Sam Ashworth-Hayes and Charlie Peters

The child victims of rape were denied justice and protection from the state to preserve the image of a successful multicultural society

Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.

A review of the abuse in Oldham was released in 2022, but its terms of reference only stretched from 2011-2014. Survivors from the town said that they wanted a government-led inquiry to cover a longer period, and catch what the previous review had missed. In Jess Phillips’s letter to the council, revealed by GB News, she said she understood the strength of feeling in the town, but thought it best for another local review to take place.

This is a scandal that should be rooted out entirely, and investigated by the full might of the British state. Voices ranging from Elon Musk to Kemi Badenoch have joined the calls for an inquiry. Yet the Government seems curiously reluctant to dig into the failings of officials.

This reluctance is not new. Across the country, in towns and in cities, on our streets and in the state institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable members of our society, authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to horrific abuse of largely white children by gangs of men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Over time, details have come to light about abuse in Rotherham, in Telford, in Rochdale and in dozens of other places. But with the stories released in dribs and drabs, and the details so horrific as to be almost unreadable, the full scale of the scandal has still to reach the public.

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Here are the 158 Democrats who opposed the deportation of illegal immigrants for sex offenses:

Joanne Jacobs summary:

Are U.S. students working too hard? Really? California’s new “healthy homework” law tells schools to set homework policies that alleviate stress and “promote learning equity and well-being,” reports Newsweek‘s Khaleda Rahman. Homework policies should “consider the resources available to students to successfully complete homework, including parental support and access to technology.”

Homework is overwhelming students, says Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, who sponsored the bill. Students get behind on homework and can’t catch up, says the mother of a sixth-grader.

While students trying to get into elite colleges load up on AP courses, extracurriculars and sports, the average U.S. students spends about an hour a night on homework. Students from low-income homes do less, non-poor students do more.

Sam Levin:

It was long considered taboo in media to retract or alter old stories, particularly when there are no concerns about accuracy. But Quinn said he felt an ethical obligation to rethink those norms. “I couldn’t take it any more … I just got tired of telling people no and standing on tradition instead of being thoughtful.”

He recalled an early case of a drunken teenager who broke part of a monument in a cemetery and was charged. Years later, he had “completely atoned” and was starting to apply for jobs, Quinn said. “He did something stupid as a kid … and he said: ‘I can’t move on.’” The editor granted his request, removed his name and presented it to his colleagues as a model for similar cases.

There was some initial internal resistance, but eventually Quinn and his staff came up with general parameters: they would not erase names in cases of violence, sex offenses, crimes against children or corruption. Police officers would be treated as public officials, so stories of their wrongdoing would remain. The incident typically had to be at least four years old, although the paper has made exceptions. Quinn did not want to have strict rules, since every case is different. The guiding question, he said, was: “What’s more valuable – this story remaining available to the public, or this person being able to move on?”

Jared Walczak:

• Property values have skyrocketed in recent years, rising almost 27 percent faster than inflation since 2020, which yields dramatically higher property taxes in jurisdictions that fail to adjust millages (rates) downward.
• Legitimate discontent over high property taxes is fueling a movement to significantly curtail or even eliminate the property tax, but many of the policy solutions offered, like assessment limits and tax swaps, create more problems than they solve, distorting property markets and undermining long-term housing affordability.
• Despite its unpopularity, the property tax is relatively economically efficient, and shifting to any alternative tax would harm economic growth.
• Well-designed levy limits can provide homeowners with much-needed relief from soaring property tax bills without the harms associated with other policy responses, and narrowly tailored circuit breakers can help ensure that low-income families are not priced out of their homes.
• The property tax is a tax worth saving—and therefore worth reforming. Policymakers should work to constrain the runaway growth of property tax liability witnessed in some parts of the country but should not overcompensate by eliminating or dramatically curtailing an economically efficient tax.

John Hawkins:

Perhaps worst of all, if we treat kids like they’re pieces of glass that will break if they’re pushed too hard, they won’t have what it takes to do anything truly exceptional. The sort of people who create new companies, build rocket ships, and code paradigm-changing pieces of software are not working 40 hours per week from home. They’re getting after it in a way that many people never do in their whole lives. Furthermore, the skills it takes to do those things are typically not the same skills you get from being an influencer, a model, a star football player, or a badass who can wreck five guys in a fight, which are the types of things we lionize in American society.

I have had the privilege of being around more than a few people who raised successful kids and from the outside, you know what it looked like?

The Economist:

In a recent paper Linda Chang of the Toyota Research Institute and her co-authors identify a cognitive bias that they call “quantification fixation”. The risk of depending on data alone to make decisions is familiar: it is sometimes referred to as the McNamara fallacy, after the emphasis that an American secretary of defence put on misleading quantitative measures in assessing the Vietnam war. But Ms Chang and her co-authors help explain why people put disproportionate weight on numbers.

The reason seems to be that data are particularly suited to making comparisons. In one experiment, participants were asked to imagine choosing between two software engineers for a promotion. One engineer had been assessed as more likely to climb the ladder but less likely to stay at the firm; the other, by contrast, had a higher probability of retention but a lower chance of advancement. The researchers varied the way that this information was presented. They found that participants were more likely to choose on the basis of future promotion prospects when only that criterion was quantified, and to select on retention probability when that was the thing with a number attached.

One answer to this bias is to quantify everything. But, as the authors point out, some things are mushier than others. A firm’s culture is harder to express as a number for job-seekers than its salary levels. Data can tell an early-stage investor more about a startup’s financials than a founder’s resilience. Numbers allow for easy comparisons. The problem is that they do not always tell the whole story.

Kimberly Wethal:

Between October 2023 and the UW Board of Regents meeting in December, the board approved 34 new programs, with most of them at the bachelor’s degree level, in addition to a handful of master’s or doctorate programs.

The majority already existed in some form on their campuses or across the UW system but have been restructured and needed a refreshed stamp of approval.

But there are several new majors and degree programs, as universities look to respond to student interest or workforce needs.

UW-Superior is being added to the UW systemwide program that lets students earn a nursing degree online. Other programs are currently minors, such as the UW-Madison School of Ecology’s Design, Innovation and Society program, which is expanding to become a major due to rabid interest.

Connie Marshner

A computer-based curriculum effectively cuts parents out of the helping process. The school district where I worked issues Chromebook laptops to second graders, and from then on, everything happens on that machine. It’s like that in many schools across the country.

Even the books elementary students are supposed to read for “free reading” are preloaded onto it. The teacher “assesses” their progress by seeing that they clicked pages open. There are expensive illustrated paper readers in lower grades, but those don’t leave the classroom. In one history class in a high school, I saw some textbooks stacked in a corner, but students told me they were never opened. At every level, all classwork is done on the Chromebook and sent to the internet cloud, where an acknowledgment of the work is entered into the teacher’s electronic record book—perhaps the fact that the work was “completed.”

If there is any homework, which there usually isn’t in elementary school, it’s done on the Chromebook. By sixth grade, a parent cannot see homework unless her child logs in while sitting beside the parent—but that only works if the child hasn’t already clicked to submit it to the teacher before mom or dad has found the time to sit down. With this digital system, a parent can’t know what his child doesn’t know—and thus cannot support the teacher by reinforcing or reteaching lessons at home. 

Third, computerization hinders, not helps, the learning process. 

Neuroscience shows that the effort of writing with the hand intrinsically enhances and reinforces the learning process in the brain. But even in kindergarten, the classroom is dominated by the “smart board.” In the classes where I was an aide or a teacher, kindergartners actually wrote with their hands for about 15 minutes of their six-hour days—not counting filling in worksheets. From second grade on, everything is done on Chromebooks.

Paul Vallas

Make no mistake, due to the upcoming CTU elections and her job being on the line, Stacy Davis Gates began a war against Pedro Martinez, who she is using as a scapegoat for the irresponsible contract she is trying to force onto the Chicago taxpayers.

After using her member’s union dues to elect her lobbyist to become mayor, she promised members enormous raises in her first contract negotiation as CTU President. Now, it is clear that her promises, which would mean increasing taxes by billions and billions of dollars, are simply not based in reality.

She remains unconcerned about the havoc that she is causing with the firing of Martinez and that the contract she is proposing will create a financial crisis that will raise taxes on Chicagoans, including CTU members, for years to come.

Meanwhile, she refuses to release her union’s financial audits, which is mandated by law. Why hasn’t the Illinois Attorney General stepped in to demand their release?
CTU members, please pay attention: Your vote matters in the upcoming election.

The Economist:

Another tendency in education (as elsewhere) is deference to public-sector unions, whose members make up much of Labour’s rank and file. The party is right to fret that teachers are getting harder to recruit and retain. The long-term answer is higher pay. But the government seems keener to offer other concessions that put standards at risk. It has ordered schools inspectors to issue vaguer, gentler (and thus less informative) reports. It says it will reduce schools’ freedom to set curriculums and pay star teachers better. Some school leaders have used their autonomy poorly. But others have bred excellence.

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has identified some serious problems in state education. One is absenteeism: about a quarter of secondary-schoolers are missing at least 10% of the time, twice as many as before the pandemic. The share who miss half their lessons is going up. Another is the buckling system for the one-fifth of pupils with special educational needs, who are not doing any better than they were five years ago, even though spending on it has soared. Yet in both these areas Labour has little by way of convincing plans.

Abbey Machtig:

During an initial conversation, some Madison School Board members said they wanted to avoid creating competition with the district’s technical education and youth apprenticeship opportunities.

McKenzie told the Wisconsin State Journal via email he is still pursuing a charter agreement with the UW Office of Educational Opportunity. The final application to UW is due on Jan. 13.

Organizers are aiming for the school to open in fall 2026 with a cohort of 150 ninth-grade students. Enrollment would ideally grow to 600 students over the next three school years. The proposed charter school has not yet secured a location. If granted a charter agreement, it plans to use a facility already within the district.

Here are other important details to know about the Forward Career and College Academy:

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Related: Act 10

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

more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor. 

 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?

David Rees:

An Ohio school district will pay $450,000 to a middle school teacher who resigned for refusing to address two transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns.

Jackson Local School District reached a settlement in December with the teacher, Vivian Geraghty, after she claimed in a 2022 lawsuit her First Amendment rights were violated when she was told to resign from a middle school language arts position. 

The agreement follows a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio in August that said forcing Geraghty to use students’ preferred names amounts to “compelled speech”and that the school’s “pronoun practice was not neutral.”

Quinton Klabon

Wisconsin predicts -69,053 fewer grade-school-age children (5 to 14) from 2020 to 2030, -9.4%. They predict -106,513 fewer from 2020 to 2050, -14.5%.

The first 2 images are population loss by count. The second 2 are population loss by percentage.

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more.

Madison’s 2024 tax & $pending increase referendum

choose life

BY BONNIE O’KEEFE | INDIRA DAMMU | LINEA HARDING | ALEX SPURRIER | JENNIFER O’NEAL SCHIESS | SOPHIE ZAMARRIPA | KRISTA KAPUT

Education finance sets the foundation for what is possible in every school in the country. Education finance equity is critical to leveling the playing field for underserved students in under-resourced schools. But in too many states, the education funding system remains inequitable, inadequate, and opaque to all but a few. Even state school finance systems designed to reflect strong principles around equity can be rife with technical pitfalls or loopholes that jeopardize the realization of those principles for students and schools. 

How can states make school funding formulas work more effectively to provide the necessary resources for all students? 

Splitting the Bill: A Bellwether Series on Education Finance Equity gives advocates, state policymakers, and other stakeholders a crash course in the fundamentals of education finance and in key questions to ask in their states and communities. First published in 2021, we are adding new briefs to the series on an ongoing basis.

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more.

Stephen Kell

The concept of “type” has been used without a consistent, precise definition in discussions about programming languages for 60 years.1 In this essay I explore various concepts lurking behind distinct uses of this word, highlighting two traditions in which the word came into use largely independently: engineering traditions on the one hand, and those of symbolic logic on the other. These traditions are founded on differing attitudes to the nature and purpose of abstraction, but their distinct uses of “type” have never been explicitly unified. One result is that discourse across these traditions often finds itself at cross purposes, such as overapplying one sense of “type” where another is appropriate, and occasionally proceeding to draw wrong conclusions. I illustrate this with examples from well-known and justly well-regarded literature, and argue that ongoing developments in both the theory and practice of programming make now a good time to resolve these problems.

JD Busch:

This unit sold for $1.05 million in November, down from $1.97 million in April of 1995 (nearly 30 years ago!) 

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Illinois lawmakers refuse to do anything about the state’s punitive property taxes, so Illinoisans continue to get crushed. Not only with the taxes, but with stagnant home values. Many Illinoisans are being squeezed out of their homes and forced to move elsewhere.

A recent analysis by SmartAsset, a consumer-focused financial information company, finds that six of the top 20 cities with the highest real estate taxes in the nation are located in Illinois, including the top two spots. SmartAsset analyzed the 342 cities across the country with populations greater than 100,000.

Peoria, Illinois led the entire country with the highest effective property tax rate in 2023 at 2.64%. The median tax bill there was $4,455 a year. Rockford came in second, at 2.46% and a median tax bill of $3,452. For contrast, the average tax rate across the 342 cities, weighted by aggregate real estate taxes paid, was 1.04%,

The SmartAsset data corroborates what ATTOM, another real estate data firm, found last year: that Illinoisans pay the nation’s highest property taxes.

more.

Gary Marcus:

1. Hallucinations (which should really be called confabulations) will continue to haunt generative AI.
2. Reasoning flubs will continue to haunt generative AI. 
3. AI “Agents” will be endlessly hyped throughout 2025 but far from reliable, except possibly in very narrow use cases. 
4. Humanoid robotics will see a lot of hype, but nobody will release anything to remotely as capable as Rosie the Robot. Motor control may be impressive, but situational awareness and cognitive flexibility will remain poor. (Rodney Brooks continues to make the same prediction.)

Matthew Garrett:

This is part of an overall argument that Microsoft’s insistence that only hardware with a TPM can run Windows 11 is with the goal of aiding streaming companies in their attempt to ensure media can only be played in tightly constrained environments.

Lake Superior State:

A new year brings the promise of fresh beginnings, but it is also the perfect moment to reflect on the words and phrases that may have worn out their welcome. Lake Superior State University (LSSU) proudly reveals the 2025 edition of its Banished Words List, a quirky tradition that dates back to 1976, when former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and his colleagues delighted word enthusiasts with the first “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness”.

Each year, this lighthearted list shines a spotlight on words and terms that are overused, misused, or simply unnecessary. It offers a moment to laugh, pause, and consider how we can be more mindful of the language we use every day.

Rachel Wolfe

“We’re moving from later to never,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He notes that the longer people take to launch into a more conventional adulthood, the less likely they are to do it at all.

A third of today’s young adults will never marry, projects conservative think tank the Institute for Family Studies, compared to less than a fifth of those born in previous decades. The share of childless adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have kids, meanwhile, rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, from 37% to 47%, according to Pew Research Center. 

George Shay

Chicago’s machine politics is legendary, but the power play now unfolding in the Windy City would make the late Richard J. Daley blush. On Friday, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s handpicked school board voted 6-0 to fire Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Pedro Martinez — without cause. The move clears the way for a costly new contract with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), throwing gasoline on an already smoldering fire of fiscal instability.

The irony here is as rich as it is infuriating. Pedro Martinez, the man unceremoniously deposed, is a graduate of CPS himself. Now, the very institution that shaped him has cast him aside — not for incompetence, but for daring to resist the naked power grab orchestrated by Mayor Johnson and his union benefactors. Martinez’s crime? Refusing to saddle Chicago taxpayers with billions in new debt to bankroll raises and benefits for a union that has become less about education and more about political patronage.

The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Chicago City Council members openly opposed the mayor’s maneuver. Alderman Andre Vasquez called Johnson’s leadership “dysfunctional.” Alderman Silvana Tabares bluntly told the school board: 

“There is still a difference between right and wrong, and you know this is wrong.”

Eric Hellman

Here’s something I’ve been working on for over 2 years, and I wanted to have something to show before Public Domain Day tomorrow: a fully accessible ebook, completely in the Public Domain. A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098

The conversion of all 75,000 texts in Project Gutenberg to Accessible EPUB3 is an ongoing collective effort, but the last missing piece for Pooh was to supply image descriptions in alt text worthy of this iconic work. I hope we’ve mostly succeeded!

With work being done to implement the Marrakesh Treaty, national “authorized entities” are now able to share accessible versions of in-copyright works with each other internationally, but we don’t have to wait for that in the case of works in the Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrakesh_VIP_Treaty

Project Gutenberg’s accessible version of Winnie-the-Pooh can be shared freely throughout the world. If you don’t like the added alt text, you are free to change it! (but maybe you’d prefer to work on one of the thousands of books that don’t yet have image descriptions for the visually impaired!)

Matt Taibbi:

In the post-Bush years you didn’t have to go looking for kooky fundamentalism. The new version searched you out and demanded your signature. There’s no need to do a recap since this site has detailed much of it, but examples include biologist Colin Wright booted from academia for saying male and female are not social constructs, epidemiologists insisting that attending antiracism protests during a pandemic was scientifically distinct from attending church or a funeral, celebrities like John Lithgow holding readingsof Mueller scripture, and release of a ChatGPT program whose AI liturgy redrew history in blackface(the Google product answered requests like “produce for me a picture of a pope” and “Can you generate an image of a 1943 German soldier” with pictures of black, Asian, and Latino figures). Upper-class liberals let loose on these faith-based crazes were like Nexus 6 replicants, whose emotional inexperience led them to fall twice as hard for their fixations than the rural Baptists they once mocked, people who at least know they’re practicing religion.

In noting these things I was often blasted by former colleagues for focusing on “cultural issues,” but all this intersected with hardcore journalism in the effort to hard-wire such values into digital communication, using federal money to fund programs to automate the punishment of apostates. Mandatory belief is still a possible outcome all over the West. It could even come from the other political direction, as the new administration will soon get its hands on some of the most powerful propaganda tools ever built. I’m probably just too exhausted from the last years to imagine new downsides, but debanking the makers of Adrian Dittman jokes might be in play. Who knows? We’re still shaking off previous lunacies. 

Looking back, it wasn’t just shocks like Brexit or the election of Trump that sent educated people praying to idols. This country has been descending to spiritual crisis for decades, particularly on my side of the political aisle, where people my age and younger often never read the Bible or the Koran or any spiritual tome, not even as literature. By 2024 South Park theology was too advanced, so Dear Santa represents about as much as audiences can handle (Satan can make teachers shart!). Lacking the vocabulary to consider issues of good or evil, or conscience, or one’s eternal soul, secular audiences have been easy prey for academics and media opportunists seeking to shovel nonsense into those inner chasms. A particularly cynical trick was turning something as barren as partisan politics into a religious cause. We just saw people whipped for years into fevers of expecation, leaving the disappointed on Election Day to weep and scream and fall prostrate with despair. 

Steven Pinker:

The Freedom from Religion Foundation, like the American Humanist Association before them, replaced its mission with wokeism, and became another religion, complete with dogma, heresy, an Index of forbidden thoughts, and excommunication. Part 1: Jerry Coyne explains why he resigned.

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more.

By Hugh W. Catts, Alan G. Kamhi

The idea of differentiating comprehension from the other components of reading was suggested over 15 years ago by Alan Kamhi (the second author).⁶ He argued that many assessments of reading conflated word reading accuracy and fluency with comprehension, which could lead to misconceptions about why children performed poorly on reading tests. Was it due to their inability to accurately or fluently read words, their inability to comprehend, or both? To address this problem, he argued that reading should be viewed narrowly as just word recognition. This narrow view of reading would include the components of phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency. Comprehension (and vocabulary) in this view is treated as a separate and distinct cognitive process and ability. In a companion article, Hugh Catts (the first author) argued that adopting a narrow view of reading leads to a broader view of comprehension, one that goes beyond skill-based notions and recognizes the similarity of reading and listening comprehension.⁷

In proposing and advocating for this narrow view, we had no expectations that it would be widely accepted by educators or policymakers because the skill-based approach to comprehension has long been entrenched in the research and educational communities. In recent years, however, there have been significant advancements in the science of how to teach and assess comprehension that are beginning to impact educational practices. At the forefront is the movement toward providing integrated comprehension and knowledge instruction within content-rich literacy curricula. In these curricula, which are often implemented during English language arts (ELA) class time, students are taught the appropriate strategies (i.e., ways of thinking), vocabulary, and language needed to understand texts on subject-specific topics drawn from science, history, and the arts as well as more traditional ELA content. This instruction is also combined with oral discussions, hands-on activities, and writing opportunities with the goal of facilitating literacy and increasing knowledge. This is similar to the broad view of comprehension that we had advocated for in our earlier papers.

Paul Vallas:

Since 2000, over 266,000 African Americans have left Chicago. An overwhelming majority of blacks exiting Chicago are middle-class families with children. Within the black exodus from Chicago, children are overrepresented in the black population’s decline. In comparison to black adults over the same time period, 2000-2020, the number of black children 17 and younger have fallen by nearly 50 percent. How can this startling decline occur in this most progressive of states, whose leaders have portrayed Illinois as a progressive model of success for the nation?

Despite the state and city government’s years-long efforts at promoting racial equality of outcomes — “equity” — the extraordinarily uneven consequences of government policies under Democratic state and local leadership prove these promises to be mere rhetorical flourish. State and local policies, like those of Illinois, directly undermine the four most important elements of improving outcomes for black residents: Public safety, quality public education, taxation, and public services.

Illinois ranks first in tax burden and last in equity

Lamentably, Illinois ranks at or near the bottom among states in terms of racial equity. A 2023 study by WalletHub placed the state dead last in disparity between blacks and whites according to eight measures of prosperity: Poverty rate, homelessness rate, share of unsheltered homeless, labor-force participation rate, homeownership rate, share of executive positions, median annual household income, and unemployment rate.

More troubling for Illinois, the Archbridge Foundation Index ranked the Prairie State the tenth-worst state for social mobility, or a person’s ability to climb the income ladder and out-earn the previous generation. A Wirepoints‘ examination of 2023 U.S. Census Data reported that median black household incomes in Illinois are only 54 percent of white incomes — the 3rd-worst ratio in the nation, behind only Louisiana (52 percent) and Wisconsin (50 percent).

George Shay:

How progressive lawfare created a moral vacuum in our schools that destroyed the character of our most vulnerable

With the impending arrival of a new administration, we may expect the subject of school prayer, last in the headlines in the early days of the first Trump administration, to re-emerge.

At that time, Eric Zorn’s lament in a piece titled “The emptiness behind Trump school prayer references,” in the February 9, 2020, edition of The Chicago Tribune, ignored the worst emptiness in public education: The absence of moral values.

Zorn correctly cited the 1962 Engel v. Vitale, Supreme Court decision as a death sentence for God in public education, although was not until April 8, 1968, that Time magazine ran His obituary as its cover story.

Few mourned His passing at the time, as was the case on the first Good Friday. Later, exponential increases in crime, drug abuse, and nuclear family disintegration gave even some of His executioners cause for concern.

Few, if any, were found in public education. Public school students, graduates, and teachers are unconscious inheritors of the anticlerical trend that began in 16^th Century Europe in the wake of the reformation, which condemned the unholy alliance between the aristocracy and the Church as a tool of subjugation, culminating in Marx’s denunciation of religion as the opiate of the people. Only in the 20^th Century did we find, much to our horror, that in the absence of religion, opiates become the opiates of the people.

George Shay:

Saving CPS is not an easy task by any means, but our schools can be returned to centers of learning

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are in crisis, and it’s impossible to ignore the role the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) plays in Chicago’s ongoing educational failures. The CTU wields immense influence — over the mayor, city budget, and school policies — yet students, parents, and taxpayers continue to pay the price for a dysfunctional system. 

The question is no longer whether CPS is broken, but how to fix it.

The problems

1. Poor Performance, High Costs: CPS students consistently underperform on basic literacy and numeracy metrics, with only about 30 percent reading at grade level. Meanwhile, Chicago teachers are among the highest-paid in the nation, earning well above the city’s median income. Despite this, the return on investment for taxpayers is abysmal.

2. Absenteeism and Accountability: Teacher absenteeism reportedly hovers around 40 percent, while student truancy is even higher. Yet, no concrete solutions are implemented. Critics argue that the CTU focuses on protecting its members rather than ensuring student success, creating a cycle of unaccountability.‍

3. Union Overreach: CTU’s grip on city politics is undeniable. From negotiating contracts to influencing mayoral elections, the union is often accused of prioritizing its agenda over student needs. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration, elected with CTU backing, exemplifies this dynamic. Critics fear that this dual role — advocating for teachers while influencing city policy — leaves students as an afterthought.

4. Inefficient Resource Allocation: Despite declining enrollment, CPS continues to increase teacher headcount, leading to unsustainable budgets. Instances of schools with more staff than students highlight systemic inefficiencies, compounded by rising pension obligations that drain city resources.

Rosario Lopez:

At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support their own political goals and potentially falling into presentism. The past few decades have seen the rise of this hybrid profile, and while some have claimed that politicians need historians so that we can transform current political debates and use their expertise to help us project ourselves into the future, critical voices have warned that ‘rapid-fire’ superficial histories might serve political aims at the price of historical accuracy.

Therefore, defining J G A Pocock (1924-2023) both as a historian and a political actor stands in need of clarification since, arguably, he does not fit into a two-camp debate on the usefulness of history, but instead he shows how history inhabitsus at a much deeper political level.

Originally published in 1975, Pocock’s book TheMachiavellian Moment is an acclaimed masterpiece and one of the most influential 20th-century works for intellectual historians, political philosophers and political theorists. By 2025, itwill have inspired scholars and public debates for 50 years. The Machiavellian Moment presents a fluid, non-linear and geographically diverse history of republicanism as a transatlantic political language that can travel among different periods and contexts, namely, from classical antiquity to Renaissance Florence, early modern England and colonial America.

Sonya Gugliara

Chicago‘s projected budget deficit is a whopping $982.4 million, according to The Civic Federation.

Despite several tactics to save the city from bankruptcy, politicians have failed to get to the root of the issue –  increasing pension payments to Chicago’s more than 40,000 public employees.

‘Retirement benefits are like free junk food to politicians – everyone loves them, and the bills don’t arrive until later,’ Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a New York Times opinions piece. 

‘They can be ruinous for a city’s long-term fiscal health.’

Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson’s latest attempt to reduce the city’s debt – a proposed $300 million property tax increase – was shot down by City Council. 

——

Related: Act 10

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

more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor. 

 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?

Mark Gilson:

Here’s a wide array of clips from 48 districts that referenced these mandates. Find your 🏫district clip in this 🧵

Philip Greenspun:

As it turns out, I have some experience in this area! About 25 years ago, I started “ArsDigita University”, a post-baccalaureate program in which people who had non-nerd degrees could take all of the core undergrad computer science classes in a TA-supervised cooperative open office-style environment. People just had to show up for 9-5 every day for a year and they’d come out knowing pretty much everything that a standard CS bachelor’s degree holder would know. Not a “coding camp”, in other words, but traditional CS knowledge. The big differences compared to a traditional university were (1) take one course at a time, and (2) do all of the work together in one room so that it would be easy to get help from another student or a TA.

Did it work? We ran it for just one year, but as far as I know everyone who completed the program got the kind of job that someone graduating with a CS bachelor’s would get.

As loyal readers may be aware, I’ve long been a critic of the traditional four-year college/university. Simply getting rid of summer and winter breaks would reduce the time required to get a degree and begin a career to 2.5 years. 18-20-year-olds are blessed with tremendous health and energy and shouldn’t need to take nearly half the year off. Here are some examples of my previous criticisms:

Paul Vallas:

As long as the CTU commands the levers of power over CPS, minority students will suffer most

Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates’ latest gambit is to ratify a contract that will induce the complete collapse of CPS finances and thus force the state to intervene and provide Chicago the billions needed for CPS to dig itself out of the rubble. This is a rosy vision, but it will never materialize. Even if willing, with the state facing a budget deficit of $3.2 billion next year, Springfield does not have the money to provide schools statewide with the over $4 billion needed to get the $1 billion Johnson and Davis Gates are demanding. Furthermore, Pritzker has no intention of asking his allies in the General Assembly to raise taxes to pay for a bailout for the CTU’s outrageous contract.

It is time to realize that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) does not have a revenue problem but a CTU problem. The fact remains the CORE-led CTU has been largely responsible for denying poor children, overwhelmingly black and Latino, a quality education. The CTU and its former lobbyist-made-mayor, Brandon Johnson, remain the greatest obstacle to the district spending its $10 billion, the equivalent to $30,000 per student, in ways that ensures quality school choices for all Chicago children, regardless of income or zip code.

Today, CPS is perhaps the best funded big city school district in the nation, boasting the highest paid teachers and one of lowest staff-to-student ratios among large districts. It receives an astonishing 56 percent of all city revenues and over $1 billion in city subsidies, including a separate dedicated property tax levy to fund its teacher pensions. Since 2019, per-pupil funding has increased 43 percent despite a 9 percent drop in enrollment. During the same period, the district added over 9,000 new staff and today has one full-time staff for every 7.6 students.

Tom Elliott:

 don’t blame us when you notice that most of this year’s most mortifying media moments are political. Their obsession is not something we’re able to cure.

So with that curtain-raiser out of the way, let’s meander back through this year’s most cringe-inducing moments of media failure.

10.  One of the saddest parts of carrying water for the DNC is how the corporate media, by extension, also found itself having to carry water for Joe Biden. In July someone at the White House had the bright idea of labeling viral clips of Biden’s dementia as “cheap fakes.” Being cheap fakes themselves, the thought manipulators at CNN/MSNBC/etc. all dutifully began employing this term themselves.
11. In an attempted “gotcha,” CNN’s British reporter, Donie O’Sullivan visited Trump rallies and interviewed MAGA voters about their thoughts on “democracy.” When Mr. Sullivan was corrected that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, O’Sullivan became incredulous, reaching to “experts” like Anne Applebaum to explain that anyone who disagrees with progressives’ contemporary notion of the United States being a pure democracy are themselves fringe cranks hellbent on “attacking democracy.”

Milly Burroughs:

What do you do when you’ve secured your legacy as one of the great creative minds of the 20th century? You make children’s books, apparently. From Milton Glaser’s If Apples Had Teeth, Saul Bass’s Henri’s Walk to Paris and Paul Rand’s I Know a Lot of Things, to Bruno Munari’s Zoo, Dick Bruna’s Miffyand Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a number of prominent mid-century designers and illustrators turned their hand to books for kids as they sank into their own old age. Milton Glaser — creator of the iconic I Heart New York logo, the DC Comics logo and that 1966 Bob Dylan poster for CBS Records — had already cemented his place in history with a portfolio of pop-culture iconography, yet the designer also found himself drawn to illustrating children’s books such as author Alvin Tresselt’s The Smallest Elephant in the World and writing If Apples Had Teeth, which he created with his wife, Shirley Glaser, and published in 1960. Perhaps producing the most famous tale of them all, Carle is best known as the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar — an irresistible story of transformation that has sold upwards of 50,000,000 copies around the world. While he had prior success as an illustrator of books such as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, it was a career in advertising that got Carle noticed as an emerging creative talent. 

Jill Barshay:

My most consequential story of the year was about how so-called “science of reading” instruction can still be at odds with the research evidence. One common pitfall is the over-teaching of sounds or “phonemic awareness.” (1/7)

Brooke Masters and Stefania Palma

But if the public had “the perception that the judiciary is acting not consistently with facts and law in deciding cases, but rather that the judges are political in nature . . . it degrades their faith in the impartiality of the courts, and that undermines the rule of law”.  Unlike most European countries, the American legal system allows a fair amount of leeway on where lawsuits can be heard. Plaintiffs and defendants routinely jockey over whether state or federal judges should hear a case and whether the matter belongs in a particular court within either system.

Historically, business groups have criticised plaintiffs’ lawyers for seeking out friendly judges and juries for large damages claims, and liberal public interest groups often filed their challenges to the firsthand Trump administration in states and circuit courts with more Democratic appointees. But in recent years, powerful industry groups have done some of the most visible manoeuvring by finding ways to challenge government regulations in courts that have a larger share of conservative judges, particularly the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas and nearby states. 

While the US Securities and Exchange Commission contemplated new disclosure rules for private equity and hedge funds, some of the industry’s most powerful members set up a lobbying group in Texas. When the regulation passed, they used that group’s location to file a challenge to it before the Fifth Circuit rather than in Washington, where such challenges have traditionally been brought. The financial industry used a similar tactic to take on the SEC’s rules on short selling and new requirements for participants in the Treasury market. “It does work both ways. That doesn’t make it right or optically palatable,” said Scott Dodson, professor at the University of California Law, San Francisco.

——-

Related: Act 10 ongoing lawfare

Alec Johnson:

December is often seen as a month to celebrate the holidays and enjoy time with family and friends. On a less fun note, it is the month when people’s tax bills arrive. And if your taxes have gone up, it may make the holidays feel a little less cheery.

In April, an MPS referendum narrowly passed that will provide the district with an additional $140 million for the 2024-25 school year. for the next school year. It will ramp up to by an additional $51 million for the 2025-26 school year, an additional $47 million for 2026-27 and $14 million for the 2027-28 school year, for a total of an additional $252 million annually by the 2027-28 school year.

Meredith Kolodner:

More than 7 million students nationwide are entitled to special education services in K-12 schools. Services can include access to assistive technology, small-group instruction, extra time to take tests and a range of therapies. In most states, graduation rates for students with disabilities are lower than their peers and the quality of the education they receive varies greatly. 

We’d like to learn more about how students with disabilities are learning in schools today and if they are getting the education they’re entitled to receive.

We need to hear from people who can help us ask the right questions as we report this story about special education. Fill out the form below to share your thoughts with our staff. We will contact you if we want to publish any part of your response to us.

Ian Vásquez, Matthew D. Mitchell, Ryan Murphy and Guillermina Sutter Schneider

The Human Freedom Index 2024

• When people are freer, they are allowed to make more of their own choices.
• Governments can either prevent individual choice by limiting what people are allowed to do with their persons and property, or it can safeguard individual choice by protecting people, their property, and their decisions.
• The Human Freedom Index measures the degree of freedom in 165 countries using 86 indicators of economic and personal freedom.
• It includes data from 2000 through 2022.
• After having fallen significantly in 2020 and further in 2021, human freedom increased in 2022 but remained well below its pre-pandemic level.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

That’s the kind of largesse that keeps Illinois’ government class happy and its most vulnerable class placated. And it’s taxpayers that will have to make up the resulting deficits (i.e. watch out for a coming second attempt at a progressive tax hike). 

The best example of how Pritzker and team have leveraged the budget so far is in human services. His administration is spending $5 billion more now than it did in 2019, almost doubling the human services budget in just six years. 

Apparently, that hasn’t been enough. Now the administration wants to add another $2.6 billion by 2030. In all, spending on human services will have jumped from just $6.2 billion in 2019 to $14.1 billion in 2030, a massive 128% increase.

Adam Feldman:

Everything you want to know about the case boiled down into a few pages

1) Top line points: 

• The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on January 10 in TikTok’s appeal against a federal law requiring the app to cease U.S. operations unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divests its U.S. arm by January 19. 
• The expedited case, fast-tracked without initial input from the Biden administration, is at the epicenter of a clash between national security concerns and free speech protections. Congress passed the law, citing the threat posed by foreign-controlled apps, while TikTok argues the ban would silence a major platform for expression used by 170 million Americans. 
• Previously upheld by the D.C. Circuit Court, the law was deemed a carefully targeted response to national security risks, but TikTok maintains it violates the First Amendment. 
• Represented by former U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco, TikTok has urged the court to delay enforcement to allow the incoming Trump administration to weigh in. 
• Both parties are required to submit briefs before January, reflecting the urgency and significance of the dispute.

What is covered below? The legislation in question, lower court opinions, the application for the injunction / petition for certiorari, amicus briefs filed in the case, and third party commentary

Tyler Cowen summary

“Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely underrepresented for seven decades, especially in humanities and elite universities.”

HAMIDAH ODERINWALE

In the not-so-distant past, scientific discoveries crawled forward at a glacial pace. These days, research papers wither behind paywalls, with their insights locked away. When peer reviewers keep their gates closed, breakthroughs fade into oblivion. After Croatian virologist Beata Hallasy discovered a cure for her recurring breast cancer by self-experimenting, she found no place to share her cure with the world. Journal after journal rejected her discovery. Her story is just one example of the system falling short, but it leaves other researchers and the greater scientific community wondering how many transformative discoveries never made it past a reviewer’s desk.

Hallasy’s struggle revealed an ongoing tension in modern science. To maintain the rigor of the research commons, we rely on trusted institutions and reviewers to delineate what is and what is not acceptable. However, like the rest of us, they are prone to misjudgment, yet they are often treated as though their decisions are beyond question. When we fail to recognize how peer review falls short—whether in deciding which papers to publish, which projects to fund, or by moving too slowly—we risk stifling innovation and leaving untapped potential unrealized.

Preprints are already an integral part of today’s research culture. Within this ecosystem, competing visions for science naturally emerge: one champions democracy through decentralization, while another laments the loss of control over selective practices that curate copious amounts of research and shower attention on the academic stars.

Dr Peter Chow:

In the Fraser Institute’s Report Card on Ontario’s Secondary Schools, Korah and St. Mary’s tied for highest math rating in the city with 6.0/10 – 378th out of 689 Ontario schools; Superior Heights 5.7 – 425/689, White Pines 4.5 – 562/689 and CASS 4.2 – 587/689.

The provincial average was 6.3.

The top schools in Ontario scored 9.9.

The 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the world’s most prestigious mathematics competition, took place in England weeks before the Paris Olympics.

China has been the undisputed king of the IMO for the past 30 years.

But this year, the 2024 U.S. team, of whom five of the six are of Chinese ethnicity, took back first place … by a paper-thin two-point margin over China.

more.

Jeffrey Tucker

The most astonishing court document just came out. It was unearthed in the course of litigation undertaken by America First Legal. It has no redaction. It is a reverse chronicle of most of what they did from February 2020 until last year. It is 500 pages long. The version available now takes an age to download, so we shrunk it and put it on fast view so you can see the entire thing. 

What you discover is this. Everything that the intelligence agencies did not like during this period – doubting lockdowns, dismissing masking, questioning the vaccine, and so on – was targeted through a variety of cutouts among NGOs, universities, and private-sector fact-checkers. It was all labeled as Russian and Chinese propaganda so as to fit in with CISA’s mandate. Then it was throttled and taken down. It managed remarkable feats such as getting WhatsApp to stop allowing bulk sharing. 

It gets crazier. CISA documented that it deprecated the study of Jay Bhattacharya from May 2020 that showed that Covid was far more widespread and less dangerous than the CDC was claiming, thus driving down the Infection Fatality Rate within the range of a bad flu. This was at a time when it was widely assumed to be the black death. CISA weighed in to say that the study was faulty and tore down posts about it. 

Michael Gordon & Warren Strobel:

Bannan had been told by his superiors to be on hand in case the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to join a top intelligence community briefing for the president. But the White House summons never came. 

Bannan, a Ph.D. in microbiology, had joined the bureau after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington when the agency bulked up its expertise to deal with the threat of germ weapons, toxins and other weapons of mass destruction.  

But for more than a year he had spent most of his waking hours on the Covid-19 virus that had seeped out of China in 2019. 

The economist:

“ai” summary:

PhD abstracts have become increasingly difficult to read over the past 80 years, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. This trend, driven by increasing specialization and technological advancements, is problematic as it hinders accessibility and understanding of academic research.

Liz Essly Whyte and Julie Wernau:

Heidi Lawrence’s daughter was 14 when she began dabbing—heating and inhaling the fumes from powerful globs of marijuana extract. By 15, the girl couldn’t resist the quick, intense highs and was dabbing every half-hour from school bathrooms to her bedroom.

Smoking the potent cannabis concentrates “has almost broken her brain,” said Lawrence, of Longmont, Colo.

Dabbing has emerged in recent years as a popular way to consume marijuana, especially among youths. But it is dangerous. Like other new forms of marijuana use that have proliferated in recent years, dabbing involves highly potent concentrates of cannabis.

Health authorities are sounding the alarm, warning that dabbing could addict users and is sending teenagers to emergency rooms with seizures, cyclical vomiting or psychosis. Some users and doctors call a cannabis overdose, with the accompanying sweaty nausea and disorientation, a “green out,” a term believed to be a play on “black out.”

“People are consuming extremely high doses of THC,” the psychoactive component of cannabis, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “People can become psychotic.”

Katherine Boyle:

Curriculum

-Three-year program; 1 year core, second year tracked to four programs: AI, Automotive, Energy and Aerospace engineering. Additional tracks will follow. Co-op model with company starts in second year. No summer breaks as co-op work is spread throughout year. Students must work with sponsor institution, though based on performance they can work for another company in the consortium after graduation.

-Based on class rank (1 through 1000) students pick company and role at one of a consortium of companies that have agreed to hire Texas Institute of Technology and Science graduates. -Students can change company sponsor based on performance. (Like Military Academies top performing students get the best roles). Debt to sponsoring company repaid /subsidized through years of service at the sponsor company. Students will receive equity in chosen company after graduation.

• The Texas Institute of Technology and Science Fund is an option for students who want to build companies immediately after graduation . Texas Institute of Technology and Science to take 8 percent stake for seed capital and accelerator; ownership is given to endowment.

To Do:
-Acquire Texas-based private school for accreditation/regulatory purposes.
-Rename school to Texas Institute of Technology and Science.
-revamp curriculum/professors for 2025/2026 school year.
-Develop Texas Institute of Technology and Science Entrance Test
-Co-op model to begin with 25 sponsor partners, all companies or USG that can commit to sponsor students. Companies develop co op curriculum but must meet a set of requirements developed by professors and administration to ensure rigorous work environment.
-Texas Institute of Technology and Science board of directors formed. Board must pass the entrance test.
-Texas Institute of Technology and Science president selected by Board. President must also pass entrance test and publish his/her results.

Jessica McBride:

Embattled incumbent Jill Underly is under growing fire from multiple corners within her own party, as infighting fractures the Democrat party in the state school Superintendent’s race.

Underly has drawn not one, but two, likely opponents in the Feb. 18 spring primary to continue heading the state Department of Public Instruction. The top two finishers will advance to the April 1 election.

The race is ostensibly non-partisan. However, all three candidates are Democrats. Kinser, though, is a leader in the charter school movement who is supported by key school choice advocates. Wispolitics.com wrote that Kinser “describes herself as a ‘Blue Dog Democrat.’” RRH elections calls her a “moderate Democrat.”

Behind the scenes, some conservatives are positioning Kinser as a Tulsi Gabbard type due to her charter school advocacy – one GOP Congressional District is even circulating her nomination papers and referred to her as the “Conservative Leaning Candidate” in an email. Meanwhile, the anti-choice, extremist Underly is so radicalthat she once called an opponent “transphobic” for not wanting biological boys to compete in girls’ sports, and her office has been accused of mismanagement, hiding MPS’s severe financial issues from voters, lowering testing scores, and poor communication.

——-

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

more on Jill Underly and reduced rigor. 

 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?