.

Last week, Imamoglu lawyer Mehmet Pehlivan told Reuters there were no irregularities with the mayor’s diploma.

In a post on X on Tuesday, the lawyer said the university’s board of directors did not have the authority to make such a decision and called it null and void.

Imamoglu has long been seen as a capable challenger to Erdogan, who has run Turkey for more than two decades and who must hold elections before they are scheduled in 2028 if he wants to run again under the constitution.

Bytes & Borscht:

In the following paragraphs I want to examine the issues with regulating cyberspace in cooperation with Russia, showing that agreements on Moscow’s terms could legitimize authoritarian control over information and bind others without truly constraining Russia.

I’ll explore how autocratic regimes have used disarmament talks for self-interest in the past (and yes, there will be the mandatory reference to Nazi Germany and the period of Appeasement), how Russia’s cyber treaty proposals since the 1990s harbor hidden obstacles, why Russia’s definition of “information security” is incompatible with the West’s concept of cybersecurity, and how accepting Russia’s framing could undermine free speech and empower hypocrisy.

I will also touch on the long-running debate over applying existing international law to cyberspace versus creating new rules – and how Russia exploits that ambiguity (or at least tries to use the threat of a “Wild West in cyberspace” to coerce others) – as well as the U.S. preference for flexible norms instead of binding treaties.

BytFinally, I will talk about Russia’s success in partnering with China on information security, and why they were able to come to agreements when “the West” was unable to (in short it’s because of the true intent behind these initiatives, controlling online discourse and quashing dissent).

Tony:

In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Others, which he coauthored with William P. Berlinghoff. I had not come across this book before, as I noted in my post I gave up reading general histories of maths long ago, so, I went looking and came across the following glowing recommendation:

“Math Through the Ages is a treasure, one of the best history of math books at its level ever written. Somehow, it manages to stay true to a surprisingly sophisticated story, while respecting the needs of its audience. Its overview of the subject captures most of what one needs to know, and the 30 sketches are small gems of exposition that stimulate further exploration.” — Glen Van Brummelen, Quest University 

Glen Van Brummelen is an excellent historian of maths and regular readers will already know that I’m a very big fan of his books on the history of trigonometry, which I reviewed here. Intrigued I decided to acquire a copy and see if it lives up to Glen’s description. The book that I acquired is the paperback Dover reprint from 2019 of the second edition from Oxton House Publishers, Farmington, Maine, it has a recommended price in the USA of $18, which is certainly affordable for its intended audience, school, college and university students. The cover blurb says, “Designed for students just beginning their study of the discipline…”

Kali Fontinella

If you want a textbook example of teachers union corruption, look no further than the gold standard for scandal and failure: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The year 2023 was a banner year of debacles for what was the largest local union in the American Federation of Teachers until the 1960s. Similar to what the modern U.S. president hailing from the same city used to say, change you can choose to believe in came to the CTU when they elected Stacy Davis Gates as their own new president in May of 2022. Like former President Barack Obama, the results were disappointing, to say the least.

Sexual Abuse, Lost Laptops, and Hypocrisy

Where to begin? In 2023, there were 446 sexual abuse allegations in the Chicago Public School (CPS) system, ranging from sexual harassment to “the appearance of impropriety or possible grooming concerns.” Yikes.

Yet the issue of sexual abuse seems to have been overshadowed in the media by the loss of 77,000 laptops and other electronic devices..

Then, there are the scandals surrounding their new union president. Gates publicly opposed Chicago’s only school choice program, only to be caught sending her own son to private school. Choice for me, not for thee. She helped end the only lifeline for Chicago students who want out of their failing public schools, but her son gets the benefits of a pricey quality education, which she can afford with her income, which is just short of $300,000 a year. For those families without such resources? Tough luck.

But opposing school choice while sending your kids to private schools is par for the course for leftist politicians and teachers union leaders. So is demanding the “rich” (how much does she make a year again?) pay their fair share of taxes while skirting tax laws. Gates has reportedly claimed an Indiana tax break meant for Indiana residents, while not residing in the home—a great example of integrity for the students of Chicago Public Schools.

Danielle DuClos:

Ratzlaff: Property tax relief. With the median home value in Dane County at $304,700, the typical annual property tax bill reaches $7,324 — far exceeding the national median of $2,690. There is no way that this can or will sustain itself. Plus, you add in the two referendums that the city of Madison has passed and it’s going to be harder than ever for senior citizens to stay in their homes.

One idea I have is to go to the Legislature and ask for an increase in shared revenue, but with strings attached and/or benchmarks that must be met in order to receive said funding. Our current leaders have no idea how to even balance a checkbook: see Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and Dane County Board Chairman Patrick Miles for more information on this subject. They are using homeowners as an ATM. Absolutely ridiculous!

Agard: My number one priority as your Dane County executive is to be a responsible and good steward of taxpayer dollars. I will always ensure that county resources are used efficiently, transparently and effectively to benefit all Dane County residents. My approach focuses on fiscal responsibility, smart investments and accountability in government spending.

I prioritize evidence-based policies that deliver strong returns on investment, such as preventative mental health services. I support affordable housing initiatives which save money by reducing reliance on social services. And I will seek to leverage partnerships with businesses, nonprofits and state/federal agencies to maximize our funding sources and reduce the burden on local taxpayers. We can do all this while still ensuring Dane County remains a beautiful place to live, work and play.

Mariam Mahmoud

Nestled in a café-bar-museum-event space in Fort Mason — San Francisco’s water-front, weathered military campus with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge —is a floor to ceiling library housing the Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilisation. A crowd-curated collection of the 3,500 books “most essential to sustain or rebuild a civilisation,” the Manual for Civilisation began with one question: If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have with you?

The collection, displayed along industrial walls, is both solemn and optimistic, earnest and futile, a romantic’s bookish Golden Record. It is, most vividly, a humbling monument to historian Barbara Tuchman’s proclamation that “Books are the carriers of civilisation.” “Without books,” Tuchman wrote, “the development of civilisation would have been impossible.”

Linking civilisation and human culture to books, reading and writing is not unique to Tuchman.

Writing nearly 350 years earlier, Galileo had declared books “the seal of all the admirable inventions of mankind,” because books allow us to communicate through time and place, and to speak to those “who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years.”

A few generations later, Henry David Thoreau, writing in the seclusion of Walden Pond, wrote that “books are the treasured wealth of the field and the fit inheritance of generations and culture.”

Glenn Reynolds:

Another thing you could do with simple majorities, as Ron DeSantis has noted, is to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to issue Temporary Restraining Orders and Preliminary Injunctions in the class of cases that we’ve been seeing. Or, indeed, to strip them of jurisdiction to hear any complaints regarding the internal administration of the Executive. Or stripping courts of jurisdiction to issue any order in such cases until an appeals bond has actually been posted by the moving party.

Congress could also provide that lawsuits challenging changes to federal programs or agencies be assigned to randomly-selected district courts from around the nation, rather than the District for the District of Columbia. (It could possibly even go further and simply abolish the District for the District of Columbia, and do this with all cases. In 2025, there’s no real reason for all such cases to be heard in DC; it’s not the horse-and-buggy era anymore. Going further still, they could simply abolish the District of Columbia itself, which is permitted but not required to exist by the Constitution.)

Congress could also require that all proceedings in federal courts be televised. Federal Judges have resisted that, but ultimately it’s not their call. Many lawyers involved in the January 6 proceedings have said that if video of what judges were doing there had been made public, there would have been a revolution. At least the prospect of public scrutiny might make judges more cautious, and less imperious.

Link:

By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Too many Illinoisans have yet to connect the dots between their outrageous property taxes – the highest in the country – and the huge amount of money Illinois politicians keep pouring into K-12 education, now at $24,000 per student and highest in the Midwest. Education spending typically makes up anywhere from 50% to 70% of an Illinoisan’s property tax bill, so keeping a close eye on education spending matters.

Take a look at how fast education spending has gone up in the last 25 years. In 2000, the state spent $16.2 billion overall, including all state, local and federal dollars and covering everything from classrooms to pensions and debt. If that spending had grown at the pace of inflation, today the total K-12 spend in Illinois would be $29.5 billion.

But the actual number is far higher. It’s jumped to $43.9 billion. That’s a whopping $14.5 billion more in education spending in 2024 alone. 

K-12 spending has increased by 172% since 2000, while inflation is up just 82%. For sure a big chunk of that spending increase has been the spike in pension costs for teachers and staff – some of the biggest pensions in the country – but much of it has come from a big jump in bureaucracy too, as we detail later.

That $14.5 billion is the equivalent of about 40% of all Illinois property taxes, both residential and commercial. So you can imagine what kind of property relief we could see in Illinois today if we made education spending more efficient and more affordable.

WisPolitics:

Ahead of the forum, Kinser and Republicans have repeatedly attacked Underly for changing the educational assessment standards, charging the incumbent lowered the standards which leads to misrepresentation of how students are doing. The GOP-run Legislature passed a bill to reject the Underly change. It’s now before Gov. Tony Evers. 

Underly has defended the change, saying the standards were adjusted after discussions with experts to best fit Wisconsin needs. 

Underly and Kinser appeared Wednesday night in a joint forum co-sponsored by the Wisconsin Public Education Network, the NAACP Wisconsin State Council of Branches, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and Early Childhood Action Needed. Kevin Lawrence Henry Jr., UW-Madison associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis, moderated the discussion. It’s the first and likely only joint appearance of the campaign.

The two candidates will face off April 1. Kinser, an education consultant from Wauwatosa, is backed by conservative groups and school choice advocates. Underly is backed by the Democratic Party and the state teachers’ union, WEAC.

——

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

Brooklyn Moore:

When the bell rings on Friday morning, no students in Central Athens Elementary are around to hear it. The drop-off lane is empty and the hallways are quiet, save for the few teachers who come in to prepare for the next week. Like at least 114 of Texas’s 1,207 districts, Athens Independent School District operates with a four-day instructional week. Six years into the experiment, the district’s superintendent, Janie Sims, says she would expect a staff, teacher, and parent mutiny if the change was reversed. Many teachers and parents of children in the district whom I talked to agreed.

All around Texas, small, rural districts have made the switch to a four-day school week since the Legislature in 2015 changed the state’s requirements for instruction time from a 180-day year minimum to a 75,600-minutes-per-year minimum (districts with 4-day weeks have longer days). These districts have historically struggled to compete with urban schools’ salaries and benefits, leading to low teacher retention and subsequent staffing shortages. The four-day week helps districts be competitive in recruiting and retaining instructors. Multiple Texas superintendents told me it also helps improve student attendance rates.

State education officials aren’t as convinced of the benefits for schoolchildren of the shorter week. At a February Texas House Education Committee hearing, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath testified, in part, on districts that have switched to four-day instruction. Harris County Republican Charles Cunningham asked him what effect it was having on learning outcomes. Morath answered plainly: “It’s bad; the data is pretty unequivocal.” He cited that STAAR (state testing) scores are, on average, six to eight percentage points lower in districts that have made the switch than in five-day ones. 

Steve Hsu

A reader who understands Korean shared this SK TV show about education of gifted kids and “geniuses” in China.

Deepseek founder did not make it into the under 10 testing / qualification program. But he did make it into the age 15 High-School program.

1st slide: Chinese Nationwide intellectual resource development plan

By 10 years of age, Test & Filter & Identify outstanding potential intelligence candidates

By 15 years of age, Ensure geniuses are surrounded by others only of similar caliber & accelerated curriculum & resources

By 20 years of age, Ensure geniuses are working in appropriate fields deserving of their ability, (sciences etc.)

Chris Rickert:

A former teacher at a Madison private school was placed in a first offenders program after pleading guilty Monday to sexually assaulting a student.

Jessica M. Kelbel, 30, of Madison, who was a special-education supervisor at The Richardson School on Madison’s North Side, was charged in February 2024 with sexual assault of a student by school staff after admitting to police she had sexual contact with a student at a North Side home, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dane County Circuit Court.

Under the terms of her plea, Kelbel’s case remains open and her bail conditions in place while she completes any programming assigned through the Dane County District Attorney’s Deferred Prosecution Program. If she’s able to do that, the conviction would be wiped out. If not, she faces up to six years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000 or both on the felony charge

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released a new report called “Shining a Light: Enhancing Transparency and Accountability in Wisconsin’s Public Records Process.” The report highlights several actionable reforms that would enhance government transparency and make it easier for citizens to hold their government accountable. 

The Quote: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, stated, “Too often, citizens have to hire a lawyer just to hear back from their own government and that’s wrong. We believe holding government accountable starts with access to transparent information and records. These proposed reforms will bring greater access to open records and make it easier for members of the public to learn about what their government is doing on any given day.” 

The Report:  Our report outlines several key reforms for the legislature to implement that would improve Wisconsin’s public records process and enhance government transparency. We lay out the following policies:  

Becky Jacobs:

More than 287,000 students were enrolled in the state’s technical colleges in the 2023-24 school year, according to the system’s most recent figures. The system includes Madison College, which operates three Madison campuses and locations in Fort Atkinson, Portage, Reedsburg and Watertown.

The rise in tuition is expected to bring in an additional $4.7 million in revenue across the system’s 16 schools, said Paul Hammer, its executive vice president. Hammer anticipated the colleges will receive just over $210 million in tuition during the current academic year.

The tuition rate for occupational programs will increase to $152.85 per credit, which is 2.25% more than the current year. The rate for students pursuing an Associate of Arts or Science degree is set to increase 1.75% to $192.20 per credit. Students from outside the state will pay more.

Steve Hsu:

The US can’t begin to win an economic and technological competition against China without elite immigration. This is a strong statement, but I can prove it to you with a simple calculation.

Consider the fact that China has four times the population of the US. Its 18-year-olds now attend college at roughly the same rate as Americans (this has only recently become true, as China has become richer and more developed). Chinese college students are roughly twice as likely to study science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and they graduate high school with much stronger math capabilities. This means that each year China is producing about eight times (almost an order of magnitude) more new engineers and technologists than the US. In fact, the proper comparison is between China and Rest of World (RoW). China produces as much top talent in technology fields as the RoW in aggregate.

China does have demographic challenges due to low fertility, but the children who will enter the workforce over the next twenty years are already born, and detailed analysis shows a huge deepening of their human capital pool — a huge increase in the quality of Chinese skills and knowledge — over that period.

Staff Cao:

According to a Pew Research Center studyreleased in January, more teenagers are using ChatGPT for their homework, with 26% of them age 13 to 17 reporting that they have used the AI service to help with their assignments this year, compared with 13% who used it two years ago. As traditional tech companies continue to roll out AI chatbots and summarization features on their platforms, Amari says, the use of AI has indeed become more common at her school. “Usually if kids don’t get the work done, they’ll probably use ChatGPT or they use their Snapchat AI,” she says. “I try to use it as little as possible, though.”

Rikki Schlott:

Over the next month, high school seniors across the country will find out whether or not they got into their first-choice college. But for some students who had dreamed of going to Columbia University, acceptance suddenly doesn’t sound so hot.

“If you were to compare Columbia with virtually any Ivy League, virtually any other Ivy League will win [in terms of desirability with students] — and even non-Ivies like Duke, Emory and Washington [University] in St. Louis,” college admissions consultant and Command Education CEO Christopher Rim told The Post.

As President Trump has cut Columbia’s federal funding in an effort to squash chaotic pro-Palestine protests, applicants are weighing whether to accept an offer of admission from the school or to go elsewhere.

Matt Taibbi:

I first came across the issue of universities sitting on hidden cash reserves at Rolling Stone years ago, when Collinge told me about an extraordinary slip-up in the state of Wisconsin. University of Wisconsin president Kevin Reilly in 2013 blurted in a state hearing that his school was sitting on $648 million in reserves, also above endowment. This number had jumped 62% in the previous two years, at the end of a period in which tuition had jumped 5.5% a year from 2007 on. This was revealed in the context of a proposal for the state of Wisconsin to add $181 million in taxpayer aid to UW’s allegedly ailing budget. “The good news is, no dollars have been reported missing,” was the sheepish quip of Gerald Whitburn, chairman of the UW Regents’ Budget, Finance, and Audit Committee.

Collinge in 1999 graduated from USC with a degree in aerospace engineering, lost a job, and saw his $38,000 in loans balloon to $100,000. Drunk on a couch, he swore he’d find a way to get Sallie Mae on 60 Minutes if it was the last thing he did. “Lo and behold, I ended up being interviewed by Lesley Stahl within about a year,” he said. His site, StudentLoanJustice.org, became what he called a “complaint box for the industry,” focusing among other things on the scammish financial setup of higher education. “The colleges are more awash in cash today than at any point in U.S. history, even adjusting for inflation,” he says. “But here we have them just falling over themselves trying to pretend they’re poor.” He notes most states annually send gigantic amounts of interest to the Department of Education, with Maine for instance earning $388 million from lobsters while sending out $410 million to the DOE, and Floridians sending the feds more in interest than they earn from visitors to Disney:

Collinge in 1999 graduated from USC with a degree in aerospace engineering, lost a job, and saw his $38,000 in loans balloon to $100,000. Drunk on a couch, he swore he’d find a way to get Sallie Mae on 60 Minutes if it was the last thing he did. “Lo and behold, I ended up being interviewed by Lesley Stahlwithin about a year,” he said. His site, StudentLoanJustice.org, became what he called a “complaint box for the industry,” focusing among other things on the scammish financial setup of higher education. “The colleges are more awash in cash today than at any point in U.S. history, even adjusting for inflation,” he says. “But here we have them just falling over themselves trying to pretend they’re poor.” He notes most states annually send gigantic amounts of interest to the Department of Education, with Maine for instance earning $388 million from lobsters while sending out $410 million to the DOE, and Floridians sending the feds more in interest than they earn from visitors to Disney:

Maxwell Forbes:

Let’s call them,

• Science 1 ← an idealized concept. Trying to understand how the world works. Seeking and describing truth. The scientific method (maybe?). “Pure science.”
• Science 2 ← how humans attempt to do Science 1. A cultural practice that now spans multiple societies. “Science in practice.”

Important facts about Science 2:

• people require both training and money (think: salaries, grants, the student → professor transition)
• lots of people are trying to collaborate (think: spending huge amounts of time communicating work)
• lots of people are competing for limited resources (think: need ways of determining who is more qualified than another)

Douglas Belkin:

Three years ago, as a University of Florida freshman, Bia Castanho kept her head down and her mouth shut when classroom conversations veered toward politics. Virtually every time students with her conservative orientation entered a debate it ended badly for them, she said.

Her time on campus has paralleled a concerted effort by Republican lawmakers to dismantle what they consider entrenched liberal orthodoxy within Florida’s institutions of higher learning. In a class this past fall about the economics of farming, she felt emboldened enough to take a stand: Donald Trump was right, illegal immigration was wrong and farmworkers without proper documentation should not be allowed to work, she said.

“Things are changing,” said Castanho, now a senior. “When I got here, if you were a conservative, people thought you were a hater, a racist or homophobic. Now at least some people will at least listen to your ideas.”

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.” Recent edicts from him and his new administration ordering colleges to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs or anything they deem as discriminatory—or risk losing federal funding—aim to begin the process.

David Blaska:

Blaska’s Bottom Line: If students are expected to rise when a teacher enters the room, might they also knuckle down and learn to read? Blaska’s public high school in Sun Prairie WI was not that different. For one thing, we all could read.

Would school uniforms be a start?

Tom Singleton:

US politicians, civil rights campaigners and the BBC are all calling for a High Court hearing about a data privacy row between Apple and the UK government to be held in public.

The tech giant is taking legal action after the Home Office demanded the right to access customer data protected by its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) programme.

Apple cannot access data stored in this way currently – but the UK government says it needs to be able to see it if there is a national security risk.

The BBC understands the matter will be considered at a closed hearing of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal at the High Court on Friday morning.

Molly Beck:

The move could deliver a blow to Democratic State Superintendent Jill Underly ahead of the April 1 spring election, when Underly is up for reelection against education consultant Brittany Kinser.

Lawmakers passed a bill 18-14 that requires the DPI to overhaul its state report cards to match how they measured academic achievement before changes made last year.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has criticized the process Underly took to change the state report cards.
MADISON – Senate Republicans on Tuesday sent to Gov. Tony Evers a bill that would undo a controversial overhaul of how the state measures students’ academic achievement.

The move could deliver a blow to Democratic State Superintendent Jill Underly ahead of the April 1 spring election, when Underly is up for reelection against education consultant Brittany Kinser, who is backed by conservatives and has made the testing change a campaign issue.

—-

DPI’s statement.

More.

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

notes and links on Incumbent DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

S. Mac Healey and Angelina J. Parker:

The Harvard Math Department will pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students, according to Harvard’s Director of Introductory Math Brendan A. Kelly.

The course, titled Math MA5, will run alongside two established math courses — Math MA and MB — with an expanded five-day schedule.

Kelly said that students in MA5 will meet with “one of two instructors all five days” with “a variety of different activities” on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

He said the Covid-19 pandemic led to gaps in students’ math skills and learning abilities, prompting the need for a new introductory course.

“The last two years, we saw students who were in Math MA and faced a challenge that was unreasonable given the supports we had in the course. So we wanted to think about, ‘How can we create a course that really helps students step up to their aspirations?’” he said.

“Students don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum, and so it creates different trajectories in students’ math abilities,” Kelly added.

Despite the schedule differences, MA5 will reflect the material and structure of MA and MB, collectively known as Math M.

“Math MA5 is actually embedded in Math M,” Kelly said.

——

Amanda Rae Aragon:

This feels like I good time to remind people that when I left New Mexico to attend a top 100 university, nearly all my classmates took CALCULUS in high school. Meanwhile, most of my NM peers topped out at Algebra II.

much more on remedial math.

WILL:

Additional Background: Beginning in the 2020-21 school year, DPI made several changes to Wisconsin’s academic accountability system that have made it less rigorous. These changes were made unilaterally by the Department without any input from the legislature or Governor. These changes included: 

• 2020-21: DPI lowered the cut points on the state’s report cards, allowing more schools and districts to be rated as three stars or higher 
• 2023-24: DPI changed the labels on the categories for outcomes on the Forward Exam. 
• 2023-24: DPI lowered the cut points on the Forward Exam, allowing students to be judged proficient at lower scores. 

Earlier this year, WILL endorsed Assembly Bill 1, introduced by Senator John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Representative Bob Wittke (R-Caledonia), because it would reverse DPI’s actions and revert to previous cut scores and labels. The bill passed the State Assembly on February 19th and the Senate followed suit today.  

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

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?

Emma Shanahan, Emily Reno, …Kristen L. McMaster

Although writing instruction can positively impact reading for students across grades and levels of literacy, the extent to which these findings generalize to young students with literacy difficulties is unclear due to the dynamic nature of reading-writing relations. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine the effects of writing instruction on the reading outcomes of students in grades pre-K–5 who have reading, writing, or co-occurring reading and writing difficulties. Across 19 studies and 72 effects, writing instruction had a positive effect on reading outcomes in English (g= 0.27, 95% CI [0.13, 0.41], p< .01). Descriptively different subset effects for higher-intensity instruction (small student group, greater total hours) could not be reliably estimated. Effects were moderated by the focus of instruction, with transcription instruction associated with larger effects. Percentage of instructional time spent writing and type of comparison condition (reading treatment or control) did not moderate effects. Implications for the design of early writing interventions are discussed.

John Sailer:

I’ve acquired a trove of documents created by members of the RISE UPP Alliance—a working group that includes professors and administrators from Maryland, California, North Carolina, and Texas. The records show how program administrators brainstormed “workarounds” to state policy, disguised the project’s true intentions, and used proxies to achieve their demographic goals.

These documents reveal NSF’s influence on diversity policies at universities across the country. They show how a racialist hiring scheme continues to operate at public universities in states that have banned DEI. And as more schools ditch diversity policies in response to federal pressure, the records detail how administrators are trying to maneuver around these reforms.

In May 2024, a team of RISE UPP administrators conducted a “reverse site visit,” a progress report meeting with the NSF, which involved a long presentation to an NSF-appointed panel of reviewers responsible for evaluating the program.

The panel, whose comments were documented in a report that I obtained, urged the RISE UPP team to use more overtly identitarian language in the way that they framed the program. “The panel noted that the Alliance did not discuss fundamental issues within the majority of STEM disciplines,” the report explained, “where ways of doing STEM are based on white, patriarchal, colonizing Western European norms.”

more.

DSHR:

The most important part of an archiving strategy is knowing how you will get stuff out of the archive. Putting stuff in and keeping it safe are important and relatively easy, but if you can’t get stuff out when you need it what’s the point?

Will:

The News: School Resource Officers (“SROs”) were placed in Milwaukee Public Schools (“MPS”) today because of a successful lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) on behalf of a MPS parent, Charlene Abughrin. In February, Judge David Borowski held the City of Milwaukee (the “City”) in contempt of court for not complying with state law and “ignoring” his own orders to bring SROs into MPS. 

The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “The message from today is simple: frustrated parents, like Charlene, are fighting back and standing up for what’s right. SROs will provide much-needed safety resources to schools and ensure MPS moves closer to a safer, more productive learning environment.”  

Milwaukee parent and WILL client, Charlene Abughrin, stated, “I am so grateful to see SROs back in MPS and for Milwaukee to take this small step towards bringing the focus back on learning, rather than letting students fear for their safety. This victory would not have been possible without the perseverance of the incredible team at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.” 

Matt Barnum and Deepa Seetharaman:

A high-school senior from New Jersey doesn’t want the world to know that she cheated her way through English, math and history classes last year.

Yet her experience, which the 17-year-old told The Wall Street Journal with her parent’s permission, shows how generative AI has rooted in America’s education system, allowing a generation of students to outsource their schoolwork to software with access to the world’s knowledge.

Educators see benefits to using artificial intelligence in the classroom. Yet teachers and parents are left on their own to figure out how to stop students from using the technology to short-circuit learning. Companies providing AI tools offer little help.

The New Jersey student told the Journal why she used AI for dozens of assignments last year: Work was boring or difficult. She wanted a better grade. A few times, she procrastinated and ran out of time to complete assignments.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

So what exactly do we mean by free speech, and should there be any limits on it? In democracies, we celebrate free expression for good and hard-won reasons. Liberty of conscience is superior to enforced theocracy. The right to voice opinions without being persecuted is a hallmark of free societies as opposed to autocracies; so is the creation of challenging art and literature. Whatever your truths, freedom of expression is a valuable and inspiring ideal. 

But that doesn’t mean its principles are obvious or absolute. We often assume they must have been clearly established by great thinkers of the past, from Milton to James Madison to George Orwell, and that it’s only in the present that we’ve lost our way. But the real history of free speech is far more interesting — and it illuminates our current predicaments in surprisingly direct ways. 

Victor Davis Hanson:

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

Ryan Allen:

I teach a lot of international students about the US education system and our schools. Whenever they go into our schools for the first time, one of the things that always shocks them is the school car pickup traffic lines. These lines are ugly, annoying, dirty, and they have become a common mainstay in American schooling. 

Parents across the country must waste much of their mornings and afternoons in these lines. These lines are so pervasive that an entire subculture has sprung up around them. Mommy bloggers even swap book suggestions to help pass the time.

Parents often hate having to sit in these lines, and it is even absurd that we expect them to do so. The school car pickup line is a national embarrassment. It wasn’t always like this, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

Per Roland:

The cellular biology of brains is relatively well-understood, but neuroscientists have not yet generated a theory explaining how brains work. Explanations of how neurons collectively operate to produce what brains can do are tentative and incomplete. Without prior assumptions about the brain mechanisms, I attempt here to identify major obstacles to progress in neuroscientific understanding of brains and central nervous systems. Most of the obstacles to our understanding are conceptual. Neuroscience lacks concepts and models rooted in experimental results explaining how neurons interact at all scales. The cerebral cortex is thought to control awake activities, which contrasts with recent experimental results. There is ambiguity distinguishing task-related brain activities from spontaneous activities and organized intrinsic activities. Brains are regarded as driven by external and internal stimuli in contrast to their considerable autonomy. Experimental results are explained by sensory inputs, behavior, and psychological concepts. Time and space are regarded as mutually independent variables for spiking, post-synaptic events, and other measured variables, in contrast to experimental results. 

Steve Losh:

This post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it’s about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries.

I love reading great documentation. When I have a question and the documentations explains the answer almost as if the author has magically anticipated my problem, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. I feel a connection with the writer that makes me smile.

I also love writing documentation. Being able to rewire the neurons in someone’s brain so that they understand something they didn’t understand before is extremely satisfying. Seeing (or hearing about) the “click” when a bunch of concepts suddenly fall together and make sense never fails to make my day.

This post is going to be about what I think good documentation is and how I think you should go about writing it. I’m not perfect, so you should take everything with a grain of salt, but I hope you’ll find it useful and thought-provoking even if you don’t agree with me about everything.

I’d like to say thanks to Craig Zheng and Honza Pokorny for proofreading this.

1. Prior Reading
2. Why Do We Document?

Jennifer Sey:

The Boston Globe published a review of the book “In Covid’s Wake” about a week ago. The book, while being praised as redemptive for those of us who pushed back early and often, provides no such redemption. While I’ll admit I haven’t read it, I’ve read the review several times now. It allows for “it was early we didn’t know” and seems to scapegoat Fauci and even other public health officials without excoriating EVERYONE that went along with the hysteria, turning in neighbors to police and targeting colleagues for firing. 

As philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke famously said in 1795: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 

All those who did nothing are also responsible for the global human rights violations of the covid era. And of course the covid enthusiasts who acted as snitches, and joyfully targeted friends and neighbors for punishment deserve our ire. Beyond that you have those directly responsible, the media which utterly failed in their duty as the 4th estate resorting instead to publishing Big Pharma and government issues talking points as “news”; the medical community, with few exceptions; the academics; the teachers; I could go on. 

The vaccine (and of course mandates — which people lost jobs over) have disappeared from public consciousness. I mean does anyone actually get that thing anymore? 

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More.

Covid era Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate and Lockdown policies.

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

Tom Loveless:

The watchword of this year’s Brown Center Report is caution—caution in linking state tests to international assessments—“benchmarking” is the term—caution in proceeding with a policy of “algebra for all eighth graders,” caution in gleaning policy lessons from the recent progress made by urban schools. State and local budget woes will restrain policymakers from adopting costly education reforms, but even so, the three studies contained herein are a reminder that restraint must be exercised in matters other than budgets in governing education well. All too often, policy decisions are based on wishful thinking rather than cautious analysis. As education evolves as a discipline, the careful analysis of high-quality data will provide the foundation for meaningful education reform. 

The report consists of three sections, each discussing a separate study. The first section looks at international testing. Powerful groups, led by the National Governors Association, are urging the states to benchmark their state achievement tests to an international assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). After comparing PISA to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the other major international assessment in which the United States participates, the Brown Center analysis examines findings from a chapter of the 2006 PISA report that addresses student engagement. The chapter presents data on students’ attitudes, values, and beliefs toward science. 

Benchmarking proponents argue that PISA offers policy guidance to American school officials by identifying the characteristics of successful school systems around the world. The Brown Center analysis calls that claim into question. The PISA report makes causal claims from cross-sectional data that cannot support such inferences. The chapter on student engagement presents inferences based on selective treatment of data, with policy recommendations going beyond the evidence adduced to support them. 

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more

Glenn Greenwald:

Three weeks after JD Vance (validly) castigated Europe for its growing censorship schemes, the US Government just told Columbia that it must put its Middle East Studies Department into a receivership for 5 years, and provide a detailed plan to the US Govt on how it will do so:

Samuel Watling:

Asquith’s gambit failed spectacularly. Britain in the early 1900s became a case study in how administrative complexity can derail land value taxation. The tax cost more to administer than it collected, and it was so poorly worded that it ended up becoming a tax on builders’ profits, leading to a crash in the building industry. As a result, David Lloyd George, the man who introduced the taxes as chancellor in 1910, repealed them as prime minister in 1922. The UK has never fully reestablished a working property tax system.

This history serves as a cautionary tale for modern Georgist sympathizers who believe a land value tax will solve the world’s housing shortages. While Georgists argue that land markets suffer from inefficient speculation and hoarding, Britain’s experience reveals more fundamental challenges with both land value taxes and the Georgist worldview. The definition of land value was impossible to ascertain properly and became bogged down in court cases. When it could be collected, it proved so difficult to implement that administration costs were four times greater than the actual tax income. Instead of increasing the efficiency of land use, it became a punitive tax on housebuilders, cratering housing production. 

Worst of all, it not only failed to solve the fundamental problem with British local government – that it had responsibilities that it could not afford to cover with its narrow base – but actually contributed to the long-term crumbling of the property tax systems Britain did have.

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To better prepare us to meet these challenges, we are implementing a freeze on staff hiring in the university. Critically needed positions may be approved by the cognizant dean, vice president, or vice provost, though these situations should be limited. Similarly, hiring may continue for positions that are fully funded through externally-sponsored research awards; please confirm these hires with the cognizant dean’s office. The freeze does not apply to faculty positions, contingent employees (temporary and casual), or student workers.

We will be in further touch as the budget for next year develops. In the meantime, we do urge that new financial commitments be given careful consideration in the current environment.

Jesse Signal:

The same thing applies to publications, from the lowliest tabloids to the most celebrated medical journals. And I think The New England Journal of Medicine is about to put itself into that camp.

I am going to slice off only one very tiny, very wrong piece of Aaron and Konnoth’s article, but there are so many galling problems with the whole thing that it’s taking every ounce of my self-control not to turn this into an extended diatribe. Luckily, the excellent writer Void if Removed published a thorough takedown on his Substack, and I highly recommend that you read it (and follow his work in general).

For now, let’s focus on this and only this:

The [Cass] Review calls for evidentiary standards for GAC [gender-affirming care] that are not applied elsewhere in pediatric medicine. Embracing RCTs [randomized-controlled trials] as the standard, it finds only 2 of 51 puberty-blocker and 1 of 53 hormone studies to be high-quality.

Just about everything in these two sentences is wrong.